Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  “Of course,” he said.

  AT THE FRONT door there was, as there always was, the pause at the good-bye. The instant fraught with danger, the moment Germaine used to crave and dread. Because he had always wanted to kiss her, and because that wanting hurt so much.

  “I might come by on Saturday,” he said. “That lawn could use mowing.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Liz said. “Danny tries, bless his heart, but he can’t get the mower running for more than five minutes at a time. And the boys are starting to fret that the grass is giving too much cover to the NVA.”

  Germaine smiled. He still wanted to kiss her. He probably always would. The only difference now was that he knew it would never happen. Something had changed between them, in that hospital room. He was, forever, the man who had given the last rites to her daughter. And soon enough would be the man who had sent the picture of her dead baby to her husband.

  And he thought, So this is what it takes to make a human being into a priest.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

  ON EASTER SUNDAY morning, Hotel Company climbed out of its holes, stuck bayonets in all the sandbags, dumped the dirt into the trenches and bunkers, and walked down off Hill 851 under their own power, as if the place were just one more night defensive position and it was time to move on. Someone had decided that the siege was over and that the good guys had won. Mike hoped somebody had told the NVA. He didn’t want any of his men getting killed in defense of an anticlimax.

  They walked in through the wire of the combat base just before noon the next day. The base was a shocking mess, riddled with trenches, foxholes, and shell craters, with nothing left above ground but piles of Marine trash and the hulks of blasted machines. It looked, Mike thought, like a garbage dump that had been bombed, which was not far off the truth. There had never been a particularly good reason for them to be here in the first place. Khe Sanh’s only redeeming tactical feature was that it was a very good place for a lot of people to die.

  Hotel Company went straight to the airfield, but there had been some kind of fuckup, the typical bullshit, someone else had gone out on their choppers, and so the company waited in shallow trenches in the broiling heat for a couple of hours. The men broke out their cards and cigarettes and hoarded cans of peaches and played Back Alley. Some of them started writing letters. The general mood was upbeat and celebratory; they were almost out. Mike just sat and fretted. After all those months on their cozy hilltop, the base on the broad plateau seemed vast, and the vastness seemed very dangerous. He felt like a cockroach, caught in the middle of a kitchen floor as the light came on.

  The CH-46s finally showed up, and the men began loading. Mike kept everyone moving, hollering and kicking ass, his ears cocked for the pop of mortars or the boom of artillery, for the sudden scream of a rocket in the air. It was just going to be too much for him, somehow, if anyone got killed at the goddamned airstrip waiting for his evac. But everyone got aboard without incident, in good order, and the choppers lifted off one after another.

  Mike clambered onto the last chopper, with the Third Platoon command group and the corpsman Mike had made stay until everyone was out. Dermott Edmonds was ecstatic as the chopper left the ground.

  “Fuckin’ A!” he hollered into Mike’s ear, over the engine’s din. “Fuckin’ A, Skipper!”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Mike agreed, and settled back against a stanchion. He was sitting on his flak jacket; the last thing he wanted was to lose the family jewels on the chopper ride out. But it was really starting to feel like they had made it.

  As they gained altitude, the whole plateau came into view. Mike could still remember how, when he had first flown in the previous fall, he had been struck by the quiet green beauty of the place, the lushness of the mountains and the clear lines of the waterfalls, the gentle way the fog crept along the valleys in the morning. It looked like the moon down there now, a cratered landscape blasted clear of vegetation, with hundreds of burned-black scars carved into the red Khe Sanh clay and broad swaths of particular devastation stamped along the paths of the B-52 strikes. It looked, he thought, like there’d been a war down there.

  “They say we killed more than ten thousand of them!” Edmonds hollered in Mike’s ear.

  The kid sounded almost giddy. Mike wondered if he’d ever been that gung ho himself. “That’s what they say.”

  “I wonder how they figured that out?”

  Mike shrugged. He knew exactly how they had figured it out. The grunts at the sharp tip of things had knocked some bad guys over and called them dead, and their squad leaders had passed the KIA figures on to the platoon leaders, who had inflated the count and passed them on to the company commanders, who had added a few more for good measure and forwarded the count to battalion, where it had been doubled by some pogue with a business degree. By the time the estimated KIA number got to the highest levels, they had wiped out two or three NVA divisions and generally depopulated North Vietnam.

  In any case, they’d killed a lot of bad guys, any way you looked at it. Which was, he supposed, the point. If there had been a point. Mike said, “I guess somebody just counted up the arms and legs and divided by four.”

  Edmonds seemed happy enough with that answer and turned to pass it on to his first sergeant. The sergeant just nodded, leaned his head back against the vibrating chopper wall, and closed his eyes, with an air of long-suffering.

  Mike settled back and took the letter from his inner pocket. He remembered Father Ezekiel Germaine of St. Jude’s parish only vaguely. They’d never met formally that Mike could remember. The guy had been ex-Navy, but he always looked like a stone-cold Jesuit to Mike, a pre–Vatican II hard-ass, and his sermons were terse, almost grudging things, as sparing of words as a casualty telegram.

  The priest’s handwriting was oddly lyrical, lit with little swoops and scruples. Mike could appreciate the letter’s gutsiness and its delicacy; as a company CO, he had written more than his share of this kind of thing. He knew he shouldn’t hate the guy. He was glad someone had been there for Liz, someone of that quality. But it hurt so much that it hadn’t been him. It was like the shrapnel in his knee, too deep in his working nerves and bones to be removed. It would hurt forever.

  The picture was the killer. Liz with Anna in her arms, the two of them snagged in a web of half a dozen IV lines looping in and out, so many you couldn’t sort out what went where, just a tangle of connections. Liz looked so drained that Mike could hardly bear to look at her. The baby’s hair was wispy brown, like Liz’s, and her eyes were squeezed closed tight. Mike wondered if he’d ever be able to ask Liz what color their daughter’s eyes had been.

  “We kicked their ass, Skipper,” Edmonds hollered, still celebrating, and Mike came back to himself. They were crossing Highway 9, and the mountains were green again. On the horizon, the Khe Sanh combat base had faded to a single torn patch of blasted red, like a fresh wound, beneath a huge blue sky.

  Just like that, Mike thought. He wondered if he would really be able to remember what it had been. Not what it had meant, not what it would become in the stories later, nothing lit by phony glory and phonier coherence: just what it had actually been. Just to be there, just to do it, day by day and moment by moment, wound by wound, and death by death. To pass beyond understanding any of it and to be more sure every hour that there was no way out of the thing alive while the world got smaller and smaller in the shrinking interval between the fall of the shells that were walking toward you, until finally you were infinitely patient and everything was quiet inside you because there was nothing left that you could do but take what came; and you were fearless, not because you were brave, but because you were at the empty bottom of yourself, and there was nothing left to lose.

  Mike slipped the photograph into the envelope, put the letter back into his pocket, and took out Stinson’s flask.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we did.”

  He twisted the top off, took a shot, and
handed the flask to Edmonds. Edmonds grinned, raised the flask in a brief salute, and drank.

  Beside him, his first sergeant was eyeing the flask with an unmistakable air. Edmonds hesitated, then gave Mike a hopeful look. Mike nodded, and Edmonds handed the sergeant the flask with some relief. The kid might make a decent Marine yet, Mike thought, if he lived.

  The first sergeant met Mike’s eyes, raised the flask, and nodded. A moment, a simple moment between men. Mike nodded back, feeling the gooseflesh rise along his arms. The sergeant took his shot, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve, leaving a smear of orange Khe Sanh dirt, and passed the flask on down the line.

  CHAPTER 30

  APRIL 1968

  IT WAS STRANGE being out alone at night. Liz tried to remember the last time she had been in the car after dark without children or Mike, and couldn’t. She had the nagging sense of having forgotten something crucial, something no doubt child-related. But the kids were in good hands tonight. Liz had left them with Betty Simmons’s daughter Miranda, which should have felt like some kind of defeat but somehow didn’t. Miranda had shown up with her calculus homework, some Beatles albums, and a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She’d told Liz that she planned to spend the summer working for the McCarthy campaign, and Liz had not failed to notice the round plastic compact of birth control pills in Miranda’s purse, along with what certainly looked like a pipe. Liz wondered what poor Betty made of all that. But Miranda was wonderful with the kids, who adored her. When Liz had left, all of them, plus Temperance, had been singing along to “I Am the Walrus” and playing Parcheesi. Liz even had the sense that Miranda was going to find a way to let Deb-Deb win.

  The April night was clear and balmy. They’d been in the grip of a spring heat wave, but it had broken on a thunderstorm that afternoon, and when Liz got off the toll road near the oceanfront, the sea-cooled air smelled of honeysuckle. It was Shakespeare’s birthday, which Liz had fought an uphill battle throughout her marriage to make a sort of family holiday. It had always been like keeping a promise to herself to celebrate the day. One year, just after the miscarriage between Danny and Kathie, she and Mike had even made it to England in April and had walked hand in hand up the avenue of lime trees to the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  It had been two days after St. George’s Day; Mike had insisted on missing the crowds celebrating Shakespeare’s traditional birthday, which had proved a brilliant call. They had the church almost to themselves on a gray, drizzly afternoon. The two of them had ducked through the comically low stone entryway and stood in the nave, looking through the pillars into the weeping chancel, tilted, it was said, at the angle of Christ’s head on the cross. They’d knelt in the chapel of St. Peter—they’d still been praying together, then—and finally paid their pounds and entered the chancel, beneath which the playwright was buried. The room was still overflowing with flowers left by the local schoolchildren on St. George’s Day. Liz had been awed but also oddly disappointed—the stiff, slightly pompous bust, the gilt crosses, the inescapable sense of a managed asset; it all seemed just a bit off somehow.

  The real moment had come the next night at a performance of King Lear. When Paul Schofield’s Lear had told Cordelia, played by Diana Rigg, “Come, let’s away to prison: / We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage,” Liz had found herself in tears. For everything, simply for everything. Afterward, walking back to their room beneath the slanted, centuries-old rooftops, she had continued to cry and Mike had put his arm around her and she had known he understood, and she had never loved him more.

  When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down

  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies….

  The narrow side street near Birdneck Road was badly lit, its potholed shoulder crowded with cars. Liz thought for a moment that she wouldn’t be able to find a place to park and that it was a message from God, a cosmic discouragement. She was about to take the hint and turn around and go home and call the whole thing a stupid idea, a fantasy, but a pickup truck pulled out just ahead of her and left a gaping space. So much for God.

  She settled the station wagon into the spot and turned off the engine and the lights. She took a deep breath and thought, Okay. Okay. Now. But it was almost ten minutes before she finally got herself out of the car and walked to the door, and another moment or two before she actually went in, past the sign with the quote from Kafka—“The great theater of Oklahoma calls you! Today only and never again! If you miss your chance now you miss it forever!” and, beneath that: “Virginia Beach Little Theater: open auditions tonight for John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea.”

  SHE HADN’T BEEN inside a theater since she’d tried to play Joan of Arc in Quantico while she was pregnant with Deb-Deb, but the whole feeling came back instantly the moment she was through the door: a surge of joy, the sense of a suddenly firm ground, of a place to work where the work would not be wasted. People often thought acting was about glamour, about spotlights and curtain calls, the crowded theater of an opening night, but it had never been the applause side of things that appealed to Liz. It was something much more blue-collar for her, something about the lighting, the spaciousness, and the quality of sound in a theater on a weeknight, when the real work was done: the house lights on low, the seats folded up, and the echoes amplifying everything anyone said, turning it plastic and framing it with possibility. The working emptiness of a theater in rehearsal felt like a church to Liz. More than a church, she thought: it felt like she’d always thought a church should feel, felt more like a church than any church she’d ever been in.

  The auditions were already in progress—three women stood on the stage, two young and one older, keening through the first big grief chorus after the announcement of Michael’s death.

  CATHLEEN: It’s destroyed we are from this day. It’s destroyed, surely.

  NORA: Didn’t the young priest say the Almighty God wouldn’t leave her destitute with no son living?

  MAURYA: It’s little the like of him knows of the sea….

  Liz skirted the back row of seats and walked slowly down the gently curving side aisle, along the wall, taking the measure of the place as she went. The women on the stage presented no problem; their accents were too self-conscious, their emotions Big and completely hollow. They’d end up village women at best, kneeling at the door, doing their gassy Weeping. Clustered throughout the theater like lily pads, half a dozen other groups of three or four sat poring over scripts, waiting their turns to read. Mostly women: the drama students from the local colleges, with savage eye shadow, wearing black; the song-and-dancers in sweatpants and leggings; the hopeful matrons, slightly chubby, and the first-timers, and the wishful thinkers; and, here and there, more or less transparently, the little theater veterans, some wearing T-shirts from previous productions, like advertising signs, some just quietly at home. It didn’t seem to Liz that any of them was a factor. But no doubt she seemed the same to them. A housewife, a first-timer. A wishful thinker. Maybe she should have done something savage with her eye shadow.

  She slipped into the third row, where a woman in an Ashland Shakespeare Festival sweatshirt wielded a clipboard with a slightly officious air.

  “Name? Role?” she said briskly.

  “Elizabeth O’Reilly. I’d like to read for Maurya.”

  The woman gave her a frankly impatient look. “Maurya’s the old woman. That’s the old woman’s role.”

  “Yup,” Liz said. It was a Mike-ism, pure and simple; she realized that she had learned a lot since the last time she’d been in a theater. In the past, she’d have given the young woman a long speech on the art of acting or told her that she’d played Lady Macbeth twelve years ago at Catholic U., with nothing to age her but bad hair and a tremble in her voice. Now she just stood there until the woman finally shrugged and handed her the script.

  “You’ll be in the G
group,” she said, pointing to a cluster of women toward the back of the hall. “The parts are marked in yellow.”

  THE SCENE was a good one, the meatiest, the moments after the last son’s body was carried in on a dripping piece of sail. Maliciously or not, the woman with the clipboard had grouped Liz with two daughters who were older than she was. The woman reading for Nora was a sturdy housewife in her midthirties, completely wrong for the role, while the woman reading the Cathleen part, a bespectacled, slightly horse-faced woman named Sally, with her auburn hair pinned up into a tight bun, looked to be pushing forty.

  They read through the scene together quietly. Neither of the other two women showed Liz much, but she was keeping it low-key too, just walking her tongue through the words, playing a little with the accent. Liz actually liked Sally right away, and she suspected that the woman could act. The Nora wannabe, however, Barbara, was bad enough to take them all down with her. Barbara told them she had done Oklahoma! in high school, so maybe she could sing. Or maybe she just specialized in Bright. Her Nora was remarkably peppy.

  After a couple of dry runs Liz felt like she had the text, and she settled back in her chair while Sally and Barbara continued to quietly work their lines. On the stage, the F group had just collapsed into giggles after blowing several lines in a row and were starting over, to the obvious displeasure of the director. A lean man in his midthirties, dressed in worn jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, he sat in the second row with his feet up on the chair in front of him, making low comments to an earnest note-taking woman beside him, not his wife, though they were certainly sleeping together. His dark brown hair was long enough for an incongruously mellow ponytail; his beard, trimmed crisply to a Mephistophelian point, seemed closer to characteristic. He had a mild Southern drawl in normal discourse, but when he grew impatient the accent steeled into uninflected diction.