Vanished (2 page)

RUMORS

W
hen Tommy Doyle’s mom died, in 1992, Tommy inherited a big wooden trunk. It was about four feet long and two feet wide, and sitting on the floor of his ranch house in West Texas, it came up to his knee. Tommy could remember seeing that trunk all his life, tucked at the foot of his mother’s bed with books and blankets piled on top, but he’d never looked inside. There was always something private in the way his mom regarded the trunk, so for a while, Tommy left it shut.

His wife, Nancy, was more curious, but she didn’t want to seem nosy. “I decided to let him open it in his own time,” she said later. “But
it seemed like he never would
.” Nancy was patient. She waited weeks, then months, then a year. Tommy never opened the trunk. He dragged it to a back room, shut the door, and walked away.

Nancy knew enough about Tommy to guess what bothered him. There
were painful rumors in his past, stories that cast a shadow over his life—over who he was, who his daddy had been, and why Tommy never knew him. Those were things that Tommy and his mom never discussed. There might be clues inside the trunk, and he wasn’t about to start looking for them now.

Tommy had been just fifteen months old when his dad shipped off to war in 1944, and Jimmie Doyle never came back. Or anyway, that was the official story. That’s the story his mother told him: His daddy’s plane went down in the Pacific Ocean, some patch of islands called Palau. The crew was never found.

But Tommy heard another story growing up, one he wasn’t supposed to hear. As a kid, he heard his uncles whispering. Jimmie was still alive, they said. He’d survived the crash. He’d come back from the war. He was living in California with a new wife and two daughters. He just didn’t care about Tommy anymore.

Tommy never believed that story. Mostly, he didn’t. But he wondered. In time, he grew into a powerful kid, tall and fast, played basketball on the state championship team, starred in high school football. In one game, he scored off two interceptions and kicked the winning field goal. But underneath, the hurt and suspicion coursed through Tommy’s life.

Nothing about the family stories made sense. If his dad was dead, then why did the military send his mom letters that said they were looking for him? Why did the Army say that some of the men on his plane escaped, but they never said which ones? And why didn’t Tommy’s mom remarry, when at least two good men had asked? She and Tommy scraped by on nothing. For a while, they lived in an apartment with no front door. But she never told Tommy that she missed his dad, or loved him, or hoped he would come back. She rarely mentioned Jimmie at all: never told Tommy what his father did or loved, never described his voice or his laugh. She kept Jimmie close, like she couldn’t stand to share what little she had left, not with anyone, not even Tommy.

Football was supposed to be Tommy’s ticket. He got a full ride to Texas Tech in 1961 and joined the Air Force ROTC to earn money on the side. For the first time in Tommy’s life, he had a future and not just a past. If he played hard, he might go pro; if not, he’d stick with the Air Force and follow his dad into the sky.

From the first day of practice
, Tommy took off. By junior year, he was on the starting lineup alongside future pros like Donny Anderson and Dave Parks; by the end of that year, when Parks was chosen as the first pick in the NFL draft, Tommy was tied with him for the most touchdown receptions, and he’d set a school record for the most in a single game. “He had great hands,” Donny Anderson said. “We called him ‘Touchdown Tommy.’” Anderson got the call in 1965, drafted by the Packers in the first round for more money than anyone in history. A lot of people thought Tommy Doyle would be next. A lot of people still think he might have been, if things had broken differently. Or if they hadn’t broken at all.

It started with his shoulders in spring practice. They felt loose, wobbly, sore. He’d go to make a play and his arms just wouldn’t do it. He put his joints on ice and slept in the locker room all summer to stay close to the rehab weights. When that didn’t work, he moved to defensive end—but the play was rough and Tommy was lean. He kept taking hard hits. In one game, he came down wrong on a jump and both of his legs got crushed. By the middle of the season, between his shoulders and his knees, he knew his game was over. He lost his spot on the starting lineup, then his place on the team. Then he had to give up his position in ROTC, and with it, his last hope for the future.

Tommy was working in a windowless room at an airplane factory in North Texas when a friend introduced him to Nancy. She came from a prominent family near Dallas, but after she and Tommy got together, she followed him back to West Texas. They got married, bought a ramshackle house in the town of Snyder, and Tommy took a job coaching football at the local school. While Dave Parks roared through a decade in the NFL
and Donny Anderson won two Super Bowls, Tommy was on the fields of West Texas shouting for teenagers to hustle. Then a new head coach came in and fired everybody, including Tommy.

A friend was starting an oil company and Tommy went all in. He poured his retirement money into the business, and he poured in Nancy’s, too. Then the oil market bottomed out, and Tommy lost it all again.

Now he was in his late thirties with no job, no savings, no plan, no dreams, and two young kids, one of whom was sick. “
I was just born crooked
,” his son, Casey Doyle, said. One day it was asthma wracking Casey’s lungs; another day, he was coughing up blood. His little legs were so weak he had to wear metal braces. The medical bills were crushing. One morning, Tommy took Casey to a new doctor and spent the whole day waiting to be seen. At five o’clock the doctor came out to explain that Tommy’s name was on a list of people who couldn’t pay.

Tommy took any job he could find. He mowed lawns. He patched leaky plumbing. He re-grouted tile. He took a job at the local bank, but the oil crash was hurting banks, too. When one of Tommy’s friends got laid off, she went home and shot herself. When the bank called in a loan on another guy, he threatened to blow up the branch—and the whole town came out at three o’clock to see if it would happen. In a good week, Tommy might catch a job building a shed in someone’s yard. In a bad one, he turned to his friends in the church for help.

When another coaching job came up, Tommy Doyle grabbed it. It was only junior high, but he figured that was a blessing in disguise. This was West Texas, after all. A varsity coach was never safe. A few bad seasons and he’d be packing. Tommy had been down that road before. He promised himself that he’d never put ambition over his kids. When the high school offered him a varsity coaching position, he took a JV spot instead. When another school offered to make him head coach, Tommy thanked them anyway. For twenty-five years, he stayed under the radar, mostly running the JV team and helping with varsity on the side. “He did that for us,” Casey said. “He did that for his family and he never said a word.”

But inside, Tommy always wondered. Not about coaching, about everything else. He wondered what else might have been. What would have been, if his dad had come home. He wondered who he might have become, and what he could have given his own kids. He wondered if there was anything to those old family stories. Was it possible that his dad survived? If so, how long? Did he really come back? Why would he refuse to see Tommy? Was there any explanation that could make it all okay?

Tommy pushed the questions down, but they were always there. The slightest mention of his dad would bring the old coach to tears. The doubt lingered inside Tommy like a weight. It was there when he drove to work in the morning, and when he came home at night, unfolding his long, sore body to watch a game tape. It was there when he called out drills on the football field, and when his kids opened their presents on Christmas morning. Sometimes it seemed to Tommy as though he’d spent his whole life waiting for something. Waiting for a future that never came. Waiting for answers to make sense of the past. Waiting for a sign of that twenty-five-year-old kid with the cocky grin and jaunty hat, the rascal eyes that stared back at Tommy from the one good portrait he’d ever seen. On weekends, his mother came to the house and played with the kids and helped in the kitchen, but she never mentioned Tommy’s dad. She never asked Tommy what he heard, or believed, never told him what she knew. Everything stayed packed up and locked away, pushed out of view like the trunk.

—

F
OR
N
ANCY,
walking past the trunk was a kind of test. It was Tommy’s past and Tommy’s choice and she wanted to let him make it, but it wasn’t like Nancy to leave a closed door shut. She loved Tommy all the way through, but they were as different as they were in love. When something bothered Tommy, his voice would fade to a whisper and his whole laconic frame would settle into a cryogenic stillness. Not Nancy. She was just about half his size, but she seemed to occupy twice the space, with a high
clear voice and biting wit that called out what she saw. When Nancy walked into a room, the lights got a little brighter. When something in the room upset her, the lights got brighter still.

Nancy came from a conservative family, devout in the Church of Christ. Growing up, she’d always kept her faith, but she wore it her own way. She was the daughter who might turn up in town wearing a short skirt and go-go boots, the one who might miss curfew by a lot. When Nancy announced that she was heading off to study at Abilene Christian College, her parents prayed that she’d come home on the arm of a handsome preacher. Instead, she came home with Tommy—a Methodist, a football player, a kid from the West Texas nowhere. “It didn’t go over so well at first,” Casey Doyle said with a chuckle. But Nancy’s family knew better than to try to talk her out of something. They welcomed Tommy and watched him closely, and soon enough they loved him, too.

Back in Snyder, Nancy set about sanding Tommy’s edges. They left his family church to attend the local Church of Christ three times a week. At home, there wasn’t any drinking or smoking or dancing or cursing, except that one time Tommy said, “Crap,” and if little Casey or his sister, Brandi, forgot the rules, well, Nancy helped them remember.

But walking past the trunk involved a different kind of faith for Nancy. It meant leaving things in Tommy’s hands, and doing things Tommy’s way. For two years, Nancy followed that path. For two years, she walked past the trunk. Then two years began to seem like enough.

One night after supper, they were settling into the living room and Nancy brought it up.

“Tommy,” she said quietly, “is it okay if I open your mother’s trunk?”

Tommy hesitated, then he whispered, “Sure.”

So Nancy did.

—

S
HE WAITED UNTIL
he was out of the house, then she cleared off the top of the box and pried open the lid, embarrassed by her own racing heart.
There was an old blanket on top, and she set it aside, then another blanket, some sweaters, a photo album, and a handmade coat. But near the bottom of the trunk, Nancy spotted an old shoe box. It was worn and separating at the seams, and somehow she knew instantly that she’d found what she wanted. She raised it gingerly to her lap, and lifted the cover.

The envelopes were stacked in tidy rows and Nancy felt her hands trembling as she pulled them out, one by one, the airmail paper as thin as tissue, with red and blue checks around the edges and Jimmie’s loose cursive spilled across the pages inside. Line after line of his thoughts and dreams, all written to Tommy’s mom.

“My Dearest,” he wrote in one of the first, from May 1944. “
At last I can write a few lines
, but of course there isn’t so very much I can tell you except I’m okay and a long ways from home. I’m in the South Pacific, but can’t say just where. It’s a pretty place, but Lord, it sure is hot. There are worlds of vegetation that I have never seen before, and I would be as well satisfied if I never had. But the nights are really beautiful. We are south of the equator and there are thousands of new stars, and they seem to be a lot closer. There is a lot to do tomorrow, so I will have to stop for now, but I’ll write again soon. Tell the folks hello, and kiss Tommy for me. Keep our home and our baby safe, and maybe in the not too distant future, we can be together again. Write as often as possible, and remember I love you very, very much. Forever, Jimmie.”

A few days later, he wrote again: “
My Precious, sure am ready for bed tonight
. Have been swimming in the ocean today, and eating coconuts, and trying to find some ripe bananas. Sure wish you could be with me, what a lot of fun we could have, finding all these new things together. Gee, I sure do miss you, and of course you know you are the sweetest wife in the world. I am sending you a necklace and bracelet, made from shells from the sea. I hope you like them, and later on, maybe I can send one to Mother. As I can, I will try to send you different things from this part of the world. Take care of yourself and Tommy, and write often, and know I love you with all my heart. Forever, Jimmie.”