The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (12 page)

Something woke me early that morning. Not the house. Margaret’s regular breathing was as always, and I could sense the presence of Stephanie, a now-unfamiliar blessing. I went downstairs, ran some water in the sink, and washed off the serving dishes Margaret had set to soak overnight. Nice surprise for her when she got up.

Of course, I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang.

“Hey, Al,” I greeted him. Drunk again. “What’s the hurry? It’s only six months, not five years between calls this time.”

“How d’you like it, Joe?” he demanded. “Those little bastards pulled it off. They don’t want to go, so, by God, they stop the war. Can you believe it? Not like us, was it. I tell you, ol’ buddy, we were suckers. Go where we were told, hup two three four, following orders like goddamn fools, and these kids change the rules on us and get away with it.”

Maybe it would be better. Margaret and Steff had held hands and cried for joy. I had to believe it was better, that I wasn’t just bitching because other men’s sons wouldn’t have to go through what I had. I started to talk Al down like I had in Korea, but my heart wasn’t in it.

The sky was gray. All the houses on Outlook were dark. Soon it would be dawn and the streetlights would go out, regular as an army camp.

But what were those lights going on? I levered up from my chair—damn, my bones were creaking—and peered out. Lights on at Bentfield’s? And, oh my God, Johnny Bentfield... no. Oh no.
Not my son, thank God!
Dammit, what kind of a man was I to thank God like that? Sometimes I make myself want to puke.

“Al!” I broke into his ramblings. “I gotta hang up
now
. Something’s going on on the street.”

“Probably a bunch of stoned kids, celebrating the new age. Well, they’re welcome to it. Let ’em come running to me when it blows up in their faces. I’ll laugh.”

“Yeah, Al. Sure. But I gotta go.”

Moving more quietly than I had since Korea, I slipped upstairs and slid open drawers for undershorts, slacks, a sports shirt. Very cautiously, listening to see if they’d wake up, I dressed in the bathroom, then left the house, moving as cautiously as if I were scouting out my own neighborhood. I sneaked over to Bentfield’s and peered in the window. At least they didn’t have a dog. If what I feared was true, they’d have more on their minds than listening for prowlers. And if I were wrong, please God, if I were wrong, they were good enough friends I could always make up something.

But they were in robes in the living room. Alma Bentfield sat hunched over, hands over her face, while Stan came in, gray-faced, with coffee. The two little girls clutched each other, too sleepy to feel yet how badly they were going to hurt.

God
damn
! Just a little longer, and we’d have brought Johnny home safe. Someone must have called from Vietnam. Unauthorized. Don’t ask me how.

I slipped out of their yard and back home.

“What’s wrong?” Margaret’s voice was sharp and came from outside Stephanie’s room. She must have heard what she thought was a prowler, found me gone, and run to see if our daughter needed help.

“Better get dressed,” I told her. “There’s a light on at Bentfield’s. I’ve had a crazy feeling. I went over and looked. It’s about as bad as it can get.”

My wife’s face twisted, and she clenched her hands.

“I’ll wake Steff, too,” she said. “She’s grown up enough to help out.”

I went upstairs to change into a suit. It was almost time to get dressed for work anyhow. But long after I should have left, I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Margaret was cooking something. A casserole to take over, maybe. A knife fell into the metal sink. We both jumped and she spilled the milk she was pouring.

“Shit!”

In twenty-five years of marriage, I don’t think I’d ever heard her cuss like that.

She mopped up, and I poured myself another cup. I sat staring at the birds and butterflies on the wallpaper mural she took such care of. Different from birds in Southeast Asia, that was for sure: nice tame birds and pale colors. They call it a green hell there.

“It’s time to go,” she reminded me. I picked up the phone to call my office and tell my secretary I wouldn’t be in just yet.

“Hope you’re feeling all right,” Mary-Lynn wished me, almost laughing.

“I’m fine,” I almost snapped. No point taking it out on her. She’d gone to high school with my kids. I remember how old I felt the day I interviewed her—and found out that her mother had been my secretary when I’d started out in practice.

“That’s good.” She was almost singing. Guess she was relieved too about how the vote had gone. Her husband—the first one was no damn good, but this guy seems to be treating her okay—would be coming home. Vet or no vet, he damn well better be good to her. She’s a nice kid, and besides, big as he is, I’ll beat the crap out of him.

I drank my coffee and looked out at the street till the olive-drab Army car I was expecting pulled up outside Bentfield’s and the long-legged uniformed men strode up the neat walk to the front door. It opened, so reluctantly. All over the street, doors opened, and the women started coming out. Each one carried a covered bowl or baking dish.

Margaret kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold. Then she and Stephanie went out. My daughter carried the casserole. She had on her good clothes again and lipstick the color of bubble gum. It looked fake against her pale face, and I wanted to tell her to wipe it off, but I didn’t. Her legs, under the short, dark skirt, looked like a little girl’s, heading into the doctor’s office to get a shot. It was Johnny Bentfield who’d gotten shot.

My womenfolk went to Bentfield’s and the door shut behind them.

All down the street, cars pulled out of the driveways like we were escaping.

When I got home that night, Steffie was in her jeans again, sitting in the living room.

“You shouldn’t sit in the dark.” I switched on some lights.

“Mom’s upstairs with a headache. Took two Fiorinal.” Margaret never took more than one.

I headed for the liquor cabinet and pulled out the Scotch.

“I’ll do that,” said my daughter. She mixed me a double the way I like them. To my surprise, she poured a stiff one for herself.

“I don’t know, kitten,” I began.

“I’m legal,” she said flatly. “And I was there. You weren’t. God!” She sat down too fast and lifted her glass. But she knows better than to belt down good Scotch.

“You did the right thing,” I praised her. She’d done a good job, the sort of thing nice women like the ones on our street do without even thinking about it.

She wrapped her arms about her shoulders and hunched in. In her jeans and workshirt, she looked like a veteran of some army I’d never seen before. A vet who’d lost a buddy.

Finally, she looked up. The big brown eyes under their floppy bangs held my attention. “They brought her a flag. It was for John, they said. She didn’t want to take it, but they put it in her hands. Her knees caved in, but she had to take the flag. We all sat around her. All day. Even after the soldiers left. They had other houses to visit. God
damn
!”

“Don’t swear, baby. It’s not nice.”

“Wasn’t nice to be there. Or to have to be there. What if...”

“Don’t think about it!”

What kind of a father was I, leaving her alone like that? But I couldn’t help it. I got up and went outside to check the garage door. Saw a neighbor.

“You hear about Bentfield?” he asked. Carefully, he bent and broke a dead branch off the hedge that divides our property.

I nodded. “My daughter’s pretty shook up.”

“It’s worse than that. Stan told me, and I’m not telling the family. It wasn’t VC that got his boy. ‘Friendly fire,’ they call it. He was stationed in front of the regular troops and, well, someone screwed up.”

That’s what happens when you cut and run. You get stuck facing something even worse. I had to go in and face Steffie like nothing had happened. She wasn’t crying, at least, but she’d turned the lights off again.

“You want dinner? Mom said to heat stuff up.”

I shook my head.

“Me neither.”

“Let’s not tell her we skipped dinner. She’d get mad.”

We sat in the dark for a long time. After a while, the house got chilly, and it was time to go to bed.

Well, Nixon had his recount. It was close. Even closer than when he’d lost against Kennedy. I don’t know, if I’d have thought he’d be such a bad loser, maybe I wouldn’t have voted for him the first time. And the grins on the faces of those guys who look like Ho Chi Minh’s grandsons at the UN made me want to wipe them out with my fist.

“It’s face, y’know,” Al said. After all these years, he’d finally made it to Youngstown on a business trip. Some of us got together at his Holiday Inn. These days, Al sells steel pipe. Frankly, I think he drinks through them—the gut he’s got on him now! “Now that we’re pulling out, they don’t respect us. Not that they ever did, all that much. Talk about yellow... I know who’s yellow, those little yellow...”

“Al.” Father Klein picked his beer bottle out of his hand. “You’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough.”

Al lurched onto his feet, his face red. Peanuts scattered across the table. I swept them back into the bowl. Didn’t think Al would take on Father Klein. He was wearing his collar, for one thing. For another, he’d always been able to punch out anyone in our outfit.

“I wanted us to win,” Al said. The fight drained out of him. “You know what happens when you retreat. Remember what we’d have got if they’d caught us in Korea? Tiger cages and bamboo under our fingernails. This isn’t going to be a retreat. It’s a goddamn rout. Who’s holding the fort while everyone’s pulling out? You mark my words, it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“It’s okay, Al,” Father Klein said. “Joey and I’ll walk you back to your room and you can stick your head in the john.”

Pro-war or peacenik, we all went sort of crazy that spring. The atlas from our
Britannica
fell open at the mark of Southeast Asia as I showed Margaret just where our men were pulling back from.

“It’s so green. Can’t they just jump out?” Our dining room is white and gold: formal, Margaret calls it. If she likes it, fine, I’m happy. It seemed weird to be talking about weapons and jungles as we sat at a table covered by a cloth, eating off real silver.

“McGovern won’t let us burn off the jungle. It’s a no-no. Like DDT. Damn! It’s all tunnels underneath. The VC can pop out of a tunnel, strike from behind, then disappear. Or hide in a village. You can’t tell VC from rice farmers. And there’s no good aerial cover.”

“I don’t want to talk about this at dinner,” she said, and closed the atlas. She didn’t ever want to talk about it. Well, she wasn’t a vet. God forbid we ever use our women like that, though those nurses... you’ve really got to hand it to them. They’ve got guts. Day after day, nurses flew out with their patients. The big, silent planes flew out too, with the flags and the coffins. But the news wasn’t showing them much anymore.

McGovern called it peace with honor. Withdrawal with honor, someone had tried to call it at a press conference; the reporters had cracked up. They’d had to fade to black real fast. Besides, you couldn’t say that around the kids. McGovern still had them in the palm of his hand. They had a lot of influence, and they wanted our boys out. McGovern always had a bunch of them following him around, as interns or admirers or something. They were beginning to look a little frantic.

It was Father Klein who called it the long defeat. We were fighting to lose. It reminded me of something. Once I had to help the Bear with his history homework, and I read this thing about a Children’s Crusade. They wanted to do what their elders couldn’t—free the Holy Land, miracles, that sort of thing. So they left home and went on Crusade. And none of ’em ever made it back.

Every time the phone rang, I dreaded it. Sometimes it was Steff. She’d turned expert, like all the kids. We talked over the withdrawal, and she said the exotic names in tones I hadn’t heard for years. Sometimes it was relief operations. Everyone wanted a check. Once it was Steff’s school—some lady from development assuring us that no, the school wasn’t planning to close down as it had in 1970 so everyone could go do relief work. Oddly enough, I don’t think I’d have minded if it had. Let the college kids do their share. But while she had me on the phone, could she possibly convince me to donate...

Yeah, sure.

Al never called. After a while that sort of worried me, I picked up the phone one evening at a decent hour and called him. Got his Mrs. And the cold shoulder, too, till I explained. Al was resting, she said. He’d been working too hard lately. No, he couldn’t come to the phone.

Drying out, I thought. Not all the casualties of a war happen in combat.

Used to be, letters from the Bear were a surprise—a treat to top off a good deal or a reward to make up for a lousy one. Now, I started calling home about the time the mail usually came. “Any news?” I’d ask. Usually, there wasn’t. If there was, Margaret would read Bear’s letters to me. Steffie said he was still writing her, but she didn’t offer.

Don’t know when he had time. He said he was helping out when he was off-duty in one of the orphanages. Run by French nuns. Didn’t know he’d learned some French, too. Maybe he wouldn’t mind if his dad stuck his nose into his business when he came back and suggested going to college on a GI bill. There
had
to be a GI bill or something, didn’t there? I mean, we owe those boys a lot.

Well, he always had been good with kids. He sent us one snapshot. There he was, all spit and polish, with these cute little round-faced kids with their bright eyes crawling all over him, scuffing up those patent shoes.

At least he got to keep clean and dry. I remembered how your feet felt like they’d rot off if you couldn’t get them out of those stinking boots. In the jungle, you get mold on everything, it’s so damp. I didn’t like it when the Bear would complain that he had it soft, compared to most of the men. I was scared he’d try to transfer out. But I guess someone talked to him, and he thought of what he owed to his mom and sister, because after a while, he didn’t talk about that anymore.

And meanwhile, those goddamn VC were getting closer to Saigon. The whole fucking—sorry, I never swear like that, must be thinking back to my army days—country was falling apart. Hated to admit it, but Al was right. As long as we came on like Curtis Le May and threatened, at least, to bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, they’d at least respected what we could do to them if we really set our minds to it. Now, “paper tiger” was the kindest name they had for us.

President McGovern began to look haunted. He’d be a one-term president, that was for sure. And when he came down with cardiac arrhythmia, some of us wondered if he’d even manage that. The kids who surrounded his staff looked pretty grim, too. Like the kids who get caught stealing cars and suddenly realize that things are not going to be much fun anymore.

The anchormen on the evening news sounded like preachers at a funeral. I’m not making this up; it happened at Da Nang. You saw a plane ready for takeoff. Three hundred people crowded in, trampling on women and children, they were so panicky. Then the crew wanted to close the doors and get out of there, but the people wouldn’t get off the runway, clear the stairs. They pulled some off the wheels and took off anyway. And you could see little black specks as people fell off where they’d hung on to the rear stairway.

Did McGovern say anything? Sure. “We must put the past behind us. Tragic as these days are, they are the final throes of a war we never should have entered. In the hard days to come, I call upon the American people to emulate the discipline and courage of our fine service-men who are withdrawing in good order from Vietnam.”

I’d of spat, but Margaret was watching the news with me. We couldn’t
not
watch. Funny, neither of us had ever liked horror films, but we had to watch the news.

Some people waded into the sea, the mothers holding their babies over their heads. They overloaded fishing boats, and the Navy found them floating. Or maybe the boats hadn’t overloaded. Those people mostly hadn’t much, but it wouldn’t have been hard to take what they had, hit them on the head, and throw them overboard.

Refugees were flooding Saigon. The Bear’s French orphanage was mobbed, and the grounds of all the embassies were full. Would the VC respect the embassies? How could they? Human life means nothing to them, or else they wouldn’t treat their own people the way they do. And Cambodia’s even worse, no matter what Steffie’s poli-sci profs say.

In a letter I didn’t show my wife, Barry told me he could hear the cluster bombs drop. The North Viets were at Xuanloc, thirty-five miles northwest of Saigon, on the way to Bien Hoa airfield, heading south, always heading south.

“If our allies had fought as well as they did at Xuanloc, maybe we wouldn’t be in this fix, Dad,” Barry wrote me. “It doesn’t look good. Don’t tell Mom. But the Navy’s got ships standing offshore in the Gulf of Thailand and a fleet of choppers to fly us out to them. I hope...”

I crumpled the letter in my hand. Later, I smoothed it out and made myself read it, though. My son was out in that green hell, and I was scared to read his letter? That wasn’t how I’d want to greet him when the choppers finally brought him out. He’d be one of the last to leave, I knew that. Probably pushing the ambassador ahead of him.

I wrote I was proud of him. I didn’t say the half of what I meant. I don’t know if he got the letter.