The world played chess, p.15
The World Played Chess, page 15
“Shit,” Mif said, knowing this would add an hour to his drive.
We drove the El Camino Real into San Mateo and dropped off Cap. We were nearly to the 280 freeway when Mif again swore. “The gas light came on. We’re on empty.”
I leaned over to gauge the needle. I worked on cars with my dad and fancied that I knew more about them than my friends. But E was E, and the needle was on it.
We found a gas station near the freeway entrance. Mif swore again. The gas cap was locked. The gas crisis that had followed the Iranian revolution had caused people to siphon gas tanks, which led to locked tanks.
“Where’s the key?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mif said.
We checked the key ring but didn’t find it. We then tore apart the glove box. No key. It wasn’t there. We had no way to get ahold of Mif’s sister. After fifteen minutes, we did the only thing we could. We set out for home. I told Mif he could sleep at my house and we’d get gas in the morning.
Mif jumped on the freeway. As we neared Black Mountain Road, Mif put on his blinker. “No,” I said. “Go to the Trousdale exit. If we run out of gas, we can coast down the hill and get closer to my house.”
It was a good plan. In theory.
The VW bug bucked as we neared the uphill grade to the exit, then it died. Mif pulled to the side of the freeway.
“We can push it,” I said.
Hell, Mif had a chest like an inflatable raft. I stood at the driver’s door steering and pushing. Mif went to the back, bent to the bumper, and pushed like he was hitting a football blocking sled. The bug picked up speed. As we neared the top of the grade, we gave it another push and I jumped in behind the wheel.
“Get in,” I yelled, but before I knew it, I was flying down the exit. “I’ll get my car and come back and get you,” I shouted out the window, seeing Mif getting smaller in the bug’s side mirror.
It was idiotic, really, another illustration of that underdeveloped frontal cortex, or simply beer on the brain. I should have just stopped and let Mif in. We were on a downhill slope, and I could easily have gotten rolling again, but my thought process was to not hit the brakes, to pick up as much speed as I could, and to coast as close to home as possible. And that’s what I did. I ran every stop sign on the downhill grade and made it to my house. I didn’t try to be stealth this night. I ran inside to the flicker of blue-gray light coming from the television in my parents’ bedroom. I grabbed the keys to the Pinto from the desk in my room, ran back out the door, and made my way to Trousdale. Along the way I expected to see Mif.
I didn’t.
He had to be on the exit. He wasn’t.
I thought it unlikely he could still be on the freeway, but at a loss as to where else he could have gone, I drove onto the on-ramp heading south, the wrong direction, took the first exit and made my way north again. As I approached the spot where I’d left Mif, I slowed and looked along the side of the road. I didn’t see him. With each passing moment I got more and more concerned.
I thought of William telling me that he didn’t make friends in Vietnam, that it was easier if you didn’t really know the guys who died.
“Shit.”
I took the exit, scouring every shadow. I backtracked to my street. No Mif. I turned around and drove back, compulsively swearing. My mind thought of the worst-case scenarios.
What if he got hit by a car on the freeway?
What if the police picked him up wandering along the freeway?
What if somebody killed him?
I kept driving, kept looking. All the while, William Goodman’s words kept flowing through my mind.
You don’t make friends.
Guys can be gone in an instant.
It’s just bad luck.
I had visions of driving the Pinto, Mif’s battered, bleeding, and lifeless body strapped across the hood, like those soldiers on the armored personnel carrier that had carried their bodies from the jungle. I drove backstreets. I drove in circles. When I finally looked at my watch, it was one in the morning. I’d been looking for Mif for an hour. I drove home and contemplated calling Mif’s house, but what would I say?
Uncertain what to do, I did the next stupid thing. I went to bed. It seemed like just minutes before my mother’s voice woke me.
“Vincent?” She stood in my bedroom. “Mrs. Mifton is on the phone. She said Lenny didn’t come home last night. Is that his car parked in front of the house?”
Fear gripped me. I got up and went to the phone and explained what had happened. “I got my car and went back to get him, but I couldn’t find him.”
I don’t know what possessed me to keep talking. If Mif’s mother wasn’t upset before, she certainly was now. I’d just painted the worst possible scenario for her. She no doubt thought her son was dead and that I had abandoned him.
I was no marine.
I hung up the phone and tried to explain to my mom. She wasn’t pleased, but she didn’t have time to deal with it. She had to get to work. I showered and was getting ready for work when the phone rang.
Mif.
I swore a blue streak. “Where the hell did you go?”
Mif laughed that nervous chuckle. “You took off. You left me.”
“I yelled that I was coming back.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I ran to Ed’s house and woke him.”
Ed’s house was a couple miles from the exit, but so was mine. I know Mif chose Ed’s house because he could get into the room in the back without waking Ed’s parents. Smart thinking, I suppose, except it screwed me when Mif didn’t call home.
Then again, I’d screwed myself.
I picked up Mif and we got gas for the bug. He’d reached his sister. The key to the tank was on a ring on the emergency brake between the seats. We were such idiots.
I was late getting to work and decided to just come clean. Todd and William laughed their collective asses off.
“Why didn’t you just hit the brakes?” William asked.
I told him my rationale. Then I said, “Shit, I thought the guy got killed.”
William’s grin vanished. He didn’t say another word. He didn’t have to. He gave me that thousand-mile stare, like the one he gave me at Behan’s. I had no business mentioning the possibility of Mif dying, not to two guys who truly understood that possibility every day for a year. I had no clue what I was talking about. If I or one of my friends died at eighteen, it wouldn’t be from a Viet Cong bullet, or from stepping on a land mine while I humped through a jungle. It wouldn’t be bad luck.
It would be from utter and complete stupidity.
May 5, 1968
The moratorium has officially ended and so have the peace talks. The Viet Cong launched Mini-Tet, firing rockets and mortars at Saigon and more than a hundred other cities and military installations. We can hear the bombs going off and see the flashes of the explosions at night.
We’ve been told to expect to saddle up and go outside the wire on long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs or “lurps”) for weeks at a time. “Vietnam is a war of nerves, each side waiting for the other to blink first,” Cruz said one night in our bunker. “The difference is, we’re all waiting to blink and go home. For Charlie, this is home. He can wait forever.”
I was in my bunker, throwing a blade at the wood post—I’ve become proficient; I can stick the blade just about every throw. In between, I was talking with Longhorn, whose DEROS had come up. He was preparing to ship out on the next Huey bringing supplies to our firebase. Longhorn’s real name is Jimmy Edelson. He’s from El Paso, Texas, and performs in the rodeo circuit—rides bulls, horses, the whole thing. Jimmy isn’t big, but he looks like a tough little shit.
“Got something for you, Shutter.” He handed me a Tiger Chewing Tobacco tin. “I kept my personal stuff in here—a picture of my girlfriend and my parents, and a medal.”
“What medal?” I asked, thinking it a military medal.
The medal was now around his neck. He held it out. “Saint Jude, the saint of desperate cases and lost causes.”
I laughed. “Sounds about right for Vietnam.”
“I’m not taking any part of the Nam home with me. I’m leaving it all here. That tin brought me good luck. I hope it does the same for you.”
I thanked him, though I’ve never been superstitious. I do wear the crucifix my mother gave me, and I pull it out and kiss it whenever I get the chance. Maybe say a little prayer. I figured the tin might come in handy though. I opened it and fit my journal and my pencil inside. That’ll do, I thought.
“I kept it in the pocket of my flak jacket. Right here,” Longhorn said, putting his hand over his heart. “One more thing Charlie had to penetrate before he killed me.”
I went back to throwing the knife. Cruz came in, and I nearly impaled him with the blade. Missed his shoulder by an inch. He didn’t even flinch.
“Tomorrow,” he said to me, “we’re heading outside the wire. Search and destroy.”
I nodded. I was uncertain how I felt. I’d thought I would be happy to have something to do, but now a million thoughts were running through my head. Like that night with Haybale. Shit just got real.
“We’re going after the NVA, try to disrupt whatever they think they’re going to start.”
The NVA. I recalled Cruz’s admonition—that they won’t run. They will stand and fight.
I noticed Longhorn never looked at Cruz. Never looked at me. For him, the war was over. For me, this was just the start. I looked at the tin. I’ll slip it into the pocket of my flak jacket. One more thing Charlie has to penetrate before he can kill me.
Chapter 12
July 12, 1979
I had progressed on the job and was handling the work well. Now that Mike was working in the insurance industry, Todd and William didn’t treat me like his kid brother. They treated me like an adult and expected me to handle myself like one. I figured that was because no one had treated them like kids at eighteen, far from it.
When I left the house that morning, I noticed the sky had clouded over, or maybe it was just my mood. I was nursing a wicked hangover despite downing a tall glass of water and four Tylenol before going to bed at two a.m. I was also dog tired, and my brain was addled. I’d been out late every night of the week. As the summer progressed, my friends and I tried to compress as much fun as possible into the time we had left.
By the time I reached the jobsite, the clouds had darkened. Tendrils resembling the barren, spindly branches of winter trees reached down from the sky. It did not rain during the Burlingame summer, not that I could ever recall, but it would rain today, and from the look of those angry clouds, this would not be a mist or a sprinkle.
William knew I was hungover the moment I stepped into the garage, but he had no sympathy for my plight. “Night is your time,” William liked to say. “Come morning, your ass belongs to Todd.”
His, too.
“Brought you something.” He handed me a tool belt, an older one he said he’d had at home. He said it was his first belt, and I sensed the belt meant something to him, though he downplayed it. I told him how much I appreciated it. I wore the belt proudly, and, like the jungle boots, it gave me attitude.
“No time for that now,” he said, not with the sky about to open and no roof on the remodel, making everything on the first level susceptible to water damage. As we opened the tarps William bought that morning, he explained that when drywall gets saturated, it loses its structural integrity, making it unsalvageable, and even if salvageable, wet walls become susceptible to infectious mold. The knob and tube wiring between the walls was at risk of shorting out, and otherwise becoming damaged, and the decades-old hardwood floors could buckle and warp and would be expensive to replace.
William moved as if in battle mode. I felt like a dull knife, barely cutting through my morning fog as I tried to keep up. Twice I went around the side of the house to throw up, first my toast and more Tylenol I took. Then dry heaves. I wanted to go home and sleep it off, but I didn’t have that luxury. “Lock and load,” William kept saying. “Got a job to do.” We were in a fight, the enemy didn’t care if I was hungover, and I didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing my battles.
“You do what has to be done, or we all suffer the consequences,” William said.
William looked at the darkening sky like it was an old acquaintance, though not a friend, come back to pay him a visit. I imagined it was. William had described the weather in Vietnam as “hot, with rain, becoming hotter with still more rain, turning to sizzling with showers, and a shitload of mosquitos.”
William and I fastened bungee cords to hold down the tarps. It was a lot of work getting the tarps over the new roof ridge. We finished, barely, just as the first showers fell.
The rain sounded like hail as it splattered against the blue tarps, and I noticed William looking up at the noise like it was something far more lethal. “I’m going up to check the tarp for leaks,” William said, leaving me in the garage.
All the rushing around and climbing up and down ladders had caused the blood to pound at my temples like the rain pounding on the tarps. The prior day Todd had had me cutting lengths of rebar for a brick barbecue we were building at another jobsite. I think it was busywork, but it was something to do and I hadn’t yet finished.
Cutting metal rebar is done by switching out the wood-cutting blade on a Skilsaw for a black carbon fiber blade that cuts metal. I’d watched William and Todd change out the blade a number of times, and I’d watched them prop the rebar over the toe of their boot to get one end off the ground when they cut.
Still moving like a dullard, I changed out the blade, plugged in the Skilsaw, put on protective goggles, measured a piece of rebar, and put it over my boot. The blade whined and screeched and threw sparks when it hit the rebar. I hesitated, thinking I should put on leather gloves, then dismissed the thought.
I was bent over, the metal blade spinning, sparks flying, when William came into the garage and shouted over the whine of the blade.
“Stop!”
I turned and looked up at him through the goggles. He put a hand to his throat and made a violent slashing motion, then reached out as if to grab me, but pulled back before he touched me. With the gray light behind him and the fingers of his hand spread wide, he looked like the ghost of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I released the trigger, and when the noise of the saw faded, William stepped forward, his arm still outstretched.
“Drop the rebar,” he said, his voice calm but adamant. It sounded like he was telling me not to move, as if I had just stepped on one of the land mines he had described in Vietnam. I let the rebar drop. It pinged twice against the concrete, the sound tempered by the puddle of water in which I stood.
The dull blade of my mind sharpened. The cloudy haze fogging my common sense lifted, and my frontal cortex made the connection. I had gripped a metal bar in one bare hand. In the other hand I held a saw plugged into a compromised electrical outlet, while standing in a puddle of water. I flashed to my childhood, to being in a crawl space over the kitchen with my dad while he repaired a stove fan. My father had looked at me and said, “If I start to shake. Don’t touch me.”
I’d never been so scared.
I stepped back. William let out a held breath. He looked pale, his pupils enlarged dark circles in a sea of white. William had been scared for me. Now he was angry.
“Do you have a death wish?” He asked the question with such intensity, such brutal honesty, such piercing practicality, that I felt compelled to answer, though I knew his question to be rhetorical.
“No,” I said.
He shook his head, like a father disappointed with a child. “You’re standing in a puddle of water with an electric power tool and holding a piece of metal.” He punctuated every other word with a profanity. “You’re supposed to be smart.” He pointed to his temple, a quick, decisive gesture. “Think.”
Then he turned and left the garage, but not before he brought the heels of his hands to his eyes.
I looked at the tool belt William had given to me that morning and realized I had just thrown away what respect I had earned in one dull moment of stupidity.
I imagined William had experienced too many of those senseless moments and the resulting consequences, moments that could never be taken back, never changed, never forgotten. Guys were there one moment and gone the next.
If William mentioned the incident to Todd when he arrived later in the day, Todd never said anything about it. He never called me an idiot or a moron or asked how I had such a wanton lack of common sense. He never fired me.
Still, William hardly talked the remainder of the day, and after work he didn’t squat in the garage to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer. He gathered his red cooler, put it in the bed of his El Camino, and drove off. I knew William had experienced far too much death for a man who had just turned thirty, and I knew I had brought him back to a place he had tried hard, though unsuccessfully, to forget. I’d brought him back to the bush.
Perhaps I was just too naive to understand that death did not discriminate because of age, and that I could die, in an instant and without any warning.
William and Todd were not that naive.
They were never given the chance.
Over the weeks of work, I’d come to learn certain other things about them. Similarities. Neither seemed to have much of a plan for their future. They both lived from one paycheck to the next. And when each day ended, they routinely grabbed a beer from the cooler. And they didn’t stop at one. I knew what a hangover looked and felt like. I’d gotten that down to a science. Their tired eyes and lethargic movements as they sipped cups of black coffee like it was a tonic every morning came from too little sleep and too much alcohol. I doubted they drank to socialize, as I did. I doubted they drank to celebrate the future.
