She was going to be a teacher, and she was going to be the kind who wanted to hear what her students had to say.
CHAPTER THREE
When he was working, Brian’s head stayed quiet. Lenny had been right about that.
He’d been back on the oil fields about six weeks, since early March, and having work he knew well, that kept his hands and his mind focused, set the war off to the side. The rhythms of the fields, too—the patterns of movement and work, the sound of the rigs, of the trucks and other heavy machinery, of the men who ran it all—helped to keep his head in Oklahoma where his feet were. When the memories tried to take center stage again, he recited the contents of his toolbox until his focus returned.
There were no televisions spewing memories at him on the job, and the guys who had transistor radios with them for lunch-break entertainment kept them on the sports-talk channel. So even during breaks, Brian kept all of himself in place. He’d sit with the guys, each of them opening identical black lunch boxes, and eat the sandwiches and thermos coffee the women in their lives had prepared for them.
In six weeks, not one man on Brian and Lenny’s shift had spoken a single word to him about the war. Brian was sure Lenny had told them not to, and he was glad for it. They talked work, and sports, and family, and in those hours, Brian felt like he was Brian.
It was during the hours when he wasn’t working that he struggled. In those hours, he couldn’t stop fighting the war.
But he’d figured out a way to feed that beast. Not a healthy way, necessarily, but an effective one.
On this Friday, facing a weekend in Faye and Lenny’s square little life, Brian already had plans for letting the beast feed. When he pulled his empty lunch box out of his locker, tossed his hard hat on top of his toolbox and slammed the door closed, Lenny was standing right there, an expression that had become habit parked on his face: something like paternal concern.
Faye was five years older than Brian, and Lenny was eight years older than Faye. Their mother had died of cancer when Brian was six and Faye eleven. His big sister, at that young age, had become the woman of the house and more mother than sister to Brian. But when she’d fallen in love, she’d moved out and prepared to make her own family, and left Brian and their father to make their own way.
A few months after Faye and Lenny tied their knot, in the harvest following their summer wedding, their old man had died horribly in a combine accident. Brian, at fourteen, had been there, had seen it happen. Suddenly an orphan, with his father’s bloody death scored into his mind, Brian had moved in with the newlyweds.
Though they’d barely had a chance to set up their new life before he arrived to disrupt it, they’d never made him feel like a burden. Lenny had stepped into the father role, but gingerly, without trying to replace Brian’s actual father. Brian had resented him anyway, at first. He’d resented everything in those first couple of years. But Lenny was a good man, and when the memories eased and the loss found its place, Brian understood that.
So he knew that look of paternal concern tightening Lenny’s brow now. But he was twenty-eight years old. Not a boy who didn’t know from up or down. A man who’d lived through more kinds of hell than there were words to describe.
He resented the look as much as the boy had. More.
But Lenny didn’t add words to the look. He simply asked, “You ready?”
They rode to work together in Lenny’s truck just about every day. “Yeah, let’s go.”
~oOo~
As usual, they didn’t talk much on the ride. Neither Lenny nor Brian was naturally inclined to flap their gums just for the hell of it, so they usually listened to the radio. Lenny liked country music, and the cab was full of Conway Twitty’s twang when he pulled the truck onto the driveway and cut the engine.
As Brian reached for the door handle, Lenny said, “Bri.”
“Yeah?” Brian turned to Lenny but didn’t let go of the handle.
“Stay home tonight. Your sister worries when you go out like you do. I do, too.”
Now he let go of the handle. “What d’you mean?”
Lenny’s gaze shifted, just slightly, so he was looking at Brian’s cheek. There was a cut there. It was a week old, without even any scab left. Just a red line beneath his eye, and a little hint of color from the bruise.
He’d known since high school, since he was a grief-dazed, furious ninth-grader, how therapeutic a brawl could be. It turned the rage outward, opened the pipes, let the poison flow away. The trick was finding someone to fight with, either someone like him, who was looking for it just the same, or someone who deserved to get his ass kicked.
Thanks to his new buddy Collie Berhardt, Brian had found a way to kill two birds—get his poison out and kick asses that needed kicking.
College bars. Full of hippie motherfuckers just begging for a whoopin’.
He liked to get in there and poke at a big one until the fucker threw the first punch. He always let that punch land, used the shock of pain to spark his fuse.
Last week, that first punch had blacked his eye and bled his cheek. That guy had fought back pretty well altogether, and he’d had a few friends willing to back him up, too. Brian had had more bruises than his eye—his belly and back had carried several blooms, and still bore the greenish ghosts.
A good fight like that on a Friday night got him through a weekend without work. The stiffness and aches brought the brawl back to mind and squeezed out any other dark thoughts.
“You know what I mean. You come home every Friday night like you did a couple rounds with George Foreman. Faye and me, we remember after your dad died. You’re doin’ it again, and you’re gonna get hurt bad—or hurt somebody else bad enough to get in bad trouble. This isn’t the way, Brian.”
“The way of what?”
“The way to put right in your head what needs to get right.”
Lenny didn’t have the first hint of a clue to an idea what was wrong in Brian’s head. “You got a better idea?”
“Talk to me. Talk to Faye. Talk to the preacher. Get it out that way.”
“You don’t have the ears to hear what I’d say. You’d never understand. But I’m okay, Len. I don’t throw the first punch.”
Lenny laughed bleakly. “And that makes it okay?”
Brian didn’t answer. Eventually, Lenny gave up and got out of the truck.
~oOo~
There were several colleges and universities within an hour’s ride of Hiram, and a least a couple bars near each one that catered to the student crowd. This was Oklahoma, not California or New York, so the colleges weren’t packed full of hippie weirdos like the coasts, but they had their share, and they all seemed to flock to the same places to party.
He had no quarrel with fellas with long hair and bushy beards—he wasn’t so far off that look himself—or chicks with their belly showing, and their legs showing most of the way to their ass—in fact, he was one-hundred percent in favor of bare flat bellies and bare long legs. He didn’t even care much about the peaceniks; hating this war made sense to him—so long as they were respectful of the men putting their lives down for their country.
But all he had to do was belly up to the bar, open his ears, and within five or ten minutes, he’d hear somebody say something about the troops, calling them ‘murderers’ or ‘savages’ or something else.
From there, it was easy. He’d engage, say something vague, get the guy’s attention. His shaggy appearance made them think he was on their side, and they’d say more, usually listing atrocities they’d heard from a guy who’d heard from a guy, or building fantasies on the backs of the news stories. Often those half-informed ramblings, always intoned with a righteous, know-it-all, college-boy smugness, bore some nugget of truth. Sometimes, they were straight-up right. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the facts Brian disputed. It was the sneer and the bile, and where they directed it. Oh sure, they bitched about the politicians, too, but when they talked about what was going on in Vietnam, it was
the soldiers, boys about their own age, they hated. And that, Brian would not abide.
All these peaceniks were plenty quick to throw a punch if you called them a cocksucker. And then Brian had the fight he was looking for.
On this night, with Lenny’s soft-spoken lecture still ringing in his ears, Brian stayed close to home and headed to Norman. He rode around the edges of campus until he saw a place with the right clientele, then parked his chopper and went in.
The place was called Buster’s, and it was little more than a shack. The ceiling was low, and the light dim. The tables were made of bare, rough wood, carved with decades of initials and other graffiti. Two pool tables with games in progress took up most of what might have been a dance floor in another bar, but an old Rock-Ola was playing The Doors, and about a dozen people were swaying woozily to Jim Morrison.
At the corner of the bar, a cluster of four boys in striped jeans and denim jackets were arguing with the heat of righteous philosophy, and three girls stood with them, looking forgotten and irritated. A couple of those girls were cute.
A space at the bar near that promising group opened up, and Brian sidled in. When the weary bartender—who was easily in his fifties and looked disgusted with his customers—leaned in, Brian ordered a beer and a shot. The bartender raised bushy iron-grey brows and gave him a nod. That wasn’t a college-boy order, Brian supposed.
He grabbed a handful from a bowl of peanuts and snacked as the philosophers next to him argued—the topic wasn’t the war but something about free speech. He rolled his eyes and tuned out a little. They’d get around to it eventually. His order came, and he poured the bourbon down his throat.
Booze helped, too. With enough of it, his memories got swamped and went quiet. But there was a stretch in the meantime, about two drinks long, where he got lost in them instead, and he hadn’t figured out if that horror was worth the quiet that came later.
Better to just kick an ass or two that deserved it.
There was a television on a shelf above the liquor. It had been dark, but the bartender switched it on, and Brian checked his watch. Time for the late newscast. Normally, he avoided the television news as much as he could, and only peeked carefully at the paper, but tonight, this was good. The college boys next to him quieted as they focused on the television, and Brian waited.
“I gotta hit the road, man,” one of the college boys said.
“Yeah, me too,” another said. “Come on, baby, let’s split.”
Damn. No! They’d looked so likely for trouble. Brian looked over and saw hands slapping as two of the four headed out, one of them catching the hand of one of the cute girls, too.
He’d been looking forward to fucking up all four of those pansy-asses.
Now there were two guys and two girls, and the whole shape of their group was different. They’d pulled the girls in, remembered that they had a good time waiting. They ordered a fresh round.
So did Brian.
“Gosh,” said one of the girls, watching the television, “It’s so horrible. Look”
Brian was looking. The report was on the battle at Khe Sahn, which had raged from January until just a few days earlier, more than two months, and Brian doubted it was really over yet. That was the way of this war. Nothing ever ended, nothing ever changed. Just a cycle of gains and losses, all of it swamped in gore, over and over. No matter how many NVA or VC were killed or how many US or ARVN troops were killed, it just rolled like a wheel, mowing them all down.
He poured the whole beer down his throat in a couple gulps, and called for another.
The news was showing pictures of soldiers and marines—exhausted men, wounded men, dying men, dead men—and scenes of bombs and battle. Brian snatched his next round from the bartender’s hand and tossed shot and beer down in the same breath.
“Another.”
“You okay, fella?” the bartender asked.
“Another,” Brian repeated, resisting the need to yell over the heavy artillery fire in his head.
The bartender nodded and set him up. He took the shot.
Before he could drink down the Budweiser, the college boy next to him declared, “Every one of those assholes is an invader, and CBS is just propaganda, Barbie.”
Finally.
“It’s the same as if they broke into somebody’s house and shot them,” college boy went on. “The North Vietnamese are just defending their home. It’s the Army rolling tanks over their farms and killing their families. The US soldiers are the villains in this story.”
“I know boys who are over there, Steve,” little Barbie said. “They’re not villains. You know I hate this war as much as you do, but the boys don’t have a choice. They’re drafted. Not everybody can afford to be in college.”
Steve scoffed. “Then they should go to Canada, like my brother did when he flunked out. That’s what I’d do. You don’t become a murderer just because somebody tells you to. That’s the excuse the Nazis used.”
Brian never threw the first punch. But this time, he had bombs and tanks in his head, and he and his brothers in arms had just been compared to Nazis by a guy in orange striped bell-bottoms.
He grabbed Steve’s bony shoulder and socked him in the nose. Steve squealed like a girl and grabbed his gushing face.
“What the fuck, man?” Steve’s remaining college-boy friend shouted and flew at Brian, telegraphing his swing from ten feet away.
Brian let it land, and they both fell to the floor.
In the way of bar fights, even in a den of hippies, it took mere seconds for the whole place to be engaged. Brian got over on Steve’s friend and straddled him, letting loose with his fists until he took a pool cue across the back of the neck and got knocked loopy for a few seconds, long enough for somebody to haul him up by the armpits and shove him toward Steve, who was ready to fight back.
Steve was pissed, and that girly squeal probably echoed between his ears, but he was skinny, and already hurt. And clearly had not been in many fights in his life. Brian let him land a few punches, and then turned him inside out. He put the asshole on the ground, followed him down, and punched until another pool cue hit him, cutting across his throat and holding there, and burly, grey-haired arms were dragging him backward, that cue still cutting off most of his air.
The bartender dragged him all the way to the front door, through the door, and dropped him on the sidewalk outside. While Brian tried to breathe around the dent in his throat, the bartender dealt him a swift kick in the kidney, and Brian lost what little air he’d gained, in a barked groan.
Then the bartender crouched close. “What’s your unit, soldier?”
Brian coughed, tasted blood, spat it out. “What?”
“You were in-country.”
This guy was on his side, and Brian was the one lying on the sidewalk? “173rd Airborne.”
“You’re a jumper. Damn—you were at Dak To.”
Brian nodded. “2nd/503rd. Alpha Company.”
“Shit, son. Shit.” The bartender offered a hand and helped Brian sit up.
“Were you in?”
“Korea. 1st Cavalry. My boy’s over where you were. 4th Infantry.”
“Why’d you kick me, then? Jesus. You’re taking those pansies’ side over mine? Did you hear what he said?”
“I heard, and he’s an entitled piece of watery shit who wouldn’t know honor if it blew up in his face. They all are. But son, you can’t work it out like this. You can’t come into my place of business and tear it up, and no amount of pain you go lookin’ for is gonna drown out what’s goin’ on in there.” He lightly knocked Brian’s head with his knuckles and stood up. “Don’t come ‘round here no more. Stay away from places like this. You’re lookin’ for trouble, and it’ll find you.” With that, the old soldier went into his college bar.
Brian stayed where he was, still trying to get a full breath in, but every attempt now came with a blade of pain in his lower back. He might well piss blood for a couple days.
The c
ollege boys, he’d had handled, but the crusty old soldier taking their orders had done some damage.
The door opened again, and Brian got his boots under him, ready to stand and fight. It was the cute girl, the one who’d been talking to Steve. Which meant that her boyfriend was probably on his way out. Brian made his way up to his feet.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “What’s it to you?”
She held out a little pink hankie and gestured at his bleeding face. “What Steve said was terrible. He deserved that punch. Did you serve?”
Brian couldn’t think why he’d answer that question, or take her little hankie.
She reached toward his face, and he pulled away. Then, with a guilty look toward the door, she hunkered in close and whispered, “I ask because my cousin’s over there. We’re the same age, and grew up close. I don’t talk about it, because … but I’m worried about him. He doesn’t say much in his letters. We haven’t gotten one in a long time. Do you think that means bad news?”
Brian couldn’t say. Sometimes, when a soldier stopped writing home, it meant they were KIA or MIA, or lying in a hospital bed. But sometimes, a guy just got tired of trying to figure out how to talk about where they were and what they were doing, or how to lie about it, and just stopped writing. Some guys saw the end of their own life looming over them from the moment they opened their eyes every single day, and decided it wasn’t worth it to keep connected to a home they were sure they’d never see again. Others wrote more, wrote every day, because they thought every day that it would be the last time they could. Brian had landed somewhere in the middle, writing sporadically, every time the guilt that Faye was wondering and worried pricked him hard enough to force a pen into his hand.
Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 4
