“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. Rene took Louis’s hand. “Louis, it’s Rene. 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 Rene 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.
Rene’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 Rene, 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 RENE 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 Rene 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. Rene’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 Rene 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.
Rene 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?”
But he paid her no attention. His eyes were wild and he muttered oaths as he pulled car after car off the shelves and flung them at the far wall.
“Dad, stop it. Stop it!”
But he didn’t stop. He glanced wildly at Rene, then took a model fire engine and smashed it to the floor. And when it didn’t break, he dropped to his knees and pummeled it with a hammer.
“Dad. Please. Don’t,” she pleaded.
But he disregarded her and tore another off the shelf and smashed it.
“Dad, I made those with you. We did those together. Please, stop. Please,” she wailed.
He froze, the hammer still raised. He glowered at Rene, and for a hideous moment she thought he would come at her.
“Dad, it’s me. Rene, your daughter.”
“You’re not my daughter. Where’s my daughter? You’re a … fake.”
She moved closer to him and the overhead light. “Dad, it’s me. Rene. I’m right here.”
Then for an agonizing moment she watched his eyes soften as recollection registered in his poor beleaguered brain. He then let out a low groan as he surveyed the bright wreckage. The hammer slipped from his hand, and he began to cry. “I hate this,” he said as she embraced him.
“I know, I know,” she whispered. “I love you …”
“I hate this. I can feel the damn holes. I can feel them filling my head.” His voice dissolved.
“Don’t,” she begged, as she felt her heart tear. “I love you, Dad. I love you.”
And for a long moment they stood there silently embracing amongst the scatter of dimming light.
Rene could not bring back her father, nor could she have saved him from the slow and inevitable disintegration—this conclusion she had at last come to accept. But she would do anything to see Louis go home and resume his life with his mind again intact and his memories whole and good and not fraught with throwback traumas of the Red Tent.
41
SIX MONTHS.
In the muddy light of his room Jack woke up again. The nurses had checked him at regular intervals, wiring his head to monitors to be certain he hadn’t slipped back into a coma. He hadn’t. He had made it to the other side with his mind and senses open to his surroundings. Green and orange beeps and blips and drips and broken blinds and gray predawn light seeping through like fog.
Six months.
Everybody was amazed and delighted that he was thinking so clearly, so logically, and communicating so well. Some kind of miracle, they had proclaimed.
But what difference did that make to him? Yesterday he was married and planning to retire from teaching to open a first-class restaurant with Vince Hammond—to give Carleton Center some gastronomic panache. And today it’s next year, and he’s divorced, bedridden, stripped of plans beyond his med schedule, and feeling like roadkill.
