Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  “He’s still a pain,” Brendan said.

  Peering down the hall, Del saw Robby holding Johnwayne’s hand through the bars in a soul grip. “I’m bound for the mainland Monday mornin’,” Robby was saying. “I wanna thank you for all you done for me. I’m a dumbfuck, J. W. May the Lord blind me if I’m not. But I got somethin’ true to tell you just the same.”

  Johnwayne dipped his head intently.

  “You’re different, old friend. You’re retarded. Now come on, look at me straight. You’re retarded, hear me? You know what I’m sayin’.” Robby shrugged. “Hey, I’m no genius myself. But the fact is, you got rights on this earth same as any man. So walk proud, and remember: Nobody means to treat you wrong. You gotta forgive the bastards every time.”

  “’Kay.”

  “Every time.”

  “’give.”

  “Right. Forgive.” Robby took up his guitar and picked a soft melody. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

  “Yup.”

  Robby began to sing with the tune he strummed, Johnwayne joining in at once: their song.

  [EXT]

  “I’m a good ol’ boy / Never meanin’ no harm . . . ”

  [/EXT]

  In earlier years of the Vietnam war, assignment as an aerorifle platoon leader would have put Willoughby in the teeth of airmobile combat. Things had slowed by 1972. Vietnamization was working as planned, replacing Americans on the casualty lists with many anonymous South Vietnamese. “Background,” Willoughby explained to Brendan Cochran. “I’m not sure how much you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” the boy said. He sat beside Willoughby on the sidewalk bench where he’d encountered him after leaving the police station. “I want to know it all.”

  “Famous last words,” Willoughby joked nervously. The moment was here, no pistol needed at all — he could take revenge on Jerome with mere history, mere fact. He could give Jerome’s son his genuine dad.

  “My first action,” Willoughby said to Brendan, “I gave way too many orders,” four years of textbook small-unit tactics spilling out in a jumble as AK rounds had zinged past his head, “but nobody paid much attention so no harm was done. We killed four and suffered one wounded. Your dad was pleased.” Awaiting dustoff. Sergeant Cochran had winked to some soldiers, “I believe our Willyboy’s good luck.” Willoughby had tingled with the praise. He was almost twenty-three and should have been wiser. But dead men at his feet and a warm weapon in his hands — some people vomit and some people don’t.

  An engineer company had built a small schoolhouse for an Australian missionary in a local Vietnamese village. The platoon escorted in a civilian camera crew to film the school as political P.R. They found the village in flames. The platoon took defensive positions as Willoughby, Sergeant Cochran, an ARVN interpreter, and the camera crew went to look for the missionary. They found his wife and baby. She was a Viet girl. Her elbows had been broken backward and her child executed. A scout patrol dragged a Viet Cong from one of the huts, bandaged and half-dead with seeping wounds across his belly. Villagers watched impassively as Sergeant Cochran began hitting the prisoner. “Body blows,” Willoughby said. “The wounds opened up. The dink died in a minute or two.”

  “You told me before my dad was the best,” Brendan said.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  The boy’s eyes were focused far away. He could picture his dad doing that — like a fight in a bar with pool cues and fists, like hammer blows on creatures nesting in Jerome’s duck blind.

  The interrogation was filmed, Willoughby went on, but the camera was destroyed when mortar fire suddenly struck. Two soldiers were killed right away, two were wounded. Willoughby led a pursuit into the jungle but found nothing, the enemy already invisible. Casualties were laid by the LZ for medevac. It was dusk. The platoon lingered edgily in the glow of the burning village. Someone shouted on the perimeter. A figure approached across a clearing. Willoughby hoped it might be the missionary but it was a dink doubtful carrying a satchel. Weapons drew down and safeties unclicked. The dink halted about thirty feet away. The interpreter hailed him but received no answer. Willoughby glanced at Sergeant Cochran, who looked back at him, weapon at rest on his shoulder: “Your move.” The dink reached into the satchel. Willoughby fired a burst and his target pitched backward like a paper wad. A soldier inspected the satchel, which contained not a grenade, as Willoughby had hoped, but a khaki shirt and trousers. “The Aussie’s, looks like.” Willoughby flicked his eyes to the body: twelve or thirteen, and a mess. Cochran approached him. “I figured you for a killer.” Willoughby replied, “We lost people today. That’s on me.” Cochran shook his head. “I’ll tell you when it’s your fault.” The choppers came in. The wind and roar relieved Willoughby of having to think for now.

  Willoughby must have made other mistakes to have provoked such bitterness among his men, but the only one he could cite was when, two months later, he permitted his pilot to land in an unsecured area to maintenance an overheated engine. No sooner had the rotors coasted to stillness than small arms fire opened up from the jungle. It was slow-motion chaos as the engine coughed and the rotors grudgingly turned. Soldiers in the open field were target practice and two were hit immediately. A third, a cherry who’d wandered off with diarrhea, took forever crawling back. When the rotors began to bite the air and the Huey lightly to flutter, the kid panicked and stood and ran for the chopper. He fell forward, hit. He stood and was hit again. His face looked like a wide-eyed baby’s as he watched the aircraft rise. Willoughby was about to go for him, about to leap out and rescue the kid, when another guy leaped first. The deck of the chopper was slick with blood and the guy’s fatigues were soaked from lying in it — Willoughby always would remember the fluid sheen of sunlight on the guy’s wet clothes as he ran toward the cherry. The pilot hovered six feet off the ground. Willoughby lay prone, shooting, looking for something to shoot. The guy on the ground slung the stricken kid over his back and came running. It was beautiful to see — Willoughby actually thought it at the time, the thought itself like a perfect crystal filament untouched through a horrible earthquake. The chopper dropped down and the guy threw the kid aboard like a hay bale. He jumped on the skid and had hold of Willoughby’s hand when he got hit in the back of the head. For his valor he was decorated posthumously. Willoughby provided the details and his company commander wrote up the citation.

  Willoughby tried to put the action behind him. But his men’s eyes pressed against his back and their chilly, shared, unspoken opinion lurked in each exchange. A word from Cochran, who’d gone ahead in another chopper and hadn’t seen the incident, could have put the issue to rest; the sergeant’s silence was his verdict. It took every ounce of Willoughby’s hubris to lead his platoon after that. He drove and tormented his men as he himself was tormented by that face, not a foot from his own, fixed in the moment of dying. Willoughby should have gone to rescue the cherry. Having brought his people into that place, he shouldn’t have gone away standing.

  “Your dad never put guys in danger needlessly,” Willoughby told Brendan. “He never forgot anything, he never overlooked anything. He was just very good at his job.”

  “Why won’t he admit it, then?”

  By way of reply, Willoughby continued:

  On a topographic map the elevation line made a curve called The Devil’s Elbow. The platoon was on a reconnaissance swing through the area when one of the scout squads found a tunnel, which by policy were to be explored before blown. Sergeant Cochran said nobody here’s a tunnel rat so nobody goes in, period. Willoughby, slightly built and craving atonement, peeled off his gear, took a flashlight and a .45 and crawled inside. Ten feet in, fear hit, dispelled through a sort of ultimate terror when something moved in the dark ahead. Willoughby fired twice (today his hearing suffered) and cries of “Chieu Hoy!” followed. The dink was surrendering. His face poked around the tunnel bend, filt
hy and squint-eyed in the flashlight glare. Willoughby beckoned him to follow as he inched backward to the tunnel mouth. As he emerged feet first it crossed his mind that his men could shoot him now, so helpless; as he stood and brushed off the piss-smelly dirt he began to feel triumphant. The dink came out, shielding his eyes from the sun. His uniform identified him as an NVA regular, its condition suggesting months or years of living out here like an animal, like a VC. He got to his knees chanting, “Chieu Hoy, Chieu Hoy.” Sergeant Cochran kicked him quiet. “We got holes all over,” he told Willoughby: “Must be an old CP or supply base.” “Why old?” Willoughby said: “It could still be active, we don’t know. I only went in twenty feet.” “And you can go in again, alone.” “We’d need a guy down every hole, obviously.” Cochran shook his head: “We’re airmobile, man. You want somebody to eat dirt, call the fuckin’ Marines.” “It’ll take no time to check — ” “Negative. You got enough of us killed already. No more for that shit.”

  Through the interpreter, the prisoner was questioned as to what was down the tunnel. His story was that the complex had long been abandoned. Cochran told Willoughby, “I’m sold, let’s book.” The soldiers agreed one hundred percent. But Willoughby had resolved to prevail here. He hated Cochran for his natural prestige, and he would take out his hatred on the prisoner. But execution would be absurd. Truth would die in the process, and the dilemma of tunnels no one dared enter would remain unaddressed.

  Then Willoughby got an idea — that is, he told Brendan, he did something that amounted to a whole philosophy of expedience and priority which proved a good idea as well, as far as settling the matter at hand. In addition to its ARVN interpreter, the platoon had a Chieu Hoy scout, a young VC turncoat who’d been received into the open arms of South Vietnamese repatriation, the same merciful policy the NVA prisoner was invoking for all he was worth. The platoon’s Chieu Hoy was new. He would smile nervously when anyone looked at him, as if in apology for not doing more to make the war less inconvenient to all. Willoughby bade him kneel on the ground beside the prisoner. The Chieu Hoy, smiling nervously, complied. Willoughby pointed to him while exhorting the prisoner, “Chieu Hoy, see? Same you. Well, fuck Chieu Hoy!”

  “I shot our guy in the head,” Willoughby said. He’d bent forward on the bench, elbows on knees, and was staring down at the brick sidewalk as if it were carved with relevant runes. Brendan mimicked the pose exactly.

  “You killed the . . . ”

  “Chieu Hoy, we called ’em. A friendly. And yes.”

  “Like a murder?”

  “Just like.” Willoughby’s heart raced in his chest. Like a long distance runner expecting more miles, he’d rounded a blind corner and been shocked to find himself at the finish line. He went on with his story — pure fiction now, with a new hero and villain and ending.

  All the soldiers watching recoiled. The NVA prisoner, gone rigid in fright, glanced quickly down where blood pooled at his knees. “Ask him again,” Willoughby ordered the interpreter, “what’s down this tunnel here?” Suddenly the prisoner couldn’t say enough about how big this complex was, with a commo station, hospital, and ordnance depot contained beneath the ground; and about which entrances were boobytrapped and which were passable. Sergeant Cochran radioed for combat support. The operation proved a major success at the cost of zero U.S. casualties. The platoon was airlifted out of there and enjoyed hot chow that night.

  Two days later Willoughby opened his footlocker and got his leg blown off. “No mystery why,” he told Brendan. “Killing that guy was an evil thing, forget if it turned out . . . efficient. I was out of control and Sergeant Cochran, your dad, corrected the situation.”

  “He set the bomb?”

  “The grenade. He rigged it. Which is probably why he doesn’t talk about the war with you. Right or wrong, a frag is illegal.”

  Brendan sat up. “You must hate him.”

  “Not really. I might be pissed off, I might be lame — but I was the bad guy, not him.”

  “You didn’t come to Penscot to get him back?”

  Willoughby gave a parched laugh. “Why’d I come here? I think I came to tell you this story. To tell Sergeant Cochran’s son this true story. Yeah.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You ought to.”

  The sharp press of Jerome’s pistol under Willoughby’s belt was eased when Willoughby sat up and stretched wide his arms. When his right arm came down it was around Brendan’s shoulders. The boy had brown hair and brown eyes, a scatter of acne on the bridge of his nose, and his father’s straight-staring gaze.

  “I appreciate you telling me,” Brendan said again.

  “I appreciate you listening.”

  Willoughby watched Brendan walk away down the lane, waited till the boy turned a corner. With the brazenness of a dazed innocent, of one unexpectedly reprieved from harsh justice, Willoughby took the pistol out from under his shirt without thought of who might see him, who might be alarmed or intrigued. He flipped the pistol one time from hand to hand. He sighted it nostalgically on the clouds in the sky, checked it by rote to make sure it was empty, wiped it clean of smudges as they do in detective movies, then tossed it into a nearby dumpster. He walked away whistling toward the rest of his life. He never saw the person observing from around the corner of the police station. He never saw Johnwayne at all.

  Del Locke wasn’t sure why, earlier that day, he’d come out to his mother about his homosexuality after years of plotting the moment like an artist afraid to begin. Though he’d told her gently, it had taken inner fury to get the words out. He credited Johnwayne’s contemptuousness toward him in their argument yesterday as providing, finally, the spark.

  Mrs. Locke had counterpunched like a prizefighter with displays of mortal shock at hearing the news. She’d petulantly phoned her employer Mrs. Winston to give notice; hanging up, however, it hadn’t taken long for her to warm to the idea of no female rival to her son’s affections ever. The truth out, Del left his mother with her TV and went upstairs to unwind. Popping into Johnwayne’s room to say hi, he evidently surprised his brother, who quickly slapped his pillow over some unseen object. “I didn’t mean to intrude,” Del smiled. “And don’t look so guilty. It’s okay to have secrets.” He guessed his brother had borrowed another of their mother’s undergarments or else bought Cosmopolitan at the grocery store today. “How’s Robby, by the way?”

  “Good.” Johnwayne, Del knew, was a proud, protective friend.

  “He’s going away Monday, you know. Not for long. They can’t prove intent. They can’t prove he meant to kill that guy.”

  “Was wrong,” Johnwayne said. “Rob say that to me, ’cause drugs. And ’day he say, wrong forgive, every time.”

  “What was that?”

  Johnwayne hesitated, wanting to get it right. “Rob tell me, every time wrong, forgive. He say that.”

  “Do you know forgive? It’s when, like — ”

  “I know. Say sorry.”

  “Yes. I say sorry, you forgive me, which means you accept my apology. You let me feel better again.”

  Silence.

  “And I am sorry,” Del said, “for times I’ve been unkind to you, when I haven’t listened or cared enough. Do you forgive me?”

  Johnwayne nodded. “Rob say.”

  “Then he must be all right.”

  Del would remember that conversation for the rest of his life. He’d remember the image of Johnwayne sitting on his bed, one hand clamping his pillow in a child’s version of guile, obviously hiding underneath it something he’d broken or found. “Bye,” Johnwayne had said to him then, in courteous dismissal.

  Twenty-Five

  Anna came to the Winstons’ dinner party as assistant to the substitute chef, Mr. Jerome. This afternoon she’d accompanied him on a whirlwind shop for foods to serve. Besides half a dozen lobster dishes, his specialty was meatloaf. Anna urged hi
m to something flashier, so he went with chicken in cream sauce over wild rice that could be prepared inside of two hours. Shopping was fun, the sort of drudgery that becomes a giddy lark when done with someone with whom you’ve been intimate and still would like to know better. Anna kept the grocery receipts for reimbursement by the Winstons — Jerome had padded the list with some items he needed at home. She said nothing; her way with him was of an anthropologist among tribals. She wanted to study, not disturb, his apparently ancient ethos that everything always is fair.

  They drove out to Oceanside with an air of sweet conspiracy. Jerome was looking forward to tweaking Brendan a little; the boy had been evasive about tonight’s party, “as if I’d actually crash it or somethin’.”

  Mrs. Winston met them at the servants’ entrance. Jerome launched himself into the huge kitchen as if into a sporting goods store or carnival tent. The guests were due at seven. The ones who most dreaded arriving first did. Police Chief Rickert and his wife Sally. Mrs. Winston bore upon them with a smile. “Thomas, Susie — welcome!”

  Jerome had chicken baking, frozen biscuits in the toaster oven, sliced zucchini simmering in canned tomato sauce and wild rice on the boil. Anna had set the table and made a garden salad. Jerome wore an apron from home that read Eat the Rich, a sentiment that favorably influenced Mr. Winston’s impression of him. “I concur,” said the old man as he stepped from the back stairs. He preferred a ten dollar bill, and Jerome pocketed the tip.

  Araby entered the kitchen from the pantry end. “Eat the Rich? That line is so stale.”