Carry Me Home (7 page)

Tilden switched tactics. “Would you like to attend an antiwar rally with us next weekend?”

Wapinski stared at him. There were about a dozen people listening. “I’m not against our efforts ov—”

“Hey,” a student called from behind Wapinski, “how was the dope over there?”

“I talked to one guy,” another student called in, “who says everybody’s stoned all the time. He wants to go back just for the grass.”

“What about them Viet Namese women?” A third student said.

Wapinski turned. The students were not looking at him. “We didn’t see very many—” he began but was cut off.

“This guy got the clap four times,” the second student called across the top of the crowd.

“What about them Viet Namese women?” The first student pressed.

“How many babies did you burn?” A coed shouted from the other end of the bar. “How many women did you leave pregnant? How many children don’t have parents because of you?”

Wapinski stammered. He knew at this point he should simply withdraw. He could not get a word in edgewise. He’d come for beer, not for debate. He turned toward Akins and was about to say, “Let’s go,” when an older coed yelled, “Hey, that’s my brother.” Wapinski turned. A smile hit his face, both because he had not yet seen Joanne and because she was relief, his tie, his legitimate ticket to the present. He was about to call to her when she said, “My brother the army captain.” She did not disguise her hostility. Her breasts held out a T-shirt epigram—
I SAY YES TO MEN WHO SAY NO
. Again he began to speak, was about to say, “Hello Kid. I tried to call but your phone’s disconnected.”

“He kills people for a living,” Joanne announced. “Mother didn’t tell me you were back. When did you return?”

His teeth clenched. “Do you give a shit?”

More students were now snickering at him. The big elf staggered up in front of him, smiled, asked Tayborn for three beers.

Joanne snorted, pronounced, “We spend billions of dollars on big bombs to drop on little people while you turn every decent girl in the country into a whore. Then we spend billions more for their politicians to stuff their pockets. Pigs!”

The big elfish student drew up tall and stepped up to Wapinski. He towered above him and everyone else in the room. “Pig.” Spit sprayed from his mouth.

“Tell em, Montgomery,” someone shouted. The room reached low-level hysteria. “Pig,” three or four students shouted. “Pig,” a dozen joined in. Wapinski looked from face to face. He saw they despised him, that he’d entered a foreign den, an alien camp, that he was the alien and he had not known it when he’d entered. He reared back. Akins was behind him.

“Pig.” Montgomery glared at him. The big boy put his beers down on the bar. He clenched his left hand. He balled his right, squared off to Wapinski.

“Throw im out,” someone screamed. Students closed in. Someone screamed, “Get him, Monty.” Montgomery shot his left hand hard at Wapinski. Wapinski blocked the arm, hit the big boy without thought. He hit him with such force the boy toppled. Wapinski hit him twice more as he crumpled. Skin above the boy’s left eye split open. On the ground his face erupted in blood. Instinctively Montgomery raised a leg to protect himself. Wapinski, intent on the kicking foot, stomped the leg with his heel then smashed three lightning kicks to the bloody face before Joe Akins, screaming, “RJ! RJ! STOP! RJ!” and Rick Tayborn and two others could grab him. Wapinski flicked their gripping hands off like gnats. Punched, counter-punched, two of them to the floor. A girl in cutoffs screamed. Another girl shrieked. “Montgomery!” She knelt bravely, horrified, behind the boy. Everyone else backed off. Tilden had already left. The room imploded in silence. Wapinski glared at them all, looked at the bloody boy, walked through the crowd in disgust, disgust at their unthinking self-righteousness, their youthful naïveté, their rejection of him. And disgust at himself for not knowing, for once again entering uninvited, unexpected, unannounced.

“Sit down, Josh. Sit down.” Wapinski turned the ignition key. The Mustang roared to life. He drank straight from the bottle as he drove, sped back toward Mill Creek Falls. “Fuckin home,” he shouted out the open top. “Fuckin home. What the fuck for? Home? Eat shit. Eat shit and die.” He banged the shift through the gears, holding the bottle between his legs. “Home sweet home, Josh. Buddy, me and you make a good team. They all eat shit. That’s what you already knew, huh? We haven’t gotten up to Grandpa’s yet, Josh. If he shits on us....”

Wapinski sped east on 220 to Williamsport at speeds to ninety miles per hour. He exited in Williamsport, raced through the city streets, drinking, sideswiping a parked car, finishing the bottle and tossing it, allyoop, out the car, not seeing it crash into another parked car.

He raced up the new section of 15 trying to see how fast the Mustang would go. Then he took the back road to Loyalsock skidding and sliding, then up 87 to Forksville where he went off the road but saved it only to launch the car a few minutes later over a dirt embankment on the side of 154, tossing Josh like a rag doll first to the floor then up against the dashboard base, then almost out the open roof, landing in a small clearing, narrowly missing a previously battered oak but not missing several large rocks that seemingly in slow motion tore off the oil pan, ripped away the left rear axle, the car finally coming to rest by bludgeoning a thick tree, crinkling the grill and hood like aluminum foil, springing the doors, breaking the windshield.

Noise and motion ceased.

Wapinski startled, woke to Josh whimpering and licking his temples. He stared forward. He reached down, checked the ignition. He’d already turned it off. He didn’t remember. His vision was blurry. He couldn’t tell if the blurriness was from focusing on the shattered windshield or if he’d damaged his eyes. He felt his face. His nose hurt, was swollen, maybe broken. Slowly he moved his toes, ankles, knees, then fingers, wrists and elbows. His left hand was stiff, the thumb sprained. Cautiously he moved his head a little to the right, a little to the left, then farther, then looking up, then down. His eyes cleared somewhat. He checked his watch. It was two thirty in the morning.

Josh licked him again. “You okay, little brother? Oh God, we done somethin bad.” Wapinski tried his door. It was jammed in a position about two inches open. He climbed over the door, reached down, lifted Josh out. “We can walk this,” he said to the dog. “No sweat. I do it all the time. Walked five times this far last week. Geez! One week. Aw, Josh, look at our Mustang! Aw shit! I’m an asshole. I’m a drunk fuckin asshole. Look what I done. Shit! Better en bein put in the corner to cool! Ha. Aw ... there’s gotta be an unbroken bottle here somewhere.”

He was very drunk now. It was dawn. He’d vomited on his shirt, his pants, his shoes. He sat in the gutter. Josh sat on the curb. “What the fuck av ah done?” He looked up at the grimy brick of warehouse walls. It was Sunday, Father’s Day. The machine shops and offices were closed. “What’d I do to that kid las night?”

He thought about Joanne. He was hurt, deeply hurt, shocked by his sister, by the professor and the students. And he was disappointed, bitter with himself for having lost control. He’d beaten up the big jerk, he thought, and he’d thrown Akins and two others into the walls before he’d realized what he’d done. “I didn’t mean to hurt em,” he mumbled to the gutter. “I didn’t want ta hurt em. Why’d they attack me? I just wanted to be left alone, maybe talk to Akins. And our car, Josh.” Tears welled up in Wapinski’s eyes. He tried to sniff them back but his nose was clogged with blood. “Why? Fuckin why?”

He pulled the cigarette lighter from his pocket. He was out of cigarettes. His stomach retched, bile burned his throat. “All this shit, Josh. It’s melting on me.” Again drunken tears rushed out. “This was a mistake. There’s somethin wrong. Somethin wrong. I gotta get back where I belong. We left three guys on a hill. Four guys. I gotta go back. They were blown up and charred and bloody fuckin messes. Blood, Josh. More blood than ever. Right on that kid’s face. I gotta go back where I was good. Where I did good. I gotta find Doc.”

Wapinski fondled the lighter, belched. The belch caused him to lose his balance. He fell back on the storm drain, rolled, looked into the drain, retched a thick mixture of bile, saliva, postnasal blood and mucus. He coughed, spit between the bars of the sewer grate, watched for the splat in the black water below. Then he brought his hands before his face. He still held the lighter. He stared at it. On one side there was a list and an inscription:

DAU TIENG

CU CHI

GO DAU HA

TRUNG LAP

VEGHEL

A SHAU

DONG AP BIA

I SERVED MY TIME IN HELL
.

On the other side there was an outline map of Viet Nam and the inscription:
THANK YOU, SIR. YOU SAVED LIVES. MEN OF 1/506.

Wapinski stared at the lighter. He held it with both hands. The sewer grate cut into his elbows. He rolled onto his side, toward the street, held the lighter in his right hand, then between his right thumb and index finger. He couldn’t feel the engravings. He lowered his hand to the grate, held the lighter between two bars, then purposefully, slowly, opened his fingers. Then he passed out.

Wapinski woke at midmorning. He was still in the gutter before an alley separating machine shops and warehouses. He was broke: without his wallet, cigarettes or lighter. An old man was cleaning the blood from his nose. Before them was a familiar 1953 Chevrolet sedan. Wapinski’s head hurt. His hands were bloody. He felt guilty but his head wasn’t clear enough to understand why.

“This your dog?” the old man asked. “And what’s this paper ... Bea Hollands? This pup here, he’s been watchin over you since I came. Nice looking animal.” Concentration slowly seeped back to Wapinski. “How come you haven’t been up to see me?” the old man asked sternly. His hands were gentle on Wapinski’s face. “When I finally heard you’d made it back, I came down to your mother’s place. Imagine that. I haven’t been inside there since she chased your father away.”

Wapinski focused in on the old man’s face. It was a beautiful face, he thought. Wrinkled like a happy bulldog’s. He could not hold the thought, nor keep his eyes focused.

“Come on up,” the old man said. “I’m not strong enough anymore to lift you.” He remained kneeling by Wapinski. “Well, how do they say it,” he said slipping a hand under Wap’s head. “If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain’ll have to come to Mohammed.”

“Gran—” Tears flooded Wapinski’s face.

“Don’t do one any good to cry and say you’re sorry, now.” Tears were in the old man’s eyes too. “Come on home, Bob. There’s fresh garden greens and corn fritters with syrup waiting.”

“Granpa.”

W
E NEVER RELATED STORIES
to each other. You know, not like we’re doin now. We’re all doin it now. Tellin our war stories. But then, when we were still in the Corps, or whatever branch, we never did. The extent was, “Hey, what outfit you in.... Yeah, I think I worked with you guys out in the A Shau....” Or, “Yeah, I was too. Were you there when the typhoon hit?” That was it. But now ... now it’s time.

I know homecomings were really different. I mean, nearly 2.6 million Americans—men and women, 99.54 percent men but women too—served in Nam between 5 August ’64 and 7 May ’75. Official dates. Eight hundred thousand more served in the Southeast Asia theater. Three point four million Americans ... or as Bobby’d say it, “representing fifteen percent of all American families.” And each family dealt with it differently. Returning varied more than being there. No two guys came home at the same time, to the same house, same family, friends, neighbors, with the same baggage of experience.

This has taken me years to figure out, to fill in details or be willing to jump over stuff or guess about the gaps. It was difficult getting to this point. For years it was like I had this voice inside me that couldn’t get to my vocal cords—like it wanted to speak but couldn’t get out and then somehow it came out of him and I felt as if it had come out of me. But now, partly because of him, I’m no more that person than I am the little boy in the store watching Bobby get smacked.

What we, each and every one of us, brought to the war was a basic core identity established in early childhood. Other layers encased the core—schooling, adolescence, and military training. Then Southeast Asia. When we returned we reentered families barely changed from when we’d left. But like a ball of wax dipped and redipped, we returned with new layers, and not uniform ones either, but varying layers as if we had entered a hundred or a thousand different dipping pots. So varied was the Nam experience—from year to year, north to central to south, mountains to paddies to rivers to villages—it might just as well have been a hundred or a thousand different wars.

My homecoming couldn’t have been more different than Bobby Wapinski’s, yet despite the differences, the same feelings developed—alienation, estrangement from my core identity, from my layered American identity ... as if my new wax coatings were impossible to hide or shed or deny.

O
KINAWA, FRIDAY, 19 JUNE
1968—The day was clear, hot. He had been standing in line for nearly an hour. “NEXT,” the clerk called.

“Pisano. Anthony F. P-I-S-A-N-O.” He waited. The clerk checked the register, gave his crew the last few numbers, again rang out with a loud “NEXT.” Tony stepped to the side. The crew disappeared into the shadows of the giant Quonset hut, then reappeared with four footlockers on a roller cart.

“Okay Pisano, here it is.”

Tony looked at the footlocker. His name was stenciled in black on the top, front and sides. There was a combination lock at the hasp. He attempted several sets of numbers unsuccessfully. “Hey, ah, ya know,” he stammered at the clerk. “How am I supposed to get this open?”

“Ferget the combination?” The clerk’s tone was sarcastic.

“Listen.” Pisano almost said, Listen asshole, but he just wanted to be gone. “Yeah, I forgot it.” He smiled cheerfully. “I been in the bush for thirteen months”—he chuckled a self-degrading chuckle—“who’s goina remember a combination after thirteen months?”