Ordinary Men
A story about the aftereffects of war
They returned in the summer of 1973. They were fitted back into the jobs they’d left behind — bank teller, auto mechanic, grocery store clerk — like eggs into a carton. Except that many of these eggs had rotted on the inside.
Nobody knew what they had seen, what private wars they were still fighting, and nobody asked. Some went back to school or started families. Some preferred their rock music loud to drown out the sound of helicopters flying low over the rice paddies. Many turned to drink; others to drugs. Only one that we knew of committed suicide, in a phone booth outside the Stagecoach Diner. We didn’t see it happen, but the next morning we watched as a young man in white coveralls attempted to wash the blood off. He didn’t do a very good job, and of course, nobody wanted to use the phone booth after that.
“They should have taken it down to the police station as evidence,” remarked old Mrs. Shanley, the town busybody, who was convinced that it was a murder. (“He was shot through the left temple, but he was right-handed. You tell me how that’s possible.”)
At some point, the booth was removed. No one noticed. But sometimes we could hear a phantom phone ringing.
That summer, the Monongahela River swelled with fish. Teenage boys carried baskets overflowing with walleye and largemouth bass home to their mothers to cook, and to pack the remainder in tinfoil in the icebox. On the Fourth of July, it rained, and then a low fog hung over the river, shortening the fireworks’ trajectory.
Dean Lindstrom missed the celebration; he was home with his wife Martina, trying to make a baby. Dean knew what the human brain tasted like. He’d shot a Vietcong soldier in the head. When the bullet entered the man’s skull, it splintered in all directions, and small chunks of the brain flew into Dean’s mouth. Had anyone thought to ask, he would have told them it tasted slightly salty, like tears.
The baby-making was not going so well. On nights when Martina said she had a headache, Dean went down to the Starry Plough, the old men’s bar, where he could sit unmolested and drink beer after beer until closing time. Some nights, he staggered down the block to hide in the bushes across from the Barrys’ house, so he could watch seventeen-year-old Judith Barry, who called herself “Jude,” in various states of undress. He watched her through his military-issue binoculars, thinking he had never seen any girl so lovely, with her waist-length mane of brown hair and the Victorian line of her shoulders.
Jude, for her part, never noticed Dean in the neighbors’ bushes ogling her. She was the second of the Barry children, all of whose names began with the letter J: Jacqueline, Judith, Jonas, and Jennifer. Late at night, when everyone was asleep, she stood before the mirror and put on her blonde wig and pretended to be Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde. In August she would lose her virginity to a fraternity brother who drunkenly whispered in her ear, “The lunatic is on the grass.”
Meanwhile, her younger brother, fourteen-year-old Jonas, was having trouble making friends. He confided this to his grandma, who said, “Why don’t you keep me company, then?” As he helped her clean out the garage one Saturday afternoon, he discovered ammo and a girlie magazine belonging to his grandpa, who’d fought in that earlier war, the one Jonas had always thought was in black-and-white.
When Jude entered his bedroom unannounced to tell him it was time for dinner, she caught him reading it. “Pervert,” she said.
He quickly stashed the magazine in his desk drawer, face burning red up to his hairline. “It’s not mine, it’s Grandpa’s.”
Jude rolled her eyes. “Sure it is.”
No matter what Jonas said — it could have been something as simple as the sky is blue — she would have disagreed with him.
Jonas spent a lot of time by himself at the river, where the water ran shallow over the rocks and the weeds undulated as if in a gentle breeze and the guppies glinted silver in the afternoon sun. He would wade a little farther downstream where the water was deeper and he could float. He loved the feeling of suspension; it made him feel safe, sequestered like a jewel in a clear box.
One night, he awakened to screaming outside. Looking out his bedroom window, he saw his father beating up a guy next to the Meyers’ house. His father wasn’t a violent man, so this guy must have done something really bad.
Dean emerged bloodied from the bushes and limped off down the street, binoculars thumping against his chest. When he got home, all of Martina’s things were gone. Her closet empty. She had left a note for him on the mantle in her native Czech, which he couldn’t read. He called his mother-in-law, who lived in the next town, and she told him in her broken English that Martina was there but didn’t want to speak to him. A week later, she filed for divorce.
Years later, Dean’s second wife, Pam, was taking boxes of Christmas ornaments down from the attic when she happened upon an old shoebox containing Martina’s note. From the public library, she borrowed a Czech-English dictionary and translated the note word by word. It was a proverb: Avoid a drunkard as well as a fool.
When Jude found out that Dean had been spying on her, she didn’t press charges; instead, she took a Greyhound bus clear across the country to Los Angeles. Nobody heard from her again until 2002, when she called Jonas asking for money. Her dream of becoming a famous actress had never panned out; the height of her career was when she played Girl #4 in a horror movie where she runs up the stairs and gets decapitated with a hacksaw. She was married to a guy who called himself Bhagwan Paramahamsa, and the two were involved in some scam involving water purifiers. They wanted Jonas to invest $10,000 and for him to ask each of his friends to do the same.
“I get that you’re struggling, and I’d like to help you,” he said, “but I’m not going to send you $10,000. Hell, I don’t have that kind of money.”
She laid into him, saying he was just like their father, cold, tight-fisted. Didn’t he know how hard her life had been?
He wanted to tell her that his life hadn’t been a piece of cake, either. Like her, he’d had grand plans to leave their small town, but, for one reason or another, they had never come to fruition. He could have gone on and on about how he’d fallen off a forklift and broken his back, or his failed attempts to go back to school, or his wife’s lung cancer, but his sister wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise.
His youngest daughter, Stacey, pulled at his free hand. “Come on, Dad, we’re going to be late.”
He covered the mouthpiece. “One second, honey.” To his sister, he said, “Listen, Jude, I have to go now.”
But she didn’t listen, just kept right on talking. He hung up on her. The phone did not ring again.
