Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Deb-Deb’s eyes widened as she tried to picture this, but the image seemed to please her. She considered the situation for a moment, then said, “Maybe I could play with her in the pool when she comes out.”

  “I’m sure she would love that,” Liz said, noting her daughter’s assumption of gender but deciding not to fight that battle now. Deb-Deb no doubt felt she had enough brothers.

  THE RADIO spluttered in the dark, a whispered “Alpha Sierra Sierra Romeo Sierra,” barely audible in the hammering rain. The Second Platoon listening post was the last position to broadcast their midnight check-in, and Mike sat back in the muddy foxhole as the radio lapsed into static. He could relax for an hour or two now. The bottom of the hole had eight inches of standing water in it, and he made a splash as he settled, but wet was wet once you were soaked through, and he’d been soaked through for fourteen hours. It felt good to relieve knees stiff from squatting.

  The night beyond the foxhole was impenetrable, a streaming blackness that drowned his usual sense of himself as the spider at the center of the company’s web, alive to every tremble of the converging threads. It was unnerving, inheriting total responsibility for a group of armed, demoralized strangers on a moment’s notice. It wasn’t just that the noise discipline was for shit. There were people walking around with empty grenade pouches because they didn’t want to carry the weight; half the squads had food in the ammo cans and no bandoliers, and when Mike had first shown up the mortar crews weren’t bothering to carry plates and tripods, though he’d fixed that quick enough and had some helo-ed in posthaste. Hotel was in dire need of about a month of training and reinforcement, but they’d been in the field almost continuously and Mike was still steering the company only broadly and approximately, as if it were a truck on ice, seeing how much control he actually had of this huge and lethal machine. Learning to juggle three or four radios under fire, each with someone screaming for an immediate decision. Getting to know the crucial personnel, the platoon leaders, sergeants, and forward artillery observers who were his eyes in the field, and the radio operators who were his ears, finding out who he could count on and who he couldn’t. Learning the ropes of air support and artillery support. Learning who back at battalion headquarters was an idiot and who wasn’t.

  That, and trying to keep his people from getting killed. Taking over a fucked-up company in the field was like being handed a burning sack of shit with a baby in it. You definitely wanted to get the poor kid cleaned and fed eventually, but the first job was just to get the damned fire out. They’d been lucky so far to not run into anything serious in the course of their wanderings, but luck like that couldn’t hold.

  To Mike’s immediate left, Stinson had fallen asleep the moment Second’s LP had cleared, his helmet off, his ear against the receiver in case anything unexpected came through. To Mike’s right, the only other upright figure in the foxhole was Doug Parker, the First Platoon commander. Huddled in his hooded poncho, the lieutenant looked like a Buddhist with an M-16, pointed down so the barrel didn’t fill with water.

  “I’m gonna close my eyes for a minute, Dougie,” Mike said. “You okay to stay awake?”

  “Fresh as a daisy, Skipper,” Parker said.

  Mike chuckled appreciatively; they were all spent after the day’s slog through the mud, and the lieutenant’s humor was the only dry thing left. Parker, a Princeton grad, had the makings of a decent platoon leader in spite of his Ivy League handicap.

  “Wake me if the Chinese come into the war,” Mike said. He tugged the hood of his poncho over his helmet, adjusted the angle of the runoff to miss his nose, and let his chin drop to his chest. He was finally going to get to dream of home. It was amazing how warm and dry he was in his dreams these days, how utterly happy he was in Liz’s arms. The rain drumming against the rubber drowned out the low crackle of the muted radio, but Mike knew Stinson heard things better in his sleep than most men did awake. Besides, the NVA were way too smart to be out in the rain on a night like this.

  ON THE WAY home from the doctor’s office, Liz stopped to pick up Kathie at her friend Temperance’s house, where Kathie often went after school to play. The Williamses lived an easy walk from the elementary school, down a narrow street in the older, presuburban housing on the north side of Little Neck Road. It was a working-class neighborhood of mostly black families, a world away from the two-story colonials and ranch-style split-levels of the King’s Grant development on the other side of the school. The houses were simple clapboard boxes barnacled with bedroom additions, flanked by clotheslines laden with laundry and gardens green with edible vegetables. Kathie, glamorized by Temperance’s domestic life in general, wanted to put up a clothesline in her own suburban backyard and had acquired a taste for collard greens sautéed in bacon grease, though she remained unenthusiastic about broccoli and spinach.

  The driveways were dauntingly narrow, one-car driveways for one-car families, no room for boats. Temperance’s mother, Liz knew, walked to her job in the school cafeteria, while her father drove the family’s ancient Buick to his job at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Liz parked her big Ford station wagon on the road, with the wheels in the mild grassy ditch. Deb-Deb got out of the car with her, still subdued by considerations of the thing swimming inside her mother. The ob-gyn had picked up on her concerns and given her a cheerfully literal lecture on prenatal development and a green lollipop, but Deb-Deb had been so upset by the wave of fresh information that she hadn’t opened the candy.

  An American flag, its stripes weathered to soft pink, drooped from an angled stick beside the screened front door. Liz knocked once, drew no response, and knocked again, rattling the flimsy frame without producing much noise. There didn’t seem to be a doorbell. She could smell something chickeny cooking within the house, and the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” was blaring on a record player upstairs. Liz could hear Kathie clearly, singing along to the grainy 45—the Flo Ballard harmony, she noted with pleasure, strong, dignified, and contained. Temperance was riffing more exuberantly on the melody.

  Liz knocked one more time, then called “Hello?” through the screen door. There was an answering call from the back of the house, and a moment later Linnell Williams hurried up the hallway with a wide-eyed three-year-old on her hip and a spatula in her hand. Temperance’s mother was a slender, even fragile-seeming, woman of about thirty, lost in a bright red sundress, the skin of her beautiful shoulders poured smooth as a Reese’s peanut butter cup. She wore a tiny cross on a gold chain around her neck and battered blue flip-flops.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, laughing. “Can’t hear nothing back there, this house is way too big and those girls are singing way too loud. How you doin’, Miz O’Reilly?”

  “Liz,” Liz said, as she always did. The house actually seemed painfully small to her, for a family at least as big as her own. She felt overdressed in her go-to-the-doctor skirt and blouse and wished she had worn shorts. “I’m fine, thank you. And who’s this?”

  Linnell Williams glanced down, giving the little boy an affectionate jounce. “This little hunk o’ burning burning love is Dmitri Jay Williams the Third. Say ‘Hey,’ DeeJay.”

  “Heh,” Dmitri said, readily enough.

  “Hey, Dmitri,” Liz said. “I’m pleased to meet you. And this little hunk is Deb-Deb.”

  Dmitri beamed, showing a mouthful of perfect tiny teeth. “Heh!”

  “He say he pleased to meet you too,” his mother supplied. “Hello, Deb-Deb. Ain’t you a pretty little thing?”

  “We were at the baby doctor’s,” Deb-Deb told her.

  “No kidding,” Linnell said, keeping her face toward Deb-Deb, so obviously being tactful that Liz felt compelled to add as brightly as she could, “Yep. Another one on the way.”

  Linnell gave her a glance, picking up on something in her tone, but said readily enough, “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Liz said, and then, frankly rueful, answering the glance, “Life is what happe
ns while you’re making other plans.”

  “I hear that,” Linnell said dryly. Liz felt absurdly grateful. It was the most realistic and supportive thing anyone had said to her yet.

  “The doctor gave me this sucker,” Deb-Deb said. “But I’m saving it for the baby.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Linnell Williams said. “It’s gonna be a lucky little baby, to have such a sweet sister.” She turned and hollered up the stairs, “Temperance! Kathie’s momma is here!” then glanced at Liz and rolled her eyes. “Like that’s gonna do anything…. Y’all come on in.”

  Liz and Deb-Deb followed her down the short hallway, past a tiny living room dominated by a playpen and strewn with plastic-wheeled vehicles, noisemaking instruments, and dolls. In the kitchen Linnell Williams gave a quick stir to the stewish concoction simmering in a pot, hitched Dmitri up a notch on her hip, and pulled out a chair from the kitchen table for Liz.

  “You want something to drink?” she asked. “Some sweet tea?”

  “No, thank you,” Liz said. “I should probably be getting home. My other two are going to be getting there soon.”

  She regretted the refusal as soon as it was out of her mouth; Linnell Williams looked startled by it, and even chagrined. But Temperance’s mother said, amiably enough, “I hear that. I got two more still running around out there somewhere myself.” She turned to the doorway again, plainly accommodating Liz’s ungraceful haste. “Temperance!”

  “Coming, Momma!” her daughter called, but the music continued to blare. They’d started the record over again.

  Oh, you can’t hurry love, no, you’ll just have to wait—

  The two mothers exchanged “What can you do?” smiles.

  “They still working out that routine for the school talent show,” Linnell said. “They calling themselves the Supremettes now.”

  “Oh, God, did I miss something?” Liz moaned. This was the first she’d heard of the Supremettes. “What talent show?”

  “Oh, it ain’t ’til next month sometime,” Linnell reassured her. “You know how these girls are. Everything gotta be right away.”

  Liz was silent a moment, feeling embarrassingly out of the loop of her daughter’s life, then shook her head at herself and regrouped. “I suppose Kathie’s going to need some kind of glittery outfit. God, out comes the sewing machine again. I’m still trying to find the right material for her Bluebird uniform, much less figure out the pattern and the sash.”

  Temperance’s mother gave Dmitri another hitch up and busied herself with the stew. “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you manage to get Temperance’s together yet?”

  “Oh, ain’t no hurry on no glittery dress.”

  “No, I mean her Bluebird uniform.”

  Linnell Williams gave Liz an odd glance. “Temperance ain’t in no Bluebirds.”

  “Well, neither is Kathie yet, until I get out the sewing machine. These people are uniform crazy, aren’t they? Won’t even let them walk in the door without the right outfit. I’ve seen shorter lists of requirements for an amphibious assault.” Liz began to feel she was babbling, as Linnell’s silence persisted. “Did I miss something else? Kathie said she and Temperance were joining together.”

  Linnell shrugged. “Temperance can say what she please, it ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Well, granted, it’s a pain in the butt. But the girls are so excited about it. I mean, if it’s a matter of you having trouble getting Temperance there, I’m sure I could—” She broke off, at a sudden thought, then blurted, “Oh, God, this isn’t about money, is it? Because if it is—”

  “Now, now—” Linnell Williams said, a sharp, warning note. “None of that.”

  Liz shut up, feeling chastened, white, and very stupid. Temperance’s mother eyed her for a moment, as if weighing how much she really had to spell out.

  Finally, apparently opting to give Liz the benefit of the doubt, she said, more gently, “You ain’t from around here, are you?” She seemed almost amused.

  “Well, no,” Liz conceded. “I’m from Detroit, originally. But—”

  “Well, I don’t know what things are like in Detroit. I never been up north. But down here, honey, the Bluebirds ain’t blue. Just like the Brownies ain’t brown.”

  Liz opened her mouth then closed it again, unable quite to believe Linnell Williams was saying what she seemed to be saying.

  Upstairs, the record started over again. Temperance’s mother shook her head.

  “I wish you could hurry love,” she said, and went to the doorway again. “Temperance Williams, if you are not down here in ten seconds I am going to whup your little fanny!”

  “Oh, Momma!”

  “Now, girl. Miz O’Reilly’s gotta get going.”

  “Liz,” Liz said, futilely. She really wished she’d taken that glass of tea.

  CHAPTER 7

  OCTOBER 1967

  THE ANCIENT air conditioning system at St. Jude’s had broken down again, and the pews were a desultory tumult of makeshift fans, row upon row of fluttering missals and weekly bulletins, like the wings of a thousand tethered doves. Father Winters’s homily went on and on, the pop of the p’s in the microphone punctuating the priest’s drone with little explosions.

  From the chairs to the side of the altar, where Danny and Percy Killebrew sat garbed in their red altar-boys’ cassocks and white surplices, it was clear that no one was listening to the sermon. The children were all squirming, and the faces of the adults who weren’t trying to keep their children quiet had settled into expressions of patient endurance. High in the west wall of the church, where a new stained-glass window was to be installed, a raw hole gaped, hastily patched for the Sunday services by an old green tarp. One corner of the tarp had come loose, and a shaft of Indian summer sunlight, filled with lingering construction dust, sifted through the gap and fell across the area just behind the altar. It looked like an intruder, a bright weed in the meticulous garden of the candlelit sanctuary.

  Danny checked his watch. It was already early evening in Vietnam. That seemed realer, somehow, than this endless mass. Beside him, Percy was quietly mangling key phrases from the sermon out of the side of his mouth, ventriloquist style—the eugaradsic communillby, the laugh of faith, the gaggacy of our common ploptism—and it was all Danny could do to keep from laughing out loud. In the third row, his mother sat with Angus, who kept trying to slip down under the pew, and Deb-Deb, who was placidly drawing otters in the margins of the program. Kathie was at her friend Temperance’s church this morning, as she almost always was now. Danny could see that his mother’s lips were set in the thin tight lines of what he had come to think of as her I-can’t-stand-this look. He knew she thought Father Winters was an ass.

  The Sunday service was different from the daily mass he had come to love, serving it with Father Germaine. On weekday mornings the altar area and first few rows were all that were lit; everything was sharp with crisp shadows, and the church was alive with what felt like holiness. Father Germaine said a brisk mass without flourishes; he often didn’t give a sermon at all. Danny had the impression that it actually pained the priest to talk, sometimes. But Sundays were a different kind of mass, and Father Winters was a different kind of priest.

  The sermon ended at last, and the congregation stirred and stood for the Nicene Creed, knelt for the prayers of the faithful, and sat for the preparation of the gifts. Everyone seemed relieved to be in ritual motion again. Danny and Percy brought the water and wine to the altar for Father Winters to mingle in the chalice, then returned with more water and the linen cloth for the ritual cleansing of the priest’s hands. Father Winters wet his stubby fingers perfunctorily, dabbed them dry, and dropped the visibly soiled linen into Danny’s hand.

  It was unsettling to be privy to the theatrical underpinnings of the mass; beneath the green and gold silk chasuble and pristine linen alb, Danny knew, Father Winters wore an aloha shirt with sweat stains at the armpits and polyester slacks crusted with recent spaghetti. Being an altar b
oy was like slipping behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz; this magic show was run by a churlish, somewhat prissy man who picked his nose and kept a bottle of peach schnapps with his liturgical gear. It made it hard to maintain an attitude of awe.

  The congregation stood for the preface to the Canon, then knelt for the Eucharistic Prayer. Danny and Percy moved to opposite sides of the sanctuary and knelt facing each other, with the sunlight from the construction gap puddled on the floor between them. As Father Winters turned to the altar and launched into the solemn business of the Eucharist, Percy gave Danny a wink and contorted his plastic features into a face that looked like Popeye. Danny ducked his head to keep from laughing and concentrated on Father Winters’s obsequious monotone. He’d missed his cue the previous Sunday because of Percy’s antics and rung the bells late at the sacramental hoisting of the bread, a mortifying lapse that Father Winters in his fury after the mass had seemed to think all but invalidated the Transubstantiation.

  “Lord, you are holy indeed, the fountain of all holiness. Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy, so that they may become for us the body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ….”

  Angus took advantage of the general solemnity to slip under the pew, and Liz’s head disappeared briefly as she retrieved him. Percy was still mugging; he looked like Herman Munster now. A baby began to scream in the back of the church. And suddenly none of it mattered, because this was it.

  “Before he was given up to death, a death he freely accepted, he took bread and gave you thanks…”

  The dust swam languidly in the renegade sunbeam, keeping its own slow time. Danny could feel the silence in that light, beyond the wailing babies and the coughs and fidgeting of the sweaty congregation, the silence that was the church’s secret heartbeat, the silence nothing could mess up. He reached for the bells, lifting them gently to avoid any premature sound.