Another Man's Moccasins

An airman came up and looked at me as I picked up the shot glass and plucked the paper that was stuck to its bottom. It was typed in black letters and was obviously written by a two-fingered typist since the pressure was even on all the letters. It was from a mountainous site ten miles inside Laos; a station that wasn’t supposed to even exist. Recon Team Wyoming was assuring me that he was fine and was inquiring as to how I’d made out in the war’s most recent developments in his own special way. I read “Seen your ghost lately?”

The shot glass stayed steady in my hand as I remembered a professor of Shakespeare at USC who read to an uninterested class, “I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’ the dead men walk again.”

The airman leaned forward and looked in my face. “How do you know her?”

I poured myself another shot. “Who?”

“Colonel Maggie.”

“Who?”

“Martha Raye, Lieutenant. She was on the Steve Allen Show, she was a movie star...”

I slugged the shot down and set it back on the Bear’s note, picked up the pen, and started on the letter to Mai Kim’s family with a renewed vigor. I had to get out of Vietnam, it was getting as strange as Wyoming.

I dropped Henry at his T-Bird and Dog with Ruby and was late getting to the gym but changed my clothes and quickly climbed the steps to the second floor and the Universal machines. I made the corner at the landing and started the last leg when I heard a smattering of laughter that caused me to slow.

I stopped on the stairs. I could see Cady, who was seated at the leg press, and Vic’s brother, who was standing in front of her with his back to me. Michael’s T-shirt stretched across his broad young shoulders and read PHILADELPHIA HOMICIDE UNIT, OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. They laughed again, and I listened as he attempted to motivate my daughter into finishing her workout. “Two more...”

I waited to see how the conflict would resolve itself and then fought against the wave of exhaustion that cemented my feet to the concrete steps and forced me to think about the scene that had unfolded only an hour ago. I caught my breath, more than a couple of emotions tearing at me like the mockingbirds had torn into Virgil’s untouched groceries.

The bag I’d left at the beginning of the week had still been hanging off the Lone Bear Road guardrail.

I had sat with Dog at my side, placed the new grocery bags at my feet, and watched as the sporadic traffic dutifully slowed and swept into the opposite lane. Wyoming was an emergency-lane-change state, after all. I thought about this morning. I thought about Ngo Loi Kim, and how she wouldn’t get out of my truck.

A three-way conversation had lasted for almost an hour with Henry as the translator, but it still seemed that there had been so much more to say and not enough time to say it. I tried to tell her about Mai Kim and about the war.

She had given me a letter. The words had been written in an unsteady hand and poorly. The word choices were simple and sentimental, and the guy who had written it had needed a lot more practice giving condolences. He’d gotten it.

I wondered what I’d have told that baby-faced Marine; and the things I wouldn’t have. I wondered what he would have had to say to me. Would he approve of how we had turned out? Would he think I had done everything I could? Would he think I was a good man?

I hoped so and, as I’d read the tattered letter, fuzzy at the edges where it had been folded and refolded, I remembered how I had written Mai Kim’s family that I had told her about a place on the other side of the world—about an unremarkable pass in a remarkable red rock wall where a number of unsavory characters had found a place through which they could herd stolen livestock, about the fat trout flipping their powerful tails through clear freezing water—about my home, a place where the snow-capped peaks stood guard.

“You did not really expect him to be here, did you?”

I looked up at Henry Standing Bear and then down at the plastic bag from the IGA that had twisted in the wind and cinched itself down to a braided strip. I could still see the outline of the untouched groceries—there were a few apples that the mockingbirds had broken through the plastic and gotten, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, and a tin of smoked oysters.

The afternoon sun warmed us and a cooling breeze feathered down from the mountains as I looked at the entrance of the tunnel but could see no tracks in the shallow mud of Murphy Creek. “I guess it’s like a wild birds’ nest, once you touch it, they move on.”

The Bear sat beside me on the guardrail and looked off toward the Bighorns. There were two clouds that hung over Cloud Peak like smoke signals. “Maybe so.”