A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

  The bartender poured Levi a beer. “You won the Silver Star, right?”

  “That was a long time ago.” He pulled his wallet from his pocket. “Can I open a tab?”

  “Put that away. The first one’s on me. It’s not every day I get to serve a war hero.”

  “Thanks,” Levi said. Thanks for thinking some bits of string and steel actually mean something, he thought. He put his wallet on the bar without opening it. “But really. I can pay.”

  “I insist,” said the man.

  “I appreciate your generosity.” Levi hoped to create distance with his formality. He lifted the glass a few inches off the bar in cheers before turning his attention back to the game.

  The man remained, hands on the bar. “So was it in Iraq? Where you got the medal?”

  [I mean, you had to have dealt with the same kind of thing, right? I had four choices as I saw it: The first was to tell the guy bluntly that I appreciated the beer but didn’t enjoy talking about my time in the army; the second was to play it cool, nod when appropriate, and hope the guy just got the hint; the third was to engage, tell some stories, read the man’s cues to get a feel for his political leanings, rant about the current or former administration, shake my head when talking about the media, give him the stories that he wanted instead of the truth he didn’t, and collect free beers all night; the fourth would be to describe in detail what it feels like to grasp the power of having another man in the sights of your M4, describe the adrenaline rush of pulling the trigger after higher gives you the okay, make him feel the overwhelming satisfaction of removing evil from the world as you watch the enemy crumple to the dust from which he came knowing that you just kept a bullet from going into your gunner’s brain or you kept an IED from being planted beneath your buddy’s truck, and then as the bartender leans closer and his mouth opens a little wider—devouring every salacious word that comes from my mouth—I could tell him about the dump truck load of bricks that drops in your stomach when you stand over the dead man realizing that he wasn’t in fact armed, that the Kalashnikov you saw against the pickup from a hundred meters away was really nothing more than an axe, and what you thought was a shovel was just a pitchfork, a simple farmer’s tool.

  I chose to sip my beer and nod.]

  “Been to Afghanistan too?”

  Levi nodded again. He felt like one of the Bobblehead dolls they were probably handing out to the fans at the baseball game on TV.

  The Brewers had never won the division during Levi’s lifetime and had only made the playoffs once. But the thing he loved about baseball was that it was so different from life. It was a metaphor for how life could be, or at least should be. At any time, things could change for the better. Every season was a fresh start. Maybe this year they could turn it around. Maybe one solid game could end the drought. Maybe one quality start at home could turn the tide and carry them through the long season. It could happen.

  “So what was it like over there?”

  Levi looked down into his beer, which was nearly empty. “Can you believe this? Just when you think we can contend again.”

  The bartender turned and looked at the screen. “Oh yeah. I’ll tell you what; I can’t watch anymore. Not since the strike and then all that steroids business.” The man took Levi’s glass and walked away.

  “You know,” his dad whispered. “He’s just trying to make conversation.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “All these people here in town, Son. They remember you kids from when you were little. They all know and remember you more than you remember them, that’s all.”

  Levi pulled out his pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke.” It wasn’t a question.

  The bartender brought back a full glass of beer with an ashtray. He set the beer and the ashtray down and hovered. “Pretty bad then, huh?”

  Levi looked at his dad. His eyes silently nudged him forward. “All right. You want to know what it was like over there?” He took a slug of beer and the man leaned forward. “Your wife ever take you shopping? Mall of America? Valley View, wherever?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “Afghanistan was like that. You walk around all day and you don’t have a single clue about what the hell you’re looking for.”

  The man threw his head back in a hearty laugh. “That’s great. I guess that’s about what my dad said about the European front. Hurry up and wait, right?” Satisfied, the man walked back to his post near the taps.

  “Happy?” Levi whispered. “I don’t even know this guy’s name.”

  “Hey, Brad. Think we can get a few more?” While Brad poured new beers, Levi’s dad whispered back, “Happy?”

  The men watched the game. Between innings, the bartender would bring Levi another beer and empty the ashtray. As he brought Levi’s sixth beer, Levi’s dad said, “You mind bringing me a plate of that roast beef special, Brad?”

  “Sure. Levi? Hungry?”

  Levi shook his head. He tried smiling to show the man some semblance of warmth, but after downing several drinks in quick succession, he felt his face was as distorted as his thoughts.

  “So,” his dad said.

  “So.”

  [Ya know, by this point, I should have felt ready to loosen up, start buying shots, start riffing and having a good time. This was usually the point when life stopped being so drab, but the silence was oppressive. The ice machine rattled and the Miller Genuine Draft sign buzzed, sure, but they only made me more aware of the silence. Kind of like when you notice no one is talking at dinner and suddenly it sounds like your chewing could be heard in China. The things is, I had seen my parents like a handful of times, maybe, since I got back, so what did I have to say? And even if I could think of something to say, I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it because the longer I stayed away and the longer I didn’t talk to anyone, the more guilty I felt about not talking to them, and then the more guilty I felt about it, the harder it was to open up and talk about it. It was, and is, this self-perpetuating problem.]

  “Work things out with your sister?” said his dad.

  “Mmm. She told you about that?” He sipped his beer. “Yeah, anyway. I acquiesced. No sense keeping up a fight over something dumb. She’s fragile.”

  “Not as fragile as you think. She stands up to you, doesn’t she?”

  Every time she called Levi on the telephone, she spoke in low hospital-bed tones. The week he had moved out of Nick’s and into his own apartment, she stopped over to drop off a casserole. To be specific, she had stood there smiling—she was always smiling, even when he knew she must be revolted at the smell of cigarette smoke and the shredded commercial carpeting found in the hallway of the industrial building offering studios for less than 300 bucks a month—and she had said, “I thought you might like something low maintenance to heat up in your bachelor pad and all.” All white teeth and bubbles. “It’s a duck cassoulet with artichokes. And then this Tupperware here doesn’t even have to be reheated. This one is a chilled beet soup with crème fraîche and dill. It’s so yummy. Your nieces love it.” He invited her in, but she stayed in the hallway as if she were scared to go in, like if she went into his apartment she might find the bodies of dismembered hookers; or at the very least, she’d find the dried-out ears and fingers of enemy combatants.

  For a year she’d been doing the same thing as his dad. She’d been calling him every week, begging him to come over for dinner, forcing him to talk, to engage with her for full minutes at a time. Finally he accepted, almost as a last-ditch effort to be left alone for a while. It turned out to be as bad as he’d anticipated. When he arrived, she escorted him into the living room to see his nieces and nephew. She stayed close as if he were a rescued dog, ready to latch onto an internal jugular at any moment. She said, “Hey guys,” and she moved like an inch a minute because sudden movement might have startled him. “Do you remember your Uncle Levi?”

  The kids looked up at him, excited, but his mood had already soured. Of course they remembered
him. He had seen them when he came home and he had seen them once a year every year he wasn’t deployed. And it’s not like he had any control over the rest of the missing time. Something about two wars, three deployments, the exigent scheduling of the military industrial complex, and the vicissitudes inherent in weaving that blanket of freedom under which she loved to sleep.

  Her husband Chris had offered him a drink on the patio, and then he offered a few more. The switch had been flipped. That was it.

  It was hardly Levi’s fault that Chris asked him to demonstrate some hand-to-hand combat. And it wasn’t his fault Chris was so drunk that he wouldn’t give up. He didn’t remember much, but he remembered being unable to control his laughter after she began shrieking that the kids were asleep. It was too ironic. He assured her that the cries of, “You’re almost thirty, for Pete’s sake!” and “You need to get help!” were far louder than the wrestling they were doing in the basement. He didn’t remember putting a hole in the drywall, but Chris fixed it the next day; so what was the big deal?

  “You know,” said Levi to his dad. “I don’t think she trusts me around the kids.”

  “She just needs to see you more. She never sees you. We never see you. She doesn’t know how to act.”

  “What, and I do?”

  “None of us do.” They watched Prince Fielder take ball four and lumber to first. “I’d like to talk about that.”

  Brad placed a plate of roast beef and vegetables in front of Levi’s dad.

  Levi’s dad picked up his knife. “I know how it is. I know how easy it is to get a bit rough around the edges, and I know things haven’t been easy.” He set his knife down and scratched his beard. Levi turned away from the game and toward him. “I’ve been there myself, which is why I’ve tried to give you some distance. Sometimes a guy just needs to work things out for himself.”

  “Exactly.” Thinking they had reached some sort of understanding, Levi turned back to the game.

  “Are you thinking of suicide, Son?”

  The suddenness of the question caught Levi off guard. “What? No.”

  Rather than accept his answer, his dad gazed into his eyes as if he were searching for something truer than words. Levi’s mind flickered to the debacle in Afghanistan that got him put on the first plane back to Fort Drum. He tried to keep his eyes steady so as not to betray anything to this experienced interrogator. “Hell no. Why even ask that?”

  “It needed to be asked.”

  “Nick say something?”

  “I’ve talked to Nick, sure. But he’s never spoken a single ill word of you. This isn’t about him. Let me put it bluntly.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “I think the time has come for you to talk to someone.”

  Levi let out an exasperated sigh.

  “I have some pamphlets in the car.”

  Levi removed his hands from his glass and laced them behind his head. He looked up at the ceiling, contemplating the idea.

  [Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I pretended to contemplate the idea. I had been on that stage before in forced visits to the mental health clinic at Fort Drum, and before that, the joke of a system in Afghanistan, where they made me video-teleconference on some crappy satellite connection with some prick on Bagram. They cleared out the single concrete room in this bombed out UNICEF school on Sperwan Ghar—the same room where we all lived together—and they did it so my discussion with the shrink would be considered “confidential.” Could anything get more degrading or humiliating than having your entire platoon uprooted to go stand on some mountain in the middle of nowhere so you can have your forced visit with the shrink? And how could I ever lead any of those guys again after that?]

  No. Levi was done with the government’s idea of mental health care. And the thing now was that even if he quit being a slug and got out to talk to a group, some veterans’ support group or something, it would only be for one meeting. Just the one. Because this is what would happen: He’d go to the meeting and everyone else would have something to share, the essence of which would seem so platitudinous or like, trite. He had seen every character already.

  He could imagine that each meeting would be filled with the same bromidic long-winded narrators, and each one would be identical to the characters he already knew. He conjured images of the night he got home when he had been trapped by Robert Wright and his stories of his air base. The star of the show at the meeting would be a similarly quintessential Vietnam vet with the “Look-What-I-Did-Thirty-Six-Years-Ago” baseball cap adorned with campaign ribbons and mini-medals. A graying ponytail would hang out the back of his baseball cap. Just like Wright, he’d be the broken-record type who probably didn’t say a word to his family, but every weekend he went to hang out with his brothers-in-arms at the VFW who couldn’t let go of their history—a history Levi would just as soon forget—and in the presence of his fellows he felt it was okay, necessary even, to rehash his battles.

  A few months earlier he had paid a visit to Nick at Oma’s Pub. The same kind of guy—sans ponytail but with the campaign hat—told all his stories. Nick had abandoned Levi, feigning work to excuse himself.

  Levi couldn’t take it. The guy continued to tell his stories. He kept pulling poor Shirley the bartender over to the conversation. With every calculated pause and well-time choke-up, with every attempt to connect or convey some real sentiment, Levi wanted to scream and tell the man how sentimental it was, and didn’t he know that sentimental stories were inherently bad? And the stories were always so didactic; and didn’t he know that audiences wanted to be entertained, not instructed? Didn’t he know that audiences didn’t want to be dragged down with the wisdom and moral lessons he was seeking to impart? He wanted to scream, but that wouldn’t have been polite, because this man—this storyteller—was an American war hero after all, at least in the sophistic sense of the word; so he never screamed out his frustration, never put a stop to the narrative, and so the war stories, of course, continued. Would always continue.

  [Don’t think for a second that the irony here escapes me.]

  “Like what then?” Levi asked his father. “Support groups? Therapy?”

  “Sure. Could be. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.”

  “Let me tell you how that will go down.” The alcohol had loosened Levi’s tongue and the confrontation got his blood going. “I’ll go to some meeting and some guy who spent his whole tour at Salsa Night or in the morale tent on Balad or Bagram or somewhere like that—some guy who’s never ever been outside the wire for even a second—will corner me. Then I’ll be stuck between politeness and the coffee table that holds the stainless steel coffee urn; and when I don’t, like, placate him with a concerned response about what he’s been through—which may as well have been an all-inclusive Sandals Resort getaway, comparatively speaking—he’ll try to keep the conversation going by asking where I was and what was my mission? And how long were you in? And what made you get out? And man, don’t you just miss it sometimes?

  “I’ll have to wait there with a crazed and impatient look in my eye, not wanting to further damage this already emotionally wounded character.”

  “Character?” his dad interrupted. “But these are real people with real feelings.”

  Levi ignored him and lit a cigarette. “To make it worse, we’ll have to sit through these AA-style confessionals in which all I’ll want to do is escape or smoke, but I can’t smoke, because the VA is a government building after all, and so all I’ll be able to do is bite little chunks of Styrofoam from my coffee cup. I’ll pray that it will all end. That it will all be over. It’s the type of thing that will make me literally wish for death.”

  When Levi paused to catch his breath, his father waited to make sure he was finished. He said gently, “Are you sure you aren’t thinking of suicide?”

  “Geez, Dad. It’s an expression.”

  “So then what? You don’t think any of the guys there, anyone trying or needing to get help, will really be—what did you cal
l it? Emotionally wounded? Maybe they haven’t been through as much as you’ve been through, but don’t they still deserve our empathy?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. The drinking, the fighting, the stories, the failure to adjust. It’s all just so cliché, don’t you think?” Levi felt like anything he said would be wrong.

  [I still feel like anything I say would be wrong. The truth is, he was right, but I still couldn’t/can’t help feeling this (misplaced?) anger. Guys like that—guys, who, by virtue of the fact they’re there at a meeting at all, or writing a blog about their experiences, or publishing their memoirs before they’re forty, or having an open-forum panel to share their experiences, or sitting at the bar telling their war stories—these guys obviously don’t have a problem telling their stories and recounting their heroes and going through the whole terrible and painful process of facing their demons with all the necessary emotional upheaval, if you will. All in the hopes of finding some redemption. And isn’t that the problem with coming home from wars like this? We’re all seeking redemption as mythical as the reasons they sent us over there in the first place.

  But unlike them, I do have a problem telling my story. This generation: It’s not like Grandpa or my dad—hell, or even you—who didn’t/don’t talk about war. No, we can’t stop talking about it, blogging about it, tweeting about it, and updating our Facebook statuses about it. So what is there even left for me to say? There’s nothing left. It’s all been said, and it’s cheap, and we’re frustrated, and we’re all tired of it.]

  “Not to mention, Dad, it’s not like the Greatest Generation who fought a great evil like the Nazis. So what kind of heroes can be in my story? I mean, really, what did our friends die for? Huh? What did I get my ears blown out for? Why did you go over there and get shot? And why did Nick get his ears blown out, his leg snapped, and all his flesh burned? Why did we go over there to fight and kill people? Not the threat of WMDs; that’s for sure. And we’re sure as hell not fighting for freedom. If anything, they’re sending us to fight these useless wars to scare people, because when people are scared they’ll give up anything. If we were actually defending freedom, the people we’re fighting would actually have to threaten our freedom, and no one in Iraq or Afghanistan has ever threatened that. Not al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, not any of those primitive dirt farmers, and not even those maniacs that flew those planes into our buildings. The worst those radicals can threaten is our lives. The truth is, the biggest threat to freedom is our own corrupt government, which is bigger and scarier now than it’s ever been. But hey, let’s deify the troops and thank them all for defending freedom, right?