To be honest, I used to burn inside whenever Pop said that.
Mostly because I know how dead wrong he'd be, if that had ever come to pass. Bobby met Daisy maybe twice before he left for basic training in the fall of 1968. That summer he was playing in the instructional league in Puerto Rico but got sick of the heat and the bugs and the food, and like a dope signed up for the Marines instead of seeing what might have come of his raw talent for the game. Bobby and Daisy got along instantly, Bobby taking her for a ride in the gleaming emerald green '67 Impala convertible that Pop had bought brand new for himself. I remember them coming back with ice cream cones, with both of them, ego-typically, sporting triple dips. After a brief stint at Camp Pendleton he was shipped to Vietnam, stationed who knows where, serving six months of duty until the night he was separated from his Marine platoon during a chaotic firefight and never heard from again. They searched for his body over the next few days and found his helmet and a bloody boot, but then the whole division had to quickly pull back under an intense VC counterattack and naturally the next thing that happened was a carpet bombing of the area, which obliterated everything living or dead. After the war he was on the long roster of MIAs submitted to the Vietnamese government during prisoner and bodily-remains exchanges, but even Pop knew that that was pretty much the end of the story for Robert Henry Battle of Whitestone, New York, and never fought the reality or was one of those people who made pilgrimage to Vietnam or agitated for more efforts from the government.
I think Pop made the best of the situation, at least for himself, for while he didn't have Bobby's body he could entertain the notion of Bobby Ongoing, which was unassailable and ever-evolving. Not that Pop was under any delusions that he was still alive somewhere, but he could imagine Bobby growing older, Bobby maturing and marrying, Bobby as a father and the scion of the family business, all this without interference from any Bobby Actual, whose presence, like all our presences, would have been an inglorious mitigation. Ma, of course, was inconsolable for a long time; she wouldn't talk much when she and Pop came over and just trudged about the kitchen wiping surfaces or occupied herself with pressing my shirts down in the basement or sweeping the patio. In her own house she wouldn't let anybody into Bobby's room, not even Pop, until a leak in his dormer after a bad storm eventually led to a smell that couldn't be ignored, and when Pop and I finally went in there, it was like a lab lesson in the varieties of fungi and molds, green-gray splotches on the walls, grayish shadings on the window panes, and then a cottony white fur growing in and out of his old sneakers and shoes. The room was so sharply musty that Pop had a contractor come in and tear it down to the studs and floor joists before building it back again.
Almost nothing of Bobby's was salvageable, none of his clothes or pennants or books. The only items Ma could keep were his many baseball trophies, which she soaked in a tub of bleach and then displayed on the mantel in their living room, where they remained until I moved Pop into Ivy Acres. They now sit atop the microwave in his quasi-efficiency suite, pedestaled brass Mickey Mantle — modeled figures, posed in their home run swings; these, by the way, are the only objects from the old house that Pop has kept for himself. It'd be squarely sad-sweet, for sure, except that Pop sometimes confuses whose trophies they are and will brandish one and compliment me on my glovework at the hot corner, or worse yet, talk about his own power to right center field, the bolting line drives that even Willie Mays couldn't have run down.
Bobby was by any account a memorable baseball player, and I won't go into it except to say that he was a speed demon on the bases and definitely the one with the flashy glove and power to the alleys and perhaps could have gone all the way, given the physique and skills he had. He was built like Jack but was more lithe than Jack could ever be, big and strong and flexible the way most of these extremely tuned and pumped up professional athletes are today but that back then was quite rare, especially as expressed (if you'll excuse my saying) in some neighborhood white kid. After the instructional league ball in Puerto Rico, he signed up at a Marine kiosk, leaving behind both a minor league contract and a full college scholarship, which would have put off his being drafted, and maybe changed his luck entirely. I'd already been a Coast Guard reservist, and during those years I spent every other weekend on a boat sailing mostly nowhere, which was perfect for me.
And like I've said — although I never said it to anyone — I thought Bobby was a fucking idiot, and on several important levels (and not because it was Vietnam, because Vietnam wasn't Vietnam yet, at least to us back here), but to my amazement nobody considered what he was doing to be a terrible idea, not even Ma, who seemed to think going into the service was like an extended sleepaway camp, and not even Pop, who thought Bobby should spend a year or two and take in the sights of Southeast Asia and just come back and lace up his old spikes for St. John's or the Columbus Clippers, no problem whatsoever.
Like everybody in our neighborhood Bobby was patriotic enough but it wasn't love of country or sense of duty or anything else so fudgeably grand and romantic that made him do such a thing. For no matter how excellent he was at something (and there were many somethings besides baseball, like acting and singing and then drawing, which I remember all the girls adoring, because he'd sketch them to look as lovely as they'd ever be, accentuating their eyes or lips), Bobby had a habit of cutting short his involvement before anything really great could develop. He was what people these days would term a grazer, a browser, a gifted Renaissance kid who never quite wholly commits (one could maybe think ADD). But really, if I have to say it, Bobby was Bobby because he didn't ultimately care. It wasn't a nihilistic streak, nothing dark like that, but rather a long-ingrained insoluble indifference, which sprang from how easily he could do things, like pick up any instrument, or a new sport, or have a beautiful girl fall in love with him, with what was always this effortless sparkling performance of Himself, which he was mostly unconscious of, and thus why most people instantly championed and loved him. And so you could think his predraft enlistment was just another circumstance to be easily sailed through, but I have thought that what it really was was Bobby pushing the venue, pushing the para-meters to include, finally, the chance of testing his mortality.
Which turns out is what many of us otherwise self-tucked in chronic safety will do, and with surprising regularity, whether we're aware of it or not.
If Bobby were still alive it is almost certain that he would have ended up running Battle Brothers; although we were seven years apart (Ma had two miscarriages between us), I would have simply put in a few years until Bobby was old enough and then gone off on my own and probably pursued something to do with flying. Although I always dreamed of being an ace of a P-47 Thunderbolt (long ago manufactured by Republic down the road in Farmingdale) or a Grumman F9F
Panther like in The Bridges at Toko-Ri, I didn't end up applying to the service academies and thus had no genuine shot at being a fighter jock and having a subsequent career as a big-jet commercial captain. I do believe I would have been like a few guys you hear about around the hangar lounge who try to climb the ladder themselves, average Andys who just love flying so much that they wait for their chance to pilot commuter puddle-jumpers or regional mail runners or even just drag those message banners above the South Shore beaches that say MARRY ME ROSALIE or MAKE IT ABSOLUT. Or if I didn't quite do that maybe I'd have my own little travel business, by handle of My Way Tours, offering eight- and fifteen-day guided re-creations of all of Jerry Battle's favorite trips ("Serengeti Supreme," say, or "Blue Danube"), because anyone knows that the best way to make a living is to spend the workaday hours submitting to your obses-sions and that everything else is just plain grubby labor. But that's the life of the charming and the lucky and the talented (i.e., people like Bobby), and for the rest of us perfectly acceptables and okays and competents it's a matter of persistence and numbness to actual if minor serial failure and a wholly unsubstantiated belief in the majesty of individual destiny, all of which is democracy's spell of The Possible on us.