The Executor Read Free Page B

course, it’s possible—however implausible—that my mother and her family were genuinely enthusiastic about the match. I’ll never know, because I wouldn’t show up for another seven years, and by the time I got old enough to ask questions, all the original intentions had long since vanished, the emotions dried up and blown away.
    On April 23, six months before my older brother was born, President Richard Nixon signed Executive Order 11527, amending the selective service regulations and making it difficult for men to get draft deferments based on paternity. My father might have tried to appeal his conscription on the grounds that while not yet a father, he was soon to become one. Or he might have argued that the fetus had been conceived under the old law. As far as I know, he never did protest, on any grounds whatsoever, and neither did my mother or her family. The baby, a boy, arrived in October; in November my father shipped out to Nha Trang for the first of three tours of duty.
    There is no need to discuss at length his experiences in combat.
    Snapshots taken around the time of his homecoming show him cutting into a cake; standing with other returned servicemen along the fifty-yard line at Stinton County High School stadium (last winning season: 1951-52), accepting a standing ovation from those present for the home opener; restraining his squirming son, now old enough to feel ashamed when held. In these photos, my father lacks the customary “thousand-yard stare.” To the contrary: looking at them, one gets the sense that he can hardly contain himself, that keeping still requires an enormous effort on his part, and by the next frame he will have exploded all over the walls like a burst melon. The Polaroid is a poor medium for capturing a man who in life never stopped moving, whose defining quality was a physicality so animal, muscular, kinetic, and urgent that it sought any available escape route, however destructive.
    Maybe it was Vietnam that brought this out in him. Maybe it was there all along. That’s a question for a psychologist, not a philosopher, and anyway, not an answerable one. I understand this now. But when I was younger and still believed that lives could be read like stories, I strove to figure him out. Not by talking to him, of course. People seldom possess the self awareness to describe themselves in detail, and even when they do, they’re seldom inclined to, the confessional not being a form found in nature. Instead I looked at the effects he had on me and those around me, and—combining that with what I gathered second- and thirdhand from my mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—worked to reverse-engineer his soul.
    Demanding, volatile, possessed of a blunt charisma, he’s actually quite intelligent, albeit extremely concrete. It’s probably for the best that he’s never talked to me about my work. He wouldn’t understand, and I wouldn’t be able to explain it to him. (The flip side is that he can do things I can’t, like run a business or fix a busted washer.) When he decides that someone is bad, they are irredeemable. When they are good, they can do no wrong—for a time, anyway. People like him are destined for torment, as they face the same two choices in judging themselves. That he should be funny, sometimes startlingly so, will come as no surprise, for the true face of humor is cruelty. My mother was not the last to be seduced by him. The checkout girl; my fourth-grade teacher—I remember them flirting with him, leaning toward him in a wet-lipped feline way. As far as I know he never had affairs, but who can say for certain? (By contrast, my mother’s fidelity is unquestionable.) Many of these more pungent qualities have faded as he approaches old age, but back then he was a force to be reckoned with, and while I wouldn’t call him a monster, I will say that he often did a very good impression of one.
    Upon his return from Vietnam, he trained as a plumber, eventually