The Phantom Blooper (30 page)

Mr. and Mrs. Rucker look at the pearl-gray Stetson. It is sun-faded, battered, shrapnel-torn, and too much of the red clay of Khe Sanh has been rubbed into it for it ever to come clean. it still bears a black and white peace button.

Mrs. Rucker shakes her head. "No," she says, a little coldly. "It's yours now. You best keep it."

I put the Stetson back into my bag.

"They sent a Captain," says Mrs. Rucker. "He had a real bad sunburn. I gave him some lotion for it. He was a nice young man, very well spoken. Missing in action, body not recovered, he said to us. He said that they knew that Johnny was gone, but that his body was lost."

I don't say anything. I'm thinking that after what my bullet did to Cowboy's head, his body if recovered would have been sent back tagged "remains, nonviewable."

Mrs. Rucker says, "It don't seem right somehow that he ain't resting here at home near his people." She looks away. "We for the longest time figured how maybe he was still alive, maybe they made a mistake." She pulls a Kleenex from a cardboard box and blows her nose. "I still get blue sometimes. I know it's wrong, but I got hate in my heart. I got hate heavy enough to carry to the grave. I sent them a good Christian boy and they made him into a damned killer. Then God's hand reached down and struck him."

Mr. Rucker says, "Them people lied to us. John Wayne movies murdered my son. Them pointy-headed politicians hung him up like a hog for slaughter."

Mrs. Rucker says, "I know that war was wrong. I know it. They were done wrong, all the boys. But he was still my son and I'm proud of him. Johnny was the best thing about this country."

Mr. Rucker says, "Where are your people, boy?"

I say, "Alabama, sir."

"Farm people?"

I say, "Yes, sir, we had a hundred and sixty acres in watermelons, but my dad had to go to work strip-mining coal. He died while I was in Viet Nam. I got a letter from my grandma. She said he had a stroke. I guess he didn't take to coal mining."

"These are hard times," says Mr. Rucker.

"Yes, sir," I say. "Hard times."

After supper Mr. Rucker sits in a rocking chair in a faded gray work shirt and stares through steel-rimmed glasses at a glowing plastic log in the electric fireplace, and smokes his pipe. The smell of the pipe smoke is pleasant and reminds me of the Woodcutter.

Mrs. Rucker and I sit on the sofa. The sofa is red, black, bloated, and ugly. Mrs. Rucker shows me the condolence letter sent by the Marine Corps. She says, "It was real thoughtful of johnny's General to take the time to write to us. They must have thought Johnny was real special."

I read the letter:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Rucker:

On behalf of the officers and men of the First Marine Division, please accept my deepest regrets and

heartfelt sympathy on the death of your son, Sergeant John Rucker, U.S. Marine Corps.

Although words alone can do little to console you in your great loss, I hope you will find comfort in

the knowledge that John died valiantly in the service of his country and his Corps.

If I may be of assistance to you, please feel free to write to me at any time.

Sincerely yours,

The letter is signed by the Commanding General.

I don't tell Mrs. Rucker that the condolence letter is a form letter. When I was a Combat Correspondent and pulled pogue duty in the Informational Services Office in Da Nang, I used to type them up by the dozens and sign them myself, forging the Commanding General's signature. No one man ever could have signed letters as fast as our men were dying.

Mrs. Rucker pulls an envelope from a thick stack of letters tied with a yellow ribbon. Mrs. Rucker says, "This one came two weeks after they told us that Johnny was gone."

The envelope is marked FREE where the stamp should be. The letter inside is written in longhand on Marine Corps stationery, the cheap stuff they sold in the PX, a blue flag-raising-at-lwo-jima across the sheet, and a gold eagle, globe, and anchor at the top. It's a letter Cowboy wrote to thank his mother for a box of sugar cookies she'd sent in a care package. It is signed, "All my love, your green amphibious monster, Johnny."

Beneath Cowboy's signature are a dozen other signatures. The whole squad shared the box of cookies, so we all signed, thanking Mrs. Rucker. My name is first. At the bottom of the letter is a P.S.: "Don't worry about me, Mom and Dad. Joker will take care of me. I've got friends here, and we all take care of each other."

We sit, in silence, and all of the unasked questions hang in the air between us like black stone funeral wreaths. Why didn't I take better care of Cowboy? Why did I survive while Cowboy died?

After a while, I say, "Thank you, ma'am, for the supper. I enjoyed it. But I should be getting back on the road. I'm kind of anxious to get home."

"I know you are," says Mrs. Rucker. "But it's late. You're welcome to stay the night."

Before I can reply, Mrs. Rucker gets up and walks to the rear of the motorhome. "I'll fix up Johnny's bunk bed for you."

"Thank you," I say, knowing that my visit has been an intrusion, and thinking that Cowboy's parents don't seem to have known him very well.

Sometime after midnight I take Cowboy's guitar from the wall over his bunk and I go outside.

I sit on the corral fence. Cowboy's horse watches me with suspicion. Then the beautiful stallion trots across the small corral, ghost-white, sleek, and strong. The horse nuzzles my arm with his nose.

I sing a song that Cowboy wrote in Viet Nam to Cowboy's horse. The name of the song is "Jukebox in the Jungle."

Cowboy's horse seems to like the song:

The lights out here ain't caused by crowded barrooms,

There ain't no jukebox in the jungle,

There ain't no honky-tonks in Viet Nam,

So, darling, when I got your Dear John letter,

There was no place to go to hide my pain. . . .

In the morning at first- light Mr. Rucker gives me a ride into town in his Datsun pickup truck.

I catch a bus to the airport.

It's only a short hop on a Delta 707 to occupied Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, where they talk so slow that if you ask them why they don't like Yankees, by the time they finish telling you, you agree with them.

My plane lands in Birmingham and I catch a Greyhound bus north a hundred miles to Russellville, the county seat of Winston County, the "Free State of Winston."

I sit in the bus, an unreconstructed Viet Nam veteran, and I watch the familiar countryside of low rolling hills and red dirt farms and cotton fields that go all the way to the horizon.

The South is a big Indian reservation populated by ex-Confederates who are bred like cattle to die in Yankee wars. In Alabama there is no circus to run off to, so we join the Marines.

History is a Frankenstein's monster puppet whose strings are manipulated by the White House. Indians are murderous red devils who spitefully built their villages on top of gold deposits and in the paths of railroads and were unwholesomely partial to captive white women. Confederate soldiers are un-wholesomely partial to black women and had nothing better to do than whip Uncle Tom to death and sell black babies down the river. The Russians, who have never fired so much as a pea-shooter at an American soldier, and who have never taken a cupful of American soil, and who lost twenty-five million people saving the world from Adolf Hitler, are an Evil Empire spawned by Satan, and are our worst enemies on the planet. Because of our history, we drop bombs bigger than Volkswagens onto barefoot peasants twelve thousand miles from home and call it self-defense.

Black John Wayne saw it all: you can stay here and live with us in our constructed phantom paradise if you promise to pay lip service to the lies we live by. If you salute every civil service clerk who claims to be Napoleon, you may play in our asylum.

In America we lie to ourselves about everything and we believe ourselves every time.

Looking through the smoked glass of the bus window is like watching a movie. I see an abandoned black tarpaper shack with broken windows like open mouths. The inevitable stripped and rusting car bodies sit in the weedy front yard next to the inevitable collapsing tool shed.

I see scrub pasture being grazed by a bony red swayback mule.

Nothing but a few metal historical plaques remain to show that the Greyhound bus is rolling along a black strip of asphalt laid down over the graves of a defeated race of people who lived in a stillborn nation, rolling through a haunted region, over buried battles. It's Viet Nam, Alabama.

The South was the American Empire's first subjugated nation. We are a defeated people. Our conquerors have cured us of our quaint customs, quilting parties, barn raisings and hog killings, and have bombed us with revisionist history books and Sears catalogs and have made us over into a homogenized replica of the North.

The only visible relics of our conquered nation are crumbling brick walls and weed-grown fieldstone foundations and fluted white Doric columns being swallowed by swamp water. Crumbling earthworks, trenchlines and gun emplacements, are silent now in the shades of forests of virgin timber, all garrisoned until the end of time by ragged, barefoot Confederate grunts, sweet old ghosts wailing to be understood.

But the Confederate Dream lives on. The Confederate Dream, a desperate and heroic attempt to preserve from federal tyrants the liberty bequeathed to us by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Stubborn sinews of the Confederate Dream live on, deep in our genes, a dream recorded silently and permanently by the metal in this soil.

The Greyhound bus pulls into Russellville. My hometown is moving on the other side of a piece of glass now and looks like television. We glide past the Confederate stone soldier. Beyond the stone soldier I can see a parade breaking up on a back street.

In almost every town in the South that is big enough to have more than one gas station a stone soldier of the finest Italian marble pulls guard duty in the center of town.

Our stone soldier is standing tall, leaning on a marble musket, staring intently at the horizon to detect the advance of Yankee armies.

For generations the stone soldier in Russellville stood his ground in the center of the main intersection in town. But after a drunk driver from Moline, Illinois, splattered his fancy little foreign sports car all over the stone soldier's marble pedestal, the old campaigner--one Yankee to his credit, confirmed--was shifted to a more strategic position across the road and onto the courthouse lawn.

I get off the bus at the courthouse. I say to the bus driver, a sexy young black woman with a red silk scarf around her neck, "Thanks, darlin'. Don't work too hard."

She grins. "You take care now. And welcome home."

Russellville is so small that I used to draw a crowd when I'd set up my old paint-spattered rickety stepladder in front of the Roxy Theater. Climbing up that baling-wired stepladder with an armload of foot-high red plastic letters of the alphabet to put up the title of the latest Elvis movie is probably the most dangerous thing I have ever done.

People are friendly in Russellville, and used to stop and talk to me while I placed the letters, to ask me what the next movie was, or to make fun of my spelling errors, so eventually I started talking back to them, and telling them jokes. Pretty soon I decided I was ready to be and wanted to be an actor in Hollywood. Of course, in Russellville it was easy to stand out and be a star. And it hasn't changed. It's still just a wide place in the road. It's still just another hillbilly half-town, clean and quiet, the kind of place that falls off maps.

I walk past the Roxy Theater, which was built in an old-fashioned design like fancy icing on a Technicolor wedding cake.

I walk into the parade as it turns a corner, breaks ranks, and dissolves into costumed people.

When I was in high school the most common kind of parade down the main street of Russellville was the parade of hot rods full of my friends, one hundred 1955 Chevrolets burning up the last remaining fossil fuels in an eternal looping back and forth through town, from the A&P parking lot SALE-SALE- SPECIAL-SPECIAL at one end of town and back to the King Frosty, beneath an ice-cream cone that had light inside and was as big as a man, and back again, yelling at everybody, giving the finger to the guys, banging on the side of your car at fifteen-year-old jailbait.

Every girl wore her boyfriend's varsity sweater and class ring. The girls put adhesive tape on the rings to make them fit. The big joke was to say, every time you saw a couple who were going steady and sat close together while cruising, "I wonder who's driving?"

I feel like a New Guy in my own hometown.

The band uniforms are of Napoleonic design, red longcoats and tall furry hats, brass buttons and brass buckles. Trumpets and tubas gleam like burnished gold sculptures.

As I scan their faces to see if there's anybody I know, the marchers fall out. The last few ranks continue to lift their knees in a fading reflex even after the snare drummers stop rapping out the cadence on the metal edges of their drums. The fat bass drummer unstraps himself from his drum and puts it down on the ground. The drum says: THE MARCHING 100.

On Main Street, farmers' wives without makeup and farmers who look at events and react, if they react at all, only with shy smiles, flow in converging currents along the sidewalks, heading for their cars and trucks. The men are tall and thin and tanned and wear faded blue overalls and brown felt hats. The women are plump and plain and wear cheap cotton dresses from Sears.

The drum majorette walks by with silver in her eyes, tooting absentmindedly into the silver whistle in her mouth, her perfect body molded by gold sequins. It's Beverly Jo Clark. I know her. But she doesn't recognize me.

She's gone before I can speak to her; she's like a dream come true.

Then come a dozen girls in red sequins and white vinyl cowboy boots, some idly twirling chrome bars with white rubber tips.

I speak to a girl behind one of the blinking batons. She's about seventeen, maybe a senior, but probably a junior. I say, "Hi. Don't I know you?"