The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

  “Maybe he gone rape some gook pussy. You fuck a little girl, cracker?”

  “Don’t look like he got the weapon to do it.”

  I squat in the back corner of my cell, grateful for the dark, for the chain on my door.

  “Nah, that ain’t it,” says the Boss. He’s still watching me, his face pressed against the door of his cell. “What is it, Baby-san?”

  “Killed somebody,” I say, forcing my voice loud, hoping this will shut the motherfuckers up. But as I say the words, it’s like I’ve breathed ghosts into the cell—they put a shudder on me, put their fingers on my neck; and in my climbing panic, I hear the sound of laughter.

  “Ain’t that the fucking point, cracker?”

  “That’s what they send you here for, boy.”

  “Who you kill?” says the Boss.

  I picture his face, the grown-man command in it, the mouth always moving, giving orders; he’s so damn real in my head, it feels like a lie when I say, “My CO.”

  “Your CO? You discharge your weapon or something?”

  The palm on the grenade; the noise. “Threw a frag in his hooch.”

  Silence.

  The Boss whistles. “You fucked, Baby-san,” he says, voice soft, like he’s talking to himself. “Ain’t getting out of here for a long fucking time.”

  I feel a sickness worming in my stomach.

  “Crackers greasing crackers. There it is.”

  “They gonna hang you for that?”

  “They gonna beat him for that.”

  “Don’t you fall asleep, cracker. Them pigs gonna come, they gonna put that blanket over your head and beat you dead.”

  I spit a mouthful of vomit juice onto the ground and breathe deep.

  “Shut up, brother,” says the Boss. “Why you do it, Babysan?”

  I don’t answer, just put my hands over my eyes and sit back on my heels, like I’m waiting for a fucking streetcar, like if I dig deep and sit tight, a ride is going to come by and take me out of here, out of all of this, soon.

  “Fuck you too,” whispers the Boss, and the others raise a murmur, but they hush down fast. The box is pressing the air out of us, and talking costs. It gets quiet, real quiet; and, here, sweating in my own darkness, safe in my cell, I could be anywhere: sitting in my room at home, listening for my dad to leave to go drinking so I can steal some of his liquor; or fishing in the bay with Bobby, soaking up some heat while waiting for a perch to bite; or playing hide-and-seek with Jeannie, squatting behind the trash can with skinned knees and the sun blasting me, wondering if she’s given up on the game. There is no fucking ride out of this torture box, might never be a ride; all I got is closing my eyes and letting my brain carry me home.

  Time goes, and I feel hot sleep creeping on me, feel my neck sagging under the weight of my head. Then a loud crash; I jerk up and open my eyes. Ahead of me, the Boss is smashing his head against the door of his cell, over and over. Nobody says a word.

  Truth is, I did it because of Shea.

  Shea was a straight-arrow kid from Cleveland, Ohio, toughed up by nineteen knife-cold winters. He liked to keep quiet and do as he was asked, was told by his dad—who was told by his dad before him—that the best way through life was to keep your head down, your boots clean, and your pecker in your pants.

  Shea would have spent a lifetime dodging trouble if Vance hadn’t sent him into the forest that night. He would have returned home after a so-so tour with fungus feet, a sun-peeled face, and a crappy service medal that would have gotten his fiancée—a fox named Pamela with bee-stings (he showed everybody her picture, who wouldn’t)—hot to trot. (She would have climbed on him in the back of his father’s Plymouth and the way she unzipped his zipper and slid right on top of him would’ve made him wonder if she’d done it before; her all-business smile as she straightened herself out afterward would’ve made him sure she had.) After a summer of getting fat on hot franks and beer and screwing in the backseat at the drive-in and the lake, Shea would have learned that Pamela was in trouble, and he would have steeled up and asked her to marry him, getting a job at the post office and saving his dollars to rent them a crappy apartment in the city. He would have taken it, taken four decades of a gut-growing wife and bad pay, taken it like a good hardworking American, until, finally, on a dream retirement trip fly-fishing in Montana he would have died quietly, in his wading boots, of a dime-a-dozen, run-of-the-mill heart attack.

  Shea didn’t get the chance to live out his days, nor did Dopfer or Skid or any of the other suckers that Vance sent on his glory-grubbing, doom-infested gook hunts. What is it the Bible says? Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

  Jeannie / June 1968

  Jeannie’s dad should never have told Bernie. Bernie told Eugene, who told Kenneth, who told Ray, who told everybody who drank at Flanagan’s, which was how his neighbor Mr. Reilly found out; and soon, instead of asking after his dahlias, Jeannie’s dad’s neighbors were crossing the street to avoid him. At the liquor store, in the post office, at Mae’s or Sam’s Sports Bar, eyes and whispers followed him. Mr. Jackson, whose son had done something shocking in Southeast Asia. No telephone calls came asking him to join a bowling night or a poker game, or inviting him to make the fourth spot in a round of golf. So he stayed home—couldn’t even bear to make the walk from his front door to his car to go to work. Home, where the pressing dirt to clean was Kip’s mess, and while he tried to scrub to the bottom of it, the housekeeping could wait.

  “What do you know?” he asked Jeannie as he sat on the couch, balancing a plate of saltines on his knee while Jeannie set about tidying the living room.

  “Not much,” said Jeannie. “I’ve been calling the DoD several times a day. They keep telling me the same thing—they’ll let us know when he’s received a formal charge.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “They said there was a war going on.” Jeannie’s dad gave a bitter snort. “Daddy, eat.”

  “I got no stomach for it, honey. Can you fix me a drink?”

  “I’ll fix you some coffee.”

  “Just get me a damn drink, will you.”

  Jeannie went to the kitchen, loaded a glass with ice, and dribbled bourbon so that the ice cracked. Her dad took the drink with a quaking hand. The tips of his fingers were swollen red. He drank in one steady swallow, then gripped the empty glass to his chest.

  “He wrote about his commanding officer,” he said.

  “He did?”

  “Just one time. One of his first letters. Here.” Her dad reached into the pocket of his pajama pants, pulled out a folded letter, and handed it to Jeannie. She sat on the arm of the couch, and read.

  December 30 ’67

  Dear Dad,

  Well, I’m here.

  I’m sitting in my hooch on a hill overlooking triple-canopy jungle. We’re some 80 or 90 klicks up the coast from Hue, VC hiding all over the forest. Nothing’s happened since I landed—shits been flying, but I missed it. Two days before I got here the base got probed—sappers cut the wire, threw Chicom grenades all over the place. A couple Marines got hurt, but the bad guys came off a hell of a lot worse. I got lucky, Dad—got a CO—name’s Vance—he’s real salty, gone a couple rounds with this war already and is still standing, had so many near misses he must be bulletproof. As soon as the enemy cut the wire he was ready for them, rallied a dozen gun-bunnies and greased every last dink—before the grunts were even out of their rubber ladies (they’re still pissed off about that). The guy’s collected. I’m going to be fine.

  It’s only been a few weeks but it feels like I did my whole thirteen months already. You never told me how damn boring it would be. It won’t stop raining—not rain like at home, this rain falls in a damn wall so you can’t see squat. And mud everywhere, sucks at you like it’s something alive. Most days it feels like were waiting for something to happen—but if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen at night. Sleeping’s tough.

  Truth is, this country’s got
my feelings on a yo-yo. Yesterday we took a MEDCAP to the local village. Someone’s mom sent blow bubbles—the little kids went wild, chased those damn bubbles like they were dollar bills. A bunch of older girls came to watch—these girls are unreal gorgeous, all squaw hair and shy looks, like we’re warriors or something. But everybody’s your friend here till they cut your throat. Vietnam’s the most beautiful place I’ve seen, and I’ll be glad never to see it again.

  That’s all—the sun’s going—

  Kip

  Jeannie set the letter on her lap, her fingers lingering over the ink.

  “He liked him,” she said.

  “Sure did.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “As much sense as a screen door on a submarine.”

  It was a hick expression of her mom’s. Jeannie let a smile touch her lips, but her dad was stone-faced.

  “Kip would never do something like this—”

  But her dad wasn’t listening. “I’ve been trying to make sense of it,” he said, shaking his head. “Why did he go from admiring the guy to blowing him up?”

  Jeannie had the slow, unpleasant realization that this wasn’t a rhetorical question; this was the puzzle her dad was trying to solve, the enigma that had kept him from his work, his food, his hygiene, his daily obsessions—that had kept him from himself. “You’re serious?” she said. “You’re really asking why?”

  “You know why?” Hope clutched her dad’s face.

  “But it’s the wrong question. You know he didn’t do it.”

  “C’mon, Jeannie.” Her dad gave the half note of a laugh, his shoulders lifting and dropping in an exaggerated gesture of defeated amusement. It was like she was a kid again—her naïveté a source of mirth to her parents, and, as she grew older, a source of impatience—and the old heat of injustice flared.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. Her throat was tight with disappointment. “Of everything you’ve done to Kip,” she said, “this is the worst.”

  “What do you mean?” Her dad’s face made a cartoon expression of surprise, his mouth and eyes forming little matching O’s. A spark of anger lit the kindling of resentments Jeannie had put away over weeks and months—the swallowed rebukes to her dad’s greedy disapproval, his near dislike of Kip.

  “You kept saying he was a disappointment, that he was turning into a bad kid. I didn’t think you actually believed it.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said her dad; he swung his glass to his mouth, but only the softening ice slid against his lips. He slammed the glass on the coffee table, his face clenching in annoyance. “You saw that letter. He said it himself: he did it.”

  “You know how the popular kids can carry him away.”

  “C’mon, Jeannie. Robbing a liquor store’s one thing. But this?”

  “He always had a difficult relationship with the truth.”

  “Yeah, you’ve never been one for reality either, honey.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You want to pretend this isn’t happening—like you’ve been pretending all along, with your too-busy, too-good city life. That’s fine. But I don’t want to hear it.” His voice rose to a shout; his plate tipped from his leg, sliding saltines onto the couch.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You come here, with your concern and your half-assed tidying and your saltine meals”—he plucked the crackers from the couch and dropped them back onto the plate one by one, plink, plink, disgust in his face—“but it’s all too little, too late.”

  He had hit his stride now, greased by liquor, and he wasn’t ready to stop. Jeannie recognized it from when she’d lived at home, the rages that came suddenly, violently—little earthquakes that shook the house, then disappeared, each time leaving something, however small, damaged in their wake. Some strained, tolerant fiber inside her broke.

  “I don’t need to listen to this anymore.”

  “We needed you here, Jeannie.” She was shocked to see that he was crying—meager tears reeling down his cheeks. “We needed you here a year back when I was working overtime and Kip was losing his way. We needed a woman in the house, somebody to keep a pair of eyes and a pair of hands on things. You were never here.” His anger was softening into self-pity, faster than she expected—it surprised her how weakened he was, how uncertain in his moods.

  “I have my own family now. That was Mom’s job, not mine.” A cinch of gratification at the hurt that flashed over her dad’s face; but doubt heavied her stomach.

  Her dad rooted a handkerchief from his pocket and honked so loudly into it that Charlie—quiet and forgotten, sitting at her feet and rolling a marble over the carpet—giggled. Jeannie heard something in his laugh—hope, entreaty—and pulled him up onto her lap. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she murmured, kissing his neck.

  “You’re right. It was your mom’s job,” said her dad. His face was flushed and tight, but his voice had the reasoned, it-never-happened quality that used to drive Kip crazy. “Truth is, you needed your mom too.” Jeannie felt the words like a burn; she turned her head from them.

  “We all needed her,” said Jeannie. The sulkiness of her tone wasn’t lost on either of them. She felt her dad’s eyes on her.

  “She would have stopped you from being unhappy,” he said.

  “I’m not unhappy, Daddy.” But the words sounded like a lie. “Jesus Christ,” she said. She set Charlie on his feet and began gathering her things; then, realizing she had no place to go, dropped into the easy chair and pressed the heels of her wrists to her forehead.

  “Remember when you were a kid?” her dad said. “Your mom used to call you her little stargazer.” Jeannie had forgotten this. An old yearning flushed warm and empty in her chest. “We never knew where your head was at. You were always that way. You never paid heed to what was going on around you. You were always someplace else, someplace you never invited anybody.

  “Kip was a dreamer too,” he continued. “But you always knew what he was dreaming about. Buffalo Bill, Al Capone, Audie Murphy. Kip always had too much . . .” He studied the carpet. “Too much of a sense of history.” His face loosened. “Too much history, too much nostalgia for things he didn’t know squat about. Got him into trouble time and time again. His head was so busy with some hokey idea of the past, he never saw what was going on in front of his nose.” Her dad nodded, then stilled, staring into the mid-distance. Jeannie watched as drifts of expression crept back over his face: specters taking up their haunts—regret, dismay, anger. He narrowed his eyes on her; she turned her eyes down.

  “But you, Jeannie,” her dad said. “You—you’ve never had any sense of history at all. No sense of how the world got to the place it is now. Kids like Kip—the world’s seen thousands of them. Every damn war they get riled up and sent to some God-awful place to fight, where they’ll live, or they’ll die, or, sometimes, just sometimes, they’ll do something so damn stupid that the life they held on to isn’t worth having. Jesus.” Her dad sighed, a final sigh. “Maybe that’s all there is to say. There’s no big mystery. He’s just a dumb kid. I thought Kip was smarter than that. I guess I was wrong.”

  “Kip’s not dumb,” said Jeannie.

  Her dad blew breath from his nostrils, and his mouth tightened.

  “Daddy,” said Jeannie. “Daddy. We’ve got to help him.”

  “He’s in the brig, in the middle of a war, and he’s blown up his superior. He’s deep in a shithole and they’re letting him sweat. I can’t help him anymore. He’s on his own.” Her dad put his plate on the coffee table and heaved himself up. He picked up his glass and carried it to the kitchen, pajama pants slipping on his bony hips to show the shocking white of his buttocks. Jeannie heard the unstop-and-slug of bourbon. She watched Charlie pulling her dad’s chess set from underneath the coffee table; remembered all the Sundays Kip and her dad had sat for hours, moving pieces over the board, her dad placing his pawns at risk and watching hopefully for Kip to take them, Kip�
�s pride at checking his dad’s king.

  “Then I’ll help him,” she said. She stood and gathered the dirty cups, carrying them to the kitchen and splashing out the moldy coffee; then ran the sink full with warm water and squeezed in a quarter bottle of Lux to make a chaos of suds. She dragged a wicker stool to the sink and called for Charlie, then stood him on the stool and handed him a sponge. Letting herself outside, she pulled the mail from the mailbox and—ignoring the glare of Mr. Kowalski as he dug the weeds from his perennials—brought it inside and slapped it on the countertop.

  “Kid’s making a damn mess,” said her dad.

  Jeannie ignored him. She shook out a trash bag and carried it to the living room, stuffing it with armfuls of newspaper, beer bottles, an old pizza box containing curled pieces of pie. Straightened the desk, thumped the couch pillows, dusted, vacuumed—driving a wet Charlie between his Grandpa’s feet in fright—and yanked the drapes. Finally, she turned the television to face the room and switched it on.

  “Charlie, it’s Road Runner. Come sit. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  “Who you calling?” said her dad.

  But Jeannie’s fingers were already hauling the dial. Three long rings, and just as she was expecting the answering service to kick in—

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Ettlinger?”

  “Mrs. Harper. Good to hear from you.”

  “I was going to leave a message. I’m moving back to my apartment and wanted you to have the telephone number. I didn’t think you’d be there on a Saturday.”

  “Saturdays don’t seem to count for much these days.” His mouth was full of something. Jeannie heard the gluey slap of chewing, imagined the baloney sandwich, the rolled sleeves, the weekend stubble. Ettlinger swallowed. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

  “You have?”

  “I have news for you. Are you sitting down?”

  Kip / June 1968

  Here’s the thing: Vance didn’t die. He looked dead, arms broke-hanging over the stretcher like a G.I. Joe with its limbs worked loose—it didn’t seem like somebody could come out of that bunker any other way—but he was still breathing, grappling onto the world of the living like the dedicated Marine he was. Maybe the sweet-faced corpsman knew it—but even if he felt the flutter of a pulse, the whisper of a breath, he most likely shared the same thought I read in everybody’s faces that night: the captain was as good as dead. They flew him to Danang, over the jungle and the war, the bladed air rushing his skin; the man himself must have felt he was dying, lifting into the sky with the dawn, his body burning away. And the medic in the Dustoff would have felt it too—would have wanted him to be comfortable, to disappear quiet and easy—but when they landed at the hospital, he was still fighting. So the surgeons got to work—busywork, keeping their skills sharp, their fingers limber—and after a mess of surgeries, three slugs of morphine, and a night on the fucked-up-and-beyond-repair ward, they were surprised next morning to find him still alive. Flew him to Yokosuka to heal his burns, and finally, when he was strong enough, to the good old U S of A, where he’s recovering someplace clean and caring, making plans for the rest of his life.