Fatal Light Page 2

  Yes sir, that it is.

  My grandfather told the vendor he should do good business on such a fine day and the vendor said he certainly hoped so and the warm paper sack came down to me aromatic with oil and salt. We walked on with the crowd growing around us, my grandfather at my left shoulder as we edged through shifting groups for a place on the parade route. There was excitement riding out of the sky’s span of clean light, and we found a place behind a boy sitting on the curb. I stood between the boy and my grandfather’s legs, eating popcorn, watching the north end of Main Street, a long incline to where the high school band would appear.

  We could hear the music before we saw the band, drift of the march coming toward us across the air, at first like an afterthought, and the drum major’s tall hat rose over the Main Street ridge and behind him, shimmering, levitating into view, the majorettes strutting and kicking. The sparkle of the instruments wobbled up, the drum major turned and blew his whistle and marked time, the fat majorette dropped her baton.

  The parade went on forever: Middle-aged men in fezzes riding motor scooters in figure-eights, sad clowns with gigantic red feet and smiling cars that tipped suddenly to their back wheels to turn frantic circles in the street. Sprays of hard candies thrown from floats, the mayor and his polished family in the backseat of a Chrysler Imperial convertible. The Nashville singers on a flatbed truck, stair-step children dressed like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, sequined silk cowboy shirts with scallops of piping, ranges of fringe and tight pants tucked into boots tooled with intertwined lariats. Waving to the crowd, the eldest son wearing a sombrero, the youngest daughter doing curtseys.

  The festival queen and her court rode into view on a float garlanded with tissue flowers, gliding across the horizon of Main Street like a mirage, small-town madonnas sliding past waving their downy arms dreamily, their eyes the eyes of soft animals turned heavenward from thrones of blossoms and crepe, their faces all a magnificent promise, the romance at the end of the world passing so slowly in those long moments of perfect quiet, like the air over the river, the light and stillness inside the world at daybreak, like a held breath.

  After the parade my grandfather led me through the crowd, down the hill and west to Juliana Street and Whitlow’s Bar and Grill.

  Inside the dark bar I climbed onto a stool, everywhere mahogany and sepia and the soft glitter of glassware arrayed under the mirror in front of us. My grandfather pushed his hat back on his head but left it on, a Panama with a black band, and I watched his face in the mirror as he ordered a beer for himself and Coca-Cola for me, talking baseball with the bartender. At the end of the bar a blind man tilted his face to the ceiling, half-finished beer in front of him. The far side of the blind man’s body was lit by sunlight from the back door that stood open, his sleeves rolled to where I could see purple tattoos losing their clarity on both forearms. Well, he ain’t the slugger you were in your prime the bartender was saying as our drinks came with glasses turned upside down over the bottle necks, mine the same as my grandfather’s. I poured my Coca-Cola and watched the foam rise; the bartender leaned on the bar in front of us as my grandfather spoke quietly and poured his beer. Traffic sounds filtered from an imaginary distance, time passing in the artificial twilight with no other customers coming in and the bartender and my grandfather talking, now about politics, about Eisenhower. I was finally introduced and the bartender asked my age and how I was liking my visit and by then our drinks were finished. I jumped down from the bar stool to follow my grandfather, and looked back to see the blind man was already gone. An empty beer bottle and an empty glass stood together at the end of the bar. My grandfather touched my shoulder and we were outside, walking toward the bridge and its sudden arch into the sun, disappearing into points west.

  4

  Mary Meade always said we fell in love in front of Bippo’s Pizzeria in Ocean City, Maryland. I had known her for years—elementary school, junior high school—she was the first cousin of Ricky Bayner, who I played football with until he graduated a year ahead of me and went to Yale. I was with Ricky at Bippo’s as she wandered the boardwalk with her girlfriends. Hey, Ricky had said, you remember my cousin Mary don’t you? Yeah, I said, sure, we’re neighbors after all. Ricky and I bought pizza for the girls and we clustered in the back of Bippo’s, laughing and playing pinball, and spent that weekend together on the beach, cruising the carnival attractions, Tilt-A-Whirl, The Zodiac, The Scrambler, nervous glances at obscene novelties in the tourist shops, swimming through long afternoons. We rented a surplus navy life raft; Ricky and I inflated it with a bicycle pump and pushed it beyond the breakers while the girls swam out behind us. We drifted the far side of the surf, zinc oxide smeared on our noses, drinking sun-warmed beer and watching the opulent Chesapeake schooners slice past with names like String of Pearls, Rhonda’s Dream, Body and Soul, in flight toward paradise.

  That night we sat on a bench in front of the Mermaid Bar, talking, listening to the ring of arcades and carnival screams and the ocean booming in the darkness behind us, and after the others drifted away Mary and I stayed on, still talking as the neon signs along the boardwalk clicked off and the moon rose higher and we could see a rim of surf break and disappear back into shadow. We slipped off the bench to sit on the sand and kissed, hard and carefully at first, then softer and with more assurance, lying down on the sand and holding each other, watching the moon move from behind the boardwalk façade to flood the beach in a sweep of cold light.

  5

  In 1967 I was eighteen years old. It was my senior year in high school. Ricky Bayner’s older brother was in the army, serving in Vietnam. I had finished my high school football career with six touchdowns in ten games and just under a thousand yards rushing. There was talk of a scholarship to one of the smaller universities. The college scouts believed my speed and agility and fine hands made up for my lack of weight and height, and during that football season the Director of the Selective Service Administration announced that the draft would be intensified due to increased troop demands in southeast Asia.

  My grandfather sent me $100 for my birthday, and for Christmas I bought Mary a ring with a diamond inset. On December 28 I received the letter notifying me that my draft classification would revert to 1-A as of graduation day. The letter went on to say that the time and location of my induction physical would be forwarded at a later date.

  6

  New Year’s Eve, 1967. A dark heaven of rock and roll, fall of color, and lives played out in cars. In my Camaro with three other football players, driving, talking, passing around a wine bottle, cruising down the hours and near midnight finding ourselves at the reservoir where we swam and drank and brought girls all through the summer. We got out of the car, crunching leaves, moving like strangers on the landscape. The gravel beach and pier and black water seemed bruised and solitary, no place we had ever been, and the sky was wet with cold moonlight and ragged clouds. Somebody said it was 1968.

  The half gallon of cheap sour wine made the round and nobody spoke. After a moment I walked back to my car and sat alone behind the wheel, frightened by a deep and uncertain longing in that expanse of silence.

  The news on New Year’s Day said Nguyen Duy Trinh, speaking from Hanoi, claimed his government would begin negotiations if the United States would unconditionally halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The New Year’s cease-fire was allegedly violated by 170 enemy-initiated actions. There had been fighting at Tay Ninh, 60 miles northwest of Saigon, close by the Cambodian border: 23 Americans were dead, 155 wounded.

  By the end of the day Texas A&M had upset Alabama, 20 to 16, in the Cotton Bowl. USC had no trouble with Indiana in the Rose, and I watched Oklahoma squeeze past Tennessee in the Orange Bowl, 26-24. When I turned the television off I felt claustrophobic, vaguely ill. I had received the official letter directing me to report for induction into the armed forces the following November, and I stepped out into cold dusk, shivering. The blue air and hard starlight smelled like smoke. I looked at my car in
the driveway, and went inside for jacket and keys.

  I drove, through the serenity of quiet winter streets, the already beaten fragility of early demise. Police reports and body counts lived in the radio with psychedelic rock and Detroit soul, a running backdrop. Cultured BBC voices lectured over the shout of gunfire on satellite links from Saigon or Phnom Pen as I drifted the neighborhood lanes and, closer to the city, passed the dark shops and stores in front of their vacant parking lots. I turned the radio off as I moved onto an empty boulevard, and snow began to fall.

  7

  The night before I left for recruit training I sat in my parents’ dining room. My sisters made faces at each other and my father told stories about his years in the service, in the navy during the Second World War and again in Korea.

  “There were tough times, sure,” he said, sitting back at the end of the meal. “But all in all it was OK. A kid’ll pick up things. See things you’d never see anywhere else.”

  I nodded. My mother looked at her plate and her cheeks were flushed. My younger sister loudly asked to be excused; both girls left the table.

  “I’ll tell you, though,” my father went on. “There was something more—I don’t know, organized about World War Two. You went because you wanted to, it was the right thing to do, you were proud to wear the uniform.”

  “I guess the lines were a little bit more clearly drawn,” I said. “Back then.”

  My father shrugged. “That’s all I meant,” he said. “We weren’t thrashing around the jungle like a bunch of idiots.”

  “Joe Powers told a different story,” my mother said to my father. Then, to me, “Joe was in the Pacific war, on those islands... .”

  “Corregidor, Iwo Jima,” my father said. “But hell, Joe was always a little melodramatic anyway.”

  A silence passed; we looked at our plates. My father swirled what was left of his iced tea. The ice cubes rang in the glass.

  “Maybe somebody knows what’s going on over there.” My father sighed. “You wouldn’t know it from reading the papers, though, I’ll tell you.”

  My mother stacked the dinner plates and asked if we wanted coffee.

  “Sounds good,” I told her.

  My father nodded, watched as my mother moved away, into the kitchen. When she was gone he leaned toward me saying, “One thing about the service. You have your fun.” He looked at me, in possession of secrets.

  “You know what I mean,” he said, smiling. “One time I even shared a rubber. You believe that? No shit. Me and this kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma—Ronnie Bills, I even remember his name—me and Bills and this Mexican girl in the backseat of a rented car. We were on a weekend pass in San Diego, must’ve been the summer of ‘forty-three. Bills went first, gets out and takes off the rubber, empties it out, and gives it to me. Christ.” My father was laughing. “What the hell. I mean there we were, one rubber between us and the señorita hot to trot.”

  My mother turned into the dining room with coffeepot and cups on a tray. My father’s laughter subsided and I smiled with the story and he sighed.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we did some crazy things back then.”

  My mother glanced at him as she filled the cups and handed them to us.

  “You know, though? What I really loved about those days?” My father stirred sugar into his coffee. “This’ll sound strange, maybe, but what I really loved was the music. Really. Benny Goodman, Harry James, Artie Shaw. Glenn Miller. I saw ‘em all.”

  My mother smiled, holding the coffee cup close to her lips. “Your father was quite the dancer,” she said.

  My father said, “Your mother and I won some dance contests. Jitterbugging. Fox-trots.”

  “Spotlight dances,” my mother said. “I loved those.”

  “You did those at kind of half speed,” my father told me. “You had to be good, couldn’t snow the judges with a lot of flailing around and throwing your partner in the air. You had to have a little grace. Of course, I had one hell of a partner.” My parents beamed at each other, and my father said, “There was one night...the Palladium?”

  “You’re thinking about Roseland,” my mother said.

  “Roseland, right.” He nodded. “Who was the judge? Some movie star.”

  “Betty Grable.”

  My father turned to me. “Your mother and I did an encore dance right up on the bandstand, Glenn Miller playing right behind us.”

  It was good to have my parents preoccupied with their past, enjoying themselves. I asked if they remembered the steps.

  My father grinned. “What do you think? Give the boy a demonstration?”

  “I don’t know.” My mother put her coffee cup on its saucer. “We had a pretty complicated routine.”

  My father pushed back from the table. “I’ll bet we remember every move,” he said, and stepped into the adjoining room.

  I could hear him flipping through his record collection, sliding albums in and out as my mother said, calling in to him, “It’s been years since I even thought about those days...”

  “Got it!” my father yelled. My mother and I went into the sitting room and he was moving the recliner against a wall. He went to the stereo and set the needle down, and the sound of Glenn Miller’s orchestra filled the room and my parents came together to move easily, backing around each other, turns, half turns. My mother swung inside his arms, whirled out; they turned and smiled, looking like the song sounded: supple, in touch with every corner of the room, good-humored and well mannered but ready for anything.

  My sisters ran in when they heard the music and danced together, imitating my parents, cavorting and giggling. My parents rode into the music and as the song ended they fell into each other, laughing, my father flushed and panting. “Guess I’m not in the shape I was,” he said, patting his belly.

  My sisters chased out of the room as my mother leaned on one arm of the recliner, hands on her knees.

  “Hey,” my father wheezed, “we’re still OK, y’know?”

  “Well.” My mother winked at me. “Not bad.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “I could have the next dance?” My mother smiled, flattered. “By all means. The spotlight dance?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  My father put on Harry James doing September Song and I placed my left hand in the small of my mother’s back, and lifting her left hand in my right I stood poised a moment before we moved off into a box step. My mother looked away from my face.

  I said, “I’ll be OK.”

  Her eyes misted and she held her smile in place. “You take care,” she said. “Wherever they send you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You better be.”

  “Promise. ”

  Her smile never wavered. “All right,” she said. “I believe you.”

  8

  I said goodbye to Mary on the floor of her parents’ basement, a universe of slow heat and half-light, our bodies turning and exquisite. We used television to conceal the sounds of lovemaking and moved in late whispers, as if we could find a private arc of time and live there, protected, in the grip of salvation. Inside her I was desperate and transfixed and believed she must surely feel the same behind her closed eyes. Afterward she would remember things, vagrant moments from years before, the shape of a particular tree on an uncle’s farm, the peculiar death of a distant relative, something somebody had said and everybody had forgotten except her. She would tell me the stories as if she was possessed by the memories and I would listen, afraid we were aimless children with no real knowledge of any sort of world, at sea with our own lives.

  She told me she was terrified for me, that she might never see me again.

  I said I could go somewhere else, Germany maybe.

  No, she had told me. They’re sending you to Vietnam. And you know they are.

  I rolled onto my back and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know anything,” I whispered.

  “I can’t believe we’re ending,” she said.

  “
Nothing’s ending.”

  She sat up and spoke with her back to me. “They’re taking you away and sending you God knows where and I won’t see you. That’s an ending.” Her voice was flat.

  “You’ll know where I am. I’ll get a leave, I’ll come to see you.”

  Mary continued as if I had said nothing. “I’ll be constantly scared you’re dead, and I can’t live like that.”

  I looked at her back, the graceful trace of her spine. “Please,” I said, “don’t do this to me. I can’t change anything. I can’t help it.” I stood and pulled on my jeans.

  “I won’t wait for you,” she said softly. “I mean, I want you back. You know that.” She looked down at her body; when she spoke again she was whispering. “But I can’t just wait. I’d go crazy. You can’t ask me to do that.”

  I put on my T-shirt, moving as if I were already alone. “I won’t ask that,” I murmured. I knelt to put on my tennis shoes, laced them. I stood again and told her I would write to her. She began to cry.

  9

  The air outside the recruiting office was a gash of cold. Windy, overcast. The few of us there stood with hands shoved deep into pockets, moving from foot to foot, waiting for the van that would take us to the induction center. A boy with a motorcycle jacket opened over a torn T-shirt stepped close to the building and tried to light a cigarette against the wind. He went through three matches before I stepped back to shield him and he got the cigarette lit.

  “Thanks,” he said, squinting at me, smoke whipping away from his face.

  A newspaper truck pulled to the curb in front of us. A black boy no more than twelve years old stepped down, dragging a bale of morning editions. He dropped the bale in front of a vending box, pulled wire cutters from a hip pocket and snipped the wire that bound the newspapers. He was a professional: smooth and efficient, unlocking the vending box to take out the day before’s leftovers, neatly stacking in fresh papers, sliding a copy into the window rack. Closing the box he gathered wire and newspapers and stepped up into the truck. Gears moaned, the truck lurched away. The black boy stared at us from the open door.