“I’ll call at nine o’clock,” said Jeannie. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“They might not be able to tell you a whole lot. Seems like a real mess over there.”
“It’s some stupid mistake,” Jeannie repeated. “Kip wouldn’t do that to somebody. Something’s wrong.” She stuck her thumb between her teeth and bit hard, then sat back and drummed her palms against her knees. “They’ve arrested the wrong person—or he’s gotten mixed up in something. Damn.” Jeannie slapped the dashboard; Billy gave her a stern look. “Stupid kid. It’s the same damn thing. He gets in with some bad kids, something goes wrong, and they pin it on him. It’s Pete Marshall all over again.”
“Jeannie,” said Billy. “Quit cursing.”
Kip / May 1968
I opened my eyes to a knife of light. I was underground, could tell by the damp, the smell of worms, that I was deep in the earth. My lungs panicked, tried to stuff themselves with air; and it took a few moments for my brain to tell my dumb body I wasn’t buried, I was bunkered, the sun scoring hot lines around the hatch above me. Pain sizzled my brain. My legs were stiff-sore, and I shifted them to bring the blood back; but the muscles cried, and I stopped. I leaned against the wall of earth and moved my body in tiny, chickenshit experiments. My bones clicked dry. And as the daylight fried blotches into my brain, I had that feeling, the same feeling I had the day after Mom got hit, the day after Bobby smashed his car: that slow-wash feeling of something hazy and evil, some just-vanishing nightmare, curdling into straight, throat-clasping fact.
The previous night came at me in blinks—the hatch wide-mouthing in front of me, the sag of the stretcher, a ripped arm lollygagging over the side. After that, everything was blurred—a movie happening in slow, smeary pieces, with big panicky spaces in between. Hutch’s face leering at me like a jack-in-the-box, fist springing for my mouth; me, bunched like a bitch in the dirt, boots slamming my ribs, my back, my ass. Roper yelling.
The blast. I felt the ground shake with it, smelled the punch of cordite, felt the shove of the explosion at my back. It was settled the moment the clip was released, the spoon unlevered; that long saggy moment before the explosion, a moment of no sound, my legs running themselves away as time caught up with itself and the grenade found its mark. It was still all over me—the cookout smell, the dust, the ear-ringing, skin-slapping stun. I felt sick with the fact of it—like that hot bright light was radioactive, leaving every cell shivering and retching in its wake. I wanted it to stop, wanted that clean release, the kind I had when I hurled after Skid died; the sweet-choir deliverance I had felt just hours before, when I opened my mouth and sang the big, brave truth. I tipped myself forward over the earth and tried to force it, opened my mouth and tried to roll the nausea up my throat and over my tongue, heaved my body; but it was no fucking use. Just a dry-heave gagging, the sickness squatting back down in my cells like thousands of tiny rotten toads.
I told myself he would have died anyway, would have kept throwing himself back into this clusterfuck of a war as long as it was still going; and if this war didn’t kill him, the next one would, or the one after that. I remembered what Pete told me after Bobby slammed into that tree: “If it’s happened, it’s past. So it don’t fucking exist anymore. You can’t sweat something that ain’t real.” It was how he moved past his dad’s beatings, how he blew off the Old Ted business. I closed my eyes and forced the explosion away, focused on the wet silence of the bunker, tried to summon something new, something else to be right-now real.
The hatch blew big with light. My eyes screwed against it. Something bulky slid and landed on the ground.
“Private Jackson.”
I opened my eyes. It was the corpsman, the one who’d diapered Esposito’s ass, the one who’d helped carry the stretcher from the bunker. He was crouching in front of me, solid in the daylight that poured from overhead.
“I’ve come to check on you,” he said. My eyes eased against the light, and I watched him: his fat-curded muscle bulking his shirt, his round face frowning, his fingers unfastening his bag. And something in his flesh-and-blood presence, in the aliveness thrumming behind his eyes, made me feel ashamed and afraid. All those bones and fibers and nerves and arteries and entrails and brain tissue, all woven and conjured together, adding up to a body, a one-of-a-kind soul. The work of a zillion years; the work of a god. Finished, at the fling of a palm.
“Corpsman,” I said, but my voice wasn’t ready, had been sunk too long in the dark, and the first part of the word was lost.
He kept his eyes on his bag, flicking through plastic pouches that crinkled at his fingers. He pulled out a small flashlight and aimed it fast and sloppy at my left eye, then my right, then stashed the flashlight away. I watched as he felt the bones of my legs, pressed my belly, my ribs, my collarbone. Pain spread where his fingers went, and I clenched my teeth; but I wanted more—more pain, something that would take everything from me, that would smash everything else out of my brain. He moved his fingers to the bridge of my nose, my cheek—threads of pain, pulling in stings across my face. He was close to me, his nose breath warm and snorty on my skin, and I held my own breath for as long as I could. When I breathed out, his shoulders jumped, his eyes flicking to mine, then away again. And in that instant I saw what he didn’t want me to—something shameful in his eyes, something like fear. He moved away, his eyes down.
“Just bruising,” he said. “You might have cracked a couple of ribs.” His words were quiet and strange-weighted.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Chopper’s coming to take you to Danang,” he said. I stared at his large, soft face, willed his eyes to lift to mine again, so I could see what was there. He wouldn’t do it.
“The brig,” I said.
He fastened his bag and swung it over his shoulder.
“Hey.”
“You’ll be handed over to CID. They’ll explain everything.”
“Hey. Look at me.” My voice was loud.
The corpsman placed his foot on a snout of rock and hauled himself out of the hatch. The steel door slammed.
Next time I opened my eyes it was to the whump of a chopper closing in on the earth above me. It came again, that free, blank moment before memory lurched in, bringing its cold facts and its charges of murder. I closed my eyes, wanted to sink back into sleep, wanted no part of it, wanted nothing to do with the world and all its fucking history; but metal clanged above me, and the hatch blared open—they wanted me out.
“Move it,” came a yell. I eased myself up; my foot gave.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered the voice. Then, hollering again, “Hey, you—come help me!”
Hands wriggled down from the light, and I held up my arms. They dragged me out, the sunset smacking me blind. They pulled me across the firebase to the LZ, my ankles rolling, my eyes squinting against snatched faces—Hutch, Pederson, Roper—players in a dream. They pushed me into the Huey, and I slipped on the skids, banging my chin on the metal floor.
“Get the fuck up,” somebody yelled, and I heaved myself up to sit, the sun pinching my eyes, the noise of the rotor blades beating through my body, the insecty hum of men shouting. The slow lift, and we were up, the yelling faded out, the air cool and moving. Inside the chopper lay a kid, a blood-wadded bandage around his leg, the slow, patient look of morphine in his eyes, a medic crouching at his side. Next to me slouched the crew chief, a farm-boy type, reading a book. He looked me over and smacked the gum in his mouth.
“Going to Dong Ha,” he said, like he was a conductor on a streetcar. “CID will pick you up and fly you to Danang.”
I nodded, and put my hand to the sting at my chin. My palm smeared red.
He watched me, gum rolling in his cheeks. He closed his book and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Why’d you do it, man?”
I turned away and looked out over the canopy, back toward the firebase. I watched it grow smaller, watched belches of smoke rise up from the mountain, flashes
of fire.
Jeannie / June 1968
When they arrived back at Noe, Billy telephoned Dorothy to tell her about Kip. Dorothy insisted that Billy, Jeannie, and Charlie stay with her on Spruce for a while. Jeannie bickered—any meeting up with Lee would be impossible under her mother-in-law’s roof—but she could find no good argument against it, and moving to neutral ground suited her restlessness.
“We need to draw together at times like this,” said Dorothy as she installed Billy and Jeannie in the guest suite at the top of the house and handed Charlie to Fanny, the maid with the cushiony bosom and the hard stare. Jeannie set up at the telephone in the hallway to continue her quest for information through the maze of the Department of Defense telephone exchange. Eventually she connected with a voice named Ettlinger, who told her in chipper tones that Kip had been transported to a secure facility and was awaiting formal charges; that once he’d received these, he’d be assigned legal counsel, who would keep her closely informed; but that until then, she would have to be patient, and wait.
Several days passed. Every morning, Jeannie telephoned Ettlinger, but there was no news. Despite her pestering, Ettlinger remained Labrador-ish in disposition; he was so dependably happy to hear from her that Jeannie began calling more frequently—four, five times a day. Those remaining hours of the day, Jeannie was skittish with anxiety and boredom. One morning over breakfast—always formal, with Charlie expected to sit quietly for up to an hour while Dorothy read The New York Times and ate her eggs in small, agonizing bites—Jeannie raised the subject of returning to Noe. Dorothy held up a palm.
“Don’t say another word,” she said. “You’re not imposing one bit.”
“But—”
Dorothy leaned across the table and squeezed Jeannie’s wrist. “Save your strength for the next few months. You’ll need it.”
“You’re too good to us, Mother,” said Billy as he rose from his seat and brushed pastry flakes from his shirt. But Jeannie detected a subdued fury in Dorothy’s sugared politeness with Billy, her refusal to look Jeannie in the eye. Dorothy wanted to keep them quarantined—to keep them close, so they couldn’t leak their news into the world.
She had proved a diligent warden: Jeannie had not been able to leave the house without her; and every evening, when, dismayed and isolated, she had tried to telephone Lee, Dorothy had appeared like a genie, a question in her face. And so Jeannie would call her dad instead, waiting for the long, lonely ring, each time letting it run a little longer, imagining the receiver shaking on its cradle in the kitchen. Each time, she was relieved he wasn’t there. There was something monstrous in his unrealized grief, and it made her afraid.
“Running errands again, is he?” Dorothy would say, strain tightening her beautiful face.
“I guess,” Jeannie would murmur; and she wondered where he was running to, which bar he’d chosen to empty his billfold in, before driving home to scrub the house of all its mucky history.
One Saturday morning, Dorothy left the house to play her monthly bridge game, leaving her captives alone for the first time. Billy was at the hospital, and Jeannie was playing doctors with Charlie in the drawing room. Jeannie waited until the noise of Dorothy’s car had died, and unhooked herself from the plastic stethoscope.
“Just a minute, Charlie,” she said, half running into the hallway. She dialed Mrs. Moon’s number. No answer. Noticing Dorothy’s address book on the hall table, she picked it up and flicked to W. Virginia Walker. She held the page open with her elbow and dialed.
“Walker residence.” Lee’s mother, Virginia—an ice-cream blonde whose coolness could be felt, even from four miles away.
“Hello.” Jeannie cleared her throat. “Is Lee there?”
“Who’s speaking?”
“It’s—” Jeannie glanced at the address book for a name. “Evelyn. I’m a friend from school.”
“Oh.” Virginia sounded surprised. “Well, of course. Hold on, dear.”
Jeannie’s heart rode fast. Her body filled with longing, and for a moment she forgot her spoiled grief and her fear; felt nothing but herself, her body, separate from her dad, her mom, Kip, only hers. She heard movement at the other end of the line, and held her breath.
“Hello?”
Jeannie’s heart banged. “Hello.”
There was a pause, and Jeannie wondered if Lee had heard her. “Who’s this?” said Lee, suspicion in her voice.
“It’s me.”
“It’s you?” Jeannie could hear the slow smile. Lee dropped her voice to a whisper. “Where are you? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”
“You were?” Jeannie felt a warm flush of pleasure. “I’m at Dorothy’s.”
“Sounds like a blast.”
“She insisted, after everything that happened.”
“Everything that . . . ?”
“With Kip.”
“Right.” Lee gave a low whistle. “Gee. Like things aren’t bad enough, you’re shacked up with the Wicked Witch of the West.”
The party, the breaking glass, Kip’s letter; Jeannie gave a dry swallow.
“You okay?” said Lee.
“You were right,” said Jeannie.
“What do you mean?”
“Kip. He’s alive.” It was Jeannie who was whispering now. She watched the kitchen doorway for a sign of Fanny, listened for footsteps. She heard only Charlie, chattering in the drawing room.
“What?”
“He’s—he’s all right. He survived.”
“No shit,” said Lee. There was wonder in her voice, as though her own magic had come true.
“Lee!” came a stern call from the background.
“Sorry, Mom.”
Jeannie felt a sting of embarrassment, enough to stay her from asking the question that dragged at her stomach.
Lee said it for her. “I need to see you.” Her breath was close.
“I know.”
“Today.”
Jeannie closed her eyes, saw Lee’s heart-shaped face, her sandy skin.
“Meet me at Michel’s,” said Lee. “It’s at California and Mason. Twelve o’clock.”
“Can we go someplace private?” said Jeannie.
“Later. Meet me at the restaurant first.”
“Why?”
“Let’s call it a date,” said Lee.
Jeannie watched as Charlie wandered out of the drawing room, clutching a toy syringe, a smile breaking over his face, and was gripped by the need to escape.
“You’ll be there?” said Lee.
“Yes,” said Jeannie, nodding at Fanny as she stepped from the kitchen, and gesturing for her to take Charlie. “I’m leaving now.”
Jeannie knew something was amiss as she climbed the moneyed stretch of California, past the pale-faced cathedral, the leafed hotels, the Frenchified park. She checked the name over the door. The place was too expensive for Lee: an empty French restaurant, grandiose and sad, waiting for its evening life. Nonetheless, Jeannie pushed through the door and stepped inside. The sunlight struggled through the windows, showing every drift of lint on the wooden floor. Jeannie sneezed—an exaggerated kerchoo that bounced off the paneled walls. With the beat of heels on wood, a small woman in a dark dress appeared, her face striped with wrinkles.
“I’m sorry,” said Jeannie. “I thought I was meeting somebody here, but—”
“In back,” said the woman, and gestured for her to follow.
She led Jeannie down a dark corridor. Jeannie heard the murmur of talking, the knock of china. She stepped into a small, electrically lit room hosting a small number of tables, empty but for one. Lee rose from her chair, her face jaundiced by the light.
Seated at the table with her, and turning to look at Jeannie in annoyance, was an enormously fat woman, her face pancaked beige. Next to the woman was a man, his back to Jeannie, his red-raw hand hanging over the edge of the table, dangling a pipe. The man turned his head, and Jeannie took in the beard, the squashed nose, the crawl of hair at the neck of his s
hirt. Jeannie met Walter’s eyes and saw the command, the contempt, forming in his face.
“Who’s that?” said the woman, her mouth small between the trembling chunks of her cheeks.
“Hey, come sit,” said Lee.
“I don’t want anyone else involved,” stage-whispered the woman, pitching her bulk over the table toward Lee. Jeannie recognized a certain unsteadiness in the woman’s tone—it was the same insulted desperation that Mrs. Dewey had shown in the cafe on Stockton, just a few weeks ago—and felt uneasy.
Lee was sitting. “She’s a friend,” she was saying. “She’ll help.”
They came again, the memories that sutured themselves unhappily together each night as Jeannie lay in bed, awake: Kip in the playground before he enlisted, asking for her to stop him; the night in May, when, soaked in sentiment and self-pity, she’d typed the letter to save someone else’s brother; and the punishment—Kip’s death, his coming-to-life, his shame. It was happening again—Lee was asking her, persuading her to risk everything for someone else’s family.
Jeannie turned and walked. Out of the room, down the corridor, out of the restaurant, letting the door bang behind her; down the sidewalk, her feet brisking with the beat of her heart, avoiding women wearing hats and dragging small dogs, over one, two intersections, pausing at Jones as a bus barreled by—
“Hey!” Jeannie turned to see Lee flying down the street, her hair and beads lifting, her bare thighs shaking with each slap of her sandals against the sidewalk. Jeannie continued across the intersection, listening to the tap-tap of Lee’s approach, her self-righteousness gathering.
“What the hell, Jeannie?” Lee grabbed Jeannie’s arm and pulled her around.
“You ambushed me, Lee.”
“What are you talking about?” Lee’s body rose in big breaths, a frown rucking her forehead.
“You tell me how much you need to see me—” Jeannie paused as a gentleman with a large Brylcreemed head walked by, eyeing them vigorously. Lee stared back.
Jeannie lowered her voice. “You say you have to see me here, and now, and it’s for this?”
The Outside Lands Page 16
