DOES IT SHOW IN VIETNAM?

A Short Story

By

Jane Piirto

First published in Piirto, J. (1995). A Location in the Upper Peninsula. Minneapolis,MN: Sampo Publishing

       Linda met Larry right before the first snowstorm, soon after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, about a year before Kennedy was killed. The locals who commuted to the state college and the Air Force guys were downtown at the bars to celebrate the Air Force guys getting off alert. The local boys didn’t like the Air Force guys, because they went after the local girls, but the local girls liked the Air Force guys fine. Seven guys for every girl was the ratio.

       The Air Force guys were from all over the country, and it got so the local girls could tell a guy from California from a guy from Maryland just by the way he danced, before he even said a word and gave away his accent. California guys danced looser than Maryland guys. Many local girls ended up marrying Air Force G.I.’s, leaving the Upper Peninsula and settling down elsewhere. This is how it is wherever there are military bases.

       Larry was from the Bronx, in New York City. He wore black pointed ankle-high boots or black pointed shoes and white socks, with cuffed pants, a thin black tie, and sunglasses, even after dark. Linda noticed him at once, the first night they met, when he came in. Who wouldn’t? He seemed to be by himself, and smoked Pall Malls. He looked like a member of the rock and roll band playing there that night. The band, in suits and thin ties, swayed in sync with little steps thrown in, the guitars swinging. But this boy’s hair was a little too short, so Linda knew he was Air Force.

       After he asked her to Cha-cha, he asked her to have a drink. Linda didn’t drink, but she had a coke with him, and a couple of puffs from his Pall Mall. They talked and talked. He was her first warrant officer, halfway between an officer and an enlisted man. And her first helicopter pilot, too. Well, not yet, but he planned to re-up and become one. His favorite book was Kerouac’s On The Road. Linda’s favorite book was Salinger’s Frannie and Zooie. His favorite singer was Little Richard, and his favorite group was The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Linda’s favorite singer was Edith Piaf, and she liked Dave Brubeck, too. He said he went into the Air Force because he got sick of college and thought he’d take a few years and see the world on Uncle Sam, then finish up on the G.I. Bill. He said he wanted to go to Columbia and study medicine later.

       He said he liked the college girls better than the other local girls. They knew more. Everyone here was so conservative, such hicks. Linda agreed. She wanted to go East someday, to New York City. Would he show her around? She let him walk her home even though he had a car. If she let him drive her home it would mean she was cheap, a pickup in a bar. He held her hand as they walked along the sidewalks past the sandstone police station, and he sang “Maria” to her. They each had seen the movie three times. He’d seen the play, too, on Broadway. She let him kiss her while they were sitting on a stone wall on the hill where her neighborhood was located. The first snowfall of the year was beginning. They caught snowflakes on their tongues.

       After they walked up the rest of the hill, she ran into the house, got the keys for her father’s 1956 Ford station wagon, and drove him back down to the bar, where his battered Willys 4-wheel-drive Jeep sat alone in the parking lot, getting covered with snow. “You don’t look like the Jeep type,” Linda said.

       “I wasn’t, but I am now,” he said. “I love this country. I’m learning to fly fish.” It was 5 A.M. and they had been talking all night. Linda’s car pool would pick her up at 7:15 to go to the state college, so when she got home she didn’t go to bed, but just sat and thought about him. She would spend many nights alone, thinking about him, but she didn’t know that then.

       He didn’t call her for three weeks and she almost died. By the time he did, there had been a huge snowstorm, just in time for Thanksgiving, and the deer hunters were very glad. Usually there is not very much snow for deer hunting season. Deer hunters prefer snow so they can track the deer easier. The Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend the snow came down. The radio was filled with news of students stranded on the way back to school downstate, caught on M-28 or U.S. 2, or out in the snow blowing across the fields or on the Seney stretch with lake effect snow off Lake Superior. But the college didn’t cancel classes, so Linda picked her car pool up thirty minutes early. Five of them shared the driving, one day per week. Monday was Linda’s day.

       Sandy came out of her house late as usual, clutching her half-eaten toast spread with sticky jam, no boots on, slipping through the drifts. The others talked of dropping Sandy from the car pool because she had no consideration; they always had to wait for her and she was always getting people’s cars sticky, but Linda was fond of her. They studied for literature tests together, to see who could get the higher “A.” Linda headed them to Marquette and the soft snow flew up as the Ford station wagon solidly hit the drifts. The snowplows couldn’t keep up with the snow. One of the keys to driving on snow is to keep a steady foot, to accelerate or decelerate slowly, so you don’t lose traction. Linda’s father had taught her that on the hills of town. “Shift!” he’d cry as she turned onto the bottom of a hill. “Downshift and keep it steady.” Linda rarely got stuck.

       Larry called her that same night, said he’d been working swings, but had been thinking of her and did she want to go out on Friday? Did she.

       She taught him to crosscountry ski that year of their courtship. They packed cocoa and peanut butter and banana sandwiches into her father’s old World War II-vintage knapsacks, with the leather straps cutting into their shoulders, and they skied up behind her house through the sparkling woods in the sun, over snowfields, under clean skies. She told him what wax to use, and how to tramp so he wouldn’t slip back down the trails he’d made. She told him to be the boss of his skis. That was the secret of skiing. Don’t let the skinny little devils get away from you. Control them. Just like driving in the snow. Plant your legs solidly. Use your poles like levers, in front. Place them, to pull with maximum efficiency when you pank up the hill. A little practice and they won’t cross on you. They’ll obey you.

       Even though he was a natural athlete, from all the gang fights, he’d joke, he took awhile getting the hang of it, having two long planks attached to his feet, and he’d forget to dig in his edges or to bend his knees in gulches. He had trouble stopping and would have to sit down to avoid trees. He looked very comical, and she often turned her head to suppress giggles at the sight of him. “Wait until I get you to the city, lady! They we’ll see who thinks what is funny. I’m going to abandon you in the subway and see if you can find your way home.” His jeans would be soaked from falling down so much, and Linda’s would still be pristinely dry, as she waited for him to catch up. Even with wet jeans he took her breath away, with his cocksureness.

•

       Years later, when they could afford downhill skiing in the Rockies, he’d zip past her as she slowly snowplowed down the wide slopes, shushing by her, leaping into spraying stops in front of her. This was after she’d learned her fear of snow.

•

By 1969’s winter, Chicago had happened and everyone had been assassinated. Linda and other professors at the state college called themselves doves as they had meetings and marched and signed petitions. As the wife of a helicopter pilot, Linda got first preference for teaching courses at the Base, and she drove there, passing the B-52’s lined up, painted flat sky blue on their bellies and camouflaged with splotches of green and shades of brown on top. It always bemused her to know that these were the very bombers that all the fuss was about, the silent killers dropping fire from the skies; that here in peaceful, wintry Upper Michigan they rested in innocent rows at the Strategic Air Command base; that next week or tomorrow they could be above North Vietnam dropping firestorms and death, and probably would be.

       Another cold February day. Outside, Linda turned the locking hubs, putting the vehicle into four-wheel drive. She climbed up into the old Jeep, her high-heeled teaching boots turning at the ankle. She clapped her gloved hands, wiggling her fingers, woofing her breath into clouds that soon frosted the windows. She pressed the starter with her thumb, her fingers now curled into her palm, the fingers of the gloves flopping, wet and freezing. She pumped the accelerator. The defroster blew a feeble shoot of air, dripping a vertical puddle on the windows. She waited for the engine to get just a little warm, and for the heater to heat.

       Her small son waited patiently in the seat next to her, his legs stuck out in the stiff red snowsuit, his arms and mittened hands at his side, touching the seat. He couldn’t turn his head to her because his hood couldn’t turn, and so he resorted to speaking from the sides of his eyes and mouth, looking like a miniature gangster. “Mama, are we going to make it out of the driveway?”

       “I’ve got it in 4-wheel.” She noticed her legs getting red in their nylons. Her short skirt was not much protection. But fashionable she would be.

       She wrestled the 4-wheel shift lever and eased the clutch, and the Jeep tires grabbed the crunchy snow as sure as spring was coming, and they moved down the long unplowed road from the trailer court where they lived, to the highway. At the highway she stopped and scrambled back down to turn the locking hub back to regular drive. Then they drove along, up high, higher than the slipping cars on the glassy highway, almost as if they were in a low-flying helicopter.

       “Does it snow in Vietnam, Mama?”

       “No, it’s very hot. Jungle. Lots of trees, like here, though.” Her breath puffed out as she answered him.

       “Will my daddy have a letter for us when we get home?”

       “Perhaps. If the mail can land at the airport after last night’s snow.”

       They drove along past the frozen waves of Lake Superior, into town. This drive into the city was always beautiful, whatever the season. She was glad Larry talked of settling here after he got out of the Air Force. She couldn’t picture herself in the Bronx, though she liked visiting there, taking the subway into Manhattan, strolling along Fifth Avenue past the Metropolitan Museum, on a sunny day. “Looks like I’ll make my ten o’clock after all.”

       “That’s good, Mama. Will we get to play outside in the snow today?”

       “Son, if Mrs. Maki can get all you kids into your snowsuits and if you can find your own boots, you’ll go outside, I’ll bet.” Mrs. Maki and her helpers stuck twenty children’s fat legs into snowsuit bottoms and forty stiff arms into snowsuit tops and all those recalcitrant thumbs into mittens pinned to sleeves. They slid all those rubber-soled shoes into plastic bags and then into boots that always had stuck zippers, all so that twice a day the children could stand around like stiff robots in the yard, trying to run and play, but hampered so much by their snowsuits that they could do little that was graceful and normal for toddling children. Then, twice a day they had to undress them all.

       They pulled up to the nursery school, and Craig tumbled out of the Jeep and waddled up to the door. He had begun to insist on going in by himself, because he thought he was getting older now. Besides, he got a kick out of ringing the doorbell. She watched him as he ran clumsily up the walk, doing his helicopter imitation sound and trying to whirl his snowsuited arms.

       “When will my daddy be home, Mama?” he asked every night as she kissed him before sleep.

       “On leave? In a few months. But he’ll be going back. He’s got eighteen months left, Craig,” she would say.

       She passed the bombers once a week on her way to her humanities class. A navigator in her class wrote a theme about a napalm drop from one of those B-52’s. “We are so high up,” he wrote, “and the plane is dark. Nothing but the smoothness of the flight and the lights on the instruments. I am isolated from the rest of the crew. Chit-chat on the earphones. I find the right coordinates and tell the pilots. Someone presses something. There isn’t any sign that we have dropped. Far below, a pinpoint of fire color, but real small. Most of the time we are above the clouds and we can’t see anything. We turn around and go home. We have a drink at the officer’s club before we go to sleep. Being a navigator in the U.S. Air Force has nothing to do with what you bleeding heart liberals think it is. I’m in the war, supposedly fighting, but I’m as removed from it as the rest of you people up here in the U.P., doing your pinko picketing at the Post Office.”

       She read the essay to the other men in the class. They were mostly enlisted men who had joined the Air Force, hoping to be stationed stateside, and they were. They held technical jobs like airplane mechanic E-4, and radar technician E-3, trying to get a few hours of college credit in. The navigator had a college degree but it was in engineering and he wanted to become a Renaissance man, he said.

       “What do you think of this essay?” The men complacently said it sounded like a good tour to them, better than being a grunt in the Army.

        “Don’t you see the moral distance here?” She pleaded with these bland young men. “Someone presses something. And what are the consequences of pushing that starter button? Don’t you care that people are getting killed for nothing? Don’t you care that we’re in a war that isn’t even declared?”

       “Lady, I’m trying to save my own ass. Just didn’t have a deferment like you liberal college types, that’s all.”

       “What does your husband think, him out there flyin’ helicopters and you here safe and warm, talkin’ to us like this?”

       She read them from Larry’s letters, passages about picking up maimed and burned soldiers, children in rags, adults in tears; she read passages describing his fear of dying for no reason, and his fear he would never see her and Craig again, never take the A train again, never fly fish on the Dead River again.

       “Listen, this is written by a middle-class American G.I.,” she would say. “I believe in George Washington and the flag and all that, too,” she would say.

       Some of them would get explosively angry, standing up and shouting at her. But this was certainly humanities in humanities class, she explained to her department chair who’d gotten a call from the Base coordinator. Other students would sit sullenly. She got a few anonymous calls calling her a traitor to her man and her country.

       She was not asked back to teach an extension course at the base the next semester. She wrote letters to Larry telling him what she was doing and he wrote back and said he wished he could be there, joining her. She read anti-war poetry at a rally at the college and encouraged students to burn their draft cards. She wrote letters to her legislators and signed them as the wife of a serviceman. Such senseless and random death and destruction as from the lofty and lethal B-52’s cannot be tolerated. Please stop in the name of human rights, she wrote.

•

       “Sure is a lot of snow up here,” he said, brushing it from his shiny black flapping overshoes with the broom. “I’m from Tennessee myself, we don’t get mucha this white stuff at home,” brushing the snow from the shoulders of his heavy fur-lined Air Force parka.

       “Would you like some coffee?” Linda said, as he bent to pull his boots off.

       “No’m. I won’t be here long. My wife makes me take my boots off the minute I come in the house, just habit, I guess.”

       He looked out the front window of the trailer, acting awkward at being here, a big, red-faced boy playing soldier. “Those kids shore have a good hill built out there,” pointing to the seven foot snowbank where the trailer court kids were pushing each other off in King of the Castle.

       “Yes. Kids and snow, you know. They love it. They never seem to get cold, and it seems to make them healthy, at least it did me. I love the snow, too. I grew up around here.”

       “Yeah, I heard you’re a local. Came back home to be near your folks. Which one of them is yours?”

       “The one in the red snowsuit,” Linda said, coming and leaning next to him on the counter, pointing out the front window.

       “Cute little tyke,” he said.

       “That’s not what you’re here for, is it?” Linda said. “To admire my son and to talk about why I moved here? What did the Air Force want to see me about?”

       “Well, ‘m.” He cleared his throat. “It’s your picture in the papers again. Makin’ that speech at that there anti-war teach-in at the college,” he said. “And then we got another photograph of you carryin’ a sign at the Post Office, that said—. He peered at the photograph. “War is not Healthy for—”

       “War is not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things,” Linda finished, interrupting him in her best supercilious professor’s voice, though she was trembling inside. “It’s the slogan of a group called Another Mother for Peace. I’m in the local chapter, and we marched last Mother’s Day, with our children.”

       “Someone sent us a copy of that one. And we ignored it, but this year you’ve been in the paper three times.”

       “So what?”

       “Well, your husband. Being a G.I. and all. It doesn’t look good for a military wife to act up like that. We got to keep a united front, stand behind our men.”

       “You sound like a black and white World War II movie.”

       He flushed and his mouth turned tough.

       “I’m sorry,” Linda said in a kinder tone. “That was uncalled for. Lieutenant, I am standing behind my man. I’m trying to help stop this war, and get him home. Do you know what he’s probably doing right now? Going in under fire and pulling out wounded soldiers.”

       He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “So the colonel told me to come and mention it to you, nice-like.”

       “Well, Lieutenant—” She peered at his nameband. “Greenwale. You’ve mentioned it. We thank you for your concern.”

       “Are you going to be more careful?”

       “It shouldn’t matter to the Air Force what I do. I don’t live on Base. I’m an American citizen with freedom of expression. Haven’t you heard of the First Amendment? I’m not hurting anyone by speaking and marching.”

       “It don’t look good,” he insisted. “Freedom of speech. Why we’re fighting communism.        “I’m just exercising my rights.”

       “You aren’t doing your husband any good. Why, what must he think of you?”

       Linda had enough sense not to mention that Larry was every bit aware of what she thought, and she had the urge to show his letters to this man, as she had read them to her classes. Being a disloyal wife? She wanted to prove to him exactly how loyal she was.  “I’m against the war for personal as well as political reasons, Lieutenant,” she said. “It took my husband away from his family. All he wanted to do was fly helicopters. Not fly them in Vietnam. He hardly knows Craig at all, and he’s almost three. He could get killed, or captured, anytime. And for what? A civil war that’s been going on for hundreds of years. Not even our fight. A damned civil war!” She heard her voice getting louder, as if she were making a speech.

       “Yeah. Well. You’re dead wrong. And you don’t need to give me another one of your speeches. I read them, they sounded just like the ones they were giving at my college.”

       “But you were one of those in ROTC, weren’t you, Lieutenant? You would never go to a peace rally, would you?”

       “Our instructor assigned us to go or I never would have,” he said. “You don’t have to believe what people are saying about us. We’re people too. Those bleeding heart professors and long-hairs don’t know which end is up, to go and hear them speak,” he said. Linda could feel ire. This kid was calling her narrow-minded, when it was he, and his kind, who were.

       “I heard you speak before,” he continued. “You’re pretty good, you really get people’s emotions het up,” he said. “We got a tape of you at that rally.”

       “A tape?”

       “Your file. Why I came to talk with you. You’re being watched by Washington.”       “Washington?” Linda was shocked. Here? In the U.P.? Then the anger came. “Washington? What do I care about Washington! Let them arrest me! Putme in jail. Put me on tape. Put me on file! Try me. I’ve done nothing illegal. What country is this, anyway?”

       “You liberals think you know it all, that you’ve got right. Well, if you’ve got right, we’ve got might,” he said. His smug face.

       “Let them stop this war. This is an immoral, imperialistic, fucking war, and I don’t care who’s got me on file for saying it! You can go and tell your colonel that! Tell that to Hoover! Tell him to take all the tapes and pictures he wants. Took pictures of me? Who do you think you are? Who do you fucking think you are?”

       “Ma’am, I never heard a nice lady say that word.”

       “What word?” Linda stopped. She remembered. She shouted, “Fucking? Well, I’ll say it again. This is an immoral, imperialistic, fucking war, Lieutenant.” She walked over to him, picked up his boots, and pushed them to his chest, beckoning toward the door. “Now get out of here.”

       He resisted and stood up to her and seemed about to raise a fist to hit her. “Lady, youare what is wrong with this country! You and all those other commies, hippies, and nuts! You and your kind is why we have to fight in ‘Nam!” He pushed her. She had stepped into his space and he was flailing at her to get away. “What kind of wife are you? Your own husband fighting and you act like the bra burners and the filthy-mouthed libbers!” He was yelling very loud. He snatched his boots, not bothering to bend to put them on. He stepped out onto the ice-covered steps and slammed the door. He slipped down the path on his slick soles, his voice raging, as he shouted back at her.

       “If my wife ever acted like you, you smartassed, you—college professor, you dope freak, I’ll bet—I’d-I’d beat the shit out of her!”

       He slammed the door of the blue Air Force official car, started the motor, jammed the gears into reverse, tromping on the accelerator, spinning the wheels backward too fast, too fast, as if he were peeling on pavement and not on snow, a southerner who didn’t know the finer points, not seeing the small red nylon sled of a boy belly bumping behind the car after being pushed off the top of the King’s Castle.

END