Travis


Travis was the oldest of Ovada's and Roy's boys, had the
brown eyes of Roy and Ovada's always-laughing ways. Their
family took me in for two years when nobody else would --
who wanted a pimply 13-year-old, who speechlessly
stuttered, who was terrified of airplane sounds, who was
frightened of his Air Force brother dying in Korea, who
missed his sister, who fearfully wondered if his divorced
dad and mom would ever return from where they had gone
eight years before.

Happy Travis, five years old, immediately took me as his
god-sent older brother, made me feel important and loved,
brought me out of my terror of abandonment at his age. He
helped me speak clearly, asking me child questions about
life and animals and jesus and where people went when they
died. My paralyzed tongue loosened to tell him hopeful
tales, thawed my brain's horror of the unknown future.

We prowled sandy-streeted Odessa, sun-browned and barefoot,
the laughing fat kid and the gangly beanpole, hand-in-hand,
him pulling on me like a yapping puppy. Those were the
happiest days of my boyhood life, maybe his, we were in
brother love but didn't know it.

After two years, my mom came back to town and I lived with
her until going off to the army at seventeen. Travis and
I stayed in touch by mail, me writing of the the excitement
of being in the army, training with weapons, traveling to
strange Far Eastern countries. Just like the war games we
played in Odessa, so I wrote him, to ease his fears of war.

By time I got out of the army, Travis and his family had
moved to Oklahoma, following the oil business. We lost
touch when I went off to college, marriage, kids and such.

Then I heard that he had joined the army, went to Viet Nam
as an officer and was grotesquely wounded by a mine, lost
both legs and an arm, spent three years in rehab, retired
on full disability to Oklahoma City, got married and had
his own three kids. Though he didn't need to, he went to
work in a wheelchair, for Social Security.

Three days ago, my ever-laughing boyhood little brother, my
god-sent language-returning savior, now 48, went to work in
his specially equipped 4x4, parked it and wheeled himself
across the street into the ground floor of the federal
office building in Oklahoma City.

There was he sipping coffee with his good hand, feeling his
morning painkillers kick in, talking to his wife Lil on the
phone about a school event for their kids, she said,
probably gazing out the big glass window, maybe looking at
the truck pull up, the two guys get out and walk quickly
away. Lil says the sound was awful.

And my stuttering, the paralyzing terror of dying alone
unloved is back in full.

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April 22, 1995