A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Page 8

  Christ, it all made sense. The way she swept onto the scene to comfort them, provide the love he and Christopher never got from their father. The brandy tea, the special nights with just the three of them, the secret treats and gifts.

  “Does it really change how you think of your mother?” Peter asked. “Does it diminish the love she gave you? The love you gave her?”

  Walter tried to hold onto his anger. Pack all of his injured feelings into hard balls of ice and stack them with the rest of his grudges. But he couldn’t hold onto his righteousness and surprise; they melted away even as he tried to hold on to them. Was it because he was dead? Was it because he made his own mess of parenting? Did it even matter why forgiveness should come the way it did?

  He shook his head. “I guess not.”

  Peter’s fingers flew over his phone and he finally nodded. “You know your mother didn’t make him that way? Vicktor Zawislak was a son of bitch, no matter what. And your mom just figured out how to work him. She figured out how to make your home livable.”

  “How do you know that?” Peter asked, grasping onto the straw Peter held out to him. A way to keep his memories intact.

  Peter held up the device. “Your father was a born bully.”

  The sun was coming up over the edge of the concrete buildings, turning the sky the color of orange sherbet. A million years ago this used to be his favorite time of day. A side effect from the years of fishing.

  “Do you want to go back to that celebration dinner with your mom and Christopher?” Peter asked, a cowed puppy at his side.

  “It’s okay,” Walter said. “I’m glad I saw that. I’m glad...I’m glad I have a better picture of my dad. My mom.”

  Peter eyed him carefully. “Perhaps we’re seeing some progress here.”

  A breeze blew the smell of sour trash toward them.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” he asked.

  Peter pointed over Walter’s head and he turned in time to see the back door of his apartment open and Walter, young and trim in those years after the war, stomp down the metal fire escape with a garbage bag in his hand.

  He skirted the puddle of urine and the vomit and lifted the black metal lid of the green dumpster. He tossed the bag inside and at the sound of shattering glass Walter remembered this day.

  “My first sober sunrise after the war,” he said, watching himself dust off his hands. Young Walt turned to go back to the apartment, but caught sight of the pink sky on the eastern horizon.

  He tucked his hands in his pockets and watched the sky brighten, pale pink turning florescent, turning orange. Finally the giant blazing sun burned through the clouds and the day began.

  “It was after our first date,” Walter said, remembering it with awful clarity. Bittersweet perfection.

  He and Rosie’d talked into the wee hours. He’d drunk ten cups of undoctored coffee and now he couldn’t sleep. At dawn he’d gathered his bottles and thrown them away.

  Walter looked at that young man and remembered the road ahead of him. The things he would face. That sober young man didn’t know how to make breakfast or how to dress for work without a slight buzz on. He didn’t know where things were, how to talk to people, who to be, and he felt raw like a snake in new skin.

  But watching this sunrise he’d been ready to give it a shot. Rosie had given him that. The courage to be better than he was. Faith without proof in the face of terrible obstacles.

  Walter followed himself up the stairs. Inside the crappy apartment, his young self took one of the empty coffee cans he’d never gotten around to throwing away off the top of the fridge and rinsed it out.

  Hazy new sunlight streamed through the dirty window over the sink, illuminating his face, the scar on his neck, the tiny bit of hope his smile carried in the corner of his mouth.

  He dried the can, took out his wallet, counted three singles, and dropped them in the can. He grabbed the loose coins in his pocket, shook out eighty-one cents, and dropped the change in after the bills, the pennies and nickels clanging and clattering against the tin.

  Three dollars and eighty-one cents. The price of a bottle of Ol’ Granddad.

  “You ready to go?” Peter asked, standing in the open door.

  “The pain will stop?” Walter asked, hopeful. He was getting pretty sick of the whirlwind effect of going in and out of these days.

  “That’s up to you, Walter.” Peter consulted his pager. “Well,” he said after a moment. “I totally forgot about that.”

  “What?”

  From the cracked linoleum in front of the sink popped another door. This one serge green canvas, held together with duct tape and flimsy one-by-two pine slats. A hot and moist wind blew through the screen and licked Walter’s face. He closed his eyes in sudden recognition. There was only one place where the wind felt like a dirty washcloth.

  I don’t want to go in there.

  He thought he said it. He meant to. He meant to scream it but instead he reached out a hand and touched the rusted spring coil that kept the door from flapping in the wind. This night was something he’d done his best to forget—he’d pushed it down, sunk it under gallons of alcohol, lost it in drugs and neglect and yet...here it was, like it had always been, just on the other side of something, waiting like an animal for someone to open its cage.

  “You know it’s always a pleasure when we get one of you.”

  “One of me what?” Walter whispered. He touched the canvas—slightly damp from the humidity

  “A war hero.”

  Walter pushed open the door and entered hell.

  * * *

  He’d been here once. This patch of jungle on the edge of a swamp. A million years ago for five hours. Five hours that had stretched like a millennia—endless and all-encompassing.

  They’d been in the field two days and were humping back to rendezvous with their replacements.

  It was silent among the dark palms and mangroves. No sound. No stars. Not even a breeze rustled the elephant grass. Just black silence and that was a very bad thing.

  “Some of our war heroes choose the day that made them heroes,” Peter said, appearing beside Walter in a helmet and flack jacket over the dress pants and shirt he wore.

  The jacket and the helmet fit the kid, but it still looked so wrong. He looked like all the fresh meat he’d seen in his tour of duty—ridiculous and sad, boys playing at being men and scared shitless.

  Walter walked on, his internal compass leading him deeper into the heat and the endless dark. To that place—that divot in the earth, the mangrove with all the leaves shot off—where everything had changed.

  It had been a standard search and destroy mission. Creeping through the jungle, knee deep in the muck and mud, their hearts hurtling into their throats at every noise, their fingers, already jumpy, ready on the triggers of their M-16s.

  But the noises they heard were always their own.

  Charlie was a quiet son of a bitch.

  At this time, Walter’d had three months left on his second tour and had been thinking about home as a series of sensations. Cool sheets. Ice. Dark movie theaters. When he tried to imagine himself there, with his mother, drinking her brandy tea, he got lost. He couldn’t find himself on the chair or the couch, in front of the TV. He could see the river up at his grandparent’s cabin—but he couldn’t place himself next to it. Not anymore. Sex with MaryAnn Arneson was a skin flick. He’d done it—could probably do it again when he got home, he could imagine those breasts, see those ivory legs, the dark brown curls—but he didn’t feel it.

  All those memories were there, he just was never in them.

  It was like the popcorn the kid had given him at Make-out Rock—there, but not there, both at the same time.

  “You’re my first, you know,” Peter said. “I get some of the guys that died in battle, but you’re the first decorated surviving war hero I’ve managed.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” Walter asked. He stepped into a puddle, remembering how i
t would suck at his leg like a thousand-pound weight. He pulled up his leg, but in death the mud was no more than air, it didn’t even stick to his old loafers or brown pants.

  “What?”

  “Managing me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not doing a very good job.”

  Up ahead the canopy broke, solid streamers of bright white moonlight slid down into the dense forest, and Walter found himself in that jungle. Twenty-three years old, crouched and tense, looking right for a command from Sarge. Jonesy was on his left and the rest of the patrol was spread out in fan formation on the right behind Sarge among the trees that skirted a rice paddy.

  But as bad luck would have it, they were walking right into a unit of Viet Cong.

  There was a snick, a barely audible vibration against the ear drum, and it could have been anything. A twig. The brush of camos against the vegetation.A suppressed sneeze. But Sarge held up his fist and Walter watched himself stop, and out of some instinct, some beautiful, terrible instinct, get on his belly in the mud behind an elaborate mangrove root system.

  He remembered thinking, Something is out there. He remembered the way the fear gripped him behind the neck. Paralyzing him.

  The swamp breathed—

  “I don’t want to relive this!” Walter screamed.

  And then everything erupted.

  11

  August 13, 1968

  Mekong Delta, South of Saigon

  Vietnam

  6th Battalion/31st Infantry, D Company, 9th Infantry Division

  * * *

  Walter pressed the trigger and applied downward force to the kickback of his rifle. He couldn’t see anything but the white-hot sparks of bullets exploding out of the guns a hundred yards in front of him.

  He didn’t aim. He just fired and got as small as he could in the mud.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He didn’t want to kill anyone, but pulling the trigger and ducking seemed to be the best way to stay alive.

  Branches and leaves scattered down in the crossfire, cut to ribbons by the bullets. Something big landed on his back, part of a tree he hoped. The black night turned white and then faded to green only to be lit up again by another burst of gunfire.

  Jesus they were close.

  The fire slowed and then stopped. Walter smiled and felt the bite of tears behind his eyes—his reaction to the stress was to want to cry. The boys gave him endless shit about it, none worse than what he gave himself.

  And then Walter heard it.

  “I’m hit!”

  Disoriented and with his ears ringing, Walter looked left. Jonesy, the newest guy on the squad, the one most likely to do something stupid that would get him hit, looked back at him wide-eyed but gave him the thumbs-up. He was fine.

  Right of him were Sarge and the rest...

  A hand came up, reaching blindly out of the vegetation, twenty yards in front of him.

  “Oh, Jesus. God. I’m hit.”

  It was Sarge.

  Walter pressed his head down against a root until the lip of his helmet bit into his skull. What the hell am I supposed to do? Crawl out into the crossfire?

  Sarge was on his second tour—he wasn’t fresh meat, and creeping forward into the crossfire was a rookie mistake.

  Walter could feel the silence coming from the bank of trees a hundred yards away like a fist in his gut. The Viet Cong were still out there. They weren’t going anywhere.

  “Help!” Sarge screamed. “Oh God. Help me.”

  “Quiet, Sarge!” Walter shouted, and the other side of the forest lit up like a Christmas tree, everything aimed right at him.

  He hunkered down, hands on his helmet, belly in the mud.

  Some of the bullets were so close he could feel their hot breath against his body.

  The fire stopped and it was quiet again. Except for Sarge.

  “It’s my stomach!” he yelled. “Oh my god…the blood.”

  A stomach wound. Walter inhaled, smelled his own piss, his fear and frailty, and exhaled.

  We’re all gonna die. They’ve got us pinned.

  He looked right again and Sarge was trying to move. Trying to crawl on his side back to their line—like it was any safer.

  “Stay the fuck down!” he hissed, and the bullets thunked and thudded into the tree he was hiding beneath.

  They weren’t shooting at Sarge. He was already dead in their eyes. Sarge was bait and Charlie was holding out for someone else.

  Charlie was quiet and he was really patient.

  There was a rustle to his left. Jonesy was backing up through the elephant grass, going for home. Walt signaled him to stay put, but the fear was in the kid’s eyes. He looked like one of the scrawny wolves Dad trapped up at the cabin in the winter. Wild and hurt but mostly dead anyway—he just didn’t know it yet.

  Jonesy wouldn’t stay put for anyone. Not Sarge. Not Walt. Not even his momma if she were out there. Like the wolves, he’d chew his leg off to get away.

  He belly-crawled backward out of Walt’s line of sight.

  For all he knew the rest of the guys were doing the same. He couldn’t see anyone else in the dark and it seemed like not even the air moved.

  “Help!” Sarge whimpered. “Please help me.”

  Time moved on like a glacier. He couldn’t tell if it was seconds or years. He could go with Jonesy. With the rest of the guys. Take his chances on retreat and leave Sarge, who was gut shot anyway, probably wouldn’t make it through the night no matter what.

  Something clattered to his left. Jonesy, unused to his equipment, stood up and the barrel of his rifle hit his flack jacket and the enemy line lit up again. A rainshower of fire and falling leaves.

  The bullets hitting Jonesy didn’t sound much different than those bullets hitting the trees. But Jonesy screamed. Once. Like a dog when his paw gets stepped on. And then it was silent.

  There was no retreat.

  “We’re all gonna die!” Sarge cried. Walter was surprised at what the pain was turning Sarge into. It was rumored that Sarge had been shot four times. Walt believed it. He’d seen some of the scars once when Walt had taken a bet from the guys and spied on him in his tent.

  If Sarge, on his second tour, as crazy as they come, thought they were all going to die, what chance did they have?

  Walter lay in his own urine, his face pressed to the mud and tried to remember something good.

  All the states that began with the letter A.

  All the countries that began with the letter C.

  He didn’t know what he was waiting for. More shots from Charlie. Morning. Sarge to die.

  “Walt,” Sarge called, his voice weaker.

  Walt pressed his head hard against the ground. Please God. Sarge. Just go. Just die. Let us leave here.

  “Walt. I want my mom,” Sarge sobbed, sounding as if spit and snot and probably blood were thick in the man’s throat. “I want my mom.”

  Out of the inky darkness to his right, Marcus cried, “Shut up for the love of God!” And there was a flurry of fire that sent Walt scrambling for cover.

  Walt tried to block out the screams. Time was a weight pressing on his back, pushing him through the earth until his mouth filled with swamp water and dirt and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  “Please, Momma!”

  The jungle, the war, Charlie—they were trying to eat him alive. He had to clamp a hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t start screaming prayers to his own mother.

  And suddenly, before his brain just ate itself and he went running into the arms of the enemy and the sweet hereafter, he realized what he had to do.

  I have to get Sarge.

  He had to get him and drag him back to the rendezvous point. It was either that or lose his mind. Or maybe he had lost his mind, because anything, even dying, was better than the current FUBAR situation.

  He eased out from behind the tree, up the small slope he’d been hiding behind, a climb that felt like Kilimanjaro, like he was nake
d on Kilimanjaro and thirty men with guns and hate were watching him. He stopped when his foot cleared the last root and took a breath, and then crawled through the muck with the snakes and slugs toward that upthrust hand.

  He crawled over one of the branches riddled in the crossfire, and his camos brushing over the elephant grass made a rustle so loud he thought farmers in Nebraska could hear him. He held his breath, waiting for the bullets to rip into his flesh. But none came. He continued to creep. Slow. Like when he was turkey hunting with his dad. Dad didn’t use guns on turkeys—said it was a waste of bullets. So they used to sneak up on them and wring their necks.

  Dad. I want my dad.

  Finally, the mud beneath his belly changed to the wet metallic soup of spilled blood. He pushed over some elephant grass and there was Sarge, staring at the sky, blood bubbling on his lips with every breath.

  His hands frantically clutched and pushed at his gut. Tucking whatever had spilled out of him back where it was supposed to go.

  Risking my life for a guy who won’t even make it through the night. I really have lost my mind.

  Walter reached out a hand and grabbed Sarge’s chin, forcing his attention from whatever visions had appeared to him in the night sky. Sarge slowly focused and opened his mouth, blood oozing like black sludge from the corner of his lips. Walter put a finger to his own lips and clamped his hand over Sarge’s mouth just to be sure.

  One word, one audible breath, and they were both toast. Sarge nodded, and Walter removed his hand.

  He hooked his arm around Sarge’s shoulder, getting his biceps as high as he could in Sarge’s armpit, and then he pulled.

  It had to hurt. It must have, Walt could feel Sarge’s body go tight like piano wire. But Sarge didn’t say anything.

  Walt crawled backward and pulled Sarge nearly sideways. They were saved, not by any skill Walt had, but by the passing of a cloud over the moon. The jungle went pitch black, and the grass they displaced in their torturous route back behind Walt’s tree to that small cradle of earth couldn’t be seen.

  Walt picked up speed, splashing in the deep mud, and Charlie could hear that and opened fire, shooting blind into the thick dark—near them, but not at them.