It normally took five minutes to walk from the bus stop to Jack’s house, but Julie’s bad leg forced her to walk slowly. On a dare she’d once walked blindfolded and backward from St. Patrick’s on the corner, landing right at her front door. Blindfolded or not, Willa Street constantly drew Julie back. Here, her grandparents had raised her mom. Here, her mom had returned when pregnant with Julie’s older brother Jack, and again a dozen years later, after she’d divorced their dad.
Julie climbed the stairs to a warped stoop, faced a wooden storm door with half its screen in tatters and knocked lightly. The door creaked open, and she pushed it wide, a spider’s silk snagging her face and the stench of rotting garbage and stale cigarette smoke making her gag.
“Jack, you home?”
Julie peered into a small darkened hallway. Straight ahead, an open door showed the kitchen, its sixty-watt bulb reflecting off a pile of dirty dishes. To the right, a short landing led to a flight of stairs.
“Jack? Where are you?” Julie ventured the two steps to the landing, and with a diffuse shaft of light piercing the small, stained-glass window behind her, she cautiously followed the varnished hand rail until the shape of a body sitting on the top stair stopped her. Tremulously, she whispered, “Jack, that you?”
In jockey shorts, his bearded chin resting on his bare chest, Jack sat with his arms folded across his thin, naked thighs.
“Jack, you okay?” she asked gently.
“Julie?”
“Yeah, what’re you doin’,” she asked, her voice tentative.
“Go ’way, don’t bother me!”
In the shadowed stairwell his face appeared like a dark gray blot, but she knew her brother’s throaty voice.
“Get outta here. Don’t come any closer!” Jack barked, as Julie put her foot on the next step.
“Jack, what’s the matter?”
“Nothin’. I got business to do.”
“Business? What business?” Jack hadn’t worked in months. Not since Anna had left with their daughter.
“Sheriff came. Couple days ago. Tacked papers to the door. Did you know that Anna wants a divorce? Irreconcilable differences. All I did was call her to say three solitary words: ‘Will is dead!’ Julie, he ain’t never coming back.”
“I know, Jack, let him go. It’s been ten years. Jack, she’s a good woman, she loves you.”
“Just go away, I gotta take care of business.”
The stairwell was quiet. Julie looked it up and down like a mouse looking for a place to hide. She broke the silence. “So why are you sittin’ in the dark?”
Jack ran his hands through his graying hair. “Dark’s natural. It’s always dark, otherwise ya wouldn’t need light. Anyway it helps me think things out.”
“Jack, you’re not making sense. What’s the matter? What things?” Slowly moving closer, Julie was hit by the stench of whiskey.
“Nobody’s business, for Christ’s sake.”
“How can I help?”
“Can’t, unless you want to pull the trigger!”
Julie saw a flash of silver as Jack quickly lifted a small revolver pressing the barrel hard into his temple. Julie clutched the handrail, fell a step back, and struggled to catch her breath.
“What the Christ you goin’ to do with that?”
Jack’s thumb rubbed the treads on the hammer pulled halfway back. “I’m squeezin’ it and... Whammo!”
Inevitability Postponed
WHEN JACK DRANK ENOUGH HE INEVITABLY went from ranting to babbling and back again, mostly about how Anna, his soon-to-be ex-wife, was making a record for the divorce, broadcasting her disappointment that he never rose above middle management despite his relationship with the company president. Julie had heard it countless times. “Jack’s turning points” she’d labeled it: Korean War, marrying after Korea, raising his wife’s son William, their daughter Mona’s arrival after he thought they could not have kids. William’s death. But, this was different, he had never pointed a gun to his head. And, she was not so sure he would not pull the trigger; Jack was definitely capable of that.
“Jack, wait. Let’s talk! Why you want ’a go an’ do that?”
Julie saw the gun shaking in Jack’s hand.
“Because I’m fucked up, that’s why; can’t get out of it.”
“Get out of what? Tell me what’s goin’ on, what’s buggin’ you?”
“I’m spinnin’, woman, spinnin’. Can’t face it no more.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean—spinning?”
The hammer half-cocked, Jack began sobbing, his shoulders shaking. “I been drunk too long. Forget what’s real. Lost it. Other day I heard Dad’s footsteps doubling up the back stairs. Then I was standin’ at the head of his grave. I don’t even pass out no more. My eyes stay open. A bad dream?” Still clutching the gun, he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
“Jack... Jack.”
“Ah, ah, murderin’ bastard, a fool—drunk—freakin’ freak, man, I’m floatin’ away from everybody—and everything.”
“What do you mean, murderin’? What’re you talkin’ about?”
“I’m bringing the man down, ya hear?”
“What man?” She wondered if Anna had been having an affair.
“Yes, sir, I’m bringing the bastard down.”
Julie took two steps up. “Jack, put down the gun; let me help—promise I can, know I can!”
“You can’t, no one can. I’m unstuck from everything, mother fuckin’ earth and mother fuckin’ god—everything is—out of control! Do ya hear? Ev... everything. My mind goes in one direction, my body’s stuck here. I know one thing. Hamilton’s going down.”
“Hamilton? What are you talking about? Trent Hamilton? What does he have to do with anything? You haven’t worked for him in over ten years.” She begged in an unsteady voice, “Put the goddamn gun down. Please. Please, Jack, please!”
She took another step closer. “Come on, now, let me help. You’re not well. I’m calling the VA. You can get some sleep, some coffee, something decent to eat.”
Julie tried looking in his eyes, but he bowed his head, dropping the gun to his side. He grunted, “I lost it. Lost it. Can’t get my timin’ right, no how. I’m fuckin’ slippin’ deep. Ain’t got no options. Gotta remember, but gotta forget, man, day by day. Ain’t got no choice, but to blow it all away—puff.”
Julie wrapped her arm around his bent shoulders, took a deep breath and gently took hold of the gun barrel. Jack slumped his head between his knees and wept quietly, seemingly resigned to his survival.
For the moment, all that had to be said had been said — dust motes twirled lazily in the yellow, red and green shafts of light shining through the stained glass window. As Julie shifted, her brother slumped back onto the top landing.
“What happened, Jack? What brought this on? Today, I mean,” Julie enquired softly.
“Life takes on its own rhythm, doesn’t it?”
“What’s that, Jack?”
“I still need to find my place. I can tell you it’s not on this fuckin’ earth.”
Julie reached back and stroked Jack’s head. “It’ll be all right. I’ll help you. It’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, I gotta go to court. Got subpoenaed.”
“What for? Is it Anna or something?” Julie asked.
“No, the Army.”
“The Army? It’s been thirty years since you were in the Army.”
“Might be the past, but it never stops. It’s tracking right behind me all the time. That’s the thing.”
“What thing?”
“It ain’t important.”
Jack and Julie sat in a silence broken only by the dog barking from across the street and little girls giggling and jumping rope under the street lamp. Cinderella, dressed in yella, went upstairs to kiss a fella, by mistake she kissed a snake, how many doctors did it take, 1, 2, 3... .
Suddenly, everything went silent and Julie changed her focus from Jack to a name
lost in the vacuum of war thirty years ago. Then and there she decided to call in sick to work, something she rarely did, and follow Jack to court.
“What time do you have to be there?”
“At ten down on Lafayette, at the federal court over there.”
“I’d like to go.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going with you.”
“I don’t need you there; it ain’t important. Sorry I mentioned it.”
With Julie next to him now, Jack’s headache began to subside, but an unbridled palsy took hold of his hand, arrhythmic palpations took hold of his heart, a storm of low pressure shuddered through his body, the thought of the subpoena, its consequences, pushing everything else aside. He licked his lips, tasting the ghost of a stiff shot that might still quell the thought that Julie could bear witness to what had happened to Roger Girardin—a man lost in a winter of mayhem, a man whose fate he had withheld from her, a man about whom she filled a three-decade long diary of solitary conversations. A man, for all intents and purposes, present but invisible.
One-Lung Law Practice
1981–1983
NICK CASTALANO RAN WHAT THE LOCAL WHITE-SHOE firms called a one-lung law practice, a two-room office over Zorba’s Luncheonette, where he could set his watch by the smells that wafted up the ventilation shaft, where the only items he actually owned were a few law books, a chess set and a phone with an extension that sat on the secretary’s desk. Everything else, the desks, the credenza, a side chair and a gray steel filing cabinet was leased. Over the past few years he had done contract work for the VA, defending the agency when it had turned down claims and veterans sued. That work had dried up, so Nick resorted to advertising divorce, DUI and debt collection. Most days he stayed holed up in his office, working on cases, reading and playing chess with a few luncheonette regulars he had gotten to know, but on Fridays, to get away from the smell of fried fish, he left the office early and walked two blocks to the American Legion Club. One particular Friday, while Nick sat at the bar watching a Yankee shutout, Art Girardin, an infrequent patron, took up the stool next to him, ordered a beer and began to tell him a wild tale about his brother Roger, last seen twenty-seven years ago in a North Korean POW camp along the Manchurian border.
Art told Nick about the day a letter came from the Army notifying the family that it listed Roger as MIA, somewhere in North Korea. Four years later another letter arrived, indicating that the Army entered a presumed finding of death, based upon having received no further reports. Art never believed that his brother could simply have vanished. And years later, when families were raising issues about Vietnam MIAs, he began his own investigation by perusing declassified Army records. He told Nick he believed that Roger was then, and now, a POW. Art, picking up on Nick’s curiosity, excused himself, went to his car and returned with a battered briefcase full of “evidence” gathered over the years. Intrigued by what little he had read—an International Red Cross report listing Roger Girardin as a POW, and a later, official Army letter stating Girardin was MIA, presumed dead—Nick invited Art back to his office to make a better assessment of Art’s collection. More than curiosity, though, Nick’s instinct told him that this could be one hell of an opportunity for his struggling practice.
Art Girardin, slightly overweight, early-fifties, had worked in the Department of Transportation for the past nineteen years, spending most of that time inspecting roads throughout Connecticut. He had a ruddy complexion and thick muscular hands that did not go with the image of a guy who had painstakingly rifled through the arcane records of a complicated war. Now seated in Nick’s office, he started from the beginning.
“Yeah, this old bastard at the National Archives told me I was wastin’ my time. But I said to this little prick, get the goddamn records out, an’ let me decide. That was the middle of, no, beginning of ’77 when I first went to D.C. The fucking Army was, well, they were worse than the guy at the Archives.”
Nick perused one document after another while Art briefed him and let off steam.
“For almost three goddamn years I went back and forth to the Archives, running down leads going nowhere, others pointing to people who vaguely remembered a Girardin, writing admirals, generals, staffers at the Department of Defense, the U.N. Military Armistice Commission and the CIA. Then the minute I found a guy, out in California, who definitely could place Roger in Camp 13 in ’52, he turns up dead two weeks later. It was like either collective amnesia, or the thing was hexed.”
Nick tried to size up this man, who had worked himself into a lather, to make sure he wasn’t some whacko on a crusade.
“Yeah, useless politicians mostly humored me. Promised more than they delivered,” Art continued sullenly. “And depending on who was in, they talked to one or more of these asshole bureaucrats in the Defense Department.”
“Which ones did you contact?” Nick asked.
“Oh, Goodsmith, from Georgia, Walkovich, Welsh, Connecticut. Yeah, these suckers have short-term attention. They read from a patriotic script and eventually move on. But, I never let them forget me, what it means to find some poor foot soldier, the gullible kid who drank the Kool aide and enlisted. And who now may be living in hell somewhere.”
“Have you been in touch lately? With the politicians?”
Art threw his arms in the air. “No, these jerks all called it quits after a little publicity.” Art looked at his puffy hands. “I wished I had a crystal ball, so I could see what goes on in those bureaucracies.”
“They hide a lot, Art, they hide,” Nick commiserated.
Bemoaning, Art continued, “Now, well, the Pentagon dropped us. Like a sack of shit. They don’t even take my calls.” He slammed a fist into his palm. “Goddamn it, I want my day in court. This is my last chance. We gotta get them to listen, Nick. Can you do that?” he was pleading now.
“Art, before I say yes, I need to know what you’re trying to do. I mean, your brother’s been gone thirty years. A lot of boys didn’t come back. What is it, Art?” Nick looked deep into the man’s eyes.
“Listen, Nick, on my dad’s sixty-fifth birthday, I made him a promise that I’d find out what happened to Roger. My brother, dead or alive is over there, unclaimed. I’ve come to bring him home, the only way I know how.”
Nick had a military habit of standing ruler-straight in his 5’11”, one-hundred and fifty pound frame, which as of late shouldered the gathering disappointments of life. But tonight he rose from his chair, shoulders curved and an unmistakable weariness in his eyes adding ten years to his already advancing forty. He had grown up not far from the town center in a working-class family; his father had hammered home the idea that hard work built character. Yes, he knew about fathers, the heavy burden of expectations, the hopes unrealized, and the torment of those that lose or come close to losing their sons altogether. Drifting to the window overlooking West Street, he saw that the stores were dark, and his eyes focused on the reflection of his face—sunk behind a five o’clock shadow. At street level, people scurried for home. He took a deep breath.
Directions Decided
1981
NICK PUT THE KEY IN THE BACK DOOR OF THE SPLIT RANCH that sat isolated at the cul-de-sac of Coswell Street, feeling that what might appear to be the wrong move to the rest of the world might turn out to be the right move after all. He’d decided to take the case, despite having represented the government’s interests against veterans, despite Art’s inability to pay but more than a fraction of what it would cost to prosecute the claim. Nick told Diane his decision after dinner, when she and the children—Trish, seven, and Jamie, fifteen—were all seated on the tall chairs that surrounded the kitchen bar. The conversation turned to an obligatory appearance at the Bennetts’ next Saturday evening, to his son’s petition for new sneakers and his daughter’s recitation of the day’s playground politics. Finally, left alone with dirty dishes and over the endless murmur of the television in the corner, his rationale to Diane was that his practice nee
ded a boost, and one of the things he knew well was the ins and outs of veteran claims. As she dried the pots, she nodded her head—more a sign that she was listening, rather than approving. Nick said he thought representing veterans rather than fighting them had a better business upside. What he had not shared with Diane was his curiosity about the apparent dismissive treatment Art got from the Army, especially in light of the reports of his brother’s sighting in Camp 13.
Later on, when the children were in bed, Nick peeked into Jamie’s room to listen to him breathing, something he did every night since nearly losing the boy to an asthma attack as a baby. Nick recalled the hours spent watching Jamie sleep in a clear bubbled hospital croup tent, a speck in the Universe tenaciously clinging to life. Three days and three nights he had stared through the tent enveloping this human lump of flesh, whom he had only known for a few days but for whose life he would have traded places. He left Jamie’s door open a crack as he walked towards his study, mulling over his reasons for taking the case. Reasons beyond those he had given Diane, and not simply because he had developed a soft spot for veterans. Reasons to do with that image Art painted of his dad, how he had lost the will to live when the government marked the death of his son in a registered letter. Recalling how he had nearly lost Jamie and experienced an uncertainty no father should, Nick knew his reasons had to do with a man’s grief, a son unclaimed. Nick knew about feeling helpless and hopeful at the same time as he watched Jamie’s doctor pull an all-nighter—his stethoscope to the boy’s chest, palpating, peering deep into the body; running blood to the lab, scribbling on charts, searching for the pathogen destroying his son’s lungs. Jamie survived. This, he knew, was what drove him to undertake the quest for Roger, because he, like Jamie’s physician, was now linked to a son’s fate.
We Were Beautiful Once Page 2