by Veda Boyd Jones
I watched Ed Beale pull his big Ford 150 into the driveway of Barbara’s folks’ house just outside of town. Well, it was just Lucille Heath’s house now. I hadn’t seen Ed in years until yesterday at Ray’s funeral, but we went way back.
Decades ago, Ed was just starting high school when he’d moved next door to me. I had talked him into going out to the golf course to hit a few balls, and as his self-appointed advisor, I insisted he go out for the golf team his sophomore year. Turned out he was a better player than I was, a senior, but we both made the team.
A few years later, he became the advisor to me since he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam right after high school. With a college deferment, I didn’t get called by the draft until later, and I sought him out when I got orders for Vietnam. That was a lifetime ago.
I wondered if Ed had kept up with the game. He wasn’t much of a student of geometry, but he was a whiz at angles, and golf was all about angles, just like shooting pool. In high school, he’d come out with me to the Heaths to play pool in the basement with Barbara and me. That had been my cover, bringing Ed along, so it wasn’t a date or anything. We were just hanging out. I had a steady girlfriend when I met Barbara Heath, but I couldn’t stay away from her. Now I sat in Lucille Heath’s front porch swing with my arm around Barbara, years later, having married her.
“Ready to get your ass kicked, Will?” Ed called through the open pickup window.
I grinned. “We’ll see who kicks who.” I pecked Barbara on the lips. “You be okay, honey?” We exchanged a long look, one that said if you need me, I’ll stay. She nodded and smiled. “Beat his socks off.” I shouldered my bag and slung it in the pickup bed before climbing in the cab.
“See you later, guys,” Barbara called before she opened the screen door and walked inside.
“How’re they doing?” Ed nodded toward the house.
“Fine. Barbara’s helping go through Ray’s things, although Lucille had most of his clothes ready to go. They’ll take them down to Goodwill this morning.”
“It was a nice service,” Ed said and turned around in the wide drive and headed south on the county road.
“Yep. Short and sweet… Just what Ray would have wanted if he’d been in his right mind.” I blew out a long breath. “I guess that’s why it’s a pretty easy transition for Lucille. What do they say, it’s a blessing when someone dies who’s not really living? And Ray didn’t even know Barbara the last few months. That was hard on her.”
“Ray got me on at the electric company when I got back from Vietnam. I’ll always be in his debt for that…I’m glad they had military honors at the cemetery.”
“Couldn’t ask for a better father-in-law,” I said. “Never interfered or gave unasked-for advice.” We were silent for a while as we watched the countryside pass by.
“Good morning for golf,” Ed said. “No wind.”
“Glad you suggested we play. I’m just in the way at the house.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. I stayed out of the way after Pam’s dad died. I think women have a ritual or something they go through. And there’s always crying involved, and I don’t like tears.”
“I hear ya,” I said. “Is Pam number three or number four?”
“Three. Susan was my second wife. I didn’t read her well. She maxed out three credit cards our first six months.”
“Wasn’t there a Wendy in the mix?” That name had stuck in my mind all these years.
“Yeah, but we didn’t get married. She was the one I was seeing that time you came home on leave before you went over. That was a hell of a party.”
“Yeah…. Hey, slow down. Here’s the turn.”
“I usually take Kodiac Road,” Ed said. “I like it better.”
“This is quicker.”
He glanced begrudgingly at me, his lips puckered and a frown line between his eyes, and I thought he wasn’t going to made the turn, but at the last moment, he jerked the wheel over and turned. We rode without words for a bit while I wondered what that was all about.
He finally broke the silence. “Say, the Heaths still have that pool table?”
“Yep. Lucille’s wondered what to do with it, but I told her that kind of decision needs time. I can see getting rid of clothes this week, but not important stuff.”
“Remember all those pool games we played? You always had a bet with Barbara for brownies or a car wash, and you always beat her. You know, I was surprised when you two married. I knew you were good friends, but I did not see that coming.”
I chuckled. “Not many did, but Barbara has always been the one. Always.”
“But you’re so different. You were drinking and smoking and cussing, and she was a goody two-shoes. She was nice enough to me in high school after you left for college, but I knew guys who said she was a cold fish. She’s plenty smart, like you, but you two are different,” Ed repeated.
“On the outside, but not the inside. All those years when we weren’t in the same state or even the same country, she was in the back of my mind. In hindsight, she was the gold standard I held up against every girl I ever dated. Hey, there’s Roger’s house. I forgot it was on this road.”
“I never forget,” he said in a hard tone. “I suspect I was out here a lot more than you.” That was true. He and Roger were the same age.
“I always liked that house. It’s proportioned well. The columns are sized right for the front porch, and it has a nice sense of entry.” The architect in me couldn’t keep from noticing details.
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t glance at the house. He stared at the road ahead and then heaved a big sigh. “I meant to come out and talk to Mrs. Prichard after I came back. Roger and I weren’t in the same company, but we were both at Da Nang in sixty-eight. I was there when they brought his body back in.”
“You should talk to her.”
“I’m always headed somewhere else when I’m out this way, and to tell the truth, I’m not crazy about doing it. I’m rarely on this road.”
“Huh.” The way he confessed that told me he avoided it on purpose. So Roger would have been taken to the mortuary in Da Nang instead of shipped down to lay on one of the hard tables I’d grown familiar with as clerk at the mortuary at Ton Son Nhut.
“You play much golf these days?” Ed said as he signaled for the turn into the golf course’s graveled parking lot.
“Not like I want. Work’s been busy.” That was an understatement. I had more architectural business than I could handle and had an office of fifteen employees now. “And it seems like we’re in the monsoon season on weekends. I’ve been wondering the same about you. You still have that great slice?” I asked with a grin.
“I corrected that a long time ago. But I don’t get out much, either. When I retire, I’m going to get one of those old codger passes and play every day.”
We unloaded our clubs and didn’t even hesitate about getting a golf cart.
“Remember carrying fifty pounds of equipment on a five-mile run?” Ed asked.
“That was a long time ago, and I’m about twenty pounds heavier than in my prime.” I sucked in my rounded stomach. “Not too bad for an old man, but I don’t carry my clubs anymore.”
“Me, either.” Ed stretched his slim six-something frame to attention. “But I could.” He obviously thought he was in better shape than me, but then he hadn’t been through all I had been through health-wise. His hair was still brown, although cut short instead of in that ponytail he’d grown when he first got out and declared nobody was ever going to tell him to cut his hair again. His hair was thinning just a tad on top. My hair was mostly brown, but my beard was salt and pepper.
“Sure you could,” I said in mock agreement.
I insisted on treating Ed to the round, and he let me—with thanks. I’d heard he was doing all right financially, but Lucille said he struggled for a while. She went to the beauty shop where his current wife worked. She wasn’t one of Pam’s clients, but it was a small shop, and everybody knew everybody else anyway. And everybody certainly knew everybody’s business.
Lucille had credited me for saving Ed’s life. At the beauty shop she’d shared my history of four primary cancers, all caught early because of annual checkups, so Ed’s wife had insisted he have a checkup, which is when the doc found his colon cancer. Of course, Barbara was the reason I’d had all those checkups. She’d done her research on Agent Orange.
I’d kept up with news of Ed through Ray Heath, too, even after Ray retired from the electric company. He said he’d run into Ed in town sometimes and he always asked about Barbara and me and our three sons. But that was when Ray was still himself instead of slipping into the old age disease. God, I hoped I didn’t get dementia when I got older. What a way to go.
I probably wouldn’t live to old age. Or Ed, either. I read obituaries. I figured Vietnam vets didn’t live out of their sixties. But with all my successful surgeries, maybe I’d beat the Agent Orange curse.
“Quarter a hole?” I asked. That had been our standard bet even in high school, and I’d usually come away the loser by fifty cents or so. But it made the game more interesting.
“Sure,” Ed agreed.
We concentrated on our play for a while, catching up on life as we drove from hole to hole.
He flipped me a quarter. “You might get lucky this game,” he said. “Used up all your bad luck on that draft number you pulled.”
“Fifty-fucking-seven.” That was a number I would never forget, nor would I forget the night of the birthday draft drawing and my brutal hangover the next day. At least, my 2-S deferment let me go my final semester, but the army didn’t waste a moment after I graduated to call me up.
“I’d already been in-country and out. Looking back, it was like being inside a computer game my grandson plays.”
“Good analogy, but we were being jacked around by old men instead of a kid with a controller. And it was a damn violent game.”
“Damn violent. Hard to believe it was real.”
“A surreal time. I’d like to go back to Thailand,” I said. “That wasn’t bad duty, once Vietnam shut down.”
“I never want to go back.,” he snapped. “My feet still peel from jungle rot.”
“Understood. Every few years my hands peel, and I’ve still got fungus fingernails.” I held up one hand where three fingernails were white. I’d tried everything to get rid of it, and nothing worked for long. I climbed out of the cart and grabbed my Ping driver.
A couple strokes later, Ed was in the woods.
“Will,” he called. “Did you see it land?”
“Over to the left, I think.”
Ed walked left, his gaze alert, his mouth in a straight determined line. His eyes darted from place to place with intensity as if his life depended on finding that ball among the trees and brush. He looked like he was on patrol, looking for signs of homemade land mines that could blow his legs off or worse.
I strolled over to where he was looking.
“Special ball?”
“Yeah, my son gave me a sleeve of them with my name on them,” he said in a tight voice.
“Could have bounced.”
We looked a couple more minutes before Ed spotted it.
“I’m not the only one.” He held up two balls. “A bonus.”
We finished the hole with Ed flipping a quarter to me.
As we drove to the next hole, we talked about future travel plans. His wife had a dream of going to Hawaii, and he was saving to surprise her.
“Take a few years the way I’m putting away nickels,” he said.
“I went to Hawaii on R and R,” I said. “I had a couple days’ notice, but I didn’t have but fifty bucks in my pocket, and I’d borrowed fifteen of that from a buddy. I slept on the beach two nights until I fell in with some guy who knew some people, then I landed on someone’s couch.”
“Australia. Same thing. Beach.” Ed grinned. “I and I. Remember? Intoxication and Intercourse? When I was there, you were still in the dating and trying to score phase of college and hadn’t thought of paying for it.”
I laughed. “Yeah, about my whole time in Thailand was I and I.”
“No wonder you want to go back.”
“Naw. It wouldn’t be that way now. I’d take Barbara with me.”
“You ever tell her about all the whores?”
“Sure, but that all happened before we were married.”
“I told number two wife about the prostitutes, and she blew her stack.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t even know her then, but she thought it was awful.”
“When you think you might die tomorrow, you don’t worry about it. You just need to feel alive. Barbara got that, but she couldn’t believe the hookers carried US Army approved cards. Not like any of us asked for ID.”
Ed chuckled, and we got down to playing another hole and another, as the same quarter changed hands, back and forth, back and forth.
At the end of eighteen holes, we had talked about baseball and kids and politics, and how our sons would never have to go to war with the all-volunteer army. We talked about the shape of the greens and about army food. But we did not talk about the fighting and the dying in Vietnam.
Ed came out the winner by seventy-five cents.
“My putting isn’t worth a damn,” I said as we climbed back in the pickup. “Those last two holes were forgettable.”
“Ooohhh, no. I’ll remember them for a while. You don’t forget a seven on a par three.”
Ed drove out of the parking lot and headed down the county road. He looked over at me, his mouth in a straight line, before he turned on the road that passed by the Pritchard’s house. As we approached Roger’s parents’ place, I saw Mrs. Pritchard out in the yard hanging sheets on the clothesline.
“Pull in,” I said. Ed glanced at me with reluctance, almost pleading, in his eyes. “We’re not on a time schedule. We’ll just say hi.”
Mrs. Pritchard, somewhere in her mid-seventies, stood holding an empty laundry basket in front of her, as if for protection from us when we got out of the truck. She wore brown slacks and a checkered brown and white top. Her gray hair balled from her scalp in tight curls.
“Hello, Mrs. Pritchard,” Ed said. “We were just passing by and thought we’d say hi.”
“Hello. Do I know you?”
“Yes, but it was a long time ago. We were friends of Roger’s,” Ed said. “Ed Beale.” He pointed at himself with a trembling hand. “Will Bajolie.” He pointed at me.
She did not say another word. She looked at Ed, studying his face. Then she looked at me, peering intently, her brow furrowed, her eyebrows arched, her mouth opened slightly. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t speak.
In her long silence, I heard the robins calling to each other, and I glanced at a squirrel scampering up an oak tree, glad to break eye contact with her.
“We were in Vietnam together,” Ed said at last.
“We were all drafted,” I said.
She looked at Ed and then at me, her head tilted as if pondering something.
“In Vietnam with Roger?” Again, she stared at Ed. I held my breath to still the shivers in my chest.
“But you’re old.”
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Veda Boyd Jones is the widow of Vietnam veteran Jimmie L. Jones, an architect and an outstanding man, whose ashes are interred at Arlington National Cemetery. She’s the author of 47 traditionally published books and a handful of ebooks. Her latest is The Bookstore Window. You can learn more about her on her website, http://vedaboydjones.com
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