Frag Box

Eveleth, Minnesota

Early March, 1968

It was twelve degrees below zero when he got off the bus. He still had fifteen miles to go, but Eveleth was the end of the line, as far north as the Greyhound would take him. He would have to hitch hike the rest of the way to the town of Mountain Iron, where his parents had a tiny house. Neither the town nor the house nor the parents were much to come home to, but they were what he had.

After four years in the service, three of them in Vietnam, he had finally had enough. The Army had dangled a big wad of money and some stripes in front of him, but this time, he didn’t bite. He mustered out and went back to the World.

His class A uniform and greatcoat were no match for the cold, and he had nothing to cover his hands or ears. He decided to get a few shots of antifreeze before starting the rest of his trip, and he walked the two blocks to Main Street, weaving between mountains of shoveled snow that towered above his head.

Downtown, upstairs over an appliance store, there was a VFW bar. He assumed he would be welcomed there. With his uniform and his ribbons, he might get a freebie or two, or even a ride home. Who knew?

At the side of the appliance store, he opened a frosted-over glass door, kicked the snow off his polished jump boots, and climbed the stairs.

Upstairs was a workingman’s bar, with a small hardwood dance floor that hadn’t been varnished in thirty years and cheap paneling on the walls, adorned with stuffed moose and deer heads and phony looking lacquered fish. Beams of feeble late afternoon light from a few narrow windows pierced the smoke and dust and illuminated a big American flag on a floor standard and some dingy patriotic bunting over the bar. Under the moose head, a movie poster of Jane Fonda in her sex-kitten role from
Barbarella
had obviously been used as a dartboard, with the moose also getting his share of random punctures. The tables and chairs were all stacked and pushed against the outside wall, but that didn’t matter, because the seven or eight regular patrons all sat at the bar.

They looked interchangeable: dumpy-looking retired or out-of-work men in dirty baseball caps, plaid shirts, and Osh Kosh work pants held up by wide suspenders. Their Chippewa or Red Wing boots rested on the brass rail, showing rubber soles worn to banana-shaped profiles. They also wore expressions of well-practiced boredom, and they hunched low over the bar, nursing flat beers, trying to keep an all-day buzz going on a scanty mining pension or an unemployment check. They did not chat. The bartender was younger, though definitely not young, and he wore black slacks and a white shirt with a crumpled clip-on bow tie.

Near the door was a jukebox with selections by such worthies as Whoopee John, Frankie Yankovik, and The Six Fat Dutchmen, but it wasn’t playing. This was not a place for music. Everything here was yesterday, elsewhere, and too bad.

All eyes turned when the young sergeant came in with a cloud of frigid air. He took off his greatcoat and hung it on a peg, dumping his duffle on the floor nearby. Most of the regulars turned back to stare into their beers, but some of them smirked and exchanged knowing looks.

“Anybody looking to buy some cookies?” said one of the smirkers. “I think the Girl Scouts just came in.”

The soldier ignored him and took a stool near the center of the bar.

“Beer and a bump,” he said.

The bartender made no move to get him anything.

“You a member?”

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He spread his arms wide, to display his chest full of ribbons, including a purple heart with a bronze V in the proper position of honor, top row, inside.

“Well,” he said, “I am damn sure a veteran, and of the foreign-ist goddamn war the politicians ever made. What else you gotta have?”

“This place is for members only,” said the bartender, now folding his arms and tilting his chin up aggressively.

“Aah, give the kid a drink,” said a voice from the end of the bar.

“Who the hell asked you?”

“He wears the uniform, he’s entitled.”

“Not if he ain’t a member. He ain’t entitled to diddly shit.” That brought a chorus of muttered agreements from up and down the bar.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it,” said the lone dissenter on the end, a stumpy, bowlegged troll with a barrel chest and a full white beard. He detached himself from his stool and came over, his hand extended.

“Luther Johnson,” he said. “I was with the Seabees in Burma.”

“He was with the Salvation Army in Bumfuck, is where he was,” said another regular. “He has a half a beer, he gets all confused.”

“No, he don’t. The two are the same thing.”

“Throw the both of them out, Mack.”

“Fucking-ay. We don’t need their kind here.”

“Charlie Victor,” said the soldier, taking the hand. That brought a whoop from the others.

“He not only couldn’t beat the enemy, he took their name!”

Johnson stood his ground. “Can that shit,” he said. “I’m a paid up member, and Charlie here is my guest. Pour him a drink.”

“You ain’t paid your tab in two weeks, Luther,” said the bartender, though now he moved to get a glass from the counter behind the bar.

“Well, it ain’t the end of the month, is it? I ever stiff you on it?”

“Just don’t be calling yourself paid up, is all I’m saying.”

“Listen, mister civilian barhop, you can—”

“How much is his tab?” said Victor.

“What do you care?”

“How much?”

“I dunno without looking it up. Twenty, maybe twenty-two or three bucks. Mind your own business, soldier boy.”

The soldier reached into his wallet and dug out a twenty and a five and slapped them on the bar top.

“My friend Luther is all paid up, okay? Now give us both a drink.”

“I can pay my own way, kid.”

“No shit. And I can fight my own battles.”

“Really?” The voice belonged to somebody slightly younger and a lot bigger than Johnson, though still cut from the same common mold. He slid off his stool and came up behind them, doing his best to look imposing despite a sagging beer belly and unfocused eyes.

“Seems to me all you candy-ass, druggie Viet Conga boys know how to do is whine, get high, and lose.”

Somewhere in a primitive part of Victor’s brain, old wheels began to turn, mixing dark impulses into explosive slurry, begging him to add a detonating spark. But he ignored it with a force of pure will, also ignored the fat, belligerent drunk.

“Are we square now, or what?” he said to the bartender.

The bartender didn’t answer, but he poured a shot of rye and slammed it down on the bar, deliberately slopping some over the side. Then he drew two beers and put them on the bar top as well. After he had scooped up the money and stuffed it in the till, he walked back to where the soldier was throwing back the shot and pointedly spat into his beer. The cogs turned a notch farther and the juices started to approach critical mass.

“Just exactly what is your problem?” said Victor as calmly as he could.

“His problem’s same as our problem,” said Beer Belly, now coming close enough to poke him in the arm. “His problem is that we won our war. We didn’t protest and we didn’t run off to Canada and we didn’t get high on dope and badmouth our country. We didn’t fuck up.”

“What makes you think I did?”

“Well you damn sure ain’t won, have you?” The bartender again, and Victor turned back to stare into his eyes.

“And just exactly which war did you win, Mr. Bowtie?”

“Well, I, um—”

“He don’t have to have been in any war to respect the guys who was. He knows how to act. But you phony jungle heroes with your pussy berets don’t even know how to do that. You screw around and you keep this damn war going, and pretty soon some real Americans are going to have to go over there and die.”

“Like his precious kid,” said Johnson.

“What about it? My kid is college material, is what he is. His hockey coach pret’ near said so. This asshole here’s nothing but mine slag. That’s probably why he got drafted; they always take the trash first. And if he couldn’t finish the job, he shoun’t a come back.”

The final bit of machinery clicked. To Victor’s surprise, though, the wave of rage that flooded through him was cold, quiet, and supremely controlled. And he knew exactly what he was going to do with it.

“You know what’s wrong with war?” said Victor. “I mean, three tours in-country and two purple hearts, and I didn’t figure it out until just now. Do you know?”

“Easy, man,” said Johnson. “Maybe you should—”

“Oh, now we’re gonna get the peace and love speech.” Beer Belly turned sideways to play to the rest of the regulars, but before he could say another word, Victor took the glass with beer and spit and smashed it against the side of the man’s head. Foam and blood ran down his pasty face, obscuring one smashed eye. The other eye bulged, matching the astonished “o” of the mouth below it. The man howled but didn’t go down, so Victor gave him a solid jab to the solar plexus, dropping him in a blubbering heap.

Behind him, Victor heard Johnson say, “Whatever you’re reaching for under that bar, Mack, it better be made out of chocolate, ‘cause I think you’re about to eat it.”

Victor whirled around to see the bartender pull a sawed-off baseball bat from under the bar. But before he could do anything with it, Johnson pounded the man’s forearm with the side of his fist, pinning the arm to the bar top. The hand went limp. Victor snatched the bat and shoved the end of it into the man’s mouth, grabbing a fistful of greasy hair with his other hand, preventing him from backing away.

“What’s wrong with war,” he said, staring intently into the bartender’s eyes, “is that the wrong people always die.”

Johnson said something he didn’t hear, and the bartender tried to say something but couldn’t. Victor shoved the bat down his throat, as hard and as far as he could. He felt things tear and break and squish, and he gave himself over utterly to the delicious black rage that flooded his brain.

Up and down the bar, nobody else moved. No beers were drunk and nobody spoke as they waited in frozen terror to see what the crazy Vietnam vet would do next.

The lunatic went around behind the bar, where the bartender now lay on the floor, convulsing and making choking, gurgling sounds. Victor ignored him. He slammed two handfuls of shot glasses up on the bar and poured them full from two bottles of liquor he picked up at random, one in each hand. He sent the glasses sliding up and down the bar, distributing them, then continued to pour. He doused liquor on the bodies on the floor and flooded the bar top.

“Drinks all around,” he said. “On the house.” In the background, he saw Johnson go over to the pay phone on the wall and rip out the receiver cord.

“Drink, you sonsabitches,” he screamed, “or I swear I’ll kill every fucking one of you!”

They drank.

Over by the phone, Johnson made a gesture toward the door.

“Time we got out of here, kid.”

He nodded, held up a finger in a gesture that said “just one minute.” Then he took out his Zippo lighter and calmly lit the puddles of booze.

***

What the rest of the regulars said or did after that, he would never know. Nor did he know what else, if anything, he did to them. The next conscious memory he had was of himself and Johnson running over brittle-crusted snow to jump on an ore train that was laboring up a grade on the edge of town. Twenty miles later, just outside the Erie Mining plant, they swapped it for a ride on a trainload of processed taconite pellets, headed for the dockyards at Duluth. It was blackest night by then, and the temperature seemed to drop almost as fast as the train speeded up. They huddled on the machinery platform at one end of a big hopper car, holding onto the framework with arms looped around steel bars. Neither of them had gloves, and they didn’t dare grab the frigid metal with their bare hands. Somewhere between Hoyt Lakes and Duluth, Luther Johnson froze to death.

“So it’s true in the World, too,” said Victor. “Always the wrong ones who get killed.”

He jumped off the train in West Duluth, dumped his uniform, except for the boots and fatigue jacket, in a dumpster at a truck stop, and started hitchhiking. South. In a Catholic church across the street from a gas station in Cloquet, he stopped long enough to light two candles, one for Luther Johnson and one for himself. He was not a Catholic, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Then he continued heading south.

He never made it back to Mountain Iron, to the father who had once told him to go off to war. He settled in St. Paul, finally, sometimes living on the street, sometimes with a former hooker in Lowertown, in the wino district.

“It’s always the wrong ones get killed,” he told her, when one of their fellow winos died from drinking antifreeze.

“Well, why don’t you quit your whining and do something about it?”

So he did.