by Trent Reedy
Fix it? What did I know about fixing the roof? Why was it always up to me to fix everything anyway?
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. I grabbed a bucket from the bathroom closet and went up to my attic bedroom, where the rain tapped the roof like a thousand little snare drums. A few years ago, I finally moved out of the bedroom I’d been sharing with Mary to come up here. My fortress took its natural light through the single windows in the two vertical walls. Otherwise the steep underside of the roof sloped down all the way to the floor, the rafters arching above me like some huge animal’s ribs, with pink insulation stuffed between them. A barrier made of pinned-together bedsheets divided the bedroom side of the attic from the storage side, where I hid my gym from my mother.
I could hear the water running from somewhere on the gym side, like someone had turned on a faucet. Past the curtain, I had to stop to let my eyes adjust to the dimness. The only overhead light was from a bulb hanging from a wire, and that was on the bedroom side of the attic.
There it was, back near the corner — a big, stupid, steady trickle coming down from the ceiling, ruining one of my best Iowa Hawkeyes football posters and making a dark puddle on the floor, which I guess ran down into Mary’s room. I plunked the bucket down to catch the water. Hopefully the rain would stop before tomorrow and the weather would stay dry until I could figure out how to fix this.
The repairs needed to be cheap. Even with Mom’s two jobs and some of my cash from Derek’s, we never had enough money to take care of everything. I shivered in my wet clothes and sat down on my homemade weight bench, putting my head in my hands.
“Hey, Michael?” Mary called from over by the stairs.
“Go away,” I said.
“Letter or something for you.”
Weird. Nobody ever wrote to me. “Who from?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
I went to the bedroom side of my attic to find the envelope on the floor next to the stairwell. Mary had gone back downstairs. I picked the letter up and sat down in the metal folding chair at my desk. The letter was addressed to me in wobbly handwriting with no return address.
I opened the envelope and found some slightly yellowed sheets of lined notebook paper with the spiral fringe still on them. Who would be mailing me old paper? The clean white envelope looked much newer. The pages had been folded in thirds, and I carefully flattened them out.
Saturday, May 29, 2004 (365 Days Left)
Dear Michael,
If you’re reading this, then I’m very sorry, but I didn’t make it home. I will die was killed here in the war in Afghanistan.
I put the letter down in my lap for a moment. What was this? A letter from my dad? I skipped to the end to see it signed Love, Dad. But this couldn’t be from my father, could it? He had been killed in 2005. Who would have kept this letter for so many years? The Iowa City postmark offered no clue. I didn’t know anyone from Iowa City, but a ton of people here in Riverside worked there. I checked the envelope to see if the person who mailed the letter had also sent a note. Nothing. Maybe this was some prank.
As I write this, I miss you very much, and I’ve only been away for four months. I miss playing games with you in the backyard, teaching you to kick and pass with that little Hawkeye football. You had a pretty good spiral pass going before I left. We watched Iowa play in the Outback Bowl, and you wore that toy football helmet you got for Christmas through the whole game. That was a great day.
I remembered that day! Mom and Dad had made popcorn and we had salami and cheese on a platter, like a sort of picnic in the living room. That old helmet was in one of the boxes up here somewhere. It had been a great day.
Only our family had been there that night. Nobody else would know about it. This letter really was from Dad.
This is the first day of what is supposed to be a one-year boots-on-the-ground mission in Afghanistan. If you have this letter now, then the day count doesn’t matter much, since I guess I’ll never see the end of this tour. Right now, though, I have to live as though I’m going to make it home, and that day count helps keep me going.
Wait. This didn’t make sense. I flipped back to the first page of the letter. It was dated May 29, 2004, but I knew for certain that Dad died August 28, 2005. That was the date on his tombstone, which I’d visited often enough. How could Dad die in the war three months after his tour in Afghanistan was over?
If you have this letter, that means I’ve been gone dead for seven or eight years. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be more of a dad to you. I know I’ve missed a lot of great moments — all the Christmases and birthdays. More than that, I haven’t been able to tell you much about me or about life. A father is supposed to provide his son with some guidance. I didn’t have that advice growing up, so I intend to write you a couple of letters to make sure you have some help from your old man. My plan is for you to be given my letters in order, one at a time, early in your sophomore year of high school, so that you’ll have read them all by your sixteenth birthday.
Little Mikey doesn’t know much about what I do in the Army National Guard, so now that you’re grown up, Michael, I thought I’d tell you a little about it. I’m a combat engineer, which is like a soldier in the infantry. We are trained in battle tactics with the M16, as well as various machine guns and other weapons systems. Combat engineers are also trained to work with land mines, TNT, and C4 plastic explosives.
I’m a sergeant E-5 and a team leader in third squad. Each squad has nine soldiers, and one of those is the squad leader, an E-6 staff sergeant. There are two teams in each squad. I’m the A-team (or alpha team) leader, in charge of three guys. By now, you’ve already met one of those men, my friend Specialist Marcelo Ortiz, who has promised to deliver these letters to you.
Marcelo Ortiz? Who was that? He sure hadn’t delivered the letter. The stamp and postmark proved it came through the mail, and Mary would have mentioned some guy showing up to drop off the envelope. What was going on here? Maybe the letter would explain.
Before I was in the National Guard, though, I grew up in a small town in western Missouri, less than an hour south of Kansas City. My parents were both teachers — Dad was a history teacher and Mom taught English. When I was in eighth grade, they were killed in a car accident while driving home on icy roads. I was sent to live with your grandmother in Riverside, and I was pretty miserable that summer and through my freshman year of high school.
Dad hadn’t been born here. How had I never known that? I’d always assumed that, like me, he had been born at the hospital up in Iowa City and then spent his whole life here in Riverside.
For me, everything changed at sixteen. I got my first car, my grandma’s old 1980 Chrysler LeBaron wagon. White, a little rusty, and butt ugly, but with it, I could go places on my own, without my grandma looking over my shoulder.
I also started hanging out with Taylor Ramsey and Todd Nelson, two of the best friends a guy could ask for. Wow, did we used to have fun. One night after we won a football game, I think against Kalona, I actually drove the wagon down the railroad tracks all the way out to the party at Nature Spot. Your mom scooted close to me on the bench seat, and when we went over the Runaway Bridge, she was freaking-out scared, but I acted like it was just a normal drive. Taylor and Todd laughed the whole way as we bumped down the tracks. Then I backed the wagon up by the fire and put the hatch up in back. We all sat there, listening to the music and talking and laughing. I’d give almost anything to live those days over again.
I couldn’t believe my parents dated back in high school. The idea probably shouldn’t have been a surprise, since they both graduated from here. I guess I’d just never pictured my parents young. I’d only known them as Mom and Dad. But Dad was gone, and Mom never talked about life before she was Mom. And they’d partied at Nature Spot? It seemed impossible. All the best parties were supposed to be out there, just off the railroad tracks outside of town. People never just showed up to Nature Spot. You had to be invited. You had to be
popular.
A couple of the guys I serve with just asked what I was writing about. I told them, and they immediately laughed at me. (If you ever end up serving in the Army, remember to never share anything personal with your fellow soldiers. In the Army there’s no such thing as a personal secret, and everything is fair game to be made fun of.) The guys said I was being stupid and that high school is pointless and meaningless, but I know I’m right.
Your freshman year is a trial run, a chance to check out high school and what it’s all about. But your sophomore year is the time to start to experience it all. I felt like I came alive at sixteen, and those really were the glory days. Adults say that the problems high school kids face are no big deal, or that they’re just a phase. But those adults only say that because they’ve already made it. They have already worked through their issues, one way or another. You haven’t yet. Your problems are real, and you don’t know how it will all work out. You must think of real solutions, and your decisions will affect the years to come.
I want to remind you about the importance of school, about one day going to college. I didn’t have enough money to go, so I enlisted in the National Guard partly because it offered great tuition assistance, and I thought I might become a history teacher and football coach, like my dad. One thing he did have time to pass along to me was his love of history. I especially loved reading about old sea explorers and naval battles on sailing ships. I love visiting historical sites. That’s why we took that vacation down to Hannibal, Missouri, to the boyhood home of Mark Twain and the Mark Twain Cave. I remember watching your little eyes light up when we entered the cave and when we went on the riverboat cruise.
The cave! I sometimes thought about that trip, but couldn’t remember where we had been or why. We’d walked through these really boring, old-fashioned buildings where Mom and Dad kept saying “Don’t touch.” That must have been a museum or something, maybe where Mark Twain was born. But the cave had been amazing, like a whole other world. And on the riverboat Dad and I had acted like pirates.
I had hoped that I could make history come alive for my own students in the classroom, but I never quite found the time and money to make that happen. That’s why I’ve made sure that you and Mary both have college money set aside. Whatever else happens, I want my children to get college educations, so you can get good jobs where you work with your brains and not with your backs. Trust me. I’ve worked at a meatpacking plant and then as a construction laborer for this guy Ed Hughes since I graduated from high school. That kind of work can drain the soul.
I guess what I’m saying is that I hope you can find a balance between high school fun and success with school. You’re a good kid, really a man now. Just be yourself and go for something great. Don’t let your fear of failing prevent you from doing good things.
I don’t know how involved you are with sports and other activities at school, but if you aren’t, I want you to challenge yourself by getting out there. Maybe there’s a club or a sport you’ve been wanting to participate in, but you’ve held yourself back so far. Well, I’m giving you a mission, just like the ones we have in the Army: Go for it! Whatever it is you’ve been wanting to do, give it your best. I know you can do it.
I did a lot of growing up without a father, and I would have liked to know if he approved of the choices I made. Ortiz is my very best friend over here, and if you have questions, you want some advice, or you want to know how I would have felt about something, feel free to ask him. He’ll help you out.
How could I ask Ortiz for help if I’d never met him? Who was this guy? I made it my goal to find out.
I want you to know that I’m willing to do this, to fight these terrorist scumbags, if it means that you and Mary and everybody else back home can grow up without war and with the freedom to live your lives and chase your dreams. As long as you get the chance to live your glory days and start a good life for yourself, then all this will be worth it.
I wanted to be there for you. I tried. I swear to God nothing is was more important to me than getting back home to you and your mom and sister. I know you’ll be good to them, help take care of them. I’ll never get to know the man you’re becoming, but I hope you’ll take your time with my letters to get to know me.
They’re calling me to formation. I have to stop for now. I miss you, buddy.
Love,
Dad
I held the letter up in the dim light. Besides Marcelo Ortiz, my father was probably the very last person to touch this piece of paper. It had gone from his hands to mine almost as if he were with me in my attic right then. It was amazing to hear from him. When he was in the war, we’d tried talking a few times on Skype, but the picture and sound were real jerky and kept freezing up. The phone connection had this weird delay so that one person had to make sure the other had finished talking before he said anything. As a little kid, I couldn’t do it right and ended a lot of phone conversations in tears, frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to talk to my dad.
I wished I had more from him to read now. All my life I’d wanted to know about what Dad had done in the Army, especially how he died. Looking him up online only told me he’d been killed in action in Afghanistan’s Farah Province. I’d learned so much about him just in this one letter. Had Dad written other letters? It sounded like he’d planned to. And if I could talk to this Marcelo Ortiz, maybe I could learn a lot more.
Dad’s hopes that Mary and I wouldn’t have to grow up with this stupid war hadn’t come true. This thing in Afghanistan had been going on for almost my whole life, as long as I could remember, anyway. I’d read about it, but I couldn’t seem to find a good explanation of what all this sacrifice was for, of what had happened to my father, or why he had to be over there in the first place. People sometimes said crap like, “He died fighting for freedom.” Even Dad had used language like that. What was that supposed to mean? Freedom from what? On those rare occasions when people talked about my father, they called him a hero. But what did that mean? How did marching off to a useless, endless war make someone a hero?
His hopes for a fast end to the war had been in vain, but he had other hopes for me too, a mission. Go for it! he had written. Whatever it is you’ve been wanting to do, give it your best. I know you can do it.
I laid out the sports physical and parental permission forms on my desk. The physical part had been easy. I’d paid for the doctor visit myself at the clinic here in town, back when I naively thought that maybe Mom would let me play football this year.
The hard part was the “Parent’s or Guardian’s Permission and Release” section. One of my parents might not have given me permission, but years ago, my father had. He’d practically ordered me to play football. That was all the approval I needed.
I printed and then signed Allison Wilson exactly the way my mother would have.
The next morning, I lay on my homemade wooden weight bench, my biceps flexing and burning. My chest muscles trembled as I tightened my core and pushed the bar up. One hundred ninety pounds. Nine reps going on — I locked out my shaking arms — ten. I lowered the bar onto its cradle above me.
“Yeah!” I whispered to myself as I rolled up off the bench to pace around my secret gym. I’d achieved my new record working weight. I loved feeling the aching tension in my back relax, the way my muscles seemed to uncoil after a heavy lift.
I stepped up to my punching bag. Today was going to be the start of a new life. One-two. I threw a low right and left, turning my whole body into each punch. “Give it my best?” I whispered. “You got it, Dad.” One-two, one-two. “Hundred ninety pounds!” I swung my right shoulder and upper body into a high right jab. Some days, a lot of days, it felt good to beat the heck out of this thing. While rich kids went to psychiatrists for help sorting out their emotions, I tore into a punching bag. That’s the way it was.
I went down to the bathroom on the second floor to shower and dress, then came back upstairs to read.
“Mike?” Mary said.
>
I jumped in my seat. “Ever hear of knocking?”
She was just head and shoulders out of the opening in the floor for the stairs. “On that curtain you put up as a door to the hallway downstairs? Yeah, I knocked.” She leaned her elbows on the attic floor and rested her head in her hands. “Funny, nobody answered. What are you doing, anyway?”
I snapped my Edgar Allan Poe book closed. “None of your business.”
“I so don’t care about your dorky books,” Mary said. “I need some money.”
My chair scraped on the wooden floorboards as I pushed it back from my desk. “How could you possibly think it’s a good idea to come ask me for money this early in the morning?”
“It’s seven o’clock,” Mary said, in a tone she might use to say, Duh! You’re an idiot! Since she turned thirteen this last July, she answered most people’s questions that way. “Tara and I are putting up campaign posters. On Friday, I’ll be seventh-grade class president.”
“I’ve seen your posters everywhere already, even in the high school wing. You don’t need to make more.”
“The money’s not for posters! Seriously. We have all that totally covered. I need it ’cause me and Tara and Crystal are going to —”
“Tara, Crystal, and I,” I corrected her.
She rolled her eyes. “Me and Tara and Crystal are going to Piggly’s Friday after school to celebrate our win.”
Piggly’s was this crazy barbecue restaurant out on the highway. “How are you getting there?”
“Crystal’s brother has to drive us. His mom’s making him.”
The last thing I wanted to hear about was my little sister going anywhere with a guy like Nick Rhodes, even with all her horrible friends and even just for the mile-and-a-half ride out to Piggly’s. “Does Mom know about this?”
“What? Are you kidding? No! Come on, Mike.” She came up out of the stairwell, dragging her feet as though they were chained together and weighted down, her hands folded in front of her chest almost as if she were praying. “Please? Please. I’ve already told the girls I’ll be there, and if I back out now they’ll think I’m a total loser.”