Authors: Daniel Buckman
The captain’s father was Major General Douglas Rogers Senior, West Point 1942, now G3-Operations at Third Army, a gaunt man with prizefighter’s eyes who won the Distinguished Service Cross at Monte Casino, and married a woman he first glanced in a Tuscan hill town while retreating from the Germans in late 1943. He came back after the war and found her in a ruined café, pouring an old man espresso and kicking stray dogs away from the table with dirty bare feet. She claimed she remembered Rogers, his glance through the sideways rain while German artillery hit the river, and married him the day the paperwork cleared headquarters. The army press repeated the story in post newspapers whenever the old man got a new assignment. There were before and after pictures. She had wide hips, dark eyes, a perfect 36C, and looked at him the way a hungry person does a waiter.
Rogers sat in officers clubs with the few classmates that hadn’t retired, thin men who’d went gray on their thirty-fifth birthdays. He wasn’t going to let some draftee frag his son. He got him a job on Creighton Abram’s Saigon staff in late 1972. He lived near the embassy, along Tu Ten Street. Goetzler figured the captain had a snapshot of him and his father having dinner on the rooftop of the Rex Hotel. There were no women in
ao dai,
poised like cats on the officers’ laps. The men ate steak and looked at their watches.
The general had an infantry division there late in the war and claimed he led junkies, pimps, and thieves into Cambodia. I have to be honest, he said. I was scared of the enlisted. The rumor went that Doug Rogers told a reporter that under the condition of anonymity. Goetzler knew three officers were killed by fragging in his division, hit during firefights with hand grenades at very close range, and two had died in Cambodia.
He summoned Goetzler to Third Army headquarters. He sent a courier down to Bamberg, some starched PFC in a Department of Defense Ford. The orders were specific. Report in uniform, 1300 hours.
The general’s face was lean, his cheekbones definite. He sat behind his desk with his hands behind his head, his legs crossed at the knee. He looked at Goetzler as if watching TV from a couch. The red flag with his two white stars hung from a wooden pole in the corner. The office was nice, an executive’s desk, a padded leather swivel chair, but the window looked upon the headquarters’ parking lot and the general’s own reserved space. Goetzler had expected something different, maybe a few more potted plants, a wet bar stocked with package store bourbon, but it was a room in a big building, like one square in an ice cube tray.
Rogers kept Goetzler at attention, locked up in his green uniform. The sweat ran down his back. His shaving cuts burned.
“My boy is taking an assignment in the South Carolina National Guard,” the general said. “He got a job in a bank, Goetzler. Charleston First National. He’ll sign off on car loans to start.”
The general’s eyes were smug but terrified. His two stars hadn’t helped his son. The army today was like the HMS
Bounty
after the crew sent Bly off in the rowboat. Goetzler could see the general never imagined Vietnam would cause all of this.
“Can you understand the humiliation?” he said.
The general waved Goetzler quiet before he spoke.
“He went to West Point, Captain Goetzler. Twenty-first in his class. You think he fooled with dope.”
“No, sir.”
“Wrong place, wrong time about my boy. Wouldn’t you think?”
“I’d guess, sir.”
“You think his wife would fornicate with the enlisted?”
“No, sir.”
“By the way, Captain, was your ex-wife from the North?”
“Yessir.”
“Those women are not suited to this life. But my daughter-in-law’s father was a colonel, Captain. From Mobile. This is our home.”
“The war changed the army, sir.”
“There hasn’t been a war in thirty years.”
“I mean Vietnam, sir.”
“That was for draftees and OCS lieutenants. It’s over now and time for the regular army to reflect on its true procurement goals.”
Goetzler felt weak all the way down.
“So, you think you’ll go into banking, Captain Goetzler. Maybe real estate? I think selling Fords might be a worthwhile pursuit. Good solid cars, Captain Goetzler. I’ll write you a letter of reference. That would be my absolute pleasure.”
The general nodded his head to dismiss him. The starched PFC courier opened the door after he pressed a button by his phone. Goetzler imagined his legs going like a closing telescope while he saluted.
* * *
After Goetzler set his cell ringer to vibrate, he dropped the phone in his pocket, still waiting for some guy to cancel with Annie. He walked the nursing home hallway and looked for the door with Uncle Kerm’s name written on a piece of masking tape. Kermit Goetzler was dying, but he made eighty-five drinking vodka martinis on the rocks and smoking Camel filters, and the heart problems only started six months ago. The bachelor-detective-captain kept his habits until the end.
Goetzler took his time down the hallway, knowing a faster pace would give Uncle Kerm more time to proclaim how he beat them all. He looked in rooms where men and women lay in Christmas-gift sweat suits looking out the windows, then watched his shoes hit the shiny tiles, wishing his phone would vibrate.
Uncle Kerm finished his working life tougher than Goetzler and his father had. He was a detective captain when he retired with ten three-flats and a thirty-five-footer he rarely sailed in Belmont Harbor. Goetzler’s father played the guitar, watched TV baseball, and sent his mother to the grocery store with a pull cart and pension money from the tool and die makers local 165. They seemed only brothers by law. Goetzler’s father never forgave Kerm for flying a Mustang against Stukas on the Italian Front after his father got discharged from the navy for shitting his pants in boot camp, a problem his father corrected by forcing Goetzler to catch balls and shoot pheasant without his thick glasses. Kerm neither cared if his brother ever forgot messing himself in the chow line, nor how he took the permanent humiliation out on his kid by making him try catching baseballs. Kerm was a tall man with a smooth face and so darkly handsome the guys in his detective squad called him the wop even though he was German. Anytime, he could finish a Camel and check his silver oyster Rolex and feel that his hands weren’t calloused from working a lathe. Uncle Kerm also knew his brother never smelled his wife on him, and Goetzler figured it was a big gag these years.
In the mornings, Goetzler’s mother would wait upstairs for Kerm, naked beneath the two white towels, and stare out the window. She’d think her son was gone, learning to play CYO dodge ball without his glasses because his father took them to Finkel and Sons and kept them locked in his toolbox. She was a beautiful woman who watched the wind blow tree limbs all day, and after turning seventy, started knitting clothes for her cats.
But Goetzler never left the bungalow on Logan Boulevard. He’d hide in the basement and dream himself a U-boat commander silent among British merchant ships, the water pipe his periscope. He even made a captain’s hat from paper and staples, drawing the Kriegsmarine eagle with a pen. His imagined men wore beards, but he was clean-shaven.
The first time Kerm let himself in the back door, Goetzler was ready to fire a torpedo at an American destroyer in the North Sea. The ship lifted between the swells while the rain drove hard. Then Goetzler heard the wind take the screen door, and he turned from the drain pipe, wearing his paper hat, the bill blackened by crayon.
Uncle Kerm was combing his hair in the foyer while the rain blew through the screen and rolled off his shoes. He looked at Goetzler, shaking the water off the comb, and lit a Camel with his Air Corps Zippo. He pointed at his hat with the cigarette, the smoke rising like kite string. A nickel-plated .45 hung beneath his wet armpit.
“I’ll get you a real one of those,” he said. “There’s Nazi leftovers in basements all over the city. I know a couple of guys.”
Goetzler squinted to see Kerm while he removed his jacket and slung it over his arm. His eyes were still focusing when his uncle turned on a heel and went upstairs to his mother, his smoking nearly sounding like laughter. But the next time Kerm used his key, he carried a Kriegsmarine Hauptmann’s hat in a bag, and gave Goetzler a surplus Iron Cross, 3d Class besides. After the first summer, Goetzler had a Luftwaffe gas mask, a Waffen SS helmet, and a dummy potato-masher grenade.
* * *
In the nursing home, his uncle rented the only carpeted private room on the east wing. His window looked over Lake Michigan and he could bribe the nurses with chocolate. They let him play his Ramsey Lewis CDs until midnight, and gave him two 10-milligram Xanaxes a week if he brought them Godiva.
After Kerm had turned eighty, his eyes went black, dark as shoes, but they still stared long and unblinking. When he’d made captain at fifty, the guys continued asking him to buy their cars because Kerm’s eyes made the salesman’s intestines bloat from nervous fear during the test drive. You know I want to buy a car today, he’d say. He got the best price out of people. But the guys stopped calling him the wop, even though he still combed his hair straight back at hotel bars and lit his cigarettes with a platinum Zippo. It was time. He was a captain now. He kept a peroxide blonde in a studio on Clark Street, and she even quit her job cashing checks at LaSalle Bank. I never got to spend the night, he’d say.
When Goetzler walked into the room, Uncle Kerm was sitting in bed watching Bloomberg on a thirty-six-inch Sony, his laptop open to Ameritrade. His hair had gone white, but remained thick and toniced. He wore a heavy cotton robe, a gold oyster Rolex, Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene, and played with his Air Corps Zippo even though he’d quit smoking. Goetzler waited while Uncle Kerm watched the numbers roll past, the Dow always slower than the NASDAQ.
“Goddamned Kmart,” he said to Goetzler. “They invented the idea and lost everything. I know they give retired army officers jobs. But that’s like putting cops in charge of passing out the dole. Lifers are lazy thieves at heart, Donny.”
“I sent lots of them to Leavenworth,” Goetzler said. “The supply sergeants couldn’t stop stealing, and the mess sergeants were dumb enough to sell mess hall pork chops on the local market.”
Kerm laughed and waited for the afternoon bell at the New York Stock Exchange before turning away from the television. Goetzler saw his uncle’s Rita Hayworth screensaver, the famous silk sheets pose. The old man was looking out at the lake.
“You could have retired like I did,” Kerm said. “A boat and money for broads. All the pollocks and micks kissing your police captain ass.”
“I did fine with Weber.”
“You asked contractors if they read the catalog,” Kerm said. “And the cops never would have clipped you like the suits did. I told you those boys have no code.”
Goetzler had forgotten the chocolates for the nurses. If he kept quiet, his uncle would talk until he forgot last week’s request. Though, he never wanted to stop being a cop or a soldier. When he came home from Germany, he decided that if the army hadn’t let him remain a professional soldier, the Chicago police department would. But he’d shot a kid heroin dealer in the knee, firing quickly, like the kid was Saigon VC, and Internal Affairs determined the young man was unarmed and carrying two nickels of heroin. Mike Rosen, the criminal defense lawyer representing the kid, forced the department to settle for sixty thousand dollars and require Goetzler to attend Vietnam Veterans group therapy if he wanted his badge. Kerm tried fixing things, but failed since Rosen got a City News reporter interested in tracking Goetzler’s requirement, and Kerm never would admit the limits of his power. The department was adamant and Goetzler left the job after two years as a flatfoot. That group would’ve been like talking to Chuck Murphy, Kerm finally said. They’d have called you on your bullshit.
His uncle flipped the channel from Bloomberg to Telamundo, the Spanish cable station. He watched the Mexican girls in neon thongs play beach volleyball in off-season Cancún, keeping the volume muted because he hated the music.
“You were too pissed off at the guys who didn’t go to Vietnam. It screwed you out of being a police captain.”
“I had a good career at Weber.”
“They iced you, Donny. If you’d stayed on the job, you’d be an area commander by now. You had my friends until you got squirrelly about going to the VA shrink. That lawyer wanted you fired or he’d sue in federal court. My friends stood up and argued him down.”
“I wasn’t sitting in that group. I did nothing wrong in Vietnam.”
“Listen to me,” Kerm said. “The group was a goddamned hoop. Nobody in the department understands Vietnam enough to give a shit—even the guys who were there.”
Goetzler was silent.
“You come home from a war,” Kerm said. “You get laid for a month, then you forget about it. You can’t punish the lucky guys who stayed behind. They wouldn’t learn from a beating anyway.”
Goetzler watched the TV screen reflected in the window. The volleyball players were blurry against the lake. He was long done telling his uncle why he wouldn’t go to the group. He’d used all the arguments. Those groups, Goetzler might say, contain humiliated men who would be in a group even if they never saw the Republic of South Vietnam. It was useless. For Kerm, war was something you got over by living well. He’d wave Goetzler away with a lit Camel, then say, “The damn group was just a hoop, Donny.”
6
It turned hot the month after Susan died. The wind quit for a week and the car exhaust lingered, blurring the Loop lights. The department forced Mike into bereavement leave, and he spent the time at his mother-in-law’s clapboard house after they’d spread Susan’s ashes in a creek that ran between an apple orchard and a cornfield. It was just them, Mike and the widow afraid to walk to Wal-Mart by herself. For three days, she talked to him factually and never looked into his eyes. A kid would have made Suzy-Q get over her temper. Her dad was smart enough to know that.
But his mother-in-law was gone now, like his wife, and he stood nights at State and Congress, directing traffic in a surgical mask against the car exhaust. He waved some lanes to turn. He held others still with his raised palm. When his underarms became wet, his shaving cuts burned, and he hoped he wouldn’t start coughing from the smog. It forced his eyes closed and the intersection went to pieces.