But the universal laws of shared war stories were abrogated when Wendy got up and turned on the lights and the mood shifted and she and her father could see that Singleton was under too much of a burden to speak. Her father understood. For every man in the VFW who told his story fully — albeit according to the rules, waiting for the baton to be passed in the form of a question — there was another man who sat mute.
Singleton gazed into his shot glass and said, “You know, my shit was a different kind of shit, and well, gee, sir, I wouldn’t even know exactly where to begin if I could recall it. I suppose I might start with Tet — and that’s just a guess — and take it from there, but all I can tell you is I was in for a tour of duty.” And then he choked up and let his throat clear, a few tears blurring his eyes. He was conjuring up images he had from news clips and the photos from Life magazine.
“Don’t worry, son,” the old man said, putting his hands on Singleton’s shoulders. “We should eat something, right now, pronto, before the rotgut starts to rot the gut.” And that was it. They were all back in the present moment and facing hunger they had put aside to listen to the old man’s story. He scurried around the kitchen, removing a string of franks from the refrigerator, cutting them apart, oiling up a pan and getting them sizzling and then bringing out a bowl of potato salad he had made that afternoon, and Wendy set the table. He said a prayer over the food, and they ate for a few minutes without a word, just the clink of silverware. Then he turned and said, “At least we weren’t yellow-streaked slackers. At least we weren’t that, son. We might’ve had our troubles but we weren’t hiding out in the Red Cross or home at the YMCA, or none of that.”
“No, sir, we weren’t yellow, not at all,” Singleton said.
* * *
Pulling out of the driveway, they spotted the Zomboid, moonlight glinting off the spokes of his chair, a cigarette glowing in his mouth. “You’d think he was put there just for us,” Singleton said. “For me and your father. You’d think God would think: Man, I’m not going to put a Nam guy like that next to a Second World War grunt, because it would be too obvious. But God says, Hey, man, it’s just statistically there, man. I had nothing to do with it. You get fifty or whatever vets living in the same area, it’s gonna happen. Don’t blame me, God says. You send them over from Flint and they’re gonna come back to Flint.”
“So long,” the Zomboid was calling. His hand, waving, was clearly visible. Wendy was at the wheel — he was too drunk to drive — and they slipped into the dark streets, past the moldering houses. The little boy was still in the yard, standing in attack mode, pointing his finger into the charge. Everything was navigable thanks to the glow in the east. On the radio Iggy was hollering against the fury of noise in a way that somehow seemed to match the stench of charred wood as it mixed with the faint benzene smell from the canal.
“We have a history,” Wendy said. She turned the radio down. “The guy in the wheelchair and I have a history.”
“What kind of history?”
“We were close when I was in high school. Then his number came up and he went over and came back and we were even closer and then he went back for a second tour.”
“How close,” Singleton said. His heart was pounding, the nut in his head beginning to throb. To go from an old vet, all that talk, everything that wasn’t said and was said, and then to hear this.
“Too close to talk about right now.”
If he had learned anything, it was that she made confessions when she was high. She’d hint at a fact, put something out there between them and let it fester until she was ready to talk. He’d have to be more patient, he thought. But he couldn’t resist and he asked again, how close was close, and as he’d expected, she remained quiet, her fingers curled around the wheel, until she was at her place, parking, and they went upstairs into the apartment and licked a tab and sat, waiting for the high to kick.
Even before she spoke — because she did, finally, when she was tripping — he understood that she had loved the guy in a carnal way. (No other word, he thought. He hated that word but it was the right one.) He imagined a puppy-dog teenage love, fumbling at first but then smoothed out to delicious first touches and then an understanding. He imagined Old Spice cologne on his shoulder blade, her nose down in there as he kissed the smooth skin behind her ear and then the nape of her neck in the backseat of a car. A young man whose draft number came up, went over and served and came back with his legs gone and his arms not working and a smart-ass new language and a new way of thinking. The new language was the biggest change, he imagined. She had had to confront that vacant look in his eyes and his physical infirmities but those were nothing next to the aberration of his language, the defeat that hovered between his phrases, the tight, edgy bark. Taking advantage of a temporarily clear mind — the kick hadn’t kicked yet — he tried to imagine it from her point of view, as a young woman, seeing him off, maybe even throwing a small party on the beach with a few friends, drinking beer, somber with the fact that in the morning he would be in boot camp. A beautiful young man with long cornsilk hair, almost girlish, and a smile (it was still there) that was loose and sloppy, who came back damaged. When he got back she was finished with nursing school and working at the hospital during the days, hours and hours of serving up medication — not drugs, she had explained, but medicines — and hanging out with the other nurses, smoking in the break room, listening to them gripe, worrying because they had the patients’ lives in their hands (the doctors were blunt, well tanned, always talking about their golf games). One wrong dose, one forgotten IV change, one wrong mark on a clipboard and death might be at hand. But when her boy was discharged from the VA he had stumps where his legs had been, still glossy and wet-looking, and she had tried to nurse him, helping him change the bandages, listening to the pure postwar silence between ranting and raving. Then a line had appeared and that line was a choice, to take care of him and live up to her obligations, the promises she had made to herself and her God (she mentioned that she used to believe, that her mother had been a devout Catholic), in honor of her father (she had mentioned that her father had instilled in her a sense of honor and a sense of humor), or find a way to let him go. It was easy to imagine the whole setup. His high was starting up, but he had a chance to hear himself ask if she wanted to talk about it.
“You want to talk about it?” he said.
Now the ceiling was sparkling with starlight and the moonlight streaming through the window became a rhombus changing shapes and texture, smooth marble one second — he got up and went over to touch — and then quivering and liquid the next. He went back to the bed, navigating through his high, still in control, he thought. When he looked again the moonlight was smoking, steaming. He’d seen that kind of moonlight in Nam. Maybe, maybe not. High or not high.
“I loved him,” she said, touching his shoulder, running her finger along his scar. “He was a sweet boy, just a kid, and then he went and came back and I tried, for a little while, to take care of him. I nursed him until I couldn’t handle it. I wanted him enfolded but of course you know they couldn’t do that. I began to think about men and war, about stupid men and stupid wars, about getting inside somehow and fighting for change…”
“Wow, will you look at that,” he said. The moonlight was striking the floor, vibrating the floorboards, which looked a yard wide, old barn-floor boards, and he heard a mooing sound and the cackle of chickens feeding and smelled the sweet hay as he got up and got his lighter and held it, monolithic in his fingers, with the eagle and etched words: Tet, Tet, Tet. On the bottom of the lighter was the stamp he had studied (he liked to imagine) countless times during the rage of firefights, to keep his mind steadied (he could hear the chur-chunk of the stamping tool machine at some factory in Pennsylvania) while Wendy, for her part, in her own high, also looked at it as he rolled it in his fingers, and said, Wow, wow, and studied it in her own way. For an hour, maybe more, they passed the Zippo back and forth.