I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t some eight-year-old kid needing to have his tears brushed away by big brother. I went to my room.
I lay there for a while, listening to the sounds of my folks getting into bed themselves, before I snapped off the light and turned onto my side. But I wasn’t ready to fall asleep, so I turned onto my back again. Hands behind my head, I thought about jerking off, but I couldn’t even work up the energy for that. It was like everything in me was focused on the room on the other side of this wall. Just beyond this very wall, the one behind my head, was Chris’s bed, with Chris in it, the same Chris who might go over there and die before I ever saw him again.
Then I decided I was being morbid, and ridiculous. I nearly laughed; hell, maybe he was jerking off. This actually cheered me up a little, and I shifted my position so my head was closer to the wall. Again I almost laughed, because I could hear something. He was definitely doing something in there. I got onto my knees and pressed my ear to the wall.
He was crying. It sounded muffled, like he was sobbing into his pillow, but he was definitely crying. Gut-wrenching sobs. I pulled away and stared at the wall I couldn’t really see in the dark. What the fuck? Chris? The brave soldier, the guy who pulls his buddies out of punji pits, is in there sobbing like a baby?
But no; it wasn’t like a baby. There was way too much pain in it for that. He wasn’t crying for his bottle. It sounded like he was crying for his life.
I threw myself onto my stomach and covered my head with a pillow. I didn’t want to hear this. I couldn’t stand the thought of him in there, crying like that. My mind reached back over the last week, going through his stories, trying to come up with something he’d said, or something he’d left unsaid, that might account for this. He hadn’t overtold anything, hadn’t made himself out to be this big hero, and nothing he’d described made him sound like a coward. He’d done some heroic things, he’d done some crazy things. He’d helped his friends, they’d helped him. He’d almost made some of it sound like fun, or at least like it made for stories that would be good in years to come. It sounded like he’d made some friends who would be his friends until he died.
Until he died. Is that it? Is he afraid of dying?
Would I be? Would I lie in there sobbing the night before I had to go back to a place that was hot and muggy and full of bugs and bullets and bombs and beer and koon sa? Would I go back to a place where I didn’t know whether the Vietnamese girl I’d just met wanted to cut my throat? Or, really, when what I knew was that she did? Chris didn’t talk like that, he didn’t tell stories where the worst part was like some dark secret that could kill you, but I’d heard them, and I knew they were true.
Why hadn’t he told stories like that?
Thinking back again, none of it had that fog of not-knowing about it. None of it except maybe that comment from Mason, about when something unexpected happens and you just don’t know what to do. Sometimes in Chris’s stories he wasn’t sure where the enemy was, but he always knew who they were. There were no shades of gray. He didn’t talk to us about killing villagers, or wondering who was a spy. But I heard about that stuff, on TV and in newspapers. Why was it just occurring to me now that Chris never talked about that part of it? Maybe we were all just so glad to see him that we took whatever he gave us and accepted it, face value. Like we believed what he wanted us to believe.
And here was the proof. I was willing to bet anything that if I went into my folks’ room and told them their precious first-born was in his bed crying his eyes out, they’d tell me I was full of shit and to shut the hell up! Okay, that’s a little dramatic, but essentially it was right; they wouldn’t believe it. Or, they would refuse to believe it.
But it was real. I could hear it, or I imagined I could, right through my pillow. It was not the Chris that Chris wanted us to see, but it was real. I turned so that my feet were near the wall, my head toward the foot of the bed. I pulled my covers around until I’d made enough of a nest that I thought maybe I could sleep that way, not hear what was happening in Chris’s room, not have to know what I didn’t want to know. What he didn’t want me to know.
But it was no good. Before I knew my feet had hit the floor, they had carried me into the hall and stopped in front of Chris’s door. Should I knock or just go in? Should I give him a chance to get himself together or ambush him in his disgrace?
Was it disgrace?
What else could it be? I mean, my God! If I ever acted like this, and Dad heard me? Man, I don’t even want to think what he’d say, how he’d make me feel. But Chris gets away with it? After making us believe what a brave grunt he is?
I didn’t want to be angry with him. Really I didn’t. This was his last night at home before going back to a place nobody in their right mind wanted to be, and I wanted to be nice to him. But I wanted him to be nice to me, too, and he was just holed up in there disgracing himself. Getting away with something I would catch hell for, just because nobody would believe it of Chris.
I opened the door and stepped in.
Then I shut it behind me quickly, afraid the sounds would get out. In my heart of hearts, I really didn’t want to expose Chris, to do anything that would tarnish his image. I loved his image. Hell, I worshipped his image, and that’s partly why I was angry. He was destroying it.
He didn’t even know I was there. The light from the backyard spotlight Dad insists on leaving on all night was just enough to let me see that Chris was huddled under the covers, and just as I had imagined, his head was under a pillow. His arms were clamped down on either side; it’s a wonder he could breathe. I stood there as long as I could tolerate it, listening to something ugly and painful working its way up through his body until it came out in the vicinity of his face, and then I called his name.
“Chris?” It was softer than I’d expected, and he didn’t hear me. I tried again.
I heard a gasp. His body jerked, and he lifted onto his elbows. He made another gasping noise. It was like he couldn’t speak.
Now that I’m here, what am I gonna do about it? What can I say? What do I want him to say? I almost turned to leave.
He was breathing oddly, like you do when you’ve been crying so hard you can’t breathe normally, but he managed to say, “Paul?”
“What is it?” It was all I could think of.
He worked his way into a sitting position and ran the fingers of one hand into his hair. I reached over to flick the bedside lamp on. He rasped, “No! No. Don’t.”
Now what? But he hadn’t asked me to leave. So I felt my way across to where I knew his desk was, and I lifted the chair and walked it over near the bed. I sat down.
“What the hell’s wrong?” I tried again, in a whisper. He ran a hand over his face and groped for the tissue box, blowing his nose as quietly as possible. I added, “I mean, besides the fact that you have to go back. Is that it?” I don’t know what I was hoping. In the silence I thought, did I want that to be “it”? What would it mean, if that were it? And did I want to know what else it could be?
Finally he whispered, “No.”
But then nothing. I felt a need to fill the gap. “So it’s not that you’re thinking the odds are stacking up against you? It isn’t that the longer you’re over there, the more likely something is to happen?” It was what I’d been thinking.
I could barely see him shaking his head. He snuffled a few times and then said, “No. That’s not the way it works. It’s not like the real world, the world where real people live. We aren’t normal human beings over there. We live in the jungle, we go into the villages, and we kill people. Normal human beings don’t do that. Normal human beings die over there. They’re the ones in body bags.” He snuffled almost violently.
“So you’re not human anymore? Is that it?” I sounded sarcastic to my own ears. It wasn’t what I wanted, but what the hell was he getting at?
“I thought I wasn’t. I thought I was gonna make it.” He took a deep breath,