A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak

by Molly O'Keefe

  In the chaos and noise Walt got reckless. He lifted himself slightly so he could use his other arm to pull, too. In one giant surge, he lifted Sarge up and over him, onto his own body, and then pushed him, rolling him down the small slope to the safe place behind the tree.

  Sarge screamed and the jungle went white. Walt’s company lit up, too. Firing back like hell on earth. They hadn’t run. He and Sarge were not alone.

  Marcus even got up on his knees, peppering the woods with better aim. His mouth was open in a primal scream, but it got lost in all the noise. More screams tore through the night—mostly from the other side.

  Walt wondered what kind of foolhardy courage they’d all been sickened with.

  He rolled over onto this side and dug his toes into the mud to leverage himself up and over the tree roots. Halfway through his roll, his right leg exploded, just below his hip. Skin, muscle and material from his pants spilt and sprayed his face. His neck burned hot, then cold. The force of the bullet finished his roll and catapulted him toward Sarge. Walt came to rest against Sarge’s side, spooned against him like a lover.

  We’re both dead, Walt thought. He swallowed dense air and the taste of blood. His chest shook with the effort of breathing. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, and slowly all that he could feel—the heat, the mud, the horror and worry he’d lived with for nearly two years—all bled away.

  For a second he thought he was on Adelaide Street, playing stickball. Josh Weber had just hit him in the leg with a foul ball.

  It’s okay, he heard himself say. It’s okay. You did everything you could.

  Believing it, he shut his eyes and let go.

  12

  Walter sat down next to his dying body.

  “It’s okay,” he told himself, remembering those moments with razor-sharp clarity. The slow stutter and stop of his heart. His lungs. The sudden memory of playing stickball when he was a kid, fighting with Josh Weber about a foul ball.

  “It’s okay,” he repeated. Stroking his own head, covering his already shut eyes like a priest performing last rites. “You did everything you could.”

  Walter, both the dead one and the dying one, flickered, like the picture on an old black- and-white TV. Walter’s brown polyester pants and yellow work shirt vanished, and both Walters wore the blood-stained and filthy camouflage.

  Young Walter gasped for breath, his eyes popped open, and the two Walters flickered back.

  “It’s okay,” Walter insisted again, sliding his hand down his own young face until he covered his mouth and nose. “You can let go—”

  “Walter!” Peter cried, pulling Walter’s hands from their ministrations. “What the hell are you doing?”

  From the right, Marcus, his black face gleaming with sweat, charged from the trees. Behind him were Crofty and Bern-dog.

  They slung their rifles across their chests, and midstride they grabbed Sarge and Walt by the armpits and hoisted them up.

  Walt tried to hold onto his own jacket. Keep himself there. Dying now, while he was young, before he had everything that was taken away from him. Before the agony of what was to come made the bullet wound that had torn apart his leg insignificant.

  “You idiot!” Peter yelled, his face glowing white under the helmet. “Are you trying to ruin everything?”

  Walter didn’t say anything. Like when his daughter had come home that last time, he thought the truth was obvious. He’d already ruined everything.

  “You’re a hero!” Peter cried. “You saved that guy’s life!”

  Walter turned eyes that burned on the kid. “December 12, 1969.”

  Peter blinked. “You want to relive that day?”

  “No. Just take us there.”

  The boy turned his sharp, white nose to the sky and sighed like Walter was testing the very limits of heavenly patience.

  “Fine,” he said, like Jennifer used to when she was in those ugly, mysterious teenage years.

  The jungle spun a quarter turn, but Walter and Peter were still, the world around them clicking and spinning like a cosmic tumbler settling into place. Then the jungle was gone and they were in the crappy one-room apartment Walter had rented above the liquor store when he got discharged from the war.

  Walter was passed out on his back, snoring on the sagging yellow brocade couch handed down from his mother. A bottle, not quite empty, was tipped on its side beside him. The letter, crumpled into a ball, sat in a pool of bourbon.

  He still limped, would always limp. They’d removed a lot of muscle in the three surgeries that saved his life. But he’d come home. Decorated and discharged.

  Lucky, with just a limp and an addiction to painkillers.

  “What’s the point of this, Walter?” Peter asked, no helmet, no flack jacket.

  “Read that letter.” Walter pointed to the ball.

  “Really,” Peter sighed. “Most of the deaths I manage are not quite so dramatic.”

  Walter nearly smiled.

  Peter grabbed the ball and smoothed out the crinkles.

  “Dear Z,” Peter looked up, “Z? That’s the best nickname someone could come up with?”

  Walter shrugged.

  Peter rolled his eyes and went back to the letter. “You lucky SOB! How’s the leg? Hope it hurts like hell...blah blah bl...” The boy paused and then swallowed, and the air in the room changed with what the boy had read, the knowledge that they both shared. The frenetic energy the boy pulsated with was tranquilized and he started to recrumple the paper.

  “Read it.”

  “Walt—”

  “Read the damn letter!”

  “I thought you’d want to know” the boy read, “and didn’t know if you’d already heard, but Sarge got out of the hospital about two months ago. The belly wound healed up with nothing permanent to keep him from re-upping except for some bad heartburn. Well, you know that crazy asshole signed up for another tour the second he walked out of the hospital. Three days ago he stepped on a land mine while on patrol. Nothing left of him but three teeth and a boot. Sorry, Z. You saved his sorry ass for nothing. Signed, Marcus.”

  Peter folded the paper and dropped it. The letter fluttered back to the pond of booze like a crippled bird.

  “I’m not giving up,” Peter said.

  “Giving up what?” He was beginning to feel more hollow, emptier. Like he’d been upended and the last of whatever humanity that had been stuck in his corners, clinging to his sides, had finally seeped out. Was he more dead? Or just less alive?

  The green shag carpet gave birth to a metal door with safety glass windows. Walter could see the men on the other side past the peeling and faded red stickers that read VFW Post 3878.

  “On you,” Peter said and pushed open the door. The din of men and band music poured out on a serrated wave of cigarette smoke and recollection.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he told Peter.

  Of his own accord he walked through the door to prove it.

  13

  It was like an American flag had exploded in the room. The civilians were wearing red skirts and blue dinner jackets, and Stars and Stripes ties and earrings. Balloons and banners festooned the ceiling and chairs and tables. Red, white, and blue confetti wafted across the cement floor and drifted against table legs every time someone opened a door.

  Walter and Peter walked through people, because there was no room to walk around them and Walter could feel the volatile emotions at work underneath the dancing and the small talk. Vietnam wasn’t over and even the most patriotic were feeling duped. It was a room full of sad and scared people. But there was nothing the VFW took as seriously as their annual Fourth of July dinner dance.

  The high school jazz band was in full swing, wearing Uncle Sam hats and sweating through their navy-blue shirts. The trumpet player had obviously been hitting the spiked punch. The kid was three sheets to the wind and missed half his notes.

  But the offbeat trumpet player didn’t seem to bother most of the dancer
s. And thanks to Rick Ames and his mickey of hooch there were more dancers than usual. Mr. Hernandez, principal at the high school, attempted a waltz with his secretary but they kept stepping on each other’s toes and laughing, while her husband got drunk with the rest of the vets from Korea.

  “Looks like quite a party!” Peter yelled over the noise.

  Walter nodded. Quite a party.

  “We need something good,” Jack Miller, secretary of the VFW said to two other men standing in line at the bar to get whiskey sours for their wives. “We need to have some fun this year.”

  The three men all cast sideways looks over at the table shrouded in smoke in the corner.

  Ah, Walter thought, both proud and somehow resigned, there are my people.

  He walked through Jack Miller to join them and Jack’s agitation and pity for the guys in the corner clung to Walter like spiderwebs.

  The Vietnam vets sat together—a pack of wild dogs, their voices like gunfire in the cheerful room. Their grief and terror paraded across their faces and echoed in their desperate and manic laughter. And so everyone stayed away, and the brilliant festivities faded to gray in that corner.

  The air was choked with blue smoke. Thick curls of it drifted toward the scattered red, white, and blue balloons that hovered at the ceiling.

  The table of men wore uniforms that had been defiled in a million ways that the World War Two vets always looked down on. Walter glanced back at the old-timers who sat along the wall watching the dancers. The old boys had managed, for the special occasion, to squeeze into their dress uniforms. Brass buttons strained across beer bellies and barrel chests.

  But the boys from Vietnam were gaunt, worn down to sharp edges, and their motley uniforms hung off their bodies like crepe paper the day after a party. One of the only black men in the room turned and Walter staggered for a moment. Oscar Jenkins. Walter had gone through basic training with Oscar and they’d both landed stateside after their second tours around the same time.

  Oscar had a marijuana leaf drawn on the back of his camouflage jacket and make love, not war printed on the front. He would move to Milwaukee, stop drinking, and find God in about two years. Marry a pretty girl and start some kind of outreach program for homeless vets in the city. Tonight he was in high form, telling the stories Walter had heard a dozen times about the Saigon whore with no legs.

  The ladies of the auxiliary picked up their dirty dinner dishes in a hurry and moved off quickly to the quieter men who’d served in Korea.

  Walter sat in an empty chair next to the guys and concentrated on the way he remembered cigarettes smelling, and after a while, like a frozen tap thawing, the smell came back to him. Acrid and sharp.

  This was familiar. While the basketball game had been a dream, something long ago forgotten, these moments, these landscapes of drink and despair and his exact location in them, were easily recognizable. He was moored here. Any place he got in his life, any distance from this was only measured from this perspective. He was only as happy other places as he’d been unhappy here.

  When Jennifer was a little girl and he and Rosie would take her into Milwaukee for the Fourth of July fireworks on the lake, Rosie would tie one end of a piece of red yarn around Jennifer’s wrist and then tie the other end around her own. Despite all of their warnings and dire instructions to not wander too far, as soon as he or Rosie let go of her hand, Jennifer would take off running among the crowds. But that stretch of red yarn always brought her up short.

  He and Rosie used to laugh, but when he got brought up short after Rosie died he’d known there was a strand of red yarn tied from his wrist back to these years.

  He breathed deep, as if going underwater, and the air in this corner of the VFW hall tasted sour, tainted by jungle rot and gangrene. Pieces of these men were dying even as they sat here picking Gloria Poticus’s dry pot roast out of their teeth.

  “If everyone will take their seats, we will get the program…” Someone up front, Walter couldn’t see, tried to clear the dance floor, but nobody listened much.

  The president of the Beaverton VFW, Biford Vogler, stood up and made his way to the small stage in the corner. He had a bad hip from a Japanese sniper bullet, but he was one of those soldiers who had not left part of himself on the battlefield, or so it seemed.

  There were two kinds of vets, Walter had learned. There was the kind that war added to, made better in some unseen and unknown way. The kind their families and neighbors were proud of and could look in the eye. The other was the kind that war only took away from. Biting out chunks and pieces until there was nothing left but holes.

  “Hey, glad you’re having a good time. But I need folks to take their seats,” Biford said and the crowd on the floor scattered to any available folding chair. “The Ladies’ Auxiliary is bringing by some dessert and we got some work to do here tonight.”

  Peter, whom Walter had actually forgotten about, arrived next to him, consulting his list.

  “Why are we here?” Walter asked, watching the white star confetti swirl like a tornado in the draft from the opening door.

  His mother stepped into the room and Walter shut his eyes, wishing himself away from this place. This moment.

  “This day is on your list. You received a special citation from the VFW for your Purple Heart and Silver Star.” Walter opened his eyes and watched Peter scan the crowd, wondering when the kid would catch on. “But I don’t see you here.”

  Biford Vogler took a pair of glasses out of the pocket of his dress blues, unfolded a piece of paper, and spread it out on the podium, rubbing the flat of his hand across the wrinkles.

  The crowd was silent, waiting for whatever he might say, prepared to clap and cheer and break into “God Bless America” should Biford require it.

  “You’re supposed to be here,” Peter said.

  “I’m here.”

  “But I don’t…”

  “I’m out back, getting drunk.”

  Walter turned, wanting to leave. But he faltered and drifted sideways, like the drunk he had been, into his place in this particular landscape.

  14

  July 4, 1972

  Beaverton Chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars

  14th Annual Fourth of July Dinner/Dance—in the alley behind the hall

  * * *

  Goddamn—it was so hot in Wisconsin in the summer. He’d just spent four years fairly sure that he would never get cool again, that he would just sweat himself into smoke and that would be the end of him, only to come home and be greeted by the same hot, wet air.

  No relief.

  He tucked his legs up on the edge of the small loading dock and took another swig from the bottle of Ol’ Granddad. He should go inside. Sooner or later he was supposed to stand up and get some award. Biford had asked him to say a few words about the medals and about Vietnam.

  Which was why he was out here sweating to death instead of inside with the loud and cranky air conditioning.

  Walt didn’t know what to say.

  “People were shooting at me. So I shot back.” His voice echoed among the trash and brick.

  Not much of a speech.

  He took another deep swallow of the bourbon, hoping maybe the right words waited at the bottom of the bottle.

  He knew Biford wanted him to talk about Sarge but that hardly seemed the talk for a Fourth of July party.

  “Someone had to go get him. So I went and got him.”

  Again, not much of a speech.

  Walt yanked off his tie and laughed, because it seemed like someplace in that mess there had to be a joke. He took another pull from the bottle and rested his head against the aluminum door of the loading dock.

  The sky was too hazy for stars and there was a nebulous ring around the moon that made it look like it, too, was sweating itself into smoke.

  Walt fanned himself with his cap and thought of cooler places.

  His grandparents’ cabin in Minnesota. They’d gone every year for Christmas when he was a
kid. It was cold there at that time of year, the kind of cold that hurt to breathe, that made your lungs ache.

  That kind of cold seemed like a myth. He shut his eyes and tried to conjure it up.

  At the far end of the alley a cat screeched and ran helter-skelter into a garbage can. Walt turned and watched his brother walk through the thick air toward him.

  He should be surprised. He hadn’t told his family about this and they weren’t much for dinner dances. He was surprised, he guessed. He just couldn’t feel it in all this heat.

  “What are you doing out here?” Christopher asked, yanking off his own tie and putting it in the pocket of his suit. “They just called your name for the award.” He stripped off his brown jacket. He had giant sweat rings under his arms. “Jesus, it’s hotter than hell.”

  “I know.”

  “We looked for you inside, but you weren’t there.”

  Walt didn’t answer because it wasn’t a question, and frankly, the way his brother always stated the obvious seemed like a painful waste of time.

  “Mom came down to see you get that award.”

  Christopher’s gaze struck Walt’s and skidded away. That was how his brother looked at him these days, like a hit and run accident. Fleeting, but hard enough to scratch.

  “Where is she?” Walt took a swig to wash away the slimy residue of guilt in the back of his throat.

  “In the car. I’m taking her home.”

  “You should come back, after,” Walt invited. “Have a drink or something.”

  Christopher shook his head. “It’s just you VFW guys in there now.” He shrugged, looked down at the end of the alley like he couldn’t wait to leave.

  Walt could relate—he couldn’t even bring himself to go in the doors.

  Christopher hadn’t gone to war. He stayed home, thanks to a heart murmur and bad sight in his left eye from an accident with a BB gun when they were kids. Had things gone the other way the day they fought over that gun, it might have been Walt at home, suffering from migraines and taking over the family business like he’d planned to all along.