The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Page 12

  “I guess that’s the point,” I mumbled, hogging the last of the ice cream in the glass. But Marcus wasn’t finished yet. His hand kept moving, sketching out a rough version of a helicopter with two blades.

  “This baby here is the HueyCobra. That’s short for AH-1 Cobra. It can go two hundred nineteen miles per hour, which is pretty good considering it’s almost seven thousand pounds, empty. It goes up to eleven thousand four hundred feet at a rate of one thousand two hundred thirty feet a minute.” He flipped the newspaper page. “Oh, look, here’s another story about Khe Sanh.” My mind struggled with the unfamiliar sounds of another language, while Marcus ripped out the article and stuffed it in his pocket. In an empty cigar box under his bed, I knew, he was hoarding clippings about battles and attacks. He’d flattened and folded the pages of a Life magazine with a photo essay on the soldiers. The black-and-white helicopter blades and rifles sang out to him, and the soldiers sweated and grinned, and every time Marcus looked at them, I just knew that his heart was hammering blood through his body like the blasts of a machine gun. War, war, war, the beat pounded, a staccato heartsong as ancient as it was young. A song just for Marcus. His chance finally to do something heroic and big.

  So far, Ebert Vickers’s son had been killed by mortar, his body shipped home in pieces like a puzzle. His friend Henry’s older brother, Frederick, was garroted by a Vietcong spy outside a village and found a few hours later by a local woman, the wound on his neck picked clean by ravenous sparrows. In Vietnam, it seemed that even the birds were starving. Mandy James sent weekly letters describing her life as a nurse. Whenever her mother received another letter, her nose and eyes swelled and reddened like the poisonous berries on a holly bush, and the whole town knew then that things were not going well for our troops. I looked into Marcus’s round, expectant eyes, the empty lane leading down the Dyerson farm stretched out like a ribbon behind him.

  “Aren’t you afraid? You watch the news.” I looked for a flicker of fear or uncertainty, but all I saw were my own bulbous features reflected back at me.

  “I have to do this, Truly. I’m sorry. I’ll write, I promise.” He tipped his chin up, and I knew that he wanted me to kiss him, but I was too mad. I turned my back on him and started walking to the farmhouse, so furious that I didn’t turn around and didn’t even say good-bye.

  At first, his letters were full of bravado. Dear Truly, he wrote, lots of fellows have been homesick, but I haven’t. I can do fifty pushups now. I know how to clean and oil a gun. Charlie won’t get this American! During basic training, I learned, he figured out how to shoot craps for cigarettes, whistle a hornpipe, and spit polish his boots. Once overseas, he was assigned to drive ambulances. He didn’t know how to drive a stick, he said, but he figured he’d tackle that problem when he got to it.

  Soon, however, his letters grew shorter. Dear Truly, I’m alive. I’m still here. Time had become a game of do or dare to him, I could tell. Even his handwriting started to look tired and pissed. One day, I received a letter with a story in it that finally made me write him back.

  In the central highlands, Marcus wrote, the only thing marking the remains of former villages were the skeletons of rice silos. Sometimes ten feet or more of them were still standing, or sometimes the whole structure would be toppled, the rice long since devoured. Huddled in an emergency first-aid post that used to be a barn, Marcus clapped his hands over his ears and bowed his head as yet another shell screamed to an explosion on the horizon.

  Marcus looked outside at the smoking sky and then down at the cracked wristwatch banding his arm. Two more hours until nightfall, when he could load whoever was left onto the ambulance and get the hell out. He sank into a pile of straw, settling himself against his pack, and drew his knees up to his chest. It was late spring, but the weather in Vietnam was that of the underworld—pregnant with a heat so wet and heavy, Marcus said some men just gave up and died in it.

  “Thompson! Time to load up! The mule train is good to go.” Connelly, his section leader, shook his shoulder. Night had arrived, and with it all the paraphernalia of the maimed and wounded. Canvas stretchers. Syringes filled with morphine. Yards of sheer white gauze that could transform a solider into a drugged mummy.

  “You’ve got three down-boys tonight,” Connelly barked. The ambulance could accommodate three gravely wounded on stretchers or six sitting soldiers. Connelly grappled with the handles of a stretcher, upon which a human form writhed. “Lie still!” he brayed at it. The soldier paid him no mind and continued twisting on the canvas, as if being manipulated by an invisible puppeteer.

  “Goddamn bleeders,” Connelly wheezed as he started toward the cluster of cars, crouching as a shell exploded nearby. “They leak all over the damn place. I prefer the corpses. They’re less work.” Corpses were what they called the almost dead. The ones with open throats, with half their skulls crushed in, with no feet.

  Marcus put the car into gear and started down the heavily camouflaged road. The full moon glared at him through ragged clouds, orbital and bright as a fish eye. On either side of him, tall fences of brushes and weeds rustled messages and threats. He patted the tool kit on the seat next to him, making sure it was still there alongside his gas mask, and then foraged in his coat pocket for his flask.

  Abruptly, he pulled the car to a halt, idling the rattletrap engine while he assessed the tree branch lying in the middle of the road. Behind him, Connelly braked, followed by Swanson and Smith, their little convoy rounding up like wagons at a hostile pass. “What, ho?” Connelly called through the darkness.

  “Tree branch in the road, sir,” called Marcus. “I’ll remove it.”

  “Mind yourself, Thompson,” Connelly ordered. “Could be a booby trap.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marcus said. As if the thought hadn’t already occurred to him. He jumped out of his car, then inched his way forward through the darkness, wishing he could turn on his headlights. At least the moon left enough light to see by. He leaned over the gnarled branch, running his eyes all around it, then took a deep breath and kicked it out of the way. Nothing. Little bullets of sweat clustered on his forehead, slicking him with relief.

  Marcus stood up on the road and opened his mouth, but the most enormous percussion suddenly erupted in the air, filling his open throat with a poisonous roiling that stung his lips and eyes before snaking into his lungs, making it impossible to breathe.

  “Mortar!” Marcus heard Connelly scream, and he fumbled back to the cab of his ambulance, groping for the salvation of his gun, his tongue blistering, his eyes two bilious swamps. He pulled his shirt over his mouth. He felt his stomach heave, then vomit filled his shirt. Leaning against his ambulance, he let the sick pool up around his chin, breathing through it as best he could. The shell had struck about a hundred yards ahead of them, a little ways off into the woods.

  An ambush. It was the worst eventuality, the thing that made even the atheists into believers, the thing that stole life like a quiet thief and replaced it with a death scented with the lingering tropical odors of tamarind and coconut.

  The air in front of Marcus began to clear slightly, the haze subsiding enough for him to find his torch and switch it on. Worrying about the light now was pointless with the woods in flames feet away from him. He swung his light in panicked arcs around him, flashing on grisly tableaux with each movement of his arm. There was a pile of soldiers convulsing by the side of the road. Marcus stumbled over a pair of boots and found Swanson facedown in the mud, the back half of his skull smashed open like a candy Easter egg.

  Marcus was startled to see that he was still breathing. Swanson’s hand dropped the gun and clawed at Marcus’s wrist. Marcus peered into the lolling bed of the ambulance to assess the damage. Those men were certainly dead. Swanson’s fingers dug into Marcus’s arm, as if taking his pulse. He squeezed. He fluttered his eyes—the semaphore of the dying. Marcus squeezed back. He understood.

  As fast as he could, before Connelly saw him, he rummaged in his pocket f
or his handkerchief. He hesitated a moment, then he pressed Swanson’s nose, pinching the nostrils closed, and laid his other hand flat over Swanson’s mutilated mouth. Swanson gasped and squeezed his arm, but Marcus stayed still. Maybe, he wrote, I could have saved him. Maybe I could have got him out. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.

  In the distance, Connelly was yapping his name. “Thompson . . . Thompson! Why have you left your wounded? Forget Swanson. Get back to your car.”

  Marcus left his friend and stumbled back to his car. He didn’t bother to check whether or not the soldiers he was carrying were alive. He would find out when he got to the field hospital and handed them over to the nurses, beautiful and calm as milkmaids. I pictured Marcus putting his foot down on the accelerator and roaring off through the mist, crunching over sticks and stones, leaving the irritated screaming of Connelly behind him like the crows back in August’s fields, and for the first time since he left, I let myself really think about him, and I realized how much I missed him. I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love—how what’s left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what’s written on the page.

  I tucked his letter in the rough flannel pocket of my shirt and waited for Amelia to go down to feed the chickens so I could compose something back to him. I gazed out over the broken stony fields and wondered what I had that I could tell him about. A line of weak corn that I’d planted? The crows that fed off of it? Maybe something as simple as the earth itself. When you get back, I finally wrote, let’s lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We’ll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we’re nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we’re so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.

  I licked the envelope and sent it, but maybe I said too much, for I never got a reply, and the next thing I knew, I heard that Marcus was in a hospital in Maryland, recuperating. I heard his leg got blown apart, and one of his hands, too, changing the whole shape of him, making it difficult for him to walk and even more difficult to write. Or maybe he just had nothing left to confess. Maybe the shell had taken care of that.

  Chapter Ten

  The morning of Aberdeen’s one hundred fortieth official May Day celebration, my sister woke up early, hobbled over to the flowered porcelain basin in her room, and threw up. Then she rinsed her mouth with Listerine, tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom, and quietly emptied the basin’s contents into the toilet. She gathered her flaxen hair into a bunch at the base of her neck and peered into the medicine cabinet mirror.

  In the dingy square of glass, her eyes looked puffy and bloodshot. Her cheeks were pale, and her lips had a new fullness to them that had absolutely nothing to do with the beeswax lip salve she used at night. Her hands traveled over her clavicles and down to cup her aching breasts. You only had to glance at her to know how plump and round they’d gotten or to verify that her hips were spreading out on either side of her like a pair of misplaced wings. She sighed, pinched some color into her cheeks, and set her mind to the problem of how she was going to squeeze herself into her May Queen gown.

  It had been ten weeks since her last period—long enough for her to know that it wasn’t likely to arrive anytime soon and long enough to know why. It wasn’t long enough, however, to have figured out what to do about it. I was the only one who knew, and every hour of every day, I could feel her problem whorled inside my own abdomen like a question mark. A baby was not what my sister wanted, I was aware. I pointed this out to her as soon as she told me, a week before the festival.

  “Truly, I think I’m pregnant,” she said, her pretty hands twisting in her lap like a pair of kite strings. We were in Amanda Pickerton’s kitchen, which she had just repainted an avocado green. The color ricocheted off my sister’s cheeks and turned her hair into fairy moss.

  “Are you sure?” Maybe she’s just being dramatic, I thought, but Serena Jane bowed her head and started crying. A baby, I knew, wasn’t going to get her a screen test in Hollywood or her face on the covers of magazines. A baby meant soiled diapers, and drool, and sour milk. It was the most unappreciative audience in the entire world. Of course, it was easy enough for me to think all of that. What did I know about the contorted physics of sex and love? Only that I was too big to enter into them. Every month my period came and went with the blank regularity of the moon, and if the dull cramps in my belly and back ever made me long for the body of a boy, all I had to do was look in the mirror to know that I stood about as much chance in that department as one of August’s racehorses winning the Kentucky Derby.

  Serena Jane sniffled. “What am I supposed to do? Sal Dunfry had this problem last year, and a doctor in Manhattan took care of it, but I don’t have that kind of money. Besides, I would never get the chance. Amanda would have me crucified first.”

  I hunkered in my chair and tucked my fist under my chin. “Is it Bob Bob’s?”

  Serena Jane bit her lip and nodded. She placed the flat of one hand against her belly and pressed inward toward her spine. “He doesn’t know yet.” She sucked her belly in some more, as if trying to will herself back into her old shape, but it was no use. The evidence was there, as plain as day. Anyone with two eyes and a brain could look at her and know what was happening, and soon everybody would. Everyone except Bob Bob, that was. He didn’t have a clue. Every day at school, my sister stared daggers at him, but he never so much as turned in her direction. I imagined that after all this time it must be strange for Serena Jane to have Bob Bob ignoring her—a feeling like cutting off her hair or shedding the heavy weight of a winter coat.

  “Why don’t you write him a letter?” I suggested, but as soon as Serena Jane seized the pen, the muscles in her palm cramped up. She took to tracking Bob Bob with the zeal of a bloodhound, pacing the edge of the baseball field during practice, and shadowing him on his route home from school. If August didn’t need me in the barn, I went with her.

  We trailed him like listless ghosts, until Bob Bob startled both of us one day, turning on us with the savagery of a kennel dog. We were on the sidewalk outside of his house. I noticed that the picket fence needed painting but couldn’t imagine Bob Bob engaged in such a menial chore. Probably the Morgans hired people to do things like that, I thought.

  Serena Jane opened her mouth to tell him about the baby, to let the whole dilemma come pouring out of her like a stream of water, but when she tried to speak, her voice crackled and died. She just stood there, croaking like the enchanted Princess Bugaboo, until Bob Bob snorted in disgust and walked up the path to his house, leaving us on the pavement with the haunting aroma of vanilla seeping down the backs of our tongues. Serena Jane waited till he slammed his door, then leaned over the hedges and vomited while I held her hair.

  Inside the Morgan house, the pale moon of Maureen Morgan’s face appeared at the parlor window, her mouth pursed into an O, her breath leaving a vapor trail on the glass. She frowned. Girls that age didn’t throw up out of love alone. In her experience, unrequited love never made anyone very sick, but requited love, well, that had its own, corporeal consequences, and it was pretty clear which type she was looking at now. Bob Bob’s fascination with my sister over the years had been no secret—his family teased him about it nightly at the dinner table—but the thing that surprised Maureen was that Serena Jane had finally given in, and Bob Bob had said nothing about it. That didn’t seem right. Maureen narrowed her eyes and let the swag of heavy curtain fall back into place. From behind folds of velvet, she watched me help my sister wipe her lips with the back of one hand. Maureen turned away. She’d seen what she needed to. She knew what had to be done.

  No one in Aberdeen had been surprised when Serena Jane won a unanimous vote for the title of May Day Queen. After all, the crown had practically been hers since the d
ay she was born. By age six, she’d even had the float ride down cold, a spatula cradled in the crook of one arm for a scepter, a tinfoil crown on her head, her right arm waving like a mannequin come to life. Now that the actual moment had arrived, however, I could tell that Serena Jane was finding it difficult to execute the maneuver. For one thing, the bodice of her gown was so stretched, the seams were beginning to pucker. And for another, fumes were frothing out of Dick Crane’s car with such vigor that even I felt sick. When my sister wasn’t looking, I saw Dick surreptitiously tilt the rearview mirror to get a good view of her magnificent calves. A girl like that was bound to go far, he was clearly thinking, his eyes raking the mirror. My sister probably hadn’t been born that blond for nothing. Women never were. He smacked his lips, peeling his eyes away from Serena Jane, anticipating barbecue.

  Aberdeen’s May Day celebration was the oldest continuous festival in the state of New York, a fact that Dick loved to advertise. Each spring, he had another commemorative object manufactured to mark the occasion—a proud tradition that had led to decorative mayhem in Estelle Crane’s parlor. The official May Day platter of 1962 hung on one of her walls, the daffodils on it smeared owing to an uneven kiln temperature (the potter had been a friend of Dick’s over in Hansen). And there, plopped on the rocking chair, was the May Day needlepoint pillow of 1965, its bulk covered with butterflies so small and pale, they resembled moths.

  The 1959 May Day teacup held pride of place on Estelle’s credenza, with the corresponding 1960 tea tray propped just behind it. There was an unfortunate gap between 1965 and 1967, but this year, 1969, was almost the start of a new decade. In spite of his wife’s protestations, Dick had had a phalanx of T-shirts printed up with beribboned maypoles emblazoned on the front, and on the back, in rows of big blue letters: May Day Festival! The Oldest Party in New York! Still Going Strong! Against better judgment, Estelle wore one of the shirts to the postparade picnic on the town green, but besides Priscilla Sparrow (who we all knew harbored an abiding affection for Dick that defied age, position, and common sense), she was the only one. Estelle squinted her eyes in Prissy’s direction and sniffed.