The Phantom Blooper (33 page)

I take a step toward Obrey, but my mother steps between us. "Don't you dare lay another hand on my husband!" She turns away from me. "Well, I've had just about all I can stand for one day. I'm give out." As an afterthought she adds, "There's banana pudding for dessert."

Obrey and my mother retreat down the hall. At a safe distance Obrey says to me, "I don't want loaded guns in my house. You ain't impressing nobody. I own the land you're standing on, and I want you off." Then to my mother: "That boy is hog wild and jaybird crazy."

I say, "Don't worry. I'm not staying."

Obrey sneers. "Where you gonna go? Ain't nobody gonna give no job to no crazy Veet-Nam veteran. You're up shit creek without a paddle, boy."

I say, "Hey, I got me a job in Istanbul polishing brass-topped buildings, if that's all right with you, and even if it's not all right with you, shit-for-brains. Now go away. Leave me. Change your pants."

As Obrey and my mother hunker down in their bedroom I can hear my mother saying, "Where's that Istanbul?" and, "I swear, I prayed that the Army would make a man out of him. I prayed, Obrey. I prayed to the Lord."

Old Ma gets up from the table, comes over and hugs me.

I say, "I've missed you, Old Ma. Been doing any fishing?"

Old Ma says, "No, James, I don't get around too much after I broke my hip. I never thought I'd be old, but look at me now." She pats me on the back, but her hand is frail and weak. Old Ma has always been old, but she never seemed old, until now. The bounce has gone out of her. "I'm just an old broad, but I'm still sharp upstairs. You a good boy, James. Your daddy was always proud to bust of you."

I say, "Thank you, Old Ma."

Old Ma whispers to me, "He sure knows how to lap up the joy juice. He's just eat up with jealousy, that Beasley. Don't blame your mama."

Old Ma, looking tired, her face soft but solid, like an old cameo, goes off to bed.

Sissie and I eat banana pudding. Sissie picks through the creamy yellow pudding and eats vanilla wafers and round chips of banana until she looks sick.

I go outside and chop firewood until sundown, until night comes, night, the great black dragon.

When I come in from chopping firewood I go to Sissie's room and I wake her up. She follows me to my room.

I dig into my AWOL bag and pull out a small brown paper sack. I make a
shush
gesture, putting a forefinger to my lips, and I give the paper sack to Sissie.

Sissie opens the sack and peeks inside. Her mouth falls open. She reaches in and pulls out a few of the crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills. "James, I'll bet there's a million dollars in there!"

I say, "Not quite. It's three thousand dollars. From my back pay for when I was a P.O.W. It's yours now."

Sissie says, "But don't you need it?"

I say, "I've kept a couple of thousand. That's all I'm going to need."

Sissie thinks I'm playing a joke. "But this is your money, James. You earned it. "

I laugh. "Well, not actually." To her puzzled look, I say, "I wasn't a very good prisoner."

Sissie doesn't understand. She looks at the bills. "But why you giving it to me? What can I buy?"

I take her hand between my two hands and I hold up the three hands between us. "Listen, Stringbean, I'm going to have to go back into the service. I'll probably be shipped back overseas. Maybe for a long time. I wish I could take you with me, but I can't. In a couple of years you'll be sixteen and they can't put the law on you. When you're sixteen, you take this money and you buy yourself a bus ticket to Arizona. They've still got room to breathe out there. Get yourself a job. You're a smart girl. You got a good head on your shoulders. You'll be okay. I got confidence in you."

Sissie nods, not understanding.

"Now you take this money and hide it. Don't tell anybody you got it. Okay? Not anybody. I want you to promise."

Sissie thinks about it, then says, "I promise, James. Cross my heart and hope to die."

I say, "Wrap it up in wax paper and stick it in a Mason jar and bury it under the house. Okay?"

Sissie nods, not understanding. "Okay, you ol' poop-head. I promise it'll just be our secret." She hugs me good-night. "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite. I'll take real good care of your money for you, big brother, until you come back home."

Sissie goes to her room and I flop down on my back on my bed, still wearing the green of a cold-hearted Marine. I stare at the ceiling. It's hard to sleep. There's no firing in the distance. No dying sick men screaming in the dark. It's too quiet.

When I do sleep I have a nightmare about a napalmed tiger. The napalmed tiger has red, white, and blue stripes. It lopes across my father's fields, slapping watermelons off the vines with powerful claws, splattering the rich earth with black seeds and wet chunks of juicy red meat.

In the morning I feel a painful poking in my ribs. I open my eyes. At first I think I'm having a nightmare and that the old Broom-Maker of the village of Hoa Binh had come to exact her revenge. But it's only my mother, waking me. My mother is holding a broom by the yellow bristles and is poking me in the ribs with the tip of the long handle, careful to keep her distance.

I say, "Ma, that hurts. I'm awake now."

My mother says, "Breakfast is on the table, James. I took your Army clothes out of that little bag and washed them for you. I took them pictures."

I say, "What pictures?"

"They was in your pockets. Them that showed dead people in the war."

The pictures I took from Commander Bryant, the Navy shrink. I say, "Where are they?"

My mother says, "I burned them."

I laugh. "I don't need photographs, Ma. I got pictures of Viet Nam tattooed all over my body. What are you going to do, burn me too?"

She does not reply.

Breakfast. There is gunpowder in my cereal bowl. Civilian gunpowder. Pure and white.

Obrey is not at breakfast. Ma says, "Obrey's sleeping in today. His back has been acting up."

Old Ma says, "Daughter, that man was born tired and he's still resting. Or maybe he's still wore out from his little hissy-fit."

I say, lying, "I'll be leaving tonight. Maybe get a job up North. Or find a place where they got rich farmland. Maybe get a piece of land up North somewhere. Do a little farming."

My mother is deaf and dumb to any unpleasant reality and hears only what she wants to hear; she's pretty much got that down to an art form. But now my mother and I are communicating again because now I am telling her nothing but lies.

Ma, if I dared to speak the truth to you, I'd have to say that I joined the Marines to get away from you and people like you.

In Birmingham I will catch a plane back to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles I'll take a flight to Viet Nam. I'll get a visa by using my old Combat Correspondent I.D. card; I'll say that now I'm a freelance reporter, looking for a story.

From Da Nang I'll thumb a ride on a medevac chopper going toward the DMZ. I'll buy a bicycle. I'll ride the bicycle to the village of Hoa Binh.

I should be there in time for spring planting. Time to plow the paddies and plant the tender rice shoots. Maybe I'll learn to hear the rice grow, after all.

The only time I ever felt like I was being what an American should be and doing what an American should be doing was when I was a prisoner of the Viet Cong. I could be real there. I could be myself. Even when I was playing a role there I was myself. Here I'm expected to play a role, but I don't know who I'm supposed to be. People who have nothing to lose have nothing to live for. I'd rather be killed in a war than be bored to death an inch at a time. In the village of Hoa Binh I was free. I was not a helpless pawn. I had a future. I had friends who could be trusted. War is real and men need reality like they need air and food.

When I was a fighter in the Viet Cong, I was real. When I was a fighter in the Viet Cong, life was not a talk show.

Sitting across from me at the breakfast table, my mother does not know what to say in response to my announcement that I'm leaving and going up North to farm. So she simply ignores it and tries to sound cheerful. "Well, tonight's Obrey's bowling night. Maybe we could give you a ride to the Greyhound station. Save you walking."

I swab up some gravy with a piece of biscuit. "Thank you, Ma. I'll be home on about sundown."

To the gloomy silence around the breakfast table, I say, "Cheer up." I smile and say, "
Toi chong chien trach
." Fingering a braided string inside my shirt, I hold on to the white jade Buddha given to me by Comrade-General Tiger Eye, Commander of the Western Region.

When Ma, Old Ma, and Stringbean look at me, confused, I translate: "
Toi chong chien trach
. It means, 'I'm going home.'"

I walk miles across our neighbor's fields to the Rock Creek Cemetery.

The graves in the cemetery have been covered with special sand that is as white as sugar. On each low mound of earth are green wire stands holding plastic flowers mounted on Styrofoam blocks of pink or white. Once a year, on Decoration Day, the families of the dead come together and clean off the graves of their ancestors, and remember all of the generations that came before, just as they do on TET in Viet Nam.

In the Davis section of the cemetery lie about fifty of our people, going back to 1816. The oldest marker is for William Oliver Davis. The marker is a thin slab of orange fieldstone, weathered, the name and the date almost unreadable.

Near my father's grave is the impressive granite marker put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy back in the 1930s, when Solomon Davis was buried in his Confederate uniform, seventy years after the end of the War for Southern Independence. Grandpa Davis was a scout for Bedford Forrest and was wounded at the battle of Shiloh. He died in the middle of the jazz Age with a grapeshot the size of an iron golf ball still inside his chest.

My father's grave is freshly dug, not yet covered with white sand, but still the plain rich brown of turned soil, the color of soil in a freshly plowed field.

I touch the gray limestone block that says: PLEASANT CURTIS DAVIS.

My first memories of my father are of me bouncing beside him, a boy sitting on the hard seat of our green wagon. The wagon was drawn by a sturdy and indestructible one-eyed mule we called Roosevelt. The wagon bed was loaded high with ripe sun-warmed watermelons.

We'd drive down to the county highway and park by the road. To people in the cars that whizzed down the highway we sold watermelons, big, dark green, and round, for a quarter each, while Roosevelt grazed on wild flowers by the side of the road.

My job was to make change out of a cigar box while my father helped our customers pick a good melon, ripe but not too ripe. He'd thump the melons hard with his finger until he found one that sounded just ripe enough.

At the end of the day my father would count up the cash and pay me my wages. My father liked to say, "If you've got a dollar you didn't earn, you won't have fun when you spend it."

My father never had any money, but his weathered face had that dignified and undefeated strength that comes from keeping faith with the land. He'd say, laughing, each morning when he came to wake me up at the crack of dawn, "Farming puts iron into your blood!"

One day some pogue book-farmers come down from up North, college kids working for the Yankee law. Wanted our neighbors, mostly sharecroppers, to spray bug poison over the soil.

My father refused, but some of our neighbors went on ahead. They sprayed poison out of airplanes and it spread onto our land. The poison ended up killing all the earthworms that help to keep the soil arable. We lost the crop.

Next season my father rolled his John Deere tractor and broke his hip. Our friends and kinfolk pitched in to help, and we made a crop that year.

Hospital bills put us so far in the hole that a rich man from Decatur offered to buy us out. The rich man said we could stay on and work the land for him on shares. The rich man was not a farmer; he was a banker who liked to buy land. The banker joked, "Land is the one thing you can't make more of."

The only way my father could hold on to the farm was to take a job with a strip-mining outfit in Jasper. He hated his job because of how strip-mining ruins the land. One night after supper I asked him how he liked his new job. He said, "Son, I done plowed up a snake."

Back in the big double-U-two, when Americans were all ten feet tall and named Mac, my father was a cook in the Navy. At battle stations he was an ack-ack gunner. Somewhere off Okinawa he shot down a kamikaze plane that was diving into an aircraft carrier. The plane exploded so close that a piece of wingtip hit my father in the neck. My mother says that my father looked into the Japanese pilot's face moments before the plane burst into a red ball of fire.

Standing over my father's grave, one war older, I think:
In every other way, you never let me down. You were always as dependable as a tractor. But you never told me about war, and I don't know why. You never talked about your war. Your brothers, my uncles, who fought the Nazis in Europe, never talked about the war. All of you let me go off and stick my face into a meat grinder, when you all knew it was going to be a meat grinder. I went to Viet Nam a military virgin, too dumb to do anything but draw fire. And you cheered me and were proud of me and you wished me good luck, but you never gave me one word of warning. I didn't want to go; I did it for you.

Touching my father's cold gray granite tombstone one last time, I know that I've got no choice but to secure this detail and move out toward the future. Time measured in blood never ends. Blood never dries. Facts are not pretty. By some black magic a stray Viet Cong bullet ricocheted around the planet and blasted open an artery inside my father's head.

My last day on the farm, all of the hogs had died of cholera and my father and I spent the day burning them.

My father is dead now, and time is moving away from him. Meanwhile I have plowed up a few snakes of my own, the ground is full of snakes; that's my op and I'll walk it.

But, touching the tombstone, I wonder if my father knows that I'm here, and if he knows, is he still proud of me? I'm not even twenty-one years old yet and already I've killed more men than Billy the Kid.