The kid in the backward cap is standing over him, phone out, FILMING. “Yo, check out Captain America over here,” he says, and his friends in the back seats lose it.
The man being filmed has one arm. His left sleeve is pinned at the elbow. He’s staring straight ahead, jaw tight, holding a grocery bag between his knees.
I’ve been riding the 41 route three times a week for two years, ever since my truck died and the VA moved my appointments across town. My name’s Dennis. Fifty years old, bad back, two tours in Fallujah. I know what a combat injury looks like.
The man with the pinned sleeve – I’d seen him before. Maybe four or five times on this same bus. Never spoke. He always sat in the third row, always alone, always quiet. Mid-forties. Wedding ring. Work boots.
That Tuesday, the kid and his two friends got on at Greenfield.
They were loud from the second they stepped on. Shoving each other, talking over everybody. The driver didn’t say anything. Nobody ever does.
Then the kid saw the pinned sleeve.
“Bro, what happened to your arm?” He said it loud enough for the whole bus. The man didn’t answer.
“Hello? I’m talking to you.” The kid leaned in closer. “You a robot or something?”
His friends started laughing. One of them said something about a pirate. The kid pulled out his phone.
That’s when he started filming.
“Yo, check out Captain America.” He was grinning. Panning the camera up and down.
The man with the pinned sleeve still didn’t move. His knuckles were white around the grocery bag.
My chest was pounding. I was three rows back. I stood up.
“Put the phone away,” I said.
The kid turned. “Mind your business, grandpa.”
I pulled my VA card out of my wallet and held it up. Then I pulled out my phone and dialed. Not 911. I called Terri Meadows at Channel 7. She’d done a story on me last Veterans Day. She picked up on the second ring.
“Terri, I’m on the 41 bus, westbound on Cermak. A kid is filming a disabled veteran and mocking him. I’M FILMING BACK.” I held my phone up so the kid could see it.
His grin disappeared.
“Delete it,” I said. “Now.”
He looked at his friends. They weren’t laughing anymore.
The bus stopped at Pulaski. The kid and his friends got off fast, heads down. The doors closed.
I sat down next to the man. He was still staring forward. Up close, I saw the tattoo on his right forearm. Third Battalion, Fifth Marines.
He looked at me. His eyes were wet.
“Ramadi?” I said.
He nodded. “2006.”
I put my hand out. He took it.
Then his phone buzzed. He glanced down at it, and his face changed completely. He looked at me like he was seeing a ghost.
“What’s your last name?” he said.
“Wojcik.”
His hand started shaking. “Your brother,” he said. “Was his name Kevin?”
My whole body went cold.
Kevin died in Ramadi in 2006. They never told me who was with him.
The man reached into his grocery bag and pulled out a folded American flag. “I’ve been carrying this on every bus for two years,” he said, “looking for you.”
What Two Years on the 41 Does to a Person
I need to back up. Because the flag didn’t make sense to me yet, and I was standing there in the aisle of a city bus with my hand still out like an idiot, trying to remember how to breathe.
His name was Ray Cobb. That’s what he told me next. Ray Cobb, formerly Corporal, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines. He’d been living in Bridgeport since 2009, working maintenance at a school district facility on Loomis. Married. Two daughters, eleven and eight. He took the 41 because his wife had the car on Tuesdays.
He’d lost the arm in August of 2006. An IED on Route Michigan, which is what they called the road that ran through the Ramadi industrial district. The same stretch where Kevin’s convoy got hit six weeks later.
Ray knew Kevin. Not well, not the way you know a guy from your own squad. But well enough. They’d shared a smoke outside the firm base one evening in July. Kevin had shown him a photo of our mother’s garden. Tomatoes, Ray said. He remembered because Kevin wouldn’t shut up about the tomatoes.
That sounds like Kevin.
I sat there on the bus and I didn’t say anything for a while. Outside, Cermak rolled past. A laundromat, a currency exchange, a taqueria with a hand-painted sign. The bus lurched at every stop and the grocery bag was still between Ray’s knees and I kept looking at the flag in his hand, folded into that tight triangle, the way they do it at funerals.
“Where’d you get that?” I finally said.
He looked at it. Then at me. “The chaplain gave it to me before I got medevaced out. Said to find the family.” He paused. “Said Kevin asked him to.”
What Kevin Asked For
My brother Kevin was twenty-four when he died. I was thirty-two. I was already out by then, working a warehouse job in Cicero, trying to pretend the war was something that had happened to a different version of me.
They sent two officers to my mother’s door. She called me from the front steps, couldn’t get the words out, just said Dennis come over, come over right now. I drove twenty minutes in six. I remember the officers’ faces but not their names. I remember my mother’s hands on the screen door handle, knuckles white, same as Ray’s on the grocery bag. Funny how the body keeps score.
They gave us a flag at the funeral. Standard. Kevin’s CO said some words. There was a reception at the VFW hall on Archer Avenue and my uncle drank too much and cried in the parking lot and I stood next to him because I didn’t know what else to do.
Nobody told us about another flag.
Nobody told us Kevin had asked for anything.
For seventeen years I thought the last thing my brother did was die. Turns out the last thing he did was try to make sure his family got a piece of him back. He’d asked the chaplain. The chaplain had given the flag to the nearest guy getting medevaced stateside, which was Ray, which was a twenty-six-year-old kid from Bridgeport with one arm and a long way home.
Ray had kept it. Through the hospital in Germany. Through Walter Reed. Through two years of physical therapy and the surgery that didn’t work and the surgery that did. Through meeting his wife, Karen. Through the birth of their first daughter. He’d kept it in a shoebox under the bed until Karen found it one night and he finally told her what it was, and she told him he had to find the family, and he said I know, I know, I’ve been trying.
He didn’t know our last name. Kevin had just said Dennis, my brother Dennis, he’s in Chicago. He’s in Chicago and he needs to know I was thinking about him.
Ray had been looking for a Dennis in Chicago for two years.
The Part Nobody Believes
I know how this sounds. I know.
But here’s the thing about this city. It’s enormous and it’s small at the same time. You can ride the same bus route for a year and never talk to the guy two rows up, but you’re still in the same orbit, circling the same stops, buying groceries from the same stores. Ray had moved to Bridgeport in 2009. I’d been in Bridgeport since 2011. We’d probably been within six blocks of each other a hundred times.
He’d seen the 41 route listed in a veterans’ resource pamphlet. Something about VA appointments across town. He’d thought, long shot, but what if. He’d started riding it on Tuesdays. Just Tuesdays, because Karen had the car.
Four or five times I’d seen him and never said a word. Just two guys on a bus, doing what you do on a bus, which is look out the window and wait for your stop.
It took a kid in a backward cap being cruel to make us look at each other.
I’ve thought about that a lot since.
What Happened After the Doors Closed
Terri Meadows called back about four minutes after I’d hung up with her. I’d forgotten I’d even called.
I stepped to the back of the bus to take it. Told her the situation had resolved, the kids were gone, no story. She asked if I was okay. I said yeah, I’m fine, I’ll explain later. I never did explain later.
When I came back up the aisle, Ray had the flag on his knee. He was smoothing one of the corners with his thumb, the way you’d smooth a wrinkle out of a tablecloth. Careful. Deliberate.
I sat down.
He held it out.
I didn’t take it right away. I’m not proud of that. My hands were doing something and I didn’t want him to see it. I looked out the window for a second. A woman walking a dog. A kid on a bike. The ordinary Tuesday afternoon world, completely indifferent.
Then I took it.
It was lighter than I expected. They always are.
Ray said, “He talked about your mother’s garden. He said she grew the best tomatoes in Chicago and that you always ate them before they were ripe and it drove her crazy.”
I laughed. I don’t know what sound it came out as.
“That’s true,” I said. “That’s completely true.”
We rode three more stops together without talking. My stop came first. I stood up. Ray looked up at me.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” he said.
I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t stupid, so I just put my hand on his shoulder for a second. Then I got off the bus.
I stood on the corner of Cermak and Halsted and watched the 41 pull away.
The Flag Is on My Mantle Now
My mother came over that weekend. Saturday morning, early, because she’s seventy-one and keeps farmer’s hours even though she’s never farmed anything in her life.
I’d put the flag on the mantle between a photo of Kevin at boot camp and a ceramic thing she’d made him in a class she took after he died. She stood in front of it for a long time. I made coffee. I gave her the whole story, start to finish, the bus and the kid and Ray and the tomatoes.
She didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she said, “He always did eat them too early.”
She sat down at my kitchen table and put her hands flat on the surface, the way she does when she’s steadying herself. I put a mug in front of her.
“Did you get his number?” she said. “This Ray.”
I had. We’d exchanged numbers on the platform at Halsted, me with my phone out and Ray reading the digits off his screen with his one hand, patient, steady.
“I want to meet him,” she said. “I want to thank him.”
That happened the following Saturday. Ray brought Karen and both girls. My mother made pasta. The older girl, Deb, ate three helpings and asked if she could have the recipe. My mother looked like she’d been handed something she’d been waiting for.
At some point in the afternoon I looked across the table and Ray was showing my mother the tattoo on his forearm, tracing the letters with his finger. Third Battalion, Fifth Marines. She was nodding slowly, touching the edge of it with two fingers, like she was reading Braille.
I went to get more bread from the kitchen.
I stood at the counter for a minute.
Outside, the tomato plants on the back porch were coming in. I’d planted them in May, first time in years. Don’t know why. Just felt like the thing to do.
They weren’t ripe yet.
I ate one anyway.
—
If this one got you, pass it on. Someone out there needs to read it today.
For more stories of standing up for others, check out how My Manager Tried to Have a Veteran Removed. Then He Pulled Out a Piece of Paper. and what happened when The Principal Stopped My Daughter’s School Play to Announce She’d Been Replaced. You might also appreciate this sweet story about a little girl who asked, “My Niece Asked If My Skin Comes Off Too.”
