The Home Front

 

1.

The trailer house rests on a small bluff overlooking Village Creek on the fringes of the Big Thicket National Preserve. Mattie Solis has lived here for two years cataloging the plants and wildlife that live along the sloughs and in the scrub wilderness that grows up whenever one of the large trees, a beech, an elm, a spindly loblolly pine, gives up and dies. She has always been fascinated by the natural life of the thicket. She loves the knowledge that the death of just one of the great trees provides new forms of habitat for so many different kinds of animals. Now it’s her job to think about the changes and to write about them.

If the job were all she had to worry about, Mattie would be happy, but she is growing increasingly uncomfortable with Tim Nielson. He had moved into her small trailer with her three months earlier and she thinks that the size of the trailer might be part of the problem and sometimes thinks she might be the problem.

Tim Nielson comes from a long line of drinkers, some of his relatives still live back in holes in the thicket and make their own. Not hardly civilized, she knows. No, not hardly. But she loves him, she thinks. Some nights Mattie closes her eyes real tight and can still see him as

he was that first day and feel the trailer house shake all over again like it did when he jumped up into the living room without even using the steps. He just stood there, shirt unbuttoned and hanging out over his jeans, hips thrust forward like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and holding a longneck Lone Star beer he'd picked up on his way back from the refinery on the other side of Beaumont.

Mattie sits on the edge of a lawn chair, listening to the sound of the creek as it rushes around a drifting log, to animal and bird noises, to the wind blowing the grasses and the trees. She reads a letter from Peter Conroy. She had once thought she loved Peter, but that had been in 1963 when she was only 18 years old and a sophomore in college. Peter and Tim, she thinks. How could two men be so different and, in some ways, so alike.

She looks up to watch two cardinals, vivid flashes of red against the almost too deep green of the woods on the other side of the creek. She remembers that first night she and Peter had made love. He had been inexperienced at 21, shy, burrowing under the sheets. When she touched him, he had flinched, closed his eyes. She still remembers the touch, her hands sliding down his body, can feel the hard muscles of his belly, the tight skin over his hip bones. In that moment when he opened his eyes and looked at her, slid his own hand down the slope of her side and up to her hips, when she saw a slow smile grow on his lips, felt him pull her up and hold her, the muscles of his arms hot and firm against her chest, she had loved him.

She pushes herself out of the chair and folds up the letter. The banks of the creek are damp, cool against her bare feet. The thicket, as the sun falls behind a massive Black Walnut tree comes alive with noise—frogs, crickets, screech owls, the bubbling of the creek—, but it is not yet dark. She sits down next to a still pond, tropical night blooming water lilies slowly, but almost visibly, opening as she stares out over the water. She reads the first lines of the letter again. “We arrived at Chu Lai yesterday on large landing ships....” Vietnam, she thinks, Peter’s in Vietnam. She can feel the dampness seeping through her shorts, cold, uncomfortable. He had left early the next morning. She would not have noticed if he had not stumbled against the bed. “You weren’t going to say goodbye?” She had asked. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I have an early class and my books are at home.” He had kissed her then, dry lips brushing lightly, on the forehead and left.

“Peter is in Vietnam and Mattie’s up the creek,” she sings softly in a parody of the Mothers of Invention. Water bugs skitter across the surface of the pond. She hears the deep booming of a bull frog. In the distance a cougar screams. A cloud passes over the moon and the darkness is a physical touching, her skin cool, soft, the wetness of the earth spreading from the contact of her buttocks with the ground. She had not seen Peter for two days after that first night and after the second visit she had not wanted to see him ever again.

As she holds the envelope from Vietnam, her fingers sliding over it, no postage, just the dry polish of the paper, she sees him again, can still not understand. When she opened the door to him, he had not come in. Instead, he had stood framed in the doorway, looking at her, his jaw clenched. She remembers that she had smiled, invited him in. But he had not crossed the threshold into her apartment. He had begun talking, not to her, but into her room, about his daddy who had been a preacher at the Primitive Baptist Church in Spurger, Texas, way back in the thicket. He had called her names, hurt her in ways much worse than physical, each name shattering against her ears. She was a whore, he had said, a Jezebel. He had showered in water so hot his skin had hurt, but her smell remained. She remembers the way he pointed at her, his whole hand shaking and how he went on and on, loud, almost shrieking, the neighbors finally pulling him away.

She cannot understand why he has written her, what he really wants from her. She slaps her thigh, feels her own blood in the splattered body of the mosquito. She walks back to the trailer house and goes in. Why would he want me to write, she wonders. I’m lonely, he had written. He wants to hear from her.

The letter tells so much, nothing more. Names, a litany of dead friends she does not know, different kinds of mines, ambushes, claymores turned back on the men who had set them out, punji pits. He wants her to write to him, a love letter that he can share perhaps, a photograph. “Don’t be wearing too much,” she reads. He talks about Orion shining above him and how it makes him think of home and her. “I remember how mean I was, Mattie.” She remembers, too. “I don’t know why. My daddy said what we did was evil. We got down on our knees and we prayed and fasted all day and all night and the next day my daddy opened the Bible and we read scriptures. I’m sorry, Mattie, for hurting you.” She sprays herself with repellant and walks back outside. The thicket is alive, so noisy that no one could carry on a conversation even if there were someone there to talk to.

Write me, he had written. Forgive me, he had not quite asked. She closes her eyes, remembers the way he looked at her the first night when his hand reached out. But that night blends with the second and she hears the words again. Peter is holding her, his skin so warm against hers. They have kicked the sheets off the bed, sprawl naked in the center, her thigh between his, her breasts flat against his chest; he stands in the doorway, fully clothed, screaming at her, his hand raised, shaking. It had been so sweet, so awful.

The harsh light from the trailer frames her on the chair, the letter open in her hands. Hundreds of insects fly around the lamp. “It isn’t as bad as it was,” she reads. “But it’s not good, Mattie. Yesterday, our point man stepped on a Bouncing Betty. We all heard the pop and then the explosion. It ripped open his stomach. He died before the medevac even got there. I want to come home.”

“No,” she whispers, the expiration, soft, an almost inaudible hiss, is lost in the night. She crumples the letter, balling it tight in her hand. The creek flows by the trailer house, dividing around a snagged log, she hears the sound of the thicket at night, walks barefoot along the trail along the creek that she has walked so many times in the past seven years. Her hands clench the paper. “No.”

 

2

Peter walks through the wide hallway in Oakland. He wears his first class uniform, the first time he has worn it since he boarded a plane for DaNang a year earlier. Nervous, he looks around, half expects a brigade of long-haired young men and women to begin spitting at him. He has heard the stories about the reception at Oakland, stories about beautiful women wearing peace symbols and no bras. From the stories he has assumed that no one soldier DEROSing from Vietnam could avoid a spit bath, but he wants to see the hippie chicks, wants to check for himself, see what they look like without bras. He is relieved and half disappointed that no one spits on him, throws shit at him, screams “Baby killer!” in his face. He is prepared for a fight, almost unwilling to believe that no one cares.

Mattie had not answered his letter. And he had taken a long time to write it, had wanted to get down all his thoughts about killing and about his friends being killed or wounded, had wanted her to remember the good things and forget about that night. Maybe, he thinks, the letter didn’t get there. Maybe she still cares for me.

He is in her bed, her body molded to his, her breasts against his chest, her belly rubbing, slightly moist with sweat, against his. His hand slides down her side and up the slope of her hip. Goddamn that night was good. His father had known. His father knew everything. When Peter had come home that night, his father had taken his leather belt off and made him drop his pants and lean against the chair. No other words, no questions. “I’m twenty-one years old!” he had cried. “God doesn’t care how old you are,” his father had said. And then he had beaten him, the belt rising and falling against his bare bottom. Afterwards, they had had knelt and prayed.

Billy died that day. They had been moving slowly through a rice paddy not far from Chu Lai. Hot, all of them sweating. Not far away, Peter could see the mountains that swept down toward the coast. No one was paying much attention. Billy was walking point and talking, he wasn’t supposed to be talking, about a whore he’d had the night before. “You know,” he said, “at that laundry down by shack city.” And then they’d all heard the popping sound. Peter swore he could see the small bomb fly into the air after Billy triggered it, saw it blow up, shards flying into Billy’s stomach, neck, crotch. A bouncing betty designed to explode only after a much smaller explosion popped it into the air to do maximum damage. Billy fell into the rice paddy, face down in the water. Peter had watched, almost detached, as clouds of red blossomed like flowers in the muddy red water. He had taken a long drink from his canteen.

He’d written Mattie that afternoon. Not yet a short-timer, 220 days and a wake-up, he wanted to go home. Billy still had 133 days in country when he triggered the mine. He’d be home first. The blood bubbled slowly up in the water, buffalo and human shit, piss, parts of Billy to fertilize the rice. Peter wanted pine trees, the slow moving water of Village Creek, Mattie. “I want to come home,” he had written.

Peter feels odd in his uniform even though a few other soldiers are on the plane. Nervous, he taps his feet. When the flight attendant asks, he orders a Budweiser, drinks it quickly. He closes his eyes tight, summons a picture of Mattie Solis. Buddy Johnson has called for a medevac though Billy is obviously dead. Buddy’s a mean son of a bitch. Doesn’t take shit from anyone. Home boy from back in Southeast Texas though they’d never met. Peter had been thinking about Chuyen, a whore he’d bought just two nights earlier. Maybe the same whore Billy’d been talking about. He didn’t know. He’d called her Mattie when he felt the rush between his thighs. He hadn’t snapped out of it until Buddy had pushed him down into the paddy. “Move, shit for brains!” he’d shouted. “Get him outta there before the chopper gets here.” Mattie, he thinks, Jesus Christ.

He takes a Greyhound from Houston and almost wakes up as the bus pulls to a stop at the Texaco station in Silsbee. He had fallen asleep almost as soon as he sat down. He jerks up, shakes pictures of Billy out of his head. The driver smiles at him, throws his cigarette to the ground. “Welcome home,” he says.

 

3.

It’s hot out there in the summers and Village Creek, filled with old limbs and lilies and all kinds of swimming things, isn't fit to jump into just for fun. Sometimes small whirlpools erupt in the water as big alligator gars swirl around on the surface. Sometimes, Mattie lies down on a blanket, closes her eyes, and just listens to the woods: the trees moving against each other and the leaves rustling in the wind, a pileated woodpecker some distance off banging at a diseased tree trunk to find insects under the peeling bark, frogs and crickets and some things she can't even identify.

Just after Tim moved in, he had grabbed Mattie's hand and they'd taken off into the woods, walking down the creek to try to find a place where they could wade out into the water and go skinny dipping without getting caught up in the lilies, but just past the yard, the creek slipped over the bank into a big slough. Lots of frogs and moccasins, algae-filled water. She'd told him that, but he still wanted to look. They had lain down right there on the damp ground next to it. It was cool and Mattie was warm and Damn, she thought, it did feel good.

About six o'clock, supper almost ready, she waits in the trailer for Tim to come home. She had told Tim about Peter and now thinks that might have been a mistake. She knows Tim, knows he often takes things wrong, almost as if he were looking for fights.

She feels him get up at about one in the morning and watches him open the trailer door, briefly framed strip naked in the bright moonlight. She hears the door on the old pickup creak open and then slam shut, but he doesn't go anywhere.

After a short while, she gets up and peeks out through the small window in the kitchenette and sees Tim sitting in the lawn chair, holding a pistol in his hand, and looking over it, out into the creek. Every once in a while, he pulls the gun up and points it at something way off on the other side, but he doesn't shoot at it.

The next morning Mattie makes Tim's lunch and watches him closely as he gets into the truck and hears the tires roll over the oyster shells in the drive. He doesn't wave goodbye.

She sits by the creek for a long time just thinking about Tim and why he’d brought a piston into her house. He hasn't said anything, but Mattie can tell from his walk and his nervousness and the way he’d made love last night. More nervous, more tense and wild. And she doesn't like the gun, not even a little bit. She knows the thicket can be dangerous, but not the kind of dangerous that can be held off with a pistol. Most of the crawling things would rather keep away from people than hurt them. And the people who live there would just as soon leave each other alone as bother with them.

 

She worries about it and thinks about it, but can't think of anything to do about it. She gets up and walks out into the thicket to work.

The next night Tim brings the pistol into the house.

"What do you need a gun for?" Mattie asks him, but he doesn't really answer. Just says something about how a man living so close to the thicket might need some protection every now and then, about how his daddy'd been shot back in the thicket and would have been okay if he'd had his own gun to shoot back, but he'd died instead. “And there’s Peter,” he says. “He’s just back from Nam and no telling what might happen.” Tim sits down at the table with the gun in his hand and drinks from the longneck and scratches at his sweaty and oily T-shirt.

Mattie leans over him and massages his shoulders, trying to get every trace of tension out of his muscles. “I can handle Peter,” she says.

Tim doesn't even go to bed that night, just sits out in the yard looking into the thicket and aiming. Mattie wakes up at about 2 a.m. when she hears the pistol go off three times real quick and loud in the quiet woods. She doesn't bother to put on a nightgown, just runs right out to the creek. She sees Tim, stark naked on her chair, blowing on the pistol barrel like Tom Mix in one of those old western movies and staring across the dark water at something she can't even see.

"What did you shoot at, Tim?" she asks. She hugs herself against him, feeling his hard muscles clenching and unclenching all up and down his body. He is wet with sweat, wet clear through, and Mattie can feel the sogginess of the shirt he still hasn't taken off, and even the wet waistband around his pants.

"Nothing," he says, "just aiming at an old possum. It’s hard to hit anything with a pistol." But he holds her tight, his face buried in her nightgown and his hands pulling her in close. “Damn, Mattie," he says. "Just stand here a few minutes, don't move."

Finally, she gets him out of the yard and back into bed. He falls asleep immediately and Mattie curls up next to him.

Peter had called that night. She told him no, she didn’t want to see him, told him she was glad he’d made it back, told him she had a new life, a boy friend, a job. He’d begged her. “Just give me another chance.”

“No.”

“I’ll see you later,” he had said and hung up the phone.

When she told him Peter had called, Tim wanted to stay at the trailer instead of going to work. She just looked at him. He was slender, wiry, tight jeans and T-shirt, standing slouched so his hip was thrust out. She wondered why she kept getting mixed up with guys like that. She told him she could take care of herself and sent him off to his job at the Mobil Refinery.

It feels so cold in her hands. Tim’s pistol, much too heavy for her, a little rust speckling what had once been a silver-colored barrel. It has a life of its own in her pocket, startling her when it bumps against her thigh. She worries about it, but can't think of anything to do about it. She’d promised Tim she’d carry it until he got back that night, but she puts it down. No way, she thinks. No way I’ll carry that thing with me. She looks down at it, heavy even lying on the table. She turns and leaves the small trailer.

As she crosses an old log over the creek, she has trouble keeping her mind on her work from worrying so much about Peter and trying to figure out what kind of a mess he is going to make for her. She knows he won’t leave her alone. Neither will Tim, she thinks. She watches a squirrel racing across the path and into a tree. “Maybe I should just swear off men,” she tells it. “Got any good suggestions?”

She walks slowly and quietly up a path coated with long pine needles. On the other side of the small hill, the trail runs beside a murky area where Village Creek backs up and grows stagnant. She's been looking there off and on for a strange lacy fern no one has seen in the area for more than a decade.

When she reaches the backwater, Mattie slows even more, walking so quietly nothing can hear her move. She pulls out her logbook to enter the date and time. Then spots the tiny tuft of fern growing up from a mound of green mold that coats the damp ground. At the same time, she spots a huge cottonmouth water moccasin sunning itself in a cluster of cypress knees rising up from the low water. She walks carefully around the fat snake. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t bother you.”

 

4

Peter knocks on the trailer’s door. He’s driven a borrowed car out from town to see Mattie. He wants to impress her, maybe take her to lunch. When she doesn’t answer, he pushes on the door and it swings open. He walks inside, looks at the small quarters. Not much bigger than my hootch back in Chu Lai, he thinks. We can do better than this.

He moves back outside and looks around, sits for a while in Mattie’s chair, gazing out across the creek at the darkness under the trees. He knows she is out somewhere in the woods. He decides to wait.

Peter listens. The sounds remind him of the jungles of Vietnam, but he knows it is not the same. No rice paddies. No steep hills with triple canopied covers. And yet the insect sounds are the same. He cannot hear any “fuck you” lizards. The snakes he knows are all around are not as bad as the “two step” snake in Vietnam. But there is an atmosphere about the place that reminds him of that patrol when Billy tripped a mine. He feels someone looking at him and turns quickly around. Nothing there.

He changes his mind, stands up and walks to the creek. Unlike most of the creeks he had seen in Vietnam, this one is fairly clear but is streaked with a deep brown color. He follows the small path alongside it upstream, finds the log and crosses it. He looks carefully left and right, walks slowly, his eyes running along the ground. Like Billy was supposed to, he thinks. He looks upward at the branches of the tall trees. A squirrel races along the limb of an old beech tree and jumps to the thick, dark green leaves of a magnolia. He stops as he hears a rustling noise, but it is only an armadillo rooting in the leaves that have blown up against the base of a loblolly pine.

He watches carefully, looks left and right, thinks he hears a noise behind him and spins backwards to check the trail. Sometimes they would take out the last man on a patrol. He knows that. That’s why no one ever wants to walk slack . He stares down the trail but can see nothing out of the ordinary. Something there, he thinks. He shrugs, probably just some normal movement, maybe another armadillo.

As he walks quietly through a small bend in the trail, sunlight breaks through the cover and illuminates a small cypress slough. He sees her. She is leaning down on the edge of the bank looking at something. He watches as the sun glistens on her long hair. He notices the tightness of her jeans on her thighs as she bends over, the way her breasts fill her old checked shirt. “Mattie,” he whispers.

She looks up from the small fern when she hears the whisper. She sees Peter. “I don’t want to see you, Peter” she says. “Go away.”

He sees all the green foliage, sees bamboo and titi trees, tupelos and cypress. So much like that day though the plants are different. “Mattie,” he says. He lunges forward, his feet slipping down into the slough, into the rice paddy, bright sunlight blinding him after the darkness of the deeper thicket. He has always hated wading through paddies, but the sergeant says it’s safer than walking on the narrow dikes. Billy should have been down in the water.

“No!” Mattie yells at him. “Don’t move!”

But he doesn’t hear her. He wades through the shallow water, bumping into cypress knees, kicking away floating limbs. As he wades closer to her, she backs up. “Mattie. It’s been a long time. Don’t go away, Mattie. I love you.”

“I told you I don’t want to see you, Peter.”

“But you didn’t mean that. I’ve thought about you for years, Mattie. What we did that night.”

Mattie stands up. She speaks in a low, controlled voice. “Go away, Peter. I mean it.”

He walks closer, his feet near the edge of the bank, the water quiet, no movement. The only sound the drop of leaves, a bird somewhere off in the distance calling. The sunlight glistens on his forehead, his eyes wide.

“I’ve always loved you, Mattie,” he says. “Even when my father whipped me, when we were praying. In Vietnam, every woman I saw was you.” Peter stops for a moment, his foot slipping, throwing small clods of dark brown dirt into the still water. He stands quietly for a moment. “I didn’t think you were like the others. They used to laugh at me. Even in Chu Lai, the whores at the laundry. When Billy died, he talked about them. What they said about me.” Peter looks down. “But that doesn’t matter, now. I’m home, Mattie. We can get married.”

Mattie walks carefully along the edge of the slough. She does not take her eyes off Peter. “Go home, Peter. Call me. I’ll talk to you on the phone.”

Peter walks closer to her, then sits down on the damp ground that is only a few inches higher than the water of the slough. “Sit down, Mattie. Let’s talk…like old times.”

When Mattie remains standing, he takes her arm and pulls her down. She feels his strong hand on her arm, his leg beside hers, as she falls to the ground. “Leave me alone, Peter. I don’t love you. There weren’t any ‘old times.’ I don’t want whatever you want.”

“Yes, Mattie, you do. Remember that night? I can’t forget it.”

He puts his arm around her, turns her to face him. “I want you, Mattie. The way we used to be.” He pushes his lips hard against hers. She feels his hand on her breast. “No!” she screams and pushes against him.

He grabs at her when she tries to stand up. “Just you and me, Mattie, the way God wants it.”

“No you and me, Peter, no!” She kicks him hard, her foot ramming into his groin.

“You bitch!” Peter screams. “You fucking gook!” He grabs her to pull himself up and then stumbles, pitches backward into the slough.

 

5.

Mattie runs back through the woods. When she gets to her trailer, she sees Tim’s truck parked beside the rental car. When she goes into the trailer, Tim is there drinking. “Why aren’t you at work?” she asks.

“Didn’t want to today. Whose car’s that in the drive?”

Mattie picks up the phone and dials the number for the sheriff’s department. “It’s Peter.” She tells Tim. He’s come back, found me down by the cypress slough.”

Tim’s eyes drop down to the pistol, still resting on Mattie’s table. He picks it up. “I told you to keep this with you. No telling what that nut will do.”

She talks to someone at the Sheriff’s Department, tells her what’s happened. “I don’t want him hurt. I just want him to leave me alone.”

“You know,” he says, watching her as she reports what has happened. “I could have gone to Vietnam, would have been real good. But I had asthma. 4-F.”

She turns back to Tim after hanging up. “He’s harmless, Tim, really. He’s always been just a little off. And what the hell makes you think you can tell me what to do?”

Tim ignores the question. “Sure he’s harmless, just another crazed Vietnam vet.” He jams the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. “You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“No,” she says. “It’s not like that. He was already a little off before he ever went to Vietnam. He’s kind of sweet most of the time.”

He opens the door to the trailer.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She grabs his arm.

Tim grins at her. “Someone needs to teach the son of a bitch a lesson.”

“No, Tim! The sheriff will be here soon. I just want him to leave me alone.”

He pulls his arm free and walks out, closing the door firmly behind him.

 

6.

Mattie goes out to the creek. She stares at the water as it rushes around the limb. She watches as Tim crosses the old log. Sees him pull the pistol out of his waistband and hold it out in front of him. She follows him.

Not far down the trail she stops as she sees Tim slow down. He holds the pistol higher.

“Tim, don’t,” she says and then jumps as he jerks on the trigger. The noise echoes through the thick trees.

“We don’t want you around here, Peter,” she hears Tim say. “Mattie and me, we have a good thing.”

For Mattie it’s like slow motion as she sees him pulls the pistol up again and hears the noise of another shot makes the thicket grow quiet.

She jumps on Tim’s back, grasping his arm, pulling his hand down. “You bastard! You bastard! Leave him alone. I don’t want either of you here, not either of you. Is he hurt? Did you hurt him?” She pushes him away and looks down the trail.

Peter steps out from behind a thick loblolly pine. “I’m okay, Mattie. Mattie, I won’t hurt you. I’d never hurt you. You know that.” Peter grins crookedly. “He’s not a very good shot, Mattie.”

“Just both of you, both of you, leave me alone. Get out of here!” Mattie turns and runs back down the trail. “I don’t need anyone!”

 

7.

That night, Mattie sits at her table. She reads Peter’s letter again. She thinks about her conversation with the sheriff’s deputy.

When she goes outside again to sit and listen to the night sounds, she cries a little. “I don’t need anyone,” she had said and she believes that. She watches the leaves blowing slightly in the wind, sees their moving pattern in the shadow of the full moon weaving patterns on the surface of the creek. It can’t be like this, she thinks. She hears the splashing of a gar in the water, the murmuring of insects along the bank.

Mattie undresses and walks to the bank of the creek. She dives in, not even caring if there’s anything under the water and swims to the far bank. “I don’t need anyone!” she shouts up into the trees. She swims back and pulls herself up on the bank and lies down on the cool dirt. She feels the water dripping down her sides. “Not anyone.” She looks up at the bright moon and cries.