Fire Bear had aged just like the rest of us. There was a lot of silver in his hair now, and his broad shoulders were slumped, suggesting that time had ground him down a bit too. I got to feeling guilty and ashamed, sitting there in his office, thinking about what I had done to him almost fifty years ago in Vietnam.
So I started rambling, saying I had orders back in the jungle, I was just a child, and everyone who had been engaged in combat for so many days was legally insane. I heard an urgency in my voice as I tried to defend myself. I could talk to Fire Bear about these things, I realized, because he was a veteran; he had been there.
Finally, I just said I was sorry. I put the knife on his desk. I told him it was his, and I didn’t want anything for it; I just wanted to give it back.
Then he asked if I had found his name carved into Jessica’s underwear drawer, which made me shiver. His voice was nothing like I remembered it. The hot anger was no longer there, which was a relief, to say the least.
I wanted to kill him for presumably breaking into my home all those years ago, but I also wanted to know what the fuck had happened, and why Jessica never told me about any of it.
When I didn’t say anything, Fire Bear spilled it all without turning around to face me. His voice was so deep and it seemed to scrape the inside of his throat on the way out.
A few years after his discharge from Fort Riley, he had driven his old pickup truck across the entire country, just to visit our home in New Jersey and make good on his promise to scalp me. He waited until he thought maybe I had forgotten all about him, using that line about how revenge is a dish best served cold. He entered my home on a weekday afternoon, when he figured I’d be at work, because he wanted to use the knife I had stolen to do the scalping. He had to find it first, and then he would kill me. Part one would be much easier if he could search my home when I wasn’t there. What he didn’t know is that I used to carry his knife on me when I went to work, so he searched my house but couldn’t find shit.
With a backup knife he had brought with him, Fire Bear carved his name in Jessica’s underwear drawer, hoping she would find it and ask me what it meant, which would force me to either lie or explain the unimaginable shit I did in Vietnam. He also wanted to send me a clear death threat. But as he was finishing that carving, he heard Hank start crying in the other room. Immediately, he knew that the best revenge was to kill my son.
Fire Bear stood over the crib with the knife in his hand, watching tiny, vulnerable Hank wail. He tried and tried to get up the stones to take revenge on the white man who had humiliated and abused him in the jungle before stealing a family heirloom. Do it! Do it! Do it! he told himself.
Obviously, Fire Bear never went through with his plan to kill Hank. But the pause he threw into the story at this point was terrible anyway, especially since he hadn’t moved at all. My nemesis sat like a statue, facing the window, the whole time he talked.
Finally, Fire Bear said, he heard a woman’s voice. When he turned around, he saw Jessica standing in the hallway. She had been in her art studio when he first entered our home. He still had the knife in his hand, so it was pretty clear what he had come to do.
But then Jessica asked him why he was crying. That shocked Fire Bear because he didn’t realize he was. So he put a hand to his face, and found out that he was indeed crying, and hard.
That’s when he sort of lost it, falling to his knees, realizing that he was about to kill an innocent child. The knife fell out of his hand, and the next thing he knew, my wife had her arms around him and she was trying to comfort him, which made him cry even harder, because he’d been just about to stab her baby, and here she was trying to make him feel better.
But Jessica understood what it was like to be angry and depressed and insane from time to time. If he had run up against any other woman, he might be in jail right now. Most women would have called the cops right then and there. But it turns out that Jessica even allowed Fire Bear to hold Hank, and she explained what I had done for them both—that Hank wasn’t even my flesh and blood, but I had pretended to be his father after Brian raped her. Fire Bear said he couldn’t stop crying the whole time, he just sobbed and sobbed, because he felt so bad about what he had come to do and everything his government had forced him to do in the jungle. So Jessica tried to level him out, making him coffee and lunch and then even showing him a few of her paintings in the garage.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and yet it all made so much sense.
He talked about how her art made him feel, saying it was like she understood what was going on in his mind and heart. Jessica kept showing him more and more images, trying to get him to stop crying, and he said right there in the garage studio he reached out and hugged her and apologized for breaking into her home and trying to kill her baby and also for many other wicked things that he had done in Vietnam too.
She kept saying she forgave him, and every time she said it, he’d sob even harder until he knew he had to leave because I would surely be home from work soon, and he didn’t think I would forgive him so easily.
He told Jessica that he forgave me, her husband, and that he would never return. The knife was now a gift that he had given our family. He would never come looking for it again.
Then he left.
There was a long silence here. It might have lasted twenty minutes. As you might imagine, neither of us knew what to say. And I was trying to decide whether I could possibly believe this story. As I stared at the back of Fire Bear’s head, I realized he was making himself vulnerable by turning his back to me. Vietnam veterans don’t like to have anyone behind them, out of sight, let alone a potential enemy. Fire Bear was no longer my nemesis. That’s when I decided to trust him.
Finally I said, “She never told me any of this.”
“I understand that your wife is no longer with us?” he said, letting me know that Frank had clued him in a bit.
So I told him what had happened to Jessica, how she not only killed herself when Hank was still just a boy but burned all her paintings, and how Hank was now an art dealer, and his biggest regret in life was never seeing a single one of his own mother’s artworks. I was rambling.
Eventually I fell quiet. After another long silence, Fire Bear spun his chair around and faced me. There were tears running down his wrinkled face. His once-sharp jawline now sagged, just like mine. He was dressed in a sharp suit that looked exactly like one of Frank’s, and his hair was cut like a white man’s. No braids or feathers or anything like that.
His eyes fell for a second to the knife on his desk, which he hadn’t seen since he was in Vietnam back in sixty-seven. Then he said he was very sorry for my loss and asked if Frank and I would join him at his house for dinner that evening so that we could break bread and heal old wounds. After all he had shared with me, I agreed to the invitation immediately.
Then he asked if I would please bring his father’s knife to dinner, because he wanted his son to see it.