Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,40

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Tim asked around after this, and apparently killing a spider was about the unluckiest thing a person could do in Vietnam. “It’s crazy, I know,” he wrote. “I don’t buy any of that stuff. What does a spider have to with whether or not Charlie gets a crack at me?” But the cleaning boy began to avoid him, running to the opposite side of the road, even ducking around corners when he saw Tim coming. It made him feel, Tim wrote, like he wore the mark of death on him.

His letters began to take on a darkly philosophical tone. He wrote about things he’d never mentioned before, friends of his who had gone out on routine patrols, or even just down the street to buy farm eggs in the next village, and had never come back. He wrote about the superstitions that soldiers came up with to explain away the randomness of life and death. How you should never say aloud the number of days you had left, for instance—that was sure to kill you. Or how some claimed that they could tell how long a newbie would last the minute he stepped off the chopper; it was a gutted look behind the eyes, or a hesitant gait that gave it away. “That one’s a goner,” they’d say. “Two months, tops.” But as far as Tim could see, death didn’t play by any rules. A clumsy blueleg from Minnesota who could barely load a rifle would go home without a scratch, while the smartest, sleekest tracker you ever met would get blown to a gory paste his third day out. Didn’t have anything to do with how good or bad a person was, neither. Line them all up—the nun, the priest, the shopkeeper, the rapist, the murdering NVA, the screaming teenage girl in a straw hat holding a live baby boy, the smoke still rising from its black charred body: you think there was any difference between them? There wasn’t no difference. Didn’t matter who you were or what you did, we all came to the same dead end. “And if you can figure that one out, I’ll be happy to hear it,” Tim wrote.

But even as his letters dipped into this darkest of places, he still clung to one desperate hope, and that was me.

“I picture you running up to meet me when I step off the bus in Zachary at Christmastime,” he wrote. “You look just like I left you, only better. You’re wearing shorts. (I always picture you wearing shorts even if it’s the middle of winter, hope you don’t mind.) I pick you up and hug you and kiss you and nobody can say nothing because I just came back from Vietnam and I got a whole mess of medals on my chest.” We’d have a little house there near the woods, nothing but peace and quiet, and for about a year he wouldn’t do anything but sit and look at me and we’d make love all day.

“My good luck charm,” he wrote. “Laura. All I got to do is turn my arm up to see you. That’s permanent, won’t ever go away.”

• • •

Elizabeth, see if you can understand this. I stopped reading his letters. I couldn’t bear to hear any more about his ugly war. Why did he have to tell me all that? What could I do to help him? I had my own problems to worry about. I couldn’t take on the burden of being his lifesaver, too, his one and only hope.

The first one I removed from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and didn’t open right away because I knew how depressing it would be; then I didn’t open it for the rest of the day, and then a week had passed and it was still in the drawer of my desk, unopened, beside the scrapbook I’d abandoned long ago. And then the next letter came, and I put it in the drawer with the first. Then another one. Later, I told myself. I would read them later, when I was stronger. But by semester’s end I had a small stack, light as the airmail paper they were written on but weighted with the accumulated guilt of my avoidance.

He was killed, they said, in his sleep. Two weeks before his discharge, three clumsy mortar shells were lobbed from a hill where they hadn’t seen any North Vietnamese for a year and a half. One landed just short of the base fence, one landed