SUMMER PASSED, AUTUMN CAME. The gloom at High Meadow was palpable. On the morning of Saturday, 30 October 1976, in the tractor garage, Bobby ordered Tony to pack.
“Fuck it, Man,” Tony said. “Don’t mean nothin. Give me a couple a days.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.” Bobby’s head ached. As things had deteriorated, disillusionment had turned into disappointment with himself. He was about as communicative as the cold forge.
“Fuck, Man,” Tony grumbled. “It’s goina take a few days. I got things here.”
“Pack a ruck,” Wapinski said. “Field pack. Knapsack. Whatever you fuckin Marines called em. There’s one in the shop. We’re movin out in an hour.”
Bobby scowled, left, returned. “There’s rations there too. Three-day resupply.”
The day was crisp, clear. They barely spoke. It was a patrol of two. Tony was acquiescent, pliant. He’d seen Bobby’s enthusiasm die and Bobby’s despair had in turn left him without hope, with nothing but his final-bunker mentality. He had harvested lackadaisically in the attitude of “What the fuck for? To give her money for new dresses to impress Denham?” But he had not given up completely. He’d achieved a state of minimal subsistence, with one and only one, cause. By the time Gina and Michelle entered first grade, Tony’s bunker room was ten-by-ten-by-seven and was shored up with every scrap of pipe, beam and post he could scavenge from every corner of the farm.
They dropped to the pond, picked up the knoll trail through the orchard, up to the cliff edge where they paused to scan the pond. They descended to the spillway, crossed the dam, climbed the back trail, pushed on, scrambled over the old stone wall in the woods, crested the ridge into the sugarbush, into territory Tony knew intimately. Bobby did not stop, slowed only to allow a pair of squirrels the right of way in their trek across the wood. Tony looked out to the high meadow, to the tractor road he’d improved. At the far edge the sugarbush gave way to scrub pines, ash and deformed beech, which grew in the shallow soil above the rock ledge. This gave way to the barren crest rock that led to the gap.
Tony did not know of the Indian ladder, the hand and footholds in the rock face. Still he followed without question. The movement, with direction, with purpose even if he did not know the purpose, charged him. On the gap floor stagnant pools rimmed with ice looked lifeless. They crossed quickly as if crossing an exposed rice paddy, then ascended into the forest of virgin eastern hemlocks and picked up the narrow and ancient Lenape trail that meandered under the 150-foot trees.
“This is the cathedral.” There was reverence in Bobby’s voice. He led slowly, paused for full minutes. His concentration was returning. Occasional sun rays filtered in but the cathedral was dim. At the trail spur Bobby whispered, “Tonight we’ll come back. NDP there.” Quietly he moved on. Twenty minutes later at a small, once-cleared site Bobby de-rucked. “We’ll set up here,” he said quietly. “This is where the survivors of the Pennamite War hid. Recon the north and west. I’ll check out the east.”
An hour later Tony returned. Clouds had begun to form. Crispness gave way to rawness. “Sit rep, negative,” Tony said quietly.
Bobby nodded. He had cleared a small sleeping area, had cut a few branches and made a tight, low lean-to.
“Want me to clear an area for a campfire?” Tony asked.
“No. No fire here. Relax. I’ll be back in a bit ...”
Bobby disappeared like a spirit. At first Tony sat back, rested, but immediately felt antsy. He fiddled with the backpack he’d taken from the barn, dug inside, pulled out a can of soup, opened it, drank it cold. His anxiety rose. He turned at every crinkle of leaf, at every woodpecker’s drumming, every creaking branch in the light breeze. Then he rose. He could not see more than a few yards into the woods. Quietly he cleared the low brush. Within paces he found stones, logs, chunks of sod. He raised the back of the lean-to, dragged in a thick log, clawed out a trench for it, rolled it in place. At the sides he placed stones and sod, more logs, more stone. From the brush he carefully chose the most natural pieces to camouflage the low berms and the lean-to. He cleared fields of fire in all directions—not clear-cutting but thinning so from outside the campsite appeared natural. Even in Bobby’s quietness, Tony spied him on his return at fifty feet.
“What’s this?” Bobby still quiet.
“You can never overimprove a defensive position,” Tony said. He laid another rock onto the revetment he’d built off one side of the trail.
“You can build a Maginot Line,” Bobby said.
Tony eyed him. He hadn’t busted his ass to be challenged.
“False security,” Bobby said. “Makes you less secure because you lose flexibility, agility, vigilance.”
“This?” Tony gestured to the berm.
Bobby shook his head. “Me,” he said. “The plan’s not working. I gotta regroup. I’ve been a fuckin jerk.”
Tony chortled. “Yep.”
“A sucker, huh?”
“You bet your sweet ass, Man.”
“You knew about Ivanov?”
“All he wanted to do, Man, was to fuck your wife,” Tony said. They were now sitting side-by-side, looking out from the shelter. Bobby stared forward. “How come you let him in the house?”
“How else—” Bobby began, changed thoughts midsentence. “What about you?”
“I’d like to fuck her, too,” Tony blurted, laughed, sputtered between laughs. “Naw. I’m kidding. I mean I would but I’d never do it. Never even hint ... you know ...”
“Why?”
“Why?!”
“Yeah. Why? How come you wouldn’t think of fuckin me over but Ivanov couldn’t think of anything but?”
“I don’t know.”
“I got to understand this, Tony. I’ve got to understand. Otherwise, it’ll never work.”
“Bringing in guys?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we ought ta put a separate kitchen in the barn. And a bath.”
“Um.”
“You can’t be havin guys goin upstairs when like maybe Sara’s in the shower.”
“It’s a matter of showing trust.”
“It’s a matter of stupidity, Man. I been there. I been in RRVMC. You’re talkin about bringing in psychos ...”
“I was talking about bringin in guys who were down and out.”
“Some of em are schitzo, Man. Fox in the henhouse. Maybe you want to help the fox, but you don’t kill the hens.”
“Umph.” That was hard for Bobby to take.
“Better for us anyway,” Tony said.
“How?”
“Bein separate. Responsible for ourselves.”
“We’d need a new septic system. New well.”
“Piece a cake.”
“God damn it.” Bobby balled his fist, hammered his knee. “I still gotta understand somethin. Why is it that a guy like you, who comes from such a caring family, drops off the deep end? And ...”
“I ...” Now Tony clamped his jaw. How much easier it was to advise than to be advised, to analyze another than to be asked to analyze oneself. “Maybe I was kinda the odd man out.”
“Oh,” Bobby said, not sympathetically, not to draw Tony out, but in simple acceptance.
“Naw. I wasn’t really like outside it. I wasn’t like the black sheep. I was just tee-tee to the side of the main current.”
Again the simple, “Oh,” followed by, “Then why ...”
“Maybe ...” Tony paused. “Maybe because I expected everybody to be like my family. You know, in Nam, the villagers were like that. Not if you were on a sweep going through a ville, but the villagers if you lived with them. My platoon was like that, too. We were family. Even the guys I was with in Philly. We were like brothers. But gettin out, Man. The World hasn’t been like that. I thought people cared. Nobody gives a shit. Maybe I felt not like pushed out, but not looked at. You know, like when somebody keeps their eyes down when you walk into a room. Then like I reacted to it with, ‘Well fuck you too.’”
“Um.” Again the pause to understand, to assimilate. “Like, ‘Fuck it. Don’t mean nothin’?”
“Yeah. But not us. It’s those motherfuckers don’t give a shit. They’re goina blow the whole place up anyway.”
Bobby turned his head, his brow furrowed.
“Nuke it, Man. Bobby, they’re goina blow everybody off the face a the map. Why should we give a fuck?”
“That’s a cop-out.”
“Like hell.”
“Sure it is. If you didn’t give a shit you’d be like Ivanov. Damn it. I can’t figure ... I tried but I fucked up.”
Tony had no more to say. Bobby too was silent. He’d put himself back in the funk he’d been in for months. Overhead the clouds thickened and the air gusted in sporadic dips. The two men lay back, closed their eyes, slept.
At dusk Bobby nudged Tony. “C’mon. We’re movin out.”
Tony sat up. He did not speak. The order, the movement, felt natural.
“Lights,” Bobby whispered. “Water and sleeping bags.”
They moved south out of the Pennamite clearing back to the Lenape Indian trail. Without speech they meandered back under the hemlocks, deep into the darkening forest, to the spur. Bobby turned northwest. A hundred yards in was the fire circle—nothing lavish, a slight depression, a shallow circular pit perhaps sixteen or eighteen feet in diameter with a small circular ring of stones, maybe thirty inches across, at the center. Stacked to one side was a neat pile of kindling, to the other slightly larger branches, nothing more than two inches thick or two feet long. Overhead a narrow shaft through the hemlocks opened to the sky. There were no berms, no fields of fire, no camouflage. Bobby struck a match, lit the small wood teepee he’d erected earlier, alone. Immediately flames spread, licked up into the air. In the deep woods Bobby and Tony were completely open. Anyone could see them. Yet with the fire they could not see even a foot beyond the larger circle. Tony nearly shit. His response was to flee, to hide in the dark, to shun the exposure. But Bobby sat, his sleeping bag wrapped tightly over his shoulders, and Tony, trying hard, followed suit. Bobby lay larger sticks on the fire. The original teepee collapsed, curled, oxidized, disappeared. In the flickering of the flames, to Tony, Bobby’s face deformed, furrows became crevices, wrinkles became chasms, features became craggy outcroppings. There was no color, no warmth, no life: only time—past, present, future—fused and frozen.
They sat silently watching the fire, mesmerized by the changing forms. After some time Bobby picked a stick from the wood pile; it was perhaps fifteen inches long, an inch and a quarter in diameter. From part of it the bark had fallen away. Bobby held it close to the flame but did not drop it. Instead he broke silence, said calmly, “This is a truth stick. When it is held no one else can speak. To the stick the holder owes an obligation—the obligation to speak the truth. When you begin, you say hè, which is the Lenape word of greeting. If you stop and recommence say làpi [luh-pee] which means ‘again.’ When you are finished say wëll [wah-lee] which means ‘good’.”
“What?!” Tony stared across at Bobby, at his stone face. Then he rocked back, looked up the long dark shaft toward the invisible sky.
Bobby repeated the Lenape words, the explanation.
“You’re kiddin, Man,” Tony said.
“No,” Bobby said.
“Where the fuck did you dig up this shit?”
“It was in one of Granpa’s files. This is the Lenape ceremony of truth. It may have been performed right here for five thousand years. And the truth is, I’m lost. I don’t have the answers I thought I had.”
“That’s what the fuck we’re doin out here?”
“That’s what the fuck we’re doin out here.”
“This is fucked up.” Tony was angry. Bobby shoved the stick at him. He snatched it. “You’re fucked up,” Tony stormed. His rage multiplied, built on itself, spiked. “You’re some sort of fuckin ... workaholic.... You act like nobody’s good enough for you. Fuck you. Fuck your pious help-the-dregs crap. Fuck your goody-two-shoes I fucked up, crap. Truth ceremony! You’re the biggest fucking hypocrite I ever met!” With that Tony whipped the stick back at Wapinski.
Bobby’s arm shot from under the sleeping bag. The stick nicked his ring-finger knuckle, spun, hit his leg. He ground his teeth, grasped the truth stick, restrained his urge to bash Pisano with it knowing full well Tony expected to be bashed, was ready for him to lunge. Bobby’s breath came hard. His hands trembled. “yuho [yooh-oh]. Okay.” Slower, longer breaths. “I ...” He paused. Bobby could see Tony was still ready to throw off his sleeping bag, ready to get into it. “I haven’t been truthful. Not completely. I wanted you to do the farm but I didn’t tell you about all the other parts.” He could see Tony sink back. “I feel like we’ve been doing everything right but we’re still losing.”
“Yeah,” Tony snapped. “Definition of a Nam vet. Do everything right, lose. That’s me. That’s my cousin Jimmy. Losers.”
“Why?” Bobby pushed the stick out but did not release it. “I got an article says ten percent of the prison population is Nam vets. Says we lost the war. Says we were druggies during the day and praying to God at night we wouldn’t be killed.”
“Fuck em.”
“Right on. But it doesn’t answer the fuckin question, Why? Everything I’ve been reading, everything I’ve been thinking about, all the planning for a program of retransformation ...”
“Of what?”
Bobby did not acknowledge. “It didn’t do any good with Ivanov.” Tony snorted. “And it hasn’t done squat for you.”
“Leave me out of it.”
Again Bobby pointed the stick at Tony. “Loser!”
Again Tony snatched it away. “That’s fuckin right. I’m a loser. Even back in school. If one side picked me, that side lost. If I bet on a Super Bowl team, they’d lose. One hundred fuckin percent.” Tony flipped the stick.
“You didn’t lose at Dai Do.” Bobby held the stick out.
Tony grabbed one end. Bobby didn’t let go. Their hands and wrists were just off-center of the main heat rising from the fire. “What’d you know? We didn’t win, either.” Tony refused to flinch. His hand was very hot.
Bobby too refused to move. “Maybe you did. Just like we did at Hamburger. Even if they called it losing. But I’ve been reading. If they’d never been given the A Shau, they’d never of been able to win farther south.”
“I don’t give a fuckin flyin leap.”
“We gotta learn more ...”
“That’s more of your shit. You can win every fuckin day, you still die, In the end everybody loses.”
“Naw.” Bobby pulled on the stick bringing Tony’s hand into the fire. “That’s two different games. When you came home, were you a loser?”
Tony pulled back. His fingers were baking. “No fuckin way,” he snarled. “When I left we’d been makin progress.”
“Me too,” Bobby said quickly. He was having trouble holding on. “We’d virtually won. Who the hell lost it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not till Saigon fell that anybody called us losers. Even though we were out of the country, militarily, for two and a half years! Kick ass of anybody who tells you we lost the war. We didn’t. The politicians did. The American people. Not grunts. We couldn’t even of been called losers before April ’75 because there wasn’t any loss until then. Who lost it?!”
“Not me. Not my cousin.”
“Me neither. So how come we’re losers?”
“Cause maybe ... cause maybe if you’re a loser, it’s not your fault. Nothin’s your fault. Ow!” Tony released the stick, pulled his hand back.
For a long time neither spoke. Occasionally Bobby or Tony added new wood to the fire. The bed of coals thickened, glowed continuously. Sporadic flame tongues leaped. The faces of the two men dried, toughened like jerky; their backs chilled; their muscles tightened.
Now talk came more easily. Tony accepted the stick, passed it back, learned the Lenape words. His mood was less acquiescence, more exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. Bobby said there was no way back without flashlights. They’d brought none.
“You were a grunt,” Bobby said. Tony nodded. “Grunts can do anything. Wëli.” Bobby passed the stick.
“Hè. I might be fucked up. Neurotransmitters. All that stuff they talked about at Rock Ridge. But you’re right. A grunt can cope. But he’s got to have people around him who don’t just listen, but understand. I ... I could tell you some stories ...”
“Tell me,” Bobby injected.
Tony told Bobby about the corpse in the tunnel, about his nightmares, about once grabbing Linda. He moved on to Dai Do, the hand-to-hand fighting, the machetes, how he’d hacked and slashed like a madman in order to save himself and his platoon. Bobby shuddered, controlled his expression.
“You know what my biggest fear in Nam was?” Bobby said. “Getting stabbed. I didn’t care about getting shot. I mean, I didn’t want to get shot. But I never thought about it. But Man, I thought about bayonets.”
“I got stabbed,” Tony said. “Here.” He touched his thigh.
Bobby winced. “I ... I hate being stuck. With anything. Like at the dentist. The moment he touches me, even if I like him, I just think, I’m outta here. I can’t stand ... you know, needles even.”
“No big thing.”
Now their talk was every place. Tony told Bobby about Manny being shot in his arms, and about the village, the mother and the children. He did not tell Bobby about shooting them. He was still uncertain, and he sensed that Wapinski, with his theoretical perspectives, did not want to know about American atrocities. To Bobby it would add another blemish to a record he seemed intent on defending.
Bobby told Tony about Hamburger Hill, about the multiple assaults, about giving the order, about the mud, about losing Americans, not knowing if they’d been wounded, killed, or captured. “It’s the difference between the officer’s perspective and the enlisted man’s,” he said. “You guys would condemn a decision because you had to carry it out. Our condemnation came later. You had to tell this person to walk point, this person to walk his slack. You knew what you were doing. You knew where you were, knew the consequences. We got orders, we gave orders. Sometimes we were mortified by those decisions. We weren’t sitting in some boardroom saying to our staff, ‘I think we ought to buy AT&T. What do you guys think?’ We made decisions that if they weren’t right on, maybe three, four guys died. And you can’t afford three or four guys when you only have thirty. And if you weren’t right on, the guys are saying, ‘That son of a bitch. Where was he? Why’d he lose my friend?’ When I got back, my nightmares ... Shit.”
“Yuho,” Tony said.
That released Bobby’s tension and he chuckled. Now he was happy Tony was with him. “I had one that repeated for years,” he said. “About triage. It finally stopped. Then it started again when my granpa was dying. But it stopped again.”
They moved on. The mood ebbed, flowed. “I need your fuckin help.” Bobby was nasty, demanding. “I can’t do it alone. Either commit or go.”
“Fine, fuckhead. I’ve been planning to go back to RRVMC anyway. Lick some nurse’s ass.”
“Yeah. Right!”
“Let em take care a me.”
“Enable you to be a fuckhead like Ivanov?”
“Why the fuck not?!”
“What the fuck would turn you on? What would make you ... make you pursue a dream? What would elate you?”
“Elate?!”
“Rev you up? Satisfy you? Be meaningful?”
“I don’t ... Maybe like at the forge.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m not there. I’m not paying attention to me. I’m focused. It’s happening. Something’s being created.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “That’s my theory of pure elation. Get out of your self, into a cause.”
“Fuck causes,” Tony said. “They all got causes. Nuclear freeze movements. ERAs. BMWs. Ivanov had a cause—get the head of his dick wet. Fuck people with causes. Causes are fucked.”
“We’re using it differently,” Bobby said.
“I’ve never been more elated than when I was stoned out of my fuckin gourd.”
“Oh boy! You gotta help me. Cause and elation. That’s what makes the world turn. That’s the key to retransformation. It sounds stupid but the final piece of the puzzle is fun. Unselfish fun. That’s why we’ve had all these false starts. It wasn’t any fun.”
From across the circle Tony glared at Bobby. For some time neither spoke. Finally Wapinski said, “We had a cause that was greater than our selves and we expanded to a higher level. We went to defend freedom and help establish democracy in Southeast Asia. That’s different than just trying to get laid. Trying to get laid is concentrating on the self. Think about falling in love. When you really fall in love, where’s your focus? Not on yourself but on the other. You go outside yourself. That’s the difference between latching on to a cause with the focus on you, and adopting a cause with the focus on the cause. If the focus is on you it brings stress and kills joy. But if the focus is on the cause you enter a state of elation.”
“Maybe—” Tony shifted, opened his bag.
“Why can’t I grasp it?” Bobby asked. “So much of this self-indulgent self-fulfillment stuff is really shallow, but there is a core there. It’s the key to becoming unstuck. It’s the key to meaningfulness. Pursue is the wrong word. But elation isn’t. Excitement. Fun. Playfulness. Without that, responsibility becomes drudgery. Without it decisiveness is unsustainable.”
On and on, deeper and deeper into the night; deeper and deeper into each other’s thoughts. “I missed Jimmy’s death,” Tony confessed. “We were putting up the gate. I’d just finished the hinges, remember? I didn’t remember until later. That’s been like a holy day of obligation to me and I didn’t keep it holy. I didn’t even remember it for a week. Even in San Jose I kept it holy.”
“It was partly my fault,” Bobby said. “I’m the one who ran off with his girl.”
“Who? Red?”
“Yeah. I think maybe he wouldn’t of gone back ...”
“Naw. Naw, Man. He was goin back Red or not. She ... you know, Man, she was like his pet. She was ... You know, she wasn’t a cause to him. I mean, he liked her. But he was never committed to her like he was to ... geezo, like even to Li. I wonder if Linda’s still got her drawings. You gotta see em, Bobby.”
“He had a gal there?”
“An orphan, Man. A kid. That was his cause. Helpin them people. Me too when I was at the ville level.”
At dawn they returned to the Pennamite camp, ate heartily, crawled into the lean-to. Before they went to sleep Bobby whispered, “Dear Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil, forgive us our trespasses ...”
Tony, to Bobby’s surprise, completed the beseechment. “And give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.” Bobby propped himself, craned over toward Tony. Tony chortled. “Ah, he taught it to me, too.”
He is not in the fire circle but to the side, in the dark, in the blackness of space. The images form, coalesce out of slow churning glowing blue gray black fog. It is a sphere, a skull viewed from the blackness, from the void, viewed from above, beside, before, a skull, a globe drifting in space, drifting away, the jaw opening, slowly, painfully, a silent anguished cry escaping. There is no sound. He is viewing the skull from miles above as it floats, spins slowly in the blackness, and there, there, falling from him a black dot, small, smaller, falling, being pulled into the anguished globe until it is imperceptible a second before it hits against the occipital crown. The jaw again and then the eye sockets—how can they, dead, inanimate—cry in silent pain. The bone cracks at impact, a black jagged hole in glowing blue, one, two, three, four seconds—it seems an eternity as he watches from miles above—then slowly, silently, a cone of gray brain matter explodes toward him, not high enough to touch him, but close enough for him to feel the earth’s pain of millions of man-years of devastation, of death and dying drifting farther until he sees them all, sees the entire galaxy, sees Jimmy and Manny, sees hacked globes rolling, sees the mother, her children, the specks flying from him, they frozen, strong, Gina Michelle Linda ...
“Tony?”
... blood gushes, erupts ...
“Tony.” Wap called him gently. “Tony. It’s 1976. We’re at High Meadow.”
“UH!” Tony’s eyes opened. He did not breathe. His eyeballs flicked. On the open side of the lean-to he could see their small camp, the low berm he’d built the day before, vegetation, open lanes. The sky had faded to deep blue. It was dusk.
“Almost time to go,” Bobby said softly.
“Um,” Tony sat up. His back was stiff. His right leg tight.
“Movin out in one five,” Bobby said. “Best eat something.”
An hour later they sat across from each other at the fire circle. Through the shaft between the hemlocks they could see the clear sky, yet with their vision so tunnelled Tony could make out only Cepheus.
“Yuho.” Bobby was laconic. Then, “Damn it, Man. I’ve been marchin in place since I returned. That’s what hit me in the lean-to. You too. Just marking time. Losing six fucking years. Yeah”—Bobby’s voice rose, his hands began to shake—“some good stuff’s happened. But some good stuff happens to a blob of shit on the sidewalk. There’s no fuckin time to waste anymore. This is URGENT!”
“What is?”
“Getting off the fucking ground. Understanding why we haven’t before. Correcting it. Taking off.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you gotta transform. It means the next move is up to you.”
“Maybe the next move is up to my chemical im-fucking-balances.”
“You control it.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. It’s a neurotransmitter imbalance that causes mania and depression. That’s what the doctors say.”
“Fine. Did they tell you why you had a chemical imbalance?”
“Why?!” After last night’s finale, Tony had not expected to be back in a pissing contest. “They don’t know why! That’s what ticks me off. Cause I killed people. It’s ... They don’t have a clue. You got a broken leg, they give you a crutch. That’s their approach.”
“Exactly,” Bobby said. “That’s all they can do. Chemical imbalances are caused by something. Maybe something you saw. Or did. Or maybe it’s diet. Who knows? But something caused the onset. Then the system went out of whack. That increased the depression, pushed the imbalance. Fuck the drugs. That only keeps you from getting to the original problem. Makes you stick where you’re at. Keeps you from taking off.”
Spit flicked from Tony’s lips. “I know the goddamned problem. Everything’s been fucked in my life, everything since Nam. And I’m not takin any drugs.”
“No it hasn’t,” Bobby said. “Not since Nam.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“In Philly? You were crazy then? When you met Linda? Go ahead, tell me you were nuts then.”
Tony did not respond.
“In Nam? Were you crazy in Nam? I mean truly schitzo?”
Still no response.
“Once you had to pull your weight and you did.”
“I do now.”
“You work hard. You’re a great worker. But you’re not pulling your weight. You’re hiding. And so the fuck am I. We did it once. We can do it again.”
Tony was exasperated, exhausted. “What the fuck, Man. Over.”
“No,” Bobby said. “There’s no ‘what the fucks’ to get you off the hook. It’s decision time, Man. It’s time to make the decision and never look back.”
Tony reached out, grabbed a stick from the pile, ran a hand over it breaking off a few dry twigs. “Hè.” He held the stick vertically before his face, grasped it in a steel fist, glared at Wapinski, at the drawn wrinkled features reflecting the sporadic bursts and ambient glow. “One condition,” he said. “Consult me. Fill me in. Don’t treat me like your fuckin pet. Like you keep no animals except Josh and Tony. And don’t you ever give anybody any unconditional handouts. You want a platoon sergeant?! I’ll fuckin out-sergeant anybody in the fuckin world. You develop the programs. You let me run em.” He snapped the truth stick straight out, his hand just above the flame.
Bobby reached, grabbed, quickly, attentively, neither being burned. “This is the program,” he began. He spoke at length, spoke like a military instructor first mentioning the main points, then backtracking to fill in. He spoke of his own family, moved on to EES, not simply the technical and production ends but the cause he called attitude evolution. From there he outlined his thoughts on farming and was surprised to have Tony adopt his phraseology of cause and attitude evolution as Tony took over to describe reduced-pesticide methods, water and soil conservation techniques that would allow for minimal chemical fertilizer usage without affecting yield. For the first time he listened to Tony’s report on chardonnays, “... drinkable, marketable, in demand.”
Then Bobby asked, “Can we produce wine here?”
“You mean actually be a winery instead of selling the grapes?”
“I mean if we’re going to be detoxifying guys—”
Now they spoke of the dilemma of starting a winery with workers who might be alcoholics. “I’ve been through detox,” Tony said. “Only about one in ten are actually physically dependent. It’s genetic. The rest drink for other reasons. To be numb. To take the edge off. Sometimes for fun. Sometimes it becomes habit and after a while habit becomes something you depend on, physically.”
“That begs the question,” Wapinski countered. “If we’re going to have alcoholics here we better be dry.”
“Not true,” Tony said seriously. “For a year you’ve been talking about responsibility. We’re dry here. A guy’s fine. He leaves here for the real world. You haven’t taught him a fuckin thing. Sometimes I want a drink. Sometimes I want to get drunk, fall down, laugh, be stupid. So fuckin what?! We’re developing a fanatical antialcohol attitude in this country when the real issue is drinking and driving. You talk about risks, you talk about decision making, about taking the plunge, about fun, about getting out of the self. If you’re physically addicted, you’ve got to learn to stay away. Otherwise you just have to learn to drink responsibly. Control it.”
Bobby burst out laughing. Tony was so serious.
“Fuck you,” Tony snapped. He sat back, crossed his arms, jammed a heel into the rock ring.
“No. No. No.” Bobby coughed out the words. “It’s ... it’s just ...” He rolled to his side laughing, making Tony even angrier. Then he grabbed the small pack he’d brought, opened it, pulled out a new fifth of Jack Daniel’s. “Hè.”
Tony stared. Then he too began to laugh. Bobby took a swig, passed the bottle. “The Yards in Nam,” Bobby said, “wouldn’t trust you unless you’d get drunk with them.”
Again the bottle passed. Bobby moved on to the Community. He didn’t know what to call it. Still he laid out the plans he’d made, fully including Tony for the first time. “... take care of our own ...” he repeated. “... a retreat. A center. Teach them to become unstuck. To take off. Grab a piece of life. An incremental program to teach them to make decisions. Stay as long or as short as you want. No government regulations. Work in the barn, the vineyard ...”
“Just don’t give me all the shitheads,” Tony said.
“What does that mean?” Bobby was perplexed.
“You talk about dregs, Man. About down-and-outs. Open it up, Man. Open it up to just guys in need. Or guys who want to be here. Want to help. Let some of em set examples for others. If you only take the worst, we’re not goina move off square one.”
“Well ...”
“Make entry formal. Like basic. A series of rites of passage. Each passed means greater responsibility, more freedom. Just like in the Corps. Call us NAM. Like we did in San Jose. That’ll be our cause.”
The night was crystal clear, cold. Both Bobby and Tony had their sleeping bags wrapped over their backs, pulled up over their necks to their ears. They were feeling mellow. Bobby talked of transformations, of attitudes, of building self-reliance and commitment, of tenacity and teamwork, of establishing habitual, efficient mechanics of everyday life, of his grunt theory of psychotherapy, which combined a teaching of basic life skills with a think-it-out, tough-it-out, no self-pity, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other philosophy. Very slowly it occurred to him, even if it had not occurred to Tony, that Tony had, in the past ten months, already transformed.
Bobby thought to say this to Tony but he did not. Instead he talked about the High Meadow Code, about his files, his attempts and false starts. “This is where it’s all headed,” he said. “This is what has to be done to get to an Ethic for Our Times.” He moved a quarter way around the fire. On the ground he drew an arrow pointing away from the fire. Beside it, beginning at the arrow base, he marked the letters PFFEIPS. “I think it’s kind of the time-lapse of the self,” Bobby said. “Kind of time layers. Physical, financial, familial, emotional, intellectual, political, spiritual.”
“I gotta pee,” Tony said. He stood, swayed. They had eaten little. It had been nearly a year since he’d had a drink. The bottle was half-gone. Still, from the dark looking in, looking at the circle, at Bobby in the glow of the small fire, it struck him. He returned, sat, rehunched under the sleeping bag, said, “It doesn’t work because it’s not a circle.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Yeah.” He too was feeling the alcohol. “I like a circle,” he said. “The Great Circle. The Fire Circle. Everything connected. A to Z. Alpha to omega.”
In the wee hours they finished the bottle, laid it in the coals for a meltdown, talked on, ranted, chuckled, challenged each other. At one point Bobby said, “That’s what we’re goina turn around. Attitude ev-oh-lu-tion. Ev-oh-lu-tion!” At another, “Let’s build a basketball court.”
“Yeah, sure. Like the one you had in California.”
“Something simpler.”
“You ever play bladderball?” Tony asked.
“Huh?” Bobby focused on him, unsure he’d heard.
“It’s a Viet Namese game played with a pig’s bladder,” Tony said. “Your grandfather had pigs, right?”
“Ye—”
“Jimmy once wrote about it. You take a pig’s bladder and blow it up. The kids play soccer with it.”
The night did not end. “Guy once said to me,” Bobby said, “‘if you don’t plan your life, someone will plan it for you. And he isn’t interested in your best welfare.’ Something like that. There’s five billion people on earth, Man. A billion more than a dozen years ago. As the number goes up, as the species becomes more successful, the individuals lose value. Those that survive will be those that take charge of themselves.”
As the sky lightened Tony Pisano and Bobby Wapinski were back to talking about layers in reference to the theory of expanding beyond the self. The idea fascinated Tony. “Maybe it’s like stages. You have to go through the first to get to the second. But you’ve got to delaminate for the self to be stable enough to be the foundation for the expansion.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “That’s the challenge. That delamination. That becoming unstuck. We’re all affected by it. The whole country. We’ve got to decide right here and now. We’ve got to have the courage to decide, the discipline to try, the perseverance never to give up.”
“Driven by elation.” Tony chuckled.
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “And it’s urgent. Life is urgent. Me, you—we don’t have the right to waste it. We’re stuck because we don’t know. We’re stuck on unfinished business. Were we hoodwinked? Used? And if we were, does that negate the cause?”
“Um,” Tony nodded but he wasn’t certain he’d followed Bobby’s line of thought.
“We went,” Bobby said. “We fought. I saw it as an ethical obligation. But was it really right? Or was it wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. He rose. Shook out his bag.
“What could have been?” Bobby said.
“What should have been?” Tony countered. “Or should be now?”
“Yeah. Let’s make a vow,” Bobby said. He too rose. The fire was out. The bottle was a misshapen ugly gray form amid the ash.
“I vow,” Bobby began, “to make the effort, to expend the energy, to discover the truth about—”
“No ...” Tony interrupted. Bobby paused, frowned at him. “I ... can’t. Not just yet. There’s ... there’s something I got to find out first.”