Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Stacy returned in a simple robin’s-egg blue cotton dress, stockings and heels. She stood at the edge of the hall, smiled. Then she spun. The dress rose slightly showing her legs. Tony wanted to fall to his knees, to hug her legs. Her smile was enchanting but as she walked to him his spirit drooped. In heels she was at least three inches taller than he.

  They sat on the sofa again, again talked about modeling. “I close my eyes,” Stacy told him, “and I think what I want to look like, and when I open my eyes, I look that way. It’s a visualization technique I learned when I was in school.”

  “You sure learned it well,” Tony said. He felt stupid, tongue-tied.

  “What’s wrong, Tony?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me about yourself. Bea said you’re a Marine.”

  “Hm-hmm.”

  “And you’ve been to Viet Nam? I have a friend over there. Maybe you know him.”

  “Is he a Marine?” Tony perked up.

  “No. He’s in the army. In the parachute division.”

  “I wouldn’t know him, then,” Tony said dejectedly. “The Marines and the army don’t mix much.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t have anything against paratroopers, myself. Just Marines and Airborne don’t mix. It’s like throwing water on an oil fire.”

  “Oooo! That bad, huh?”

  “Naw. Everybody just makes it out like that. This guy, he your main man?”

  “Just a friend. Are you always so quiet?”

  “I got some, ah ... bad revelations since I came home.”

  “Like what?”

  “Aw, like my father. I think he’s having an affair.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. You know what I think ... I think it’s cause I was in old Nam Bo. I think my mom was such a wreck this last year that she musta drove my father to it.” Stacy didn’t comment. “Hey,” Tony’s tone changed completely, “are you wearing contacts?”

  “Hmm?” Stacy smiled, surprised at the question, the change of tone.

  “Contact lenses? Colored ones?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone with eyes as blue as yours. Really.”

  Stacy smiled, lowered her gaze.

  “Hey, would you like to dance?”

  “Where?” Stacy asked.

  “Here. Look, I know I’m a short guy but ... ah, if you’ll take your shoes off ... we could put on a few records and dance. I haven’t danced in a long time.”

  When Jimmy and Red returned they found Tony and Stacy slow dancing to soft music in the dark.

  “Damn it. No.” Jimmy was raging. The argument must have been going on long before they walked in.

  “Well what am I supposed to say?”

  “Nothin. You’re supposed to listen.”

  “I was listening.”

  “No you weren’t. You got no idea what I was sayin.”

  “I think I understood how you felt.”

  “You’re still not listening. Listen with your mouth shut. You can’t hear if you’re talking and telling me what I’m sayin and what I mean.”

  “Jimmeee!”

  “Come on, Tony. Let’s get outa here.”

  On the drive back into town Tony was flying. Stacy had kissed him. “Man, what’s happenin with you and Red?” he asked, but he did not want to talk about it. He wanted his cousin to ask him about Stacy.

  “Augh, nothin,” Jimmy said. He was seething. “I fucked her eyes out and we’re layin there and I began tellin her about like, like goin into a ville. I told her about the steam-n-cream and I was tryin to tell her that I didn’t really like goin there. She heard nothin, Man. Nothin.”

  “Hey. I’m sorry.”

  “Naw. It’s fine. It’ll work out fine. We’ll be back sailin in no time. How’d you make out with her friend?”

  “Oh Man, I’ve never seen eyes like this girl’s got.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty. She’s fucked up though. A fuckin tramp, Man.”

  “I wouldn’t mind doin some trampin around with her,” Tony guffawed, but he did it against what he was feeling.

  “Red said her steady guy left for Nam like a month ago. She’s been fuckin round on him like a bunny. You oughta—”

  “What? What guy?”

  “Army guy. From down in Lutzburgh.”

  Tony Pisano did not have to report for duty until July 22d. On the 20th, the second morning after he’d doubled with his cousin, he packed his seabag, said good-bye to his folks and caught a bus for Philadelphia. That night Jimmy Pellegrino and Bea Hollands announced their engagement.

  July 1984

  I WALKED HERE. DID I mention that? I walked the last ten miles or so. Kind of a penance. Or a tribute. I left my scooter at Ma’s, packed a ruck and walked here. Mostly in the dark. Guess I felt self-conscious walkin through town with a ruck and these old jungle boots so I left about, I don’t know, when the moon was comin up. Got to the culverts down there about dawn then came around the back way. Real slow. Real quiet. Thinkin some about the old man but mostly not thinkin.

  Sun’s low now. It’s too early to hear the evening sounds from the fields or woods. Too early for the deer to show along the edge. All the creatures rest at this hour—except maybe a few nonunion squirrels.

  When the sun hits the ridge it’ll disappear quick, like in any mountainous region. I’m going to stay. Stay here. Maybe gather some wood, make a small fire. Talk to the old man the way Bobby used to. He was really somethin. Talk to the deer and the fox and the bats, too. See if they’ve got any answers. Watch the garbage cans. See if the raccoons check em out. They’d stop checkin if there wasn’t any trash for a while. Watch the house, too. See if a light comes on.

  I’ve cleared a small spot for sleeping but I don’t expect to sleep. Cleared a spot for a fire, too, but I’ll hold off a few days. No need to announce to the whole world I’m back, back here thinkin about it. Meditating on it. That was one of Bobby’s solutions ... to clear up dreams. He’d call it “controlled dreaming,” say it allows “the subconscious/conscious mind split to reconcile differences.”

  Dreams. I still have em. Old ones. Almost like friends now. And new ones. I don’t even think of em as havin begun at Dai Do, but that’s where the shrinks tried to put it. I think they’re wrong. I subscribe to Wapinski’s theory, kind of a Grunt’s Theory of Psychoanalysis. Yeah, for me, Dai Do was there. Yeah, it was traumatic. But it’s like blaming a blown engine on the thing being made instead of on overrevving the sucker. Or maybe more like blaming a crop failure on lack of rainfall in August—but when irrigation is available. Get it? There’s a cause there but it’s not The Cause. Not for me. Like a chemical reaction where the potential for disaster exists in the test tube—but so does the potential for something really good. And it depends on the next ingredient that’s dumped in—not only on what’s there. Shrink said Dai Do was it. Bobby said it was what came later. “The initial traumas may have been traumatic,” he said, “but fact is you handled it then and you could have handled it forever if circumstances had been different. If somebody or something didn’t mess it all up.” One of the guys, this was later but I liked the way he put it, he said, “Your dreams, you know, many times they’re true. They’re right on target. Even when your life is a bucket of shit.”

  Dreams! I shake my head. Dreams unfurl slowly, begin like pinpoints then open up ... massive ... a pin prick into a balloon of the unconscious. Not only the unconscious but the subconscious and the semiconscious right up the damned ladder rung by rung till you’re dreamin with your eyes about to blow out of your head like a cartoon drawing ... dreaming awake-asleep in another consciousness that prevents sleep, that prevents rest, that prevents rejuvenation.

  These problems, their origins, their complications, their multiplications—from not being able to sleep—from being so tired and still not bein able to sleep. Bobby’d say, “But think where we were, where we came from.” And he’d say, “Where is that? Where?! Time, Man
. Twelve-hours-out time! It can take up to three months to adjust.” His words. “Blaming sleep disturbances on memories of traumatic events can cause additional, more prolonged sleep-disturbance problems.”

  Yet they all experienced it. Every one of em! To some extent or another, at one time or another. I’m not just talkin Nam returnees—Viet Vets. I’m talkin all combat veterans. I’m talkin about World War I German soldiers who had no time-zone dislocation yet who suffered the exact same time dislocation. I’m talkin American Rebs and American Union troops 125 years ago. I’m talkin Odysseus. I’m talkin a psychocauldron of wants and emotions boiling out through numbed physical exhaustion. Later, much later, Wapinski had this plaque hanging in the big barn:

  If we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way anymore.... And men will not understand us.

  All Quiet on the Western Front

  Erich Maria Remarque—1928

  After you’d slept forever, Wapinski’d say, “Fuck it, Man! Fuck that shit! Drive on! Take your nitric-acid blood, your swirling brain waves, your numbed-out, drugged-out, burnt-out body—take all that shit, ball it, wrap it, throw it away. And DRIVE ON! If I knew, or if you knew, when we got back life was going to be like it was, we’d all have returned, gone back to Nam, without hesitation. But we didn’t know. And you can’t, and I can’t, go back in some zomboid state.”

  But he didn’t say that for years. He had to have his dreams first, like all of us.

  It’s almost dark. Lights in town are comin on. The mall lights—parking-lot cool, mercury-vapor pink at this hour—are beginning to glow. Up over the ridge, above the sugarbush, faint stars blur together. The house is dark. Behind me they’re resting, comfortable. No technicolor, full touch, taste, smell, stereo dreams for them tonight.

  4

  HIGH MEADOW FARM, 24 June 1969—He rolled onto his back. Josh adjusted, snuggled against his leg. Bobby moved again. Again Josh adjusted. In his whiskey-induced fog-sleep, Bobby shuddered. His right arm fell over the edge of the mattress. Immediately he jerked it back up, laid his hand across his stomach. Dim light from the bathroom—Grandpa let a seven-watt night-light burn continuously—seeped in through the doorway. At Bobby’s motion, Josh raised his head and shook it, causing his ears to flap, then lay back down, sighed, went to sleep.

  Wapinski’s face contorted. He did not move. For hours his mind had been snatching at images, yet the scotch had deadened it, made it lethargic, closed down each sprouting thought before it could take hold. Now the alcohol was mostly metabolized, the toxic remnants washed to the liver and kidneys for sorting, filtering, and evacuation.

  He grimaced. Josh sensed his restlessness, snuggled in tighter, snorted. Wapinski’s mind filled with the image of a tree-lined dirt road surrounded by lush green vegetation. He stares up the road. On the right there is a stone wall, very clear, the stones covered with blue-green lichens. He can see the wall diminishing in the short distance to the forested hill at the end of the road.

  He is behind the wall. They are in numerous positions along the wall and the road, dug in, expecting an attack. He has an incredible number of weapons—pistols, M-16s, captured AK-47s, all heaped and loaded—ready. There are boxes of ammunition beside him. Somehow he has moved across the road into a gully on the left side. He is facing up the road, uphill, expecting the attack to begin any moment. He lies in the gully, in fresh orange-brown dirt, focusing on the road. Others are in positions behind the stone wall. At the end of the road, perhaps a quarter mile, there is a crossing road and beyond there is a hill that rises sharply. The hill is alive with movement but he cannot detect anything specific, for the movement is under a thick canopy of oak, ash and maple. Local land. He does not know why he is there but has been told an attack will come from the hill, a human wave determined to sweep over the land.

  Wapinski checks his rifles, aims one in on the road. Stacy is behind the stone wall. He can see her crouching silhouette. Slowly the attack begins, the wave rumbles forward, hidden beneath the vegetation. The earth trembles. Still there are no soldiers. The dirt is mud. The vegetation thins. One soldier breaks from beneath the trees, begins his sprint down the road toward Wapinski’s ambush. Wapinski recognizes him. The ambushers are withdrawing. He glances across. Stacy is gone. The sprinting soldier, the attacker, is running down the left edge of the road, a rifle in his hands. His legs churn. The road surface is thick mud. It slows him. He is trying hard but he is slowing. Wapinski is confused. It is Akins. Joe Akins. He aims in on Akins. Why is Akins attacking? Why must he be ambushed? Wapinski centers his bead at Akins’ stomach. If the rounds are high, low, left, or right, he will still have a decent chance of killing him. Wapinski breathes in deeply, begins a long, slow exhale, begins his smooth squeezing, of the trigger, begins—BAM! A round slams into Wapinski’s hip. Before the pain explodes upward into him, he knows it will come. He knows his pelvis is shattered, hears the bones crunch, feels the shards scraping against each other, waits for the pain. BAMTHUD! A round hits his ribs, his chest, rips deeply into him. BAM! Another round. Another impaction. Bam! God! Help! Medic! Stacy! His company, Stacy, completely gone. Medic!

  He is cool. The vegetation is gone. He is in a small room, cramped, a hundred masked people pushing, shoving. “Next,” one shouts. “Next,” another answers. “Not him,” Akins says to the corpsman. “Put him—”

  Wapinski opened his eyes, bolted up. “Don’t leave me,” he mumbled. He was in his own room, his old room at Grandpa’s. His own voice surprised him. He knew exactly where he was, when it was. “Why the fuck?” he muttered into the dark. Josh lifted his head from where he lay by Wapinski’s legs. “Akins,” Wapinski said. “Of all people, Akins.” Josh wrinkled his forehead, rose further, then again fell back onto the bed. Wapinski swung his feet to the floor, stood, fumbled for cigarettes, lit one, went to the bathroom. Outside it was dark. His head hurt. His hands were sore. The knuckles of his right hand had scabbed over, on his left forearm there was a long abrasion. He returned to bed, pushed Josh over, smoked another cigarette. He did not want to think about the party, the people, the fight. He didn’t understand how the flow of events led to the fight, or even to the debate that had preceded the fight. His head felt dull; his eyes itched. He got up again, put his pants on. He thought about going out for a walk but was afraid the squeaking door hinges and the creaky floor would disturb his grandfather.

  It was impossible to sleep. The night was humid. More humid than Nam, he thought. Besides, he thought, Josh keeps hogging the bed. He stared into the darkness. Stacy’s image was there, everywhere, in every corner, on the dark windowpanes. He looked out the window, cupped his hands about his eyes, leaned against the glass. He could see her in the night sky. Behind her image was the bloody face of a foolish boy. Wapinski felt sick. He felt for the bottle in the dimness, drank. The whiskey burned in his throat.

  For the second time in his life Robert Wapinski had moved into the farmhouse at High Meadow. And for the second time he fell under the spell of the land and of his grandfather.

  He knew—not consciously, not yet, that would take more time—that High Meadow would be a place of healing, a place of new perspectives, new energies, new idealism. But first Robert Janos Wapinski, ex-Army infantry captain and combat company commander, age 23 that summer of 1969, would need to be held in the grip of the land, would need to feel he belonged to that once-scarred and once-rejuvenated land.

  The farm at High Meadow wasn’t much of a farm anymore ... no cows, no pigs, only a few chickens, the lower pasture rented out and planted by the Lutz boys in feed corn, the sugarbush and orchard ignored. Perhaps it never had been much of a farm. The soils were thin and the humus scant. A million years earlier the land had been seabed. Sediment had built up year after year, compressing to become the underlying bedrock formation of Pocono sandstone. Then the land had elevated in the geological Appalachian Revolution, then folded and weathered, the impervious Pocono strata fractur
ing into immense mile-square blocks. When the land receded, successive glaciations scarred and gouged the surface.

  For 13,000 years, first microscopic vegetation, then mosses and larger green plants grew, died, deposited their organic materials. Animal life migrated to the area. Then came man. Delaware Indian oral history dates back at least a millennium. Linguistically Algonquin, the Delaware called themselves Lenape, “true, original” people, and the Monsee tribe (Mountain People) called themselves Wolf. They were the fiercest of all the Delaware, though even they did not live on the land. The mountain ridge between Loyalsock and Little Loyalsock creeks, including the land of the future farm at High Meadow, was considered unsuitable.

  Europeans first viewed this land in 1681, the year William Penn the Younger acquired all of Pennsylvania from King Charles II. At that time north central Pennsylvania was covered by a forest of eastern hemlocks that rose to 160 feet and stood four to six feet in diameter at the base. In 1743 mapmakers referred to the area as the Endless Mountains and noted the gloom of the forest, the three-inch thickness of the tree bark, the thick carpet of needles on the forest floor, and the wide alleys between the massive trunks.

  Prior to the beginning of the American Revolution a band of survivors of the Pennamite War between Connecticut and Pennsylvania took refuge in the area along the Indian trail north of the gap at High Meadow. They lived there for three years until the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 when British troops and Iroquois warriors wiped out the settlement at Wilkes-Barre. Fearing reprisal, the Pennamite survivors moved on.

  European settlers moved west and north from Philadelphia but circled the mountain regions. Only after most of America had been settled did farmers come to the Mill Creek delta. Mill Creek Falls was established in 1849 by Raymond Hartley, an Englishman who had fallen out of favor with his wealthy family. He designed the town center, laid out the roads, built the courthouse, hotel and first school. He also established the first industry, a tannery and leatherworks. By 1860 Mill Creek Falls had grown to 800, Heckley County to more than 4,000.