Shawn Inmon - The Vigilante Life of Scott McKenzie

Earl immediately went to the woodpile out back so he could get a fire started. Cheryl bustled around in the kitchen, trying to throw together a lunch for them. She wasn’t Cora, but she had learned at Cora’s apron strings. Scott, meanwhile, sat on the couch, watching the rain and feeling like a stranger in this familiar land. Before lunch could be served, he drifted off.

Cheryl and Earl let him sleep, and when he woke up, darkness was gathering outside. He had laid over in his sleep, and Cheryl had covered him with a quilt.

“Guess I needed some sleep.”

“Guess we all do. You just got a head start on it. Good for you,” Earl said.

Now that Scott wasn’t so bowled over by everything that had happened, he took a longer look at his grandfather. His first idea that he hadn’t changed was either wrong, or he had aged a decade in the preceding twenty-four hours. His cheeks were sunken and he seemed to be melting into himself.

Cheryl made dinner and they ate on TV trays, silently watching the news.

The house was often silent over the next few weeks. Cheryl was gone to school during the day, finishing up the last few days before Christmas vacation. Earl, who typically spent his days in his basement shop happily messing with one woodworking project or another, mostly sat in his chair doing nothing.

The American Psychiatric Association wouldn’t list Post Traumatic Stress Disorder until 1980, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. In World War I, it was called “shell shock.” In World War II, it was “combat fatigue.” During the Vietnam War, it was typically called “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.”

Whatever it was called, tens of thousands of broken and damaged soldiers brought it home with them. Many thought that when they returned home, it would take a few months to reintegrate into a society where someone wasn’t trying to kill you every day. Scott was one of those. He believed that a few weeks or months of quiet life back in Evansville would cure the depression, the nightmares and flashbacks, and the overall numbness he felt.

Scott was wrong.

The longer he sat in his grandparents’ house, the more anxious and fidgety he became, and the more prevalent his nightmares became. It wasn’t unusual for him to awaken the house with his screams.

Earl and Cheryl did their best to treat his injured psyche with love and understanding. They knew where he had been and what he had been through. What they didn’t know, was what they could do to help heal him.

Scott did what he could to exorcise his demons. He tried helping Earl with his projects in the basement. He did his best to read books, but found he couldn’t focus for more than thirty seconds at a time.

He got rid of everything from his army days except for his Purple Heart, which he gave to his grandfather. He ceremoniously burned the army jacket he had worn home from the war. It was tough and built to withstand a lot, but he poured half a gallon of gasoline on it and let that soak in, then dropped it in the burning barrel. That did the trick.

Finally, by the spring of 1973, Scott’s mood swings and anxiety drove him to take a bus downtown, where he found a bar called The Rusty Bucket that was frequented by other vets and blue-collar workers. The clinking of glasses, the softly playing jukebox, and the crack of a cue ball breaking a fresh rack soothed his soul. The beer, and later in the day, the whiskey, helped him self-medicate and hold his inner demons at bay.

Time passed. Earl eventually returned to his woodworking. Cheryl graduated from high school and got a job working as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic. Scott contributed part of his monthly check to the household and spent the rest at the Rusty Bucket.

The three of them moved in different directions.

As the months passed, Earl got thinner and thinner. He had never been a heavy man, but since Cora had died, he had become whippet-thin. By the time he went in for his annual checkup and the cancer was discovered, it was too late. He was gone by Halloween.

For the second time in less than a year, Scott and Cheryl buried a grandparent. It wasn’t as traumatic as when they lost both parents at once, but when Cora and Earl passed so close together, it felt like they were orphaned all over again.

Scott’s drinking had progressed to a point that a few glasses of beer and whiskey at the bar were no longer sufficient to dull his pain, and he began to stop at the liquor store each day to bridge the hours between closing time and when it reopened the next morning.

He had reached that tipping point where one drink was too much, but one hundred wasn’t enough.

Cheryl worried and fussed about Scott’s drinking, but it was like trying to hold the tide back with your hands.

By the time Scott had been home for a year, he knew he wanted to leave. He wanted to go to the open road, stick his thumb out, and see where fate took him. The only thing that stopped him from doing so was that he couldn’t imagine abandoning Cheryl, even though he was effectively no help to her.

Cheryl had begun dating Mike, a man who had brought his cat into the vet clinic a few months earlier. He had taken to spending most evenings at the house, which helped Scott feel less guilty about staying later at the bar.

On Christmas morning, Cheryl made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, and she and Scott exchanged their gifts. A new watch for Scott, and new seat covers for Cheryl’s Pinto. By noon, Scott was on his way to celebrate the day with his other family at the Rusty Bucket and Cheryl went to dinner at Mike’s house.

The next morning, she sat Scott down and showed him an engagement ring on her left hand.

Scott was as present as he ever was, because he’d already had a few nips off the flask he kept in his bedside table. His motto had become, If you never sober up, you’ll never have a hangover.

Scott smiled.

Cheryl said, “I think that’s the first honest-to-God smile I’ve seen on your face in I can’t remember how long.”

“I know, I know. I’m not doing too good, am I?”

Cheryl didn’t contradict him, or bother to correct his grammar.

“So, aren’t you guys moving pretty fast? You’ve only known each other, what, a couple of months?”

“Yes, but when you know, you know. You and I need to talk, though. What do you think is best? Mike’s sharing an apartment with two friends, but he’s thinking we should get a place of our own. I don’t want to leave you here all alone, though.”

Scott shook his head. “No. That doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been thinking about taking a little trip, anyway. You and Mike should move in here. If you don’t mind keeping my bedroom open until you fill this place up with kids, you two stay here. I’ll come back and stay when I’m not on the road.”

“What does that mean, ‘on the road,’ anyway? You gonna become a hobo or something?”

“I don’t know what it means. That’s what I want to find out.”

Cheryl and Mike’s wedding was at the end of April. By then, Scott was antsy and itching to get out onto the open road. He agreed to stay in Evansville and watch the house while the newlyweds went to Florida on their honeymoon. As soon as they returned, he was off.

He traveled light. Everything he needed fit into a canvas knapsack on his back.

He hadn’t continued with his physical rehabilitation once he had gotten home, but he had begun to move little by little, and by May of 1974, he walked almost without a hitch in his step. He wasn’t strong yet, but he was upright, and that let him get moving.