Chevy came back with his drink and plopped in close beside Maria at the table. She looked a little startled by this—the two of them had been tense with each other for most of the trip—then put her arm around him and kissed his head. He was telling her something, and she bent close to listen.
Liz was watching them too. “What were you and Chevy talking about?” she asked.
“Just guy stuff,” Mike said, and he put his nose into her hair behind her ear. She smelled of salt and sun and something vaguely floral.
Danny came around the turn on the trail just then, slogging through the sand with Angus over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Angus was coated with sticky brown mud almost to his waist, and his arms and face were smeared brown too. Mike felt his heart leap, but then he caught a glimpse of Angus’s face. His younger son looked pleased enough and even a little proud. Mike relaxed.
“Angus is hit!” Danny called, and Chevy and Lejeune both jumped up and ran to help.
“Jesus God in heaven help us,” Liz said.
“He’s okay,” Mike said. “Just dirty.” He almost said, Boys will be boys, but he caught himself. He could feel the tension in her shoulder beneath his hand; and in any case, that old formula had changed while he was gone. It fell flat now, most of the time, when he said it; and when Liz said it, as she still did, it had a sharp edge and a hook.
Danny, aided now by Chevy and Lejeune, staggered up, and they managed to get Angus laid down along the picnic table’s bench without doing any damage. Danny’s face was bright red; it was really sort of amazing he’d managed to carry his brother all that way through deep sand. He looked over at Mike and rolled his eyes and let his tongue hang out, miming exhaustion. Mike gave him a wink and a quiet nod: Good job. Marines didn’t leave Marines in swamps.
He said, “Chevy, keep his airway clear and apply pressure to the wound. Danny, go get the hose. And somebody get him a soda. We need to keep him hydrated.”
“Is there any root beer left?” Angus said, perking up.
“I got the last root beer, but you can have it,” Lejeune said. “I’m going to try the strawberry-grape mix.”
“I want the strawberry-grape mix too,” Angus said.
MIKE HAD GOTTEN the fire going earlier in the grill, and the coals were ready now. Liz brought him a second beer as he cooked the hamburgers and hot dogs. Kathie, Temperance, and Lejeune were dispatched to the store down the road for more strawberry and grape soda, as the exotic mix Ramada and Deb-Deb were concocting had suddenly become irresistible to all the kids.
As everyone settled in to eat, Chevy once more sat down beside Maria. She put her arm around him right away this time, and he gave her a bite of his hot dog. There wasn’t room at the table for everyone to have a seat, so Deb-Deb sat on Liz’s lap while Ramada clambered up on Mike’s.
“That drink mix of yours is a big hit,” Mike told Ramada.
“I figured it out myself, with Deb-Deb.”
“I know you did.”
“Do you want some?”
“As soon as I finish this beer.”
“Uncle Mike—” Chevy called from down the table, and Mike stuck his head around Ramada to look.
“Yeah?”
“What was that poet guy’s name?”
“Kipling,” Mike said.
“Are you sure we’ve got the book?” Maria asked, frankly dubious. “I mean, I’d hate for him to get all—”
“It—Yeah, I’m pretty sure. It was in his seabag.”
Liz and Maria exchanged a look, inscrutably, and Mike ducked his head. When in danger or in doubt, jump in a hole and wait it out. It was unnerving, how hard the women had gotten to read. Maybe it had always been that way, though.
“I’m going to mix mustard and jelly and see if it’s good,” Ramada told him.
“What kind of jelly?” Mike asked.
“Red.”
“Should be interesting,” Mike said, and attended to his hamburger before the kid wanted him to try the mix. Larry would have eaten it without hesitation, he knew, and said Yum-yum and asked for seconds. But Larry had been something special.
AFTER DINNER most of the kids walked up to the store with Liz and Maria for ice cream. Mike and Danny passed and walked west instead, to watch the sunset from the edge of the marsh.
They found a good spot and sat down on a fallen tree. Beyond the swamp, the sound glittered, alive with the long-angled sunlight. The sun, about a hand over the horizon, was turning orange, and the scattered cumulus clouds were starting to be fringed with pink.
“I’m sorry about saluting you earlier,” Danny told Mike.
Mike’s heart panged. The kid took everything so hard. He said, “It’s no big deal, it’s just something everybody has to learn. We had a lieutenant once, green as a head of lettuce. Nobody quite knew what to make of him, he was sort of stiff and bossy and full of himself. He loved to wear his nice shiny bars on his collar and to be saluted, and by golly, everybody saluted him all the time and nobody ever told him different. Until one day there was this little fight, and he did okay in it, kept his head, took care of his people. And that night somebody painted over his bars with shoe polish for him. And they stopped saluting him. That was the real sign of respect.”
“That’s cool,” Danny said.
“The closer you get to the real thing, the less rank matters anyway,” Mike said. “Everybody’s a rifleman when the shooting starts.”
Danny nodded and they were silent again. In the marsh, a fish jumped. A heron was stalking not far from them, poised on one leg, its blue head cocked. The mosquitoes buzzed, and Mike waved a hand desultorily. But he really didn’t mind mosquitoes that much anymore.
“Are you still thinking of being a priest?” he asked Danny.
His son shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I like that guy, Germaine. My kind of priest.”
“Yeah. Father Zeke’s cool.” Danny hesitated. “Did you pray, in Vietnam?”
“All the time,” Mike said.
“I was praying so much I thought maybe I should be a priest, because they pray just about all the time.”
“You don’t have to be a priest to pray all the time,” Mike said. “Just about anybody paying attention is going to end up praying just about all the time. Because so much is out of your control.”
“Yeah,” Danny said.
The sun touched the edge of the horizon. The western sky was a quiet blaze of orange, rose, and gold. Somewhere across the marsh, a plover screed.
A moment, Mike thought. A forever. The thing he had promised himself he would never miss again. He put his arm around his son’s shoulders.
“We don’t get many kangaroos in here,” he said.
Danny smiled and leaned back into his hand. He said, “At twenty bucks a beer, I’m surprised you get any.”
CHAPTER 32
LABOR DAY 1968
THE BIG WAVES rolled in, one after another, swelling silently from the night sea, cresting white in the darkness, and breaking in a frothy crash. It was like thunder without clouds in the sky; the ocean itself was utterly placid, glittering beneath a three-quarters moon. But there was a hurricane somewhere far to the southeast, churning unimaginably, sending these long silent swells in a steady pattern like coded pulses, like telegrams, deceptively succinct and bland unless you happened to be in the water and got caught by one and tumbled, and felt the crush of the storm that had sent it.
Liz tried to remember the last time she and Mike had walked alone, hand in hand, on a beach at night. It would have been June of the year before, she was sure. The family had rented a cottage in Kitty Hawk not long before Mike deployed. That had almost certainly been where Anna was conceived; Liz remembered the nights in the flimsy bedroom with the watercolors of lighthouses on the walls and the shells lining every available flat surface: conscious of the kids beyond the thin walls, trying to keep quiet. She had felt torn open, like a plowed field; it made perfect sense to her that she had gotten pregnant despite all
their precautions.
There had been a hurricane coming then too, though that storm was much closer, close enough to churn the sea into ragged gray, close enough to thicken the sky, close enough for them to have to leave early, to the disappointment of the children, especially the boys, who had wanted to batten down the hatches and ride it out.
Less than a year and a half ago, Liz realized, doing the math. But time meant nothing anymore; or, worse, it meant something entirely different, something fluid, fitful, and a bit capricious. It had been lifetimes and it had been moments, a grueling time that seemed it would never pass or an instant as fleeting as a dream. But everything was touched with forever now. She’d never wanted to be one of those people who got old and started blathering about how your sense of things changed, but here she was, thinking about forever and the way it undermined the clocks and calendars like a storm tide scouring the sand from the foundations of a beach cottage. It was probably possible to keep living in the thing, for a while at least. But you could feel it wobble.
She was holding Mike’s right hand, which was new, and a little disorienting. She’d always held his left hand before; they’d spent twelve years learning each other’s rhythms with her right hand in his left, partly because you walked facing the traffic with the man on the street side, the way he had been raised; and partly, Liz knew, because Mike wanted his right hand free in case he had to do something heroic, like hit somebody or snatch a spear from the air. He’d never said as much, but she knew her man. Just as she knew now, without him ever saying so, that his left arm hurt him, somehow, that that was what was behind the switch.
A particularly big swell made its eerily silent approach, gathered itself, and toppled with a crunch. The foamy water churned and thinned into swiftness, sizzling across the sand to run over their feet.
“God, those waves are huge,” Liz said.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “It’ll be a yellow-flag day tomorrow, for sure. Perfect for body surfing. The boys will love it.”
It was, in its way, precisely the opposite of what she’d meant. Liz repeated, trying for lightness, “Huge, Mike.”
He laughed. “I’ll be out there with them, Lizzie. We’ll be okay.”
“Not Ramada. And not Angus.”
“Angus swims like a fish,” Mike said, which was true. Angus had swum before he’d walked and had jumped off the low diving board into Mike’s arms at the Officers’ Club pool when he was two years old. He’d gotten caught by a riptide once, in a sea worse than this, at five years old, and Mike had just swum along beside him, talking him through it, teaching him to not try to swim straight back to shore, to swim sideways, across the current, until he was out of it. They were a hundred and fifty yards offshore by that time, and Liz had already screamed her throat out for a lifeguard and started planning the funerals, but when the two of them got back to shore, they’d both been elated and Angus had wanted to jump back in and do it again, as if it were a carnival ride.
“He’ll be fine, sweetie,” Mike said, and, as she hesitated, “I’ll stay close.”
“Lejeune won’t want to go out,” Liz said, conscious of insisting, of reaching for straws.
Mike shrugged. “I won’t push him. But it might be the best thing in the world, right now, for Lejeune to go out.”
This was almost certainly true as well; even Maria was starting to be concerned about Lejeune’s gun-shyness of late; but still Liz resisted, feeling peevish suddenly, and more than a little ornery. Mike finally picked up on her tension, and they walked for a time in silence.
“What was that look you and Maria gave each other earlier?” he asked at last. “About the Kipling?”
It was a typical Mike move, connecting such disparate dots, and a touch of their old style together as well, frankly opening the can of worms. Liz felt a little leap of joy.
“It wasn’t about the Kipling,” she said. “It was about the seabag. She hasn’t opened it.”
“Jesus. Really?”
“Really.”
“Jesus,” he said again; and, after another few steps, “There are presents in there for her, and for the boys. His wedding ring is in there.”
“I’m sure Maria knows that.”
“Then why—?”
“For God’s sake, Mike. It’s the last thing left. She opens it, and he’s dead, all the way, completely.”
“Well, isn’t he?”
She shook her head, disgusted: nowhere to go, with that tone. Another wave slammed in, slapping at their feet with more punch this time, running up their calves. Mike steered them a few steps higher on the beach and said, “The tide’s coming in. We should head back now, or we’ll have to walk back in the loose sand.”
“I don’t want to go back yet,” Liz said stubbornly, and then realized that he probably meant his knee hurt already and that walking in the loose sand would hurt it more. But she kept silent anyway because she was mad now and they could jolly well deal with it, one way or the other. They’d been way too goddamned nice to each other since he’d been back, and they were overdue for a sorting out.
Mike hesitated, and Liz recognized the familiar chess-move mulling typical of the early stages of their fights. He could flank her easily, she knew, take the low road and insist on going back, but to do so would mean acknowledging somehow that he had come back so damaged that they’d had to change the way they held hands, that he couldn’t raise his left arm enough to put it around her shoulder, that they couldn’t walk on the beach unless the goddamned tide was going out and the sand was packed just so. She let him deal with it, feeling mean, and at last he said, “How about we just sit down for a while?”
It was a nice compromise: he was willing to have it out but not to admit his leg hurt. Liz said, “That would be great. I wish we’d brought a blanket.”
“The sand’s still warm. It will feel good.”
It did. They settled on a slight rise just beyond the band of debris along the high tide line, and the sand felt like a lap. The moon was well over the ocean now, and the long band of its light on the surface ran straight toward them like a highway until the surf chewed it into impassability. Mike sat on Liz’s left, which was still disorienting, and took her hand in his. They were silent for a moment, neither of them quite sure how much they really wanted to push it. Like two boxers after an early flurry of blows, backing off, circling, regrouping.
Mike was absently fingering his calf. Liz reached for the leg and found the scar beneath his hand.
“What’s this from?” she asked. Her husband’s damaged body shocked her still—this changed, scourged, compromised thing he had brought home to her, flesh of her flesh. She had a sense of ongoing violation and even, strangely, of jealousy, at his wounds, at the violent intimacies of them, in which she had played no part. She was still trying to sort the injuries out, to map his scars into some kind of coherent history. But it was hard to keep track. Her husband had scars on his scars, at this point.
Mike shrugged. “Shrapnel.”
“From the mortar shell?”
“A grenade.”
“I don’t think I heard about the grenade.”
“Wasn’t much to hear about.”
Liz was silent for a moment. There had been a telegram in May, informing her of Mike’s second official wound, some splinters from a mine that had killed his radio operator. She had actually almost welcomed that one: the second one had not been as bad as the first, and she had been reduced by then to hoping for a not-too-bad third wound that would have gotten him sent home. But apparently Mike had not bothered to report his third wound.
Mike read her silence and said, reluctantly, “It was friendly fire. One of our guys got hit as he was throwing a grenade, and the damned thing just plopped down right there in front of us.” And, as she still said nothing, “Really, it was no big deal.”
“That would have been three,” Liz said. “Three and out.”
“It was our own grenade, for Christ’s sake. It was more embarrassing than
anything else.”
“God forbid you should get an embarrassing oak leaf cluster on your overloaded Purple Heart and just come home.” Her husband shrugged, stubbornly, maddeningly. Liz said, “Goddammit, Mike, you promised not to be a hero.”
“I wasn’t being a hero. I was just doing my job. And trying to keep my men from getting killed in the process. And trying to stay alive myself. Which I did. And here I am.”
Liz noted how far down the list of his priorities his own survival had been, a distant third at best, but she said nothing. It was useless to fight about this, she knew. But it was so close to the fight they needed to have that she said, “Do you have any idea what it felt like, having Khe Sanh on the front page of the newspapers for three months?”
“It’s not my fault those reporters needed something to write about.”
“Goddammit, Mike!”
“It really wasn’t that big a deal, Lizzie. They shot at us, we shot at them. It was a war.”
Liz shook her head. Every time she tried to have this conversation, it dead-ended here: it was a war. Maybe it really was that simple to him; maybe that was all he would ever be able to articulate of what the last year had meant to him, and all he would be able to give her to try to grapple with what it had meant to her. It was a war. And Anna was a dead baby.
Her hand was still on his calf. Liz dug her fingernails in, sharply, along the soft smooth flesh of the scar. She had worked for a month before Mike’s return, growing them long and shaping them, painting them soft pink. The skin of the recently healed wound gave beneath the point of her nail, and she tore at it, and Mike yelped and slapped her hand away.
Lizzie's War Page 31