“I know, Bess. I don’t think any of us is sleeping much.”
“But your father—” She paused and her hands moved once. “His son, and he’s a man. Danner, I think he feels ashamed. That he can’t do more. That he should, and he can’t.”
I listened to his voice, its hesitations. He was asking these faraway, successful men to intercede. He was asking for help.
Bess waited a moment before going on. “It’s a terrible thing to think of losing a child. So many times I was afraid about Katie. If you outlive your own child, well, I suppose you go on, but I don’t know if you ever really live.”
I was alone in the house on the day Robert Taylor’s letter came. In two weeks, we’d had no word except that the army had no other information. My mother had gone back to her administrative job in the school system. She said she wept easily and embarrassed herself at work, but working was better than being at home, where that man had stood in her living room and told her about Billy. I hadn’t wept at all. The blue envelope with the familiar miniature map of Vietnam lay on my mother’s gold carpet under the mail slot, and I thought at first it was a message from Billy. My father had received a letter just a few days ago, written about a week before Billy was MIA. I hadn’t let myself read it. But this wasn’t his handwriting, and then I saw the name on the return address and sat on the steps to the upstairs and read. Many times, without moving. Then I took the letter to my room and cried loudly, horribly, hearing my own sounds. The letter was a miracle. My first reaction was thankfulness and inordinate hope. I’m still thankful. No matter what happened when they got on the ground, he wasn’t alone. The Luke is my shepherd: not my phrase, Billy’s, Billy’s joke. He hadn’t been alone, that was it. The image in my mind was of Billy in the air with Luke, both of them poised to land, arms extended.
My father couldn’t seem to quite believe the letter at first. I showed it to him that same afternoon and said Billy had mentioned Taylor to me, I did remember the name.
“You say this is a black fellow, from Los Angeles?”
“What difference does that make, Dad?”
My father shook his head impatiently. “Don’t make any difference, but the government ought to make this information official. If this is the truth, why haven’t they told us this? They ought to back up this man’s story. Right now, this is still hearsay.”
I was completely puzzled by his reaction. Did he think the set of facts made things seem worse for Billy? “Hearsay?” I took the letter back and looked through it again. “What are you talking about? This man was there. He kept his agreement with Billy and wrote to me. Don’t you see what he says here? He saw Billy jump.”
My father went inside to phone Reb Jonas, to phone the state senator who’d promised to help. I sat on the porch swing and put the letter carefully back into its thin blue envelope.
When the army wouldn’t confirm Robert Taylor’s letter, I decided the men Mitch was phoning needed some reminder Billy was real, that Taylor’s letter existed. I made a list of men in charge: President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, our Congressmen, members of the House Armed Services Committee, the Governor, assorted others. I sent them, along with a typed copy of Taylor’s letter, a Xerox of the original, and my own request for information, two 8″ × 10″ photos of Billy. I drove back and forth to Winfield to have the photographs printed in two days by a color lab. They were, in effect, before and after pictures.
The first, taken the summer of ’69 when Billy worked for the Park Service at the river, shows him in cutoffs, bare-chested, his hair still long, about to dive from a boulder into green water. The water is very clear and you can see outlines of submerged rocks in the water itself.
The second is Billy in uniform, at the going-away party Mom had for him when he was home on leave in May. Kato took the picture and I went down to Black’s Billiards to get the negative from her. It was a hot evening in August; I parked in the alley and walked up the fire escape steps to the back door of the apartment. She gave me the negative in an envelope, and we sat on the ribbed metal landing that served as the Black’s porch. We drank iced tea. Kato brought out a box of pretzels but neither of us ate. She told me she’d always keep Billy’s letters, made me promise to tell her any news we heard of him. And she gave me an address. Buck had been transferred to a town in western Pennsylvania and she was leaving soon to go and live with him.
“He’s so old-fashioned,” she said, “he’ll start telling me we ought to get married.”
I looked over at her. “Are you going to?”
“I don’t know.” She wore no makeup and her eyes looked tired. There were beads of moisture along her hairline. “It’s hard to think. This whole summer—knowing about Billy, my dad drinking so much, the heat—I want to sleep all the time, it seems. If I hadn’t already given notice at the paper, they’d probably fire me.” She looked down at the cold glass she held.
That’s how I remember her. Her face in profile, her eyes lowered. It’s hard to think. She must have already known she was pregnant; in two weeks, she married Buck in Pennsylvania. She asked to see the other picture I was going to use, and I showed her the snapshot of Billy at the river.
She held the image near her face and looked closely. “Even if it’s twenty years, I’ll think of him as gone. I can’t think of him as not alive.”
Years were on everyone’s mind. My mother helped me pay for the photographs and the mailings. We sat in the living room, assembling the packages. “If we had enough money to make these pictures even bigger,” I said, “say, billboard size, and pasted them by the hundreds on signs in every major city in the country, I bet we’d find out something.”
Jean put down the package she’d just sealed. “Danner, we don’t have that kind of money. Even if we did, what is it you expect to happen? If the government paid attention to us and asked personally and especially for Billy, do you think the people who might have him would listen?”
I said nothing, and she looked away from me into the room.
“They’re the ones he was taught to shoot at,” she said. “They don’t care what we want. They won’t ever. No matter if the war ends, no matter how many years.”
Two days after I mailed the packages, before any of the addressees had seen the pictures, a Family Services Assistance Officer visited my father and mother again. He brought an official telegram from the army that confirmed, five weeks after Billy was listed MIA, most of the information in Robert Taylor’s letter. But there was no mention of anyone actually seen jumping from the chopper, only a “supposition that Pfc. Hampson and Sgt. Berringer jumped or otherwise escaped” from the aircraft. There was no mention of an ambush or of an eighteen-man unit lost. I never got a reply to either of my letters to Robert Taylor, thanking him and asking for any other news. Our FSAO told me Luke Berringer’s only next of kin was a grandmother who didn’t wish her address given out.
I don’t know why the army took so long to tell us most of the story Taylor told me. We had no word of a hot zone but we came in very hot. Suppose the army had made a mistake, suppose their Intelligence was mistaken. Did they think my family would make trouble in some way? Blame them, maybe?
I did blame them. I went back to college in the fall of ’70 because I didn’t know what else to do. I blamed the army for what I felt, and sought out veterans; I began working as a liaison volunteer for the Veterans’ Caucus that had been set up on campus. They had no vote in student government, such as it was. They were self-designated spokesmen for veterans’ issues, acknowledged by the administration but not funded. I stopped spending time with nice liberal guys interested in organic farming or tenants’ rights, and started seeing veterans. They were who I talked to, listened to, argued with. Finally, in alliances of a few weeks’ duration, they were who I slept with. Some of them were kind to me. Kindness is not always a specialty with Vietnam vets, not in the beginning, and I wasn’t much interested in getting past beginnings. Some of them weren’t kind; they w
ere guys Billy wouldn’t even have drunk beer with. But they’d stood on the same ground he had or they’d flown in the same kinds of machines; they knew subtle facts about the military, and they were angry. In the first year Billy was missing, that was all I needed.
One night that winter I went over to Lynchburg State with three vets, to talk to a student committee interested in veterans’ programs. The students were straight and uninformed; the men I was with were impatient and resented my attempts at mediation. The meeting went badly and they walked out; I followed them. We went to a bar in Lynchburg and started drinking. There was a feathery tension between us—I’d slept with two of the three and it wasn’t clear who I was with. It wasn’t clear to Riley either. I looked up from my third or fourth drink to see him standing near me.
“Danner? Could I talk to you for a minute?”
I’d known he was back in school at Lynchburg, that his wife worked in a bank there, but I was so surprised at seeing him, at the look on his face, that I said nothing.
“Who’s he?” someone said.
“He’s an old friend,” I answered. I stood and realized I was dizzy.
Riley and I went out to the parking lot. It was cold and we got into his car. Finally I said, “How long have you been back?”
“Not long.” He turned to me in the dark of the car. His hair was close-cropped and he seemed even thinner, more angular. He had a mustache. “You don’t look too good, Danner.”
“No?”
“I don’t mean your looks, I mean the way you act.” He glanced out the windshield nervously. Snow was beginning to pelt the glass. “It’s no good for Jean and Mitch if you rack yourself up in a car with three drunk vets.”
I didn’t say anything.
Riley put one hand on the dash. His wedding ring was a plain gold band, unmarked and narrow. “Hell,” he said slowly, “I’m sorry about Billy. I’m sorry.”
“I know. Your mom came over to the house.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No. I mean we hear, but it’s always nothing.” I kept watching Riley’s face, his eyes. He was really here. Someone real had come back. “I haven’t seen you since way before Billy left.”
“Danner, I want you to let me drive you back to the University. You stay here, all right? Don’t get out of the car. I’ll just go back inside and tell your friends we’re leaving.”
“Yes,” I said, “okay.” My own voice sounded distant to me. Riley sounded so familiar, when the world was full of strangers.
He came back and I heard him slam the door of the car; he said I should lie down and rest while he drove. I lay down across the seat with my head on his thigh. We didn’t talk and I fell asleep. I hadn’t slept so easily and quickly since it happened. Sometimes in my sleep I felt the turning of the car in the dark, the winding of the slick road as my body shifted, Riley’s hand steadying my shoulder.
I wakened as he pulled up behind a University bus at a red light. I gave him directions to my apartment and asked him in, but he said he had to get home. Before the roads got any worse. “Take better care,” he said, holding my face in his two hands. “Will you?”
After that I stopped sleeping with anyone. I stopped going to classes much. One of my honors professors told me I should see a psychiatrist and gave me a name. I started talking to a shrink at Student Health Services. On the eighth visit, the shrink said I had a lot of blocks against talking to him or talking to myself; he suggested I try to talk to Billy. Write him a letter. If I could say things Billy would hear, what would I say? I was to work on the letter a while every day, and I was given a week to complete it.
I wrote the letter. It contained no greeting and was unsigned. The words came into my mind as though carved in stone, and I don’t think they will alter. This is the letter in its entirety: They’ll never convince me I won’t see you again—I just don’t feel alone.
The psychiatrist wasn’t pleased. “That’s the whole letter?”
“Yes.”
A silence. Then he said, from his chair five feet away, “Who’s trying to convince you, Danner?”
“Everyone.”
“Who, exactly?”
“The world, the war still going on and on, people I know, guys, time—all the time going on, piling up like evidence against him, that he’s just—”
“Just what, Danner?”
“Dead over there,” I shouted, “you fucker, you made me say it—” And I leaped toward him, into him, striking out with my fists. How many times I hit him is a blur. I remember he got me back into my chair. The matronly receptionist was in the room, very nervous, and the shrink was bending down to pick his glasses up off the carpet. He signaled the receptionist to go. She did, but left the office door ajar.
“Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and sitting down, “I think we got somewhere today.”
I was sobbing. He tried to hand me a box of Kleenex.
“I’m not coming back here again,” I said.
He looked at me resignedly. “I think it’s advisable you come twice a week for a while. You have a great deal of anger and sorrow to express.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll have to express them somewhere else.”
I got up and put my coat on and left. An orderly in a white uniform was leaning against the wall just outside the office door. Reinforcements, just in case. He looked me over blankly. “Go fuck yourself,” I said.
I had to make appointments with several professors to quit college in the last weeks of an English honors program but, like my determined brother before me, I managed. I spent half the summer in Bellington, until I realized I was only making things worse for my parents. Worse for myself, watching them in such constant, low-profile pain.
My father keeps Billy’s Camaro in Bess’s wooden garage, and he takes good care of it. After I told him I’d decided to go to California, we walked out to look at the car.
The narrow old garage was just a kind of shed, and the Camaro looked bright and cherished, hidden in a place almost too small for it. Mitch asked if I’d like to drive the car, take it West.
“No,” I told him, “I think Billy’s car should stay with you.”
He nodded, leaning on the white hood of the Camaro. “How is your mother doing?”
“Not good.”
“Sweet Jesus,” he said, in the pale-lit garage, “we should have gotten him the hell out of the country. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Dad, Billy didn’t want to leave the country. He’d already decided.”
My father looked out the narrow garage window at the alley. “Honey, I hate to see you go so far away.”
“I’ll come back.”
Kato was in town that July before I left; she heard I was leaving and phoned me. I went down by the billiard hall to see her. The baby was five months old and she looked like Kato. Blond, blue-eyed, with the same shape face. I think Kato must have been honest with Buck and they’d both accepted whatever possibilities existed. She told me things were better for her now, that a baby made things better and Buck was a good husband. She asked if we’d heard any news about Billy.
I went to California on the bus and arrived like a refugee, knowing no one. I found an inexpensive apartment in a rundown house on a bay in a northern coastal town. I got a job in an insurance office. All I do there is type letters, pour coffee, post the mail. I have no diversions from thinking, and the thinking has stretched out.
Billy told me, during the summer he worked at the river, that some types of pollution actually clarify the appearance of water. The water grows more and more polluted but becomes clearer and clearer because things that are living in it die.
Maybe that’s what’s happening. I feel very clear, almost transparent. My next move will come to me.
The best way to be lucky is to take what comes and not be a coward. In the beginning, my thoughts were murderous. I fantasized about killing Nixon, someone killing Nixon. I thought about money, trying to get money—how could I
get money? Hire some weird mercenary to sink into the morass of Vietnam and find out what happened to Billy, actually bring him back. The North Vietnamese took care of pilots; pilots were officers, political leverage to be exchanged, they possessed information. But the NVA wouldn’t realize Billy had information, so much information. These guys are the only country I know of, they’re what I’m defending. I felt betrayed by my government but I’d expected betrayal: I just hadn’t expected betrayal to such a degree. That it would go on so long, that I would have to live with it. If I hated my government, shouldn’t I go and live in some other country? Not use the supermarkets, where there was more harvested, neatly wrapped, germ-free food than they’d ever seen at one time in Lai Khe? But my parents are my country, my divided country. By going to California, I’d made it to the far frontiers, but I’d never leave my country. I never will.
For weeks one winter on Brush Fork, Billy came to my room after our parents were asleep. They still slept in the same room, so we were young—seven and eight or so. Each night we shoved my bed away from the wall and surveyed the floor with a flashlight, brandishing two stolen dinner knives and a screwdriver. “It’s under there,” Billy said, “I can tell.” We were looking for a secret passage, a trapdoor. Every night we moved the parquet squares already pried loose and went to work on another, exposing a black gummy surface underneath. The squares of flooring were alternating strips of oak, maple, walnut, ash. We worked at each strip until the whole parquet square came up, an hour, two hours, quietly, breathing dust. “If I find it,” Billy whispered, “I’m the king.” “King of what?” I asked. “King of the World,” he said, “king of everything that’s down there.” “You are not,” I told him, “it’s my floor.” “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “I told you the secret. I knew it was there.”
My mother discovered the project one Saturday while vacuuming. She had moved the bed away from the wall to do a thorough cleaning, and then she called my father into the room. She called us in from outside.
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