—Tedium unto death!
But, in fact, Jessica seemed to agree with me about the mistakes Kennedy had made committing so many so-called advisors to the conflict.
—It’s a civil war. We don’t have any right to be poking our imperialist noses in there.
Kip scoffed, both at the meaning of my rhetoric, and at the rhetoric itself. —Listen to you, Brice. “Imperialist noses”? Come on. Anyway, it’s less a civil war than an ideological war, Communism against democracy.
Jessica said, —It’s both civil and ideological. I think Brice is right, it’s terrible and we don’t belong there.
—Oh no, not you too.
By then I would be deep into a monologue, thoughtful if humorless. —We should have let the French fix it if it needed fixing. They were the ones who were in there profiting right along from confusion and colonialism. What use is it to us even if we do get South Vietnam under control?
—It would halt the spread of Communism, which is looking to me more and more like the same virus we had to fight against twenty years ago. You of all people don’t want to see it build to that, do you, Brice? Nuclear deterrence becomes nuclear holocaust when local wars get out of hand. Am I wrong?
—I don’t think it will ever come to that.
—Haven’t you ever heard of the domino theory?
—That domino business is for the birds, cultures don’t behave like little flat black blocks lined up in a row and toppled one against the next. Leave it to a war hero to come up with such an arrogant idea. Dear Dwight Eisenhower, screw you. Yours sincerely, Brice. I mean, the contempt, the kind of ridiculous superiority it takes to compare societies of human beings—people, man, people—with dominoes. Listen, Kip, we’re the ones with dominoes clattering around in our heads, thinking that these people are yellow, rice-fed weaklings who are going to fall to Communism a country at a time, like mindless blocks of wood.
I have forgotten how the quarrel ended that night. Likely, I shrugged my shoulders and went off to bed feeling ashamed at my vehemence. On other nights the debate went on until it devolved into shouting, or simply wore itself out and meandered into silence. Though around Jessica he remained at least somewhat aloof, Kip could be brutal, especially when cornered. He might curse, he might sneer, but either way he would do everything possible to offset, if not invalidate, my rhetorical victory. He would suddenly become silent. Eyes rolled back under their lids, his tongue out and head fallen on his shoulders as—one hand grasping an invisible rope over his head—his whole body lifted, he bore himself upward by the invisible noose around his neck. The pantomime of self-hanging. Then would come forth a slow laugh.
—You win, Brice, you win, he would say. And I’d know I had lost. This mime of his never failed to invoke my deep defensiveness with regard to all things Kip. He knew me too well. No one, I expect, will ever know me better. But, of course, being known by another human leaves one open to incursion, to cast it in military parlance. Being known is being witnessed is being exposed is being made vulnerable is being placed in danger.
I can appreciate Kip’s impatience. —Brice, he said, one night after the three of us had eaten dinner together and Jessica had gone home, —Brice, you’ve got to stop this harping about Vietnam. I want to talk about love, you want to talk war all the time.
—Get off it. If you want to talk about love, maybe it’s better you talk about it without me around.
—Good idea.
—How come you’re always inviting me, anyway?
—Fair enough question.
—I mean, seriously.
—Because you’re lonely and love is compassionate.
This was a form of the peppers game, I had come to understand.
—Kip, seriously, just leave me out of it from now on.
—Hey look, Brice. For some reason, don’t ask me why, Jessie likes you.
When Jessica wasn’t around, Kip and I indulged ourselves in talk, at length and in as much depth as we could manage, about her. Who we thought she reminded us of from back home, what we thought she loved about Kip and what she didn’t, what her parents must be like, and so on. Who was Jessica Rankin?
She was from Ohio, a small town called Irondale, rustic little town in a rustic little county, as she put it: —Rusty little Irondale’s up above Steubenville, down below Canton, left of Pittsburgh, and pretty far to the right of just about everywhere else.
—Couldn’t be farther to the right than Los Alamos, Kip contended.
—He’s got you there, I said.
—Still and all, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than good old Irondale. We Rankins were considered exotic because my father was half-Sioux and even had a touch of Jewish blood in his veins where everybody else in town was Irish and Scottish—McEllerys and Crabbs, Barnhills and Scroggs, McYeas and McNays. My mother and father were Catholics and still are and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
I looked at Kip and half-smiled. I liked his new girlfriend.
—Apple pie was invented in Irondale. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?
—Now hold on a minute, I said. —Our mothers invented apple pie, not yours.
—Fireworks for the Fourth of July maybe, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on fireworks, but not apple pie. Apple pie is from Ohio.
The better I got to know her the more I realized what I liked about her was a simplicity, keenly Midwestern, that was and remains cut, or complemented, by a kind of hardness, complex and finally undefinable. It’s this odd combination that makes her special, to my mind. Jessica still eats Jell-O, for instance, and relishes its goofiness even as she truly loves the way it tastes. I have seen her make pineapple upside-down cake and then box and mail it to a friend on the West Coast with a note that reads, “Hope this finds you right side up.” I’ve seen her serve dumbfounded New York friends a politically incorrect dinner of Southern fried chicken—dipped in enriched, bleached white flour, fried in bacon drippings—and mashed potatoes and gravy, followed by banana cream pie and whipped cream. It’s a charming perversity, given she usually lives on vegetables and water, and it is something I will always love about her. Jess and Ariel have made, on special occasions, delicacies like caramel corn balls, and fudge with walnuts, and I have eaten them without complaining even though they’re so sweet they make my teeth curl.
Stories about her when she was a kid are Americana. She wore grass-stained white pedal pushers and she jumped up and down until she was nauseated on the neighbor’s trampoline, whose stretchy canvas sweetly stank of mildew in the humid summer. Because her sister was ten years her senior, Jessica was the baby of the family, and was treated like an only child. She got to stay up late and “help Pop watch the prizefights,” as he put it. She would see the big guys slugging it out on the black-and-white screen while her father and she ate barbecue ribs so greasy and sticky with sauce it took three napkins and a bath to come clean afterward. As the two men in the ring jabbed and roundhoused, her father would yell, —Kidney punch, did you see that? below the belt, the ref’s a bum. Once in a while she stayed up to help him watch a movie. There was John Wayne besieged at the fort, cloaked in his buckskins and bravery, and there was her father commenting, —No way are they gonna make it, and against all odds of hope in her heart in fact they don’t. It didn’t seem fair, the honorable dead draped all over the place after the final onslaught of the enemy. How it made her cry that the cavalry men didn’t win, but she held back her tears as the credits rolled.
—It’s way past somebody’s bedtime, her father said, and off she would go.
A good girl, was Jessica.
Then, something happened. She ironed her hair, much to the dismay of her father, freed it of its flowing waves. She stopped watching maudlin movies and eating greasy ribs. Over the protests of her mother, the Girl Scouts she refused to join, 4-H she begged off, junior prom and glee club she skipped, first boyfriend was the foreign exchange student, an introverted and articulate youth from somewhere overseas
, none of her friends knew where or cared much—spoke with an accent, wore odd clothes, what did Jessica see in him? She became an outsider. She lived on a tributary of Yellow Creek, could hear it below her window when she was a girl, as it made its way along toward the Ohio River toward the Mississippi and finally the gulf, until a scholarship got her to Barnard and she carried her delta blues records and rebellious attitude off to Manhattan.
—Not an exceptional childhood, she would say.
—All childhoods are exceptional.
—Exceptionally fucked up, Kip would add.
Kip and Jessica, Jessica and Kip, they were inseparables. When I went to bed at night she was there and when I got up the next morning she was still there. Sometimes the door to Kip’s room was open, sometimes it wasn’t, and I heard the muffled giggles of their lovemaking through its hollow frame, and caught a view of her in the darkened apartment from time to time as she walked past my room toward the bath, wearing a shirt of Kip’s maybe, maybe with one sock on and another off.
Was I envious? Why deny it. I came more and more toward the recognition that yes, I was lonesome—especially when the three of us were together, as we often were—and expendable, from their perspective, or so I saw it, and the more my envy grew. There was nothing to do about it, and I did nothing. I wasn’t able to conceive that my unwillingness to go out and find a girlfriend of my own had to do with a developing attachment to Jessica. Doing nothing was if not the healthiest at least the simplest response. It seemed there was no response that would cancel altogether my status as odd man out. When I found myself alone in the apartment, the place seemed too big, when I was there with the two of them it seemed too small. Trading roles with Kip, I now became the loner. Then I came upon the famous photograph of the Buddhist monk sitting full lotus in a swirl of flames in a summer street in Saigon and was truly radicalized. After that I would not be able to find words to voice how I felt, so fully had my horror matured beyond whatever articulation was available to me; after that I’d have to pitch my body and voice together against this thing we Americans were doing in order to make my convictions known.
The monk had taken his final step in June 1963, the same month Kip and I moved off campus. The photograph was poignant, awful, eloquent, provoking—I can to this day recall it in detail—the monk viewed from the side, seated in a lotus position with hands in his lap, his back erect and shaved head held high, at the center of a fully enveloping body of white fire. A phallic flare emanated from between his spread knees. Though his face was blackened, he appeared to gaze at a point directly before him, serene and imperturbable. At some distance in the background, other monks looked on, their robes flowing downward like inverted replicas of the upward leaping blaze that framed their brother. Dignity and strength, not a hint of agony, saturated the image. How did he do it? I wondered. How did he maintain such poise at death’s gate?
Inspired, I clipped it out of the paper and taped it to my bedroom door. The photograph became a powerful presence in my life, so much so that Kip knew better than to comment. The monk’s suicide and the purpose behind it worked at me, remolded me. We’d been in there with our helicopters, in the south, helping Ngo Dinh Diem put down the rebels. South Vietnamese troops in Hué had fired on peaceful demonstrators who protested a government order forbidding them to fly Buddhist flags. They raided Buddhist pagodas throughout South Vietnam, these wild troops under the rule of Diem, and arrested hundreds of worshippers. The United States complained, I guess, through our ambassador, but not with sufficient vehemence. I read in the paper that we were displeased by all this violence, and yet as if caught in a mechanical operation that disallows any change of course, as if compelled, we continued to back the regime, went on dispatching men and matériel under the presumption that as wretched as Diem was, Ho Chi Minh was worse.
Then, November 1963. A coup d’état brought Ngo Dinh Diem down. Both Diem and his notorious and rather glamorous sister-in-law Ngo Dinh Nhu, who only the month before had toured our country to gain support for the Diem regime, were assassinated. It seemed tidy, didn’t it? That happened on the first and second of the month. Kennedy formally recognized a new provisional government on the seventh, a mere two weeks before he himself was murdered. I began to understand our pattern was set and that there was a warp and woof to the larger world. Nothing thereafter, to my mind, wasn’t connected. It was a lesson I must have learned from Los Alamos—the lesson that public events are masks for private determinations—and it changed me. I had come to believe that on the world stage little occurred that was strictly coincidental. The puppet-masters’ strings got tangled from time to time, sometimes the lighting was wrong, too bright perhaps, and moving strings were seen by members of the audience who weren’t supposed to see them, but generally puppets rose and fell by the finger actions of artists hidden behind the curtains. Diem got his threads severed once he stepped outside the painted footmarkings on the ballroom floor. I wasn’t unhappy to see him tumble but wondered what manner of Punch would be brought out next, for the dance itself must go on, I knew, the dance could never finish.
Our course in Vietnam was definitive and inevitable, in my estimation. We were going to escalate, despite what we were being told, as surely as we’d intended to use all three of the bombs we had worked so hard to build back home. These early years in Vietnam were for me like the Alamogordo phase of the Manhattan Project—we were flexing, assaying, and were committed, as if by inertia, to going forward, no matter what, into the endless circle of killing and being killed. Hiroshima would, in retrospect, be cousin to the bombing of Hanoi. The macabre accomplishment of Nagasaki—which was as much a scientific experiment as a strategic act of war, a hasty testing of the plutonium 239 machine on live victims, a testing while the testing was good (they assumed it would work, but why not make sure?)—was no better or worse than the predestined, disgraceful final hours of exodus from Saigon that were ahead. Both marvelous nadirs in the country’s history.
—Broken record, I can just hear Kip saying it. —Same old song all day long. Same way my father used to talk about the bomb being okay, every day, okay, now you’re starting to sound like the flip side. You’re both broken records.
I thought of Kip’s father, remembered him walking me along toward the soda shop, insidious in that he was about to offer sweets to a child in hope of getting some information from him, and I felt upset at the comparison. Kip meant for me to feel upset, to be sure. Father’s son, I thought. I said, —Listen, man, the broken record was pressed by somebody else, not me.
He moaned, —I know, I know.
—You know, you know. You used to be with me on this sort of thing, Kip.
—You’re the one who’s turned into a fanatic, not me. You’re the one who used to be able to talk about other things besides war. But things change. And besides, Vietnam has nothing to do with the Second War.
—You’re wrong. It’s all the same war, first war, second war, third war, the one to come. What’s going on now is no better than what was going on way back when.
He interrupted. —You know what your name should be? It should be Skip, like a skipping record.
—Forget it, I said, amazed at how hurt I felt.
—All right, we’ll skip it.
He didn’t mean to be as surly as this, I assured myself. He was still my friend, my bosom friend. There was something wrong and perhaps he was taking it out on me because he was my best friend and could get away with it.
Here is a time warp if ever there was one. My sister on her porch dressed in a floral cotton dress trimmed in pink rayon rickrack shot with silver, smiling uncomfortably, saying, “Good gravy, Brice, why didn’t you say you were coming?” and turning her son rather against his will to face me, “Sam, this is your uncle Brice.”
“I know who he is.”
Sam yawns.
“Well,” says my sister, “aren’t you going to shake his hand? Where’s your manners?”
On the porch I shake my nephew’s h
and. We are going through the formalities of meeting twice, for the benefit of Bonnie Jean.
“Where’d you get that nice cap?” she asks the boy.
Sam looks at her and nods his head in my direction. “He gave it to me.”
“Did you say thank you?”
I can feel my sister’s eyes upon me, taking me in, and as a way of avoiding this scrutiny of hers I give her a brief embrace. “He thanked me fine, Bonnie. Now let me have a look at you,” and I step back. She glances down. The resemblance to Father, always evident in her prominent lips and pallid skin, is greater now that Bonnie Jean’s dark brown hair is graying and the half-moon creases at either side of her mouth have deepened. Her smile, seen but rarely by me, is uncannily like that of Father’s; an earnest, dry, undoubtable smile. Not that she’s smiling just now, of course. “You look great,” I say.
“I thought you lawyers were better liars than that.”
“I mean it.”
“Well,” says Bonnie Jean, “let’s don’t just stand here. Come on in, Brice.”
In the house there are things everywhere, things and more things. There are little potted cactus plants, piles of magazines, there are gourds in baskets, candleholders, toys, bikes and brooms and ice skates, there are hats, cassette tapes, a Christ on black velvet, skis in this corner and archer’s bow and quiver of arrows in that, stuffed bears, one chair piled high with metal clothes hangers, a Christmas wreath of plastic pine shaped like a diamond and hung with red chilies; indeed the whole place—front porch, carport, every window in the house—is hung with long strands of red chilies, mysterious bundles of dried chamisa. There is the matchstick schooner Dad and I built off and on over half a dozen summers, its masts and sails strung with cobwebs. The television plays soundlessly. On the radio, country music. Somewhere unseen, a washing machine pulses and a dryer whirs. A cat sleeps on top of the refrigerator, a yellow dog has spread himself to full length on the couch.
Trinity Fields Page 17