July 4, 1972
Beaverton Chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
14th Annual Fourth of July Dinner/Dance—in the alley behind the hall
Goddamn—it was so hot in Wisconsin in the summer. He’d just spent four years fairly sure that he would never get cool again, that he would just sweat himself into smoke and that would be the end of him, only to come home and be greeted by the same hot, wet air.
No relief.
He tucked his legs up on the edge of the small loading dock and took another swig from the bottle of Ol’ Granddad. He should go inside. Sooner or later he was supposed to stand up and get some award. Biford had asked him to say a few words about the medals and about Vietnam.
Which was why he was out here sweating to death instead of inside with the loud and cranky air conditioning.
Walt didn’t know what to say.
“People were shooting at me. So I shot back.” His voice echoed among the trash and brick.
Not much of a speech.
He took another deep swallow of the bourbon, hoping maybe the right words waited at the bottom of the bottle.
He knew Biford wanted him to talk about Sarge but that hardly seemed the talk for a Fourth of July party.
“Someone had to go get him. So I went and got him.”
Again, not much of a speech.
Walt yanked off his tie and laughed, because it seemed like someplace in that mess there had to be a joke. He took another pull from the bottle and rested his head against the aluminum door of the loading dock.
The sky was too hazy for stars and there was a nebulous ring around the moon that made it look like it, too, was sweating itself into smoke.
Walt fanned himself with his cap and thought of cooler places.
His grandparents’ cabin in Minnesota. They’d gone every year for Christmas when he was a kid. It was cold there at that time of year, the kind of cold that hurt to breathe, that made your lungs ache.
That kind of cold seemed like a myth. He shut his eyes and tried to conjure it up.
At the far end of the alley a cat screeched and ran helter-skelter into a garbage can. Walt turned and watched his brother walk through the thick air toward him.
He should be surprised. He hadn’t told his family about this and they weren’t much for dinner dances. He was surprised, he guessed. He just couldn’t feel it in all this heat.
“What are you doing out here?” Christopher asked, yanking off his own tie and putting it in the pocket of his suit. “They just called your name for the award.” He stripped off his brown jacket. He had giant sweat rings under his arms. “Jesus, it’s hotter than hell.”
“I know.”
“We looked for you inside, but you weren’t there.”
Walt didn’t answer because it wasn’t a question, and frankly, the way his brother always stated the obvious seemed like a painful waste of time.
“Mom came down to see you get that award.”
Christopher’s gaze struck Walt’s and skidded away. That was how his brother looked at him these days, like a hit and run accident. Fleeting, but hard enough to scratch.
“Where is she?” Walt took a swig to wash away the slimy residue of guilt in the back of his throat.
“In the car. I’m taking her home.”
“You should come back, after,” Walt invited. “Have a drink or something.”
Christopher shook his head. “It’s just you VFW guys in there now.” He shrugged, looked down at the end of the alley like he couldn’t wait to leave.
Walt could relate—he couldn’t even bring himself to go in the doors.
Christopher hadn’t gone to war. He stayed home, thanks to a heart murmur and bad sight in his left eye from an accident with a BB gun when they were kids. Had things gone the other way the day they fought over that gun, it might have been Walt at home, suffering from migraines and taking over the family business like he’d planned to all along.
Not that he would wish Vietnam on his brother. Not at all. But he couldn’t look at Christopher without thinking he would have made a good soldier. The heat and bugs would have killed him, though.
Walt raised the bottle of bourbon to his lips with hands that shook.
“You’re drinking?” Christopher’s face ran with sweat and the reflected light from the street lamp on the other side of the alley. “Mom made the effort to see you get some kind of medal and you’re sitting out here getting drunk?”
Walt wiped his damp neck and nodded. That about summed the situation up.
The silence really stretched and Walt wondered if he was supposed to say something, but before he could, Christopher took the two steps over to the loading dock and hitched himself up beside Walt.
“What’s in the bottle?” Christopher asked.
“Granddad.”
Christopher held out his hand, surprising the hell out of Walt, who had for years before going to war tried to corrupt him with beer.
“You don’t drink,” he said stupidly, but passed the bourbon to his baby brother.
Christopher took a meager sip and shuddered. Walt felt a sudden broad river of good will, an accord with things that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He and his brother were going to sit out here and have a drink.
It was better than getting the damn award.
He toasted the moment and drank.
“It looks like the moon is sweating.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pointed up to the misty sky. But Christopher didn’t look up; he watched his feet like they might walk away without him. “Did you see Hernandez in there with—”
“Walt, we need to talk,” Christopher interrupted and Walt’s bonhomie evaporated and the episode dropped its shiny disguise. They were in a back alley, sitting in God knew what kind of filth. He was pained by his stink and grime, by his unshaved face.
His brother, on the other hand, smelled like Old Spice and gum.
This was no long overdue moment of brotherhood, here in the squalor.
“Everyone’s worried about you,” Chris said, and Walt nodded. He knew that. He wasn’t sure what he could do about it, but he could feel their eyes on him, their concern like a too-heavy blanket. “Mom, Dad...”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
Christopher rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. “Walt, you’re drinking so much. I gave you that job—”
“I appreciate it.”
“Is that why you show up late?” Christopher asked. “You show up drunk or so hung-over you can’t even see straight. You barely work...”
“I do my job,” Walt protested, though mostly on principal. His brother was right. He couldn’t muster up any deep pleasure or satisfaction about plumbing the new school out on Highway 10. But anything was better than staying home with Mom, who watched him like he was walking wounded, like at any moment he might bleed out all over the carpet.
Apologize. Tell him you’ll try harder. That you want the job. Do it before it’s too late.
The voice was left over from the years before the war. It’s like the seventeen-year-old basketball player was still inside of him, just opening his eyes after having them closed for the past four years.
“We told you that you didn’t have to work. We said you could take all the time you needed. No one expects you to be ready to work after what you’ve...” He tripped over his words and Walt could feel the scar glowing along his carotid artery. Christopher cleared his throat and looked off into the dark alley. “You don’t have to work right now.”
“I want to work.” That wasn’t true. He thought he should work—that it would help him. That work would tell him who he was and what he should do. If he held a wrench and a length of copper pipe, then clearly he was a plumber. That’s how simple it should be. But the wrench looked all wrong in his hand.
Sweat ran into his eyes and he wiped his face hard with his arm, abrading the skin with the rough weave of his shirt. He pressed harder with his arm, raking his skin across the broad weave, digging at the sensitive skin near his eyes.
Wanting, a little bit, to bleed.
“Walt,” Christopher whispered. “Tell me what I am supposed to do.”
Walt laughed.
“This isn’t funny, Walt! I’m trying—”
“You remember Minnesota?” Walt interrupted.
“What?”
“Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin?”
Christopher paused. Shook his head. “Sure.”
“Remember how cold it was there?”
“Yes,” Christopher answered into the heat and silence.
“It was nice there, wasn’t it?” Walt rested his head on the door and looked up at the sweaty moon. “So cold.”
“You…you want to go up there? Take a vacation up there right now? Because you could go. You could take the time, maybe do some fishing.”
“I’m not much of a fisherman anymore.” Walt heard the slow quiet hiss of disappointment leave his brother.
He wants me gone, he thought and had another drink. The bourbon loosened his notoriously stuck tongue.
“Remember the winter I told you I found that bear?” Walt rolled his head to look at his brother’s clean profile in the lamplight. “You were eight or something?”
“I was ten,” Christopher murmured. “You were twelve.”
Walt nodded and took another drink. Christopher was right. He was always right about those little details. Age. Who had who for a teacher.
Christopher, after he stopped being such a baby, grew up to be a scientific kind of kid, always taking things apart to see how they worked. The summer before that Christmas with the bear, Dad had caught a frog and helped Christopher dissect it to find the heart and the brain.
Walt had watched, feeling clumsy and left out.
“You must have been pretty bored to believe me about that bear.” Walt laughed.
“You were my big brother. I wanted to believe you.” Christopher’s smile was a thin, tight grimace. “And, yes, I was bored out of my head.”
Walt had never expected Christopher to come along that day. There was no bear. He’d expected his brother to say no and then Walt would have told him how cool the dead bear was, how he could see the heart and the lungs, and too bad that Christopher was such a baby that he didn’t want to go.
But Christopher said yes and started putting on his boots, and Walt’d had no punch line for the lie. No final trick that would fulfill his desire as a big brother to torture his little brother. So Walt just led his brother out into the woods and waited for something to come to him.
“I got so panicked.” Walt looked at his hands and watched them shake. “The longer we walked, the more sure I was that I got us lost.”
“You kept walking though.” Christopher’s laugh was the first easy sound between them. “We broke through the ice on that stream and you fell into that snow bank and I had to pull you out. But you kept going.” His brother said it like it was something honorable.
“Yeah,” Walt said on a small huff of air. “I don’t know why I did that.”
It had started to get dark and cold. And the longer they’d walked the surer Walt had been that they were going to die.
“How long you figure we walked for?” Walt asked.
Christopher shrugged. “A few hours, at least, before I stopped at that stream. Who knows how long you would have gone.”
Once Walt had realized that Christopher wasn’t behind him anymore, he ran back to find his brother sitting on a rock next to the last stream they had crossed.
“There’s no bear, is there?” Christopher had asked, in that serious way of his that was so strange from a ten-year-old. Walt could only shake his head, near tears with worry and embarrassment.
“I think we’re lost,” Walt had finally admitted.
But his baby brother had just scowled at Walt, the first in a long line of scowls, a thick history of distrust and worry, and a pity that settled between them like fine dust.
“You knew exactly what to do,” Walt said. “I was crying and scared, and you just turned around and followed our tracks in the snow back to the cabin.”
“It wasn’t that big a deal, Walt. You always make those things into big deals.” Christopher grabbed the bottle and took a long drink, like a man suddenly dying for the taste of cheap bourbon.
Walt, surrounded by heat and the smell of garbage, peered into the darkness of the alley and couldn’t see his tracks.
He had gotten here and now he couldn’t get his bearings. Couldn’t find home.
Oh God, Chris, please help me. I’m lost.
Christopher put down the bottle and leaped off the loading dock. He swept the grime from his brown pants. “I am really sorry for whatever happened to you over there—” Christopher’s voice cracked. “This war…it’s terrible. I know—”
From nowhere, or perhaps from those places in his memory and gut that he was trying to drown with bourbon, Walt started to laugh.
He howled until tears gathered in the corners of his eyes and ran down his face like beads of sweat. He held his stomach and accidentally knocked the bottle of Granddad off the landing. It shattered into a million pieces and Christopher swore and jumped out of the way, but was still sprayed with the cheap liquor.
The laughs were giant hiccups, like someone was yanking on his diaphragm, trying to pull out something stuck there in his gut.
“What do you know, Christopher? Huh?” Walt wiped away the tears, but they kept coming faster.
“What do you want me to say, Walt? If you keep drinking like this, I can’t keep you on the job. You’re a liability.”
“I’m a war hero,” Walt whispered.
“I know,” Christopher said, his eyes wet. “And it’s breaking our hearts.”