“Hold on, buddy.” The old Impala weaved through traffic like some oversized yacht cutting between skiffs, leaving them in its wake. “Just a bit longer.” At the wheel, Joe looked like he might burst into laughter. “Almost home.”
I crouched out of the wind in the backseat to avoid any possible splatter from Frank. Frank, all six feet of his lanky frame, rode shotgun in front, half-curled against the door, head lolling out of the open window, moaning like he could upchuck at any moment. Someone blew a horn, and Joe slipped between two slower cars and down the exit ramp to W Street. We headed west to Myrtle Grove.
“Kinda like driving in Saigon,” Joe said. He glanced back, flashing a grin, and then his eyes settled briefly on Frank. He shifted, became more determined, muscles setting, stubby hands gripping the wheel with ease and efficiency. At five and a half feet, give or take, Joe looked like a shipping box with stumpy legs, strong and durable. The thing about Joe, laughter and good times were his preferred mode of operation. Usually laid back and content, Joe changed some when it came to friends and their well-being. You could see the concern creep into his eyes.
Frank was home for the weekend, like every weekend since emerging from boot camp eleven months earlier, landing Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City as his duty station, about three hours from Pensacola. And, like most weekends since then, he’d drunk himself sick at the drive-in. When my parents split and I moved here with Mom, Frank reserved most Fridays and a lot of Saturdays to do things with me, mostly take me to movies or to shoot pool. Why, I haven’t a clue. Maybe because I was his only male cousin. Maybe he just felt sorry for me. Maybe he preferred my company to his peers’—I don’t know. He had girlfriends from time to time, but even when dates landed on Fridays, I tagged along. I’m sure the girls liked that. Probably why he had so few repeats. Even back then, Frank liked to drink, but not to the puking stage. That had come gradually.
The last time Joe’d seen him this way was the summer before when Frank gulped down about half of a fifth at the show. He had twisted repeatedly around in what he thought was hilarity, trying to catch me doing something with Joe’s cousin in the backseat. Carmel was fourteen, same as I, brought along by Joe because she wanted to see They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—not because she wanted to make out with some pimpled geek still two years away from a driver’s license. One kiss, an angry shove, and arms crossed over her breasts after my hand tried to wander under her T-shirt was as far as it went that night. Frank didn’t get the eyeful of young lust he wanted, and I haven’t seen Carmel since.
About seven months after Uncle Sam invited Joe to take what Joe called an extended Asian world tour, Frank dropped out of second-year college to join the army. He told me it didn’t matter what he thought about the war personally, that it was a matter of pride and patriotism. I think it was a matter of guilt. He didn’t feel right watching buddies, who didn’t have college deferments or weren’t lucky enough to be their family’s only child, go off to Vietnam. So he joined up, believing he could rid himself of the guilt in some exotic jungle, but, even in the army, privilege undermined intent. His superiors told him he was officer material, that he’d be trained, and then maybe he’d get the assignment he wanted. First things first.
People like Joe, the ones who wouldn’t have joined without a draft, did the fighting while the Franks of the world trained to be officers. The draft nailed Joe his first summer out of high school. No plans for college, no plans for technical school, no plans for much of anything, so going into the service seemed to him the natural course of life. “Learn to kill, stay alive, come home.” The Joes of the world weren’t interested in military careers. They wanted to do their time and get out before some poor bastard doing his time in another country’s army put him in the ground. Three of Frank’s buddies had died in ’Nam in the past month, not one having signed up to go in the first place, and yet Frank, all fierce-eyed and ready to kill, remained stateside, comfy in his cot, receiving two back-to-back “soldier of the month” awards (looks good on that officer-in-training résumé, yessir), working banker’s hours, coming home on weekends, puking whiskey at the drive-in every Friday night.
Joe, on the other hand, shipped out not long after boot camp. Few letters came, even to his mother who received mail from him maybe once every couple of months. Each said the same thing, that the weather was hot, humid, that he’d be home soon enough. And he was. One late August afternoon, he and a buddy had jumped from a chopper transport, hitting the ground in a crouching run through high grasses toward jungle cover. His buddy, maybe ten feet yards away, caught a mortar in the chest. Shrapnel hit Joe, and a stray bullet passed through his left thigh, hitting nothing major, but it proved enough to get him a ticket home. His buddy got a body bag. As soon as he was fit, Joe was back in ’Nam.
Frank decided then to drop out of college and become a soldier boy. In relatively good physical condition, he prepared himself and everyone he knew to expect him to be in a war zone within weeks, if not days, after boot camp. But those days multiplied into months, and Frank remained in spitting distance of home, cleaning rifles and shining boots. Now Joe was back home for a second time, getting ready for a third tour.
Frank bucked against the door, threatening to blow bile.
“We got a towel in here?” Joe asked.
I checked in and under the seats, not knowing what I might find in Frank’s old Impala. “Just this,” I said, coming up with an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Joe chuckled. “Put a towel in tomorrow. You should always have one, just in case.”
“Of what?”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
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