I remember we were on the New Jersey Turnpike when Jessica told me she was pregnant. I’ve never told this story to anyone, and obviously Hank didn’t know shit about this for most of his life. I wouldn’t be spilling all of this now if I didn’t have a good reason to do so, and if I didn’t have your word that all of this will remain classified until I die. That being said, if you tell anyone about this little secret of mine before I’m in the ground, I will break into your house in the middle of the night, slit your throat while you are sleeping, and annihilate your entire family. I have your name and title—it wouldn’t be all that hard to track down your home address. Believe me. Nothing personal here. Of course I trust you, or I wouldn’t be telling you all of this in the first place. But it makes me feel better to let you know that there will be big-time fucking consequences if any of this shit becomes public. If you break our little agreement, you will be sorry. And dead.
Brian was the father, Jessica went on to tell me. He had raped her a month before. The day I showed up she had gone back to the house to speak with Brian about her options, but like I said before, he was high out of his mind, so all he could do in response to Jessica’s pleas was jerk off. Nice guy, right? I have no regret killing that motherfucker, if it was indeed my fist that took his life. They say killing a man with one punch is one hell of a hard thing to do, so maybe it was divine intervention. If you believe in God, we may be able to agree on that.
Back in the GTO, I glanced over at Jessica. It was nighttime by then, and I could only see her face when we passed under lights, or when cars going in the opposite direction illuminated her with their headlights for a second or two, creating an eerie sort of strobe effect. I could clearly see that she was contemplating buying the bullet. She was a senior in high school. Beautiful. Radiant. And I would later learn that she was an extremely talented painter. But that night, as we drove around, she was contemplating death. I could smell the Grim Reaper there with us. Like I said before, I know that motherfucker Death better than you know yourself.
Scary fucking words started coming fast and furious out of her pretty little mouth. I knew she was closer than ever to buying the bullet, because she didn’t care what I might think about her. She told me all about how Brian had coerced her into smoking too much weed, and then he used his tongue to transfer a few LSD tabs when he forced her to kiss him. I don’t know too much about drugs—I’m a beer guy—but this asshole used weed and acid to make a young girl vulnerable, and then he raped her several times over the course of an afternoon. Yes, rape, because she didn’t want it to happen. Period. That’s rape. She was a virgin before that. And all this happened because she was genuinely concerned about her brother Roger’s well-being. No good deed goes unpunished, right?
Jessica didn’t want to have an abortion because she didn’t think she could live with herself afterward, murdering an unborn child. She wasn’t religious and was all in for women’s rights. My dead wife might even have been described as a bleeding-heart liberal, if we’re really being honest, but for whatever reason, she just couldn’t wrap her head around killing the baby inside her—which, of course, would end up becoming Hank.
What she could wrap her mind around, and was working her way up to telling me about, was killing herself. That way she wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of aborting her unborn child, and as an extra bonus, she wouldn’t have to deal with her depression any longer either. The fact that she had been raped would go away too.
I picked up on the self-slaughter vibe way before Jessica got around to admitting that she was suicidal and so I interrupted her and told her that I had a plan that might work.
My plan was this: she and I would get to know each other over the next few weeks, and if we liked each other, we’d begin to tell everyone that I’d knocked her up, and then we’d get married. If we didn’t like each other, well then, nothing was lost, and she could go ahead with her original plan.
“What original plan?” she asked me, because she hadn’t yet actually admitted to being suicidal.
I told her the common Vietnam veteran theory about buying the bullet, which she hadn’t heard before because her brother was too busy getting high to educate her. “If you think you’re going to die, it will definitely happen. So be careful with your thoughts.”
Then I told her I knew what she meant when she said she was going to just disappear, but she kept pushing me to say it. So I finally did.
“Why would you want to marry a suicidal girl?” she asked. It was a fair question. I didn’t want to marry her just yet, I told her, but I liked driving around with her and thought she was pretty.
“You’re attracted to the pregnant raped girl?” she said, which made me want to kill that scumbag Brian because I didn’t yet know that I already had.
I told her that while she was undoubtedly feeling bad, and understandably so, she had no idea how low you can really go when it comes to feeling shitty about what you have done and what has been done to you.
“You mean about the war?” she said.
I nodded, and then for some reason I just started telling her things. Not everything I’ve mentioned in this here report, but things that I had never told anyone who wasn’t a Vietnam veteran. I’m not quite sure why I opened up to Jessica. Maybe it’s because she opened up to me. Maybe it was because she felt dirty, like I did. Maybe it was because I had dirt on her, so my sharing my dirt only made things equal. Maybe it was because she was gorgeous, because she absolutely was. After decades of thinking about all of this shit, I guess I just wanted her to feel clean by comparison. No one was dirtier than me.
Before I knew what had happened, I had talked straight through the night about my tour, and we were somehow on a beach in Sea Isle City, watching the sun come up over the ocean. There was snow on the sand, and it was fucking freezing cold, but we were wrapped up together in an old scratchy green wool army blanket I kept in the trunk. I had my arm around her, and she was leaning her head on my chest. I thought about the life inside her belly.
On the one hand, that baby had the genes of a fucking rapist. But I had been exposed to a lot of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and I was worried about my ability to father a child myself. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how fucking terrible that potion was way before any civilians started talking about it on the news. I had seen firsthand what it could do to an entire living, breathing ecosystem. And I guess I wanted to atone for some of my sins too. Also, I knew that Brian hadn’t seen as much jungle action as I had, so therefore he had less exposure to Agent Orange. Brian’s baby probably wouldn’t be as genetically fucked-up compared to a child I might biologically father.
I asked Jessica what she wanted out of life, and she said she only needed art supplies and a room to paint. That was easy enough to accomplish—I was sure I could make money. Any white man with half a brain in America can make a good living if he works hard and really wants to.