Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Last April, I took a journey down memory lane to an old cadets’ reunion at the brown-stucco, pantile-roof campus of my old military school — Gulf Pines on the Mississippi coast. “Lonesome Pines,” we all called it. The campus and its shabby buildings, like apparently everything else in that world, had devolved over time to become an all-white Christian Identity school, which had itself, by defaulting on its debts, been sold to a corporate entity — the ancient palms, wooden goalposts, dusty parade grounds, dormitories and classroom installments soon to be cleared as a parking structure for a floating casino across Route 90.

During this visit, I happened to hear from Dudley Phelps, who’s retired out of the laminated-door business up in Little Rock, that Wally Caldwell, once our Lonesome Pines classmate, but more significantly once my wife’s husband, until he got himself shell-shocked in Vietnam and wandered off seemingly forever, causing Sally to have him declared dead (no easy trick without a body or other evidence of death’s likelihood)— this Wally Caldwell was reported by people in the know to have appeared again. Alive. Upon the earth and — I was sure when I heard it — eager to stir up emotional dust none of us had seen the likes of.

Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories — the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us — anything we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly we were all of us pretty hard cases when we’d arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all. My father had died, my mother’d remarried a man I pretty much liked and moved to Illinois, only I simply couldn’t imagine going to high school with a bunch of Yankees — though, of course, I would someday become one of them and think it was great.)

The casino’s big building-razing, turf-ripping machinery was already standing ranked along the highway like a small mean army. Work was due to commence the next morning, following this last muster on the plain. We had a keg of beer somebody’d brought. The Gulf was just as the Atlantic is in summer: brownish, sluggish, a dingy aqueous apron stretching to nowhere — though warm as bathwater instead of dick-shrinkingly cold. We all solemnly stood and drank the warm beer, ate weenies in stale buns and did our best not to feel dispirited and on-in-years (this was before my medical surprises). We chatted disapprovingly about how the Coast had changed, how the South had traded its tarnished soul for an even more debased graven image of gambling loot, how the current election would probably be won by the wrong dope. Surprisingly, many of my old classmates had gone to Nam like Wally and come back Democrats.

And then around 2:00 p.m., when the sun sat straight over our sweating heads like a dentist’s lamp and we’d all begun to laugh about what a shithole this place had really been, how we didn’t mind seeing it disappear, how we’d all cried ourselves to sleep in our metal bunks on so many breathless, mosquito-tortured nights on account of cruel loneliness and youth and deep hatred for the other cadets, we all, by no signal given, just began to stray away back toward our rental cars, or across the highway to the casino for some stolen fun, or back to motels or SUVs or the airport in New Orleans or Mobile, or just back — as if we could go back far enough to where it would all be forgotten and gone forever, the way it already should’ve been. Why were we there? By the end, none of us could’ve said.

How, though, do you contemplate such news as this possible Wally sighting? I had no personal memories of Cadet W. Caldwell, only pictures Sally kept (and kept hidden): on the beach with their kids in Saugatuck; a color snapshot showing a shirtless, dog-tagged Wally squinting into the summer sun like JFK, holding a copy of Origin of Species with a look of mock puzzlement on his young face; a few tuxedoed wedding photos from 1969, where Wally looked lumpy and wise and scared to death of what lay before him; a yearbook portrait from Illinois State, showing Walter “The Wall,” class of ’67, plant biology, and where he was deemed (sadly, I felt) to be “Trustworthy, a friend to all.” “Solid where it counts” (which he wasn’t). “Call me Mr. Wall.”

These ancient, moistened relics did not, to me, a real husband make. Though once they had to Sally — a tall, blond, blue-eyed beauty with small breasts, thin fingers, smooth-legged, with her tiny limp from a tennis mishap — a college cheerleader who fell for the shy, heavy-legged, curiously gazing rich boy in her genetics class, and who smiled when she talked because so much made her happy, who didn’t have problems about physical things and so introduced the trusting “Wall” to bed and to cheap motels out Highway 9, so captivating him that by spring break, “they were pregnant.” And pregnant again and married by the time Wally got called to the Army and joined the Navy instead, in 1969, and went off to a war.

From which, in a sense, he never returned. Though he tried for a couple of weeks in 1971, but then one day just walked off from their little apartment in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, never to return with a sound or a glimpse. Kids, wife, parents, a few friends. A future. Boop. Over.

This was the extent of my knowledge of Wally the uxorious. He was already legally “dead” when I came on the scene in ’87 and tried to rent Sally some expandable office space in Manasquan. She’d identified me from a bogus reminiscence I wrote for the Gulf Pines “Pine Boughs” newsletter, though I had no actual memory of Wally and was merely on the Casualties Committee, responsible for “personal” anecdotes about classmates nobody remembered, but whose loved ones didn’t want them seeming like complete ciphers or lost souls, even if they were.

The thought that mystery-man Walter B. Caldwell might still be alive was, as you can imagine, unwieldy personal cargo to be carrying home, Mississippi to New Jersey. There could probably be stranger turns of events. But if so, I’d like you to name one. And while you’re at it, name one you’d find easy to keep as your little secret, something you’d rather not have spread around. No more details were available.

On arriving back to Sea-Clift (we’re only talking about last April here!), I decided that rogue rumors were always shooting around like paper airplanes in everybody’s life, and that this was likely just one more. Some old Lonesome Pines alum, deep in his cups and reeling through the red-light district of Amsterdam or Bangkok, suddenly spies a pathetic homeless man weaving on a street corner, a large, fleshy, unshaven “American-looking” clod, filthy in a tattered, greasy overcoat and duct-taped shoes, yet who has a particularly arresting, sweet smile animating tiny haunted eyes and who seems to stare back knowingly. After a pause, there’s a second cadged look, then a long unformed thought about it afterward, followed by a decision to leave well enough alone (where well enough’s always happiest). But then, in memory’s narrow eye comes a fixifying certainty, an absolute recognition — a sighting. And ker-plunk: Wally lives ! (and will be in your house eating dinner by next Tuesday).

In eight years of what I thought were much more than satisfying-fulfilling marriage, not to mention almost thirty since Wally walked away and didn’t come back, Sally had made positive adjustments to what might’ve driven most people bat-shit crazy with anger and not-knowing, and with anxiety over the anger and not-knowing. Therefore, to drop this little hand grenade of uncertainty into her life, I concluded, would actually be unfriendly (I’d decided by then it wasn’t true, so it really wasn’t a hand grenade in my life). But what was either of us supposed to do with the news, short of a full-bore “Have You Seen This Man?” campaign (I didn’t want to see him), “aged” photos of Wally put up on Web sites, stapled to bulletin boards and splintery telephone poles beside aroma-therapy flyers and lost-cat posters, with appeals made to “Live at 5”?