Tin Soldier: The Seven Sequels Page 7

  “You want me to be angry about it too? Maybe I’ll just go back to enjoying the view of pine trees.”

  “I’ll be angry if you don’t get angry. I want more people thinking about it. Black people and white people. More people thinking about it means maybe more people trying to do something about it. When I was your age, musicians came up with songs about fighting injustice and creating peace for the world. Now I turn on the radio, I hear songs that glorify taking drugs and getting somewhere alone with a girl. We don’t need any more teenage mothers having babies with no fathers around to help raise them. Guy like you, maybe you could come up with another song like ‘One Tin Soldier.’ Make a difference, not just make money. Be like Bogart. Not Sinatra.”

  Webb might have resented getting a lecture like this from Lee, but it wasn’t just a lecture. There was passion in it. And Webb couldn’t help his curiosity.

  “Not Sinatra?”

  “Each of them, for a time, the biggest names in Hollywood. Bogart, he was cynical. You saw that in Casablanca.”

  “His character was cynical. Not Bogart. Rick was cynical. Bogart just played Rick’s role.”

  “An actor like Bogart,” Lee said, “who can take any role he wants, is only going to take a role he likes, is going to want to become the hero he portrays. You with me there?”

  Webb didn’t disagree, and Lee continued.

  “In the end of Casablanca, you see Bogart making a sacrifice. To me, Bogart was cynical and tired of the world, but he believed in old-fashioned truth and justice. Was willing to die for his beliefs. I knew soldiers in ’Nam, they hated being there, hated the war, but they were serving a bigger cause. We were cynical about the war and plenty tired of it, but until our country told us to stop serving, we were going to do our duty and do what it took to protect the men on each side of us. The biggest compliment I can give Roy Hawkins? He’s Bogart in Casablanca. Smart. Square but smart, and doesn’t care if people think he’s square, because he’s going to do the right thing. But we had guys in our platoon, they wanted to be Sinatra. Hate is a strong word, but he was an actor I hated.”

  Webb couldn’t recall having a conversation like this with his stepfather. Webb’s father had died when Webb was young, but he liked to think they might have talked like this.

  “Sinatra?” Webb said, to let Lee know he had dropped his attitude and was listening. It was better talking about Sinatra than trying to dodge a discussion about long hair.

  “Sinatra came along and replaced Bogart,” Lee said. “Sinatra represented hip. Hip is a fake type of cool. You try to wear it like a hat or a coat. Hip said that values were for losers. Hip didn’t get into fights that cool might lose. Hip got other people to fight those fights. Great reporter named Mike Kelley said something like that. Same reporter who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he could have been safe back in the States. Hip was all about taking care of yourself and looking good while you did it. Kent State, those kids that got killed protesting the war I was fighting? What we shared was a belief that values mattered, even if we disagreed about those values. Took me a while to understand that, and believe me, I didn’t understand it when I first got back to the States from my tour and people spat on my uniform as I walked through the airports. But at least they cared enough to protest. Cared enough to spit. Never did like those long-hairs, but I couldn’t help but respect that they believed in something.”

  Webb said, “So hip doesn’t spit. Hip doesn’t protest.”

  “Hip doesn’t spit,” Lee said. “Hip doesn’t protest. Hip doesn’t get involved. What I’m seeing now is kids posting photos of themselves on Facebook accounts that’re all about them, and kids bullying other kids who are different and not trying to be cool. What I’m seeing now is an entire generation of kids who want to be Sinatra. Not Bogart. Today, kids have long hair, it’s just to be cool. At least back then they did it because they believed in something.”

  Webb waited for more, but that was all Lee said, as if he wanted it to sink in while they covered the miles and miles of interstate in their quiet little world.

  Webb reached for his iPhone.

  “See?” Lee said. “Perfect example. We’ve got something here worth discussing, and you’re looking to escape in your device.”

  “No,” Webb said. “Going to download a song and listen to it. Give me a minute here.”

  It took less than a minute to get it on his phone. Another thirty seconds to connect to the car sound system by Bluetooth.

  Lee said nothing, giving Webb the time he’d requested.

  Webb played the opening notes, then paused the song.

  “Flute and snare drum leading into violins?” Webb said to Lee. “Kind of…”

  “Kind of seventies,” Lee said. “But that only matters if you’re worried about whether it’s a cool enough song for you.”

  “Nice jab,” Webb said. He’d been thinking it was kind of cheesy, not kind of “seventies.” But he didn’t say that, because it was obvious Lee liked the song enough to hold it up as an example of music that mattered.

  Webb tapped the Play button and the song continued. Listen, children to a story / that was written long ago / ’bout a kingdom on the mountain / and the valley folk below.

  Webb fought the impulse to make another critical statement, but it would only prove Lee’s point. Nothing about the beginning of the lyrics was cool.

  The song continued until the title finally made sense, coming from the chorus.

  There won’t be any trumpets blowing / come the judgment day / On the bloody morning after / one tin soldier rides away.

  When the song finished, Webb said to Lee, “You’re right—not a Sinatra song. Mind if I play it again?”

  The tune of the song wasn’t really relevant, Webb thought. Part of what made it cheesy was that it was set in a major key. Approaching it from a minor key would give it a moody, dark feel instead of a sing-along-around-the-campfire feel.

  But the message…that was something different. It made Webb want to get back to his music dreams, if only just for a single song.

  Maybe when he got back to Nashville, he would find a studio and recut the song. Get rid of the flute and trumpets and violin and make it something Bogart would listen to.

  One tin soldier rides away.

  SIXTEEN

  They found Derek Irvine in an antique shop on Broad Street in the heart of the old part of Charleston, but not until Lee had first spent half an hour cruising the mansions that overlooked the waters of the harbor.

  Broad Street had tiny old stores and small restaurants crammed together in a way that reminded Webb of photos of Europe. It had been strange, jumping off the interstate and going through the usual stretches of Walmarts and Home Depots and chain restaurants only to end up south of Broad, in a neighborhood that exuded old wealth and charm.

  “Grasshopper requests permission to speak,” Webb said as Lee eased the Camaro into one of the few parking spots on Broad. Webb was hoping a minor joke like that might lighten the mood inside the car.

  “Yeah,” Lee said. The lack of inflection in his voice reflected the somber mood that had cloaked him while they’d been cruising up and down the streets like tourists.

  “Thinking about slaves while we were driving through those rich neighborhoods, weren’t you?” Webb said. During Lee’s shift at the steering wheel on the interstate, Webb had googled Charleston on the iPad. He’d learned that for a period of nearly a hundred years, before the Civil War, Charleston had been a hub for export based on an economy driven by cotton plantations. While Webb and Lee had driven along the quiet streets lined with glorious mansions, it hadn’t been difficult for Webb to picture slaves inside the kitchens and dining rooms, serving people who had grown wealthy on the backs of slaves working the fields.

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “And wondering if much has really changed. Chains are different, that’s all.”

  “I saw you leave a two-hundred-dollar tip at a restaurant,” Webb said. “You’l
l be sitting me down for steak and lobster tonight. No chains on you.”

  Lee snorted. “Only because somewhere along the way, I broke them. Wasn’t easy. Never is, for the poor.”

  “Poor whites too?” Webb asked.

  Lee turned his head and didn’t reply until he’d given Webb a long, thoughtful look. “Poor whites too.”

  “You spend time helping them?” Webb asked. “The poor whites? Or just poor blacks?”

  “You and me are getting along pretty good,” Lee said. “But that big foot of yours is about to step on the trigger of a land mine. Might want to back up a step.”

  “You live in a country where it’s possible to break those chains,” Webb said. “A country where you can try to help other people do the same. Isn’t that something at least?”

  “My self-imposed job is to get you to see the world my way,” Lee said. “Not the other way around.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Webb said. “And first, let me make it clear: I agree that racism is crap. And if we agree, are you going to take a step my way and tell me it can be a two-way street? Blacks have to fight it as much as whites?”

  “Hmmph,” Lee said.

  Webb thought that was as close as he would get to a yes from Lee, so he pushed on. “What I don’t get is that I see you make judgments all the time. Me and my long hair for a negative judgment. Then the waitress and her short nails for a positive judgment. Want to explain that to me?”

  “No,” Lee said.

  “So fun having thoughtful discussions with you,” Webb said. “Answers like that make me want to keep putting my heart out on my sleeve for you.”

  Lee chuckled. “No, I don’t want to answer it. Not yet. I want to give you a chance to answer it. When you are ready. It’s a grasshopper thing.”

  “Wonderful,” Webb said, clearly meaning the opposite.

  “Deal with it,” Lee answered. “Let’s go talk to Derek Irvine.”

  Lee took a deep breath, and his body language changed from slumped to alert. A man going into battle.

  They stepped out of the car. Across the street was a Starbucks. Not everything in old Charleston looked like it had been built two centuries earlier.

  “Roy close by?” Webb asked as they walked. He had not caught a glimpse of the green Chevy half-ton for at least an hour.

  “In combat in ’Nam,” Lee said, “nobody on the other side ever saw him until it was too late for them. For a man as big as he is, he can be a ghost. He’s around.”

  Webb liked that. It meant Ali was around too.

  With light rain falling in the late-afternoon coolness, they reached the ancient wooden door of Antiques on Broad, varnished a rich brown, with ornate carvings of ships on the panels. It could have been there since before the Civil War. But not the security camera perched above it.

  “Maybe we should invite Roy to steak and lobster,” Webb said.

  Which really meant maybe Lee should also invite Ali to steak and lobster.

  “Focus, Daniel-san,” Lee said.

  “Wax on, wax off,” Webb said, acknowledging he knew the source.

  Both were lines from the movie The Karate Kid. The original. Not the remake. Webb didn’t like the remake that much; it had a Justin Bieber song in it that drove him crazy. Maybe Webb would have to cut a song and call it “Never Play ‘Never Say Never.’”

  Lee gave Webb a grin and pushed the door open to the pleasant chiming of a bell.

  The light inside was soft, from floor lamps scattered among the wardrobes, paintings, musty chairs and shelves of knickknacks.

  A man in an elegant suit pushed himself toward them in a wheelchair. He had thin gray hair and square glasses; the skin of his face showed acne scars.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in a soft southern accent. If it seemed strange to him that an older black man and a kid with long hair and a Calgary Stampeders T-shirt were paired up to shop for antiques, nothing in his manner showed it.

  “Mr. Derek Irvine,” Lee said. “I’m Lee Knox. This is Jim Webb. We don’t want to waste your time, so I won’t pretend we’re here for anything else but to ask you some questions about paddy fields and elephant grass and the Americans like you and me who did our best in a situation that made little sense then and makes less sense now.”

  “Not interested,” Derek Irvine said. He rapped the top of his thighs with his knuckles, making a hollow sound. “Plastic all the way down. Other than telling you I lost both my legs over there and that the sound of grenades exploding still wakes me up in the middle of night, Vietnam is a subject I am reluctant to discuss. Even with another vet. The past is over.”

  No, Webb thought. It isn’t.

  “I understand,” Lee said. “I lost plenty myself, so I have no intention of pushing you in that regard.”

  “Then we are finished here?”

  “Yes,” Lee said. “If you change your mind in the next couple of days, I’ve written my cell number on the back of this card.”

  Lee handed Derek a business card. Derek glanced at the handwritten number of Lee’s throwaway cell on the back of the card and ran his fingers over the glossy raised ink on the front as he checked out the information.

  “State Farm,” Derek said, reading from the card. “Franklin, Tennessee. You should have called ahead and saved yourself a trip. This is a long ways to come to ask about a war that everyone else has forgotten.”

  He tapped the top of his thighs again and gave Webb a twisted, bitter smile. “Or that another generation knows nothing about.”

  “In the forties and fifties,” Webb answered, “an obscure revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh fought, with the Viet Minh party, to overthrow French colonists in North Vietnam. His country was finally given official recognition by Russia and China, and a communist state was established when the Viet Minh succeeded in driving out the French. The United States and Great Britain gave official recognition to a French-backed State of Vietnam based in Saigon to the south. President Eisenhower’s administration argued a domino theory—that if another country fell to communism, more would fall, and that meant they needed to stop North Vietnam from taking over the south. The irony is that Ho Chi Minh had first gone to American diplomats to get their support but had been ignored for nearly a decade. If he had been given help earlier, he wouldn’t have embraced communism, because he was not driven by ideology but by a desire to help his people.”

  Webb spoke quickly, not giving either of the slack-jawed men a chance to interrupt. Since first meeting Lee and not having answers to any of Lee’s questions about Vietnam, it had taken Webb hours on the web, sorting through the politics and history, to understand what had happened, and he wanted the satisfaction of slam-dunking this, as if he were reciting a short memorized piece to pass a classroom test.

  “Rebels from the north began aiding rebels in the south against a puppet dictator supported by the Americans,” Webb continued, “and the growing political unrest drove Americans from being unofficial observers helping the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, or ARVN, to active involvement against the Viet Cong army from the north that had joined with the rebels among the villages of South Vietnam with a common goal of gaining complete independence. This turned into a war mainly fought by Americans because the ARVN wasn’t that competent or inspired, and the rebel cause in the south was aided because American generals ignored on-the-ground advice and fought the same war that had been successful for them in World War II, using airplanes and bombs that more often than not destroyed the villages of the people they were trying to help.”

  It was a boring recital filled with too many facts, and Webb knew it. But he also knew it sounded impressive, like when you loaded up an essay to get a better grade.

  “It made for a mixed-up, ugly situation where massive firepower lost a battle of attrition to guerrilla warfare,” Webb continued. “Finally, the American people couldn’t stomach continued losses of tens of thousands of young men halfway across the world for a cause that didn’t seem important t
o anyone but politicians. America finally withdrew. It didn’t help that the late sixties and early seventies was a time of great social unrest in America, with race riots in different cities and students at universities all across the country rebelling against the power of what they felt was an unfair establishment.”

  Webb finally stopped for breath. He gave the man in the wheelchair a calm smile and said, “That about cover it?”

  “Dang,” Lee said.

  Irvine threw his head back and laughed with enthusiasm. Then he shook his head from side to side in wry admiration of Webb’s slam dunk.

  “All right,” he said. “As long as it’s nothing too personal, what questions can I try to answer for you gentlemen?”

  SEVENTEEN

  They followed Derek as he wheeled into the back of the store and made a right-hand turn to move into a windowless office where there was a desk and a monitor. The desk had been modified so that the wheelchair fit in a space directly in front of the monitor and keyboard, leaving space on both sides for the papers strewn across the top. Two small chairs sat opposite it.

  Derek made a tight turn with the wheelchair and sat behind his desk, motioning for Webb and Lee to take the chairs across from him.

  Webb noted the photos on the walls as he sat. Mainly of a yacht, taken at different times of day. Derek was on the deck in his wheelchair, his wife and children with him. The photos showed the family in different stages as the children grew older.

  Yacht. So Derek had money. Plenty of it.

  Webb guessed the antique shop didn’t make Derek enough money to buy a yacht and figured that Derek came from a wealthy family. Maybe he’d grown up in one of the mansions south of Broad Street. Generations back, there’d have been slaves in the household.