Stan takes this in. “Well, that’s what my attorney says.”
“You’re going to jail. But I can help you.”
Stan’s confused. “Have you got another attorney for me?”
This seems to amuse the man. “If it comes to that. But I have another angle—let me try it first.” He holds up an envelope. “It’s this right here.”
Stan sees the thin envelope is sealed. “What’s inside?”
“None of your business what’s in there.”
“Well, what am I going to do with this?”
“When you see the judge . . .” He pauses. “Now, listen to me. It’s very important that you follow instructions. I know you can do it, because the Army’s full of instructions.”
Stan nods.
“When you’re sitting in court, you don’t tell your attorney about this. You don’t tell anybody about it, or word can get to the judge before you hand this to him. You can tell family members, but nobody else.”
“Okay.”
“Now the judge is going to ask, ‘Does anybody have anything to say before these hearings take place?’ And you’re going to say, ‘Your Honor, may I approach the bench?’ ”
“Okay.”
“Go ahead, let’s try it. I’m the judge. Let’s practice.”
He turns to one of his men and tells him, “You’re the attorney.”
Stan steps forward to the guy playing the judge and says the words and pretends to hand the guy an envelope.
“Do it again,” says the guy.
Stan does this several more times. “All right. You got it,” says the guy. “Now I’m going to have a couple of my men in the courtroom just to make sure things go right.”
Stan drives home, dying to open the envelope. His father at home asks him, “What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘Give this to the judge.’ ” Stan holds up the envelope.
“You’re kidding me. What’s inside? No, don’t open it. Do you think there’s money in there?”
“There could be money. I don’t have any idea what’s in there.”
“We won’t open it,” says his father. And with that, his father sticks the envelope in the kitchen freezer behind some peas.
A week or so later, Stan is in the courtroom, dressed in his Army uniform. His father is there, his brothers Bruce and Dub, and a few high school buddies. Carl Calhoun is brought in in a wheelchair, bandaged from head to toe. All Stan can see are his eyes glaring at him through the bandages. Stan glares back. He looks around and sees two of the guys from the warehouse office in the back of the courtroom. They’re watching him. Stan sits down, nervous.
The judge looks down from the bench and says, “Does anybody have anything to say before these proceedings take place?” Stan clears his throat and stands up. “Your Honor? Permission to approach the bench?”
Stan’s lawyer is surprised and pulls him down by the arm. “What are you doing?” he asks.
The judge waves the attorney away. “Mr. Parker, let me tell you something. You might be in your uniform here today, and you might be a decorated Vietnam veteran, and you might say you’ve done a lot in defense of your country, but let me tell you, that doesn’t work in my courtroom. Do you understand? Now approach the bench.”
Stan walks up. “Your Honor, I’ve been instructed to give you this.” He hands over the envelope.
“By whom?”
“A gentleman told me to give this to you, and you’re to read this before we start these proceedings.”
The judge opens the envelope. Stan sees that it doesn’t contain money, which he’s glad of. The envelope contains just three pages of typewritten script. He watches as the judge rifles through the pages.
He looks up at Stan. “Did you read this?”
“No, sir, your Honor. I was instructed not to. I have no idea what the contents are.”
“You did not see this?” the judge asks again.
“No, sir.”
“All right,” says the judge, folding the letter. He picks up his gavel, bangs it on his bench, and says, “This court is adjourned. All charges are dropped.”
Stan is shocked; his attorney is confused. Stan sees Carl Calhoun and Carl’s mother, and both of them are yelling at the judge.
The judge bangs the gavel. “Order in this court. Bailiff, be prepared to eject them!” And with that, he exits the courtroom.
At the courtroom door, the boss’s men are waiting to shake Stan’s hand and escort him to his car.
“The boss says for you to come by when you get out of the Army. You come by if you need a job.” Stan shakes their hands, mumbles something about seeing them later, and hurries out.
On the way home, his father tells him, “There’s no way you’re going to see that guy. He had something on that judge. You know, ‘I know that money you took,’ or ‘I know the girl you’re sleeping with.’ ”
Stan agrees his father could be right. He also agrees that he won’t be paying any of them a visit for a job. He is afraid they want him to be one of their enforcers, a guy who beats up people for a living. But he doesn’t want that; that’s not who he is. He doesn’t feel bad about skating on the charges; he just feels damn lucky. Carl Calhoun had attacked his brother and he had fought back.
The kicks and punches had come instinctively, but Stan also knows they had come way too fast. He knows he has a problem.
• • •
He decides that he has to see Maureen again—one last time, in hopes he might figure out what happened to them. They’d been so happy once. He has to see her. Has to. Her soft blond hair. He’s still angry about her leaving him the way she did, writing him, Dear Stan, I have to tell you . . . blah blah blah and him threatening to rip up her picture among the platoon members. But he can’t not see her.
Yet he knows that she probably doesn’t want to see him. She’s married, after all. But her husband, he can’t be good enough for her, can he? He’s thinking of the Stan she once knew before he went to Nam, the Stan she drove out to meet at O’Hare Airport the time he came home from training to see his dying mother. That Stan was good enough for her. He was still a young man who had not killed anyone. He doesn’t realize how angry he is when he decides he has to see her. He decides that he must, above all other tasks, retrieve from Maureen his high school letterman jacket; he’d given it to her before leaving for Vietnam. It’s a ruse, really, a pretense to show up at her house and make himself known again.
He knocks on the front door, and Mo’s mother answers. She is surprised to see him and gives him a big hug and says she is so happy he made it back. She even starts to cry and steps back to look at him. There he is, Stanley Parker, the kid from Calumet high school. Stan last saw her the day she and Mo picked him up at the airport and drove him to the hospital, and he’s always been grateful for the kindness she’s shown him. He asks her if Mo is home, and she says no, not yet. Mo’s at work. She invites him inside. She asks him if he knows that Maureen is married now.
Stan says, yes, he does know. And he leaves it at that. He remembers being in Vietnam and how she’d written that she had started dating a guy name Jack, and how much this had saddened him; he felt like he was suffocating. And when she wrote and told him that she’d broken up with Jack, Stan immediately wrote back and asked if he had any chance with her at all. He even inquired as to whether she’d like to meet him in Japan when he had R&R and she’d said, well, maybe. . . . And then came her letter that she’d gotten married. It all seems like such history now, a long time ago, as he stands waiting in her living room.
Maureen and her husband suddenly walk in the front door. Stan looks at them both, focusing on the husband; he feels himself ready to fight, even though he realizes that he barely escaped jail for assault. Mo does not look happy at all to see him.
The husband steps forward and announces, as if he and Stan are resuming a long-standing conversation about Maureen, “We’re married now.”
“Married,” Stan says, feigning ignora
nce. “You’re kidding?” He suddenly knows that by coming here he’s disgraced himself.
Mo’s mother is looking nervous and Stan says after a minute that he’s only come there to pick up his letterman jacket—the one he gave Mo his senior year. Her mother says she doesn’t know where it is, and Stan says, “That’s okay, I’ll wait.”
Maureen disappears into a back room and returns with the jacket.
She walks up to Stan and hands it to him. “It’s time for you to leave,” she tells him. “This is not some kind of reunion for you after the war.”
But the war’s the last thing they’re going to talk about, and it’s the last thing Mo would know how to bring up with Stan, having received all those letters from him when he was overseas, and she tried to answer them. Stan knows that his letters were so filled with longing, loneliness, that there was never really anything she could have written to make him feel better.
“How could you come to my mom’s house without my approval?” she asks.
“I was invited by your mom and I was just about to leave.”
Her husband says something to Stan, and when it seems Stan is getting angry, Maureen tells him he must go.
He collects himself and he tells her that he’s sorry about this unannounced visit. He wonders to himself why he couldn’t just have picked up the jacket and left. But no, he had wanted to wait for her. He had to say good-bye. And now he knows he’s got a look in his eye—several looks, actually. Anger and sadness. He and the husband start going back and forth again, arguing, and Mo can tell pretty quickly that there’s going to be a fight. She tells Stan for the last time to leave.
Stan says fine and stomps out of the house. He gets in the GTX muscle car, throws it into reverse, and smashes the pedal to the floor, peeling out of the driveway, sending smoke up. He comes to a halt in the road, throws the car into first gear, hits the gas, and pops the clutch. The GTX roars so much it sounds like a drag strip out there in the street, and Stan is doing 60 by the time he grabs second gear. He keeps going. He has in his hand her senior school picture, the one he carried all those miles, all those steps, the picture he didn’t rip up to keep the guys alive because they said she was their talisman. He looks at it, and he’s crying. He throws the picture, wallet sized, out of the window and he thinks it flies away and that he’s gone from it forever.
What he doesn’t know is that the picture scoots out the window and shoots back inside the car through the driver’s-side rear window. It lands on the seat and keeps scooting across the vinyl, then edges into the crack between the back seat and the seat itself and lodges there. It keeps going, sinking down, where he will find it seven years later, in Montana, when he’s removing the carpet from the floor of the trunk and cleaning the GTX and there’s the picture. There she is, Mo, the very picture that’s come back to haunt him, the past always coming back.
• • •
Forty-four years later he will email Maureen after finding her on the Internet, tracking her down via Facebook, the search occasioned by questions about his journey through Vietnam and home. He finds she is still scared of him, still wondering if he is still that angry guy who had raced down her street, the man she feared was going to beat up her husband. But about him, Stan had been right: Mo and her husband were not meant to be. They’d long ago divorced. Mo now wondered, these many years later, what she ever saw in him. What she had left from the marriage was a grown son, whom she loved deeply. But beyond that, she had nothing left of Stan Parker, of those days when they were young, in high school, in love, before Vietnam.
• • •
On the rebound from this reunion with Mo, Stan falls madly in love with another woman. We’ll call her Carly. Stan has a couple of weeks remaining in his Christmas leave before he must return to Fort Bragg. His impending departure makes each hour seem more urgent; he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come home again. He meets Carly at a restaurant; she’s tall with long brown hair. She’s home on break from an expensive state university. He takes her to a party and she’s wearing a miniskirt. At midnight, someone lights firecrackers and Stan experiences a flashback, a new sensation: he hears gunshots, not celebration. He tries shrugging this off and walks with Carly to the dance floor. On the way, a man pinches Carly’s bottom. Stan suddenly hits him and he drops to the floor, unconscious. The room turns silent and people are staring at him. He wants to leave and they head for the door. On the way, another guy says something sexual to Carly and Stan hits him too.
She’s shocked by his immediate reflexes. Two down in two minutes, Stan thinks. I cannot get arrested again. He wants to go before the cops show up.
Stan grabs Carly by the hand and they flee to his car. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” she says. “Where did you come from?”
• • •
He knows her parents won’t approve of him, an ironworker’s son. What he loves about her is that she seems to love him, or, put another way, she accepts him.
She is the first person who ever asks him a question about what he did in Vietnam; that she’s a woman asking him blows his mind. He doesn’t tell her much that’s graphic, like about the heads lying on the ground the morning after Tet, or the pile of skulls they found one day that had been churned up out of what looked like a mass grave. The squad sat and held the skulls and rolled them in their hands; they were light, fragile as bees’ nests. Higher command had wanted to know if these skulls were American or NVA, and the guys said, “Hell if we know.” They moved on and kept walking, thinking that people had once been inside those skulls.
The romance with Carly is so intense it can’t last, Stan can feel that. Still, they press on: he asks her if she thinks they can remain a couple after he returns to Fort Bragg. It’s January now, he says; he’ll be out of the Army in August, eight months off. Will she wait? Then he adds: “You should know I’m thinking of signing up for another tour. I want to go back to Vietnam.” This scares the bejesus out of Carly. She’s crying, telling him she loves him but she’d worry constantly that he’d be killed. He promises that he won’t be going back.
• • •
He returns to Bragg to finish his hitch. They talk on the phone; each night he thinks of her. Eventually she stops answering his calls. Eight months later, he receives his discharge from the Army. He’s free; he’s done his service. At twenty-two years old, he’s been shot, blown up, stabbed, and shot down; he’s surprised he’s still alive. He once again finds his whole life ahead of him. In high school, he’d joined the Army. This time, he doesn’t have a next move—except love. Love, he thinks—a woman’s acceptance of him—will save him from destruction, or so he believes. He drives to the nice part of town and knocks on Carly’s front door. Her mother answers and says, “Carly can’t talk right now.”
Is she home? Stan wants to know.
“She can’t speak to you,” Mrs. Mother says. She closes the door, and Stan’s heart breaks.
It’s fall, 1969. The decade is ending. Something new is coming, but Stan doesn’t know what it is. He’s sure he must leave Indiana to make a way for himself. He must change if he’s going to be happy. He knows this. The boy he thought he was—that boy has fled.
• • •
When Dwight Lane comes home to Woodville, Indiana, from the war, he hitchhikes the last few miles to his family’s farmhouse. His mom, Verneil, and dad, Earl, are still at work; his mom is a housekeeper and Earl operates the sewage plant at the nearby state mental hospital, and the house is empty. It’s snowing when the last car drops him off.
How does a man come home? When you have seen terrible things, shot, killed, maimed, quivered, and quaked at the moment of truth, with the shells coming in, how do you come home from this? Dwight stands at one of those old picture windows, single pane, thick, like the glass of an aquarium, and as he stands close to it, he can feel the winter coolness seeping through from the other side. He looks at the cornfield out the window with the snow falling and the cut-off yellow cornstalks holding a dusti
ng of dry snow on their cut tops, about the diameter of sawed-off leg bones, hundreds of them lined in rows, knee high, their tops mounded with snow. The bones go on and on, row after row.
Dwight is tired and sunburned and the house is so quiet and so empty of anything, but especially the guys. The guys. Where are they? He is sure he is about to crawl out of his skin.
• • •
Tim Anderson comes home to Tacoma, Washington, and to a party in his honor hosted by his parents. There’s a heavy snow falling outside, a freak storm, and after spending months in Vietnam, the cold weather is disorienting. Tim stays up in his bedroom, refusing to come down. Finally he walks outside and finds a friend standing in the snow, smoking a joint. He tells Tim that as soon as the roads clear, he’s heading to California, and one day not long after that the two of them take off in an old mail truck headed to Long Beach, where Tim will stay drunk for most of two years. To make enough to eat, he starts stealing cars from dealerships; he won’t steal from people on the street, that’s a rule. This is a job, he feels; he’s not a criminal. Nothing in his boyhood would have predicted he’d become a car thief, but it seems to him that after Vietnam, all bets are off. One day, he wakes up and realizes that he can no longer remember the war in detail—the things that happened, the things he did. The war seems to have happened to another person altogether. He decides to quit stealing cars and go straight. It’s time to start a new life. He wants to go home.
On the day he decides this, he’s driving back to Tacoma in the last vehicle he’d stolen. He plans to get home and park the car on a side street and walk away, leaving this old life behind. He hopes the cops find the car and can easily return it to its owner. He wants to make amends. For two years, he’s been successful at his trade; now, flashing lights appear in his rear windshield. He’s being pulled over. The cop starts to write a ticket for a busted taillight, and when Tim can’t provide the correct papers, he’s arrested. He spends six months in jail, gets out early for good behavior, and starts working construction. Years later, two things will have happened. He’ll have had a successful career as a building foreman overseeing construction of schools, high-rises, and office buildings, and he will wake up in his house in Ocean Park, Washington, in sight of the ocean, wondering about Charlie Pyle. He can hardly remember much of it. Had he dreamed it all? Had he made Pyle up? He will write in a journal, “Being in Vietnam was the most important year of my life. And I remember almost none of it.”