The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  “Daddy looks hurt,” the boy said.

  “He’s going to get better,” his mother said. “These men are going to help him.”

  The younger paramedic led the boy to the back of the ambulance and gave him a plastic dinosaur to play with. All the guys walked off and gathered around the stack of crossties to give Gary F and his wife some time alone.

  Nobody said anything. Gary F’s wife tried to straddle the couplers so she could face her husband, but she was too short. She reached for him, then shied away as if she was afraid to touch him. Finally, she said something I couldn’t make out, leaned her head against his chest and cried. And although Gary F showed no visible emotion, I’m sure he wanted to say something, the one thing, the sweetest thing he could think of to say to her. But he just hung on those steel arms, staring at the car in front of him, because that was all he could do.

  I could already see myself afterward, once the woman and her boy were on their way to the hospital and the helicopter had landed to take Gary F away, his blood pouring onto the gravel as the paramedics loaded him, all the guys shielding their faces from the blowing dust. I could see myself driving the dark streets that night, slowing to look into lit windows, trying to glimpse the lives inside, caught between work and home, and then waiting for Cindy to come through the door and drop her keys on the table, her white blouse stained with coffee, her hands trembling as she crawled into bed and I followed, sliding in behind her and burying my face in her stale hair, putting my arm against hers as she reached across the cold mattress.

  WAITING WIVES

  by Bev Marshall

  Everyone knew he was dead; everyone except Donna, his wife and the mother of his four children. Donna hung on when most of us would have given up hope. Her conversations were peppered with phrases like, “when Glen gets home” and, “maybe we’ll be assigned there next.” But we all knew there was no next for Glen.

  Like all of us with living husbands, she changed the sheets on her bed, swept her floors, cooked pot roasts for dinner. She went right on with her life as though nothing had happened, as though Glen hadn’t been missing for six years. She shopped for school supplies, checked the oil in her car, and kept her wardrobe up-to-date with stylish miniskirts and fringed vests. She looked good in them, too.

  All of us wives with living husbands envied her the wavy, raven hair that shone beneath the lights at the officers’ club when she danced the watusi with our husbands. She wore that hair cascading down her back, held high on her crown with a headband. Some, Gail Henshaw for one, said she wore a fall, but it was real. It was hers. And all those kids were hers. Ages ten, nine, seven, and six. All boys. Gina Long, one of the teachers at Baker Elementary, said the kids were smart as whips, never late with their homework, and brought hot lunches packed in little tin pails on which Donna had painted their names in bright colors. Some days I hated her. Some nights, washing the scent of love making from my body, I cried for her.

  Joan’s husband was alive. We all knew he was because Joan received letters from him every now and then. They were propaganda letters, of course, in which he wrote dictated praise about his North Vietnamese captors. “I am being treated well. The U.S. aggressors are killing the Vietnamese children, destroying the family happiness with their bombs and shells.” Joan read the letters to Donna, who was her best friend. She babysat for Donna sometimes, because Joan and Eric had no children. They’d only been married three months when he boarded the plane bound for Vietnam.

  Joan was physically the opposite of Donna. She was tall and thin with short, blond hair and pomegranate breasts. She wasn’t as beautiful as Donna, who was petite and dark and showed generous cleavage, but both of them had gorgeous green eyes. I imagined that when they looked into each other’s eyes, they saw themselves, and maybe that’s why they were such good friends. That and the fact that both of them bore the label Waiting Wife.

  Joan lived four units down on my street, and Donna’s backyard bordered mine. I wasn’t their friend, even though Donna and I had both grown up in Mississippi and had suffered similar childhoods. Joan was from upstate New York and talked so fast I had to ask her to repeat whole sentences when she got really animated telling some story during the shuffling of tiles when we played Mah-Jongg on Thursdays. Still, I liked her, envied her freedom. She drove down to Chicago or over to Milwaukee whenever she felt like it, while the rest of us wives in the 85th Bomb Wing were stuck at home slathering cream on babies with eczema, and cooking stringy meat bought at the commissary for ravenous men who left yellow stains on the toilet lid after a night of drinking.

  Besides Joan and Donna, on K.I. Sawyer AFB there were four other Waiting Wives with MIA and POW husbands. There was ample housing, and it was free for any woman who was unlucky enough to receive a uniformed visitor informing her that her husband wouldn’t be coming home when his tour of duty in Vietnam was up.

  I was lucky. Although Butch had spent three of the four years we had been married in Southeast Asia, he had come home to me after each tour of duty. And when he was in Saigon, Utapao, Vung Tau, Udorn, Da Nang, Cam Rahn Bay, wherever his orders sent him, he wrote to me on blue-lined paper stuffed in white, blue, and gray envelopes that bore the word free on the top-right corner. All of the wives joked about how our husbands would write, “I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing as the mission is classified. Top Secret.” And then we’d turn on the evening news and Walter Cronkite would tell us all about it.

  The war was waged in my living room more realistically than in Butch’s letters about a lobster dinner or a tennis game or occasionally about impotent gunfire that missed his plane by a mile. There on our TV screens were Green Berets on patrol, men wriggling in high grass with bullets whizzing over their heads, Vietnamese in rice fields wearing non la’s, the conical hats that shielded them from the merciless sun. My living room was alive with the sound of M-16’s (which our husbands called “widow makers”), the roar of B-52’s, the screams of the wounded being tossed into helicopters.

  We drew our chairs close to the television screen, anxiously watching for the faces of the pilots of the choppers—the F-4’s, C-130’s, AC-47’s, F-100’s, all of the winged creatures the Viet Cong were determined to shoot out of the sky. We feared seeing boys we knew, or thought we might know, or a young man who was the son or husband or brother of someone we did know. But even if the youthful eyes of the pilot were alien to us, we knew him, knew his wife, knew his mother. The shape of body bags, the sound of the zipper, the weight of the corpse haunted all of our dreams, and we all watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and anyone who could tell us what the hell was going on in the faraway jungle where Joan’s and Donna’s dreams had been killed.

  At K.I. Sawyer AFB, the men ebbed and flowed like ocean waves. Crews were sent TDY to Thailand or Guam or places we never found out about until after the war was over. TDY—temporary duty, they said—but a Thai assignment lasted three to four months; The Rock, the nickname for Guam, meant six months away. The crews on the B-52 (or “BUF,” as we called it), went to Guam. The acronym BUF stood for “Big Ugly Fucker,” which naturally led to a lot of speculation about the qualifications needed to be on a BUF crew; the crews who flew the KC-135, a refueling tanker, were known as “gas passers.” Ribbing was a way of life, though, and most of the wives took the jibes that came their way good-naturedly.

  The crews remaining on the base left on one- or two-week sorties and returned to sit on seven-day alerts. They missed birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas mornings, Thanksgiving turkeys, Easter hams, and Fourth of July picnics. They missed playing tooth fairy and their son’s first home run. They wrote letters, made ham radio calls, and begged for packages of things they missed. For six years Donna had sent no packages. For three years, ever since Eric had been captured, Joan had sent practical things like soap and shaving cream and shoelaces and underwear to the Hanoi Hilton, but Eric never wrote that he had received them.

  I should have sent more. When Butch cam
e home from his first tour of duty in Vietnam, he told me he’d received fewer packages than anyone in his squadron. Why hadn’t I baked more, knitted, shopped for delicacies he longed for? I didn’t because, like so many of my friends, I was too busy trying to build a life without him. Sounds terrible, but there it is. You go on. You work and eat and sleep and play and pray and you go on to the next day, praying and working and writing a letter filled with lies about how you’re doing just fine. Nearly every Air Force wife I knew was a great liar, and the few who weren’t were shunned by us all. Weakness wasn’t tolerated at Sawyer. We couldn’t afford it. If the line of female defense weakened, we knew we’d all scatter and run with our tails tucked back to mama and a good night’s sleep.

  I didn’t meet Donna and Joan until the summer of 1969. When Butch and I arrived at Sawyer just before Easter that year, a blizzard arrived with us. The cold wind that swept off Lake Superior froze my fingers, numbed my mind, and turned the knot of fear inside my gut to ice. It was spring, wasn’t it? The calendar said so, my Southern relatives wrote it was so, the summer clothes that draped mannequins’ bodies in the store heralded the season. But in Upper Michigan it may as well have been the dead of winter. I bought gloves and a woolen scarf and tall suede boots that looked fine with miniskirts and colored leggings. I learned to wield a shovel, drag a sled, identify approaching vehicles by the neon orange or green balls moving above snow-banked corners. When the snow turned to slush, I ate the Hershey bars I’d kept in the trunk of the car.

  And then in July summer finally arrived! Two whole weeks of sunny days warm enough to sit on our stoops and swap recipes, remedies for cold sores, tricks to get children into bed at nine even though the sun was still visible in the sky. It was the warm weather that brought Joan and Donna to my patch of grass, where I sat in a webbed lawn chair writing a letter to my mother.

  I already knew their stories. Isolated as we were at Sawyer, there was no snippet of gossip or news that didn’t get reported (and distorted). And so I recognized them. The two Waiting Wives who were connected in a way none of the rest of us would ever be. They stopped to admire my snapdragons, which had miraculously pushed through the cold soil and bloomed in abundance. In shades of purple, red, pink, and yellow, they stood in front of the brick wall of my kitchen as testaments to the hardiness of nature and my faith in the prayers I had sent to the Lord for their survival.

  After we three introduced ourselves and exchanged basic facts about our backgrounds, Donna pointed to my garden. “How beautiful! I hope my boys don’t see these flowers. Every blooming plant they find, they rip out of the ground and bring home to me. You’d better keep an eye out for them.” She cocked her head and, lifting both hands, she flipped her hair back over her shoulder.

  Her metal MIA bracelet winked in the sunlight, and I looked down at my own, which bore the name Alvin Potts, a POW I would never meet. I imagined that the weight of the bracelet, the feel of it sliding up and down her arm, would be a constant reminder of her loss, and I searched her face for lines of sadness, defeat, misery that I could only imagine. What if Butch were an MIA or a POW? How would I look? How would my grief manifest? Where was the sadness in Donna’s broad smile, where was the dullness in her lively eyes?

  I shifted my gaze to Joan, who stood with her hands on her hips. “Impossible to catch those boys,” she said. “They’re as fast as an F-4. All of them except Boo, the baby.” She was wearing blue jean shorts with an overall bib and a lacy T-shirt beneath. I envied her the long legs, the Jesus sandals, the confidence that was apparent as she rocked from side to side as she spoke. I had expected to feel embarrassed when I finally met these two, for tragedy to me meant pity and no one wants to be the recipient of sympathy. And yet somehow I felt that it was I who was to be pitied. “I’ve heard your boys are darling,” I said to Donna. We had no children and I longed for a baby snuggled on my shoulder, but Butch was away so often, it seemed it would take a miracle for us to conceive.

  Donna smiled. “Darling devils,” she said. “I swear they’ll be the death of me one of these days.”

  At the word death, I looked down at my pink stationery. Of course, she didn’t know her husband, her sons’ daddy, was dead. Still it seemed appalling for her to use the D word we all tried to avoid.

  “Do you play Mah-Jongg?” Joan asked.

  I had learned the game two years before when Butch was in pilot school in Laredo, Texas, which often held the record for high temperatures. We joked about the irony that we now lived near the town that frequently held the low-temp record. “I’d love to play anytime,” I said.

  “We play on Thursdays,” she called, as she took Donna’s hand and they strolled on down Hustler Street toward Invader.

  Sitting at the table in the officers’ club dining room, shuffling ivory tiles, I came to know bits and pieces of Joan’s life. And it was Joan who suggested I join her as a Red Cross volunteer at the hospital. Because I worked at the front desk, checking people in for their appointments, and Joan was a chaperone in the exam rooms, I rarely saw her during my shifts, which lasted only a few weeks. I was susceptible to every germ that a patient carried into the hospital, and after I missed my period, I learned that my resistance was low because somehow I had finally gotten pregnant.

  Four months later, I was back at the hospital, having a miscarriage. When Joan stopped by my room to offer condolences, I noticed the good-looking Master Sergeant who stood in the doorway of the ward waiting for her. Shortly afterwards, the gossip grapevine at Sawyer entangled Joan. She was supposedly having an affair with the sergeant.

  I refused to speculate on whether or not this was true, just as I paid no attention to the rumors that two families on Invader Street had swapped husbands and wives. There were key parties, blue movies shown in basements, cheating husbands, cheating wives, cheating children in school. The rumors of a suicide were true and some of the other ugly stories that were bandied about over the Mah-Jongg table were true, too.

  But it was the era of hippies, communes, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Eric Burdon and the Animals, whose song lyrics we all knew by heart. The old rules we’d grown up with no longer applied. Living under the shadow of Vietnam, none of us were leading the lives we’d expected when we said our vows. When Butch had gotten off a plane wearing his uniform at an airport in California, a long-haired boy had spit on him. How were we supposed to behave? Were our husbands heroes or despicable killers of women and babies?

  As it turned out, the rumor about Joan was true. She was in love, and it was just bad timing that Nixon finally secured the release of the POW’s. She didn’t fly to San Antonio to meet Eric, who would be in the hospital there for several weeks. Why didn’t she go? How could she not? I imagined that Joan didn’t want to give false hope to Eric; she couldn’t pretend she loved him when she loved someone else. After all, she and Eric had only been married a short time before he’d left for Vietnam, and after four years, he wouldn’t be the same man who had kissed her good-bye in the Chicago airport.

  Donna had never met Eric, but it was she who took Joan’s place and boarded the plane headed for Texas. Everyone on the base wondered why Donna would entangle herself in Joan’s predicament. And while I never knew the answer to that question, I believed that she went because Donna loved Joan, because that’s what best friends do for one another. I imagined that during the three weeks she visited Eric in the hospital, Donna explained how things were, so that by the time Joan picked them up at the nearby Marquette airport, Eric held no illusions about his wife. But I could be wrong. Maybe Donna told him Joan was sick or temporarily out of the country and that’s why she couldn’t come, or maybe Donna, who had for so long believed her own lies about Glen’s survival, made up some other story that was plausible to Eric.

  Whatever she told him, Eric looked very happy when the three of them showed up for brunch at the officers’ club on the Sunday after his return. Butch and I had just sat down with our friends, Tammy and Vince Moss, when they walked into
the dining room. I remember how beautiful both Donna and Joan looked that morning. Beneath the chandelier their faces literally glowed, and their smiles seemed nearly magical. Joan introduced Eric to everyone. Tall, blond, thin, but with no visible damage I could detect, he sat between them, wolfing down an omelet as both women smiled at each other over his bent head. It was Donna who buttered his toast.

  Shortly after the war ended, Butch was reassigned to reconnaissance at Offutt AFB, in Bellevue, Nebraska. Tammy and Vince were moving to Enid, Oklahoma, and since we were just off the interstate, they stopped by. And that’s when I found out what happened to Joan, Donna, and Eric. As it turned out, we had all been right in assuming Glen was dead. I don’t know what proof the Air Force gave Donna that Glen was never coming home, but his status was changed from MIA to KIA. Our friends told us that Joan had divorced Eric, married her sergeant, and moved to Oregon or some other northwestern state. Donna was living in Alaska, married to Eric now, and pregnant. They hoped it would be a girl.

  For the next fifteen years I remained a Waiting Wife during both short and long TDY’s until Butch retired from the Air Force just after the beginning of the Gulf War. We were living at RAF Mildenhall in England, and one of my last duties was to teach Waiting Wives how to detect a car bomb before strapping in their babies for a trip to the commissary. We’d just gotten news that one of our pilots had been shot down over the Persian Gulf. His widow was pregnant and had boarded the plane bound for home with their two-year-old girl.

  There was a party planned for that weekend, and none of us were in the party mood, but for various reasons, nearly everyone in Butch’s squadron showed up anyway. That night, as I stood watching the sadness that passed over the countenances of the young wives discussing the tragic news, one of them, Barb Aton, a slip of a girl dressed in overalls and a striped top with a blonde rat tail hanging down her back, walked away from the group. Leaning over the stereo set, she popped in a Bruce Springsteen tape and turned the volume up as high as it would go. As Bruce’s voice rang out through the small British house, one by one, the wives pulled their husbands close, and raising their arms victoriously they danced, singing the words over and over, “I was born in the USA.”