The most prominent event after that was the sudden death of my father. I had no right to be as upset by it as I was. Bonnie Jean would have the audacity to make note of the fact some months later.
—You acted like you and he were the closest father and son that ever existed, Brice, she’d come to say, and she wasn’t wrong. I was broadsided by it. Patresfamilias weren’t supposed to die and furthermore mine needed to go on living so that one day, when it suited me, when I had left childish cares behind, I could come to terms with such matters as the ambivalence I’d always felt about his life’s work, so that one day we could attend to the business of understanding each other, even admitting to a certain attachment for one another. He wasn’t supposed to die yet. Who knows?—maybe he harbored similar ambient dreams of having that talk with me, the one we always avoided with such splendid success, the one where we’d finally see eye to eye. And so, broadsided. I’d become the child who failed to speak up in time.
My mother’s serenity in the midst of this was disconcerting, as well. When she gave me his wedding ring as a remembrance, I felt embarrassed, resistant, curiously obtuse. It was as if the world knew what to do, how to behave, while I had, at least for a time, tumbled off into a strange ignorance.
—One of the things we’ll all miss most about him, the minister whom I’d never met said at graveside, —was his love of knowledge. Know thyself was his belief, his guiding light, and it is a trait hard come by, but it was a trait that defined him above all others.
He was talking about my father? and I looked at Jessica, then around at the faces of fellow mourners for some confirmation that surely this fellow had got his eulogies mixed up. I mean, I loved my father, did I not? But he knew himself no better than I know myself, which means he didn’t know much. Then I thought, Christ Almighty, Brice, these are the last rites of the man who engendered you and listen to yourself rave as if you knew him, as if you ever knew who he was. I told myself, You’d best shut up and listen, you might learn something.
But it was over, too late, the little tribute had concluded and my mother approached the open grave after the four men had lowered his casket into the ground with tatty ropes, two on either side, not straining as much as I thought they might. I thought, What is he, a feather, my father?—then suddenly remembered thinking but my father was not so tall as that, recalling that cowboy song he loved to sing about his head in Colorado and his feet in Montana when he lay himself down to sleep, or was it the other way around, and my mother bent down and gathered a handful of soil from the mound of displaced earth beside the grave, and gently cast it over the lid of his coffin. Bonnie Jean went next, in tears, gathered an ample handful of dirt and followed suit. Finally, it was up to me to make the few steps forward, take up a bit of dust into my clenched fingers, toss it into the sunken rectangle, and after I did what was expected of me I walked away from the mourners—and the men with the ropes also left, coiling them into lassos for the next occasion.
During the trip home I found myself thinking about Ariel (whom we’d left in the care of her grandparents Rankin), about patrimony, about fatherly responsibilities, and before I knew it was speaking to Jessica about what had been preying upon my mind—wordlessly, unconsciously—since we’d arrived for the service.
—I owe him.
Jessica placed her hand over mine. —Your father?
—For letting me do things I had to do he probably didn’t like. When I was arrested those times, when the bar admission was held up—all that antiwar business must have hit him right where it hurts.
—That’s probably where you were aiming, wasn’t it?
—But he never let me know whether it hurt or not. No criticism, no chiding, no rebukes. I can’t believe it never occurred to me before. Let me ask you a question.
—Ask away.
—Do you think I’ve gotten complacent?
—About what?
—You name it. About you, my work, whatever.
—I don’t think so. Why?
—It’s like, the things that really used to bother me—it’s not that they don’t bother me still, but I don’t believe as much as I used to. I mean, the world hasn’t stopped ordaining rogues and bastards to run it, there are more wars going on now than when I was out in the streets protesting, aren’t there? And what do I do? Not a damn thing. I’m completely inert.
—No, you’re not.
—I am. Probably because I’m inured to it all.
—If you were inured, you wouldn’t be thinking about it. You might be less involved than you once were, but it’s not like . . . Look, no one’s stopping you from doing anything you want.
—I’m not being complacent about Ariel?
—What are you talking about?
—Do you think I’m a good father?
—Brice.
—What I mean is, I know it’s been more me than you who’s wanted to put off coming clean with Ariel. Maybe you’ve been right all along, about not waiting until she’s an adult to tell her. That’s what I’m trying to say, I guess.
—I don’t think that it’s a matter of coming clean—you make it sound like we’re some kind of obfuscators.
—Ariel’d want to know. She’s old enough to handle it.
—The question is, Are we?
—No, it’s more the question is, Am I?
—When do you want to tell her?
—Maybe we should talk to her now. I’m just thinking what did my dad take down into that hole with him that I could have known, or should have. Maybe nothing, maybe some wonderful things that he was afraid to tell me that I’d have loved to know. Not just out of curiosity, but to understand who he was.
—If you want to talk with Ariel, I’m right there with you. If you want me to tell her, that’ll be fine, too.
Ariel was the very image of youthful dignity when we arrived. She’d talked her grandmother into buying fresh flowers, and had made a sign, which was taped to the mirror in the entrance hall, that read, WELCOME HOME MOM AND DAD I MISSED YOU!—and when I gave her a hug she whispered in the most earnest voice, —I’m going to take good care of you from now on, Brice, because you’re the best father anybody could have and now that you don’t have your dad anymore I’m going to be your dad from now on.
I smiled, heartache flustering my efforts to maintain a calm veneer, and said, —You’re already a good daughter, you don’t need to be my father, too.
—But I want to be.
—All right, I said, and when I glanced up at Jessica from where I was crouched holding the flowers Ariel’d presented me, I saw in her eyes the very look I knew must be in my own: a look that declared that the time to talk with Ariel about another father had once more vanished, come and gone with the same precipitateness as that wartime apparition on temporary leave from battle who had visited us so many years back.
Life settled again afterward, but settled in a way subtly different from before. The incompleteness of my kinship with my father worked at me for days, for weeks. I continued to bristle about the eulogy. Know thyself, was this ever the true formula for improvement? Aristotle thought so. Yet knowing hardly guarantees acting on what is known.
I got to know myself in the weeks that followed my father’s funeral maybe more than was salutary. Or, not well enough; either way, off the mark.
One of the pitfalls of being a temporary anarchist is that your conscience is wise to you, can see right through you. Even as the tear-gas canisters used to dance and rattle hollowly at my feet, and began to cloud the air thick with the perfume of acrid chemicals, even as our cohorts were being chased by guardsmen with definite orders and live ammunition—Kent State was in the minds of we who were in the thick of it, and the colloquialism “getting busted” shone for us in its full spectrum of meaning—even as all this happened, as I ran and cursed the pigs and chanted, —Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh, and —One two three four, We won’t fight your fucking war, and even as I lay face down as I was being taken into custody yet again, and still c
ouldn’t believe the weight of a man’s wide knee on my back as he got my wrists together behind me, thought he’d break my arms like a chicken’s wishbone, and locked on the cuffs, a voice inside me spoke, and what it informed me was, This is all a fake, Brice. It’s a sham and you are a sham, too.
It wasn’t, though. Neither was the instance sham nor was Brice, that he who was me. Strange how it sits in my memory, one of the defining moments, just like when my father died, like now—like when Kip wrote and has come back. You get older, you go along, you are diluted by many labors and loves and necessities. And then, if you are awake and lucky enough, your rigorous complacency is challenged. And this is it. Third time, the charm. You try, you fail, and then either you try or else you don’t. Third time is the definer.
Which brings me back to one last thing. So many of my best moments were spent with Kip, and the unconscionable pang of jealousy I’d felt toward those refugees when he’d described engineering water up into their shantytown comes over me, jolts me, out of the blue, once more. Had I mythologized everything, carved it in marble, or framed it in gilt? No, hardly. But while the finest moment in his life might not be the finest in mine, I wonder if the worst moment in his was still the worst in mine. Probably not, probably no longer and yet I can still picture the look on his face when he broke attention during drill back on a flat field at the edge of campus, and began to study the crowd of hecklers to find if I was there among them. A hundred of us to the twenty ROTC men in dress uniform. We were protesting their presence on campus, the university’s tie with the military, and the inevitable had come to pass, where Kip was on one side of the fracas and I on the other. We chanted, they continued their marching drill as if we did not exist. My focus was on my friend and I was exactly divided that afternoon between crying out so loud that he would have to hear me, maybe even rushing forward to assault him with my bare hands, and withdrawing altogether. Torn in two, my instinct was to conceal myself from Kip in the throng yet stay with the demonstration until we disbanded into the early autumn dusk after their training session had concluded.
How does one compromise when what he believes and who he loves are at utmost odds, without losing one’s integrity and wholeness?
I walked home that evening, my breath forming mirages in the frigid air before me, and faltered between hope that Kip had not seen me there and hope that he had. Neither of us raised the issue that night, the next, or any other night. I thought that this was the worst moment in my life, just as I’d think later when he came back from Laos and left again and Jessica left too that that was the worst. Just as I’d think when my father died, that was the worst. Whether or not I’ve been fortunate in being able to cite these as the worst is hard to tell. On the one hand, the cornucopia of hardships available to any individual has forever been overflowing with variety.
Laotse wrote, “A good runner leaves no track.” Here is another question I’ve never been able to answer: had I been a good runner that October afternoon when we were growing into different men, Kip and I, and were going off in opposite directions, or was Kip’s the silence of a master runner? Had I kept to my course, held my bearings, and managed to elude the one obstacle I didn’t want to encounter? Or had Kip seen me and out of courtesy or perversion chosen not to challenge the tracks I was making? Whatever the truth might have been, the tracks seemed long since to have been lost. And here, now, they risked once more being uncovered for both of us to see. Well, I think, let us look. Let’s see what there is to see. Who knows but that Kip and I are building what we could both come to believe was a day purer than clean water in droughtland.
Jump-cut time to mid-decade, bleed space from Luang Prabang to Luang Prabang.
Kip was walking with Wagner as he did on Saturdays, every week. Other men walked the streets with them, all going to the same place. Luang Prabang was no longer the royal capital. Royalty now had no place in Laotian society, not since the Pathet Lao assumed power after the American retreat. Jump-cut time and bleed space, because Kip had found Wagner that day some years before, and he’d been correct in assuming Wagner would have thoughts about what they must do.
They had finished out their tours of duty as gentlemen should, but had not rotated home, as obligated. They simply declared themselves private citizens, not bothering with the niceties of discharge, and took up residence in Laos. Neither clung much to where they’d come from, but were absorbed in how they might stay where they were. Laos had given them each their first opportunity to act in a way that might be deemed responsible and honorable. They found, after the others had gone home, that they were not required to forfeit their United States citizenship, but did have to attend these weekly seminars—seminahs, in fact, was the word the Lao used for these annoying symposia, taking the English word straight into their language. And so now they were walking to the seminar run by the government and mandatory for all who had during the war shown sympathy for foreigners who’d backed the previous regime. A man in a uniform stood before an assemblage of some four hundred seated citizens, and declaimed for the entirety of the afternoon. He spoke of communal farming and mass ownership. He derided all forms of economics and governance that veered from the simple truths of socialism and communism. He abhorred private greed and extolled the virtues of hard work toward common good. His khaki cap he removed from time to time and shook it before him to punctuate a particularly important idea. He frowned, then laughed, was warm and then darkly serious. He paced. His energies seemed interminable.
When he finished, Wagner and Kip rose with the others and left the square at the center of the city to walk back to their storefront house near where the Khan and Mekong rivers merged, along a road where buffalo and cattle jostled among the occasional car and playing children, across the way from a row of beautiful wats whose layered roofs swooped low toward the ground and whose doors were decorated with hammered silver. The seminars were a necessary nuisance, but far better than the reeducation camps, where many of the anti-Communists were taken for periods of time that could range from months to years to forever.
Some Saturdays were work days, not lecture days. The men were assembled down by the river and given scythes and hand sickles to mow with. Work was regarded as important a part of their reformation as listening, and so on these work Saturdays Kip and Wagner could be found along the shoals laboring side by side with other citizens of Luang Prabang, some of whom had become their friends, cutting the long grass that grew there in the soft mud.
When they learned why the grass was being cut, their resolve to create a secondary business to the tourist business they’d begun was galvanized. The vegetation was being mowed in order that government soldiers would find it easier to spot people attempting to flee the country at night, across the Mekong, as they hauled their ramshackle boat or raft down to the bank and set forth across the dark, muddy water, toward the refugee camps awaiting them on the opposite shore. It was not the government officials Wagner and Kip stayed behind to live among, it was the very people who were sometimes taken away to camps deep inside the country, those who defected in the hope of settling one day somewhere else. Just as they felt they ought to be able to live where they wanted, these people should be allowed to go as they pleased.
All right, they thought. We will mow, and we will conduct our business by the rules during the day. And at night, we will get out of here those who want to go.
The two did not begin to identify how many cross-purposes they were working at. They were now reduced—or rather, extended—to living by intuition, wits, guile, impulse, spirit. It was Wagner’s potpourrism become political, and Kip rolled with it like a colored chip in a kaleidoscope.
Now they were finding their way, but back in the beginning, at the end of the war, it was clear they had a lot to learn. Neither Kip nor Wagner was much the entrepreneur. And so, before they began their tourism outfit, there came the misguided bicycle shop. The bicycle shop began as a repair shop.
Kip never rode bikes when we were growing up
—he rode horses or walked. He never understood how people managed to balance themselves along those narrow central horizontals forged of metal and supported by tires thin as sausage. But in Long Tieng he not only learned how to ride, but taught himself how to repair them, and made friends with some of the Hmong children there through this skill. The bikes in Long Tieng were rare assemblages made up of different sizes and kinds, not one unadulterated. Kip, on a day when weather kept him grounded, might repair a frame with junk metal left behind by construction workers or other pilots, glue rubber to the inside of torn innertubing, and come up with an object that acted like and resembled a bike enough to make some child happy.
In Luang Prabang gas was expensive, cars exorbitant, and since even the few roads that existed between major towns in the country were damaged during the war, or difficult to negotiate during bad weather, bicycles were the principal means of travel, aside from walking. “It all made such sense. We thought we’d hit on the perfect way to make a living.”
As it turned out, there wasn’t a bicyclist in the city who didn’t know how to repair his own. The business went under before it was so much as up. It was then they struck upon the idea that since they knew how to fly, knew the terrain, they would go into the tourism business. The enthusiasm they felt about this maverick new venture erased all sense of failure about bicycles. They came up with a name, not imaginative but earnest, Laos Tours, and began again.
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