I am more reliable than anyone out there when it comes to gun safety, but the fucking asshole skiers I had for doctors could not be trusted when it comes to my medication, which, at the end of the day, meant that I really couldn’t trust myself. I decided that I would get Sue to carry for me when we were hanging out together in the city and would talk to her about that plan just as soon as I could.
To Hank I apologized, not for carrying the Glock without his permission, because he is not the fucking boss of me, but for putting his daughter in harm’s way by having the seizure while armed. Obviously it was the fault of the dumbass doctors, who didn’t know goddamn anything about medicine, or at least not enough to give me the proper dosages, but I could understand Hank’s not giving a shit about that. His first priority was to protect Ella, and I had to agree with that logic.
And so I told him I would not carry a firearm again until I went seizure-free for four weeks, which seemed to satisfy him, because he said, “I can’t believe we are actually in agreement. Pinch me.”
I told him that I wasn’t going to pinch him then or ever, but we were in agreement about Ella’s safety coming first. Then I added, “Don’t get cocky, son. I’m not dead yet. You ain’t never gonna ever eclipse me, because I’m gonna live forever. And there ain’t no man better than your father when it comes to completing missions and taking care of business. I’m a real man. You hear me?”
Hank stared through the windshield for a few minutes as we crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge. Then, as we were driving past Camden, he said, “You were telling Ella about Mom. At the art museum. She told me last night when I was tucking her in.”
“Hope that’s not illegal too,” I said.
But Hank actually approved. I knew because he said, “Would you mind telling me about Mom’s artwork again? It’s the closest I’ll ever get to seeing one of her finished paintings.”
So I told Hank what I remembered, which was a lot actually. Jessica painted for a decade, so she managed to finish hundreds of works. I was the only one who ever saw any of them—or so I thought. She kept them hidden in her garage studio, which was always locked. At the end, she wouldn’t even let me into her work space, because she felt that her paintings were visual representations of all that was going on in her mind. Since her mind was so fucked up with depression, she was worried about infecting others with her art, especially me, because of all that had happened to me during the war. Jessica had actually started to believe that others might become mentally ill simply by looking at her artworks.
But I didn’t tell Hank about those later years; I told him about the beginning, when Jessica was still a teenager, painting more hopeful pieces at the start of our marriage. The boy spent many days and nights in a basket next to her easel. Sometimes I’d come home from work and find different-colored blobs of paint on his clothes, arms, legs, and face. My son loved when I talked about that. Without interrupting, adult Hank listened to me go on and on about his mother, and when we pulled into his driveway, I caught him wiping a tear off his cheek. I didn’t call him on that girly-man behavior because sometimes I also feel like shedding a tear or two when I think about a nineteen-year-old Jessica looking up from a canvas big as her, smiling at me with paint smudges all over her face, like camouflage. Her long, brown hair is always braided into pigtails, and she is perpetually in overalls, as if she were a farmer riding on a tractor. All she needed was a piece of hay hanging out of her mouth. You could see the light in her eyes back then. It was bright as goddamn June moonbeams shimmering off ocean waves still warm from the day’s sun.
11.
By now you probably have pieced together why I might be so immediately sympathetic toward a rape survivor like my dead wife Jessica. You have access to my secret military records, and I know you’ve already been through all of those, so don’t even try to bullshit me about that. But since I don’t have access to those files at this point in time and therefore have no idea just what the fuck they say, I figure I better set the record straight about my being sexually assaulted myself.
When they shipped me home from Vietnam, they allowed me to see my parents for a weekend before I had to go to Kansas, where I was supposed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Like I said before, after so many days in combat, everyone becomes legally insane, regardless of his—or unfortunately her, these days—mental fortitude going into war. This is a well-known fact that even the liars in Washington would never publicly dispute, even if they will never send their own sons and daughters to fight wars. So fuck them. And yes, I was definitely pretty fucked in the head when I came home, but I managed to keep it together for the forty-eight hours I spent with my mother and father, eating my mother’s food and smoking my father’s cigarettes. Because my father had been to war, he knew I was acting, but he played along for the sake of my mother. I tried to protect her from that the best I could. If she were still alive, I wouldn’t be telling you half of what I am here, but my mother died years ago without knowing these things. Mission accomplished there.
I started to really lose it on the bus ride to Kansas. I kept seeing gooks in the trees we passed and in the backseats of vehicles next to us on the highway and peeking out of gas station windows. The pajama wearers were everywhere. There was part of my mind that knew I was hallucinating, but a larger part of my mind kept saying, Just because you are in America doesn’t mean you’re safe. Your government fucked you so many times overseas, what makes you think they’ll stop now that you’re home and within arm’s reach? Part of me—the part that was seeing little yellow bastards in American trees—was completely paranoid, I admit, but another part of me was right about a lot of things too.
I was also afraid of seeing my nemesis, that Indian, Clayton Fire Bear, on the base. He and I had arrived in Vietnam at the same time, and therefore we were set to return stateside at the same time too.