He glared at her through wild eyes. “They took care of him good. Oh, yeah. In the Red Tent, the dirty bastards. The Red Tent is where they did it all. Colonel Chop Chop and Blackhawk, the Russkie.” Louis began to lick his lips and swallow hard against whatever was afflicting his recall. Suddenly his face contorted. “He was sitting right across from me.” Then his voice changed. “Between my goddamn knees,” he cried in dismay. “They put it between my knees. In my goddamn helmet. God!” His voice thinned out into a plea. “Please don’t. Please don’t. I’ll tell you whatever you want.” The next moment his face spasmed into something else, and he sat up straight in his chair, his voice hard. He was wavering in and out of some awful recollection. “Yeah, I was there. Not six feet away, and they kept cutting him—the bastard with the baby face and knife.”
Louis’s eyes dilated as he seemed to stare beyond René as he addressed her. “I couldn’t make them stop, you got me? No matter what, I couldn’t make them. And those two bastards stood in the corner telling him to keep going, keep cutting, no matter what I told them. I begged them.” Louis’s face crumbled, and he looked down at his lap and the sleeve of his shirt. “I got his blood on me.”
René took his arm. “Louis, snap out of it. Everything’s okay.”
From the corridor a nurse and two male aides walking by saw the commotion and shot over to their table. René was on her feet trying to calm Louis, who was trying to get away, his face contorted with anguish. When Louis laid eyes on Malcolm, he started yelling and swinging his arms.
“Hey, Louis, what’s the problem?” He tried to catch Louis’s arms and keep him from breaking away.
“Louis, calm down. Everything’s okay,” the nurse said.
But it was clear Louis was beyond reasoning with, lost someplace far away. Malcolm managed to pin Louis’s arms from behind and settle him in a chair.
Louis kept looking behind him. “Over there,” he said to the aide.
“What’s over there?” the aide said, looking at the trees outside.
Louis shook his head. His face was taut, his eyes squinting as if trying to get a clear focus.
“Come on, Louis,” the nurse said. “You’re upsetting all these people.”
But Louis kept looking across the area, his eyes fixed on something else. “Louis, open up.” René could see the nurse hold a pill to his mouth.
“They cut one side, then the other,” he said to the aide. Then he looked down at his lap, seeing imaginary horror.
“Come on, open up.”
Louis looked at the pill and water bottle in the nurse’s hand and pushed her hand away. But she persisted. “You have to take this, Louis. It’ll make you feel better.”
He shot a look at René. “They’re trying to brainwash me,” he whispered. “It’s what they do, they brainwash you.”
“Don’t be silly, Louis,” the aide said. “Nobody’s brainwashing you. Open up.”
René could see the small yellow pill. Haldol. One of the antipsychotics the staff had been giving patients suffering flashbacks. But to Louis the pill represented something else. “Who, Louis?” René asked, disregarding the others. “Who’s trying to brainwash you?”
“The NKPA,” he whispered to her. “The fucking Commies. Take it and you’re gone, kaput.”
He struggled to get up again, still focused on his buddy dying and the blood on his hands and enemy gunners on the ridge. René took Louis’s hand. “Louis, it’s René. Look at me. Please look at me.” Louis turned his face toward her. Tears were in his eyes. “Nobody’s brainwashing you. Please believe me. Please take the pill.”
He glared at her for a moment, then he opened his mouth to say something, and the nurse pressed a pill inside and put the bottle to his lips and squirted some water. Reflexively Louis swallowed as if drinking from a buddy’s canteen. “He’s got a kid sister. What’re we going to tell her, huh? That they cut him up?”
Then something clicked inside of him, and his expression changed. “Gotta get them back,” he said to René in a conspiratorial whisper. “I promised.” The aides raised Louis to his feet and began to walk him to his room. “I gave him my word.” And he tugged against the grip of the aide.
René’s insides squeezed as she took one of Louis’s hands, feeling as if she had betrayed him. Because in a few minutes he’d be back in the ward—in the moment, and that was not where he wanted to be.
“It’s what they do. They brainwash you.”
He wanted to be back with his buddies of the 187th Airborne, going on his “special” drop, avenging whatever they did to Fuzzy Swenson in the Red Tent.
As they approached the door, Louis looked at René, then over his shoulder. “I saw him and his buddy. I saw the bastards.” His eyes were huge and blazing.
“Who, Louis? Who did you see?”
“The colonel.”
“What colonel?”
“Chop Chop.”
“Who’s Chop Chop, Louis? Tell me.”
“They were here.”
“Who, Louis?”
But Louis didn’t answer. He just nodded to himself as they hauled him to his room.
40
FOR A LONG TIME RENÉ SAT in the parlor looking out the window at the rustling leaves of the trees. All was calm again, and outside the slanting sun sent shafts of dancing light into the woods. She could not stop hearing Louis in distress and seeing his face contort and his eyes blaze like coals in the wind.
And suddenly she was at the sink in her parents’ kitchen doing the dinner dishes.
Her mother had passed away the year before, and he managed to function well without her. The visiting nurse was gone for the day, and her father was in the basement at his workshop, from which René had removed all the dangerous tools. In a matter of months, she would move him into a nursing home. Over the years, he had built model cars from kits and had become an expert. Nearly every night after dinner he’d go down, turn on his tape player, and while oldies filled the cellar, he’d sit on his stool and work away like some crazed Gepetto. As a girl she had helped him put together several models.
He would sometimes wear a jeweler’s loupe for the fine detailing—fitting chrome trim and micro decals in place. He had even built a spray-paint station with sheets of plastic and glove holes. His handiwork was wonderful, and he was at his happiest when engaged in it. After twenty-five years, he had amassed an impressive collection of classic models, from Matchbox-size to over a foot long. And they sat on shelves arranged by size and years—all enameled in brilliant gloss colors and looking like jeweled artifacts from some pharaoh’s tomb. René’s favorite was a 1938 Packard, which looked like something Clark Gable would have driven. Her father’s favorite was the 1952 Studebaker Commander, the car her parents drove after his return from Korea.
“Someday all these will be yours,” he once said. “Imagine the yard sale.”
It was a little after seven and the slanting rays of the sun lit up the western wall of the house. Suddenly René heard banging below. She shot to the cellar door. “Dad, you all right?” she yelled down.
No response.
“Dad, is everything okay?” She could see that the orange pools of sunlight coming from the window wells mixing with the fluorescent lamp of his bench. “Dad?”
Silence. Then a sharp metallic crashing sound.
René dashed down the cellar stairs, half-expecting to find him sprawled out under one of the tables or machines. Instead he was standing in the middle of the floor and hurling model cars at the wall, pieces ricocheting around the room. “Dad, what are you doing?”