I’ve always wished I had some good war stories for the beer nights at the VFW and the Legion. But the truth is, I never did see anybody around me get killed, though I saw more than a few men being loaded into field hospitals and choppers; and so far as I know, I never killed anybody, either, though there was a guy from Kentucky I thought about fragging sometimes. I did not become an alcoholic, my respiratory system was not tainted by Agent Orange, I was not angry with those who elected not to go (I would not have gone, either, if I’d known how easy it was to slip through the net), and I never had any psychotic episodes, not even when I was drinking the Everclear that sometimes got passed around camp.
While I was there, Susan wrote me three times, each time telling me how heroic she thought I was, and how she and David both missed the old days when we’d all been good friends, and how she was recovering from a broken arm she got from falling down on the tennis court. Tennis, she said, had become a big thing in their lives. They’d both been accepted by a very prestigious old-line law firm and were both given privileges at the city’s finest country club.
I wrote her back near the end of my tour in Nam, telling her that I’d decided to try golden California, the way so many Midwestern rubes do, and that I was planning on becoming a matinee idol and the husband of a rich and beautiful actress, ha ha. Her response, which I got a day before I left Nam, was that they were going to Jamaica for their vacation this year, where it would be nothing but “swimming swimming swimming.” She also noted that they’d gotten married in a “teeny-tiny” civil ceremony a few weeks earlier. And that she’d been married in a “white dress and a black eye — clumsy me, I tripped against a door frame.”
Well, I went to California, Long Beach, Laguna, San Pedro, Sherman Oaks... in three years, I lived five different places and held just about double that number of jobs. I tried real estate, stereo sales, management trainee at a seven-eleven, and limo driver at a funeral home, the latter lasting only three weeks. I’d had to help bury a four-year-old girl dead of brain cancer. I didn’t have it in me ever to do that again.
By the time I got back to New Hope, Mom was in a nursing home equidistant between New Hope and Carstairs. I saw her three times a week. Back then, they weren’t so certain about their Alzheimer’s diagnoses. But that’s what she had. Some days she knew me, some not. I only broke down once, pulling her to me and letting myself cry. But she had no idea of our history, no idea of our bond, so it was like holding a stranger from the street, all stiff and formal and empty.
I met and married Marcie, I got my job at the ambulance company, I joined the VFW and the Legion, I became an auxiliary deputy because my Uncle Clement was the assistant county sheriff and he told me it was a good thing to do, and I made the mistake of running into a cousin of Susan’s one day and getting Susan’s address from her.
The funny thing is, I was never unfaithful to Marcie, not physically anyway. I had a few chances, too, but even though I knew I didn’t love my wife, I felt that I owed her my honor. Bad enough that she had to hold me knowing that I wanted to be holding Susan; I didn’t have to humiliate her publicly as well.
I never did write Susan, but I did call her. And then she called me a couple of times. And over the next six, seven years, we must have talked a couple of dozen times. Marcie didn’t know, and neither did David. She told me about her life, and I told her how crazy she was and where it would all lead, but she didn’t listen. She loved David too much to be reasonable. I made all kinds of proposals, of course, how I’d just sit down with Marcie and tell her the truth, that Susan and I were finally going to get together, and how I’d give Marcie the house and the newer of the cars and every cent in the savings account. One time, Susan laughed gently, as if she was embarrassed for me, and said, “Earle, you don’t understand how successful a trial lawyer David is. He makes more in a month than you do in a year.” Then her laugh got bitter. “You couldn’t afford me, sweetheart. You really couldn’t.”
There were a few more conversations. She saw a shrink, she saw a priest, she saw this real good friend of hers who’d gone through the same thing. She was going to leave, she had the strength and courage and determination to leave now, or so she claimed, but she never did leave. She never did.
The prison was a WPA project back in the Depression. Stone was carried from a nearby quarry for the walls. The prison sits on a hill, as if it is being shown to local boys and girls as a warning.
You pass through three different electronically controlled gates before you come to the visitors’ parking lot.
You pass the manufacturing building where the cool blue of welding torches can be seen, and the prison laundry where harsh detergent can be smelled, and the cafeteria that is noisy with preparations for the night’s meal. I walked quickly past all these areas. The rain was still coming down hard.
You pass through two more electronic gates before you reach the administrative offices.
The inmates all knew who I was. I wouldn’t say that there was hostility in their eyes when they saw me, but there was a kind of hard curiosity, as if I were a riddle to be solved.
The warden’s office had been designed to look like any other office. But it didn’t quite make it. The metal office furniture was not only out of date, it was a little bit grim in its gray way. And the receptionist was a sure disappointment for males visiting the warden: he was a bald older guy with his prison-blue shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal several faded and vaguely obscene tattoos. He knew who I was.
“The warden’s on the phone.”
“I’ll just sit here.”
He nodded and went back to his typing on a word processor. He worked with two fingers, and he worked fast.
I looked through a law enforcement magazine while I sat there.
The receptionist said, “You do anything special to get ready?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
He went back to typing. I went back to reading.
After a time, he said, “It ever bother you?”
I sighed. “I suppose. Sometimes.” I got into this five years ago when the state passed the capital punishment bill. MDs couldn’t execute a man because of the Hippocratic oath. The state advertised for medical personnel. You had to take a lot of tests. I wondered if I could actually go through with it. The first couple times were rough. I just keep thinking of what the men had done. Most of them were animals. That helped a lot.
“It’d bother me.” He went back to his typing again.
Then: “I mean, if you want my honest opinion, I think it’d bother most people.”
I didn’t respond, just watched him a moment, then went back to my magazine.
George Stabenow is a decent man always in a hurry. Pure unadulterated Type A.
He burst through his office door and said, “C’mon in. I’m running so late I can’t believe it.”
He was short, stout, and swathed in a brown three-piece suit. This was probably the kind of suit the press expected a proper warden to wear on a day like this.
He pointed to a chair, and I sat down.
“The frigging doctor had some sort of emergency,” Stabenow said. “Can you believe it?”
“You getting another doctor?”
“No, no. But he won’t be here for the run-through, which pisses me off. I mean, the run-through’s critical for all of us.”
I nodded. He was right.
He walked over to his window and looked out on the grounds surrounding the prison.
“You see them on your way in?”
“Uh-huh.”
“More than usual.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe a hundred of them. If it’s not this, it’s some other goddamned thing. The environment or something.”