Machine Dreams

got around to writing me the facts about trees in Vietnam, but maybe he never took a really good look at Asian trees. Not from ground level the way grunts, the foot soldiers, did. Guys in the Veterans’ Caucus at the University talked to me about trees, about Lai Khe, about choppers. They would answer any question and their answers were detailed. The leafy branches of cultivated rubber trees start at about twenty feet up the thick trunks; the leaves are long and shiny, a waxen, glossy green.
    Trees in Bellington are oaks, elms, chestnuts, maples. Birches, evergreens. These trees are the green world of Bellington, of the county surrounding the town, of the mountainous state. In California, I live way up north, near the sea. The trees are different there. The land—the beautiful cliffs, the ocean, and the waves of the surf—seems foreign. When I think of home, I think of a two-lane road densely overhung with the deciduous trees of a more familiar world. The real world. I come back two or three times a year, always at Christmas, always late in June, most of July. Both are bad times for my family because Billy’s absence is so immediate and felt.
    The two bedrooms in the upstairs of my mother’s house remainjust as they were in 1969, except that the beds are covered with handmade cross-stitched quilts. My mother makes quilts in the long evenings when she is alone with the television set.
It gives me something to do with my hands and keeps me from thinking
, she says. This is the second summer Billy has been gone: I do want to think. Weekdays when Mom is at work, I sit in Billy’s room and think. I sit on Billy’s bed and don’t disturb anything, but I open the windows as far as they will go—to get some air circulating, some ventilation. It is late June now and summer is taking hold in Bellington. Most of the upstairs windows have worn-out screens, and my mother advises me not to open them at all; flies get in the house.
Better not stand on the little balcony porch off the upstairs landing; the roof is weak and the cracks in the plaster ceiling of the dining room below might widen. Wipe up the water that seeps out around the bathtub; it rots the flooring. Dry the tiles with a towel after you take a shower; they’ll last longer. Don’t sit on the quilts or put books on them; you’ll break the stitches. And don’t use them for cover; use the old blankets.
Her admonishments are low-key and continuous, as though a war is coming, rationing, proud impoverishment, or a death: something requiring fortitude. Except that a thing more continual than death has already happened, and fortitude is an ongoing process. My mother was ready for anything but this. She lived in fear for months before it happened: then it happened.
    My mother can’t talk about Billy in the present. Her emotions concerning the present are shaky. She doesn’t want to join the National League of Families, as I have in California; she says she can’t yet be of help to an organization if she hasn’t managed to help herself. Perhaps later. Meanwhile, I am the family representative in a league founded to lobby for government support of MIAs and POWs, to remind the general populace that they exist. My mother can’t think of Billy as Missing In Action. She thinks of Billy as himself. Often, with constancy and fidelity. She talks about him in letters to me and on the phone; we talk about him when I visit. Maybe she’s working her way into the present, questioning and concluding slowly. Last night she talked about taking Billy and me to the doctor as kids.
Billy hated shots. Rememberthose wide dark steps to Reb’s office above the hardware store, the medicinal smell as you got halfway up? On Saturdays half the County was there, poured in from the country. That big glass frame on the wall was filled with hundreds of snapshots, all the babies Reb had delivered, whole families. I’d try to get Billy interested in the pictures. He was so scared of needles, but he wouldn’t give in to being afraid until the last minute. He’d scream and it took two adults to hold him. Afterward I’d have to get him into the hallway before he’d seem himself again.
Her stories about the past seem to comfort her, but they sadden me. After all, I’m in the stories. I’m here, relating the stories to the present and to the future, and I’m always looking for hints.
You’d come trailing after us, having watched Billy and then taken your own shots in rigid silence