by Dale A. Dye
“They’re having a hell of a time getting Vietnam guys to join. I guess I’m one of them.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ve had enough organizational stuff. Maybe it just reminds them too much of being in the service, you know? Maybe they think the last organization they joined lied to ’em and then sent ’em somewhere where they could get killed. Think about it, Ricky. A Vietnam Vet comes into an outfit like this full of old World War II and Korea geezers who tell them how it was in the good war, and how their war was a cock-up that they lost. Who’s gonna volunteer to be the whipping boy for what happened in Vietnam among old vets who don’t understand why it wasn’t the same as D-Day or Iwo Jima?”
They made love for a second time that night in Ricky’s bedroom, but it wasn’t the same. He was a little too drunk and she was sleepy. When she drifted off, he put on his clothes and walked home through a gathering snow storm. The luminous dial of his watch said it was Christmas morning, and Will Pud decided he’d gotten a good present. If he took it slow with Ricky, didn’t push her, and played the game carefully, he just might get what he really wanted next year.
j
Stosh Pudarski was sipping coffee beside the little plastic tree they always put on the coffee table when Willy woke up and walked into the living room on Christmas morning. Willy handed his Dad a wrapped box containing a new Cubs baseball cap and three pairs of the strong reading glasses the old man needed and kept losing.
His own present was a refinished and colorized photo of Stosh in his Navy uniform posing with his Mother who had a smiling little boy on her knee dressed in a Buster Brown suit and short pants. The old man had crafted a lovely frame for it and polished the wood so that the tight grain glowed.
“It’s great, Pop…really great. Thanks.”
“Merry Christmas, Vilhelm.”
“Merry Christmas, Pop. Sorry if I pissed you off last night.”
“You didn’t piss me off, boy. I shouldn’t have said what I did in front of Ricky.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“I guess so. She called while you was sleeping.”
“She did? How come you didn’t wake me up?”
“She said it wasn’t important. She just wants you to come by and see her when you can. She’s probably got a Christmas present for you or something.”
“OK, cool. I’ve got one for her too.”
When he called her back, Ricky said she was going out to Evanston to see her folks. She’d be back in a day or two and then she wanted to talk.
j
They met in a little off-campus coffee shop in the early afternoon of a blustery day a week later. When they were settled at a back table in the mostly empty café, he handed her a wrapped gift. It was a woman’s watch, a fairly expensive one, but Frank Hovitz had a brother-in-law who was a jeweler, so Willy Pud got a deal on it. She chewed on her lip for a while and just looked around the shop in silence, until a waiter brought them their order for coffee and croissants. And then she picked up the oblong box wrapped in bright Christmas colors. Ricky seemed unsettled by something and Willy thought maybe she’d had a bad time with her folks.
“Everything go OK out in Evanston?” She kept fiddling with the bow on the gift wrap and didn’t seem to want to open the present.
“It was OK, I guess. Typical Christmas thing…the usual crap, you know.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Not really.” She finally opened the gift and just stared at the watch. She didn’t try it on react in any way he’d expected. “It’s beautiful, Willy Pud. Thank you.” She closed the box and reached for her coffee.
“Ain’t you gonna try it on?” Willy couldn’t understand her reaction. Did he screw it up by selecting an expensive gift? Did she resent it? Did she have a thing about watches?
“I didn’t get you anything.”
“Just being with you is the only gift I’ll ever need, Ricky.”
The words made her wince. She pulled off a piece of pastry and chewed for a bit, staring across the table at the man who was trying so hard to pin her down, to take her in a direction she didn’t want to go. The Christmas trip to visit her parents had convinced her of that. The bickering, the minutia, the cloying grip of family obligation, the sheer mundane agony of it all, was what she desperately wanted to escape. That was why she left SIU and came to Chicago. She just couldn’t bear the thought of falling into that life-long agonizing rut.
And here was this older, totally naïve guy, clearly love-struck, sitting across from her with a worried expression on his face, a guy who wanted just the opposite of what she did out of life. Here was a guy who believed in so many things that repelled her. Here was a man who was scarred in so many ways, who would probably wind up right here in Chicago for the rest of his life trying to heal those scars with booze and carousing with his buddies in a workaday world that terrified her. She couldn’t fall into that trap, no matter how she felt about Wilhelm Pudarski. Ricky pulled a folded paper from her purse and slid it across the table.
“What’s that?” Willy’s guts were clenching. He knew something terrible was coming. He could feel this whole thing slipping away in Ricky’s attitude.
“Peace Corps,” she said. “I’ve been accepted for service in South Africa…as a teacher. I leave in around the first of May.”
“Jesus Christ, Ricky. Why didn’t you say something?”
“What could I say that wouldn’t upset you? I didn’t want you trying to figure out some way to follow me…or anything stupid like that.”
“You sure you want to do this, Ricky?”
“Positive. I’ve got to get out of here. I want to see the world and maybe help some people, Willy.”
“So how long is a gig like this for? How long will you be gone?”
“If you’re talking about waiting for me, don’t do that. I won’t see you anymore.”
Willy Pud just stared at her, feeling the anger boil in his belly. A guy could only take so much and then he had to face facts. She didn’t want him…much less love him. And all this time he’d been mooning like a stupid kid, mooning over something he could never have in the first place. Story of my dumb-ass fucking life, he thought, just one crappy deal after another. He felt sad and sick and stupid, clawing desperately for some way to hang on to a little dignity.
“Well, you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, I guess. Just wish you would have told me something before, you know? I just wish you wanted to hang onto what we had as bad as I do.”
“We never had anything, Willy Pud…not really.”
“Maybe you didn’t have anything but I damn sure did…or thought I did.” He stood and reached for his jacket. “Sorry I didn’t measure up, Ricky. Sorry you think I’m such a loser. Good luck in Africa. You can keep the watch.”
The more he thought about it on the bus ride home, the more Willy hurt. He was a little surprised at how badly the break-up—and no question that’s what it was—made him ache. He shouldn’t be reacting like this, a guy who’d been through the stuff he had. He was emotionally damaged like a pimply teenager losing his first high-school crush. It wasn’t rational, but it was real. He sat staring but not seeing, slack-jawed and shocked, like combat survivors he’d seen too many times. He tried to dredge up the anger he was feeling when he stormed out on Ricky, but his indignation always gave way to a certain soul-crushing sorrow. Willy Pud didn’t know what to do and he didn’t much care, as he left the bus at his stop and walked through slushy streets back to the apartment.
j
He quit school in mid-March 1975 and went to work with his Dad as a work-for-hire helper on various carpentry jobs. He had never been any kind of exemplary student, but that didn’t keep the advisors and counselors from trying to talk him out of leaving the University of Chicago. Willy listened politely but never changed his mind about dropping out of college. It seemed about time for him to get a realistic grip and loo
k for productive work that didn’t lead him down a long academic tunnel toward the unknown. What he needed was a drone job, a pay-as-you-go, take-it-as-it-comes gig that covered the loss of his GI Bill checks and didn’t give him a lot of time for moping.
On nights when he drank too much—and that was most nights since Christmas—he still felt the ache of losing Ricky. He picked up a few loose women more his own age and background and did his share of sweaty fucking, but none of it ever meant anything beyond release. The kind of woman who responded to Willy Pud’s advances was not the kind of female who made long-term commitments. The ones he dragged out of Hogan’s when the need arose were usually just going along to say they fucked that guy there in the picture on the wall wearing the Medal of Honor. If it worked for them, it was good enough for Willy Pud.
On a Friday night in late April, after a long day helping to renovate a west side brownstone for some new owners, he passed up a ride and his usual watering stop at Hogan’s. The weather was beginning to warm and a long walk would help soothe the aches in his muscles he’d developed from hanging dry-wall all day. Commuters hustled and bustled heading home and the start of the weekend, but Willy just flowed through the pedestrians with no plans and no particular direction other than back to the apartment eventually. Ricky was probably packing for Africa now in her apartment just a few blocks from where he walked on a spring evening in Chicago. And in a little while, she’d probably be hooked up with some Peace Corps geek and trying to save the huddled masses yearning to be fed from the American tit. He wondered briefly if it was worth trying to contact her before she left. Take one last shot, hit or miss.
Entering their building, he ignored the mailbox and clumped up the stairs to the apartment. It was a disaster zone and he’d have to clean it up soon…maybe Sunday. The old man wasn’t home, but Willy didn’t expect to find him on a Friday evening. Stosh would be with Frank Hovitz and the crowd down at Hogan’s. There was no beer in the fridge. Willy had been meaning to stop for some on the way home, but he’d been thinking about Ricky again and as usual when he let himself go there, he forgot everything else.
He went directly to the cupboard where the old man kept an emergency stash of hard liquor. The current stock was a full bottle of Four Roses. He unscrewed the cap, tossed it in a trash-can and sat down at the kitchen table, chugging directly from the bottle, he tried to keep his mind in neutral, tried not to think about anything in particular. He chugged whiskey for a few minutes, staring at a spot on the wall where the paper was peeling. For some reason, Lucinda Harris came to mind. He ran into her on the L a week ago and she’d told him Ricky was still in town, doing a bunch of admin things required before she left for overseas. They didn’t exactly spit and claw at each other. It was a fairly civil conversation, but Lu Harris let him know she was glad it was all over between him and Ricky. She made several remarks that indicated her roommate was making a wise decision in running off to Africa and away from the likes of Willy Pud.
He got up and retrieved the bottle cap from the trash. If he sat there in the apartment and drank himself into a stupor, life and all the shitty turns it was taking would conquer. No profit in that, not on a beautiful spring day in Chicago. He retrieved his jacket and headed for the door. What he needed on a day like today was a little company, a little distraction.
It was unusually somber and quiet when he walked into the bar. A row of people he knew sat staring up at the new Sony Trinitron Hogan had mounted in a strategic location where his regulars could watch Cubs games without undue neck strain. Pale, flickering shadows danced across upturned faces as Willy slid onto a stool on the short leg or the bar directly facing the TV. The drinkers all along the expanse of Hogan’s bar were watching a game, but it wasn’t any sport they knew or much wanted to follow. It was the final quarter in the Greater Southeast Asian War Games—and the home team was losing.
Hogan walked down the bar toward him and pulled a beer from the tap. He set it down in front of Willy shook his head. “This OK? Or you want something stronger?”
Hogan knew. He understood. Hogan was the strong silent bartender who kept a taut cultural canopy over his emotions as did all the people who grew up in this neighborhood. While Willy stared up at the TV, showing film and commentary from something called Operation Frequent Wind, Hogan reached behind the bar and gently placed a bottle of Jack Daniels next to Willy’s beer glass. “I want you to know we…me and Maggie…we feel real bad about what’s happening over there.” Willy just nodded, his eyes frozen on the monumental rout he was seeing unfold on the TV screen. “You want me to turn that off?”
“Leave it, Hogan. It is what it is, I guess. Ain’t nothing I can do about it anyway.”
He sat drinking whiskey and chasing it with beer, trying to build a liquid bunker around himself as he watched the chaos in Saigon and on the ships at sea off the South Vietnamese coast. The old man slid onto a stool on his right and Frank Hovitz occupied the one on his left. Neither man said anything.
Willy glanced down the bar at the old timers, the people he’d known since he was a kid, since long before the Marine Corps and Vietnam. They snuck furtive glances at him occasionally, but quickly looked away when Willy glanced back in their direction. These guys wouldn’t say anything hurtful where he could hear it, but they weren’t the sort to suffer indignities in silence, not from an out-of-town ball club, not from the mayor or the IRS, not from the cops or some glib candy-ass on TV. Yet they held their peace, alternating attention between their drinks and the nagging news updates from a crumbling South Vietnam.
When a breathless correspondent reporting from Saigon introduced pictures of panicky South Vietnamese storming the American Embassy in an attempt to escape aboard the Marine helicopters bounding in and out of the city, Willy tuned into a few of the comments burbling up and down the bar in angry tones.
“We never should have got involved in that stinking mess over there.”
“How about the Kapinsky boy? Lost both legs…”
“Them fucking South Vietnamese are running like rabbits.”
“We should have turned that place into a parking lot years ago.”
“I told you so, didn’t I? I said this was gonna happen in the end.”
Willy Pud just sat silently, drinking the shots his Dad or Hovitz kept pouring. He couldn’t hear the commentary or the comments any longer. The booze was hitting him hard and his brain sizzled with a whining white noise. He waved both his hands past his ears as if he was swatting away a swarm of mosquitoes, but the noise wouldn’t abate. It seemed to build in intensity until he thought his eardrums would burst right there in the quiet bar.
His brain barely registered what his eyes saw on the TV screen. It was live reporting from a soon to be defunct South Vietnam, and aboard one of the American aircraft carriers, steaming offshore and being buzzed by aircraft of all types and descriptions, he saw a Navy deck crew pushing a Huey over into the sea to make room for more fugitive pilots trying to land and save themselves or the families they’d pulled away from the steadily advancing North Vietnamese juggernaut. Willy Pud felt like he’d gone over the side with that Huey. He could feel his soul sinking into dark depths. And two of the marauding sharks swimming in that water, grinning with mouths full of razor-sharp teeth, bore the faces of Salt and Pepper.
Willy Pud lit a cigarette and shook his head. No…they were dead. Had to be. So where were all the helicopters criss-crossing the sky when he needed them out in the bush? Running crowds burdened with kids, parcels and possessions scrambled toward the American Embassy. He saw images of South Vietnamese soldiers stripping and discarding their uniforms. They were running harder in the mass retreat than he’d ever seen them run in the attack. At the embassy gates, Asian mothers and fathers, faces distorted into grotesque masks by fear of an inevitable slaughter, screamed and cried for admittance or tried to toss their infants over the fence to safety. American Marines and civilians fought them off and chaos ruled in the land of the Lot
us Petal, the lair of the Snake Eaters, and the home of the Bush Beast. Watching it all with the only family he had, suffering with the other penitents at the Church of Hogan’s Bar, Willy Pud whispered a prayer for them all.
Stosh Pudarski watched his son suffer and tried to think of something to say. He felt like the cut-man in the corner of a losing fighter, staring at blood and bone and sensing vital nerve damage. There were words, standard platitudes, but nothing seemed right or sufficient as he watched his boy’s shocked expression. Finally, he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“You got nothing to be ashamed of Vilhelm. You didn’t start it and they wasn’t never gonna let you finish it.”
“Tell that to all the guys who got torn up or to the families of the ones who got blown away.”
Suddenly he was surrounded by people who all seemed to want to touch him. Guys he couldn’t name, people he barely knew beyond a casual round of beers, were stacked up around him like tent pegs. Maggie Hogan came out from the little short-order kitchen and kissed him on the cheek. “God bless you for what you done, Willy Pud.” And others chimed in a chorus that drowned out the TV.
“Ain’t nobody blaming you, Willy.”
“You done what you could, boy.”
“You done what you had to do, that’s all.”
“Thank God it’s over.”
“God bless you and all them others, Willy Pud.”
When they returned to their seats, Hogan hit the remote control and snapped off the TV. “This round’s on me,” he shouted. “And I’m watching you barflies.”
Stosh Pudarski draped an arm over Willy’s shoulder. “I know you’re gonna wake up pissed off at the world, Wilhelm. Just be pissed off at the right people.”
“What? What’s that mean, Pop?”
“It means you can’t go blaming yourself or the others who did their duty over there. It means if you’re gonna be pissed, be pissed off at the politicians. You done your duty. It was them sold you guys out.”