Fatal Light (3 page)

The night before I left for recruit training I sat in my parents' dining room. My sisters made faces at each other and my father told stories about his years in the service, in the navy during the Second World War and again in Korea.

“There were tough times, sure,” he said, sitting back at the end of the meal. “But all in all it was OK. A kid'll pick up things. See things you'd never see anywhere else.”

I nodded. My mother looked at her plate and her cheeks were flushed. My younger sister loudly asked to be excused; both girls left the table.

“I'll tell you, though,” my father went on. “There was something more—I don't know, organized about World War Two. You went because you wanted to, it was the right thing to do, you were proud to wear the uniform.”

“I guess the lines were a little bit more clearly drawn,” I said. “Back then.”

My father shrugged. “That's all I meant,” he said. “We weren't thrashing around the jungle like a bunch of idiots.”

“Joe Powers told a different story,” my mother said to my father. Then, to me, “Joe was in the Pacific war, on those islands... .”

“Corregidor, Iwo Jima,” my father said. “But hell, Joe was always a little melodramatic anyway.”

A silence passed; we looked at our plates. My father swirled what was left of his iced tea. The ice cubes rang in the glass.

“Maybe somebody knows what's going on over there.” My father sighed. “You wouldn't know it from reading the papers, though, I'll tell you.”

My mother stacked the dinner plates and asked if we wanted coffee.

“Sounds good,” I told her.

My father nodded, watched as my mother moved away, into the kitchen. When she was gone he leaned toward me saying, “One thing about the service. You have your fun.” He looked at me, in possession of secrets.

“You know what I mean,” he said, smiling. “One time I even shared a rubber. You believe that? No shit. Me and this kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma—Ronnie Bills, I even remember his name—me and Bills and this Mexican girl in the backseat of a rented car. We were on a weekend pass in San Diego, must've been the summer of ‘forty-three. Bills went first, gets out and takes off the rubber, empties it out, and gives it to me. Christ.” My father was laughing. “What the hell. I mean there we were, one rubber between us and the señorita hot to trot.”

My mother turned into the dining room with coffeepot and cups on a tray. My father's laughter subsided and I smiled with the story and he sighed.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we did some crazy things back then.”

My mother glanced at him as she filled the cups and handed them to us.

“You know, though? What I really loved about those days?” My father stirred sugar into his coffee. “This'll sound strange, maybe, but what I really loved was the music. Really. Benny Goodman, Harry James, Artie Shaw. Glenn Miller. I saw ‘em all.”

My mother smiled, holding the coffee cup close to her lips. “Your father was quite the dancer,” she said.

My father said, “Your mother and I won some dance contests. Jitterbugging. Fox-trots.”

“Spotlight dances,” my mother said. “I loved those.”

“You did those at kind of half speed,” my father told me. “You had to be good, couldn't snow the judges with a lot of flailing around and throwing your partner in the air. You had to have a little grace. Of course, I had one hell of a partner.” My parents beamed at each other, and my father said, “There was one night...the Palladium?”

“You're thinking about Roseland,” my mother said.

“Roseland, right.” He nodded. “Who was the judge? Some movie star.”

“Betty Grable.”

My father turned to me. “Your mother and I did an encore dance right up on the bandstand, Glenn Miller playing right behind us.”

It was good to have my parents preoccupied with their past, enjoying themselves. I asked if they remembered the steps.

My father grinned. “What do you think? Give the boy a demonstration?”

“I don't know.” My mother put her coffee cup on its saucer. “We had a pretty complicated routine.”

My father pushed back from the table. “I'll bet we remember every move,” he said, and stepped into the adjoining room.

I could hear him flipping through his record collection, sliding albums in and out as my mother said, calling in to him, “It's been years since I even thought about those days...”

“Got it!” my father yelled. My mother and I went into the sitting room and he was moving the recliner against a wall. He went to the stereo and set the needle down, and the sound of Glenn Miller's orchestra filled the room and my parents came together to move easily, backing around each other, turns, half turns. My mother swung inside his arms, whirled out; they turned and
smiled, looking like the song sounded: supple, in touch with every corner of the room, good-humored and well mannered but ready for anything.

My sisters ran in when they heard the music and danced together, imitating my parents, cavorting and giggling. My parents rode into the music and as the song ended they fell into each other, laughing, my father flushed and panting. “Guess I'm not in the shape I was,” he said, patting his belly.

My sisters chased out of the room as my mother leaned on one arm of the recliner, hands on her knees.

“Hey,” my father wheezed, “we're still OK, y'know?”

“Well.” My mother winked at me. “Not bad.”

“Maybe,” I said, “I could have the next dance?” My mother smiled, flattered. “By all means. The spotlight dance?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

My father put on Harry James doing
September Song
and I placed my left hand in the small of my mother's back, and lifting her left hand in my right I stood poised a moment before we moved off into a box step. My mother looked away from my face.

I said, “I'll be OK.”

Her eyes misted and she held her smile in place. “You take care,” she said. “Wherever they send you.”

“I'll be fine.”

“You better be.”

“Promise. ”

Her smile never wavered. “All right,” she said. “I believe you.”

I said goodbye to Mary on the floor of her parents' basement, a universe of slow heat and half-light, our bodies turning and exquisite. We used television to conceal the sounds of lovemaking and moved in late whispers, as if we could find a private arc of time and live there, protected, in the grip of salvation. Inside her I was desperate and transfixed and believed she must surely feel the same behind her closed eyes. Afterward she would remember things, vagrant moments from years before, the shape of a particular tree on an uncle's farm, the peculiar death of a distant relative, something somebody had said and everybody had forgotten except her. She would tell me the stories as if she was possessed by the memories and I would listen, afraid we were aimless children with no real knowledge of any sort of world, at sea with our own lives.

She told me she was terrified for me, that she might never see me again.

I said I could go somewhere else, Germany maybe.

No, she had told me. They're sending you to Vietnam. And you know they are.

I rolled onto my back and looked at the ceiling. “I don't know anything,” I whispered.

“I can't believe we're ending,” she said.

“Nothing's ending.”

She sat up and spoke with her back to me. “They're taking you away and sending you God knows where and I won't see you. That's an ending.” Her voice was flat.

“You'll know where I am. I'll get a leave, I'll come to see you.”

Mary continued as if I had said nothing. “I'll be constantly scared you're dead, and I can't live like that.”

I looked at her back, the graceful trace of her spine. “Please,” I said, “don't do this to me. I can't change anything. I can't help it.” I stood and pulled on my jeans.

“I won't wait for you,” she said softly. “I mean, I want you back. You know that.” She looked down at her body; when she spoke again she was whispering. “But I can't just wait. I'd go crazy. You can't ask me to do that.”

I put on my T-shirt, moving as if I were already alone. “I won't ask that,” I murmured. I knelt to put on my tennis shoes, laced them. I stood again and told her I would write to her. She began to cry.

The air outside the recruiting office was a gash of cold. Windy, overcast. The few of us there stood with hands shoved deep into pockets, moving from foot to foot, waiting for the van that would take us to the induction center. A boy with a motorcycle jacket opened over a torn T-shirt stepped close to the building and tried to light a cigarette against the wind. He went through three matches before I stepped back to shield him and he got the cigarette lit.

“Thanks,” he said, squinting at me, smoke whipping away from his face.

A newspaper truck pulled to the curb in front of us. A black boy no more than twelve years old stepped down, dragging a bale of morning editions. He dropped the bale in front of a vending box, pulled wire cutters from a hip pocket and snipped the wire that bound the newspapers. He was a professional: smooth and efficient, unlocking the vending box to take out the day before's leftovers, neatly stacking in fresh papers, sliding a copy into the window rack. Closing the box he gathered wire and newspapers and stepped up into the truck. Gears moaned, the truck lurched away. The black boy stared at us from the open door.

In the window rack of the vending box the close-up face of Lyndon Johnson looked withdrawn and defeated. He was gazing down, leaning his face into his big workman's hand. The headline over the President said MARINES STOPPED NORTH OF SAIGON and, below the headline,
LBJ considers bombing halt.
A side panel had a football player in the air with his hands on the ball and the caption
Redskins clip Oilers in overtime.
A blue van turned the corner and slammed to a halt where the newspaper truck had stood. Our recruiting officer burst out of the van, sharp creases and the smell of aftershave lotion, arranging his garrison cap on a crew-cut skull. He moved briskly to the van's side door, banged it open and turned to face us.

“Gentlemen,” he said loudly. “Line up. Right here in front of me, please. One single line.”

We shambled into a line.

“Outstanding,” the recruiter said. He waited a moment before he spoke again: a memorized speech, and he seemed proud of it. “Gentlemen, you are about to be reborn. You are about to become soldiers, like it or not. May I remind you that these are the last kind words you will ever hear. Best of luck to each and every one of you.”

He stepped aside. We filed into the van.

The bus, stopped for a light in the middle of a small-town night, stank. We made it stink, all of us packed in. The fat boy next to me was sweating and finally introduced himself, imitating a used-car salesman: loud voice, extended hand, high-school ring. The bus pulled up at the main gate of the Recruit Training Center, military figures vaulting aboard, swinging the aisle, white helmets, guard belts, nightsticks, crisp green trousers stuffed into scrubbed brown leggings with polished gold eyelets. I stood with the others, prodded and herded inside the ornate gates, feet positioned on shoe soles painted on the asphalt at regular intervals, storm troopers between the ranks shouting into ears. Floodlights on. We were marched into a long armory, Drill Hall 31: white squares on blue-fleck linoleum. I was assigned a square. A middle-aged enlisted man appeared and talked like an auctioneer. We were to strip, place our civilian clothes into the cardboard boxes in front of us. We were not to talk. We were not to grabass. We stood at attention nude in 3 A.M. bare-bulb glare, and for thirty seconds the auctioneer looked bored. Then he sighed and said,
You're in the army now.

Training blurred by in a Deep South welter, Spanish moss and magnolia in swamps, drill instructors born out of the flat sun and hostile towns. There was a battery of written tests at scarred schoolroom desks; one by one, soldiers were led out of the room as they reached the part of the test that defied them. When I finished I was taken away to an office where an aging sergeant ran a red pencil over my answer sheet and asked if I'd like to be a medic. Wear a white suit he told me, care for the sick.

I did not answer.

He shrugged and said it was good duty any way you looked at it. People took care of you, looked out for you. Half the time you're in the rear, made in the shade.

I asked about the other half. He shrugged again and said I'd be beating the bush with an infantry company. But, he added, at least I could die a hero.

I asked him what my choices were. For the first time since I came into the office he looked at me, and he smiled gently. He told me that in this man's army there were no choices.

The pilot announced that the smudge of coastline moving toward us was the Republic of Vietnam.

Vietnam framed by airplane porthole and haze and first light: the plane banked, turned, for a moment was adrift, leveled out, and the coastline was on the other side of the aircraft, pure green into pure blue, innocent, mysterious, dreaming into the sun.

First look: sandbags and fog. And quiet. As if the fog itself were the carrier of silence easing among us, touching us, loving our faces. Hundred-pound sandbags stacked fifteen high and four deep until life itself was a simple connection between sacks of dirt and the mudhole ring inside them where we talked and ate and slept.

“No, really, man,” Linderman told me, talking quietly. “This is what she said. Her exact fucking words. She will wait for me, and there will be no other guys in between. Not unless she gets word I ain't coming back.” Linderman looked out on the fog. “God forbid I buy the farm in this shithole.”

“You got any smokes?”

He seemed relieved. “Got some Salems. You can cut the filters off if you want.”

“No problem.”

We crouched behind the sandbags, lit cigarettes where a match flame could not be seen. Against the perimeter, mortar fire started again, booming distantly.

“How many you think's out there in them hills?” Linderman asked me.

I shrugged, flicked an ash. “Captain Bowers heard something like twenty thousand,” I said.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Maybe more, is what he was saying. Nobody knows for sure.”

“You think they mean to overrun us?”

I drew on the cigarette, blowing a mouthful of smoke between us, and said, “So your ladyfriend says she'll wait for you?”

Linderman nodded slowly, looking at me soberly. “That's what she told me,” he said.