Finding Seth Haines: Part II

The Vietnamese donut lady, the ghost, and the advent of Grunge music.

This is Part II of Finding Seth Haines. It pairs well with Part I. I’m not sure where this is going, but it’s broken something loose in me. Enjoy.

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Now, to the show.

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II.

Some donuts are just donuts, and just donuts are the best kind of donuts. Once, my son and I stopped at a just-donuts store in Harrison, a town that flies more Confederate flags per capita than any other location in the United States. In Harrison, there are no less than two billboards for White Pride Radio rising high above the run-down gas stations selling vapes and Monster energy drinks in the front and opioids out the back. Harrison isn’t the armpit of Arkansas; it’s the pothole.

In the just-donut store, a Vietnamese woman stood behind the glass case, standing on a wooden box to give her the appearance of height. She pointed to rows of confections so straight they could’ve been placed by a NASA engineer or an army drill sergeant. Anyone in the precision-industrial complex, really. Her English was good enough—You order?—and we spoke back—Two apple fritters, please. She said Thank You with enough pride to scramble the white supremacist AM radio signal floating somewhere above our heads.  

When she served the fritters, they were still warm. One bite took me back to Apple Town, a long-since-closed-up strip town outside of Lincoln that served warm cider and fritters to the families traveling to watch the Razorbacks play on cold October Saturdays. But these were better than the fritters at Apple Town. These were—and pardon me, writers, for telling and not showing—the best apple fritters either of us have ever had. I said this to the twig of a woman, and she probably didn’t understand, but she got the gist from the ecstatic moaning, and when she smiled, her teeth were pure white and aligned with the precision of the same NASA engineer or drill sergeant who'd laid out her donut rows. She took great pride in her teeth, too.

Now I was under the falls of the Buffalo River, just on the edge of what—the memory hole?—and I opened the white box that’d been waiting for me when I climbed out. These donuts were not just donuts. They weren’t Vietnamese apple fritters, either. They were round, covered in powdered sugar and something like gold flakes. I ate one, then another, then another, and when I’d finished the entire box, I was still hungry. Not for more donuts, though. I hungered for more memory. An insatiable hunger. I stared into the black hole that was still uncovered and my stomach growled.

It was midday and there was plenty of daylight left, so I held my breath and fell back into the pitch. 

There I was, again in another pew at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. I know this night, this service—Midnight mass. I’d arrived late and sat near the back of the cavernous space with the blue walls and blue ceiling. Blue is light seen through a veil, Thoreau wrote.

There in the blue, a man slides into the pew beside me. Gene, the father of a childhood friend. But only months before, I’d heard the news that Gene had died—his heart had misfired or unfired, which is to say it had stopped beating on the first cold midnight of the year. And yet, here he is in a green corduroy jacket and brown pants. He is cold, or at least the pew turned cold when he slid in after the entrance hymn. When I try to make eye contact with him, he is barely visible. Slight. His eyes are already full of blue tears. 

Gene had been an infantryman in Vietnam, or at least that’s the story I’d heard as a child. He’d carried a ruck and an M-16 through rice patties, jungle growth, and death, and he’d come out alive by the skin of his ass. He was one of the lucky ones who dodged bullets and malaria. I do not know what he saw in that war. What I know is this: when he was not stamping out parts at the factory in the late 1980s, he was sitting in a plush recliner drinking beer and thinking about nothing but football. His son once told me he did this to push back the ghosts, but we were in sixth grade, so who knows if that was true. He might have been pushing back the pressure of college tuition or car payments or pensions or whatever. 

It is what it is. 

Here Gene is, anyway, sitting next to me in this light seen through a veil. Why would a dead vet choose to haunt me? 

During the prayers of the people, the man at the podium says, For all those who’ve departed, that they may find eternal rest, and all the congregation—save for Gene’s ghost—responds, Lord Hear our prayer. I don’t respond either because Gene is sitting next to me, and I wouldn’t want to offend a good man’s ghost. But Lord knows I pray it in my head, pray it so hard a row of sweat breaks out on my forehead. The mass continues along at the speed of eternity, and during the passing of the peace, I do not conjure the testicular fortitude to turn to the haunting and extend my hand. I just stand there, staring up at the blue ceiling and shivering. I pull on my puffy jacket.

We tell the Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed, then the crowd files into the Eucharist procession. Gene floats from the pew and into the line of the living. He disappears. I search the line, but there, I do not see Gene’s ghost among the good Catholics—white, Latino, Vietnamese, Italian, Black.

After mass, I try to make a quick exit, but on my way out the back door, I hear my name. I turn and see Pat—the mother of my childhood friend—and she’s standing by Gene. In the flesh. She smiles. He smiles. His teeth are not nearly as straight as the Vietnamese donut lady's.

She says, Gene came up to the choir loft after the Eucharist and said he thought he was sitting next to you. I lose my breath, then catch it again. 

You can see him? 

They look at each other, and exchange a look that says, Does Seth need professional help? 

Anyway, I reach out to shake Gene’s hand and say, I’m sorry; I heard you’d died. 

His face flattens and he tells me there was a scare, but no, he was still among the living, which comes as a great relief. In that case, I say, Peace of Christ be with you. Pat laughs. Gene does not. Instead, he leans in and says, Thank you. 

For the souls of those who’ve departed, Lord hear our prayer.

When I walk through the back doors of the church, everything is black again, and then a shard of light in the night sky pulls me toward it. A star. I am in the white-hot center and the edges of everything burn with a light so bright that it hurts even with my eyes closed. My bone marrow sees this light. Then there is napalm. Then there is the racket of gunfire. Then I’m in a village, and I see a mud-covered American with a Leica camera standing in front of a pyramid of dead bodies. The bodies were once a village. Now they're just a pyramid of people whose lights have blinked out. 

A soldier stands on top of the pyramid, and when the documentarian says, Say Cheese, the soldier straightens his back, points his rifle heavenward, and smiles. To the left of the cameraman stands a helicopter pilot who carried the death platoon to the village. I know him. He is the father of another childhood friend. He pulls out a flask and turns it up. The smell of sulfur, whiskey, and death soaks me. 

Again, the light. Again the aching in the bone marrow. It is years later, now, and I’m standing in the helicopter pilot’s garage. He sits in a red and white lawn chair with an open footlocker at his feet, and he stares at a photo. He’s wrinkling his forehead and pinching himself as if trying to cry. He looks like a boy whose mother has just taken away his least favorite toy.

More than Vietnamese women and children died on that day thirty years ago, and he knows this. So, every day he does things to feel. He eats Thai chilies and moves landscaping timbers in the scorching summer and jumps off high cliffs into ice-cold water. He stands naked in the creeks of the Ouchitas and tries to catch smallmouth with his bare hands. He presses a heavy barbell till his chest throbs and he sees stars—The iron won't lie. He hungers for the pain of penance. 

For the souls of those who’ve departed, Lord hear our prayer. 

The pilot turns, places the photo back in his footlocker, and says I’m one lucky sonofabith to have not known war. Then, he evaporates. 

Lucky—yes. 

***

I am part of the generation born in the 1970s, the generation who came screaming out of our mothers’ wombs after the war and before the advent of the internet. We are the sons of men who stood atop piles of bodies, the children of those who’d died in war and come back to haunt America. It also means we are the children of mothers who took birth-control pills and had legal abortions, so the fact that we live at all makes us extra lucky. As ova, we wandered down fallopian tubes, sat in our mother’s uteruses, and waited for the rifle shot of life.

Yes, we were by-God miracles. 

We felt most lucky because our childhood was filled with peace and the soothing words of our grandfather, Ronald Raegan. There was no threat of being called to carry rifles overseas. We’d not be tasked with standing atop piles of dead human beings. We were not scheduled to smell sulfur and shit and decay. Hell hath no fury for the children of slaughterers, and we knew that. So, we took all this luck—the miracle of it all—and we made good on it. We created grunge music.

In 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind, and I still remember the cover art for the album. A naked baby submerged in a pool of clear blue water, swimming after a dollar attached to a fishing hook. Blue is light seen through a veil.

We were the generation who saw everything as a kind of drowning, I suppose. We were born into the pool of peace and given dollars to chase. But how long can you chase a dollar in a pool? Only until the oxygen runs out. 

Yes, we were the lucky generation, but this is what luck does: It breeds contempt. We were no great generation—Generation X—and so, we never believed we’d be in charge of anything. More to the point, we didn’t believe there was anything worth being in charge of, mostly because all the things men had been in charge of before led to more and more death. Maybe that’s why we’ve never been in charge of anything except for a genre of music in which teenagers sang songs about either heroin or nothing, and they sang as if they had marbles in their mouths.

For the souls of those who’ve departed, Lord hear our prayer.

I pull myself from the hole and climb to the edge of waking. Over the river, a Kingfisher dives for prey.