“I’m one of those guys the VA sent you to destroy in 1980. Remember me, Agent Orange?”
“Mister? What’s your name, sir?”
“Jenkins, VA denied me, and you... ”
“Yes, now I recall. But, Mr. Jenkins, I’d nothing against you. I was just doing my job.”
“You know, doctors givin’ me six months now—multiple myeloma they call it.”
“I’m truly sorry, but... ”
“No need to be sorry now, but people like you are a disgrace—anybody ever tell you that? Did anybody ever tell you that you kill people—veterans? That you kill veterans, and that you’re a fucking government goon?”
“Sir... ” Before Nick could say anything more, the man walked off in the direction of the gate. Nick studied him for a moment and, for an instant, wondered what he had done. Whether he played a role in this man’s fate.
When the Jaeger’s left the room, Julie followed them to the foyer. “Mr. and Mrs. Jaeger, I’m Julie O’Conner. My brother was in Camp 13. And when you mentioned Conner, I thought that maybe you were talking about him.”
“Ma’am, I’m afraid I told them all I know,” Jaeger answered humbly.
“Well I can tell you what he looked like. I even have his pic... ”
Jaeger smiled. “Nah, that can’t help. He seemed like a regular guy.”
“I was hoping that... ”
“I’m afraid I can’t be of any help. Good meetin’ you.”
A Judge Of Oral Hygiene
TEN MINUTES AFTER ADJOURNING COURT, Lindquist was sitting in Dr. Pendergrast’s dentist’s chair. The doctor, a portly man, waddled over.
“Okay, Joe, open up.” After forty-five years of poking around people’s mouths, he showed little bedside manner as he peered through the spectacles that sat comfortably on his red, bulbous nose.
“Joe, the abscess perforated the bone, draining into the surrounding tissue.” He put his hand on a swelling on Lindquist’s neck and said, “Does this hurt?”
“It’s tender.”
The doctor reached under Lindquist’s jaw, felt around, moved down his larynx, and squeezed. “Does this hurt?”
“A little.”
“You should have gotten here when you first felt the tenderness in the gum. Infection like this floods the bone, washing it away like soap. I’m going to have to take the tooth. There isn’t enough bone left.”
“Do whatever you have to.”
“Well, we’ll give you some nitrous oxide to dull the pain. I have to go up there and scrape the bone, after I remove the tooth. You’re going to have a gap if you smile too wide, but there’s little I can do right now. If you want a false tooth, I can build a bridge later.”
Lindquist’s chair vibrated and his ears buzzed. His head dropped below his knees, and a dental assistant with a fair amount of cleavage moved beside him. He closed his eyes. “Take a deep breath, Mr. Lindquist,” she said, in a calmingly squeaky voice.
Within seconds he went from admiring long hair brushing tops of flourishing breasts to hearing, “Joe, wake up. We’re done, Joe.”
Lindquist looked over and saw Pendergrast on a stool next to him.
“Joe, I felt this lump in your neck, and I want it looked at.”
Still drowsy, Lindquist came back, “Probably a swollen gland right?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not the expert. I’d like you to get it checked out. Probably nothing, maybe related to the infection, but I want to be sure.”
Uneasily, Lindquist asked, “What else might it be?”
Pendergrast knew what else it might be. “I don’t know, but go see, Doc Reichhart over at the North Avenue Medical Center. He’s an oncologist, and he’ll let us know if it’s nothing or something we need to deal with.”
“Oncologist! You mean... ”
“Joe, I don’t mean anything. It’s a lump for God’s sake. It could be anything. I don’t remember seeing it last year. So let’s not read anything into this. Let Reichhart tell us what it is.”
Later that day, Lindquist sat in his easy chair as the sun set, feet on the foot rest, his tabby Red squeezed between his hip and the armrest. He rubbed the knot of flesh on his neck to which he had paid no mind over the past several months. He pulled out his journal and wrote:
A witness today reminded me about the winter of ’44, the one that shaped my fear—the kind of fear I saw in my father’s face every time it rained hard, the kind of fear that I felt when the doctor told me Mattie had a week to live. The kind of fear I now feel toward what the doctor may say about the lump. Fear, will I ever conquer it?
He closed his eyes, and December ’44 flashed before him. The rain had turned sleety, thawed mud thickened and froze in a diabolical cycle. Where the wind blew hard, and snow packed itself into all corners of the foot-soldier’s life. The enemy left behind twisted wire, booby traps and mines. Winter settled into daily routine, and the troops found refuge in burned out farmhouses, barns, pillboxes and foxholes. But such refuge did little to ward off pneumonia, trench foot. frostbite. The day before Christmas, while patrolling in the mountainous Ardennes, his squad took a wrong turn down a deserted road that turned into a forest opaque with sharp-sided hills and deep rapids. Eventually, they came to a no-name village. When they heard the distant, strained growl of diesels they found a small cottage where they laid low spying in the direction of the increasing sound. Finally, a brown tank came into view, escorting a dozen armored half-tracks and a column of ragtag foot-soldiers from the retreating 1st SS Panzer Division.
When the tank came within a hundred yards, it moved out of position and swiveled its turret toward the cottage. VROOM! A fast whistle followed a delayed thud. The first shell hit next door. The house collapsed into a pile of seventeenth century rubble. The turret groaned a few more degrees to the right, where the squad hid. Before the next round, Privates Joe Lindquist and Robby O’Halloran ran down a cobblestone alley to an abandoned rectory. The tank pounded the cottage until it too turned it into a pile of stone, marking the spot of another burial ground.
The tank twisted its turret toward the small church attached to the rectory. VROOM! A whistle, a wait and a thud. A bronze bell and its wooden headstock tumbled through the belfry. Its clapper clanging one last time.
Hearing three more shells, the privates burrowed deeper into the corner of the cellar. Fifteen minutes later, VROOM! A whistle, nothing and then, a thud. The first floor of the rectory splintered into grains of sawdust and a thousand shards. Joe looked up at two precariously hung beams and beyond that, the dome of a placid night sky. The tank stopped shelling. A five-minute pause, and then a shell screamed in. The beams came down and wood, masonry, and shattered wine bottles covered Robby to his waist.
“You okay?” His body slumped forward. “Robby, you all right?” Lindquist pulled himself out of the rubble far enough to see his friend leaning forward. “Robby, you all right?” The soldier did not answer, his chin resting between the open lapels of his burgundy stained overcoat. Blood spurted lazily from the side of his neck.
Lindquist shut his eyes, but he could not shut out the sound of crashing cymbals, the oversized pounding drums, concrete, exploding glass—unwrapping his senses only to be reset by the whistle of the goddamn shell. VROOM! Aged wine or Robby’s blood—maybe both—painted the ancient walls purple.
When he heard the tank move on, Joe pulled a heel of gray bread from his overcoat and drank from a decapitated blue bottle. An hour passed and he stared, trembling through the gaping hole at the half-hearted moon, at the ominous apparitions of war. He was a man who would someday judge other men’s intentions. A man who someday would sit in his armchair, with his red tabby and a legacy of dreams about tanks, hard earthy sounds, Robby O’Halloran’s corpse, bread and wine, outlines and accidents that follow missed turns in the road, perhaps giving new meaning to the phrase: In vino veritas.
Searching For Answers
BARE-CHESTED, WEARING JOCKEY SHORTS and wool socks, Jack reached fo
r the pack of Lucky Strikes on the stovetop. The phone rang. He tapped out a cigarette and put it to his lips. He fumbled the match, lit the cigarette and released a cloud of blue smoke as he ambled over to the phone.
“—ello,” he rasped.
“Jack? You ’wake? Geeze, it’s nearly noon!”
“Julie?”
“Guess where I’ve been all week,” she snapped.
“Where?” He took a deep drag, letting the smoke out little by little.
“Goddamn court, that’s where! Thought you were supposed to be there!”
“Couldn’t make it,” he answered, sounding like he could not care less.
“You mean you’ve been goddamn drunk!”
“Why’d you call?”
“I heard some things that made me feel like dying,” she replied, signaling in her tone that she wanted sympathy.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Jack, what do you know about my boyfriend Roger?” she asked, shifting to a prosecutorial voice.
“What? Roger who? What’re you talking about?” Jack put his thumb and index finger around his mouth and slid them down his chin.
“Roger, you know... the guy I used to date.”
He took a deep drag. “For Christ’s sake, are you crazy? That was thirty years ago. Are you feeling all right, or what?”
“Jack, you know I never forgot him,” she said.
“How the hell am I supposed to remember what happened thirty years ago? I can’t tell you what happened last week.”
“I’m comin’ over.”
Jack exhaled smoke through pursed lips, letting out a blowing sound.
“What’s that?”
“I farted. Don’t you have to go to work or something?”
“I gotta get to the bottom of this.”
“You’re crazy, you know that? You’re goddamn crazy,” he barked.
“You must have made the connection when you returned from the war. I talked to you about him. I remember it like yesterday. We were in the gym at school. I’m comin’ over later.”
Jack hung up, grabbed a tumbler from the sink and went to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a stiff Seagram’s 7, no ice. He walked to the front room and flopped on the overstuffed couch. A picture Julie had taken of him and his mother when he returned from Korea in late 1954 lay over the fireplace in a bed of dust. He remembered that he had arrived home dressed in a new army shirt, canvas duffle bag slung over his shoulder, and had stood in the kitchen doorway watching his mother through a screen door. She had aged a dozen years since he had kissed her that morning at the train station just over four years before. Her housedress was faded and frayed, her knees and elbows more boney. Then, jolted by an emotional current coursing through her tiny frame, the frying pan she held flew into a kitchen cabinet, and she flung her head back. “Jack!”
Two deep-set gray eyes peered back from a pasty, sunken face squeezed dry. “Yes, Mom, it’s me.” He opened the door and Mary ran into his embrace, weeping for all the years that had washed away.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said, patting her hair as if in a strong wind. “I hardly recognized you, hardly recognized my own son... lost in that, that uniform.”
“It’s a size too big,” he laughed.
“Oh, my son, Jack, Jack, my son, you’ll never know, you’ll never know. I prayed every night.” She hugged him again.
“I know. It’s okay,” he whispered to comfort her.
Mary moved away, the two sizing one another up, readjusting memories. Jack looked into Mary’s eyes and knew what she must have seen: a thin, tired, delicate man, not the strong boy who had left when the train pulled out of the station. Mary put on a pot of coffee. Jack sat down at the yellow table that had witnessed three generations of Prados in happier times.
“They wouldn’t tell me where you were.” Mary patted a napkin in front of her.
“Let’s not talk about that now.”
She started for the fridge. “I’ll heat up some soup.”
“Terrific, it’ll be the best I’ve eaten in years. What is it?”
She reached for a large ceramic bowl. “Pasta fagiole, your favorite.”
“Well, not sure about that. All I ate was soy beans, half-cooked, and sorghum, a ball about the size of my fist.”
Hesitating, she offered, “I can cook a... ”
Jack smirked. “Oh, no, just kiddin’, Mom, the fagiole’s good.”
They talked about his trip home, where he had boarded the Marine Adder, a one stack transport out of Pusan that landed in San Diego. After a half dozen military hops, he had reached Long Island where he hitched a ride. Then Mary began to fill in the weightier events that had occurred during his time away, notably the passing of Nonna Rosa.
Jack scanned the once familiar room. For all the ways their lives had turned, the room where Nonna Rosa had spent her days had changed little. A large woman who dressed in flowing flowered housecoats, her graying hair wrapped in a swirl pinned to the top of her head. She washed her cherub-like cheeks with nothing more than Ivory Soap—a woman as plain as her kitchen. Before college, Jack spent most of his time in that kitchen, listening to the radio, doing homework. Every so often he would look up from a book and let his gaze sweep past the pantry on one side, the back window, the porcelain sink, the gas stove with double kerosene-fired heaters and the small Frigidaire. The kitchen had a resonance all its own: the radio, penetrating sounds from Julie’s violin, boiling water, oils in the frying pan, the mechanical innards of the gray enameled tub swooshing clothes. Sometimes Nonna would waltz around the kitchen like a portly ballerina. And at some point, like a jukebox out of money, the music would stop and Julie would emerge from the pantry, pour a cup of black coffee and return to her “music room.” If the windows were open, the percussive crack of wind filled bed sheets on the line called attention to a kind of freshness that was left in the residue of his later childhood. On the day he returned from war, the wind blew hard too, the grass that had always grown high rustled furiously, a broken clothesline flapped from side to side, waiting for someone to put it to work again.
When Jack asked about Julie, Mary told him that she had taken ill in ’51 and that she no longer played violin. “I don’t think it’s so much the hand. It’s her heart. It’s broken. That guy Roger she dated never came back. She works at St. Pats, at the school.”
Jack said nothing and walked over to the rear window to look out.
After three bowls of soup, Jack set out to surprise Julie at work. At the principal’s office a plump young woman with insect eyes lifted her head when Jack walked through the door.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah, I’m looking for Julie O’Conner.”
“You her boyfriend?” she asked coyly.
“Nah, her brother.”
“Oh, you’re Jack. In the Army. Julie showed me your pit’cher.” The woman grinned through her nicotine-stained teeth, waiting for his reaction.
“Right,” Jack cracked, careful not to show the slightest interest.
The secretary’s eyes lifted over Jack’s head to the clock. It was 2:30. She turned back to Jack and scanned his brown ribbon-less shirt. Jack saw her give a faint smirk. “Probably in the gym. Out the door, take a left.”
The echo from the leather heals of his military shoes ceased when Jack opened the heavy steel door that led to the combination auditorium/gym. He heard sloshing from someone mopping the floor. He walked across the gym to the edge of the stage from where the sounds were coming and boosted himself onto the elevation. He peeked behind the red, heavy curtain and in the corner, dimly lit by a 60 watt bulb, a petite woman in a gray smock swabbed the floor. She had a mop stick twisted beneath her upper right arm, which she managed to push back and forth using a rotating wrist movement. “Yo, Julie! Julie, that you?” he yelled.
Even before she turned, her jaw had dropped. “Jack? Jack, you’re home!” The mop fell.
Jack ran to hug her,
thinking how Julie and his mother were as close as he had been to any woman in years. Julie, likewise, had not embraced a man since the night Jack left for Hamilton’s farewell party.
“How’ve you been?” she cried, stepping back and beaming.
He glanced down at her odd foot position and quickly turned his attention to the sparkling lime green eyes he had remembered as he had languished in prison.
“Good, good, real good. Got in about two hours ago, stopped by the house. Mom looks good, little tired. Is she seeing Dad?”
“Not often, but when they do, you know it’s never good. Mom wastes so much time in the past. She doesn’t let go.” Jack showed no emotion, and she changed the subject. “How are you? You look skinny.”
“Well, yeah, I haven’t been eatin’ in the best restaurants.” He laughed.
“I imagine, but how much do you weigh? Can’t be more than... .”
“One-twenty, more or less.”
“Wow, I wouldn’t ’a known you, Jack, if I saw you coming down the street.”
“Forget me, how are you? How’s your leg? Mom said you were sick.” Jack grimaced.
“It’s fine. The doctor figures that I’ll limp a little from now on. My foot, it’s getting so I can almost get it off the ground, but,” she hesitated, “it doesn’t matter.”
“You always had that stick-to-it-ness. You’ll get there.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s my hand.” Pushing her hand toward Jack she said, “See, I can’t move these two fingers much.”
Jack ran his finger lightly over her wrist, and then pulled her close. Julie sobbed as he gazed over her shoulder, out the grimy gym window where the wire mesh ran crisscross, looking to the green lawn and beyond to the maple trees that were turning red-yellow. He turned his head in the direction of the older, brown and white three story houses beyond the trees—the ones that were freshly painted. The place looked like it did before he left, quiet and reserved, where the gardens and hedges still lifted spirits, where his baby sister ran down Willa Street, a non-stop chubby toddler, always the center of attention. Where it went unnoticed that she’d changed from a talkative five-year-old, to a shy seven-year-old, to a skinny, introverted nine-year-old, until finally in her mid-teen years, she’d withdraw for long periods as she worked her music to near perfection.
We Were Beautiful Once Page 18
