by Joe Cassilly
“Then Elana’s father.”
“He is in prison. The same kind of man as Bibi’s father. I thank God she never married him.”
“What did he do?”
“He shot a storekeeper to death during a robbery.”
“What happens when he gets out of jail?”
“If he comes for my Bibi I will kill him.” The old man was not just talking, his tone was serious and he had thought over his response. The old man held out his hand. I could see a piece of metal, a ribbon. It was the Silver Star. “I was in a war once, like your war.” The old voice had changed; it was tired and discouraged. I looked into his face, trying to see his eyes.
“Korea?”
The old man nodded. “I thought like you. But we fought half a war for half a victory and young men die because old men can’t remember history’s lessons.”
We sat there, two spirits being healed by nature’s rhythms. Then, the old man stood, put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, and walked back into the house. The breezes pushed me down onto the bench and hummed me to sleep.
3
The Second Goodbye
I woke up on the bench. Someone had put a blanket over me. I must have been exhausted; I’d slept outside the whole night. I was about to get up when I heard stirring inside the house. I pulled my arm from under the blanket and tried to focus my eyes on the luminous hands of my watch. It was 5:15. The sun was only a possibility in the eastern sky. The door opened and Bibi walked out wearing a bathrobe that belonged to her grandfather. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I remembered how we ended yesterday and I didn’t want it to start up this early. She sat a big mug of coffee beside me and reached out and softly stroked my hair.
She hung the robe on a nail by the shower, walked down the steps, and ran into the ocean. I shivered as I watched her dive in and swim through the swells. She came out and went into the shower and struggled out of the wet swimsuit. Drat, I thought, this was the time for x-ray vision. She lathered shampoo into her hair. Quietly, I rose from the bench. I took a sip of the coffee and walked down the porch and stood watching her. She was beautiful. There were goose bumps on her soft brown skin, her nipples hard. She rinsed the soap from her hair and opened her eyes. She was startled to see my grinning face.
I stepped forward and offered her the robe that was draped across my arm. She jerked it away from me. “If my grandfather had seen you just then, he would have killed you.”
“Why, you haven’t got anything I haven’t seen before.” She faked a smile. I walked into the house and quietly closed the door.
By noon, the VW was parked outside the Oakland Army Base. I stepped out, slid open the back door, and pulled out my duffel. Then, I reached back in the front and picked up Elana. I held her very close and kissed her on the cheek before sitting her back in the bus. Bibi had walked around and slid the back door closed. She turned and I held out my hand with a twenty-dollar bill. “What’s that for?” she asked.
“Gas money.” She shook her head. “Go on take it,” I said. “I understand this is an all expense paid trip, so there probably won’t be any place to spend it.” I grinned, but she didn’t. She took the bill and turned and walked around the bus. I felt slighted. I thought we knew one another at least enough to say goodbye. I bent down to pick up the bag when she reappeared.
“How old are you?” Her voice was gruff with maybe a touch of hoarseness.
“Nineteen,” I said, “How old are you?”
My question surprised her and she stood blinking as if trying to remember. “Twenty-three.” Our faces were only inches apart. Tears began to go down her cheeks. “Damn you, I wish I had never stopped to pick you up yesterday. I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if you got yourself killed or what!”
“Do you want me to write?”
“No!” She pointed to the gate. “I just want you to walk through that gate and get the hell out of here.” I shrugged and bent to pick up the bag. She pulled at the shoulder of my shirt and I stood upright. She looked into my eyes. I pulled her towards me, intending to kiss her. She pushed softly against my chest, stepped back, took a breath, and walked around the bus. Then, she was in and it roared away. As I stood watching, a small hand came out the window and waved.
I picked up the duffel and swung it up onto my shoulder and walked toward the gate. The MP there asked, “Your wife and kid?”
“No, just a girl I met yesterday.”
“You wouldn’t like to give me her name and phone number would you?” he called after me.
“I don’t know her name.”
The noise of the door to the nurses’ station closing brought me back to Christmas Eve. Lieutenant Staunton was coming around for one last check before she went off at midnight. I liked her. She was shy and soft-spoken. Her dark brown hair was cut short. She was too skinny for her starched white uniform. She folded it at the sides back under her belt.
I watched her work her way down the line of beds. When she got to my bed, she turned and watched the blinking lights on the tree. “Hey,” I whispered loudly. She jumped, startled from her thoughts. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to scare you. If you stand there like that, Santa will know we are not asleep and he won’t come.”
She walked back beside me. “Santa isn’t going to bring you anything anyway from what I’ve heard,” she said smiling.
“Yeah, and what have you heard?”
She tapped the mistletoe, which was tied to the frame above my bed. “I hear that you and your deadly plant have gotten a kiss from every nurse on this ward.”
“Everyone but you and Captain Rogers,” I corrected, “and I don’t think Captain Rogers has lips.” She covered a laugh with her hand, not wanting to wake any patients. There was an awkward silence, but I could not think of what to say. She reached out and touched my forehead. “You are still running a fever.” I knew. It was a bladder infection. I put my hand over hers and held it against my head. “I was fine until you got close.”
She pulled her hand away. “I am a married woman,” she said gently.
“Oh come on, Scrooge, it’s Christmas—mistletoe—custom.” I reached over with both hands and took her hand between them. There were no calluses on my hands and I was self-conscious about how smooth they must feel. She looked around to see if anyone was watching. She sat on the edge of the bed and kissed me. I slid my hand up her back and into her hair and pressed her face toward me and felt her mouth open for my tongue. We were breathing quickly. She put her hands on my cheeks and pushed me away. She straightened her cap and hair and fanned her face with her hand. She sat still on the bed and held my hand.
“That’s all I wanted for Christmas,” I said and I fluttered my eyelashes.
She ignored me and pointed to something near the head of the bed. “Can I look at this?”
I could not tell what she was pointing to but I said, “Sure go ahead.”
She reached behind me and took a black beret that was hanging at the head of the bed. She felt the heavy wool and fingered the small metal crest pinned to the front. She put it on her head and it slipped down over her eyes. “Jeez, you have a big head.”
I reached up and adjusted it. “It’s mandatory for all Rangers to have big heads, you develop it during training.”
“What do Rangers do?” she asked.
“Most of the time we did recon, six- to eight-man teams sneaking through the jungle looking for trouble.”
“Suzie,” a woman’s voice called from the nurses’ station.
“Oh my god, the next shift is here,” she whispered. She hurriedly hung the beret up.
“Your first name’s Susan, huh?”
“Yes, I gotta go. Merry Christmas.” She double-timed back to the nurses’ station.
I lay back. I wondered what kind of relationship a guy whose body was three quarters non-functional could have with a woman. I was finding out all over again who I was. I’d have to sleep on it.
4
Christmas Presence
&
nbsp; The time at Walter Reed was twelve hours later than in Vietnam. I watched “A Christmas Carol” until 2:00 a.m. Then, I went to sleep, but that was an afternoon nap by my body clock. I was awake at six. The Christmas tree was dark and the ward was all shades of gray in the early dawn.
Men were still sleeping in the other fifteen beds. Someone at the end was snoring and choking. I could not see the rest. Most of us just knew the others by their voice or by the visitors they had.
I held my arms up in front of me and rocked from side to side to roll off my back. I reached for a water pitcher on the stand beside my bed. My hand would not grasp the handle, so I had learned to slide my palm between the pitcher and the handle to lift it. I sucked on the thick plastic straw and tasted the icy cold water. I swished it in my mouth and swallowed; then, I dipped my hand into the pitcher and wiped it over my face and neck to cool my fever.
It made me think of the water in Vietnam, and the lack of it. Maybe it would figure in the outcome of the war. The presence or absence of water at crucial times had certainly caused death and had been a factor in my own injury.
Maybe I could write a book about water and the war. You always— and never—had water at the worst time. There were big trucks and two wheeled tank trailers with “POTABLE” and “NON-POTABLE” stenciled on the sides that were constantly filled and emptied. My unit had a shower with 55-gallon drums on the roof, which were painted black to absorb the tropic sun. If you weren’t in the field then, the best time to shower was around 5 p.m. when the sun had all day to warm the water. Unless, of course, it was raining and then it was always a cold shower.
One time, I had come in from the field desperate for a shower. The heavy rucksack and equipment had rubbed my skin rash to a bloody mess. When I pulled off my shirt, it tore open the raw flesh. I went to the shower at about 11:00 a.m. for some relief. The water was so refreshing. I had my eyes tightly shut with soap on my hair and face. I heard the screen door on the hut open and shut. Someone had come in but they didn’t say anything. I continued lathering and scrubbing. Finally, I pulled the chain to get water to rinse with. It was then that I found that my audience was four mama-sans squatting on the floor washing clothes.
The rains in Vietnam. There was never a mist or a shower or a gentle rain. There were only downpours. They might be ten minutes or ten days long, but it always rained as if God had a surplus and only one place to hurry and get rid of it. In the jungle, the sound in a single second of a billion raindrops striking every tree, bush, leaf, your hat, rifle, pack, and friend was a roar. Like standing beside a passing train. It was a dangerous time to be on patrol. You couldn’t hear yourself go through the brush and you could not hear the bad guys coming up on you. If the shooting started, you had to yell into the radio to be heard and there was no air support or reinforcements.
Once, on the move, I stepped on a root, which snapped under the weight of me, my pack, gun, and ammo. I quickly sunk up to my thighs and it suctioned around me. I had to take off all my equipment and then it took two guys pulling on me to get me out of the muck. There were creeks on maps that, during the rainy season, were rampaging rivers that carried trees along. There were rusting vehicles and corroding ammunition that did not work. And when the sun came out, the temperature would soar from the eighties to a hundred and something. The moisture in the air was so thick that it felt as if tiny spider webs were brushing over your skin as you walked through it.
There was water taken from streams and treated with iodine tablets to make it safe to drink. But if I drank it too fast, it made me throw up. And there was running out of water and licking the sweat off your arms and the backs of your hands just to moisten your lips. I put the straw back between my lips and took another deep drink. “ Water and Warfare ” I would call my book.
At 7:00 a.m., the lights came on. I could not believe I had been daydreaming for a whole hour; maybe I had gone back to sleep.
The daily routine began. A nurse pushed a cart down one row of beds. She gave each patient a thermometer, took their blood pressure, and then gave them a small paper cup of pills. Down the other row of beds, an orderly pushed a big bucket on wheels. He wore a rubber apron and gloves. He stopped at each bed where a patient was connected by a catheter through a tube to a small plastic bottle, which had filled with urine overnight. He emptied it into the bucket.
Christmas started quieter than other days; most of the staff was off. Lunch was delicious. I could not believe that the U.S. Army had actually served lobster and a glass of wine. I think it was lobster; there was no shell, but it was white and orange and you dipped it in butter and it looked too big to be a shrimp. Lunch was served by an older man who explained that he was a volunteer who had come with a church group from New Jersey. They had come to keep the patients company and fill in for the staff on Christmas. I listened while the man told stories of Christmas in World War II. I kept looking past the man toward the entrance, wondering if they would come. “I mean, Christ, it is Christmas! You’d think that they’d come on Christmas,” I muttered.
The man stopped his story. “Did you want something?”
“Na, just talking to myself.”
The man picked up the tray of dishes. “I better clean these up,” he said. “I’ll stop back later.”
I nodded. I hoped I hadn’t hurt his feelings interrupting his story, but his story just made me feel lonelier. Almost all the patients had visitors. Wives with children carrying presents to show Daddy what Santa brought. Girlfriends. Mothers. Fathers. Sometimes, the children spoke loudly, but mostly it was hushed tones about “Howya doin’? What the doctor say? Whenya gettin out?” I fished in the drawer beside my bed and reread some letters from my mom and friends that I had received while I was in Vietnam. The folks from the church group came through with a guitar and sang carols. I looked at the door a dozen more times. Still, no one came for me. I felt lonely. I felt tired. It was after two in the afternoon, the middle of the night to me. I rolled onto my stomach and went to sleep.
5
The First Goodbye
Someone had touched me. I strained my head back to look out of the window. It was just getting dark. In December, that would make it about 5 p.m. The last two months had taught me to hate hospitals. They were always waking you up and telling you to get some rest. A hand shook my shoulder again. I rolled over and started to say “What!” but Lt. Staunton slid a thermometer under my tongue, picked up my wrist, and looked at her watch.
“You have a visitor,” she said softly.
I raised my head and looked around the nurse. There on a folding chair sat my mother. She wore a red dress with a white sweater. There was a holly sprig tied with a striped ribbon pinned to the collar. In her lap she held a folded topcoat. Her blond hair was streaked with gray and worn pulled back. Her eyes were red and puffy—maybe she had been crying or was just tired.
“Bing hur lung?” I asked with the thermometer still in my mouth. She shook her head “no,” but I felt that she had probably been there for sometime watching me sleep. The nurse took the thermometer and noted the reading on the chart.
“Lt. Staunton, this is my mom—Mom, Lt. Staunton.” The two women shook hands and the nurse answered a few questions. I looked toward the door for the presence of another visitor. The nurse excused herself and moved to her next patient. My mom pulled her chair close to the head of the bed.
“He didn’t come, did he?”
She dabbed her eyes. “No.”
My father and I had always had a, a…I don’t know what word to use, “confused,” “uncomfortable,” “adversarial” relationship. I keep trying to do something or be someone that would win his approval.
After two months in the Army, they gave me some tests. The results were good. I was told that I was eligible for helicopter pilot training or Officer Candidate School. I was so excited at the chance to fly helicopters. When I had joined the Army, I never thought of myself as a pilot. This was wonderful. I wrote home and told my parents of the news
of the test results and that I had decided on flight school. I thought I had finally done something that would make my father proud.
I was surprised the next weekend when my father showed up at my barrack. It was the first time anybody had visited me since I had been in the Army. My father had come all that way to ridicule my decision to become a pilot. In his opinion, I had to think about what I would do when I got out of the Army. A prospective employer would not be impressed by the fact that I had become a pilot, which was nothing more, in his opinion, than a glorified truck driver. I had to be able to put on my resume that I had been a U. S. Army officer, a leader of men. I started to tell him what I wanted but he was in a rush. He had a plane to catch, but he would get back to pin those gold bars on. My father left.
I was so damn mad. My father would not take the time to listen to me. He left assuming that I would follow his “advice.” If he had stayed a few more minutes, I could have told him I had already ruled out being a leader of men. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t want to be responsible for bringing another bunch of eighteen year olds out of combat alive. I walked out to the PT course, pulled out a rum-soaked cigar, and argued with myself. I could not find it in myself to do what I wanted to do in the face of my old man’s objection. But I’d be damned if I were going to do what he wanted me to. So I found another school to go to. The Rangers. I never found out what my father thought about that school.
After I became a Ranger, I got a two-week leave before shipping out to Nam. I was home for three days. My father never spoke to me. I kissed my mother goodbye and left to spend the rest of my two weeks hitch hiking to California.
When I had first arrived at Walter Reed, my parents came to visit. My mother stepped beside my bed and saw the tongs fastened into my skull. The tongs went into holes that had been drilled into either side of my skull. A rope was tied to the tongs and went over a pulley to weights to pull my broken neck into line. My mother broke down crying and sat beside me, holding my hand between hers. My father stood at the foot of the bed. He looked at the tongs, the hose going from the urine bag up under the sheet, but he did not see me, his son. He walked to the end of the ward where I could see him talking to the doctor. He walked back to the bed.