Christmas Presents and Past. Janice Johnson Kay

yeah, he’d stepped over the stick. But Van Gorder hadn’t. And Will was responsible. He’d led them to their deaths.

      Things became a blur then: the eventual arrival of a helicopter, blades beating and leaves flying; getting loaded; medics hovering over him. Eventually an operating room in Cu Chi, where he shook with the cold and realized it was air-conditioned.

      A surgeon with a mask over his face appeared in his line of sight. “I’m knocking you out, Will. You’re going to be fine, but we need to clean shrapnel out of these wounds and stitch you up.”

      He threw up when he awakened, and again after they let him suck ice cubes.

      “Lucky you were wearing your flak jacket,” he heard twice. Most of the damage was on his legs, although they’d pulled a sharp piece of metal out of the back of his neck.

      Eventually an officer visited to tell him that he might have made it back to his unit under other circumstances, but since his enlistment was about up, he was going home.

      “Do my parents know I was wounded?” he asked.

      “They were notified.”

      Going home took two more weeks. At last he flew into Travis Air Force Base. He’d recovered enough to make his way down the steps himself and to hobble across the tarmac. Wives and parents were crying and holding out their arms. He searched the crowd for faces he knew.

      At last, there they were. His mom and dad, and with them was Dinah, older but definitely the girl he knew, not the hippie in the photograph. Her hand was pressed to her mouth, and tears ran down her cheeks.

      They collided as much as reached for each other, all four of them. They were all trying to hold him, and shit, yeah, he was sobbing like a baby.

      The drive home was surreal. It was evening, and fog hung low and thick. Through it he kept glimpsing Christmas lights. That made sense. He’d left right after Christmas, but somehow he hadn’t even thought of the holiday. Earlier, he’d planned to buy presents for his parents and Dinah before he flew home, but he’d expected to have time. He had only a few souvenirs, but they were all of a war Dinah despised. She wasn’t proud of his service, so his Purple Heart wouldn’t be deeply meaningful to her.

      He and she rode in the backseat of his parents’ Buick. She reached over and took his hand. In a quiet voice, she said, “We’re so glad you’re home, Will. We’ve been so frightened.”

      “Yeah. Boom—” he clapped his hands “—and, hey, you can go home, O’Keefe. Kind of a surprise ending to the party.”

      He felt her surprise at his levity. His mother turned her head, too.

      “They said…some other men were killed?” she asked hesitantly.

      Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it. “There was a mine. I was lucky.”

      His mother turned to face the front so quickly, he knew it was to hide her distress, though he might have had trouble seeing it in the dark.

      Beside him, Dinah said fiercely, “Well, things will be different now.”

      “What do you mean?” he asked.

      “I brought something for you.” She held out her hand.

      Puzzled, he took what she handed him. It was stiff, but cloth. A patch? Headlights coming the other way briefly illuminated it. It was a peace symbol—white—embroidered against a blue background.

      She touched the front of his fatigue jacket. “I’ll sew it on there for you. Now you can speak out.”

      He wanted to drop the patch, or thrust it back at her. Instead, he just sat there. His voice sounded a little strange. “My Christmas present?”

      “Well…” She chuckled, a musical sound he’d dreamed about. “I have others for you. But…yes. A first present.”

      Something he didn’t want. Didn’t understand. A symbol that repudiated everything for which the men around him had died.

      “I’m so glad you’re home for Christmas,” she murmured.

      Chapter 4

      The Will O’Keefe who left for Vietnam was not the same Will who had come home that foggy night before Christmas.

      It had been naive, Dinah realized, to think he would be. Anyway, she had expected change. Just…not so much.

      Physically, he had gone from being a boy to being a man, growing another inch—his mother insisted on measuring him—and adding muscle. The planes of his face had become harder, as if a sculptor had decided it needed more definition. Ironically, his hair was longer now than when he had been inducted. Not long enough to be tied back, but shaggy enough to make him appear untamed. The smile, revealing his essential sweetness, came rarely.

      Oh, and he’d started to smoke over there. He was rarely without a lit cigarette dangling from his lips or between his fingers. Dinah was trying to become accustomed to the taste, but failing. Once she suggested he think about quitting, now that he was home. He just looked at her, tamped out the one he’d had between his lips, deliberately pulled out his packet and lit another, his insolent gaze on her the entire time. It was an uncomfortable moment.

      One of many. The laid-back guy she’d known was laid-back no more. Sometimes he was distant; she would realize, in the midst of telling him something, that he wasn’t listening. He’d be slumped on the sofa or her bed in the dorm, his gaze fixed on a wall, and he was a million miles away. No. Half a world away. In Southeast Asia.

      He brooded, and his sense of humor had become more cutting. He had developed a volatile temper. Once, when they were in the city and a car backfired, he hit the sidewalk facedown while she stood and stared. Then, he jumped to his feet and ran after the car yelling obscenities, giving the driver the finger. When he came back to her, he was still simmering, as if that poor old guy behind the wheel had been deliberately trying to set Will off.

      He was sexier, of course. Christina, with whom Dinah was rooming at S.F. State, said after the first time she saw Will in January, “Wow. I never got what you saw in him, but now I do. He has that Steve McQueen thing. You just know he could be dangerous.”

      Dinah did sometimes find herself reacting physically with a barely contained wow. But mostly she missed the sweet guy who had been so attuned to her.

      Then, of course, she immediately felt guilty. Was that why she’d fallen for Will? Because he was totally into her? Was their whole relationship about her? Well, if it had been, she resolved, that was going to change. He needed her now. She could tell from the way he made love to her, with intensity and desperation, and in the way he turned to her at night after one of his nightmares, clutching her as if she was all that stood between him and his monsters.

      Of course the old Will was still there. Once in a while, he opened up and talked to her. Really talked. Never about the awful stuff she knew had happened to him, but as if he were tentatively propping open a door. She had incense burning in her dorm room once, and he told her how you could smell it in the villages over there, especially at night. He talked about the M-16 rifle and what a piece of crap it was, jamming incessantly and often at the worst possible times. He got off one time on the dust, just a red cloud that covered everything, got into weapons, made clothes that had been washed and hung out dirty before they dried. And the bugs. One guy was chopping bamboo, and red ants fell on him, dropping inside his shirt, stinging while he was running around screaming. Some of the stories were funny, some so alien to her experiences that it helped her understand why he was having trouble just walking back into his old life.

      When she asked, he’d talk some about patrolling or guarding a bridge during monsoon rains with convoy after convoy rumbling over it, but he never talked about his injuries or about whether he’d killed anyone.

      Once, she pushed a little too hard, and he looked at her and said, “You trying to find out if I bayoneted any babies?” and then turned and walked out. She didn’t see him that time for three days.