Lizzie's War Read online

Browning lifted his Schlitz. “Here’s mud in your eye.”

  Mike took a breath and raised his own beer. “To First Lieutenant Lawrence C. Petroski, Bravo Company, 1/3. ‘Your dextrous wit will haunt us long / Wounding our grief with yesterday.’”

  “Semper Fi,” the bartender seconded. They touched their cans together and drank. Mike took one long pull, and then another, before lowering the can. It made an empty clank as it hit the bar, and Browning got him another beer without a word. Down the bar, the second lieutenants were agitating for more drinks, but Browning ignored them and took his own beer over by the sink, where he busied himself polishing a series of shot glasses.

  Through the open doors to the terrace, the sun was easing toward the East China Sea. The breeze stirring the palm trees smelled like frangipani. Across the surface of the turquoise lagoon below, Okinawan fishermen’s skiffs skittered like water spiders, making glittering ripples. It was all indecently idyllic. Like Hawaii, Mike thought, only with warehouses filling with the luggage of the dead. He was going to have to write to Liz. Jesus. Should he write to Maria too? What the hell did you say? Dear Maria, So sorry Larry bought it. He was a helluva guy. There wasn’t really anything to say. It came with the job. That was the thing the women never got. It came with the fucking job.

  On the wall behind the bar was a framed cartoon: two vultures sitting on a branch. “Patience, my ass,” one of the vultures was saying. “I want to kill something.”

  The brown bars had begun to sing the “Marine Corps Hymn,” but nobody seemed to know the second verse. Mike set his empty beer can on the bar beside the first and took the rabbit’s foot out of his pocket. What a ridiculous goddamned thing to hang on to.

  “Another one, sir?” Browning asked.

  “Thanks, no, Sergeant,” Mike said, and rose to go. Much as he would have liked to have his private wake for Larry Petroski, he was almost certainly shipping out tomorrow, and he had to get his own seabag squared away.

  “THIS ISN’T THE EXIT for Grandma’s house, is it?” Danny asked.

  “No,” Liz said, trying to sound calm. “Kids, get down on the floor.”

  Woodward Avenue looked like it had been bombed. Liz had taken a right off the exit ramp, but she was already thinking she probably should have gone left. The street’s six lanes were deserted and strewn with debris. Three National Guardsmen with M-14s, the only human beings in sight, stared incredulously at the passing station wagon from the glass-strewn sidewalk in front of a looted grocery store. She could see empty shelves through the gaping window. The next building was a burned-out hulk, and the one after that was too.

  “What’s happening?” Angus asked.

  “It’s a riot, birdbrain,” Danny told him.

  Deb-Deb looked up from An Otter’s Tale. “What’s a riot?”

  “Shut up and get down on the floor!” Liz snapped. “Now!”

  The urgency of her near-panic had finally leaked into her voice. The children hastily complied. Kathie began to cry. Deborah, seeing Kathie’s tears, followed suit. Angus lifted his head to look at Danny, to see whether he should cry too.

  “Angus—”

  “Danny’s got his head up!”

  “If Danny jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” Liz demanded, realizing with dismay that she was quoting her mother. It had come to that. She was turning into her mother, in spite of her best efforts. That seemed worse somehow than Detroit in flames.

  “It would depend on how high the cliff was,” Angus replied judiciously, after a moment’s consideration.

  On the radio, the Beatles had given way to the Byrds’ sugary version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

  Take me for a trip

  Upon your magic swirling ship

  All my senses have been stripped

  And my hands can’t feel to grip—

  Liz reached over and snapped the music off, immediately regretting the forfeiture of the last vestige of normality. In the absence of electronic filler you couldn’t hear anything but a single siren receding in the distance. The silence of the city was the most frightening thing she’d ever heard.

  “Hey!” Kathie protested, raising her head from underneath the dashboard.

  “Angus’s feet stink,” Deb-Deb noted from the floor of the backseat, where she remained crouched obediently. She was the only one of the four who would do something the first time you told her.

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “We just drove past a gas station,” Danny said.

  Liz hit the brakes, and all four kids pitched forward. Kathie smacked her head on the dashboard and began to cry again. Angus fell on top of Deb-Deb, who squealed in protest.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Liz said, peering into the rearview mirror. The tiny gas station was half a block behind them already. She hesitated, but they were the only car on the road, and finally she just put the car in reverse.

  “Kathie, go ahead and turn the radio back on,” she said as she began backing up. “Angus, for God’s sake, get off of Deb-Deb. Danny, keep an eye out and tell me if I’m going to back into anything.”

  “All clear back here,” Danny said, while the other children sorted themselves out. They were accustomed to a certain amount of chaos on rides with their mother.

  I’m ready to go anywhere

  I’m ready for to fade

  into my own parade—

  “Everybody except Danny get back down on the floor,” Liz said. “I am absolutely serious about this.”

  It felt outrageous, backing down Woodward Avenue in broad daylight. She found herself keeping one eye out for the cops. But they were obviously busy elsewhere. The two-pump gas station was deserted, but an older black man who looked like the owner was sitting on a chair outside the office door. Liz backed up to the first pump, hearing the heartening little ding-ding as the tires went over the welcome cable. It sounded like the place was in business. From sheer force of habit, she checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror. It was gone, of course, and her hair was a fright. She got out of the car and smoothed her powder blue skirt, blinking in the bright sunlight, smelling smoke.

  The owner, if that was who he was, was staring at her in open dismay, but Liz decided that the best thing to do was to just act as if everything were normal. Just another white woman in her best traveling suit, stopping in a burning ghetto for a fill-up.

  She unscrewed the cap to the tank and picked up one of the nozzles, but the pump was dead. A National Guard truck rumbled by, with a dozen soldiers in the rear with automatic rifles, all of them looking up, scanning the rooftops for snipers. The building across the street was burning, a quiet fire, weirdly matter-of-fact. All four of her children’s heads were up again.

  “Mom, I’m hungry,” Angus announced, as he had at every gas station since Virginia.

  “There are sandwiches in the cooler.”

  “Can I have a candy bar?”

  “I want a candy bar too!” Deb-Deb said.

  “We’ll see,” Liz said. “Now get down. I don’t want to have to tell you again!”

  The four heads disappeared. Liz hesitated, then crossed the pavement toward the office, noting for the first time that the owner had a shotgun across his lap. The little building’s window was shattered, and the glass had been swept up into a neat pile by the door. Inside, the floor was strewn with toppled shelves. A hand-lettered sign propped in the corner of the empty window read, “NEGRO BUSINESS. PLEASE DON’T BURN.”

  “Jesus, lady,” the man said as she walked up to him.

  “I know, I know.” He had a kindly face, and Liz gave him her best woman-in-distress smile, feeling foolish and very suburban. “I’m afraid I got a little off my usual route.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “Your pump doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Pump’s turned off,” the guy said. “I’m just tryin’ to keep the place from blowing up.”

  “Would you mind turning it back on, just for a quick fill-up? I’m really i
n a bind here.”

  The man looked over at the station wagon full of children, whose heads were all up again. “I guess you are,” he said. He hesitated, then shook his head. “I been runnin’ this place for almost twenty years, and I ain’t never seen the likes of this. There was that riot in ’43, but I was overseas then. I was in the damn Marines.”

  “My husband’s a Marine.”

  “How ’bout that. I was a sergeant. First Negro sergeant in my unit. They wouldn’t let me do nothin’ but laundry, though. I’da been just as glad to get shot at, after three years of laundry, I can tell you that.”

  “My husband was a sergeant,” Liz said, feeling there was no need to complicate the rapport with Mike’s current rank. “In Korea. He just left for Vietnam.”

  The owner gave her a sharp, more attentive glance. His wide, somewhat sad brown eyes were shot through with streaks of red. She wondered how long he’d been sitting here with that shotgun. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “I lost my oldest son in Vietnam,” he said. “Just last year. Died in a damn helicopter crash. Can you believe that? They wouldn’t even give him a Purple Heart. I said, Dead’s dead, the boy deserves his medal. But they got their rules, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Liz said.

  “Thank you, ma’am. I hope your husband makes it okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  They were silent a moment. The building across the street continued to burn, but otherwise the neighborhood was eerily peaceful. Angus, his nose pressed against the car window, was making suggestive motions with his hand and mouth, miming eating a candy bar. Deb-Deb’s little moon face beside him looked hopeful too. Liz made a fierce quashing movement with her hand, and her children’s heads ducked out of sight again.

  “I’ll pay you double for the gas,” she offered. “I’ll give you a dollar a gallon.”

  “There’s no need to pay me double, lady,” the owner said, offended. He stood up and leaned his shotgun against the wall. “Jesus. I ain’t here to make no money off no one’s troubles.” Still shaking his head, he shuffled over to the pump, fumbling for a key ring as he went. At the pump, he turned a key in the slot and set her tank to filling with the nozzle on automatic.

  “God bless you,” Liz said as he walked back to her, and the man shrugged.

  “God bless us all, I guess,” he said, sounding tired. He went by her, into the office, and began righting the toppled racks. Liz followed, tiptoeing amid the wreckage. The floor was strewn with items the looters had rejected: tampons and sugarless gum, Kleenex boxes, packs of cinnamon jawbreakers, and some postcards of Detroit. A bottle of mouthwash had smashed, and the place smelled like Listerine. Scattered amid the debris were several unlikely candy bars; apparently whoever had looted the place had not liked Three Musketeers. Liz retrieved four of the candies and then, after a hesitation, a fifth for herself. She was already craving chocolate, feeding the pregnancy. As a sop to her conscience, she also grabbed a can of Fresca.

  Amid the floor’s debris, the headline of a disheveled copy of the National Enquirer caught her eye: “1200 TO DIE SOON AT KHE SANH.” Liz picked up the paper and scanned the article, wondering where Khe Sanh was. Jeanne Dixon, the psychic, was predicting all manner of mayhem there.

  The only place-name Liz knew in Vietnam was Saigon. Mike had not known where he was going to be stationed. All she had for a mailing address was FPO San Francisco 96602. The Third Marine Amphibious Force was operating throughout I Corps, Mike had told her. Whatever that meant.

  Not that any of it meant anything, really: who, what, why, where, when. All she really wanted to know was that her husband wasn’t going to die.

  She took the National Enquirer up to the counter, feeling ridiculous, along with the soda and candy bars and a postcard for Mike, who would appreciate the irony. The owner was trying to rehang his overhead cigarette rack. He’d already replaced his framed business license; through the cracked glass, she noted the name in proud roman script: EDWARD JOHNSON, PROPRIETOR. The liquor shelves behind the counter were neatly scoured, as if a cleaning service had come in. The cash register had been pried open, and the empty drawer hung askew.

  “Uh, what do I owe you for these?” Liz asked, laying her salvaged goods on the counter, hoping she had exact change.

  “No charge,” Johnson said cheerfully, giving up on the rack and leaving it hanging tenuously by a single screw. He rummaged behind the counter and found the well-chewed remnant of a cigar. “Just take what you want. Everyone else did.”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t—”

  “Hell, my nephew got himself a color television set the other day.” Johnson struck a match and puffed for a moment, getting the cigar butt lit, then blew a circle of fragrant smoke politely away from her. “No antenna, though. I told him, If you’re gonna risk gettin’ shot for a damn TV, you might as well steal some rabbit ears to go with it. But that boy never had much sense.”

  “Well, how about the gas?”

  He glanced at the pump monitor. “It’s still filling. You must have one helluva big tank.”

  “Eighteen gallons,” Liz said. It had been a selling point for the station wagon; she could drive for almost three hundred miles without stopping, if the spirit moved her and her bladder held out. The kids hated it.

  “I got you for twenty-five, and counting.”

  “Well, that’s odd.”

  Their eyes met; then Johnson hurried from behind the counter and out the door. Liz followed, her brain still trying to do the math. Across the dirty asphalt, the air around the station wagon was rippling in the July heat, as if the car were engulfed in its own dreamy atmosphere. It took Liz a moment to realize that the automatic pump had failed to shut off and that gas was overflowing onto the pavement. She could see all four of her kids’ faces, alert to the possibility of candy bars, pressed hopefully against the car’s windows. Across the street, the building burned on, the flames visible in the upper stories’ windows now, licking outward like dragons’ tongues. The city was on fire, and her children were sitting in a puddle of gasoline.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Johnson breathed. He took a step toward the car and stopped, remembering his lit cigar.

  Liz couldn’t move. She knew that she should do something, but she couldn’t for the life of her think what it was. She felt strangely incendiary herself, as if the electricity of her terror might arc across the pavement and set off the fireball. She felt like a lighted torch.

  Johnson spat into his hand and stubbed the cigar out, clenching his fist around the butt to be sure of it. Liz winced. Everything was moving in slow motion now. She could feel the man’s pain, like a hot nail’s point, in the palm of her own hand. She could feel everything, and everything was clear, like the view through a rinsed windshield. She could feel her overwhelming love and her horror and the specter of her loss, pooled like the gasoline on that pavement, waiting to ignite. But she couldn’t move.

  Johnson crossed the asphalt like a man walking on ice and sloshed without hesitation into the puddle of gas. He flipped the catch on the pump, turning off the flow, then opened the back door of the station wagon and said something. Angus hopped right out. Kathie, in the front seat, seemed frozen, and Johnson opened the passenger door with a reassuring smile, reached in, and lifted her gently in his arms.

  “Angus, come here!” Liz called, and her son trotted toward her. Behind him, Edward Johnson carried Kathie, who was sobbing. In the car, Danny had climbed over into the backseat and was sitting beside Deborah, the two of them engaged in some sort of discussion.

  “Danny!” Liz hollered. Her oldest son turned and met her eyes, and she saw his father in his unhurried amusement, in the look that said, Yeah, yeah, calm down, I’m on it.

  Angus reached her, and Liz took him in her arms; and a moment later Johnson set Kathie down beside her. In the station wagon, Danny and Deb-Deb continued to speak, and then Danny got out of the car, lifted his sister across the puddle of gas
, and set her down. He took her hand, and they walked toward Liz. Deb-Deb seemed untroubled and was even beaming from the attention. She really did adore her older brother.

  As her last two children walked up, Liz engulfed them too. Beside her, Edward Johnson smiled his sad-eyed smile, pleased and a little indulgent, absently rubbing his hand. Liz could see the blistered spot on his pale pink palm. The realization that this man had taken fire against his own skin, for the sake of her children, finally made it all seem real. She began to cry, from gratitude and relief. Kathie joined in readily. Deb-Deb looked a little puzzled, and Angus squirmed.

  Danny patted her comfortingly.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he murmured. “It’s not that big a deal.” It was just what his father would have said, of course. But his father wouldn’t have been crying too. Somehow Danny had ended up with Mike’s ridiculous toughness and her own big soppy heart.

  “It is a big deal, sweetie,” she told him. “It’s a big, big deal.”

  Beside her, looking at the broad, spreading puddle, with the flames from across the street reflected in it, Edward Johnson shook his head.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do with all that gasoline,” he said.

  CHAPTER 2

  AUGUST 1967

  from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly

  Fri 4 Aug ’67

  TDO, HQ Bn., 29th Marines

  Phu Bai, RVN

  c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602

  Dearest Lizzie,

  Well, here I am in the garden spot of Southeast Asia. It’s really very pleasant if you don’t mind dust on everything, an average temperature of about 93°, and 103% humidity. That all changes in the rainy season, I’m assured. They say you can stand up to your knees in mud and have dust blow in your eyes.

  The local people are sincere, hardworking, brave, trustworthy, loyal, etc., and till their fields and paddies industriously all day long. At night they shoot mortars at us. We shoot back, of course. I’m not sure when anybody sleeps. Last night our howitzers quit firing about 0300 and the silence woke me up. I think it woke up the local VC too, as they took the opportunity to shoot a rocket in here. One rocket, just for irritation value. I had laundry on the line when the damn thing hit, and it’s full of nifty shrapnel holes now. My best dungarees at that. Those VC are malicious little bastards.