The hot Carolina sun was broken by a stand of yellow pine, dotting the cracked gray sidewalk. My father was sweating, nervous, fiddling with his tie and dusting off nonexistent lint from his blue slacks. A single drop of sweat curved around my own brow, tracing my face's lines and running down my face till it fell from my chin. I wiped my face with my sleeve and kept walking. Our shoes were quiet as we walked, and the air was broken only by the shrill calls of grasshoppers and unfamiliar birds.

Pale blue paint peeled from the house in front of us. On the front porch was an old swing with only one chain still attached. Golden yellow marigolds grew alongside the porch. We walked up the steps towards an ancient screendoor, rent with holes and patches and patches in patches, and I noticed the flag. It was an American flag, still on its pole, but laying on the floor of the porch, behind the fallen porch swing. The flag was faded and moth-ridden, its colors no longer the red, white and blue, only different shades of brown and grey. A small wolf spider was busy at its work on the lump of cloth, building his lobster traps of cobweb.

My father looked at me, then looked into through the old screendoor. Reaching up with his left hand, he rang the door bell, or rather he tried to, as it merely buzzed a bit behind the molding and said no more. "Hmp," Dad said as he glanced back at me in a vain effort to look amused, and he knocked on the fragile frame of that old screendoor.

Perhaps before we go any further I should tell you how the story really begins. It goes a little like this: when my father was 18 years old he graduated from high school in his hometown of West Chesterfield, Rhode Island. Three weeks later he kissed his mother goodbye and threw his lot in with the United States Marine Corps. He was trained and retrained, made into a vicious machine of war, bent and molded and prodded into abandoning his entire moral framework save for one moral, one principle, that of loyalty. Loyalty to God, the Corps, and the United States of America. It was during this process that he met Elwin Malley of New Edinburgh, North Carolina. Malley was the first black man Dad had ever become friends with.

Take your pick, but God or luck or fate decided Dad and Malley should stick together awhile longer, and a few weeks after their graduation ceremony in northern Virginia the pair found themselves tramping through the jungles of southeast Asia. I don't know a lot about their time there; Dad doesn't like to talk about it and I don't particularly like what he has to say when I listen. But I do know that somewhere in the field Malley and my Dad swore to each other that if either one of them died in the field the other would go to their friend's house, give them a letter that he'd written saying goodbye, tell them how he'd died and what his final words were.

Four months later Malley bought the farm. He caught a sniper bullet in the throat and died in Dad's arms, gurgling and coughing through red-stained teeth until finally he just went limp and his eyes, wild with pain before, dulled. Mom told me that sometimes Dad still wakes up yelling "Malley, DAMMIT MALLEY!!! Hold on you sonufabitch!!! They've gotta' medivac comin' for you, comin' right now you sonufabitch!!! Don't you give up and leave me in this shithole with no cigarettes you bastard!!!"

On the car ride south Dad told me what Malley's last words were. "Malley," said Dad, "had just spit on the ground, smiled, and said, ‘Damn John, I cain't git the taste of that shit we had for dinner outta' my mouth. You got a cig?'" No background music, no heroics. Just a shot in the throat.

The episode had left Dad shaken, but determined that as soon as he got back stateside he was going straight to Carolina. In fact, from hearing him talk, I think that is half of what got him out of Vietnam alive. But then he got back to the States, back to his family. He watched hid mother cry for twenty minutes when he got home, holding him and saying over and over again, "OhGodmybabyishomethankyouGodthankyou." And he realized that if he went south, went to see Malley's family, it would be even harder. There would be lies, about what a decent fellow Malley was, about how he talked about home and his family all the time, about how he had never done any of the things people talked about on TV. There would be lies about Malley's last words, about how he handled death and on and on, until finally, once he'd made Malley truly dead to Malley's family, he would leave. That was what it was really about, wasn't it?

Making Malley dead.

My father once told me he never actually pulled a trigger when he was in Vietnam. He was drunk and stank of cheap beer, but I knew that it was true. Its not that he was a coward. He just couldn't kill a man, and later, looking back on it, I realize that is why he never went to Carolina, never fulfilled his promise. My father couldn't even kill a dead man.

When I was twenty, my father's little brother was on his way home from a business trip in Delaware. An eighteen-wheeler lost a tire as it passed him on the left. My uncle died in the ambulance fifteen minutes later. I went with Dad to the wreck site a couple of days later. The truck had been hauling cookie-cutters and they were scattered around the roadside in every direction. It was the most surreal thing I had ever seen. Thousands of silver cookie cutters gleaming in the afternoon sun, scattered among wildflowers and weeds in bloom, the wind blowing quietly, my father crying on his knees in the middle of it all with two Delaware state police on either side of him, looking helpless in their woolen uniforms. Cars and trucks screamed by behind me, and though I never turned around to watch them, I could hear them screaming by, crying like an entire clan of banshees.

My father came up to me a few weeks later and hugged me, held me close. Then he looked at me and asked, "do you know what his last thoughts were?" Then, through the tears and the sobbing he told me about Malley, about the promise, about the guilt that had been dormant for so long that now was welling up in him all over again, poisoning his guts.

A week later we lied to my mother and told her we were going pier fishing in North Carolina. Our stationwagon rolled down the interstate to a symphony of vrhrhhrrhrhhhhrhhhrhhh (the sound of the engine), clikclukclikcluk (the sound of under-inflated tires on aging pavement), and that same rushing scream I had heard that day in Delaware. As I sat in that passenger seat I again thought of the cookie-cutters, searching, perhaps, for some metaphor, some allusion to refer to later in life when I told this story, something hidden and meaningful in that aluminum menagerie. But there was no hidden meaning, no secret and powerful metaphor. Only pieces of metal thrown across fields of wildflowers that weren't really wild.

And so, after checking into some faceless, sterile hotel decorated with bad reproductions of worse paintings, my father and I got back into our stationwagon and drove it through the New Edinburgh, North Carolina, windows down, hot wind hitting us in our faces. On the outskirts of town we pulled off the road onto a narrow gravel shoulder. There was a fence around the yard, though the gate appeared to have been long removed. I brushed my pants smooth, and with a glance from my father stepped forward, glancing at the sumac bushes that ran along the gate.

This is where you came in.

Dad knocked on the door and tried not to look intimidated. A few moments later a lady wearing a bright red sundress came to the door, setting a weatherworn romance novel on a small table that sat beside the door. She slowed after setting it down, taking us in, running a chocolate brown hand through her silver hair as her eyes took us in. She seemed to be noting every detail, trying to figure us out before she knew our names, trying to decide if we were traveling salesmen in our ties and khakis, there to drink her tea and lie to her about a vacuum or an insurance plan or some religion named after a man from Tulsa.

"Can I help you gentlemen?"

I sat on the front porch sipping on very sweet iced tea, trying not to look into the living room window, trying desperately to avoid actually being a part of things. The glass was cold in my hand as I held it, praying for my father while occasionally and unintentionally thinking of the attractive young woman who had checked us into the hotel. Finishing my tea I stood up and walked into the yard, crouching by the walk. Along the edges I find old oyster shells, broken and faded. I turn one over in my hand and lean on the old fence, watching firemen across the street washing their truck and laughing over jokes I can't hear. Then I hear the screendoor open and close and I turn to see my father taking off his sportscoat and crying. He doesn't look at me, doesn't say anything, just gets into the car and starts it. Turn around and see the dark outline of the old woman in the screen. I walk over to the car and open my door. My father is cursing, complaining about how he forgot something, and told me to give this to Mrs. Malley as he pushes an old yellow envelope into my hands.

I walk back up the sidewalk quietly, listening to the sound of the insects and the unfamiliar birds, watching Mrs. Malley watch me. She opens the door as I get near, and I see that she too has been crying. But instead of being a broken doll (like my father), she stood straight and her eyes flashed with anger under her grey brows. "What?" she snapped at me. I held out the envelope and noticed for the first time that on it was scrawled a single word. The word was almost illegible, both from fading and incredibly bad penmanship, but there it was, and I realized what I was doing. I was making Malley dead. Not my father. Not Malley's family. Not even the VietCong.

"This is for you Ma'am." I said.

Slowly, carefully, she reached down and took the envelope, sliding it out of my hand, imprinting its texture into my mind, never breaking her gaze until it was completely into her hands. Then she glanced down, pulling a pair of hornrim glasses from her hair onto her eyes. She read the faded script, then reread it. When she looked up at me again, her face had softened just a bit, and she whispered, "Thank-you son. Take care now."

I walked back to the car and sat down next to my father. I never asked him what had happened inside that small house with the peeling blue paint and the white trim. Instead we drove to a local pancake house and talked about the Red Sox and school and work and about how bad the traffic was going to be Sunday, sipping overpriced orange juice and pretending that we didn't believe in ghosts.