Fishing with Wussy

My father, unlike so many of the men he served with, knew
just what he wanted to do when the war was over. He
wanted to drink and whore and play the horses. 'He'll get
tired of it,' my mother said confidently. She tried to keep up with
him during those frantic months after the men came home, but she
couldn't, because nobody had been shooting at her for the last three
years and when she woke up in the morning it wasn't with a sense of
surprise. For a while it was fun – the late nights, the drinking, the
photo finishes at the track – but then she was suddenly pregnant
with me and she decided it was time the war was over for real. Most
everybody she knew was settling down, because you could only
celebrate, even victory, so long. I don't think it occurred to her that
my father wasn't celebrating victory and never had been. He was
celebrating life. His. She could tag along if she felt like it, or not if
she didn't, whichever suited her.

'He'll get tired of it,' she told my grandfather, himself recently
returned, worn and riddled with malaria, to the modest house in
Mohawk he had purchased with a $200 down payment the year
after the conclusion of the earlier war he'd been too young to enlist
for legally. He liked to think there couldn't be more than a handful
of men who had lied about their age in both wars. The others had
lied to get out, not in. This second time around he felt no urge to
celebrate victory or anything else. From his hospital bed in New
London, Connecticut, he read books and wrote his memoirs while
the younger men, all malaria convalescents, played poker and
waited for weekend passes from the ward. In their condition it took
little enough to get good and drunk, and by early Saturday night
most of them had the shakes so bad they had to huddle in the dark
corners of cheap hotel rooms to await Monday morning and
re-admission to the hospital. But they'd lived through worse, or
thought they had. My grandfather watched them systematically
destroy any chance they had for recovery and so he understood
my father. He may even have tried to explain things to his daughter
when she told him of the trial separation that would last only until
my father could get his priorities straight again, little suspecting he
already had.

'Trouble with you is,' my father told her, 'you think you got the
pussy market cornered.' Unfortunately, she took this observation
to be merely a reflection of the fact that in her present swollen
condition she was not herself. Perhaps she couldn't corner the
market just then, but she'd cornered it once, and would again. And
she must have figured too that when my father got a look at his son
it would change him, change them both. Then the war would be
over.

The night I was born my grandfather tracked him to a poker
game in a dingy room above the Mohawk Grill. He was holding a
well-concealed two pair and waiting for the seventh card in the game
of stud. The news that he was a father did not impress him
particularly. The service revolver did. My grandfather was
wheezing from the steep, narrow flight of stairs and he stopped to
catch his breath, hands on his knees. Then he took out the revolver
and stuck the cold barrel in my father's ear and said, 'Stand up, you
son of a bitch.' This from a man who'd gone two wars end to end
without uttering a profanity. The men at the table could smell his
malaria and they began to sweat.

'I'll just have a peek at this last card,' my father said. 'Then
we'll go.'

The dealer rifled cards around the horn and everybody folded
lickety-split, including a man who had three deuces showing.

'Deal me out a couple a hands,' my father said, and got up
slowly because he still had a gun in his ear.

At the hospital, my mother had me on her breast and she must
have looked pretty, like the girl who'd cornered the pussy market
before the war. 'Turn it over,' my father said, and when she did he
grinned at my little stem and said, 'What do you know?' It must have
been a tender moment.

Not that it changed anything. Six months later my grandfather
was dead, and the day after the funeral, for which my father arrived
late, my mother filed for divorce, thereby losing in a matter of days
the two men in her life.