Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and we can talk.”

  “Stay close, Josh,” he said. They headed out the back door of the house toward the pond. Josh jumped, leaped, nearly did flips in the air. Bob caught him on one of the jumps and hugged him. “Yer a good dog, Josh.” He nuzzled his face behind the dog’s ear. “You really are.” They made a short detour to look at the car they had crashed. Pewel Wapinski had had it towed to High Meadow and pushed into the garage bay on the barn’s downhill side below the main floor. “You know, little brother,” Bob said to Josh, “I coulda gotten you killed. Damn. What a mess. We’ll work on the yard this afternoon and tonight we’ll start strippin her so we can find just how bad she is. Maybe we can pull the engine and seats and stuff and find one that’s been junked with a blown engine and combine the two.”

  They walked down the path to the pond’s edge. The morning was already becoming warm. There was a high thin cloud cover. Josh walked into the low water, lapped up some, came out shaking himself next to Bob. “Geez,” Bob laughed. “You dummy. Come on. I’ll take you around.”

  The path climbed south, away from the pond, through the edge of the orchards. Bobby was stiff. He hadn’t walked much since the accident. Now climbing the small hill to the orchard his knees ached. He walked slowly. He was not in a hurry. He did not want to think about anything in particular. He felt happy. For the first time since the day he returned, he actually felt happy. They walked into the orchard. It had not been tended in years. In one tree he found the remnant of an old treehouse he and his grandfather had built. Along with feeling happy, he felt melancholy. He didn’t explore the feelings.

  He grabbed a branch with his left hand to help himself up a short, steep section. His thumb was still weak. The mild pressure of his grip caused some pain. He paused, examined his knuckles. They had healed from where they’d connected with the boy’s jawbone. His stomach felt better after having eaten with his grandfather for two weeks and having reduced his whiskey consumption. And he was gaining back some weight.

  The trail meandered over the wooded knoll at the south end of the pond. They paused. Bob led Josh to the edge of the cliff and sat and looked at the pond. The pond lay at the base of a large, hundred-acre, natural bowl with the highest rim of the ridge at the north, the bowl opening south, the east and west ridges very gradually descending, extending like two arms holding and protecting the pond and the inner farm and even the knoll upon which Wap and Josh sat. Halfway down each arm from the north crest was a sheer six-foot step, a major fracture in the underlying bedrock that ran from one ridge, under the pond, to the other. There were two springs in the floor of the pond that seeped from the fracture, oozing water that created cold spots to swim through in the summer and warm spots where the ice was always thin in winter. The pond was shaped like a Christmas stocking, or fat, squat boot. At the bottom of the toe to his left was the spillway. The dam ran up the entire toe.

  The hill in front of the boot was covered with woods. Above the top of the boot there was a steep grassy area before the slope evened out into the forty-acre upper meadow. On the right side, at the back of the boot was the house, the barn, several outbuildings, the stone ruins of the old barn, and three fenced enclosures. The fences had long since deteriorated. Along the east ridge was a cluster of pines, and beneath was the family cemetery. He’d visited his grandmother’s grave numerous times with his grandfather. His great aunt Krystyna, who had come to America after her brother established the farm, also lay there, and two workers had been buried up there in the 1930s, men without families, who’d died one winter in the old barn when the structure had caught fire.

  “Pretty, isn’t it, Boy,” Bob said to his dog. “You want to keep moving, don’t you? Okay.” They walked back to the trail and followed it down the west side of the knoll, over the spillway and across the dam. Several trees with arm-thick trunks were growing from the earth of the dam. He made a mental note to bring the chainsaw down and remove them before their roots caused leaks.

  The trail followed the edge of the pond for several hundred feet, crossed a small stream, then headed uphill. Josh scampered back and forth, racing wildly, glancing back at Bob every few seconds for approval. Wapinski laughed at his antics. A red-winged blackbird flitted across their path, then glided toward the tall reeds at the pond’s edge. In the trees above, two crows screamed their intruder alarm to the forest.

  Wap and Josh continued the climb, up over a set of crags, cresting then descending through a rock crevasse. “Come on, Josh,” Wapinski said. “You can do it.” He stepped carefully from foothold to foothold, dropping quickly into the narrow chasm. Josh barked and whined. He crouched, his paws at the edge of the gorge, hesitated, peered down, shirked back, unsure. Then he stood straight up. “Come on, Josh,” Wapinski called again. But Josh was now still, staring over the chasm, not listening, sniffing. Then Wapinski smelled it. A slight whiff. Entrails and fresh blood. Then full force, repulsive. It threw him back, pushed him to the other side of the world. He snapped his head around. Searched. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood. He knew where he was, but his body reacted over his knowledge. He stepped down. The scent closed upon him in the warm humid air. He looked for the dead. He mumbled to Josh, “There’s got to be a cat or a raccoon here. Maybe a dog. Maybe a dog got a deer. Come on,” he ordered. “Get down here. This is the path we’re takin.” Josh barked, whined. He came to the edge of the steep descent. Wapinski stretched up, grabbed him by the collar. The dog reared back. Wap pulled him down, caught him as he fell, tucked him under his left arm. Josh squirmed, his strong body objecting to being held. Bob descended. The odor closed in on him. The back of his throat tightened. He swallowed. He cleared his throat, spit. He descended to the bottom, put the dog down, looked into the crevices and holes but saw nothing. He searched the area beyond the path, first to one side, then the other. He climbed over a fallen tree and foraged beneath several bushes. With his head up he could smell the death but the moment he tried to home in on the origin, the smell decreased.

  There was a slight breeze, so slight Wapinski could not ascertain its direction. He looked uphill at the trees. The wind should lift the leaves, he thought. If I can see the bottoms, the wind will be coming from that direction. The leaves hung listless. He moved farther down toward the pond. Again the smell came strong. He searched and the smell dissipated. He backed up and the smell was gone. He descended and the rancid, piercing smell nearly knocked him down. He felt his stomach tighten. Then he knew he would not stay, would not find the source.

  He continued on the path. It rose over a small hummock then fell again toward the pond. He paused and covered his face. “Josh,” he yelled. Wap knelt. The dog came over and pushed his face between Wap’s arm and chest. “Josh,” Wap said softly, almost pleadingly, “you smelled it too, didn’t you?”

  When Bob Wapinski and Josh returned to the farmhouse Grandpa was waiting for them with news. Joanne had called. Montgomery McShane was pressing charges.

  Bea Hollands was dissatisfied with her life. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Pellegrino, was in Viet Nam, had been there for most of the past two years. Her last close friend, Stacy Carter, was planning a September wedding and a move to New York City with her new husband. And in nine days she would be twenty-one years old and no one seemed to know or care. Bea was stuck in Mill Creek Falls, Pennsylvania, without adventure, without future, stuck, she felt, in a backwater, back-hills town where even yesterday’s Fourth of July celebration, which supposedly brought out the best of small-town America, had been a total drag.

  Bea was small, barely five one and not ninety pounds dripping wet, smaller than petite, so small she purchased her clothing in the girls’ departments of the local clothing stores. As if to make up for this diminutive size, she had a wild mane of bright red-orange curls that covered both shoulders and fell to below her waist. Her hair added two inches to her height and framed not just her face but her neck, shoulders and her slight upper body. In the center of
that frame, two hazy green eyes tried to look languid, despite their natural vim.

  “Hi,” Wapinski said. “You’ve got to be ...”

  “Red.” She gave him a big smile. She was dressed in matching pistachio-colored short shorts and T-shirt. “You’re taller than I remembered.”

  “Yeah. Ah ...” Two sentences, he thought. Already I’m awkward. Does she mean I’m too tall for her? “I can slouch,” he said. Red laughed. She had an easy laugh.

  “It’s probably because I’ve only seen you with Stacy and she’s tall too,” Red said. “Why don’t we go for a drive. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Any place you want to go.”

  “There’s a new ice-cream shop downtown that has the creamiest, yummiest ice cream you’ve ever tasted.”

  Wapinski didn’t know what to say. She’d moved into high energy. He felt overwhelmed.

  “Stacy told me that you just came back from Viet Nam,” Red said as they got into Grandpa’s ’53 Chevy. “This is really a neat car. You could put wood trim on the sides and it’d be a real woody.”

  “Ah, it’s my grandfather’s. I, ah, crashed mine a few weeks ago and haven’t been able to fix it yet.”

  “Why don’t you just have the insurance company fix it? Look how wide the seats are. I feel like I’m on my living room couch. This is so much better than my car.” Wapinski was about to ask her which car was hers, but she rattled out before he had a chance. “That’s mine. The Vee Doub. It’s cute, don’t you think? My father helped me put the racing stripes on it.”

  “Very nice,” he said. He started the Chevy, backed out, and in silence followed her directions toward the ice cream parlor. She continued chatting. Bob Wapinski liked her voice, but the chatter drove him to lean against the door. Very gradually she slowed down as he stopped even his occasional um-hmms. He liked the way she looked, too. She wasn’t Stacy, but in a very different way she was pretty. Even her legs were nice, not model legs like Stacy’s, he thought, but she had smooth skin and firm-looking thighs and calves. He decided that he didn’t like her but that he’d like to fuck her. Then her entire countenance changed. She shut up, became serious.

  “You probably’d like to get a word in here, huh?” Red dropped her head. “Jimmy told me I talk too much, and I know he’s right. Sometimes it just bubbles out of me.” She looked up at Bob, tilted her head just so, smiled sheepishly, said, “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he said. “I was enjoying listening to you.”

  “Yeah, but I think you wanted to talk, didn’t you?”

  “Who’s Jimmy?”

  “He’s my boyfriend. Stacy said she told you.”

  “Oh. I must of forgot. Who is he?”

  “He’s in Viet Nam, too. He’s a Marine.”

  “Man.” Bob sighed. “He’s got no idea what he’s comin back to.”

  “He’s been back. He’s on his second tour.”

  “And he’s still your boyfriend!?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re engaged. I wrote him and told him I was going to see you and just talk. He knows what Stacy did to you.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Stacy and I doubled once with Jimmy and his cousin and once with Jimmy and Jerry.”

  “She was playing around the whole time I was over there, wasn’t she?” Bob didn’t ask it with bitterness. Somehow, he could not blame Stacy. It wasn’t that he thought the fault or reason for their splitting up lay with him or with his service: it was simply a matter that he could not think badly about Stacy. To him she was perfect.

  “She dated,” Red said. “She wrote to you and told you.”

  “No she didn’t.”

  “She told me ... that’s what she told me. She said she wrote and told you.”

  “She wrote and told me she loved me,” he said. “What happened to her? You know we’d been going for almost four years? I sent her a long-stem red rose on the first of every month, FTD. A dozen roses, one for each month I was away.”

  “I know. I remember when she first went to Nittany Mountain and she met you. She was crazy about you. Really. She was always crazy about you.”

  “Damn! See. I don’t know what happened. Did she just get tired of waiting? Did this guy Jerry sweep her off her feet? Who is this Jerry sucker?” Again Red just looked up at Bobby with her great big green eyes and shrugged. There was a short silence. Then he said, “Can I ask you ... about your boyfriend?”

  “You mean ...”

  “Yeah. Do you cheat on him?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. I wouldn’t do that. He’s, he’s like—like the love of my life. He’s been my only love. We’ve been going ever since we were sophomores in high school. I’ve never even dated anybody else.”

  They talked about Stacy and Tony and Jerry and Jimmy for an hour. They sat in the car in the small parking lot of the ice-cream parlor, ate their cones, talked more. Red sat sideways on the seat, her knees folded, her feet by her butt. Bob lay against the driver’s door. Talking about Stacy, finding out that she’d been dating, dating more he was sure than what Red let on, and from almost the time he left for overseas, bummed him out, dropped him into gloom. If Red looked lovely in the amber light that came through the windshield, he didn’t notice. He drove her home, in silence, until they reached her curb.

  “All women aren’t rotten, Bob,” Red said. “I know you’re feeling that way, but it’s not true.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know you’re right. It’s just depressing talking about this.”

  “Bob ...”

  “Um.”

  “If you’d like to talk again, I’d like to talk too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call me.”

  Their first dates, if they could be so called, set up the next four years of their lives. Later, much later, Robert Wapinski would look back on this time with Red and think, I must have needed someone terribly then. That’s why I fell in love. But at the time he did not realize it, simply went with the flow. He had had good friends in the army, friends that knew his intimate fears and hopes, that had shared his joy and his sorrow. Close friends. Better friends, he felt, than any man had a right to. Now, except for Grandpa and Josh, he was alone. Cut off. Cut off from his family by an invisible wall and from friends by seemingly infinite distance. He wondered if they were still in the A Shau, or back in the A Shau on another operation, on new hills, new or reopened firebases. Was Thompson the company commander? Had Colonel Cordman rotated? Great battalion commander. Was Quay still interpreting with S-2? And Doc Edwards and Billy Smith, his medic and RTO on Dong Ap Bia, were they okay? He hoped they’d DEROSed, unscathed. He had Faulks’ address, and a few others who’d left country before him. Faulks was in Nebraska—too far, it seemed, even to call. He didn’t know why. And Eton, and Bowers. Missing. Left behind when they withdrew—when the rain turned the mountain to mud and they less withdrew than slid away, involuntarily, slid down the side of Hamburger leaving Eton and Bowers wounded, getting Carino killed trying to go back and recover them. And Ty Blackwell too. Not KIA, WIA and pissed. Moaning, bitching, vengeful at the evac hospital at Camp Evans. Son of a bitch, Wapinski had thought. Son of a bitch, still a better man than anyone has a right to know: better men than anyone has the right to be befriended by, much less the privilege to serve with, under or command.

  So Bobby transferred his need for intimacy to Red. Through July they just talked. Their “dates” alternated, it seemed, between fun talk and serious talk, between times when Red couldn’t control her chattering and Bob was in no mind to listen, to times when Red drew the most painful thoughts out of him and if not understood, at least listened without judging.

  “Sometimes it’s like I don’t know what I think anymore,” he told Red. “I read these god damned papers. We’re fighting honorably there. Damn it, I know this. I was on Dong Ap Bia. I know who was up there. I know where they came from and what they had. Then I read this shit about Nixon thinking abo
ut throwing in the towel. Or these senators. I can’t believe Kennedy! I can understand the protestors. I just can’t understand our own government. And I can’t understand the press. Those people are way off base. They see one side of things. They’ve got no idea what war is and yet they think they’ve got the right to report it. Well, damn it, they do, but they’ve got a responsibility, too, to report all the different sides. God, sometimes, inside, I get so worked up.

  “Red, sometimes I feel like I’ve been shaved all over my body. Especially inside my ears. Like I’ve been shaved by a razor that was set too high. You understand? It’s like it’s taken off my outer skin. It’s like my nerves are exposed. Like everything rubs the raw ends.” Bob held out his left arm, exposed the underside, and drew his right thumb up from wrist to elbow three times as he said, “Imagine it like this. Like somebody’s slicing away my skin. As they lift the razor it looks clean and pink but in a second you can see tiny droplets of blood oozing from each pore and in ten seconds my whole arm’s dripping blood. Real watery blood cause it drips off and doesn’t scab over and the skin stays so sensitive even breathing on it hurts.”

  Bob continued rising at five each morning, making coffee, skimming the papers, often walking around the pond with Josh. As the mornings lightened he worked around the house at High Meadow, clearing the yard, patching the roof, replacing boards in the porches, painting. In the afternoons he worked on his car, ran errands, or set about the business of exploring options. In the evenings he read or wrote or went to talk to Red and shared with her what had happened during the day.

  “Happy birthday,” Bob said. “Here, they’re for you.” He held out a cluster of Queen Anne’s lace surrounded by maidenhair fern all wrapped in white freezer paper.

  “Where’d you get these?” Red giggled. “They’re really pretty.”

  “Up at High Meadow. You should come up with me sometime. It’s my favorite place. I like to walk around the pond. There’s a lot of wild-flowers at this time of year and the woods are full of birds and animals. I saw a fox this morning.”