“Sara, you awake?” “Um-hmm.”
“I think we should go back.”
“Hmm?”
“We could sell this place. If you don’t like it—after a year, we’ll come back.”
Sara sat up. “Bobby, what are you talking about?”
“I’d like to call Willings, tell him we’re going back.”
“To your grandpa’s farm?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Oh. I didn’t think you wanted ...” She leaned toward him.
“What do you think, Sara? Would that be a better place for Noah ...”
Four days later Nguyen Van Thieu resigned as president of the Republic of Viet Nam. Suddenly, it seemed to Bobby, everyone was saying we should never have stopped the bombing. Kissinger was still requesting U.S. aid! Congress was still holding hearings on aid! The political-electronic absurdity increased. The roof rats, on the other hand, dispersed.
Tony called. “It’s over, Man. There’s no place to land.”
Within days the local papers and local TV were covering the arrival of the South Viet Namese refugees at Hamilton Air Force Base. There was gallantry amid pathos. There was every imaginable emotion from anger and disgust to pride, from humiliation to indifference.
On the 29th, Bobby’s 29th birthday, rockets rained down on the airports and into the city and a massive helicopter evacuation began pulling the last one thousand Americans from Saigon.
Then, on the phone, Tony. “It’s over, Man. Mothafuck! Peter Jennings just announced, ‘Viet Nam is now Red.’ Hey, you know what, Man?”
“What?”
“It does mean somethin, Man. It means one fuck of a lot.”
“Come up, okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re goin back, Tony. We’re going back to Mill Creek Falls. To High Meadow. I called Willings. Come home with us.”
Part III
High Meadow
October 1984
BACK.
It is cold. I am chilled to the bone. My right thigh is stiff. The sky above is blueblack. On the horizon is Draco, the dragon, with its tail by the pointers of the Big Dipper. Toward me is Polaris and the W of Cassiopeia, and there is Pegasus, the winged horse created from the blood of the Gorgon, Medusa; Pegasus who transported Bellerophon into battle against the monster Chimera. To the east Leo is barely visible. The sky there brings first light.
Slowly I limp from the sugarbush down through the high meadow to the edge of the pond. I do not have the sustenance for winter nights in these hills the way I once had when I brought Linda to World’s End ... eleven hundred million eons ago. I am moving, going back to the barn. There is so much more to tell.
We entered a time of rapid transformation, a time without motion, a time of expansion and contraction, of rest, retreat, revival, of relief tainted with humiliation. The year 1975 began a time of great turmoil for veterans of the Southeast Asia war. For many it began the expatriation many others had been enduring. For America, though thousands of people spoke of putting that “dirty little war” behind us, ’75 marked an acceleration, albeit muted, muffled, glitzed over, trivialized or Tinseltownized, of the fragmentation and polarization of our society. The preceding decade had stimulated our internal conflicts. Thesis had been crashed head-on into antithesis, forced toward synthesis, only to have ’75 release the bruised and wounded to scatter, to separate, to fester silently, to reentrench and prepare for the coming rounds. For Bobby and me ’75 began repatriation, and for Bobby it marked his awakening to the needs of the roof rats and the rest.
Climbing. The big barn looms before me. This was the heart of High Meadow. Squirrels have built a nest in the eaves and they scamper as I approach. Below, there in the shadows of the mouth of the tractor garage, is the forge. That first winter I lived below the big barn in a cubicle at the very back of the garage. I worked every day—alone mostly, not wanting to talk to anyone—setting up the forge, building it right into the barn’s foundation, into the earth, adding first an archaic hand bellows, then an old motor, then three—a fan, a vacuum cleaner reversed, finally through belts and wheels geared up and up, the powerful motor from a discarded clothes dryer whirling a five-tiered turbo-charger into tubes and hoses, like a mad scientist’s kid’s Erector set, but powerful enough to melt steel or stone. I worked bare-chested before the furnace, searing my belly, my back to the opening that faced the pond, the wind freezing my sweat—me heating and banging, shaping and cooling, forging the long ornate hinges for the gate across the drive, trying to burn the toxins and anger and dreams from my mind.
Bobby came back to High Meadow in November of ’75. It took all that time to sell his Old Russia Road house, Sara’s car, and the office-mobile. Without even entering the farmhouse Bobby climbed to the cemetery. He carried Noah on his shoulders, the little guy wrapped like an Eskimo and supported by both of Bobby’s hands. With Josh scampering in accompaniment, Bobby brought Noah to meet Pewel, grandfather and great-grandfather and nothing more or less than a simple stone set next to Brigita’s. “Granpa, this is Noah Pewel Wapinski. Granpa, here’s the plan....”
I called Linda that night. What night? I don’t know. Sometime later, sometime before. Before I arrived—I don’t know—in December? I told her I could make it. I said, “I’m comin back, Babe. I’m comin home. I’m gonna make it.” She said something like, “Make it, then come back,” or “Prove it,” or “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And I said, “Okay.”
Ty did not come back with me. In May, Ty was released on a PTA but he split. They picked him up in June. The public defender led him through various legal steps, plea bargaining, swapping charges here for admissions of guilt there. In August he was sentenced to seven-and-one-half years in prison with the possibility of parole after three and one-half years.
The roof rats of San Jose did not come either—not yet—and some of them never because some never made it home. “Wildman” David Coffee left the roof, got a job, died of head injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. Fuzzy Golan was killed attempting to break up a convenience store hold up. I don’t know what happened to Big Bro Boyson. I don’t know what happened to any of the others except Ty and Frankie “The Kid” Denahee, who told me about Wildman and Fuzzy in 1980, when he arrived at High Meadow.
Look in here. This is the main floor, the one Pewel fell to nine hundred million eons ago. Through the late seventies it changed greatly. That’s the Pittsburgh machine for making the female joint in sheet metal duct work, and next to it is the Flanger. There’s the Slitter, a roller-cutter that grasps and pulls through entire sheets, and back there is the sheet metal break. We may have been small-town backwater hicks but through Bobby we attained a certain level of technical sophistication. This electronic system can measure and record the thermal collection efficiencies of twelve separate panels simultaneously. At one point Bobby was experimenting with not simply flat, domed and parabolic collector shapes, and water and air as collector mediums, but with argon, helium and neon, and with thermo-syphonation tanks and photovoltaic ribbons. Step-by-step experimentation, maybe you’d call it R & D, attempting to understand How Things Work—perhaps that’s what this is all about.
The sun is up. The landform, the natural south-facing bowl of High Meadow, acts as an immense solar energy collector. I am now in the barn office—we always called it Grandpa’s office. I’ve laid my bedroll on the floor, been poking around. The office is intact, the files undisturbed. Bobby kept files on each and every vet—their stories, their interests, their participation in his programs—but he carefully coded every vet, numbers, and I think he destroyed the master list.
To us, at that time, the essence of the time could be summed up in the questions, What does Viet Nam mean? and, How does that meaning work on us? Was it horror? Was it a leaderless bureaucracy running a death machine? Was it gallantry? Heroism? Was it calling for the best, for the most noble cause, and getting the best? It was intense struggle, intense hardship, met with intense valo
r, perseverance and pride. To Bobby, to many of us, Viet Nam—as an experience, as a natural topographic region, as a political-ideological entity, and as a human culture—represented the best, the most beautiful nascent possibilities, and warm humanness; represented all this as a backdrop for the worst, for the cowardly, the horrific, corrupt, disenfranchised, and finally for the abandoned. Together, the experience, the nation, the best, the worst, had been set adrift in ancient and leaky trawlers to sink or float, to die, to be forgotten. But that is description, that is not meaning. That dirty little war. That foolish misadventure. Just made us the laughing stock ... ’round the block, ’round the world. We could not yet peg it, could not nail it down.
24
“HAPPY NEW YEAR, MAN,” Bobby said. They could hear the peal of the midnight bells from St. Ignatius, and the Episcopal and Methodist churches.
“Happy New Year, Tony.” Sara leaned in, hugged him, a buddy hug.
“Yeah,” Tony said. He was quiet, bitter, dejected. Happy fuckin new year, he thought. They were in the living room of the farmhouse. Noah was asleep upstairs. Earlier Linda had stopped by with Gina and Michelle, had stayed only long enough to exchange wishes. “I’m headin out,” Tony said. Then low, bitter, he quipped, “Three’s a crowd.”
“It’s goina be a good year, Man,” Bobby said. “I can feel it in my bones. I can really feel it. Tomorrow,” he paused, “today I guess, I’ll show you the plan.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. It was warm in the house, freezing outside, cold in the barn. “Right on.” There was no enthusiasm in his voice. He slinked toward the kitchen.
“Tony.” Sara stood like a schoolgirl with her hands and feet together. “We love you.”
Tony snorted. He hadn’t meant for her to hear it but she had. “Don’t give me any of that second-grade California empathy crap.”
“I’m not,” Sara said. She was not offended. Tony’s head was down, his eyes turned up. “I mean it,” Sara said.
Tony sneered, then said, “Maybe Josh can come out with me.”
“Sure, Man,” Bobby said. “You wanta call your folks?”
“Naw. Might wake the girls. I can’t believe she went out with Denham.”
“Tony!” Sara’s voice was laden with sympathy. “She didn’t. Really. It’s their group’s party. She said you could have gone.”
“Yeah. The monster and Miss Priss! Beauty and the Beast!”
“That story has a happy ending ...” Sara began.
“Not when Beauty’s lookin to be with Mister Rich Doctor.”
“Screw the self-pity shit!” Bobby snapped. “Tomorrow. I’m goina show it to Sara tonight. Tomorrow, Man, we get to work.”
Earlier that evening, after Linda had left, and left Tony in a funk, Brian and Cheryl and their children, Anton and Lara, had popped in for hot cider and Christmas cookies.
“Give me a week and I’ll explain to you what I’m thinking,” Bobby had told them.
“It’s okay,” Brian had said. Then he’d laughed. “But make us some money, huh? Two kids and Cheryl’s not back to work ...”
“I think it’s going to,” Bobby said.
Cheryl tried to hide her disappointment. Aside to Sara she said, “Why would anyone want to live out here?”
“I like the hills,” Sara countered. “And the pond. We went skating earlier and it was lovely.”
“You better be careful with that ice,” Cheryl said. “There was a boy who went through on the Loyalsock this week. He got trapped under and drowned.”
“Oh! I didn’t hear about—”
“The ice just isn’t thick enough yet.”
“That’s the river,” Sara had said. “The pond’s pretty solid.”
“But even this house!” Cheryl wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s so cold.”
“We’re planning to rebuild it,” Sara explained.
“Well—” Cheryl shook her head slowly, “I don’t know why. If you and Rob had just sold the place, we’d have the cash to move out of Miriam’s guest house. You could sell it for a subdivision like the new one over in Hobo Hollow. Then we’d all be rich.”
Bobby overheard her. “That would be one shot and gone,” he said. “Let me develop this plan, make this place pay you something every year. Besides, it’s like money in the bank. If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it later.”
Weeks earlier, months earlier, back to before they left California, Bobby had begun planning—game planning, financial planning, personal and business planning. It had gone slowly. The decision to split from his recent past had been made, yet the decision to step into his future had to be remade daily. What if it didn’t work? What if he took this opportunity and blew it—not only failing but causing hardship for others, digging a hole he would not be able to refill in a lifetime? What if he made something bad, something evil?
With patience, using all his design ability, Bobby had created a framework, a five-year, open-ended plan. Yet despite his efforts there were major gaps and unresolved problems. High Meadow would be the base for Environmental Energy Systems—EES—which at this moment wasn’t much more than a concept, and boxes of books, product pamphlets, technical reports and drawings. It would be a working farm, even if Bobby was not a farmer. It would be home—he had his family, his son to raise, his wife to cherish, and the house to rebuild. And High Meadow would be a gathering, a cause, an evolution of thought about energy, about veterans, about the self.
That was the design challenge. Financial planning was easier than planning a personal agenda, and that was easier than planning a code, an ethic for the times, a criterion of what presently was morally valid. “Values,” he’d told Sara, “can be ethereal. They change with the society, with the times.” He found he could not plot value projections in the same manner he once plotted income projections. To earn $30,000 a year in real estate commissions—the calculations had been simple. But how does one plan morality? Is it possible to project value goals? This year I will have 30,000 integrity points!
“Grandpa used to talk about living by a plan and a code,” he reminded Sara. “That’s the framework.” Yet as he’d tried to define it, refine it, it had become clouded and obscure. How do things work? How do children develop? What’s happened to the soldiers who fought in Viet Nam? What is the right way to live? Without a code could any plan, no matter how successful financially, produce the right, sustainable results? And if it did, would one know? And what were those “right” results? What is the final goal?
Even on paper it had become muddled, so Bobby had settled, temporarily, for Master Plan, Phase 1, Zero to Five Years; had settled, for one clamorous circuit of the carousel, one round with the calliope whizzing and banging, blaring and tooting.
Tony stopped, stared into the black overhead. He did not carry a flashlight. Beside him Josh too stopped, leaned lightly against Tony’s leg. The temperature had continued dropping. On the pond the ice expanded, fractured. Cracks shot out, split the ice for two, three, five hundred feet, the sounds long and fast like rifles firing. Tony remained motionless. More fractures, more eerie, cracking shrieks. Tony did not turn toward the pond. Overhead, north, just above the high meadow ridge, he saw Draco, the Dragon—a small-headed dragon, he thought—with its long tail curled about the Little Dipper. To the west, over the spillway, he identified Orion, the Hunter, seemingly aiming from his shoulder star, Betelgeuse, a double-barreled thumper at Draco. Yeah, Tony thought. Get some. Get some, Man. Happy New Year. Happy fuckin new year. Fuck Denham. Right now, Man, she’s probably unbuttoning his shirt. Screw the self-pity shit. New Year’s Eve and they don’t even have a beer! Not one fuckin beer. How the hell ken ya get fucked up without even one beer. Hot spiced cider!
Tony plodded forward into the dark shadow of the barn. He did not need to see. With one hand on the wood siding he edged downhill, into the wind, toward the tractor garage. His ears stung from the cold, his fingertips burned. Josh stayed next to him, bumping him every few steps. Tony reached down, ruffl
ed the thick fur on the dog’s back. Somehow, Josh allowing him to do that was reassuring. “Fuckin women,” Tony muttered. “Playin games with men’s minds. Bitchin. Bitchin they’ve been kept down and cut out. But shit, so have we. So’s the average joe. They compare themselves with some wealthy motherfucker and call us chauvinist pigs. ‘We love you, Tony.’ Get off my fuckin ass, bitch. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Sure Linda. You woulda shit your pants if I’d said yes.”
Inside the tractor garage Tony worked his way to the forge. He’d dampened the firebox all the way down. Coals still smouldered and the stone and brick were warm. Josh nudged him. He grabbed the dog’s fur, ran his hands over Josh’s coat. “We could fire it up, huh, Boy? But that’d make a racket. Sara’d go through the roof if I woke Noah and Bobby’d have to come out and tell us to stop.” Tony crouched, pushed Josh’s jowls back, caressed the dog’s ears. “I bet right now,” he whispered, “she’s licking his nipples.” He stood, rolled his shoulders, thought to head back to his cubicle, his bunker. An immense cracking exploded from the far edge of the pond, blasted like artillery at him. He jolted, froze. Then whispered, “Tomorrow, Josh. Tomorrow ‘we get to work’! Like what the fuck have I been doing all my life?”
“Can you envision it, Sar?” They were cuddled together, in bed, excited, energized by ideas, by New Year’s resolutions, by plans.
“I think so,” Sara said.
“We’ve got the start-up capital from the sale of the house. We’ll probably never be in this position again.”
“I understand the part about the house,” Sara said.
“I’ve just made preliminary sketches,” Bobby said. “I want to change the roof line a little, and drop the collectors between the rafters. Then we’ll put the glazing on top of the rafters. The problem with most solar collectors is they’re ugly. But if the installation is beautiful ... if we can do it with this house, we could show it to people. It’s really going to look sharp. Really.”
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