Carry Me Home (8 page)

“Hey, Tony,” Al Cornwall said from behind him. “I remembered mine.”

“Ha!” Jim Bellows chided. “He’s a dago. You know, you got to retrain em every few weeks or they forget everything.”

“Bite this, Bellows.” Tony grabbed his crotch, laughed good-naturedly.

“Re-mem—mem, re-mem-mem-member, re-mem-mem, re-mem-mem ...” Bellows began singing, jumping side to side.

Al cut in. “You guys hear what those guys said is happenin in Frisco?”

“Wait a minute, Man.” Tony threw his arms straight up. “I got to get this thing open.”

“They say there’s a war goin on back there,” Al said.

The clerk brought a well-used pry bar. “Ah, hot-damn. Thanks.” Tony jammed the bar behind the hasp. “I knew ya had ta have somethin like this.”

“What guys?” Bellows asked.

“These guys here are all talkin about it,” Al said. “They’re sayin there’s a thing called a hippie that’s slaughterin Marines if they catch em alone.”

“Ooof!” Tony crashed forward as the hasp snapped from the plywood. “What a hassle, Man.”

“There was a guy over at chow ... just back from the World. He’s sayin he couldn’t stand it. Sayin things like, what happens when you get to Frisco is ... you know, he had a little time so he goes to a bar nearby the airport and like ten long-haired, bearded guys surround him. He said they were goina kick his ass but the bartender pulled a pistol and escorted him out. He says it was like he was slime.”

“What’s a hippie?” A Marine farther back in line asked.

“I heard about them,” another answered. “They’re supposed to be real strange. Wear necklaces. The guys! Smoke pot. Stuff like that.”

“Shud up, Bellows!” Tony threw him the pry bar. He didn’t care about “hippies.” As he opened the locker to inspect the contents, he said, “Don’t listen to those idiots, Man. You know, they all the time.... Hey, what the fuck—this ain’t my shit.”

The clerk came over. “Says ‘Pisano, Anthony.’ That’s you.”

“Yeah, that’s me but this ain’t my stuff.”

“Those your records in there?”

“Ahhh ... no. Look! This guy was court-martialed. I’ve never been court-martialed. Honest. Ya know, maybe I deserved to be court-martialed. But I never was. Look at this guy’s shit. He wasn’t squared away, Man. Naw, that aint my service number.”

The clerk grabbed a crewman, and both disappeared with the foot-locker into the bowels of the dark hut while Jim and Al and others continued repeating rumors they’d heard about the hippies of San Francisco and Tony kicked the dry dirt showing a disgust and boredom he didn’t really feel. “This is weird, Man,” he said to his two friends.

“Yeah,” Al said. “Imagine finally gettin out a Nam only to have to fight yer way through Frisco.”

“No,” Tony said. “I mean that footlocker. It’s like there’s somebody else, you know, somebody livin my life.”

“Hey, Pisano,” the clerk called. “This one yours?”

Tony inspected the footlocker. It appeared identical to the other. He tried the combination and the lock opened. “Yeah,” he beamed. “See, dagos don’t forget.”

Anthony Pisano danced and limped through the next three days of processing on Okinawa. His leg was still hurting where he had been wounded six weeks earlier, a wound he had re-injured on his second-to-last helicopter flight in Viet Nam when the bird crash-landed at Phu Bai. He had been en route to Da Nang when the bird was hit by ground fire and the padding inside had begun to burn. The pilot had set it down fast and hard. Pisano’s right thigh muscle ripped from the jounce and the leap from the aircraft.

“Hey,” he had yelled at the pilots as ground crew immediately surrounded the bird and extinguished the flame. “You guys goina take me to Da Nang, or what?”

“Not in that,” the copilot yelled back. They both laughed. Pisano had crashed twice before, the copilot seven times. Controlled crashes. Nam craziness—hard-nosed, twenty-year-old macho. One more adventure. One more jarring to add to the body, one more nonfatal injury to laugh at.

At Treasure Island Pisano said to Jim Bellows, “Ya know, I was standing right here day I left to go overseas. We were just gettin ready to go. And I looked up there.” Bellows turned, looked. “There was some fine California woman kissin her man good-bye right up there. She had a skirt on and she had her foot up behind her like this, kind a wrapped over the lower railin, and Man, you could see all the way to Camp Pendelton.”

“Ooooo.” Bellows squeezed his arms in tight to his torso. “Oooo. OooooOoooo! Let’s go find one.”

“Yeah,” Pisano said. “If they ever let us outa here.” Tony smacked the back of his right hand into his left palm. He had received travel and leave orders that morning, but along with a hundred other Marines, they’d hit a bureaucratic snafu. Again he slammed his fist. “Man, I’m not staying here. They’re just fuckin with us.”

Bellows eyed him. “I don’t know, Man. Paperwork aint right.”

Tony opened his hands like a preacher. His eyes twinkled in the sun. “What can
they
do?” he asked innocently. “We got orders. They can’t keep us. That’s cuttin into our leave time. I’m beatin feet.”

“Oh Man ...”

“Hey! What can they do, huh?” Tony shrugged. “I’m just a dumb dago. Come on.”

“Okay. Let’s get Cornwall. We don’t wanta be in the airport with just two guys against all them hippies.”

“Aw, fuck em.”

“Okay,” Al Cornwall said, “this is the way it is.” The Marines had broken down into destination groups—those going to New York, to Chicago, Dallas, Philly, St. Louis, moved to their respective gates en masse. “Don’t anybody break up,” Cornwall said. “As long as we’re in a group, there’s no way anybody’s goina fuck with us.”

“Nobody’s goina fuck with us.” Pisano was eyeing an older woman sitting at a dimly lit bar off the bright corridor.

“Hey! Look! We all heard them stories on Okie, right? Maybe nobody’s goina fuck with us, but if the shit starts to fly ...”

Tony turned, leered at Cornwall, pulled his head back, smirked. “Man, there ain’t nobody here in the fuckin airport.”

“Tony.” Cornwall pulled him aside. “Look, Man, there’s an honest-to-God fear factor workin here. If somebody spits at one of these guys, they might tear em to pieces.”

“Geez! Look around. There isn’t hardly anybody in here but us. Only long-haired thing I seen so far is that old dollie with the big ba-zooms.”

“What about that creep over there?”

Pisano turned. A young man was walking down the wide corridor in their direction. He had neatly combed shoulder-length blond hair. He was wearing a three-piece business suit without a shirt. A turquoise-and-silver necklace hung against his skin. His sneakers were untied. “Hey! You!” Pisano yelled in his best DI voice, his right hand jabbing outward.

“Oh Christ.” Cornwall dropped his eyes toward the floor. Several of the Marines fell in behind Pisano. The young man paid no attention.

“Hey!” Pisano yelled again.

The man furtively glanced over.

“Yeah,” Pisano shouted. He gave the man his most-infectious smile, walked out to intercept him in the center of the corridor. “Yeah, you,” he said more quietly. “Ken I ask you a question?”

“Me?!” the young man said.

“I was wonderin,” Pisano said, “ah, see, all of us just got back from Nam and we were wonderin what a hippie is and if you’re one.”

“You’re stoned!” The young man stepped back, then sideways, turning, continuing to face Pisano as he moved down the corridor, finally backing away still in the direction he wanted to go.

“AAaaARRR!” Pisano roared.

The young man spun, ran away.

“I can’t believe you guys,” Pisano blurted between laughs. “Here you been through a year a shit and you’re worried about somethin like that.”

“Passengers holding boarding passes for rows twelve through twenty-seven may now board,” the ground attendant announced.

Pisano got up, shuffled to where other Marines and other passengers were forming a line. He shuffled slowly toward the door, feeling a bit disappointed because the attendant taking the tickets was a guy and not one of the pretty girls he’d seen at the other gates. He handed the worker his ticket and pass and then it struck him that he had forgotten something. “Ah ... wait a minute,” he said to the worker. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave without me.”

“I can’t hold—”

Tony shouted, “I forgot to call”—he sprinted up the corridor to the phones—“my Mom.”

As Tony deplaned in Philadelphia he smiled and winked at the stewardess, leaned forward and placed an innocent peck on her cheek, then tried to ever so lightly brush the back of his hand across her thigh, barely succeeding to brush her skirt as she stepped back. He did a little jig in the lighted bulbous pod where the ramp sealed against the plane’s body. He checked his reflection in the small window, now black with night outside, then started walking up the enclosed ramp. He felt he looked sharp in his Marine Corps uniform with its three rows of ribbons, carrying his short-timer cane and attaché case, standing tall at five feet eight inches, feeling like a mountain at one hundred and forty-six pounds.

I’m a proud motherfucker, he thought. A Magnificent Bastard. I got my shit to-geth-er, rolled in a tight little ball, and the folks are goina be proud. Two-thirds of the way up the ramp he paused, switched the cane to his left hand, bent and rubbed his right thigh with the heel of his right palm, then straightened back up, threw out his chest, and marched into the terminal.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. He stopped. They grabbed him. “Uncle Joe! Mom! Pop! Who’s this? Maxene?” Thirteen friends and family surrounded him, twenty-six arms tried to hug him at once. He beamed, he hugged back, kissed. He broke loose, did a little jig, then let them hug him again.

Family was important to Tony. Indeed, it was the stories of his Uncle Joe—Tony’s childhood hero who had been a Marine in the Pacific during World War II—that had led Tony to enlist in the United States Marine Corps in August of 1965, two months after his high school graduation, three months before his eighteenth birthday. Tony’s enlistment convinced his cousin Jimmy, son of his father’s sister, Isabella, and her husband, James Pellegrino, to follow suit one month later.

His family and friends had driven down in three cars, one car with four friends from high school, guys who hadn’t gone into the military—Roy, Jack, Donny and Ken—all slapping him on the back, congratulating him, shuffling him toward the baggage claim area, two of them dropping off to try to pick up his cousin Annalisa, Jimmy’s sister, who had just graduated from high school and who was pretty without being intimidatingly beautiful. Tony stopped to let his mother and father catch up, and his eldest brother John and Uncles Joe and James and Aunt Helen, and his cousins Vinny and Maxene. Maxene, at sixteen, was a knockout.

He hugged his mother again, said to his father and uncles as he eyed Maxene, “We can’t talk here. Let’s get outa here and talk in the car. You musta rented a bus. I thought maybe just John, or John and Pa ...”

“We came in two cars.” His mother wiped tears away as she looked at him, grabbed him again, pulled him to her. She was short, coming up only to his shoulders. He winked at his friends over her head. “Your friends came in their own.” Josephine Pisano sniffed. Some strangers were glancing at them. She humbly offered an explanation. “My son. He’s just back from Viet Nam.” She hugged him again, then said, “I think Uncle James wants to ask you about Jimmy.”

“Oh yeah,” Tony said to Jimmy’s father. “I saw him last month up by Gio Linh. He’s doin great. He loves it there.”

“I know,” Uncle James said, concerned, sad. “He sent a letter saying he’s going to sign up for another tour. Isabel’s worried he’ll bring home a Viet Namese woman.”

“Aw, that wouldn’t be so bad,” Uncle Joe said from behind Tony. Joe grabbed Tony by the shoulders, clenched his hands affectionately hard. “If I hadn’t been married when I hit Japan, I might’ve brought home a little geisha girl myself. You feel pretty solid. How’s the leg?”

“I’m not worried about the girl,” Uncle James said. “He’s got that Hollands girl here to come back to. What I’m worried about—”

“Please! Please, let’s just go,” Tony’s mother said. “John, you and Joe get the cars,” she directed her brother and husband. “And Johnny, you and Vinny get Tony’s bags. I want to look at my boy.” She stopped Tony, burst into tears again, hugged him again. “If you only knew what a mother goes through. If you only knew what I’ve been through this year.”

In a few minutes John and Vinny returned with Tony’s bag. The cars were waiting. “Where do I go?” Tony asked light-heartedly. He was hoping to sit with Maxene. Annalisa had already left with his friends.

“You ride with me,” his mother said. “In Uncle Joe’s car. You can sit in back with Vinny and John. Your father and Helen like to ride together and Maxene can talk to Uncle James.”

The Pisano family house in Mill Creek Falls was on the first street to be finished in the ‘old’ New Town subdivision, which had been built between 1951 and 1957 and backed up to the much older Creek’s Bend neighborhood. Over the years Josephine Pisano repeatedly had begged John to sell the house and buy a larger one, but John opted to expand the house and to add a landscaped swimming pool as the central feature of the backyard.

It was nearly midnight. Uncle Joe turned the car onto their street. Tony’s father had arrived a few minutes earlier and Annalisa and Tony’s friends were directly behind. Tony was exhausted from the flights, the travel, the airports. His body was sore from fatigue and sleeping in seats and the jouncing from the last helicopter crash. He had finally relaxed and fallen asleep against his brother somewhere north of Allentown.

Suddenly twenty car horns were blasting him awake. “What the fuck—” He shot up, banged his head on the roof, crumpled to the floor. Lights exploded, flashed. All around people cheered, banged pots and pans, blew whistles. A banner, fifteen feet long, car lights blinking high-beam low-beam high-beam—
WELCOME HOME.
In the middle of the street Tony’s father stood waving an American flag.

“Hey, what the—aw, no.”

“Welcome home, Tony,” his brother John said. He opened the door, got out, turned to help. Tony froze. Vinny got out the other side, shut the door. He felt self-conscious, ducked into the crowd.