Nell looks at the page, looks at her brother, follows his gaze down to the lake and the freshwater light of the late winter thaw. Starlings drift past like smoke.
“You just got out of the hospital . . . ”
“Don’t be like the rest of them, Nell.”
He slides another page in front of her.
“This is what it looks like left-handed.”
“Not bad for a kindergartner,” she tries teasing him.
“So it will take me seven years to go from barely printing to drawing like a twelve-year-old?”
“If anybody can . . . ”
“Nell, please.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“You don’t have to say a word.”
Silence falls between them and Nell has no idea how to breach it. Billy’s journals are the thread of their childhood; his coming into his own as a naturalist, as an artist, developing his eye, his hand, his deepening identification with birds. From sketching in the field to detailed study, to painting the portraits he began to make the year before he shipped out.
“Will you give me another painting?” she asks.
“I was just playing around. A silly idea: words and birds.”
“I like them.”
“You can have them all. I don’t give a shit.”
The dog lopes up from the lake where she’s been digging under the dock. Bangs her shoulder against the back door to be let in, greets Billy with nose and tongue and muddy paws.
“Did you see this?” He pushes the Geneva Star across the table. A fourteen-year-old girl named Pamela Moss from Penfield, up near Rochester, has been missing since Sunday. There’s a photo from school. Pigtails. Soft, childish features. Nell pushes the paper away.
“There’s been nothing about Megan,” Billy says. “Not for days and days.”
“I think Rob Chandler knows what happened to her.”
“What would be the point of hiding information?”
“If he’s responsible . . . ”
“For what?”
“Her death.”
“C’mon, Nell, this isn’t Peyton Place.”
“Then where is she?”
“I wish I knew,” he says, running his scarred fingers over the birds on the page.
There’s an ache in her throat: Billy’s hand on those pages, the birds so alive. Megan missing. She wants to touch him. Doesn’t dare. She sees him register her thought, his uncanny ability to read her, and pull away.
Nell says yes to the four-hour drive south to Altoona, Pennsylvania, because she’s glad Billy asked her. Marion lends them her car without any fuss. But Billy’s silence is ticking her off until she sees him take more pain pills and fold his jacket to cushion his hand and arm.
When she turns to point out a red-tailed hawk, he’s asleep. Hawks are messengers, Billy used to tell her when they were kids. Pay attention.
Crowded into Frank Buckles’s kitchen with his wife and two babies, Billy knows instantly they shouldn’t have come.
Lila offers coffee to go with the donuts they brought. Nell holds the baby while Lila fusses with the percolator.
“Do they look like Frank?” Nell asks.
“As much as babies can look like a grown man.”
Nell shuts her mouth on her smile.
“There’s a picture of Frank in the living room,” Lila says. “His mother says both boys are the spit of him at that age.”
“I didn’t mean . . . ”
“Frank couldn’t walk through that doorway without stooping. Just hard for me to see Frank in a baby, that’s all.”
“Hands the size of baseball mitts,” Billy says.
Lila smiles at him. The toddler clings to her leg.
“Go play, Samuel,” she says, but he just grips tighter. “I can’t move, honey.” They make a three-legged game of moving between the stove and table.
“Billy, grab some cups for me. To the right of the sink. And open up that bakery box, would you?”
“Want a donut, Sam?” Billy tries to lift Sam into his chair, can’t.
“I do it,” Sam says, climbing in himself.
“You still hurting?” she asks.
“It’s nothing.”
“Can you use that hand at all?”
“I’m working on it.”
“And the arm?”
“It’s coming along.”
Lila pours coffee, breaks a donut in half for Samuel. The baby falls asleep in Nell’s arms.
“What’s the baby’s name?” Nell asks.
“Marcus.”
Billy reaches for his coffee with his right hand, a bright flash of pain. Switches hands, scoops sugar, stirs.
“Frank said you had a sweet tooth.”
“He wrote about me?” Billy asks, surprised.
“Said you had some plans, maybe, for after the war. The two of you. Sounded like pie in the sky to me.”
“Probably.”
“But it kept him going.”
“Ma’am . . . ”
“Lila.”
“Some of the guys . . . we took up a collection. It’s not much, but I promised I’d . . . ” He places an envelope on the table, thick with small bills. “I know it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
His hands are trembling. He hides them under the table. Lila reaches out and takes his right hand, smoothing the crabbed fingers straight.
Billy can’t bring himself to speak the words he’s come to say, how Frank sang at night in their tent, spirituals and raucous working songs, no matter how much they teased him. How they’d toss an old football back and forth in the twilight that seemed to last forever. How Billy tried to drag Frank from the burning ship, how he’s got the burns and the scars to prove it; how he failed, his hands on fire, fusing to Frank’s flak jacket where he grabbed hold. He’d be there still if a secondary explosion hadn’t blown him clear, breaking his shoulder and his elbow and six ribs but saving his life. There was never any question of letting Frank go, was there? No question of leaving the big man behind.
“I don’t know if Frank was even still . . . ”
“Don’t you bring that war into my house,” Lila says. “These boys need their father. Can you give them back their father?
“Not you, not Nixon, not McNamara, not Rusk, not the joint chiefs of staff, can raise the dead. Every single one of those sons of bitches sending men and boys to die. For what?”
Billy looks out the window. A Cooper’s hawk glides over the corn stubble, hunting. What’s the message? What’s the fucking message?
“They sent me a report, no doubt full of lies. They sent me his remains, but he was so badly burned . . . I couldn’t see him. Not one last time.”
She picks Sam up, wrapping her arms around him.
“Lila . . . ” Billy says, her name soft on his lips.
“I think it’s time for you to go.”
Billy stands, his chair scrapes across the floor. He pulls himself erect, an act of will, looks directly at her.
“I’m so sorry.”
She looks at him for a long moment.
“You let that go, you hear me, Billy Flynn? Don’t let this war wreck your life, too. Nothing you can do will bring Frank back. You understand me?”
Getting into the car, they hear the low whicker and blowing of the mares in the field next door. Billy rests his head against the seat. He looks at the horses, grazing hock-deep in thistle, squints in the sun.
“My first tour . . . God, there were so many birds, Nell, fantastic things I’d never seen before. The Mekong River Delta where it meets the China Sea,
“The Red River, in late afternoon, when the sun fills the river, is really red. And the Black River is really black, full of shadows from the steep banks and overhanging trees.
> “You watch the jets drop napalm from the safety of three thousand feet. You see the forest catch. If there are villages, and you know we target villages, every living thing is burned.
“The first time I saw napalm I thought—you’ll laugh at me—I thought about the birds. The ibis and Himalayan swiftlets, Oriental skylarks. Birds, when below me people are burning.”
He tries to stretch his hand open, feels the mutinous burst of pain.
“Napalm is a jelly,” he says. “It adheres to what it burns.”
Nell looks at him, then down at her hands, playing with the keys.
He knows he should stop. “Your mind plays tricks on you, but inside you know.”
“It’s not . . . ”
“My fault? My responsibility? If we don’t ‘know’ or are too naive to ask or protest, then you can’t blame us, we can’t be guilty, is that the bullshit you believe?”
“Billy . . . ”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
She reaches out to him. He smacks her hand away; it bangs into the gearshift.
“Jesus!” She shrinks away from him.
“Let me see it.”
“It’s fine.” She massages her wrist.
He reaches for her hand again.
“Let it be.”
“I didn’t mean . . . Damn, Nell, I don’t know what gets into me.”
He looks back at the house, the missing shingles, the peeling paint; all the things that need to get done that Frank will never do.
“I promised to bring him home,” he says.
No one can promise that, she thinks.
“One minute I’m holding on to him, the next . . . There was nothing left, nothing at all in that box they sent Lila.”
He touches his thumb to the scar over her eye. “You shouldn’t be hearing this.”
“It’s okay.”
“I keep trying to lock it away.”
“I’m not eight anymore.”
He tries smiling at her, wonders how long he can keep taking her forgiveness for granted. Looks up to see horses running in the field.
He sleeps through most of Pennsylvania. Wakes thinking of Frank Buckles and the whores in Saigon. You held them, used them, alert to every sound in the alleyway—cocks crowing at the oddest hours, water dripping, the slap of sandals on a porch step, a rickshaw creaking past—other soldiers, other rooms, drugs, booze; a debauchery of the spirit. A thin mattress on a dirt floor, filthy sheets, a bucket in the corner, and beneath you a girl, a country you drill yourself into, leave your poison behind.
Frank Buckles refused these exploits and was teased mercilessly. The big man didn’t give a damn. He knew what he knew, wanted what he wanted: his wife and family at home. As though walking the straight and narrow would protect him. He prayed every night in their tent, on his knees, prayed before every mission; a man of belief, of ritual. Billy loved him.
And still he went to the whores.
He can’t quite see himself talking about this with Father O’Rourke, not that he thinks the old man is a puritan, but no one wants to hear the truth about this war. Like we can all just leave our money on the table, leave that girl giggling and crying on the bed, filled with fear and hatred, reaching for a pipe to smoke, pull the veil, dull the pain, as her brother, uncle, father follows you out the door, down the street, as silent as the Seneca or Iroquois, as invisible to us there as here, murder and money on their mind. Her high thin voice following you, crying for the Coca-Cola she’d been promised before the next soldier pushes through the beaded curtain, unbuckling his pants, eyes wide: Christ, she’s no bigger than a kid, he could pick her up in one hand.
Her first day at the grocery, Nell loses count of how many boxes opened, cans stacked, bottles of milk, cream, buttermilk slotted into the humming cooler.
The butcher, a wiry man with a walleye and a cleaver, intimidates her. He tells her she can call him Walt but she knows she never will. Megan started calling adults by their first names in grade school. Began with Marion and Jack, called her own mother Maeve. Asa would have none of it. Most adults overlooked the impertinence, thinking, mistakenly, that Megan was cute and sweet. Truth be told, she was an impudent devil, egged on by Billy, who reveled in what she could get away with.
Nell adopted her brother’s approach: shake their hands, call them Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so, look them straight in the eye. No chumminess. Respect given. Boundaries drawn. She might need a fence with Walt.
He keeps sending her to the walk-in meat locker. The carcasses hanging from hooks terrify her. The smell of blood stuffs her nose. She wonders if she’ll get used to it. Shakes off the nightmare thought of getting locked inside. Wants a shower.
Arriving home, she finds a letter from Cornell in the mailbox. Opening it, she allows herself to hope that the thickness of the envelope means good news.
She scans the letter as fast as she can . . . welcomes you to the class of 1974 . . . and skips to the last paragraph . . . We are pleased to offer you a scholarship in the amount of . . . which, in addition to your Regents Scholarship, will cover your tuition.
Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe there will be a call and they’ll take it back. She looks at the envelope again; yes, it’s addressed to her.
Rereading the letter, she allows herself to feel a rush of excitement. She wants to tell someone. A year ago she would have picked up the phone and called Megan; she wonders if Megan’s letters are sitting in the Alsop mailbox: acceptances, rejections, offers of financial aid.
She calls out to Billy, no answer, though Flanagan appears at the back door. She lets the dog out, then charges up the stairs to see if maybe, just maybe, Billy is home.
When she knocks the door falls open. The curtains are drawn, the bed unmade; there are beer bottles on the floor and under the bed, overflowing ashtrays. The desk is buried under a pile of clothes, his discarded duffel stuffed underneath it.
All of his paintings are gone and all of his drawings have been torn from the corkboard. In some places the board had been thick with paper, study after study, an individual bird emerging, finally, like magic, on the page.
Now the wall holds images torn from newspapers, from magazines, all of them, she realizes, a variation on a theme: the jungle on fire. Shot from above, helicopters caught inside the frame; shot from the ground, villagers or soldiers running, the fire pouring toward them. Fire and smoke rolling over fields and forest, the suggestive beauty and the scathing ruin.
Another group of photos: birds, impossibly on fire and in flight, some falling from the sky. Helicopters at the moment of crashing. A pelican’s skeleton stretched over a huge rock. The first X-rays of Billy’s hand and arm and torso. The shrapnel, even here, glinting like knives.
In a panic she searches the floor, under the bed, thinking something can be salvaged. Inventories the paintings she has in her possession: the great horned owl in her room, the Eastern Phoebe inside her closet door, the mourning doves in her locker at school, the small canvas at the piano downstairs. Turns to the wall beside Billy’s bed: the heron is gone.
Looks to the bookshelf. At least his field journals are still here, she sees with relief, dozens of them, filling the shelves. Thinks of moving them to her room for safekeeping.
And then she smells smoke.
Pushing the curtains open, she looks out to the side yard. Billy stands with his back to her, a trash barrel burning in front of him, feeding his drawings and paintings into the fire.
She sees the grackle’s shiny blue-black feathers, facing away from the viewer, looking over its shoulder, consumed in the flames. Feels the caption Billy had written rising up in her: Had I But Hands to Put Around Your Throat.
She lifts a hand to knock at the window, yell through the glass. Knows it’s too late.
His hands are nearly empty, the fire blazing. He looks over his shoulder, up to the window,
sensing her presence, unconsciously mimicking the bird. His eyes are blank.
APRIL
A month into rehab in the pool, Billy can feel that he’s gaining ground. He buys a new pair of swim trunks when the old ones slide off, leading to a fair amount of embarrassment when Kyle has to find them in the deep end and help Billy put them back on without flashing the four-year-olds learning to swim two lanes over.
He still despises the water walking but has to admit he’s growing stronger. Fighting his way through waist-high water never gets easier. He knows he should quit smoking, drinking, and showing up three times a week hungover, but knowing it and doing it are different things.
Swimming continues to be difficult, his right hand and arm weak and unresponsive. Even though Kyle and his surgeon explain that healing takes time, and healing nerves, if it can be done, takes longest of all, Billy is baffled by how an entire limb can feel not just dull, but nearly lifeless.
The nerves, tendons, ligaments, muscles, communicate, they tell him. The nerves send messages to the brain. When nerves are damaged, that fine-tuned communication system breaks down.
Understanding has not helped him live with it. Or be more patient. Or less angry.
So he fights through the water three times a week, correcting for the weakness on his right side with each stroke. His crawl is slow, his right arm like a beaver’s tail, slapping the water. He still can’t do the backstroke without running into the lane lines; the imbalance side to side is too great. And the breaststroke devils him.
When he tells Kyle he wants to quit fooling around in the pool and work out in the weight room, Kyle puts him through an upper body workout in the water that leaves his muscles like jelly.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he has additional therapy with a hand specialist. Cindy McAdams is just out of school: blonde, vaguely pretty, and very serious about her work. He has to take pain meds just to get through his sessions with her.
She has him hold a hockey stick horizontally. A rope is wound around it and she asks him to wind and unwind the rope between his hands. She does not allow him to cheat and rely on his left hand. This simple task is so difficult sweat drips from his face.