Dear Miriam.
I’m working again. The boys here drink a lot. They are good friends. Everyone of them went through the same stuff I did and I finally have found a place where I can talk and not be crazy. Tell Pop and Mom where I am. I’ll get a letter to them too. I’m really sorry that circumstances have forced this on us. I pray it would be different. Tell Brian to help his brother and sister more. Sometimes I recall that littlest guy and I even miss him spitting up on me. I’m not a very good man for what I put you through. I know that. I’m makin a lot of money right now with the oil coming in and I’ll be able to send you a lot.
The letter stopped in the middle of the second sheet. It was unsigned. In the envelope there was a simple blank card scribed by a different hand. It said: “We’re sorry about Paul. He was a fine, fine friend.” There were four signatures: Tom. Jack. Omeed. Jimmy.
Bobby Wapinski was stunned, stunned beyond shaking, beyond anger, beyond belief. Why had no one shown him this letter? Had they contacted this Tom, this Jack, Omeed, Jimmy? What did his ma, his grandfather, know that they hadn’t told him? Had Miriam written back? “Has he,” he’d written in one letter, “settled down for you?” He knew. He knew I needed him. She must have written. What else had they known for sixteen years? Since he was seven! He felt tears well to his eyes but they did not fall. He felt injustice, anger—anger, anger—but it would not focus and he felt helpless, empty. He pushed the letter out of reach, stared at the desk. He wanted to get up, run to the house, shake the letter, the card, in his grandfather’s face. But he was spent, exhausted, numb. He lay his head on the desk, looked at the letter, the envelope, a foreshortened plane with illegible pencil smears. It was late afternoon. Bobby Wapinski fell to sleep; fell not asleep, but into a semiconsciousness similar to the half sleeps he’d had for nearly a year in Asia, an infantryman’s sleep.
Now they are shooting. They had come from the mountain, a human wave. Behind them, unseen, there is the vibration, the trembling, the roar of tracks, tanks, self-propelled howitzers, unseen. He is low, crawling, positioning himself. The crack of small arms comes from the far side, from the lead element of his ambush, comes premature setting off a torrent of return fire that isolates the lead element from the long base. The enemy spreads out, continues advancing. The mud surface is slick. He slips as he crawls forward into the midst of his men. The mud is thick, deep, grabbing, sucking him down. He strains to move forward but is mired. Overhead a new roar, a beating mixing with the downpour, and now mortar explosions mixing with thunder and the trembling ooze of the earth. Bam. Thud. He is hit. He doesn’t feel it. He crawls on. They advance. Behind him men move up, before him they fall back. All know the lead is isolated, lost, out of contact. Still the enemy advances. Now they return fire. Friend, foe, locked in face-to-face slugfest. Across the trail, behind a hummock, his unit retreats. BamThudHitAgainPain. Now they are sliding away. He is sliding away from himself left in the mud, left on the hillside. “I pray for you. Pray for me.” Sliding away. BamThudBamThudBamThud. There is no pain, only the smell of blood and shit and blood and flesh and blood. There is no sight except the last view of himself in the mud as he, they, slide back, last glimpse of himself, on the mud floor eating mud, trying to hide, to eat mud so quietly. Then there is the room, the masks, the hustle bustle, “NEXT.” Get up! He lies there. Get up! It is not a busy day after all. There are nurses leaving, going to the club, corpsmen chatting softly, betting on a ballgame, smoking. They’ve decided not to treat him because they are tired. It has become habit because of the worst days of mass casualties, the busy days, to let the goners go—but today is a slow day—s l o w d a y. He can see it. See into their minds, see how tired they are, see how they think about him, how they see his glassy eyes, how they don’t think of him. “Covered with mud! Dirty. Like a pig. Sounds like a pig. When you learn to eat like a human being we’ll—Jesus! I can’t stand it anymore! Put him in the corner to cool ... in the corner to cool, inthecornertocool.”
Wapinski woke. His head snapped up. How much had been a dream, how much did he control, he did not know. “Fuck it!” he said aloud. “Fuck em all! Drive on!”
Winter arrived at High Meadow in mid-December. The temperature dropped thirty degrees on the night of the 10th and on the morning of the 11th it barely warmed at all. That night the temperature dropped to single digits. On the 13th a low front swept in and precipitation fell as frigid rain, then froze into a layer of ice. By noon the ice was half an inch thick.
It was transition time. At the back of Bobby’s mind were Viet Nam, his father’s letters, Red. Viet Nam, he thought, had become a hook to his past, a momentary identity penetrating into some deep layer of self-definition.
Grandpa had heated up a pan of chicken broth and the two of them sat, sipping the steaming broth. “Do you know what you asked me once when you were a little boy?” Grandpa asked Bob.
“Unt-uh,” Bob intoned.
“You once asked me if being truthful meant not telling a lie even when Pinocchio would tell a lie?”
“How old was I when I said that?”
“I don’t know. Five. Maybe six. Do you know what I told you?”
“No. I don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember either.” Grandpa laughed and Bob laughed too and Josh jumped up and slapped both his front paws on the table and seemed to want to laugh with them.
“G’down.” Bob pushed him, still laughing.
“I mighta said something like this,” Grandpa said. “I really can’t remember. But I mighta said, being truthful means doing what your heart tells you is right. That’s about the way one talks to a five-year-old, isn’t it?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Granpa?”
“I’m saying, don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable to you.”
“Um-hmm. You taught me that way back.”
“You like the farm, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s always been my favorite place.”
“Mine too. But you aren’t much of a farmer.”
“Nope. I guess not. I, ah ...”
“Doesn’t make much difference. None of the farms around here produce enough income to keep a family anyway.”
“The Lutz farm makes money.”
“Adolph’d make money if his place was solid rock,” Pewel Wapinski said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t know if you’re being truthful with yourself. You’ve got that gal out in California and you’re over here. You could have a job in town, work up here. You could work the farm. You could run a business from up here like what’s his name two places beyond Adolph’s does. But Bob, I don’t want you attaching your life to this place if it’s not valuable to you.”
Bob Wapinski leaned his forearms on the table, grasped the soup bowl with both hands. “Why didn’t you tell me about my father?”
“Tell you what? Oh. Texas?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well ... well, tell you when?”
“When you knew.”
“Me an his ma went to Texas to search for him. You wouldn’t remember that. Put ads in all those papers. Figured that odd name’d get us some results. But we never come up with a single thing. I thought later, maybe, being that he was kind of hiding his exact whereabouts from Miriam, that maybe he was really in Oklahoma but sent that last letter from Texas ... or they did it for him.”
“She knew where he was. She must have written him.”
“We all wrote im. Always to general delivery. But he never had an address after Missoura.”
“I could have been told.”
“At seven or eight!”
“Yes.”
“Bob ... we still don’t know. Maybe he’s hiding. Sides, sometimes a man has to discover things in his own time. What could you of done at seven?”
Over the next month, through Christmas and New Year’s and into the coldest days of January, Bob Wapinski fantasized about Red. He wrote her almost every day and received a letter from her as frequently. Whate
ver their relationship might have lacked when they were together, whatever their trepidations, the voids were filled in their letters and in their minds. Their plans took shape. Bob asked Red to find out about residence requirements for California state schools. “I’d like to take some courses in engineering, in city planning, maybe a few art classes,” he wrote. “What would it cost if I were a resident? I can use the GI Bill for tuition.”
Red called, told him the addresses to write to for brochures. It was their first live communication since the day she’d driven off. He hadn’t expected the call. When it was over he felt odd, dissatisfied, yet he told himself it was because it had happened so suddenly and he had not been able to get his mind into the right gear. If anything, his move to California went from possible to certain, his letters became more amorous and her expressed apprehension dwindled.
“This past week,” he wrote in January, “I’ve felt your absence the most. I cannot think of a thing better than being with someone you love—especially if that someone’s like you.”
In turn she answered, “When you get here, if we can afford it and I can take the time, let’s go to a big hotel in San Francisco and get reacquainted. I can’t wait to take you to North Bay Mall. It’s such a pleasure to be there, to walk in the open air down the esplanade between the stores and to look in all the windows, or just to sit on the benches and watch the people. They are much happier than people in Mill Creek and it shows. I’m so happy to be here—even if it rains so much. One of the jewelry shoppes has the most beautiful rings. I hope that we’ll be able to work out our differences and live happily ever after like in a goddamn fairytale. I say HURRAY for goddamn fairytales. At work, Pauline is getting a divorce. We went out last night and drank three bottles of wine.”
If Red’s January tone was relaxed, expectant, and Bobby’s was peaceful, transitional, Pewel Wapinski’s bordered on frantic. “Bob,” Pewel addressed his grandson at breakfast, “a man lives easier when he has a set of guidelines he lives by.”
“Makes sense,” Bobby answered.
“A code,” Grandpa said. “You know. That way you’re not having to figure out everything from scratch. You plant in the spring, you reap in the fall. You know that. You don’t have to waste time or energy or seed experimenting.”
“Yes Sir.” Bobby teased the old man, teased him politely, lovingly, thinking he knew what his grandfather was doing, thinking that his grandfather didn’t need to do it for there was plenty of time and California wasn’t permanent, wasn’t a disease.
At lunch Grandpa gave Bobby a photograph of himself and Brigita taken on February 22, 1947, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. At dinner Grandpa produced a photo of himself and Bobby and Josh, which Red had taken in September. With the second photograph he gave him a simple list.
Lead others through your service to them.
You are special, your family is special, your country is special. You and they are something sacred, something to be honored.
You are here for a reason.
A man must be able to make money and be able to keep some of the money he makes. Take care of business first—plant before you play. You’re not finished until you’re finished. Unfinished business has a way of haunting you.
Don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable.
Each day from the moment it was acknowledged Bobby would move, Pewel gave him something. At one dinner Pewel handed Bobby an envelope with one hundred twenty-dollar bills. “I can’t take this,” Bobby said.
“Yes you can,” Pewel countered.
“No Granpa. It’s not right.”
“It’s seed money,” Pewel said. “I can do it and I want to do it.”
“I can’t do it,” Bobby said. “If I ever need it, I’ll ask you for it. Okay?”
“There’s a card in there. It’s something I remember from my father. The words mighta changed but the meaning’s the same. He said it was the oldest prayer of the Old Testament. Maybe older than Judaism itself. Keep God in your life Bob. Someplace. Not necessarily like they teach at St. Ignatius’, but someplace.”
“I think He’s in the land,” Bobby said.
Pewel Wapinski nodded. Then quietly he said, “Dear Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil; forgive us our trespasses; and give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.” He paused again. “That’s for your sons.”
“Sons! Granpa, I don’t have—”
“That’s for your sons when you have sons.”
Every day Pewel Wapinski gave his grandson something more, and every evening Bobby Wapinski packed the items in his footlocker. Still what grandfather wished to give to grandson was not physical or financial but spiritual—words, ideas, ideals that to the old man were poignant. “Civilized people ... civilization, Bob, this is a gift of God or of circumstance, and of five hundred generations that have gone before us. You’ve got the ability to control, to some extent, today’s circumstances. That’s a responsibility. Try hard. Never give up!”
“Granpa, I never knew you were such a philosopher!”
Pewel chuckled. “Only on midwinter nights like this when there’s not so much to do around here.” The old man lay back in his overstuffed chair in the dimly lit, dingy living room. “Take these with you, Bob,” he said. He did not move. Inside, dimly, he was thinking about his daughter-in-law, thinking vaguely, She drove my son away and now she’s driving away my grandson.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“These words,” Pewel said. His eyes were closed. “Integrity. These words are principles. Virtue. Pride. Confidence. Responsibility. A man must live not by expedience, not by quick gratification, but by principles. Liberty. Independence. Freedom. Faith. Family. Courage.”
During the last week of January 1970, after having rebuilt the Mustang, Bobby sold his car to John Lutz for $900, not even the price of the parts. He finished packing his footlocker, sent it via Greyhound to the depot in San Martin where Red said she’d pick it up if it arrived before he did. He heard from Red one more time. She was taking a real estate license course at Academy Schools and already had a test date of Saturday, February 14th, Valentine’s Day.
On January 27th Grandpa drove Bobby and Josh to Williamsport. He put them both on a flight, via Philadelphia, to SFO.
August 1984
“YOU CAN CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES.” That was the birth of the code. He didn’t listen. Not at first. None of us did the first time we heard it. And I’m not sure I can interpret it now. Isn’t that the way it is with codes and canons, principles and plans? They’re okay until you hit an extreme, then it’s a matter of figuring out how they apply, how to decode them, what’s relevant.
The raccoons haven’t come. For a week there’s been no lights in the house. None in the barns. It is cool, cold. My body is stiff, chilled, and I can barely bend my right leg. The fire hardly warms me. Three days ago I dug the pit and chimney. Nothing much, really—a small one-man kitchen with a flat stone over the fire pit, an entrance flue downhill, a six-inch-deep exit tunnel-chimney, a covered trench, snaking back up into the pines there, maybe thirty feet away. The tunnel-chimney controls smoke. Moisture and particulants cool, condense, fall out. What comes out the far end is pretty minimal—a crude scrubber, the kind the VC used in old Nam Bo when they didn’t want us to know where they were.
This morning, at first light, I got off my duff, descended to the pond, washed my stinko bod, my pits. Shaved. Dove in with my clothes on and used the soap to wash them before I took em off and washed me. Could hardly believe yesterday. Of all people! I’d slipped back into the pines to watch. Thought maybe she’d notice the firepit, start snoopin around—maybe freak out, split, notify the authorities, send somebody up here to evict me. I didn’t realize it was Joanne, Wap’s sister, till she parked behind the house and got out of the car. I’d already sanitized my camp as much as I could. There wasn’t much I could do with the firepit except cover the opening with the dirt I’d dug out making
it. Still, I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice. Of all people she woulda been the last I’d of expected to come up and plant flowers. It blew my mind. Couldn’t rest, couldn’t meditate. Felt like shit at first light. That’s why I went down below, cleaned up, filled my water blivet, changed my duds, came back up and hung the wet ones on a line I’d stretched at the back of the pine break. Controlling circumstances.
While I was in Philly there was always something in the pipeline—something from the rumor mill about drops—early-out programs tied to Nixon’s reduction in force. It was really a matter of laying guys off, of firing them, because Viet Namization was going to turn the war over the ARVN. No severance pay. No bonus. Just get out. I was discharged 123 days early—discharged not with a bang, barely a whimper. Crocco, Williams and Lambert went out and got drunk for me, then they disassembled Lieutenant Mulhaney’s car—doors, wheels, hood, wires, even the windshield—and left it there for him to put back together. The rumor mill said I did it but I was in Boston and Mulhaney never laid that rap on me. Still, I say, thanks guys. Mulhaney deserved it. I left without a whimper. Just collected my pay, signed the papers, caught a bus to Scranton and one to La Porte where my mom came and got me and drove me home and all I could think of was leaving for Boston and the most wonderful woman in the world. But first there had to be another family party! I hung around for a respectable bit until I figured I could go to Boston to “visit.” Oh God, how I missed her.
In Mill Creek Ma’d say, “Tony, you decide yet what you’re goina do?” She really liked having me home but the nicer she was the more I wanted to go. I felt like I was caught in a niceness trap and bein mushed to death like when I was seven and she’d make me sit on her lap and hug me against her big plump motherness while she’d be talking to Aunt Isabella who’d be doing the same thing to Jimmy. “I think I’m goina go to school,” I’d tell her. “Maybe become a doctor like Joey.” She believed me. “Ma, I’m going to be a college kid.” She believed me and that meant it was okay for me to believe it too. “Where are you going to go to school?” Mark asked. “I don’t know,” I lied. I’d already applied and gotten the conditional answer. “Maybe BU, you know, in Boston.”
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