Fatal Light (2 page)

At night in the war I listened to monkeys in the jungle all around me. Low murmur of voices, the clucks and warbles and sighs of monkeys at peace with starlight, and I could rest with their voices knowing that as long as I could hear them I was safe in a ring of darkness, lying there thinking When this is all over and I am out and gone everybody will want to hear the story.

 

And the story begins like this: There was a boy standing in the middle of America. He was standing in a winter garden with his toy gun strapped on slightly askew, an easy smile, blond hair cut close to the pale skull, rolled-up cuffs on his jeans. The stretch of distance behind him was indistinct, unreal, as if field and horizon had raced on ahead as he stood to turn and look back.

 

He was a boy who rode his bicycle on early summer mornings, past the elementary school named for Mark Twain and the junior high school named for General Patton, out into the wide boulevard with Ormin's Market at the corner and Henry Ormin sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store window filled with mops and stacks of fruit crates and racks of dusty hats and gardening gloves. The boy
had never seen anybody buy a hat or a pair of gloves from Henry Ormin, but hats and gloves lived on in the window, next to the seed envelopes faded by too many sunlit mornings.

 

The boy's bicycle tires hummed the asphalt and birds foraged on lawns, spooked at his approach: Sudden flutter and crowded whisper of wings, flocks wheeling overhead.

 

He rode on toward the bridge, riding for the simple pleasure of the open speed, sweat beginning at his hairline and a hard pain above his knees as he pumped against the drag of one gear and balloon tires and an incline, and he slowed on the bridge, halfway across.

 

I remember: It was only a short bridge over a creek bed but the gorge seemed formidable, falling away to a thin run in the rocks below. I would take my bicycle to that bridge on early summer mornings and stand at the rail feeling the sun was alive and I was steering the sky into luminous places, happy to be the pilot of the tallest air I could find.

My grandfather kept an album. Photographs, newspaper clippings, yellowed squares pasted on black rag pages. An occasional letter folded into the spine. Stained black-and-whites with notes penned in the margins or on the backs:
Uncle Bob Tulley,
1936.
With Vallie in California, April 1948.
There were obituaries of family and neighbors, sons dead in the Battle of the Bulge, on Guadalcanal; an account of a cousin's conviction on charges of conspiracy and extortion in the thirties. My grandfather sat beside me as we paged through the heavy book, and he pointed out people, telling their stories. The old photographs seemed always to conceal—shadow days, winter faces—sturdy women watching children or looking away, girls in cottony taffeta, men staring hard and blasted, big-nosed, and tobacco-stained in antiquated suits or huge farmer's overalls; every picture an event: a wedding, a Christmas, a harvest. A cluster in black gathered at the gates of a cemetery.
Bill and Eddie Luke after corn was in. Emma and Tad with kids, Thanksgiving 1943.
My grandfather told me that Tad wasn't in the service in those days because of a clubfoot; he was killed anyway in a thresher accident on the farm, left Emma to go to alcohol and finally suicide, the kids
spread out to bitter relatives and orphanages, lost to one kind of destitution or another. There was a picture in the album of me on my second birthday, fat-legged blond on a short ledge with a layer cake, the already extinguished candles leaning into the icing and my face betraying an irritation, a passing anger lost there on that mid-October day. Beyond my grandfather's house, behind me in the picture, massive trees ranged along the Ohio River's eastern shore and through the trees the river itself, vast at that point with glisten and scud and the small frame houses on the opposite shore only squares of white or silver flash in the afternoon sun.

In the long summer visits at my grandfather's house I walked the abandoned campsites along the river, under the face of the floodwall that followed the railroad tracks. I pushed sticks through the ashes of spent hobo fires, broke wine bottles against the rails and watched the shards glitter on the roadbed. I stood on the bridge that spanned the river between West Virginia and Ohio, watched freight trains troll by beneath me, hollow roar and tilt, car after car clocking past, desires run distant by time and the force of the land. The trains made a music below the bridge, like my mother always said when she read children's books to me, a long rumble and boom. I walked up the bridge to the imaginary border in the middle of the air where a plaque announced I was about to step into the State of Ohio. There was a low dirty skyline beyond me, factory haze and exhaust smudge. An island drifted downstream, a paradise appearing out of clouds, and a coal barge came toward me, humming a slow wake north.

Hand-painted banners announcing the Apple Blossom Festival hung between telephone poles along Main Street. A printer had donated handbills that were nailed to fences and taped inside store windows all over town: a parade, animal rides, bake-off, quilting bee, pie-eating contest. In the afternoon at Dedweiler's pasture there would be aerial barnstormers and at night in the city park the carnival that came every year and a dance in the pavilion with music from the fire hall bluegrass quintet. In that autumn when I turned eleven years old a professional touring group was coming as well, a family of Nashville singers, television smiles and electric guitars and snakeskin western boots, coming to sing on the stage built on festival day by volunteer carpenters from throughout the county.

On the day of the festival traffic into town was already slow by ten o'clock in the morning. Children crossed the streets and the high school marching band drifted toward its collection point on the courthouse lawn, brass and silver shine of trumpets and tubas scattered on ground cloths, uniforms modeled after those of Hessian soldiers in the Revolutionary War: blousy trousers, epaulets and metal buttons and front panels on vests
embellished with mothers' and grandmothers' stitchery, a walking fleet of Wellington boots hand-colored white with indigo tassels. I moved beside my grandfather, across the street behind a stalled car and hearing the idle dissonant honks of high school musicians, echo and rattle of snare drums, vendors shouting and somewhere in the distance an automobile horn stuck and moaning. I asked my grandfather for a bag of popcorn from a red cart, and we stopped and my grandfather and the vendor exchanged pleasantries.

Beautiful day for the festival, Bob,
my grandfather said.

Yes sir, that it is.

My grandfather told the vendor he should do good business on such a fine day and the vendor said he certainly hoped so and the warm paper sack came down to me aromatic with oil and salt. We walked on with the crowd growing around us, my grandfather at my left shoulder as we edged through shifting groups for a place on the parade route. There was excitement riding out of the sky's span of clean light, and we found a place behind a boy sitting on the curb. I stood between the boy and my grandfather's legs, eating popcorn, watching the north end of Main Street, a long incline to where the high school band would appear.

We could hear the music before we saw the band, drift of the march coming toward us across the air, at first like an afterthought, and the drum major's tall hat rose over the Main Street ridge and behind him, shimmering, levitating into view, the majorettes strutting and kicking. The sparkle of the instruments wobbled up, the drum major turned and blew his whistle and marked time, the fat majorette dropped her baton.

The parade went on forever: Middle-aged men in fezzes riding motor scooters in figure-eights, sad clowns with gigantic red feet and smiling cars that tipped suddenly to their back wheels to turn frantic circles in the street. Sprays of hard candies thrown from floats, the mayor and his polished family in the backseat of a Chrysler Imperial convertible. The Nashville singers on a
flatbed truck, stair-step children dressed like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, sequined silk cowboy shirts with scallops of piping, ranges of fringe and tight pants tucked into boots tooled with intertwined lariats. Waving to the crowd, the eldest son wearing a sombrero, the youngest daughter doing curtseys.

The festival queen and her court rode into view on a float garlanded with tissue flowers, gliding across the horizon of Main Street like a mirage, small-town madonnas sliding past waving their downy arms dreamily, their eyes the eyes of soft animals turned heavenward from thrones of blossoms and crepe, their faces all a magnificent promise, the romance at the end of the world passing so slowly in those long moments of perfect quiet, like the air over the river, the light and stillness inside the world at daybreak, like a held breath.

 

After the parade my grandfather led me through the crowd, down the hill and west to Juliana Street and Whitlow's Bar and Grill.

Inside the dark bar I climbed onto a stool, everywhere mahogany and sepia and the soft glitter of glassware arrayed under the mirror in front of us. My grandfather pushed his hat back on his head but left it on, a Panama with a black band, and I watched his face in the mirror as he ordered a beer for himself and Coca-Cola for me, talking baseball with the bartender. At the end of the bar a blind man tilted his face to the ceiling, half-finished beer in front of him. The far side of the blind man's body was lit by sunlight from the back door that stood open, his sleeves rolled to where I could see purple tattoos losing their clarity on both forearms.
Well, he ain't the slugger you were in your prime
the bartender was saying as our drinks came with glasses turned upside down over the bottle necks, mine the same as my grandfather's. I poured my Coca-Cola and watched the foam rise; the bartender leaned on the bar in front of us as my grandfather spoke quietly and poured his beer. Traffic sounds filtered from an imaginary distance, time passing in the artificial
twilight with no other customers coming in and the bartender and my grandfather talking, now about politics, about Eisenhower. I was finally introduced and the bartender asked my age and how I was liking my visit and by then our drinks were finished. I jumped down from the bar stool to follow my grandfather, and looked back to see the blind man was already gone. An empty beer bottle and an empty glass stood together at the end of the bar. My grandfather touched my shoulder and we were outside, walking toward the bridge and its sudden arch into the sun, disappearing into points west.

Mary Meade always said we fell in love in front of Bippo's Pizzeria in Ocean City, Maryland. I had known her for years—elementary school, junior high school—she was the first cousin of Ricky Bayner, who I played football with until he graduated a year ahead of me and went to Yale. I was with Ricky at Bippo's as she wandered the boardwalk with her girlfriends.
Hey,
Ricky had said,
you remember my cousin Mary don't you? Yeah,
I said,
sure, we're neighbors after all.
Ricky and I bought pizza for the girls and we clustered in the back of Bippo's, laughing and playing pinball, and spent that weekend together on the beach, cruising the carnival attractions, Tilt-A-Whirl, The Zodiac, The Scrambler, nervous glances at obscene novelties in the tourist shops, swimming through long afternoons. We rented a surplus navy life raft; Ricky and I inflated it with a bicycle pump and pushed it beyond the breakers while the girls swam out behind us. We drifted the far side of the surf, zinc oxide smeared on our noses, drinking sun-warmed beer and watching the opulent Chesapeake schooners slice past with names like
String of Pearls, Rhonda's Dream, Body and Soul,
in flight toward paradise.

That night we sat on a bench in front of the Mermaid Bar, talking, listening to the ring of arcades and carnival screams and the ocean booming in the darkness behind us, and after the others drifted away Mary and I stayed on, still talking as the
neon signs along the boardwalk clicked off and the moon rose higher and we could see a rim of surf break and disappear back into shadow. We slipped off the bench to sit on the sand and kissed, hard and carefully at first, then softer and with more assurance, lying down on the sand and holding each other, watching the moon move from behind the boardwalk façade to flood the beach in a sweep of cold light.

In 1967 I was eighteen years old. It was my senior year in high school. Ricky Bayner's older brother was in the army, serving in Vietnam. I had finished my high school football career with six touchdowns in ten games and just under a thousand yards rushing. There was talk of a scholarship to one of the smaller universities. The college scouts believed my speed and agility and fine hands made up for my lack of weight and height, and during that football season the Director of the Selective Service Administration announced that the draft would be intensified due to increased troop demands in southeast Asia.

My grandfather sent me $100 for my birthday, and for Christmas I bought Mary a ring with a diamond inset. On December 28 I received the letter notifying me that my draft classification would revert to 1-A as of graduation day. The letter went on to say that the time and location of my induction physical would be forwarded at a later date.

New Year's Eve, 1967.
A dark heaven of rock and roll, fall of color, and lives played out in cars. In my Camaro with three other football players, driving, talking, passing around a wine bottle, cruising down the hours and near midnight finding ourselves at the reservoir where we swam and drank and brought girls all through the summer. We got out of the car, crunching leaves, moving like strangers on the landscape. The gravel beach and pier and black water seemed bruised and solitary, no place we had ever been, and the sky was wet with cold moonlight and ragged clouds. Somebody said it was 1968.

The half gallon of cheap sour wine made the round and nobody spoke. After a moment I walked back to my car and sat alone behind the wheel, frightened by a deep and uncertain longing in that expanse of silence.

The news on New Year's Day said Nguyen Duy Trinh, speaking from Hanoi, claimed his government would begin negotiations if the United States would unconditionally halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The New Year's cease-fire was allegedly violated by 170 enemy-initiated actions. There had been fighting at Tay Ninh, 60 miles northwest of Saigon,
close by the Cambodian border: 23 Americans were dead, 155 wounded.

By the end of the day Texas A&M had upset Alabama, 20 to 16, in the Cotton Bowl. USC had no trouble with Indiana in the Rose, and I watched Oklahoma squeeze past Tennessee in the Orange Bowl, 26-24. When I turned the television off I felt claustrophobic, vaguely ill. I had received the official letter directing me to report for induction into the armed forces the following November, and I stepped out into cold dusk, shivering. The blue air and hard starlight smelled like smoke. I looked at my car in the driveway, and went inside for jacket and keys.

I drove, through the serenity of quiet winter streets, the already beaten fragility of early demise. Police reports and body counts lived in the radio with psychedelic rock and Detroit soul, a running backdrop. Cultured BBC voices lectured over the shout of gunfire on satellite links from Saigon or Phnom Pen as I drifted the neighborhood lanes and, closer to the city, passed the dark shops and stores in front of their vacant parking lots. I turned the radio off as I moved onto an empty boulevard, and snow began to fall.