After another meal, Tim marched everyone to more classes—army rules, army chain of command, commo etiquette—“You heard ‘over and out.’ Well, this ain’t Hollywood, this is the real thing. ‘Over’ means ‘now you talk,’ and ‘out’ means ‘goodbye,’ and ‘over and out’ means dogshit!” Another thing that he learned early on was “Diddy dum dum diddy”: “Repeat what you just said.”
—
AFTER FORT GORDON (teletype), Tim got two weeks’ leave before deployment. He spent a week at home, but he couldn’t settle down to eat or to talk or to look at his father. He was so restless that he couldn’t wait at the airport for a plane to San Francisco, where he planned to stay with Aunt Eloise for a few days. He took the plane to Los Angeles, squirming in his seat the whole way. When he got off the plane, he decided that he couldn’t take a bus, or even another plane, up the coast. He had to hitchhike, and the most direct route looked to be the 101.
Texas and Arizona had not prepared him for California. The sunshine was brilliant but refreshing, and even when the ocean was invisible, Tim could sense that it was out there—not the flat, warm, green-blue ocean he knew from Maryland and New Jersey, but something colder, more beautiful, and more endless, lit by the sun to a burnished hyacinth color hour after hour for the whole long day. And hitchhiking was easy, especially in uniform. The first car took him to Venice; that guy offered him a hamburger. The second couple, about his parents’ age, took him to Morro Bay, where they invited him to stay the night. The next one to stop was a girl, maybe seventeen, who seemed unafraid, and took him up and down a steep grade—maybe the steepest he’d ever seen—to Atascadero. A Mexican fellow got him to Salinas, and another guy dropped him near the San Jose airport. The weather was perfect, and the hills to either side of the road were pale velvety green. At San Jose, he made his way to a different highway, one that headed to Oakland, and he waited. It was almost dusk when a pickup truck—a beat-up Ford—stopped maybe a hundred feet past him, and an arm waved to him out of the passenger’s window. He shouldered his duffel bag and ran.
A guy in a sharkskin suit opened the door and got out, throwing a large package into the bed of the truck, and gesturing to Tim to throw his duffel in there. A woman was driving, maybe Tim’s age. She had on a revealing beige cotton dress and high-heeled sandals. Both the man and the woman wore sunglasses, even though the sun was about down. He got between them, and at once began to regret it. “You in the army?” said the guy, as if that wasn’t obvious, but before Tim could speak, he said, “I was a marine myself. Out of Camp Pendleton. You know where that is? Down south. We’re coming from around there now.” He looked Tim up and down, then said, “We should feed this guy to the horses.” The girl laughed. “I was in the marines for eight years. You believe that?” Tim opened his mouth, and the girl laughed and said, “No!”
“Eight fucking years,” said the guy. “Thought I was a big shot. Who did Wayne get?”
The girl said, “A sailor.”
“Yeah.”
“He said.”
“Anyway, I’m out now. Never got to ’Nam. I don’t look that old, but I’m forty.”
“You look forty,” said the girl.
“Shut the fuck up,” said the guy.
“Well, you dress like someone’s dad.”
“I dress like your dad. That’s why you fuck me.”
Tim shifted his weight. They passed a sign that said “Fremont.” Tim looked at the speedometer—eighty-seven. The girl said, “Keep telling yourself that, asshole.”
There was a pause, and then the guy turned suddenly to Tim. “Where you headed, soldier?”
Without thinking, Tim gave Eloise’s address. The two exchanged a glance across him, and the glance clearly said, Nice neighborhood. As if to underline this thought, the guy said, “We can take you right there. No trouble.”
Tim’s skin was practically prickling, he was so sure that this man was dangerous. Here it was, 1966, and he was dressed like an old-time gangster from New Jersey: the sharkskin suit, right down to the flashy tie, and his hair had marks from being combed that you only got with plenty of Vitalis. He offered Tim a cigarette, which Tim took, and then the three of them smoked in the darkness with a thoughtful air as they sped toward Oakland.
The girl knew right where to go, as if she was from Oakland, and the girl and the man exchanged two more significant glances as they turned corners. Eloise’s neighborhood hadn’t started out nice—the houses were modest wooden ones, similar to one another and probably built from kits. But the yards were large, the trees and gardens had grown up nicely, and now it was a little on the prestigious side, or so Eloise had told his mother. You could see under the streetlights that nice cars were parked in front of them, too: T-birds, a couple of Chryslers, an Oldsmobile, a Cadillac. When the man peered up through the windshield, let his gaze drift along the block with a whistle, Tim became convinced that he planned to kill Tim, and maybe Eloise and whoever was there at the moment—his cousin Rosa, her baby. He maybe outweighed Tim by fifteen pounds, but a lot of that was belly. If he had to, Tim could take him.
The man read out the addresses in the dark, and the girl pulled up in front of Eloise’s place, now dimly visible, the porch light bright. The girl turned off the engine. The three of them sat there. Then the man shifted deliberately and stared at him. He said, “I like this place. I like this whole neighborhood. Why don’t you introduce me to your friends?”
After a moment, in the toughest voice he could come up with, Tim said, “Well, get out, then.” His plan was to grab his duffel bag and hit this guy behind the knees as he was heading up the walk. If the guy had a gun, and made Tim go in front, then Tim would stop suddenly and throw the duffel at the guy’s head. His heart started to pound. The guy opened his door and stepped onto the curb—not right under the streetlight, but well lit all the same. Tim eased out behind him. The guy’s hand slipped into his pocket, and Tim stepped backward, his hand on the rim of the truck bed, until he was out of the light. He reached for his duffel and pulled it toward him, then moved around the corner of the truck bed. He bent his knees and straightened them, bent them again, poised to spring. The man banged suddenly on the hood of the truck with both hands, and Tim jumped. The man laughed derisively. He jerked himself back into the cab of the truck and shouted, “Just putting you on, kid!” The girl sped away, leaving Tim standing in the street with his duffel in his arms. He trembled for two solid minutes, maybe from fear and maybe from readiness. Afterward, he remembered it as the first time he had ever been afraid for his life.
—
FOR SOME REASON, Tim thought there would be fighting as soon as the plane landed in Vietnam. It would be like that movie he’d seen years ago, Pork Chop Hill—lines of armed men in helmets, crawling from one ditch to another, only straightening up for half a second to fire their weapons at the unseen enemy. But the first thing he saw was air-force guys with their shirts off, walking around in the sunshine. The first thing he smelled, since it was morning, was shit disposal, a powerful combination of what was in the latrines and the diesel fuel they lit to burn it. The air was hot and humid, like Virginia on the worst day of the summer, but the light was bright and oceanic. There was sand everywhere. He realized he had landed at a tropical beach. The second thing he smelled was something sharp, yet floral: incense. That was the smell that told him he was far from home.
He handed in his paperwork, and twenty-four hours later, still foggy from the long trip, he was sent to the 101st, at Phu Bai, a flat, humid spot near the ocean, though no breeze seemed to blow—it was more like Maryland than California.
Their hootch was sixteen feet wide and thirty-two long, with a plywood floor. The walls were one sheet of plywood high, and above that, screen. The corrugated tin roof was weighted down with sandbags, and sandbags were also piled around the walls. Every time a rocket hit outside the hootch, shrapnel flew into the sandbags or over where Tim was lying in his cot, which was eighteen inches off the floor. The other p
rincipal feature of his hootch was clouds of mosquitoes.
Two weeks after Tim arrived, a rocket managed to make its way through the open door of another hootch. The roof was blown off, and five soldiers were killed. About ten days after that, a rocket hit a fully loaded helicopter on the airfield in just the right spot to blow up all the armaments it was carrying, in a spectacular explosion that jolted the helicopter into a nearby JP-4 that was holding five thousand gallons of rocket fuel. When that went up, the ground shook. Ten soldiers were medevaced out that evening, but then it was quiet. As the units pushed, day by day, farther into the hills, unbearably hot and much more humid even than Virginia, rocket attacks got less frequent.
He got used to his job, which had two parts. One was to drive his captain in the jeep out of the base to check on the signalmen. Some of these men were no more than ten minutes away but, depending on circumstances, could seem to be on the other side of the world. His other job was to get in a helicopter and fly out to the firebases. Tim was to make sure his guys had supplies, but the mortician’s job was to take the body bags and pick up the bodies. At first, Tim could not help watching. There weren’t too many casualties—a body every few days at the most. The creepiest part was not death, even gruesome rocket-attack death—it was the way the mortician took the dead soldier’s dog tags from around his neck, slipped them between the corpse’s two front teeth, then whacked them with the butt of his weapon to jam them into the gums.
When he drove Captain Bloom, they made their way sometimes in relative solitude and sometimes through droves of people—women, children, old men, all with the sun beating down on their heads. These people would be transporting whatever they could carry or push in what looked more or less like wheelbarrows. Captain Bloom babbled as they drove: Watch this, watch that, careful, do you see the child running there, stop for a minute. You could say boo to Captain Bloom and he would jump out of the seat of the jeep. Captain Bloom was a square-shaped West Pointer originally from Washington State, at the base since January. The object of their drives was to get to the spot where they could make as much contact as possible with each of their guys at the firebases in the jungle. At this spot, Tim would turn on the radio behind him in the jeep and call up each base to get a report. If they could not reach the base, they had to drive even closer to the edge of the impenetrable green vegetation, and figure out what had happened.
The scariest thing that happened to Tim himself was also his best story—he told it for days afterward. He was out at a firebase to the north, on a flat hill just above a rice paddy. The helicopter lowered itself and picked up the body bag and the mortician; then Tim jumped in. The copter started to lift off, and right then there was shooting from the perimeter. The helicopter jerked upward, and he fell right out. He must have been sixty feet in the air. Without even thinking, he rolled himself as if for a cannonball off the diving board. He dropped into the rice paddy, plopped right down into it like a tulip bulb. He was tall enough to get his nose out to breathe and his arm out to wave. He shook his head back and forth to toss the water out of his eyes, and saw the helicopter lower toward him. When the ladder dropped, he somehow grabbed it, and it yanked him right up and out, covered with mud and soaking wet. When he told the story, he said that there had been a loud sucking sound as he was pulled from the paddy.
They had been mostly inside their hootches for about two days, waiting out what was expected to be a typhoon. The rain stopped in the night—Tim woke to the silence. The air was still hot and wet. In the morning, right after breakfast, Captain Bloom was on him first thing—these storms meant havoc at the bases. They needed to communicate with them right away, find out what was going on. By the time they had the jeep ready and the radio stashed behind Tim’s seat, the sky was clear and the air merely damp. Tim drove slowly, creeping along the road out of the base. The parade of families had diminished but not halted; everyone was dripping wet.
The road hooked left, and Tim had to slow down. He turned the wheel. Captain Bloom had his weapon across his lap, and he was leaning forward, looking down the road. As Tim pressed the brake pedal, he just happened to glance to the right, and he saw a boy with thin arms and thick black hair staring at him, and then a grenade flew into the back of the jeep. It landed just behind the radio and rattled around. Tim yelled something, and the last thing he saw was Captain Bloom’s face turning toward him, and then fragmenting into the wet air.
—
LILLIAN RECEIVED Tim’s last letter the day after the telegram. It was wedged benignly between the electric bill and a letter from her mother. His handwriting, always nearly illegible, now looked terrifyingly meaningful. It took Lillian several seconds to make herself touch the letter, and then she could not help putting it to her nose and sniffing it. It smelled, like all of his letters from Vietnam, faintly of sandalwood. She stared at it for a long time before walking back to the house and placing it on the dining-room table, next to yesterday’s New York Times, which Arthur had been reading when the telegram arrived. He had left it open to an article about Nixon addressing the American Legion at the Hilton. Arthur had been supposed to attend, but had not done so. Now Lillian looked away from the letter and stared at the article. Nixon had declared, “Those who predict the Vietnam War will end in a year or two are smoking opium or taking LSD.” Lillian looked at the letter again.
Arthur had pulled a string, and would be driving out to Andrews AFB to watch them bring the casket. He was taking Dean. Debbie, who had already left for Mount Holyoke, would be home for the funeral. Tina had been in her room for twenty-four hours, working on a memorial painting. As Lillian stared at the letter, she had to put both her hands on the table to prevent herself from passing out and falling out of her chair. The letter was addressed to her—that’s what he had done since heading off to boot camp, address letters to her, not Arthur, knowing that she would read them aloud. She and Arthur had discussed this quirk, and they agreed that addressing the letters to her let Tim more easily reassure everyone that he was fine, that he had simply embarked upon a classic masculine adventure. Letters to his father might have consisted of only the fewest words—“Okay here. The colonel is an asshole. Shot two Cong yesterday.”
It was dated a week previously.
Dear Mom,
It’s been raining again, pretty hard. It’s such a swamp here, I don’t know how they stand it. Thanks for the books. I started the one Cat’s Cradle. It is pretty good. I loaned the one Dune to another guy in my hootch who was reading Atlas Shrugged so many times that his book fell apart, but when he started reading Dune, he finally shut up about it. I bought this Vietnamese guitar. It is pretty bad, and because of the rain, even worse, but I can get some sound out of it. I play it with one of the other guys who is from North Carolina and really good. His guitar is better than mine. Another guy, who is from Austin, Texas, plays the drum, which is really a mermite can, but he gets great sounds out of it. If I had a band again, I would definitely include a mermite can or two. Also thanks for the cookies. I think I had one. As soon as the guys saw them, they passed them around and they were gone. Captain Bloom says, “More more more.” I suppose you could say that that’s an order, Mom. Otherwise, things are pretty quiet, I guess the infantry is doing their job, which is called Operation Byrd, though I call it Operation The Byrds just for a joke. I guess we talk a lot about music here, because Billy Copps was in a band, too, before he came here. Austin, Texas, sounds like a pretty neat town.
Okay, well, I am going to wind this up, because I have to do some stuff for Captain Bloom. Don’t worry. Nobody gets killed anymore around here. The civilians always smile at us. Love to Dad and the kids. A message for Dean: Bite me.
Love, Tim
Lillian left the letter open on the table. She didn’t think she was going to be able to read it aloud. After a moment, she got up from the chair and walked out the French door to the pool, where she picked up the skimmer and walked around, removing leaves and unrecognizable bits from the surface of the
water. She looked out, down the hillside, toward the tree line. She had the strongest feeling that she had foreseen this, that a voice had spoken to her in the night, three nights ago, and said, It’s time. But she knew that this feeling was wrong, that nothing of the sort had happened. If it had happened like that, then all of this would be part of a pattern. But it wasn’t. Tim had vanished; that was all. He had escaped her long ago—as soon as they moved to this house. It was not that she had seen him more and more intermittently (at first a few times a day, then every few days, then every few weeks, then every few months, then hardly at all); it was that he had gotten less and less corporeal, at first visible from time to time, then almost always invisible, only manifesting very rarely in unexpected spots—at the bottom of the pool, in her shower, in the attic looking for something. It was quite likely, she thought, that he would manifest again. But this conviction was not something she planned to confide to Arthur.