“Your mother is a traitorous bitch, Ella. A real Jane Fonda,” I said, which pissed off Hank, even though he knew I had spoken the truth. He kept blaming my cursing on the brain surgery, telling my granddaughter I couldn’t help it, as if I never ever cursed before you people cracked open my skull and got me thinking so much about Clayton Fire Bear.
I don’t think Ella understood what I had said anyway, because she started talking about Gandhi and nonviolence and not eating to get what she wanted from her mother, which, in this case, was to come home to the land of the free.
I once read that Gandhi used to sleep naked with his own teenage niece and force her to take baths with him. Apparently he beat his wife too. But I didn’t want to talk with Ella about a wife-beating sexual deviant and how schoolteachers lie, so instead of setting the record straight on India’s most famous pervert, I told her that I was just glad she was back in the best country in the entire world, the United States of America, and my little granddaughter nodded proudly, because she is a true patriot.
Then she said she was glad I was going to be living with them, which made me look over at my son, who explained I needed to be supervised for a time.
Ordinarily, I’d have told him to go fuck himself, but it was obvious that he needed me to help him put his life together after his wife had run out on him. Hank was going to need a hand with Ella and was just too shy and weak to ask directly for assistance. So I let that slide too, and told Ella I was very excited to be moving in with her.
“Do you want to stay in my room?” she said.
I told her I needed my own room because of the nightmares. I still sometimes wake up screaming, soaked in sweat. Ella said she had bad dreams too, so it was okay. I appreciated her trying to bond with me, but my granddaughter didn’t understand a few things. Primarily that it’s really fucking dangerous to interrupt my sleep, because I used to reflexively kill anything that woke me up in the jungle—rats, snakes, gooks, insane perverts (which I’ll tell you about later), whatever the fuck. And that killer instinct remains strong to this day. Instead, I just told my granddaughter that I preferred my own room with a lock on the door and left it at that.
Hank watched us talking with this distant look on his face. We used to call it the thousand-yard stare back in Vietnam. Men got that when they had seen too much horrific shit or when they had simply given up, which was different than buying the bullet.
Regardless of all that, I knew my son’s head was fucked, and here he was now, all alone with a seven-year-old daughter to take care of. My old man’s dying words echoed in my head once more. It was clear that I had one last mission. And I always, always, always complete my mission.
6.
The first thing that happened when I moved into my son’s house was this: Ella and I had a tea party. This was to welcome me, because my granddaughter is a hell of a lot more thoughtful than her foreigner mother. My son, Hank, did not attend.
Normally I don’t have tea parties with little girls, but I made an exception because my granddaughter allowed me to have real coffee. So the tea party was just barely manly enough to be okay.
Ella drank pretend tea out of a pink plastic cup. Every time she took an imaginary sip, she stuck out her pinkie like she was the Queen of England. She was also wearing white gloves and a tiara made of rhinestones that sparkled like the thing was plugged in.
I was wearing my default safe outfit: camo pants, jacket, and bucket hat. We had stopped at my home on the way, so I was also packing heat again, which felt good, like coming up for air after diving deep down into the ocean, but my antigun son didn’t know that I was carrying. Just a small Glock in an ankle holster. Nothing too serious. No AK-47 or anything like that. Left my bazooka at home. Didn’t even bring my flamethrower.
“Why the hell are you in full camouflage?” Hank asked, because he didn’t understand what it was like to be under attack and vulnerable. He didn’t have a Clayton Fire Bear.
My nervous, untrusting son actually patted me down when we left my house, because he had banned me from carrying a firearm. “I’ll allow you one knife only,” Hank said, because I can’t really sleep without a knife under my pillow. They had to knock me out with powerful drugs every night in the hospital, and my goddamn liver needed a break from all those extra chemicals. But Hank doesn’t know about ankle holsters, because he’s an ignorant gun-hating liberal.
To be fair, Hank lives in a safe neighborhood and has a state-of-the-art security system, which he said was the reason we wouldn’t need to bring any guns, but if my year in the army taught me anything, it was this: you never fucking know.
“Do you have any imaginary friends, like Mr. Peanuts?” Ella said to me during our tea party, after she had introduced me to everyone.
Mr. Peanuts was an invisible elephant who liked his pretend tea strong and his pretend cookies peanut-flavored, hence the name Mr. Peanuts. He was allegedly seated to my right, but only Ella could see him. That was the deal with Mr. Peanuts. On my left was a real doll named Julietta who liked her tea “stronger than an elephant’s” but was on a strict diet, so she ate no imaginary cookies and took no imaginary lumps of sugar, nor did she take imaginary milk. Julietta could not see Mr. Peanuts either, and therefore doubted his existence.
“I had a friend named Tao once,” I said to Ella.
“Towel?” she said. “Like what you use to dry yourself after a bath? That was his name, Towel?”
“Close enough,” I said. “He was Cambodian. They have moronic names over there. He couldn’t read or write, so not even he knew how to spell it. I have no idea either. But I think it might have been T-A-O. That’s my guess.”
Then she asked why he couldn’t read or write. Was he blind?
And I told her that Tao was poor. Too poor to go to school. His parents were farmers. But the Vietcong killed them.
She wanted to know why the Vietcong had killed Tao’s parents, and so I told her the Vietcong were very bad people. Not nice. They killed by the thousands. She wanted to know who the Vietcong were, so I said, “Communists. Bad guys. Our enemy.”
It was nice to see Ella so concerned for Tao. She was biting down on her lip and twirling her hair around her finger. My granddaughter is compassionate.
She wanted to know what Tao did after his parents were killed, so I told her he escaped. Lived in the jungle. Ate snakes to stay alive. He was amazingly resourceful. Would have been extremely successful had he been born in America. Maybe would have even made president. But he wasn’t lucky as we are. He was born in a shithole country.
She said, “He ate snakes?”
So I said, “I did too. Tons of them.”
That made her stick out her tongue and say, “Yuck!”
And she was right, because snake is one nasty fucking meal.
Then Ella said she didn’t want to talk about eating snakes, and so I said I didn’t either.