Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

“I meant, the two of us,” Evans said.

  Kathie and Angus took the hint and sat back down. Danny, stubbornly, remained standing, clutching the bloody paper towels to his nose. He was near tears, but he was furious, and everything in his demeanor said he considered Principal Evans an idiot. Evans gave him an exasperated glance, then looked at Liz, his eyebrows raised, as if to say, You see what I’ve had to deal with here.

  Liz sought her oldest son’s eyes, but he would not meet her gaze. Whatever had happened, he believed he was in the right.

  She said to Evans, “I’m sure that whatever you have to say, the kids need to hear it too.”

  Evans seemed inclined to dispute the point, then shrugged a reluctant concession. Liz nodded to the children, and Kathie and Angus rose again, like overworked puppets. They all trooped into the principal’s office. Evans moved at once to sit behind his big steel desk. The children arrayed themselves on a threadbare couch with an incongruous rose pattern. Liz took the stuffed chair directly in front of the desk, with a sense of sinking into ineffectuality. The thing was much too low for dignity, which was, perhaps, the point.

  “So what actually happened?” she said.

  “There was some kind of argument in the cafeteria between your boys and the Bentley boys, which, unfortunately, um, escalated, I suppose you could say. Into a brawl.”

  “What were they fighting about?”

  “No one seems able to say,” Evans said, with a pointed glance at Danny, who glared back. “But the facts are clear enough. One of the lunchroom monitors saw the whole thing. Your boys—well, attacked, is really the only word for it, the other boys. Just started hitting.”

  “Unprovoked,” Liz said dryly.

  “I’m sure there were unpleasantries exchanged prior to the fight,” Evans said. “Boys will be boys. But the point is, Danny started it. He hit Tony, and the thing took off from there. No one is disputing that.”

  Liz glanced over at her children, but it was true, they were not objecting. Even Angus, on whose tendency to spill the beans she generally relied, had his mouth firmly closed, though it was clearly requiring an effort.

  Name, rank, and serial number, Liz thought, impressed in spite of herself. A united front. Whatever was going on, they had decided not to talk about it here, in what they clearly considered hostile territory.

  “I find it absolutely impossible to believe that my kids jumped two much larger and older boys for no good reason at all,” she said. “The Bentley boys are bullies. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Nevertheless,” Evans said. “Your boys started the actual fighting. Under normal circumstances, in a case this clear-cut, I would have no choice but to suspend the fight’s instigator—”

  “Meaning, Danny?”

  “Yes. For three days, and everyone else involved, for one day. But I understand that there are, um, special circumstances in their lives right now, what with their father, uh—”

  Getting blown up, Liz thought. But she realized that wasn’t what the principal meant. His tone was off; he clearly didn’t know Mike had been wounded. He meant simply that her husband was a Marine in Vietnam. Warmongering father, violent sons. She thought she understood something of Danny’s fury now. This chubby little peacenik twerp in his bell-bottoms fancied himself a psychologist. She let him fumble.

  “—with his situation overseas, I suppose you could say,” Evans managed at last. “With the family’s situation.” He paused, savoring his own delicacy, then went on, “Given that, and the children’s otherwise excellent records, I’m inclined to forgo the suspensions in this case and ask you to simply keep them home for a day or two. In a spirit of, shall we say, self-examination.”

  “A day or two,” Liz said.

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Evans said magnanimously.

  THEY WALKED to the car in silence. Kathie was in tears again, and Liz put her arm around her. In the parking lot, Liz unlocked the station wagon and opened the door. Kathie climbed into the backseat, followed by Angus and then Danny. About to shut the door, Liz paused, seeking her older son’s eyes. To her relief, he met her look.

  “You really hit Tony Bentley first?” she said. It was very hard to picture; Tony was at least six inches taller than Danny and twenty pounds heavier, and his brother Mark was bigger still.

  “I hit them both first,” Danny said. Both he and Angus had stopped pressing the paper towels to their faces, and their lips and chins were smeared with half-dried blood, as were their shirts, but Liz decided not to try to clean them up yet. She just wanted to get her children home.

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, Danny went straight to his room without a word. Liz let him go; she knew her older son. Like Mike, he would talk when he was ready. She debriefed Kathie first, but Kathie, it turned out, did not know what had started the ruckus. She had simply jumped in, on principle, when she saw her brothers fighting with the Bentleys. Apparently she had blindsided Mark Bentley with a cafeteria tray that still had a plate of spaghetti on it, and she seemed pleased, on the whole, with her performance. Liz, still at a loss as to what sort of disciplinary measures were going to be appropriate, considered sending her daughter to her room, but in truth, she could not feel too upset with Kathie for what amounted to sibling solidarity. And there was a secret, guilty pleasure in the image of that bully Mark Bentley with spaghetti sauce all over him. She ended up giving her daughter a glass of milk and some cookies and letting her watch the afternoon soaps. Kathie loved soap operas.

  Liz finally got the whole story out of Angus while she was sponging the blood off his face. The Bentley boys, he said, had come over while he was eating his lunch and taken his Twinkies. Angus had started crying, Danny had hurried over to defend him, Tony Bentley had “said something,” and Danny had hit him.

  “What did Tony say?” Liz asked.

  Angus hesitated.

  “Come on, Angus.”

  “He said that Marines are baby killers.”

  God help me, Liz thought. She felt sick, instantly and literally nauseated. And furious. But at whom? Tony Bentley had not arrived at that formulation himself; he’d heard it somewhere, probably from his parents. He could have gotten it off the evening news, for that matter, from one of the increasingly frequent film clips of college students waving signs and chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

  She said, “Why didn’t you tell any of this to Principal Evans?”

  Angus shrugged. “Danny said it was none of his business.”

  Liz was silent. She suspected that Danny’s take on Evans was accurate; the man was probably out there waving a sign himself on weekends. She had a sudden sense of embattlement, of a net of hostile forces tightening around her and her family. If her children had to fight every kid whose parents thought the war was dubious, it was going to be a long haul through grade school.

  “Daddy would never kill a baby,” Angus declared, with a trace of tentativeness that hurt her heart.

  “Of course not, sweetheart.”

  “He only kills bad guys.”

  Liz dabbed the wet washcloth at her son’s upper lip. Angus’s soft peach skin was raw from all the scrubbing, but at least he didn’t look like someone requiring a medevac helicopter anymore. She felt completely inadequate as a parent, as a communicator of values and principles: defeated, by complexity, by vicious circumstance, by history itself. She had wanted to raise her children on poetry, beauty, and the subtlety of the world’s glorious grays, and here she was, reduced to cleaning the blood off them while they defended a painfully simple white against an even more idiotic black.

  What did you tell a seven-year-old who had just had his nose bloodied fighting with someone who had called his father a murderer? She wished that Mike was here to help her deal with this. Though if Mike were here, he would probably have been laughing and giving the kids pointers on combat technique. He would have been proud of his children, pure and simple. Liz felt perversely proud of them herself; there was a quixotic
nobility in them taking on the Bentley boys that came straight from their father. Mike was fighting this war because he believed, essentially, that Communist bullies were trying to take the South Vietnamese’s Twinkies.

  Angus was as cleaned up as she was going to be able to get him. Liz took his bloody shirt off and found him a clean shirt in the pile of unsorted clothes on top of the dryer. Since she had already given Kathie milk and cookies and let her watch the soaps, further discipline was out of the question at this point. She found the last package of Twinkies in the cupboard, to replace the loss to the Bentleys, and left her younger son at the table with a glass of milk while she went upstairs to try to talk to Danny.

  The door to the boys’ bedroom was locked, as she had known it would be. Danny, she noted, had put his bloodied shirt in the dirty clothes hamper at the end of the hall. For some reason, that small fidelity tore at her heart, and Liz sat down on the top of the stairs, put her face in her hands, and finally began to cry.

  IT WAS TWELVE STEPS, on crutches, to the double doors that led onto the hallway, and twenty-three steps down the hallway to the courtyard. It took Mike a week to get to the hall doors, and another week to build up enough stamina to reach the courtyard exit. By that time he had stopped using the crutches and had to recount: twenty-one hobbling steps to get off the ward, and another forty steps to get down the hall to the door. His left leg wouldn’t bend much yet, but it held his weight now and that would have to do. He carried the crutches with him anyway, partly because he wanted to make sure he could still carry a gun but mostly because the doctors seemed to think he needed them and he was trying to keep the doctors happy. The happier his doctors were with him, the sooner he was out of this place.

  The courtyard was a lush leftover from the days of the French, overgrown now but still incongruously beautiful. You couldn’t even hear the Da Nang traffic. It felt like a secret; the only other patient who came out there was a lieutenant in a wheelchair, who had taken an AK-47 round through his hip. The guy was a brooder and never spoke, just nodded politely and rolled himself to the farthest corner possible. He would smoke two cigarettes with metronomic regularity, lighting the second off the butt of the first, then nod once more and wheel back inside. Otherwise, the garden was deserted and Mike savored its silence, the odd birds flickering through the flowering shrubs, the sweet, alien fragrance of the heavy white blooms. He could feel parts of himself stirring and stretching, in inner openings blocked off too long by bustle and blare. It was like water after a long parching; in a weird way, more even than warm food, clean, dry clothes, and not getting shot at, solitude was what he missed the most. You were almost never alone in a war zone.

  He had Liz’s latest letter with him; he’d been saving it up since the morning mail call. The envelope was heavy and promised photographs. Mike gave it a discreet sniff and smiled at Liz’s faithful dab of Chanel No. 5, then tore the flap open carefully, conscious of still relearning the mechanics of his left arm. It was like working a puppet with a couple busted strings; the hand was intact, but the fingers were numb, and something had happened deep inside his shoulder that would have made it impossible to comb his hair, if he’d had enough hair to need combing. But he didn’t, and the hell with it.

  There were three photographs, a welcome haul, one of the kids in their Halloween costumes, one of Kathie and her friend Temperance in their Bluebird uniforms, and an old black-and-white of Liz on the front steps of his parents’ house. She was wearing a sundress, and Mike studied her shoulders closely. He loved his wife’s shoulders: smooth, strong, and firm. Proud shoulders, and luscious. Sometimes in bed with her, he would just put his nose against her nearest shoulder and breathe. She would laugh at him for that and call him a cheap date, and he would just smile into her perfect skin.

  The letter was disheartening, as so many of the recent letters were. The kids had gotten into some kind of scuffle at school; Danny had punched a bully after he made an antiwar crack and had ended up taking the fall with the school’s authorities. It sounded to Mike like the next time it happened, Danny should just skip punching the bully and go straight to punching the principal. It tore at Mike’s heart to picture his older son being put in a spot like that. It was like sending Edmonds up Hill 93 with the Third Platoon: the poor kid had been thrown in over his head, sink or swim, and he was just doing the best he could. But of course Liz didn’t see it that way. All she saw was that Danny was in trouble and needed his father home, which was true enough. In a perfect world, Mike would have been there, of course he would have been there; he would have had his son’s back come hell or high water, as in a perfect world he would have had somebody running the Third Platoon who wasn’t getting his on-the-job training by running head-on into fortified bunker positions. But in a perfect world you didn’t need to be at war in the first place.

  The thing was, Liz was still mad at him for getting wounded, though she couldn’t say so. Mike had told the goddamned doctors not to bother with a notification, or at most to just send a telegram, but of course the Marine Corps in its wisdom had sent two guys in uniform to the door and made the whole thing into an unnecessarily big deal. Then they’d given him the damn medals to boot, so she thought he’d done something crazy. It wasn’t his fault the goddamn Marine Corps gave you medals for just doing what Marines did.

  He’d tried several times to call and say something reassuring, but the radio-telephone hookup was hit-or-miss and he hadn’t been able to get through. And even if he had, those harried radio conversations tended to leave them both feeling worse anyway; with the time limit, the necessity of using radio procedure, and the knowledge that pretty much anyone in I Corps could be listening in, it was hard to get very real or deep. It left a bad taste. You just ended up feeling frustrated, and lonelier than ever.

  What could he say to her, anyway? His country was at war. It was his job to fight his country’s wars. It wasn’t like he was some clueless cowboy with his six-shooter strapped on. He knew the score. You started out shiny and certain, but that didn’t last. He remembered getting off the boat in Hungnam, North Korea, in late October 1950, bright eyed and bushy tailed, fresh out of Parris Island, not knowing a damn thing. The wind was straight out of Manchuria, and the thermometers were sticking at twenty below, and suddenly they weren’t fighting the North Koreans anymore, they were fighting the Chinese. There were two Marine regiments trapped in the mountains around the Changjin Reservoir, which on the Japanese maps they were using then was called the Chosin, and Mike’s company had climbed an icy ridge above the main supply route to try to keep the road to Hagaruri open for them.

  The first night on the hill, it seemed like the whole slope below them turned into Chinese, like the snow just gathered itself into a thousand moving shapes. Mike remembered the bugles, the eeriness of their tinny toot-toot sounding suddenly in the darkness. The bugles, and whistles, and the Chinese screaming as they came: MAH-rine, you die tonight.

  And the next night was the same, and the next; he’d just become an animal, they’d all settled into savage simplicity: try not to freeze to death, kill Chinese. And every night there came that point at 3:00 a.m. when everybody in the company knew exactly how many bullets he had left, and you fixed your bayonet and figured that this was your night to die, because the Chinese just kept coming and you just couldn’t kill them all. There were a million of them, like the stars in the sky. And it wasn’t noble, it wasn’t John Wayne at Iwo Jima and people dying in well-behaved movie ways in one take. Mike had killed one man with his knife, and it had taken what seemed like hours, just the two of them in that frozen hole in the ground, in the pitch-black, closer than lovers, trying to stab or choke or bludgeon each other through all those winter layers. When he finally got the knife in under the guy’s ribs and held it deep inside him, keeping the pressure up, he had felt the warmth of the man’s blood spreading over his hand and smelled the shit as the man’s bowels let go. That wasn’t something you did for freedom and democracy.

  The
y’d given out medals like Halloween candy afterward, but Mike knew he hadn’t been a hero. He’d just been a freezing animal in a hole, doing what he had to, what they all had to do, on an endless night no one expected to survive. But it had meant something, in the end, watching the Marines of the Fifth and Seventh Regiments file past on the road below, the road they’d kept open for them. Not something you wanted to wave a flag about, not even something you wanted to talk about. Just something so deep it changed you completely inside. And then you came home and everyone thought they knew something, everyone had their glorious opinion on war and why and the price of tea, and you just wanted to tell them to shut the fuck up. No one could ever know who wasn’t there.

  MIKE REALIZED he was sweating; the late morning sun had cleared the roof line. He looked at the photographs one more time, lingering over the Halloween picture. Danny and Angus had gone as Marines, wearing his old dungarees and field jackets, their faces blackened with burned cork. Kathie had dressed up as a nurse, and Deb-Deb had gone as some kind of animal. God, they were all getting big.

  He’d be there for them next year. He’d play catch with the boys, go fishing, get them out to the ballpark and eat too many hot dogs with them. He’d take the girls to ballet and Girl Scouts and birthday parties and sit in the back row trying not to tear up when they sang in school shows. He’d do his job here, take his lumps, and go home to his family.

  Meanwhile, it was time for his noon nap. He might as well enjoy the clean sheets while he could; they were the last ones he was going to see for a while. He’d walked two hundred steps today, and he would walk three hundred tomorrow, and by God, by Friday he was walking out of this damn hospital and getting on a chopper back to Khe Sanh before they gave his company to someone else. He just hoped Liz would understand.

  [ PART SIX ]

  To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.