“You're welcome. Have a good one,” the girl called after her, and with that, Faunia drove back to Coleman's to finish her breakfast and see what developed with him next. The ring's in the cage. He's got the ring. He's got a three-hundred-dollar ring.
The trip to the Moving Wall up in Pittsfield took place on Veterans Day, when the flag is flown at half-mast and many towns hold parades — and the department stores hold their sales — and vets who feel as Les did are more disgusted with their compatriots, their country, and their government than on any other day of the year.
And yet there he was, on that day of all days, driving up to Pittsfield in Louie's van. They were headed for the half-scale replica of the real Wall that for some fifteen years now had been touring the country; from the tenth through the sixteenth of November, it was to be on view in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn under the sponsorship of the Pittsfield VFW. With him was the same crew that had seen him through the trial of the Chinese meal. They weren't going to let him go alone, and they'd been reassuring him of that all along: we'll be there with you, we'll stand by you, we'll be with you 24/7 if we need to be. Louie had gone so far as to say that afterward Les could stay with him and his wife at their house, and, for however long it took, they would look after him. “You won't have to go home alone, Les, not if you don't want to. I don't think you should try. You come stay with me and Tess. Tessie's seen it all. Tessie understands. You don't have to worry about Tessie. When I got back, Tessie became my motivation. My outlook was, How can anyone tell me what to do. I'm going into a rage without any provocation. You know. You know it all, Les. But thank God Tessie steadfastly stood by me. If you want, she'll stand by you.”
Louie was a brother to him, the best brother a man could ever hope to have, but because he would not leave him be about going to the Wall, because he was so fucking fanatical about him seeing that wall, Les had all he could do not to take him by the throat and throttle the bastard. Gimpy spic bastard, leave me alone! Stop telling me how it took you ten years to get to the Wall. Stop telling me how it fucking changed your life. Stop telling me how you made peace with Mikey. Stop telling me what Mikey said to you at the Wall. I don't want to know!
And yet they're off, they're on their way, and again Louie is repeating to him, '“It's all right, Louie'—that's what Mikey told me, and that's what Kenny is going to tell you. What he was telling me, Les, is that it was okay, I could get on with my life.”
“I can't take it, Lou — turn around.”
“Buddy, relax. We're halfway there.”
“Turn the fucking thing around!”
“Les, you don't know unless you go. You got to go,” said Louie kindly, “and you got to find out.”
“I don't
“How about you take a little more of your meds? A little Ativan. A little Valium. A little extra won't hurt. Give him some water, Chet.”
Once they reached Pittsfield and Louie had parked across the way from the Ramada Inn, it wasn't easy getting Les out of the van. “I'm not doin' it,” he said, and so the others stood around outside smoking, letting Les have a little more time for the extra Ativan and Valium to kick in. From the street, Louie kept an eye on him. There were a lot of police cars around and a lot of buses. There was a ceremony going on at the Wall, you could hear somebody speaking over a microphone, some local politician, probably the fifteenth one to sound off that morning. “The people whose names are inscribed on this wall behind me are your relatives, friends, and neighbors. They are Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, white, native people — Americans all. They gave a pledge to defend and protect, and gave their lives to keep that pledge. There is no honor, no ceremony, that can fully express our gratitude and admiration. The following poem was left at this wall a few weeks ago in Ohio, and I'd like to share it with you. ‘We remember you, smiling, proud, strong / You told us not to worry / We remember those last hugs and kisses...’”
And when that speech was over, there was another to come. “...but with this wall of names behind me, and as I look out into the crowd and see the faces of middle-aged men like me, some of them wearing medals and other remnants of a military uniform, and I see a slight sadness in their eyes — maybe that's what's left of the thousand- yard stare which we all picked up when we were just brother grunts, infantrymen, ten thousand miles away from home — when I see all this, I am somehow transported back thirty years. This traveling monument's permanent namesake opened on the Mall in Washington on November 13, 1982. It took me roughly about two and a half years to get there. Looking back over that time, I know, like many Vietnam veterans, I stayed away on purpose, because of painful memories that I knew it would conjure up. And so on a Washington evening, when dusk was settling, I went over to the Wall by myself. I left my wife and children at the hotel — we were on our way back from Disney World — and visited, stood alone at its apex, close to where I'm standing right now. And the memories came — a whirlwind of emotions came. I remembered people I grew up with, played ball with, who are on this wall, right here from Pittsfield. I remembered my radio operator, Sal. We met in Vietnam. We played the where-you-from game. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Whereabouts in Massachusetts? West Springfield he was from. I said I was from Pittsfield. And Sal died a month after I left. I came home in April, and I picked up a local newspaper, and I saw that Sal was not going to meet me in Pittsfield or Springfield for drinks. I remembered other men I served with...”
And then there was a band — an army infantry band most likely — playing the “Battie Hymn of the Green Berets,” which led Louie to conclude that it was best to wait till the ceremony was completely over before getting Les out of the van. Louie had timed their arrival so they wouldn't have to deal with the speeches or the emotional music, but the program had more than likely started late, and so they were still at it. Looking at his watch, though, seeing it was close to noon, he figured it must be near the end. And, yep — suddenly they were finishing up. The lone bugle playing taps. Just as well. Hard enough to hear taps standing out on the street amid all the empty buses and the cop cars, let alone to be right there, with all the weeping people, dealing with taps
Inside the van, Les was still shaking, but he didn't appear to be looking behind him all the time and only occasionally was he looking over his head for “the things,” and so Louie climbed awkwardly back up inside and sat down next to him, knowing that the whole of Les's life was now the dread of what he was about to find out, and so the thing to do was to get him there and get it done with.
“We're going to send Swift in advance, Les, to find Kenny for you. It's a pretty long wall. Better than you having to go through all those names, Swiff and the guys'll go over and locate it in advance. The names are up there on panels in the order of time. They're up there by time, from first guy to last guy. We got Kenny's date, you gave us the date, so it won't take too long now to find him.”
“I ain't doin'it.”
When Swiff came back to the van, he opened the door a crack and said to Louie, “We got Kenny. We found him.”
“Okay, this is it, Lester. Suck it up. You're going to walk over there. It's around back of the inn. There are going to be other folks there doing the same thing we're doing. They had an official little ceremony, but that's finished and you don't have to worry about it. No speeches. No bullshit. It's just going to be kids and parents and grandparents and they are all going to be doing the same thing. They're going to be laying wreaths of flowers. They're going to be saying prayers. Mostly they're going to be looking for names. They're going to be talking among themselves like people do, Les. Some of them are going to be crying. That's all that's there. So you know just what's there. You're going to take your time but you're coming with us.”
It was unusually warm for November, and approaching the Wall they saw that a lot of the guys were in shirtsleeves and some of the women were wearing shorts. People wearing sunglasses in mid-November but otherwise the flowers, the people, the kids, the grandparents — it was exactly as Louie had described. And the Moving Wall was no surprise: he'd seen it in magazines, on T-shirts, got a glimpse on TV once of the real full-sized
