Mercury Descending

I’d never met the old man who lived on our street. We - my wife, Kerry, our kids, Alex and Robbie, and I - had been in our house eight years, just six doors down the block from him, yet I didn’t know a thing about him except for his name, Kilroy. That changed one day, about six months ago, when my right knee decided that enough was enough.  

Not that I’d been avoiding him, certainly not because of his age, nothing like that. I don’t know half of the people on our street. That’s just how it is in our suburban, Maryland enclave, a bedroom community of busy, professional couples and even busier, overscheduled children. People are respectful, polite, and friendly, but we’re not the kind of neighborhood that puts on big block parties or welcomes newcomers with plates of warm, home-baked goodies.  

The residents in our development mind their own business. The homes, mostly newish, four-bedroom colonials, are set well apart on one-acre lots. The builder threw in an occasional ranch or split level to break up the cookie-cutter homogeneity, but the real standouts are our house and Kilroy’s. Ours is a contemporary style home, better suited to Brentwood, California than Annapolis, Maryland. His is a three-bedroom, moldering, Cape Cod, better suited to the last century. If not entirely ramshackle, it was well on its way, as out of place as its occupant, paired reminders of the ravages of time. 

Life on our street moves in the proverbial fast lane, except for Kilroy. He lumbers along in the right lane, not quite making the speed limit minimum. Weather permitting, we spot him shuffling down his driveway or puttering in his yard. But he’s easy to overlook, almost invisible, a faded old man in front of a run-down house, its faded paint, faded shingles, faded lawn, and faded shrubs camouflaging him well. I don’t mean to be harsh, but in this impeccably landscaped neighborhood, he’s not keeping up with the Joneses. Kerry, an accomplished writer, prone to pile on the adjectives and never at a loss for words, deigned only to describe his house as a “teardown.” I used to pass it a few times a day, either to and from work or out running, and occasionally I saw him, but it had never crossed my mind to stop.

It happened on the home stretch of my usual, five-mile run. I had made the turn from Flanders Road onto his end of our street, Longmeadow Road, when my right knee called it quits. The knee had been balky since my high school track-and-field days. Long jumping, that’s how I messed it up, and what forced me into early retirement from varsity sports. Arthroscopic surgery cleaned up a macerated meniscus, and I was able to resume running, but only for fitness and recreation and, these days, to stave off dad-bod inevitability.    

Longmeadow was aptly named for its sweeping, pastural lawns of immaculately manicured Kentucky Bluegrass buffering the homes from the road. As I cruised past the first house, a cranberry gambrel colonial, my leg locked up. The pain felt like someone shot me in the kneecap with a nail gun.  

Over the years, this knee and I had maintained a fragile cease-fire. As long as I kept to the terms of the agreement it did my bidding with minimal protest. When you’re younger, you can run through pain, confident it’s nothing serious, convinced it’ll go away. Once you’re in your forties you can never be sure, and you start to worry. This pain stopped me in my tracks. 

I limped along for a few yards, trying to walk it off, but it was no good, and I came to a stop in front of Kilroy’s house. Doubled over, massaging my knee, I found myself face to face with his rural-style mailbox, staring at it. What stared back brought to mind a long-neglected scarecrow still standing guard over an abandoned field gone fallow. Its letter box was rusted through and through, its red signal flag was bent and twisted, its door was dangling on loose hinges, and its phosphorescent address number was fading into oblivion. Its dire distress distracted me from my own, but just for the second or two it took my knee to reclaim my undivided attention. As I resumed kneading it, I heard a voice say, “Are you okay? Do you need some help?”  

The pain must have addled me for a moment because I thought Kilroy’s postal scarecrow was speaking to me. Luckily, this lunacy lapsed quickly enough for me to dismiss its more sinister implications. Once you’ve crossed the mid-life Rubicon, such worries lurk in the back of your mind, no getting around it. Every time you forget where you parked your car you think, uh oh, it’s starting.  

I jerked my head up in search of a human source of the voice and saw Kilroy. He was in front of his garage leaning against his car, anchored to it by his left forearm, which was planted on the hood. In his right hand he clutched a handkerchief that he was using to buff the fender. It looked like a mighty struggle and he was quite winded. I straightened up and gimped up his driveway.  

His car was one of those nineteen-sixties gas guzzlers. Not many of this vintage are still on the road, not well-preserved ones, at any rate, except in regions devoid of body-rotting road salt and other corrosive elements. In a more hospitable climate, this car would have enjoyed classic-car veneration. This one hadn’t been so lucky. It was battered, buffeted, and beaten up by East Coast weather, and looked right at home on Kilroy’s driveway but not among the Teslas, Beamers, and Benzes comprising our neighborhood’s motor pool.  

A four-door sedan, it had two distinctive features. The first was a preposterously long trunk that looked spacious enough for four large golf bags with room to spare for one or two folding pull carts and a cooler of beer. The trunk was all the more conspicuous because this model didn’t sport the flamboyant tailfins that were all the rage back then. Instead, this baby had the funkiest roofline I’d ever seen. The rear window slanted inward forming a reverse angle to what you find on every other hardtop Detroit ever cranked out. As I drew closer, I saw that Kilroy was trying to wipe a splotch of bird shit off the fender.  

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

“I didn’t notice you there,” I said.

“You looked like you had quite a break-down.”

“Just an old sports injury.” I introduced myself and offered my hand.  

“Joe Kilroy,” he said, pointing to the reason his hand wasn’t fit for shaking. “Effing bird dive-bombed my car. That’s what I get for parking it on the driveway. I try to keep it shipshape. Can’t do the same for myself, but at least I keep the car looking like new.”

Which car was he talking about? Not this one. It looked as worn out and tired as he did. He was clad in a pair of baggy blue jeans that were hitched up above his waist, held there by a belt that roped in a billowing flannel shirt. His hair, what was left of it, was white and wispy, more of it emanating from his ears than his liver-spotted scalp. His skin looked like tracing paper that someone had crumpled up by accident and then tried to uncrinkle. And then there was his smile, a warm, friendly smile that revealed impossibly perfect teeth. Those teeth triggered memories of my grandmother, of my parents dragging my brother and me to the nursing home to visit her, and of her smile, a smile that revealed impossibly rotten teeth.  

“This bird turd is stubborn stuff once it dries,” he said.

“Need a hand?”

“No, thanks. I’m stubborn, too. You live down the street in that modern-looking house?”

“That’s me.”

“You have two kids?”

“Right again.”

“Polite kids. I admire that. Parents these days don’t teach kids good manners.”

“My wife and I try.”  

“Good for you. In my day, child rearing was women’s work. My wife was a terrific mother.” He fell silent and seemed far off.

“What year is your car?” I asked.

“Nineteen sixty-three Mercury Monterey Breezeway.”

  “I’ve never seen a car with a rear window like that.”

  He gave me a spiel about it that would have done any car dealer proud. “When the Breezeway hit the market,” he began, “it was considered a marvel of automotive elegance and technology. They named the model for the rear window, which retracts down behind the back seat. The driver operates it with electronic controls in the cockpit, which was an innovation in its day.” He seemed especially proud of its four-hundred-five-horsepower, V-8 engine, which he described as muscular. “This car is a symbol of Twentieth Century American power and superiority,” he stated before lapsing into a fit of coughing and wheezing. Once he caught his breath he added, “As soon as I got back from Vietnam, I went out and bought it.”

“You were in Vietnam?” 

 “I was one of those military advisors Ike sent over.” 

I braced for an old-soldier war story.

“The real action was in Korea,” he went on. 

Here is comes, I thought. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for veterans, especially those who fought for our country. I never served, but I do my part as chief financial officer of a financially-teetering, community hospital, defending it for all the patients depending on it. Anyway, he spared me.

“After I’d done my duty keeping the dominoes from falling, they posted me stateside teaching at the Naval War College; not exactly out to pasture, and a lot better than riding a desk for this marine. As a professor I needed a proper car to drive to campus, so I went out and bought this baby. Cost me three-thousand, seventy-five dollars, a fortune in those days, even on a colonel’s salary. But it was worth every penny to drive it off the lot with just seven miles on the odometer. It has almost three-hundred thousand now. My wife loved this car.”  

I limped around the car to check it out.

“It’s still in mint condition,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

Mint condition? Hardly. The bronze paint had lost its luster, the body was dented and dinged and showed signs of rot, and the chrome bumpers were pitted. 

“Sure,” I said. “How’s it run?”  

“Still a cherry ride.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t ask.

“Not that I get to drive it any longer.”  

“How come?”

“They took away my license.” He clenched his jaw and renewed his assault on the bird shit.

“Who did?”  

He stopped buffing and fixed me with a look.

“The state, where you get your license, the car registration place, you know what I mean…the DMV! They rescinded it. No, that’s not right. Recalled it? Revoked it? That’s it, they revoked it! Can you believe it?”

I could, but I tried to look surprised.

“My sons had something to do with it.”

I didn’t want to hear this war story either, so I tried shifting the topic. “How many sons do you have?”

“Three. They’re good kids, and they mean well, but I wish they’d mind their own damn business.”

My knee throbbed.  

“They’ve been after me to quit driving for a while. They don’t think I’m safe behind the wheel. They think I’ve lost it.” He paused, then added, “They even want me to get rid of this car.”  

He returned his attention to the white stain on the fender. He alternated circular and back and forth motions, rubbing harder and harder, grunting through clenched teeth, succeeding only in smearing the smudge into a wider and wider film. He was again wheezing, and a big vein in his forehead bulged. I didn’t know whether to insist on helping him or to call nine-one-one, but I just stood there. I must have looked pretty concerned because he said, “Don’t worry, they’re not getting away with it.”

“They’re not?”

“I filed an objection. No, that’s not it. What do I mean? You know what I’m trying to say, like in court, when you fight the verdict.”

“An appeal?”  

“That’s it!”

He started to complain about the DMV bureaucracy, but my patience ran out and I interrupted, “Mr. Kilroy…”

“It’s Colonel Kilroy, retired, of course, but call me Joe.”

“Joe, I must get going. I was expected home a while ago. My wife will wonder where I am. Nice talking to you.” I started to make my way down his driveway, limping like a man with almost three-hundred thousand miles on his odometer.

“Put some ice on that knee,” he called after me.

“Did you get lost?” Kerry asked as I entered the laundry room. She was folding towels.  

“Stopped to talk to Mr. Kilroy.”

“Who?”

“In the Cape Cod down the street.”

“The old guy in the teardown?”

“Be nice.”

“You stopped to talk to him?”

My explanation garnered little sympathy. My knee was an old story, and Kerry had been after me to give up running for years. “You have only yourself to blame,” she said, as she pushed some socks my way to sort.  

Kerry is a successful novelist with a loyal following. Besides knowing how to turn a phrase, she’s a terrific wife and mother and has many other wonderful qualities and skills. Empathy is not one. Sometimes I think she cares more about the characters she conjures up in her head than the living and breathing ones cohabitating her corner of the world. She seemed more interested in the laundry than Mr. Kilroy. 

“I met him once,” she said, yawning.

“You never mentioned that.”

 “Sure I did. How could you forget?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” 

“It was last summer, when the bee stung Robbie on her cheek while she was riding her bike. She fell in front of his house and scraped her elbow and knee. He was outside pruning his shrubs and saw her rolling around on his lawn screaming that she was dying. He calmed her down and walked her and her bike home. The doorbell rang and I came to the door and saw him standing there holding her hand and she was crying and had blood running down her arm and leg and a big welt on her cheek. I took one look at him and you can imagine what went through my mind.”

“In this neighborhood? Him? At his age?”

“I was polite. I thanked him and hustled her in the house. After I cleaned and bandaged her scrapes and put some Benadryl on her cheek, I gave her chocolate milk. She told me how he had helped her, how nice he was. She convinced me that he hadn’t hurt her.”

“You asked her that?”

“You never know these days.”

I motioned for her to pass me more socks.

  “I intended to bake him a pie and stop by to thank him but I never got around to it. I see him futzing around with that old car and I wave but I never stop.”  

“It’s a nineteen sixty-three Mercury Monterey Breezeway.”

“It’s a what? No, never mind.”

Our son Alex wandered in. “How come he keeps that old-fashioned car?” he asked. “Why doesn’t he get a new one?”  

“Good question, Alex,” Kerry said. I had no answer, and Alex wandered off in search of his baseball mitt. He had a little league game in half an hour.  

“So, did he say why he keeps that car?” Kerry asked, resuming her folding, and prompting me to do likewise. “I’m sure he can’t drive it; he must be a million years old.”

“They revoked his license,” I said, “but he’s appealing, to get it back.” 

“Are you kidding? Is he senile?”

“A little forgetful, but he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s adamant about driving again.”

“Why? At his age? Where’s he got to go? For that matter, what’s he still doing living in this neighborhood of families with young children. Why doesn’t he move on? That house is too much for him. It’s a shack.”

“That’s a little extreme.”

“Every other house on this street is immaculate. No other house has peeling paint or split clapboards. No other lawn has weeds. And his driveway is all cracked. He belongs in an old-folks home.”

“Have some sympathy. He seems decent enough, and he’s a war veteran.”  

“The Old Soldiers’ Home, then.”   

“I’m going to get some ice for my knee,” I said.

“You said you’d drive Robbie to her dance class and drop off Alex for his game,” Kerry reminded me. “You have to leave in fifteen minutes, and you need a shower. You’d better get a move on.”

After a few visits to the local sports medicine clinic and several sessions of physical therapy, I resumed exercising, but now riding a bicycle, forced to quit running for good. 

Six months passed before Mr. Kilroy again became a topic of conversation in our family. I heard about what happened one evening when I came home from work.  

The hospital where I work has been on the brink of bankruptcy forever. Every day I go to work wondering whether I’ll succeed in keeping it afloat another day. My job is a no-net, highwire act, balancing accounts payable and accounts receivable. I spend my days frantically shaking the revenue tree, stalling vendors and creditors, and holding predatory hospital chains at bay. Kerry expects me to use my half-hour commute home to unwind, but ever-worsening traffic, lunatic drivers, and road rage have the opposite effect.  

So, I was in no mood for Kerry to pounce at me as I walked through the door. Kerry works in a studio we fitted out in a sunroom on the back of our house. Usually, I find her there, still immersed in writing. This time she was waiting for me as I entered. “You’ll never guess what happened to me today!” 

“You’re right. Just tell me,” I said.

“I rescued him! I think I saved his life.”

“Is Alex okay?” She now had my full attention. “Who are you talking about?”  

“Colonel Kilroy.”

It took me a moment. “Oh, the old guy down the street.”

“His name is Joe Kilroy.”

“Okay.”

“Did you know that he fought in the Korean War?”

“I think he mentioned it.”

“Did you know that he was in the Marines?”

“Don’t remember.”

“They gave him the Medal of Honor! That’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

Who was this woman? She looked like my wife but didn’t sound like her. “Let me change out of this suit and pour myself a drink, and then you can tell me all about Mr. Kilroy,” I said.

“Colonel Kilroy.”

Running worked great. Endorphins, endocannabinoids, whatever gives you the runner’s high, I didn’t get it from cycling. I tried yoga, tai-chi, and meditation. All disappointing. Not scotch. Scotch never disappoints. I’ve yet to find anything that does the job as well after work. I poured myself a double Dewars on the rocks, threw on shorts, tee-shirt, and flip-flops, and got ready for the Kerry data dump that was coming my way. After two sips of the eighty-proof amber elixir, I felt fortified.

We sat down on the sofa in our family room. Kerry was abuzz with high-voltage excitement. It gets warm in her writing studio, and she was wearing only a tee-shirt and a pair of old running shorts. The shorts were scanty, made of a stretchy, silky, clingy fabric with a side slit that left her shapely legs bare from the tip of her toes nearly all the way up to the magic garden. I reached over to caress her thigh, but she slapped my hand away. 

“Later,” she said. “Right now, you have to hear what happened.” 

I took another sip of scotch and settled back.

Kerry had been on her way home from the supermarket and had just made the turn off Flanders onto Longmeadow when she had to slam on the brakes and come to a screeching stop.  

“Colonel Kilroy was just standing there, in the middle of the road! I could have run him over. Good thing I had my eyes on the road, that I wasn’t texting, or something.”   

Kerry has a lead foot. “You might try keeping to the speed limit,” I said.

“I was running late for a Zoom meeting with my editor, and I had perishables to put away.”

  “There are kids on this street. Two of them are ours. The speed limit is twenty-five for a reason.”

She rolled her eyes. “Can I continue my story, please?”

I sighed and gestured for her to go on.

 “I stopped not ten feet from him. I rolled down my window and yelled at him to get out of the road, but he didn’t respond. He was looking around, like he was lost. When he finally noticed me he shouted at me to get back in formation.”  

“What did you do?”

“I parked the car, got out, and walked up to him and asked if he was okay. He looked like a trapped animal. He grabbed my arm, surprisingly hard, and yelled at me to get back in my tank! ‘What tank, what tank? What are you talking about?’ I yelled back. ‘I’m Kerry, your neighbor from down the street.’” 

“I didn’t think he was that out of it,” I said. “So, what happened?”

“I’m getting to it. Give me a chance!”

Kerry must have been pretty freaked out because her story got harder to follow, and she writes stories for a living.    

“He was ranting about us being sitting ducks, exposed, out in the open. He mumbled something about ‘crossing ground’ that made no sense. His eyes were darting all around. Then he snapped out of it, sort of, like when you wake up flustered from a nightmare. He asked me what he was doing standing there in the middle of the road, as if I had the answer. I managed to coax him out of the road and back inside his house.

“You went inside his house with him? Alone?”

“Why not?”

“He sounds pretty senile. Who knows what he might do?” I didn’t remind her that she’d questioned our daughter’s safety in this man’s presence. “What’s his house like inside?”

“Dusty, dated, and cluttered.”  

“Does it have the old-man smell?”

 She gave me the give-me-a-break stare, so I kept quiet.

“It took forever to get him inside. He shuffles his feet, and his hands were shaking. I thought he might need medical attention, but he didn’t want me to call an ambulance or drive him to the emergency room. I didn’t think I could just leave him like that, so I made him a cup of tea and sat down with him on his living room sofa while he drank it. After a few minutes he perked up and apologized for frightening me.  

“The ice cream was melting in the trunk of the car, and my purse was out in the open on the front seat, so I was eager to get going, but he started rocking and muttering ‘jarhead idiot,’ and then he punched himself on the side of the head. I called, ‘Mr. Kilroy, Mr. Kilroy,’ but he didn’t stop, so I tapped him on the arm. He looked up, startled, but then, as if we we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party, he said, ‘It’s Colonel Kilroy, but call me Joe.’ I asked him if he’s prone to spells, but he looked puzzled, so I described what happened out on the street. 

“He apologized again, and I asked him if anything like this had happened before. He hesitated but then admitted that he gets mixed up and thinks he’s back in Korea, during the war. It sounded to me like PTSD, but he shook his head and said that he never had shell shock or battle fatigue, what they called it back then, and it’s been seventy years. No, his troubles began just recently, as his memory started going down the crapper. That’s what he said, ‘down the crapper.’” Kerry stopped, repeated the phrase, and jotted it on a magazine cover.  

I leaned forward, put down my drink, and waited, my curiosity aroused, but more about Kerry than Kilroy. She finished her note and continued.

“Out on the street, he believed that he was somewhere called Chosin Reservoir, about to come under attack. I asked him if that’s why he was talking about tanks. He looked pained and said that he didn’t like talking about the war, but then did. 

“Twenty-one, that’s how old he was when he graduated from the academy, a lieutenant in the Marines. They sent him to Korea, and after six months they promoted him to captain and put him in charge of a tank brigade. He asked me what I know about tanks. Me? Tanks?  

“It was so strange. One minute I’m with this feeble old guy who’s losing his marbles, the next with George C. Scott, in Patton, telling me what awesome weapons Pershing M26 tanks were. Did you know that they had five-hundred-horsepower engines, four-inch armor plating, and ninety-millimeter guns?”  

“You remember all that?” 

“Part of the job.”

I’m used to Kerry stopping to jot down snippets of conversations she overhears for future use in her writing, but this stuff? “Tank specs? Really?”

“There was something strangely stirring about it,” she said. “I had him chalked up as an Alzheimer’s case. But, then he started rattling off those facts about Pershing tanks. There was something about it, poignant and heroic. Even how he described the odor inside, that of diesel exhaust, machine oil, burnt gunpowder, moldy leather, and cigarette smoke, it was so evocative. Without thinking I said it sounded gross, and he nodded, but when he said that inside his tank, behind its armor plating, with that stink in his nostrils and all that firepower at his command, he felt invincible, something about how he said it made me want to put my arm around him.”  

I picked up my scotch. Kerry went on. 

“As quickly as the lights had come back on they flickered back out. General Patton left leaving behind frail, sullen Colonel Kilroy. I asked him if there was anyone I could call. He said no, but there were family photos on his mantel, and I got up to take a look. He’s been a widower for a long time, but he has three sons, Jack, Bert, and Ray. They live nearby, and he sees them regularly, but he doesn’t want them to know about these spells. Why not? I asked. Instead of answering, he asked me whether we have kids. I reminded him about Alex and Robbie and how kind he’d been when Robbie fell off her bike. He said that they were lucky to have a mother like me.”

 “I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

She smiled and blew me a kiss before going on.

“At the other end of the mantel, off by itself, was a black-and-white wedding picture. He told me to bring it over. Stupid me nearly asked who the bride and groom were. His wife, Peggy, was gorgeous, and he looked dashing in his dress uniform, so tall, so erect, so striking. I handed him the picture and sat back down on the sofa next to him. 

“They married just before he shipped out to Korea. After the war, he was promoted to colonel and posted at the Demilitarized Zone. He and Peggy wrote each other every day. Imagine that. Would I love to get my hands on those letters. Eventually, the colonel was transferred to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. Off and on they sent him to Vietnam as a military advisor. Peggy didn’t want their kids growing up on military bases, especially not in Seoul or Saigon. Her father was commandant of the Naval Academy, so they bought that house up the street. Whenever the colonel wasn’t overseas, he drove home on weekends. Then Peggy got ovarian cancer and died. She was only thirty. He never remarried.”

“There’s your next novel,” I said, but Kerry shot me the look she gives Alex when he tracks mud in the house. I let her go on. 

“As he spoke about his wife he had to hold their wedding picture with two hands because he was shaking so violently. When Peggy’s cancer was diagnosed, her father pulled a few strings and got the Colonel a teaching appointment here at the Naval Academy. To this day he regrets all the time he spent stationed away from home, time with Peggy he lost. He was choked up and there were tears running down his cheeks. I pretended not to notice.” 

Kerry stopped talking, and I saw that she was holding back tears. I asked her if she wanted a drink. She shook her head no. After a few moments she seemed ready to go on, but then she stared at me. 

“What?” I asked.

“I was just wondering.”

“What about?”

“Oh, nothing. Never mind,” she said, and then quickly went on. “After Peggy died, the Colonel raised the boys himself, but he has regrets about that, too.”

“Did he say why?” I asked.

“This is what he said: ‘I was a jarhead idiot for thinking military discipline was a sensible way to raise boys.’ Why does he keep referring to himself as a jarhead?”

“Some kind of marine slang, I think,” I said. 

“Jack’s the eldest and an attorney. He stops by once a week for dinner, which I thought was sweet, but the colonel thinks Jack’s just keeping an eye on him, making sure he’s paying his bills. They butt heads. Bert, the middle boy, is a nervous wreck. The colonel blames himself, thinks he was too hard on the boy. Bert’s a parcel delivery driver. He drops in whenever he’s in the neighborhood. The colonel resents that too. He said that Bert snoops around more than Jack and talks to him like he’s a senile old fool.” Kerry stopped to make a note of that phrase, too.  

“Ray’s the youngest,” Kerry resumed. “They get along the best. The colonel thinks he mellowed and went easier on Ray. Ray comes over on Sundays and they watch football and drink a beer together. 

“I said that he must have been a good father because his sons obviously care about him, but shrugged and said, ‘That’s the trouble, they care too much. Jack thinks he gets to poke his nose in my affairs because he’s a lawyer and the eldest. And Bert nags and nags. Stay off the cellar stairs, Dad. Remember to turn off the oven, Dad. Remember to take your pills, Dad. Nag, nag, nag. And he’s always after me to quit driving!’”

Good for Bert, I thought.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Kerry said, “so I asked him about Ray. Ray’s a physics professor at Georgetown. He must be a smart cookie, but he sounds like a real egghead dufus with his head in the clouds. Get this, Ray doesn’t nag the colonel to quit driving, like Bert or Jack. Instead, he brings him research papers to read.”

“On what?” I asked.

 “Driving safety studies full of crash statistics and accident rates for older drivers. He thinks he’s being subtle, but the colonel has his number.”   

“Ray sounds like a guy who knows his stuff,” I said. “You have to respect data-driven people.”

“Kerry looked like she was going to take issue with me but then said, “Did you know that older drivers are safer than teenage drivers?”

“That can’t be true.”

“The colonel found it buried in one of Ray’s articles. He had it out on the coffee table and showed it to me. He still has his moments.”

“What, exactly, did it say?” 

“Teenage drivers have a higher crash rate than elderly drivers. The Colonel is apoplectic about this. ‘The bastards let teenagers drive but yank my license?’ he said. ‘I have a perfect record, over seventy years without an accident or even a moving violation, not even a parking ticket. What more proof do they need? This is totally fubar!’” 

Kerry was getting shrill, herself, but I was too transfixed by images of Alex behind the wheel in a few years to tell her to cool her jets or to ask what “fubar” means.  

“Ray doesn’t press his dad to quit driving, not directly. During half-time of the Army-Navy game, he suggested that the Colonel consider selling the house and moving into assisted living. That way he could get rid of the car and save all the auto expense. I asked the colonel if he’d ever considered it. ‘I’ll never sell this house,’ he said. “It’s Peggy’s house. She’s here, in every room.’ And the car – he calls it his Merc – Peggy picked it out. He won’t part with it, either. When he was home, the whole family would pile in it and go for rides in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Those were happy times.

“I should have just minded my own business, but I couldn’t help myself. I tried convincing him that his sons mean well, that they have his safety in mind. Big mistake. I stepped in it, big time. He pounded the coffee table with his fist and yelled, ‘I’m tired of being lectured to about safety!’ I almost jumped off the sofa, but he put up his hand and smiled, and said in a softer voice, ‘Look at it like this: at the age of twenty-one I was sure I was going to be killed at Chosin Reservoir. It’s seventy years later and I’m still here. At my age, safety’s not my first concern.’”

Kerry asked me what I knew about Chosin Reservoir. I hadn’t a clue, or about what kind of rabbit hole she had fallen down. 

“They gave him the Medal of Honor for his actions at Chosin Reservoir,” Kerry said. “It was also on the mantel, in a silver frame under glass.” 

I was looking at my cell phone and hadn’t noticed that Kerry had stopped speaking when she snapped at me. “Are you listening to me? That’s so rude. Put down that phone!”

“I’m at the Marine Corp’s website. There’s a page on the Chosin Reservoir Battle.”  

“What does it say?”

“Major battle of the Korean Conflict. November 27 to December 13, 1950. One of the worst defeats in U.S military history. U.S. forces were vastly outnumbered and surrounded by the Chinese. Two-week bloodbath. The Americans were able to break out and retreat to the sea, escaping more massive casualties. The troops who fought there came to be known as the Chosin few.” 

“What else does it say?” Kerry said.

“Here’s The National Medal of Honor Museum website. It says that the Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest award for military valor in action. This site also has a page on the Chosin Reservoir Battle. Thirteen men were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions at Chosin Reservoir. It lists them. Holy Shit! Captain Joseph Kilroy, that’s him!”  

“What does it say about him?”

“In command of the tanks of the First Marine Provisional Brigade. Ordered to hold off the advancing Chinese Army to cover the American retreat. Maneuvered his tanks directly into a mountain pass to block the enemy's advance. They held off the Chinese long enough for thousands of American soldiers to escape certain slaughter.”

“OMG!” Kerry said. “I’m so glad that I kept addressing him as Colonel. I said something trite about it being an honor living down the street from a war hero. I hope I wasn’t patronizing.”

“I’m sure you were fine.”

“He poo-pooed the whole Medal-of-Honor thing. ‘Just following orders like everyone else,’ he said. I said that he was too modest, but he smirked, and then boy did he let it fly: ‘Big deal! You serve your country with valor and distinction. You put your life on the line. You nearly die. Many did. I came close more times than I care to recall. Somehow, I managed not to get my ass shot off. So, they pin a medal on you and say you’re a hero. So what? So your wife can die? So your boys can grow up without their mother? So they can take away your driver’s license? My driving was good enough for them when they needed me to drive those tanks. Thank you for your service. Here’s a medal, now give us back your license. Defending freedom, that’s what they said we were there for. Yeah? Whose?’”

I began massaging the nape of Kerry’s neck. “I knew he was pissed about losing his license,” I said, “but he didn’t seem that rabid to me.” 

She pointed to a knot in her shoulder for me to knead. “It gets worse. He said that he would gladly trade the Medal of Honor for his driver’s license. That was shocking enough until I heard what he said next. Get this, he said that he would I love to get his hands on a tank once more, just for an hour, so he could show them how good he can still drive. He would drive the tank to the DMV, crash through the front of the building and take up a position in the middle of the lobby, emerge from the hatch on top of the turret, while swiveling the cannon around three-sixty degrees, and demand to know whether anyone still wished to question his driving.”

“That’s bat-shit crazy,” I said. “You can’t make this stuff up.” 

“It sounded unhinged to me, too. As gently as I could, I asked him if he really would do that. He gave me an evil grin, which creeped me out even more, but then he chuckled and winked at me and said, ‘No, of course not. It’s a nice idea, though, isn’t it?’ I must have looked skeptical because he added, ‘Come on, Karen, where would I get a Pershing tank? It’s not like I could go down to the dealership and trade in my Merc for one.’ He laughed, and I was more confused than ever because he again was sharp, clever, and witty, except for calling me Karen. I reminded him that my name is Kerry, and he apologized, but he kept calling me Karen. After the third time, I stopped correcting him.  

“He explained that he has a condition, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, something with a long name that he can never remember. I felt awful and said I was sorry to hear it, but he made light of it. ‘So, my hands shake. So, I’m forgetful. At my age, so what? VA doctors, what do they know? Only reason I went there was to get Bert off my case.’ He started in again about Bert’s nagging, and I must have looked concerned because he said, ‘Sorry to go on like this, Karen. Don’t mind me.’”

I sat there swirling what was left of my scotch while I tried to make sense of Kerry. When it comes to our family, she’s the first and fiercest defender of the realm, but everyone else, they’re on their own. I didn’t know what to make of her concern about Kilroy. Sure, reading about his exploits at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir impressed me, but it didn’t overwrite the indelible image I had of him fighting the Battle of Bird Shit Fender. 

I was tired. It had been a long day and I’d drunk a double scotch on an empty stomach, so maybe I wasn’t as tactful as I could have been when I said, “He’s ninety-one, and senile, for God’s sake, Kerry. Don’t you think it’s for the best that they took away his license? Someone should take away his keys, too, before he drives that old beater during one of his whacko spells. Who knows what he might do? He might drive it through the front of our house thinking we’re the DMV.”

Kerry stopped me with a stare. 

“Kerry,” I said, “he’ll run over someone. Maybe one of the kids. Can’t you see that his sons are right? Weren’t you the one who said that he belongs in an old-folks home?”  

She grabbed the glass from my hand and downed the last sips of my scotch. I braced myself, but she sighed and said, “I want to invite him over to our home.”

I gave her a quizzical look.

“For dinner, with our family.” 

“Seriously?” I asked as I took back my empty glass. “When he’s here, are we going to have to call you Karen?” 

Instead of telling me to knock it off, Kerry said, “Good question.”

“Well, Karen,” I said, “maybe while you’re thinking about the menu you can ponder that.”

She sighed. “I wish I could do something for him.”

“Like what?” I said, not expecting an answer.

“We could take him for a ride in the Blueridge Mountains.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Maybe I could offer to take him grocery shopping once a week.”

“Kerry.”

“We could go in his Merc.” 

“Kerry!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll drive.”

I got up and went to make myself something for dinner.