He was in the Secondary Radio School at Navy Pier in Chicago, working to earn his EMT rating so he could ship out to the Pacific and get killed. In late May 1945 he was a week away from finishing the program, and they were conducting the umpteenth speed trial. He and three other seamen were lined up in front of identical units. When they started the timer you were supposed to switch off the power, take out the drawer, replace the faulty tube, put the drawer back in and switch the power back on. Vernon did all that, then noticed he’d slid the drawer in cockeyed, so he pulled it out to feed it in straight, only he’d forgotten to turn off the power again. These were your typical electronics racks with no bottom. His right-hand fingers slipped up inside the frame, the juice hit him, and as he convulsed, the heavy drawer settled farther down, frying the holy crap out of index, middle, and ring finger while maybe he screamed or maybe he just vibrated and grinned until someone thought to switch the power off.
His hand was the biggest mess you ever saw, and for six weeks the Navy doctors pulled surviving skin around flesh and bone, dressed and undressed, cleaned and repeated, and during that time his unit shipped out. Some of his classmates saw action, a few were killed in his place. Once his fingers had more or less healed, it took the Navy the usual dog’s age to reassign him. All that time he stayed in the hospital up at Great Lakes, playing gin rummy with other grateful malingerers. They had just issued his new orders when the war ended.
• • •
John Vernon Fuller—J. V. to his family and few acquaintances, Vernon to his wife and self—grew up in Durham, North Carolina. His mother was an agoraphobe, his older sister a dim bulb, and his younger brother fancied himself an artist whom the world unaccountably failed to appreciate. He loved his father, who endured the weight of them all in their underbuilt little house on First Avenue, just inside the city limits. Their front porch looked across scrubby fields and farmland. There were no other numbered avenues, as though, after taking the measure of this one, the planners had thought better of it.
Dad sold life insurance from an oak desk in an office downtown for thirty years. Vernon and he shared a sense of humor, an interest in baseball teams and a love of playing catch, all of which his brother, Julian, lacked. Julian decided he was superior to that, and everything else besides. Dad didn’t understand him and maybe Julian felt rejected. He was closer to their mother, whose mind was vacant enough that she could wander in it freely, fearing accidents, decisions, ideas, plans, and changes of plans. She’d grown up as the assigned companion of a disabled sister who couldn’t even attend to her own toilet. She had never spent a moment alone, never gone to a dance or movie, never dated a man until she met Dad. Some of his mother’s neuroses young Vernon managed to forgive, but one of the many things she would not allow her children to do, on grounds of intolerable risk, was ride a bicycle. To this day, Vernon resents that. His father seemed never to lose patience with the old ninny, but would occasionally trade a glance and a wink with his older son.
One night when Julian was in his late twenties—this must have been the summer of ’55—he telephoned their father from jail. He’d been caught in Wilmington soliciting sex from a sailor. Vernon rode buses all night down from the University of Chicago, where he was a graduate student, and witnessed how devastated his father was. Julian, out on Dad’s bail, stood shaving in the bathroom in the old house and had the gall to say to Vernon that the discovery was a relief. He even smirked, “You wouldn’t believe who else we know—”
Vernon recoiled. Their father had aged a decade and here Julian was gloating, floating free, as always. “Julian,” he said, “what on earth makes you think I want to hear who you’ve fucked or been fucked by?”
Vernon had to hurry again down from Chicago less than a year later, when his father died of a heart attack. Vernon has always wondered if Julian’s disgrace helped to kill him. He has also wondered if his father might have survived the attack if there had been someone around other than his worthless mother and his dimwitted sister to get the poor man to the hospital faster.
• • •
Growing up, Vernon was at the top of all his classes. Later he said to his own son, Mark, when Mark was burning through high school, “I was always being told by one teacher or another, ‘You’re good at this, you ought to make a career of it.’ You can’t let that influence you. You can’t say to them, even if it’s true, ‘Hey, I’m an ace—I’m good at everything.’”
Mark is even good at music, which Vernon isn’t. Mark must have gotten that from his mother. Vernon played sax in a high school jazz band, honking through big band numbers written out in simplified form. Improvising was way out of their league. He has a photo somewhere of his band playing at the senior prom. He’s sweating, sporting a pompadour that looks like a possum, leaning into his sax as though engaged in unrewarding work with a shovel.
The mood at the prom was somber. It was June 1944, and most of the boys had an idea they might die soon. All those “best of lucks” written to him in his yearbook took on a deeper meaning. Only one classmate made a direct reference: “I hope
