Sweet Talk Page 8

  Ahead of us, the plane trees are so uniformly spaced, so beautifully arched that they form a green arcaded cloister along the stone walk. A soft, easing wind passes through the boughs with the sound of falling water. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “But I’d like to give you an ear.”

  Did he know that I came from a military family? Did he know that I had a nineteen-year-old brother in Vietnam? Did he know that my sense of the war derived largely from the color snapshots MacArthur had sent of happy young men posed before the Army’s largest movable artillery weapon, their boots heavy with red dust, the jungle rising like a green temple behind them? There were two things MacArthur asked me to send him during his thirteen-month tour—marinated artichoke hearts and Rolling Stones tapes. The only artichoke hearts I could find came in glass jars and were not permitted in the Army’s mailbags. The first Stones tapes I sent were washed away in a monsoon flood. I sent more tapes. These were stolen by an old man who wanted to sell them on the black market. I sent more Stones tapes. These MacArthur gave to a wounded boy who was being airlifted to a hospital in Tokyo.

  It has been said that the war in Vietnam was so fully photographed that it was the one war we learned the truth about. Which truth did we learn, and who learned it? One of the most famous pictures to come out of the war was the videotape of the South Vietnam chief of police firing a bullet into the head of a prisoner, a man who stood before the chief in shorts and a loose plaid shirt. He looked the chief in the eye, looked with fear and no hope, and was still looking with fear and no hope in that moment when he was already dead but had not yet fallen like a rag into the Saigon street. There were other memorable pictures like that. There were also ones like the picture of the blond, blue-eyed soldier, his head wrapped becomingly in a narrow bandage (“Just a flesh wound, sir”), reaching toward the camera as if to summon help for his wounded comrade. This photograph, with its depiction of handsome, capable, white middle-class goodwill, was so popular that it appeared in every major American news source and has been republished many times since, whenever a news agency wants to do a story on the Vietnam era.

  That picture always reminds me of my student, a man in his late twenties who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam and was being put through college by the Army so that he could return to active duty as an officer—the student who stood before me pulling a canvas sack from his book bag on that dazzling June day at the end of my first year as a teacher.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the student said. “But I would like to give you an ear.”

  “What would you want to do that for?”

  “I want to give you a present. I want to give you something for the end of the course.” He withdrew his hand from the sack and opened it, palm up.

  You probably have heard about the ears they brought back with them from Vietnam. You may have heard how the ears were carried in pouches or worn like necklaces, the lobes perforated so that they could be threaded on a leather thong. You may have heard that the ears looked like dried fruit, or like seashells, or like leaves curling beneath an oak tree. The mind will often make a metaphor when it cannot make anything else.

  A human ear, though, still looks like a human ear. It is only after you have stared at it for a long while, at its curving ridges and shallow basins, that you begin to see: here is the dry bed of a wide river valley, here is the tiny village, the bright paddy, the water buffalo. Here is the world so green you could taste that greenness on your tongue even from an altitude of ten thousand feet in a jet bomber.

  As the student and I looked at each other in the sunlight, two young women strolling along the walk separated in order to pass us—parted like river water moving around an island. They were laughing and did not notice what the student held in his hand. “So,” said one of the women, “my mother calls me back to say they had to put the poor dog to sleep, and you know what she says?” The student and I turned to hear what the mother had said. “She says, ‘And you know, Anita, that dog’s mind was still good. He wasn’t even senile.’ ”

  When the student turned back to me, he was smiling. “What a world,” he said. He extended his hand.

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I do not want that present.”

  We had begun to move again. I was walking slowly, trying to show with my easy pace that I was not afraid. Perhaps he was angry with me for something I had said in class. Perhaps he was on drugs.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “I have lots more.”

  “Really,” I said. “No, but thank you.”

  “If you don’t want this one, I can give you a better one.” He reached into the bag again.

  “How can you tell which is which?” I said calmly, as if I were inquiring about fishing lures or nuts and bolts or types of flower seed.

  “I can tell,” he said. “I’ve got this one memorized. This one’s a girl.” The girl, he told me, was thirteen. At first, the men in his outfit had taken pity on her and given her food and cigarettes. Then they learned that she was the one who planted mines around their encampment in the night.

  It took us a long time to cross the campus and shake hands and say good-bye. Two days later, the student left a bottle of vodka on my desk while I was out. Apparently he had been sincere in wanting to give me a present. I never saw the student again. I did not see another war souvenir of that kind until after my brother returned from Vietnam.

  The autumn we lived at Fort Sill, our family ate five hundred doves. There was a fifty-day dove season, a ten-dove limit each day. Every night, my mother brought the birds to the table in a different guise. They were baked and braised and broiled. They were basted and stuffed, olive-oiled and gravied. But there were too many of them, each tiny and heart-shaped, the breastbone prominent in outline even under a sauce. Finally, a platter of doves was set before us and MacArthur said, “I am now helping myself to a tuna casserole. There is cheese in this casserole, and some cracker crumbs.” He passed the platter to me. “And what are you having, Gemma?”

  “I am having jumbo shrimps,” I said. “And some lemon.”

  In this way, the platter moved around the table. My mother was having lamb. My grandmother was having pork chops. My father hesitated before he took the meat fork. All his life, he had been shooting game for the dinner table. He believed he was teaching his family a lesson in economy and his son a lesson in wilderness survival. No one had ever made a joke about these meals. He looked at MacArthur. Although my father had never said it, MacArthur was exactly the kind of son he had hoped to have—tall and good-natured, smart and obedient, a boy who could hit a bull’s-eye on a paper target with his .22 rifle. “All right,” my father said at last. “I’m having a steak.”

  However, after dinner he said, “If you want to play a game, let’s play a real game. Let’s play twenty questions.” He took a pen from his pocket and flattened a paper napkin to use as a scorecard. He looked at MacArthur. “I am thinking of something. What is it?” We were all going to play this game, but my father’s look implied that MacArthur was the principal opponent.

  MacArthur tried to assume the gamesman’s bland expression. “Is it animal?” he said.

  My father appeared to think for a while. He mused at the candles. He considered the ceiling. This was part of the game, trying to throw the opponents off the trail. “Yes, it is animal.”

  “Is it a toad?” my grandmother said.

  “No, no,” MacArthur said. “It’s too soon to ask that.”

  “It certainly is not a toad,” my father said. He made a great show of entering a mark against us on the napkin. This was another part of the game, trying to rattle the opponents by gloating.

  “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” my mother said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it bigger than a car?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it bigger than a house?” MacArthur said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it the Eiffel Tower?” my grandmother said.

  Again my father used e
xaggerated motions to record the mark. MacArthur dropped his head into his arms. This was an unmanly response.

  “Settle down,” my father said. “Think.”

  “Can’t we play some other game?” my grandmother said. “This game is never any fun.”

  “We are not trying to have fun,” my father said. “We are trying to use our minds.”

  So the game went, until we had used up our twenty no answers, and my father revealed the thing he had been thinking of. The thing was “the rocket’s red glare”—the light from exploded gunpowder. Gunpowder, if you analyzed its ingredients, was actually animal, vegetable, and mineral—providing you agreed that the carbon component could be derived from animal sources. He poured a drink and leaned back to tell us a story. The first time he had played the game he was a soldier on a ship going to England. The ship was in one of the largest convoys ever to cross the Atlantic during the Second World War. The sea was rough. German submarines were nearby. Some men got seasick, and everyone was nervous. They began to play games, and they played one game of twenty questions for two days. That was the game whose answer was “the rocket’s red glare.” My father had thought that one up.

  That was as close as he ever came to telling us a war story. He had gone from England to Normandy Beach and later to the Battle of the Bulge, but when he remembered the war for us he remembered brave, high-spirited men not yet under attack. When he had finished speaking, he looked at his glass of scotch as the true drinker will—as if it contains a prophecy.

  The spring following the season in which we ate whole generations of doves, MacArthur acquired two live chicks. A Woolworth’s in the town near the post was giving chicks away to the first hundred customers in the door the Saturday before Palm Sunday. MacArthur was the first customer through the door and also the fifty-seventh. He named the chicks Harold and Georgette. He made big plans for Harold and Georgette. He was going to teach them how to walk a tightrope made of string and ride a chicken-sized Ferris wheel.

  A week later, Harold and Georgette were eaten by our cat while we were at church. The chicks had been living in an open cardboard box on top of the refrigerator. No one imagined that a cat as fat and slothful as Al Bear would hurl himself that high to get an extra meal.

  Looking at the few pale feathers left in the box, MacArthur said, “He ate them whole. He even ate the beaks.”

  “Poor chicks,” my mother said.

  “They were making an awful lot of noise up there,” my grandmother said. “They should have kept those beaks shut.”

  Everyone looked to see if MacArthur was crying. In our family, people believed that getting through a hardship intact was its own reward. “This is nothing to be upset about,” my father said. “This is the way nature works.” It was in the natural order of things for cats to eat birds, he told us. Even some birds ate other birds. Some animals ate cats. Everything we ate had once been alive. Wasn’t a steak part of a steer? MacArthur looked away just long enough to roll his eyes at me. My father began to gesture and to project his voice. Now he was lecturing on the principles of Darwinian selection. He used the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw.” He seemed to like that phrase, and used it again. The third time he said, “nature red in tooth and claw,” Al Bear walked up behind him and threw up on the floor, all the little bird parts of Harold and Georgette still recognizable on the linoleum.

  MacArthur never became a hunter of birds. By the time he turned twelve, and was given a shotgun for his birthday, we were stationed in Italy. The Italians, who for generations, perhaps even millennia, seemed to have a limitless appetite for small birds, had gone through entire species of game birds and were now working on the European songbirds that flew south in the winter. Thus, the diminishing numbers of thrushes, larks, and swallows in the Italian countryside made it impossible for my father to find a place that he could hunt with a clear conscience and allowed my brother to turn from real birds to imitation ones. Soon after his birthday, he was taken to the skeet range at Camp Darby, where he was permitted to shoot fifty rounds at black-and-yellow disks, called pigeons. Fifty recoils of a large gun are a lot for a boy, even one big for his age, like MacArthur. By the time he got home that day, there were bruises beginning to bloom across his shoulder.

  “Maybe he should wait until he’s older,” my mother said.

  “What ever happened to the all-American sports?” my grandmother said. “Couldn’t he learn to throw or kick something?”

  Months later, when we all drove into the post to see him shoot in his first tournament, MacArthur kept saying, “See Kid MacArthur forget to load the gun. Watch fake birds fall whole to the earth.” “Kid MacArthur” was what he called himself when something went wrong. He did not like the general whose name he bore. He did not admire him, as my parents did, for being the man who said, “I shall return.” MacArthur was not one of those ordinary names, like John or Joan, which you could look up in my grandmother’s Dictionary of Christian Appellations. MacArthur was a name my brother had to research. General MacArthur, he decided, had talked a big game but then allowed his entire air force to be bombed on the ground the day after Pearl Harbor. General MacArthur had sent his troops into Bataan but had not sent along the trucks that carried food for the battalions. The general had fled to Australia, uttering his famous words, leaving his men to perish in the Death March.

  “You’ll be fine if you don’t look out any windows,” my father said. “Looking out the window” was his expression for allowing the mind to wander. “I’m pulling down all the shades on my windows,” MacArthur said. “I’m battening all the hatches in my head.”

  Something overtook MacArthur when the tournament got under way and he finally stepped onto the range, the only boy among the shooters. The bones of his face grew prominent. His eyes became opaque, like the eyes of a man who can keep a secret. By the second time around the stations, he was third among the five shooters. No one spoke, except a man named Mr. Dimple, who was an engineer working for the American government in Italy, and the only civilian on the skeet range.

  “That gosh-damned sun,” Mr. Dimple said. “Those gosh-damned trees.” It was a hot, bright day, and the angle of the sun made it difficult to see the disks as they sailed in front of a pine forest at the back of the range.

  “Maybe we need a fence in front of those trees,” Mr. Dimple said. After his next two shots, he said, “Damned if the wind didn’t get to those birds before I did.” It was clear that Mr. Dimple was disgracing himself before the cream of the American Army. When he spoke, the other men looked at the grass. The women, seated behind the semicircular range, looked at each other. Their eyes seemed to say, “Our men are not going to complain about any trees. Our men are not going to complain about the wind or the sun.”

  “I’m not wearing the right sunglasses,” Mr. Dimple said.

  MacArthur stepped up to the station just in front of the viewing area and called for the pigeons. “Pull!” Swinging to his right, he aimed just ahead of the flying, spinning disk. He pulled the first trigger and began the swing back to his left to get the second sailing bird before it touched the ground. The first bird exploded in a star of fragments and fell to the earth with the sound of raining gravel. The second bird fell untouched and landed on the ground with a clack as it struck another unexploded bird. Perhaps because his swing back had seemed so sure, so exactly timed, MacArthur could not believe he had missed. He shook his head as he stepped away from the station.

  My father looked over at him and said within hearing of everyone on the range, “Whenever you step back from that peg, you step back the same way, hit or miss. You do not shake your head.”

  Mr. Dimple put his hand on his hip and sighed at his gun. Colonel McGrath and Major Solman looked away.

  “Do you understand?”

  MacArthur did understand. He was embarrassed. “Yes, sir,” he said. As the group moved to the next station, the other men nodded at my father and gave MacArthur friendly punches on the arm. He was not goi
ng to grow up to be a Mr. Dimple.

  The next year, MacArthur won a place on the championship team my father took to Naples. For years, my father liked to tell about MacArthur’s first day on the range. “He was black-and-blue all over,” my father said. “But he never spoke a word of complaint.”

  Two years later, we returned to the States to live on a post on Governors Island, which was in the middle of New York Harbor and so close to the Statue of Liberty that we could see her torchlight from our bedroom windows. It was on Governors Island that my father received a letter from the government that seemed to imply that MacArthur might not be an American citizen, because he had been born in the Philippines. He was not quite a foreigner, either, because his parents had been born in Ohio.

  “He’s a juvenile delinquent, is what he is,” my grandmother said one day when my father was trying to explain the citizenship difficulty. She had slipped into MacArthur’s room and found a cache of cigarette lighters. “Where does a fourteen-year-old boy get enough money to buy these things?” she said. “What does he do with them, anyway?”

  “He doesn’t smoke,” I said, although I knew that with my father the health issue would not be the central one.

  My mother beheld the lighters with great sadness. “I’ll have a talk with him tonight.”

  “No one will speak to him yet,” my father said. He was troubled because the evidence of MacArthur’s criminality had been gathered in a kind of illegal search and seizure.

  “Does this mean that MacArthur can never become president of the United States?” I said. In our family, we had been taught that if children were scrupulously honest, and also rose from their seats when strangers entered the room, and said “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” at the appropriate moments, and then went on to get a college education, they could grow up to be anything, including president of the United States. Even a woman could be president, if she kept her record clean and also went to college.