Hearts In Atlantis (70 page)

“What's the thumb?” Dieffenbaker asked. “Come on, Sully, you're killing me here.”

Sully looked at his folded thumb. Looked at Dieffenbaker, who now wore bifocals and carried a potbelly (what Vietnam vets usually called “the house that Bud built”) but who still might have that skinny young man with the wax-candle complexion somewhere inside of him. Then he looked back at his thumb and popped it out like a guy trying to hitch a ride.

“Vietnam vets carry Zippos,” he said. “At least until they stop smoking.”

“Or until they get cancer,” Dieffenbaker said. “At which point their wives no doubt pry em out of their weakening palsied hands.”

“Except for all the ones who're divorced,” Sully said, and they both laughed. It had been good outside the funeral parlor. Well, maybe not
good
, exactly, but better than inside. The organ music in there was bad, the sticky smell of the flowers was worse. The smell of the flowers made Sully think of the Mekong Delta. “In country,” people said now, but he didn't remember ever having heard that particular phrase back then.

“So you didn't entirely lose your balls after all,” Dieffenbaker said.

“Nope, never quite made it into Jake Barnes country.”

“Who?”

“Doesn't matter.” Sully wasn't much of a book-reader, never had been (his friend Bobby had been the book-reader), but the rehab librarian had given him
The Sun Also Rises
and Sully had read it avidly, not once but three times. Back then it had seemed very important—as important as that book
Lord of the Flies
had been to Bobby when they were kids. Now Jake Barnes seemed remote, a tin man with fake problems. Just one more made-up thing.

“No?”

“No. I can have a woman if I really want to have one—not kids, but I can have a woman. There's a fair amount of preparation involved, though, and mostly it seems like too much trouble.”

Dieffenbaker said nothing for several moments. He sat looking at his hands. When he looked up, Sully
thought he'd say something about how he had to get moving, a quick goodbye to the widow and then back to the wars (Sully thought that in the new lieutenant's case the wars these days involved selling computers with something magical called Pentium inside them), but Dieffenbaker didn't say that. He asked, “And what about the old lady? Do you still see her, or is she gone?”

Sully had felt dread—unformed but vast—stir at the back of his mind. “What old lady?” He couldn't remember telling Dieffenbaker, couldn't remember telling
anybody
, but of course he must have. Shit, he could have told Dieffenbaker anything at those reunion picnics; they were nothing but liquor-smelling black holes in his memory, every one of them.

“Old
mamasan
,” Dieffenbaker said, and brought out his cigarettes again. “The one Malenfant killed. You said you used to see her. ‘Sometimes she wears different clothes, but it's always her,' you said. Do you still see her?”

“Can I have one of those?” Sully asked. “I never had a Dunhill.”

•   •   •

On WKND Donna Summer was singing about a bad girl, bad girl, you're such a naughty bad girl, beep-beep. Sully turned to old
mamasan
, who was in her orange top and her green pants again, and said: “Malenfant was never obviously crazy. No crazier than anyone else, anyway . . . except maybe about Hearts. He was always looking for three guys to play Hearts with him, and that isn't really crazy, would you say? No crazier than Pags with his harmonicas and a lot less than the guys who spent their nights snorting heroin. Also, Ronnie helped yank those guys out of the choppers. There must've been
a dozen gooks in the bush, maybe two dozen, all of them shooting away like mad, they wasted Lieutenant Packer and Malenfant must have seen it happen, he was right there, but he never hesitated.” Nor had Fowler or Hack or Slocum or Peasley or Sully himself. Even after Packer went down they had kept going. They were brave kids. And if their bravery had been wasted in a war made by pigheaded old men, did that mean the bravery was of no account? For that matter, was Carol Gerber's cause wrong because a bomb had gone off at the wrong time? Shit, lots of bombs had gone off at the wrong time in Vietnam. What was Ronnie Malenfant, when you got right down to it, but a bomb that had gone off at the wrong time?

Old
mamasan
went on looking at him, his ancient white-haired date sitting there in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap—yellow hands folded where the orange smock met the green polyester pants.

“They'd been shooting at us for almost two weeks,” Sully said. “Ever since we left the A Shau Valley. We won at Tam Boi and when you win you're supposed to roll, at least that's what I always thought, but what we were doing was a retreat, not a roll. Shit, one step from a rout is what it was, and we sure didn't feel like winners for long. There was no support, we were just hung out to dry. Fuckin Vietnamization! What a joke that was!”

He fell silent for a moment or two, looking at her while she looked calmly back. Beyond them, the halted traffic glittered like a fever. Some impatient trucker hit his airhorn and Sully jumped like a man suddenly awakened from a doze.

“That's when I met Willie Shearman, you know—falling
back from the A Shau Valley. I knew he looked familiar and I was sure I'd met him someplace, but I couldn't think where. People change a hell of a lot between fourteen and twenty-four, you know. Then one afternoon he and a bunch of the other Bravo Company guys were sitting around and bullshitting, talking about girls, and Willie said that the first time he ever got French-kissed, it was at a St. Theresa of Avila Sodality dance. And I think, ‘Holy shit, those were the St. Gabe's girls.' I walked up to him and said, ‘You Steadfast guys might have been the kings of Asher Avenue, but we whipped your pansy asses every time you came down to Harwich High to play football.' Hey, you talk about a gotcha! Fuckin Willie jumped up so fast I thought he was gonna run away like the Gingerbread Man. It was like he'd seen a ghost, or something. Then he laughed and stuck out his hand and I saw he was still wearing his St. Gabe's high-school ring! And you know what it all goes to prove?”

Old
mamasan
didn't say anything, she never did, but Sully could see in her eyes that she
did
know what it all went to prove: people were funny, kids say the darndest things, winners never quit and quitters never win. Also God bless America.

“Anyway, that whole week they chased us, and it started to get obvious that they were bearing down . . . squeezing the sides . . . our casualties kept going up and you couldn't get any sleep because of the flares and the choppers and the howling they'd do at night, back there in the toolies. And then they'd come at you, see . . . twenty of them, three dozen of them . . . poke and pull back, poke and pull back, like that . . . and they had this thing they'd do  . . .”

Sully licked his lips, aware that his mouth had gone dry. Now he wished he hadn't gone to Pags's funeral. Pags had been a good guy, but not good enough to justify the return of such memories.

“They'd set up four or five mortars in the bush . . . on one of our flanks, you know . . . and beside each mortar they'd line up eight or nine guys, each one with a shell. The little men in the black pajamas, all lined up like kids at the drinking fountain back in grammar school. And when the order came, each guy would drop his shell into the mortar-tube and then run forward just as fast as he could. Running that way, they'd engage the enemy—us—at about the same time their shells came down. It always made me think of something the guy who lived upstairs from Bobby Garfield told us once when we were playing pass on Bobby's front lawn. It was about some baseball player the Dodgers used to have. Ted said this guy was so fuckin fast he could hit a fungo pop fly at home plate, then run out to shortstop and catch it himself. It was . . . sort of unnerving.”

Yes. The way he was sort of unnerved right now, sort of freaked out, like a kid who makes the mistake of telling himself ghost stories in the dark.

“The fire they poured into that clearing where the choppers went down was only more of the same, believe you me.” Except that wasn't exactly true. The Cong had let it all hang out that morning; turned the volume up to eleven and then pulled the knobs off, as Mims liked to say. The shooting from the bush around the burning choppers had been like a steady downpour instead of a shower.

There were cigarettes in the Caprice's glove compartment,
an old pack of Winstons Sully kept for emergencies, transferring from one car to the next whenever he switched rides. That one cigarette he'd bummed from Dieffenbaker had awakened the tiger and now he reached past old
mamasan
, opened the glove-box, pawed past all the paperwork, and found the pack. The cigarette would taste stale and hot in his throat, but that was okay. That was sort of what he wanted.

“Two weeks of shooting and squeezing,” he told her, pushing in the lighter. “Shake and bake and don't look for the fuckin ARVN, baby, because they always seemed to have better things to do. Bitches, barbecues, and bowling tournaments, Malenfant used to say. We kept taking casualties, the air cover was never there when it was supposed to be, no one was getting any sleep, and it seemed like the more other guys from the A Shau linked up with us the worse it got. I remember one of Willie's guys—Havers or Haber, something like that—got it right in the head. Got it in the fuckin head and then just lay there on the path with his eyes open, trying to talk. Blood pouring out of this hole right here  . . .” Sully tapped a finger against his skull just over his ear. “ . . . and we couldn't believe he was still alive, let alone trying to talk. Then the thing with the choppers . . . 
that
was like something out of a movie, all the smoke and shooting,
bup-bup-bup-bup
. That was the lead-in for us—you know, into your 'ville. We came up on it and boy . . . there was this one chair, like a kitchen chair with a red seat and steel legs pointing up at the sky, in the street. It just looked
crapass
, I'm sorry but it did, not worth living in, let alone dying for. Your guys, the ARVN,
they
didn't want to die for places like that, why would we? The
place stank, it smelled like shit, but they all did. That's how it seemed. I didn't care so much about the smell, anyway. Mostly I think it was the chair that got to me. That one chair said it all.”

Sully pulled out the lighter, started to apply the cherry-red coil to the tip of his cigarette, and then remembered he was in a demonstrator. He could smoke in a demo—hell, it was off his own lot—but if one of the salesmen smelled the smoke and concluded that the boss was doing what was a firing offense for anyone else, it wouldn't be good. You had to walk the walk as well as talk the talk . . . at least you did if you wanted to get a little respect.

“
Excusez-moi
,” he told the old
mamasan
. He got out of the car, which was still running, lit his cigarette, then bent in the window to slide the lighter back into its dashboard receptacle. The day was hot, and the four-lane sea of idling cars made it seem even hotter. Sully could sense the impatience all around him, but his was the only radio he could hear; everyone else was under glass, buttoned into their little air-conditioned cocoons, listening to a hundred different kinds of music, from Liz Phair to William Ackerman. He guessed that any vets caught in the jam who didn't have the Allman Brothers on CD or Big Brother and the Holding Company on tape were probably also listening to WKND, where the past had never died and the future never came. Toot-toot, beep-beep.

Sully hitch-stepped to the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe, shading his eyes against the glare of sun on chrome and looking for the problem. He couldn't see it, of course.

Bitches, barbecues, and bowling tournaments
, he thought,
and the thought came in Malenfant's squealing, drilling voice. That nightmare voice under the blue and out of the green.
Come on, boys, who's got The Douche? I'm down to ninety and a wakeup, time's short, let's get this fuckin show on the fuckin road!

He took a deep drag on the Winston, then coughed out stale hot smoke. Black dots began a sudden dance in the afternoon brightness, and he looked down at the cigarette between his fingers with an expression of nearly comic horror. What was he doing, starting up with this shit again? Was he crazy? Well yes, of
course
he was crazy, anyone who saw dead old ladies sitting beside them in their cars
had
to be crazy, but that didn't mean he had to start up with this shit again. Cigarettes were Agent Orange that you paid for. Sully threw the Winston away. It felt like the right decision, but it didn't slow the accelerating beat of his heart or his sense—so well remembered from the patrols he'd been on—that the inside of his mouth was drying out and pulling together, puckering and crinkling like burned skin. Some people were afraid of crowds—agoraphobia, it was called, fear of the marketplace—but the only time Sully ever had that sense of
too much
and
too many
was at times like this. He was okay in elevators and crowded lobbies at intermission and on rush-hour train platforms, but when traffic clogged to a stop all around him, he got dinky-dau. There was, after all, nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

A few other folks were emerging from their air-conditioned lifepods. A woman in a severe brown business suit standing by a severe brown BMW, a gold bracelet and silver earrings summarizing the summer sunlight, all but tapping one cordovan high
heel with impatience. She caught Sully's eye, rolled her own heavenward as if to say
Isn't this typical
, and glanced at her wristwatch (also gold, also gleaming). A man astride a green Yamaha crotchrocket killed his bike's raving engine, put the bike on its kickstand, removed his helmet, and placed it on the oilstained pavement next to one footpedal. He was wearing black bike-shorts and a sleeveless shirt with
PROPERTY OF THE NEW YORK KNICKS
printed on the front. Sully estimated this gentleman would lose approximately seventy per cent of his skin if he happened to dump the crotchrocket at a speed greater than five miles an hour while wearing such an outfit.