Walking Wounded

by Chris Lynch

  My ma, because she is a good and attentive ma, sweeps right over to me as I walk in the door.

  “I don’t think I can do this for very long, Ma,” I say.

  “I understand,” she whispers back while at the same time maneuvering me right into harm’s way. “Just do as much as you can while you’re here. It means a lot to have you here.”

  “I know,” I sigh.

  “I’m very proud of you,” she says as she shoves me right up to face Rudi’s mom.

  “Well, it’s over now,” she says as we embrace for a few awkward seconds. She is seated at the Bucyks’ dining room table and I have to bend down to meet her. I straighten back up to see a cup of tea, a scone, and a folded flag on the table before her.

  “You visited him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  “How did he seem? I mean, with the service and all. Was he fitting in? He never did, you know. Never, never, except with you boys, and you all had to practically adopt him to get him through life here. His father was a big nincompoop, you know.”

  I almost laugh there, but smile politely instead. “I did not know that, no. But you should know that Rudi made a magnificent Marine. He was so good I am certain he was going to make a career of it after the war was over.”

  This, now, is the thing that really appears to strike something in her. She had the scone up to her open mouth when I said that, and then let her hand drop back to the table with it.

  “Career,” she repeats, rolling her eyes upward in wonder. “I never even thought, not once, to connect that word and my boy.”

  I feel a bit lighter, more useful here, to have inadvertently tapped this source of badly needed good feeling.

  “You would have connected it if you saw him there. A career, a career officer, probably, was where he was going.”

  I am being a little reckless with the language here, but it is recklessness in a good cause. Rudi’s mom appears light-headed with the image she has of him now, and that is as good as we could ever hope to get it.

  “Thank you, Morris,” she says, holding her hand out regally and letting it hang there for me to do something with. Knowing well this is a once-in-a-lifetime arrangement, I kiss her hand.

  Beck’s parents have apparently been standing as silent witnesses to all this because when I rise, Rudi’s mom gestures toward them, off a few feet behind me. She releases me to go to them and begins repeating all I just said to my mother as she sits down with a plate.

  “We can’t really stay longer,” Mrs. Beck says to me, kissing my cheek and rubbing my arm gently.

  “We just wanted to make sure we got a chance to say hello to you, son,” Mr. Beck says. “How are you holding up? Are you okay? Anything you need, anything we can do for you while you are here? I can only imagine the strain of all this on you, you being the only one able to be here out of all you boys.”

  “You were always a very special group,” Mrs. Beck says. “Always meant a lot to Beck, and he wasn’t shy about saying so.”

  Were? Are? What is this thing now?

  “That’s why he’s over there right now,” I say with both a smile and a slight recoil, knowing me and my pledge are responsible.

  “No,” Mr. Beck almost snaps at me. He does point a sharp finger into my chest. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. It didn’t take any kind of pressure or pledge to get Beck to do what he thought was right, and nobody could talk him out of anything once he had decided.”

  I nod enthusiastically, and Mr. Beck releases me from the lance of his finger. He could not be more right about this.

  “Well, anyway, I’m good, folks, thank you for asking. I mean, this is hard, don’t get me wrong. Hard. But I already feel like I’m getting through it, just as of today, really, you know?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Beck says. “That makes all the sense in the world. I only wish we could see Beck, look at his face up close and see him like we are seeing you, so we could tell for ourselves that he’s doing all right.”

  “He is,” I say reflexively. “I can tell you he is. He’s Beck, and Beck will always be all right, more than anybody I know.”

  I notice them leaning in tighter to each other as we get to this point. They smile gratefully at me but there is a flicker of something else there, too, and now I’m going to hear about it.

  “We know,” Mr. Beck says conspiratorially, and my knees almost give out with the shock of it. I am certain that my face goes bloodless because of the worry I see on theirs.

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Beck says, and rushes to give me a quick reviving hug before stepping back to her husband’s side. “You don’t need to worry about it. It’s between us. Beck told us, in the few minutes we had on the phone, how Rudi died right there in your arms, with the two of you holding him.”

  Mrs. Beck loses out to tears here, and Mr. Beck picks up the baton of the conversation. “It is a wonderful thing, in the midst of this wretched, horrible thing, that you boys were there in his last moments. There is a rightness to that ending for that boy.”

  I am shaking with the bone-closeness of this conversation, and with some anger at Beck for not giving me a heads-up. Though, with me in transit since then, I don’t see how he could have. But he should have.

  “He tells us everything.” Mrs. Beck sniffs. “That’s how he is.”

  Not everything, I’m thinking. Not anymore.

  “And Ivan —” Mr. Beck says before I rudely interrupt.

  “Was already gone,” I say, speeding things to a conclusion of my choosing. “We were all there, briefly, all together again. It wasn’t much. But I was happy to be able to do my part….”

  To get them together.

  I must look to the Becks like one of those wackos they say more and more of us look like when we come back from Vietnam. I am staring at the floor to stop all the motion, all the dizziness that is overcoming me as I remember it was my pledge that got everybody committed to the war in the first place, and then it was my nagging that forced us all into the same place for that last time.

  “We just wanted you to know,” Mr. Beck says close to my ear as Mrs. Beck presses close to my other ear. They don’t try and force me to look up again. “Know that we know, and that if you need to talk to somebody, just to get it in the air, confidentially … well, you are our son, too. You all are. Come to us any time. The door will be unlocked.”

  I get kisses on both cheeks at once and they are all that is holding me upright until I feel a strong grip on my arm.

  I look up to see the Becks waving and backing away quietly as The Captain asks as well, “How are you holding up, Morris?”

  I shrug. “Just about?” I say.

  “Well, if you’ve got a minute, I’d like to talk to you in my study. Won’t take long, I promise.”

  I follow along to The Captain’s study, which sounds like a nice seafood restaurant rather than the gallows it feels like right now.

  It turns out to be neither, of course, but a small musty-warm room with a handsome collection of military books and models, framed citations, and photos of The Captain over the years meeting some of the legends of warfare history, including General Patton. It also contains Ivan’s brother, Caesar.

  “Hey, Caesar,” I say, shaking his big hand.

  “Hiya, Morris, how are you?”

  I’ve decided to go with “Fine, thanks,” now, and for the foreseeable future.

  Caesar has grown, quick and strong. He has always been about as close as it would be possible to get to a second Ivan, in terms of disposition and general Ivan-ness. In my absence, he has begun to look the part. He would definitely win the role of Ivan’s stunt double in the unlikely event of him going into the movies and the even unlikelier event that he wouldn’t do his own stunts. Caesar is rugged and ready and if anything maybe a little bigger-boned than his older brother.

  The Captain takes a seat behind his desk and starts nervously playing around with the brass replica Sherman tank sitting there.

>   “I’ll be direct here, Morris, because I know you’ve probably already had your fill of questions.”

  “Oh, no, sir, not at all. I understand why everybody has so much they want to —”

  “What do you know, Morris, about Ivan?”

  He did say direct.

  I get all panicky, look to my right, to Caesar, who stands more or less at attention along with me, then back to his dad.

  “Sir?” I ask, to play for time as much as anything.

  “He’s missing, Morris,” Caesar says, because he’s possibly the only person who finds The Captain’s approach too meandering.

  “What?” I say, astonished.

  The Captain waves both hands in a crowd-calming gesture.

  “Caesar,” he growls. “No, now, it’s not as official as all that. What it is is that, we cannot make contact with him. When we all heard about Rudi, through official channels, and then you and Beck were in contact with your families, we waited to hear from Ivan. Then, when we got nothing, that sounded strange, and so I have been trying since to get ahold of him with no luck.”

  It goes without saying that The Captain is not a worrier, and his composure remains ironclad now. But the fact that I am in here at all, that I have an audience with the great man himself in this room I have never seen the inside of in all the time I have known this family, and that the meeting includes the number-two son and nobody else, puts this at a level of need The Captain does not have to spell out for me.

  “Sir, you know how he is,” I say.

  They both roll out a similar-sounding, utterly Bucyk chuckle at all of us knowing how Ivan is. It is quite welcome but not quite enough.

  “It’s also in the nature of his job,” I say more helpfully, “and the nature of this war.” I take the liberty to punch that emphasis there to assume just a small bit of authority on a subject where this man is otherwise the unquestioned authority.

  The Captain nods at me, thoughtfully, appreciatively. I feel like I am being taken seriously, treated with a level of respect that I would never have earned with the man without my tour of duty in the hellishness of the Mekong Delta.

  “I do understand,” he says, “inasmuch as anyone can understand without going there himself. But I do have an abiding interest in the situation … and pretty soon I will have two.” He nods in Caesar’s direction.

  “Yes, sir,” Caesar says to me with familiar moxie. “As soon as I’m old enough, I’m signing up for the Army. Hope me and Ivan will be fighting together soon enough.”

  “That would be nice,” I say in response to his eager-scary grin. “Not nice for the Vietcong, of course …”

  “Gentlemen,” Mrs. Bucyk calls while knocking at the door, “people are leaving now, and I think you want to be out here.”

  “Out here” sounds good to me. Out of here sounds even better.

  “Okay, Hannah, we’ll be just another minute,” he calls. Then back to me. “I do get all that, Morris, and true, he will probably just materialize in his own good time. I also appreciate that you have a lot going on, and you can hardly be expected to bear all of the —”

  “We really appreciate you even being here,” Caesar adds.

  “Certainly,” The Captain says. “We absolutely do. But it just feels … not quite right. After all the years of you boys being together, and then not hearing from him nor being able to locate him myself. It may just be my overdeveloped soldier’s sense of wariness … but you saw him, right? You were all together, just before Rudi got killed.”

  His overdeveloped soldier’s sense of wariness is right now frightening the daylights out of me, and I am praying for Mrs. Bucyk’s knock at that door again.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “So, nobody has spoken to him since then,” Caesar says. They make a good team, these two.

  “You were the last,” The Captain says. “How was he?”

  Oh, the question. Such a question. So many different ways to look at it, and to answer it, honestly.

  “Fine, sir. He was fine.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Bucyk says, bursting through the door. “Enough. Out here, all of you, now.”

  “You’re right, Hannah, you’re right,” The Captain says, getting sharply up from his chair. She holds the door for them for good measure as first her son, then her husband file past.

  “Sorry, Morris,” she says, patting my back as I pass.

  “Not at all,” I say, “really.”

  I am the last person to leave, and I feel like part of a POW swap when Caesar finally opens the front door for me. I told Ma to go ahead in the car taking Rudi’s mom home earlier, and the truth is the promised aloneness was heaven on the horizon in my eyes.

  I stand on the Bucyks’ porch, just like that last night after our going-off-to-war dinner with the haircuts and everything. Just like that, except for the many profound differences.

  We buried Rudi today. He was killed by friendly fire, the friendliest fire of all time, and only the three of us know the truth.

  Ivan and his rifle have not been heard from since.

  Beck is on duty, and I can hardly fathom his being there while I’m back here.

  And I am, indeed, back here, waiting to find out what the big wheel spins for me next. Or maybe I shouldn’t just wait.

  “What is the word on your next posting?” Caesar asks, standing in the doorway with his parents close behind.

  “Well, it was all seriously short notice,” I say. “Everything in motion before anything could be planned.”

  “I’ll say,” The Captain says. “That would be a logistical migraine nobody would want.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “So, my CO said my new orders would be mailed to me here at home, in a week or ten days, and to be ready to report within twenty-four hours.”

  “Kind of unsettling, not knowing,” Mrs. Bucyk says. “They could send you anywhere, to be doing anything.”

  I nod, chuckling, but in a pretty humor-free way. I’m afraid.

  “Well, they probably can’t top where they’ve already sent me,” I say.

  “True,” says The Captain. “But you know, I still know a few people across the services. If you think you need any help with anything, just let me know. Couldn’t get you out of a tour, of course —”

  “Nor would you,” Caesar snaps.

  “Right, but since you’ve been already … Stateside, I might be of help. Pals who fought together in the Big One, they’re pals for life. So …”

  “Thank you, sir,” I say, waving and walking down the steps at the same time. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “And if you hear …” Mr. and Mrs. Bucyk say at the same time, with the same ache, and I so desperately would like to help them if I could do anything about it.

  “Of course,” I say, picking up my pace down the path to the street.

  It may have been easier if they’d kept me in Vietnam. Truly.

  Lately I find myself thinking more and more about how improbably close the four of us were for all those years. I spent roughly equal time in the company of Morris, Ivan, and Rudi as I did with the members of my immediate family. And I adore my immediate family.

  The other three spent an even greater percentage of their conscious hours on friendship than on family. Rudi once suggested without a hint of a joke that we get a house together, just the four of us. We were around thirteen at the time.

  Information was always a shared commodity. Playground rumblings or the international kind, gossip, facts, lies, rumors — all of it was passed, filtered, and processed among us as if there were never any original source beyond ourselves. And if the topic in question was one or more of ourselves, there was exactly zero chance we would have heard it from any fifth party.

  Which makes the news from my father that much more jolting.

  “Ivan is coming home,” he tells me on the phone. It is the first time since I deployed that he felt he could not wait until I phoned him. So I knew as I picked up the receiver that it wasn’t going to
be chitchat, but this information still catches me off guard.

  “He is? Hans, that’s kind of shocking to hear. What’s up?”

  It’s a poor connection, and in the interminable delay between question and answer, Rudi flashes through my mind. What does Hans know? My stomach gets the same feeling as when it suffers a sudden ten-thousand-foot drop in altitude.

  “He was seriously hurt in fighting,” Hans says.

  “What … ?” I say while he is still talking. He tries rushing his answer to accommodate me, but we are compounding the delay, chopping up the conversation with impatience.

  “Right,” I finally snap. “I’m just going to shut up and let you talk it all out.” I never snap at Hans. And saying shut up in our family is bad form on par with lighting a fart on fire at the dinner table.

  The pause on his end is a little longer than the line delay requires.

  “I do hope that is combat stress I am hearing, son, and not your new military-inspired style of address. Anyway, yes, Ivan was rather severely wounded but he is going to be all right. It took a while for word to get back because he wasn’t with his own unit when it happened and communication got snafued. Then Ivan himself seems to have been in no hurry to call home. He got shot in the face, the neck, and the shoulder. He should recover just fine for the most part. But he lost an eye, and that’s the main thing.”

  This should not come as such a shock. It is a war. All we ever do here is shoot at one another and chuck explosives every which way. The shock would be in not getting maimed and mangled at some point.

  And yet, I am shocked. One might think I’d be entirely shock-proof in light of everything. But, for better or worse, I now believe I will never get there.

  Ivan, out of service. Ivan, shot, taken down, defeated by an enemy not named Ivan.

  Unthinkable, once. Like so much else.

  If they ever get a tourism industry functioning here they should coin a slogan — Vietnam, the country that really makes you think.

  “Are you all right, Beck?” Hans says after carefully calculating the reasonable reaction time.