Sons (52 page)

“Man, those are some classy pajamas,” Jimmy said, giggling in his very high, almost girlish way.

“You like them, huh?” Rudy said, still smiling.

“Oh, yeah, man, I really dig them,” Jimmy said.

“Then what’s so funny?” Rudy asked, and the smile dropped from his face.

Still giggling, Jimmy said, “Nothing.”

“Then what the hell are you laughing like an idiot for?” Rudy said.

“
Who’s
laughing like an idiot?” Jimmy asked, and since he was no longer giggling, there was a certain comic validity to the question. In fact, I expected the whole thing to fizzle right then and there, expected it to pass into company lore, Remember the night ole Rudy Webb put on them red p.j.’s and skinny Jimmy Wyatt start laughing like a fool, and then they both rolling on the floor in tears, oh, man, we sure had some high old times in Vietnam, d’in we? Lloyd Parsons, who was sitting on his cot just opposite me, glanced up, and with a note of authority befitting the highest-ranking man in the hootch, said, “Hey, you guys, knock off the shit,” and that
certainly
should have been the end of it.

But without glancing at Lloyd, his eyes on Jimmy who was still stretched out on his bunk tensed now for a move, anticipating trouble, Rudy said, “Maybe he’d like to tell me what’s so fucking funny about my pajamas.”

“Hey, man, bug off,” Jimmy said, “you and your pajamas both. You was going out to brush your teeth, so why don’t you go brush them, huh?” He picked up his comic, searching for his lost place, and Rudy took one quick step toward him and slapped it out of his hands. It fell to the floor with a tiny flutter that crashed through the hootch like a mortar explosion. Jimmy lay still and silent for a moment. His hands were empty, but he deliberately held them frozen where they’d been when he was holding the comic. Slowly, deliberately, like a challenged gunslick, he raised his eyes to Rudy’s face, and then opened the blanket, swung his long legs over the side of the cot and stood up.

Rudy was waiting.

With the toilet kit still clutched in his left hand, he threw his right fist full into Jimmy’s face, sending him falling back onto the cot, and almost collapsing it. Dropping the kit and rushing up tight to the side of the cot, fists clenched, he waited for Jimmy to get to his feet again, but Jimmy was too smart to stand up into another punch. He swung out on the opposite side of the cot instead, giving himself the full clearance of the hootch aisle, and then backed cautiously toward the door to move outside, where he would have plenty of room to maneuver and where his longer reach might easily give him the edge in a jabbing fight. Rudy bounded out of the hootch, yelling something about the pajamas having cost him thirty-five dollars, and Lloyd and I both ran out after him, anxious to put an end to this thing; we had never had a fight in our hootch before, and we did not want one now. The two men were warily circling each other when we reached them. Lloyd stepped close to them and said, almost in a whisper, “Come on, you guys, save that for Charlie.”

“This
is
Charlie,” Jimmy answered.

They were referring, of course, to the Vietcong, the V.C
.,
Victor Charlie in the Army’s phonetic alphabet, shortened by the fighting men of America, ta-ra, to plain old Charlie, the enemy out there in the boondocks. Or at least I was certain that
Lloyd
was referring to the men in the black pajamas, but I wasn’t too sure that Jimmy’s man in the red pajamas wasn’t quite another Charlie, a different Charlie, the Charlie who was the enemy back home in the really distant boonies of America, Charlie nonetheless,
Mister
Charlie the white man. For a startling moment, I wondered if the double meaning had been intended. We had never had any racial bullshit in our hootch, but news from home traveled very fast these days, and the race riots this month in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, Mississippi, and Christ knew where else had caused at least
some
consternation among the black troops. So maybe this was it, maybe Jimmy Wyatt had suddenly stopped worrying about the big Yellow-Red color war we were fighting out there in the boonies and was insisting instead on making
his
war very real and personal — stating it plainly in black and white, so to speak.

“We’ll settle this ourselves,” he said, and Rudy hit him.

There was no contest.

Rudy was a powerful man, and it was obvious from the start that he had also done some boxing back home in Newark, New Jersey. His first punch opened Jimmy’s lip. Jimmy flailed his arms the way he must have as a twelve-year-old on the streets of South Philly, landing only a few wild haymakers that hardly fazed Rudy, who kept moving in with his head ducked to deliver blow after solid blow to Jimmy’s body and head. Jimmy’s face was covered with blood, there was blood in his hair, blood on his shirtsleeves and on his trousers. Rudy was going for his eyes now, battering punches at first one eye and then the other, and I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s going to blind him.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said.

“I can take him,” Jimmy said, spitting blood, and Rudy hit him in the left eye again, opening a cut at least two inches long.

“That’s
enough!”
I yelled, and threw myself on Rudy.

I knew he was strong, but I didn’t realize
how
strong until his first punch connected. He hit me just below the heart, and I thought for a wild moment that his fist was going to bore a tunnel clear through to my back, tearing whatever flimsy tissues offered resistance, breaking ribs, ripping arteries, penetrating with the force of a shell fragment. I reached for my chest like a man in the midst of a cardiac seizure, clutching right hand crossing over, mouth open, gasping for breath, my left arm dangling at my side. Rudy hit me again, in the face this time, and as I staggered back and away from him, he whirled on Jimmy and clobbered him on the side of the head with a roundhouse punch that knocked him to the ground. I threw myself at Rudy again, certain now that he was going to kill us both and bury our bodies just inside the wire, throwing a punch that he easily knocked aside, and then feeling his fist collide with my throat just to the left of the Adam’s apple, another inch and I’d have been choking in the dirt. He hit me on the ear, and then threw a straight jab at my nose, and I felt blood gushing from my nostrils, and I thought how glad I was that Dana wasn’t here to see this, and then I heard Lloyd say, “Okay, Webb, that’s it.”

“You want some, too?” Rudy shouted, and whirled on him.

“Yeah, I want some, too,” Lloyd answered and reached into the top of his boot and pulled out a hunting knife, because Lloyd did not kid around, Lloyd had lived with danger all his life, and was too used to coming back from it alive.

Rudy stared at the knife.

“Okay,” he said.

“I can take him,” Jimmy said again, and tried to get up, and fell back to the ground on his face.

An old lady holding an open yellow parasol sat on a bench silhouetted against the cloudless sky and speckled water. I watched her from across the Drive, and saw her delicately rise, the sunlight filling the yellow silk for a final instant before she snapped the parasol shut, and hung it on her arm, and slowly walked away. Chicago, burnished with October’s gentle light, had been silenced by Sunday. Looking out over the lake while the waiting cab driver impatiently revved his engine, I could imagine a time centuries ago when La Salle stood on this same shore with an Indian named Chikagou, chief of all the Illinois country, and talked of furs and kettles, hatchets and knives. Had there been gulls against the sky then as there were now, crying into the stillness? Had La Salle here in “Portage de Checagou,” as he had spelled it in a letter, even remotely suspected the immensity or wealth of the land that lay to the west? For whatever you said about this city, however you compared her to New York, which was bigger and busier and had more restaurants and barber shops and easily as many gangsters, you could not take from her the certain knowledge that she was neither huddled nor crouched upon a tiny island, but towering instead on the brink of a continent. I felt the openness of prairies here. I fell space behind me and ahead of me and around me, the limitless space of a sky free of flak. I was happy to be home.

The driver honked his horn.

“Coming,” I said.

Nothing had changed.

The Tyler crest was still there, leaded into the frosted glass panel on the front door, green spruces against a blue sky. I rang the bell below the small brass Tyler escutcheon set in the richly carved oak jamb, and Linda opened the door and flung herself into my arms. My father came through the sliding doors from the living room, and smiled broadly and held out both his hands to me, and I thought, He looks the same, a trifle older perhaps, but essentially the same, nothing has changed. We went into the living room, and my father slid the doors shut behind us, and then poured scotch for himself and me, and a glass of sherry for my sister who was, after all, eighteen years old now, and going steady with a boy my age who expected to enter college as soon as he was discharged from the Navy.

“He wants to be an accountant,” Linda said.

“That’s very nice,” I said.

“You’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“His name is Stanley.”

“That’s nice.”

“I call him Stan.”

The glasses were passed around. My father stood in the middle of the room with the portrait of my mother hanging behind him over the fireplace mantel, not a good likeness, I had hated that picture even when she was alive. He raised his glass and said, “To Will,” and my sister echoed simply, “To Will,” and I said, “To all of us.”

My sister wanted to know whether New York was really as exciting as everybody said it was, and my father asked if I’d been to this or that restaurant which he went to whenever he was there on business, most of them too expensive for me. Linda went out to the kitchen to see how the new maid was managing with the roast, and my father and I talked some more about New York, and then he got around to asking me what my plans for the future were.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you expect to go to college?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said.

“What do you want to study?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“No.”

“I suppose you’d like to take it easy for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any school in mind?”

“No.”

“I imagine you’d be given preference at a school in Illinois.”

“Yes, I would imagine so.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“Mmm.”

My father poured a little more scotch into each of our glasses.

“I’m glad you’re home, Will,” he said.

Critical revision, he had called it.

I was eight years old and sitting at the dining room table in another house, Linda on my right with her elbow in my ribs as usual, my mother listening attentively, oddly silent. He was telling us about the paper industry, and of how he would not have risen to his present position (Sales Manager, I think it was) had he remained inflexibly committed to an original false notion. When the opportunity for critical revision had presented itself (remember those words, son, critical revision) he had eagerly seized it and, as a result, his entire life had changed. (All of this was terribly fascinating to an eight-year-old boy who was anxious to get upstairs to his comic books.) Critical revision, he said again, and I remembered hoping he would not go into another of his long-winded sermons, but he sure enough did, explaining that all too often people pursued a wrong idea with the same zeal and energy that could be devoted to the
right
one, developing a life style that was based upon a fallacy or a series of fallacies. Or worse yet, people and even nations — failing to recognize that once-worthy goals, causes, or ideas could become obsolete, being creatures of habit, and lacking this capacity for critical revision — remained steadfastly devoted to a way of life that was no longer a valid response to the times.

It was funny the way words meaningless to me then, despite my father’s eagerness to explain (my mother listening so attentively, as though he were telling her something private, not to be heard by the children, a glance exchanged at the table, their eyes meeting, had he said something to her that I did not understand, why had he been so insistent on defining the way of life a man chose, the way of life to which he irrevocably committed himself — well, never mind.) The words had meaning for me now because, home and safe, surrounded by all the things I had known through eighteen years of boyhood, I suddenly felt a lack of direction or will, and wondered whether it wasn’t time to engage in some of that critical revision my father had tried to promote those many years ago.

I told myself that what I missed most was flying. I had not been inside an airplane since I left Foggia early in April, and I wished now that I could climb the access ladder onto the wing of a Lightning again, open the top hatch and settle into the pilot’s scat, lock my safety belt and run through all the familiar pre-flight checks, battery switch on, cross-feed switch off, tank selector valves to outer wing on, half a hundred more burned into my memory through repetition. I longed to taxi out to the end of a runway, and then hold hard on the brakes and open the throttles, manifold pressure and rpm mounting, the airplane trembling around me, and suddenly let her go, release the brakes and allow her to roll away, speed building, fifty miles an hour, eighty, airborne at a hundred, memory taking over completely as I thought again about flying. I wanted to be in the sky again. I missed flying terribly, I told myself, and had no right to deny myself its pleasure any longer. So I went out to the Elmhurst Airport one day, and rented a twin-engine Beech for fifteen dollars an hour, and took her up and put her through some simple maneuvers, and then landed her, and went back home to the house on East Scott, still filled with an odd sense of deprivation.