What Phil Told Me

Phil probably wasn't sober as I could smell liquor in the air. He was a Caucasian man with a wart on the apex of his right ear and short brown hair somewhat thinned on top, though that's only apparent when he takes off his baseball cap. His shirt collar was a little frayed but his clothes were clean, and his reading glasses hung from a cord.

He talked about baseball, but it seemed to me he was really talking about life. It was important, he said, to play to win. You had to play your very best to win. And if you didn't win, at least you knew in your heart that you had tried. His voice nearly broke when he said this.

He hates the righteous and the ministers. He hates the people with attitudes and would bury them all if he could. He hates them all because they don't know anything. But Phil knows he is going to hell. He's 57 now and isn't afraid of anyone, and he really doesn't believe there's a place like the brimstone and fire hell, but if there was a place like that he knows he'd go there when he died. He knows because he killed a boy.

It was war and the boy moved at the wrong time. The Viet Cong had already left the village, but Phil didn't know that and neither did his squad. And they were all easily spooked. The boy in the bush moved and Phil turned and shot him in the forehead. Phil hadn't known he was a boy. The sergeant told Phil he couldn't have known, and if he hadn't shot he could have been killed himself. But it wasn't like that. The fact was it was only a boy and he had shot him in the forehead. Phil was only 19 at the time, and he held the boy's body and he knew right then that he was going to hell. Two or three times while he was telling me this he recreated the motion of drawing and firing a pistol with his right hand. Tears ran down his cheeks when he told me this. He almost sobbed when he lamented this boy; this boy would never grow up, have a girlfriend, get married, or have children of his own. He'd never go to college. It seemed unlikely to me that a Vietnamese boy growing up in a village during that time would have much chance of going to college anyway, but that wasn't the point.

When he had started talking to me he was sitting on the bench and I was standing about fifteen feet away, but the noise of passing trains made him difficult to hear so I moved closer. He wanted me to sit but I refused; I sit nearly all day. So he stood. This truly tested my self-discipline because my personal space extends in a radius of about three feet around me, but he very plainly wanted to stand closer than that. So I centered myself and we compromised at two feet.

And he told me of his job as a writer for a local newspaper. He told me of a number of things. He talked about his girlfriend and he remarked how odd it was that I didn't look away from him. I had my reasons for that. First of all, I was listening to him. Secondly, he was in my space.

In the course of meandering from topic to topic he told me that he really didn't have a girlfriend, that the woman he earlier referred to was just a good friend and not the same thing. And he touched my shoulder. He said if he were twenty years younger he would snatch me and take me away to Mexico. I found myself wondering if I should tell him that I've been ordained.

My train arrived and I left Phil at the station. And as I headed south it occurred to me that he had, in the course of talking about nearly everything else, told me that he craved to connect with somebody and be close to that person. And that he had also told me that he was in hell.