Gradually the NVA began to step up their rocket and mortar attacks on both the engineer camp and the firebase, although except for probes by small squads of NVA, there had been no ground attacks. If a ground attack against the firebase came, it would have to be launched along a long ridge that connected the mountaintop with the rest of the chain. This was the place where he was to meet with Light when Light contacted him on the walkie-talkie. Although he set the radio on Light’s frequency every night, Jackson had heard nothing from him.
The intensity of the attacks increased, and Jackson sat in the TOC listening to the incoming, the dust from the sandbags above his head sifting down on him as each shell or rocket exploded in the compound. Although he was afraid, he did not believe he would die. He had moved the cot Light had slept on into the TOC. Pressing his nose against the canvas fabric of the cot he tried to remember how Light had smelled, that stink of decaying leaves and damp earth.
“You promised. Goddamn, you promised,” he often whispered into the canvas.
After the attack was over he would lie on the cot, just outside the circle of light thrown by the TOC’s single naked bulb, and think of home.
I could have gone to college, he often thought. I could have had a deferment.
But Jackson found it difficult to take the deferment. Jackson’s great-grandfather had ridden with Forrest, his grandfather had fought at Belleau Wood, his father in Normandy, and his uncle Frank in Korea. He had noticed how excited his father and Frank got when they watched the war on the news, the camera bouncing around all over the place when the action got hot. They expected him to enlist.
The summer he graduated from high school he began to help his uncle Frank at the cleanup shop for used cars. Then it was fall, and some of his friends went off to college while others were drafted. He polished cars with a buffer in the shop and waited.
“It won’t last much longer,” Frank said. “You’re going to miss it.”
“Mama wants me to go to college,” Jackson said.
“You can go after. Sure, I know you’re worried now. You’ll be all right.”
Frank had been the one who had cured him of his fear of hand-grabbing for catfish. Every spring he had dreaded the sound of the first heavy rain falling on the roof because that meant the lake would soon flood the woods and fields.
On Saturday mornings his father and Frank would take him to the backwaters and force him to wade through the flooded trees and brush and stick his hand down into that cold, muddy water to grope about for a fish under a submerged log or in a hollow tree trunk.
There was a trick to it he just couldn’t seem to learn. He always got finned by the fish or ended up with a turtle and a few times with a snake or, worse yet, grabbed the fish’s tail and the cat, twisting its cold, slick body out of his grip, escaped.
Finally in disgust they allowed him to stay in the boat. Then one day Frank had made him get out of the boat and taking his hand showed him how to place it gently on the fish, both their hands under the log together, he smelling the whiskey on his uncle’s breath.
“Feel him, boy?” Frank asked. “Pretend it’s a woman. Tickle her, find out where she lives.”
His father and Frank had laughed.
But suddenly he had understood, not because he knew anything about touching a woman. He understood because Frank had said the right words, had showed him. Closing his hand around the fish’s tail, he jerked the cat out from under the log.
Maybe Frank was right about the war, Jackson thought. Maybe I should enlist.
But instead he waited, and Frank kept telling him about the good times he had had in Korea. Frank showed him the leather holster and pistol taken off a North Korean officer he had shot in a night ambush.
But Jackson’s mother had other ideas.
“None of my family ever went to college, no Jackson either. Bill’s going,” his mother kept saying every time Frank mentioned the war.
And his father said, “I told him I’d pay. He says he don’t want to go.”
So Jackson worked on the cars and looked after the cows and made sure the five thousand chickens in the three big chicken houses had plenty of feed and water while his father drove off to work fifty miles away at the steel plant in Birmingham.
On weekends he and Loretta went to the movies and afterwards went to the old Jackson homesite to make love in his pickup. Years ago there had been a fire. Now only the foundation, the well, and the jonquils remained.
He remembered one night they had driven out to the homesite. Loretta had just found a job in Birmingham as a legal secretary.
“Maybe we should get married?” he said. “I could find a job working on cars in Birmingham.”
“You’re going to be drafted,” she said.
“You could come live with me after basic.”
“You’ll be going to Vietnam.”
“Maybe I’ll get Germany.”
Her clothes were gone, and he reached out for her. She pushed his hand away.
“Are you going to spend the rest of your life fixing up cars?” she asked.
“You know I’m waiting on the draft,” he said.
“Go to college.”
“Frank’s teaching me the business.”
“You don’t want to marry me.”
She began to dress. After that he still took her to the movies occasionally, but they no longer went to the homesite.
Then Jackson got the letter. He was relieved someone had made up his mind for him.
In late October he and his father went to the river near the home-site. At the churchyard across the river, the cavalryman and the marine lay buried. They fished for bass, wading the shoals. At noon they stopped for lunch on a large, flat boulder in the center of the steam. They gutted the fish, throwing the entrails into the river. Jackson washed the blood off his hands in the cold water.
“Were you afraid?” Jackson asked.
“Sometimes, mostly before we fought,” his father said. “Once it started I was all right. You’ll be all right too. Jacksons have always been good soldiers.”
“Did you hate the men you killed.”
“They were Kraut bastards. They killed my buddies. I hated them during the war but not after. They were soldiers like me.”
“I don’t hate the Viet Cong.”
It was funny, Jackson thought. He had imagined he would be fighting little men dressed in black pajamas, not NVA regulars.
“You’ll learn,” his father said.
But he had not learned to hate them. He would kill them if he could, but it was hard to hate men who had been trapped by the war the same as he.
When he came home on leave after basic, Loretta showed up at Frank’s shop. Jackson was steam cleaning an engine.
“I’m thinking about moving to Birmingham,” she said.
“When?”
“You’ll be gone.”
“This time next year I’ll be home.”
“You be careful.”
He put down the steam hose and kissed her. Then he drove her home.
And in the bunker at night he often tried to picture his homecoming, his parents and uncles, and Loretta meeting him at the Birmingham Airport. But one night he closed his eyes and found it impossible to imagine what Loretta looked like.
“Loretta, Loretta,” he said out loud, hoping the words could make her appear.
But all he could imagine was the figure of a girl without a face. He knew if he did not have her picture wrapped in plastic in a pocket of his fatigue jacket he would never be able to summon up her green eyes and red hair, her knees skinned from playing softball.
But one person whose image was always clear in his mind, whom he was able to call up anytime he wished, was Light. All he had to do was close his eyes and there was Light with his skin that was too white, his washed-out blue eyes, his face set in an expression that gave no clue to what he was thinking.