Missing in Action (13 page)

Even if Elaine hadn't heard what Lester said, someone had told her by now. What was she thinking about him? “He learned to dance by dancing with a
boy
? A
Jap
?” People would tease her, too, and she'd be sorry that she ever danced with him.

They didn't know that Ken was just like them.

“Jay, honey, are you all right?”

He looked up. His mother was standing in the doorway. She was still looking happy, her face sort of reddish. She had lipstick on, and she had fixed her hair nice. She was even dressed up in her green dress with the stitching on the shoulder—the dress that she usually only wore to church. He didn't say anything. He wanted her to leave.

“What happened, honey? You seemed upset when you came in.”

“Nothing happened.”

She came to his bed and sat down, then leaned
toward him, with her hands on either side of him. “Your eyes are red. Have you been crying?”

“Who was that guy?”

“You know him, don't you? His name's Hal. Hal Duncan. He was a friend of mine in high school.”

“A
boy
friend?”

“Yes. But that was a long time ago. He's been in the army. He was in the African campaign, in Tunisia. He got wounded over there.”

“He looked all right to me.”

“Well, he is. He's been recovering for months. But you're only asking me about him so I won't ask about you. Tell me what happened.”

“Why was he here?”

“He just came to see me. We're old friends.” But Jay could hear that her voice sounded nervous.

“Is he married?”

“No, he's not.”

Jay stared at her, tried to see what was there. This was wrong, her laughing with some guy, maybe flirting, when his dad was a prisoner of war. Everything was wrong in this world. Everything. “I want to move back to Salt Lake. I don't like it here.”

“Honey, you might as well know right now, we're never moving back. It's been hard for me to get used to things too, but this is a good place. I wish I'd never left it.”

“That's not what you said before.”

“I know. But I've changed my mind. I thought you had too. You've got more friends here than you ever had in Salt Lake.”

“No, I don't. I don't have
any
friends.”

“What happened? Did you get in a quarrel with Gordy, or—”

“I don't like Gordy. Or any of those guys. I don't want to live here.”

“Tell Gordy you don't like being called Chief. I know that bothers you.”

“I'll leave, Mom. I'll run away. I'm not going to live here.”

He watched what was happening to her face, but he didn't care. She shouldn't have been flirting around with that Hal guy. She sat up straight, turned away from him. “We're not leaving, Jay. I made that mistake once in my life, thinking I had to get away from this little town. What I got away from were the things I was raised with. I made a whole lot of mistakes that I regret now. You know how bad things were for us.”

He knew what she was saying. “We were okay.”

“No, we weren't. We couldn't pay our bills. You know how we lived.”

“Dad will want us to go back to Salt Lake when he gets home.”

“Oh, Jay. Things aren't going to be like that.”

He knew what she was saying. He heard it in the tired way she said it. “You think he's dead, don't you? That's why you're
flirting with that guy—looking for a new husband.”

“Don't do this.” She bent forward and cupped her hands over her face.

“He's not dead, but if you don't pray and have faith, he will be.”

She turned back to him, and now her eyelashes were wet. “Honey, listen. We have to be honest with ourselves. His ship went down. No survivors were found. And now a lot of time has passed. We have to accept things the way they are.”

He wasn't going to listen to this. “You want him dead. You want him dead so you can marry that guy.” He sat up. “Get out of here. Get out of my room.”

She stood up and looked down at him, her hands clasped together. “Jay, stop it. I've never seen you like this. Calm down.”

“No. Get out of here. You hate Dad. You always hated him. You called him lazy. I heard you say that to him.”

“We argued sometimes. I said things I shouldn't have, but so did he.”

“You called him a lazy Indian. I remember you said that.”

“I was mad, Jay. I just—”

“You're still mad.”

She stepped close and looked right into his face. “Okay. I am mad.” She waited, took a big breath, and
then spoke in a softer voice. “He was mean to me, Jay. You know that. And he was mean to you. He's your dad, but yes, I'm mad about those things. If he did come back, we might not stay married anyway. You need to know that.”

“He won't come back. You're killing him. Everything you say is killing him.”

“That's stupid, Jay. He's either at the bottom of the ocean or he isn't. Nothing I say is going to make any difference.”

Jay was crying—had been for a while. Everything she was saying was killing him. She had no faith at all. “Get out of here!” He slid off the bed, grabbed her by the shoulders, and tried to push her.

“Don't do that! That's what your dad thought he could do to me.” She pushed his hands away.

“Get out of here!”

“Listen to me, Jay. You're lying to yourself about your dad. He
was
lazy, and sometimes he was mean. And don't talk to me about flirting. Your dad went out with other women. I caught him, and he said he wouldn't do it again, but he did.”

“You hate him, so you're making all this up.” He pushed her again.

She twisted away from him, then stepped back close, looked into his face again. “Jay, this is crazy. You want him to be a sports hero, and he wasn't. You want him to be a war hero, and he wasn't. You want
him alive, and he isn't. We can't bring him back. And we can't make him into something he wasn't. I've tried to make you feel good about him. I thought you needed that. But he wasn't a good husband, and you know as well as I do, he was a
lousy
father. You know what he did to you.”

“He was nice to me. He played ball with me. He—”

“How often? Once? Twice? The biggest mistake of my life was to marry your dad instead of Hal. Hal wanted to marry me, asked me every time I came home from college, and I married your dad because he was good-looking and exciting. But he was all show. You know that better than anyone.”

“Get out! Get out!”

He pushed at her again, and she stepped away. “All right. But sooner or later, you have to stop making the guy up. And you're old enough to start—right now.” She turned and walked out.

He was standing in the middle of the room, sweat running down his face, his body trembling. He didn't know what to do. He wanted to run away, but he didn't know how. He didn't know where to go, how he could live. He dropped onto the rag rug by his bed. He curled up, but he felt the heat of his own body, so he stretched out, ran his legs across the hardwood floor, searched for some coolness. He was crying hard now.

He was remembering things he tried never to think
about. His dad had spanked him a lot, had slapped him hard across his legs, his back. And he had screamed at Jay, called him filthy names, accused him of things, called him “worthless.” Always that word. As a little boy, he had thought it was a curse word, some way of saying, “I hate you.”

And he knew something else. One night, when Mom was working late, Dad had put him to bed early, but he hadn't gone to sleep. He had heard his dad talking to someone, heard his voice all slurry, the way it was when he drank, and he'd heard a woman laugh. Over and over she had laughed, and Dad kept saying, “Be quiet. My kid's asleep. You're going to wake him up.” And then they'd both laughed.

He felt it more than remembered it. He didn't take time to think it through, the way he had so many times before. It was Mom who had told him that his dad would change, that he would come home from the war different. He still believed that. He had learned to say it to himself, repeat it when he remembered things he didn't want to think about. So what was she trying to tell him now?

He thought maybe he should pray—pray harder than ever. But he couldn't do it. He kept thinking of what she'd said:
at the bottom of the ocean
. He finally got up and lay on his bed again. He tried so hard most of the time not to remember, fought not to, but now he let the woman's voice come into his head, Dad telling
her to be quiet, and the time his dad had got the razor strop from the bathroom and lashed him across the backside, making red welts that turned into bruises. And he remembered why: He had wet his bed. “Pee-pants,” his dad had called him, and “baby,” and “worthless,” always worthless.

Grandpa stepped into the room. Jay felt him there before he heard him. He opened his eyes. “Jay, your mom's down in her room crying her eyes out. She wants you to know how sorry she is for the things she said to you.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Grandpa was wearing a white shirt and red suspenders. He had pulled the suspenders off his shoulders, and they were hanging over his hips. Jay looked at his middle, the white shirt, not at his face. “There's something I want to tell you,” Grandpa said. He waited until Jay looked up at his eyes. “If I understand what happened tonight, you got upset about Hal Duncan coming over. But I just want you to know, I was sitting in the kitchen the whole time, just a few steps away. I could hear everything they were talking about. It's not like they were courting or anything like that. Hal's been your mom's good friend for many years—since grade school, actually. They talked about his wounds and his recovery, and they talked about their old friends. That's all that happened.”

Grandpa didn't say anything about Mom wearing
lipstick, about being happy, about wearing her nice dress.

“Do you understand all that?”

Jay didn't answer.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I just want you to know, your mom would never encourage another man so long as we don't know for sure about your dad. We know that things don't look good for him, but she isn't writing him off. She's married to him, and she'll be true to him until she knows for certain that he didn't survive.”

“You told me to pray for him.”

“Well, you should pray for him. That's what we all should do—ask the Lord to help him get through this if he happens to be alive and in a prison camp somewhere. But we also have to be honest with ourselves and accept that he probably went down with his ship.”

“You told me not to give up.”

He heard Grandpa breathing, long and smooth, as though he needed time, needed to think things over. Finally he said, “Well, it's good to hope for the best, but—”

“You told me to have faith and he would come home. You promised me he would.”

“No. I didn't say that. I never made any promises. I told you to pray for him, and keep hoping. But I never
promised anything. We have to trust the Lord. He knows what's best.”

That sounded all upside down from what he had said before. Grandpa was going back on everything. That's how everyone was. No one ever gave straight answers or stuck with things they promised. He wanted to get away from this place.

“Jay, there's one more thing I want to tell you. I heard some of what your mom said when she was mad, and she didn't say it right, but it's something you need to understand.” And now he waited again, breathed again, but Jay refused to look at his face. He stared at that bulge in the middle of him, the white buttons on his white shirt. “Your mom got to an age where she wouldn't listen to anything your grandmother and I told her. It was just one of those things some kids go through. Once she got to the university she stopped going to church, and I got back reports that she was running with a crowd of kids who weren't at all like her. I don't think she did anything too terrible, but that's what she meant when she said she left a lot of things behind—you know, the things she'd learned here with us.”

Jay knew all that—knew that she hadn't gone to church in Salt Lake. He knew that she had gone drinking sometimes with Dad, gone out to dance halls, had smoked cigarettes sometimes, and he knew that she had stopped all that when they'd come back here.

“Your grandma and I met Gary, and we liked him all right, but then one day your mom showed up down here and said she was married to him. We weren't too happy about that, but—”

“Because he was an Indian.”

“No, that's not true, Jay. He was half Indian, but that didn't matter to us.”

“Mom said it did.”

“Well . . .” Grandpa seemed to think that over. “Maybe it did some. I don't know. Some things run pretty deep in us, Jay, and a lot of people say things about Indians. But I tried to be fair about all that, and I liked Gary. He was a nice young man, handsome as any man you'll ever see, and he loved to sit out on the porch and talk with me. He even promised me he'd learn something about the church and consider whether he would join. But that was part of the problem, Jay, and that's what you mother was trying to tell you. The man knew how to say the right things, but there was always that other side to him. It wasn't until your mom moved back down here that I found out how rough he'd get with the two of you. If I'd known he was beating you and your mom, I would have gone up there and brought you both home.”

Jay didn't want to hear about that again. He rolled away from Grandpa and looked at the wall. He tried to think how he could stop Grandpa. Grandpa needed to understand that Dad wasn't really like that. He got mad
sometimes, and he'd hit his mom, but he was nice sometimes too. And when he came home from the war, he was going to be nice all the time. He was going to play ball with Jay and take him to ball games.