If You Lived Here (32 page)

I’m sitting in the study. Outside, the rain has turned our entire yard into limp grass and mud. You would love it. Remember the time you pulled me outside during a thunderstorm, and insisted that we both wash our hair? Remember how loud it was, and the way you started singing? I had never seen anyone as happy as you were. We were so wet and so happy, soaked right through.

It’s a grim night here. I guess I’ll begin.

They stationed me in Danang, at the base at China Beach, like the TV show. It wasn’t a bad place really and I didn’t suffer there. Not physically, at least. When people thought of Vietnam back then, they thought of kids on patrol, eating rations out of cans, dirty, sick, stepping on mines, putting their lives on the line every day. You were young, but I know you remember. You might think of me that way, but here’s what I did: I worked in air-conditioning. I faced fewer risks than nurses, generals, number crunchers in Artillery who had to keep track of bombs.

No one considered the morgue a top priority on the enemy hit list. Why waste ammunition on people who had already died? I did go to Vietnam, but I didn’t do anything heroic.

For a long time, I wished I had never let on about the family business. I was safe, but I had no social life. The other guys my age wouldn’t come near me. They couldn’t see me as a normal nineteen-year-old. I listened to Creedence. I got hot for Raquel Welch. I would have been happy to smoke weed, if anyone had offered me any. The grunts I met in Basic called me “Chilly” or “Chilly Long Hands.” One kid named Pepper, from Arkansas, called me “Sneed.” I never figured out why.

The guys were superstitious. Pepper wouldn’t change his underwear. Supposedly, he planned to go through his whole tour in the same pair of Fruit of the Looms he had worn the last night he slept with his girlfriend back in Little Rock. I heard that Pepper had hired a call girl from the Queen Bee Bar and she walked out on him right in the mid-dle of his hour. After that, none of the other Queen Bee girls would go near him. I never knew if that was true or not, but he always looked depressed to me.

I suppose I was depressed as well, maybe not clinically, but unhappy and discouraged. I had regular hours at work, and during my free time I just wandered around. I didn’t have any friends. I avoided the guys in Graves. The morticians I knew from home were decent people who cared about their communities and tried their best to help people through pain. These Graves guys, though, never had any personal contact with the families of the dead. They were career military morticians, just patching up bodies and sending them back to the States. They didn’t plan funerals or memorial services. They didn’t hold widows’ hands and stand at the back of the church, watching mourners grieve. In my mem-ory, they didn’t do much besides drink. When they talked at all, they discussed football stats and compared brands of formaldehyde. From what I could tell, four years seems the outside limit on how long most military morticians could last there. By that point, they had become incurable alcoholics and made one too many dumb mistakes. The military shipped them stateside, where they finished out their careers at some VA hospital, embalming vets who’d died of heart disease and liver ailments. I kept a distance from them. I had a twelve-month tour and I counted the days until I could go home.

The only one who lasted longer than four years in Vietnam was an old guy, Avery. Avery. I like that name. I had heard that Avery served in World War II and Korea both, so he must have been about sixty. Old enough to retire, for sure. He was tall, balding, thin but sturdy. Remember the butler, Hudson, on the old
Upstairs, Downstairs
vid-eos we used to watch on TV? That butler reminded me of Avery. They both had that same expression: firm, wise, serious but cheerful. (This comparison will probably explain why I acted so ambivalent when you brought home the videos—I’m sure you remember. I didn’t want to watch, but I did, too.)

Avery behaved like Hudson as well. I don’t mean that he would bring me coffee or anything. I mean he had a butler’s style. He was discreet, well-mannered, knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, and curious about everything. He asked me so many questions about Wilmington, my family, the beach. He gave me his old
National Geographic
s and, because of him, I read them. He had excellent posture. He was older than the rest of us by at least twenty years, but he could work like a horse. I imagine he embalmed thousands of bodies during the course of his career. When I think of the wall of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, I wonder how many of those guys he prepared for burial. He never seemed phased by the load.

Basically, I was alone there, and I wasn’t used to loneliness. Back home, my friends liked to visit the mortuary. If they managed to spot a dead body, even better. In high school—I’ve probably told you this—the only time I had a problem was in tenth grade, when Mrs. Hicks thought the experience of visiting Marino and Sons would help my classmates “grow more comfortable” with the idea of death. Maybe she was right, but after that I couldn’t get a date for months.

In the States, people consider death kind of creepy. But they also think of it as far away, unlucky, something that happens to grandparents, kids who dive into the wrong ends of swimming pools, and bankers with

weak hearts. In the U.S., people can spend the first fifty, sixty, even seventy years of life ignoring death. In Vietnam, though, you couldn’t avoid it, just like you couldn’t avoid the heat, or bad dreams. I think guys had a hard time forgetting about death. They saw me as an unwelcome reminder of where they could end up: refrigerated in the big gray building at the far end of China Beach. Everyone wanted to avoid Graves Registration. So they avoided me, too.

I remember on New Year’s Eve I went to the USO show and sat at a table by myself. It strikes me as funny now. Why should it matter, really? But I was only nineteen. New Year’s Eve seemed like a big deal then.

Other than my social life, or lack of it, the hardest thing about Vietnam was the fact that I had to prepare the bodies of people I had known. Thousands of U.S. soldiers went to Vietnam, the equivalent of a good-size city—bigger than Wilmington, for sure—but, still, it wasn’t that unusual to find yourself staring down at a familiar face on the gur-ney (it’s just that so many people died over there). It took me a while to get used to that. Back home, whenever we had a case that Dad knew would upset me, he took care of it himself. After my friend Ben Anson died of leukemia, I just sat with all the other New Hanover students crammed into that little church.

I wished my dad was with me at China Beach. Some weeks, I recognized two, three, even more of the names rolling in on the gurneys—my basic training sprint partner, Ellis, who stepped on a mine near Doc Lai; Jackson, my seatmate on the flight from Okinawa, who accidentally set off his own grenade when he was horsing around, pretending to pull the pin out; and Pepper, who lost his head, literally, when he stood up too fast after his lieutenant announced that Charlie had cleared out of the area. I found myself able, then, to settle the rumors about Pepper’s Fruit of the Looms. They were a bit gray, and worn thin from so much hand washing, but they didn’t stink any more than mine did. (I know that this kind of information is “off topic,” as Theo would say, but somehow, now that I’ve started, it all seems relevant. I should probably go see a psychiatrist.)

One day, I embalmed Holcomb, the clown who sang a bawdy

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” during the holiday talent show. Poor Holcomb took a sniper shot through the left eye. He wasn’t even fighting at the time. He was sitting on the ground, writing a letter to his sister. I kept trying to imagine what kind of person would shoot a guy writing a letter. War has no limits. Not a single limit.

Part of me felt glad to be the one to clean them up and ship them off, to make them as presentable as possible for their families. But I also felt ashamed to see them like that. In life, these guys were tough and swaggering. The base counselors talked about our “soldier’s armor.” You didn’t see the “real” person, which felt fine to me. Whatever got these boys through the weeks and months before they could turn around and go home again. I didn’t care if I didn’t see the “real” side of any of them. I would have been satisfied to spend the rest of my life thinking of Holcomb as the joker who stuck out his foot and tripped Tony Morton headfirst into the C barracks latrine. I would have been fine with that.

Then Holcomb—loudmouthed Holcomb—came in on the gurney and I had to spend a couple of hours with him. Holcomb was a big guy, with Popeye muscles and carefully tanned skin. I’d seen him surfing on his days off, or just dozing out there in the sun, one arm stretched up over his eyes and the other hand gripping a bottle of government-issue Bud. If I had had my choice, I would have remembered Holcomb like that. But instead I remember his nails. Chewed down to the quick. Even the skin around the cuticles was bitten until it was raw and red, like something worked by sandpaper. No, like meat. I wondered if it hurt. I wondered when he found the privacy to do it. I couldn’t help seeing Holcomb, sitting there in the dark on patrol, awake and listening, chewing and chewing, wishing for the night to end. And I’ve always remembered the wound on him, the hole where his eye had been, and the expression on what was left of his face—lips pursed in concentration, right eye squinting.

After I finished up with Holcomb, the old guy Avery looked him over and said, “Nice job, Martin. That was a tough one.” Avery was very polite, and I appreciated it. Nobody else in Vietnam ever called me Martin. “Could you pass me that scalpel, please, Martin?” he would say.

He was a gentleman. A gentle man. As I saw it, he made everyone else in Graves seem like brutes. The physical demands there could be crushing. Much harder than what I did back home. You had to be strong enough to maneuver a two-or three-hundred-pound corpse into proper position on the table, all by yourself. You were constantly hauling heavy gallons of chemicals from the storage areas to the preparation rooms. And on a bad day you’d stand in the exact same spot for hours at a time. A “bad day” might bring a dozen or more bodies rolling through the door. The physical exertion could knock you out, but you needed more than stamina to do the job. The colonel who ran Graves talked about our patriotic duty to make these Lost American Heroes go home looking human again. But what could we do with a guy like Pepper, who came in without a head? America called itself the leader of the free world and we couldn’t even make Pepper recognizable to his girlfriend back in Little Rock. I often felt beaten down by the challenge. Out of all of us, Avery was the only one who came close to getting it right. He would spend a whole afternoon smoothing over the face of a burn victim, try-ing to simulate healthy skin. He scrubbed out the crud-filled nails of guys who hadn’t been able to shower in weeks. He focused on those tiny details that the rest of us, too busy or overwhelmed, were always neglecting.

I don’t want to paint myself as completely pathetic and depressed. I wrote letters, mostly to Janet and my mom. I received a lot of letters, too, which kept me going. I remember feeling startled by how little happened back home, but I read every word, often twice. On Valentine’s Day, I got a valentine from some church lady in Indiana, but that just seemed weird.

I guess I was weird, too. One day, probably out of bored desperation, I followed Avery to the base front gates. Out of all the guys in Graves, Avery was the only one who seemed to have a life. I wondered about him. When he left the building after completing his shift, he had on well-pressed trousers and a clean polo shirt. He might have been sixty, but the guy moved like a kid. By the time I reached the road outside, all I saw was the back of his bald head as he sped away in a hired cyclo (a

three-wheeled bicycle taxi. That was the main way to get around at that time. Maybe it’s the same way there now, for you.).

That day, I didn’t follow him. I wouldn’t have admitted it to any-one, but I hadn’t left the base since I got to Vietnam. Three months. I was too afraid. I always felt edgy. I spent my days around the bodies of so many guys my age that I couldn’t stop thinking about ending up on the gurney myself. You never knew. The VC could be anywhere at any time. One guy told me he always checked before he sat down on the toilet—someone might be hiding down there—and the idea didn’t seem completely unreasonable to me either.

Still, it looked kind of interesting out there past the main gates. I realized that there was only so long that a guy could hang around by himself playing pinball. Finally, one afternoon when the heat had eased a bit, I left the base. I’d been thinking about it for days. I decided I’d just go out for an hour or so, take a ride in a cyclo, get a look around, and be back by supper. It sounded fairly simple.

The cyclo drivers parked in a line to the side of the main gate, lounging in their battered wicker passenger seats. When they saw me, four of them jumped up and ran over.

“Queen Bee?” “Queen Bee?”

“You like Queen Bee? I take you there cheap.”

They formed such a tight cluster around me that I had to step back. I shook my head. “I just want to take a look around the city,” I told them.

Three of the cyclo drivers started talking to each other, trying to deci-pher what I’d said. Apparently, their English didn’t go beyond “Queen Bee.” The fourth, who was wearing a Dodgers baseball cap, grinned at me and said, “City tour?”

I nodded.

His smile got broader. “Let’s go, fella!” he said.

I remembered what they’d told us in the “Customs and Culture” lecture when we arrived. You’re supposed to bargain. “How much?” I asked.

The cyclo driver bunched his eyebrows and rubbed his chin. He had a greasy face and a lazy eye. “Five dollar,” he said. He didn’t even want my piasters.

“One dollar,” I replied.

He laughed energetically. One eye looked at me; the other gazed at a button on my shirt. “Three dollar. One hour!” he said. I followed him to his cyclo.

We headed north along the main road, which was lined with small stalls selling sodas and souvenirs. Within a few minutes, we turned left and started across the bridge that led over the river and into the city of Danang. From there, I could see the city stretching along the shore in both directions. The skyline was low, with only a few taller buildings and the spire of a church jutting up toward the sky. In the river below us, rickety wooden fishing boats and small gray U.S. naval vessels plied the water. A breeze blew across my face. I’d never ridden in a cyclo before. I wondered if the driver thought I was heavy.