Everybody Sees the Ants (5 page)

After that he went back to work and I went into my room and read my book. It’s called
One Shot, One Kill
, and it’s about snipers in different American wars. Lara Jones never fails to tell me that my reading about war makes me weird, but I can’t get her fascination with reading about fairies and wizards, so I guess that makes us even.

After the dreams started to come every other month or
so—when I about was nine—I started reading about the war as much as I could. My elementary school library had a set of World Book encyclopedias and I pulled out the U–V volume one day and found “The Vietnam War” on page 372 and read about it, even though I had no real idea of what it was talking about. All sorts of names and places I’d never heard of (
Gulf of Tonkin, Laos, Cambodia, Vietcong, Indochina, Ho Chi Minh
). Dates (
1957, 1964, 1973, 1975
). Numbers (
approximately 9,000,000 US military served; 58,000 dead; 300,000 wounded; 2,300 missing at the end of the war
). And there were three pictures: one of a helicopter hovering inches above a clearing in the jungle, and three soldiers providing cover; one of protesters at the Capitol in Washington, DC; and one of a bunch of Vietnamese people stuffed into a helicopter during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

Every time I went to the library, I revisited page 372 to see if I could understand more. This went on through middle school, when I started to read other Vietnam-related books, too. I figured out who “Charlie” was—that it was just a nickname for the enemy, the Vietcong, or the VC: the Communist soldiers fighting for North Vietnam to take over our allies in South Vietnam.

Then, when I was twelve, I took a trip to the attic to find an old baseball mitt, and I discovered the box—the box from Granny Janice’s house filled with keepsakes and paperwork and books and letters about Granddad Harry’s case. Even though it was a hot, late-spring day and the attic was sweltering, I went through the whole box, paper by paper. That’s
where I found
One Shot, One Kill
. It’s where I found all the letters between Granny Janice and the government. It’s where I found out she was a big-time member of the POW/MIA movement who spoke at rallies and national meetings and worked with the families of the missing. There were newspaper clippings, including a big one about how the government decided to classify all missing as “presumed dead” and how Granny Janice refused to see it that way.

It quoted her. “No one has proved to me that my husband isn’t still alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, as far as I’m concerned, if even one man is alive, we owe him more than this—than presuming him dead for the sake of tidying paperwork.”

There were more than twenty clippings, from places all over the country where she was invited to speak. Some had pictures. There was even a picture of her at the White House. This made me realize that Granny was a hero as much as Granddad was.

At the bottom of the box, I found a shoe box full of love letters between her and Granddad Harry from the time he was in training all the way up to when he was captured. I took it and hid it under my bed at the bottom of an old box of Transformers.

There’s this one letter I read nearly every day.

This letter was the last personal letter Granny Janice received. Then, he was gone.

No one could explain it. In the box in the attic, we have a ton of letters from the government that asked to change Harry’s status to “presumed dead.” But they never had proof. No bones or tags or anything. No one ever returned his wedding ring or his teeth. In the end, they changed the status without her permission, but it’s a lie.

The last she ever heard, he might have been alive in a Lao prison camp in 1987, fourteen years after the end of the war. This information came from fifteen unrelated sources—mostly refugees and boat people, and only thanks to the civilian POW/MIA organization that Granny Janice had worked for. The Pathet Lao (Communist Laos) returned very few US prisoners after the Vietnam War.

Under a dozen.

This was okay because we didn’t technically have a war with Laos. This was okay because our government wanted to move the nation into a more positive political era. This was not okay with the more than six hundred families who’d lost track of their loved ones in Laos.

Of course, it was easy to assume that these men who never returned from the war had died from jungle diseases. Jungle diseases suck. There’s dysentery, which goes like this: constant bloody diarrhea until you die. And malaria, which goes something like this: fever, body aches, vomiting and convulsions until you die. Also beriberi, which sounds way fruitier than this: weight loss, body pain, going crazy, swelling limbs, paralysis and heart abnormalities until you die.

It was also easy to assume that these missing men had died from an assortment of war wounds—from stinging shrapnel to torture injuries to booby-trap infections, thanks to the practice of coating spikes in a variety of infectious materials. But some men survive all sorts of crazy stuff, and Communists at the time were known for holding live prisoners for use as political currency or a ticket out of their unstable country.

So every time the government tried to make Granny Janice sign a piece of paper declaring Harry dead, she fought it. I can see her saying, “Up yours! My Harry is not dead!” Because Granny Janice figured Harry could survive anything to see her one last time.

Of course, now I know it, too.

Granddad, his guard Frankie and I are playing a game of gin under the canopy of the jungle. I’m winning. Granddad is not really paying attention, because he is too busy swatting
red ants off his ankles. He’s missing three fingers on his left hand.

“Aren’t you guys getting eaten alive out here?”

I look down at my ankles. No ants. “Nope.”

Frankie ignores us and is concentrating hard on his cards.

Granddad gets up and sees that his chair is right on top of an anthill, so he moves to another part of the card table, and play continues.

Frankie turns to me and says, “How you dealing with that jerk in school, Lucky Lindo-man?”

I shrug. “It’s under control,” I say. I hadn’t talked about Nader with Granddad for years. How could I complain about titty twisters at recess to a guy who was missing his limbs or his teeth or his whole damn life? I know he told me to come to him if ignoring Nader didn’t work, and I wanted to, but I’d stopped telling any adults about it in real life, and here in the jungle it felt too whiny.

And I wasn’t there to whine. I was there to outsmart Frankie, kill him if I had to, and then rescue Granddad Harry.

“Gin!” I say, and I lay down my run of diamonds and four queens.

Frankie picks up his rifle and puts it to my head. “Why don’t you tell us the truth, kid?”

Granddad is standing now. “Frankie, put the gun down.”

“But he don’t tell you the truth, Harry. He lie.”

I duck, punch Frankie in the gut and grab his rifle from him. I kick him to the ground and put my bare foot on his neck. Granddad sits on his torso. I put the rifle to his head.

“It’s none of your goddamn business how my life is,” I say. “You got that?”

He nods quickly. My finger jitters on the trigger.

“Don’t kill me! Please!” he says.

I laugh. But my trigger finger just won’t pull.

Granddad says, “Don’t, Lucky.”

“I’m getting you out of here, Granddad. For good. Forever.”

“I let you go,” Frankie says. “You go and I never see you again!”

I kick him in the face. His nose bleeds instantly.

“Lucky, stop,” Granddad says.

“Why are you defending him? He’s tortured you for your whole life!”

“He’s fed me, too.”

I look at Granddad and figure he must be suffering from some freaky kind of Stockholm syndrome, where you bond with a kidnapper.

“He brainwashed your ass,” I say. I point the rifle right at Frankie’s temple. “I’m taking you home.”

When I feel my finger pull the trigger, I wake up.

•   •   •

Next to me on my pillow is a winning hand of gin. An ace, two, three, four, five and six of diamonds and four queens. The cards are coated in four decades’ worth of jungle dirt.

I pull out my Transformers box from under my bed and put the cards in, alongside all my other jungle souvenirs that
I’d collected over the years: the very first one—a small rusty bolt I’d found when I was ten, the cigar from my first booby trap, a small block of wood with nails hammered through it. A petrified frog. Two rocks. A map. An empty C ration can. An assortment of metal parts.

I lie back down for a while, feeling like a jungle hero. But then I hear Mom and Dad talking in the living room, and I remember that I am a weak suburban failure.

Le
Smugasbord is closed on Mondays, so we treat Mondays in the summertime the way most people treat Sunday. Dad is required to stick around all day if possible, though he usually only makes it until midafternoon before something we do makes him mad. Around ten, Mom comes to my bedroom door and says, “Lucky? You want some brunch?”

I groan and tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.

Through my one half-open eye, I see her put a pair of swimming trunks on my dresser. “I bought these a size too big last year. I think they’ll fit you now.”

When I arrive in the kitchen, I realize I’ve been set up. The eggs are still in the carton next to an empty bowl. The whisk is sitting on the counter next to the bowl. There’s a loaf of bread by the fridge, and an empty frying pan on the stove.

Oh, God. Not this again—the once-a-month attempt to give-a-shit-through-cooking
.

Before I can turn around and go back to my room, Dad arrives next to me, and Mom is at the kitchen doorway.

“French toast or scrambled eggs? It’s up to you,” he says.

“I don’t care. Whatever you guys want,” I say.

“Nope,” Mom says. “It’s your choice!”

I go to the cabinet with the cereal in it and pull out a box of Cheerios. I grab a bowl and am about to get a spoon out of the drawer, but Dad stops me.

“Come on, man. Just for fun. Let’s make breakfast together.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Why not? How come you don’t want to cook with your old man anymore?”