Sleuth
by Emily Rich
I find the soldier with the blown-off face in my father's desk drawer. Held up to the light—my small fingers carefully keeping to the cardboard edges so as not to smudge the slide—pink gore explodes out of black skin, white bone shines beneath it all.
In a second slide the soldier is repaired, railroad tracks of medical stitching running from mouth to ear. He is still asleep under my father's anesthesia.
I'm not supposed to be in this room, and I feel exposed, in enemy territory. So I shove the slides back in the yellow Kodak box before my movements can be detected.
The war is a tiger that followed my father home. It's been with us for years now. I must stay on alert and listen for its growling.
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"How did you get those bruises?" my first grade teacher asks. And though I don't answer her, my parents will pull me from that school by year's end. They ask too many questions, and we must stay agile, to keep ahead of the tiger's pursuers.
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The war is never spoken of, so I become a sleuth. What clues did the house hold? The man with the blown-off face gurgles from the desk drawer. Amid a stack of dust-covered stamp albums, I find a faded picture of my father, candlestick white in the hot tropic sun, hitting a volleyball over a net. His hospital scrubs are the color of palm fronds. He is grinning wide.
The father I know is only brooding moods and violence.
What became of the grinning man in the picture?
Deep in my gut I feel the tiger as it circles and warns and snarls.
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Mom says, "Your father gave anesthesia to Lewis Puller, the Fortunate Son, after he was blown up by that landmine."
What Mom means is that Dad is a war hero, and it's important to her that I know this.
But I can’t ask Dad about what he did during the war because I am never not afraid of him and his russet paws that ball quickly into fists.
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Many years later, after Lewis Puller has committed suicide and my father has lost his medical license, I will read Fortunate Son, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.
Puller recalls the moments after his accident, lying on a gurney at the Naval Support Hospital in Da Nang: "...I count down from ten while the anesthesia takes hold..."
The anesthesia. My father. And just when I think I've found him, he slips back into the darkened jungle.
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My first job out of college is in the Vietnamese refugee camps on the Thai border. I want to solve things, to fix the problems my father’s generation helped to create.
The Vietnamese government has just released political prisoners after ten years of reeducation, now America will take them and resettle them. The old ARVN soldiers and bureaucrats sit on a bench before me, skeletal thin, quaking with memory.
Did you know my father, the war hero? I want to ask.
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Many years later I will go to the research library at the Quantico Marine base to see what I can find out about the Naval Support Hospital in Da Nang. I find nothing about my father or Lewis Puller. But there are a number of men with blown-off faces. And arms, and legs. Too many to count.
Back in Denver, in my parents' house, the tiger circles my father, possessive. Round and round. They are both old now, and yet, there is no way I can get past the tiger even after all these years. There is no way to reach him, my father the war hero, my father who at one point existed before the war.
About the Author:
Emily Rich has edited nonfiction for literary reviews for over five years. She writes mainly memoir and essay. Her work has been published in a number of small presses including Little Patuxent Review, r.kv.ry, the Pinch, and Hippocampus. Her essays have twice been listed as notables in Best American Essays. She is currently the editor of the Bay to Ocean anthology, published on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her twitter handle is @emilyjuanita12
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.