The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  She caught him staring down the front of her dress. Her jaw began to shake with disbelief and rage.

  “You are a filthy, perverted heap of crap,” she said, just as the doors opened and a cheer went up, and Anita and Jeff, splendid and strange in their wedding clothes, swept in.

  Ryan went to the bar and asked for two rum and Cokes and the barman served them up with a wink. He guessed there were some benefits to the wedding thing after all. He found a vantage point near the back door and watched as Anita and Jeff made the rounds, kissing and hugging and shaking hands. His girlfriend had taken herself off somewhere, but he didn’t think he’d seen the last of her. The bridesmaids were carrying on and showing off, his sister’s friends who were just as stuck-up as she was. The bridesmaids’ dresses were sky blue velvet tricked out with floppy ruffles and bits of gauze and some other kind of fruit-salad trim, bad enough, but they’d really outdone themselves on the tuxedos. They were dark blue, with ruffled shirts and some shine to the jacket, and wide lapels faced with more velvet. Jeff and his groomsmen looked like they were about to emcee a wrestling match. When no one was watching, Ryan unpinned the carnation on his lapel, which by now resembled a piece of blue cabbage, and tossed it into the trash.

  He drank one rum and Coke and then the other, and when people began to line up for supper, he felt a little blurred, and he sat down with some guys he knew from school and ate some more of Martha’s beef to steady himself. He was working himself into a sad and rotten mood, which had something to do with his girlfriend, but was also about a loneliness that sometimes crept up on him without warning. Everybody else could have themselves a hilarious good time. He wasn’t really part of it.

  The band started up. Anita and Jeff danced and made moony eyes at each other. His dad and Anita danced. His mom and Jeff’s dad. And so on. It was a regular festival of bad moves. The band had a keyboard player and a drummer and a guitarist and a scratchy-voiced lead singer who kept twirling and rocking the microphone and you had to feel sorry for them, trying to be cool when they had to play shit like “The Hokey Pokey” and “The Bunny Hop.” At least now, with his girlfriend on the warpath, he wasn’t going to have to dance. He wandered back to his spot at the rear of the room and stood there, arms folded, while in his mind he was in the desert on the horse with no name, silent, stern, keenly aware . . .

  A hand landed on his shoulder from behind. “I don’t know why it is,” a voice intoned, “but I always cry at weddings.”

  Ryan turned to see his cousin Chip Tesman, grinning his crooked grin. “Hey man.” They shook hands, a high-style fist lock. “How you been, I haven’t seen you in the longest.”

  “Ah, I been my usual funky self. How’s the happy couple?”

  “Happy, I guess.” They looked out over the room, the field of weaving, waving dancers struggling for space. They made Ryan think of a shipwreck, of bodies dumped into the ocean. In the pass-through he saw Norm and Martha moving around in the kitchen. “At least, Anita’s happy. It’s a big day for showing off.”

  “There you go,” said Chip, by way of agreement. Chip hadn’t been at the wedding, and showing up at the reception looked like it had been an afterthought. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt and his green army jacket with TESMAN printed above the chest pocket. His hair was growing out in scruffy patches. He was twenty-two, five years older than Ryan. The army had been meant to make a man out of him.

  “Your mom and dad are here,” Ryan told him, and Chip nodded, uninterested. Chip was really Ray Jr., after his father. Such boys were called Chip because they were chips off the old block.

  Although Ray Jr. had never really lived up to that, had always been an oddball, a kid who’d collected comic books all through high school and never played sports of any kind and spent most of his time up in his room, reading science fiction and producing elaborate shaded drawings of robots, spacemen, and rocket ships. He’d managed to get himself graduated, barely, and then drafted into the infantry, and everyone had thought it was probably a good idea. There didn’t seem to be any particular future for somebody like Chip, with his nervous, skeetering laugh, his habit of ducking his head instead of looking people in the eye, his lack of any practical aptitudes or skills. Somehow he’d managed to return from the war unshot, skinnier than ever but somehow bigger, alarming people by the way he looked and the way he acted and the knowledge that now he at least knew how to use a rifle.

  Chip squinted at the bar station. “You think they’d serve me a drink?”

  “Sure, why wouldn’t they?” said Ryan, although he was aware that certain possibilities for friction and conflict attended Chip wherever he went. “You’re family. Hell, it’s the Legion, you’re a veteran.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the wrong kind of veteran.” He punched Ryan lightly in the arm and laughed his too high laugh and sidled through the crowd. When he returned, he was carrying two plastic glasses of Scotch and ice. “Hold these,” he instructed, and Ryan watched him go back into the room, walking with his jerky, loose-footed slouch, like a puppet on busted strings, watched other people register his presence. Chip took a plate from the buffet line and loaded it up with whatever he could scrape out of the picked-over food pans.

  “One of those is for you,” he said when he got back, meaning the drinks, but Ryan took one sick-making sip and shook his head. “All yours,” he said, setting them down on a window ledge.

  “Get you something else, huh?” Chip asked with all the concern of a host, and Ryan said no thanks. He watched Chip hauling food into his mouth, gobbling away. Ryan was about to say Chip acted like he hadn’t eaten all day, then thought better of it, since you never knew, Chip might just have woken up and this was breakfast. Chip had been out of the army for most of a year now, living in his parents’ basement, and was having trouble getting his wheels underneath him, as Ryan’s father said.

  Chip finished off the food and set the empty plate on top of a trash container. He patted his pockets looking for cigarettes and found none. He took a drink from the first Scotch, put it down, picked it up again. Then he pointed out into the room. “Hey, Ry? Your hen’s running around loose.”

  Ryan looked and saw his girlfriend, or at least that’s who she’d been this morning, with one of Jeff’s Denver friends, a guy with blow-dried hair and a lot of teeth. They were dancing together, dancing about as slow and dirty as you could get away with at the American Legion. Her face was pink, and he wondered if the guy had been feeding her alcohol or if she was just a slut and always had been for everybody but him. The Denver people had mostly been standing around all night as if they were watching a not very interesting television show, as if they were too good to be here in the first place, but now some of them were cheering their buddy on, and Ryan hated them and hated her and didn’t care if they all fucked her upside down on the nearest table.

  Chip tugged at his arm. “Hey, come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  Ryan found his coat underneath a heap of others and followed Chip out the back door. It was cold, but that felt good after all the heat inside and the heat filling up his head, and he was glad to be walking out, even though there might be consequences to tagging along with Chip, the no-account, the fuckup, the guy everybody figured for a druggie and a criminal, though they couldn’t have said exactly what sort of criminal.

  “You got your truck here?” Chip asked, slapping his sides to try to keep warm. There was nothing to the army coat. Ryan opened the truck door and got in and Chip got in the other side and they breathed out clouds of frost and said “Whoo-ee” to holler back at the cold.

  Ryan started the truck and the engine knocked a little bit before settling into a rhythm. “What is this, a 305?” Chip asked.

  “No, a 325.”

  “Hah.” Chip nodded appreciatively. It surprised Ryan that his dorky cousin might actually know something about engines now. Another part of the new Chip. He coughed his smoker’s cough, again looked without success in his pockets for cigarettes, then continued, “I n
eed to get, I don’t know, a van, maybe. Something I could hit the road in, crash in if I needed to. What?”

  “It’s just funny, you saying crash like that.”

  “What? Oh yeah, I guess.”

  It was taking a long time for the engine to throw any heat. Ryan lifted himself one side at a time off the vinyl seat. His suit pants were useless when it came to keeping his ass warm. Being in the truck made him think of his girlfriend. A certain scent, a combination of wool, perfume, and cold air had accompanied their recent winter episodes, and in a wave of furious, hateful lust he saw again her white, white exposed skin. It staggered him for a moment, then he fought it down and made his voice casual. “So where did you want to go, Chipper?”

  “Don’t call me that, Lambchop.”

  “Ooh, that hurt.”

  “I was thinking we could sit right here for a while. You get high?”

  “Sure,” said Ryan. He did, he had, but not in any big-deal way. It had always been somebody else’s stuff, he wouldn’t have known how to get any himself or how much to pay for it or even how to roll a joint, a whole body of worldly knowledge he was still ignorant of. It hadn’t done that much for him either, unless the lack of oxygen from the coughing fits was some kind of high. “Sure, you got some?”

  “One great thing about the great Republic of Vietnam, they got the world’s finest ganj. Jungle pot. Guys been bringing seeds back for years, starting their own little farm operations. Guys who know guys I know.”

  Chip rummaged around in his shirt pocket, came up with a plastic baggie. He shook and smoothed it with one hand and with the other switched on the radio. “Got to have tunes.”

  Yelps and whistles came out of the speakers. Ryan worked the dial and came up with the Cedar Rapids AM station, playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).”

  “Fuckety-fuck. There are like zero good stations around here, you know?” Chip complained. He was busy tapping leaves into a pipe bowl, and Ryan was beginning to get a little uneasy at the prospect of smoking up right here in the parking lot. The back door of the Legion opened and a man and woman he didn’t recognize came out, walking carefully on the crusted snow. “Yeah, I’m gonna get out to see my buddy in San Francisco pretty soon. The summer of love is over, we missed that party, but they still make real music out there. The Dead still rule.”

  “Yeah?” Ryan echoed, not knowing what Chip was talking about, not really listening as he went on and on, because after all it was only Chip running his mouth, the way he always did, and anyway Ryan sort of liked “Brandy” himself. The man and woman headed off down the street without looking in their direction. He decided not to be a chickenshit, to go along with the program. Otherwise Chip would give him a hard time, and even if it was only gooneybird Chip, he wouldn’t let it drop.

  Funny to think that his cousin, whom he’d known all his life (though Chip had been too old and too uncool to be a playmate), had been a soldier and been to a war and come back grown-up. Or at least, as grown-up as he was likely to get. These days the war was going right down the toilet, getting more and more lost every day. You knew it was lost when they kept having peace negotiations. And though you still had to worry about that shit, about registering and getting a lottery number, odds were you weren’t going to get called up or shipped off or anything that was dangerous and important and real. It was another party he’d missed out on, though that was a strange way to think about a war.

  Chip flicked a lighter over the pipe bowl, firing it up and inhaling. He motioned for Ryan to take the pipe from him, then drew his breath in and in until it exploded out of him, smoke filling the space between them. They were both going to stink like chimneys.

  When it was Ryan’s turn, he fought to hold the scorching smoke inside him. The last thing you wanted to do was cough. He kept it going as long as he could, then opened his lungs and took in air. “Anything left? Gimme,” Chip said, and Ryan checked himself for anything like a high, found nothing. But after his third turn at the pipe he began to feel it a little, and then without warning it snuck up behind him and spun his head around.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  Chip laughed, but his laugh had slowed way down. “Catch a buzz?”

  “The top of my head is ten feet tall and filled with marshmallow.” Ryan laughed too because it was such a goofy thing to say, but it was the absolute truth.

  “Yeah, this ain’t your local roadside hemp. You ever hear of Thai stick? Well, you have now.”

  “Not bad,” he managed, pulling the words out of some box where all the words were kept.

  “Who would have thought, a nice boy like you, smokin’ out behind the barn.”

  “I’m not a nice boy, asshole,” Ryan said, because nice boys were pussies.

  But he guessed he might pass for one, if he was honest about it.

  Chip reached to turn the radio down, then he seemed to forget about the conversation and absorbed himself with putting different parts of his body up against the truck’s heater to warm them. There was a space of silence, except for the tiny radio noise. “Snow,” Chip said.

  Ryan, his brain by now operating underwater, took a slow moment to process this, then connect the idea of snow with the small, sleety stuff accumulating on the windshield.

  They watched it coming down for a time. “Man, I hate winter,” Chip complained.

  “I don’t mind it so much.”

  “That’s the Norwegian in you. Me, it never took.”

  “I don’t want to be a Norwegian.” He guessed it was a stupid thing to say, but he knew what Chip meant. It was the same as being a nice boy.

  Chip laughed another of his stupid laughs. Really, the guy should not go anywhere near a joke. “Little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “Shit.”

  “Maybe you could get yourself adopted by an Indian tribe. Your Indian name could be, ah, Hair of the Dog.”

  “Funny.” The snow changed over to flakes, softer now but falling faster. Ryan thought about turning on the truck’s windshield wipers, then remembered he wasn’t driving.

  A thin white layer began to veil the glass and fill the cab with reflected light. Chip loaded the pipe again and they smoked again but Ryan didn’t feel any more stoned, just sleepy. Chip said, “Man, I need a cigarette. Why don’t you have any cigarettes?”

  “Bad for your wind.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. Track star.”

  “Eat me.”

  “Sorry. You know I’m just messing with you.”

  Ryan said Yeah, sure. Chip was an asshole, even if he was an asshole with good pot.

  “It’s just, you know I was never your all-American-boy type. Never climbed a tree or went fishin’ with an old cane pole.”

  “Didn’t go . . . fishing,” Ryan managed. What was Chip complaining about now? He couldn’t keep track of all the different gripes, which basically boiled down to all the ways Chip had been a total spaz. The snow was dragging his eyelids shut.

  “Never had a girlfriend, hell, I don’t think I even had a conversation with a girl, except I must have at least once or twice, right? Mathematically impossible not to. Lost my cherry in a whorehouse in Saigon.”

  “Yeah?” said Ryan, waking up. “What was that like?”

  “The whorehouse? I don’t know, stud. It’s not like I got anything else to compare it to.”

  Ryan had meant something else, though now his meaning escaped him, what was it like, to travel across an ocean, to be in a war, to be afraid for your life, to kill someone or think about killing them, to buy a woman. They were quiet. The windshield was a solid white layer, though Ryan’s window was still clear. The light above the back door of the Legion Hall threw a yellow cone downward, and in the light he could see the flakes falling steadily, then lifting when the wind swirled. It reminded him of a snow globe, one of those pretty scenes under glass, and then he had the sad, stoned thought that he was outside of the snow globe looking in. Just as something in him always stood apart, and he was not who peo
ple assumed he was.

  “ . . . beautiful country,” Chip said, as if he had been speaking all along and maybe he had, in his head. “Even after we bombed the shit out of it. It’s hot, sure, but I don’t mind that. Everything’s green. Fruits I don’t even know the name of. Mangoes. They got about ten different kinds of bananas, for Christ’s sake. Mountains, there’s all this fog or mist or something, turns the mountains this color, blue mostly but like, a rainy blue, if that makes any sense. I guess you’d have to be there and see it for yourself.”

  Ryan tried to make a picture of it in his head, blue mountains and green jungle, but it kept getting mixed up with desert, what he imagined the desert to be, red sand and yellow sand and bare rocks and the heat and feeling the horse’s heat beneath him and when he looked out the truck’s window he was surprised that the snow was still there. He guessed he was good and high.

  “Beautiful country, fucked-up war. People here don’t get that, they think all you do is show up in the middle of somebody else’s deal and say, ‘Hey, we’re the Americans,’ and everybody’s happy to see you. You know what Martin Luther King said? ‘America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’ You think the old boys at the Legion want to hear any of that?”

  Ryan said he guessed they didn’t. He was beginning to realize that there were all sorts of ways to be on the outside of things.

  Chip fished around at the neck of his shirt and brought out a leather cord with a silver peace symbol hanging from it. “You know what the Legion boys call this? ‘Footprint of the American Chicken.’ I’ve seen the bumper stickers. They hate guys like me because we lost a war we were supposed to win and anyway we’re a bunch of baby killers.”