by Dennis Foley
Hollister looked out the window into the black night. Susan would still be in a cold, damp cab somewhere on her way back to her apartment. It would be a very long day for her. For her the sun would be up in a little over three hours.
He would get to Kansas City in time for the morning traffic, but it would be nothing like New York’s. His folks had never been to New York. They would never understand how people could live there. They were just simple farm people, and he was eager to see them.
Uncomfortable, Hollister got up, took off his blouse and folded it neatly. Satisfied that his efforts would minimize wrinkling, he placed it in the overhead bin. As he did, Tammy moved up the aisle behind him. She lightly placed her hands on either side of his waist as if to let him know that she was behind him and not to back up. He thought he heard her say something like excuse me, but couldn’t be sure over the sounds of the jet engines.
Turning, Hollister saw her move up the aisle and stop at a couple with a small child. She bent over to help the child with something, revealing more of her great legs. At the same time she quickly glanced back down the aisle to see if he was looking and caught his eye.
Hollister appreciated the attention. It helped his mood. But as he looked back toward his seat he noticed a passenger sitting in the row behind his, staring at him with the same look he had seen in the bar in Greenwich Village. The young man wore a colorful wool serape, had long straight Prince Valiant hair and a leather thong wrapped around his head.
Suddenly Hollister wanted the guy to say something to him. He felt an urge to confront him with whatever the hell was bothering him. But it didn’t happen. The passenger finally broke eye contact and raised the book in his lap to continue reading.
Fuckin’ pussy, Hollister thought. He tried to picture the guy in a rifle platoon for a day in Vietnam and then wondered why the hell he was so angry with the guy. He was embarrassed by his attitude.
Sitting back down, he picked up his empty plastic drink glass from the seat next to his and placed it on the tray table for when Tammy returned to ask him if he wanted another. He did.
Losing interest in what was going on in the cabin, and tired, Hollister didn’t get to the drink before sleep overtook him.
On the ground, Hollister’s parents were standing next to the airport terminal with their collars up to shield them from the cold Kansas wind. He waved at them from the top of the truck-mounted ladder that the ground crew had driven up to the jet’s doorway.
As he walked down the steps, Hollister felt the early sun against his back. He had a normal infantryman’s reaction to the sun at his back. He was aware that it blinded his parents’ view and prevented them from seeing him. He laughed at himself. He had never been so conscious of the sunrise and its affects on visibility before he went through Ranger School. He wondered if he would ever turn it off.
“There he is!” his mother yelled as he reached one of the tar-rimmed concrete squares of the airfield apron.
His parents hurriedly encircled him with firm hugs, his mother’s breaking first, so she could take his face in her hands and kiss him just below the eye.
He had forgotten how much he missed them. At that moment, all his cares seemed to fade, and the tension that had built up between his shoulders just melted into the hugs.
“Oh, baby. You’re so skinny! Are you okay? Is there anything wrong?” Mrs. Hollister asked.
“Here, here. Leave the boy alone,” Mr. Hollister said. “For Chrissakes, Louise, he’s been in a damn war, not at a cupcake factory!”
“How’s Susan?”
“She’s fine, Mom. She sends her love to you both.”
“I’m glad. She’s such a nice girl.”
Hollister’s father took his AWOL bag from his son, and the trio turned into the air terminal. Just then the passenger who had been seated behind Hollister passed on his way in. He gave the family a disapproving look.
Mrs. Hollister spotted her son’s reaction. “Never mind, James. There’s lots of those beatniks around here since you left.”
“Beatniks?” Mr. Hollister said.
“You know what I mean.”
The Hollister men laughed.
The station wagon turned out of the airport property that always seemed to Hollister to be under some construction and headed west on the airport road, out of Missouri. Mr. Hollister chose to use the farm roads, never having become comfortable with I-70, the interstate that would speed up a short leg of the trip.
As they rumbled along the roads, a hissing sound told Hollister there was a hole or two in the muffler, letting exhaust pressure escape.
“Doesn’t sound good, Dad,” Hollister said.
“Drove over a chunk’a ice yesterday that musta had some rocks in it. Punctured the damn thing like it was an eggshell,” Mr. Hollister replied.
“Maybe I can fix it for you—”
“Oh no you don’t, mister,” Mrs. Hollister responded. “You ain’t gonna be home long enough to be doin’ chores. I want you to get some rest and some good food in you.”
Hollister was amazed at how little the countryside had changed since he had been a boy. He loved Kansas. There was something solid about his part of the country. It was simply home.
He sat back and looked at his folks. They were getting older. Both had just had their fifty-eighth birthdays. Hollister wondered if the work around the farm was getting to be too much for his father. His color was good, but he was getting leaner and seemed much more weathered than he had remembered him.
“Looks like we might get a little more snow soon,” Mr. Hollister said as he leaned over the steering wheel to look up under the sun visor.
“Had much, Dad?”
“Nope, it’s been a good winter. Not like two years ago—” the old man said, as if he were going to rehash it.
“Jimmy doesn’t need to be worryin’ about the weather. Sakes, he’s visitin’—not here to plant corn,” Mrs. Hollister said.
The exchange tickled Hollister. His whole life he had listened to his parents correct each other’s topics or choice of words.
The path from the driveway to the front steps of the old farmhouse was clear of the snow that had fallen the night before. His father had been up early to shovel the walkway for his mother.
Hollister looked around the aging farm. Kansas was not pretty in the winter. The level fields were brown patches of frozen mud with blotches of blown snow in the low spots. The stumps of ragged brown cornstalks extended in rows to the margins of the Hollister property, and the livestock huddled in the enclosure near the large barn.
Worried she might slip, Hollister helped his mother up the front stairs. Her walk had not been too steady since she had injured her hip in a fall three years earlier.
While he was preoccupied with his mother, his father opened the front door.
There was a strange silence as they entered the simple gray and green fifty-year-old farmhouse.
Hollister closed the door behind them and walked into the gaping archway that led to the parlor.
Suddenly the room erupted in a chorus of “Surprise!”
Startled, Hollister was caught completely off guard. Hugging the far wall of the parlor were twenty-five of his friends and relatives.
They all broke from hiding and gathered around him, hugging and kissing him, shaking his hand and patting him on the back.
Hollister looked through the crowd and caught sight of his parents standing by the door to the kitchen. They were beaming at having pulled off the little surprise.
By midnight the crowd had thinned and Hollister went out onto the back porch to clear his head. He had had far too much to drink.
Leaning on the dried-out railing around the porch, he heard the animals moving out back and became conscious of similarities with the smells in Vietnam. Missing was the decaying smell of rotting vegetation and the ever-present odor of wood and charcoal cook fires.
He looked up at the moon and wondered if his teams were on the ground somewhere, l
ooking at the same moon. Had they holed up for the night in a thicket that would hide them until dawn? Had they put out their Claymores? Was the commo with the base station good?
“Thinking about going back?”
Turning around, he found his cousin Janet leaning against the doorjamb with two bottles of beer in her hand. She offered one to Hollister.
“Thanks.”
“Well,” Janet said. “Are you?”
He nodded, not knowing why he should feel apologetic about thinking about his teams and Vietnam. “It’s all I ever think about anymore.”
“You know how much we worry about you?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Jimmy, it’s not like when we were in high school. We all worried about you getting hurt playing ball. But this is different. We just reached a population of thirty-one hundred last year, and we’ve already had two boys killed in Vietnam. It’s crazy, Jimmy. Your mama won’t let you see it, but she worries herself sick. Your dad is just as worried, but he’s proud of you, too.”
He had no reply.
“It’s not like it used to be around here. We don’t all have the fun we used to. Everyone was trying to put on their best face in there tonight. It’s just not fun here in Lansing anymore. Boys are worried about Vietnam. But they all had fathers in World War Two or Korea, and they can’t tell them they’re afraid. Kids are running off and getting married just to keep from being drafted.”
Her words sank in. Janet’s husband was a pilot in the air force in Germany. They didn’t need to talk about where he’d be reassigned after he left there. He knew.
Hollister took a sip of his beer and lit a cigarette. “So everyone’s scared?”
“No,” Janet replied. “I think they’re more than just scared. They’re pretty damn confused—there’s so much argument about us being over there. That—that … I don’t know, Jimmy. We just don’t want to lose any more kids from here.”
He reached out and hugged her. She couldn’t hold back any longer and broke into tears.
“How long you been holding this in?”
Janet sniffled and rummaged through her sweater pocket for a Kleenex. “Since last month. Paul got orders for Vietnam. Oh, Jimmy, we haven’t told his parents or mine or even yours. They’re worried enough.” She kept crying, and he held her without speaking.
As on so many mornings in his childhood, Hollister was awakened by the sound of his father outside beginning his chores. He looked at the clock. It was five, and he realized that his mother was cooking something delicious, the coffee was brewing, and he had a terrible hangover.
In the bathroom he balanced his shaving kit on the corner of the old sink and found his razor. He looked in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes and realized that he had really been screwing off since he was told he had to take Lucas’s body home. Too many long hours, too much to eat and drink, and absolutely no exercise.
He found his B-4 bag, pulled a pair of woolen socks from a side pocket and put them on. In another compartment he found the tiger-stripe PT shorts that he had made in the village outside the base camp in Vietnam.
He knew that it would be cold out until the sun came up, so he went to his dresser and pulled out a pair of cotton work gloves and an old sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off.
He stopped on the way out and looked around his room. He had not really taken it in since he’d returned. He reached out to touch his old dresser. There was a knob missing and the top was a mass of scars, water rings, and orange peel varnish. It had been handed down in the family and showed the damage from years of service in a boy’s room. Still, it was as clean as Hollister had remembered it.
On the desk in the corner were his high school books, still covered with brown paper bags. The effort proved necessary to protect them. The covers were torn—a couple had deep grass stains from the many times that he had dumped them on the football field before practice.
Even standing there, home seemed so far away since he had been in Vietnam.
Hollister tried not to make too much noise as he walked down the back stairs that led to the kitchen, because his aunt and uncle from Topeka had stayed over rather than try to make the drive late the night before.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, his mother turned and looked at him. “Where do you think you’re going, mister?”
“I’ve got to go run off some of your good food.”
She wiped her hand on her apron and gave him a look. “Now don’t you go tryin’ to butter me up. You can’t go out dressed like that.”
“Mom, I’m going out to run. I’ll be fine.”
His jump boots clumped against the crumbling edge of the asphalt, and the sun warmed his face as he turned onto the short stretch of U.S. 73 leading into town. The air was brisk and clean, reminding Hollister of high school track practice before school. It was held in the mornings because of harvest season, and freed up the boys to be home in the afternoons to work on their farms.
He passed the WELCOME TO LANSING sign rimmed with Rotary, Toastmasters, and VFW insignias. Hollister hated running. He had always hated it. But his decision to do things that required running, like track in school and Airborne units in the Army, weren’t swayed by his dislike for the boredom and discomfort that he always associated with running. To him running was essential, part of trying to ward off the ill effects of his bad habits—smoking and drinking. Like so many others, he felt that if he did enough running, he would be able to continue to drink and smoke without their having a negative impact on his health. Deep down, he knew what a crock that was. But it was what men did. It’s what paratroopers did. It’s what he would continue to do.
Lansing had the same red brick buildings that its founders built after the turn of the century. The only new structures were warehouses and storage areas with metal frames and corrugated siding. Most of what they held used to be down at the railhead, a few blocks over. But there wasn’t as much rail commerce anymore; harvested goods still left to feed the country, but on diesel eighteen wheelers. Even that early in the day tractor trailers were blowing by.
“Jimbo! Hey, Jim!”
Hearing his name, Hollister looked back over his shoulder and saw Beeler Andrews, the neighborhood barber, unlocking his door and waving at him. Jim waved back and kept on running to the center of town.
He reached the sidewalk on Main, in front of the feed store, and stepped up on it without breaking his stride. Mr. Kessell was setting out display items and saw Hollister approaching. He took the pipe from his mouth and raised it as Hollister passed. “’Lo boy. Good ta see ya home.”
Reaching the end of the sidewalk, Hollister looked both ways at Eisenhower Street and crossed at a jog. As he did, a new Ford Mustang turned the corner in front of him. Hollister looked at it longingly. He had never owned a new car. He wondered if he would ever be somewhere long enough and have enough money to buy a Mustang. Thoughts of a normal life brought back Vietnam. Before he could think about normalcy, he had to get Vietnam behind him.
As he looked up from the sidewalk, a car from his past stood at curbside near the end of the block. Petey Nellis was standing at the driver’s door of his ’49 Mercury. They had done a beautiful job chopping, channeling, and lowering the two-door sedan. It had no remaining chrome on it except the bumpers, two teardrop spotlights flanking the windshield, and baby moon hubcaps.
As Hollister got closer he adjusted his stride to stop to say hello to Petey. Hollister raised one hand to signal Petey that he saw him. But Petey turned away, got in the car, and quickly drove off.
Confused, Hollister stopped and turned around to watch him drive away. He could see Petey looking in the rearview mirror at him. There’d been no mistake.
As he continued through town, Hollister thought about what Janet had said the night before. Things had changed. When he left for Vietnam, hardly anyone even knew where it was, much less had any opinion about it. He was discovering the extent of the polarization. It hurt a little to think that he and
the others in Vietnam were not being supported.
Sucking in a deep breath, he decided that he couldn’t think about it. It would only depress him if he tried to focus on the growing antiwar attitude.
His mother made him shower before she let him into the kitchen. Everyone else had eaten, but she kept some biscuits and gravy warm for him in the aging oven. He had worked up an appetite on the run and felt a little self-righteous about running with a hangover.
“Saw Petey Nellis this morning and he avoided me like he owed me money, Mom. You know what that’s about?”
“Story goin’ around is that his father has pulled some strings to get him by the draft board, and it slipped out at the VFW. Now his father’s claimin’ it wasn’t his doing, and Petey’s avoiding everyone—ain’t just you.”
Hollister’s father came in, wearing bib overalls and a cap that read FOSTER’S FEED STORE. He had some small part of something in his dirty fingers and mumbled something about needing his glasses.
His mother poured herself a glass of milk and sat down to watch her son eat, just enjoying the few moments together.
“Your father and I are going to church before we take you to the airport. You plannin’ on going with us?”
Hollister hesitated for a long time and shook his head no.
“Don’t you go to church in Vietnam, honey?” his mother asked.
Without looking at her, Hollister answered, “All the time and none of the time, Mom.”
She looked around at his father. “Well, what does that mean?” she asked.
Before he could reply, Hollister’s father looked over the top of his reading glasses as if to say, Enough … let him be.
Finished with breakfast, Hollister poured himself another cup of coffee and walked over to the half-windowed kitchen door. Through the steamed-up glass he could see that the light was on in the work shed; his father was back out there. Hollister filled a second cup and went out the back door.
