And all the time we were talking, he kept giving me advice. On the streets of Saigon, he’d say, “Don’t ever go in there, you get VD just from window-shopping,” and he’d say, “Look out for little kids with their shirts buttoned up, cause the VC like to strap grenades to them and send them over to GIs to blow them up.” He told me the parts of town never to go into, and he especially told me all kinds of stuff about what it was like in combat. What the booby traps looked like, how walking point is the safest place because the VC always wait till you’re past their ambush so they can kill the main bunch of guys in the middle, how if you hate your lieutenant all you got to do is salute him and he’s a dead man, some VC sniper’ll get him. And all the time I’m thinkin’, How the hell do you know about combat, Mr. Danny I. Son-of-a-Guy-Who-Owns-Politicians?

  And I guess he knew I was skeptical because he says to me, “Bobby, this isn’t like other wars. Desk jobs aren’t safe here. Just cause you don’t take a rifle to work doesn’t mean the other guy isn’t trying to kill you. They love nothing better than killing GIs walking around Saigon, thinking they’re safe. You’re never safe. We’re all combat troops, and the guys who don’t realize it are the ones who’re gonna die. That’s why I ask every guy I know who’s been in combat, I ask ’em how to stay alive and they tell me because anything can happen. One day they’re gonna come into our office and hand out weapons and say, Congratulations, boys, you’re all infantry now, and they’ll take us out and get us killed unless we got some idea what we’re doing.”

  That’s when he told me he was my guardian angel. “You’re going to amount to something, Bobby,” he says to me. “You need to stay alive.”

  And I just laughed cause what does it matter what happens to a boy from Hickory, except to my mother and daddy, but he says, “No sir, it’s the way you type. Maybe at first your pop made you learn, maybe you hated it then”—cause, see, I already told him about that—“but the way you type now, that’s ambition. You got to be the best. That’s in you, to be the best. So that means you’re worth keeping alive. So I’m your guardian angel. My job is to teach you what you got to know to stay alive in this war.”

  I says to him, My daddy already saw to it I know what I need to know, but he says, “Every soldier needs a guardian angel, it’s the only way you get through the war, I promise you.” And I says, Who’s your guardian angel, Hubert Horatio Humphrey? And he says to me, “I got no guardian angel, God doesn’t waste time on screwups like me,” and I says, If you believe in Jesus he’ll forgive all your sins, and he says, “I like Jesus too much to ever repent of my sins, cause as long as I don’t repent, he doesn’t have to pay for them,” and that was pretty much the end of our discussion of religion.

  He never took advice from me, though. Like when he typed, he was fast, but he wasn’t very accurate. Typos on every order he ever sent out. I tried to tell him to slow down so he wouldn’t make mistakes, and he just said, “Faster I type, faster they’re out of here.” And when I told him I thought that stunk cause a mistake on those orders could get somebody killed, he just looks at me like I’m crazy and he says, “Bobby, even when the orders are exactly right they get somebody killed.” Afterward I thought of all kinds of things to say to that, like how maybe if the orders were right the guys who died might accomplish something first, but I never said it to him cause I knew with him it was all the same. He didn’t want my advice cause he didn’t want anybody’s advice cause he didn’t care enough to want to get better at anything. Except staying alive.

  So he’d come back to that guardian angel thing now and then. “Don’t do that,” he’d say. “This is your guardian angel speaking.” And then I’d laugh and sometimes I’d do it anyway and sometimes I wouldn’t—you know, just stuff like going out in a jeep with a guy when we had a pass, or going up to a kid and giving him a candy bar. “Listen to me, Bobby, and someday I’ll save your life.”

  So we were sitting in that very restaurant, the first one he ever took me to, and there’s the usual crowd, all kinds of soldiers and reporters and Vietnamese businessmen and officers and whatever, and I see this kid come in, little beggar kid, they come in, you know, to beg, cause the doors are open with ceiling fans, the place wasn’t air-conditioned, I mean this was Vietnam, we didn’t even have air-conditioning in Hickory in those days. So I see this little beggar kid, and I’ve seen a hundred just like him, five hundred, only there’s something wrong. He’s going from table to table just like they did, only I keep watching him, not even thinking about why, I’m listening to Danny, only I can’t take my eyes off the kid.

  And Danny says, “What’re you looking at?” and he turns and sees the kid and he waves the kid over to our table and he pulls out a candy bar to give him and all of a sudden I know.

  “His shirt’s buttoned up,” I says to Danny, and without even thinking about it, I’m standing up, I stood up so fast I knocked my chair over and I remember somebody cussing cause my chair fell against him, and I says, “Danny, no, his shirt’s buttoned up.” But it’s like Danny doesn’t even hear me, he’s holding out the candy bar to the kid and the kid’s right there in front of him and I’m around the table, reaching for him, grabbing to pull him away, and at the exact moment that Danny is between me and the kid, the kid blows up.

  Wasn’t even grenades, they said, it was high-tech explosives. It was a big enough deal it made the papers back in the States. Mostly I think because reporters got killed. Hell, everybody in the place got killed or so blown up they were in the hospital for months, they strapped enough explosives on the kid that people were killed on the street outside, that’s how bad it was.

  Except me. They told me it was a miracle that all that happened to me was getting three fingers blown off.

  Only it wasn’t a miracle, it was Danny. He was right between me and the kid. He took the whole blast that was meant for me. I mean, I got knocked back fifteen feet and I blacked out, it’s not like nothing hit me, my head hit the floor so hard I had a concussion and it took a month for my ears to heal, but I was no more than six feet from the kid, I should have been dead, blown to bits like those other guys, but there I was lying on the floor and when I came to—and I was only out for, like, a couple of minutes—when I came to, everything was silent, cause of my ears, you know, and when I tried to get up my head hurt, but I had to see if Danny was OK, you know? I had to see about Danny. And I sit up and I got stuff smeared all over my eyes but I wipe them off and I look and the whole place looks like a tornado hit a meat locker, it’s all bloody and pieces of people are everywhere and I’m thinking, This is combat. Danny was right, the war is everywhere and this is combat.

  Only the one thing I don’t see is Danny. And I start to get up to see if maybe he got thrown over me, you know, right over my head so he’s behind me, only as I get up my clothes move wrong and I think, my legs are cut off inside my pants, I mean that’s what it looked like, I was getting up only my clothes didn’t move right, and then I realize, those aren’t my clothes. I pull at them and I’ve got another whole uniform spread out on my body like somebody had held it up against me to see if it fit. Only it was torn open in front, it was really only just the back half of a uniform, and then I recognize the shirt, the stripes on the sleeve, the way they were rolled up. It was Danny’s uniform. It got blown clean off him. Or he got blown clean out of it. And the stuff I wiped off my face, that was probably . . . that was.

  Oh God. Oh God. This is why I don’t tell the story. He saved my life, see? I had got around behind him to pull him away from the kid, and it just happened that he was exactly, he was so perfectly between me and the kid that he took it all for me. Everything. Except where I was reaching my right hand around to grab him. What happened to my hand, that’s what would have happened to my whole body except for Danny. He was my guardian angel.

  No, not just because he took it all for me. Think about it. Lord knows I had plenty of time to think about it. A month in the hospital, and then coming home with my damn Purple Heart and Pop calling it my million-dollar wound till I got so sick of it I moved out and went to college just to get away from home, and the whole time I was thinking about Danny, and he really was my guardian angel, because if he hadn’t told me to watch out for kids with their shirts buttoned up, if he hadn’t pounded it into me that when you see something like that you just get out, you don’t talk about it, you just go—I mean, I would’ve still been sitting at that table. Maybe getting something out of my pockets to give the kid. The only reason I was exactly behind Danny was because I was on my feet getting the hell out of there the second I realized that kid had his shirt buttoned up.

  Only it wasn’t just that, either. Cause if Danny had listened to me, if he’d headed for the door like me, we’d both be dead. Everybody in that place was dead, or had pieces blown off them a lot worse than fingers, you know. I’m the only guy walked out of that place. And if Danny hadn’t bent over to give that kid a candy bar, if he’d run for it like I was running for it, you wouldn’t be here and neither would I. It was just like he fell on a grenade to save his buddy in a foxhole. And sometimes I even think that he knew he was doing it. I mean, he’s the one who taught me to look for a kid like that, he taught me to get out of there, only when the time comes he doesn’t even see it? Come on. I think he knew. I think he chose between me and him, or anyway he knew that the only way I’d live is if I had protection, and he decided my life mattered.

  And when I get to thinking that way, for a long time I thought, Wrong, Danny I. Keizer. Wrong. My life wasn’t worth saving. I haven’t done one thing important enough to be worth you or anybody else dying for. That’s why I never came to the Wall before. I couldn’t face him.

  And then they blow up the World Trade Center and you come home and you start talking about volunteering so you can fight the way Pop did in World War II and the way I did in Vietnam and I realized for the first time. I looked at you and I thought, No way are those bastards going to take you away from me, but then I looked at your sisters and your mother and I thought, What if they blew up the school where one of my girls was? Or the grocery store when your mom was shopping? And I knew you had to go, ’cause you thought it was right, and if you went, I knew you might die because that happens, guys die, there’s a wall full of guys here who died.

  No, hell no, I didn’t bring you here so you’d change your mind. I brought you here because I finally knew I could face Danny. Because I had done something with my life. I really was worth saving.

  You. You’re the thing I did. You and your sisters. Your mom and I had you all, and I worked all my life paying the bills and I also tried to raise you decent, we both did, and whether it was because of us or in spite of us, you’re a great kid, you’re a good man, and your sisters, they’re terrific, too, and I knew I could face Danny cause I had you here with me.

  See, I taught you how to type, but I also taught you how to shoot, because it isn’t my choice. It’s your choice. But right here at this wall, here’s my guardian angel. I wanted him to meet you. I don’t know where you’ll go or what you’ll do, but I’d like to think you got somebody with you like I did, watching over you. Because I know you’ll do right, but when it’s all over, I don’t want your name on a wall somewhere. I want you to come home to me, just as bad as Pop ever wanted me to come home. You do whatever you think is right, but let Danny watch over you, and if he sometime whispers in your ear, then by God you listen, you hear me?

  The Polish Boy

  John Paul hated school. His Mother did her best, but how could she possibly teach anything to him when she had eight other children—six of them to teach, two of them to tend because they were mere babies?

  What John Paul hated most was the way she kept teaching him things he already knew. She would assign him to make his letters, practicing them over and over while she taught interesting things to the older kids. So John Paul did his best to make sense of the jumble of information he caught from her conversations with them. Smatterings of geography—he learned the names of dozens of nations and their capitals but wasn’t quite sure what a nation was. Bits of mathematics—she taught polynomials over and over to Anna because she didn’t even seem to try to understand, but it enabled John Paul to learn the operation. But he learned it like a machine, having no notion what it actually meant.

  Nor could he ask. When he tried, Mother would get impatient and tell him that he would learn these things in due time, but he should concentrate on his own lessons now.

  His own lessons? He wasn’t getting any lessons, just boring tasks that almost made him crazy with impatience. Didn’t she realize that he could already read and write as well as any of his older siblings? She made him recite from a primer, when he was perfectly capable of reading any book in the house. He tried to tell her, “I can read that one, Mother.” But she only answered, “John Paul, that’s playing. I want you to learn real reading.”

  Maybe if he didn’t turn the pages of the grown-up books so quickly, she would realize that he was actually reading. But when he was interested in a book, he couldn’t bear to slow down just to impress Mother. What did his reading have to do with her? It was his own. The only part of school that he enjoyed.

  “You’re never going to stay up with your lessons,” she said more than once, “if you keep spending your reading time with these big books. Look, they don’t even have pictures, why do you insist on playing with them?”

  “He’s not playing,” said Andrew, who was twelve. “He’s reading.”

  “Yes, yes, I should be more patient and play along,” said Mother, “but I don’t have time to . . .” And then one of the babies cried and the conversation was over.

  Outside on the street, other children walked to school wearing school uniforms, laughing and jostling each other. Andrew explained it to him. “They go to school in a big building. Hundreds of them in the same school.”

  John Paul was aghast. “Why don’t their own mothers teach them? How can they learn anything with hundreds?”

  “There’s more than one teacher, silly. A teacher for every ten or fifteen of them. But they’re all the same age, all learning the same thing in each class. So the teacher spends the whole day on their lessons instead of having to go from age to age.”

  John Paul thought a moment. “And every age has its own teacher?”

  “And the teachers don’t have to feed babies and change their diapers. They have time to really teach.”

  But what good would that have done for John Paul? They would have put him in a class with other five-year-olds and made him read stupid primers all day—and he wouldn’t be able to listen to the teacher giving lessons to the ten- and twelve- and fourteen-year-olds, so he really would lose his mind.

  “It’s like heaven,” said Andrew bitterly. “And if Father and Mother had had only two children, they could have gone there. But the minute Anna was born, we were cited for noncompliance.”

  John Paul was tired of hearing that word without understanding it. “What is noncompliance?”

  “There’s this great big war out in space,” said Andrew. “Way above the sky.”

  “I know what space is,” said John Paul impatiently.

  “OK, well, big war and all, so all the countries of the world have to work together and pay to build hundreds and hundreds of starships, so they put somebody called the Hegemon in charge of the whole world. And the Hegemon says we can’t afford the problems caused by overpopulation, so any marriage that has more than two children is noncompliant.”

  Andrew stopped as if he thought that made everything clear.

  “But lots of families have more than two kids,” said John Paul. Half their neighbors did.

  “Because this is Poland,” said Andrew, “and we’re Catholic.”

  “What, does the priest give people extra babies?” John Paul couldn’t see the connection.

  “Catholics believe you should have as many children as God sends you. And no government has the right to tell you to reject God’s gifts.”

  “What gifts?” said John Paul.

  “You, dummy,” said Andrew. “You’re God’s gift number seven in this house. And the babies are gift eight and gift nine.”

  “But what does it have to do with going to school?”

  Andrew rolled his eyes. “You really are dumb,” he said. “Schools are run by the government. The government has to enforce sanctions against noncompliance. And one of the sanctions is, only the first two children in a family have a right to go to school.”

  “But Peter and Catherine don’t go to school,” said John Paul.

  “Because Father and Mother don’t want them to learn all the anti-Catholic things the schools teach.”

  John Paul wanted to ask what “anti-Catholic” meant, but then he realized it must mean something like against-the-Catholics so it wasn’t worth asking and having Andrew call him a dummy again.

  Instead he thought and thought about it. How a war made it so all the nations gave power to one man, and that one man then told everybody how many children they could have, and all the extra children were kept out of school. That was actually a benefit, wasn’t it? Not to go to school? How would John Paul have learned anything, if he hadn’t been in the same room with Anna and Andrew and Peter and Catherine and Nicholas and Thomas, overhearing their lessons?

  The most puzzling thing was the idea that the schools could teach anti-Catholic stuff. “Everybody’s Catholic, aren’t they?” he asked Father once.

  “In Poland, yes. Or they say they are. And it used to be true.” Father’s eyes were closed. His eyes were almost always closed, whenever he sat down. Even when he was eating, he always looked as though he were about to fall over and sleep. That was because he worked two jobs, the legal one during the day and the illegal one at night. John Paul almost never saw him except in the morning, and then Father was too tired to talk and Mother would shush him.