by Gerry Boyle
The driveway was more of a path, two wheel ruts that deepened on the S curves where the road snaked its way downhill toward the river. The big Ford jounced along, turning left and right, stuff rattling in the toolbox in the truck bed.
“Can see why he doesn’t get out much,” I said.
“And nobody gets in,” Clair said.
“Keeping the world at bay.”
Clair was quiet. The truck bounced and heaved.
“When I got back from my first tour, we were living on a farm in North Carolina. Kids were in school, Mary at home. I spent the first week sleeping in a cow shed a half-mile from the house.”
I looked at him.
“You go from lying on your belly in the jungle, holding your breath, not making a sound for hours. Not a cough or a sneeze, not scratching that itch because the enemy is walking by six feet away, and there’s five of you and a hundred of them, and one sniffle and you’re all dead. And then you’re in a bed with white sheets and a shower every morning and your wife tippytoeing around you, being so nice and patient and just waiting for you to open up to her.”
I waited.
“And you can’t explain it, what you’ve seen. And when it comes down to it, nobody really wants you to.”
“So you shut it all in,” I said.
“Until you make it over that hump,” Clair said. “Or you end up shutting the world out.”
“Retreating to a place like this.”
We had emerged from the woods into a small clearing. There was a log cabin to our left, an open porch on the front. There was a line of orange marigolds and red geraniums on the porch, planted in white five-gallon pails. The black Jeep was parked beside it, sitting high on its oversize tires. A four-wheeler and a snowmobile, an older one. Unidentifiable stuff under dark-green tarps.
Clair turned the truck toward the house, parked beside a vegetable garden, aluminum pie plates hanging from strings to keep away birds. A scarecrow wearing a ragged red T-shirt that said CAMDEN, MAINE.
Clair shut off the motor. I eyed the house and waited. Five minutes, ten. Clair calm and still. A half-hour went by. Clair still didn’t speak, the Zen of the Recon Marine.
“Let’s just go,” I said finally.
“He’s here,” Clair said. “He’s watching. Just wait.”
We did, another ten long minutes. I listened to the birds: crows, then a pair of ravens. Cronk, cronk, Sophie would say. Clair was listening, too. He said, “He’s coming.”
“I don’t see—”
“Behind us.”
There was a galloping sound and I turned toward it, flinched. The dog, the same one from the road, skidded to a stop beside the truck. In the daylight he was black and even bigger, some kind of giant Baskervillian hound. He didn’t bark and he didn’t take his eyes off of me.
I turned and looked left and there was Louis, standing ten feet from the truck, driver’s side. There was a rifle slung over his shoulder by a tan canvas strap. A handgun in a brown leather holster set low on his hip.
“Hey, Marine,” Clair said.
Louis didn’t answer, just stared. Clair added, “Mind if we get out and talk?”
“I’m gonna take that as a yes,” Clair said, and he smiled. He opened the door and got out. I popped the door, eased down and out of the truck, came around and stood beside him.
“Hey, Louis,” I said.
“Didn’t teach you to read at the newspaper?” Louis said.
“The signs?” I said. “The cable was down, and it’s important that we talk to you. This is Clair; he’s a friend of mine, and sometimes he works with me.”
Louis, his expression dark and brooding, looked at Clair. The dog stared, too.
“Marine Corps, huh.”
“Force Recon,” Clair said.
“Vietnam?”
“From ’66 to ’70.”
“Where?”
“Mostly along the Laos border. Based out of Phu Bai, Gia Vuc, Kham Duc.”
“We lost Kham Duc,” Louis said. “I read about it.”
“Yes,” Clair said. “That was a very bad week.”
A long pause. The dog sat down and swallowed, then panted, showing his salmon tongue and Tyrannosaurus teeth. He looked at Clair, then at me.
“Iraq?” Clair said.
“Yeah.”
Louis hesitated, then choked it out.
“In ’06, ’07,” he said. “Kilo Company, three-eight.”
“Ramadi,” Clair said. “What was it the Marines used to say there? ‘Another day in paradise’?”
Louis said, “ ‘Another day in hell.’ ”
“IEDs?” I said.
He looked at me, the non-Marine, then decided to answer.
“IEDs, firefights,” he said, taking on a lecturing tone. “Didn’t mind the firefights. They were trying to kill you and you were trying to kill them. And then an hour later you were handing out soccer balls, pretending the locals didn’t hate your guts, wouldn’t just love to disembowel you and feed your bleeding intestines to their dogs.”
There was a pause as we took it in.
“But you survived it?” I said. “I mean, not wounded?”
Louis looked at me like I was the dumb kid in the class.
“Everybody’s wounded,” he said. “Some on the outside, some on the inside, some both.” He glanced at Clair. “He understands. You can’t.”
Louis looked back at the house and said, “I guess you might as well come and sit down.”
He looked at the dog, nodded. The dog got up and bounded to the house and up onto the porch. There was a blanket on the floor and he circled once and lay down.
We followed him, climbed the steps. There was a makeshift table, a piece of plywood on sawhorses. A brown pint beer bottle on the table, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a tuna can for an ashtray. A stack of books, hardcovers. The one on top was something about North Africa, World War II. I could see another one about Vietnam. Michael Herr. A Louis L’Amour Western, for a guy who had seen his own Wild West.
Louis unslung the rifle and leaned it against the wall of the cabin. There was only one chair. Louis went to the end of the porch, picked up two wooden crates. He turned them over and shook and kindling and sawdust fell out. He put the crates down by the chair and table upside down. We sat.
“Cigarette?” he said.
We shook our heads. He slipped a lighter out of the pocket of his cargo pants, a silver Zippo with a red Marine Corps emblem. He flipped it open, lit the cigarette, snapped the lighter shut, and put it on the table.
“Force Recon,” Louis said, his voice soft and low. “Officer?”
“No. Master sergeant.”
Louis considered it. Clair continued.
“Very different game, fighting in a jungle, compared to those towns you were in,” he said.
“Hot as hell,” Louis said. “I got used to that, the heat. But everything’s this reddish brick color. Had a hard time with that. The sameness.”
The flowers, explained.
Louis was quiet, lost in the past. Then he faded back in. He drew on the cigarette. There was a tattoo on his forearm, a rifle and helmet, an empty boot. Under it was written NEVER FORGET.
“You lose a lot of friends over there?” I said.
I got the look again.
“Yeah,” he said.
A long pause and then he said, “They give you what you never had and then they take it away.”
“In an instant,” Clair said. “One minute you’re talking to a guy, knows you better than your wife, you’d die for him. And then the next minute he’s gone.”
Louis looked at him. “And the next day it happens again,” he said.
“And the day after that,” Clair said. “And you just have to keep going. So it’s this grieving that never gets done.”
The dog shifted and grunted. His head was on his big paws but he was still doing the guard thing, looking from me to Clair and back again, his mahogany eyes flickering.
Louis sudde
nly dropped the cigarette in the can, got up.
“You want a beer?” he said to Clair. “Can’t not offer a beer to a Marine.” Then to me. “You, too.”
“Sure,” Clair said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Louis got up, the handgun still on his hip. It was a revolver, not a big one, maybe just a .22. He saw me staring and said, “Gun like this way out here—it’s like you have a silencer.”
He pushed the door open, a windowless massive thing made of two-inch planks, like something from a medieval fortress. We heard his boots cross the room inside, then come back. He emerged with three of the brown bottles, a pint glass, two canning jars, and a soup bowl. He gave the glass to Clair, and he and I had jars. The dog got the bowl.
“Excuse the glassware,” he said. “Don’t usually have company.”
“You make the beer yourself?” I said.
“That I do,” he said. “This one’s brown ale. Yeast on the bottom, so pour it slow.”
We did. Louis raised his jar to Clair. “Semper fidelis,” he said. They clinked and then he turned to me and we tapped jars. “Sláinte,” I said.
We drank. The ale was pretty good. Louis leaned down and poured some from his jar into the dog’s bowl. The dog got up and lapped. His back came up almost to the top of the table.
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Friend,” Louis said. The dog whumped his big tail back and forth.
“What kind of a dog is he?” I said.
“Big,” Louis said.
We sat and sipped and looked out. A hermit thrush was calling from the woods, like Pan on his flute. The river flickered through the trees below the house. The air had thickened in the past couple of hours, and the sky was darkening to the southwest. More Vietnam than Iraq. Maybe why Louis hadn’t moved to Arizona.
“Gonna rain,” Clair said.
“In Anbar that would be a sandstorm coming,” Louis said.
We looked at the slate-gray sky.
“What was that like?” I said.
“Horrible. Gets in everywhere. Your food, your mouth, your eyes.”
We drank.
“Vietnam,” Clair said. “Thickest, heaviest rain you’ve ever seen. For days. Boots, clothes, blankets. Nothing ever got dry. Everything rotted, even your feet.”
Louis drank, seemed to be considering that.
“Well,” he said, “the world is rotting, when you think about it.”
I hadn’t.
“Why’d you come back here?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“You know people? From coming here with your parents?”
“What?” he said. “You’ve been inquiring about me?”
“Your name came up,” I said.
“Came up here to be left alone,” Louis said.
“Didn’t want to stay in the Marine Corps?” Clair said.
“Wasn’t an option,” he said.
He put his jar down on the table and looked at me.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s so important you show up with a military escort?”
I put the jar down, took out my pad and pen, and laid them in front of me on the table.
“I’d like you to be in the story,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re one of the outsiders. Like I said, you’re one of the people they’re eyeing as possibly being the arsonist.”
“Like I would kill that doctor?”
“I guess.”
“And the other ‘suspect’ is that kid?”
“Yeah.”
“They know who beat him up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Louis reached for the cigarette pack and shook another one out. He lit it and drew deeply, raised his head and exhaled.
“So I’m supposed to defend myself against these anonymous accusations?”
“You can say whatever you want.”
He smoked. Took a swallow of ale from the jar. Leaned over and sloshed a little more into the dog’s bowl. The dog lapped.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s my statement to the press.”
He drew on the cigarette, exhaled slowly so the smoke clung to his face.
“It’s funny how some people get classified as outsiders,” he said. “I’ve been coming here since I was a baby. My parents had a house in Sanctuary, their parents before them. I come here now, I see all these new people. Retired folks from New York and New Jersey, people moved over from the coast, the businesspeople. But I’m the outsider. That kid, just ’cause he looked different, walking around in the middle of the night.”
“You saw him?” I said.
“Yeah,” Louis said.
“He see you?”
“No,” he said.
He smoked. “Why do you walk at night?” I said.
Louis exhaled.
“Like to know what’s around me. Only way to know that is to do patrol.”
“So you watch people in town?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I watch people watching people. You’d be surprised what you see.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Not surprised they beat the crap out of the kid in the coat. Didn’t do anybody any harm, did he? What is it he has?”
“Asperger’s.”
“Jesus. And that gets him nearly killed. People are sick, you know. Problem is, some of ’em see outsiders as a threat, even this poor kid. Rejection of the pathetic social order they live under. That kid’s saying, ‘Screw all of you. I don’t need you. You’re nothing.’ ”
“And that causes them to question their own value,” Clair said. “Which is uncomfortable.”
“Yes, it is,” Louis said, flicking an ash. “I’ve always been an outsider. When I was a summer kid here, local kids thought I was weird. When I was at boarding school, I didn’t fit there, either. Maybe ’cause I was up here in Maine every summer, running around the woods by myself. I was on my own, building cabins, tree forts, even a tunnel once.”
He looked to Clair.
“Read about the Vietcong. I read all the time, every military book I can find. The VC and their underground hideouts. Amazing ingenuity. Mine had a trapdoor kind of thing, vent holes with pipes sticking out.”
He smoked, tapped the cigarette on the edge of the can.
“Fuckin’ A, man. Talking more today than I have in the last six months.”
He raised the jar. “Must be the truth serum. Anyway, when I joined the military, my family, they thought I’d lost my mind. Turned out the only place I felt like I belonged was in the Marine Corps. Only time I felt I could really trust people. Shit we went through, people were laid bare, you know? We knew each other to the fucking core.”
He looked at Clair.
“You know what I’m saying. You can trust a fellow Marine,” Louis said.
“Trust him with your life,” Clair said.
“So why didn’t you stay?” I said.
Louis shrugged. The dog perked up at the slight movement.
“Shit happens. I had some things to deal with when I got back from Anbar. First I was in San Antonio, the VA there. Then I went to Bethesda, the naval hospital. That was for mental health stuff. Depression. I mean, I was a little sick with it before I went, now that I look back on it. Then you come back all the way from hell and nobody cares. About any of it. Not one iota. You’re over there fighting for your life, your buddies getting blown to shit, and you get back here and it’s like it ain’t even happening. Nobody here gives a rat’s fucking ass.”
He looked at me.
“They gave Fallujah back to the friggin’ Taliban.”
He said it like it was somehow my fault.
“Yeah,” I said. “I read the stories.”
“Guys died to take that place. Guys way braver than me. And then we just let the insurgents walk in and raise their freakin’ black flag. I saw it on the front page of the paper at the store. I’m standing there and I look around. Nobody ev
en notices. Guys got killed there. Guys got their legs blown off. Guys got burned alive.”
Now he looked at Clair.
“So it’s all a big joke, and the joke’s on us. Never mind. Forget it ever happened. I mean, Jesus. Some of us were just kids, you know? We threw those kids away. For nothing.”
“Vietnam,” Clair said. “You can go there on vacation now. Scuba diving. Lie on the beach.”
“So what the hell is it all about, then?” Louis said, looking up at him, the anger fading, the question real.
Clair hesitated, took a long swallow of Louis’s beer.
“Every society has a warrior class. Without that we have anarchy. You’d see way more suffering, way more carnage. We fight to keep humanity from going totally crazy. Somebody has to step up.”
Louis considered it. Turned his jar in his hand.
“Pretty fucking abstract,” he said.
“All I got,” Clair said.
We were quiet, the three of us and the dog. A pileated woodpecker called from somewhere in the treetops, a primeval sound. Bees bounced around in the flowers.
“Well, you Vietnam guys—at least nobody was spitting on me,” Louis said. “Somebody spits on me, they may not be alive when they hit the ground. Anyway, the docs—the shrinks, I mean—they decided what with everything going on with me, my ‘adjustment issues,’ maybe it was better I took my disability.”
I glanced at Clair. He was listening closely. Waiting.
Louis had darkened like the sky. Scowling, he tipped the jar and finished his beer.
“San Antonio VA,” Clair said. “WIA?”
Louis stubbed out his cigarette in the can.
“The Humvees, the early ones—they were like tin cans. You know a lot of guys lost legs, feet. But the thing is, even if you don’t get your legs blown off, you’re stuck in the goddamn thing. And it’s full of fuel and ammo and the enemy, they’re following up with RPGs, small arms. So the vehicles, sometimes they—”
He stopped.
“Catch fire,” I said.
Louis stood up, leaned down, and pulled the left leg of his pants up above his knee. His calf was a mass of pink and red and purple scars, the muscles misshapen. He reached to his right leg and pulled that pant leg up, too. It was the same—hairless, disfigured, scars from skin grafts and surgeries.
“Battle of Ramadi,” Louis said. “Some guys got tattoos.”