He was back from Vietnam before Christmas that year. A Marine. His smile was rictus-like. That is, his teeth were clenched and his jaw muscles tight, so that the smile, if that was what it was, appeared sinister. He moved awkwardly, talked haltingly.
His father gave him a membership to the Elks Club as a Christmas present.
“The Elks Club : Charity – Justice – Brotherly Love – and Fidelity; to promote the welfare and enhance the happiness of its members; to quicken the spirit of American patriotism…”
What bull shit.
The Beatle’s Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. It was the winter and Christmas of 1967. Strawberry Fields Forever.
“July 28, 1967: A UPI (United Press International) story on the front page of the StarNews reported that in the previous week 164 Americans had been killed in Vietnam and 1,146 wounded. That put the U.S. death toll in the war at 12,316 with 73,925 wounded and 681 Americans listed as missing or captured. The article also gave the previous day’s toll, almost as if it were reporting sports scores. On July 27, 1967, the Department of Defense reported that 11 Americans had been killed and 42 wounded, all from mortar attacks by Viet Cong guerrillas, and from a new rocket that could accurately hit targets six miles away.”
And the young man, just back from this grisly war, was given a membership to the Elks Club. To quicken his spirit.
And we listened to With a Little Help from My Friends.
With his sister, we spent the next summer in Yakima working. When we left the motel room each day, he placed invisible tape on drawers, around doors, on suitcases. He checked in the evening to see if anything had been opened while we were gone.
He rented an army jeep and carried his pistol as we drove up and down dusty, barren hills in the valley. He carried his pistol. He taught me to shoot it.
Back in Seattle, one day, he was oiling the bottom of a cast iron skillet. He hand moved round and round inside the pan. Then, when I came close enough, he put the oiled cloth on my face and moved it round and round. The same motion. The same gesture.
When we were alone in our house on Greenlake one night, sitting in front of a big window that overlooked the lake, he grabbed one of my hands and put it on his crotch over his jeans. He held it there and told me what he saw hovering over the lake. Apparitions. Things or beings I could not see. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
He slept with pistol under his pillow.
His V.A. doctor called it schizophrenia. He was given pills. He had his own medicine cabinet full of drugs.
His parents called it a phase.
One night, he locked the doors of the family cabin we frequented. His sister was out walking. He told me I’d have to choose between him and her. He wouldn’t let me go. Somehow, we all slept there. Even so.
He paced all night long. He paced all night long. He paced.
He reenlisted in the Marines when he failed to be admitted to Seattle Police force.
One morning his sister came to the cabin, the cabin where he had been living, the same cabin he had locked against her, the cabin his parents owned, She came to take him to his bus to go back to the Marine base.
She found him hanging from a rafter, under the round woven-reed basket boat he had shipped home from Vietnam.
I helped his sister’s husband clean up the cabin the next day. We had to remove every trace. Nobody would want to see that. The rope was still hanging from the rafter. There were dozens of cigarette butts on the grate in the fireplace. I imagined him pacing all night long. Smoking and pacing. Pacing some more. And finally deciding to die.
In the bathroom was a slip of paper where he had kept track of his daily weigh-ins. Evidence of him was everywhere.
He knew she would find him.
…
He wasn’t altogether gone.
Months later, some work friends and I spent a weekend at the cabin. I didn’t tell them what had happened there or that we were the first to use it since.
On the last night of our retreat, we invited his sister and her husband for dinner.
After a fine meal, we sat around a large table and oddly our conversation turned to interests in divination. We set up for a game with a pendulum made of a needle. We passed the needle around the table and asked questions to the person with the needle while another person noted answers on a grid the needle holder could not see. We had some astounding results early on. One person was able to retrieve a driver’s license number imprinted on a card held out of sight by yet another person.
Then the needle was passed to the sister.
The temperature in the room changed. We all felt it. Still, only three of us in the room knew what had happened there.
The sister held the needle and the nature of the asks changed…my friends began to pose questions as if addressing a person. After a series of (to me) chilling exchanges (using still the grid hidden from the sister), someone asked the “being” for its name.
The sister’s spouse and I were side by side and could see the grid. The sister was deep in concentration as she was asked to spell the name.
The first three letters spelled the name of her deceased brother.
The spouse and I looked at each other and without a word, tipped the table over.
We did not let the game continue.
My friends were outraged.
I could not tell them why we stopped. I never did tell them why we stopped.
We stopped because he was still in the cabin or still inhabiting us. We could not let it be so.
For many years, I saw him in crowds, in streets, in stores. It wasn’t him, of course.
