Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (14 page)

He started reviving when Johanson got a note back from Shari, A really sweet thank you note saying how touched she was by his gift and that she hoped he was doing well and she wouldn't mind hearing from him again. So he –Johanson, that is--sent her a Valentine—the biggest, fanciest velvet heart full of Russell Stover's chocolates he could find, and a funny card, which Amato got him to pick out instead of the mushy one Woody reached for first. If Nick was going to have a second-hand life, he wanted the guy representing him to show a little class, at least.

Woody covered his bets by sending his Becky the mushy card and a box of chocolates too but he could have saved his money on the second box—the first one came back, the package unopened. She must have rotated out—gone home maybe. But she'd told them that she still had time left to serve after she left Nam—funny they hadn't forwarded the package to her new duty station.

Johanson didn't pursue it then because he was on his way home, and the lighter and Amato with him. Becky was waiting.

At first, Amato was simply glad they had somewhere to go. He was starting to reconcile himself to his situation as part of Johanson's life. Johanson's parents had moved from the farm to Florida while he was gone, but he went back to Ohio first and found Becky at the bank where she worked. The folks came back up from Florida briefly when the Johansons got married a couple of weeks later.

Amato watched Johanson's dad, who never touched his son, barely tolerated Becky's brush on the cheek, and his mother, who fluttered and talked a little too much as if to make up f or the father's silence. Nick was glad when they left. He had idolized his own dad when he was a kid, learned to play guitar like him, remembered all of his stories, all of his expressions of speech and face, learned from him how to get around the City. He thought having his own father half his life was maybe better than what Woody had after all.

Woody deserved better than that. With all this good stuff around him, his new wife, his folks, the nice house and land he inherited from them, Woody was still worried about what had happened to Nick. He'd light up, using the Zippo, and stare at it. He made a few phone calls, and got quietly, stolidly pissed off when nobody seemed to know anything or be very interested. Most of the other guys in their unit were dead or still in Nam now. Everybody had been real busy keeping alive when Amato got hit and none of them saw what happened to him. Amato knew this, from the eyeblink between the time he died and the time he joined Johanson. Not one other guy had any idea that he was gone. Amato wished he could tell Woody what the deal was but somehow or other, it didn't seem to work that way.

The only time Amato was able to come out was when Woody slept, or got drunk, or sick. Then it was easier to sort of take control. The first time Becky and Johanson made love, Woody checked out, mentally, for a short time and Amato moaned Shari's name, wondering what it might have been like with her. He knew in that moment that the love making which seemed to Johanson too trivial to talk about in view of all the death he'd seen was about the most important thing a person could do. It would be worth dying all over again if he could feel this, do it with someone he cared for.

The profundity of the moment was interrupted by Becky smacking poor old Woody silly and rolling out from under him. She'd heard the moan, of course, since it had been made with her husband's vocal equipment. She left him for a couple of weeks, but then she found out she was pregnant and returned.

Amato knew he was causing trouble for his buddy but he couldn't seem to help it.

After that, whenever Woody tried to talk to Becky about Nick, which wasn't all that often, she shut him down.

“Yeah, sure. You say it's your old buddy but it's really that nurse you met, isn't it? You fell for her and now you want her and you're sorry you married me. We promised each other before you left that we'd be faithful—I kept my promise, Woody. Did you?”

And Johanson swore he did, of course, and felt annoyed with Becky for dwelling on some imaginary love thing when he was trying to tell her about life and death. He couldn't talk to her about the important stuff. Not back then. So he didn't talk to her very much.

He started to drink heavily after his first kid was born.

Instead of letting him lapse into one of his brooding silences, Amato came out during a blackout and made Becky listen to what he had to say about the last firefight and about himself. He made her believe him too. He was a better talker than Woody, even when he was pretending to be him, and Becky wasn't used to that, so she listened, if grudgingly.

Maybe interfering wasn't the best thing to do, but if he was going to still be part of life, even by proxy, he didn't want to spend it on the streets someplace when “he” had a wife and a kid and a home. He didn't want Woody's kid to go through what he'd gone through. Maybe if he had felt everything Woody felt and had the chance to enjoy the drinking, it would have been different. Maybe he wouldn't have cared about the consequences if he could have just got drunk too. But Woody's life was all he had and while he wasn't mad that he was dead and Woody was alive, it seemed like
Woody
was. There were times over the next thirty years when Amato had to wonder who was haunting whom.

Becky was as stubborn as Woody and stuck it out. Both of them were hard workers and the kids turned out okay, though all of them moved away from home. Amato didn't blame them. His own parents used to argue, before his Mom died, but they did it out loud, got over it, kissed and made up. Woody and Becky didn't say much when they fought but the house filled with tension way more tangible than Amato could ever hope to be again.

After a long time, Amato realized that in spite of all the fighting, and all of her bitching, Becky actually loved Woody, actually saw him as something more than a paycheck, even if the marriage seemed more like a battlefield sometimes than anything in Nam. Becky wasn't trying to be a pain in the butt. She was a desperate woman who had been using every weapon in her arsenal over all those years to try to get Woody back.

Finally, she bought them both tickets to DC.

“I'm not going there,” Woody protested. “Nothing there but damn politicians. Why do you want to go there now? We could take the grandkids to Disneyland cheaper.”

“Why would the grandkids want you spoiling Disneyland for them?” Becky asked, not sounding mad, though she was. “Come on, Woody, you're not in the rice paddies any more. I want you to go see the Wall. That's where they put the guys who died there. Look. If your name is on there, I'll leave you alone. If it isn't, you come back and come home with me. You got to put this behind you sometime.”

“That's easy for you to say.” He brandished the lighter and held it in front of him like she was a vampire and it was a cross.

“What are you hanging on to that thing for? You stopped smoking ten years ago.”

“Amato gave it to me,” he mumbled. That was a lie. Amato had loaned it to him and the cheap SOB still hadn't given it back when they were hit. Woody crammed the lighter deep in his pants pocket, like Becky would try to take it away from him.

“Come on,” she said, “Maybe you'll find his name on the Wall. You can give that damn thing back to him.”

So he got on the plane. They
all
got on the plane in Columbus and got off in DC.

And here they were. And there it was, like a giant tombstone or the half-buried wing of some black marble airplane, sticking up out of the ground. There was a hill behind it so you could only see most of it from the front side.

Becky herded Woody down the hill toward it. The sun had set an hour ago but the place was lit up with floodlights and there was a guard on duty.

“24 hour service, huh?” Woody said.

Becky ignored the cynicism in his question and said, “They say a lot of the men who most need to see this won't come during the day, with tourists here. They wait until it's dark. Nobody will bother you. Come on.”

Woody strolled up to it nonchalantly, pretending disinterest as he read a few names. Amato was struck by how many people were here, even at night. Everybody but them seemed to be guys, most of them in jungle fatigues. A reunion maybe? It was nearly Veteran's Day. There was one other couple in civvies, just leaving, and a guy in a dress uniform standing by a book. Becky walked up to him and he explained to her how to find names. While he was talking, Woody walked up and asked, “I got a buddy who went MIA at the same time I got hit. Where would he be?”

“MIAs aren't on here, sir,” the guy told him. Young guy. Maybe twenty. Still, he looked older than all the guys in the jungle fatigues. Now that Amato looked at some of them more closely, he decided they were way too young to be vets having a reunion. Maybe they were one of those historical re-enactment groups. Or maybe there were some guys on active duty who were training to go some place like Nam, God help them.

“Why not?” Woody asked belligerantly.

“Because the memorial is for those killed in Vietnam, sir. Missing personnel are not classified as killed.”

Woody glared and fidgeted, as if he were ready to leave. Becky was examining the panels, name by name.

Amato took in the scene, before Woody could haul them both away. He wanted to remember this. Remember people remembering, if not him by name, then at least remembering people who went through the same thing he did. He found himself tuning in to the conversations going on around him.

“Damn, these guys look
old
, don't they?” one jungle-fatigued kid was saying to another.

“Yeah, well, man, time has passed out there in the world,” the other replied.

“No shit,” yet another said. “And it just goes to show you long life ain't all it's cracked up to be. Look at that bald dude and know that there but for the grace of Charley go all of us—gray hairs, gravity, hemorrhoids, heart problems and all.”

Woody moved toward them, and they parted. Becky was kneeling, still scanning names.

Amato looked at his friend and his wife with Woody's eyes, but without his viewpoint. Other than being dead, Amato felt just as he ever had. Woody on the other hand did have all of the afflictions the girl had mentioned, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, reflux that woke him up at night feeling like he was going to puke, and a bad back and knees. Arthritis, the doctor said. He also lost most of his hair.

Becky was no spring chicken either. Her fair skin, after fifty-two years, was wrinkled around the mouth and eyes and her chin sagged a little, as did other parts, and she'd packed on a little weight, hard as she tried to watch it. She was still a pretty woman but no spring chicken.

“Woody?” Becky said suddenly.

“Yeah?”

“She's here. Oh, Woody, I'm sorry. I know I've been jealous of her because of the way you used to talk about her when you were drunk or asleep. You didn't tell me she'd been killed.”

“Killed? Who got killed?” Woody asked, but he knelt beside his wife and looked where she pointed.

The engraved letters were silvery shadows in the black. “Sharyl P. Ryan,” it said.

“Shari?” Amato and Woody said in one voice. Woody said, “Well, I'll be damned. Guess that's why she never wrote again. I just figured she rotated or got married or something. That's too bad.”

“Too bad?” Becky demanded indignantly. “Is that all you have to say? I thought you were in love with this girl! I thought all these years you were still wishing you were with her instead of me, which is why I never seem to be able to get your full attention, no matter what. And you find out she's dead and you say ‘too bad'? What the hell is the matter with you, Woody? Did you get replaced with some sort of pod person when you went to Vietnam?”

Woody scratched the back of his head and then tucked his hands under the opposite armpits, standing with his legs straddled. This was his serious thinking posture. For once he wasn't clamming up and turning away. “It
has
felt like that sometimes,” he said slowly. “But whatever you think, it had nothing to do with Shari.”

It seemed to Amato that the people in uniform had all stopped talking to listen, though their backs were still turned to Woody and Becky.

The Wall curved around them all like the ironically sheltering wing of an overfed carrion crow.

“It didn't?” Becky for a change seemed ready to believe Woody instead of just believe
in
him. She stood up. “Is it
really
more because of the firefight? The one where your friend died? I mean disappeared?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He took the lighter out of his pocket and Amato watched, fascinated, as Woody rolled it over and over in his hand as he had done a hundred times, until the insignia was almost entirely worn level with the rest of the metal surface. “But you were right the first time, hon. I just didn't want to admit it. He probably got hit when I did and they never found him.”

Before Amato knew exactly what was happening, Woody knelt and propped the lighter up against the section of wall under Shari Ryan's name, then stood and took Becky's hand.

“Honey, are you sure?” Becky asked.

“It's time,” Woody said, and they strolled back up the hill again..

Which was all very well for them but there was Amato, alone for the first time in thirty years, his disembodied ass sitting by the big black wall that didn't have his name on it. Abandoned. Soon to be forgotten for good. After all they'd been to each other—the three of them.

“Hey, bro,” a voice said, and Amato looked up to see one of the fatigue-clad guys standing over him, extending a hand. “Welcome home, buddy. What kept you?”

“Can you believe that? I've given those people the best thirty years of my—well, thirty years. I kept him from becoming a drunk and her from divorcing him. I—I—“ The guy nodded slowly, grinning. “I guess I got too good and now they don't need me any more.”