The money in his jacket came from when he had worked as a chicken catcher and, since his aunt had died and left him her bicycle, as the mechanic’s gofer in Lost Nation. He had not turned over all his earnings to his mother and father; a portion, a residual, had accrued to him by mutual agreement, and he had saved it in a paint can with a slot punched in the lid. Nevertheless, from time to time his mother would come and need some of it, popping the lid off with a screwdriver, taking only what the bill required, pounding the lid back down with a hammer as Vollie watched.
A bird of prey spanned the top of the application form and bore on its breast the shield of the CCS&L while its wild eye hunted something beyond the paper’s edge. He printed the name, the address, the date of birth, the amount of the initial deposit. A line of dots invited his signature. He did not sign. The moment distended as in a spell of nausea. To sign was to horde and betray. It was to bring a curse upon himself. He didn’t recognize the force compelling him to do it. He didn’t understand why he wanted it so badly. He could not bear to do something so cruel and irrevocable to his own people, to take what was his away from what was theirs, when all they had they had offered him and would leave him when they died.
With a shock, he signed.
The curse began to work its evil at supper that same day.
“I got my eye on this Grand Prix,” he said.
“And what might that be, my lamb?” Annie asked.
“Mamma, that’s a—” Vollie took the plate of scalloped apples from his father but did not look at him, and Vollie’s neck and shoulders squared and he spooned the fruit and dribbled its browned sugar syrup on his rib chops. His face went hot. He said, “That’s a car.”
There wasn’t any question what his father would say about this.
Annie said, “And will you tell us about it?”
Potter said, “We got a car.”
“It’s a green car that needs a transmission rebuild.”
“And you can do that, can’t you?”
His father repeated, “We got a car.”
“Pretty sure I can rebuild it on this model, yes.”
“And then you could sell it back and turn a profit, you mean.”
“Yes, or I could—”
“Doesn’t smell like a profit,” Potter said.
“I could maybe.”
“People always want cars so there would be a demand,” Annie said.
“Smells like an expense.”
“You could put an ad in the church bulletin and turn it right around.”
“I could do that, yes, if I wanted,” Vollie said, “or use it for other things.”
“He doesn’t have any such intention of selling,” Potter said.
“Or you could park it on sixty-six by Marion Kierkoff. He’d let you. Where people could see it with a sign on the window.”
“He has an intention of one thing.”
“If I wanted, later, yeah,” Vollie said. “I could sell it up there or anywheres.”
“With a sign that says for sale and the asking price, the way people do, to give a sense of the sort of offer you would entertain, but you would be flexible depending on how much time and money you had already sunk into it.”
“One thing and one thing only,” Potter said.
“Or I could use it awhile first.”
“Intention of driving fast.”
“Oh, not too fast,” Annie said. “He wouldn’t drive it very fast. Would you, lamb?”
“Then he’ll smash up and break his back. I say no.”
“I feel sure you would obey the posted speed limits, wouldn’t you?”
“Mother, we got to say no at this time,” Potter said.
“I guessed you would say that,” Vollie said.
Annie got up and straightened the serving dish for the pork, the dish for the apples, the dish for the bread. She sat back down.
“I ain’t going to fight you,” Vollie said.
“Nobody appreciates how a boy wishes to go in charging, screaming his head off, and get things done,” Annie said. “This really is too bad.”
“We have to say no at this time. We got no spare. We got no cash on the margin at all.”
Vollie said, “You figure you win now.”
Annie and Potter looked at each other dumbfounded and mutually inquiring. “What?” they both said. “Win what?”
Potter’s old face was rumpled and blotched as a pie. In perplexity he said, “What is there—”
Annie said, “What is there to win?”
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT DAY Vollie fed and watered the hogs, cut school, biked into town, took the bus to Davenport, forged his father’s inscrutable signature on the document that demonstrated parental permission for recruits under eighteen, passed his physical, and was enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He made it back to Calamus in time to withdraw all but a dollar from his account at the S&L.
He told Potter and Annie, “I don’t have to explain anything. Here’s my money.”
“Jesus Christ, what have you done?” Potter said.
When Annie quit shouting she said, “I’m surprised they let a person just take himself away like that.”
“We could stop this if we went down there and I said that ain’t my hand that made the mark,” Potter said. “Except I figure you’d only find some other way.”
It hadn’t until that moment occurred to Vollie his swindle of forging the mark might succeed. He had supposed, without quite knowing it, that Annie would drive them to the recruiter in Davenport and Potter would say, That ain’t my hand. I’ll show you my hand. And come morning Vollie would be back feeding the hogs, school in daytime, and the Lost Nation garage until supper. He hadn’t thought so far ahead as finding any other work to consume his day, least of all soldiering, of which he knew not a thing; he didn’t even hunt, they had no time for hunting and no spare for shells. But his father foresaw his actions before he himself saw them. His father’s mind was a coat wrapping Vollie’s will, confining it but also comprehending it. Knowing it for him because he was too young yet to know it himself. He could act on his will and follow it, but he didn’t know it. He needed his father to tell him where his own will was taking him. Elsewise the crazy idiot thing, his will, racing avidly like it did, would have him shooting off the edge of the earth before he thought to pack a bag.
“That’s right, I’d find some other way,” Vollie said and went upstairs to the small room with the window that overlooked the yard. His coveralls hung from the hook in the closet door. It was only then he understood that nature had found its time and way of casting him out of the home he had never hoped to leave, and that a force more powerful than his will had employed him as its instrument.
2
Okinawa was a fever dream of mosquitos and Falstaff beer.
A Marine Corps rule said they couldn’t put Vollie on the plane to deploy if he was too drunk to walk unassisted across the tarmac and up the stairs into the bird. Why did command make a rule like that if they were going to give you liberty to see the town the night before you flew out?
A buddy he’d met stateside in survival training, a ranch hand from New Mexico, was teaching Vollie to drink himself sick. “The belly got to get swole up,” his companion said. “Loose that belt. Let the bubbles in down deep. You’re a beer camel now. They’ll put me on that plane in ten pieces is the only way. Tie me together in the cargo hold. We used to keep camels on the ranch. Two of them. Brother, could they drink up the whole irrigation ditch. See now, the way you doing, either breathing or drinking, that there is a mistake. You got to keep up breathing while the beer goes down. There, you got it. They’ll have to ship me in a crate because I ain’t walking.” He had a head full of cuspate teeth, and when he snored in the bunk the eyes drew open, showing only the grisly whites while
the irises pointed elsewhere within the skull. His name was Bobby Heflin.
They headed to a different bar. Everywhere in the street people were trying to sell them laundry detergent, beer and cigarettes by the case, shaving products, all the brands of home in bright familiar packaging with the power to transport him back to what already seemed a previous life: long afternoons under the lift in the dank garage, where a transistor sang catchy odes to gum and window cleaners and he timed the turns of a ratchet to the rhythm of the jingle beat.
They got to the new bar. Vollie took a seat at a long plank table where some squids were playing bridge, he could see it was bridge, concentrated and insular and leaning back to hide their cards amid the narrow quarters of the table like a crowded raft. Heflin went away for more beers. Vollie removed from his shirt pocket a letter several months old, soiled and worn in its folds from his opening and closing it.
The letter had been delivered to him on base in California and came from the preacher at home, writing for his father, saying his mother was in the hospital with hives, probably out of worry for Vollie’s well-being, but he shouldn’t think about it, or about them; he should keep his mind on what he was doing, keep his head down, and keep away from automatic weapons if possible. Which was funny; Vollie had already been trained to maintain and fire a .50-caliber machine gun.
Then back on the Okinawan street and everybody trying to sell him more detergent. Tide, the washday miracle, cleanest washes you can get. Winston, the filter blend that makes the big taste difference. Falstaff beer that satisfies your taste for living. A C-141 came in low enough you could see the light crenellating behind its engines and a red cross painted on its tail fin, so its cargo would be what? Casualties, he figured. Get the package with the spear and you’ll know enjoyment’s here, because it’s Wrigley’s here, the biggest little treat in all the land. All this while he stumbled in streets lit beautiful as Christmas yards, and every moment more beautiful as the tropical dusk settled in, the neon red lights everywhere invited him into establishments with silhouettes of what he had learned was a martini glass. You could also buy a squatting ape carved out of a hollowed coconut with a slot in its mouth for your spare change. You saved your money like that instead of blowing it on beer and trinkets to send to your folks who had no need of conch shells that carried home the sound of the soughing sea.
Vollie led Heflin toward a cocktail lounge. Or maybe it was the other way around, Heflin led Vollie. Or the other, other way: both of them led by the red neon figure of a martini glass suspended over the establishment’s door. The place inside swarmed with marines, you’d think an invasion was on, skinny pimpled white black, laughing idiots eager to get mown down to the ankles, reaped like corn, addle-eyed in the bar noise. Heflin had gone away again, because here he was coming back with two fresh cans. “Give me your life,” he shouted. Except it was knife he’d said, and turned the beers upside down and stabbed them on the bottom and showed how to cover the hole then flip it right side up, crack the top, slip the tab into the can, and shoot the beer. All this Vollie did, but the beer tasted wrong. His can had halfway drained, the black and yellow crest and the logo lion’s head leering, before it became clear the discombobulating foreignness of the beer consisted in its being hot beer, hot as blood. Then the beer was empty, Falstaff the choicest product of the brewer’s art, and Heflin howling like a spanked dog, and Vollie felt a baseball bat smack him in the eyes: felt that way, hold on, it was only the hot beer like a blow to the head. A girl—a perfect Japanese girl with shiny clothes—came by with a tray of Singapore slings and said, “Your job is to die,” except inflected like a question. “The hell it is,” he said. She repeated, “You want to buy?” Yes. And how. Another for his buddy? Yes, for the cowboy too. Look at his shark teeth. Don’t kiss him, your mouth’ll get stuck in there. And the girl went away. If you were under the influence they weren’t supposed to put you on the plane. It bewildered him the motleyness of what you could buy from a single market stall—only he was pretty sure he was still inside the cocktail place and only thinking about the market stalls flanking the street outside—all the products of home though he was in Japan, and also face paint, magazines, hi-fis, porno, decals extolling the honor of the Third Marine Division, the Fighting Third; all for sale from the same codgers in the street, no distinctions whatever to clarify what you were supposed to buy from the one stall rather than the other, which was too confusing, and that was why he wanted to go back under the neon silhouette of the cocktail glass into the lounge because the silhouette of the cocktail glass clarified things, made it plain what you were supposed to do in there. Except if he was looking at the sign he was outside, and how was he outside? He actually was outside after all. Because his drink was inside, so he went back in there. He sat on a high chair, and another shiny girl, a penumbra of light around her like a saint in a picture, wearing a brilliant, lithe, vertically striped dress like pulled taffy with a fluorescent light rod stuck in it she glowed so, approached him carrying a tray of plastic tumblers, red and frothy with straws and a quarter round of pineapple clipping the lip of the drinks and asked, Would he like a long beverage?
Later, he would remember the chair. A spindle-back chair that turned on ball bearings. He would remember he was sitting in this chair taking the plastic drink from the shiny girl, then not being greedy with the pineapple slice, taking only the one bite to avoid the sneaky shards of pine that hid in the flesh. And he would remember he had yet to pay the girl and turned in the chair with a dollar in his fist lest she vanish before she could be paid, a sudden swinging turn that swept the chair from under him, and the very next thing—no time elapsed at all, a perfect glue or weave between the days—the very next thing, there’s a voice, a staticky voice over an intercom saying, “Gentlemen, fasten your seat belts, you are landing in the Republic of Vietnam.”
* * *
• • •
YOU’D SEE A GUY was scared. They were all of them scared out of their minds even while stoned, but you’d see, what was it, the eyes too open, too reactive to movement and sun glints on passing scooter windshields; eyes too certain they could see it coming, the moment, the fell turn; a crouchy way of moving around even when the guy had no gear to hump; and it all amounted to a greed to go on living, laced with the knowledge it was not to be. Like, I know I ain’t getting out of here. And then a few weeks later, you’d hear that guy was dead.
There wasn’t any sense to make of this phenomenon. Unless God didn’t like you expecting too much and he punished you for it by giving you what you expected to get. And you might think, all right, then I’ll go ahead and expect to make it home. But that was just vanity. No available facts supported such a foolish assurance. Within a week of his arrival in the country, Vollie was picking shards of the head of a lance corporal off his shirt, a boy nearly his same age, and hair attached to the shards that smelled of smoke and Brylcreem.
You’d see a guy stop short three times while tying the same shoe, stop to look up at moonlight flicking off a rock while the river moved on it, stop and look, stop and look. And a month later that guy would be dead.
He knew a marine in Da Nang, a chancre mechanic who only ever saw combat when John Wayne got bayoneted at the Alamo on the TV in the hospital rec room—but scared as a crippled rat. What harm was going to come to him in a hospital ward in the big city where all he ever shot was penicillin? A shy marine, and he had that look of not just scared but, I see it coming. And then he was dead.
He had managed to get shot in the stomach on a park bench by a twelve-year-old boy with a homemade pistol, not even a VC, though you could never know for sure. And the boy said, once they caught him, tears gooing the face, a long breathless convulsive fugue of repeated something that turned out to mean, “I didn’t know it was loaded. It was a game. I didn’t know it was loaded. He gave me Percodan for my mother’s back sometimes. I wanted to show him my pistol. I didn’t know it was loaded. He gave me potato chip
s from his lunch outside in the parking lot. He was my friend. I didn’t know.”
The lesson was, anything you love so bad that everywhere you look you see how you’re going to lose it, that thing will be taken from you. Even your life.
So Vollie had a mantra—he had learned to meditate from Bobby Heflin, of all unquiet people, who’d read some magazine articles about Buddhism and a Buddhist’s all-eclipsing indifference to property, to life, to limb. Vollie had a mantra and he sat still in the dark on his bunk with his back against the plywood hooch wall at Dong Ha with his eyes half closed and his folded feet aflame from fungal itching, and he breathed deep and said within the mind, It don’t mean nothing. Into his consciousness came a vision how he would lose his hand, the right hand that played the melody on the Baldwin upright back home, and he said without speaking but enunciated as it were crisply in the mind, It don’t mean nothing. Not that the fear didn’t mean anything, or the vision or the pain, but the hand didn’t mean anything. Then the vision of reaching into a hole in the ground, a hidden tunnel entrance, with the left hand, the harmony hand, reaching into the ground in the jungle knowing the VC had a whole world of interconnected tunnels, whole supply channels underground. A whole division might be waiting down there to bite off the hand so why was he doing this? But he was doing it in the vision and saw with lightning clarity, the way amid the shadows of rain coming through thickening air at night the lightning makes a cut across the sky and everything comes alight as stark as noon, he saw the hole explode and the fire leaping out of it, and his own blood spitting on his face, and these two stumps at the ends of his arms like when a kid walks on the road in winter without gloves and bunches up the fists within the cuffs, except the hands were not hidden, melody and harmony, they were gone. And of the hands he said crisply in the mind, They don’t mean nothing. And he saw his silverhead father sneezing in the hog barn, ailing in his bed, and said, It don’t mean nothing. Meaning he didn’t mean anything, the aging man at home, the red and here-and-there peeling face awaiting his return. And he saw the farm with only his mother to work it, it didn’t mean nothing. Cracked drain tile clogged with earth and flooding the meadow, it didn’t mean nothing. The apple trees unsprayed and the fruit eaten to pulp by curculios, it didn’t mean nothing. And he got up and went into a tent where a couple of other dirt-caked convoy drivers lay on cots asleep before a TV hooked to a generator showing a police movie, all sirens and shadows and waxy hair, the unsteady horizontal hold on the black-and-white screen catching the moment, the scene, and losing it and the scene running away like a loose blind, then catching it again, shadows and then glowing white human faces close to the camera, and Lauren Bacall looked out of the convex box into the night that reeked of monsoon funk, with lust and reproach in her face as if to say, I dare you to forget me too.
The Volunteer Page 4