Window in Time
Rennie Fox, a cluster of Blackeyed Susans wrapped in that green tissue paper in hand, stepped out of his cruiser. He left it at the side of the highway and hiked up a hill lush with bluestem, a wild grass native to the Kansas Flint Hills. The soil around him lent a loamy smell to the air. On the other side of the hill, not a hundred yards away, his father had killed himself a quarter-century and one year ago. Fox never knew why, yet he made this annual pilgrimage—to leave flowers, a decent thing to do, he felt. No one else in his family would. All refused even to talk about it.
As he neared the top, Fox spotted a groundhog sitting high on its haunches, staring over the tall grass at him. The creature dropped from sight, and it must have skittered off for Fox saw the grass swirl as if it were a watery path, the motion moving away.
The swirl stopped. Had the groundhog come to its burrow?
Beyond the top of the hill, the sea of grass poured down into a bowl dry though as tinder. There were no springs here. Cattle wandered in to graze, then wandered out to find water elsewhere, their favorite a stock tank a half-mile on kept filled by the breeze turning the blades of ancient windmill. It lifted water from a stout well that had gone dry only once, in Nineteen Thirty-Six, his grandfather had told him. Fox knew all the stories, for this land had been the homestead. He had grown up here—until his mother sold the ranch after his father's suicide. She wanted nothing more to do with the land and moved the children to Manhattan where she took a job as some kind of lab assistant at the ag college.
Something interrupted the play of memory, a figure coming from the west, ambling down into the bowl—a battered Stetson, jeans, and the sun-faded checked shirt of a rancher, a lariat in one hand. Fox wanted to wave, but the stranger seemed not to be aware of him. Only when the man got closer, when Fox saw the mustache and the slouch of the shoulders . . . the photograph that he had stolen from his mother's album, the one she had kept locked away . . . but he was dead.
"Mister," Fox called out. But the man did not answer, just continued moving down into the bowl, looping the lariat around his waist as he came.
"Dad?"
The man stopped. He peered upslope, squinting although the sun was at his back. "I know you?" he asked.
"Dad, it's me, Rennie. Your son."
"Yeah, sure. My boy's ten. He's in school today."
"Hey, I can't explain this, but I'm Rennie."
"Fella, for you to be my boy, I'd have to be fifty-five, and I ain't no fifty-five." The man went back to wrapping his lariat around his waist.
"What'd you come here for?" Fox asked.
"Well, ain't you the nosey one. I could ask the same of you, mister. This is my land. Yeah, I saw your badge, but that don't give you no right to trespass."
"I guess I am."
"You guess you am what?" the man asked as he cinched his lariat tight.
"Trespassing. Abe Meyer owns this land, has since you killed yourself."
The man stared up from beneath the brim of his Stetson. "Do I look dead to you?"
"No sir. You did kill yourself."
"Thought about it, but I ain't done it." He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shook the pack until a butt appeared. He took it with his lips, snapped open a Zippo lighter, and put the flame that flashed up to his cigarette. "Damn Camel," he said, spitting bits of tobacco to the side. "My daddy called 'em coffin nails."
"Granddad. I remember." Fox leaned a hand on his pistol belt. "You ever smoke weed?"
"You ask the damnedest questions." The man curled his fingers in until the glowing end of his cigarette faced him. He studied the ash. "In Nam. Why should I be telling you this?"
"I don't know. Maybe because you didn't when you were alive."
"I ain't dead, can't you see that? Who the hell are you?"
"Someone you never met, I guess. Tell me about Nam."
The man made a business of tapping the ash away from his cigarette. He watched the ash drift down into the grass. "You ever see war?"
"Desert Storm."
"Where was that?"
"Iraq."
"Never heard of it."
"East of Israel."
"Know about that. Your war bad?"
"Thought so at the time, but it wasn't, I guess. Hundred hours and it was over."
"Good God. I was in Nam for two hitches—two long damn years—and that war's still not over."
"Ended in 'Seventy-Five."
"Hell, this is 'Seventy-Two."
"No, this is Ninety-Eight – Nineteen Ninety-Eight."
The man took a long drag on his cigarette. From the corner of his mouth he blew a plume of smoke that hung in the still air at the bottom of the bowl until the man waved the smoke away. "Now who's nuts?"
"You telling me I am and you aren't?"
"No, I know I'm nuts, over-the-gawddamn-hill crazy."
"Why?"
The man motioned at his forehead. "Headaches. Just blinding. I lose all control."
"Agent Orange."
"What?"
"Agent Orange. You ever get exposed to it in Nam?"
"That damn soup they rained on us for days on end when we were in the bush, them fly boys trying to get rid of all that greenery so we could see Charlie? Got some horrendous skin burns from the stuff."
Fox settled toward the ground on the hillside, until he squatted on his haunches. "You ever talk to anybody?"
"'Bout what?"
"Your headaches. Mom, maybe?"
"My wife?"
"Yeah."
"You know her?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, I can tell you this, sonny boy, she had sympathy for a while, but it wore her down. Finally told me to get help at the V.A. or get out."
"Did you?"
"Fella, I'd like to laugh at that."
"Why?"
"Those idiots at the hospital, they didn't want us there. The doc I saw said I was stressed, gave me a bottle of aspirin. Aspirin, can you believe that?" He shook out another cigarette, lit it off the first, then, with the heel of his boot, twisted the first—only half smoked—out in the dirt. "Talked to some of the guys in the waiting room. I wasn't the only one. Luckier than them, though."
"How's that?" Fox asked.
"Couple them boys, they had lumps in their bodies—they had me feel them—and they had the night sweats, three, four years after they'd come home from Nam, and a couple had fathered stillborn babies, one awful deformed. Showed me pictures. Still and all, I don't feel lucky when those damn headaches hit. So I come out here where it's quiet, talk to the breeze." He gazed around at the top of the bowl. "There ain't none down here, is there?"
"It help?"
"What, talking to the breeze?"
Fox nodded.
"Damn little," the man said. "But today, though—"
"You're going to kill yourself."
"Wouldn't take much to nudge me into it." He took another drag on his cigarette.
"Could you be talked out of it?"
"Don't see how."
"Wouldn't you want to be here in, say, thirty years and see your grandchildren?"
"Can't say as I even want to see tomorrow. Fella, I've not slept in three days, chewed through more aspirin and Tylenol than you can picture. I just want the damn headaches to stop."
Fox reached inside his shirt. He brought out his dog tags on their Army-issued chain. He held the tags up.
"That supposed to mean something?" the man asked.
"You still wear yours?"
"Uh-huh, and on one I've etched the names of my boot camp buddies—buddies that I packed out of the jungle, their guts and brains blown out or shot out. You have to pack anyone out in your damn war?"
Fox shook his head as he pushed his tags back inside his shirt.
"Count yourself blessed," the man said. "You ever have any headaches?"
"Day after I've had a few beers."
"So you don't know where I've been, where I am."
"But you've got family."
"Family I've hit, my wife. Last time, she ran to her daddy and he had me arrested. Fella, I'm on probation. The judge says I screw up again, it's not the county jail, it's a hard five in state prison. I'll not be locked up. I'll not have it. You here to arrest me?"
"No."
"Then why?"
"Like you, to talk to the breeze."
"'Bout what?"
"My father."
"And you think I'm him. What a damn fool you are. You really want to know why I'm here?"
Fox shrugged. He'd been to the State Police negotiator school. He knew the best tactic sometimes was to feign disinterest—just let the subject talk it all out—and somewhere in that talk would be the key he needed to end the crisis without anyone getting hurt.
The man pulled an envelope from his back pocket. "Gets lonely out there in the back country. We had this Vietnamese girl clean our hooch, cook for us. Not the prettiest girl. I fathered a child with her. Tore hell out of me. How was I going to explain that to my wife, to my boys—you got a little sister on the other side of the world.
"One night, Charlie attacks her village, kills and burns everyone, and so help me, I felt God had given me a reprieve. Then this letter." He waved it. "She's alive. So's the little girl. She found me through the chaplain in my old unit, and she wants to come here because all her family is dead, and, having a half-white child, she and the girl, they're outcasts in Nam. I bring her here, we're all outcasts."
The man flipped his cigarette away. He brought out his lighter and set fire to the letter. "You want it?" he asked Fox, holding up the Zippo. He threw it.
Fox snatched the lighter from the air at the same moment the man touched the burning letter to the end of his lariat. "Primer cord," he whispered.
A fssst, flash. And an explosion that blasted everything around it, an explosion that flung splatters of blood and shards of flesh at Fox, an explosion that rocked him hard onto his back.
For the longest time Fox tried to make his eyes focus, strained to hear what might be around him. Cordite. He could smell cordite and cigarette smoke, but he could hear nothing, and his head ached.
© Jerry Peterson.
