Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  For a long time neither spoke. Occasionally Bobby or Tony added new wood to the fire. The bed of coals thickened, glowed continuously. Sporadic flame tongues leaped. The faces of the two men dried, toughened like jerky; their backs chilled; their muscles tightened.

  Now talk came more easily. Tony accepted the stick, passed it back, learned the Lenape words. His mood was less acquiescence, more exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. Bobby said there was no way back without flashlights. They’d brought none.

  “You were a grunt,” Bobby said. Tony nodded. “Grunts can do anything. Wëli.” Bobby passed the stick.

  “Hè. I might be fucked up. Neurotransmitters. All that stuff they talked about at Rock Ridge. But you’re right. A grunt can cope. But he’s got to have people around him who don’t just listen, but understand. I ... I could tell you some stories ...”

  “Tell me,” Bobby injected.

  Tony told Bobby about the corpse in the tunnel, about his nightmares, about once grabbing Linda. He moved on to Dai Do, the hand-to-hand fighting, the machetes, how he’d hacked and slashed like a madman in order to save himself and his platoon. Bobby shuddered, controlled his expression.

  “You know what my biggest fear in Nam was?” Bobby said. “Getting stabbed. I didn’t care about getting shot. I mean, I didn’t want to get shot. But I never thought about it. But Man, I thought about bayonets.”

  “I got stabbed,” Tony said. “Here.” He touched his thigh.

  Bobby winced. “I ... I hate being stuck. With anything. Like at the dentist. The moment he touches me, even if I like him, I just think, I’m outta here. I can’t stand ... you know, needles even.”

  “No big thing.”

  Now their talk was every place. Tony told Bobby about Manny being shot in his arms, and about the village, the mother and the children. He did not tell Bobby about shooting them. He was still uncertain, and he sensed that Wapinski, with his theoretical perspectives, did not want to know about American atrocities. To Bobby it would add another blemish to a record he seemed intent on defending.

  Bobby told Tony about Hamburger Hill, about the multiple assaults, about giving the order, about the mud, about losing Americans, not knowing if they’d been wounded, killed, or captured. “It’s the difference between the officer’s perspective and the enlisted man’s,” he said. “You guys would condemn a decision because you had to carry it out. Our condemnation came later. You had to tell this person to walk point, this person to walk his slack. You knew what you were doing. You knew where you were, knew the consequences. We got orders, we gave orders. Sometimes we were mortified by those decisions. We weren’t sitting in some boardroom saying to our staff, ‘I think we ought to buy AT&T. What do you guys think?’ We made decisions that if they weren’t right on, maybe three, four guys died. And you can’t afford three or four guys when you only have thirty. And if you weren’t right on, the guys are saying, ‘That son of a bitch. Where was he? Why’d he lose my friend?’ When I got back, my nightmares ... Shit.”

  “Yuho,” Tony said.

  That released Bobby’s tension and he chuckled. Now he was happy Tony was with him. “I had one that repeated for years,” he said. “About triage. It finally stopped. Then it started again when my granpa was dying. But it stopped again.”

  They moved on. The mood ebbed, flowed. “I need your fuckin help.” Bobby was nasty, demanding. “I can’t do it alone. Either commit or go.”

  “Fine, fuckhead. I’ve been planning to go back to RRVMC anyway. Lick some nurse’s ass.”

  “Yeah. Right!”

  “Let em take care a me.”

  “Enable you to be a fuckhead like Ivanov?”

  “Why the fuck not?!”

  “What the fuck would turn you on? What would make you ... make you pursue a dream? What would elate you?”

  “Elate?!”

  “Rev you up? Satisfy you? Be meaningful?”

  “I don’t ... Maybe like at the forge.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not there. I’m not paying attention to me. I’m focused. It’s happening. Something’s being created.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “That’s my theory of pure elation. Get out of your self, into a cause.”

  “Fuck causes,” Tony said. “They all got causes. Nuclear freeze movements. ERAs. BMWs. Ivanov had a cause—get the head of his dick wet. Fuck people with causes. Causes are fucked.”

  “We’re using it differently,” Bobby said.

  “I’ve never been more elated than when I was stoned out of my fuckin gourd.”

  “Oh boy! You gotta help me. Cause and elation. That’s what makes the world turn. That’s the key to retransformation. It sounds stupid but the final piece of the puzzle is fun. Unselfish fun. That’s why we’ve had all these false starts. It wasn’t any fun.”

  From across the circle Tony glared at Bobby. For some time neither spoke. Finally Wapinski said, “We had a cause that was greater than our selves and we expanded to a higher level. We went to defend freedom and help establish democracy in Southeast Asia. That’s different than just trying to get laid. Trying to get laid is concentrating on the self. Think about falling in love. When you really fall in love, where’s your focus? Not on yourself but on the other. You go outside yourself. That’s the difference between latching on to a cause with the focus on you, and adopting a cause with the focus on the cause. If the focus is on you it brings stress and kills joy. But if the focus is on the cause you enter a state of elation.”

  “Maybe—” Tony shifted, opened his bag.

  “Why can’t I grasp it?” Bobby asked. “So much of this self-indulgent self-fulfillment stuff is really shallow, but there is a core there. It’s the key to becoming unstuck. It’s the key to meaningfulness. Pursue is the wrong word. But elation isn’t. Excitement. Fun. Playfulness. Without that, responsibility becomes drudgery. Without it decisiveness is unsustainable.”

  On and on, deeper and deeper into the night; deeper and deeper into each other’s thoughts. “I missed Jimmy’s death,” Tony confessed. “We were putting up the gate. I’d just finished the hinges, remember? I didn’t remember until later. That’s been like a holy day of obligation to me and I didn’t keep it holy. I didn’t even remember it for a week. Even in San Jose I kept it holy.”

  “It was partly my fault,” Bobby said. “I’m the one who ran off with his girl.”

  “Who? Red?”

  “Yeah. I think maybe he wouldn’t of gone back ...”

  “Naw. Naw, Man. He was goin back Red or not. She ... you know, Man, she was like his pet. She was ... You know, she wasn’t a cause to him. I mean, he liked her. But he was never committed to her like he was to ... geezo, like even to Li. I wonder if Linda’s still got her drawings. You gotta see em, Bobby.”

  “He had a gal there?”

  “An orphan, Man. A kid. That was his cause. Helpin them people. Me too when I was at the ville level.”

  At dawn they returned to the Pennamite camp, ate heartily, crawled into the lean-to. Before they went to sleep Bobby whispered, “Dear Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil, forgive us our trespasses ...”

  Tony, to Bobby’s surprise, completed the beseechment. “And give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.” Bobby propped himself, craned over toward Tony. Tony chortled. “Ah, he taught it to me, too.”

  He is not in the fire circle but to the side, in the dark, in the blackness of space. The images form, coalesce out of slow churning glowing blue gray black fog. It is a sphere, a skull viewed from the blackness, from the void, viewed from above, beside, before, a skull, a globe drifting in space, drifting away, the jaw opening, slowly, painfully, a silent anguished cry escaping. There is no sound. He is viewing the skull from miles above as it floats, spins slowly in the blackness, and there, there, falling from him a black dot, small, smaller, falling, being pulled into the anguished globe until it is imperceptible a second before it hits against the occipital crown
. The jaw again and then the eye sockets—how can they, dead, inanimate—cry in silent pain. The bone cracks at impact, a black jagged hole in glowing blue, one, two, three, four seconds—it seems an eternity as he watches from miles above—then slowly, silently, a cone of gray brain matter explodes toward him, not high enough to touch him, but close enough for him to feel the earth’s pain of millions of man-years of devastation, of death and dying drifting farther until he sees them all, sees the entire galaxy, sees Jimmy and Manny, sees hacked globes rolling, sees the mother, her children, the specks flying from him, they frozen, strong, Gina Michelle Linda ...

  “Tony?”

  ... blood gushes, erupts ...

  “Tony.” Wap called him gently. “Tony. It’s 1976. We’re at High Meadow.”

  “UH!” Tony’s eyes opened. He did not breathe. His eyeballs flicked. On the open side of the lean-to he could see their small camp, the low berm he’d built the day before, vegetation, open lanes. The sky had faded to deep blue. It was dusk.

  “Almost time to go,” Bobby said softly.

  “Um,” Tony sat up. His back was stiff. His right leg tight.

  “Movin out in one five,” Bobby said. “Best eat something.”

  An hour later they sat across from each other at the fire circle. Through the shaft between the hemlocks they could see the clear sky, yet with their vision so tunnelled Tony could make out only Cepheus.

  “Yuho.” Bobby was laconic. Then, “Damn it, Man. I’ve been marchin in place since I returned. That’s what hit me in the lean-to. You too. Just marking time. Losing six fucking years. Yeah”—Bobby’s voice rose, his hands began to shake—“some good stuff’s happened. But some good stuff happens to a blob of shit on the sidewalk. There’s no fuckin time to waste anymore. This is URGENT!”

  “What is?”

  “Getting off the fucking ground. Understanding why we haven’t before. Correcting it. Taking off.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you gotta transform. It means the next move is up to you.”

  “Maybe the next move is up to my chemical im-fucking-balances.”

  “You control it.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. It’s a neurotransmitter imbalance that causes mania and depression. That’s what the doctors say.”

  “Fine. Did they tell you why you had a chemical imbalance?”

  “Why?!” After last night’s finale, Tony had not expected to be back in a pissing contest. “They don’t know why! That’s what ticks me off. Cause I killed people. It’s ... They don’t have a clue. You got a broken leg, they give you a crutch. That’s their approach.”

  “Exactly,” Bobby said. “That’s all they can do. Chemical imbalances are caused by something. Maybe something you saw. Or did. Or maybe it’s diet. Who knows? But something caused the onset. Then the system went out of whack. That increased the depression, pushed the imbalance. Fuck the drugs. That only keeps you from getting to the original problem. Makes you stick where you’re at. Keeps you from taking off.”

  Spit flicked from Tony’s lips. “I know the goddamned problem. Everything’s been fucked in my life, everything since Nam. And I’m not takin any drugs.”

  “No it hasn’t,” Bobby said. “Not since Nam.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “In Philly? You were crazy then? When you met Linda? Go ahead, tell me you were nuts then.”

  Tony did not respond.

  “In Nam? Were you crazy in Nam? I mean truly schitzo?”

  Still no response.

  “Once you had to pull your weight and you did.”

  “I do now.”

  “You work hard. You’re a great worker. But you’re not pulling your weight. You’re hiding. And so the fuck am I. We did it once. We can do it again.”

  Tony was exasperated, exhausted. “What the fuck, Man. Over.”

  “No,” Bobby said. “There’s no ‘what the fucks’ to get you off the hook. It’s decision time, Man. It’s time to make the decision and never look back.”

  Tony reached out, grabbed a stick from the pile, ran a hand over it breaking off a few dry twigs. “Hè.” He held the stick vertically before his face, grasped it in a steel fist, glared at Wapinski, at the drawn wrinkled features reflecting the sporadic bursts and ambient glow. “One condition,” he said. “Consult me. Fill me in. Don’t treat me like your fuckin pet. Like you keep no animals except Josh and Tony. And don’t you ever give anybody any unconditional handouts. You want a platoon sergeant?! I’ll fuckin out-sergeant anybody in the fuckin world. You develop the programs. You let me run em.” He snapped the truth stick straight out, his hand just above the flame.

  Bobby reached, grabbed, quickly, attentively, neither being burned. “This is the program,” he began. He spoke at length, spoke like a military instructor first mentioning the main points, then backtracking to fill in. He spoke of his own family, moved on to EES, not simply the technical and production ends but the cause he called attitude evolution. From there he outlined his thoughts on farming and was surprised to have Tony adopt his phraseology of cause and attitude evolution as Tony took over to describe reduced-pesticide methods, water and soil conservation techniques that would allow for minimal chemical fertilizer usage without affecting yield. For the first time he listened to Tony’s report on chardonnays, “... drinkable, marketable, in demand.”

  Then Bobby asked, “Can we produce wine here?”

  “You mean actually be a winery instead of selling the grapes?”

  “I mean if we’re going to be detoxifying guys—”

  Now they spoke of the dilemma of starting a winery with workers who might be alcoholics. “I’ve been through detox,” Tony said. “Only about one in ten are actually physically dependent. It’s genetic. The rest drink for other reasons. To be numb. To take the edge off. Sometimes for fun. Sometimes it becomes habit and after a while habit becomes something you depend on, physically.”

  “That begs the question,” Wapinski countered. “If we’re going to have alcoholics here we better be dry.”

  “Not true,” Tony said seriously. “For a year you’ve been talking about responsibility. We’re dry here. A guy’s fine. He leaves here for the real world. You haven’t taught him a fuckin thing. Sometimes I want a drink. Sometimes I want to get drunk, fall down, laugh, be stupid. So fuckin what?! We’re developing a fanatical antialcohol attitude in this country when the real issue is drinking and driving. You talk about risks, you talk about decision making, about taking the plunge, about fun, about getting out of the self. If you’re physically addicted, you’ve got to learn to stay away. Otherwise you just have to learn to drink responsibly. Control it.”

  Bobby burst out laughing. Tony was so serious.

  “Fuck you,” Tony snapped. He sat back, crossed his arms, jammed a heel into the rock ring.

  “No. No. No.” Bobby coughed out the words. “It’s ... it’s just ...” He rolled to his side laughing, making Tony even angrier. Then he grabbed the small pack he’d brought, opened it, pulled out a new fifth of Jack Daniel’s. “Hè.”

  Tony stared. Then he too began to laugh. Bobby took a swig, passed the bottle. “The Yards in Nam,” Bobby said, “wouldn’t trust you unless you’d get drunk with them.”

  Again the bottle passed. Bobby moved on to the Community. He didn’t know what to call it. Still he laid out the plans he’d made, fully including Tony for the first time. “... take care of our own ...” he repeated. “... a retreat. A center. Teach them to become unstuck. To take off. Grab a piece of life. An incremental program to teach them to make decisions. Stay as long or as short as you want. No government regulations. Work in the barn, the vineyard ...”

  “Just don’t give me all the shitheads,” Tony said.

  “What does that mean?” Bobby was perplexed.

  “You talk about dregs, Man. About down-and-outs. Open it up, Man. Open it up to just guys in need. Or guys who want to be here. Want to
help. Let some of em set examples for others. If you only take the worst, we’re not goina move off square one.”

  “Well ...”

  “Make entry formal. Like basic. A series of rites of passage. Each passed means greater responsibility, more freedom. Just like in the Corps. Call us NAM. Like we did in San Jose. That’ll be our cause.”

  The night was crystal clear, cold. Both Bobby and Tony had their sleeping bags wrapped over their backs, pulled up over their necks to their ears. They were feeling mellow. Bobby talked of transformations, of attitudes, of building self-reliance and commitment, of tenacity and teamwork, of establishing habitual, efficient mechanics of everyday life, of his grunt theory of psychotherapy, which combined a teaching of basic life skills with a think-it-out, tough-it-out, no self-pity, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other philosophy. Very slowly it occurred to him, even if it had not occurred to Tony, that Tony had, in the past ten months, already transformed.

  Bobby thought to say this to Tony but he did not. Instead he talked about the High Meadow Code, about his files, his attempts and false starts. “This is where it’s all headed,” he said. “This is what has to be done to get to an Ethic for Our Times.” He moved a quarter way around the fire. On the ground he drew an arrow pointing away from the fire. Beside it, beginning at the arrow base, he marked the letters PFFEIPS. “I think it’s kind of the time-lapse of the self,” Bobby said. “Kind of time layers. Physical, financial, familial, emotional, intellectual, political, spiritual.”

  “I gotta pee,” Tony said. He stood, swayed. They had eaten little. It had been nearly a year since he’d had a drink. The bottle was half-gone. Still, from the dark looking in, looking at the circle, at Bobby in the glow of the small fire, it struck him. He returned, sat, rehunched under the sleeping bag, said, “It doesn’t work because it’s not a circle.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “Yeah.” He too was feeling the alcohol. “I like a circle,” he said. “The Great Circle. The Fire Circle. Everything connected. A to Z. Alpha to omega.”

  In the wee hours they finished the bottle, laid it in the coals for a meltdown, talked on, ranted, chuckled, challenged each other. At one point Bobby said, “That’s what we’re goina turn around. Attitude ev-oh-lu-tion. Ev-oh-lu-tion!” At another, “Let’s build a basketball court.”