He hugged his mother again, said to his father and uncles as he eyed Maxene, “We can’t talk here. Let’s get outa here and talk in the car. You musta rented a bus. I thought maybe just John, or John and Pa ...”
“We came in two cars.” His mother wiped tears away as she looked at him, grabbed him again, pulled him to her. She was short, coming up only to his shoulders. He winked at his friends over her head. “Your friends came in their own.” Josephine Pisano sniffed. Some strangers were glancing at them. She humbly offered an explanation. “My son. He’s just back from Viet Nam.” She hugged him again, then said, “I think Uncle James wants to ask you about Jimmy.”
“Oh yeah,” Tony said to Jimmy’s father. “I saw him last month up by Gio Linh. He’s doin great. He loves it there.”
“I know,” Uncle James said, concerned, sad. “He sent a letter saying he’s going to sign up for another tour. Isabel’s worried he’ll bring home a Viet Namese woman.”
“Aw, that wouldn’t be so bad,” Uncle Joe said from behind Tony. Joe grabbed Tony by the shoulders, clenched his hands affectionately hard. “If I hadn’t been married when I hit Japan, I might’ve brought home a little geisha girl myself. You feel pretty solid. How’s the leg?”
“I’m not worried about the girl,” Uncle James said. “He’s got that Hollands girl here to come back to. What I’m worried about—”
“Please! Please, let’s just go,” Tony’s mother said. “John, you and Joe get the cars,” she directed her brother and husband. “And Johnny, you and Vinny get Tony’s bags. I want to look at my boy.” She stopped Tony, burst into tears again, hugged him again. “If you only knew what a mother goes through. If you only knew what I’ve been through this year.”
In a few minutes John and Vinny returned with Tony’s bag. The cars were waiting. “Where do I go?” Tony asked light-heartedly. He was hoping to sit with Maxene. Annalisa had already left with his friends.
“You ride with me,” his mother said. “In Uncle Joe’s car. You can sit in back with Vinny and John. Your father and Helen like to ride together and Maxene can talk to Uncle James.”
The Pisano family house in Mill Creek Falls was on the first street to be finished in the ‘old’ New Town subdivision, which had been built between 1951 and 1957 and backed up to the much older Creek’s Bend neighborhood. Over the years Josephine Pisano repeatedly had begged John to sell the house and buy a larger one, but John opted to expand the house and to add a landscaped swimming pool as the central feature of the backyard.
It was nearly midnight. Uncle Joe turned the car onto their street. Tony’s father had arrived a few minutes earlier and Annalisa and Tony’s friends were directly behind. Tony was exhausted from the flights, the travel, the airports. His body was sore from fatigue and sleeping in seats and the jouncing from the last helicopter crash. He had finally relaxed and fallen asleep against his brother somewhere north of Allentown.
Suddenly twenty car horns were blasting him awake. “What the fuck—” He shot up, banged his head on the roof, crumpled to the floor. Lights exploded, flashed. All around people cheered, banged pots and pans, blew whistles. A banner, fifteen feet long, car lights blinking high-beam low-beam high-beam—WELCOME HOME. In the middle of the street Tony’s father stood waving an American flag.
“Hey, what the—aw, no.”
“Welcome home, Tony,” his brother John said. He opened the door, got out, turned to help. Tony froze. Vinny got out the other side, shut the door. He felt self-conscious, ducked into the crowd.
“Tony! Tony! Tony!” They began to chant.
Josephine Pisano turned and looked at her son cowering like an animal on the floor behind her seat. “Tony. What—”
“Get outa the car,” he demanded.
“Come on, Tony,” she urged.
“No,” he barked. “Get outa the car.”
“Tony!” Josephine was beside herself.
“I’m stayin here,” he snapped. He reached out, pulled the car door shut, locked it. Then, staying low, he turned, locked the other rear door.
“What’s the matter?” Josephine began. “All these people.” Her door was open. She swung her legs out but remained seated. “Nonna’s here. Uncle Frank came from Scranton. They came to see you.” The chanting waned. Popping started. Champagne. A neoprene cork thudded on the hood. Tony flinched. “Are you crazy? What are you, a ...”
“Get out,” Tony screamed. His entire body was cramping down, shaking. People began to surround the car.
“Josephine,” his uncle Joe snapped. “Get the hell out and shut that door.”
“Wha-aht?”
Tony’s arms quaked. His right thigh burned as the wounded muscle tightened. “Just get out of the car,” Joe ordered, and Josephine backed out, shocked, embarrassed, in disbelief. Joe started the engine. He backed up quickly making people scatter, then he jammed the lever into drive and sped up the street.
Tony sighed in back. He collapsed against the seat. Uncle Joe made a few quick turns and they were out of the development. “Where do you want to go?” he asked Tony.
“Just around,” Tony said. He sat up on the rear seat, then stuck his feet over the front seat and slithered into shotgun position. Joe didn’t ask anything and Tony didn’t volunteer. They descended, crossed the bridge, drove through a dark downtown, up side streets, across main roads, around the old hangouts. Tony kept his face turned to his window, seeing, remembering, reacquainting. Joe drove back toward New Town. It was after one. He turned down the street that backed to the Pisano house. The party was still going strong.
“You want to go there now?” Uncle Joe asked.
“No,” Tony said.
“You know it was your parents’ twenty-eighth wedding anniversary last week. The party’s for them too.”
“Not yet,” Tony said.
“We’ll drive around again.”
For three more hours, two tours about town and one trip to the highway for gas, Joe drove Tony. At the end of each hour they reconned the party. At four in the morning, the street quiet, only a few lights still burning in the house, they parked and went in.
The next day, before the party restarted, Tony and his father ate breakfast, alone, in silence, in the dining room. Not until they finished their rolls and juice and eggs and only lukewarm coffee remained in their cups did Tony look at his father’s face. Hundreds of images and thoughts and snatches of conversations from all his years flooded Tony’s mind. What’s it like, Pa, to kill a man? When had he asked that? Uncle Joe talked about it, why not his father? What’s this ribbon for, Pa? John Pisano had never volunteered war stories, had never displayed souvenirs. To young Tony, it was his father’s past, an era in his father’s life that Tony could not bring up even if his father did not actually hide it. The first time you’re there, Pa ... but he’d never asked, had never been told ... how do you react?
Tony did not know what he would see in his father’s face when he put his cup down, placed both palms over the table edge and looked up, but he knew what he wanted to see, what he hoped to see. I didn’t panic, Pa, he thought. Never once. Not even when I was in the tunnels extracting bodies and the guys above pulled so hard on the rope the body broke in two and they dragged it over me. Not at Loon. Not at Dai Do. Not when Manny got it while I was holdin him trying to tell him he had a million-dollar wound when the sniper blew his chest apart. Not when I got hit, even. I did my job, Pa, Tony thought. Like you did yours.
John Pisano looked at his son. For one instant his face relaxed, tension left the room. Then he bowed his head, cleared his throat. Now he kept his head down, spoke softly. “Tony,” he said, “you’ve seen things that no man can imagine unless he’s seen them too. Or done them. Not Mark, not Joey. Not even John with all his education. They’ll never understand. You’re different, Tony.” John Pisano raised his eyes, looked sadly at his son. “You’ve been to the mountain. You’ve seen ... God, I hope you handle it better than I did. Jesus God, I hope you do.”
&
nbsp; A very much subdued family gathering ensued that evening. Tony apologized individually to each adult and twice to the entire clan. John Pisano said it had been stupid of them to surprise him like that, not even to wake him up and tell him a few blocks before they arrived. Josephine, with the help of her sister Helen and John’s three sisters and Uncle Frank’s wife, Jessie, again prepared an enormous array of food.
“All right,” Josephine called into the yard and throughout the house. “Everybody, at the table.”
“Dear Jesus,” Tony’s father began the grace. He paused as conversation stopped.
Nonna—Grandma Maria Annabella—was holding one of Tony’s hands, squeezing it, repeating over and over, “Always happy. Always dignity. Always a gentleman.”
“Help us,” John Pisano intoned, “to remember that we share life and worship with all men. Help us to defeat hatred within us and let us and all men open our hearts to love, to forgiveness, and to self-forgiveness. Let goodness and kindness come to us and let us bring these gifts to others.
“Deliver us, Dear Jesus, from every evil and teach our hearts to rejoice in Your life.” John Pisano’s voice began to break but it went unnoticed. “We are happy to be Thy children, we are grateful for Your thoughts and gifts.
“And Dear Jesus.” John Pisano stopped, he choked on the welling in his throat, his eyes watered ever so slightly. “Thank You, thank You for returning my son to us. Amen.”
Uncle Joe broke the silence. “AAAaaaaayy! Let’s eat!”
The feast was nonstop. At midnight, Aunt Ann, Uncle Ernie, and their daughters, Maxene, Patty and Julie—named after the Andrews Sisters—packed up to leave. Uncle Joe and Tony were tipsy. Tony walked his cousins to the door, hugged his aunt, shook Ernie’s hands, smiled politely. He followed them onto the small porch, then gave each girl a squeeze. As they walked to their car he stared at Maxene’s legs.
Uncle Joe followed Tony’s gaze, put his arm around his nephew’s shoulder, said, “When I got back from the Pacific....” He started to chuckle, then to laugh. He didn’t finish. They returned to the house. “I’ve got to sit,” Joe said, and Tony deposited him in an overstuffed chair in the living room and meandered back to the dining room for another pastry. Why’s she got to be my cousin? he thought. He could not shake the desire she’d stirred. Annalisa, at seventeen was pretty; Uncle Joe’s daughter, Roseanne, at nineteen, was sexy as hell; but Maxene, at only sixteen, was so delightful Tony simply ached.
Maxene, he thought. Sweet sixteen Maxene. He opened the screen door, stepped into the side yard. The night had become cool and everyone, he thought, was inside. He stood in the darkness eating the pastry, thinking about Uncle Joe’s stories about Guadalcanal and occupation duty in Japan. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. Slowly, out of habit, quietly, he walked to the backyard. The yard was dark except for lights in the pool making the water glisten and the entire pool area glow. Tony paused in the dark by the side of the house. Again he thought of Maxene. Then of a Maxene look-alike—a non-cousin Maxene without the charged taboo of cousin incest. In his mind she was a year older, a year bustier, two-thirds naked. He stopped. He heard someone. There was someone in the shadows of the lilacs at the other side of the pool. Two people. Neat, Tony thought. Neat. Vaguely he wished it were he and Maxene but he stopped the fantasy. After all, he told himself, she is my cousin.
He remained in the dark by the side of the house. The couple at the far side of the pool kissed. Tony imagined the passion in that kiss, began imagining.... He stopped his thoughts. Who the hell is it? he asked himself. He bore his eyes into the darkness. He could make out Aunt Helen’s silhouette. She stepped back, adjusted her dress. His jaw clamped down tight. The rock, the foundation upon which he was built, suddenly turned to sand. His hand edged to the house for support, stabilization. Aunt Helen stepped briskly into the glow from the pool, then to the back door and inside.
Tony’s stomach began to turn. He focused in on the man. Quietly he circled the edge of the yard. John Pisano lit a cigarette, faced the pool. Tony emerged from the shadows, noiselessly approached his father’s back, coiled, uncoiled—POP. “Aaah!” Splash. Tony, like a cat, backed to the shadows, down the yard’s edge, through the screen door and to a seat at the table. He shoved another pastry in his mouth.
For the next three weeks, until his cousin Jimmy returned, Tony’s days were a mixture of culture shock, disgust, elation at being back, overindulgence in Josephine’s cooking, idleness and boredom. His nights were restless.
The first nights he could not sleep at all. He was nervous, anxious, so tense his body ached. His heart beat hard, not fast, but with such pounding that his bed pulsed. It scared him. He felt his heart was about to explode, do to itself what the North Viet Namese could never do. John and Joe, his older brothers, had their own apartment, Mark had his own room. Tony could not recall the last time he’d slept alone. In the Corps he had slept either in barracks or tents or hardbacks, or he had slept in the field in bunkers or foxholes or on the ground, but always he slept near other guys, with their noises, their smells. On R & R he had slept with his Chinese “wife” the entire week. In high school and earlier he and Joe had shared this room.
Tony shut his eyes in the aloneness. He tried to relax by masturbating. He fantasized about getting it on with Maxene. He masturbated a second time fantasizing a ménage à trois with Maxene and Roseanne. He got up, smoked a cigarette. If his father knew that it had been Tony who had given the shove, he had not let on. He had come in, his clothes dripping, had laughed foolishly. “You’re not goina believe what I just did,” he’d announced. “I was looking for Orion and I backed into the pool.” The incident passed, but the kiss, the shove, repeated again and again in Tony’s mind.
He sat on the edge of the bed, looked through the window. The pool lights were off. Beyond the back fence the old homes of Creek’s Bend lay in darkness. Tony sat, tried to think of his preservice life, but the past withdrew. He tried to think of the future, of his next duty station. He would go early, report in early, he thought. He thought again about his father and aunt and he felt, feared, his family, his foundation was collapsing. He thought about the guys he’d left in Nam and he said a prayer for them. He rose again, smoked again. Then he clenched his fist and snapped it in the air and smiled and told himself they’d be all right. In isolation from everything past he watched the sky gray, then turn pink through the trees to the northeast.
The Pisano family returned to their routines. John Sr. went back to his long hours as shift supervisor. John Jr. went back to his accounting office where he handled the books for Uncle Frank’s store along with a hundred other accounts. Brother Joe had graduated college in May and had been accepted into medical school. He was re-taking an organic chemistry course and studying. Mark, at fourteen, was a counselor with the town’s Park Department and was working, or chasing adolescent girls, seven days a week. Only Josephine stayed home and Tony struggled to be the decent, returning son, eating until he was ready to burst, struggling to repress blurting, “Is Pa having an affair? Do you give a shit?”
Then Tony also fell into a routine. He lay awake each night until dawn, then slept, restless, into the afternoon, then showered, shaved, went out with his friends, sometimes with their girlfriends, sometimes with Annalisa. Then he and they got stoned.
If his familial culture had changed little during the time he was away, the culture of his friends, or at least that segment of friends who remained in Mill Creek Falls, had changed drastically.
In high school Tony had been a rock, a hood. He had seen himself as the tough Italian kid from the good neighborhood that backed up to the bad neighborhood. His brothers had all been rah-rahs, preppies, white socks and white boat sneakers. Tony had been a slick. After he left for school in the morning, he would slick his hair back with Vaseline. He was always clean, always sharply dressed. He wore the right shirts, the right shoes with pointed toes, the right pegged pants. To Friday-night dances he wore the skinniest ties and Nehru
jackets. He moved with both cliques in school, but after school he socialized with the crowd from Creek’s Bend. By the summer of 1968 every boy Tony knew from his class of ’65 who’d lived in Old New Town, every single one except him and Jimmy, had obtained a 2-S deferment. And every friend from Creek’s Bend was in the service.
“Tonight we go to Shep’s,” Roy said to Tony and Annalisa.
“Oh,” Annalisa said. “I’ve heard about Shep’s.”
“Yeah, it’s super cool,” Roy said. “Shep finally cleared Tony.”
“Thanks to you,” Annalisa said. Her eyes glistened. Tony opened the door of Roy’s new Camaro, watched his cousin as she coyly slid in. Then he slid in beside her, put his arm on the seat back behind her, felt her warmth against him.
“Roll the window up,” Roy said. He pulled a joint from above the visor. Annalisa took it, lit it, passed it to Tony.
To Tony the grass was weak. It had none of the power of the little Nam weed he’d smoked. Still he was surprised how giddy one joint made them. Annalisa began swaying, her eyes became hazy, her demeanor changed from coyly shy to giggly.
“Shep’s got some great stuff, Man,” Roy said. “You’re goina groove on this place. It’s really far out.”
“Cool,” Tony said. “I’m groovin on your vehicle, Man, but I need somethin more.”
“Yeah. You’re really uptight.”
“Yeah.”
Lenny Shepmann’s apartment was on the second floor of a Creek’s Bend four-plex. Tony led Roy and his cousin across the street, then let Roy lead them around to a side entrance. Roy knocked out a familiar series of raps: ta, ta-ta TA ta, ta-ta. A buzzer sounded, the door unlatched.
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