Fields of Fire Read online

  It was nothing as magical as discovering some secret part that had lain dormant, but rather that his energies had finally found their outlet. He had always fought, and now it was right to fight. He had never been coddled, and now it was weakness to have been coddled.

  And there was that hard core, the nucleus of ferocity which sustained him, and which no one else could dent. He could not be broken. He sensed the difference after three days. He came with no false prides, no sensitivities that a drill instructor's words could damage.

  The trivialities of boot camp rolled off him. At worst, they were more of the same. He was beaten, but did not flinch. He sensed from the start that if he stuck it out, he won. When a drill instructor began to punish him he would stare impassively through the man, as if he felt nothing. Beat on me, Sergeant. Wear your goddamn arm out. It ain't any different. You can't squash me, and if you can't squash me, you lose. More, sir. Harder, sir. Faster, sir. I love it, sir.

  It created a mystique about him. His ability to endure, that iron shell from which all other traits derived, was also a magnet that drew the other recruits to him. In the dark of the squad bay after lights out, during field problems, on the bivouacs, his calm assessment of each threat and crisis, his reasoned suggestions without regard to pain, caused him to be the man they sought for guidance.

  And he loved it. To merely endure, to accept the pain that others feared and dreaded, was the ticket to a dignity that had eluded him all his life. And to fight, to grant his natural ferocity its whims, now brought him accolades instead of trouble.

  He would take on anyone, do anything to perpetuate that respect from the others. Early during training the recruits learned pugil sticks. They fell out onto the athletic field and formed a circle around their drill instructor, who paced inside the circle, an angry demigod, holding what looked to be a broom with a sandbag on each end.

  “This here,” he chanted, “is a pugil stick. What you do is try to kill each other with it. Now.” He looked slowly around the circle, staring coolly into each quivering face. “I need me a couple bad-ass hogs. Who's the meanest hog in this here platoon?”

  A tight-muscled Gargantua stepped out. Snake had already nicknamed him Statue Body. “The Private is, sir.”

  The drill instructor nodded once, then looked around the circle again. “Don't anybody else think he's a bad-ass? C'mon, girls. We can't let him play with hisself, can we?”

  Nobody moved. Statue Body was standing cool inside the circle, looking like John Wayne. Snake checked him out, and finally shrugged. What the hell. The bastard can't kill me.

  He stepped into the circle. “Sir,” he announced, playing the DI's word games, “the Private is the meanest motherfucker you got.”

  He stood motionless inside the circle. The DI peered down at him, hands on hips, unspeaking. Then his head went back and he laughed uproariously. The platoon had been silent but when the drill instructor laughed, everyone laughed: God had spoken.

  The drill instructor became enraged and screamed at the circle, pivoting to froth at them all. “Shut up.” They were immediately silent. He paced the circle, just in front of the recruits. “You goddamn girls. You cowards. That little shit is the only one of you that had the balls to come out here and fight. You should be laughing at yourselves, you dippy pukes!”

  He returned to Snake. There was a sparkle of warmth in his expression. Some day, Snake mused, standing at a rigid attention, he's gonna like the hell outa me. It's the tattoo. Every day he dumps on me for not rating it, but he digs it. Pretty good move to get it.

  He tossed Snake a pugil stick. “O.K., Private. Let's see how bad you really are.”

  A football helmet and a groin protector were passed down and Snake donned them, then picked up the pugil stick. It was heavier than he had expected. He held it tentatively, took a secret deep breath, and moved over to Statue Body.

  Statue Body was grinning widely, waiting for Snake to come into range. He carried the stick lightly and bounced on his toes like a fighter. What the hell, thought Snake. He moved in after the man and started to swing.

  Pow. Next thing he knew he was on the turf. His head spun as if he was one toke over. He shook it, clearing the buzzing circles, and stood again. Statue Body grinned like a taunting Muhammad Ali. Snake moved after him again and Statue Body took one step to the side and popped him up the side of the head. Pow. Down again. Everyone was screaming.

  The DI stood over him. “Get up, you little turd.” He booted Snake lightly in the ass. “I thought you said you were tough.”

  Up again. Pow. Down again. Up again, dizzily, wobbly. Pow. The DI stepped back in and started to take the pugil stick out of his hands and he looked coldly at the Sergeant with steady blue invincible eyes. “Sir. The Private ain't finished yet.”

  The DI spoke quietly, privately to him. “He's killing you, boy.”

  “Give me a break. I'm wearing him down.”

  The DI checked the area quickly for officers. “O.K., Private. You got two minutes.”

  Up again, swing and miss. Pow. Down again. Up again. Pow. Statue Body seemed embarrassed now. The circle of recruits was silent. Up again and swing, Statue Body let it go by as if he were parrying a weak jab. Pow. Snake was back on the turf, trying to find his head. It was scrambled at his knees.

  Statue Body was uneasy. He turned to the DI. It wasn't fun anymore. “Sir. The Private—”

  Snake moved as quickly as a pouncing cat, holding the stick near one end like a baseball bat. He aimed for the back of Statue Body's head. Pow. Statue Body dropped like a stunned elephant. The platoon cheered wildly.

  Statue Body was on his knees, still stunned. He started to get up. Snake knew that if he made it up Statue Body would kill him. Pow. He dropped him again. Take that, motherfucker. Statue Body bowled over, rolling like an egg. Balloop. Balloop.

  Snake pounced again and stood in front of him, determined not to let him up. He peered into Statue Body's face with the same grin that Statue Body had used earlier.

  The DI finally stepped in, stopping it. He raised Snake's hand to the cheers of the circle of recruits. Champion. As the platoon yelled the DI whispered to Snake.

  “You little shit. You are mean.”

  2 ROBERT E. LEE HODGES, JR.

  I

  February 1969

  There was a footlocker in a shed at home that his parents never opened. It was green, and had sat in the corner of the shed for as long as he could remember, under a gray footlocker that held some of his mother's old clothes. There was no indication on its outsides as to where or for what purpose it was acquired. It simply sat in anonymity under the larger gray one, year after year, its outsides slowly gathering rust and its insides taking on the musty odor of items left untended in humid places.

  If his mother and father had ever sat down and discussed it, they would probably have agreed in rather few words to get rid of the footlocker. But for them to discuss it, it would have become necessary for one of them to broach the subject to the other. And they both tacitly realized that, if one were to mention it, the other would have cause for some sort of hurt and questioning.

  If his mother were to mention it, his father would have immediate grounds to feel hurt: she would have been thinking about Him, the other man in her life. What, he could wonder, reveling in the hurt, made you think of Him again after all these years? And if his father mentioned it, his mother could feel righteous indignation that, even after all the years and the assurances and the solid base of their relationship, he couldn't cope. He would be showing the insecurity he felt in their life together, trying to drive the Other Man and all his traces completely from her life.

  So the footlocker sat, year in and year out, gathering rust and mildew in the shed. And only he had the temerity to open it and experience its contents.

  He went to it on the last day before he left for Vietnam. He was alone in the small tar-paper house that he had grown up in, and had spent his morning sorting in boredom through his childhood t
hings. He then sat in the small front room and attempted yesterday's newspaper, but could not concentrate on it. Finally he paced before the front window, wondering if his mother would return early from her shopping trip to Salt Lick, and, satisfied that she would not, he left the house and waded through dead grass and patches of horseweed to the shed.

  It was a personal thing for him, something he would have considered sharing only with his mother, although he never had. He had discovered the contents of the locker when he was twelve, and they had always been a very special secret.

  He slid the heavy door of the shed, stirring dust and spiderwebs, and entered it, pulling on a frayed cord that lit a bare light bulb. The footlocker sat in a far corner, guarded by cobwebs, unbothered and unmoved since the last time he had explored its contents.

  He removed the gray footlocker, sitting on it, and sprang the weak padlock on the green one with a twist of his powerful hand. Then he flipped the latch and pulled the top open, turning his face at first from the odor.

  There before him, in the musty browns and yellows which seem to accrue in all things with age, lay the remains of his real father.

  Not the physical remains. Those had been lowered into a hole in the side of some European hill on a cold winter morning four months before he was born. The trunk held other, emotional remains. Two brown army uniforms of World War II vintage, replete with corporal stripes and a single ribbon he had earned before going overseas. A stack of newspaper clippings about the goings-on in the European theater during the late fall and early winter of 1944. A larger stack of letters to his mother, written in a rather bold but undeveloped scrawl. A brown scrapbook, half-full of pictures of his father and mother, singly and together. And a manila envelope containing the letter which informed his mother that his father had been killed, and three medals, including the Purple Heart.

  He did not know the story behind the accumulation of those things in the footlocker, and he had never asked about them. It was enough for him that he had found them, and was able to experience them.

  He thumbed the scrapbook, rediscovering pictures he had forgotten, wondering again what it would have been like to have known him. Hello, Father. Real father. What a sad and inglorious shrine. How unfortunate to have given so much in the hills of another country and to then be relegated to a forgotten footlocker in the corner of another man's shed. How sad to have sacrificed your life for your country, to have faced the bullet on the fields of fire only to have your memory purged as a part of a jealous lover's insecurity. A jealous lover of your woman. And how sad to have carried the infantry rifle, only to have your tale hidden in a shed, while the ones who fought the war from behind a typewriter tell their stories for the thousandth time, over a beer at the American Legion.

  Bob Hodges smiled then, fingering a picture of his father in an ill-fitting uniform, wearing a defiant solemn bold glare copied from some Rebel ancestor, his cap cocked to the side of his head. You were only a kid, Father. I'm older now than you were when you died. But you were a warrior, all right. So am I. Did you thrill to the drum, loving the march as I do? Did you inhale the smoke from the gunpowder as the weapons fired in training, wondering at the moment when the training would be real? Did you feel a kinship with the woods beneath your feet, and the heft of the rifle as you patrolled?

  Hodges shook his head in wonderment at the picture. I'll just bet you did. It is your blood that yielded me this certainty, these things. And will I, in the end, meet your fate, Father? I'm not afraid. I don't want to, but I'm not afraid. You and all the others taught me that. Man's noblest moment is the one spent on the fields of fire. I believe that.

  My war is not as simple as yours was, Father. People seem to question their obligation to serve on other than their own terms. But enough of that. I fight because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who.

  HE did not look a warrior. He was rawboned and rough-edged and quiet. He emanated a stringy, acquiescent toughness, born out of a need to accept hard living and disappointments. He rarely smiled but he was fond of humor and liked to deal with people with the bedrock irony of the backcountry: What were all those men doing down in Salt Lick with that automatic digger, Bobby? Well, it looked to me like they was digging a hole.

  His eyes were clear and unquestioning and gray, an older man's eyes because they carried pain comfortably. And he had dirt farmer's hands. They shot out almost embarrassingly from his pencil-thin wrists, thick and calloused and indelicate. They were his most noticeable feature and he liked to keep them inside his pockets. He felt they accentuated his thinness.

  He returned from the shed and finished sorting out his clothes and souvenirs. He placed his clothes in two piles, leaving the larger one for his stepbrothers and packing away a few items that were special to him. He similarly sorted his souvenirs, saving old baseballs and magazines, faded classroom notes, one scrapbook. Then he placed the more important items inside a gray foot-locker next to his bed, and locked it.

  The ordeal done, he opened a newly purchased suitcase, extracted his dress-green uniform, and donned it. For a long time he stood before the mirror in the hallway, fixing the knot in his tie just so, checking the alignment of his shooting badges, standing at attention and adjusting his cap. Then he smiled tentatively, saluted himself, and walked out the door.

  She was waiting. He would be just in time for lunch.

  He walked down the dirt road that scarred the ridge-line and turned onto the narrow strip of gray that hugged the draw. On the gray road there were occasional boxes of frame or tar-paper homes that sat too close to the road. Two cars and a truck passed. The drivers waved to him, and he waved back, feeling self-conscious yet mildly important in his uniform.

  A rusted Chevrolet clanged up from behind him and screeched to a halt. Two older men leaned over to him from the car and smiled half-tauntingly. The nearer of the two spat out the window and called to him.

  “Way-ull. Kiss my ass. Didn't know whether to salute ya or burp ya. A real live Looey.”

  Bob Hodges grinned self-consciously, slapping dust off of his uniform. “You can do whatever you damn well like, long as you call me ‘sir.’ ”

  The other man laughed amusedly and leaned across the car seat. “You do real good over there, y'hear? We proud of you, boy.”

  “Thanks, Mister Tidwell. I'll surely try.”

  He reached the railroad tracks and left the road and followed the tracks for a quarter-mile, scanning the low ridges and the rock-strewn farms where the herders and the proud came so long ago. Jackson's people fought those rocks. Here they struggled still. Those sole places where a man still could walk where great-great-great-grandfather walked, still sleep where he died. Not because they were the first and seized it. Because it was the last and no one wanted it.

  He took a dirt road that scratched a hump in the tracks and walked along it, through a stream of chilled winter dust. When the spring rains came the dust would be floods of ankle-deep mud. He walked two bends in the narrow road and stopped, facing her house.

  On the old gray wood of the front porch there was a new antiqued white rocker. A gleaming aluminum television antenna jutted incongruously above the tar-paper shack. Her first television set. He had bought the television and the rocker for her with his advance pay.

  He had been visiting her forever. At least it seemed that way. It was the best of his early days, when he would slick his hair down wet and brush it hard with his mother's brush, and button all the buttons on his shirt and spend his Sundays there. He would leave the house and walk the same roads and the tracks, throwing rocks at the barking dogs that seemed so big then, walking past the scattered houses and their gardens, thicks of green dotted with red and yellow.

  He stood in his new green uniform and stared at the house and it became an aromatic memory. Days with lilacs and roses and the apple tree's explosions, the huge garden in the back that he would dig for her each spring. The heavy haunt of honeysuckle and the thickets where blackberries offered up sweets a
long the well path. And in the back, the outhouse he would lime for her each Sunday, and the chicken pen that once rattled truculently with the pecks of angry hens and the love-cry of a rooster.

  Most of it was gone. The garden was a small one he would dig for her each Easter when he was home from school. She was too old for even chickens. The pen was a museum. The roses were wild, huge bushes of them. The honeysuckle owned the outhouse, and blackberries covered the well path.

  In the bleak rainwinter air he stood on the road and remembered those early days, the summers when he would cross the damp, steamy yard of high grass and horseweed, fighting his way through the humid thickness, tucking his shirt in just so as he approached the porch. And in the summer she would be waiting for him on the porch, thick and gray on her old faded wood rocker, filling it with age and heaviness. When she saw him she would rock forward, slowly finding the porch floor with her feet, and then stand heavily there on the porch, looking at him with a mix of love and agony, and reach an arm toward him. Then she would call warmly, still not smiling, “Come on up here, boy. Come on in the house. Grandma's cooked you up a nice lunch, just special for you.”

  He would climb the porch steps, each Sunday feeling the wood grow older and softer, and look at the floor while she briefly hugged him. Then they would walk slowly, she behind him, into the darkness of her house.

  They would eat a quiet lunch, just the two of them there in the dimness of the house, he struggling to remember proper manners and she serving him like an honored guest. The lunch would be rich with her own things, a part of herself: greens from her garden, chicken from her pen, homemade peanut candy.

  He would sit small at the table, trying to be the man she was remembering through him, trying to ease the pain of her memories and make her present days more bearable. And lunch would soften her as water melts the stiffness of a sponge.

  After lunch he would do chores for her: hoe weeds in her garden; lime the outhouse, maybe; mend a fence, perhaps. And then they would talk. She would always ask him. He would come in from choring and she would have the dishes cleaned and she would stare a moment and then ask him, each Sunday as if it were the first time. “You got time to visit? I know your mama's got lots of things for you to do.” She would never mention his stepfather or his half brothers and half sister. They did not exist to her. He was the only product of her son and his mother, the only Hodges left, last of his father's family.