Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  He was turned away and he closed his eyes.

  "I'm gonna go," I said. I figured I'd said too much. "But…I'll be praying for you. And Lonnie? I ain't sorry you're my father. I get it now. I see why. I hope you can think some and get there about me. Goodnight."

  I stood then and took a last look at him, still with his face turned away. I went to the doorway then and stopped one more time. He hadn't moved.

  And here's what I knew. God took me way, way out there with Lonnie…and having gone through it…his wrath, his crazy raging life…there was nothing anyone could throw at me I couldn't survive. Cause I had survived Lonnie Grunier.

  One week later my first letter came from Danny. I went in my room and fell on my knees and removed it like it was the Magna Carta.

  “Dear Hilly,

  “Smile. I hope you're missing me and not already taking up with some high school asshole who's beating my time. Well, I know you wouldn't but that's what they drill into us…she's fucking someone else.

  “Okay, I'm some pissed off so don't listen to me. This letter is pretty fucked.

  “Vietnam is fucked. Also, let me know if I can tell you the truth or if you need me to hold it back.

  “I am on a firebase called White Stallion. It's not cowboys and Indians though. Not anything I've ever known. The food, I hate it already.

  “Hey, Hawaii is beautiful, not that I saw it for long. I had a great sandwich there.

  “When we got over the country here they fired at us, at the plane. Called it a welcome committee. Yeah, just letting us know how welcomed we were. I was like, what in fuck? But they were like, no big deal. So welcome to Vietnam.

  “Once we got off the plane they put us on school buses with wire over the windows.

  “Hot? You wouldn't believe. Stink here? Think of sticking your head in a hot hamper full of rotten socks and black slimy cabbage. That's about it.

  “They took us to this station and gave us a speech and some supplies. Me and the guys meant for White Stallion, there were only three of us. We were the last to get picked up. Two guys came for us in a jeep. One was my sergeant. What an asshole.

  “That doesn't cover it.

  “I ended up liking the army by the time I went home from basic. I don't know if I told you. I started in hate, I ended in thinking it wasn't bad at all. I did well. It was football, you know? Now I'm here and it's hate again. I'll get used to it.

  “The guys you're with? You don't feel like them either. You're just too new, still who you used to be, but you don't fit, just into this green outfit of misplants and some of them are crazy but they're who you got and you're eager. Much as you hate them, you'll kill for them. It's fucked. But there's a couple you admire right off. You can tell they know.

  “On the way to base we went through this shallow water. An old man was crossing there. I can't even tell you, but they wanted to bust our cherries. Don't let Naomi see this. Don't leave it where she'll see. That old man wasn't anything to them. And once they busted our cherries, we drove on to the base and how you doin'? You see how it is, and that old papa ain't seein' nothing no more.

  “Then to the base, barbed wire around a compound. We live in tents. The food is shit. The guy who cooks, he's stoned. It's fucked, but who can eat? They said I'd get over it. I don't know.

  “Hey, I don't know if I'll mail this. The guys I came in with, they're okay guys, whatever, you meet about the same four over and over. But these guys are fucked up but they know how to survive so I'm staying quiet and figuring it out. We do long boring-ass guard duty but they put you with someone who knows. I fired at something my first night. The guy with me, same thing. In the morning a body.

  “That's it. That's all. But these people are serious. They'll use anyone.

  “I think of you, but part of me wants to keep you away from it. If this was too rough, I'm sorry. Tear it up so no one sees it. Let me know you're alright. Your hands on me, I lay at night and think of that, and I can remember it so sharp, I can feel it still. I don't want to lose it. I love you. When you write…well I still got that letter with all the love you wrote me and gave me at the airport that time. But it's pretty worn but it's lucky. Just write me now that you know. Tell me stuff. Tell me everything, you're my word girl, you've got the words, all the words I need. I got my arms around you right now and more, yeah you know what I'd be doin' if I had you with me. Let me know what's going on. I don't want to worry about you. I need to know. Write me.

  “The country here is so different. God bless the USA.

  “I love you,

  “Danny.”

  I read my first letter five times. Then I refolded it and held it tight against my

  forehead so it would get into my brain. He was already changing. Life and death

  were like the potter's hands.

  When they called that night, the hospital…they said Lonnie died. I wanted to think he saw that doorway and went on up, new legs, strong feet, mind healed. One way or another, I was on the quarry cliff in my mind, no one before me. But Naomi, she was with me in the kitchen, her hand on my arm.

  "That last time, I forgave him," I said. "Maybe I set him free."

  "No," she said to me, "…you set yourself free."

  Then she patted me. Well, I wasn't alone.

  Finding My Thunder 49

  The world was a whole lot bigger than my problems. I did not hear much from Danny, only once in fact. What I was seeing on the news was a thing called the Tet Offensive. Danny had arrived just in time for the biggest military push by the Communist troops against South Vietnam. Up until now there had been these smaller battles, but this was a big campaign and the Americans were caught off-guard but they were fighting back hard.

  The war took all of my attention, more than Lonnie's lonely burial at Memphis National Cemetery, more than my troubles at school, my troubles with Naomi when she found out about my troubles at school, my troubles with Tahlila and her gang when my black grandmother came to school to see to my troubles, making me more troubles.

  I was above it all. Now that was the thing. My grandmother had been trying to tell me such for a long time, that Jesus called us to a life above the melee, that just because someone called you into the quicksand of their hatred, you didn't have to jump in and drown.

  Well what they said to me became more about their own hatred, their perpetuation of what they'd been taught to fear. There was a growing number of those vocal against prejudice and oppression. At least ten or so, and they were some of the school's brightest. Hannah was a part of it until she got pregnant and they gladly bid her adieu as she got skirted away to a relative's house in New Jersey of all places, but the movement did not die in her absence. Penny and Derrick stepped boldly into her vacated space. Well we all had to find a way to make a difference.

  Briefly, as in once, we had a student panel to discuss some of the issues and it got heated and it was disbanded.

  But with the presidential election brewing, more discussion broke out in other classes, and there were days where school was almost interesting and something like real learning raised its head the way a mole might, but it was careful discussion, limited discussion, and the teachers could only take so much and a lot of kids, maybe all of them were just regurgitating what they heard at home, but wasn't school supposed to be a place where you brought that crap and threw it on the table and it got challenged by a teacher who maybe knew something and then you had to think about it some?

  Seemed like we had to mostly worry about order and language and dress codes and preserving what was already set in stone.

  But in February we got two new Republican candidates for president, Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Well I knew all about Wallace. If ever the wall of oppression had a face it was that man. Naomi prayed for him many a time and the sisters would wail while she prayed so I pretty well had him figured. But Nixon, I didn't know him.

  And President Johnson abandoned his escalation plans in Vietnam. We'd won Tet overall, but we were k
ind of on our asses seeing the size of the opposition. I wondered who was making these calls up in Washington. I was just a kid but I wanted to believe our leaders had some intelligence. On TV about everything got solved, someone was right on it, there were all kinds of heroes who knew better than anyone else and they were usually Americans. Surely we had some brilliant minds weighing in on this thing in Vietnam. Surely college kids didn't know more than our leaders, our military.

  I wrote faithfully to Danny. Nearly a month and still no word. I finally got a period and I was feeling pretty emotional so I marched over to Sukey's table in the lunchroom. He wasn't eating, I noticed, just sitting there, legs spread wide, chair on its back two legs, him staring out. Two others sat with him, two punks. They did a lot of drugs, these three. Sukey was like a leper here now since he'd gone to the farm and without Danny's sun he had no light to reflect, none anybody was interested in. And he didn't seem to care. It's like he was his own evil twin, his Mr. Hyde in control, well it always was, but the mask of 'normal' was pretty much ripped away, ripped to shreds. I'd known this side of him young.

  "Has your family heard from Danny?"

  He stared at me and his friends snickered, one saying something to the other. "Black Hilly," Sukey said and grinned. That's what they called me around here, just loud enough I could hear when I passed. But he just said it to my face.

  "Why would I tell you?" he asked, turning his head to the side and spitting right there on the cafeteria floor.

  I turned away and started to walk out of there, the brown bag holding my lunch crinkling as I smashed it into my shoulder bag.

  When I got outside I kept going, far as we were allowed, over by the gym where no one sat cause it was too cold with the wind off the field.

  He had followed me and it took me aback though I tried not to act like it. I looked up at him and he had his hands in his jeans and he was studying me with his always mad eyes.

  "You stop to think he don't want to talk with you no more? You were just some ass he got before he went?"

  I dug in my purse for my lunch, no thought behind it, just needing something to do so I didn't leap up and claw his face. I found that baloney sandwich and took an angry bite.

  I chewed and swallowed and he stood there, eyes on me like cancer or something, and I said, "You think you're the first one in line to say mean things? I don't care about that…what you got to say. I just want to know if Danny is okay."

  "He told me to stay clear and I have." He spat again.

  "I haven't heard from him and I worry," I said louder. "And it's stupid I can't ask his own brother anything when he's at war and none of the other shit matters."

  He stood glaring some more, but his body curved toward me. "We ain't heard," he said. "But don't ask me again. I ain't good enough to talk to you…his black-assed Betty. If he ain't writin', he don't want to."

  He left then. He walked away, his head down, his hand at his mouth. I'd poked a stick, like Danny did that day with the radio and Lonnie. I hadn't meant to, that was not my intention, but I had just the same. Sukey Boyd hated my guts.

  They had not heard. But if something happened to Danny the army would come, that I knew. I'd heard the process in an essay someone read whose brother had been killed in the war.

  I couldn't let this fear take over, but it wanted to. So I went to see Allie. I needed something to do that was real and difficult and absorbing and about the present and future.

  Allie lived forty miles beyond in a sizeable town called Redfern. This was my second time there. Her shop sat on a busy avenue, the building at an angle behind a cyclone fence. Jackson's Welding. I went in the open garage door, and there were the sounds of machines and whooping. I caused that it seemed, strange eyes on me, heads of hair I did not know.

  She had the very kind of shop that would be my life if I did this so I had to let the whooping go over my head. I couldn't be afraid of it. "Is Allie around?" I said to the guy with the raised welding hood who approached me like I'd offered my sex.

  “Upstairs," he said, eyes up and down, and I went up and the whooping continued and it reminded me of the monkey house that time Naomi took me to the zoo.

  Upstairs were the offices, two of them. She'd said before that her husband Bobby couldn't get up here in his wheelchair but he didn't get around so much now, hardly ever came here, and she looked sad. But she carried on, that was the thing. So she was on the phone, nails long and lacquered red like usual and the whole place smelling like an ashtray and Lord I wanted a smoke, but no.

  She had two gray metal desks in here, and she sat at one, the other chair was empty, catalogues with fittings and all types of equipment everywhere. She was going back and forth on the phone, laughing this crusty laugh filled with nicotine, you could hear it. She scratched the red nails carefully through the yellow lacquered set in her hair. I twirled around in that chair and brought myself to stop just as she got off.

  "Hey," I said.

  "Hey yourself Hilly Grunier," she said. "No school today?"

  I shrugged. I'd gone nine days in a row. "Not for me," I said. "I was hoping you and me could talk about some work."

  Well that took guts, but I was trying to get some…guts.

  "Oh. It's like that?"

  Well I told her I had Lonnie's accounts and his former employee and a truck, well two trucks counting Robert's. She did not know the quality of his work, so she wanted him to come in for a test. "What if you hire him?" I said.

  She hooted and laughed. "Well I guess you got a problem then. But I ain't out to rob the cradle," she said. She leaned forward. "What are you trying to do?"

  I told her about Lonnie. She listened, her face sagging now. I didn't want her pity, or to make her think about Bobby…shortness of time…reaper's hook and all. I just wanted her to know.

  "Are you grieving hard?"

  I shook my head. "I'm sorry some…but…I had my whole life to grieve him…you know? It's just…like a door shut."

  I wanted to tell her more…Lottie and Mama…Naomi and Temple…a house…a dog…Eugene Blue covering my life like a mist…and me out of parents…how we had not heard from Danny…and inside…I was screaming. How Hannah was pregnant and Derrick had grown up seeing me as a symbol of hypocrisy…or something…and Sukey couldn't tell me the simplest thing even when we shared worry for the only thing we had in common, the biggest thing in our lives…and I was bleeding…and the world was bleeding…and cutting itself to let out some of the pain and everyday God heard the stories that killed us…and put his son to death. And I wanted to sell fittings. That's the reason I came. I wanted…I needed to build.

  And the day after that Dickens came and got me after school. The man from the army was sitting in their living room. His mom said to come and get me.

  I ran down the alley after his bicycle. I had not asked him if Danny lived or died.

  It was like I got the call I knew was coming the whole of my life. I did not carry on, I did not feel. If I was not in my socks and half-slip I would almost seem normal.

  Once there his mother said, "Oh child." She meant my attire. I held on to her, children about, the mister sitting in a recliner, the officer on the sofa, Sukey pacing like a frame around a picture, and inside I was shriveling, vanishing, pulling into the center, leaving myself to cringe…to small down to the size of a bean.

  I was told to sit on a dining room chair. Annie held my hand. Danny had been wounded is what they knew. He was in a German hospital. Wounded in his leg but they'd had trouble locating the bullet and it had traveled upward, and his leg was removed above the knee.

  "The right or left," I heard my voice.

  Left. Left. Left. Left. The strong…the beautiful…and my hand had glided…I had loved…loved…his leg…his foot…my heart…my soul.

  After that a fundamental cord…cut…and the balloon…lifted…me. God…you had not listened. Why?

  I did not know. Voices and worries. Whose idea was it to include the Grunier girl? someone asked
…Paul…the father. Then the mother, "Danny wanted her to know, he made me promise," she said.

  I thanked him, I said it out loud, "Thank you, Danny." For letting me know. But I wasn't there anymore. I was in a German hospital. I was telling Danny to hang on…to live…to hope. I saw him…I felt him, the sick and fever the pain and drugs.

  They had been trapped and they had died, and he had pretended to be dead and he was the only one who made it.

  It was Sukey who brought me home, Sukey who helped me into my room when I didn't know I needed help, didn't feel him helping or know where I was. It was Sukey who helped me into my bed.

  Sukey who fell on top of me and crushed the air out of my lungs and straddled me and knelt on my arms. It was Sukey who told me to shut up while he undid his pants and then gripped my wrists with his bruising weight and pried open my legs with his and shoved…shoved…shoved into me with his rage and his hate.

  And I fought…and I screamed…and when I could feel it even though I came back into myself, the penetration and violation, I fought and screamed and stopped and stilled and held and…the balloon burst. I had finally given up.

  Finding My Thunder 50

  Back in the Old Testament, King Nebuchadnezzar was a famous Babylonian king, and a very proud man. He was so full of himself and what he'd accomplished, he got to thinking he didn't need God, he got to thinking he was God. So God let him become an animal and for seven years he lived like a beast in the field, and he ate grass and he literally did not have the sense to come in out of the rain.

  The mental ward was not a nightmare. It was its own kind of town, a place where kindness prevailed. It's like we knew how broken we were and we didn't have to pretend anymore.

  It was relief. Out there, the battle to keep going, keep fighting, keep trying to look normal…all of that was gone now. My bathrobe was honesty, a holy garment. It was truth.