Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Liz set the tray on the table and poured everyone a cup of coffee, trying to present a reassuringly unhysterical manner. Then she settled in to hear what the poor men had to say, stirring a double tablespoon of sugar into her cup. She’d been using saccharine since Deb-Deb had been born, figuring it was better to die of cancer than to be fat, but somehow having her husband blown up seemed to call for the real thing.

  “YOU JUST COST ME fifty bucks,” the doctor told him cheerfully as he cut Mike’s bloody uniform off, after they had finally realized Mike wasn’t going to die and gotten him up onto one of the plywood flats laid atop ammunition crates that served as the first line of operating tables in Charlie Med.

  “Really?” Mike said, pleased.

  “It was a split vote on whether to stick you in the corner. I was sure you were history.”

  “Who was betting on me?”

  “Mackenzie.” The doctor nodded at one of the men at another table, though all the doctors and nurses looked pretty much the same in their helmets and flak jackets.

  “I hope he got odds,” Mike said.

  “Mackenzie always gets odds,” the doc said. He dropped the bloody shreds of Mike’s uniform in a heap behind him and reached for a sponge.

  “There are some pictures in the pockets—” Mike said.

  “Don’t worry,” the doctor said. “Some poor sergeant sorts it all out.”

  “I wouldn’t want to lose those pictures. My wife and kids.”

  “We’ll make sure you don’t lose the pictures, Captain,” the man told him gently, and Mike relaxed back onto the table. He could still smell the powder from the mortar round. He wondered if he was going to be able to smell the powder forever.

  CHAPTER 18

  NOVEMBER 1967

  BETTY SIMMONS showed up at the O’Reillys’ house on the first morning after the news of Mike’s wounding, ringing the bell three times in her hypervivid way. Liz opened the door warily, half expecting to find two more Marines there. She felt she would never again be able to answer the bell without flinching. She was wearing her shabbiest bathrobe; she had intended to go back to bed after taking the kids to the church to light candles for Mike and then getting them off to school.

  She had considered keeping the children home, then decided that was pointless. The boys would just spend the day playing toy soldiers, Deb-Deb would swim around in her otter world, and Kathie would cry all day. Better, Liz had finally decided, that they should feel the comfort of normality. She would dearly have loved to feel that herself. But here was Betty, holding a casserole covered in foil and wearing a brick-colored suit with black velvet buttons, two-inch heels, and a huge straw sun hat with a red ribbon, as if she had stopped off on the way to a polo game. It was 8:53 a.m.; Liz had the impression that Betty had felt she shouldn’t arrive before nine but then had been unable to hold off.

  “Oh, God, sweetheart,” Betty breathed. “I heard about Mike last night, and I swear I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  “I slept like a baby,” Liz said. “Woke up every two hours and cried.”

  Betty, relentless as a heat-seeking missile, persisted. “Honey, how are you?”

  “God, I don’t know. I don’t care, really. Mike’s alive; that seems like enough for the moment.”

  “No, no, honey-pie, that’s no way to think. You’ve got to be strong for Mike, now more than ever. And for the kids.”

  Fuck off, honey-pie, Liz thought. She felt dangerously raw. Kneeling in the dim church that morning, watching her children light their solemn candles one by one, she had seen the awe on the faces of her sons, the dreadful pride in their father’s heroism, and she had thought, I’m raising cannon fodder. This is not what I signed up for, all those years ago, when I married that beautiful black-haired man.

  Betty pressed the casserole on her. The dish was still warm, almost to the point of burning her fingers. Liz considered pretending it was too hot and dropping it. She contented herself with not stepping aside to let Betty in. They stood for a moment in silence.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Betty said.

  “What the hell is there to interrupt?”

  Betty blinked, then recovered to offer, “I talked to Dick last night.”

  “Uh-huh,” Liz said noncommittally. Betty’s insanely ambitious husband had already gone back to Vietnam for his second tour; as a bird colonel, he was in a staff position with the Sixth Marine Division, and the last Liz had heard, he was stationed somewhere cushy. Of course, in Vietnam, you could die somewhere cushy too.

  “I told him about Mike, and he got on the horn and talked to a few people.”

  “‘People’?” Liz said, wondering where Betty was going with this.

  “The division CO, the 2/29 battalion commander, one of Mike’s doctors—”

  Liz came alert. “Dick talked to Mike’s doctor?”

  “Well, you know Dick. Once he’s on the case—”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, he had a few ideas, actually. For one thing—”

  “Not Dick. The doctor, for God’s sake.” The two Marines the day before had been hopelessly vague about the extent of Mike’s specific injuries; Liz had harassed them from every angle and finally concluded that they probably didn’t really know anything.

  Betty looked alarmed. She floundered for a moment, apparently rummaging for a benign approach to the information. Liz thought of herself with Maria Petroski, trying not to say anything about hair, teeth, and eyeballs. She could feel her heart, a sudden blunted thudding within her chest.

  “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?” she asked, resigned to a protracted debriefing.

  “I’d love some coffee,” Betty said, with some relief.

  HE WAS ALIVE, when you got right down to it, mainly because Smith was dead; standing between Mike and the mortar shell, the corporal had absorbed the worst of the blast, and the outline of his body was plainly discernible in the pattern of Mike’s wounds. Like a tattoo, or a permanent shadow, Mike thought: the ghost of Smith’s obliteration would linger in his own scars for the rest of his life. It didn’t help to know that a meter’s difference would have reversed the situation. It was just one of those things you had to live with.

  Two beds down from Mike, a paraplegic was feeding a blinded man with no hands. In the bed beyond them, Krzykrewski dozed amid a tangle of IV lines. The star of the ward for the moment, the resident miracle. They’d cut the PFC’s chest open on that plywood slab in Charlie Med and found the chest cavity full of blood. The docs said five more minutes and he’d have died. Everybody who’d gotten him on the chopper was up for a Bronze Star. Three of them posthumous, of course: Smitty, Consalvo, Seretti. Another one of those things you had to live with: they would do it again, under the same circumstances, every time. Marines died to save other Marines. It was simply what you did.

  Mike shifted in the bed and sucked in his breath at the wave of pain. It was still hard to sort out exactly what hurt most, and where. He checked the wall clock: thirty-four minutes until his next Demerol shot. His left side was the worst; his arm and shoulder were a mess, as were his hip and left leg, and what remained of his left ear was going to look like a cauliflower. His flak jacket had stopped most of the shrapnel to his body, but what had gotten through had been enough to collapse his left lung and perforate his spleen. They weren’t sure about his kidney; the nurses had been instructed to monitor his piss pan closely.

  On the bedside table, a spent 105mm howitzer shell, fashioned into a jar of sorts, sat like the punch line to an obscure joke. A gift from the surgeons, it held eighty-seven pieces of good Soviet steel, including the little triangular chunk they’d plucked from deep in Mike’s pectoral muscle, half an inch from his heart, and a piece that had been sticking out of his skull behind his ear like a sprouting antler. The docs, a remarkably jolly bunch, all things considered, had told him they hadn’t gotten all of the debris, by a long shot; apparently a lot of the small pieces would be slowly workin
g their way out of his body for years, like metal worms surfacing after a rainstorm.

  A little something to look forward to, Mike thought. He’d be setting off metal detectors for the rest of his life. But better a living pincushion than a dead hero.

  The clock had a red second hand, and he was conscious of how slowly it moved. Demerol, sweet Demerol, in thirty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Twenty-six, twenty-five. Mike wasn’t sure what day it was, and he didn’t care that much about hours, but he knew that second hand’s crawl like the plodding of his own improbable pulse. Thirty-three minutes and twenty-four seconds until the nurse came around with her magic syringe. Thirty-three minutes and twenty-three seconds. And twenty-two. And twenty-one.

  SHE HADN’T WASHED anything since the Marines had shown up at the door, and the sink was full of dishes waiting to be rinsed and put into the dishwasher, which was full of clean dishes waiting to be put away. Liz started a fresh pot of coffee and looked for somewhere to put Betty Simmons’s enormous sun hat. There was no place in her entire house for a hat like that. The thing required a different life: new furniture, months of a remodeling, a room of its own. Liz settled for tossing it on top of the heap of deferred obligations on the dining room table.

  When she came back into the kitchen, Betty was still standing by the counter, at a loss for a place to sit. Every chair and stool had its own still life of child debris, jet fighters crashed amid stuffed animals, Barbies and G.I. Joes sprawled in disconcerting intimacy atop coloring books, miniature armored personnel carriers defending indeterminate piles of plastic and copies of Dr. Seuss. Betty’s house, Liz knew, was an exquisite expanse of polished, unencumbered surfaces.

  She swept a platoon of toy soldiers and a heap of crayons off the nearest stool into an Easter basket full of cracked-open plastic eggs, the chocolate long since hatched out. Betty ran her hand over the chair’s surface, checking discreetly for stickiness, then eased onto the seat and crossed her legs. She was wearing nylons, Liz noted. Nylons, for God’s sake, on a Wednesday morning.

  The coffee had just started dripping into the pot, and Liz felt a surge of irrational despair at the thought of trying to get some straight answers out of Betty without a cup of something strong in her hand. She considered just plopping down on the floor and beginning to cry. But she had done that yesterday. And there really wasn’t much free space on the floor either.

  “I’m going to make myself a Bloody Mary,” she said. “You interested?”

  Betty looked distinctly interested but said dutifully, “Oh, God, it would wreck me, this early, and I’ve got so much to get done today.”

  “Not me,” Liz said, and opened the cupboard under the sink, where she kept her bottle of emergency Smirnoff’s with the cleaning supplies. There was no tomato juice in the refrigerator; she settled for the dregs of an old can of V8, and A1 sauce instead of Worcestershire.

  “Are you sure you should be drinking, in your condition?” Betty said.

  “To hell with my condition. My husband just got blown up.”

  Betty watched her fix the drink with a slightly woebegone air and finally said, “Oh, what the hell, just one. But make it weak.”

  Liz took down a second glass without a word and splashed in some vodka.

  “Maybe a touch more,” Betty said.

  THE BLOODY MARYS helped. Betty with a couple of drinks in her was immediately a more pleasant person to be around; she was one of those alcoholics whose friends were forced to feel guilty because they liked her better drunk. You still had to wade through what a big shot her husband The Colonel was and how perfect her daughters were and how utterly marvelous was her life in general, but with the vodka flowing there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Liz waited patiently, nursing her own first drink and refilling Betty’s quietly, until Betty grew a little sloshy and finally got around to being honest about how badly Mike was hurt.

  “Dick didn’t actually go in to see him,” Betty said. “But he talked to the doctor and got the basic picture.”

  “Uh-huh,” Liz said. The ideal wound was bad enough to get Mike sent home but not bad enough to leave him maimed, debilitated, or bitter. It was a fine line. She knew wives who had been delighted by their husbands losing only the lower part of their legs.

  “Everything still attached,” Betty said. “Everything still in working order. Except, um, his spleen. And a lung.”

  “A lung?”

  “His left lung collapsed. I guess it’s like a balloon or something.”

  “And they can blow it up again?”

  “I guess,” Betty said uncertainly. “There may be some nerve damage to his left arm too. They’re not sure yet.”

  “He’s right-handed,” Liz said briskly, wanting to stay focused on the essentials. “So what does a spleen do? Does he need it?”

  “They didn’t have to take it out, Dick said. It’s just, um, damaged.”

  “How damaged? Come-home damaged, lie-around-for-six-months-in-a-hospital damaged, or just be-miserable-while-getting-shot-at-again damaged?”

  “I don’t know,” Betty said. “I mean, a spleen, right? That sounds pretty serious.”

  “Did anyone say how long he was going to be laid up?”

  “A month, at least, Dick said.”

  “That goddamned Mike,” Liz said. “It would be just like him to go trotting back into the fray with half a spleen. I give him two weeks.”

  “Dick said the family jewels are just fine,” Betty offered.

  “What a goddamned relief.”

  Both their glasses were empty now; medical issues did that. Liz made them fresh drinks. Betty dabbed delicately at her Bloody Mary with a limp celery stick, then took a no-nonsense slug and leaned forward.

  “Here’s the thing—” she said, with an air of getting down to business. “Dick is adjutant to the Sixth Division CO, now. He says that even if Mike doesn’t come home, he can get him a staff job in Da Nang.” She gave Liz a wink. “Which would also put him on a faster track for promotion.”

  Liz said nothing, but her heart hurt suddenly. She knew her man; Mike didn’t give a damn about how fast his track to promotion was. Betty meant well, and she could only believe her news was good, but Liz could read between the lines. Mike’s wounds were apparently severe enough that he had a chance to come home, if he played his cards right; and he could certainly get a safer job and no doubt further his career in the process. But none of that mattered. Betty, with her husband ensconced in his long-sought staff position, happily chummy with the generals, could never get drunk enough to understand that Mike wouldn’t do anything that made that much sense. He was a goddamned Marine, a warrior, a believer. He would go back into battle while there were battles to be fought.

  “Dick says Da Nang is safer than Chicago,” Betty continued. “They have an Officers’ Mess with table clothes. They have ice cream.”

  Liz stood up to put away the vodka. She’d learned all she was going to learn, and it would be best to stop before Betty got truly sloppy and started talking about Dick in bed. Or before Liz herself started crying. She really wanted to wait until Betty was gone before she started crying.

  “What kind of ice cream?” she asked.

  Betty blinked, brought up short. “What?”

  “Mike is very picky about his ice cream flavors,” Liz said. “I doubt he’d stay back in Da Nang for anything less than Rocky Road.”

  MIKE SURFACED from his latest period of unconsciousness into the labyrinth his body had become, the maze of blocked passages, tortuous corridors, and blind alleys dead-ending in the same inescapable pain. He had a moment of the usual disorientation; in his drugged dreams he had been playing catch with Danny, and the baseball, spinning infinitely slowly toward him in the summer air, had turned into a mortar shell. He’d caught it and thought, for the thousandth time, I’m fucked.

  The lights were on; it was early evening. Not that it mattered in the least. Mike flexed his right hand and lifted his arm tentatively, pleased by
the mobility. Every physical effort was an adventure, at this point, but he was starting to explore what could move and what couldn’t, like a newborn in a crib.

  His movement set off a gentle clinking; there were three medals pinned to his pillow. Mike vaguely remembered some colonel in a pressed uniform coming in that morning and sweeping through the ward like the goddamned tooth fairy. Medals, for Christ’s sake, in a place where no one gave a damn about anything but the next dose of pain medication: a Bronze Star, for being an idiot and getting three guys killed while loading a dying man onto a helicopter under mortar fire; a Purple Heart, for getting blown up while being an idiot; and something else, something silver and cross shaped, with a yellow and red ribbon, for some fine point of undetermined idiocy.

  At the other end of the ward, a man was moaning every thirty seconds or so, a persistent keening, strangely methodical: “Oh, Jesus…Oh, Jesus…” Otherwise, the hospital was so quiet you could hear the whoop-whoop of the spinning blades of the ceiling fans.

  Mike turned to his bedside table, which held the box with his personal effects, delivered by a brusque sergeant that afternoon. Like the medals, it had showed up at a bad moment in the medication cycle and Mike had just let it sit, but he reached for it now, moving slowly, feeling his way along the serrated edge of the pain. He had found that he had a period of about eight or ten minutes every two hours in which he was neither too groggy from the Demerol nor in too much pain to think straight, and he wanted to start using his windows of lucidity.

  Everything in the box was bloodstained: his shattered watch, the hands still showing 1:12; Larry Petroski’s rabbit’s foot, soaked in blood, like a slaughtered mouse. The plastic bag with his photos of Liz and the kids had been torn open by the shell fragment that had found his spleen. You always heard the stories of old family Bibles in breast pockets stopping what would have been fatal bullets, of the St. Christopher medal that deflected the shrapnel and saved a guy’s life. You never heard about the bullets that went right through every sentimental item and killed you.