The Heart You Carry Home (11 page)

“When will she be back?” he asked.

“She's not coming back.”

“What?” He looked horrified. “Where'd she go?”

Kath just shook her head. “You think I'd tell you that? Jesus.” Ben looked down at the ground. “Oh, for Christ's sake, come in.” She led him into the kitchen and motioned for him to sit. “I want some answers,” she said. “Then I'm going to kick you out.”

Ben looked more fearful than guilty. But she launched into an interrogation.

“Were you just really drunk? Were you so enraged that you couldn't control yourself? No—” She didn't stop to let Ben answer. “I just cannot believe it.”

Ben hung his head. “That fiddle was the only thing I had from my father, Kath. I didn't mean to destroy it. I swear.”

“Who gives a shit about a fiddle?” Kath pounded her fist on the table. “Ben, I'm talking about what you did to your wife!”

“What?” It was the tremble in Ben's voice that made Kath halt in her fury. She sat down across from him and studied his face. Was he playing her? He seemed legitimately confused. “Ben,” she said quietly. “Why did Becca run?”

He pushed his hand through his short hair and looked past her out the window. He bounced his leg rapidly. “Sleeping is tough. Staying awake is tough. Not freaking out about every little thing is tough. I busted up my car last week; she probably told you.”

“Ben,” Kath said. “The night she left.”

Ben nodded. “We had a fight about something earlier that day. It had to do with the fiddle and why I refused to play anymore. It was dumb. But I got mad and I left. I went to a bar. She was asleep when I came back. So I went to bed too.”

He stopped talking. He seemed conflicted about whether to continue. “And then?” she prodded.

“The next thing I knew, I was standing in her old bedroom. I guess I sleepwalked? But I was seeing and hearing things—don't ask me to describe them.” His leg vibrated so quickly it shook the table. “The fiddle was causing it. The only way to make it all stop was to smash up the fiddle. Obviously, I wasn't thinking straight. But I did it. I broke it to bits. And then Becca came in. She was crying, Kath, screaming at me. I'd never seen her like that. And then I saw what I'd done to the fiddle, and I realized that if I stayed in that house another minute, I might hurt her too. So I bolted. Got out as fast as I could. I'd wrecked my car so I had to take hers.”

For a moment, they were both silent. Kath wanted to put her hand on Ben's knee, but she didn't think touching him was a good idea.

“When I came back she was gone. I was angry. I admit it. I shouldn't have shown up at King's drunk like that. I know that now. I want to fix myself, Kath. I don't want to be like this anymore.” Ben hit the table, but there was no force in his hand. It was the gesture of a man who'd given up. “Please don't keep me from her, Kath.” Ben's voice broke. “Please.”

“That's exactly what happened?”

He nodded.

Kath stood up. He truly seemed not to know. But how was that possible? Had he snapped? Been in some kind of fugue state? Had he done it in his sleep?

“Kath! Please. What's going on? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“She's all beat up, Benjamin. A ring of bruises around her middle, front to back.”

Ben shook his head. Kath nodded. Ben shook his head more vehemently.

“Do you have nightmares, Ben?”

Ben looked at the table.

“What happens in them?”

Ben didn't answer. “I'm sorry,” he said, jumping up. “I can't.”

A moment later, Kath heard the screen door slam. She sat back down and pushed the hair out of her face. Was his ignorance real? Did that even matter? She was willing to take intentions into account. But what had Ben really done to avoid this situation? On the ride to Kansas, Becca explained that he had been evaluated upon his return, according to standard protocol, and was prescribed a variety of medications. But were they necessary? Were they working? Were the dosages correct? Becca didn't know. She said that after the wedding, he'd stopped taking them altogether. He'd also filled out a questionnaire about his mental state, but based on how evasive he'd been, she doubted that he'd reported honestly. “Or maybe he did,” she told Kath. “And then things changed later. Or maybe he just couldn't bring himself to write down how he really felt. You know what it's like with those guys.”

Kath did know. Thirty-plus years after Vietnam, the same old codes and expectations persisted. As did the excuse that civilians just didn't understand. And the possibility that the army just didn't care what happened to those boys after they came home. Growing up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she'd been one of those civilians. Just thirteen when her twenty-two-year-old brother came back from the war. Before, he'd been her protector. Afterward, he was sullen and short. His clothes hung off him like oversize pillow cases, like hospital gowns. He couldn't hold a job. And he fought with their parents, who eventually told King to pack his bags.

At the time, Kath blamed them for giving up on him. Only after they'd died did Kath question her childhood assumptions: first, that King's coming around was inevitable, and second, that he deserved infinite leeway. Brother and sister had mended their relationship, but King was slipping again. “It doesn't matter that I'm sober,” he'd told her the previous night. “Time piles up, but that just means I have farther to fall. And I always fall. It's like my dreams are full of trapdoors releasing me into the old cesspool. It's harder and harder to climb out.”

“Your sobriety matters,” Kath had argued, terrified that King was giving up. But King said he
did
care about staying alive, which was why he was returning to his old CO's compound in Utah. “I tried to live out here, Kath,” he said. “It didn't take.”

Ben eventually returned to the house and asked again for Becca's whereabouts. “Even if I did tell you where she was,” Kath explained, “I don't know how to get there.”

“Then why can't you give me the destination?”

“Because you're enterprising. Somehow, you'd figure it out.”

Ben nodded as though he understood. As though in her position, he'd do the same thing. This broke her heart. “Follow me,” she said, wanting to do
something
. In her bedroom, she handed him
The Iliad
of Homer. King had brought it from Tennessee—he carried it everywhere—and Kath had filched it before the men left. She knew this book had tremendous symbolic meaning for King, as it did for the CO and his whole Utah operation. She'd stolen it, hoping that King might come back to get it and thereby give her another chance to wear him down: Do not go to Utah! However much
The Iliad
had helped King in his darkest hours, he'd taken its help much too far. Ben, however, was not under the CO's command, neither physically nor mentally. For him, the book might be just an empathetic voice.

Ben was surprised to be holding
The Iliad
in his hands. It looked like it had been carved up into chunks and then glued back together again. It had obviously belonged to a succession of readers. The first name, written on the inside flap in faded black pen, was Wilfred Owen McKenzie. The second name was CO Proudfoot. The third name was King Francis Keller. This was followed by half a dozen other names, some of which were repeated. The last name on the list was King's again. Ben couldn't imagine Becca's father reading epic poetry.

“King and his friends seem to find something useful in here. I thought you might like to give it a look,” Kath said. Ben waited, but she did not elaborate. “You're welcome to stay here tonight,” she added.

“And Becca?” Kath had done him this kindness—given him a gift. She was softening toward him, and he felt a weak ray of hope warm his neck. But Kath shook her head.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “But it's best not to think of Becca right now. Get some sleep. Then go home and get yourself straightened out. Focus on that.”

Later, Ben lay on the guest bed, staring at the ceiling. The sheets were rumpled and he wondered if Becca had slept there. He tried unsuccessfully to pick out her smell. Had he really done what Kath claimed? For hours after leaving Kath's kitchen, he'd walked in the woods, replaying the events in his head. He remembered—mostly in the form of a feeling—that he'd smashed the fiddle because of Coleman's Humvee and the unknown thing dragging from his waist. He'd smashed it because nothing else would stop “Sally in the Garden” from playing. It was either that or cut off his ears.

Ben propped King's
Iliad
up on his chest and opened it to the first page.

Rage, Goddess, sing of the murderous rage of Peleus' son Achilles,

which caused the Achaeans incalculable pain,

sent many brave heroes' souls down into Hades

and their bodies left rotting as spoil for dogs

and a feast for the birds, while Zeus' will was fulfilled.

Over and over, Ben read these lines. “‘Murderous rage,'” he said out loud, his tongue relishing the words. “‘Their bodies left rotting for dogs.' Rotting for fucking dogs!” Ben's pulse picked up, each word shooting into him like an arrow. The rage was part of him. The incalculable pain: part of him. The bodies: all part of him. He closed his eyes and saw the image of that waitress. The one he'd called a dumb bitch. She'd barely rested one finger on his arm and he'd sent her flying into a table.

During a similar moment of unconsciousness or semiconsciousness, he'd done the same to Becca. According to Kath, smashing his father's fiddle had been only the aftershock.

“‘Goddess, sing of the murderous rage,'” he whispered. Ben didn't know if the damage he'd done to his wife—to both of them—could be repaired. But he had to try. He closed the book and put it on the nightstand. He had no use for it. He didn't need solace, didn't care whether anybody could relate to him or his situation. His situation wasn't important anymore. He was on a mission to find her, bring her home, prove his love. Nothing else mattered.

December 13, 1977

Dear Willy,

Currahee!
That's what we say in the 506th Infantry Division of the 101st Airborne. To think that you—one of the world's great linguists—had never heard a man shout
Currahee!
It's our version of the marines'
Oorah!
They say
currahee
is Cherokee for “stand alone, together.”

But you couldn't do that. You put your faith in the Cham woman, despite the very real possibility that she was leading us into an ambush. And we had to follow her. Reno was burning up. He could barely walk. You went first, talking to the woman, Lai, in her scrambled tongue. King helped Reno through the thick, waxy jungle, and I kept watch in back. After half a klick, the woman led us through a net of vines and onto a plateau. In the gully below sat the remains of a village: blasted heaps of stone and wood.

“Oh my God,” you said, standing over the escarpment, gaping at the destruction below. You'd been in-country such a short time, were too fresh to realize what must have happened: air force gunships swooping overhead like steel monsters, breathing fire. I hadn't known the United States was bombing Cambodia, but I wasn't surprised. Nor did the army's idiocy rattle me. It was almost funny, sending soldiers to make peace with a village it had already obliterated.

But then you saw something. At the north end of Li Sing stood the village's single intact structure: Durga. She was hewed from gray rock and stood at least thirty feet tall. Ten arms sprouted from her sides like stone branches, half of them curving upward toward her right ear, half arcing toward the ground. Durga's nostrils were flared and her eyes mischievous. Her mouth nearly smiled. She seemed half disdainful, half delighted at the rubble below.

I felt the breath sucked right out of my chest.

“Just look at her, Proudfoot. She's beautiful.” You whispered to Lai, who nodded. She held up her hands as though to say
Don't shoot
and pointed to a bamboo hut at the jungle edge. I nodded and she hurried toward it. Shortly, she returned with a tower of bowls. She had us build a fire. Then she boiled a pot of water and crushed a handful of herbs. As she worked, she talked to herself like we weren't even there. Meanwhile, you stared at Durga, transfixed. When I tapped you on the shoulder, you nearly jumped out of your boots. “Looks to me like she's cooking up some voodoo.” I nodded at Lai.

“Do you see how sick he is?” you snapped and pointed at Reno. He lay flat on his back on the ground. The awful rash had spread to his face and he was moaning quietly, his eyes clenched shut. You shook your head like you were disgusted with me, and for a quarter second I felt chastened. It was an unfamiliar sensation; my men never made me feel that way. You said, “A spider bit Reno. Lai says he'll become paralyzed if he's not treated.”

“You think she knows what she's doing? You trust her?”

“She's the only surviving person from the village, Proudfoot.” You squatted next to the woman. “She's all alone.”

Was any man ever as green as you, Willy? Was it possible that a year before, I'd known nothing of this war, this land? I remembered breathing in my first lungful of the stifling Vietnamese air. It had felt like drowning.