Tom / August 1968
She licked her lips, her tongue pink and plump. His cock twitched damply. She put her hands in her lap and bowed her head, like a scolded child, and even in the torture of the moment, this was charming. He waited, his tongue large in his mouth; he didn’t want to imagine what was coming next.
“My brother,” she said. His fear loosened—whatever this was, it didn’t sound like a reason for her to walk away. She closed her eyes. “He was one of yours.”
He waited for more, but she was silent, her eyes shut. He tried to make the connection, patched through the men who’d been killed, whose family might have unfinished business with him—thought of Lance Corporal Shea, who shouldn’t have died that night, who deserved better; of Private Henderson, who’d drowned while on R&R in Nha Trang; of Sergeant McKellen, who’d disappeared in Dalat two years ago.
“I don’t . . .” he said, shaking his head.
Her eyes opened. There was something naked and spoiled in her face—something like guilt—and he realized that it was she that was doing the confessing.
The light dipped.
The watchfulness, the high color; with a pitch of alarm, he saw it.
“Kip Jackson,” she said.
Jeannie / August 1968
As she raised her head to him, observing the intimacy of her own violence, she understood that there was little solace or freedom to be had, after all, in the telling of truths; and that perhaps Kip, with his dreams and stories, was at least right on this.
He sat hunched, clutching the edge of the mattress, his mind thumping.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t have to matter.”
She saw his knuckles whiten. His face turned to hers. She touched his shoulder, brought her lips to his, pressed for a kiss; but his mouth was slack, and when she flicked open her eyes, she saw that he was watching her as she kissed him. She kissed him again, with the insistence of a nurse reviving a patient—tried to somehow undo the harm she’d done—but he sat as dull-lipped and open-eyed as a doll. He drew away, his face gathering in a question.
“I wanted you to help him.” As she said it out loud, she heard how absurd it sounded. “There was nobody else.” Her throat closed around the words. “But it was wrong, and it’s done.”
His eyes picked over her face. He nodded; gently, then emphatically. He straightened, the muscles in his upper body tight with resolve, his mouth running in a determined line. “He’s not your brother,” he said.
“Tom—”
“He won’t be in our lives.”
Jeannie heard Charlie calling from the other room, the run of his feet on the floorboards, heard the bright, practical sounds of the world outside the apartment—cars, a siren, a woman laughing. The spell was breaking; and it cracked through her, as gray as dawn, that whatever contract she and Tom had, Kip underwrote it. She took in the quiet sanctuary of the room: the thin saltiness of the air that belonged to the ocean, to her childhood; the meager furniture arranged carefully, like the first pieces of a life; Tom, seeing her, wanting her anyway. As she grasped it all, she felt the loss of it, knew that what the room offered was impossible: that she couldn’t give Tom what he wanted—a new life together, with no ties to the past, a life that wasn’t founded on penance or fear or pity but was shared freely, willingly—and that whatever reparation she was making for her past negligence, with Kip’s life, with her own, it was too late, and too foolish, and it would fail.
She took his hand, brought her face close to his, paused to find the words that would have no room for confusion, and spoke slowly and clearly.
“You can’t have me,” she said. “I can’t give you what you want.”
Tom / August 1968
He felt Jackson’s soft stuntedness in her fingers, her gentleness. Anger seeped like concrete in his chest, expanding and hardening till it had nowhere to go—the pressure tightening his throat, driving pain into his head.
“It won’t work,” she said. “I want to make things right, but I can’t.” Tears streaked her face, wetting his knuckles. He pulled his hand from hers, pressed his fist against his skull till he felt his forehead blanch, the reverberation down his forearm somehow bleeding the pressure from his head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, speaking the words by rote, the same way he’d heard them a hundred different times from a dozen different mouths.
“Fuck.” His voice jumped off the walls.
“Tom.”
He heard the tremble in her voice, saw the ugliness and beauty in her: the coward jaw, the plump mouth. She was close enough that he could squeeze the breath out of her. He thumped the bed with his fist. She drew away, her pulse twittering in her slim neck.
“I’m sorry.”
He saw the fear in her face; tried to muscle down his anger.
“You have to go,” he said, trying to keep his voice low.
She sat still. “You deserved the truth,” she said, quiet, uncertain. “It could never have worked.” Her face was all hollow places. She drew her hand across her mouth, smudging lipstick over her cheek.
He saw the room in all its poverty; saw her sitting before him, half naked and begging as a slut. The distance between this and what he’d imagined—a home, a life—was so great it took his breath.
“I’m so damn stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.”
“To believe I could have . . . this.”
“It wasn’t all a lie.”
“It was a damn lie.” But the distress in her face told him he wasn’t right on this, and he felt a small, unhappy hope.
“I can love you—” she said.
“Then love me.”
“But like a sister.” She winced at her own choice of words, and he shut his eyes. “Not a wife.”
He tested himself against this—imagined them living together, sexless, castrated; he the sad-sack uncle, she the matron—and his heart went dark. It would be easy in ways—comfortable, better than whatever else was waiting for him out there, whatever small compromise of a life he would have to make for himself alone. But those words he’d learned to live by—honor, courage, commitment—what could they mean in that kind of a life? A life of restrictions, celibacy, charity: the life of a dependent. He couldn’t do it.
“Then leave. You and your kid, you need to leave.” She didn’t move. The pain in his head thickened, pushing blood against the backs of his eyeballs. The room was stifling; he couldn’t be in it any longer, with or without her. He reached for his chair, yanked it toward him, hauled himself in. Took the wheels, pushed them so his chair took the room.
“Where are you going?”
He pulled open the door; the kid stood outside the bedroom, smiling shyly, holding the keys to the apartment in his hand.
“Poor fucking kid,” he said.
“Tom—”
He plunged the wheels down, out of the building, onto the street, away from the apartment, from the place he’d dreamed of all those long, blind hours in the hospital, imagining a life that was never real. He would leave that cripple, that fantasist, that half a man—the sap to be sponged, dressed, handled, manipulated—leave his husk in that dim, quiet bedroom, with the unhappy girl and her chickenshit brother and the kid that had nothing to do with him.
He wheeled himself onto Scott, down toward Lombard, loss sinking its teeth into his gut. He drove the wheels until his arms burned and his shirt was stuck with sweat. He stopped on Lombard and let the sun blaze his face, watched the passing cars, their mirrors catching fire in the light. He played over the scene in the bedroom (his easy heart—her breast in his mouth—how she slipped from his lap—) and felt greasy with shame. All he could imagine, sitting on that mattress, his skin crawling over his face, his cock damp-heaped in his crotch and humiliation covering his face like a muzzle, was escape—to feel the ground slide beneath him, to make his own way.
A truck screamed by, Nevada-plated, dirty with dust. He thought of the Mojave, of trips with his fath
er when he was a kid, camping in the desert: a place where, in a landscape that hadn’t changed in a thousand years, a boy and everything he was made of—fears, hopes, struggles, shortcomings—was nothing but grit. Large skies, cruel rock, heat that crushed introspection, where in the need to survive the day, everything else was obliterated. However hot it got in the desert, the death of the day brought coolness.
Rain nipped his face. He hadn’t felt rain since he was in country. The rain in Vietnam washed away sight and sound; it was everywhere and everything. This was California rain: pissy, apologetic. He would get distance from her, from all of it, would leave it all to be washed away in that hot, weeping city.
He skewed his chair to face the oncoming traffic, brushed the wetness from his face, and raised his arm.
Jeannie / August 1968
Jeannie let herself into the apartment on Noe, placed the carpetbag in the hallway, and watched it settle against the floorboards. She nudged off her pumps, letting them fall untidily, and bent to untie Charlie’s shoes. The apartment was neat and ready, full of quiet expectancy, as though it had always assumed she would return. She sat in the living room, listening to the stillness, while Charlie tinkered with his train set, discreet, self-possessed, as though he was intuitively aware of her inability to play. Jeannie sat on the couch, watching the sunlight lengthen over the wall, playing the scene in the apartment over and over to see if it could have ended differently, each time arriving in the same, unhappy place, the two of them half naked, alone, ashamed. When the sunlight began to darken, Charlie climbed into her lap, and they slept. She woke to the sound of the telephone ringing, her head thick, her body soggy with sweat; she eased herself from under Charlie, and answered.
“It’s done.” It was Dorothy, breathy and loud through the receiver.
Jeannie tried to orient herself. “What’s done?”
“I called Chapman and Macht. They’re discontinuing the case.”
It came to her as though from another life—Lee coming in from the rain, Dorothy’s ultimatum, Kip. She thought of Tom, laboring out of the apartment, his speechlessness, his taste in her mouth, and felt hot with shame. She wondered where he’d gone, what he’d gone looking for in the city, if he had already returned to his empty apartment, which she had left unlocked, the key to the building hidden beneath the plant pot outside.
“Richard told me he saw you at the hospital,” said Dorothy. “It’s time to put all this to bed.”
A couple of days later, Jeannie returned to the Marina apartment. She planned on walking by with Charlie, head bent, brisk-footed on the other side of the street, sliding a sidelong glance to check that there was life behind the windows, that he was safe. But the drapes in the front window were still awkwardly half pulled, the glass murky. Jeannie crossed the street. She tipped the plant-pot and found the keys hiding. She let herself in at the front entrance and knocked on the door to the apartment. Listened to the silence, then turned the handle.
There was nobody there. The apartment was still filled with the uninhabited scent of dust and the ocean, the blocks of wood scattered as Charlie had left them; and the hopeful emptiness of the place resonated with some dark, open place in Jeannie’s heart. She felt her stomach grip against something dense and impossible, and she recognized it as loss. Her hands hurried through her purse; she found an old streetcar ticket and penned her telephone number on it in shaky digits. She knew he wouldn’t return—that he would try to force himself a different life, someplace he could free himself from what had happened between them. But she placed the stub in the center of the table anyway, her fingers clumsy: left the bread crumb for him to trace her by, though the birds might have it.
Kip / August 1968
Tomorrow is Judgment Day.
That snout-faced Brig Hog laid it on me this morning when I was taking a shit in the craphouse, yelled it through the corrugated metal door just as I was hanging a rat. I could hear the fat smile in his voice, and all of a sudden the stench of all that piss and shit—mine and everybody else’s—made my stomach heave; and there I was, puke and crap tunneling from my gut all at once, like my insides were spooling free. I sat, empty and sweating, letting drool gather in my mouth and spitting the sourness away, till my stomach stilled and my legs stopped trembling and I could stand.
The Hog was waiting when I pushed open the door. “Christ, Jackson,” he said, his pinwheel eyes fired and glistering, “your fee-cees stinks like death.” He took me to the bright, boiling shack where I meet my attorney. I sat, and waited. Dellinger was late. I thought of him taking a peaceful dump in a porcelain bowl, spinning TP around his fingers to make a lavish shit-mitten, soaping his hands under hot water, then stepping into the shower to clean up and jerk off. The asshole was making me wait.
The room was empty but for a table and four chairs, all bolted down so my felon hands couldn’t make any trouble. I could see the Hog in his guard shack just five meters away, watching me through the wire-mesh windows. A plaque was screwed into the wall of the room; I stood and went to it, read the small lettering—IN MEMORY OF SOMEBODY—and caught the shine of the metal. And for the first time in weeks—since that morning Skid got blown up—I saw my face. I saw my face, and it was still me. Whatever that grenade did, whatever it ripped up and destroyed, it didn’t leave a mark on my face—you couldn’t look at me and know. And I remembered that morning before my trial back home, how my dad fussed over the sheen on my shoes, how Huffacker spun his sad yarn for that freak Choate, how they let me go free. Dellinger was an asshole, but he was an Honor Roll, Big Swinging Dick kind of asshole, and if it would get me out of this dump, get me home somehow to Jeannie and Charlie and hamburgers and TV, I’d do what I was told.
I waited till the sun had lost its high-noon burn and the afternoon rain was tick-tacking on the steel roof. Some change of plan—I imagined Dellinger under one of those green library lamps, scribbling on a legal pad, underlining the answer, the answer that could catch me a break. I felt the Hog’s eyes on me in his guard shack, and looked away; then he was in the room with me, and that smile of his had thinned.
“Back to the yard,” he said, his voice tired, his shoulders drooping with the long heat of the day.
“My attorney—” I said.
“Ain’t coming, son.”
I shrugged. “Guess I’ll see him tomorrow.”
And I could see it—that smile of his fattening again, like there was a delicious secret under his lips; but there was something careful in his eyes, and I could tell that whatever blow he was about to serve up, his heart wasn’t in it. “He quit,” he said.
“What?”
“Quit. Fired. Either way, off the case. You’ll have to make do with one of ours.”
“But the court-martial’s tomorrow. There’s no time . . .” No time to get the story right, I thought, and a chill was seeping in my chest, pressing cold sweat through my skin.
It was his turn to shrug. “Then it’s up to you,” he said. “C’mon.” He waved for me to get up, his face folding in a frown.
I sat, staring at the room. On the wall opposite there were great finger-shaped patches of damp, like some giant, sodden thing had smeared a palm print there before dying back to the earth. The corners where the room pinched itself together were sharp and dark, and rust chawed at the edges of the table. Through the window, the sky was milky with clouds, and everything was panting with the heat—the huts wavered and the wire lines sagged, and the inmates walked like they carried their sins on their backs. The smell of dung pushed sick-sweet in my nostrils and I could hear the faint noise of helicopter blades biting the sky. Seven thousand five hundred miles from home, and I felt every single damn one of them. I thought of my dad, of Jeannie, wondered how the hell they let this happen, tried to picture them carrying on with their easy-street lives, with their coffee and their newspapers and their clean clothes—but their faces smeared, like they were standing behind waved glass.
“C’mon,” repeated the Hog, and his
hand was on me. He lifted me by the neck of my shirt, snuffled his face close to my neck. “Listen, son,” he said. “You got to give them a reason. A reason they can pity you. Because right now"—he pushed me through the door, out into the yard—"you’re twenty-four hours away from someone throwing away the key.” He shoved me, letting go of the scruff of my shirt; my feet stumbled in the dust. “Now fuck off, you nasty little skidmark. Back to fucking work.”
I’m at the edge of the yard, by the Box, filling my nineteenth sandbag. The light’s beginning to darken and the heat’s loosening its grip. The nearest guard is twenty meters away; I sit on my sandbag to watch the sinking of the sun. And as the last fingers of light draw back from the earth, as shadow swallows the yard, I feel Fear reaching for me from the darkness, hear it whisper in my ear.
“You.”
There are ghosts around me—Skid and Shea and Dopfer and Bobby and Mom and even him, even Captain Vance, who died and lived that day; he is here too.
“Baby-san.”
I turn. Through the slit of the Box, a pair of eyes, watching.
I did it because I was scared, because this shit-burning war wasn’t what they said it was, because there weren’t any bad guys to kill or girls to fuck, because I wanted the damn thrill, because my crotch was rotting and my feet were peeling, because I wanted to go home, because I smelled Shea’s shit when he dropped, because that Cambodian dope was fucked, because none of it was real, it was all a fucking movie, because I was bored, because I was dumb, because I got a dead mom and a deadbeat dad; because he was fucking there.
Jeannie / August 1968
At one o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang.
Jeannie put down the receiver and woke Billy. They laid Charlie in the backseat of the car, her mom’s quilt laid over him, his eyes bright in the dark. Jeannie sat in front, watched the car swallow the road, and felt afraid.
The Outside Lands Page 28