The Phantom Blooper (34 page)

"Life," I say before I go, "that's something I learned off of you."

On about sundown, when the crickets start to sing, I walk back to the house, tired from hiking through the woods all day.

Still in uniform, I put on my dirty Stetson. I pick up my AWOL bag.

Obrey gives me a ride to the bus station in a black Ford pickup truck. The truck has extra wide tires and chrome wheel rims.

As we drive away from the house I was born in I do not look back. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that artillery shells will be going in, blasting the ancient wood apart. I'm afraid that Phantom fighter-bombers will be booming in low over the treeline, strafing the banty hen in the yard with automatic cannon fire and laying shiny canisters of napalm across Old Ma's vegetable garden, burning the scarecrow and the squash.

I was born in Viet Nam, a long time ago. My hometown is strange to me now, like a foreign country. It's too late for Vanessa and me to settle down in a little bunker somewhere, cook C-rations, clean our M-16s, and raise recruits.

If I look back, even for a moment, the old house will be gone, swallowed up by a whirlwind of red fire and smoke.

I look forward, straight ahead. As my father said to me the day I left the farm to go to Viet Nam: "The step is hard that tears away the roots."

The Phantom Blooper is going home.

I ride in the open truck bed, with Sissie on one side and Obrey's purple bowling bag on the other. Sissie and I are scrunched in with a dozen cardboard boxes full of empty beer cans that have been stomped flat. The sun has gone down and it's cold enough to freeze the personals off a cast-iron dog.

At the bus station I say goodbye to my family.

The bus station is actually
Stella & O.V.'s Shell
station, a white mobile home set up on cinder blocks. Upon a broken thermometer on a big flat Coca-Cola bottle of rusting red metal hangs a hand-lettered cardboard sign: CLOSED.

Obrey says, "Boy, I'm a good Christian. I forgive you for the things you did last night. I guess maybe you got some call to get your back up. I hope you do real good up North." He smiles his sickening sweet smile, but he does not offer to shake hands.

My mother takes Obrey's arm and says, "You see, James? Things are going to go right for us." She gives me a stiff little hug. "You be careful. Be a good boy and things will go right for you. Write us a letter when you get settled, so we'll know where you are."

Old Ma hugs me and says, "Make the most out of the horsepower God gave you, James. Bless your heart. We all love you."

I say, "I love you too, Old Ma."

The family climbs back into the cab of the pickup truck while Sissie hugs me. Sissie is crying. She doesn't say anything, but kisses me on both cheeks and holds out a gift for me inside a brown paper sack.

Sissie wipes tears from her eyes with a shirt sleeve and hops into the back of the truck.

The black pickup pulls away. Everybody waves. Obrey toots his horn.

Sissie continues to wave to me from the back of the truck until she is out of sight.

Inside the brown paper sack is a glass fruit jar. The fruit jar is full of fireflies. Alabama kids call these fireflies "lightning bugs."

The lightning bugs radiate phosphorescent light. The false light is cold and yellow and faintly edged with green.

When I see the headlights of the Birmingham Express coming over the hill in the dark I unscrew the lid from the Mason jar and I throw the lid away. I hold the open fruit jar up high over my head, as high as I can reach, like I'm the Statue of Liberty.

I give the fruit jar a swat with my Stetson and a hundred phosphorescent dots of light explode up into the night sky, winking like muzzle flashes in a treeline, a hundred Alabama lightning bugs, alive and free, and glowing, like sparks from a fire.

*****

Table of Contents

Titlepage

The Winter Soldiers

Travels With Charlie

The Proud Flesh