I leaned on the hood of the car for a few minutes, defeated, arm throbbing, pulse pounding, perspiration running from my scalp, burning my eyes. Every positive outcome I had envisioned ended in this dirty, dusty, hopeless dead end. I swiveled into the driver’s seat and a head rush of heat.
At the corner about a half mile away sat a double-wide, a manicured lawn, and a circular, red cinder driveway, a greenhouse far in the backyard abutting some ranch fencing. I turned in and stopped. They would know something. Neighbors know everything. Maybe they would have water. I needed to see living people.
An air conditioner hummed from a curtained window. A plywood ramp covered with green Astroturf led to the front door. I knocked, twice. I knocked again. Nothing. I was about to turn away when the door rattled and an ancient man folded into a wheelchair rolled backwards, pulling it open. His skeletal face rose and his eyes grew large, his jaw fell. He seemed to gather his breath; then, a long, pathetic wail, pointing at me and slamming his contracted arm into the door, looking over his shoulder, taking a breath only to wail again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve got the wrong house. I’m really sorry.” And I backed away, turning halfway down the ramp to run to the car. When I looked up he had rolled his chair almost into the glass, still waving his good hand and crying out, the aluminum shaking as he kicked at the bottom panel. I started the engine and rolled around the circular drive. A gaunt, silver-haired woman dashed across my path, waving her arms, uncanny energy in a stiff gray dress. I turned slightly to go around her, and she stepped into my way again, then patted the hood of the car like you’d pat a horse, coming around to the window.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I’ve come to the wrong house.” I glanced beyond her at the screen door. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone.”
She said nothing for a moment, swaying slightly, dissecting every curve of my face for some sort of authenticity. “You’re at the right house. Come in. Please come in.”
I turned off my engine and sat there a moment. Her expression resolute, every fold and fissure in her face like a well-oiled old boot.
“Please,” she said. “You don’t look well.” She touched my cheek.
I followed her up the ramp to the screen door. The old man had vanished. She directed me into the semi-dark of the living room, where I collapsed onto a sofa.
“Larry,” she called. “Larry, come out here. We have a visitor.” She wandered to the bright side of the house and I heard ice cubes drop in a glass. She returned with a glass of water. “I think he went into the bathroom. He needs to come out and get control of himself. Poor dear.” She pushed an ottoman over to my feet.
“Thank you.” I drank my water. “I really should be going. I only stopped because I thought you might know something about the burned house. Up on the bluff.”
“I can tell you a lot. But it’s not for sale, if that’s your reason for coming.” But she looked at me as if she already knew why I was there. “What’s your name?”
I told her, and her sense of familiarity faded. A door down the hall squeaked.
“I’m looking for a man named Richard Nelson. He had a friend in high school. Donna Palmer.”
“Well, my name is Rita Nelson.” She stepped in the dining room momentarily and returned with a gilded frame. “This Richard Nelson?”
The man was in uniform, the same distant pose that Andy Kent had assumed. I ran my fingers along the frame, fingertips numb. He looked like me.
“And who is Donna Palmer to you?” Her voice came from far above me.
“She was my mother.”
The woman sat next to me, turning my face gently away from the photograph I still held. “Then you are probably”—she halted, closing her eyes briefly—”our grandson.”
I looked back at the photo again. Richard Nelson looked very different from the slouching, long-haired kid I’d seen sitting next to Mom in the yearbook. We both sat in silence until something brushed my ankle, the foot platform of a wheelchair. The old man had wheeled himself back in without my noticing and now sat silent, like someone in a prayer circle.
“This isn’t our Richard, dear,” she took his hand. “It’s his boy. Our grandchild.” The old man was weeping.
I felt trapped, like an imposter who had no business eliciting so much sorrow, or elation. I had terrified the old man—my grandfather, I suppose—and was now going to be subject to some unearned coronation. I didn’t know what to say. “Where is he now?”
She took the photo and hugged it against her torso. “He’s dead. Two years.” She rose and went into the dining room where she turned on a light, and I followed. An arrangement of photos hung on the wall above a marble-topped buffet that, equally adorned, took on the appearance of an altar. She opened the blinds across the table and flooded it with afternoon sun.
“He died of lymphoma. Agent Orange, you know. He was fifty-one.” The frames spread like a timeline across the wall. In one photo he held a woman close to his face, her white lace enveloping them both, a portrait of two souls. She saw me studying it.
“That was Karla. Richard was thirty. She was a little older, couldn’t have children.” She took the photo down and turned it over, as if it might explain something. “She was very good to him, though.”
“Have any picture from when he married my Mom?”
She didn’t answer, shook her head.
“He threw them away?”
Searching my face she said, “They never—” She shook her head once more. “They never married.”
I was dumbstruck. “My big day for surprises.”
“He asked her and she said yes, they made announcements and then she just kept putting it off, over and over.” She sat in one of the dining room chairs and motioned for me to do the same, but I kept standing.
“Finally, Richard lost his leave once, and she acted like it was his fault. She kept the ring but stopped calling here after that. Then somebody saw them in Seattle, she and the Kent boy.” She was still shaking her head, as if she’d never come to grips with it herself. “He’s not your father, you know. Andy Kent. I hope you realize that.”
All too well. It was a big bundle of loose tarp in the windstorm of my head and I struggled to push it all out of the way. We both stared at the photos on the wall awkwardly. I turned finally to a square one I recognized, grainy in enlargement. “I have this picture. Mom saved it.”
“Richard and Vicky,” she smiled.
“But who was Vicky?”
“The car, silly boy. A Crown Victoria. Larry’s first car.” She nodded toward the old man.
The old man managed to enunciate, “Fifty-six.”
“Ricky saved it from the junkyard, restored every screw and bolt on it.”
She turned back into the living room, opening one blind after another, great shafts of sun filling the little house. I followed her down a hallway and she stopped and turned, flipping on a light. A photograph hung on the wall, sixteen by twenty at least, a mural of mountain-scape rising from a bed of clouds, a few wisps in the stratosphere illuminated by moonlight.
“He took that on the way up to Ellensburg. Nighttime. Time exposure. He won a prize for that.” She showed me another framed photo in a bedroom, seemingly below the surface of a lake, a fish in shadows of grass. Another showed weary men swaddled against the pouring rain, a city street, gray and black and white. “That one”—she touched the glass with her nail—”was in Seattle Magazine.”
“So, he was a photographer even after the Army,” I said.
“And before. Sounds like you already know a little bit about him.”
“I knew some. Just didn’t know he was my father.”
“He and Karla gave a lot to the Boys and Girls Club, and he took photographs every year at the proms for just the cost of his film. Every kid in the school knew him. I think he was trying to compensate for not having children of his own.”
–––
We ate mostly in silence, islands of conversation poppi
ng up every few minutes. I told them about my time in the Army, leaving out my brief marriage, the time in Kosovo, the bag of medication in my backpack. Larry, I realized, was not just staring at me, but my eye, specifically. “The letters that he sent to Mom. He signed them with the letter A, just an initial.”
Larry and Rita exchanged glances. She smiled. “There was a singer back then, before then, really. Ricky Nelson.” She sighed. “Very un-cool. It turned into a joke at school, so after Richard was twelve or so, he insisted we call him by his middle name, Aaron.” She paled. “You’re bleeding.”
I looked down and the bandage had oozed through my shirt. “A little misunderstanding,” I said. “I wandered on to the property of a guy up in Whitefish, thought he was my uncle.” And then I explained the Kents.
“They weren’t good boys. Something always in the paper, police reports you know.” She stood, went down the hall, returned from the bathroom a moment later with scissors and a roll of gauze.
“Your father was a good boy. Helped his father. That was the house he grew up in, the one that burned.” She tied a little knot, then rolled my sleeve down but frowned at her work. “We were farmers. When Larry hurt his back, we leased the land and bought an antique mall downtown.” She held a bowl of green beans out to me and I shook my head. “When Richard died, well, Larry had a stroke, and we moved down here. Rented the old house and damned if they didn’t burn it down the first year.”
I learned my father had been a photographer, first for a newspaper, and later he had a studio. “Army gave him a skill,” I said. “Not sure what I’ve learned that I can put to use here.”
“It wasn’t easy for him. He cried a lot when he came back, lived with us. We thought it was about Donna at first, but then he’d wake up, say something was dead in the barn. Could smell it, he said. Was always looking for a dead lamb, saying we’d missed it.” She covered her face with her napkin. “It turned out his last position with the Army was in Saigon, where they put the bodies in caskets to go home, what was left of them. Richard had to photograph each and every one.” She pushed her chair back. “Excuse me.” She made a small cry and went to the kitchen. When she came back she had regained her composure.
“You’re very welcome to stay here. It’s late.” She set a pie on the table. “So what do you think you’ll go into, now that you’re out? What skill did you learn?”
I sat staring at my pie for a painful period of time.
“Robert?”
They were both looking at me, so honestly, so paternal. They really wanted to know and didn’t deserve my cynicism. I could turn another man’s head into aerosol at 800 yards. I really could. Not everybody can do that, half a fucking mile away, not like in the movies. You have to lead a man, estimate his speed, if he’s walking or running, so his head meets the bullet. I almost whispered this and glanced at each of them to be certain I hadn’t said it loud enough, but their faces were still full of inquiry.
“You don’t have to tell us right now.” Rita reached over and squeezed my hand. “Maybe you don’t know yet.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to be good at. I’m not even sure who I am anymore.” I pushed my chair back, stood, walked over to the Buffet of Ricky. “Your son’s boy, I guess. Sounds like he was a great guy. But I grew up thinking I had to be some kind of damned warrior, and now I’m not sure I even liked what I did, and I can’t do it anymore anyway, and what—how—would I be different?” I flopped in a wing chair at the corner of the dining room. Larry had backed his wheelchair so he could see me; he was alarmed, afraid perhaps. Rita sat imperturbable on the far side of the table.
“We were farmers,” she said. “We farmed until Larry couldn’t anymore, but we still get up every morning at four, and I find him sitting out here in the kitchen, listening to that little radio, to the farm reports. It just became part of us.” She went to the kitchen, came back with a coffee pot and three heavy white cups. “Care for some?”
I shook my head.
“When your father came back from Vietnam, he wasn’t a farmer anymore. He was a photographer. He’d taken a lot of awful photographs and I suppose that was stuck inside his head, but through the years he took a look of beautiful pictures as well.” She looked down at her pie and seemed surprised that she hadn’t finished. She picked up her fork. “Perhaps, in the end”—she took a bite—”who you are depends on what you’ve done the most of. It becomes part of you.”
I resumed my seat at the table and realized it would be rude if I didn’t eat her pie, which looked like blueberry, and had clearly been homemade. Larry relaxed and sipped his coffee.
We made more small talk; they showed me Dad’s cameras, all Nikons, heavily worn, dented, substantial in the hand. We talked about how hardly anyone processed film anymore, and the coming of computers, and cell phones, and how his time in Vietnam might have been different if they could have emailed or talked every day. He kept a .45 in his camera bag wherever he went, and it bothered Karla. He was equally fond of an angle-head flashlight that he brought back from the war, now wedged in the cushion of Larry’s wheelchair. I was in the museum of Ricky Aaron Nelson and hadn’t even bought a ticket, like a ragged straggler stumbling into a primitive valley and being made king because the locals think my face looks like some ancient carving on a temple.
On the way back to the dining room she pressed one of Nikons into my hands. “He’d want you to have it,” she said.
“I can’t take this.” I tried to hand it back.
“And where will it end up when we are gone?” She set it by my chair.
I sat alone with Larry at the table and tried to have a conversation while Rita made a bed on the couch. He could erupt one-word answers and he retrieved a satin box from the buffet. Dad got a Purple Heart for some sort of head injury, but Larry couldn’t elaborate how or when. When I told him I had one of those too he nodded and hummed approvingly and shook my hand.
“Whatever you become,” she added, “you’ll always be our grandson.”
Larry tried to smile, but his paralysis turned it into a leer. As sincere as I thought they both were, I felt like I did when I strayed into an evangelical church in Columbus, and everyone laid hands on me and tried to make me feel saved, and all it did was make me feel horribly alone.
–––
By 2200 the house was dark, just a few slits of light through the curtains from the security light over the driveway. I slept for about ninety minutes and woke up thinking about Jennifer and tried to imagine where all of her hostility came from, she who had lived a pretty uninterrupted life, so far as I knew. How could she judge what I’d done, not having been there? How could anyone but one of my platoon, or anyone who has spent almost six years in a place where anyone can put a bullet in your face? Even a child, even a dead, inanimate thing, a rotting dog carcass, could explode and mix parts of a man in the air with shreds of decay so you didn’t know what you were putting in the body bag, soldier or animal, all the time breathing molecules of both. How could I tell her about that? I’ll try, I thought. Once more. Even pretend to smoke some of her pot.
All kinds of pictures came back. Watching our six. People count on you to watch their six. I thought about Marsden. I thought about the two insurgents I’d shot. I saw them go down. I shot them. I fucking shot them. Just thirty yards away. Less. I liked to change magazines before I was empty. I left one in the chamber, dropped the clip and put another twenty beneath it, and in that time one of those two sat up, squeezed the trigger on an RPG. I took him down again, the back of his head coming off, but by that time a rocket was stuck in Marsden, and him looking so surprised. If I’d just kept my point of aim, just a couple seconds more, that motherfucker would have popped up and I would have nailed him. Marsden would have lived, but instead he was looking at me, me, looking shocked.
–––
They had a grandfather clock that chimed every thirty minutes, and at 0300 I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep,
and thought about taking an extra pill, but then I’d be too stupid to talk when they got up in another hour or so. When I rolled onto my left a dull ache arose in my left calf, and reaching down I felt a soft swelling the size of a pea. I slipped my shoes on, scribbled a quick note and left it by the radio, said I would return when I’d figured some things out, thanked them for their hospitality and understanding, and left my apartment address in Spokane. I took the camera, pushed the lock button in on the front door as I left, and drove off slowly in the half-moon shadows without turning on my lights.
And I wondered, driving that descent into the valley, the town lights feeble on the horizon, what my father felt driving that same asphalt, what song was playing on the radio, what excitement might have blessed his night, or what worried him, about finishing high school, about joining the Army, or if he was drafted, and the hopes he’d had with Donna, what plans he’d made that were forever derailed by that time.
I pulled over and I cried. For that loss, what he never knew, the good parts of life that were taken from him. For the fact that we never met, even though I could have driven down here from Fort Lewis a dozen times in those years he was still alive. For my own lifetime I could never tell him about, that our paths never intersected.
By 0500 I was headed north on 395. I snapped my head up, having drifted off, then pinched myself, rolled the window down, bounced in the seat every couple of seconds to stay awake. I pulled into a rest area surrounded by scrub sage and a handful of stunted locust trees for shade. The same litter scattered on the asphalt, like I’d seen in Montana but not as much; my last thought was that maybe the wind here was stronger.
When I woke up about eight, the parking lot was full of cars; a blue crew-cab Chevy pickup with extremely loud door hinges was disembarking a family by my open window. Next to me on the seat, the Nikon, staring at the dash like some little orphaned animal I’d adopted and didn’t know how to feed. I took an antibiotic and washed it down at the drinking fountain. I felt good, relatively, and a long list of tasks seemed to grow before me as I rolled down the onramp onto the highway.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 13
