“You ever pour concrete?” William asked.
“No. Not really. Not ever actually.”
William told me my job would be to keep a path clear for the long pump hose that would extend from the cement truck in the street to the foundation at the back of the house, to make sure the hose didn’t pinch. To save on money, I suppose, we’d do the pour ourselves. Todd would handle the nozzle. William and I would hold the hose farther up the line and manipulate it as Todd instructed with hand signals. My job was to pass those signals to the pump-truck operator. An open hand meant let it pour. A closed fist or slash sign across the throat meant stop.
“Miss a signal and we step on a land mine,” William said.
I underestimated how much a hose filled with wet concrete weighed. The minute the truck started pumping the cement, holding on to the hose was like trying to hold the neck of a dragon that didn’t want to be held, but we soon fell into a good rhythm. As we poured, two young women drove slowly past the jobsite in a red 1965 Mustang, the windows down and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” blasting from the speakers. The dark-haired passenger lowered her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and checked me out, then broke into laughter. Feeling cocky, I returned the smile and checked her out, figuring I’d never see her again. What did I care? I was surprised and a little nervous when the driver turned into the driveway two houses down on the same side of the street as the remodel.
“Vincent,” William yelled with urgency. He had his fist closed.
“Shit.” I turned to the cement-truck operator and closed my fist, yelling, “Cut. Cut.”
I was late, but we hadn’t stepped on a land mine.
I had literally perspired through my shirt, but I didn’t have time to rest. As Todd and William worked hand trowels over the concrete, my job was to clean off cement overspray, particularly in the street. At the end of the day, Todd took off to bid a small tile job, leaving William and me to finish cleaning up the site, the trowels, and other tools. When we were done, William handed me a beer and I collapsed on my bucket. We BS’d again. I purposefully avoided Vietnam, but eventually the conversation got back around to his photography, so I assumed it was safe to ask a question.
“Why are you working construction with Todd? Why aren’t you working as a reporter or a photographer at a newspaper?”
William sucked on his cigarette. Smoke escaped his nose and mouth. Something about the blank expression on William’s face, the way he looked at me but also looked past me, made me uneasy.
William dropped his cigarette butt into his beer can. I thought he was going to get up and leave. Part of me wished he would. Instead, he said, “Because dreams are hard to catch.”
Uncertain what to say and not wanting to direct the conversation to Vietnam, I remained silent. William went there anyway.
“My platoon had been pulled back from our firebase to defend a city called Dak To during another offensive by the North Vietnamese. We were fighting street to street and door to door. In the middle of all this chaos, a Jeep comes whipping down the road and slams on the brakes. The driver talks to some marines, and I see them point to where I’m standing. The Jeep jerks forward and barrels toward me. The driver again slams on the brakes. He’s young, clean shaven. Clean uniform. He looks terrified.
“He says, ‘William Goodman?’
“‘Yeah.’
“‘You’re leaving. Now. Get in.’
“I was confused because I still had something like twelve weeks before my DEROS. I thought it was a mistake.”
“What did you do?” A stupid question I regretted the minute it left my mouth.
“You know,” William said, a wistful smile spreading on his lips, “I almost stayed.”
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
It didn’t sound like a question, and even if it had, I figured it was rhetorical. For once the frontal lobe kicked in and I kept my mouth shut.
“But in the midst of all that craziness, crazy is the only reality you know.” William shrugged. He lit another cigarette, blew out the smoke, and sipped another beer. “I was amped on adrenaline and all the drugs I’d been doing, and I was thinking that what I had known in New Jersey, what I had left behind, was no longer real. Vietnam was real. It was where I belonged.”
“So you stayed?” I asked, thinking it the craziest thing I’d heard.
“This Polish guy from Philadelphia, who we called Cheesesteak, punched me, hard, in the shoulder and said, ‘Shutter, get in the fucking Jeep, man. Don’t be a hero.’ That was something my mother said to me the morning I boarded the bus to boot camp. ‘Don’t be a hero.’ It was like she was calling me home. So I got in the Jeep. I still wonder what I would have done if Cheesesteak hadn’t knocked some sense into me. The driver took me straight to the transport helicopter and wished me Godspeed. When I got on the helicopter, I realized I didn’t have my ditty bag.”