The Day the VFW Filled the Showroom
“Lorraine,” he said. “What does the lawyer cost?”
“3,500 dollars.”
“We’re not going to hire a lawyer.”
“Vern, I don’t have another idea.”
“A lawyer is for when somebody won’t answer,” he said. “Stan Kessler has never had to answer to anybody who sat across from him and looked him in the face. He just needs the right people sitting in his showroom.”
“What people?”
“The ones who’ll come when I call. Can you be at the Post on Friday night?”
Post 6193 is a long, low cinder-block building next to the old rail depot, with a wall inside of photographs of every young man and woman from the county who ever wore the uniform. Ryan’s picture went up the week he enlisted. Wendell’s is two rows above it.
Twelve of them were waiting for me, in folding chairs set in a half circle around a space heater.
I knew most by name. Hank Reisner, sixty-one, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant who served in Desert Storm. Melvin Baines, seventy-three, a Navy Seabee who built runways in Vietnam and now builds birdhouses. Pat Wendt, fifty-eight, an Air Force staff sergeant who runs the counter at the feed store. Scott Albrecht, Army, sixty-six. Two Auxiliary women sat along the back wall with their purses on their knees.
And in front, in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees and a cap that said Korea, sat Albert Mayhew, who is ninety-four and has been a member of that Post longer than most of us have been alive.
Vern had me tell it again. When I came to the check, a sound went around the room like a low wind.
“500 dollars,” Melvin said. “For a truck that cost 26,400.”
“Goodwill,” Hank said, in a flat voice. “For his service.”
Nobody shouted. Vern stood and set his cap on the table.
“Here’s what we’re not going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to yell. We’re not going to touch a thing on that lot. Lorraine walks in tomorrow morning and we walk in behind her, and we sit down, in the chairs they put there for customers, and ask politely where Specialist Tuttle’s truck is. And we keep asking until somebody tells us the truth.”
Albert Mayhew lifted one hand off his blanket.
“I’ll come,” he said, in a voice thin and dry as paper. “My great-grandson can drive me.”
Then he told me why. “Mrs. Tuttle, I shipped out for Korea in 1951. I was nineteen. I left my Ford with a neighbor named Harold Boggs, a key and a handshake. I came home in 1953 and that truck was waxed. He’d driven it to town once a month so it wouldn’t sit.” His eyes were cloudy and perfectly clear at the same time. “That is what a neighbor does with a soldier’s truck. I’ll come.”
I looked at the linoleum for a while after that.
On Saturday I drove into Braddock at ten o’clock with my hands folded on the wheel, parked at the edge of Kessler’s lot under the long banner, and got out in my good quilted coat.