Carry Me Home (80 page)

“Figure a way.” Bobby was intense, leaning toward him. “You be in charge.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Do it slow. Let it evolve.”

“Where you comin from, Man?”

“Could you do it if you had ten people?”

“Who the fuck’s goina—”

“Roof rats.”

That stopped Tony short. His face came up, eyes suspicious.

Bobby broke the silence. “Better ’n sleepin on roofs?”

“Maybe.”

“Vets. Only vets. You be in charge. It’s time we took care of our own.”

“Wait a fuckin minute.” Tony slid his chair back to the table, leaned in, picked up his coffee. “In charge a what?”

“Our farm. Your squad. Your platoon. You teach em how to farm. Set em to work. Any income above expenses is for you and them to split. But it’s got to be done right.”

“How you goina get these guys, Man?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “One at a time. How are
we
goina do it?”

“Well—” Tony put his cup down, gestured with his hands, “I could put the word out. The bartender at the White Pines, Holtz, he might—Hey, wait a minute.”

“You’re on, Tony,” Bobby said. “We’re looking for homeless guys. Down-and-out guys. Guys we can help. We want to bring em here. Let em help us while we help them. You with me?”

Again Tony eyed Bobby. “What about the solar collectors?” he asked softly.

“Guy wants to farm,” Bobby said, “he farms. Guy wants to build, he builds.”

“What’s all that other stuff you got there?”

“This?” Bobby ticked the fat file folder on the table with his fingernail. “That’s the ... ah ... program. Just ideas. It’s not finished.”

“For farming and building?”

“Yeah. And for rehabilitating the crop.”

In the afternoon Bobby sat in Grandpa’s office, alone. The roar of the forge two stories down was his background music, Sara’s enthusiasm his sustenance. How had she phrased it? “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day,” she’d quoted the old proverb. “Teach a man to fish and he’ll be able to feed himself for a lifetime.” Then she had added, “But give him a cause and he’ll learn to fish and he’ll teach others to fish, too. That’s how one learns to expand beyond the self. Give him a cause.” With that she had kissed him and taken Noah back to the house, leaving Bobby alone with his clutter of ideas, books and reports, papers and outlines, flow diagrams and fiscal projections.

In his mind he had kicked things off exactly as he’d wanted. Now he was lost. He needed to envision the next step. Bobby restacked his program papers, began relaying them out. Taken separately, each general category was easier to understand. For a while he worked on questions: What do we want to do? How do we transform attitudes, develop minds, attain and maintain defensible, sustainable life positions? At the foundation of every economic system there are people—what microsystem is best suited to the High Meadow community?

Bobby shifted to the more concrete sub-subcategory of jobs—job counseling, portable job skills, training and apprenticeships, practice. Then to detoxification. Then to leadership. (“Even if they’d only made corporal, or PFC,” he’d told Sara earlier, “they’ve learned something about leadership; and leadership principles are the same whether in the military, in business, or even within a family.”)

Bobby returned to the overall outline. He felt stuck. How could he integrate all the parts? For a moment he envisioned a circle, but that was cumbersome. Then he saw a vertical cylinder made up of vertically separate and removable leaves, or files. That, he thought, would work but the cross-referencing would be a bitch. A computer might be able to do it, but you had to be a major corporation or a university to afford a computer. Stuck. He was stuck. On a clean sheet of paper he wrote, “Overcoming Stuckness—A Program for Veterans.” Two stories down the high whine of the turbocharger slowed, lowered, ceased.

At the forge Tony was having trouble with the claw. His concentration was off. His back was cold, his front hot. He donned a T-shirt and rustic leather vest, returned to the forge. He’d been steamrolled. He’d been steamrolled in the kitchen, had been steamrolled by the last half decade. Even if he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t seen the steamroller at all, ever, he’d been flattened. He wanted to resist. He had no desire to
run
the farm. He didn’t even want to talk. “Your squad. Your platoon.” What was this shit? “Take care of our own.” Hey, he’d done that. In San Jose. Hadn’t he been the Catcher? But he’d barely been able to take care of himself. His stomach felt tight, bloated. He shut down the forge, went back to his cubicle, climbed into his sleeping bag, pulled the pillow over his face to shut out all light. “Fuck it, Man,” he mumbled. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.” Again and again like a mantra, trying to drive the thoughts away, wanting to toke up, to drink, to mellow out, to vegetate with the boob tube, to dose himself out of the confrontation with Wapinski’s challenge. Better en the roof. What the fuck does he know? Nobody asks you nothin on the roof. Steamrolled, Man. Just fuckin flattened. “If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it.” Don’t go fuckin settin me up.

Bobby rose. How could he unstick himself? He needed a break. For some time he simply stared out the window at the graying sky and the fading landscape. Then he poked into old files, files he’d packed away more than five years earlier.

There was the
Newsweek
magazine from June 9, 1969, the issue he’d found in the airport on his way home. He glanced at the cover, flipped open to the article and photo of Dong Ap Bia, Hamburger Hill, and was swept with feelings—disappointment, excitement, revulsion, nostalgia. He wondered about the men who’d served, about Tyrone Blackwell Dorsey with whom he’d lost contact.

The Nixon Administration, rattled by Congressional criticism over the battle, sought last week to disclaim responsibility for stepping up the pace of the war....White House aides insisted to reporters that there had been no escalation of military operations ... since President Nixon took office.... As with many arguments about the Vietnamese war, the truth in this case seemed to be ... elusive....

Again Wapinski was revolted by the article. In retrospect of Saigon’s fall, he found it even more abhorrent. As he looked at the photograph, he thought of the sacrifices of so many; thought of the men who’d become, in an instant, his men; thought of the cause for which the sacrifices had been made. He skimmed the article. In the back of his mind he was thinking about stuckness, about Sara’s “Give them a cause. That’s how people learn to expand beyond the self”; about criticism, responsibility and achievement; about John Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. In 1963 President Kennedy had talked about “America’s stake in Vietnam.” He had said South Viet Nam was “a proving ground for democracy in Asia. ... If this democratic experience fails ... then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy” to Asians. Senator Kennedy had countered in 1969, “even before the battle was over” (
Newsweek
), by characterizing Bobby Wapinski’s sacrifice and the cause for which he had made that sacrifice as an “outrage,” as “senseless and irresponsible,” as “symptomatic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention.”

Wapinski clenched his teeth. The political, the controversial, was mixed and muddled with memories of the repeated assaults, of the WIAs who’d been left behind. What had become of them? Bobby squeezed his eyes shut. To sacrifice, he thought. To expand beyond one’s self. To expose one’s self. The country had committed us, had given us a cause greater than ourselves and we expanded to a higher level, to defend freedom and establish democracy in Southeast Asia. Then the country withdrew its commitment, denied the cause, devalued the sacrifice and said, at best, we were only fighting for ourselves. That in turn caused the collapse of our ability to expand beyond our selves, caused us to shy from exposure, to isolate ourselves in our fears.

In retrospect Alsop, in that same six-year-old issue, had been right.

What the Communist side is proposing, of course, is a Popular Front government, precisely patterned on the popular fronts established under Soviet sponsorship after World War II, as a prelude to total communist control. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the distinguished historian [described] ... the process as consisting of three stages: “Government by a genuine coalition of parties of the left and left-center, government by bogus coalition, and a final stage in which the bogus coalition was transformed into a monolithic block ...”

For Bobby there was a flash of clarity and the fog of neopolitical, historical interpretation.

Bobby took a new sheet of paper. “To become unstuck,” he wrote, “make a decision.” Again he paused. Perhaps this was not the right approach, he thought, but he realized it did not matter. To be stuck on theory or form was like attempting to decide, in the heat of a firefight, which weapon to use—thumper or M-16. One indeed might be superior but debate could make the point moot. There were people to care for. Practicality would have to dominate theory while theory was being developed.

He smiled, felt satisfied. Make a decision. That would work. In the outline under Personal he wrote, “Pursue Elation.” That’s important, he thought. “Without the pursuit of elation, responsibility, decisiveness, and self-authorization atrophy. Elation from expansion is the real aim of self-fulfillment. That is what satisfies. Being filled with our causes. When a cause is accepted a person will do anything, sacrifice anything. A man will assault a fortified enemy hilltop eleven times. This is grunt psychology. Debase the cause and you deny the pursuit of elation. Total debasement produces irresponsibility, indecisiveness, helplessness, stuckness, and resentment. In the wake come the disempowered, the indefensible, the unsustainable, the self-pitying, the dregs.”

Again Bobby paused. The potbellied stove had cooled, the sky had blackened. He rose, closed the thermal curtains on the bay window. Then he sat, pondered for a few more moments, grabbed another sheet of paper. In block letters he wrote: “WAS THE CAUSE JUSTIFIED? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? DID SOMEONE, SOMEHOW, GET TO OUR MINDS?”

The January thaw arrived almost as if it were scheduled. Beneath the snow cover rivulets trickled, in depressions puddles formed. The warm temperatures continued for ten days—above freezing each day, seldom dropping below twenty degrees at night. On Groundhog Day it rained. In the house Sara threw a “party” for Josh, and Noah, clinging to him, “cruised” for the first time. By midnight in the hill country the rain turned to snow and the snow stuck. At dawn, under a clear sky, Sara beamed to Bobby that the entire glittering, fluff-coated world was a winter wonderland.

An hour later Bobby and Josh walked to the tractor garage. Tony was up, out. The day was magnificent. “You’ve done it again, Lord,” Bobby muttered quietly. “Absolutely perfect.” He walked to the little barn, wished that Noah were with him, that his son could walk in the snow, or cruise holding Josh’s thick hair. Surrounded by this beauty, with Sara and Noah secure, inside, Bobby thought, Dear God, you’ve given me this day, this beautiful day. I don’t need any more.

Bobby caught up to Tony at the half-erected driveway gate. Tony had already bolted the second hinge set to the post and to the left swing section of the gate. Other than a perfunctory greeting and “Ready,” “Yup,” “Up,” neither spoke. Carefully they lifted the section, positioned it, aligned the holes. Then Tony pulled the thick carriage-bolt pins from his pocket, wiggled them through the first two holes on top, the first two on the bottom, then tapped them in with a piece of two by four.

“Geez, Man—” Bobby stepped back while Tony tested the swing, “they look great.”

“They work,” Tony said.

“They’re great, Man,” Bobby said. “Those are classic.”

“Hmm.” Tony backed to where Bobby stood, admired his work. The bottom hinge strap on each side ended as a hawk’s talon. The top on each side was a hawk’s head. Tony had first rough-formed each, had then, with chisel and hammer, detailed each, the beaks and eyes perfectly smooth, the neck and upper wing feathers each individually lined and detailed. The talons too were lifelike.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Bobby asked.

“Right there,” Tony said. “They do look pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Again the temperature dropped, the slush froze. All through February it remained cold and Bobby tinkered in the barn, built an expanded siting table, while Tony worked in the tractor garage rebuilding the old tractor engine, or in the barn readying the sugar taps, or in the sugarbush cleaning the crowns and collecting wood for the evaporator. In March the second thaw came, the snow melted, the surface soils softened. Inches below, the ground remained frozen, impermeable to the melt and runoff. Paths turned to slippery ribbons of mud. Bobby became irritable. In contrast, in the sugarbush the leaves of autumn had fermented and so sweet was the smell of organic decomposition, sucking in the warm air, Tony became almost intoxicated. He began to feel he could live at High Meadow forever.

The pond surface became mushy, slick. Bobby cautioned Sara and Tony about potential thin spots, yet he still walked Josh daily onto the hardest section in the shadow of the south knoll. Again it rained and an inch of water covered the ice. Again it turned cold. The water froze crystal clear over old opaque ice. It remained cold for a week but now the sun hit the ice from a higher angle. Leaves had sunk and frozen in the new ice and their deep color absorbed sunlight which passed through the clear glaze. Beneath the surface the ice melted in perfect leaf molds—yet the surface remained intact. Bobby studied these miniature collectors, thought how beautiful, how powerful.

The third weekend in March felt like mid-May. Linda came with the twins to visit with their father, but Gina and Michelle were only interested in playing with Noah.

“If you want to go find Tony, it’s okay,” Sara said to Linda.

“I can’t leave these two with you. You’ve got enough work.”

“Actually, when they’re here, Noah’s easier to handle.”

“Well, maybe, for a little bit. He’s so angry with me....”