Chapter Twenty-One #5
Felix sat back against the tan seat of the booth.
He’d already been wondering the same thing, given where Tom was in his own life—and now there was this.
He was moved by Becky’s entire demeanor—so unlike the confident version of her he was familiar with, here she was agitated, conflicted, her hands trembling a little on the table between them.
He understood the additional gravity the question held for her.
It meant she was imagining all the possible outcomes for Skip, was having the worst thoughts imaginable, maybe she was even wondering if telling the boys might ward off any harm—though he doubted she went in for superstition like that.
She was just trying to do the right thing.
He told her he understood, then clarified that he couldn’t know exactly what she was going through, but some of the same thoughts had occurred to him lately.
Still, he was of two minds on the matter.
He apologized, shook his head, said only that he wasn’t ready.
Said he was still worried about the damage it might do.
To whom, Becky wondered. She knew, though—and she understood, even while she was surprised at how disappointed she felt.
They left it at that. Shortly thereafter, they hugged on the cold sidewalk and parted ways, moving in opposite directions but, they each suspected, toward the same eventual place.
—
In the middle of August, after eight weeks of basic, Skip came back to Bonhomie for seven days.
His blond curls had been razed to a stubble, his arms and shoulders were bulked up, his chest stretched the front of his T-shirts.
Carrying around all that muscle seemed to make him grin a lot.
He also wore something neither Cal nor Becky recognized, at first, because they weren’t used to seeing it on him. Conviction.
Tom drove down from Toledo to see him. Twenty-one now, Tom’s dark red hair was halfway to his shoulders.
His face was stripped of baby fat no one had ever thought about; he was angular, striking.
It was as if he’d had to go off to college (away from their watchful eyes) to fully come into his own body.
Cal, that evening, was aware more than ever that, for better or worse, these two young men were his sons.
Together under one roof, and soon not to be.
Theo Bach joined them for dinner. As rabbity as ever, glasses still crooked on his face (but no longer taped), Theo told them all about his nightshift job at the linoleum plant on the other side of the interstate.
Twice he said he couldn’t believe Skip was about to be gone. Twice he asked Skip if he was scared.
Tom wondered the same thing, because Skip dodged the question both times. Finally he said, “How stupid would I be if I wasn’t scared? Of course I’m scared. But I feel ready, you know?”
They didn’t. Ready for what, exactly?
Becky, who’d made Skip’s favorite, shepherd’s pie, lost what little appetite she had listening to them talk.
Skip put away two servings of it and cleaned his plate with his bread while telling them grueling stories about basic training.
The horizontal net of barbed wire stretched taut a foot and a half over mud they’d had to crawl through.
The five-foot-high wall they’d had to climb unassisted, with fifty-four pounds of gear on them and a rifle.
Skip had gotten reprimanded for trying to help a guy over the wall, he said.
His eyes lit up as he filled them in on what seemed to have been the hardest and most interesting two weeks of his life.
Theo shook his head, looking both amazed and horrified. “It sounds like hell.” He glanced at Becky. “Sorry, Mrs. J.”
Skip grinned and told Theo not to worry; the Army would give him one of those elastic straps so he didn’t lose his glasses when he went over the wall.
Then he looked across the table at Tom and asked what the big man on campus had been up to—leave out the sex and the drugs, please, old people are present.
Tom told them he’d helped organize TU’s first “Human Be-In”—which, when he described it, sounded kind of like sex and drugs on a lawn somewhere. Theo was interested—and grateful that they’d moved on to a new topic. He asked Tom if people showed up naked.
Tom rolled his eyes. Then, nudging his food around, he mentioned the anti-war rallies he’d attended, the march he’d participated in, the radio program.
Both Cal and Becky looked from one young man to the other, ready if not for an argument, then at least some sort of terse exchange.
But Skip already knew what Tom was up to.
They’d kept in touch—to the extent that, the day after Skip enlisted, he’d dialed Tom’s number and said, “You’ll never guess what I did last night, Buckeye. ”
He’d been right; Tom hadn’t been able to guess.
He’d been too dumbfounded, at first. To his thinking, his activism was a direct extension of Skip, because Skip had taught him not to give in to bullies, which usually meant being crafty about how you fought them.
So it was confounding for him to see his old friend and protector eager to go off and fight in a war in a foreign country.
But it didn’t put them at odds with each other.
Theo had a nightshift to get to. He said good night to everyone shortly after dinner and gave Skip an awkward handshake on his way out. “I guess keep your head down,” he said.
When he was gone, Skip and Tom opened fresh beers and toasted Vincent Deeds, now off fighting halfway around the world, where Skip was soon to be. Then they carried their beers down to the basement. A few minutes later, Becky and Cal heard laughter rising up through the floorboards.
Before they turned in for the night, Cal motioned her over and cracked open the door at the top of the basement stairs.
They caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and what might have been pot.
They heard the voices of men in conversation, and the wheezing, mechanical whir of the miniature trains.
Becky put her arm around Cal’s waist and drew his hip against hers.
She was so scared, and sorry she couldn’t keep them down there forever, safe, playing with the trains.
When they laughed, at least, they still sounded like boys.
—
After years of resenting those people who came to her only seeking to find out whether someone was dead or alive—as if she were a detective, or a missing persons department—Becky found herself strongly tempted to call out to her son, so that she might encounter silence and thus have some indication that he was still alive.
As time between letters from him became longer, it was all she could do not to cast a net into the spirit world by the hour, and rein it in, just to make sure it didn’t contain her son.
She couldn’t tell Cal that. She didn’t need to.
He was as eaten up with worry as she was.
They read the paper with trepidation, watched the news with knots in their stomachs.
They tried not to speculate on where Skip might be at any given time, or how he might be doing, because there was no point to it.
His letters, they realized, were like light from a star, momentarily comforting but independent of a source that might no longer be there.
They had worry, and that was all. Worry was the reason they got up in the morning. The fuel of their lives. They lived in deference to it, honoring that imaginary pact made by parents everywhere: if we keep worrying, they’ll be okay.
Jan. 10, 1968
Hey Buckeye,
How’s it going? Happy New Year, by the way.
They’re moving us around a lot but I’m still getting mail through this address, so use it if you write.
I got nine letters from you so far, thanks for those.
Sorry I haven’t written more. It’s not much like you’d imagine here, and nothing like the movies.
Do they show it much on the news? I’ve only seen one news crew here and they were standing around the base waiting for Tony Curtis or some other hotshot actor to show up, I’m not kidding.
Also I’m getting a Silver Star because of this thing that happened.
I took two pepper fragments in my left arm and three in my left leg.
(Don’t tell my folks if you happen to see them.) They pulled the frags out and gave them to me, I’ll give you one when I see you.
What happened was a month ago a guy’s medevac got ambushed and crashed right after takeoff, and we were nearby and pulled him and another guy out and got them under a lean-to.
I didn’t even know I’d been hit. I just had this guy’s head in my lap and he was bleeding and looking at me.
He asked if I was a doctor and I said no, but he asked again like he knew he really needed one, so I said yes.
He asked if he was going to make it, and I said yes.
And he’s just looking at me, so I said, Do you have a dog?
And he said yeah a beagle, and I said what’s the beagle’s name, because I’m thinking he might stay alive if he keeps talking, and he said Napoleon.
Also Napo, he said. Also Leon. Then he died.
I don’t mean this as a brag, Tom—that was nothing.
That could have been any day of the week.
The only reason I’m getting the Star is because I took a little hit.
You asked me in your last letter to tell what’s happening over here, but I don’t want you to have this stuff in your head.
The food’s rotten, by the way. We’re all starting to look like scarecrows.
We don’t get much sleep. Everyone I know is messed up one way or another, some of them fucked up forever.
None of us know why we’re here or what’s going on.
Remember how my Grandad and my Pop-Pop were vets who’d been to war and fought and all that?
And your dad? Why didn’t they ever talk about it?
Why didn’t they tell us how awful it was?
I don’t have a single memory of any of them talking about how bad it was—or what it was even like.
I keep wondering why they wouldn’t want us to know.
Don’t repeat that, I don’t want to make anybody feel bad, but it’s something I’ve been wondering.
I hate it here, Tom. It’s the worst place on Earth. But don’t worry about me. Tell my folks I’m fine and being careful and all that. Don’t come over here, whatever you do. See you in about three months.
Skip
Light from a star. The letter took almost three weeks to reach Tom’s mailbox in the student union at TU, but by then he’d heard from Cal and Becky, who’d heard from the secretary of war, by way of a grim-faced pair of lieutenants.
Skip had died in the Battle of Hu?, when the transport vehicle he and five others were riding in tripped a landmine.
He was being honored with a Purple Heart.