Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  With an empty Orange Crush pop bottle and piece of old rag, he said, “The only tricky part is getting enough gasoline in the bottle so the rag gets wet enough to burn, but not so wet it drips gas on your arm, before you throw it at the tank.” The cig bounced jauntily up and down in his lips, denying gravity—daring gravity—to pull it from those lips, where it so naturally belonged. My brother and I noticed stuff like that about Cousin Robert Michael. Life held few rules for him.

  And so we discussed and acted out the best ways to disable an armored tank, or approach a machine gun bunker, or throw a grenade. These war games were the last we played out in the grove. Before them had come cops and robbers, fed by Cousin Robert Michael’s seemingly endless and intimate knowledge of Al Capone and Babyface Nelson and countless others. Before cops and robbers had come cowboys and Indians, about which he also knew everything necessary to properly act out our scenarios.

  But the war games? They came with our maturing ability to manipulate components of that game that existed around us on the farm, namely, fire and guns. Fire from gasoline; guns from the Daisy BB rifles that every farm boy owned by natural right.

  We swiped the gas from dad’s tractor barrel, and constructed numerous Molotov cocktails, and hurled them at the old machinery in the grove, which had become enemy tanks, and large boulders sticking out of the ground in the corn fields that surrounded the entire farmstead, which had become enemy bunkers. We stalked, and hurled, and talked about burning enemy soldiers.

  Cousin Robert Michael showed us how to wire shotgun shells to the ends of the barrels of our BB guns, so the BB would set off the shell, with lots of smoke and noise. And danger, I guess, which seemed to be what we were after.

  These war games came last, and were the end of our childhood games.

  Cousin Robert Michael had been inspirational at cowboys chasing Indians, and he had brought innovative twists that Matt and I could never have come up with at cops and robbers—but he was supernatural with war and strategy and lines of defense and attack teams and army lingo. Sometimes, he was too much for us to handle. He really got into it, kind of forgot who he was, like.

  And that’s the second thing I remember, him getting lost in these games. With the tree-filtered summer sunlight casting wiggling ripples on the grove’s floor, I can see both Robert Michael and my brother Matt, from where I am trying to arm my BB gun with another shotgun shell. My attention is focused mainly on what I am trying to do, but I look up enough to see Matt from my hiding spot, see him crawling carefully backwards away from the protection of a broken grain drill. I also notice Robert Michael’s BB gun barrel jutting from his fencepost bunker, never moving, pointed like a metallic blue finger at a jumbled pile of boards over to Matt’s left. Somehow, he knew, probably even before Matt did, just where Matt was going to deploy, just like he knew that no Lucky Strike existed that dared fall unbidden from his lips.

  And I only believed after the fact that Robert Michael wouldn’t follow the rule of making sure BBs were shot only at a part of the body covered with clothing. So I watched, and wound wire on my shotgun shell, and felt lazy during a moment of sun shining on my hiding space. But I remember Robert Michael’s gun barrel never wavering or changing aim, even though I knew he couldn’t see Matt move through the tall weeds and pieces of junk between them. But he knew just where Matt’s head would come up, and he waited for his shot.

  Robert Michael’s BB hit Matt in the left lens of his glasses. It made a sudden clinking noise like a tea spoon dropping into an empty coffee cup, and my first thought was to believe that the BB had missed and hit a piece of metal machinery. But that was replaced by the reality of the red blood running down Matt’s cheek, and his cries of pain as he grabbed at his eye and rocked back and forth.

  Robert Michael never visited again. Maybe he was ashamed of what he had done, but that’s doubtful. More like he, like us, knew the games were over. It was his last shot.

  My next visit to the grove was a long, long time later, with my mother. I was on leave after army basic training; cousin Robert Michael was in Fort Benning, in the army’s noncommissioned officer school, where he had gone after advanced infantry training, and Matt had just been assigned to the 196th Infantry Battalion in Vietnam, somewhere in and around Chu Lai, but he couldn’t tell us exactly where in his first letter from there, in case the letter was intercepted by the enemy. His eye had healed up over the years since he had been shot, but the doctors said it would never be as good as the other one. It was good enough, the army said.

  In a letter to me, Matt said he was going to see if he could get a transfer to Robert Michael’s unit, when he got in-country. Slade, he said and I had to agree, was going to be a natural at running around in the jungle looking for Charley. I—God help me, we were still so innocently playing at games that had not until now involved our lives—I wrote back and light-heartedly said that I too would try for assignment with them both. Wouldn’t that be a kick.

  The army agreed that all three of us were above average in war skills, evidently. They said our tests warranted sending all three of us to NCO school. I went to the farm while I waited for orders for advanced infantry training. It was autumn. The leaves of the trees in the grove with their reds and golds were like fire up there in the sky.

  I went to the grove with mom that fall day, just to walk and talk under the dappled canopy of those trees, where the rural quiet was broken only by the background drone of insects and the faraway sounds of a neighbor’s tractor, picking corn. Mom was really strung out over the whole Vietnam war and its claim on her two sons. I thought maybe a visit to the calm of the grove would help—dad suggested it, I guess.

  As she talked about the new medicine that the young doctor in town had prescribed for her to help her sleep, I remember wondering when her hair had gotten so grey, and when her hands, with which she scratched nervously at her bare forearms, had become so restless and out of control. She began to cry as she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I never would’ve let stuff like this bother me before.”

  After another spasm of sobbing, she said, “You boys know how proud of you we are…” And fresh tears tore away the rest of what she wanted to say. Or the years between then and now took it away. I wasn’t concentrating at my best during that time. None of us were. Vietnam seemed to be all any of us thought about, all the television showed every night. All politicians talked about. It was everywhere.

  It’s three years and three months later. Dad and I just now came back from the grove. We’re sitting at the kitchen table. I’m sitting where I sat growing up. My initials are still visible on the table leg to my right, right where I carved them with my first jackknife. There’s a cup of coffee steaming on the worn and scratched table top in front of me. This home—this house in which I grew up—feels uneasily familiar and faintly strange to me, all at once, like I both do and don’t belong here anymore. Dad and I are learning to talk about things besides farm auctions and tractors and the neighbors, when I come to visit. We’re trying, anyway.

  Mom killed herself with a drug overdose, about two weeks after two army officers drove into the yard in a dark green sedan with the news that Matt had been killed while trying to rescue a downed pilot up in the hills close to Cambodia.

  Maybe if I had been with him, to help him see, my two good eyes would have….I don’t know….have helped. Somehow. I don’t know. Maybe I could have stopped Cousin Robert Michael that day in the grove, way back when we were kids, before he pulled the trigger on Matt’s eye. Then maybe Matt would still be alive. I think about it a lot. I wish I would have been there for Matt the first time, in the grove. I should have been there, the second time. It feels like I haven’t been anywhere I should have been.

  These days I know more about emotional illnesses and stuff about the kind of emotional upset that accompanies menopause in older women, but I didn’t know much then, when Mom and I went to
the grove. Mom had said she’d be all right, don’t worry about her. Maybe I could have gotten her to a psychologist, or something.

  Out in the grove, that’s where dad said he found her. He said he thought she’d just fallen asleep, the way she was curled up there in the roofless remains of our old childhood shack. That’s the most he’s ever said about that.

  Cousin Robert Michael is still up in Canada somewhere; we don’t hear anything from him. He went AWOL when his orders for Nam came. Dad and I talk about his doing that, because it’s the safest thing we can really talk about. Dad says Robert Michael’s parents never gave him the opportunity to grow up, the room to grow up. I think he might be better off for not having grown up. He’s alive.

  I can see the grove from where I sit, through the two white-curtained windows in the kitchen, out past the faded red barn, through the steam rising from my coffee. Part of me is here, and part of me is still back there, with all the hell of the momentary violence that broke down on us at nightfall, mortar rounds falling out of the dark like rain, the popcorn sound of intense rifle fire, our jets laying napalm just about in our laps. Every time it happened, I would believe that if I could just get back home to the grove, everything would be all right again. Everything would go back to the way it was. Then daylight would come again to the jungle, and with each new dawn I would choose between staying under the triple-canopied jungle of Vietnam, and a hope-starved existence, or going home to the grove, the one with elm and maple trees, and no brother, and no mother.

  I was into my third hitch over there when the war ended, and my choice was made for me. I had to go home. That was three months ago.

  Like I said, Dad and I were just out in the grove. It looks like it hurts, all torn up and twisted every which way, my trees fallen down and jumbled up like a bad throw of pick-up sticks.

  Nothing out there looks the same. Dad said a tornado went through while I was in Vietnam, and tore everything up.

  I guess it did.

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