Veteran Avenue

by Mark Pepper

  By first light, John and Virginia were once again the best of lovers. In the name of survival they had combined during the night to boost their body heat. Although John had covered Chuck’s skeleton first out of respect, he still doubted the morality of sex in the midst of death, even when that death was thirty-five years old.

  The snow had relented the previous evening around dusk, but they had decided against a moonlit trip down the mountain. It had been a tough call debating which choice was sanest: wait until daylight and hope they didn’t wake to even more inches, or take advantage of the break in the weather and make a precarious journey in the dark.

  The gamble had paid off. The sky had been kind. No more snow, now a cloudless blue. They left the cabin and trekked under the laden canopy to the Jeep. John was carrying Chuck’s suitcase, containing all the parts of the puzzle: the letters, the calendars, the Hush Puppy and silencer, the bush hat, dog-tags and medals, the photo of Harry, and his Action Man. He set the case in the snow, cleared the windows all round with a sweeping arm of his anorak, then put the case in the back. They both climbed in, John behind the wheel.

  ‘Maybe we can make this a regular thing,’ he said. ‘Stay longer next time.’

  ‘Imagination and sense of humor, John.’

  He started the engine, reversed past Chuck’s rusting pick-up and turned around.

  ‘We should call someone about Chuck,’ Virginia said. ‘It’s not right he’s left up here.’

  John nodded. ‘Okay. But once we’ve put some distance behind us. Remember he’s got a hole in his skull and I was the last person to see him alive, even if I was only eight at the time.’

  Keen to share their discoveries with Dodge, John and Virginia drove fast, only stopping to swap seats and fill up with gas. Fourteen hours after leaving Chuck’s Oregon hideaway, they inevitably wound up in the office of Doc Quealy at the Veterans Administration West Los Angeles Medical Center, formerly the Wadsworth Hospital.

  Quealy was a dour individual in his late sixties. The skin of his face was practically unlined, as though it had been rarely creased by either pole of emotion. His full head of silver hair was in a military brushtop.

  ‘How is my father?’ Virginia asked, entering the spartan office.

  ‘Take a seat, Miss Chester, Mr Frears.’

  Quealy sat behind his desk and waited for his visitors to settle.

  ‘Please, Doctor, is he okay?’ Virginia said again.

  ‘Dodge was transferred to us from Reseda Urgent Care three nights ago. He’d been patched up in their ER, but having found his Armed Forces card, and given the circumstances in which he’d received his injuries, the doctors over there decided he needed more specialist treatment, so they called us. We kept him heavily sedated the first day to allow him a little rest, but his physical condition really isn’t the problem; your father is gifted with remarkable powers of recovery, not to mention incredible luck. You don’t normally survive a frag grenade that close.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what he wanted,’ Virginia said sadly. ‘To die.’

  ‘Perhaps. That’s something we’ve yet to establish. But let’s talk basics. How much do you know about what happened? What did you learn from the police?’

  ‘Nothing we didn’t already know from the state of the gun range,’ Virginia said. ‘When we found my dad wasn’t home, we drove down to Reseda. We didn’t know where else he might be. I could see the main shutter had been replaced so I called the cops.’

  ‘I see. And what did they tell you?’ Quealy asked.

  ‘Just that there’d been an incident, my dad was here and that I should talk to you.’

  ‘Good – no amateur psychology. Their job is to pick up the pieces, not to postulate on why something fell apart in the first place.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Virginia said. ‘Something? That thing happens to be my father.’

  ‘Accepted. Forgive my talking in abstract terms, Miss Chester, but to a certain extent, a broken mind can be likened to a broken machine. When a machine breaks down, nothing works any more. However, there is usually only one component that has caused the failure. Find it, replace it, the machine starts working again. So it is with the human mind, except for one difference: even if you locate the problem, you can’t actually replace any of the parts, all you can do is patch it up and hope it holds. Now, your father has been doing a pretty good job the past forty-odd years of holding himself together. There’s no record of him having sought any professional help in all that time. I think at some level in his mind he’s always known what’s broken and why it broke, he just didn’t know how to fix it. But, as with everything, eventually the strain becomes too great and there’s a breakdown. Our goal now is to find out what exactly caused that stress fracture back in Vietnam, and why it finally gave way three nights ago.’

  ‘Can I interrupt?’ said John.

  Quealy nodded.

  ‘With all due respect, I think you’re oversimplifying things. You talk as though just one event traumatized Dodge in Vietnam, and if we uncover that we solve the problem. I disagree. I saw combat in the First Gulf War, and elsewhere, and of course some days were worse than others, but it’s the whole experience that screws you up. If you focus on just one element, that’s like extracting a rotten tooth from a cancerous mouth; it doesn’t address the real problem: that no human being should ever be in that situation, forced to take another life. However we rationalize it, something fundamental inside us balks and always will. That’s what your machine analogy fails to take into account. We’re not mechanical objects, we’re creatures driven by emotion.’

  Quealy was silent for a moment. ‘Well, that came from the heart. And I concur. I was in Vietnam myself, and, like many other veterans of that war, I suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for years. I became a psychiatrist to help myself first and foremost – physician heal thyself. And I did. You’re correct, you can’t erase a whole experience by targeting one event, but humans do tend to encapsulate a term of prolonged, heightened emotion in specific memories. Think of your childhood. Whether it was happy or sad, if asked, you’ll have one or two stories you always tell to prove your point. The rest is pretty murky, all merged in. Now, over time, those stories acquire a power of their own simply through the repeated telling of them. So what do you do? If you can’t erase your childhood, you try and blunt the worst of the pain associated with it. It’s like taking the biggest humps of a rollercoaster ride and trying to level them. The ride’s still there, but not so scary. And, Miss Chester, in your father’s case I have good reason for believing that one event did indeed cause more trouble than any other.’

  Having read Dodge’s letter, mailed from that very location more than forty years before, John had to agree it was a possibility. But it wasn’t for him to say.

  ‘Why?’ Virginia asked, not giving any hint herself of their discoveries.

  ‘Because of how the police found him. Did they say?’

  ‘Just that he was in a bad way from shrapnel wounds.’

  ‘Miss Chester, your father was found in full combat uniform, his face painted with camo cream. There were burned-out flares in the range, and it wasn’t only the targets that were riddled with bullets. It was the entire building. He’d emptied several clips from a fully automatic CAR-Fifteen, released a frag grenade – accounting for his injuries – and then sent an RPG through the front door.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ she muttered.

  ‘Indeed. Thus I would hazard that he was acting out some war game, much like a child, fantasising; only his imagination got somewhat out of his control.’

  Virginia sat motionless for a moment, then quickly glanced at John. It was a look he understood – she was also thinking of the letter.

  Quietly, she asked: ‘Will he get better?’

  Quealy sighed. ‘Most spontaneous recoveries from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder occur in the first two to three years. PTSD lasting more than five years usually becomes chronic, possibly lifelong, and often involves a major d
epressive disorder. His refusal to seek help in the past means his road back is going to be a long one.’

  She nodded. ‘I see. Doctor, you wanted to know why he snapped. I can help you with that. His son died recently. My brother Donnie. An extremely violent and … shameful death. That’s why he snapped.’

  ‘Right. I didn’t know; Dodge isn’t talking to me yet.’

  ‘And he couldn’t talk to me because I was a thousand miles away,’ she added bitterly.

  John reached to hold her hand, but she pulled it away.

  ‘Miss Chester, this would have happened with or without you. It’s clear that your father planned what happened the other night. Not the final outcome perhaps, but certainly to be on his own. Had you been there, he would have sent you away with some very plausible excuse.’

  ‘Really,’ she said, unconvinced.

  ‘Yes, really. So-called crazy people can exhibit incredible clarity of thought. The end result might be insane but the means to that end can be extremely logically considered.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. And if you want to help your father you’ll believe me. In most cases like this, guilt is a major component of the illness, whether or not it’s deserved. If he sees you feeling guilty for leaving him, he’ll feel even worse about what he’s done. So, no guilt, please, Miss Chester. You have to be strong, you have to be patient, and you have to be understanding. Nothing negative or he’ll feed off it like he did this morning.’

  John looked at Virginia, who mirrored his puzzlement.

  ‘This morning?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve jumped ahead of myself,’ Quealy said. ‘I should have told you at the outset. Your father was involved in an incident this morning with another patient. Quite an ugly scene.’

  ‘Was he hurt?’ Virginia asked.

  ‘No, but we had to sedate him again.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘What happened?’ John asked.

  ‘I’m still not in possession of the full facts. One of our sanitation workers caught the end of it. Apparently your father was reacting to an insult of a racial nature, although that may well have been merely the culmination of a more complex disagreement.’

  ‘My dad wouldn’t rise to petty name-calling. He has more dignity than that.’

  ‘Your father has suffered a breakdown, Miss Chester, so there’s no saying what he may or may not do. And if his illness continues to manifest itself in violence, I’m afraid my hands will be tied. For violent patients, our secure unit is not a long-term solution. Obviously there are other institutions that deal with such offenders, but if Dodge winds up in one, he might be there a lot longer than it takes to effect a cure. What occurred the other night was clearly a police matter, and the LAPD’s interest in your father is far from over, especially considering some of the prohibited military hardware he had in his possession. I won’t insult you by asking if you knew about that.’

  ‘You just did,’ Virginia said. ‘And, no, I had no idea.’

  Quealy nodded. ‘The good news is we have a little time to work on some plan of action. The LAPD have been cooperative and, as long as I have your father under lock and key and the Veterans Affairs Police are standing guard, they are willing to hold off on any charges until I can make my report. So how do we handle this?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘I’ve made a start. I managed to pull your father’s military record, and it makes for some very interesting reading. He had rather a colorful career.’

  He opened a file in front of him and read from some notes.

  ‘Drafted September sixty-eight, eighteen years old. Volunteers for airborne infantry. Basic and advanced individual training, Fort Gordon; jump school, Fort Benning. Assigned to the Hundred and First Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles”. Applies for special operations duty with the Fifty-Eighth Infantry, Long Range Patrol – the LuRPs – re-designated Seventy-Fifth Infantry Rangers in January sixty-nine. In-country June of that year under Mac-Vee SOG: Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group. Attends Mac-Vee Recondo School at Nha Trang, three week reconnaissance-commando course under the Fifth Special Forces Group. Then sent to Phu Bai, Central Vietnam. Highly decorated, including one Purple Heart, November sixty-nine. Recovered from his wounds right here on these very grounds in the old Wadsworth Hospital. Back in-country two months later. June seventy he rotates out, but extends for another tour. October, back in-country. One year later, he rotates out again and re-enlists again, and this time stays for two years. But not as a Ranger; as a case officer for the CIA, under contract to Plans and Ops at Langley. Initially based at Pakse on the Mekong River, southern Laos, heading up a thirty-man patrol of the Royal Lao Army, part of a CIA Special Guerrilla Unit, Ground Mobile. Aim: disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos, thus tie down NVA divisions and keep them out of South Vietnam. Returns to the States for good in March seventy-three.’

  Quealy closed the file and looked up. ‘I don’t know how much of this is news to you.’

  ‘All of it,’ Virginia said.

  ‘I thought so; you look pretty shell-shocked. The problem we have is that Dodge was in-country four years, so if we’re searching for one particular incident, there’s a lot to go at. And his first two years under MacSOG would have been extremely harrowing. MacSOG was involved in most of the major campaigns of the war, and although Studies and Observation Group sounds quite academic, their approach to warfare was anything but. It was a covert, unconventional, multi-service unit. We’re talking sterile ops where dog-tags and insignia were removed, non-US uniforms, boots and weaponry used. Deniable ops, black ops, call them what you will – at times these people were used as little more than government assassins.’

  Both men waited for Virginia to absorb the details.

  ‘Can we see him?’ she said.

  ‘He’s sleeping now, and I’d prefer it if he wasn’t disturbed. I’m sure you understand.’ Quealy stood up and opened the door, clearly broaching no dissent. ‘By all means come by first thing tomorrow.’

  Descending in the elevator, John felt awkward. Sitting in Quealy’s office, seeing Virginia grow more distressed by it all, so his own guilt had mounted accordingly. He should not have asked her to come away. She should have declined, but he should not have given her the option. The invitation had been crassly timed.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said quietly, watching the numbers count down above the door.

  ‘You read my mind.’

  She turned and smiled at him, a resolute set to her face, like she was taking Quealy’s advice and leaving the past behind.

  ‘I have to believe he’s right,’ she said. ‘That this would have happened whatever I did. And it may all turn out for the best. If we hadn’t gone away we wouldn’t now have those items from the mountain, which may be the only ammunition we have to trigger some sort of release in my dad.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  They reached the ground floor and headed for the parking lot.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Quealy what we’d found?’ John asked as they walked across the floodlit concrete.

  ‘I want my dad to see it before anyone else. In his state of mind he might consider it some kind of betrayal if we go to Quealy with it first.’

  They reached the Jeep and climbed in.

  ‘My dad might have to talk to Quealy before they let him out, but he might want to start with someone he knows he can trust. He might not even want you in the room beyond explaining how you first met Chuck when you were a kid.’

  ‘That’s okay; I’m nothing to your father.’

  Virginia took his hands. ‘Yes you are, because you’re something to me. But the fact remains he may not want you there, and I won’t ask him to let you stay. It may be too personal. Something even my mom didn’t know.’

  ‘I get it, it’s fine. So what exactly will you show him tomorrow?’

  ‘Just the letters. I can tell him about the rest.’

  She started th
e engine and set off home, leaving the Medical Center behind, and John wondered whether she was thinking the same as him: over forty years earlier, her father had spent time recovering there from his physical injuries. Tomorrow, they would have to take him back in time to find some answers, or his current mental wounds might see him incarcerated for the rest of his life.

  Coming round with a thumping head and acute DTs, Larry’s first instinct was to cure it with a shot of something strong – continue what he’d started two days before. But he couldn’t place himself and thoughts of booze subsided. He wasn’t in his own bed, which didn’t surprise him, but neither was he on a park bench, and that was odd. He did recognize the room; he just couldn’t associate it with anyone he knew. After a heavy binge it always took a moment for the here and now to establish itself.

  Then it dawned. It wasn’t anyone he knew, and it had nothing to do with the here and now. It was someone he had known, from what had fast become the halcyon days of his botched marriage. This was Frank Dista’s spare bedroom, and Larry felt like crying.

  He had to get out. He wasn’t alone in that room. He was crowded in with a bunch of memories that recently hurt like hell. Four happy people partying together, drinking into the small hours, putting a sick world to rights with their laughter. Lying down in there with Hayley, their heads buzzing, still giggling at jokes cracked hours before, hearing Frank’s wife, Connie, playfully fending off his drunken advances in the next bedroom. Now four was two and happy was sad. Frank was dead, and although Hayley wasn’t, he couldn’t count her in his life any more.

  Larry left the room and shut the door behind him.

  Connie was drinking coffee on the small covered porch out back. Unchecked vines dripped through the wooden rafters. Across her face, the restricted sun laid bright patches that made her look distinctly alien. She didn’t smile when she saw him. He guessed she was still in mourning, unable to summon a smile even for the closest of friends.