The Signal Flame

by Andrew Krivak

  Grayson turned his head as if to make sure Bo was listening. Could you wait eleven years for your brother and still feel like you do today?

  I don’t know, Bo said.

  What about you? he said to Ruth. You’re young. And pretty.

  Maybe I wouldn’t, Ruth said.

  Wouldn’t what? Grayson asked.

  Ever feel like I’ve waited too long.

  You might. When you’re old and alone and he’s still not come. Or maybe not so old, like my friend Ashley waiting tables down there in town. You just might.

  He stood and cracked his neck and went into the house. When he came back out, he held three bottles of Duquesne beer in one hand and a bar blade in the other. He popped the caps off all three bottles and said, Fridge is bare once we drink these, so you best enjoy what little hospitality I have to offer.

  He handed one to Bo and one to Ruth and sat back down with his feet pulled up to him and his knees high.

  I got to know that commander pretty well, he said as though there had been no break at all in the conversation. Went to French schools in Paris and still referred to his country as Indochina.

  He looked over at Ruth. Do you know what Ho Chi Minh’s first words were when he stood in the middle of the square in Hanoi in 1945 and addressed his people?

  She shook her head.

  Of course not. I didn’t, either. But they went something like this, according to Captain Nguyen. All men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He told me that and I said, You’re shittin me. And he said, Lieutenant, I shit you not.

  Grayson smiled, like he still held a fond memory of the man about whom he had been speaking inside his head and it pleased him to go back for that reason. He took a long swig of beer and held the bottle from the neck by his thumb and forefinger and let it dangle between his knees. Killed in a chopper crash, Captain Nguyen. Going nowhere special. R and R, I think. Just hitching a ride with the army. He always said he hated to fly.

  Grayson was quiet then and seemed to remember that he had a beer, and he drank off the rest of the bottle and set the empty down right beside him. He was a believer, though. Like Corporal Konar. That’s why I asked your brother to join CAP.

  Ruth fidgeted where she sat, and Grayson said, Sorry. He wasn’t your brother now, was he?

  That’s all right, Ruth said, and put her head down.

  You drinkin’ that beer? he asked her, and she stood and handed it to him and he held the bottle up as if to say thank you.

  Ruth sat back down on the deck, and said, What’s CAP? Sam mentioned that once in a letter he wrote before he left for his second tour. But then I didn’t hear any more about it. And then, well, we didn’t hear anything at all.

  Combined Action Program, Grayson said. That’s what I went back for. That’s what I told Corporal Konar he’d be doing if he reupped. I was assigned to the command structure of a Combined Action Group in Quang Tri, putting rifle squads in local villages to live and work with the Vietnamese. You know, winning hearts and minds. That sort of thing. Let them know that you’re not there to call in napalm. And I wanted Konar with me. I put him in charge of one of the squads because he was in the zone for sergeant. And because he had the respect of the other men. November ’71 was going to be our last month in-country.

  Grayson drank from the beer Ruth had given him, and when he was done he stared out and down at the valley, then spoke in a kind of trance, not moving his eyes left or right.

  He told Bo and Ruth that in the last village where Corporal Konar’s squad lived, there was a local elder who knew a lot of VC. He had already given Grayson information that had saved more than a few marines’ lives, and they had a good rapport, or so he thought. The day when Konar’s squad was getting ready to move out, Grayson had come to the village with another CAP squad he had picked up a few miles away. He liked to collect the men when they were coming back, see how they looked and felt in the field and what they had left behind, and he could not believe the camaraderie he saw between Konar’s marines and the Vietnamese locals who knew they were there to protect them.

  I believed in it, too, then, the war, the program, the certain inalienable rights of those villagers, Grayson said, though he said it slowly and with a snarl so that the hair beneath his lip bristled.

  They had been moving only ten minutes when they stepped into the ambush, a classic L-shape, with VC at the base in front of them and another unit at the stem to the side. They did what they always did, concentrate return fire in the direction of the attack and open fire on the stem to try to outflank the enemy. Then Grayson’s lieutenant took a round in the head, and Grayson grabbed the radio from the RTO and that marine went down right next to him. He yelled for rapid fire into the brush and could see Corporal Konar out front, could hear him shouting Tie in left! over shouts for the corpsman. Grayson started firing, and two quick grenade blasts came from the front and the flank. Boom. Boom. Just like that, and he went ass over tin can, deaf as a doorpost, his head ringing like a bell. But he saw movement and told himself to get up in case it was the enemy coming out into the open. He glanced to his right and saw Corporal Konar on one knee and firing short bursts from his rifle. As if he would kneel there all day and fire at the enemy until given the command to cease. Grayson moved his gaze away for five seconds to make sure he had the arms and legs and sorry ass to get back into that fight, then came up with his sidearm, all he had, and when he looked to his right again, Corporal Konar was gone. Like some ghost who had never been there at all.

  Bo was not for or against the war. When Sam enlisted in the marines on the same day the charges against him for grand theft auto were dropped, Jozef said, No one in his right mind is in favor of war. What I will never tell a man who would stand up for what he believes in is that what he believes in is not worth dying for. We’ve all got some reason to die.

  When Sam shipped out, Bo and Hannah watched the nightly news, the body counts at the bottom of the screen like the score of a football game, ten-second footage of helicopters flattening out elephant grass and artillery firing into jungles, and then the cut to angry faces of American college kids screaming and shouting to get the hell out of Vietnam.

  When Sam came home from that tour, he took the bus to Wilkes-Barre from Camp Lejeune, and he and Bo hung out just like before, fishing in the morning on the weekends, then heading back for more in the evening and stopping for beers at the Sunset when it got dark. Bo never told Sam he was wrong, and Sam never told Bo what it was like to feel a mortar blast or to see a man take a bullet in the neck. He spoke of the heat and what it was like to ride close over the jungle in a Huey. Sam’s old buddies came around sometimes, and he would talk to them but not for long, and when Bo asked him why one day, he shook his head and said, I’ve seen better die on a tripwire. On the weekends when Sam had leave and did not come home, Bo knew he was with Ruth somewhere. But they never talked about her, and now Bo wished they had. In August 1970 Sam came home on a week’s leave and, at the dinner table, told Hannah and Jozef that he had reenlisted for three more years and requested to have the length of his rotation reduced so he could go back to Vietnam for another tour in late September. He had made corporal.

  What happened to everyone else? Bo asked Grayson. He could feel his elbow starting to throb, and he shifted his own body as he felt it cramping where he sat, and he considered the fact that although he had waited a long time to hear what Grayson was telling him, he was not sure anymore if he wanted to know the details of what were likely his brother’s last moments on this earth.

  Well, fighting like that stops as quick as it starts, Grayson said. You want to talk about ghosts? Fucking VC. We got ourselves rounded up, got Doc working on the wounded as best he could, then looked for a clearing and secured a landing zone. Then I had some of the men who weren’t walking wounded come with me to search for your brother. It had started to rain hard, and the ground, red as goddamn blood that ground was, in no tim
e was like a quagmire inside a shit house. We couldn’t find anything or anyone. No VC. No bodies. No Konar. Not a sound in that jungle except the sticks we broke on the ground and our boots when we pulled them out of the mud. For the next week I sent what search parties I could, until I just couldn’t anymore. Then I wrote my report.

  But you told the board he ought to remain carried in a missing status, Ruth said.

  Grayson looked at her like he had seen something on her or in her that he had missed before. He took a moment to consider it, then nodded.

  Why? she asked.

  Whatever it was, Grayson no longer seemed interested in it. He turned his head and looked down at the deck, then back at Ruth. Because I never liked to lose any of my men, he said, sounding angry. Especially the good ones, and he drank off the rest of his beer in three long pulls.

  But the board, Ruth persisted, pushing her legs out in front of her as if about to rise and go off in search of Sam herself. They’ve never found anything else? No reason to say he’s in prison, or he was shot dead and left?

  Grayson put his head down and stifled a belch. I told you, he said. We gathered the dead. Konar just disappeared.

  There was a general ruckus of birds and insects in the woods below them, and the sky was turning as the sun went down. Bo closed his eyes and thought, I could sleep right here, and remembered he had a drive in front of him that would likely keep him up past midnight. He had drunk only half his beer, and when he opened his eyes, he saw Grayson staring at him.

  Still with us? he said.

  Bo nodded.

  That’s good. He talked about you a lot. Said you knew more than anyone he’d ever met, and he wished he’d had sense enough to stay home and learn every last bit of it from you.

  I don’t wish he’d stayed, Bo said. I just wish he’d come back.

  I wish they all could, Grayson said, and gave the bottle in his right hand a little toss as if to test its weight, then heaved it off the deck so that it spun end over end through the air, spilling dregs of beer as it dropped down into the ravine and out of sight, where it smashed with a muffled ooff, and everything was quiet.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  THEY DROVE BACK DOWN THE mountain in the dusk and were only a few miles outside of Abas when the truck would not accelerate, then it stalled and rolled to a stop. Bo called on the CB for a tow, and the wrecker that came took them back to the Phillips 66 station in town and left them in the lot under a lone incandescent light.

  They got a room in a small motel next to the diner, and Bo called Hannah and told her the truck had likely seen its last and they would not be home until Tuesday daytime at the earliest. Hannah said she would drive down in the Dart and pick them up, but Bo said they would get a ride back with the flatbed coming the next day for the saw.

  The room had two double beds. Bo turned out the overhead light and they each climbed into one with their clothes on. They lay breathing in the dark, and Ruth said, Thanks, Bo. For bringing me down here.

  For a while he just lay and listened to the intermittent traffic outside. Then he said, How did you know I’d swing by this morning?

  Hannah told me you might. I was in my room feeling sorry for myself after we left your house, and she knocked on the door and said, If you knew him like I do, you’d get yourself to bed and get up early, because I’ll bet you a laying hen he’ll be in that driveway before first light. I asked her if she’d called you, and she said, Call him on what? Those tin cans we got strung on wires that stretch through the woods? Go to sleep. She sure is something, your mom.

  She is that, Bo said, and there was another long spell of silence in the room.

  It had begun to rain, and cars passed by outside with a hiss of tires that rose and fell along the same arc as the headlights that swept through the blinds and across the back wall of the room as though in search of a fugitive hidden in the dark. Bo could tell in that light she had not closed her eyes.

  I wish I could give him back to you, Ruth, he said. Trade places somehow and let you two live out the life you should have had.

  She said nothing, but he could hear her breathe, a soft stuttering heave as she tried to regain control of her voice.

  We had the life we should have had, she said. I was just thinking—where would I be if you and Hannah hadn’t wanted to help me?

  Never occurred to us not to, he said.

  I can’t believe that.

  Why?

  Because your grandfather took my grandfather’s land. And my father shot and killed your father. Any one of those would be a good reason for a family to feud. And I don’t remember ever being invited up to your house for a Thanksgiving dinner.

  Bo sat up in his bed. Your grandfather sold that land to my grandfather. I’ll show you the book that proves it. And I don’t believe my father died for any reason other than bad luck. Your father told me himself that he never meant to hurt the man and was sorry his whole life for the way things turned out.

  Your mother never once told Sam to stay away from me? she asked, and he could hear the fatigue in her voice.

  I don’t know what they talked about, Bo said. I know my brother loved you. And my mother knows why now. Seems like, after the summer we just had, none of that past should matter anymore.

  He waited for a while, waited for her to say something about that past and the one person left from it who might come back to her, but when he looked over at her bed in another spray of headlights, he saw she was asleep.

  In the morning, Bo told the garage mechanic he thought it was the cylinder heads, and the man nodded and went into the service bay and disappeared under the hood of the truck. An hour later he came into the office, where Bo was standing next to a soda machine, and said, You drive that thing from Pennsylvania? Bo said yes, and the man said, Far north?

  Around Wilkes-Barre.

  The man shook his head. You’re lucky you made it to the Maryland state line.

  Is it what I said? Bo asked.

  Warped sure enough, the man said.

  Bo ran his hand through his hair. He glanced outside and could see Ruth tossing stones into the creek water at one end of the bridge.

  Can anyone around here shave it down? Bo asked.

  The man smiled and let go a stream of tobacco juice out the open office door. Got to send it to Charlestown. Take you some time.

  What’s the alternative?

  Isn’t one, if you want to drive it.

  What’ll you give me for it? Bo asked.

  Now, that’s an interesting proposition, the man said, and turned his head to look at the truck inside the service bay. What d’ya got in mind?

  Five hundred.

  Shoot, the man said, and laughed.

  Four.

  I’ll give you two-fifty right now. And a lift to Hollis’s, where there’s supposed to be a flatbed pickin’ up a saw sometime today. Ain’t there?

  Bo could smell the same stench of stale engine oil and sweat in the garage office. He eyed the man and nodded, then went back outside to see Ruth and tell her what had happened with the truck. She reached down and picked up a stone the size and shape of a large egg, with orange lines of rust running along its circumference, and threw it into a pool at the deep center of the creek.

  I’d be sorry to see that truck go, all you’ve been through with it, she said, and leaned back against the stone parapet of the bridge. I can wait here with you until they fix it. If that’s what you want to do.

  I don’t think it can be fixed anymore. His head was down and he stared at the road. All of this for a saw, he said, when I could have stayed home and done just fine.

  She kicked his foot and took his hand. You got more than that, she said. Grayson gave us something. Enough for me, anyhow. She tugged on his arm. Come on, Konar boy. Let’s go get your stuff out of that Dodge. I didn’t think it was going to make it down here when I got in it back at the farm.

  Then why’d you come?

  I figured you knew something I
didn’t.

  The man at the garage gave Bo an empty Pennzoil box for his tools and rope and whatnot, then peeled off two hundred and fifty dollars in cash. Bo held it in his hand for a minute, letting his mind go over the possibility of waiting for the parts and coming back to pick up the truck and taking it home to the barn. Where what? he thought. It’ll sit and rust and I’ll have to buy a new one anyway? He put the money in his wallet and walked around the truck with his hand brushing against the side of it. He opened and closed the tailgate just to hear the sound of it and looked through the back cab window, then went around to the driver’s side and opened that and checked behind the seat and inhaled the smell of the cab as though he might smell the years. Then he closed the door and said, All right. Let’s get a bill of sale signed and she’s yours.

  Bo and Ruth walked back over to the diner and sat down for breakfast and coffee. Ashley came out of the kitchen and pretended not to notice them. Bo called her over to the booth where they sat, and he thanked her for the directions she had given them and told her they had had a good long talk with Grayson.