Halloweenie.”
“Then where you go be stationed?” asks Pani Pilsudski.
“I’ve told you one hundred times, Mrs. Pilsudski,” Tad says. “Turn up your hearing aid.”
“No, you haven’t told us once,” Ma says.
“Wounds affected your memory?” Pa asks. “Have you seen his Purple Heart, Mrs. Pilsudski? Our nephew here is suffering wounds.”
She daydreams of something or someplace else and doesn’t answer.
My mother sure doesn’t think Tad’s showing up here drunk is very funny. During her happily married life near the Northern Pacific ore dock, she’s seen too many neighborhood men getting drunk, fighting, hollering, falling in the snow. It’s like in the Old Country. A weekly Polish paper, the Gwiazda Polarna, recently reported how a cold wave killed thirty-six people in Poland. Most of them were drinkers who went outside or fell asleep in unheated rooms. Just two old women froze, I read.
When Tad takes the heavy marine overcoat off, we see how thin he’s become.
“I’m going back to Vietnam,” he says. “Can’t eat nothing. Can’t keep it down. Too worried.”
When he removes his tassel cap, a line divides the tanned part of his face from the pale part. It’s like this from his wearing a helmet three months ago. The pale part will never go away. I think he will be marked by this Vietnam War and a pale forehead forever.
“Got you a present, Edda,” he says, pulling a bottle of vodka from the inside of the greatcoat. Next, he produces a paper he’s kept beneath his jacket.
“Going back to Vietnam. Goddamn it, I’m going back.”
“Well,” Pa says, “you’re sure gonna have the last laugh on us, because next week you’ll be where it’s hot and tropical.”
“Over there it’ll be the monsoon season when your clothes get moldy green fuzz on them.Your shoes rot, too. It’s what I’m gonna call you, Andy—Fuzz Mold,” Thaddeus says to me. “It’s your new name.”
“I like it,” I say.
“Your weather’ll be better than the siege of winter we’re gonna get,” says the gas man, my father. “It’s starting early this year.”
“I don’t want to go. I made a mistake, Uncle Edda. I’m okay. I signed up for a tour. Goddamn. But I’m okay. I can’t remember if I said I was going back or not. I forget everything these days. Here—”
The vodka he presents us looks slightly greenish in the bottle.
“Look, Andy!” says Pa.
In it is a stem of something. Thaddeus says, “European bison food. Distiller puts this herb in each bottle. It colors and flavors the product. ‘Żubrówka’ Bison Brand Vodka. I can’t recall where I got it,” he says. “Someplace where I was drinking last night. Read this to us, Andy Fuzz Mold.”
The label says, “Flavored with an extract of the fragrant herb beloved by the European Bison,” I read. I turn the bottle sideways. The herb floating in vodka hypnotizes us.
“Gimme,” my pa says. “Let’s look at it.”
“You have to work, Edda.You can’t drink,” Ma says. Putting water glasses out for the vodka, she brings Mrs. Pilsudski her glass. “Jezu,” I hear Pani exclaiming after one sip. After two, I hear her singing a radio commercial for this wine that’s always advertised: “One sip of Arriba, and you, too, will hear the beat-beat-beat of the bongos.”
With everyone drinking, everyone crazy, I think Tad looks great. He is cool. I don’t call him a soldier; I call him a marine. A new kind of savage fighter in the Asian jungle, he dresses out of uniform and wears dark granny glasses, but despite what he looks like when he is home recovering from his wounds, he wants to win the war. I’m glad he is a member of the Boruczki clan, and I hope I can put him in my Scrapbook of Brave Men under the heading “Cousin Thaddeus Milszewski.”
I ask him, “Do you want to go to Vietnam?”
“Oh no . . . oh sure,” he says. “I’ve been wounded once. I’ll fight like heck.”
“Beat-beat go the bongos,” says Pani. “Oo-la-la. Smell goot in house.”
“It’s all right if you’re afraid to go back,” Pa says. “I’m afraid some nights at the gasworks.”
“I’m not afraid,”Tad says.
“That’s the spirit,” says my dad, clinking glasses with Thaddeus. From the kitchen table, my crazy-looking cousin picks up the piece of paper he brought in. The folded map is a foot long, maybe ten or eleven inches wide. When he opens it into two halves, we see only the back part.
“Are you ready?” he asks. He drinks more vodka, nibbles a piece of herb. “You’ll see a map of your life.”
Pa sips his vodka. He gives me a drink of it in preparation for what Tad is going to show us.
Opening the paper to expose its four quarters, Thaddeus keeps the blank side toward us. We see his eyes behind blue lenses, half-pale, half-tan face, his hands holding up the paper, which he then turns.
“Wow!” I say. It has so many lines, dots, squares. There are light blue and green places, pink and purple ones. You see thin lines and circles drawn in black. The map unfolded is at least two feet by two feet, I figure. When he spreads it out, the paper covers much of the kitchen table.
“What is it of?” I ask before I see that blue represents the lakes and rivers of our home . . . of the “NE/4 Superior 15’ Quadrangle of Superior,Wisconsin.”
“It’s as topographic as I’ll ever want to get,” Tad says. “I ordered it through the mail. I’m gonna educate the Viet Cong.”
Overcoat off, he hangs his green uniform jacket on the back of the kitchen chair, then smooths the jacket. His tie and shirt are tan. The lance corporal rank insignias on the shirtsleeves are darker green than the lime-green parts of the map. “The VC will see and fear Superior, Wisconsin,” my cousin says. “They will learn to fear Superior, especially the East End. They will feel the wrath of a true son of the East End.”
“Take a drink,” says Pa to me. “Say ‘oo-la-la,’ Andy. Smell CH4.”
“I like the smell on your clothes, Pa,” I say.
Nibbling herb,Tad says,“I need strength to go back there. It’s gonna take real guts to show them my wrath.”
“You need a map of home,” I tell Tad.
Among its various features are lime-green swamps and wetlands with blue tick marks to indicate marsh grass.You also see our town in pink with symbols on it for churches like St. Adal-bert’s; symbols for schools, docks, railroad yards, sandpits, the hospital, the cemeteries; for roads that cross through woods, creeks, and swamps; for railroad trestles. One of the biggest trestles stands here by our house and Mrs. Pilsudski’s. Finally on the map are the creeks and blue rivers, one flowing to the southwest and off the map, another
