It took us those three whole days just to get the boat off the ground, and when we did my father celebrated by drinking eight beer in a row, and falling into a semi-coma, slumped over at the kitchen table.
On the fourth day, he did not get out of bed at all, and later in the afternoon telephoned Gerry in Fargo.
“Well, it’s time, old man,” I heard him say.
Gerry, as well as being my father’s sponsor and longtime friend, had also been a carpenter and had worked with my father over many years, and in that time they had often spoken together of completing the boat one day. But I knew nothing of this at the time and heard only my father’s lingering pause as the unprecedented Gerry – in an unintelligible tongue (which sounded, through the telephone line, like a low electric hum) – mysteriously entered the story. Heard my father, the interpreter of mysteries, decipherer of unfamiliar tongues, say, “No look, it’s just going to sit around here, really. If you can make it out, it’s yours.”
And just like that, my father took the boat away from us, just as my mother had said that he would.
In truth, there was a part of me that was relieved. The boat had been, in this way, given up before I myself might be required to do so. But still, there was another part of me which felt a bit like how, I might imagine now, my mother felt on the day the boat was uprooted from the barn. Or like Owen had, when one day he’d told his grandfather that he’d given up the dam, as though it was he himself, in his complicity, who had let the water in.
Because neither my father nor my mother had any idea where the original blueprints, which I had thought to be so extraordinary in my childhood, had gone, my father found a plan on the Internet and printed it off. For weeks, even before the boat itself arrived, and until the project was halted with my father’s telephone call, we had gazed on them. And to me, their intricate delineations seemed to express a form more exquisite, and consisting of many more dimensions, than the simple diagram of the completed Petrel, which had been drawn into my father’s book. Or than would later be indicated to me as a possibility by the hull that sat, untouched, on its wooden blocks where Henry and I had lifted it – waiting all through the rest of that final summer for a fourth, and peripheral, character, to take it away.
But even then my father, always a house carpenter, did not admit defeat.
“Gerry’ll fix it up in no time,” he said. “You bet. Then we’ll all go out together. Sail it out on Grass Lake. Take your mother along.”
7
After the boat was abandoned, my father got out of bed later and later each day. Sometimes he would not get up at all, but would stay in bed, not eating, listening to the radio and cursing the news reports; the curtains closed.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, on a day like that in mid-August, Henry wheeled himself into the closed bedroom and flicked on the overhead light.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Henry said.
“It’s the damn morphine,” Henry complained when he’d returned to the kitchen. “He shouldn’t take so much of it. Not with all that bloody alcohol.”
My father’s energy would return briefly, however, even in those days, by late afternoon, and then he would argue politics with Henry more fervently than he had in the past – his head full of radio reports. So that even when Henry tried to cut him short (“I don’t like disturbances in my place,” he’d growl), my father would argue on, right past the Bogart line, until Henry said, “If it was up to you we’d all be frickin’ communists,” which was an improvisation of his own, and set my father really going.
I didn’t mind the debates. They reminded me, as they seemed to remind my father, that he was still alive, and, because they gave a direction to an anger that seemed to rise so readily in him in those days, and which otherwise did not seem to be directed at anything at all, they were something of a relief.
My father might yell, for example, “Godammit!” in the middle of a meal, and it would turn out to be the simplest thing that was the matter. His salad, which had fallen from his fork, say; as simple as that.
At those times, I would say to my father, “What’s wrong?” with such concern, that he would have no choice but to apologize.
“Oh nothing, it’s just this salad,” he’d say. “It won’t stay on the goddamn fork.”
“Eat with yer hands,” Henry would say. “That’s what the communists do.”
I would take Henry’s car out sometimes and drive into town, just because I had nothing else to do. Then I’d stop at the grocery store, even though we never seemed to need anything. I liked the way that everything was so clean in there, and lit up as if from the inside, so that, though of course cluttered with many bright objects, it always appeared quite bare. Also, I liked the way that you could drift around in there with the other shoppers, in slow patterns, like birds, listening together to the constant hum of the music on the radio, which we hardly heard. Until, that is, a voice, in an authoritative burst, would interrupt to inspire within us a shared desire, which otherwise we could not have identified to be our own.
I never came home empty-handed.
“Oh, good,” my father said, one time when I chose mustard, and placed it on the kitchen table like I’d brought flowers. “Good thinking.” He was a fan of Dijon mustard because it was something he could taste.
I would make him sandwiches which he barely touched, and when I complained, or worse, sat glumly at the end of his bed, unspeaking, my father would rouse himself to say, “Don’t you worry, my sweetheart.”
“After all,” he said once, in his best Bogart voice, leaning forward to give my shoulder a second-rate squeeze, “I came to Casablanca for my health.”
I did not feel up to it then, but it was clear that my father had felt even less up to it than I. So I said: “I often speculated on why you didn’t return to America.”
It was, on my part, a very weak Renault, but my father did not complain, and continued to look at me expectantly, waiting for the line to follow.
“Did you abscond the church funds?” I added, and this time I managed a deep voice, clipped and official, which made my father laugh.
He repeated his original line, and then continued. “I came to Casablanca for the waters.”
“What waters?” I said. “We’re in the desert.”
His Bogart face was set, solemn and impassive: “I was misinformed.”
8
One afternoon, I took the boat out on my own, to the far end of the disappearing road, where Henry’s old place would have been. I stopped there, letting the boat drift slightly. Then I lay back on a pile of life jackets so that my head rested on the deck of the bow. I imagined the house, below me, still standing, like the old dock of the film. And the dam, too, that the grandfather built: still holding some things in and some things out.
It’s funny to think about. The way the whole world is disappearing like that. That every moment we get closer, until – and inevitably – there comes that one instant, that impetus, whatever it will be, by which we are one day blown, finally, from our own furthest extremity. Like leaves from a thin branch at the end of a tree.
Inevitably: that much I was able to know. And so I said that word to myself, exactly, out loud. But I was, in saying it, acting against myself. I wanted instead to cover my ears, or whatever it was that listened to me when I spoke inside my head. And also my heart. Cover that. If that’s, after all, what the feeling part of me was.
But, as I floated over Henry’s old house, and did and did not listen to myself, it occurred to me that the reverse of the thing was also as true. That instead of disappearing – or equally, as we disappeared – we also existed more heavily, in layers. And that by remaining, as in floodwater, always at the surface of everything, though our points of reference begin to slowly change, it is always so slight a transition, moment to moment, that it is almost always imperceptible.
So that, in coming to live as we do at such a far remove from ourselves, it becomes possible – no,
unavoidable at times – to float over certain essential objects without noticing them at all. As just in that moment, for example, I in Henry’s boat bobbed above Henry’s old house – from which vantage point I might have seen, if unobstructed, all the way down to the ruins of the grandfather’s dam below.
Time, it seemed – at once material, at once not – existed there, in that in-between: in the way that I might have, but could not, see down. In the way that I continued only to be suspended, at some distance, by that most curious of elements: an ultra-density of air. Removed always by a thickness to things.
Everything exists like that. Doesn’t it. Always in further combination, like the objects of my grandmother’s barn. Or like my father’s boat, which likewise, with time, did not diminish or disappear, but only lengthened and lengthened, until it had stretched itself into an irreducible oblivion, doggedly pursuing itself along an always advancing and invisible line.
I had by that time drifted so near shore that the boat snagged on a rock and jarred heavily so that waves began to knock it repeatedly against shore, sometimes splashing over the side. I got out to push myself off, getting wet to the knee. Then I started back to the government house.
Twice I glanced behind me as I went, but each time when I looked back I realized that I could do no more than I had already done. No more commit that place to memory, or understand. And so, finally, I gave it up. Having realized nothing, and felt very little, I had only to turn the boat around, resolutely, in the way that I had come.
Later that evening, as we sat together in the kitchen, a DVD playing on the TV that had been moved in there, but the sound turned off, I asked my father, “Why did Owen go to the war when he didn’t have to?”
My father looked at me, as though he had only just then realized I was in the room. “Hello, my sweetheart,” he said.
It was late, and my father’s speech was slurred by morphine and beer. On the TV screen the light flickered through an unknown city, and a man, chased by another man, ran endlessly, and at odd angles, through the shifting streets.
I thought that he hadn’t heard the question, but I didn’t repeat it. I sat down next to him on the bed, and squeezed his hand, which was smaller than I had remembered, and even more exactly like Helen’s. Already, it seemed to be losing the rough edges of itself, which had made it his own, its evidence of contact with the world.
We watched the screen a while longer. The city – soundless – continued to enter the room in flashes, the light cut by the sharp angles of the tall glass buildings, all eyes.
“Nobody,” my father said, “has to do anything that they don’t want to do. You should know that.” His voice wavered, an underwater sound.
“But, I mean,” I said, quickly. “It was different with you. In the States, with the draft –” I let my voice break off.
My father looked at me. As though it was me, suspended at a just imaginable distance to himself, who was going to tell him something then. But finally, very simply, as though he had not doubted it, he said: “I joined up too.” Then blew his nose furiously, and asked me to open up another can of beer from the fridge.
I went out into the cool kitchen, and returned, handing him a beer.
“You did?” I asked.
But again it appeared that my father had not heard.
Some time later, however, as I was clearing the dishes – which always lingered long after any meal – my father, speaking loudly from his bedroom, where he had lately retired, said: “You know, if you want to know something about the war, I should tell you about my brother, Clark.”
It is strange to stumble upon something which you have believed for so long to have been lost that you don’t even find it missing anymore. As though, having repeatedly tripped in the darkness against a final imaginary stair, one day you find it underfoot again as if it had been there all along.
At first, though, my father told me very little about the war, and I am still unsure of why, when he first spoke of it, he spoke of his brother Clark, with whom he had never been close, and whose “tragedy” – as my father described it – seemed to have very little to do with the war, or with my father. I guess it was only that I hadn’t expected that the great and undiscoverable quantity, which we had for so long assumed to exist at the root, would have anything to do with my Uncle Clark, who lived somewhere in Minnesota, worked in a sporting-goods store, and had got my father into Internet trading. Who, every year, sent a Christmas card with a picture of himself and his dog inside, on the back of which was always scribbled, “With love from two Minnesota Mutts.”
But of course it did. And still, my father’s sadness when he spoke of his brother’s life was far more evident than, when pressed, he talked of his own, and I think now that perhaps it is always easier that way. To understand the grief of another, instead of our own. Because of the way that we are able, then, to hold it at some distance from ourselves and have it return to us – in its thousand reflective eyes – not only our own otherwise unperceivable image, but also our manner of looking at the world; splitting it into a thousand directions.
Vietnam
1967
With Olaf it is different. He must give up not merely his life but also the good name that valiance customarily wins, the hero’s renown and reputation … He can do so lightly, however, defying both the military force of his nation and its massively conformed opinions, because he answers to an individual rather than a collective truth.
GARY LANE
1
The quarter of a joint that he smokes in late morning helps, so that, with the heat, he is again a small child. Sick in bed, with a fever; his mother, even now. If he listens he can hear it. Padding, padding down the corridor, her sock-feet on the floor.
That’s what it feels like, anyway.
If the door opens, it is his forehead, also opening.
“Napoleon?” his mother asks.
They are all very serious about it, and Owen always rolls. The other three gather to watch. They want to make sure that he rolls it out even. That the tobacco doesn’t gravitate to the rear of the joint, and that it doesn’t narrow at the end. Teddy always smokes first, and all eyes are on him as he begins. His tongue on the paper, in and out, then in and out again. He looks, in between the dartings of his tongue, up, at each one of them in turn. Then he holds the match out away from the joint and brings it down, between his teeth, slowly to the flame. He is careful so that it doesn’t burn too fast.
In Danang they can smoke the shit out of this stuff. There, they often found themselves staring into their own laps in a stubborn disbelief, confused to find themselves still attached to their own bodies, and in that way to the ground. Sometimes they’d collapse, and pound on the ground, and laugh, and say, “That’s so fucked, that’s so fucked,” because they were exactly where they were and nowhere else. And just by saying it – “That’s so fucked, isn’t it fucked?” – they knew or thought they knew that they were talking about the same thing, which, at that time or perhaps at any other, they could not have begun to explain.
Now it has to be just this taste, these five drags each, and in the late morning they gather. Teddy loves lighting the joint because of the attention he gets. He works on perfecting the particular tilt of his head when he first really hauls on the thing. On the way he half closes his eyes.
Napoleon comes after Teddy. If he forgets himself and takes too much he will feel his throat catch on the smoke and wind up spitting most of it out, spluttering it through his mouth and his nose. Plus, it isn’t fair to do that. They watch every haul, and get five pretty long ones each – which is twenty in total – maybe twenty-one if Owen, who finishes it off, can stand it, and goes in, burning his lips and fingers on the end, after a final draw. They watch partially to make sure that no one takes more than their fair share but partially for the sheer pleasure of it; liking especially the moments in which each man’s breath is held.
After a while the eyes start to bulge, and there’s a small gur
gle at the back of the throat. The rest of them hold their breaths, too, but they don’t even notice that they do this. They hardly pay attention to themselves at all and so it is only the man with the smoke in his lung’s heart that is heard for the entire duration of the held-in breath.
Hill, surprisingly, because he’s the runt of the group, can hold his breath longest.
The heat stretches it out so that Napoleon can feel the effects almost all afternoon. He is in this way a sick boy in bed, waiting for his mother to pad down the hall, for most of his first assignment.
Lieutenant Bean is a clean-cut, upbeat man from Indiana, and although he keeps himself aloof and is not gentle with them, he sometimes relaxes into moments of near friendship. Like when they smoke their cigarettes together after a meal, and he says “This isn’t Virginia or wherever you little fucks did your training, ye may have figgered that out by now.” And laughs good-naturedly, leaning back on his pack. Sweeping his arm around him in a ring.
One time he tells them about his own first tour. “It was fuckin’ scary, I can tell you that,” he says. “If only so’s you know how lucky you are now. A few weeks of pure fuckin’ hell,” he says. “Officers just little dipshits like yourselves, fresh from California. Didn’t know the first thing about combat. Didn’t know that –”
But Teddy interrupts him, grinning. “This isn’t fucking California,” he says. Happily, Bean is not angry, but laughs.
“That’s right,” he says, slapping Teddy on the back.
“But I’m serious,” he tells them. “You boys haven’t seen anything like it, and you won’t. You can count your pretty fuckin’ stars too. All the time, boom bam, mines everywhere. We were scared like rabbits. Nobody knew where to shoot – the F.O. was fucked, our coordinates were off half the time – and the gooks would be everywhere, so we didn’t know. Were we hitting them, or were we blowing up our own guys?”
The Sentimentalists Page 8
