And as she draws near, she says, sharply, “How do you think your mother got our home number?”
“Did she?” he says, thinking: So that’s the transformed aura. Anger. Thinking too that the discovered phone number might be a simple thing, an oversight on his part committed sometime along the way; perhaps it did not occur to him to register the number as unlisted when they moved up here to Twelve Mile.
She sets her arms akimbo. “She left a message on the machine.”
“What did she say?”
“You need to hear for yourself.”
They head off toward the house, side by side.
“You’re home early,” she says. “Did Guy cancel?”
“No. We had coffee instead.”
“I was at Becca’s. She’s not good. She and Paul may be through.”
Her anger at his mother seems to have dissipated quickly. She’s put the whole thing off on him now, and he’s okay with that. He says, “Is somebody dead?”
“Dead?” She looks at him.
He realizes she’s still thinking about their friends. He’s asking, of course, about his mother’s message.
They go up the porch steps.
He concedes to her agenda. “This is nothing new, is it?” he says.
They’ve reached the door, and they pause. She gives him another look. He’s confused her again.
He clarifies: “Becca and Paul.”
She shrugs. “Not yet,” she says.
Now it’s he who’s lost the thread.
She reads it in his face. “Dead?” she says. “No one’s dead yet.”
He leads her inside and into the front parlor, which they’ve filled with Mennonite furniture. He approaches the sideboard.
He stands hesitating over the answering machine.
He could simply erase the message. Right now. Erase it and change the number. His mother knows his wishes in this matter. It has always been best for all of them.
But he touches the play button.
Her voice wheedles into the room. Darling Jimmy. It’s your mother. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how much I regret how things went between us. Between your father and you. I’ve always loved you, my son. He has too. That’s important to say. He has too. I don’t mean to push my way now into your life when I know you’re trying so hard … Not trying. Succeeding, I’m sure, in your new homeland. I don’t mean to … I’m sorry. But your father is in a bad way, physically. The doctor is very very concerned about him. He may not live long. Whatever that might mean to you. At least just for you to know.
This all came out in a blathering rush, and then she fell silent, though she did not hang up. Perhaps she heard herself. Perhaps she knew that all she could do next was ask directly for something he’d long ago made clear he had no intention of giving. Not that his father wished to hear from him, even if he was dying. His mother was no doubt doing this on her own. He could hear her breathing heavily. The machine will cut her off soon, he thinks. He waits.
But before this can happen, she says, Your brother loves you too. We all do.
She pauses again. Then: Does your phone give you my number? Maybe not.
And she speaks her phone number into the message. Jimmy has no intention of remembering it.
In case you want it, she says.
And the answering machine clicks into silence.
He hesitates.
Humming in him is an apparatus of thought he assembled years ago. For him at least, blood ties are overrated. It’s only people who have a deeply intractable sense of their own identity—an identity that has been created through parents or siblings or grandparents, through those of their own blood—it’s only people like that who can’t imagine an actual, irrevocable break from family. But you drift apart from acquaintances. You even drift apart from previously close friends. Why? Because your interests and tastes, ideas and values, personalities and character—the things that truly make up who you are—shift and change and disconnect. Indeed, it’s harder for friends to part: you came together at all only because those things were once compatible. With your kin, that compatibility may never even have existed. The same is true of a country. You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose your land of birth. If you and they have nothing in common, if they have nothing to do with who you are now, if you are always, irrevocably at odds with each other, is it betrayal simply to leave family and country behind?
No.
Fuck no.
Jimmy extends his finger, touches the erase button. With only a quick sniff of hesitation, he pushes it.
Bob is on his back. And he starts to slide, feeling the movement first in the front of his head and then running down his body like nausea. He opens his eyes. He was upright a moment ago. Under a sky. After a talk with Pastor Somebody. After a sleep. But a cold sleep. Very cold. He’s been outside somewhere. Now, though, there’s a low, dark ceiling above. It’s not just him moving. Everything is moving. A face looms suddenly over him. A jowly, red-cheeked face, a bulbous nose. They are moving together, Bob and this man. From the front of Bob’s head: a knot of pain pressing there, pressing outward.
He tries to lift himself up at the chest.
“Hold on, sport,” the face says.
Bob lets go. Falls back. He begins to spin slowly. He closes his eyes against this.
That nose and those cheeks. A rummy. This is the guy who did it, Bob says in his head. The son of a bitch who brained me. He tries to rise up again, and even though he knows he’s not prepared, he thinks, slowly, carefully, meaning each word: I will kill you.
A pressure on the center of his chest. He falls back.
“Hold on,” the voice says. “I’m here to help you.”
Help?
“You’re on the way to the hospital.”
The pressing in his forehead. He’s stretched tight there. Thoughts congregating, trying to break through skull bone, trying to leap forth.
Bob opens his eyes, thinking he might catch sight of them.
That’s crazy, he realizes.
His mind is clear now. He believes the face.
Okay. Okay okay okay. You’re not the guy.
For a moment Bob loses track of exactly what man he is trying to find or why he should care so hotly.
“Can you hear me?” the face asks.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Bob says.
“Good.” The face narrows its already narrow eyes. “I need to ask you some questions. You understand?”
“What’s to understand?” Bob says. The man is an idiot.
“We have to see if your head’s okay.”
“My head.”
Bob thinks he has filled those two words with sarcasm.
To the emergency tech he sounds dazed. “What’s your name?” the EMT asks.
Bob’s first response is to himself: My name. All of this about my name suddenly. Not just with this rummy. Too much about my name. He’s not sure how he got that impression. So the first thing he says aloud is, “Why is it too much?”
The face cocks sideways.
Bob is simply trying to figure this out. Not that he expects the face to have an answer to the question.
And then Bob remembers. The other Bob.
“Do you understand what I’m asking?” the face says.
“What are you asking?”
“What’s your name?”
“Hello, I’m Bob,” Bob says. “Bob isn’t so popular anymore.”
“Bob,” the face says.
“Bob,” Bob says.
“Bob what?” the face says.
“Bob what,” Bob says. “Bob fucking what.” A sharp thwack of pain in his head. Not in the forehead. At the back of his head. From his father’s hand. Tell the man your name, his father says. If you’re going to sneak around in the night, little motherfucker, you’re going to get captured and then it’s name, rank, and serial number. Bob has followed Calvin from their single-wide. It’s the middle of the night, but in a fourteen-by-sixty every sound kicks
around in your head even if your bedroom is on the opposite end from theirs. All the words, jumbled and blurred but clear enough tonight about his mother’s fear of his father meeting up with somebody, a buddy, somebody up to no good. Now Bob’s standing in front of a man with a hippie-wild beard, an army field jacket dappled in piss-colored street-light, a First Cav patch—horse’s head and diagonal slash—at the shoulder. Name. And another slap at the base of his skull. Bob, Bob says. One more slap from his father: Do it right. Bob says, Robert Calvin Weber. A beat of silence and his father barks, Rank. Bob looks at him. Damn straight, his father says. You don’t have one. Lower than a buck private. And then his father does a thing that he sometimes can do. He abruptly puts his arm around Bob, crushes him close. And he says to the man in the field jacket, But he’s a crack shot, this one. He’s a goddamn killer in the making, my boy.
“Do you remember your last name?”
The face.
“Weber,” Bob says.
“All right, Bob Weber. Where are you?”
The fuck. “Hell,” Bob says.
And the man gives Bob that look. Every man jack of the Hardluckers knows that look. The look when the upstanding asshole—the Upstander—in front of you can’t find or never had or gives up on or runs out of patience for a guy who looks and smells and just plain exists like you. He gives you that tightening and tiny lifting of the upper lip under just one faintly flaring nostril, that back crawl of a gaze, that little lift of the chin, all of this so slight you could easily feel it wasn’t him at all, it was you, it was you shrinking, a shrinking that’s been going on in smooth, small increments for a long while and you only just now can see it, like staring so hard at a clock’s minute hand that eventually you can watch it move. That look says what you’re in fact witnessing is you growing smaller, and this son of a bitch giving it to you has seen it all along.
Bob wishes he had the will to lift a hand and make a fist and punch this face. Not the will. He probably has that. The strength.
The look vanishes now. This man and Bob both know it was there and will always be lurking, but it vanishes, so the two of them can go on.
The face says, “If you’re messing with me, I need you to stop so we can know how to help you. Tell me where you are.”
Bob is weary. His head hurts. “Seems like an ambulance,” he says.
“Okay. Where did we find you?”
Where.
The pastor crouched before him, a dense mane of shovel-blade gray hair crowning his head. Bob was sitting upright, probably this man’s doing. He was beneath a tree. The church community building squatted across the yard. I’m Pastor Dwayne Kilmer, the man said, putting a blanket around Bob’s shoulders. Call me Pastor Dwayne. Bob’s ears rang loudly and a small angry animal was trying to claw its way out of his forehead, but things were coming back to him already. Who did this? Bob said, raising his hand to his head. I don’t know, Pastor Dwayne said and started to add, In the … But Bob interrupted, waving his hand: I was in there. He could not remember the name for it, though the door was in plain sight. It was empty, Pastor Dwayne said without even turning to look in the direction of Bob’s gesture. He knew more than he was saying. It’s a sin to lie, Bob said. Pastor Dwayne rocked backward in his crouch. Now Brother Bob, he began. Do you know me? Bob said, sharply. How do you know my name? Pastor Dwayne said, You told me a few moments ago. This stopped Bob. He couldn’t remember. Then he thought of a question he needed to ask. Who did this to me? The pastor patted him on the shoulder. I don’t know who did it, Brother Bob. That’s the truth.
“Can you say where it was that we picked you up?”
Bob blinks hard at this question. For a moment he hears it coming from Pastor Dwayne. But it’s the face.
The face is waiting.
Bob figures the face probably has some power over him for now. For ill or for good. Bob’s hungry. His bones ache from the chill. He probably needs this guy to help. Bob should answer.
“Bloodied by the Lamb Hospital,” he says.
Instantly he knows he somehow bungled it. Wrong sort of place. “Gospital,” he says.
Not right. “Gospel,” Bob says. “The Bloody Lamb Full of Gospel.”
Clarity. Clarity.
The face has that look again.
“That’s close enough, isn’t it?” Bob says. “I’m not crazy and I’m not stupid.”
The face fixes itself and says, “Okay. Just rest.” It drifts away from Bob’s view.
Bob closes his eyes. He feels the motion all around him. He is being carried along fast now. No bumps. A straight line to somewhere. And he feels his father’s arm go around his shoulders, like it can sometimes do. As always, that gesture only makes Bob ache. Ache and ache. And he thinks of standing in the night in front of their single-wide, lit by street-light, standing side by side with his father, the man’s arm around him, and there’s a tree growing nearby, a jungle tree that sprung up there in the trailer park and nobody gets wise to it till it’s too late, and in that tree is a Viet Cong, a sniper, a helluva shot of a sniper, and the VC squeezes his trigger and sends out a single round that crashes into one side of Bob’s head and out the other and then into his father’s head, and he and his old man die together, right there and then, standing there just like that next to each other.
And as that phantom sniper’s bullet spins through Bob’s brain, Robert passes the concertina fence at the federal prison on Capital Circle, half a mile north of the parkway, the fence a thing his mind has always known to ignore, in its evocation of a military perimeter. But it’s not ignorable with the issues of this past night and this morning. His eyes know to hold on the road ahead, know to prevent even a glance to the side, but the periphery is always there for the seeing, and he is quite aware now of the four rows of razor wire spiraling along beside him, and with them Vietnam spins near, and a deep-driven voice inside Robert whispers: You are a killer.
He does not acknowledge it. Does not let this event play itself over, as it has done a thousand times in these five decades, in dreams, in near-sleep, in full waking obsession. It is this he fights off as he drives to his hospitalized father: Robert is huddled in the deep dark of the banyan tree. Outside are the sounds of pitched battles, none of them immediately nearby, the heaviest across the river. He wraps his left arm around his drawn-up legs, hugs them closer, and they press the pistol in his right hand more tightly against him, the fit of the weapon in his palm and the weight of it upon his chest making him feel oddly calm. Though his mind knows how foolish this is. The enemy is rushing through the city, filling it as if the Perfume River has risen and breached its banks. The tree and the pistol will soon fail him. If he is to live, he needs to think this out. Surely the North’s night offensive is focused on the key military positions in the city: the airport; the South’s division headquarters in the old Citadel across the river; and the place where Robert belongs, the MACV compound. If those places fall, particularly MACV, Robert is dead anyway. If they survive the night, Robert is dead if he cannot make his way back. Finding his way back will be vastly more difficult in daylight. He cannot stay where he is. He must use the cover of night to at least find another hiding place, nearer MACV.
All of this is preamble. Usually when the event coils through Robert’s head like concertina razor wire, the decision to emerge has already been made. The next few essential moments travel on their own. He closes his eyes. He turns his head, cocks it, trying to focus his hearing in the direction of MACV: AK-47s, M16s, grenades launched and exploding. Robert pushes those sounds away into the background. He listens nearby. Nothing. The rush of dark-clad bodies just beyond the tree seems to have ended. He takes a deep breath. He lets go of his legs, stretches them out, takes another breath. He rises. He clicks the pistol’s safety lever forward. He holds the weapon before him, ready to fire. He steps from the tree. Though his eyes are dilated to the dark, nothing is clear on this overcast night, not pocket-park sward or trees or alleyway beyond or huddled city shapes all ar
ound, everything is smeared together in the tarry night. He must find his way through. He pauses. And from somewhere behind him and to his right a white flare rises, rushing to its apogee, far enough away that its light simply dapples through the trees and so Robert can see but he cannot see, and there is movement to his left and he looks and a shape is there, half a dozen paces away and it is a man clad in shadow and instantly Robert’s hand is moving and he is squeezing at the trigger and the pistol pops and jumps a little in his hand and it levels and pops again and again and the shape flies back into the dark and Robert hears the shape—the man—hears the man thump onto the ground, and Robert turns and runs.
And why should this man whose face he never saw, who surely was a Viet Cong, who surely, moments later, would have done the same to him if Robert had not shot first, why should this man thrash still inside Robert? You are a killer, Robert whispers again to himself from somewhere deep in the dark, somewhere invisible in the trees. But so many men have had to reconcile so much more, so many killings, so much blood that they have spilled in some far place where there was no alternative except to let their own blood be spilled, brought into this situation by their country, in the name of and for the protection of all that they and their families, now and for generations before, have held dear. And later on this day in Hue and on the next day and on the next, first in the streets and then safe among his own in the MACV compound, Robert will shoot and shoot and it is not entirely clear if he has killed again but he probably has. But this one, this one dark figure will not simply die, will not allow himself to be buried in the psyche the way most of all the millions who have died in wars have been buried inside most of all the millions of their killers. Why? Because Robert did not go to Vietnam to do this. Because he had a graduate school deferment and he let it go and so the army gave him a choice: to enter into officers’ training and risk a combat assignment or enter as an enlisted man and select his own army occupation. So he chose not to kill. He went to Vietnam to slide away to the side, to land and work and fly home as one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills, who never experiences any actual battle, who never fires a weapon. Who goes to war to cook or repair or fuel or type or drive or warehouse or launder or telegraph; or goes to study and analyze, like doing the research he loves; who goes to war and sleeps and eats and drinks and writes letters and listens to music and falls safely in love in another country with an exotic girl and writes a resume and plans a future life and goes home; who goes to war to please your dad, to receive your dad’s approval, to make your dad proud, to win your dad’s love.
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