A Straight Answer

Thanksgiving, ‘97. The whole family gathered in San Rafael at my grandmother’s house. Green shag and white brick in the living room, wood and flowers in the kitchen, through the hallway was the tv room, football on the holidays. My grandfather sat in his chair, hulking, silent, stubbornly unknowable.

In the chair next to him, his brother Al. Sergeant Al. Great Uncle Al the war hero, wears an eyepatch over his missing right eye and always keeps everyone on his left so he can see them.

The crowd cheered on the TV as the Cowboys took it into the endzone.

“Gad, da—” Uncle Mort, sitting at the head of the couch, threw his hands up and winced, flashing a nervous glance at grandpa. “---arn it. 

Grandpa grumbled like an idling Harley and furrowed his overgrown eyebrows. He didn’t look over.

The kids started hollering in the kitchen, their mothers calling after them.

Uncle Mort turned an ear and raised his glass, “Pipe down in there, kids. It’s all fun and games…” He let the sentiment hang. Not to add a sense of poignance, but because he was just that lazy. 

“Until what?” The sarge Leaned forward past the bulk of Grandpa and turned his full face, putting his eyepatch on display.

“Huh?” Mort turned his head but kept his eyes on the screen.

“It’s all fun and games until what?”

Mort squinted, apparently lost, before glancing around in an over-acted display of confusion, looking at everything but the Sargeant’s eyepatch. He cleared his throat, shifted in his seat and shrugged, baffled. “Nothing.” He took another glance around, grabbed both sides of the couch cushions, and turned an ear as he pretended to hear more trouble in the kitchen. “Dina? You need me?” Mort dealt a flurry of apologetic nods to grandpa and uncle Al, “I’m just going to see if she needs some help.” He pushed himself up and hightailed it out of there.

Grandpa smirked, the closest he ever got to a smile. And coughed a one syllable chuckle.

Great uncle Al huffed through his nose and nodded in agreement as he fell back into his seat.

“I’m grabbing another.” Grandpa slugged back the last of his beer and crushed the can in his heavy mitt. “Want one?”  

Al slugged the rest of his back and handed the empty can to grandpa. 

Grandpa grumbled, took it, and crushed it as well.

“I’ll take one too, Gamp.”

Grandpa fixed a leery left eye on me. 

I flashed him a bunch of teeth and shrugged.

He smirked and left.

I watched him go and looked back to find Al staring at me. I shrugged at him. “It was worth a try, I guess.”

Uncle Al nodded. “How old are you now, Mike?” He raised his chin as he assessed my age. “Fourteen?”

“I’m nine, Uncle Al.” I threw my hands up as if it was the most ridiculous assessment ever made.

The twins sitting next to me exchanged a bout of silent conversation, got up and left without a goodbye.

Uncle Al and I watched them go, exchanged an indifferent glance and turned back to the game. After a few plays I got a little distracted and slowly started to turn my attention to Uncle Al and his eyepatch I couldn’t see. I nudged in closer to the center of the couch trying to get a better look.

Uncle Al turned a suspicious eye. 

I grinned a playful grimace.

He squinted, stared at me for a moment, and returned his attention to the game. 

“Hey, Uncle Al.”

He gave me a nod before glancing over his shoulder, searching for signs of grandpa. We could both hear him tied up in the kitchen with the aunties. 

Uncle Al turned to me with a glint of frustration. “Hmm?”

I cleared my throat. “Well…” I sat up in my seat and kicked my feet. “Well, I was just…”

Uncle Al gave a final glance over his shoulder, sighed in acceptance, and turned his face so I could see it. “You want to know about the eye.”

I nodded about a hundred times.

He smiled and turned his face back to the game, but I could tell he wasn’t watching it anymore. “What do you want to know?”

I shrugged. There was only one question. “How’d you lose it?”

Uncle Al nodded a single thoughtful nod.   

I stole a glance of the commotion in the kitchen. No one ever really talked about it. We all knew the Sergeant had served in both wars, I think that meant Korea and Vietnam. As a family we had always managed to brush over any acknowledgement of the patch, or the missing eye behind it, but I knew we all secretly wanted to talk about it. I was excited to know. I Grinned back at Uncle Al.

“It was a long war.” He took a breath. 

I glanced over my shoulder hoping no one was coming back, I wanted to know how it all happened and hold it ransom as a coveted and super grown-up secret. One that I could doll out in bite-sized anecdotes to the younger cousins, to scare and antagonize them. 

He launched into a long meandering speech that I struggled to follow. After what felt like forever I could hear his tone shift into some sort of conclusive timbre. 

“It was a different time in a different country. We were fighting a war against an enemy that we could never know.”

I sat there wrists together like a POW as I imagined the bombs crashing down.

“I found myself behind enemy lines, taken in by a kind and brave family. They hid me in their basement when Charlie walked patrol. Days turned into weeks and eventually we had to find a way to pass the time.”

I let my wrists relax.

“It’s funny how when you feel the safest, that’s when you’re in the most danger,” He let the sentiment fade, “Especially during wartime.”

I nodded with a furrowed brow that hopefully expressed understanding. “So that’s where they found you? In that family's home?”

Uncle Al shook his head. “No, they never found me. That family actually saved my life… and I harbor no ill will toward any of them.”

“The eye was their fault?” I tilted my head in confusion.

“No.” Uncle Al slowly shook his head. “As I look back now, I realize the only one to blame is myself.”

“You poked it out?” I said, jumping to the only conclusion I could come to.

“Well, not exactly.” Uncle Al held up a finger, turned his good eye toward me. “Let me ask you this, Mike.”

I was all ears.

“Are you a competitive fella?”

I looked up and off, considering, then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.” He wagged a finger at me. “Always remember that pride is the crutch of the insecure.”

I squinted, seriously, as I nodded along, making sure he knew that I understood, even though I didn’t.

“Well, pride, Mike, is one of my vices.” He took a deep breath. “Back then I was young and dumb and thought I knew it all. That’s how I ended up locked in competition with the head of the house, Ai Minh.”

“You fought?”

“Not a fight, but a struggle.”

I imagined him in an arm-wrestling match with an old, small Vietnamese man, both of them giving it their all in the middle of a small shack, the rest of the family surrounding them, shouting encouraging slogans in an unfamiliar tongue.

“He had me in check for the third time. You see, back at base, I was the guy to beat. I just couldn’t wrap my head around this old man from the middle of the jungle being able to toy with me like that.”

“So, he attacked you?”

Uncle Al looked away for a breath. “I called him a cheat.”

I mouthed a silent, Oh.

He turned to me seriously. “Never accuse someone else of cheating.”

I thought about it with a nod of my chin and then raised a finger. “But what if they are cheating?”

“Then it’s your fault for getting involved in a game you didn’t understand.”

I furrowed my young brow and nodded along contemplatively as if I understood what the heck he was talking about. “So, he attacked you?”

“Well…” he looked off and then back. “When I called him out for cheating, I brought my fist down on the board.”

I nodded fifty times in a half a second.

“It was a pawn.” He raised his eyebrow and a finger. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the pawn is the weakest piece. They’re dangerous enough, let me tell you.”

I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to fill in the details. He didn’t.

A clatter from the kitchen as grandpa came in. He shuffled to his seat, fell into it and cracked his beer. 

Uncle Al held up a hand. “Where’s mine?”

Grandpa took a slurpy slug. “Eh?” He wiped his lip. “Forgot.”

“Ah, geezus…” Uncle Al grabbed the arms of the recliner. “Guess I’ve got to hit the head, anyhow.” He pushed himself up with a creak and a crack and a groan and ambled out of the room. 

I was thinking about Uncle Al’s story, trying to put the pieces together when I caught grandpa regarding me from the corner of his eye. I smiled up at him. He turned back to the game. I just blurted it out. “Uncle Al told me how he lost the eye.”

“Oh yeah?” He chuckled. “How’s that? He had turned his attention on me. A rare occasion. 

I stammered. “In a game.”

He turned back to the TV, huffing chuckles through his nose as he took another sip. “What’d he say it was? Tidily-Winks?” 

I wrinkled my nose as I thought about it. “No. I think it was chess.”

Grandpa scoffed. “Al can’t play chess to save his life.”

I squinted, finally getting it. “So, it was in the war?” I nodded conclusively, realizing Uncle Al had been pulling my leg the whole time, not wanting to expose a young kid like me to the horrors of battle.

“No.” Grandpa turned and flashed me a glance that seemed to regard me as, if not a fellow adult, a future candidate for one. “Shot out by a hooker in Da Nang.” He turned his attention back to the game. 

I learned two things that day. One of them being; Vietnam has provinces. The other; It’s hard to get a straight answer from a family member during Thanksgiving.