by David Bergen
It was when he herded Jon and Del and Ada down into the bunker he had built that their father talked about the war. The bunker was stocked with canned goods and a .303 and ammunition and gas masks and waterproof matches and half a cord of wood. This would happen several times a year, usually on the warmest nights of the summer, when sleep was difficult and the air in the caboose was close and rank. They would sit in the cool darkness of the bunker and their father would shush them and listen for noises.
“They’re coming,” he’d whisper, and one time when Del spoke, he clamped his hand over her mouth and put his lips to her ear and whispered, “Don’t.”
After, when all was clear, they remained in the dark and he told them stories. He was frank in his telling and he offered them intimate details and because they were frightened they listened without protest. He said once that he had fallen in love with a woman in Vietnam. Her name was Yvonne. He said, “I was eighteen years old, fighting in a country I didn’t understand, and Yvonne offered me a comfort I had never had before. There was something inside me that badly wanted to love her. When I left Vietnam, I never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her.”
He lifted a hand as if to tell them more, but then he fell silent, rubbing his hands together in the dim light of the emergency lamp. By the age of seventeen Del refused to go into the bunker with her father. Jon still went. He was less stubborn than Del and he hoped that his going would please his father. Ada went because she believed that each successive story was like a piece of thread, and she was collecting those pieces.
WHENEVER THE NIGHTMARES WOKE HIM, CHARLES COULD NOT get back to sleep, and to push away the images he played music, sometimes classical, sometimes opera that took him to unfamiliar places. The children would still be sleeping, and so he played the stereo softly. And he drank. Not a lot, but the amount accumulated so that by the morning he would be caught in a soft haze and everything around him had slowed down. He would pass the night in front of the fire, and in the flames he would see images of both fantastic beauty and dire malevolence. He saw Sara from behind, her head turned back to him as if to say good-bye. He saw a mouth opening in a scream and insects erupting from the dark maw. He saw stumps for legs and a boy’s eyes. He saw the Vietnamese girl he had loved. He couldn’t see her face, because he couldn’t remember it. In fact, once he replaced her face with that of some woman he’d seen in town, and this worked fine. He saw Sara lying down, naked. He saw Ada as a baby, the olive skin and the chubby hands, her fat lips closing around Sara’s engorged breast.
Back then, when Ada was young, everything had been possible, and now sometimes it seemed that she was his only connection to that time. She was the one he loved most easily. He worried about her; she was too aware. She watched him, and by doing this she gauged the tone of her own life. He was afraid she would end up desperate like him.
There had been a time when the kids were younger and he was still seeking help that he would drive down the mountain in his pickup and go to a psychiatrist. The cost was covered by health insurance for a certain number of visits and when the maximum was reached, he stopped going. The woman had not been useful. Only once, when Charles had described how a friend had been killed, did she tilt her head and ask how he felt.
He didn’t know how he felt. That was why he was seeing her. He told her this. She smiled at this comment, as if he had said something humorous. She was older than he was and possibly attractive, but in a rich, austere way. Charles kept waiting for something to happen, for his heart to open up, for tears to come, for the stone that sat somewhere between his shoulders to fall away. At one point he even used those words, and as he said them, “I want this stone to fall away,” he was aware of how simple he sounded. Even so, nothing happened.
He said, “This is useless. All you give me are empty words.”
“All you can hear, Charles, are empty words. The words themselves aren’t empty.” She said that he was obviously in pain and she didn’t know if that pain could be alleviated in a few sessions with a psychiatrist.
One day, he said, “There were worse things. Killings that were reported in major newspapers. Pictures of North Vietnamese prisoners being dropped from helicopters. Beheadings. Executions. Some by American soldiers. And I, who shot one person in a moment of fear, wake up terrified in the middle of the night. Why?”
She looked at him. She was holding a pencil and the pencil was in her right hand and the point was aimed at her temple. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps there is goodness in you.”
“What about those other men who did the killing? Do you think they’re suffering today? That there isn’t goodness in them?”
“There might be.”
There were never any definite answers: this is what you have to do, Charles, this is how to take away the pain, I can help you. When he had finished his appointments with the doctor, he did what she had suggested. He contacted one of his fellow soldiers, Harry Widner. Harry lived in Redlands, California. They talked by phone and even planned to meet in Oregon for a weekend, to catch up, but when Charles called Harry several months later, Harry was evasive. He said he’d just gotten a job and wouldn’t have the time. Nothing to be done.
Charles heard Harry’s voice slipping away and he asked, “Do you think about what happened, Harry?”
“I don’t go there, Charlie. It’s not healthy.”
“Doesn’t it just arrive, uninvited? I try to send it away but it comes back and there’re all these thoughts that fuck me up.”
“You have to forget it, Charlie.” His voice was dull. He lacked imagination, Charles thought. Even when they had been together during the war, it had seemed that Harry wasn’t too perceptive. Harry had been the radio operator, the one to phone in the air strike. “Gonna wipe out this nightmare,” Harry had said. Then he lit a cigarette. A brilliant day. The blue sky all around. And in the village, a dog that had survived lifted its head and howled at the sun.
THERE WAS THE SUN AND THEN SHADOW AND IN THE SHADOW A shape and the shape became a man and the man fell and on the ground, in the place of the man, there appeared a young boy with a hole in his neck.
The darkness and then the light and the boy’s face came into the light. His feet were bare, his legs were bare, his chest, thin and taut, was bare. Just shorts with front pockets and the pockets bulged slightly and Charles thought later, if he wanted to believe something, he could convince himself that the pockets held grenades. More likely it was rocks, or some plaything.
When Charles was eleven he got a pellet gun from his dad. Went out into the wide backyard and shot at birds and dragonflies and smashed the window out of the neighbor’s shed; a shot from a great distance that took out one pane of four, the exact one he ’d been aiming at.
The fact was he had seen a man and the man had been reaching for something and so he shot him. The sun, playing hide-and-seek with the clouds, had jumped out too late and revealed the boy for what he was, a boy. But Charles had already killed him. And then, as if to underscore the necessity, Charles shot a pig that was running down the path and he shot a dog. A mongrel. An ugly little thing with a crippled back leg. No hair on the back, as if it were a large rat that deserved to die.
This little boy didn’t have a gun. He didn’t even have shoes. He was lying there, one leg tucked backward, his head turned slightly as if to look over his shoulder. Later, Charles considered going back to look at the boy, maybe it wasn’t even a boy, but he never did.
It had been early morning. It was Charles Boatman’s fifth mission with his patrol. Six men dropped into an isolated area, scouting for North Vietnamese coming down the trail, headed south. They dug in at the edge of a valley that was green and empty. In the distance there were wisps of smoke that Corporal Abel thought might be signs of cooking fires rising from a village. After the drop, when the helicopters were gone and the silence of the countryside had settled in, they waited. For four days they watched the trail and counted the soldiers. One morning, fifty-
six North Vietnamese slipped by, quiet and orderly, carrying AK-47s. Harry called in the numbers.
Charles was bunkered with Harry. They whispered through the night. Harry told Charles about the girl he’d loved and left. He wrote her every day. She was religious. She loved God and she wanted Harry to love God as well and he said that he was capable of doing that. Harry said that God was in charge. Even here, in this madness, it was a comfort to know that someone else was in control. Charles listened to Harry and thought he was a fool, but he didn’t say that. He just kept quiet and read his book, a Graham Greene novel, something Jimmy Poe, a former bunkmate, had recommended. Jimmy read a lot.
All of them had books. There was a lot of waiting and the waiting was interminable and so they read while they waited. They read and when they were done they traded books. They watched the trail and ate peaches and beans out of tins and they slept and then they waited again.
They were supposed to be picked up at dawn on the sixth day. However, the helicopters were called to evacuate injured from a firefight north of their pickup and so they waited some more and then they got a call to march south, toward the area where they had seen the wisps of smoke. It was a terrifying walk. The group was skittish and by the time they reached the village they were expecting to take fire. They saw some movement. A woman cooking over a fire. A dog. A child running between the shacks.
Charles was walking point. The night before he’d written a letter to Sara. “I’m dug in and I’m looking up at the stars,” he wrote. “Harry, my partner, is sleeping like a baby. He’s a happy man who believes in Jesus and life after death. He would like me to believe this as well, but I’ve got more important things to believe in and dream about. Like this girl I know called Sara.” He didn’t tell her about anything that was true. He told her that all was fine. That he would be home in a couple of months and that he dreamed about her every night.
Walking point was like inviting death. You were all alone and you were the first person the enemy would see and of course you would get killed walking point. Charles wasn’t killed. They arrived at the village and started a search. They set the huts on fire and there were children crying. Everything was going fine until someone started shooting. Charles had been in the doorway of a hut when the shooting started. He’d ducked and in the shadows he saw a shape and the shape moved and he raised his gun and at that point he saw it was a young boy and the boy appeared to be asking him a question but Charles shot and killed him.
Then Charles shot the pig. And he shot the dog. He didn’t shoot any more people. His body moved slowly. Harry came up to him and started talking but Charles couldn’t hear him, just saw his mouth moving. Harry saw the dead boy and pulled Charles away. After, he sat at the edge of the village. There was blood on his arms and boots. He didn’t know where the blood had come from. He thought it might be the pig’s blood and he wiped at it. The other men sat down beside him. There were only six of them and they had killed only eight people and some animals, but it was enough. Jimmy was off by himself, his head between his knees. Harry was high. He’d smoked a joint just that morning and Alex B. had joined him and so Alex was high as well. He was bragging about his aim.
Corporal Abel called for order, and Charles threw up.
ABEL KILLED HIMSELF AFTER RETURNING TO THE STATES. BUT before doing that he got married and had children and found himself a good job at a lumber mill outside of Portland. And then, seventeen years after the war, he went over to his parents’ house and late one night he sat in his father’s car and ran a vacuum hose up through the window and gassed himself. Alex B. started a drywall business and got rich. Charles Boatman moved up to Canada, pulled the caboose up onto the mountain, and sequestered himself, until his children came along and forced him back into the world. And with their arrival and the added responsibility, he put his correspondence books away and gave up the notion of being an accountant.
There wasn’t a lot of history up on Sumas Mountain, nor was there a lot of curiosity about where Charles Boatman came from or what his story was. That was good, for the most part. Sometimes, though, Charles wanted a listening ear, a neighbor who knew the stories, or at least had seen them on TV, and cared about them. When he began to spend time with Claire Toupin, he at first loved her innocence, her manner of asking a question and lifting her chin as if this were the most important question in the world, one that had never been asked before.
She was a small woman, and if she seemed easy and malleable it was only an impression she liked to give. She wasn’t that simple. The first time Charles slept with her, on the night of the party, he was surprised by her forthrightness, by her directions, and by her knowledge. After, they lay side by side, arms touching, and he said that he hadn’t loved anyone for a long time.
“I knew that,” she said.
“I mean, I love my children.”
“Of course.” She kissed him, on the mouth and then on his chest. This might be the answer to madness.
But still the dreams came, and on the nights that Charles stayed over at Claire’s, leaving his teenage children alone, he sometimes woke and sat at the edge of the bed and stared out the small window of the bedroom, breathing quickly. When Claire woke, she held him. She asked him what it was and he said, “Nightmares.” Her hand running his spine, on his shoulder, fingering his neck. She pulled him back onto the bed and asked, “What was it?” and he lied and said, “It was Ada, she was drowning and I couldn’t get to her,” or “It was Jon, he was falling.”
Claire’s hair in his hands. Her head, the bluntness of her crown. As if by determining the shape of her, he could bear out his own existence. Finally, unable to sleep, he said he was worried about the kids and he dressed and kissed her good night and walked back down the mountain to his own house.
One night he passed by Tomas Manik’s place and he saw the lights on and a figure walking down the driveway to the main road and he recognized Del’s gait, the slight sideways bob of her head as she walked. He waited for her and when she saw him she stopped and looked back at the house and then, as if resigning herself to some sort of inquisition, joined him.
“What?” Charles asked. “You sleepwalking?”
Del said that she probably was.
“That’s the artist’s house,” Charles said.
“That’s right.”
“And you’re visiting?”
“I guess.”
“By yourself?”
“I guess.”
“That ’s a lot of guessing. You a friend of Mr. Manik?” He pronounced the name wrong, with a long eee on the last syllable, as if the man were not to be taken seriously.
“Yes.”
“How good a friend?”
“Pretty good.”
Charles didn’t speak. They walked together in silence until they reached the house and then Charles said good night. Del looked at him and she went to her room.
He lay in bed that night and waited for sleep, but when it didn’t come he got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table. In the morning Ada found him sleeping at the table. He woke and picked up his coffee cup and said, “Look at me, sleeping everywhere but where I’m supposed to.”
Ada made fresh coffee, and while she did this he watched her. He said, “What do you think of Tomas Manik?”
Ada looked up and then away. She shrugged. “He’s all right.”
“You know about your sister?”
Ada said she did.
“And Jon, he knows?”
Ada nodded.
“So, I’m the only one in the dark here. Is that it?”
“Del was worried. She figured you might strangle Tomas.”
“That’s the goddamn truth.”
Ada said that there wasn’t anything they could do. Del had made up her mind. She faced Charles and said that he shouldn’t do anything stupid. “Tomas pays you for your work. You need him.”
Charles was astounded by his daughter’s matter-of-factness. He said, “It’s like I’m selling he
r then.”
“That’s ridiculous. This has nothing to do with you, Dad.”
“Sure as hell does.” He stood and pulled on his boots. Went outside and got into the pickup and looked out the windshield at the gray sky. Ada was watching from the kitchen window. He could see her profile and the fall of her hair. He started the engine, backed out of the drive onto the gravel road, and climbed toward Tomas Manik’s house.
There was no one at the house, so Charles slid down the muddy path toward the workshop. He didn’t knock, just walked in. Tomas was working and listening to jazz. The sound system he had was big, and a high whining clarinet filled the space. Charles stood in the entrance and watched Tomas work. He was welding, his back to Charles, and there was the flare of the welder and a brightness against the far wall. Tomas pushed his goggles up and turned and saw Charles. He put his tools down and walked over to the stereo and switched it off. He said, “Charles.”
Charles stepped forward. He was breathless and he rummaged about for the words that would penetrate Tomas’s smooth ease. He wondered where in this shop Del and the man would have had sex. Perhaps they went into the house.
“I’m here about Del. She’s been coming here, to see you.”
Tomas sat on a stool. He lit a cigarette and motioned at a free chair but Charles shook his head. Tomas said that it was true, Del did come to visit. However, he said, every time Del walked the mile and a half to his shop, she was choosing to do so and there was nothing he could say or do to stop her.
“You’re fucking a minor,” Charles said.
Tomas raised his eyebrows. “She said that? Or you?”
Charles stepped back. “I could kill you,” he said.
