by Tobias Wolff
We were driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge late one night. It was hot in the car, and I asked Vera to crack the window. She looked at me curiously. I asked her again. What? she said. Crack the window? Please, I said. She screamed Here! and struck the windshield with the heel of her hand. She did it again, and again, as hard as she could. Here! Here! I grabbed her wrist so she wouldn’t hurt herself and asked what I’d done wrong. You know, she said. She stared ahead, hugging herself. Finally she declared she’d never in her life heard the expression “crack the window,” and said further that I knew she’d never heard it. Why, she asked, did I like to mock her? Exactly what pleasure did it give me?
I thought it best not to answer, but my silence goaded her to fury, and the injured sound of her own voice served as proof that I had wronged her, that I was vicious, disloyal, unworthy, hateful. Vera was still going strong when we got to my place. She hadn’t moved in with me yet; that opera had yet to open. My friends and I lived in a black neighborhood where people didn’t observe the white protocol of seeming not to hear what was going on around them. I tried to hush Vera but she was in full cry, and before long our neighbors joined in, yelling at us from up and down the street. They were inspirational to Vera but not to me. I told her she had to go home, and when she refused I simply got out of my car and went inside.
It was well after midnight. My friends were in their rooms, gallantly pretending to be asleep. I opened a beer and carried it to the living room.
The first crash wasn’t that loud. It sounded like someone had kicked over a garbage can. The second was louder. I went to the window and parted the blinds. Vera was backing down the street in her mother’s old Mercedes. This was a blocky gray diesel made, no doubt, from melted-down panzers. Vera went about fifty feet, stopped, ground the gears, started up the street again and rammed my car head-on, caving in the hood. Her undercarriage got caught on my bumper as she pulled away. She couldn’t move but kept trying anyhow, racing the engine, rending metal. Then she popped the clutch and the engine died.
“I’m going to kill you,” I told her when I reached the street.
I must have looked like I meant it, because she locked her door and sat there without saying a word. I walked back and forth around my car, a yellow Volkswegen bug, the first car I’d ever owned. It was cherry when I bought it. An unusual word to use about a VW, but that’s what the ad said: “Cherry, needs tires, runs good.” Gospel, every word. It was a good car but a soft car, no match for the armor-plated Überauto now parked on its hood. Before landing there Vera had nailed the bug twice on the driver’s side, caving in the door and breaking the window.
I kept circling it. As I walked I began to tote up the damage, translating it into words that offered some hope of amendment. Crumpled fender. Dents on door panel. A phrase came to mind that I tried to dismiss and forget, because the instant I thought of it I knew it would undo me. Cracked window. I sat down on the curb. Vera got out of her car. She walked over, sat beside me, leaned against my shoulder.
“You cracked the window,” I said. “I’ll think twice before I ask you to do that again.” And we sat there laughing at my ruined car.
This sort of thing became routine, all in a day’s work. At first I was able to see Vera’s fits as aristocratic peculiarity, and even managed to believe that I could somehow deliver her from them and help her become as squared away as I was. After all, she looked as solid as a rock compared to her brother Grisha.
I never actually met Grisha. Just before I started going out with Vera he had quarreled with their mother over something so trivial she couldn’t remember it afterward, except that she had said something about not liking the look on his face, whereupon Grisha declared that he wouldn’t inflict his face on her or anyone else ever again, and locked himself in his room upstairs. He refused to come out except when there was no one to see him. Vera’s mother left Grisha’s meals on a tray outside his door and carried the dirty dishes away when he was done. The same with his laundry. That was the situation when I first visited the house. Vera’s mother was a fond and patient woman who had long ago surrendered her authority in the family. She accepted this business with Grisha as she accepted everything her children did. Anyway, it couldn’t go on much longer. Summer was almost over. Grisha had another year of school left, and he would have to leave the room once classes began.
That’s what she thought, but Grisha thought otherwise. Just before Labor Day he left a note with his dirty dishes announcing that he planned to stay right where he was and get his diploma by correspondence. He trusted his mother to arrange the details.
She called a family council to discuss the question, and asked me to sit in. I was glad to do it. It was a sign of favor and I did my best to be worthy of it. When she asked for my view I gave sound military advice, which was to lay siege to Grisha. Starve the brat out, I told her. She had to show him he wasn’t the center of the universe.
When I finished I looked at Vera’s mother and saw that I’d been wrong: Grisha was the center of the universe. She seemed embarrassed and a little amazed that I didn’t know this. She thanked me and turned to Vera, then the talk turned serious. They reasoned together and after sober consideration reached their decision. Grisha could do anything he wanted to do.
Vera’s mother signed him up for correspondence school and continued to minister to him. But one night Grisha opened his door just as she was picking up his dinner tray. For a breathless moment they were face-to-face. Then Grisha slammed the door and immediately took measures to ensure that no such accident ever happened again. He wrapped his head completely in gauze, leaving little holes for his mouth, eyes, ears, and nostrils. Once he was all covered up he became less reclusive. I could sometimes catch glimpses of him at the end of a hallway, or retreating up the stairs as I came in the front door. And once, after dropping Vera off in the early morning, I came across Grisha out for a walk. He flared up suddenly in my headlights, his bandage a white ball on his narrow shoulders. It wasn’t at all funny. It was as if I were seeing not Grisha but some terrible future, the future of my fears.
I made up my mind to live with Vera’s moods, as I wanted to think of them, even while they grew more outrageous. I tried to see them as evidence of a rich, passionate nature. What other girl had ever cared enough about me to destroy my car? She’d even threatened to shoot herself once, pulling a pistol out of a desk drawer as I was about to leave her house in the middle of a quarrel. It was pure theater, I understood that, but a small doubt remained, and a small doubt was too much for me, so I gave in and stayed. I nearly always gave in. This became part of the trouble between us. Once she got her way she despised me for letting her have it, and immediately started pushing again. She had to find that line I wouldn’t cross, where my cussedness was equal to hers. On this ground we fought like sworn enemies. We held nothing back, and once we were exhausted, after we’d given and taken every hurt, we came together with a tenderness that lasted for days, until the next round began. It was a hard way to be in love, and not the way I’d hoped for, but it was our way.
To be out of the barracks and the uniform. To be young and in love, surrounded by friends, free in a great city. To have my own time, to read, to loaf, to see plays, to hit jazz bars with Geoffrey and stay up until dawn talking about books and writing—all this was to forget for hours, even days at a time, that I had a bill coming due. But I found reasons to remember.
This was late ’66, early ’67. The news kept getting worse. More troops going over, more getting killed, some of them boys I’d known. I was afraid of the war, but I had never questioned its necessity. Among the soldiers I’d served with that question didn’t even get raised. We took the official explanations on faith and did not ask for details. Faith carried no weight in Washington. My brother and most of my friends believed that the war was an atrocious mistake and ridiculed the government’s attempts to justify it. I argued with them, furiously at times, but I didn’t have command of the subject and my ignorance got
me in trouble, never more than when I locked horns with I. F. Stone one night at Geoffrey’s house. With exquisite gentleness, Stone peeled my bluster like an onion until there was nothing left but silence.
I began to attend Professor Carroll Quigley’s Vietnam lectures at Georgetown. I went to a teach-in, but left after the first couple of speakers. They were operating out of their own faith system; faith in the sanctity of Ho Chi Minh and his cause, faith in the perfidy of those who were unconvinced. Mostly I read: Bernard Fall, Jules Roy, Lucien Bodard, Graham Greene.
The Quiet American affected me disagreeably. I liked to think that good intentions had value. In this book good intentions accomplished nothing but harm. Cynicism and accommodation appeared, by comparison, almost virtuous. I didn’t like that idea. It seemed decadent, like the opium-addicted narrator and the weary atmosphere of the novel. What really bothered me was Greene’s portrayal of Pyle, the earnest, blundering American. I did not fail to hear certain tones of my own voice in his, and this was irritating, even insulting. Yet I read the book again, and again.
In time I lost whatever certitudes I’d had, but I didn’t replace them with new ones. The war was something I had to get through. Where was the profit in developing convictions that would make it even harder? I dabbled in unauthorized ideas, and at the point where they began to demand a response from me I drew back, closed my mind as if it were a floodgate, as if I could control the influx of doubt. But I was already up to my neck in it.
My mother lived within walking distance. We had dinner together at least once a week. She liked making a fuss over me, and I liked letting her do it. One night I was sitting in her living room while she cooked up some spaghetti. Her husband, Frank, was out somewhere. She moved around the kitchen, humming along to the radio—101 Strings, Mantovani. Easy listening. The apartment was warm and smelled good. She had filled it with mementos of her travels: Spanish dolls and Brazilian puppets, posters, goat-hair rugs, a camel saddle from Morocco, where she’d spent two weeks driving through the Atlas Mountains with a friend. I sat on the sofa with my legs crossed, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper. While I was in this state of contentment I saw Hugh Pierce’s name among those of the dead.
It was no mistake. His name, rank, and unit were all there. I kept reading the words, and each time they floated farther away from my comprehension. I understood only one thing: This shouldn’t have happened. It was wrong. I knew it at that moment as well as I know it now.
I called out to my mother. She came to the kitchen doorway and stood there looking at me. She was on guard, she knew something was up. I told her Hugh had been killed. I said it reproachfully, and my mother frowned and pushed her lips together like a girl who’d been scolded. Then she crossed the room and sat beside me and touched my wrist doubtfully. “Oh, Toby,” she said.
I knew there was something I should do, but I didn’t know what. I began to walk back and forth while my mother watched me. She told me to go on home if I wanted to be alone, we could have our dinner another time. But I discovered that I was hungry. Famished. I sat down and cleaned my plate and let my mother fill it again. I didn’t talk and neither did she. Afterward I sat there and tried to form an intention. I couldn’t think at all. I felt weightless. My hands were on the table as if I were about to push myself up decisively, but I stayed where I was. My mother looked on, stricken and afraid. For her sake I knew I had to get out of there. I said maybe I’d better go home after all.
I didn’t remember Yancy’s letter until late that night. I got out of bed and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where I kept my correspondence and receipts. I riffled through the pile. She had loopy, girlish handwriting, and she’d used a pencil. I could recognize the envelope at a glance and often did, with a pang, when I was looking for something else. I knew it was there, but I didn’t come up with it the first time through, nor the second.
I slid the drawer out and put it on the floor and knelt beside it. One by one I lifted every letter, turned it over, set it aside. When the drawer was empty I still hadn’t found it. I was close to panic. I sat back and imposed calm on myself. The letter had to be somewhere in the room.
Taking care not to hurry, I searched the other drawers. I looked under the dresser, then pulled it away from the wall and looked behind it. I emptied my duffel bag, went through the pockets of my civvies and even my uniforms. I ran my hands over the shelves in the closet. When I heard myself panting I sat on the edge of my bed and forced myself to think back to when I’d last seen the letter. I couldn’t. I got up again, took stock. Quietly, so I wouldn’t wake the house, I began to tear my room to pieces. I left no inch of it unexamined. Nothing. Yancy’s letter was gone. Had I thrown it away? Could I have done that—just thrown it away?
I couldn’t even remember her last name.
A few days later I thought of calling her friend, the girl I’d taken out, but the number had been disconnected and her name wasn’t listed in the directory. I called the bar where they’d both worked. No one knew any girls named Trace or Yancy.
I don’t know exactly what I would have done if I’d found Yancy. Given her the news, of course. Tried to find out if she’d had the baby. I wanted to ask her about the baby—lots of questions there. And I would have said I was sorry for sitting on her letter, because I was sorry, I am still sorry, God knows I am sorry.
VERA AND I fought more riotously every week. She took offense at something during a party and hewed out great clumps of her hair with pinking shears. One night she climbed the tree outside my bedroom window with a rope around her neck and threatened to hang herself. The outlandishness of our quarrels isolated us, and made reconciliation harder. We had to keep upping the ante, promising more of ourselves, to put the last one behind. Just before I finished language school we got engaged.
And then my year of grace ended. At the end of it, scared, short-winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines, I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders.
Just after I got there I was assigned to a training exercise being played out in the mountains of Pisgah National Forest. I didn’t know any of the men whose temporary commander I became; I was filling in for their regular team leader, who had other business to attend to. Our job was to parachute in and link up with another team and make a show of our expertise.
It was over a year since I’d been in the field. In that time I had done almost no exercise, nor had I worn a uniform, carried a rifle and pack, or given an order. I hadn’t read a compass or used a map except on drives into the countryside. On the day before the drop I locked myself up with plenty of coffee and every field manual I could get my hands on, like a student boning up for a chemistry final.
We gathered on the airstrip well before dawn. I tagged along with the first sergeant while he made the equipment check, looking on as if I knew what he was doing. It was still dark when we boarded the plane. I sat with the others until we entered the forest, then I hooked up my parachute and stood in the open doorway, trying to follow our position on the map. There was light breaking on the tops of the hills but the land below was still in darkness and the map kept flapping in my hand. Our pilot was supposed to flash a green warning light when he saw the smoke marking the drop zone, but I knew better than to rely on him. We were moving fast. If out of distraction or malice he was even a little slow giving us the signal we could end up in impossible terrain, miles from the drop zone and the men we were supposed to meet.
We were flying up a long valley. The slopes were awash in light, the plain was turning gray. We passed a cluster of houses. I tried to find the village on the map; it was unmarked, or I was looking in the wrong place. In fact I had no idea where we were. As the valley began to narrow, the plane descended and slowed. This was the usual prelude to the jump, but the green light still hadn’t come on. I braced myself in the doorway and looked out. Smoke was rising off the valley floor a mile or so ahead of us. Our smoke was supposed to be yellow, and this was bl
ack, but it was the only smoke out there. I turned to the first sergeant. His eyes were closed. I looked back out the door and confirmed what I’d seen. Smoke. But still no green light.
A decision was required. It was my duty to make it. I gave the order to hook up, and as the first man came to the door I smacked him on the rump like a quarterback breaking the huddle and shouted “Go!” Then the next man, and the next, until everyone was out but me, and then I jumped.
Sudden silence. Mountains all around. The eerie, lovely sight of the other canopies, the men swinging below. My men. I’d gotten them out in good order, and with no help from the pilot. If I could manage this, I could manage the next thing. That was the secret—not to think ahead too much, not to rehearse every single step in advance. Just do what was needed as the need arose.
Then the man closest to the ground gave a shout and I looked down and saw him hauling like crazy on his risers, trying to change the path of his fall. The others started doing the same thing, and a moment later, when I got a good look at what lay below us, so did I.
We were not, as I had supposed, drifting down upon a field marked with signal grenades, but over the expanse of a vast garbage dump where random fires smoldered, sending greasy coils of smoke high into the air. I caught my first whiff a couple of hundred feet up and the smell got worse the closer I came. I pulled hard to the left, making for a patch of ground not yet covered with junk. I was lucky; being last out, I was fairly close to the edge. Almost everyone else landed in the soup. I watched them go down as I drifted to port, and listened to them bellow and swear, and heard the crunching sounds they made as they slammed into the dump.
We were several miles from the drop zone. To get there took us most of the day. No one spoke to me. It was as if I did not exist. We maintained this arrangement until our part in the exercise was over.
