Alive and Kicking Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE: AMERICA

  CHATER ONE: Just Missing

  CHATER TWO: Threshold

  CHAPTER THREE: Compassionate Leave

  PART TWO: EUROPE

  CHAPTER FOUR: All My Brothers

  CHAPTER FIVE: We Ain’t No Moles

  CHAPTER SIX: Does Anybody See the Light?

  CHAPTER SEVEN: I Tell You What

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Best Intentions

  CHAPTER NINE: On the Fly

  CHAPTER TEN: Keeping Score

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  There have been a lot of long roads already since I left home. This one, however, is for sure the longest.

  Even though it is the very same road I started out on.

  The plane took me to Baltimore. The bus took me to Accokeek, the finest small town in the world. Dropped me at the end of the long cracked road that is now taking me, whether I like it or not, to my house, my parents, and my sister.

  I’m here on what they call compassionate leave. As I approach the steps to the front door — the door that opened and closed on every meaningful moment of my life before the Army Air Corps took command of all my moments — I feel like it would be more compassionate to spare me what all I’m about to experience.

  Never in my life did I have to walk through that door in fear, whether I was walking inside to face a tough situation, or out. Because I never before had to walk through it without the rock of certainty that was my big brother, Hank, right by my side.

  And the first time is the worst time. Hank went down with his ship, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, when it was sunk in the Pacific at the Battle of Midway.

  I’m not here to tell them anything they don’t know, since I don’t know anything they don’t. I am here to be here. To let them see a son. To let them know they still have one, can touch him and squeeze him and feed him and pretend they are keeping him safe and out of harm’s way, because we all know that harm’s way is way, way over that way. And it is surely not in sweet, sleepy, slow Accokeek, Maryland. Not in this house, where Pop said once that no man should be expected to lose two sons to war. He should be prepared to lose one if it came to that, Pop said, and I joked to Hank that that meant him.

  It was a joke, because it would never be him. My brother was always that guy, the guy who rose to every challenge. The guy who calmly and quietly worked it all out and then stood up to the invincible school yard bully and showed everybody how invincible the bully wasn’t. The guy who flailed as helplessly and repeatedly as the rest of us at the nastiest rising curveball the Eastern Shore League had ever seen, until he calmly and quietly worked that out, too. I do believe the resulting home run ball still hasn’t landed yet, three years after Hank crushed it.

  Just like he crushed everything that crossed his path and needed crushing. And everything that crossed my path as well. He was always there for me, a protective two steps ahead of me, and he always saw to it.

  Except he’s not here now. As I stand in front of this door, the door that always represented the final barrier of safety between us, our family, our home, our peace, and whatever all out there in the world would threaten any of that, I am as fearful as I have ever been at the mere thought of knocking.

  He’s not here now. Hank. I failed to ever appreciate how profoundly that would hit me. How much he did, even when he didn’t seem to be doing anything. I never considered him not being there at my side, so I never got prepared for the first time he wasn’t.

  And then the first time I have to soldier on without him turns out to be the time I have to talk to the family about soldiering on without him. Indefinitely.

  I’m certain they were aware of my approach down the road. We’d always watched for every movement out those parlor windows since forever. And I’m certain they are aware of my presence here, up the stairs, on the porch, square in front of the door.

  And I am certain, once again, of how good and kind these anxious people are, as they wait for me to get my helpless, crying, sad self under control before they make any acknowledgment of my presence.

  Good people. They deserve better than what they’re getting. They deserve, if nothing else, an explanation. Why? for instance. Why their boy? How? How in all of God’s creation did we get to this abomination of a result? How do righteous, God-fearing folk send not one son but two off into a bloody crusade to preserve decency over evil? To do all the hard-but-right things required to promote a civilization based on God’s own love and respect for all our neighbors regardless of their strangeness? How does a stout, unblemished soul like Hank McCallum get knocked off the top deck of one of the world’s most resilient, indestructible ships? Especially after he and that ship had already just barely survived another of the deadliest sea battles in history at the Coral Sea only one month before?

  Everybody, everybody who ever cared about Hank is deserving of an explanation. And all the people who cared about him craziest are inside this house in front of me.

  I have some explaining to do.

  Even though I have no explanation for them.

  As I have no explanation for myself.

  And my certainty grows that if Hank were here he would have something to say. Something like an explanation. Hank was always the guy who said those somethings that folks needed to hear.

  “The explanation is, there is no explanation,” he would have said. And I should say that I don’t know this for sure, because no one person knows another enough to speak his thoughts for him. I should say that. And I want to say that. I don’t know why but something won’t let me say it. “Because if you allow it an explanation,” he would have said, “that’s just a step closer to an excuse. And there is no excuse. Not for all we’re doing to each other. No excuse.”

  I don’t know if I ever once seriously disagreed with my big brother, and this right here would be an awkward place to start, but it’s probably important to say that I, myself, believe there are sometimes troubles in the world that are so serious and unfair that strong countries are right to come in and do possibly unpleasant violent stuff to defend the weaker countries. Our country just happens to be one of those stronger countries, and I don’t think we should have to go around apologizing for that. This war we are fighting is the right war, and we’re fighting the right people, without a doubt. This war here — here, there, and everywhere, so it seems — frankly coughs up one scene after another, right in front of your eyes, that makes it blindingly obvious that any sane and moral country has no choice but to intervene.

  So then really, ultimately, everything explains itself. It should be easy and straightforward enough to knock on the door and fall into the embrace of my beloved loved ones who’ve no doubt been storing up hug muscle for two years just for this first contact. And it should be simple, wheezing through love-squashed lungs, to dole out all the plain, heartfelt words, telling them what a hero our hero had been, what magnificent parents they are, how grateful the whole country and the freedom-loving world is for the sacrifice Hank has made and that they have made in giving their oldest son to the Cause, to the United States Navy, and ultimately, to the sea.

  It was straightforward, if not easy. And I said it, all of it, to Mam, and to Pop, and to Susan. I practiced it over and over in my head, said it as my duty and for my family, and for peace. We should at least be able to achieve peace here in this one modest house, even if it’s the only place on earth we can.

  But we can’t even manage that, because I cannot say those words about the hero’s courage and the family’s sacrifice and the country’s gratitude and the ocean’s satisfaction. I can’t say it because it’s not so.

  Because my brother is not dead. Nobody has shown me otherwis
e, and in that case I know he has to be alive. Hank McCallum. Ask anybody, they’ll back me up on this. Hank McCallum was always gonna be the last man standing at the end of this thing, and if not one person has produced not one item of evidence that my brother was hurt bad at Midway, then you can take it to the bank that he is in one piece somewhere. And even if they did come up with something, well, just don’t even bother with it ’cause something’s usually nothing in these situations. Show me a whole entire Hank McCallum with maybe a torpedo sticking out of his gut and you will then have my attention, but upon closer inspection, we will all see for ourselves that the toughest, greatest guy who ever lived is still doing exactly that: living. Torpedo or no.

  Missing in action is what he is, actually and officially. Lost at sea. He’s been lost before, and he’ll be lost again.

  Because what is missing can be found.

  Do you have to make it worse for everyone?” my sister, Susan, says as she yanks the front door open, exposing me frozen in place.

  “I didn’t do anything, Suzie, what?”

  “Twenty minutes, Theo,” she says with all the focus I’m lacking. “Twenty minutes you been standing out there, and we’re all in here at the windows, and, what, did you forget we had the windows? Did you forget there are people here waiting and anxious while you keep to yourself outside?”

  We were so close, me and Susan. Close, like we couldn’t pass in the hallway, ever, without one of us poking the other in the side, without maybe me shouldering her into the wall or her jumping on my back.

  Now, we stand three feet apart after two years apart, and she is so different already than when I left — tall and strong, and at twelve years old, no more than a couple inches shorter than me. And we stand our distance, stand our ground, until I am propelled forward on the thought that her ground is my ground and my ground is hers, and by the time I wrap my arms fully around her waist she has already pulled me crushingly hard to her, both cracking my neck and talking to it.

  “We waited inside as long as we could bear it, Theo. Figured you needed the moment, and then the other moment, and then the moment after …”

  “All right, girl,” I say, just remembering love, right this instant, what it really is, because whatever they say, you do not know love anymore when you are separated from this thing right here. Everything else out there is just a blurry picture of it, an IOU of it that just about manages to hold you over till you can come back to the real thing one fine day.

  “But when you started crying, Theo … I just could not hold myself back, not another second.”

  “Ah, I wasn’t ever crying,” I say, playfully pushing her away as we walk together into the living room to face my folks.

  “Don’t be such a brave jerk,” Susan says, holding my hand. “Nobody in this house is gonna think there’s a single thing wrong with a man crying when he’s been through two years of war like you have.”

  “Oh, no? Did Mam have a changing of the guard in my absence, or am I still gonna find Pop in his mangy old arm chair with the moss growing over him? ’Cause if he is still there, I think I’ll need to keep a stiff lip. He hasn’t gone blind, has he?”

  The door to the room is closed like they like it, and Susan stops and squeezes both my hands tight enough to make cartilage crackle. She shakes her head at me, silently, over and over again.

  “Pop knows how to cry now, Theo. I can tell you that from experience. From a lot of experience. Mam could tell ya as well. So could the lady at the post office, and the congregation of the First Episcopal, and possibly every last crab covering his ears at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.”

  “Oh,” I say, staring at this door that is now even scarier than the last one.

  The very same doors that were our shields against all fears not long ago.

  “Do they even have ears? Theo?”

  I turn back toward her, happy for the light air of her voice, for her lively, living, loving-life Suziness regardless of whatever nonsense she’s talking. “Who, honey?”

  “Crabs,” she says. “Ugly, clacky things. Bottom feeders. Don’t even look like they should have ears down there, doing all that … scuttling they do, oh, Theo …” She buries her streaming face in my chest and I hold her head in my hands so hard I could fracture it. I have to find a way through this, and I don’t know the way. I’m not even sure what the way is supposed to lead to.

  Except for the other side of that door. I know whatever path I am meant to travel for the rest of my life, it goes through that doorway before it can go anywhere else.

  “Shall we go in?” I say to my sloppy little sister when she shows no sign of moving from our statue-like, decidedly unstatuesque situation.

  That seems to reanimate her, at any rate.

  “We?” she says, putting some distance between us with two strong, stiff arms. “I think I’ll let you be we this time. I’ve been we around here for about two years now and I’m a little pooped, to be honest. Especially since …” I know she does not mean to leave that important thought unfinished, but it is hardly unfinished all the same. Eventually we are going to have to arrive at the words, but not now. Not yet.

  “I know, kid,” I say, kissing her forehead and granting her leave. “You’ve already done enough of this duty without any backup.”

  “Yes, I have,” she says, shuffling to the stairs and up. “And I’m no kid anymore, Theo.”

  No, she isn’t. I wait for her to have cleared the area, I turn, and I knock. A muffled, indistinct sound of welcoming just barely manages to reach me. My mother’s voice. I answer to that voice, as ever.

  I cannot lie and say there is nothing about entering that old, warm, familiar sitting room that makes me feel better. There is the same low sofa as always, covered in thin fabric as green as a Granny Smith apple. There is nobody on that sofa as Pop occupies one wingback chair to the left of it, and Mam occupies one to the right.

  The two of them get up as soon as I enter the room, and despite the full-moon love faces that come beaming my way, I almost wish they’d have stayed in their chairs. At least that way they would have looked right, with their sunken chair-slumped frames fitted correctly to the furniture. But because they are who they are they are bound to get themselves up to greet me proper, and in doing so they look practically as if the chairs came right up off the floor with them, the groaning wooden frames fused right to their own.

  “You look wonderful, Mam,” I say as I take her in my arms and her gentleman waits politely behind her. She merely moans and holds tighter to me as I shake my pop’s hand over her shoulder. “And you too, Pop. Better even than the day I left. I knew you’d be better for being rid of me.”

  “That is not true,” Mam snaps harshly, and rightly.

  “Sorry, Mam. I’m just so happy to see the two of you with my own eyes, looking so beautiful and strong through everything.”

  Pop shakes his head sternly at me behind her back where she can’t see, and he toggles his hand, two fingers upright and joined as one hard admonishment. “Don’t flatter your father, Theo. You know how I feel about flattery, and about honesty.”

  So much as a cluck of protest would be a mistake right now. He knows flattery and honesty as well as any man alive. He also knows himself, what he does and does not look like.

  “Your mother likes it fine, though,” he adds. “So keep up the good work while I make the tea.”

  “All right, Pop. Taking orders is one of my specialties now —”

  “And so is speaking charming nonsense to a couple of sad old folks,” Mam says warmly, manhandling me down onto the green-apple couch.

  “I’ll admit to nothing regarding charm, flattery, or nonsense since I entered this house. I say what I see, and that’s it.”

  And I see two beautiful people, who just happen to look like they’ve seen more war than I have.

  I feel oddly, warmly oppressed by the way the two of them stand there looking down on me. They still maintain essentially the whole width of the co
uch between them, and the space of the house is something I am already very conscious of. If I were the middleman right now turning a six-four-three double play, then we would be lined up perfectly.

  But we are not turning any double plays here, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that nothing is remotely close to perfect. After standing, admiring or assessing me for about the amount of time it would take her to make one of her perfect corned beef sandwiches on marble rye bread, with melted Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and eye-watering hot English mustard, and big, sour dill pickles on the side, Mam finally breathes some life into this silent, cold room again.

  “You must be starving, Theodore,” she says, springing into action. “I’ll make you a special something,” she adds on the fly, trailing the words and the unwellness of it all behind her swinging kitchen door.

  Me and Pop, then. The space between these walls, the spaces between these people are now matched by the spaces between words.

  What are those words? What can they be? What are they going to have to be?

  What won’t they be? That’s the one. Practically the only sure thing I worked out before I got here is that I will not be saying a certain word that I expect everybody else will be saying.

  Because he is only MIA. The M is for missing. My brother, Seaman Henry “Hank” McCallum of the United States Navy and the Philadelphia Athletics organization, was listed officially as missing in action in the North Pacific on June 6, 1942.

  The Japs sunk his ship, but they lost the Battle of Midway. They lost. And my thinking is, if they couldn’t manage to win, if they couldn’t take down any of a number of easier targets with all the advantages they had, there is just no way they had what it would take to finish off a nut as hard as my big brother. So, he’s out there, only missing. For now.

  “And you wanted to be on that same vessel with him,” my father finally says, releasing the words he’s had banked up inside there since the moment he opened the letter from the Navy.

  “Yes, Pop, I did want to be on the ship with him. And I’d feel the same way about it now. As a matter of fact, I do feel the same way about it now. I wish we were together at this minute, like we’re supposed to be.”