I didn’t say anything, hoping the eighth graders would all just go away, which they finally did.
I thought so, anyway. But as soon as I let my guard down, Belman sneaked back up behind me and yelled, “BOOM!”
I nearly wet my pants and Greg fell out of his chair.
Everybody in the whole entire lunchroom laughed this time, Belman and his stupid friends the loudest of all.
Julie was already at Uncle Dex’s store when we finally made it there that afternoon for practice. Greg and I both did a double take because the ghost was standing there in our basement practice room with her.
“Easy, boys,” the ghost said. “Don’t go passing out on me now.”
“Yes, boys,” Julie said, sounding almost just like him. “Don’t faint or anything. It’s just us.”
“Just who?” Greg asked once he got his voice back after being startled like that.
“Just me and him,” Julie said. “And thanks for nothing, by the way.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What did we do?”
Julie sniffed. “Nothing. Just like I said. You could have at least had the decency to say something to my face instead of sending your, your, your —”
She was clearly struggling for the right word. The ghost leaned in expectantly, too.
“Your friend,” she said, gesturing toward the ghost.
“Sent him for what — to say what?” I asked.
The ghost took his cigar out of his mouth, examined it, then chomped on it again. “I just explained to your friend here that there are concerns that you boys have about her singing ability.”
“Julie,” Julie said.
“Julie,” the ghost said. “About Julie’s singing ability.”
Greg took a step back. “Uh-oh.”
“Oh, don’t be scared, Greg,” Julie snapped. “It’s all right. I can handle the truth. I’m not a baby or anything.”
Greg halted his retreat. “So he told you how awful your voice is and that you shouldn’t be our lead singer?”
“Yeah,” I chimed in. “And he told you how your voice sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard and everything?”
“And how your parents were probably just being nice to you when they said you had a beautiful voice,” Greg said.
“ENOUGH!” Julie shouted. “I get the picture!”
I realized how that must have just sounded — what we said about her singing. And I felt bad that the ghost had been the one to tell Julie in the first place.
“We’re sorry, Julie,” I said. “I hope that didn’t hurt your feelings and all. It’s just that, um, well …”
Greg finished for me. “It’s just that we didn’t quite know how to tell you ourselves. Not that we asked the, uh, the ghost to do it for us. Really, Anderson was supposed to be the one to tell you. Only in a nice way.”
I thought Julie was going to cry for a second, and I felt even worse for what we’d said. She bit her lip. “It’s okay,” she said, in a way that I knew it probably wasn’t.
Then she said, “It’s just that both my dog and my cat got sick last night, so I was already having a hard time today.”
Now I felt totally awful. “Oh man, I’m so sorry, Julie. Are they okay?”
“Yeah,” said Greg, also sounding worried. “Are they okay?”
Julie shook her head. “No,” she said. “They died.”
Greg and I were speechless. Greg got his voice back first. “Both of them?”
She nodded.
“The dog and the cat?” I asked, kind of stunned.
She nodded again, not looking up. Her hair had fallen around her face.
“We’re going to have a funeral service,” she said. “I guess you guys can come if you want. I was supposed to sing a hymn, but I probably won’t now.”
“Oh no,” Greg said. “You mean because of what we said about your singing? You shouldn’t listen to us. We’re total idiots about that kind of thing, Julie.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Total morons. We don’t know anything about anything, especially music and stuff. And really, you should be our lead singer, now that I think about it. You’d be the best. Really. Honest.”
“Uh, yeah,” Greg said, trying to sound sincere. But what else could he say? Poor Julie lost her dog and her cat in the same night!
Julie was shaking now. I still couldn’t see her face because of her hair, but I guessed she was crying.
Then she looked up. She wasn’t crying at all. She was laughing!
“You guys really are morons,” she said, gasping for a breath. “I don’t even have a dog. Or a cat.”
Greg and I were speechless again. I wasn’t sure I even knew this version of Julie — playing a practical joke on us. A very effective practical joke, judging by how hard the ghost was laughing, and by how red Greg’s face was getting, and probably mine, too.
“Not funny, Julie,” I said while gritting my teeth.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the ghost said. “Seemed pretty funny to me.”
“She definitely got us back,” Greg admitted.
I might have growled then. Julie just grinned.
The ghost stepped forward, sort of between us, and did that exaggerated throat-clearing thing people do when they want to interrupt — which was good, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next.
“Maybe we could get down to a little business?” he said in that gruff voice of his.
“What’s the business?” Greg asked. “I mean, is it something different this time, or the same as the last ghost we had?”
The ghost looked confused until Julie explained. “There was another ghost,” she said, already moving on from practical jokes and revenge and stuff. “From World War II. We helped him find out what happened in the war, how he came to be missing in action. And then he was able to find his peace, and finish his journey.”
The ghost nodded as he seemed to be chewing not just on his cigar but also on what Julie had said. “That’s pretty much the situation,” he said at last. “I guess I could use your help. It’s been pretty hard, I have to admit, being in this place. In between and all. Neither here or there, you might say.”
I finally set down my guitar case. Greg did, too. “Maybe we can start by seeing if you’ve been able to remember anything else about the grenade,” Greg said.
The ghost nodded, with a serious look on his face. He chomped down harder on his cigar, not that I could see a difference when he took it out of his mouth and studied it.
“Actually, something did come to me,” he said. “That word, ‘Fish.’ It kept swimming around in my head, you might say, until finally it hit me.”
“What?” I asked.
“That was his name,” the ghost said. “What we called him, anyway.”
Greg pulled off his beanie and scratched his head, obviously confused. “Him who? Whose name?”
“My buddy,” the ghost said. “With the grenade. Well, what I mean is it was my grenade, but he was with me when I had the grenade.”
“And when was that?” Julie asked.
“Not quite sure,” the ghost said. “I remember where, though. Sort of. What the terrain was like, anyway. I remember there were mountains, a lot of mist, real thick jungle, waterfalls, that sort of thing. And I remember they had us surrounded.”
“Who had you surrounded?” I asked.
“Was it the North Vietnamese?” Greg chimed in. “I bet that’s who it was.”
The ghost thought really hard for a minute, then he nodded and said, “Maybe.”
Then he continued, “Now mind you, it’s kind of like a snapshot I’ve got going here and not much else. Not right at this minute. But what I remember is just me and him — Fish — hugging the ground, our faces pressed so hard into it we were practically eating dirt, and trying to make ourselves invisible. We could hear them looking for us, what sounded like them jamming their bayonets into all the bushes around us. I didn’t dare even breathe and neither did Fish. They ke
pt coming closer and closer. No way they were not going to find us. And if they found us, no telling what they would do, but we knew it wouldn’t be good.”
I realized I’d been holding my breath from the minute the ghost started his story. My palms were sweating, too.
“That sounds more like a movie than a snapshot,” Julie observed.
“Maybe so,” said the ghost. “Little piece of a movie, anyway. Scene from a movie, maybe. Anyway, it was dark, but not dark enough. We could see out through those bushes — their pants’ legs and boots — that’s how close they were. And if we could see them, it was only seconds before they took a long and hard look inside the bushes and saw us, too. Never mind the bayonets. They would shoot. Only we probably wouldn’t be lucky enough to get killed outright. So I felt for it on my vest — my last grenade. Just barely moved my hand. Inching it along. Not wanting to so much as rustle a blade of grass or a leaf or anything.
“Fish saw what I was doing and we locked eyes and without saying anything I asked him if I should do it — go ahead and pull the pin and blow us both up before they got to us, and hopefully blow a bunch of them up, too. And with his eyes he told me back — ‘Do it!’
“So I did. I pulled the pin and didn’t even hesitate, just let go of the plunger —”
He paused and took a deep breath, almost as if he wanted to make the story more dramatic on purpose.
Greg was practically bouncing up and down on his amplifier. “And then what?” he asked.
“Yes, is there more you remember?” Julie asked in her kindest voice.
The ghost laughed. “Yeah. I remember the grenade didn’t blow us all up. Didn’t blow up at all. It was a dud.”
Greg was the first to speak. “And you got captured? Is that what happened to you and your friend?”
The ghost shook his head. “That’s the good part,” he said. “We were all ready to die for the cause — whatever the cause might have been, since I can’t remember — and instead nothing happened, and we were so stunned we just laid there not believing it, and meanwhile the enemy just sort of moved off into the jungle and we were left there still hugging dirt and pinching ourselves to make sure we were still alive and didn’t dream the whole thing up.”
“Wow,” said Greg.
“Yeah,” I agreed. It was a pretty amazing story.
Julie had another question. “What about ‘Z’?” she asked. “Do you remember anything about a ‘Z’?”
“Oh yeah,” the ghost said, as if it was no big deal. “That was me.”
We ran through every Z name we could think of, but none of them worked. The ghost — Z — didn’t recognize any of them, anyway. Zeke, Zebediah, Zach, Zane.
“How about Zephyr?” Greg suggested.
“Zephyr?” Z repeated, sounding tired. He was starting to fade.
“What about Zeus?” Greg asked. “Do you think it could be that?”
Z shook his head. He said something but none of us could make out what it was.
And then he was gone.
After a few minutes, we got the instruments out and plodded through a half-hour practice — with nobody singing — then decided to knock off early. We all agreed we would look up whatever we could find about Vietnam, and then compare notes the next day. Z still couldn’t say for sure if he’d served there — and gone missing from the Vietnam War — but it seemed like the best bet.
“I’ll see if my parents will take me to the library after dinner,” Julie said.
“And I’ll be looking stuff up on the Internet,” said Greg.
“You could also ask your father,” Julie suggested.
Greg shook his head. “No way. He won’t talk about that. Pretty much ever. I brought it up one time when I was little and do you know what he said?”
“What?” Julie asked.
“Nothing,” Greg said. “He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me for a minute and then walked away. The only way I even knew he had been in Vietnam was because my mom told me.”
Greg’s parents were divorced. His mom had a new family and lived in Indiana, which was where Greg went for a couple of weeks every summer to visit, but that was about it. The rest of his time he was here in Virginia living with his dad, who was a lot older than most of the parents we knew. Closer to grandparent age, actually.
“It might be good to ask him again,” Julie suggested, trying to be helpful.
“Probably not,” Greg insisted. What he didn’t say, but what I knew he meant, was that he was afraid if he brought up Vietnam with his dad, then it might make his dad start drinking.
“Well, there is one other thing,” Julie said, dropping the subject.
“Which is what?” I asked.
“Which is that you have to be the new lead singer, Anderson, since Greg’s voice keeps cracking,” Julie said, “and since, apparently, the two of you have decided that I am not a good singer, even though I know that I am. Only a different kind of good singer than you are used to.”
“Uh, I don’t think I can do that,” I said about me taking over as the lead singer.
“And why not?” Julie demanded. Greg just looked on, not saying anything.
“Because I have a really high voice for singing,” I said. “Like in the kids’ choir at church I have to sing the high parts of the hymns.”
Greg laughed. “He’s a soprano.”
Julie didn’t laugh, but I did see her crack a small smile. “Good. We will need something to make us stand out, besides the excellent songs that I have written, of course. And your soprano boy voice will be it.”
And with that she took off. Greg did, too, still laughing.
“Catch you later, Soprano Boy,” he said as he headed up the stairs.
I started to follow him, but I hadn’t packed up my guitar yet so I had to stay. Plus, I wanted to see if the ghost might come back now that everybody had left.
He didn’t.
Uncle Dex was busy at his computer behind the counter at the front of the store when I finally went upstairs with my guitar. Nobody else was around. He did a lot of his business selling stuff over the Internet. I used to worry that he didn’t have too many walk-in customers and that he might not be able to keep the store open. It had belonged to Pop Pop, Uncle Dex’s and my mom’s dad and my granddad, who died last year.
Uncle Dex reassured me, though, that he was doing just fine, so I believed him. I would hate for our family to ever lose the Kitchen Sink.
“I didn’t hear much practicing down there today,” Uncle Dex said.
I set my guitar case down and leaned against the counter. “Yeah. We had to discuss some things.”
“Like what?” Uncle Dex asked, not looking up from his computer screen.
“Like who’s going to be the singer,” I said. “And they decided it was going to be me.”
Uncle Dex looked up and smiled. “Congratulations. Was this something you were wanting to do?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Actually, not at all. Julie and Greg are already calling me Soprano Boy. Julie says we need something to help us stand out, and I’m it.”
Uncle Dex kept smiling. “Maybe if you guys just play loud enough, nobody will notice the singing and you’ll be okay.”
I brightened up when he said that. “Great idea,” I said. “I’ll just turn my amplifier all the way up when I play.”
“Just maybe not downstairs while you’re practicing,” Uncle Dex said. “Wouldn’t want to scare the customers.”
“Right,” I said. And then I changed the subject. “So, do you know much about Vietnam?”
“Whoa,” he said. “That was fast. From Soprano Boy to the war in Vietnam in one sentence.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I was just wondering about it. We haven’t exactly studied it in school or anything.”
“I don’t think they like to talk about it too much these days,” Uncle Dex said. “You know, since it’s the one war we lost and all.”
“We lost?” I asked. “America lost
a war?”
“That’s what they say.” Uncle Dex had stopped doing work and was facing me now. “Twelve long years of fighting, and that was just the years that U.S. troops were there — starting in 1961 until we left in 1973.”
He paused and then asked me, “You do know where Vietnam is, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “Not exactly.”
So Uncle Dex pulled a map of Asia up on his computer. He pointed first at China, which took up most of the space. “You know what this is, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s North Dakota.”
Uncle Dex smiled. “Funny guy,” he said.
Then he pointed at a land mass, sort of a very wide peninsula, hanging down below the eastern part of China. “This is Southeast Asia. On the right side going all the way down is Vietnam — fat at the top, narrow in the middle, fat at the bottom.” He pointed to the expanse of blue to the right of Vietnam and said, simply, “South China Sea.”
To the left of Vietnam were a couple of other countries whose names I’d heard of before but hadn’t ever seen on a map: Laos and Cambodia tucked right up next to Vietnam, and Thailand on the other side of them.
“So who were we fighting?” I asked, feeling dumb for not knowing.
“North Vietnam,” he said. “The country was divided into two — North and South. We were fighting to protect South Vietnam from the North taking it over and making the whole country communist.”
“Sounds complicated,” I said.
Uncle Dex took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “It was. Because not everybody agreed that the war was all about stopping the spread of communism. Some said it was like the Civil War here in the U.S., and basically none of our business. People felt like we shouldn’t send our troops over there and get involved. That it was between North and South Vietnam. And since South Vietnam had its own army, they should fight their own fight. There were a lot of antiwar protests in the U.S., especially in big cities and colleges.”
“Why didn’t we win the war?” I asked.
“That’s complicated, too,” Uncle Dex said. “North Vietnam was getting weapons from Russia and China, which both had communist governments, and the U.S. was worried about the spread of communism all over the world. You probably heard about the Cold War. Well, that’s what it was — us versus the communists in different countries, seeing who could control the type of government.”
Lost at Khe Sanh Page 3