|
.
.
.
I was three days in-country and it was the middle of
the night. Somebody yelled “Sappers in the wire.” Tracers were going every
which way. Sergeant Tavares took off toward the perimeter. I followed, bumped
into a shadow, lost my M-16. There were muzzle flashes and Sgt. T went down.
His feet began to dig and push, then the air went out of him and he was
still. Somebody popped an illumination flare and I looked around for help.
There was a sapper ten yards away, leaning against the communications bunker.
His black shirt glistened wet below his throat. He and Sgt. T had shot each
other.
The flare floated above us, washing us with its
ghost-light, the dead, the dying, the wounded forever. The sapper’s grin,
pain plus hate, was directed at me. He lifted his weapon and cranked off a
short burst that took me center-mass, slammed into my flak jacket. I landed
on my butt in the mud and began to fade. Victor Charlie slid down the sandbag
wall of the bunker. His AK-47 wavered left, right, down. He screamed some
angry word, then used the last of his life trying to kill me. Something
jerked at my left foot and I passed out.
Every spring, Mr. Nelson would present his
World History students with this little book he’d written in college. The
assignment was to read and discuss it, then take a test. Sandra Hulett, who
liked me at the same time I liked Mignon Capps, told me it was a big deal to
have a teacher who’d written a book and I caught on. I asked enough questions
to get in trouble with my classmates and I made a B+ on the test, the highest
grade I made during four years at Nall County High.
The point of Mr. Nelson’s thesis was that
communism started out to be the salvation of the Russians, and maybe the
world, but ended up an evil thing. Millions of Russians died and communism
spread all over the world in an effort to destroy democracy and the American
way of life. Mr. Nelson had a dramatic way of demonstrating what the Vietnam
war was about. He’d get out a box of dominoes and set them up the way little
kids do, on end and an inch apart, in a row. He’d name the first domino
Russia, the second China.
Further down the chain was North Korea,
then Vietnam.
Next, he’d put a record on his old portable and announce that the Internationale
is the anthem of international communism. Then, with the music playing,
he’d push the first domino over and click, click, down they’d go. He’d pick
up the last fallen domino and say “America.”
That, and how to run a slant pass pattern and how
to French inhale and how to unsnap a bra with one hand, was about all I
learned in high school. When I told Mr. Nelson I was going into the Marine
Corps, he said he was sorry he’d not had the privilege of serving, but he’d
had poor eyesight. He said I’d be in the front lines of the struggle with
international communism, and I could be proud of that.
Was I dead or alive? I concentrated on
opening my eyes. If I was alive, I’d be in the muck of Con Thien and
there’d be a dead communist. If I was dead, there’d be the face of God. I got
my eyes half open. Light, brighter than any flare, was coming from everywhere.
A tall man, dressed all in white, was standing beside me. I was dead. God
nodded and turned away. It was Judgment Day.
I closed my eyes and waited to hear the angels
sing. There was no heavenly music. Maybe I’d gone to hell, so I opened my
eyes again. Thank God, there was an angel. The angel was wearing a Navy nurse
uniform. She looked like she could bite through a twenty-penny nail, or break
down and cry, or both. She placed a cool, hard hand on my forehead and said “Welcome
back, Marine.”
The VA puts you close to home, if they can, so
I ended up back in Alabama.
It didn’t matter to me. My folks were killed in a car wreck when I was six
and the uncle who raised me died while I was in boot camp. But, the VA meant
well. They sent me to the hospital in Tuscaloosa
because the one in Birmingham
had a full quota of one-legged Marines. The VA folks tried to convince me I
was lucky because I still had one whole leg and most of the other, including
a knee that still worked. I didn’t feel all that lucky but they had a point.
With the prosthesis they gave me, within six months I could hobble around
pretty good, even got to where I could work the clutch for a stick shift. The
VA discharge counselor suggested that, since the University of Alabama
was across town, I should take advantage of the GI Bill and go to college.
I let him take me to the campus, where everybody
had two beautiful legs and looked like they were glad of it. After one hour
of being felt sorry for, I told the VA guy I had a better idea. He was a
pretty good guy, in that he helped me with my plan and never tried to talk me
out of it.
What I did was, I collected my back pay and
bought a used ten-wide which was already set up on a red-dirt lot up in Nall County,
about a mile off the state route to Ebenezer and near a played-out strip
mine. It was furnished, more or less, good enough for my purpose. My plan was
to sit out there, in the woods, and figure out life. I planned to drink a lot
of beer while I figured.
But, before I went to the woods, there was
Chuck LeGrande.
I was in the day room, playing bingo, when one of
the tenders came with a wheelchair. I was already walking well enough to not
need the ride, but he insisted and wheeled me into the front lobby. His
explanation was that some big shot wanted to meet me. I’d already been
interviewed by my hometown newspaper, in connection with Decoration Day, so I
figured this was more of the same. While I waited, a guy in a blue suit came
in the front door and started sitting up lights and a big movie-style camera
on tripods. I asked him what the hell was happening. He said I was going to
be on television with Chuck LeGrande.
When you’re sitting around the VA, waiting for
your turn at physical therapy, you have plenty of time to read newspapers.
That, or just sit and stare out the window, like some did. I chose reading
over staring, so I’d heard of Brigadier General Charles Edward LeGrande, United States Army Retired, the candidate of
the Patriots Party for President of the United States of America. I knew
his campaign slogan was “Better Dead than Red.”
BlueSuit plugged in his lights and I was blinded.
He ordered me to keep my mouth shut, said the general would do the talking.
Marine PFCs are used to being told what to do, so I did. Through the glare, I
saw BlueSuit step behind the camera. We waited.
A hand dropped onto my shoulder. By squinting
sideways, I could see that it was attached to a large man standing beside me.
He cleared his throat, then declared, in a Fourth of July voice, "Young
men like this one sacrificed themselves to protect America from the godless
communists. To honor these heroes, I will continue the fight.” After that, he
said something about where to send contributions. He repeated his little
speech, this time in a Thanksgiving voice, then walked out the front door and
got into a black Cadillac. BlueSuit was still disassembling his equipment
when the handler carted me away.
Two days later, BlueSuit came back. This time, there
was no camera and no general, so they let me clip-clop to the day room on my
own, no wheels. BlueSuit said the hospital director was going to release me
and some other heroes to the Chuck LeGrande campaign. He smirked when he said
“Heroes,” but I didn’t think much of being called that, either. I tried to
pump BlueSuit for more information, but the most he’d say was “You’ll find
out.” Although I was about to be released, anyway--I’d already signed the
papers for my trailer--the Marine in me figured this was something I had to
do because somebody who outranked me said so.
There were three of us. The oldest, Arnold, a
black guy from up North, had been an Army tanker. He’d gotten his hands
burned off when he snatched a white phosphorous grenade away from a fifty
gallon drum of gasoline. The VA rigged him up with some metal claws, scary
looking things. The Mexican-American, Jesus, also ex-Army, had been a door
gunner until a surface-to-air missile took his helicopter down. For that, he
got an Air Medal and a free trip to Alabama
and a mostly plastic face. And, there was me, the leg-and-a-half white
Marine. There was no-one from the Navy or the Air Force, probably because
they mostly had some college and were smart enough not to get suckered into
this cockamamie project.
Arnold said a
paraplegic left over from Korea
told him Chuck LeGrande had been a passed-over captain at the beginning of
World War Two and would have been forced out of the Army, except for the war.
He spent the entire war in Washington,
DC, sucking up to politicians
and getting promoted. During the Korean War, he was back in Washington, writing reports about the
communist threat. In the mid-fifties, some senator with a hard-on for the
communists made him a brigadier general. Arnold said this deal was still better than
hanging around in the VA, even if ol’ Chuck was a phony. I didn’t argue with Arnold, but I figured
nobody made brigadier without having something on the ball.
Our job was to sit on the stage behind General
LeGrande while he made the exact same speech eight or ten times a day. He’d
come on stage, wearing khaki trousers and a khaki bush jacket--Jesus called
it his Jungle Jim get-up--and commence to speechify about sacrifice. At the
end, while the loudspeakers blared out God Bless America, he’d salute
each of us. When Arnold
returned the salute with his right claw, even white folks in the audience would
get misty-eyed. Then, some local preacher’d ask God to bless us and we’d be
back on the bus and off to another one-horse town in another of the dusty
states.
We did all our campaigning between the
Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains because, as BlueSuit explained to
us, Nixon was from California, the Yankees would mostly go for Humphrey, and
Wallace was coming on strong with his “Segregation Forever” thing in the
South. BlueSuit said it was pretty damned funny, how the other three would be
weakened by fighting amongst themselves, while LeGrande got a toe-hold in
places like the Dakotas. From that base, he
expected to take enough veteran votes from the others for a long-shot win.
The general rode in the Cadillac and stayed
in motels with swimming pools. The Purple Heart Posse slept on the bus, with
BlueSuit there to keep us from running off. About two weeks out, somewhere
north of Pierre, Arnold got up the nerve to ask our
candidate why he thought it was that people would vote for him instead of the
others. Ol’ Chuck invited us over to his Holiday Inn so he could give us a
pep-talk about his vision. He sat down with the three of us beside the pool
and, for about ten minutes, spoke directly to us for the only time in the
month we were together. He said we’d been wounded while fighting
international communism, which wanted to enslave us--he looked at Arnold--and
burn our churches--he looked at Jesus who, being a Mexican, was therefore a
Catholic. He said he was the only true warrior of democracy running for
president. He leaned forward, looked me in the eye, and said we were together
on a freedom crusade. Then, he stood up and told us it had been a long day,
we all needed some sleep.
I believed everything the general told us. Even
when the Nixon people released his entire military record, including the part
about no combat. Even after the bank tracked us down and took the bus, and I
had to pay my own way back to Alabama,
I still believed him. Maybe it was because it was the biggest thing a
nineteen-year-old from a county with one traffic light had ever been a part
of. I accepted the general’s idea that my war and his campaign were directly
connected. I’d been face-to-face with communism and I believed him.
There was another trailer on the other side of
the kudzu patch that was slowly swallowing my lot. Occasionally, I’d see a
man, small, white-haired, step out of the trailer and go around to the back
of it. He never hollered, never waved, never even looked my way. Without a
word passing between us, we had a deal--I’ll stay out of your business, you
stay out of mine.
Then, about a month after I settled in, I saw
some smoke, which looked like it was coming out of one end of my neighbor’s
trailer. Because I was well into my late breakfast of beer and potato chips,
it took a while for me to decide I ought to do something. I still had enough
sense not to try to wade through the kudzu, so I went out to the dirt road
that connected both of us to the blacktop, then around to the smoldering
trailer.
His trailer was about the same age and size as
mine. Except for the new double-wides, they all look pretty much alike,
narrow boxes made of thin, white aluminum, two feet above the dirt on
cinder-block columns. When I got there, I saw that the smoke was coming from
behind the trailer rather than from inside it. So, I stiff-legged my way
around the trailer, cautious, checking it out.
On the other side of his trailer was a little
trash fire that had spread to some dead weeds. That, and my neighbor trying
to push a car away from the fire and toward a shed. It was a 1950 Mercury
two-door, the James Dean kind, sleek, black, low-slung. He was looking over
his shoulder at me, so I helped him. Then, we got after the fire, him with an
old piece of blanket and me kicking dirt, which must look pretty funny when
it’s done by a peg-leg.
After the fire was out, he nodded at me, said “Much
obliged,” and offered me a Camel.
I’d left my Marlboros in my trailer, so I
accepted the smoke, pulled out my Zippo, and lit both cigarettes. “Been
living here for a while?”
He took a long draw on his cigarette. “Year,
maybe.”
“Where’d you come from?”
He looked directly at me and waited for a long
moment. “Long way from here.” He shifted his eyes to the Mercury. “Got to get
busy.” He moved toward the car.
“Well, see you later.”
He nodded, then dropped to one knee and began
inspecting a rear wheel.
I needed at least sixteen cases of beer to
make it through two months. It was cheaper to buy beer and cigarettes on
base, but each base places a limit on such purchases. So, every other month,
soon as I got my medical retirement check, I’d fire up my GMC pickup at dawn
and take off on a 400 mile circuit of the nearest bases, Selma and Meridian
and Columbus. Whatever was left of my income after I bought the necessary
stuff, I’d spend on food. I made a supply run the month after the fire. On
impulse, I bought an extra carton of cigarettes, Camels. I was too worn out
to deliver them when I got back, so I went over the next day. I knocked for a
while, then left the cigarettes on his doorstep.
I went back the next day and the cigarettes were
gone. I still couldn’t raise anybody, so I went around the house and stood
looking at the Mercury. It was in pretty good shape--good paint, decent
tires, no dents. Because there was still some teenage boy left in me, I
popped the hood. The engine was covered with a greasy rag, which I lifted. He’d
removed the carburetor, intake and exhaust manifolds, and cylinder
heads.
“I’m going to soup it up.” He’d come out of the
woods. He was wearing a faded brown hunter’s jacket, heavy cotton twill with
loops for shotgun shells across the chest and a game pouch in the back. In
one hand he held a single-shot twenty-gauge.
He saw I was staring at his shotgun. “Squirrels.”
I nodded about the squirrels, then I nodded
toward the Mercury. “Hard to get speed equipment for a flathead.”
“Yeah. Thanks for the cigarettes.” He reached
into the game pouch and pulled out two dead squirrels. “You up to some
squirrel and dumplings?”
During the whole time he was cleaning the
squirrels and making the dumplings, he said not a word. I’ve always respected
a man who’s serious about his work, so I just sat at his little kitchen table
and watched. Once he’d finished the interesting blood and guts part, my attention
wandered. I wished I had a beer but he’d not offered me one and I didn’t want
to sound desperate by asking.
I’d noticed a couple of pictures on the
wall when we came in, so I got up and took a look. I figure, if a man puts
pictures on his wall, it’s his way of telling you who he is. Both pictures
were of about a dozen men in their twenties or thirties, different men but
wearing similar uniforms--faded, too-large trousers, dark-colored shirts that
looked as though they were newly-issued, odds-and-ends caps that ranged from
seaman to infantry.
In each picture, the men fell into two
categories. Some had their caps cocked to one side and looked as though they
were laughing at the camera. The others were slouched and seemed to be
looking beyond the camera at something they’d rather not see. Those in the
picture captioned “Civilian Conservation Corps, Camp Hill,” had shovels and
hoes and picks slung over their shoulders. The men in the picture labeled “Lincoln
Battalion, Teruel,” also had their tools in hand, but their tools were
bolt-action Mausers.
The squirrel pot bubbled away, producing an aroma
that made my mouth water, while my host mixed and rolled and cut the
dumplings. Once he dropped them in, it was only a few minutes before we could
eat. He put two steaming bowls on the table and we made use of the salt and
pepper shakers. His silence, and mine, continued until the food was gone.
I pushed away from the table and stifled a belch.
“Good chow.” I wondered if there was any connection between the pictures and
the scar above his right eye. I wanted to ask, but he'd seen me looking at
the pictures and said nothing. So, I left it alone. We smoked a cigarette and
exchanged a few comments about the weather. I got up to leave.
“Thanks again for the smokes.”
Two months later, I brought him another carton
of Camels and a case of Budwieser. This time, after I knocked, I sat on a
stump and waited. I’d brought along a six-pack for myself, so I had something
to do. After about an hour, the door opened. He stepped over his gifts and
stood in the yard for maybe a minute, looking at me. He looked
discombobulated, maybe a hangover, maybe something else. He also looked like
he’d lost some weight, and he’d been small to begin with.
“I heard you knock, but I had to lay down for a
while. Come on in.” He turned around, picked up his beer and cigarettes, and
went back inside.
Since I had half a six-pack in my hand, I offered
him one. Because he was a Camel smoker, it surprised me that he shook his
head in refusal. On the other hand, he kept the case of beer I’d brought him.
He opened the door of his refrigerator and, with both hands on its top,
leaned over and peered into it. “I got some left-over meat loaf and I could
fry some potatoes. That okay with you?”
I said that was fine by me. I sat down and opened
one of my beers. He put the meat loaf in the oven and cut up some potatoes
and onions. Potatoes and onions frying smell almost as good as squirrel and
dumplings, and don’t take nearly as long. I held off on conversation until we
began eating. “My uncle was in the CCC.”
He nodded toward the pictures. “So was I.”
“I saw that. I was in the Marine Corps.”
“Figured something like that.”
I leaned over and gave my prosthesis a good
knuckle-rap. “AK-47. Con Thien. 1967. Third Battalion, Ninth Marines.”
He ran a fingertip along the scar above his
eyebrow. “Mortar. Jarama. 1937. Lincoln
Battalion.” He stabbed a piece of potato with his fork and started to put it
in his mouth, then paused. “You know anywhere to get speed equipment?”
“Probably find a place in Birmingham.”
“If I give you the money, reckon you could run up
there? I’d pay for your gas.”
The Mercury was the other thing about him I found
interesting, so I agreed to make the trip. As soon as we finished eating, he
gave me a list--Edelbrock dual intake manifold, Stromberg carburetors,
Offenhauser high compression heads, Mallory ignition, complete dual exhaust
system with Smitty steel-packed mufflers. He wanted the best and gave me a
thousand dollars to make sure I had enough.
The day before I went to Birmingham,
I drove down to Tuscaloosa and went to the University of Alabama library. I could’ve gone to
the Nall County Library in Ebenezer, but I
figured I needed something bigger and better. After I thrashed around for a
while, I spotted a girl behind a counter, beneath an information sign. Her
nametag declared her to be Hadley. My first thought was that Hadley sounds like
a boy’s name. My second thought was that her shoulders were broader then some
boy’s. It’s not that she was unattractive--she looked okay, in a library
assistant sort of way. It was more like she didn’t care, judging by her hair,
which just hung there, and her makeup, of which there wasn’t any, and her
faded sweatshirt, which hid any girlness it might contain.
“May I help you with something?” She sounded
better than she looked. A lot of people behind counters, when they ask you
that question, they sound like they don’t really want to help but they have
to ask. Hadley had life in her eyes and an honest smile.
“Please. I need to know something about history
stuff. I guess.” My face got hot and probably red as a beet but Hadley
was studying the list I’d handed her.
“Goodness. This is certainly an eclectic list.
American laborers in the Spanish Civil War--is that the unifying theme?”
I had no idea what eclectic meant and I’d never
heard of the Spanish Civil War. My first inclination was to say something
smart-aleck to cover my ignorance. I probably would have, except that the
openness of her face told me it wasn’t a put-down. She thought I was a
student and she was simply treating me as an equal. But, that had to be dealt
with. “I’m not a student here. I just thought y’all could help me with this.”
“This library is open to the community. I’m glad
to help.” She came from behind the counter and headed toward a long wooden
cabinet with hundreds of little drawers. Halfway there, she glanced back at
me, smiled, and said “Come with me.”
I backed my GMC up to the Mercury and dropped
the tailgate. I helped him pile the parts on a bench at the far end of the
shed. Then, after he coughed his way through lighting a cigarette, I handed him
a receipt and counted out his change.
He looked at the receipt. “You didn’t take out
gas money.”
“I kept my promise. I don’t want your money.”
He studied my face for a moment, then shrugged
and turned toward his trailer.
“I found out some things about those pictures on
your wall.”
He stopped and turned to face me. “And?”
“In Spain, you were in the International Brigade?”
“Yes.”
“They were communists?”
“Syndicalists, Anarchists, Communists, Socialists,
Democrats, you name it.”
“You one of them?”
He returned to where I was standing. Before I
could stop him, he stuffed a twenty into my shirt pocket. “That ought to
cover your gas and time.” He headed toward his trailer.
I followed him. “My uncle never would’ve been in
the CCC with communists.”
Again, he faced me. “Don’t know that I ever met
the man, so I can’t speak for him. The Civilian Conservation Corps tried to
make things better for the common people. The International Brigade fought
for the same thing. Some men gave their sweat for the CCC and their blood for
the Republic.” It was the longest speech I’d ever heard from him.
I’d struggled through several chapters in the
books Hadley found for me. I partially understood what he was saying, except
that I saw things in a whole different light. I’d read that some of the men
who’d been in the CCC had gone on to be labor organizers and some newspapers
called them communists. As for the Spanish
Republic, the picture
that stayed with me was of a foreign-looking man with a hammer and sickle
painted on his helmet. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt meant for the CCC to plant
trees, not communism. After the CCC, my uncle was in the miner’s union, but
he was never a red. Matter of fact, he was a Mason.”
He kept moving while I talked, going back into
the shed, removing one of the Strombergs from its carton and turning it
around and around in his hands. “Roosevelt did right, up to a point. Your
uncle was probably a good union man. Let’s leave it there.”
I wasn’t ready to. “Vietnam never wanted to be a
communist domino, and that’s how I ended up a peg-leg.” I deliberately made
my voice louder. “I helped out on Chuck LeGrande’s campaign, which was about
making a sacrifice for the American way of life.” The LeGrande spiel sounded
ridiculous, coming from me, but I was not about to back down before a
communist.
He jammed the carburetor into its carton and
tossed it onto the bench. “LeGrande’s a coward. You desecrated your own
courage for the ambitions of a fascist.” This time, when he stalked away, he
did not stop.
It could hardly be called a date, just
cheeseburgers and cokes and talking about my neighbor. Hadley listened for
awhile, then interrupted. “He sounds like a man who stands up for what he
believes.”
“Standing up for it don’t make it right.” I
wanted Hadley to know that I’d been tricked into befriending a man who held
with those I’d been shot by and campaigned against. “Communists make
you think they only want to help you, then they take over.”
Hadley held up her hand. The flash of argument in
her eyes gave way to something else, something sad but also cold. “He’s
alone and lonely. He needs a friend, not a judge. We all need that.”
She stood up, leaving part of her cheeseburger uneaten. “I’ll just walk back
to the library.”
,,
The next month, on my supply run, I loaded up on
Camels. My idea was to not actually say anything to him, just leave the
cigarettes on his door step and see what happened. Maybe he’d wave or even
come over to my trailer. We’d get to talking about the Mercury and just stay
away from politics. But, it was threatening to rain so I decided against
leaving the cigarettes outside. There was no answer to my knock, but the door
was unlocked and I stepped inside.
I remembered the smell from my first day
in-country, when I was on a burial detail for a VC who’d been hanging in our
wire for a couple of days. Heavy, putrid, the odor clogged my nostrils and
made my stomach flip. He was on his bed, dressed in his hunting jacket, his
arms wrapped around his shotgun, like they’d laid down together for a nap.
The blood this time was dried past glistening, but it had the same dark
finality as that of the sapper.
I needed something to stop my stomach from
churning, so I went to the refrigerator. On top of the case of beer he’d kept
for me was an unsealed letter. I guess he figured that, when I found him, I’d
want a beer.
He said anybody who smoked on top of lung cancer
deserved what he got. He said he was sorry about the mess he’d probably left,
but he’d rather pull the plug himself and not have to rot away. He said he
had no regrets about who he’d been or what he’d done. He said he had no
family, so I could have anything I wanted. It surprised me to see that he
knew my full name--I didn’t recall ever telling him that. At the bottom,
above his signature, were the words “No Pasaran.” With the note was the pink
slip for the Mercury, transferring ownership to me.
I keep the Mercury in the garage, along with
the Cherokee and the boat. The twenty gauge, I gave to our oldest son. He
loves to tell its story to our Republican friends at the country club. Once a
month, I take the Mercury out for some exercise. I always tell Hadley I’m
going to swing by the campus to check my e-mail, maybe grade some papers,
maybe run some errands around Tuscaloosa.
She always smiles and says that’s good, she has some papers of her own to
grade.
After I cross into Nall County,
the traffic thins. The weight of thirty years has caused the trailers to
collapse into themselves. They’re blanketed over--the kudzu finally won, as
it always does. It don’t mean nothing. My pilgrimages are more of sound than
sight. The Mercury is from the radio-only days, so I always bring a portable
tape player. I click a cassette into the player and turn the volume up. I
double-clutch down into second and floor it. The howl of the Strombergs
sucking air and the deep-throated rumble of the exhaust blend with the Internationale
and echo among the pines.
jimmy carl harris
|
