Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  We did not know whether it was the noise we made, the movement we made on Hill 124, or simply one of those coincidences that caused mortar shells to fall on us twenty or so boys making snow angels. Maybe some of us was marked to die a long time ago, even sitting on the bus from Inchon, and this was just when it happened, or maybe every round was To Whom It May Concern, like a car accident. We did not know if the mortar shells were fired by our men, North Korean men or spit out by an angry God, but they did fall on us and it did not matter why or what we thought about it. The snow did its job, deadening the sound of the explosions, catching some of the shrapnel, which, white-hot, made tiny puffs of steam as it melted through the frozen crust, and then absorbing the fluid of several boys, one from Indiana still suffering from a bloody nose. I was fine, not hurt, some dirt blown into my mouth and on my teeth, just watching the impressions of snow angels fill with blood around me as Hill 124 tried to kill us.

  In a decent world that would have been the end of that day. I would have walked home, had dinner, maybe asked my own dad about what had happened. Going to a warm bed and waking up the next morning usually solved problems in Reeve, as many times the smell of a new day absorbed what had passed the night before. But I was not there, I was as far away from there as it was possible to be, so I heeded the Sergeant and ran to my hole. I hated him for seeming necessary then, hated Hill 124 for making men like the Sergeant necessary, and hated myself for knowing so little about the details of what was necessary now to save my own life. It was clear that whatever that Sergeant knew about whores and cursing, he did know equally about the real side of war that had just been visited on me, so I ran to my hole and, following his shouts, prepared and aimed my rifle forward expecting the North Koreans or maybe Satan himself to emerge from those woods.

  Miles was also okay. After some time had passed, he shouted my name, “Ray Ray Ray, did they get you?” and I felt more alive than ever to be able to say, “No, I am here.” Sergeant was telling us that the war was most certainly coming, to stay alert, to shoot as needed, to not hesitate to defend Hill 124. And I believed I should do this as strongly as anything I have ever believed.

  Time passed, what might have been twenty minutes as easily as several hours. The sun was still high, the sky still that unbelievable blue. Nature had reset itself, even as we cautiously had been pulled out of our holes by the Sergeant to retrieve the bodies of the boys dead behind us. It smelled like copper. I had no sense that people had so much blood in them until I saw it all spread out. It had been red, redder than you’d think, but by then had turned darker, sorta chocolate against the snow still white. Not killed, destroyed. I only looked at one of them faces. I could see blood running like little creeks between his zit pimples.

  Sergeant had us organized so that most stayed in their holes pointing their rifles into the woods while one or two were called back to help with the bodies. Sergeant said help was going to come, to start the boys home who had gotten killed and to replace them so all the holes could be refilled on Hill 124. Sergeant seemed to know what to do, and that was a powerful thing. It made us feel we could fight off whoever came at us through those woods in what he called the follow-on attack.

  More time passed, and soon enough the dead were collected. By the time it was my turn to help collect them, the boys had turned stiff from the cold, making it harder to pull them into a resting position. The sudden silence as the work ceased scared us more, amplifying every sound around us. Then came evening. This would be the time, Sergeant said.

  The noise that startled me first was harsh enough to make me cry out some kind of sound from deep in my stomach I had never known was in there. I stood up, foolishly, and pointed off to the right where the sound came from. Without warning Miles and several other of the boys began shooting. The last time I’d heard a military rifle fire was in Louisiana, where there was no snow, and so I almost did not recognize the sound as a friendly one here. I could hear the rounds cutting through the air, and I dropped down into my hole. My leg felt warm, unnaturally so, and I realized as it started to freeze that I had pissed myself. I was so scared I felt no shame, or should I say the fear took up so much of me that shame would have to wait its turn. The shooting stopped on its own, not quite as suddenly as it started. It became silent again on Hill 124, purposefully so, and I raised my head.

  It was the Sergeant again, yelling at me and Miles to crawl out into the woods and see what had happened. This was a word I had learned in basic training called reconnoiter, but now it was not a word, but my whole being. I was to reconnoiter, and I might die doing it, simply because someone had told me that was what I was to do next. Given that on my own I had shouted like a girl and peed myself, I had few options left but to do what I was told. Getting out of that hole was how I was going to redeem myself from the failure to act like a man when the moment first called me.

  Miles and I crawled forward, not feeling the cold nor smelling the lingering coppery blood smell that would have at any other time overwhelmed us. It seemed in such conditions your brain and your senses reorganized so that some things mattered more than others. I was grateful for the snow, hiding the frozen black stain on my right leg.

  We heard another sound, ahead, and came up on our knees behind the birch trees to see further. Both of us raised our rifles, aiming carefully at absolutely nothing, playing soldier, the stances and actions we had seen in the movies overpowering the scant basic training in proper technique. The sound that came from our side as we were aiming the wrong way was a SPLAT, then another, followed by cold snow down the back of my jacket, the collar hunched open as I squinted down my rifle’s length. We shouted and ran, grabbing the goddamn Korean kid who had thrown snowballs at us, drawn forward and separated from his mother once the mortar shells flew in from Hell, throwing snowballs because he had seen us doing it, smiling stupidly, a way to reach us without speaking our language, wanting us to join with him somehow. I was angry, I hated that child for almost drawing me into killing him that day on Hill 124.

  While Miles ran back to tell the Sergeant, I grabbed the kid, who was maybe young enough not to have been scared by the mortars, or maybe old enough to know what mortars were and how the fate that guides them in means it isn’t worth being frightened over. I grabbed him and slapped and punched him. Tears ran, and I kept hitting that bastard child, wanting to say I hated what had happened, hated what I had almost done, hated myself for peeing on myself, hated that snow and hated Hill 124.

  I dragged that child back to the Sergeant, knowing the Sergeant would know what I should do next. I was done. I was dead standing there, and the Sergeant could kick me or curse me as he wished. Instead, I heard him say I had done a good thing bringing the little bastard in, that maybe the North Koreans were using the kid to locate us, to direct their mortars, to draw us out, to report back. These people were animals, would do anything if they got hungry enough. Kind words of praise from a man who usually had none, and they warmed me. Sergeant said he would interrogate the child, find out what was what and that I should return to my hole. I was then glad to do so.

  It had become a heavy dark with no moon. I allowed myself to believe there would be no follow-on attack, that the mortars had likely been fired accidentally by our own men, just as scared as I was, that the kid in the woods was just a kid separated from his mother, that she hadn’t been killed by a stray mortar round to separate them, that the Sergeant would no more learn any secret intelligence from that kid than I would be able to stop smelling my own urine on myself, though it was long frozen stiff. I wondered if it got easier. I wondered if it got better. Because right then, I was just so tired. Silent but for the lifting sounds of someone hurting, which I quickly realized had been coming from the Sergeant’s hole. He had taken seriously the task of trying to get the child to talk, though God only knows what and why and how they could even communicate. None of that had come into my head when the Sergeant had praised me for bringing that boy in from the woods, and when he seemed so sure of
what to do to protect us, what we—he—had to do for Hill 124.

  People who have never been in the service, or prison I guess, undervalue simple things like being free to walk away from something. You, Earl, talk all the time about good and evil, Heaven and Hell, but you don’t know anything about those things. I knew—I knew that this was not a place where men changed for the better. Instead, men with flaws turn bad, and bad men come to evil. I walked over to the Sergeant and I saw him bent over that child in the bloody snow at the bottom of the hole, the kid’s hard almond eyes not blinking.

  “Go away goddammit Ray, and don’t say nothing,” hissed that Sergeant. “This ain’t your business.” And he turned back on the child with his fists, knowing as sure as I had pissed myself earlier that I would turn away and never say nothing. I never did, until now I guess. That was it. They didn’t do investigations back then, and they didn’t have no shrinks. Whatever happened just happened, and you were supposed to get over it.

  But nothing about me was ever the same. It was, I came to think, like taking one of those jigsaw puzzles apart piece by piece. You couldn’t say exactly when, but at some point you couldn’t see the picture anymore. I ain’t going to be saved from this, and I know in my heart God is not the only one justified to make such calls. I ain’t saying this absolves me of all the good I failed to do, for Mom and you, but I wanted you to know, now, finally, that there was more to me than just drink and laziness.

  I went to church most Sundays ’cause your mother bitched at me if I didn’t, but I never believed in God again. You take care of your mother wherever she ends up, Earl. Me, I’ll listen for you knocking on Hell’s door, because I was the Devil that day on Hill 124.

  End of the Line

  ONE MORE STOP before the end of the line, the Driver called out. Night, dark as Hell. I was alone on the bus, now, finally, even the creepy Korean kid was done with me. To say I survived is not the same as to say I’m alive, because I woke up to find that my dad’s wars, not just in Korea, but Ohio, too, survived with me.

  I’d been squatting in a trailer, abandoned or maybe more truthfully, given up, by some earlier failure. Trailer parks were purgatory, where you sorted out if you were gonna get up and afford an apartment, or slide back down. Those parks were lonely places during the day, with just enough people around to make them seem more deserted than they were. Parents at work or looking, kids at school or running away somewhere, playing on the swings in the park, back and away, back and away. If you didn’t live retired in one of God’s waiting rooms down in Florida, it was an adjustment to being around mostly people younger than you. I never had any kids, so I only saw it all once. With kids you kinda get a second look at life, and I lost out on that too. Age is the only disease you don’t want to get cured from. Nights, Angie, dammit, Angie danced through my dreams, as an adult now, giving me memories of things that never happened. Remembering is a curse when there was no space in a shittin’ room for anything bigger than memories. I had just one light in the place, and I was like a shadow running from it.

  I was so cold. I should’ve worn a coat before I shot myself, but after three days and nights staying awake afraid of what I’d be dreaming, I was thinking only about the comfort of that Glock 9 mm and not about a coat. My mom’s voice was always there in my head, even before I started seeing her on this bus, so I was wearing decent underwear as a matter of habit. Some things, right? It was just after lunch, but I already was worried it’d be goodbye to my sleep for the night again too. I was thinking I should feel tired, like I did in the late afternoons, but instead I just thought about the gun. I felt the bullet’s speed, felt it inside me, felt it pinch me to death. Others would think about the pain, but I just thought about the sleep. Maybe in another time, another place, I could have taken something, one of those medicines they advertise on TV to ask my doctor about, to help me blend in to it all, but here it seemed better to just get out. There was a fine line between having to think of reasons to pick yourself up off the floor and picking up that gun.

  The days were syrup. My fading breath on the cold window. One table, one chair, one spoon, one fork. My day, lacking an alternative, started. 7:46. I made up little routines, opening the blinds in the morning, adjusting them throughout the afternoon as if that was a job in itself. 9:37. The sun was strongest this time of year just about when SpongeBob came on, so I closed the blinds then. 10:42. What did I actually need to do in a day that actually mattered? I wrote “clip nails” on a to-do list so there’d be something there, then crossed it off when I finished. 2:17. There’s a human need to feel some purpose, some point in bothering to get off the floor in the morning. I took to studying the TV schedule, starting to anticipate certain shows, thinking obscenely too much about what’ll happen in a drama that stood in for real life. 3:10. I wish I believed enough to pray. 3:12. Why not just give it up and watch TV and drink some more? I memorized the noises of my trailer, the pacing of the refrigerator, the hum of some electrical motor. Somebody laughing outside, maybe a woman crying next door? Music from another trailer, songs from another place. I so wanted all those things on TV—they’d double my order if I called now—not outta desire but just to, I don’t know, participate. There was so much to want. 5:15. Without anything really purposeful, I became obsessed with so little, a hostage with nothing but too much time. Light slurring to shadow across my afternoon. Some days I couldn’t hear my own voice, and didn’t want to.

  Ain’t nowhere lonelier than a liquor store. You go in at ten in the morning and feel like you gotta explain why you’re there at ten in the morning, forgetting that they open that early ’cause they know exactly why you’re there. Roll in at eight on a Saturday night and there’s seven guys staring shoulder to shoulder at rows of bottles saying nothing to each other. Maybe some young kid’ll rush in on the way to a party to buy margarita mix or something as a sign that life goes on, but that’s about the only sign you have a right to expect. I started drinking more and more Everclear, 99 percent pure alcohol, all octane, just made to get you drunk with no taste or flavor added, because they knew you didn’t care anymore. Another perfect product for a new market, and the state collected tax on it, so everyone wins. The stuff tastes like drinking hand sanitizer, ’cept on those days when you didn’t care if you were drinking hand sanitizer, and then those jolts tasted like Heaven. God bless.

  Drinking helped but hurt. It was something more to look forward to, the first fizzy beer of the day tickling inside my nose or the throat-burning shot of something stronger biting into my ulcer. Drinking wiped away hours, when I felt I had too many of them. So many that I wanted to throw some away, then one day just fucking throw them all away, the old ones and the future ones—all of them.

  6:05. Sweet Jesus, the alcohol. It was always the things I did to cope that got me. There’d be the soft, blurry part where the alcohol swarmed my brain, happily swerving me away from an even line, but sooner and sooner those good feelings would lose out to just feeling empty again, falling into my past, so it was fool’s gold. My eyes were screwed on to the end of long tunnels, and my stomach shouted with the burn. More drinking chased those feelings away for shorter and shorter spans until the rhythms got so close they disappeared and, I just felt too much, which was the same to me as feeling nothing. 10:25. I had little control over what happened to me and my life. So, I decided then that I would decide when I was gonna die, not letting God do it. It was dead lonely until that click and the BANG, more surrender for me than an act of will.

  SO NOW YOU know it. I lied. It wasn’t no accident when I shot myself.

  SHOOTING MYSELF HURT a lot less than I expected, not that hurt should be a prime consideration when dead is the goal. People always say, “I hope he didn’t suffer,” forgetting about them fifty-two early warning signs. I had had the gun for a while, owning it for no particular reason along with a badminton set I am pretty sure I used as often as the gun. It held seventeen bullets, of which I only needed the one, leaving the other sixteen as usef
ul and needed as that badminton set. I bought the Glock at a pawn shop, same place I once pawned my old man’s dad’s gold watch for booze money after he died. I went back when I had a little green, looking to see if the watch was still there—you know, just curious—and ended up with the gun instead. A CLICK before the BANG. The Glock company is foreign, and only does some assembly in the U.S. so they can qualify for government contracts. Still, people call it “America’s Favorite Handgun.”

  I realized I had gone four days—or was it five?—without talking to another person. Without a job and money, you are slowly erased from other peoples’ lives. I stopped remembering when I was stronger, playing ball and swimming, and saw myself turned into something I never thought I’d become. Those good memories became scabs I picked at, and for the picking they’d just grow back crustier. My inside had atrophied as much as my muscles, giving up being a sort of shameful, sort of peaceful secret I kept with myself. I’m not sure when I changed from being unbreakable to being a late fall leaf, but it happened. Now I’m just a big sour bag of skin full of gin, self-pity and resentment crawling into another pale coma after a night of drinking, allergic to life, exempt from grace. I didn’t get old, I just ran out of future. People talk about how sad it is to hit your peak early, like the best years of your life were behind you on some high school football field. Fair enough, but what if you never had any best years? What if all you had was a steady hum that just sorta ended? It wasn’t more than fifty-two years of swimming against a tide I had only recently come to see—never mind understand—that brought me back to that pawn shop that day. I walked in thinking about my old man’s dad’s gold watch I had pawned what must have been fifteen years ago, thinking it should still be on the shelf, magically, simply because now I wanted to see it again and believing fate owed me one—and I walked out with the Glock 9 mm instead, setting me up for the trip to this bus as sure as one step leading to another. Another guy would’ve bought a twelve gauge and a bag of fresh shells to take into the place he just got fired from, but that wasn’t me. I bought that Glock on time payments, and only made the one before using her today, so much for that business decision. And they say as long as you keep your sense of humor, you’ll be okay.