By the Book (16 page)

“They are if he plans to—”

“We’ve known each other less than a week,” she said, hurrying to cut him off before he said it again. “
We
haven’t even discussed marriage.” Her gaze snagged Jonah’s. “Yet.”

He grinned at her and leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together, thumbs propped pad to pad as he watched her. She was suddenly too warm and felt like squirming in her chair. He didn’t appear particularly sensitive to the subject; looked pleased even that she’d added that last word.

Felix, looking from one to the other with a drunken astuteness, rolled his eyes.

“I need another beer.”

“Try the water,” she suggested, reluctantly tearing her eyes from Jonah’s. “You haven’t asked about Jonah’s father yet.”

“I don’t know his father,” he muttered, then recalling his role, he came up with, “Oh. The bloodline. Right.” He wagged his finger at her, then at Jonah. “You got any nuts in your tree?”

Her eyes closed slowly as she heard Jonah laugh.

“I don’t think so,” he said, chuckling. “What about you? Anything I should know about your family gene pool?”

Her eyes popped open again. If he was referring to alcoholism, he was doing so casually and with great good humor.

Felix thought about it while he waved to get the waitress’s attention for another drink. “I always thought Uncle Lou was a weird fish. Didn’t you, El? You did, I remember.” To Jonah, he said, “Elly used to think he was possessed by the devil because no dog would approach him. He’d call to them and they’d run the other way. Throw sticks for them, and they’d just keep on running. But I think that was because he smelled bad. That guy used to eat cloves of garlic like they were chocolates. Remember that, Elly?”

She nodded. She could have brought up his disease then, laid it out on the table. If Jonah hadn’t guessed at it yet, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t be appalled by it. Maybe the three of them could discuss it? Maybe he could help? Maybe ... maybe another time, she thought, her courage losing out to a deep-seated, irrational shame she had no control over.

“Course, he was my dad’s uncle by marriage, I think,” Felix was saying, his mind clearly befuddled. “You wouldn’t have to worry about the garlic thing unless you were planning to marry my cousin Dotty. Now, there’s a weird one. ...”

“Felix,” she said, quietly. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that Jonah’s father has been ill and you haven’t asked how he is yet. It would be polite.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t know he was sick,” he said, though he’d been told several times earlier in the conversation. He looked at Jonah. “How’s your dad?”

Jonah reached out to toy with an unused dinner knife. “No different. He’s had a stroke,” he said for Felix’s re-edification. He looked at Ellen. “But more interesting.”

She’d been waiting all night to hear about Earl’s mysterious lady. She perked up instantly, forgetting Felix even existed. That didn’t seem a difficult task for Jonah either, as he spoke directly to her.

“More human, I guess.”

“Tell me,” she said, leaning forward. “Mr. Gunther’s daughter-in-law, what’s she like? What did she say?”

He met her halfway across the table, the tips of his fingers instinctively seeking hers to create a connection between them.

“She didn’t know what to say at first. She didn’t know I was here,” he said, then added, “But she knew who I was.”

Ellen grinned. She could tell it meant the earth and stars to him to know his father had claimed him, even in some small way, as his son. That the woman knew he existed was all the proof he needed.

“She lives on a small nonworking farm outside town. She’s planning to move though. Two of her three children are grown and gone and the third is finishing college, and the place is too big for her to handle alone.” He shrugged. That was neither here nor there, but he had to start somewhere, right? “A real nice lady. She said she’d only spoken to my father a couple of times in person, but that she’d owed him such a huge debt for so long that she felt like she’d known him for most of her life.”

“Because he saved her husband’s life.”

He nodded. “They’d just gotten married when he left for Vietnam. No children till after the war.” He could see she understood the significance in that. “We went down to the hospital cafeteria and had coffee. She told me the whole story.”

She didn’t have to ask him to repeat the story for her. He could have told the whole world, he was so happy to know it, but she was the one he wanted to tell first. So, in a voice that Felix could listen to—or not—he told her the only solid, personal history he knew about his father.

Just as Denise Gunther had, he painted a picture of a war-torn Asian country where it was often impossible to tell friend from foe among the natives; where hit-and-run jungle tactics and twenty-one ruthless years of war experience by the opposition had American soldiers feeling overly wary and distrustful, and at a distinct disadvantage. A place where a cry for help could just as easily be an invitation to death, and everyone knew it. According to her, her husband had barely noticed the photographer attached to his squad. Though the group was small, with only seven men left, the photographer had been older, a quiet sort who kept to himself. He took his pictures without getting in anyone’s way and, in general, blended with the jungle and carnage as if he were invisible.

“Which explains how he could get the shots he did,” Jonah said, thinking of the awards and plaques on his father’s living room wall and all he’d gone through to get them. He imagined there was an incredible story behind each and every one of them. “He had to have been right in the middle of it to get them.”

She could see he was still processing much of it in his mind, arranging it on his personal timeline, maybe realizing how close he’d come to never knowing his father at all, or maybe ever being born.

“What year was this?”

“Nineteen sixty-nine. I wasn’t even a year old.”

Silently she waited for him to continue.

Trying to maintain an emotional detachment from an event that had happened to a near stranger while he was still in his infancy made the rest of the story relatively easy to tell. Naturally, Mrs. Gunther knew her husband’s side of the story better than she knew Earl Blake’s. She’d related his account of a routine patrol through a town that had recently undergone heavy mortar bombing. The squad had been met with smoldering rubble and debris, burnt-out buildings and, as was often the case, a sniper ambush. She’d been vague about the details but seemed to recall her husband’s horror as vividly as if he were telling the story himself—or as if she’d heard about it enough times to know it that well.

Just before dusk on that hot, humid day in Vietnam, Levy Gunther, Jr., the only son of a camera shop owner in Quincey, Indiana, had taken a sniper bullet through his right leg, the pain blazing through his body and exploding in his head. And while the rest of his squad had scattered and shot blindly in the direction of the following shots, he’d thrashed about in plain sight, taking a second shot in his right shoulder.

He screamed, felt his world go black, heard a voice whispering. ...

“Don’t ... move ... a muscle.”
He’d heard the whisper through the gunfire, the angry, desperate shouting of his buddies, and his own pain.
“Don’t ... move ... a muscle. Don’t make a sound. Be dead.”
He was howling in pain and fear—but only in his mind. Somehow, some way, the whisper had reached him, sure and commanding, and he had obeyed it
“Be dead. They won’t waste another bullet on you if they think you’re dead.”
Time passed, eons it seemed, but the whisper remained, constant and comforting.
“I can see you’re still breathing. I know you’re not dead. I won’t leave you. I won’t leave you. ...”

“Jeez,” Felix muttered, hanging over his beer glass in rapt attention.

Ellen shook off the chills racing up and down her spine and looked at him, then back to Jonah, who seemed to be watching their reactions closely. It gratified him to see that he wasn’t the only one to react emotionally to the story, not the only one to think of his father as a hero.

“So, I guess he bled to death, huh?”

“Felix!” She sighed loudly and Jonah laughed. “He lived to tell the story and father three children.”

They could almost hear the memory tape rewinding in his head. “Oh, yeah. Right. Your dad ... he must have been the whisperer, then.”

Jonah nodded, smiling. “He stayed hidden behind a pile of rubble, waited for dark and for things to quiet down. Then he picked up Gunther and carried him back to the aid station and disappeared. Mrs. Gunther said it wasn’t until her husband came home and saw himself in one of the photos that he even knew my father’s name. She said they wrote to him dozens of times to thank him, but he never answered. Her husband later died in a car accident. I guess he had a bad time, nightmares ... flashbacks.”

The three of them were silent for a moment, each in their own way marveling over the workings of the human spirit; feeling pride and yet wondering at it’s insanity; questioning their own grit.

“Did your old man get a medal, or something for saving that guy?” Felix asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone but the Gunthers knew about it or thought of it as anything out of the ordinary. She said that the few times she visited him, after he moved here, he asked her not to talk about it. Said he could barely remember the incident, like it was all in a day’s work.”

“Maybe it was,” she said. “To him. Lots of things happen in a war.”

Jonah’s brows rose, and he nodded his acquiescence. “He never could figure out why they’d left the house and shop to him, I guess. He told her that he thought Levy Gunther was some distant relative he’d never met or heard of, that he hadn’t known what to do with the property when he’d inherited it, so he didn’t do anything with it. Just tossed the papers in a drawer.”

“I guess you didn’t inherit your curiosity from him,” Felix observed mildly, his eyelids drooping.

“I guess not,” he said, thinking of several other personality traits that they might not share, if Denise Gunther’s description of his father was accurate. “She said he was eccentric.”

“Eccentric? How?” Ellen asked, noting from the tone of his voice that eccentric wasn’t what he would have called him.

He lifted one shoulder uncertainly. “Introverted, she said. Not shy, not a recluse, because he came and went at will and spoke his mind when he felt like it, but was happier in his own company than he was in the company of others. He wouldn’t allow anyone to get involved in his life, didn’t get involved in theirs. Was polite but not forthcoming. She said she visited several times and finally stopped when it became obvious he didn’t care one way or the other. After that, her gratitude turned to a sense of responsibility, I guess. She’d drive by the shop three or four times a week to make sure it was open, and that he was doing okay, but stopped intruding on his life.”

“Intruding? That’s the word she used?”

He nodded, recalling it clearly. “I suppose that’s how he made her feel.”

She mulled this over, then asked, “But then, how did she know about you?”

“I asked her that same thing,” he said, shifting his weight as he got to the best part of the story. “On her second or third visit to the house, they were sitting together in the living room in silence. Just sitting there. She said she was feeling very uncomfortable and he was reading something in the newspaper as if she weren’t even there. She was just about to make an excuse and leave when he folded up the paper and announced he was going to show her a picture of his son.”

Felix laughed. “No offense, but that guy doesn’t sound like he had all his dogs barkin’.”

“Felix!” She threw him a derisive glare, then looked back at Jonah. “Why? Had he read something about you in the paper?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. He just stood up and opened his wallet and showed her an old baby picture of me. Then he told her all about me. Everything. About how I spent my vacations at boarding school and my career and where I was stationed now and that I was a loner like him.”

“A loner?”

“That I lived alone. Had few close friends. Ate alone in restaurants ...”

“Man, it doesn’t sound like you got all your dogs barkin’ either,” Felix said. “A guy like you. Makes good money. Stand-up job. Women oughtta be crawlin’ all over you. Whatsa matter with you?” He looked to Ellen for a hint, saw the look on her face. “Well, nothin’, I guess, ’cuz my sister is!” Then he laughed at his own pathetic joke.

Cringing with shame and flushed with embarrassment, she watched him wave to the waitress again.

“No more, Felix. You’ve had enough. And I’ve had enough of you. It’s time to go,” she said quietly, sending an imploring, apologetic glance to Jonah. His smile was small and reassuring, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

They gathered their belongings, paid the bill, and rode most of the way back to Ellen’s apartment in a stiff silence that Ellen controlled. She started it and she’d have to break it—even Felix was wise enough to know that. She had things to say to both men, things that neither was in a hurry to hear—one fearing the pain it would cause her, the other afraid of the pain it would cause him.

“So,” she said finally, opting to avoid both conversations. “Do you think your father had you investigated?”

“I don’t know,” Jonah said with a quick glance to judge her mood. “Maybe. But an investigator might have taken more pictures, and the only one I’ve been able to find is the one in his wallet.”

She smiled then. “It was there?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling too. “In his wallet in his bedside table. It’s old and faded and frayed, but it’s there.”

“Any other pictures? Of other people?”

He shook his head slowly.

She reached out and touched his arm, leaned toward him a little. In a voice that was brimming with emotion, she said softly, “He cared, Jonah.”

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you sit there long enough.

—Will Rogers

Always a day late and a dollar short? Maybe there’s a reason for that. If your plan is logical, practical, and doable, why put it off? All the good intentions in the world can’t accomplish as much as one good action. Delay, and you give the situation time to change. Procrastinate, and you may be too late ... once again.