A Question of Manhood

by Robin Reardon

  But several weeks after Chris signed up, one Saturday dinnertime Dad said, “Irene, you going to church tomorrow?”

  “Of course I am. I always go. You know that.”

  Well, she almost always went, anyway; there was no point in arguing, so I kept quiet. Then Dad said, “Think I’ll go with you.” And after that he went with her a lot. I was old enough by then to stay home on my own, so that’s what I did. I figured if God was going to listen to anyone about keeping Chris safe, it wasn’t gonna be me.

  That homecoming scene happened pretty much as I’d pictured. Chris looked tall and masculine and strong, but his hair was longer than I’d imagined; guess they don’t make them keep it buzz cut. But there was one real important difference. After Dad offered the beer, Chris looked at me before he answered. “How’s my kid brother? Too old for a hug?”

  He held an arm toward me. This foolish grin slid onto my face from somewhere—I couldn’t stop it—and I shrugged and moved toward him. His arms felt so strong around me, like there was nothing he couldn’t do. He made me believe he was glad to see me.

  All of us wanted to know what it was like, all the stuff there’s no room for in letters, all the stuff we wanted to hear him say with his own voice. That first night, though, he was just too tired, barely able to sit at the dinner table, but he was so happy to be eating home cooking. Every so often he’d just sit there, face blank, eyes closed, chewing slowly. You could tell he was committing every texture, every hint of flavor to memory.

  At one point he set his fork down and said, “You know, I never expected the food over there to be good. I just didn’t know how—different it would be. From good food. From this.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end he just shook his head slowly and put another forkful into his mouth.

  We’d been sending him care packages. The first one had lots of different stuff in it, like socks and underwear and little goodies. The letter he wrote back was clear: All that stuff was great, but what he really wanted was FOOD. So the next packages all had peanut butter (“choke” is what the guys called it over there), crackers, cookies, candy, Tang, more cookies, more candy, and he loved it. We couldn’t send anything that would go bad, like cold cuts or cheese, that sort of thing, but his favorite seemed to be cookies. All kinds. Plus, he said in one letter, they were great for trading with the other guys for things.

  “What kinds of things?” Mom’s return letter asked. Probably she wanted to be able to include everything he might want to keep and everything he might want to trade for. But his response was evasive. “Oh, just whatever. You never know what you’re going to be in the mood for.”

  While he was home, in private, he swore me to secrecy and told me that what he traded cookies for—though he did eat a lot of them—was beer, cigarettes, and koon sa. Marijuana. But he sure wasn’t going to tell our folks about those items. I’d always thought of Chris as kind of a Goody Two-shoes, in a lot of ways. He always seemed to do everything right, as far as our folks were concerned, and I always felt like the troublemaker. So, to use one of my mom’s favorite phrases, imagine my consternation when Chris told me he smoked pot! It was the first sign, I think now, of the new way I would come to see him—a lot of stain on the pure white—by the time he left to go back overseas.

  That first night, though, at the dinner table, Chris nearly nodded off before he could finish his piece of the chocolate cake Mom had made, but he asked for more coffee and that seemed to perk him up a bit. Then he left the room for a minute and came back with stuff for us.

  He gave Mom a huge piece of blue and green silk material that she could use to make whatever she wanted. It made her cry, and she worried that she’d get salt stains on the silk. Dad got a really cool pipe. It was made of some special kind of wood they had over there. He wanted to use it immediately and even got up, mumbling about trying it first with the most bland tobacco he had so he could get a sense of the pipe, but Mom made him give it to her so she could wash it first.

  When it was my turn, Chris said, “Hold out your hands. Make a cup.” And onto my palms he dropped five round metal pellets. “Ever heard of a cluster bomb?” I shook my head. “Those five are from a SADEYE. It’s about as big as a baseball. Lots of them get dropped at once, and when they hit the ground they explode. Then all these steel balls go shooting out.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mom shudder. But I said, “Neat!” Then Chris handed me something wrapped in brown paper. Dad asked to hold the pellets, and he kind of played with them while I unwrapped the package. I held up a pair of shoes. Sandals, really. They were super ugly. I looked at Chris, confused.

  “Those, little brother, are called Ho Chi Minhs. They’re made out of cut-up tires. The straps are from inner tubes. We wear them around camp when it’s hot, or when it’s muddy or wet. You can’t hurt ’em.” He grinned like they were a real treat.

  “Thanks!” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. I was thinking I’d just have to give them a try; Chris didn’t steer me wrong as a rule.

  Mom wasn’t so patient. “Good Lord, Christopher! What do you want to go perpetuating that man for? He’s dead, and that’s where he ought to be. Why name a shoe after him?”

  Chris just shrugged. “Well, we walk on ’em, don’t we? We wear them when we need to walk through stuff we don’t want to touch, right?”

  This shut her up, though she did cross her arms and make some noise of disgust. I looked at them again, with a little more respect this time.

  Coffee or no coffee, Chris had to crawl upstairs to sleep right after dinner. I took my steel balls and my tire-tread sandals into my room, and at first I was thinking I’d stay up there. It was nice to think of Chris in the next room, and I pictured him in his bed for the first time in what seemed like forever. His bed and mine had just the wall between them, and I pictured him lying in there, head near the wall, feet pointing toward the window that looked out onto the backyard. But pretty soon I heard him snoring through the wall, and I wondered if Mom and Dad were talking about the war and about Chris, and I wanted to be a part of that.

  They were at the kitchen table, finishing their coffee. When they knew I was there, Dad stopped talking and they both looked at me. I grabbed a soda, flipped the top, and made myself comfortable, waiting for him to go on. Finally he shrugged and finished what he was saying when I came in.

  “Anyway, forget that idea, Irene. There’s no way he isn’t going back to finish his tour. They expect him back, and back he’ll go.”

  “But why?” Mom’s voice sounded almost whiny, and her plump face went into this little girl pout. “The war is ending! Henry Kissinger said so. Why can’t our son stay home, now that he’s here?”

  The war was ending. At least, that’s what we’d been hearing. Just recently the news was all about how the Linebacker operation was over. Chris wasn’t directly involved in that, since it was air force and navy carrying it out, but it was this huge offensive, and it sure put a dent in the Vietcong’s battle capabilities. And it probably cinched the election for Nixon the week before, though people like my dad believe he would have beat McGovern, anyway. Dad’s a real Nixon supporter. But my friend Terry Cavanaugh’s dad had some other opinions, and I’d heard some of them.

  I chimed in, “Mr. Cavanaugh says that was just an election ploy, saying the war was ending.”

  Dad turned a hard stare on me. “President Nixon was in no need of falsehoods to win this election. It was no contest. Kissinger wouldn’t need to lie just to win the election for the president.”

  I shrugged like it didn’t matter to me. And, really, as long as the war ended and Chris was okay, I didn’t give a shit who won the election. Or how.

  Mom wasn’t done. “But it’s nearly Thanksgiving!” she almost wailed. “He should at least be allowed to stay with us for that!”

  “Irene, stop it. The boy volunteered, very bravely”—here he turned back to me, as if to underscore silently what he thought of Terry’s brother, Ron, who’d gone t
o Canada to escape the draft—“and he will finish his work. He will not let his squad down. No son of mine backs out of his commitments.”

  Mom got up in sort of a huff and started collecting dishes to wash. We have this portable—though that hardly seems like the right word—dishwasher that you can roll over to the sink and attach to the faucet while you run it. Mom nearly dented the counter in front of the sink, she hauled it over so fast and hard. She made as much noise with the dishes as she could without breaking them, but flatware is less fragile, and she had her way with it.

  Dad tried once more to get her to see reason, as he would have put it. “Imagine, would you? Just for a second? What would he feel like, sitting here with us having turkey and gravy and potatoes and pumpkin pie, knowing his platoon was over there having rations? Imagine how he must feel every day he’s here, when one of the guys who may have saved his life at some point, maybe last week even, is in danger now.”

  She didn’t even look at him. A fork hit the floor, I think by accident, and then another landed next to it and bounced and clattered with the force of her throw.

  Dad got up and stomped unevenly out of the kitchen, leaving me there sucking on my soda can and feeling like some piece of luggage no one had enough hands to carry. Fine. So I headed back to my room.

  I got as far as the foot of the stairs when Dad came up behind me. “And as for you,” he said in this angry tone, pointing a finger at me, “don’t you go listening to anything that dove Cavanaugh says. He should be ashamed of that boy of his, instead of making excuses.” He turned on his heel and headed for his recliner in the living room.

  “What’d I do?” I called after him. Goddamn it, why does he always assume I’ve done something wrong? It’s like all the shit Chris hasn’t done, all the stuff a kid usually gets blamed for, is what I get accused of double. I’m no angel; wouldn’t want to be. But if they think they have trouble with me, they should think again.

  I sat staring out the window in front of my desk, ignoring my homework, telling myself sourly that I’d even have Saturday night for schoolwork, though that was something else I was angry about, actually. My allowance was puny compared to most of my friends, so paying for dates was an extra challenge on top of just getting them. I’d asked for more money in September, but of course the answer was no. That had felt like a slap in the face, with the store doing as well as it was.

  So parties were one place I could take a date that didn’t cost anything. Saturday there was gonna be this really great party at my friend Kevin’s house, and I had already asked Laura Holmes, just about the cutest girl in class. I’ve always thought I was okay looking—dark blond hair with just a little wave to it, gray-green eyes, decent build—but even so I would have thought Laura would be out of my league. It took guts, or arrogance, just to ask her. And she’d said yes! But when it came out that it was the weekend Chris would be home, my mom was all over me.

  “Young man, you can’t possibly think anything in this world is more important than spending time with your brother! He’s been over there risking his life every day, and anything could happen to him at any time. He’ll be here only a few days, and you think you’re going out with your friends?” She stood there, dust rag dangling from the hand that wasn’t planted on her broad hip, glaring at me.

  “Ma, it’s not just ‘going out with my friends.’ It’s taking this really”—I’d almost said hot—“sweet girl, someone every guy wants to go out with, to, like, the biggest party of the fall!”

  She wagged her finger at me, the rag flopping around in the air. “Do you want me to pull your father’s weight into this? You’re not going, Paul. I don’t care how important it seems to you now. In the overall scheme of things, in retrospect, it will pale in comparison with how important spending time with your brother will be.”

  We stood there, kind of facing off, a test of wills. Sometimes this works for me. She doesn’t always have what it takes to stare me down; she’s a softy, really. But not this time. She was ice. And the look on her face told me she would pull Dad into it if necessary. And there was no way I could win with him, once he set his mind on something. I’d need Chris for that. Chris was always the only one of all of us who could move my dad with reason or anything else, he’s that stubborn.

  Go ahead, tell Dad. Let him do his worst. I’m going to that party! It was on the tip of my tongue. But my jaw clenched tight shut, almost against my will, my hands balled into fists at my sides, and I turned and stormed off. The worst of it was that I had to call Laura and tell her. When I did, I couldn’t really get a bead on her reaction. I mean, she didn’t pout or whine or anything, but it didn’t feel like sunshine and roses. What a freakin’ mess. Who could blame her if she never agreed to go out with me again?

  And now, even though Chris was actually home, just thinking about missing that party this weekend made me steam. Lying there on the bed listening to Chris snore in the next room, this feeling of resentment started to bubble up. When you thought about it, I sort of had a lot to resent Chris for. He was the favorite son, no doubt there. And if he’d been some kind of monster, or at least if he’d been mean to me, I could have gotten angry with him and felt good about it.

  But he never gave me a chance like that. He’d never done anything to get me into trouble, and in fact, he’d stood up for me so many times in one way or another, getting my folks to ease off on some punishment Dad was sure I deserved for whatever, getting both of them to see that something I’d done was just horseplay and not a sign of evil taking over my life and theirs. He’d always been able to calm Dad down—he was the only one who could—and he’d always done his best for me.

  But I wasn’t in the mood to think of what a great brother he was. Even so, as I lay there on my bed, music playing quietly, staring at the treads on one of my Ho Chi Minhs, I could feel the steam leak out of my attempt to stay angry with Chris about missing the party. And a chance with Laura. I tried to shift the focus, be angry with Mom, but I couldn’t keep that up. I knew why she’d thrown the fork. I understood. As long as Chris was here, he was safe. Staying for Thanksgiving would be great, but really it was the staying that mattered. The being home, away from the danger, away from the possibility that one of those casualty reports could include him. Away—far away—from the knock on the door when some stateside colonel, hat in hand, might come to tell us the last thing we wanted to hear.

  But I knew what Dad was saying, too. Maybe Mom couldn’t—or wouldn’t—imagine the tug Chris must feel from over there all the while he was home, but I could. And I knew that if I were Chris, I couldn’t really enjoy that terrific meal. And even if I did, I’d feel guilty.

  Christ, this whole fucking mess had everyone fighting. Just the previous week in school, Terry Cavanaugh and this other kid, Bobby Darnell, got into it but good. I didn’t catch the whole thing, but it sounded like Bobby was talking up his brother Ken’s escapades, how many VC he’d killed, that sort of thing. I heard Terry shout something about certain people having messiah complexes, thinking they could go over there and save the world, which of course set Bobby off, and we had to pull them apart.

  “Easy, man, easy,” I mumbled into Terry’s ear as Kevin Dodge helped me hold on to him and back away. Two other guys were taking charge of Bobby. We barely got things quiet before a teacher or somebody saw, so no one got in trouble, but it just goes to show you. War is war, and it spreads.

  That little episode got me thinking about loyalty. I mean, Terry was trying real hard to be loyal to his brother Ron, but Ron—hell, he fucking skipped the country! So guys like Chris and Ken, they went over, and damn it, Chris was no martyr. He didn’t think he was Jesus Christ. And I don’t think Ken thought he was, either. But to be honest, I was a little angry at Ron, and maybe even at Terry for sticking up for him. But I was also mad at Chris for going.

  And before too long, I’d be mad at Dad for making him go. This was something I didn’t allow myself to think about. Not even that night, meditating on the ti
re-tread sandals. But now? Now I do.

  Chapter 2

  The whole time Chris was home, we all kept pumping him for stories. Sometimes he really didn’t want to talk, and Mom would shoo us away. Other times he talked, and he did his best to walk a line between satisfying Dad’s thirst for guts and glory and Mom’s reluctance to think of her favorite child in danger. He was always good at that—keeping everybody satisfied. So he tried to let us know what his day-to-day life was like and tried not to paint too grim a picture.

  Over Thursday dinner he told us about this one mission his squad got sent on, where they had to be lookouts for some other guys sweeping for mines. The VC are always coming into areas where the mines have just been found, and replanting them.

  There were a couple of guys, not Chris’s squad, walking down this dirt road, swinging metal detectors around and watching for spots that looked like they’d just been dug. Behind them there was an armored dump truck, loaded with dirt, that was retrofitted to drive backward, and the driver was way up high above the truck in a special little cab. This truck followed the two minesweeping guys a couple hundred feet behind, and some guys in Chris’s squad were way out in front of the minesweepers, and some stayed well behind the truck, and they were all watching for snipers. The idea was that if the minesweepers missed anything and the truck ran over it, the truck would set it off. The dirt was to keep the truck from getting blown far, and the driver was supposed to get thrown to safety from the cab.