The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “You mean, am I gonna go bug-eyed again while you’re gone?” said the Captain. “I feel fine. Don’t be such a wet towel. So sensitive. You know, you used to cry during Scooby-Doo sometimes? I mean, who cries at Scooby-Doo? Jee-zuss. I thought you’d turn out gay. I really did. I’m not going to die while you’re out getting Chinese. I refuse to, because the thought of you crying at my funeral makes me generally too embarrassed for you to allow my body to shut down.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I feel better than I have in months. Maybe I’m coming out of this thing.”

  Jack crossed over to where the Captain sat in front of the TV. He kissed his father on the cheek.

  “Fuckin’ fairy,” the Captain whispered, but he smiled.

  “Nice to have you back, Pop.”

  Sam was sitting in his Saturn looking at her teeth in the mirror when he climbed behind the wheel. He turned on the radio and 98.5 was halfway through “Crazy on You.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sam.

  They listened to classic rock for some time without speaking. It was just warm enough that they could crack their windows a bit to let in the air. The aroma of cut grass quickly filled the car. They looked back at houses where friends once lived, fallen into disrepair, draped with ivy. He felt himself blush as they passed the oil well drive where she’d given him his first blow job.

  “Do you remember how hot it was that summer?” she asked. “Do you think it’ll ever be that hot again?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “Yes, you do.”

  He smiled.

  “You got a girl back in Lakewood?”

  He looked at her sideways and then turned off SR 14.

  “Just making conversation, Jack.”

  “You’re never just making conversation, Sam.” He sighed. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Ever?”

  “No, not … what do you think? Not, not ever. A couple. One was pretty serious.”

  “What happened?”

  “She moved away.”

  “And you stayed?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you don’t want to talk, we won’t talk.”

  “You always have a motive.”

  “I’m not that person anymore. I grew up.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  6 Later they sat at the dining room table gorging themselves on cheap Chinese, waiting for the pizza to arrive.

  “This is not yum cha,” the Captain said, mushing a greasy dumpling around his mouth. “But it’s fuckin’ good.”

  “Daddy,” scolded Jean, canting her head toward Paige, who rocked in a chair as she picked apart a crab rangoon. She had changed into her nightclothes: pastel-green footie pajamas.

  “Does this feel like a blip, or something more?” Jack asked his father. “Does it feel like you’re getting better?”

  The Captain thought about it while he chewed his food. “I don’t know. You know what it feels like? It feels like hash. Like the hashish I smoked in Saigon.” He caught his daughter’s disapproving eye and waved it off. “Back then the hash wasn’t mixed with anything except more hash. No angel dust, heroin, meth, none of that shit.”

  “Dad!”

  “Sorry. Anyway, I had this beautiful kiseru, this long mothertruckin’ pipe, right? A work of art. Kept it at my place in the city. Put a little Yellow Brick Road in there and you’re over the rainbow. With the hash in ’Nam, you got these few minutes of clarity. Total clarity. The kind that only comes in those big moments. Like, all right, there was this astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. Never heard of him?”

  “Apollo 14,” said Jack.

  “That’s right,” said the Captain. “Apollo 14. Moonshot. 1971. Anyway, Mitchell, in space, he has this profound moment of clarity in which he realizes that we are all connected. All of us. To each other. To the planet. To the universe. It changed his life.”

  Sam stopped eating. She was staring at the Captain with concern. Had Tony’s paranoid delusions sounded something like this toward the end? Jack wondered.

  “That’s what it feels like. Like waking up. Will it last?” The Captain shrugged.

  Lights flashed against the kitchen walls. A truck was pulling into their drive, a rusty green S-10 with a Georgio’s magnetic sign stuck to the roof. The vehicle listed to the side as the large Viking stepped out. Nils waved at them and then reached back in for the pizza and soda. Jack stepped outside to meet him. Through the picture window they could see everyone seated around the table. Nils smiled at the Captain. “He looks okay,” he said.

  “He’s having a good day.” Jack took the food and handed Nils a twenty. Then, instead of going in, he set the pizza on a stack of firewood by the door. “Wait a second,” he said. “Your dad. He still run that excavating business?”

  “Yep. Septic tanks, mostly. City sewer still hasn’t made it past SR 14. He replaced that tin shack with a pole barn two years ago. Got a small crew. He’d like me to help, but…” He looked down at his girth and smiled. “Hard labor doesn’t agree with me.”

  “Does he have any cranes? Cranes you can drive?”

  “He’s got a Link-Belt Speeder. It’s slow, but it moves. Rents it out to contractors for lifting trusses. Why? Having problems with your tank?”

  “I was thinking about getting a crane out to Claytor Lake.” He pointed through the trees. “I … I think Tony’s down there.”

  “Uh…” Nils’s eyes grew wide. “Holy shit,” he said. “For reals?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit, man. Yeah. Yeah, we could do it. You’d need a spotter, of course. Someone down in the water to place the hook and net. Yeah, that’s what you’d want to do, I think. There’s this guy out of Kent State. He helped us pull out a backhoe that fell into Lake Milton. ’Course that was only fifty feet of water. But he could do it if anyone could.”

  “How much?”

  “Got to clear it with the property owner, a’course. Not even sure who that would be. The lake went into foreclosure in ’84 after the beach shut down. Someone’ll have to pay the scuba guy from Kent State. Couple hundred bucks?”

  7 The Captain thought he’d have time to tell Jack why he shouldn’t go searching the bottom of Claytor Lake. He thought they’d have some time alone once everyone went to bed. Time enough to explain everything that needed explaining before Jack truly fucked them all. But as soon as Jack stepped outside, the Captain felt his clarity dim like someone had placed a sheet of muslin over a lamp.

  No, he thought. No, no, no. Not yet. Five more minutes.

  He pretended nothing was wrong and kept eating. Smaller bites, though, in case his mind blew out like a candle and he forgot how to swallow. He willed himself to remain focused. He read the ingredients on a soy sauce packet to busy his brain.

  “I’m going to take a trip to Giant Eagle later this afternoon,” said Virginia, sitting across the table from him. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon, highlighted by strands of coarse gray hair. She was feeding Jean, who drummed her fat little arms against her high chair between bites of rice cereal. “Do you want me to pick up anything?”

  “Some Yuengling,” he said.

  “Daddy, we’re out of Yuengling,” said Jean, beside him, thirty-one years old again. “And you’ve had whiskey. How about some milk?”

  He was slipping. Worse, he was slipping and not noticing the transitions from here to there.

  His chair leaned forward as they banked the jumbo jet toward Queens. “La Guardia, this is Continental 161 on approach,” First Officer Bill O’Shannon said into his headset. “Watch out for the towers, Walt.”

  It was their little joke. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were impossible to miss, rising from the banking district like religious monoliths. Targets against the sky. An accident waiting to happen.

  “Roger,” he said.

  “Who’s Roger?” asked Sam, looking at him with a touch of concern.

  “Never mind. Could you find me some
thing to write with? Some pen and paper?”

  “I’ll get it, Daddy,” said Jean.

  Through the tall windows he saw Jack talking excitedly with Nils on the porch. He knew what they were discussing. Jack thought he was doing something good.

  He felt a knot in Virginia’s shoulder as he worked the sunscreen across her back. The sky was bright. A cool breeze but hot in the sun. They sat on the shore of Claytor Lake, which was brimming with kids. Running kids. Splashing kids. Kids with Popsicles. The concession stand sold them for fifty cents apiece. Popsicles, not the kids. Jack, age three, was forming an airplane made of sand by their feet.

  “Lower,” she said.

  “Here, Dad,” Jean said, tapping the sheet of paper she’d placed in front of him.

  The Captain took the pen in his hand.

  Jack, he wrote, get rid of the box under my bed.

  8 Jack said goodbye to Nils and brought the pizza inside. He could tell by their silence what had happened while he was gone. Even Paige was quiet. The Captain stared intently at a piece of paper in front of him. He looked up at Jack and smiled a vacant smile.

  “Ah, Dad,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

  The Captain held the paper out to him like a present. Jack took it and looked at the short message.

  He sighed. “I can’t read Vietnamese.”

  “O dau Qi?” the Captain asked.

  9 “Where is Qi?” Walter asked the bartender from the Tennessee. They were running down Tu Do. Everyone was in a panic. It was falling. The city. The country. Capitalism. From an open window he could hear Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” an odd juxtaposition to this chaos—the song was code, their cue to get the fuck out of Saigon. The Hueys were leaving the DAO this very moment. He would go. But first he needed to find Qi.

  Duong, the bartender, didn’t answer. Didn’t even slow down. He was making for Tan Son Nhut as if he had a chance of leaving with the other refugees. Walter ran the other way, a stitch digging into his side. He should have come back sooner, but he’d been pulled into Operation Babylift, flying children out in C-5s bound for Oakland.

  Qi!

  He’d met her three years ago, in 1972. This fourteen-year-old, dressed in a flowered silk blouse over dark trousers, walked up to him inside the Tennessee, sidled up next to him, and whispered, “Hour for three, GI?” She was a pretty thing. Thin lips, high cheeks, dark, hungry eyes. But her face was still pudgy with baby fat. Younger than the girl, Virginia, who’d taken his virginity back home. Walter shook his head, reluctant to be rid of her.

  Qi sat next to him anyway and Duong served her bac si de, a strong rice whiskey.

  “Clarka Kent,” she whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “You Superman, GI.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  And then Evan Sowell wandered in, looking for God knows what, probably looking for this very thing. Evan was a fine mechanic. But he was also a creepy sonofabitch. Evan’s skin was this mottled gray and his face was covered in patchy hair and pimples. Twenty pounds underweight, ribs pushing out of his skin like there was a dark mojo eating him up from the inside out. He wore that same black leather jacket, even on the hottest days. Everyone on base knew Evan preferred young whores. “It’s not illegal here,” he liked to say.

  Evan homed in on Qi right away. He walked up to her, a man on a mission, slipping between Walter and the girl, leaning over the bar to hand Duong fifty piastres. “I’ll buy the lady’s drink,” he said, eyes already glowing from some cheap hashish.

  Duong said something to Qi then, and she turned to Evan and nodded.

  “Hot damn,” he said.

  Why he’d done what he did next, Walter could never really say. But before Evan could take Qi away, he set a crisp fifty-dollar American bill on Duong’s bar. It was money he’d planned to send home—his mother would put half in the bank for him, the other half in her pantry. If pressed, he might have said he’d done it because he couldn’t add another bad memory to his mind that day. It was already overfull. But maybe he just wanted to see what would happen next.

  “What is this, Walter?” Duong asked. His English was sharp when money was on the table.

  “Ransom,” he said. “For the girl. She’s not working for a while.”

  “What?” Evan asked in a childlike whine.

  Qi, not grasping what was transpiring, spoke fearful Vietnamese to the bartender. He whispered something back to her. She looked to Walter, confused.

  “No more Uncle Sams,” he said. “Not for you.”

  “Hey, goddamn it,” Evan protested. “What are you doing?”

  “Take a hike, soldier.”

  Until the end of that endless war, Walter did his best to look after Qi. She was, he reckoned, his responsibility from that moment on. He secured a one-bedroom efficiency above a grocery for eight dollars a month. He let her stay there and gave her money for food and clothes on the promise that she would stop hooking and go back to school. Her parents, he learned, had burned to death during the Battle of Hue, and she was alone. He visited often, coaching her in English while she taught him simple Vietnamese. He called her “Qi,” which meant “turtle.” She called him “Clarka,” as in Clark Kent. Sometimes he would spoon her on the bed in their little room, the sounds of mopeds and the market drifting through the screenless window, and they would nap together. That was all the intimacy they shared.

  He meant to get her out of this hell.

  * * *

  And it was finally time.

  Qi wasn’t at the elementary school where she tutored children now, so he ran toward their apartment in the western section of Saigon as Irving Berlin sang to the soldiers a song of retreat.

  A block away, the air around him sizzled with the high-pitched doom-wail of an artillery shell. It happened too quickly for him to drop. The shell collided with the side of a concrete bungalow, a barbershop that catered to GIs. The shock wave kicked Walter in the chest like a steel-toed boot, sending him against the side of an appliance store. His ears rang loudly. He could no longer feel the smaller two digits on his right hand. They would remain numb for the rest of his life (a secret he kept from Continental Airlines physicians).

  It was another minute and a half before he reached the stairs to Qi’s loft. Ten seconds more to make it up the stairs. The door was open. His legs protested. He did not want to step inside. He already felt what waited.

  There was blood everywhere and in the center of it all stood Evan Sowell. He was naked and he leaned over Qi’s body, which was folded backward over the bed. In his hands was a large killing knife, a Ka-Bar that Evan had stolen off a dead Marine. The man’s back was to the door and he was still hacking away, distractedly, as Walter stepped into the room.

  They had a term for this in Vietnam, men who killed women they raped. Double veterans, they called them.

  Walter tiptoed across the room, and when he was close enough he wrapped his right arm around Evan’s neck and squeezed. Evan dropped the knife to the floor. He tried to pry Walter’s arm away. But it was too big. It was a python. A tangle of muscle, earned in country.

  “Shhh,” he whispered.

  Evan tilted his head and looked up at him. He was trying to say something, his mouth working like a goldfish.

  Then Evan’s face changed, became something else, someone else …

  Jack, oh God, it’s Jack!

  But then it was Evan again and Walter was glad he was hurting. He didn’t care to give Evan the last word.

  10 Jack was asleep when the Captain peered in through the open door of the bedroom, his body silhouetted by the light of the moon that fell through the window at the end of the hall. Jack didn’t wake until his father’s arm was around his neck, squeezing the life out of him.

  Jack’s first thought was that he had somehow managed to get himself tangled up in his sheets. Then his eyes flew open and he saw the shape of his father over him. He knew, immediately, this was the end.

  Please, he pleaded. Not
like this.

  “Kill you,” the Captain whispered, spittle dripping from his mouth onto Jack’s forehead.

  His arms were pinned by the Captain’s legs. Feebleminded or not, the Captain was a big sonofabitch and there was nothing doing. Jack tried to elicit a gargle from his mouth, a raspy cry for help, anything, but his throat was pinched tight. It felt like his father was one foot-pound of pressure away from snapping his neck. That would come next and at least there would be no more pain.

  No. Not now. Not here. Not like this, he pleaded. To whom? He didn’t know. But he sent the message out from his mind, into the ether, a Mayday to the universe. He saw sparkles of light in his periphery as his brain consumed the last of his body’s oxygen. Sparkles like fireflies, brief constellations.

  Suddenly the room was full of screaming. Screaming as he’d never heard before. A high-pitched caterwaul that bit into his ears and momentarily drowned out the pain of his strangulation. He saw her as through tinted glass: Paige at the door in pastel jammies, mouth open as if she were singing.

  As a gray veil descended, he saw Jean fly through the door. She pushed Paige out of the way, never touching the ground, her nightgown trailing after her like an apparition’s end. She snatched the lamp from the nightstand and brought it over her head in a tight arc aimed for the Captain’s head.

  11 “Jack? Jack, can you hear me?”

  A bright light was shining in his eyes and for a moment he thought he was dead. Then the light pivoted and he saw the harsh woman in the orange windbreaker leaning over him, penlight in her fingers. Red and yellow strobes played at the window. He heard excited voices downstairs, Jean yelling orders: “St. Mary’s! Just get him the fuck out of here!” Paige was crying.

  He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He tried to speak and was rewarded with fire in his throat. It felt like he’d gargled Everclear.

  “Don’t try to move,” the woman said. “Don’t try to speak. Just blink once for ‘yes.’ Understand?”