by Joe Cassilly
Now to leave, I pulled the first door open and pushed to the second door. The hallway was so narrow that I could not get off to the side to open the door without it hitting me. I would have to pull it toward me with one hand and back the chair up with the other hand at the same time. The door had a round doorknob. I tried pressing the palm of one hand against it and pulling it. No luck. I used both palms. I pulled. It did not open; instead, the wheelchair rolled forward into the door. I was going to die of old age in the hallway of a men’s room.
I had to let go, back up, lock the brakes, grab the knob again, and pull. The door opened. I hooked my right hand behind the knob and felt for the brake with my left hand. It released. Now I tried to reach across my lap for the right brake with my left hand. I could not get the damn brake to release. My right hand slipped and the door closed. “Shit!” I took a breath. “Be patient, you can do this.” Lock only the left brake. Grab the knob with both hands, pull, hook the right hand behind the knob, and feel for the brake. The brake released. The chair started to roll toward the door. I reached my left hand out and put my palm against the wall and pushed backward. Slowly, the chair inched backward. Quickly, I slid my palm back along the wall. Palm against the wall, push. Concentrate; don’t let the doorknob slip from the right hand. The door was about halfway open, but the chair would not roll back any more. I had backed into the door behind me. I did not have enough leverage to push it open. I just started to laugh out loud.
Suddenly, the door in front of me opened as a boy started into the bathroom, but he was startled to see a man sitting on the other side, leaning forward, staring into his face. The boy started to back out and close the door. “No, no, don’t go, help me open the door.” The boy came forward and slammed the door into my still outstretched hand and then struck the toes of my boots. I shook the pain out of my knuckles. “Wait a second.” I turned the chair as much as I could in the cramped space. The boy got the door open and held it while I went passed. “Next time, I’m pissing in the parking lot,” I vowed.
By the time I got to the table, the woman and children had almost finished their food. I started to pull into the table when I saw the man who had passed me on the way in. “Excuse me,” I said to her. “I see an old friend.” I rolled to his table. “Hi. I wouldn’t want you to ruin your lunch worrying about whether I got in or not.” He looked up with the hamburger, bun, and lettuce crowding to escape his mouth and said, “Go to hell.”
I smiled. “It couldn’t be any worse than meeting you.” I pushed back to my food. She was smiling and shaking her head, having overheard the exchange. “You’re crazy.”
“Yeah, it’s the one character trait that was developed by the Army that wasn’t effected by my disability.” I took a sip of my coffee and then extended my hand across the table. “I’m Jake.”
She took my hand. “I’m Kristi.” Her little girl crawled off the bench and back onto my lap. She reminded me that a year ago, I had been holding Elena on my lap. I wrapped my arms around the girl and gently rocked back and forth. I wondered if Elena would remember me. Would Bibi? I watched Kristi watching the little boy trying to drink from a straw.
I closed my eyes and remembered another little boy trying to drink a soda. About ten Rangers had climbed into two jeeps to visit an orphanage run by an order of French nuns. We were headed toward Long Binh. One of the jeeps was towing a trailer filled with ice and sodas. Stuffed in beside us were bags of oranges, apples, cookies, and chewing gum. We turned off the main highway and went up a road under great old trees. The orphanage was surrounded by a high wall and we had to wait until the gate was opened.
The sisters wore black dresses and veils with little starched white collars. They stood surrounded by, I guessed, between seventy and one hundred children ranging in age from four to twelve years old. From their features or black skin, it was obvious that some of the children had been fathered by Americans and abandoned to the tender mercies of the war. Some wore T-shirts and shorts that had been donated by other soldiers and did not fit well. I was carrying two of the smallest children and found that four others were holding onto the baggy legs of my pants and just going where I went. When I lay on the grass, they piled on and snuggled beside me. They were trying to absorb love and comfort just by touch. One of the girls had a nasty scrape on her knee. I got a medic’s bag out of the jeep to wash it off and put a bandage on it. One of the sisters came to me and spoke to me in French. I raised my hands and said, “Je ne parlez,” and shook my head. She took my hand and led me into one of the buildings to a small infirmary that they had.
On the only cot lay a boy covered by a sheet. His eyes stared from a skull covered with skin. Hollows filled the spaces between the bones. His dry, cracked lips would not cover his teeth. Until he blinked, I was not sure he was alive. The sister pulled the sheet down. The boy’s body was covered with sores. His arms and legs had barely any muscle tissue. Beneath his fallow skin were his ribs and distended belly. I shuddered. I had never seen a child starving to death and, for an instant, I thought I would cry. I was about to tell the sister that I was not a medic, but that would not work. Behind her was a glass cabinet intended for medicines, but it was practically empty.
I knelt beside the boy and got a tube of ointment from the medic bag that we used in the field for skin rash. I sat the boy up. It was like posing a mannequin. I put some of the salve onto my finger and worked over his body, putting it onto the sores. I stood and put the contents of the medic bag into the cabinet.
“Merci,” said the sister.
I nodded. “Um, you’re welcome.” She nodded and smiled at me. I went to the jeep and got a Coke and an apple. I went back. The boy was still sitting as I left him, maybe because he was waiting to be told he could lie down. I squatted in front of him and opened the can. There was a faint glimmer in the boy’s eyes. I held out the can and the boy took it in his hands, but when I let go, he almost dropped it; he had so little strength that he could not lift the can to take a drink. I took the can and held it to the boy’s mouth. He drank and then he smiled.
I handed him the apple. The boy looked at it and then looked at me. He did not know what to do with it. I pulled the knife from my belt. I cut a slice and chewed it. Then, I cut the thinnest sliver and put it to the boy’s lips. He bit off a small piece and chewed it very deliberately, as if it took all the strength he had just to do that. It took twenty minutes to feed him a third of the apple and half the soda. I lifted his legs into bed and covered him. In seconds, he was asleep.
“Is something wrong?” It was Kristi.
“What?” I shook off the trance.
“You’re crying,” she whispered. I felt my face. My cheeks were wet. I grabbed a napkin and wiped. “Just some old memories.” Kristi helped me back off the curb. I thanked her and said good-bye to the kids. I loaded into the car. I wondered if that little boy ever woke.
30
The Feeling of the Grey
House
The food and coffee gave me a shot of energy as I started to drive again, but it did not last long. North of Baltimore, I found myself fighting to stay awake—I had to stop for a nap. I pulled off the interstate and found a wide shoulder on the road, locked the doors, put my feet in the right seat, and went to sleep.
I dreamed about the ride back to the States on a big C-141. The huge jet carried me in a stretcher that rocked in a harness slung from the ceiling. There was a knocking in the plane and a faraway voice calling to me. Slowly, I realized that I was in a car and not a jet. I looked in the direction of the voice and was startled to see a Stetson and a pair of sunglasses looking in my window. The Maryland trooper called to me to open the window. I opened the door.
“Are you alright?” the police officer asked.
“Yeah, is anything wrong?”
“I passed here a couple of hours ago and noticed your car, so when it was still here, I checked it out.”
“I just got tired and pulled over for a rest.” Then, it struck me what h
e had said. “A couple of hours!” I looked at the clock; 4:15 pm. “Oh man I gotta get going.” I got back on the interstate. In a while, I was on a bridge over the Susquehanna River. Just on the other side, I turned north and followed a two-lane highway into Pennsylvania. The trees there had only buds and small leaves. It was 5:30 when I turned and drove back toward the river. The anticipation was growing. I shivered as I began recognizing the landscape. The car began climbing a long gradual hill along a winding road. Many days I had struggled to get my bike up this hill, strong will ordering tired muscles to keep pedaling. The feel of the ridged rubber on the pedals pressed into my bare feet, breathing hard from my dry mouth. I would never feel all that again. As I went around a curve, a pick-up truck going the other way was passing a jogging woman and the guys in the back were whistling and calling to her.
At the top of the hill, my hand instinctively reached for the turn signal. I turned slowly into the white pea gravel lane and heard the pebbles crunch beneath the tires. The sky was a soft pale blue; the long shadows from the old evergreens darkened the sides of the lane. I drove slowly, wondering how my mother would react when she saw me. Then, I saw the great, grey, three story house through the trees. I stopped the car and took a long deep breath. A wave of emotion broke over me and I sobbed. The time I had been away from its comforting rooms had been too long, measured not in days or months, but in events and changes to me. I wiped my wet face on my sleeve. I really should carry a handkerchief.
The white gravel formed an “O” in the green grass in front of the house. The lawn had clumps of garlic grass, buttercups, and dandelions across it. I pulled up by the end of a new ramp that ran down from the porch. The porch went from a sun porch on the right across the front and down the left side of the house. The garage doors were closed. Mom’s car must have been inside. I blew the horn and began unloading the wheelchair.
I got the chair out and put the cushion in it. Still, no one came out of the house. I tooted the horn again. I rolled back and opened the trunk and laid my bag in my lap. I pushed up the ramp; it was a little steeper than I was used to, but I made it. I rolled to the front door. I grabbed it between my palms and turned as hard as I could, but it would not budge. I had not expected it to be locked.
I rolled to the short, fat wall that ran along the edge of the porch. I peered up under a bird feeder that hung from the porch ceiling. I reached for the spare key that was held against the bottom by a rusted nail. Using both hands, I turned the key and pushed open the wide front door. I popped a wheelie over the weather stripping and rolled into the front hall. My wheels met with the resistance of the thick Persian runner. I sat the bag down and listened. The house was still.
The front hall was eight feet wide and went in twelve feet before it reached the stairs that went up to a landing and turned and came back toward the front of the house. I sat staring at those steps. I remembered a little boy creeping down in pajamas, peering between the rungs of the banister at the Christmas tree in the huge living room. Then, I remembered a pretty dark-haired girl in a peach-colored gown posing on the stairs for a photo beside the same boy, but he was much older and was wearing a white dinner jacket.
I went to the right into the dining room. I smelled the musty odor of old carpets and lemon oil furniture polish. In the kitchen, I noticed the red oven light was lit. I opened the oven door. Something in a casserole dish was bubbling. That meant she had only gone out for a few moments. I looked into the refrigerator. There were a few bottles of Rolling Rock beer, my father’s. It had probably been there for months; my mother did not drink it. I took a bottle and stuck it into the bottle opener bolted to the side of the kitchen counter. Then, I wedged the bottle between my legs and pushed back through the house.
Back on the porch, I pushed around to the side of the house. I looked down a set of steps that ran into a formal garden surrounded by a boxwood hedge. The stone walk ran out to an Oriental lantern on a stone column and then beyond to a trellis covered with wisteria. Looking over the trellis through a gap in the trees, I could see a patch of grey, which was the Susquehanna. I had spent hours of my childhood playing by it and in it.
The beer was good, cold, and welcome. Looking at the woods and river got me thinking about a particular stream in Vietnam. The mission was to go to a fire support base that was being abandoned and wait to ambush any bad guys that showed up to scavenge what the GIs left behind. The problem was that it took us two days to discover that the pilot left us in the wrong clearing, five kilometers east of where we should have been.
On the second day of the mission, we came to the stream. The bank dropped about six feet into the water. On the other side, four feet from the edge of the stream, a solid wall of bamboo rose. The point man went over the bank into the stream and found that the water was about chest deep. I handed my machine gun and ammo to the man ahead of me. I grabbed vines and lowered myself gently, trying not to make any splashing noise that might reach unseen ears. We waded down the stream until we could find a sandy area that we could all fit onto. We rested for a few minutes and drained the water from our pouches and ammo clips. I took a dry rag from a plastic bag in my pack and dried the gun and a belt of ammo so the links would not rust. The team leader had been looking for a break in the bamboo for us to move through but it stretched as far as we could see on either side.
The only way to go through was to low crawl on our stomachs. We took off our packs and tied them to our ankles. The point man took a knife with a saw blade and cleared a tunnel through the low, thorny branches. I was in the middle of the file. I unloaded the machine gun—in the tangle of bamboo, the ammo would have snagged and been pulled out and it would have been almost impossible to aim at anything. I pushed the gun and the boxes of ammo into the tunnel, then crawled in after them and dragged the rest of my junk. In a little over two hours, we had crawled about fifty yards; the whole way, thorns snagged our clothing and equipment. Several times, I had to slide the gun and ammo off to the side or crawl over them to get up to the guy in front of me to unhook him from a snag of thorns.
As we came out the other side, we looked at one another. The thorns had torn huge holes in our uniforms and scratched long thin cuts that trickled blood. A black ranger from Baltimore, Mac, looked at me, pointed to my face and then to his own face, and whispered loudly, “Leaches.”
“Let’s check each other out,” said the team leader. “Sixty, you and Mac go first.” While the rest of the team made a circle looking out for bad guys, Mac and I stood in the center. We unbuttoned our shirts. I lit a cigarette and handed it to Mac. He used his free hand to steady my head and then touched the glowing end to the gorged worm that was sucking my blood from my cheek. It squirmed at the burn and dropped to the ground. I dropped my pants—no one wore underwear—and while I looked down the front of me, Mac looked down my back, butt, and legs. I burned one off my stomach and he got another off my leg. Then, I got dressed and he dropped his pants and I looked him over.
“Hold still you got one on your butt,” I whispered.
“Don’t you burn my ass,” he whispered in reply.
I started laughing. “Hold still.” He shivered. He got dressed and we took our places on the perimeter and two more guys stood up. I flipped open the cover on the gun and positioned the first bullet. I heard someone running.
The white gravel crunched with a quick rhythm. I rolled toward the front porch. It was my Aunt Ann. She had slowed to a walk when she saw the strange car, and stopped when she saw the front door open. I rolled out where she could see me. “Jake!” she yelled and ran, waving her arms. She took the steps by twos and threw her arms around me. It was not my mother, but it was the greeting that I was hoping for.
“What are you doing here?”
“I pinched a nurse and they threw me out.”
She looked at me to see if I were serious. “Really?”
I grinned. “There aren’t any nurses there that I would want to pinch. You are the one that said come home so I
did.”
“Come in. I have to get dinner out of the oven before it burns.”
“Will you carry this for me, please?” I asked, handing her the beer bottle. She took it and drank the rest of the beer.
“I’ll get you another,” she said.
I followed her into the kitchen. I watched her as she worked. She was the running woman that the guys in the truck had been whistling at. She was wearing a grey sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and blue shorts. She had rock-hard muscles in her calves and thighs. I wondered if she only ran or did weights too. “You run much?”
She turned off the oven and left the door open. “Every evening. It makes me feel great, like a high.” She grabbed two beers and slid a chair beside me with her foot.
“What time will my mother be back?”
She arched her eyebrows. “Don’t you know? She spends weekends in Philadelphia, to be with your father.” I felt a stab of jealousy that my mother had never gone to that trouble for me. I shook my head no. “Yeah, you remember Doctor and Misses Parker—well they have a townhouse there. Your mother spends Friday and Saturday nights. Look, I’m going to go take a shower before dinner, you need anything?”
“No.” She put her arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. We sat in silence for a few minutes and then she leaned over and kissed my cheek. She walked to a desk by the back door.
“Here’s some mail that came for you in the last week, if you want to look at it,” she said, placing it on the kitchen table. Then she went up the back steps.
I pushed outside and went to the car. I opened the trunk and took out the box of supplies. Without my mother here, I did not know how I was going to manage; maybe this was not a good idea. I could just sleep with the leg bag on and, when she came home, I could ask her to help me with the catheter. I pushed back up the ramp, inside, and through a door under the stairs into the new bathroom. It was great. The builder had moved the wall out into what had been a small butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen. The sink sat on a counter that I could get my knees under. The toilet was high and had a grab bar. There was a big tub with grab bars and enough floor space that I could maneuver around. I put the box on the counter and drained the leg bag.
