Carry Me Home (26 page)

Wapinski wrote to Blackwell, wrote to all levels of command, to the adjutant’s office. He had nothing but praise for every soldier who’d served in the A Shau. He suggested the defense lawyer obtain affidavits from Thompson, from Quay Le, from Billy Smith and Johnson and Edwards, the medic who treated Blackwell in the field. If Tyrone Blackwell refused to return to the field, Wapinski wrote, it was likely because of rational and justifiable fear based on self-preservation—which the man had earned. Before he finished the last letter he realized his eyes were clouding; he was choking. There was before him a loaded chopper, the smell stuck in his nose, a chopper full of dead Americans.

He breathed heavily, ran the back of his wrist across his cheeks. Could we have lured them into ambushes in the valley? Could we have cordoned off 937? Waited them out? Bombed them out? He did not answer the questions but instead flipped to a news story of accusations made by Senator Ted Kennedy. His concentration faltered. He skimmed the article, whispered with little conviction, “He doesn’t understand. He just doesn’t fuckin understand.”

More hours passed. Bob Wapinski read the file his grandfather had assembled on the 101st. Then he read the stories his grandfather had collected for his father from ’42 to ’45. As he read, it again hit him that
news
was something more than what it reported—something much more. And that answering the question, What is today’s news? with a recap of the stories was like answering the question, What is God? by saying the Our Father.

Bobby Wapinski opened the manila envelope, opened the first letter. There was no date of writing, but on the envelope, Miriam, in her efficient manner, had noted “Received: 11 Oct. ’42.” The penmanship—pencilmanship—was crude. Bobby had not recognized that in 1959 when he’d last read those pages. Nor had he recognized how simply the letters were written, as if his father were a young boy who’d grown up poor on a farm in the mountainous outback of the Alleghenys. Letter after letter repeated the same phrases, made the same grammatical and spelling errors. Bobby almost began correcting them. Letter after letter asked about Brian, asked for a photograph of their baby and a photo of mother and child. There were no mentions of having received one. And all the letters from the Pacific ended with “I pray for you. Pray for me. I’m a melancholy baby until we meet again.”

Bob Wapinski paused. Ah Pa, he thought. Pa! Pa! Why? He closed his eyes. In his hands he still held the new letters, letters written after Paul Wapinski abandoned his family, abandoned his son Robert who so wished he’d not. Pa! he thought again. His face sagged. Pa, I wanted to come home to you. You know that? Sometimes I thought, sometimes over there I thought maybe when I came home, you know, maybe I could bring you home, too. I would have told you all about it. You could have held me. Once you did. I know you once did. With you Pa ... why do I have to think patient inquiry? Obligations? Responsibilities? I wanted you to be here ... to hold me ... to tell me it ... it was ... What drives this thing, ME? What steers it? I—I feel like a damn raft on some damn river. Pa, we could have come home together!

January 14, 1948

Dear Miriam,

Cleveland is a big city. Bigger then I like. I got a factory job. The pay isn’t much but I don’t need much. I’m sending you everything I can. Don’t try to get to me. I got things to work out and I can’t do it with you harpin on me. I guess I’m not enough man for you and you deserve more then me. Buy Brian a baseball glove and some crackerjacks. There’s extra money here for it. And something for the baby. I pray for you.

Paul

Bobby stared at the letter. Again he’d expected more. How badly he wanted his father to be more, wanted to see in those letters the man his grandfather described. The second and third letters were similar, each mentioning money sent, requesting she spend some on the boys. The fourth acknowledged Joanne’s birth. The fifth was postmarked St. Louis, December 1952. It too mentioned money sent, indicating Paul Wapinski had been mailing cash to his wife every month for four years, that there was trouble at work and he’d been laid off. Finally there was only one more; the postmark was but half-printed, the date barely legible. Bobby deciphered
53
and
Texas.
Miriam had not receipted it.

Dear Miriam.

I’m working again. The boys here drink a lot. They are good friends. Everyone of them went through the same stuff I did and I finally have found a place where I can talk and not be crazy. Tell Pop and Mom where I am. I’ll get a letter to them too. I’m really sorry that circumstances have forced this on us. I pray it would be different. Tell Brian to help his brother and sister more. Sometimes I recall that littlest guy and I even miss him spitting up on me. I’m not a very good man for what I put you through. I know that. I’m makin a lot of money right now with the oil coming in and I’ll be able to send you a lot.

The letter stopped in the middle of the second sheet. It was unsigned. In the envelope there was a simple blank card scribed by a different hand. It said: “We’re sorry about Paul. He was a fine, fine friend.” There were four signatures: Tom. Jack. Omeed. Jimmy.

Bobby Wapinski was stunned, stunned beyond shaking, beyond anger, beyond belief. Why had no one shown him this letter? Had they contacted this Tom, this Jack, Omeed, Jimmy? What did his ma, his grandfather, know that they hadn’t told him? Had Miriam written back? “Has he,” he’d written in one letter, “settled down for you?” He knew. He knew I needed him. She must have written. What else had they known for sixteen years? Since he was seven! He felt tears well to his eyes but they did not fall. He felt injustice, anger—anger, anger—but it would not focus and he felt helpless, empty. He pushed the letter out of reach, stared at the desk. He wanted to get up, run to the house, shake the letter, the card, in his grandfather’s face. But he was spent, exhausted, numb. He lay his head on the desk, looked at the letter, the envelope, a foreshortened plane with illegible pencil smears. It was late afternoon. Bobby Wapinski fell to sleep; fell not asleep, but into a semiconsciousness similar to the half sleeps he’d had for nearly a year in Asia, an infantryman’s sleep.

Now they are shooting. They had come from the mountain, a human wave. Behind them, unseen, there is the vibration, the trembling, the roar of tracks, tanks, self-propelled howitzers, unseen. He is low, crawling, positioning himself. The crack of small arms comes from the far side, from the lead element of his ambush, comes premature setting off a torrent of return fire that isolates the lead element from the long base. The enemy spreads out, continues advancing. The mud surface is slick. He slips as he crawls forward into the midst of his men. The mud is thick, deep, grabbing, sucking him down. He strains to move forward but is mired. Overhead a new roar, a beating mixing with the downpour, and now mortar explosions mixing with thunder and the trembling ooze of the earth. Bam. Thud. He is hit. He doesn’t feel it. He crawls on. They advance. Behind him men move up, before him they fall back. All know the lead is isolated, lost, out of contact. Still the enemy advances. Now they return fire. Friend, foe, locked in face-to-face slugfest. Across the trail, behind a hummock, his unit retreats. BamThudHitAgainPain. Now they are sliding away. He is sliding away from himself left in the mud, left on the hillside. “I pray for you. Pray for me.” Sliding away. BamThudBamThudBamThud. There is no pain, only the smell of blood and shit and blood and flesh and blood. There is no sight except the last view of himself in the mud as he, they, slide back, last glimpse of himself, on the mud floor eating mud, trying to hide, to eat mud so quietly. Then there is the room, the masks, the hustle bustle, “NEXT.” Get up! He lies there. Get up! It is not a busy day after all. There are nurses leaving, going to the club, corpsmen chatting softly, betting on a ballgame, smoking. They’ve decided not to treat him because they are tired. It has become habit because of the worst days of mass casualties, the busy days, to let the goners go—but today is a slow day—s l o w d a y. He can see it. See into their minds, see how tired they are, see how they think about him, how they see his glassy eyes, how they don’t think of him. “Covered with mud! Dirty. Like a pig. Sounds like a pig. When you learn to eat like a human being we’ll—Jesus! I can’t stand it anymore! Put him in the corner to cool ... in the corner to cool, inthecornertocool.”

Wapinski woke. His head snapped up. How much had been a dream, how much did he control, he did not know. “Fuck it!” he said aloud. “Fuck em all! Drive on!”

Winter arrived at High Meadow in mid-December. The temperature dropped thirty degrees on the night of the 10th and on the morning of the 11th it barely warmed at all. That night the temperature dropped to single digits. On the 13th a low front swept in and precipitation fell as frigid rain, then froze into a layer of ice. By noon the ice was half an inch thick.

It was transition time. At the back of Bobby’s mind were Viet Nam, his father’s letters, Red. Viet Nam, he thought, had become a hook to his past, a momentary identity penetrating into some deep layer of self-definition.

Grandpa had heated up a pan of chicken broth and the two of them sat, sipping the steaming broth. “Do you know what you asked me once when you were a little boy?” Grandpa asked Bob.

“Unt-uh,” Bob intoned.

“You once asked me if being truthful meant not telling a lie even when Pinocchio would tell a lie?”

“How old was I when I said that?”

“I don’t know. Five. Maybe six. Do you know what I told you?”

“No. I don’t remember.”

“I don’t remember either.” Grandpa laughed and Bob laughed too and Josh jumped up and slapped both his front paws on the table and seemed to want to laugh with them.

“G’down.” Bob pushed him, still laughing.

“I mighta said something like this,” Grandpa said. “I really can’t remember. But I mighta said, being truthful means doing what your heart tells you is right. That’s about the way one talks to a five-year-old, isn’t it?”

“What are you trying to tell me, Granpa?”

“I’m saying, don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable to you.”

“Um-hmm. You taught me that way back.”

“You like the farm, don’t you?”

“Of course. It’s always been my favorite place.”

“Mine too. But you aren’t much of a farmer.”

“Nope. I guess not. I, ah ...”

“Doesn’t make much difference. None of the farms around here produce enough income to keep a family anyway.”

“The Lutz farm makes money.”

“Adolph’d make money if his place was solid rock,” Pewel Wapinski said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t know if you’re being truthful with yourself. You’ve got that gal out in California and you’re over here. You could have a job in town, work up here. You could work the farm. You could run a business from up here like what’s his name two places beyond Adolph’s does. But Bob, I don’t want you attaching your life to this place if it’s not valuable to you.”

Bob Wapinski leaned his forearms on the table, grasped the soup bowl with both hands. “Why didn’t you tell me about my father?”

“Tell you what? Oh. Texas?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well ... well, tell you when?”

“When you knew.”

“Me an his ma went to Texas to search for him. You wouldn’t remember that. Put ads in all those papers. Figured that odd name’d get us some results. But we never come up with a single thing. I thought later, maybe, being that he was kind of hiding his exact whereabouts from Miriam, that maybe he was really in Oklahoma but sent that last letter from Texas ... or they did it for him.”

“She knew where he was. She must have written him.”

“We all wrote im. Always to general delivery. But he never had an address after Missoura.”

“I could have been told.”

“At seven or eight!”

“Yes.”

“Bob ... we still don’t know. Maybe he’s hiding. Sides, sometimes a man has to discover things in his own time. What could you of done at seven?”

Over the next month, through Christmas and New Year’s and into the coldest days of January, Bob Wapinski fantasized about Red. He wrote her almost every day and received a letter from her as frequently. Whatever their relationship might have lacked when they were together, whatever their trepidations, the voids were filled in their letters and in their minds. Their plans took shape. Bob asked Red to find out about residence requirements for California state schools. “I’d like to take some courses in engineering, in city planning, maybe a few art classes,” he wrote. “What would it cost if I were a resident? I can use the GI Bill for tuition.”

Red called, told him the addresses to write to for brochures. It was their first live communication since the day she’d driven off. He hadn’t expected the call. When it was over he felt odd, dissatisfied, yet he told himself it was because it had happened so suddenly and he had not been able to get his mind into the right gear. If anything, his move to California went from possible to certain, his letters became more amorous and her expressed apprehension dwindled.

“This past week,” he wrote in January, “I’ve felt your absence the most. I cannot think of a thing better than being with someone you love—especially if that someone’s like you.”

In turn she answered, “When you get here, if we can afford it and I can take the time, let’s go to a big hotel in San Francisco and get reacquainted. I can’t wait to take you to North Bay Mall. It’s such a pleasure to be there, to walk in the open air down the esplanade between the stores and to look in all the windows, or just to sit on the benches and watch the people. They are much happier than people in Mill Creek and it shows. I’m so happy to be here—even if it rains so much. One of the jewelry shoppes has the most beautiful rings. I hope that we’ll be able to work out our differences and live happily ever after like in a goddamn fairytale. I say HURRAY for goddamn fairytales. At work, Pauline is getting a divorce. We went out last night and drank three bottles of wine.”

If Red’s January tone was relaxed, expectant, and Bobby’s was peaceful, transitional, Pewel Wapinski’s bordered on frantic. “Bob,” Pewel addressed his grandson at breakfast, “a man lives easier when he has a set of guidelines he lives by.”