Sweet Talk (12 page)

My grandmother never boarded the ferry for Manhattan without believing that her life or, at the very least, the quality of her character was in peril. She did not like New Yorkers. They were grim and anxious. They had bad teeth. They did not live in a place where parents told their children that if they bit into an apple and found a worm, they would know that they were just getting a little extra protein.

“About how many do you think she took?” MacArthur said to me.

“She took about exactly all of them.”

His face went slack. He still did not have that implacable expression that was supposed to help you through any crisis. “I was going to hock those on Monday to get some more cash for Christmas.”

“By Monday, you will be restricted to quarters. By Monday, you will be calling your friends to tell them you can’t go to any movies or parties over the holidays.” I handed him a lighter. “I don’t think they’ve got them counted,” I said. The others were still lying on the dining table.

He was grateful for that lighter. “Thanks,” he said. “This is the best one.”

“How about a light?” I said. I opened a pack of my father’s cigarettes and took one out.

He snapped open the lighter and ignited it so deftly that the whole movement looked like a magic trick. “This is what we learn to do at P.S. 104,” he said.

Neither of us smoked, but we inflicted the cigarette upon ourselves with relish, exhaling fiercely into the raw night air. “I’m not asking where you got them, of course,” I said.

He smiled. “I won almost every one of them throwing dice and playing cards. At lunch everybody goes out to steal, and after school everybody plays for the loot. Remember me? Kid Competition. I’m great at games.”

“That’s a story you could probably tell them,” I said.

He ground the cigarette out under his foot. “Look
at me,” he said. “I’m littering Army property.” Then he said, “I did steal a couple of them. Either you steal, and you’re one of guys, or you don’t steal, and you’re a sleazo and everybody wants to fight.”

He was very tall by then. The bones close to his skin—his wrist bones, knees, shoulder bones—looked as though they had been borrowed from a piece of farm machinery. If you were as big as he was and also the new kid at school, someone would always want to fight you. We had started walking and were now on the dark side of Governors Island, standing by the seawall that looked toward the small lights of Brooklyn. The wind was blowing at our backs from the west, bringing the sharp, oily smell from the New Jersey refineries, but we could also smell the salt and fish taste of the ocean, and for a moment I could imagine us far away from every city and every Army post and every rural town we had ever known. He leaned across the railing of the seawall and looked tired. He had posed for himself an even more demanding ideal than the family had, and he was humiliated to perceive himself as a thief.

“Look,” I said. “Just tell them you bought a couple of lighters with your lunch money to get the stake for the gambling.” He nodded toward the water without conviction. “Don’t ruin Christmas for yourself.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

The next day he volunteered the truth to my father and was not only restricted to quarters but also made to
go uptown to meet the victims of the crimes. My father wore his uniform, with the brass artilleryman’s insignia, two cannons crossed under a missile. MacArthur wore the puffy green jacket and the green hat that had inspired his friends to call him the Jolly Green Giant. They were a gift from my mother and grandmother, so he had to wear them. They made him look like a lumbering asparagus stalk, a huge vegetable king, who could be spotted on any subway platform or down any length of city blocks. At each store, he removed his green hat and made a speech of apology, then returned one or several of the lighters. Since the lighters were now used, he also paid for them out of his Christmasshopping money. It hurt him to be the one who had nothing to give on Christmas morning. And at school he was an outcast.

“I am now Kid Scum,” he said. “The Jolly Green Creep.”

He got a Certificate of Citizenship, though, and when he entered the Army, four years later, he went in as a real American.

On MacArthur’s last day of leave before he left for Vietnam, we drove him to the Cleveland airport and then stood like potted palms behind the plate-glass window of the terminal building. My father had retired from the Army by then, and the family had returned to Ohio.

“He ought to love the heat,” my grandmother said. “He was born in the heat.”

“He’s a smart soldier,” my father said. “It’s the smart men who are most likely to get through any war.” My father had always believed in smartness as other people believe in amulets.

The plane began to move, and we strained to find MacArthur’s face in one of the small windows. “There he is,” my mother said. “I see his hand in the window.”

A woman standing next to her said, “No, that’s our son. See how big that hand is?”

The woman’s husband said, “Our son was a linebacker at Ohio State. He weighs two hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

“He’s a good boy,” the woman said, and we all nodded, as if it were obvious that physical size could be a measure of a person’s character.

After we left the turnpike and drove south to the fertile, rolling land of the Killbuck Valley, which had never produced a war protester, my grandmother said, “I believe in Vietnam.” She emphasized the word
believe
, as if Vietnam were a denomination of the Christian faith. In the 1950s, she had been a member of something called the Ground Observer Corps. Members of the Corps scanned the skies with binoculars, looking for Russian aircraft. At that time she lived in a small Ohio town whose major industries were a busseat factory and an egg-noodle plant. Twice a month
she stood on the roof of the high school to keep these vital industries safe from a communist air attack.

“I believe in luck,” I said. “I believe the Jolly Green Giant’s luck will get him through. Remember how he always won at bingo?”

“We took care of the Japs and the Jerries,” my grandmother said. “We held off the pinkos in Korea.”

“I do not think that any pinkos are planning to invade the United States,” I said.

“You’ve got a lot to learn,” my mother said. “They’re already here.”

“When you get back to school, I do not want to hear that you are marching in those protests,” my father said.

I was already marching, but that was a secret. “Isn’t this the place where we notice the grass?” I said.

When my father was still in the Army, we spent all of his leave time going back to the Killbuck Valley. As we crossed the state line and drew closer to the valley where the Killbuck River ran and all of our relatives lived, my father would say, “Doesn’t anyone notice that the grass is getting greener?” We used to say, “Naw, this grass looks like any other grass.” We made a joke of the grass, but we all did love the look of that land. On some level, the grasses of the Killbuck Valley, the clover, timothy, alfalfa, the corn, wheat, and oats, the dense woods of the hills, the freshwater springs, and the shivering streams—all of this was connected with
the necessity of a standing Army. It was as if my father had said, “This is what we will fight for.”

MacArthur had been out of the Army for a year, and his life seemed defined by negatives—no job, no college, no telephone, no meat. He lived alone in a rented farmhouse deep in the Killbuck Valley, about twenty miles from the town where the family had settled.

“He comes every other Sunday and all he eats is the salad or the string beans,” my grandmother said to me. The soul of our family life always hovered over the dinner table, where we renewed the bond of our kinship over game and steaks and chops and meatloaf. My parents and grandmother perceived MacArthur’s new diet both as a disease and as a mark of failing character. When they went to visit, they took along a roast or a ten-pound bag of hamburger.

“See what you can find out,” my mother said. I was home for Christmas week and on my way out to see him. “Talk to him. See if he has any plans.”

He did not have any plans. What he had was a souvenir of the war just like the one my student had tried to give me on that June day under the trees. This one was tucked into a small padded envelope lying on the kitchen table. The envelope made me curious, and I kept reaching out to finger the ragged edges of brown paper as we drank a pot of tea. MacArthur, sitting on the kitchen counter because there was only one chair,
finally said, “Go ahead. Look.” I opened the envelope and looked. There was a moment then when the winter sun was like heavy metal in the room, like something that could achieve critical mass if a question mark sparked the air. For some reason, I thought of the young woman reporting what her mother had said about the dead dog—“And you know, that dog’s mind was still good. He wasn’t even senile.” I thought of what I had wanted to say to my student that day: “I didn’t think that something like this could look exactly like itself so much later and so far away.”

“That’s not mine,” MacArthur said. “That belongs to Dixon.” His face was as flat as pond ice, and I saw that at last he had achieved the gamesman’s implacable expression. Even in the long curves of his body there was something that said that nothing could startle or move him.

“Who’s Dixon?” I said.

“Oh, you know who he is. My friend the space cadet. The one in the V.A. hospital.”

“The one from Oklahoma.” Now I remembered Dixon from the snapshots. He was the one who glued chicken feathers to his helmet.

“This is his idea of a great Christmas present,” MacArthur said.

His eyes were so still and wide I could see the gold flecks in them. He looked away, looked down at his legs dangling from the counter, and I suddenly felt the
solitariness of that rented farmhouse in the Killbuck Valley, the hills and fields hardened under snow, the vegetable garden rutted with ice. When I stood up to touch his arm, he did not move or speak. He seemed to have escaped from me in an evaporation of heat. Even in my imagination, I could not go where he had gone. All I knew was that somewhere in the jungle had been a boy named Dixon, a boy from Oklahoma, who had grown up on land just like the land my father used to hunt while MacArthur trailed behind with bright-red boxes of homemade ammunition. But now Dixon was a nut who sent ears through the mail, and MacArthur was unemployed and living alone in the country.

Suddenly the ear was back in the envelope Dixon had sent it in, and MacArthur was saying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have much around here you’d like to eat.”

Later, we stood out back where the garden was and looked at the corn stubble and broken vines. MacArthur paced the rows and said, “These are my snap beans. These are my pumpkins.” He proceeded past carrots, beets, onions, turnips, cabbages, and summer squash, looking at each old furrow with a stalwart affection, as if the plants he named would bloom in snow when they heard him speak.

“They asked me to find out what you plan for the future,” I said.

“Oh, great.” He kicked a hump of snow. “Did you ever notice how with the family your life is always a
prospective event? ‘When you’re a little older, when you grow up, when you get old just like me’?” He relaxed again and dropped an arm across my shoulders. “I’m just a carpenter now. Let me show you my lights.” I thought he meant lamps, since most of his rooms were empty except for secondhand lamps standing in corners. He was restoring the house for its owner, to work off the rent. In the front room, he said, “Now we are going to play a game. Tell me what you see. All right? Do you get it? Tell me what you see.”

“I see an old iron floor lamp.”

“No, tell me about the
light
. What kind of light do you see?” The walls were freshly painted white, but the sun had moved around the house, so the room was growing dark. I fumbled for a proper answer.

“Eggshell light?” I said.

He made a great show of entering an imaginary mark on an imaginary napkin in his hand. “Nooooo,” he said. “It certainly is not eggshell light.”

Then I understood, and I laughed. “Is it animal light?”

“Settle down, now. Use your head.”

“Is it vegetable light?”

He surveyed the room, its greens, and blue-greens and ochers, the pale colors of a northern room at the end of the day. “Yes, I think you could call this vegetable light. Maybe
eggplant
light.” He laughed and wadded up the imaginary napkin.

We moved through the house then, making up ridiculous names for the light we saw. We found moose light, and hippopotamus light, and potato-chip light. We found a violet light we named after our cousin Neilon’s purple car, and an orange light we called Aunt Sheila’s Hair, and a silver light we called Uncle Dave, after the silver dollars he used to send us on our birthdays. We returned to the kitchen, with its wide reach of western windows, and saw the red light of the sunset splayed across the cabinets. “Oh, yes,” MacArthur said. “And here we have another light. Here we have a light just like the light of the rocket’s red glare.”

The sun had dropped below the tree line when he went to turn on his lamps, and I put on my coat. “Well, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll keep writing. I’ll come see you the next time I’m back.”

He walked me to the car, holding my arm as I slipped over the pebbly snow. We stopped to look at the western sky, now furrowed with that fierce red you see at that time of year when there are ice crystals in the air. All the things nearby had become brilliant black silhouettes—the stand of trees to our right, the boarded-up barn, the spiky fragments of the garden. The sky grew fiercer and gave off a light I could not name.

“The shortest day of the year,” MacArthur said. He reached into his jacket and withdrew the brown envelope. “Take this,” he said.

He held it out, and this time, because he was my brother, I said, “All right,” and took it. I hugged him and got in the car. I knew he was not going to be home for Christmas. “You’re going all the way to Oklahoma to see Dixon, aren’t you?”

He had already started back to the house and had to turn to face me with his surprise.

“Remember me?” I said. “I’m the Kid’s sister. I’ll think of something to tell them at home.”