December Park(127)

“Are you and Grandma going?”

“I think we’re gonna skip it. It’s too much walking, and your grandmother’s knees are acting up. Not to mention I’ve been feeling a lazy streak coming on.” He winked at me through a screen of bluish smoke. “How many war stories have I told you since you were a boy?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. Hundreds?”

“At least, I’ll bet. Not to mention you always made me tell your favorites over and over again.”

My favorites included stories about crazy-eyed Rocko, who rode around the campground on a stolen motorcycle with no clothes on, and the aboriginals in New Guinea who electrocuted themselves when they touched a live power line that had come down in a storm. I also liked the one about the mess hall chef who dropped raisins into holes drilled in coconuts to ferment the coconut juice so he could get drunk.

“All those stories,” said my grandfather, “but did I ever tell you about the day I left home for the war?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I was about your age. I lied about my age so I could join the National Guard. I wanted to box and they had a good program. Did I tell you I was going to be a prizefighter?”

“You said Grandma made you give it up, that she didn’t want to be married to a guy with cauliflower ears.”

“That’s the truth of it,” he said, his eyes suddenly fierce and alive. “But that was much later. Back when I was your age, I still had those dreams, and I was a pretty good fighter. I already did my time fightin’ in the streets—you didn’t grow up in Brooklyn, so you don’t know how it is—and I thought boxing in the National Guard was maybe the next rung up the ladder.

“But then, see, one Sunday while I’m sittin’ in church, the priest announces that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japs. I’d never heard of Pearl Harbor in my life. Yet the next thing I know Roosevelt’s got us in the war, and now they’re talking about sending me and my friends overseas.

“My family didn’t know I’d signed up to the Guard. But seeing how I was gonna be shipped out to Fort Dix sooner than later, I had to tell them. So I told them over dinner a few nights before I had to meet the boat at the docks.”

“They must have been upset,” I said.

“Upset don’t quite cut it,” my grandfather said. “My mother and my sisters cried, but my father, he got up from the table and sat in his room all night. And the next morning, he went straight to work and didn’t say a word to me. He was furious. He was downright out of his mind with what I’d done.

“Night before I was to ship out, I went to him. After dinner, he took to sitting in the den, listening to the radio and just bein’ by himself. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say nothin’. So I turned around and left.

“Next morning, I got up early and grabbed my bags. I had packed a small satchel, but it wasn’t much—they didn’t want you taking too much with you—and my mother had wrapped me up some dried salami in wax paper. It was still dark when I left the house and went down to the corner to catch the bus.

“As you know, my father—your great-grandfather—owned a breakfast and sandwich shop in town, and he left for work before sunrise every morning. He’d already left that morning, but as I stood waiting for the bus, I see this figure coming toward me. It was my dad, wrapped in a thick wool coat and a fur hat—ah, it was ungodly cold that morning! He was a small man, my father, and very compact, and he had a bum leg that pained him in cold weather. As he came up the block, he sort of . . . well, it wasn’t quite a limp. He sort of waddled.” My grandfather smiled at the distant memory.

“Under his big coat he still wore his white apron from the store. I remember he had the small black nub of a hand-rolled cigar crooked in one corner of his mouth. He didn’t say a word to me—just looked me over, like a butcher appraising a cut of meat. I didn’t say nothin’, neither. See, I’d grown a little angry at him, I guess for no other reason than he had been angry at me.

“Eventually the bus comes and those doors hiss open. I give my dad a hug, then get on the bus. I look around, and the seats, they’re filled with boys just about my age. They all got their bags with ’em, and they’re all on their way to Fort Dix.”

“I bet they were scared,” I said.

My grandfather waved a hand at me. “Scared? You would have thought we were going on vacation. What did we know? We were kids.”

My grandmother’s face appeared behind the screen door. She smiled at me, then wrinkled her nose at the smell of my grandfather’s pipe before withdrawing into the house.

“I grabbed an empty seat on the bus,” my grandfather said, “and when I looked up, there’s my dad, limping down the aisle toward me. I slid over just as he sat down beside me. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

“‘Came to see my boy off,’ he said.”

My grandfather crossed his legs and puffed on his pipe. He stared out over the yard again. I knew he wasn’t finished yet; like an ancient scribe, he was merely dipping his pen before finding the page once more, and much of what I learned about storytelling I learned from him.

“It was a few hours to Dix. We didn’t say much on the trip. After a while, the other boys got quiet, too. When we finally arrived, all the boys got off the bus. My dad got off with me, his bald head beaded with sweat, his heavy winter coat damp and drooping with perspiration. ‘I guess I gotta go now, Pop,’ I tell him, and my dad, he just nods. He was crying . . . and he sort of smiles at me, saying we’re okay . . . and . . . well . . .”