My stepfather was outside, shirtless, watering the lawn, and I could see his war scars spread across his back like a map of an interstate highway. Shrapnel, he had told me once; nothing more. I begged for details as a boy, wanting to hear stories of glory and fighting for America, but he never indulged me.

“It was hot,” he had said. “And a lot of my friends died. That’s all you need to know.”

He’d lost a lot of weight since my last visit. This giant, this mountain of freckles and a huge red moustache that loomed in my childhood, was smaller than me now. He turned to look as I parked in the driveway and I could see his ribs.

“Nice car,” he said as I closed the door. My mother complained that he never used the oxygen tank like the doctor told him to, but his voice still sounded strong to me.

“It’s a rental,” I said. “They still don’t pay shit, you know how it is.”

He nodded, held his hand out. I shook it like I always did; soul-brother-style like he had taught me years ago. The way he shook hands in the Corps. My fingers looked childlike wrapped around his.

He looked at the dirt on the front of my car. “You drove it up from Pendleton?”

I nodded.

“A long way to drive.”

“Ten hours from the base to Sacramento.” I looked at his skin, bright red from the hundred-degree July heat. “Eight if you drive like I do.”

“Too long in a car for me; I’d fly.”

“I needed the solitude.”

He turned back to the lawn, watering spots that have been brown for years and always would be.

“You bring much luggage?”

“Just one bag, and a couple of suits.”

He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Suits?”

“Yeah, well, my Blues.”

He walked over to the faucet and turned the water off. He rolled the hose into a neat, one-foot circle and hung it along side the house on a rack. “Lawn needs trimming,” he said. The grass couldn’t have been more than an inch high.

I nodded.

“Get your things.”

“They can wait, Red, I’ll get them in a second.”

“It’s hot. Bring them inside before something melts.”

I got my gear out of the trunk. He motioned to put it on the living room floor and I laid my suit bag over the back of a couch older than I was. Red sat down in his recliner and breathed heavily.

“Need anything?” I said from the kitchen.

“Get me a beer,” his voice betrayed the toll that watering the lawn had taken.

“Are you sure that’s okay with, you know . . . ?”

“No, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

I took out two bottles and gave one to him. I watched hands that I’d seen break boards and crush cans and leave bruises strain to twist off the bottle cap. His chest was sunken, and I wished he’d put a shirt on but I opened my beer and took a long drink instead.

“Well,” he said, “someone finally gave you a decent haircut, didn’t they?”

“It’s been this way for a few years now.”

“Yeah, I guess it has.”

I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway. “Where’s Mom?”

“Store” he said. “She’s getting stuff for dinner. You staying?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I don’t have anything planned tonight.”

He took a long pull from his beer. “You going to go see your dad while you’re out here?”

I looked around. The only thing that had changed since I’d left was a new, giant-screen television dominating one corner of the living room. My mother had written that my stepfather watched golf on it all day. She hated the thing, but didn’t nag him about it because he was too weak to play anymore. They couldn’t really afford it, but how could she tell him no?

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll probably make it up to see him at least once this week.”

He turned the television on but muted the sound. In his hands the remote looked like a deck of cards. There was a documentary on. Black and white soldiers ran across black and white battlefields. My stepfather snorted and drank his beer.

“Well,” he said. “You going to show me or not?”

“Show you what?”

“You know you want to show me, that’s why you brought the damn thing here, isn’t it?” He pointed his beer bottle at my suit bag.

“I just got here.” I said. “Mom will want to see it too, I can wait.”

“One thing I’ve learned these past few months,” he said, “is there’s no point in waiting, if you know what I mean.” He smiled, but there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before: resignation. Not defeat, he would never stop fighting, but an acceptance that his condition was not simply going to go away.

I walked over to my bag, unzipped it, and pulled back the flap. Silver and brass shone from a dark blue field. I carefully removed my uniform and spread it on the couch where he could see it.

“Yep,” he said. “Looks just like I remember it.”

He stood up, looked closely at my ribbons and the gold parachute wings shining above them, the scuba pin above that. I could feel heat rising in my face. He bent down to look closer and I could see the puckered scar of an old bullet wound in his back.

“You really earned these?” he said. “They didn’t just give them to you for long-distance marching, or being a good runner, or some chickenshit like that, right?” He looked up at me, back down at the uniform, busting my balls with sarcasm.

“You know what those are,” I said. “You aren’t that old; you still remember what some of those mean.” My voice sounded funny. I hoped I was the only one who noticed.

“Yeah,” he said, sitting back down in his chair. “I remember what some of those mean.” He took a drink from his beer. “I even remember what it takes to get them.”

“You watch it on TV?” I said.

“What, the war?”

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “I’ve seen the real thing. I don’t need to see it on the news twenty-four hours a day told by people who don’t know what the business end of a rifle looks like.”

I thought about the guys in my platoon who had learned the hard way what an enemy rifle could do. The letters I’d written to their families, the dog tags I’d collected. The 18-year-old PFC who died in my arms waiting for the medevac to arrive, his blood soaking into the sand beneath us. I wondered how many letters Red wrote in his war. How many faces he still saw at night. I finished my beer and put the empty bottle in the garbage. Red was still staring at the ribbons on my uniform.

“No purple heart,” he said.

“Someone once told me that those were for people who didn’t know when to duck.”

He turned to face me; iron gray stubble lined his cheeks. Until that day, I had never seen him anything but clean-shaven.

“Did I say that to you?” he said. “I guess my advice worked.”

“I guess so.”

My memory played over the familiar close calls: landmines, vehicle accidents, impossible heat, and the constant threat of nerve gas that had me obsessively checking my protective mask. I remembered boredom, touch football games in the desert, and getting news of who won the Superbowl two weeks after it was over.

I tried not to think about killing my first human being.

“Hey, whatever anyone says; you done good, kid.”

“You don’t know what I did.”

“I know you’re here,” he said. “You’re alive and I sure as shit know better than you do that’s all that matters.” He took another pull from his beer. “So later on, when you feel bad about what happened over there, you just remember at least you’re alive to feel it.”

His voice sank into me, a rich, strong baritone, and for a moment there was no sickness, no oxygen tank. No six months to live. For a moment he was the man who’d taught a boy how to bait a hook, how to stand up to a bully and fight back. The man who’d stood in front of a bedroom wall covered with neatly framed medals and citations and told me I was crazy for joining the Marines but who’d driven me to the recruiting station the day I’d shipped out, shook my hand and told me something my real father never has, that he was proud of me.

Red raised his bottle. “Welcome home, kid,” he said and finished off the last of his beer.

Later that year, after my stepfather died, I would come home again to take care of the arrangements, collect his things from the hospice, write his obituary, give the eulogy, and arrange for a Marine honor guard at his funeral. I would stand in my dress blues when the sergeant handed my mother the flag. But that moment, Red and I sat there together, waiting for my mother to come home, two Marines from two different wars.

§ § §

Kevin C. Jones was a member of the United States Marine Corps from 1990-1994 and served in Operation Desert Storm. He is a student at the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Sacramento, California.

This piece was first published in INK POT #4- 2004, a literary journal.

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