By Constance Squires

Elaine felt something hit the back of her head and turned to see the livid face of the woman her father had just insulted. The woman stood at the other end of the cereal aisle with a lit cigarette in her mouth and yellow-and avocado-paisley scarf covering her pink curlers, pelting Elaine and her father with sugary cereal and instructing her three children to do the same. The smell of artificial fruit flavoring was in the air. Her father grabbed her hand and grinned like a skull , “Heavy fire, Lainey. Run for the canned goods. I’ll cover you!”

Elaine looked back to see her father grabbing a box of Cheerios off the shelf and tearing it open. Mom would never have done this, she thought, ducking around the corner. “Jesus, that’s Major Travis! He’s crazy.”

“I worry for that little girl.” The whir of a shopping cart passed and Elaine turned to look at the women whose voices she had heard. He wasn’t crazy. Her guts churned with rage as she stood and pondered the exotic canned goods—what was hominy? Bloated corn. Her father had shown her pictures of corpses on battlefields and pointed out the way they bloated, bursting the seams of their clothing after they died. He slid by her with his feet on the grocery cart, waving his hands like Esther Williams in a water musical. He is a battalion commander, she thought, watching him gliding along on the cart; he has killed people. He jumped down and stopped the cart in front of her. “I’m sorry about that, baby. I didn’t mean for her to hear me.”

“You were pretty loud,” Elaine said, looking down at her toenails. Her mother had painted them for her before she left and now the paint was almost gone. Elaine remembered her mother shaking the bottle of nail polish and explaining to Elaine as though they were both adults why she was leaving Elaine’s father, and why she was leaving Elaine with him. “You’re the only person keeping him human,” she had said, pulling apart Elaine’s toes, “How could I tear you apart?”

Elaine’s father was eating a handful of the cereal he had been throwing the moment before. “The truth hurts, Lainey. There is nothing more revolting than a woman who smokes. But do you know the grossest thing in the world?” He asked her, leaning his face close to hers like he was about to impart something requiring top security clearance. “A fat woman who smokes! If that woman had to live up to military standards she’d look a lot different.” He seemed very affected, as if he might get sick. “I tell you, Lainey. You’d better not ever smoke. Or get fat. I don’t think I could take it. I might not be able to be your father anymore.”

They moved through the checkout line. The cashier, a PFC in uniform, saluted her father and gave him the total. On the checkout counter a turquoise and orange display held a multi-colored population of tiny rubber trolls with tall stands of neon hair and eyes that suggested the entire troll population suffered from hyperthyroidism. Lainey selected one, hot pink with blood red hair, and slipped him into the front pocket of her shorts. Her father said life was for the taking, but only the strong ever realize it. Elaine realized it. They followed the sacker to their car, a day-glo orange Audi with a deep green interior. It had been her father’s first purchase in Germany, and his first major purchase without her mother to help him. He was colored-blind and thought the car was brown. Reds, pinks and oranges were all brown to him. Elaine had tried to explain to her father what day-glo orange looked like, why it was such a head-turner, but how do you explain a color to someone who can’t see it?

They got in the car and drove across the base, which, although American now, had been built for Nazi forces during the Second World War. Above every doorway a stone eagle held a wreath in his talons with a blank center where the swastika had been. It was sunny and hot, rare weather for Germany, and the gray stone buildings looked odd without the gray sky behind them, like bugs with particular protective camouflaging made to stand alone, away from the bark or leaf with which their bodies blended. G.I.s in sneakers, cut-offs and dog-tags all seemed to be outside, running, playing baseball and soccer and swimming. Her father pulled into the parking lot of the base pool.

“Dad, we don’t have our swim suits,” Lainey said, turning in the passenger seat to look at him. Since he had come back from Vietnam—as long as she could remember him—he had had white sideburns, stark and unblended with his chesnut hair like J. Jonah Jameson, the newspaper editor in Spiderman comics.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, sugar,” he said, opening the car door and getting out. They met at the front of the car. “These shorts I’m wearing will work, and so will yours.”

“But what about a top! I need a top.”

“Listen,” he said, kneeling down so that they were eye to eye. They were standing on blacktop, and Lainey could feel the heat rising from it, melting her red-white-and-blue layered foam flip-flops like a couple of Neapolitan ice-cream sandwiches while a freckle reproductive frenzy commenced across her nose, brought on by direct sun. She could practically feel them spreading. Her father was oblivious to all this activity, although she felt sure he must have been able to see the freckles as they multiplied and subdivided. He ran his fingers across the short, spiky top of her blond head. “You look just like a boy. Nobody will be able to tell the difference. You should enjoy it. In a few years, you won’t be able to get away with going topless.”

Elaine looked down at the perfectly flat surface of her blue t-shirt, thinking something might have begun to happen since she got dressed that morning. He was right, she looked exactly like a boy. “Okay,” she said.

“It’s like a prank. We’ll pull one over on them.”

“We’ll be breaking the rules,” she pointed out, although she knew it made no difference to him.

“Rules are there for a reason, baby, it’s true. Most people are pretty stupid. They really are, and they need to be given some clear guidelines or they’ll just wander around lost. I see it in my troops all the time. My God, in Vietnam it seemed like those kids were trying to get themselves killed! If they’d followed the rules—my rules—a lot of them would still be around today. But no, it was like they were irresistibly drawn to the stupidest moves they could make, the wrongest places to step or to stand. They needed rules. Heed the ones that keep you from getting your ass shot off or winding up in prison. Other than that, rules are for other people.” He looked at her then, seeming a little uncertain as to whether what he said made sense to her.

Elaine grabbed his hand as they walked into the pool area, where they kicked off their flip-flops, peeled off their t-shirts and dove in. The lifeguard, a young German girl with stringy blond hair and gigantic breasts, whistled for them to get out of the pool. Pretending not to hear her, Elaine dove underwater and tried to guess what was happening by watching the submerged half of her father. She could tell only that he was facing her. She came up for air and saw the lifeguard standing at the edge of the pool saying something to him. He was treading water on his back, grinning at her, so that he managed to look like someone in a big easy chair with his arms thrown casually around the sides and his feet on an ottoman. Elaine thought she detected flirting. He laughed, and the sound of his voice, probably his reaction to the girl’s attempt to evict him from the pool, echoed off the tiles throughout the pool area. The lifeguard blushed and looked down. Yes, definite flirting. Elaine dove underwater again and came up for air between them, spraying water all over the lifeguard. “Ten more minutes, Major Travis, but that’s all. Then you and your boy can come back with swimming trunks,” she was saying before Elaine soaked her. The lifeguard barely registered Elaine, who could see that her father was closing in on a date. He had begun dating in the last month, and Elaine hated it, although he allowed her to sit in judgment of them; he would ask her what she thought of their outfits, their laughs, their asses. She was unremittingly negative. The implied question was always the same, “Is she on par with your mother?” And they never were. Elaine dropped back under and came up, this time with a huge mouthful of water which she aimed at the lifeguard’s pixie face. As she sprayed the lifeguard, she felt her father’s calves clamp around her middle and pull her under.

“Be nice, Larry,” he said, laughing when he brought her back up. “Gertha here is going to let us swim for a few more minutes. Say thank you.”

She looked Gertha over. Gertha could not have been more than twenty. Gertha had hairy underarms and legs. Gertha would not do. “My Dad says German women all get big and fat,” she said. Her father’s legs tightened around her and pulled her under again. This time when he brought her up, he kept his legs tight around her until she apologized to Gertha.

When he let go of her, the red and pink troll popped out of the front pocket of her shorts and bobbed to the top of the water. She was in trouble. “Hey!” her father’s voice boomed. Elaine made a grab for the troll, but her father already had it. He swam to the edge of the pool and motioned her over. “Where did you get this?” Elaine looked down and concentrated on the dead bug corpses trapped inside a pool light. “Where?” he repeated.
“I got it at the commissary. You said we should take what we want out of life.”

“That’s not what I meant, baby.”
***
Gertha was at their apartment the next morning when Elaine got up to start vacation Bible school and listened while Elaine and her father continued their duel over her going. “A thief! My daughter! You’re going to learn some goddamned morals, Lainey. End of discussion.”

“Yesterday you said rules are for other people.”

“Well, yes. But what else did I say? Don’t get your ass shot off or wind up in jail. This could land you in jail,” he said, holding up the troll who stood at the breakfast table in front of the salt and pepper shakers.

It seemed to dawn slowly on Gertha that Elaine’s father had referred to her as a daughter. “You are a girl?” Gertha asked, pushing back her chair to get a better look at Lainey’s clothes. Flip-flops, green shorts, white t-shirt. Elaine and her father looked at her.

“She’s a girl. Her mother’s a goddamned beauty queen. Lainey will get there.”

“Do you want to see a picture?” Lainey asked excitedly and began to get up, thinking that Gertha would dissolve into a quivering mass of inadequacy and leave if she saw a picture of her mother. It had worked on more than one occasion. “Sit down, Lainey. We were having a talk. Religion is bullshit,” her father said as he slid a cheese omelet from the skillet onto her plate. “Just another set of rules to keep stupid people in line. But we live in a Judeo-Christian society, so you need to know the stories. They’re the foundation of our culture. They teach you about morality. Even the krauts know these stories. Gertha, you know the story of Noah’s ark?”

Gertha nodded from within his red terry cloth robe, which he thought was brown. “They were in the ark forty days and forty nights. Meine Got, how boring would that be?”

“You see?” he said, taking a seat between them. He had poured himself a bowl of what Cheerios he had not thrown the day before.

“You don’t believe in God?” Elaine asked her father. She asked him the question all the time, like opening the refrigerator over and over again when you’re hungry, even when you know nothing’s in there, hoping one time you’ll open it and it will contain everything you want.

“No,” he said seriously, as if she had never asked him before. Then he said something he never had, “ but I believe in ghosts.”

***

Vacation Bible School was held in a building used now for the base church facility, but which had been a hospital when the Nazis built it. Elaine’s teacher told them all the history of the building offhandedly, adding, “and this room was the morgue. That’s where they prepare bodies for burial. Nazi bodies.”

Elaine’s had a hard time paying attention as her teacher, whom she recognized from a 4th of July party as Mrs. Harner, the wife of a master sergeant in her father’s battalion, told them the story of Adam and Eve. She read every scrap of brightly colored cardboard lettering on the bulletin boards that lined the walls and then she let her eyes go out of focus and was looking at the fuzzy forms of her classmates and her teacher when she saw the crisp, clear form of the ghost standing in front of one of the billboards. He was young and very handsome in the blue-eyed blond way that Hitler so admired. He wore a hospital gown and stood in bare feet with his hands loosely clasped behind his back. He turned and, it seemed to Elaine, knew that she saw him. He stayed there, shifting his weight slightly from foot to foot, staring at the bulletin board, all morning. Elaine never took her eyes off him, but he never looked at her again.

After lunch he was gone. That afternoon, Elaine deliberated over whether or not to tell her father. She was dying to, but she knew that he would not think it was a coincidence that she had seen her first ghost the very day he had told her of his belief in them. “Tell me about the ghosts you see, Dad. What kind of ghosts?” she asked him later that afternoon as they walked into their quarters after he had picked her up from Bible School. Gertha was there, lying on the couch listening to her father’s Credence Clearwater Revival records.

Elaine expected him to act like he didn’t know what she was talking about, but he didn’t. He strode across the living room to the stereo and turned the volume down. “People that won’t go away. Those kinds of ghosts,” Gertha snapped into an upright position.

“You want me to leave, Daniel? I can leave.”

“No, no,” he said, winking at Elaine. “Ghosts live in the imagination. We carry them with us in our heads.” He sat down next to Gertha and patted her forearm. “You’re not in my imagination at all. You’re just right here.”

That night Elaine stayed home and read The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, one of the dozens of Nancy Drew mysteries that had made the trip with her from San Diego to Nurnburg, while her father and Gertha went to the movies. Apocalypse Now had finally made it into Department of Defense circulation, six months after it left theaters stateside, and was being shown at the old, single screen theater on base. Elaine knew her father would hate it. He hated all Vietnam movies; they never got it right. But he had high hopes for this one.

He returned home alone a little after ten’oclock and went straight to the hall closet where he kept his slide projector and his box of slides. Elaine had never been allowed to see them, but she knew they were of his tour of duty in Vietnam. He was completely absorbed. Bringing the slide projector over to the coffeetable, he only noticed her, under a blanket on the couch, quietly awash with relief that he was home, after he almost sat on her. She had not been able to get the Nazi ghost out of her head. Even Nancy Drew had seemed trite; Elaine knew that Carolyn Keene, the author of the Nancy Drew mysteries, had never seen a ghost. She didn’t get it right. Nancy Drew ghosts were hardly better than Scooby-Doo ghosts. Real ghosts weren’t so talkative. He sat down and turned to smile at Elaine, who crawled onto his back and squeezed both arms around his neck. He pulled her over his head and set her on his knee. “Whatcha reading?” he asked.

“Nothing. How was the movie? Where’s Gertha?”

“She went home. She liked the movie,” he snorted. “Fucking civilians. What do they know? You should have seen it, baby. They had this fat guy—Marlon Brando; he looked like hell—playing a US Army Colonel. It was absurd. He had gone nuts and was deep in Cambodia. They think we weren’t in Cambodia, but baby, I was there, and I didn’t run into any fucking Captain Kurtz.”

“It’s just a movie, Dad,” Elaine said, patting her father’s arm. After he put her to bed, Elaine crawled on her stomach from her bedroom, down the hall and behind the couch, peeked out and watched the slide show projected onto the wall. Her father drank a Pabst and flipped the controls, lingering over some slides for long minutes and speeding past others. The first few slides were of her mother standing in front of a hangar in a red minidress, long blond hair pulled over her shoulders, holding an infant Elaine. Elaine wondered if her mother had known that her father was colorblind when she bought the red dress.

The next slides were of street scenes in a big city, Saigon, she thought, many slides of Vietnamese women in doorways, shots taken from the air, of air strikes in progress, smoke rising from holes in the dense canopy, shots of her father and other men in a room, posing in front of maps scrawled over with grease pencil, shots from a gunboat riding through the jungle, with her father on deck, shirtless with an AK-47 strapped across his chest. From growing up in military circles, underfoot at cocktail parties, she knew that M-16’s were US government issue in Vietnam, but that most soldiers preferred the enemies AK-47’s. She had seen them before, and she knew that if you had one, you had killed to get it. She knew this the way she knew two plus two is four. Then there was a slide of two Vietnamese men on the ground, clearly dead, the head of one at an unnatural angle with their guns at their sides. Elaine could see that they weren’t bloated yet so she knew they hadn’t been dead long when the photograph was taken. In the next shot, her was father posing with the dead men’s guns. Her father got up and went to the refrigerator for another beer. He stood in the living room and stared at the projection of himself, holding the weapons of his dead opponents, for a long time. After he sat back down, Elaine crawled back to her bedroom, thinking that she could probably tell her father about the Nazi ghost.

The ghost was there again the next day, staring at the wall in his hospital gown while Elaine’s Bible School teacher told the story of Lot and his wife, fleeing from Sodom. She knew she should listen, but she heard nothing and let her eyes go out of focus again until the ghost became clear and sharp, the way the slides she and her father had watched had been, fuzzy until he brought them into focus, having to refocus after almost every slide. “Elaine?” her teacher was asking a question. “Elaine, why was Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt? Do you know?” Elaine shook her head. “Does anyone else know? Julio, how about you?”

“She looked back and she wasn’t supposed to.”

“That’s right. She looked back.” Momentarily distracted, Elaine looked back to where the ghost had been and couldn’t find him. She tried to relax and let her eyes go out of focus again and finally she saw him. He had moved to the door that led into the hallway. He stood exactly as he had before, just looking. Elaine was afraid he might leave. Without thinking, she stood up and began to excuse herself. “Elaine, where are you going?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Our bathroom break will be in fifteen minutes. Can you wait?”

“Nope.”

“Well, okay. Hurry up.” Elaine walked to the door where the ghost stood, sidestepping carefully to avoid him before she passed through the doorway and ran down the hall and out of the building. Her father worked at base headquarters, which she could see on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the base. She found Pershing Boulevard and followed it all the way. It took thirty minutes and she was hot and sweaty when she finally stepped into the airconditioned building. A black and yellow Ranger crest spread before her, tiled into the floor. She headed for the stairs. She was familiar with the building and found her father’s office, down a long tiled hallway with olive drab cinderblock walls decorated with aerial photographs. Sergeant Oakley looked up from his gray metal desk when she entered. “Hi Jimmy! Is my Dad here?”

“Sure, Lainey. What did you do, walk?” She nodded, and he gestured to the opaque glass door with her father’s name and rank stenciled on it. She walked through and only then thought about how she would explain herself.

Her father, behind a slightly larger version of Sergeant Oakley’s gray metal desk with an American flag and a map of West Germany behind him, looked up when she entered. He was on the phone and writing something. Lainey noticed the pink and red troll standing on his desk in front of her 4th grade picture. “I have to let you go, sir. Emergency. I’ll call you right back.” He stood up. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to show you something, Dad.”

“What? Why aren’t you at Bible School?”
“That’s where I have to show you something.”

“Lainey, goddammit,” he spread his hands over his face and looked at her through his fingers the way he had with her mother when she was yelling at him.

“Dad, you need to see this. If you can.”

“What do you mean, if I can?”

“It’s a secret. Can we take your jeep?”

“Is it a good secret?”

“It’s the best.” They pulled up to the Nazi hospital-turned-place of worship ten minutes later in her father’s jeep. Elaine led her father by the hand into the old morgue where her classes were being held. Mrs. Harner was walking among the tables where the children sat cutting and pasting magenta, red, orange and lime green cardboard into animal shapes. “ Elaine—oh, Major Travis, hello. I was just about to call you. I didn’t know where Elaine had got to.”

“It’s okay, Maurine.”

“He’s going to join our class,” Elaine said, pulling an extra chair to the where she had been sitting. Her father sat down and attempted to fold his legs under the table. The other children giggled and then just stared as Mrs. Harner started the story of Noah’s Ark, looking at Elaine’s father every few seconds. He was her husband’s boss. Elaine ribbed her father, “At least you get to hear Noah’s Ark. Isn’t that the one you like?”

“What am I doing here, baby? What are you trying to show me?”

Elaine picked up a piece of pink paper and began tearing it slowly. “Dad, what color is this paper to you?” she asked him, always curious at how his colored-blindness distorted what he saw.

“Brown, kind of light brown.” He shifted and lifted the table off the ground with his knees.

“Maybe you really see colors the same as everyone else, but you just call them different things. Maybe when you were little your parents taught you that red is brown and pink is light brown. We could be seeing the same colors and not knowing it,” Elaine said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. He looked at her, waiting.

She looked at the doorway. She had not seen the ghost when they came in, but she had been trying not to see, then. Now she let her eyes go out of focus, taking a deep breath and watching as the overhead lights all gained prismatic aurioles and her father’s features lost their clarity, then she turned her head towards the doorway. The Nazi ghost wasn’t there; he was back in his original position, staring at one of the bulletin boards. “Can you make your eyes go out of focus, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Lainey. . .”

“There’s a ghost right there,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of her gaze.

Her father followed her eyes and squinted. “What does he look like?”

“He’s in a white hospital gown open at the back. He’s barefoot. Young, handsome. I think he’s a Nazi soldier. Mrs. Harner told us this used to be the morgue when this was a Nazi base.”

She heard her father let out a sigh. “Can you see him with your eyes focused?”

“Yes, but just a shadow. Like this, he’s all the way clear, like with your slides.” She realized too late that she had betrayed herself. She kept looking at the ghost.

“Oh, so you saw some slides, did you?” He patted her back. “Yeah, the ghosts I see are all Vietnamese. It would be nice to see something different for a change.” He looked at her for a long minute and then leaned forward and put his chin into his hands. He was trying to see the ghost. “Baby, are we kidding around?”

“Are you?”

“No. I really see them. But you shouldn’t.”

“Well, I do.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

“I wonder why?” he asked, almost to himself. “Come here,” he said, lifting the table off his knees and standing up. Mrs. Harner paused and looked about to scold him, but looked back down and continued her reading. “Show me where he is.” Elaine walked over to the ghost and stood close enough to touch him. She wanted to, but she was afraid. She imagined him turning and roaring at her, or, and even worse, disappearing permanently.

“He’s right next to me. Don’t stand in him.” Her father stepped aside to make room for the ghost. They all three stood facing the wall. Mrs. Harner had stopped reading and she and the class watched them in shocked silence. The bulletin board was a multi-colored cardboard version of Jacob wrestling the angel. Jacob was midnight blue and the angel was canary yellow with chartreuse wings. “Do you think he likes this bulletin board, Dad?” Elaine asked softly.

“Maybe. But do you see this seam?” he asked running his finger along a line where brick met cinderblock. The wall was whitewashed, so she had never noticed it sitting down. “I think this was a window.”

“That’s it. He’s looking out a window. Doesn’t he know it’s bricked over?”

Her father shrugged. “He probably sees things the way they used to be.”

“Do you see him, Dad?”

“No,” he said, “but I like this bulletin board. That angel’s really bright.”

“He’s not brown,” Elaine said.

“Oh, I know. He’s yellow with green wings. I can see those colors.” Her father crossed his arms across his chest and looked over Elaine to where the ghost stood as if he were sizing him up. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I wish I could see him.”

Elaine shook her head. “He’s just like red and pink; you don’t see them either. That’s okay. I mean, you can only see what you can see. I’m just glad you tried.” She looked at the ghost, who blinked at regular intervals but showed no awareness of Elaine and her father, whom she saw watching her through the ghost. He seemed to be waiting like a soldier at attention for her to tell him, “at ease.” She recognized this, and for a moment longer they stood, side by side with the ghost between them.