The Phantom Blooper (31 page)

The girl looks at me, blushes, giggles, retreats toward her girlfriend. The girlfriend has Bette Davis eyes and Betty Crocker thighs. The two of them waddle away like baby ducks, sparkling red sequins and shiny batons glinting in the sun.

I say, "Wait . . . Don't you know me? I'm Jim Davis. Do you know Vanessa Oliver? Janice Tidwell? Yvonne Lockhart? JaDelle Steffanoni? Donna Murray? Jodi Corica? How about my baby sister, Cecilia Davis?"

The majorettes look back, giggling, embarrassed. They are staring at the scars on my face. The girlfriend says, "You're too old for us, mister." And they laugh and strut away quickly, elbow to elbow, exchanging big whispers, both talking at the same time.

I've come a long way to get home, only to find out that it wasn't worth the price of the trip, only to discover that, bottom-line, I am ashamed. I am ashamed to call myself an American. America has made me into a killer. I was not born a killer--I was
instructed
.

Russellville is a town that fears God and raises yearly crops of cotton, corn, and boys willing to die for the President.

As more farms fail, the town grows. The hearty yeoman farmers of Concord and Lexington Green, hard-working men who were close to the earth, are now refugees in the cities, begging for handouts from crooked politicians. In the country, a man made his living by hard work. In the cities, you survive by guile, lying and stealing. Grunts work; pogues make deals.

Home. It hasn't changed. It just isn't the same anymore. It's not America anymore. I'm not standing in the country I was born in and I am not the person I was born to be. Drive-in movies don't show me pictures I care to see anymore. Ice cream tastes like clay. Breasts are coconuts with nipples of black rubber. I can't remember: When did I go there, and why? And why did I come back? And where am I now? I don't know. None of us really know. The world we knew just ran away, it's gone. And where are we? We're alone. That's where we are, bros, there it is, no slack, payback is a motherfucker, we are alone. Meanwhile, all around us, like bloated white spiders, civilians cluster in their plastic shacks, polishing imaginary Cadillacs.

Walking the streets of the town I grew up in, I marvel at Black John Wayne's relentlessly perceptive vision of reality--a vision I had to struggle to attain in the Viet Nam war, but which Black John Wayne seemed to have been born with. He was right all along when he kept saying that, sooner or later, what politics comes down to is a nightstick upside your head. They neglected to tell us that particular important piece of information in civics class at Russellville High School.

Sitting Bull once said, "The white men are smart, but they are not wise." Americans do not respect people. Americans respect money, power, and machines. The Vietnamese are poor, the poorest people on the earth, yet they have dignity, sensitivity, pride, and a sense of honor. The Viet Cong live in a hellish world, and are happy. Americans have every luxury, and are sad. We're not morally bankrupt; we're in debt.

Americans have become, by imperceptible degrees, by the silent death of a thousand cuts, pathetic reservation Indians. Our Puritan heritage, our horror of everyday life, has always been a sickness, a disease dragging us down. Ultimately, the American vice and fatal weakness is pure uncut vanity. We turn our backs on the facts, and laugh. America arm-wrestles with God, confident of eventual victory. Meanwhile, trapped inside the reality of death like white mice in a jar of black glass, we damage each other mindlessly and without mercy and without even a concept of pity, in our futile attempts to escape. Even against time itself, Americans think we can simply send in the Marines.

Americans are prisoners of their own mythology, having watched too many of their own movies. If they ever want to send Americans to the gas chambers, they won't tell us we're going to take showers, they'll herd us into cinder-block movie houses.

In this country plain truth is as hard to find as Oswald's lawyer. Lost among our myths and dominated by our machines, we plug into the drug of our choice--sex, power, fame, money, booze, heroin--because we're afraid of the future, which is beyond our control. And our fear of the future makes us hate ourselves and makes us hate the work we do.

We spend our days moving pieces of paper from one side of the desk to the other. But it's just busywork, and we know it. We're all drawing the dole from the men who own the cities and who own us, too, like cattle, lock, stock, and barrel. If the men who own the cities suddenly closed down the supermarkets and turned off the electricity, we'd all starve and freeze, and we'd cry and be lost and we'd be afraid of the dark, and the men who own the cities know that, and so they know the exact extent of their power.

Life in the cities costs more than your soul, sometimes much more. Sometimes it costs more than you can pay.

As a kid, I played war in these streets. I remember the screams and the war cries, the
pock
of light-bulb hand grenades and the clatter of the trash can lids we used as shields. Real war is exactly like it was when you played it as a kid. Until you get shot. When you get shot, it's different. Everything in life somehow ends up being different from what you've been told. And when you learn that, when you learn to what monumental extent you have been bullshitted in the land of a thousand lies, something in you dies, forever, and something else is born. From that moment on, you're in danger. In the land of a thousand lies, to be an honest man is a crime against the state.

When you return to your boyhood town, you find that it's not the town you were seeking, after all, but your boyhood. I'm not standing in the same town I grew up in. My old hometown has changed. My real hometown has been taken away and a replica left behind. The sun was bought on sale at Sears and then stapled to the sky. The American hooches along the tree-lined street are colorful and unbelievably large. The lawns are neatly mowed, precisely trimmed. Translucent plastic grass like they put into Easter baskets has been manicured to within an inch of its life--the jungle tamed.

Cardboard leaves flutter lifelessly on cast-iron trees. And, down along Main Street, where the telephone poles are black and look like Tinkertoys, every building is gray. It's typical Downtown America--noisy, dirty, locked and barred.

My happy little hometown has been transformed into a brick and neon camp for round-eyed refugees.

Back in Hoa Binh, Song once said that Americans are like a man who marries his bicycle. He brings his bicycle into his house and sleeps with it. One day his bicycle breaks down. Then the man is afraid to take a trip, because he has forgotten how to walk.

Limping slightly, I walk the five miles to our farm, past the cotton-mill village, past acres of cotton fields.

When I see the farm it looks like a foreign place. Home. Home, that's what we were all fighting for in Viet Nam. Home was where we all wanted to be. We thought we knew where that was, but we were wrong.

There are no rice paddies in my father's fields. My father's fields lie fallow, spotted with big clumps of Johnson grass and a five o'clock shadow of ragweeds and thistles. In my father's fields there are no fields of fire. My father's fields are no longer strung with strings of dots that up close turn into fat round blue-green watermelons. And the only barbed wire is a two-strand boundary fence that needs repair.

I turn off the two-lane highway and climb through a gap in the boundary fence. I cut across the fields. I have worked and reworked every inch of this land, with mule-drawn plow, tractor, and hoe. I've had every ounce of this dirt under my fingernails.

I take a shortcut through a treeline that runs along a shallow stream.

I see a deer and the deer brings back memories of my childhood wars. In that treeline where the deer stands I stood tall with a Japanese bayonet my father brought home from World War II. I hacked my way through many summer banzai attacks of enemy saplings.

Later I squatted in the dirt and beat red ants to death with a rubber tomahawk. The red ants were Communists and I was Gregory Peck on Pork Chop Hill.

When I was twelve I got a .22-caliber single-shot rifle for Christmas and massacred squirrels, rabbits, and little gray lizards. But I would never shoot a deer.

A rack of antlers moves from the brush and there is the soft rhythmic tapping of hooves on a carpet of dry leaves. A stag appears, light brown with a white breast and white powder-puff tail, a rack of antlers of brown-yellow bone, and eyes too big and too human. The stag pauses, listens. He steps into the creek, drops his head, drinks from the softly flowing water. I stand still and wait until the deer melts into the trees.

It's too late to go back to the land in America; the land doesn't want us.

I walk along the dry creek bed where I caught salamanders called "water dogs" and marveled at the transparent jelly of frog eggs on the bottoms of wet rocks. Pebbles crunch under my spit-shined shoes like I'm walking on old bones.

Somewhere around here I buried my first pet, Snowball, who was run over by a drunken electrician driving a red pickup truck. I buried Snowball in a shoebox along with a wedge of cornbread and a note to God telling God what a good puppy he was.

I change direction into a meadow full of wild flowers the color of fire. The trees are booby-trapped, the soil is wired, and there is a sharp piece of metal inside every blade of grass. With one eye I scan the trees for snipers while my other eye X-rays the deck for punji pits and bouncing betty prongs. A patch of blackberry briars tears into my trouser legs like concertina wire.

I walk out of a treeline and for the first time in three years I see the house I was born in.

Our house is 140 years old. It was built by my ancestors with their own hands on the site of a log cabin built by James Davis in 1820. The 160 acres were awarded as a bounty land grant for service as a private under General Andrew Jackson. In 1814 James Davis fought at the battle of Horseshoe Bend and helped to slaughter Creek Indians so that Alabama could be stolen from them finally and forever. Nobody remembers who the Creeks stole it from.

The house is a mountain of scarred wood, weathered planks the color of pewter, newer planks like old ivory. The house sits on a fieldstone foundation, simple, unadorned, seemingly indestructible, the home of plain people.

Rusting by the barn are a manure spreader, hay mower, disk, rake, spike-toothed drag, and a grinder for mixing corn and oats for the pigs. It's sad to see good tools that have not been properly cared for.

As I walk into the yard of hard dirt, a little red bantam rooster we call Pig, because of how he eats, suddenly stops pecking and scratching and squawks and sputters across the yard in that clumsy wing-flapping that chickens call flying.

Ma is sitting on the front porch in her rocking chair, fanning herself with a cardboard fan that has a full-color picture of Jesus on the front.

Beyond the house, on the slope, Old Ma, wearing a faded blue sunbonnet, is working in her vegetable garden, repairing a scarecrow made of gleaming aluminum pie pans and large clear-plastic Pepsi jugs. The scarecrow looks like a monster born out of trash.

The only melons I've seen on the farm so far are the dozen by the porch where we used to spit the black seeds.

Pig sputters by, chased by a big red hound dog.

Half of the hound's face has been eaten away by the mange. The old dog lopes along clumsily. His ribs protrude, curved and well defined.

My sister Cecilia, too tall for her body, all arms and legs, her hair cut short like a boy's, wearing blue jeans and a man's gray work shirt, and with a strand of pink plastic pearls around her neck, charges across the yard. She pauses to break a switch from a dead peach tree. She swats at the hound with the switch. She says, "Go home, you mangy old dog. We ain't got but one chicken and you can't have him!"

The hound stands his ground, crouches, snarls, flashes big yellow teeth, and his teeth make me think of the napalmed tiger we saw that night on our way to the Nung combat fortress.

Cecilia drops the switch, runs up onto the front porch and back into the house.

Within seconds she reappears, slamming the screen door behind her. She jumps off the porch. She walks up to the hound and kneels, shoving a white paper plate at the dog. On the paper plate are three greasy pink black-edged wedges of fried bologna and half of a fluffy white homemade biscuit.

The dog hesitates. Cecilia pushes the plate under the dog's nose. She picks up a piece of bologna and holds it out. The dog snaps at the meat, then gulps it down. While he eats the rest of the meat and the biscuit, Cecilia strokes his head. The dog growls deep in his throat, and eats faster.

I say, "Hi, Stringbean."

Sissie looks up and her whole face opens into a smile. "James!" She jumps up and hugs me.

I give Sissie a one-pound sack of candy corn. Holding onto the candy, Sissie climbs onto my back. I give her a piggyback ride to the house as she yells, "Ma! Ma! It's James! James is home! James is home!"

My mother stands up on the porcb, shades her eyes with her cardboard fan, and looks at me, puzzled. She says, "James? Is that you?"

Old Ma starts coming in from the fields.

Before supper I put my AWOL bag into my old room. It's the same room, only smaller, and airless, and my bed is a kid's bed, still covered with a quilt hand-sewn with big patchwork butterflies.

My microscope and the beakers, flasks, and test tubes of my chemistry set are coated with a fine film of dust.

There's a framed photograph of Vanessa, my high school sweetheart, signed T. S. T. S. A.,
too sweet to sleep alone
. Vanessa used to write T. S. T. S.A. on the flap of her letters to me when I was in recruit training on Parris Island. My Senior Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, a romantic, enjoyed making me eat her letters, unopened.

When I was in Viet Nam, Vanessa sent me a peace button I wore in the field, now on Cowboy's Stetson.

The only addition to my room is the framed boot-camp photo of a tanned, overly serious kid in dress blues. The kid has ears like an elephant. The photo used to be on the coffee table in the living room.