The Drive
I will tell you something I am more ashamed of than the sentence. That night in the garage, after the kitchen table, I felt relief, like a man allowed to put a load down. It is not a feeling worth having. By morning the sack sat on the shelf over the telephone, the top rolled down, and he had not thrown out one envelope.
On Sunday night Em sat on the arm of the couch in her robe. “Monday he’s driving you to the post, Rawley. I’d put on a clean shirt. He’s paid the first month at a place for you.” She put one hand on my head, the way you touch a dog that has been in a fight and you don’t know if it will bite.
I said her name. “Don’t,” she said. “Not tonight. You’ll make me say something I can’t take back.” She had every right to, and she declined. It was a mercy I had no vocabulary for.
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Monday the twenty-first, the sky was low and pearl. At twenty after eight Kelvin said, “Get your duffel. I’m taking you to the VFW.”
“Kel.”
“Don’t.”
It is eleven miles to Post 6274 on County Road 14. I held the old olive-drab duffel I had carried out of Kuwait in 1991, with everything I owned in it. Kelvin drove at ten and two. It was not the silence of two men angry at each other. It was the silence of a truck cab at three in the morning, when the talking has run out and there is only the road.
We turned in at a low tan brick building with a flagpole and a gravel lot. I counted eleven pickups. Then, through the door glass, I saw old men, a dozen and more, standing along a long table with a white paper cloth, every head turned toward me. Two big coffee urns. A sheet cake with nothing written on it.
“Kelvin,” I said. “Who told them?”
“I did. Go on in.”
A big gray-bearded man in a khaki jacket crossed the floor with his hand out. Lysle Mahaffey, seventy-six, Army, Vietnam, 1969. He shook my hand before I had it all the way out of my pocket. “You Tarver? Coffee’s on. Sit down.”