Carry Me Home (78 page)

Bobby looked at the photostat pages. They’d been re-marked unclassified, but otherwise the roof rat was right. Bobby read on.

Ban Me Thuot
... The hamlet’s PF and PSDF, with no outside help, held out under constant attack until two days after Ban Me Thuot itself had fallen ... enemy tanks rolled in then and shelled the church to rubble. All but a few of the surviving population had taken refuge, and died there....

Later in the day [14 April], in a clearing, they were surrounded by about fifteen Motolova trucks that began driving at high speed through the crowd, the drivers apparently trying to kill as many people as they could ... fifty or sixty were killed....

Bobby held his head. It was nearly impossible for him to grasp the extent of the collapse, the horror. “We still going back?” The words came pained. He felt torn. Noah, Nam, High Meadow, tenancy for life, San Martin, roof rats, Sara, Saigon—where did his allegiance lie? He looked at the man with the documents. The others were quiet, still, staring at different angles into the early evening sky.

“If we could get there ...” Bobby began, stopped. “It’s late but maybe not too late. Did they really get a hundred thousand?”

“That’s the word. There’s like five thousand down in San Diego ready to go. But it’s falling so fast. Man, ABC reported like a week ago, that the war was already lost.”

“If they could hold,” Bobby said, “we could counterattack.”

“Yeah.”

“We all agree. We’re going back.”

“You got it, Captain. There it is.”

After the meeting broke up Bobby and Tony remained on the roof, spoke quietly inside Tony’s box. “I just don’t fuckin believe it, Man,” Bobby said. “That it could happen just like that. Like that.”

“Yeah. I guess it can, huh? But they’ll stop em. We’ll go. Launch the counterattack.”

“Hm.” Bobby fidgeted, dug his heels into the tar and gravel until Tony tapped his leg indicating that was a no-no. “Anything more on Ty?”

“They got him on fraud, tax evasion. I don’t know what else.”

“I can’t bail him out.”

“I know. We’re hoping they’ll release him on a PTA, a promise to appear.”

“Good.”

“I’m really sorry about Grandpa.”

“Yeah. He ... he was like my—” Bobby’s voice broke, “my dad.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “I could see that. I been flippin out ever since he had the stroke. Really weird dreams.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought I was the only one having those.”

“Oh, Man,” Tony said. “I’m like haunted. Between this shit ... Man, I lay down and I see em issuing us 14s or 16s but we don’t have any ammo. And we’re moving up. We’re waitin for the onslaught. If they kill me, it’ll be the first time in five years that I’ll be at rest.”

“Geesh.” Bobby was shocked by the depth and intensity of Tony’s feelings.

“Hey, go home to your wife and kid. If anything happens, we’ll call.”

On April 17th Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. At Xuan Loc, twenty-four miles northeast of Saigon, the ARVN 18th Division reinforced with a regiment of the 5th and a “brigade” of the Airborne, had been battling first two, then four NVA divisions. Four more NVA divisions were sweeping toward Saigon from the south, two from the north and three from the northwest. The government had all but run out of tactical air support and the allied troops at Xuan Luc were down to their last rounds. Above San Martin, in the Old Russia Road cottage, with Sara sleeping on the sofa, Noah in his crib, and Josh snoring under the dining table, Bobby flipped TV channels. He’d watched CBS’s report on the NVA massacre of South Viet Namese officials, and NBC’s coverage of Kissinger’s speech. To him, things were getting more and more disgusting. On ABC Howard K. Smith said we
should
give aid to South Viet Nam—the one hundred and first day of the
ad absurdum
and now moot debate.

“Sara, you awake?” “Um-hmm.”

“I think we should go back.”

“Hmm?”

“We could sell this place. If you don’t like it—after a year, we’ll come back.”

Sara sat up. “Bobby, what are you talking about?”

“I’d like to call Willings, tell him we’re going back.”

“To your grandpa’s farm?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Oh. I didn’t think you wanted ...” She leaned toward him.

“What do you think, Sara? Would that be a better place for Noah ...”

Four days later Nguyen Van Thieu resigned as president of the Republic of Viet Nam. Suddenly, it seemed to Bobby, everyone was saying we should never have stopped the bombing. Kissinger was still requesting U.S. aid! Congress was still holding hearings on aid! The political-electronic absurdity increased. The roof rats, on the other hand, dispersed.

Tony called. “It’s over, Man. There’s no place to land.”

Within days the local papers and local TV were covering the arrival of the South Viet Namese refugees at Hamilton Air Force Base. There was gallantry amid pathos. There was every imaginable emotion from anger and disgust to pride, from humiliation to indifference.

On the 29th, Bobby’s 29th birthday, rockets rained down on the airports and into the city and a massive helicopter evacuation began pulling the last one thousand Americans from Saigon.

Then, on the phone, Tony. “It’s over, Man. Mothafuck! Peter Jennings just announced, ‘Viet Nam is now Red.’ Hey, you know what, Man?”

“What?”

“It does mean somethin, Man. It means one fuck of a lot.”

“Come up, okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re goin back, Tony. We’re going back to Mill Creek Falls. To High Meadow. I called Willings. Come home with us.”

B
ACK.

It is cold. I am chilled to the bone. My right thigh is stiff. The sky above is blueblack. On the horizon is Draco, the dragon, with its tail by the pointers of the Big Dipper. Toward me is Polaris and the
W
of Cassiopeia, and there is Pegasus, the winged horse created from the blood of the Gorgon, Medusa; Pegasus who transported Bellerophon into battle against the monster Chimera. To the east Leo is barely visible. The sky there brings first light.

Slowly I limp from the sugarbush down through the high meadow to the edge of the pond. I do not have the sustenance for winter nights in these hills the way I once had when I brought Linda to World’s End ... eleven hundred million eons ago. I am moving, going back to the barn. There is so much more to tell.

We entered a time of rapid transformation, a time without motion, a time of expansion and contraction, of rest, retreat, revival, of relief tainted with humiliation. The year 1975 began a time of great turmoil for veterans of the Southeast Asia war. For many it began the expatriation many others had been enduring. For America, though thousands of people spoke of putting that “dirty little war” behind us, ’75 marked an acceleration, albeit muted, muffled, glitzed over, trivialized or Tinseltownized, of the fragmentation and polarization of our society. The preceding decade had stimulated our internal conflicts. Thesis had been crashed head-on into antithesis, forced toward synthesis, only to have ’75 release the bruised and wounded to scatter, to separate, to fester silently, to reentrench and prepare for the coming rounds. For Bobby and me ’75 began repatriation, and for Bobby it marked his awakening to the needs of the roof rats and the rest.

Climbing. The big barn looms before me. This was the heart of High Meadow. Squirrels have built a nest in the eaves and they scamper as I approach. Below, there in the shadows of the mouth of the tractor garage, is the forge. That first winter I lived below the big barn in a cubicle at the very back of the garage. I worked every day—alone mostly, not wanting to talk to anyone—setting up the forge, building it right into the barn’s foundation, into the earth, adding first an archaic hand bellows, then an old motor, then three—a fan, a vacuum cleaner reversed, finally through belts and wheels geared up and up, the powerful motor from a discarded clothes dryer whirling a five-tiered turbo-charger into tubes and hoses, like a mad scientist’s kid’s Erector set, but powerful enough to melt steel or stone. I worked bare-chested before the furnace, searing my belly, my back to the opening that faced the pond, the wind freezing my sweat—me heating and banging, shaping and cooling, forging the long ornate hinges for the gate across the drive, trying to burn the toxins and anger and dreams from my mind.

Bobby came back to High Meadow in November of ’75. It took all that time to sell his Old Russia Road house, Sara’s car, and the office-mobile. Without even entering the farmhouse Bobby climbed to the cemetery. He carried Noah on his shoulders, the little guy wrapped like an Eskimo and supported by both of Bobby’s hands. With Josh scampering in accompaniment, Bobby brought Noah to meet Pewel, grandfather and great-grandfather and nothing more or less than a simple stone set next to Brigita’s. “Granpa, this is Noah Pewel Wapinski. Granpa, here’s the plan....”

I called Linda that night. What night? I don’t know. Sometime later, sometime before. Before I arrived—I don’t know—in December? I told her I could make it. I said, “I’m comin back, Babe. I’m comin home. I’m gonna make it.” She said something like, “Make it, then come back,” or “Prove it,” or “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And I said, “Okay.”

Ty did not come back with me. In May, Ty was released on a PTA but he split. They picked him up in June. The public defender led him through various legal steps, plea bargaining, swapping charges here for admissions of guilt there. In August he was sentenced to seven-and-one-half years in prison with the possibility of parole after three and one-half years.

The roof rats of San Jose did not come either—not yet—and some of them never because some never made it home. “Wildman” David Coffee left the roof, got a job, died of head injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. Fuzzy Golan was killed attempting to break up a convenience store hold up. I don’t know what happened to Big Bro Boyson. I don’t know what happened to any of the others except Ty and Frankie “The Kid” Denahee, who told me about Wildman and Fuzzy in 1980, when he arrived at High Meadow.

Look in here. This is the main floor, the one Pewel fell to nine hundred million eons ago. Through the late seventies it changed greatly. That’s the Pittsburgh machine for making the female joint in sheet metal duct work, and next to it is the Flanger. There’s the Slitter, a roller-cutter that grasps and pulls through entire sheets, and back there is the sheet metal break. We may have been small-town backwater hicks but through Bobby we attained a certain level of technical sophistication. This electronic system can measure and record the thermal collection efficiencies of twelve separate panels simultaneously. At one point Bobby was experimenting with not simply flat, domed and parabolic collector shapes, and water and air as collector mediums, but with argon, helium and neon, and with thermo-syphonation tanks and photovoltaic ribbons. Step-by-step experimentation, maybe you’d call it R & D, attempting to understand How Things Work—perhaps that’s what this is all about.

The sun is up. The landform, the natural south-facing bowl of High Meadow, acts as an immense solar energy collector. I am now in the barn office—we always called it Grandpa’s office. I’ve laid my bedroll on the floor, been poking around. The office is intact, the files undisturbed. Bobby kept files on each and every vet—their stories, their interests, their participation in his programs—but he carefully coded every vet, numbers, and I think he destroyed the master list.

To us, at that time, the essence of the time could be summed up in the questions, What does Viet Nam mean? and, How does that meaning work on us? Was it horror? Was it a leaderless bureaucracy running a death machine? Was it gallantry? Heroism? Was it calling for the best, for the most noble cause, and getting the best? It was intense struggle, intense hardship, met with intense valor, perseverance and pride. To Bobby, to many of us, Viet Nam—as an experience, as a natural topographic region, as a political-ideological entity, and as a human culture—represented the best, the most beautiful nascent possibilities, and warm humanness; represented all this as a backdrop for the worst, for the cowardly, the horrific, corrupt, disenfranchised, and finally for the abandoned. Together, the experience, the nation, the best, the worst, had been set adrift in ancient and leaky trawlers to sink or float, to die, to be forgotten. But that is description, that is not meaning. That dirty little war. That foolish misadventure. Just made us the laughing stock ... ’round the block, ’round the world. We could not yet peg it, could not nail it down.

“H
APPY NEW YEAR, MAN,
” Bobby said. They could hear the peal of the midnight bells from St. Ignatius, and the Episcopal and Methodist churches.

“Happy New Year, Tony.” Sara leaned in, hugged him, a buddy hug.

“Yeah,” Tony said. He was quiet, bitter, dejected. Happy fuckin new year, he thought. They were in the living room of the farmhouse. Noah was asleep upstairs. Earlier Linda had stopped by with Gina and Michelle, had stayed only long enough to exchange wishes. “I’m headin out,” Tony said. Then low, bitter, he quipped, “Three’s a crowd.”

“It’s goina be a good year, Man,” Bobby said. “I can feel it in my bones. I can really feel it. Tomorrow,” he paused, “today I guess, I’ll show you the plan.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. It was warm in the house, freezing outside, cold in the barn. “Right on.” There was no enthusiasm in his voice. He slinked toward the kitchen.

“Tony.” Sara stood like a schoolgirl with her hands and feet together. “We love you.”

Tony snorted. He hadn’t meant for her to hear it but she had. “Don’t give me any of that second-grade California empathy crap.”

“I’m not,” Sara said. She was not offended. Tony’s head was down, his eyes turned up. “I mean it,” Sara said.

Tony sneered, then said, “Maybe Josh can come out with me.”

“Sure, Man,” Bobby said. “You wanta call your folks?”

“Naw. Might wake the girls. I can’t believe she went out with Denham.”

“Tony!” Sara’s voice was laden with sympathy. “She didn’t. Really. It’s their group’s party. She said you could have gone.”