The World Played Chess, page 7
“Too bad. You had a chance to get out while you still could. I thought for sure Todd would fire you.”
“What? Why?”
William smiled, squinting as the cigarette smoke wafted up to his blue eyes. “I’m just giving you shit. Todd called me last night. Said he couldn’t believe you got all that rock broken up and into the foundation ditch. He said anybody that would do what you did with a hangover and without complaint had to be a good worker.”
“How’d he know I was hungover?”
“Experience,” William said with his distinct chuckle. “You looked like shit. Todd doesn’t care what you do on your own time so long as the work gets done. Because you got the work done, he was able to schedule the foundation inspector for tomorrow morning, and the concrete pour for the afternoon. That puts us ahead of schedule. What’s he got you doing this morning?”
“Tearing off the roof,” I said.
William’s eyes widened. “Oh shit. From the frying pan into the fire.” He laughed and took off the long-sleeve cotton shirt he wore over a stained T-shirt and handed it to me. “Wear this,” he said.
“It’s already hot up there.”
“Forget the heat. That insulation itches like a bitch. Don’t touch it. Don’t let it touch your skin.” William pulled out a crumpled blue bandana and a pair of plastic goggles from one of the white buckets. “Tie this around your nose and mouth and wear the goggles. Trust me. Or you’ll scratch your skin off.”
William went back to work preparing the foundation for inspection and, hopefully, the cement pour. I went up the ladder with the handkerchief and the goggles and pulled down insulation for about fifteen minutes. It was already warm and humid inside the attic; my goggles kept fogging and I could hardly breathe through the bandana. The temperature felt hotter by the minute, and now that William had gotten me thinking about itching, I was itchy.
After pulling down several batts of insulation, I better understood Todd’s instruction about cutting the nailing slats. The framing looked like what I imagined a whale’s skeleton would look like from the inside. The two-by-six beams formed the backbone. In between the framing were the one-by-four nailing slats, the rib bones. The tar paper, shingles, and insulation—what I imagined to be the blubber and skin—were nailed to the slats. I stopped and thought for a minute. There had to be a better way to do this job.
I took an end of my crowbar and banged on a place where I had removed insulation. Dust fell, further choking the air, but eventually I poked a hole in the tar paper and shingles. The hole allowed bright light and a puff of fresh air. I enlarged the hole enough to insert my head, pulled down the bandana, and took a deep breath of cool morning air. I knew how Todd wanted the work done, but I contemplated a way that would save time, save lumber, and most importantly, provide me breathable air.
I stuck the blade of the Sawzall through the hole I had punched near one of the ridge beams and hit the trigger. The saw jumped from my hands like a rifle and I dropped it, putting a small gash through the top of my Converse. A quick check confirmed I had not cut off my toe. I swore, took a breath, and tried again, this time with a firm grip on the machine. The blade ripped through the tar paper and shingles as well as the rib bones. I cut a four-foot-long gash, then stepped to the adjacent two-by-six and repeated the process. When I had finished, I busted through the shingles at the top of the two gashes. I then used the crowbar to lift the square I had cut until momentum, gravity, and its weight caused the cut section to tumble end over end down the roof. It crashed in the front yard with a bang.
William cursed a blue streak, and he and Mike, who had arrived earlier, came running from the garage looking like they expected to find me sprawled on the front lawn.
William swore a string of expletives. In between he said, “I thought you fell off the roof.” He looked at the roof section on the front lawn. “I guess that’s one way to do it. Just don’t kill yourself.”
Killing myself was the furthest thing from my mind. I was only thinking about breathing. With William’s tacit blessing, I cut out bigger and bigger sections of the roof and pitched them over the side. Some I could angle so they would slide from the roof directly into the blue dumpster, which alleviated the chore of having to clean up the yard. Most importantly, I could breathe.
By the time Todd got back, just a few hours after he’d left, I had ripped off nearly the entire roof, but for the larger skeleton. I figured I could pry it apart and he could reuse the wood for the new roof. Made sense anyway. Todd stepped from the cab of his truck and considered the minimal debris in the yard. Then gazed up at me. I couldn’t tell if he was pissed or pleased.
“We can reuse these boards for the new roof.” I slapped at a two-by-six board making up the framework of the roof.
Todd pursed his lips and nodded. Then went into the garage.
The next thing I knew, he had climbed the ladder with a sledgehammer and a crowbar.
“Good idea saving the lumber,” he said. He showed me how to separate the boards nailed together using the crowbar. Once the board was down, he handed me something called a “cat’s paw” and a hammer to pull up the nail heads. “You raise the nail head. Then use this.” He handed me a “Superbar” to pry out the nails.
I cleaned up the yard first so the company could haul away the dumpster at the end of the day, saving a second day’s rental, then worked with Todd to salvage the wood. Mike came out at five to get me, but I knew Todd needed a hand disassembling the roof beams, so I told Mike I was going to stay. Todd and I got the beams down. Then he, too, took off while I stayed to de-nail them and stack the boards according to size. William also worked late, to get the foundation trenches finalized for inspection. At six o’clock he called me down to the garage. With Mike not there I felt a bit awkward, but William handed me a beer and I sat on the bucket. He again crouched, smoked, and drank.
“Doesn’t that hurt your knees?” I asked.
“The opposite,” William said, swallowing his beer and shaking his head.
“I don’t think I can bend that far.”
“I didn’t have much choice. You didn’t want to sit on anything in the bush. You’d have ants and termites crawling up your ass and in your pants. I knew a guy who sat with his ass hanging over a log and got bit by a coral snake camouflaged on the other side.”
I laughed at the visual. “Was it poisonous?” I asked.
“Hell yeah. ‘Red on yellow kills a fellow. Red on black, venom lack.’ This one was red on yellow.”
“Did the guy die?”
William sucked in nicotine, and when he raised the cigarette, I noticed a tremor in his hand. He tilted back his head and blew out a stream of smoke. “Nah. The corpsman got the antidote in him, and they helicoptered him to a military hospital. They took out a chunk of his ass about that big though.” William held his hands together to indicate a rough circle the size of a baseball. “When he came back, guys called him Rawlings.” I knew Rawlings to be a baseball brand. He chuckled. “After that everyone was looking for logs to crap over.”
I shook my head. “Wait. What? You mean so they wouldn’t get bit?”
“No. So they would get bit. You get bit and you’re flown back to base and get two weeks of R & R. That beats the shit out of humping your ass all day in the bush.” I didn’t know a lot, but I knew R & R meant rest and relaxation. “They had snakes all over that damn place,” William said. “If you weren’t looking for land mines and trip wires, you were looking for snakes. We called one ‘two-step.’ You know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because if you got bit you took two steps before you died.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Another time, this guy got bit in the ass and the corpsman is reading the manual to determine what to do. The manual says, suck the venom out of the wound with your mouth. The guy who got bit gets anxious and says to the corpsman, ‘What does the journal say?’ Medic looks at him and says, ‘It says you’re going to die.’”
William laughed.
I laughed with him, but asked, “Did that really happen?”
“Nah, that’s an old joke that went around after Rawlings got bit.”
I took a slug of beer. “How old were you when you got drafted?”
William tilted the can to his lips. After swallowing, he said, “Eighteen. And technically I didn’t get drafted. I volunteered.”
This surprised me. “Why?”
“Because I knew I was going, sure as shit.”
I gave that a moment of thought. We had a classmate volunteer for the marines, and we all thought that was about the stupidest thing ever. The marines were always in the shit. “Why’d you volunteer for the marines?”
William dropped the cigarette butt into the beer can and tossed it aside, opening a second beer. He offered a second to me.
I declined. “I’m good.”
“I was a wrestler in high school,” William said. “My junior year I won state in my weight class. I had scholarship offers, which I needed to pay tuition. My parents didn’t have the money.”
“Mine don’t, either. I’m heading to community college.”
“Mikey told me. I wasn’t that lucky. My senior year I tore my shoulder and the scholarships went bye-bye. Without wrestling I lost focus, screwed around, and almost didn’t graduate. College was no longer in the equation, so I wasn’t going to get a deferral. I got my draft notice and went down to the draft board to take my physical. The line for the army was out the door and it was about ninety degrees on the blacktop. I wasn’t going to stand in that heat all day. I looked over at the Marine Corps office in the same strip mall and there was no line. I mean no one. So I asked the guy in line behind me to hold my place and I walked over and asked the marine recruiter, ‘How long do I have to enlist for?’
“Recruiter says, ‘If you volunteer, two years active, one reserve.’
“‘How much time in Vietnam?’
“He says, ‘Thirteen months.’
“The army was two years active with twelve months in-country, so I figured it wasn’t any different and I wouldn’t have to spend all day on that asphalt. Plus, I was told if I did well on my AFQT—that’s the Armed Forces Qualification Test—I could choose my MOS.”
“What’s MOS?”
“Military occupational specialty.”
“What did you choose?”
“I got the highest score you can achieve, so I chose MOS 4341, combat correspondent.” My interest was piqued. I intended to study journalism and creative writing in college. “But they ended up denying my first choice—I think because I turned down OCS. They made me a combat photographer. I figured maybe I could put together a portfolio to get my foot in the door at a newspaper somewhere.”
“That’s what I want to do.”
William nodded. “Mikey told me. He told me you were valedictorian. I figured you had to be smart.”
“I haven’t felt like it the past two days. Todd looks at me like I’m a moron.”
“Nah, he don’t feel that way. If he did, he would have fired you.” William lit another cigarette and blew smoke over his head. “Todd doesn’t care how smart you are. He cares how hard you work. You’ve saved him time and money getting the driveway and the roof done this quickly. Reusing the roof beams was also smart. Those boards are expensive.”
I felt good about that. “How come you didn’t pursue photography?” I asked, thinking maybe I would like to see William’s photographs.
William lost the grin and the chuckle. “Didn’t work out,” he said, and I got the impression he didn’t want to talk about it. Then he said, “I got a camera and training on how to use it, but I also got a rifle, because a marine always carries a rifle. Always. I thought that I’d be working out of the combat information center at Da Nang, but the marines were down in numbers because of casualties, and I had high shooting marks. So they embedded me at a firebase along the Laotian border. I got combat photographs published in Stars and Stripes, but those were the photographs the military wanted people to see. They didn’t want people to see the others I took—like me sitting on an armed personnel carrier strewn with dead bodies.”
“Vietnamese bodies?”
William shook his head. “Americans. Marines.”
The gravity of the situation hit me. “That happened to you?”
“More than once.” William gave me a faux salute. “A marine never leaves a man on the battlefield.” My silence probably spoke volumes because William shrugged. “You get immune to it,” he said, but it didn’t sound like he had gotten immune to it. It sounded like the thought I’d had the prior night, with my friends, that we were only bullshitting ourselves.
William motioned to my chest. “I saw your cross.”
I touched it. “My mom gave it to me when I got confirmed.”
“Good Italian Catholic boy. My mom gave me one just like it before I shipped out to boot camp.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“I was.” He brought the cigarette to his lips. “When I first got to Vietnam, I used to take out that cross and kiss it all the time.”
I did not see a chain and cross around his neck and didn’t recall seeing either when he and Mike worked without shirts. “What happened to it?”
William took another drag. His hand shook. “I lost it,” he said, looking away, and again I felt something, that there was more to tell but William wasn’t about to tell me. William shrugged. “It wasn’t doing me any good anyway. I figured if God wasn’t going to listen in Vietnam, when I needed him most, I wasn’t gonna keep asking.”
Again, I gave the comment a moment of thought, covering the pause with a drink from the beer can. Finally, I asked, “So are you an atheist?”
William tilted his head, as if thinking about it. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t put too much stock in that ‘praise Jesus’ stuff. I’ve been to hell, and I didn’t see any sign of God. After a while you stop looking. You figure it out on your own.”
For the life of me I don’t know what compelled me to say what I said next, maybe that underdeveloped frontal lobe. “But you lived. That had to mean something.”
William gave me a pensive smile. “You know what it meant? It meant I got lucky. That’s all. Dumb, blind luck. Guy in front of me steps on a land mine that was meant for me. Bad luck for him. Good luck for me.”
William snubbed out his cigarette and stood, and I was glad he did. I thought I knew about the Vietnam War. I had heard and read about all the young men who had lost their lives, about what they had experienced, and what they had perpetrated. I knew about the My Lai Massacre, about soldiers coming home to protests and people calling them “baby killers.” I also knew we’d lost a lot of young men who were my age when they died to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, and that when we had pulled out of the country, it had fallen to the communists anyway, and everything American soldiers fought and died for seemed to have been a waste. I recalled the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which indicated the war had not been driven by idealism and that the US government had lied to the public and to Congress, which made the deaths of those young men all the more senseless. But those were impersonal snippets learned from news articles. William had been there. He had lived it.
When William spoke of Vietnam, he was like a live electrical wire I had gripped. His stories sent a current through my body. But then, just as quickly, William flipped a switch and the current turned off, leaving me drained and tired.
Like my high school friends who embellished our stories to perpetrate an illusion, I sensed William held back information about Vietnam, about what he had truly experienced, to perpetrate his own illusion—that the war hadn’t affected him. But I sensed it had.
After four years of high school, I didn’t feel like I really knew my friends, not at their core; I had never gotten past the veneer we all erected to protect ourselves. And I didn’t feel like I knew William. Not in the least. I knew the happy-go-lucky William with the chuckle in his voice, but not the Vietnam William who had, somehow, managed to survive and make it back alive.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that William.
PART II
NEVER, NEVERLAND
April 7, 1968
I was wearing my helmet and flak jacket and cradling my M-16 like it was a lover. I couldn’t see Kenny, but I could hear his muffled snoring beneath his poncho. At times he choked and coughed, as if he had sucked in the plastic. In the darkness, the sound was magnified. Every sound was magnified. I wanted to punch Kenny and tell him to shut up, but he couldn’t very well roll over.
I couldn’t see jack shit. The night was ink-black darkness, the darkest darkness I’d ever experienced. I know now what it’s like to go blind. One minute you see things. The next, nothing. I kept telling myself I was in a John Wayne movie. Victor Cruz put that thought in my head, but it was better than thinking of a rat pouncing on my face and ripping out my flesh. I looked around for the movie cameras and the overhead boom microphone—’cause that shit couldn’t have been real.
But it was real.
I don’t want to be here, and I just got here. I’ve got a whole year, plus a month. I miss New Jersey. I miss my parents and my brothers and sisters. I just want to go home, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I want to get to Oz, click my heels three times, and go home. And when I get back, I sure as shit won’t run away again.
Trickles of sweat rolled down my face. It was humid, even at night. I told myself sweating meant I was alive, was proof I hadn’t died and slipped into the great dark abyss. I assumed I wouldn’t have been sweating after I died; would I? I didn’t think so. I didn’t know.
I heard a noise, a scratching sound, and I grabbed the handle of my Ka-Bar. I thought maybe it was one of Kenny’s rats, big as a cat. Even with my eyes now adjusted, I couldn’t see past the rim of the sandbags surrounding our foxhole. I heard the scratching again. Then a click. Leaves rustled but there was no wind. A pop, a bright white light flashed, and the night came alive in a brilliant burst. Another pop. Another flash. More light. Claymores were being detonated.
