Hearts In Atlantis (71 page)

“Bummer, man,” the crotchrocket guy said. “Must be an accident. Hope it's nothing radioactive.” And laughed to show he was joking.

Up ahead in the far left lane—what would be the fast lane when traffic was actually moving on this stretch of highway—a woman in tennis whites was standing beside a Toyota with a
NO NUKES
bumper sticker on the left side of the license plate and one reading
HOUSECAT: THE
OTHER
WHITE MEAT
on the right. Her skirt was very short, her thighs were very long and brown, and when she pushed her sunglasses up, propping them in her blond-streaked hair, Sully got a look at her eyes. They were wide and blue and somehow alarmed. It was a look that made you want to stroke her cheek (or perhaps give her a one-armed brother-hug) and tell her not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was a look Sully remembered well. It was the one that had turned him inside out. It was Carol Gerber up there, Carol Gerber in sneakers and a tennis dress. He hadn't seen her since one night
in late 1966 when he'd gone over to her house and they'd sat on the sofa (along with Carol's mother, who had smelled strongly of wine) watching TV. They had ended up arguing about the war and he had left.
I'll go back and see her again when I'm sure I can stay cool
, he remembered thinking as he drove away in his old Chevrolet (even back then he'd been a Chevrolet man). But he never had. By late '66 she was already up to her ass in antiwar shit—that much she'd learned during her semester in Maine, if nothing else—and just thinking about her was enough to make him furious. Fucking little empty-headed idiot was what she was, she'd swallowed all that communist antiwar propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Then, of course, she'd joined that nutty group, that MSP, and had high-sided it completely.

“Carol!” he called, starting toward her. He passed the snot-green crotchrocket, cut between the rear bumper of a van and a sedan, temporarily lost sight of her as he hurried along the side of a rumbling sixteen-wheeler, then saw her again. “Carol! Hey Carol!” Yet when she turned toward him he wondered what the hell was wrong with him, what had possessed him. If Carol was still alive she had to be pushing fifty now, just as he was. This woman looked maybe thirty-five.

Sully stopped, still a lane away. Cars and trucks rumbling everywhere. And an odd whickering sound in the air, which he at first thought was the wind, although the afternoon was hot and perfectly still.

“Carol? Carol Gerber?”

The whicker was louder, a sound like someone flicking his tongue repeatedly through his pursed lips,
a sound like a helicopter five klicks away. Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him. He dodged backward in an instinctive startle reflex, but he had spent his entire school career playing athletic sports of one kind or another, and even as he was pulling back his head he was reaching with his hand. He caught the lampshade quite deftly. On it was a paddleboat churning downriver against a lurid red sunset.
WE'RE DOING FINE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
was written above the boat in scrolly, old-fashioned letters. Below it, in the same scrolly caps:
HOW'S BAYOU?

Where the fuck did this come from?
Sully thought, and then the woman who looked like an all-grown-up version of Carol Gerber screamed. Her hands rose as if to adjust the sunglasses propped in her hair and then just hung beside her shoulders, shaking like the hands of a distraught symphony conductor. It was how old
mamasan
had looked as she came running out of her shitty fucked-up hooch and into the shitty fucked-up street of that shitty fucked-up little 'ville in Dong Ha Province. Blood spilled down over the shoulders of the tennis woman's white dress, first in spatters, then in a flood. It ran down her tanned upper arms and dripped from her elbows.

“Carol?” Sully asked stupidly. He was standing between a Dodge Ram pickup and a Mack semi, dressed in a dark blue suit, the one he wore to funerals, holding a lampshade souvenir of the Mississippi River (how's bayou) and looking at a woman who now had something sticking out of her head. As she staggered a step forward, blue eyes still wide, hands still shaking in the air, Sully realized it was a cordless
phone. He could tell by the stub of aerial, which jiggled with each step she took. A cordless phone had fallen out of the sky, had fallen God knew how many thousands of feet, and now it was in her head.

She took another step, struck the hood of a dark green Buick, and began to sink slowly behind it as her knees buckled. It was like watching a submarine go down, Sully thought, only instead of a periscope all that would be sticking up after she was out of sight would be the stubby antenna of that cordless phone.

“Carol?” he whispered, but it couldn't be her; no one he'd known as a kid, no one he'd ever slept with, had been destined to die from injuries inflicted by a falling telephone, surely.

People were starting to scream and yell and shout. Mostly the shouts seemed to be questions. Horns were honking. Engines were revving, just as if there were someplace to go. Beside Sully, the driver of the Mack sixteen-wheeler was goosing his power-plant in big, rhythmic snorts. A car alarm began to wibble-wobble. Someone howled in either pain or surprise.

A single trembling white hand clutched at the hood of the dark green Buick. There was a tennis bracelet on the wrist. Slowly the hand and the bracelet slid away from Sully. The fingers of the woman who had looked like Carol gripped at the edge of the hood for a moment, then disappeared. Something else fell, whistling, out of the sky.

“
Get down!
” Sully screamed. “
Ah fuck, get down!
”

The whistling rose to a shrill, earsplitting pitch, then stopped as the falling object struck the hood of the Buick, bashing it downward like a fist and popping it up from beneath the windshield. The thing
poking out of the Buick's engine compartment appeared to be a microwave oven.

From all around him there now came the sound of falling objects. It was like being caught in an earthquake that was somehow going on above the ground instead of in it. A harmless shower of magazines fell past him—
Seventeen
and
GQ
and
Rolling Stone
and
Stereo Review
. With their open fluttering pages they looked like shot birds. To his right an office chair dropped out of the blue, spinning on its base as it came. It struck the roof of a Ford station wagon. The wagon's windshield blew out in milky chunks. The chair rebounded into the air, tilted, and came to rest on the station wagon's hood. Beyond that a portable TV, a plastic clothes basket, what looked like a clutch of cameras with the straps all tangled together, and a rubber home plate fell on the slow lane and into the breakdown lane. The home plate was followed by what looked like a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. A theater-size popcorn popper shattered into glittering shards when it hit the road.

The guy in the Knicks shirt, the one with the snot-green crotchrocket, had seen enough. He started running up the narrow corridor between the traffic stalled in the third lane and the traffic stalled in the fast lane, twisting like a slalom skier to avoid the jutting side mirrors, holding one hand over his head like a man crossing the street during a spring shower. Sully, still clutching the lampshade, thought the guy would have done a lot better to have grabbed his helmet and put it back on, but of course when things started falling all around you you got forgetful and the first thing you were apt to forget was where your best interests lay.

Something else was coming down now, falling close and falling big—bigger than the microwave oven that had bashed in the Buick's hood, certainly. This time the sound wasn't a whistle, like a bomb or a mortar-shell, but the sound of a falling plane or helicopter or even a house. In Vietnam Sully had been around when all those things fell out of the sky (the house had been in pieces, granted), and yet this sound was different in one crucial way: it was also
musical
, like the world's biggest windchime.

It was a grand piano, white with gold chasing, the sort of piano on which you'd expect a long cool woman in a black dress to tinkle out “Night and Day”—in the traffic's boom, in the silence of my lonely room, toot-toot, beep-beep. A white grand piano falling out of the Connecticut sky, turning over and over, making a shadow like a jellyfish on the jammed-up cars, making windy music in its cables as air blew through its rolling chest, its keys rippling like the keys of a player piano, the hazy sun winking on the pedals.

It fell in lazy revolutions, and the fattening sound of its drop was like the sound of something vibrating endlessly in a tin tunnel. It fell toward Sully, its uneasy shadow now starting to focus and shrink, his upturned face its seeming target.

“
INCOMING!
” Sully screamed, and began to run. “
INNCOMMING!
”

The piano plummeted toward the turnpike, the white bench falling right behind it, and behind the bench came a comet's tail of sheet music, 45-rpm records with fat holes in the middle, small appliances, a flapping yellow coat that looked like a duster, a
Goodyear Wide Oval tire, a barbecue grill, a weathervane, a file-cabinet, and a teacup with
WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA
printed on the side.

•   •   •

“Can I have one of those?” Sully had asked Dieffenbaker outside the funeral parlor where Pags was lying in his silk-lined box. “I never had a Dunhill.”

“Whatever floats your boat.” Dieffenbaker sounded amused, as if he had never been shit-scared in his life.

Sully could still remember Dieffenbaker standing in the street by that overturned kitchen chair: how pale he had been, how his lips had trembled, how his clothes still smelled of smoke and spilled copter fuel. Dieffenbaker looking around from Malenfant and the old woman to the others who were starting to pour fire into the hooches to the howling kid Mims had shot; he could remember Deef looking at Lieutenant Shearman but there was no help there. No help from Sully himself, for that matter. He could also remember how Slocum was staring at Deef, Deef the lieutenant now that Packer was dead. And finally Deef had looked back at Slocum. Sly Slocum was no officer—not even one of those bigmouth bush generals who were always second-guessing everything—and never would be. Slocum was just your basic E-3 or E-4 who thought that a group who sounded like Rare Earth had to be black. Just a grunt, in other words, but one prepared to do what the rest of them weren't. Never losing hold of the new lieutenant's distraught eye, Slocum had turned his head back the other way just a little, toward Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Mims and the rest, self-appointed regulators whose names Sully no longer
remembered. Then Slocum was back to total eye-contact with Dieffenbaker again. There were six or eight men in all who had gone loco, trotting down the muddy street past the screaming bleeding kid and into that scurgy little 'ville, shouting as they went—football cheers, basic-training cadences, the chorus to “Hang On Sloopy,” shit like that—and Slocum was saying with his eyes
Hey, what you want? You the boss now, what you want?

And Dieffenbaker had nodded.

Sully wondered if he could have given that nod himself. He thought not. He thought if it had come down to him, Clemson and Malenfant and those other fuckheads would have killed until their ammo ran out—wasn't that pretty much what the men under Calley and Medina had done? But Dieffenbaker was no William Calley, give him that. Dieffenbaker had given the little nod. Slocum nodded back, then raised his rifle and blew off Ralph Clemson's head.

At the time Sully had thought Clemson got the bullet because Slocum knew Malenfant too well, Slocum and Malenfant had smoked more than a few loco-leaves together and Slocum had also been known to spend at least some of his spare time hunting The Bitch with the other Hearts players. But as he sat here rolling Dieffenbaker's Dunhill cigarette between his fingers, it occurred to Sully that Slocum didn't give a shit about Malenfant and his loco-leaves; Malenfant's favorite card-game, either. There was no shortage of
bhang
or card-games in Vietnam. Slocum picked Clemson because shooting Malenfant wouldn't have worked. Malenfant, screaming all his bullshit about putting heads up on sticks to show the Cong what happened to
people who fucked with Delta Lightning, was too far away to get the attention of the men splashing and squashing and shooting their way down that muddy street. Plus old
mamasan
was already dead, so what the fuck, let him carve on her.

Now Deef was Dieffenbaker, a bald computer salesman who had quit going to the reunions. He gave Sully a light with his Zippo, then watched as Sully drew the smoke deep and coughed it back out.

“Been awhile, hasn't it?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“Two years, give or take.”

“You want to know the scary thing? How fast you get back into practice.”

“I told you about the old lady, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“I think it was the last reunion you came to . . . the one on the Jersey shore, the one when Durgin ripped that waitress's top off. That was an ugly scene, man.”

“Was it? I don't remember.”

“You were shitfaced by then.”

Of course he had been, that part was always the same. Come to think of it, all parts of the reunions were always the same. There was a dj who usually left early because someone wanted to beat him up for playing the wrong records. Until that happened the speakers blasted out stuff like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Light My Fire” and “Gimme Some Lovin' ” and “My Girl,” songs from the soundtracks of all those Vietnam movies that were made in the Philippines. The truth about the music was that most of the grunts Sully remembered used to get choked up over The Carpenters or “Angel of the Morning.” That stuff was the real
bush soundtrack, always playing as the men passed around fatties and pictures of their girlfriends, getting stoned and all weepy-goopy over “One Tin Soldier,” popularly known in the green as “The Theme from Fuckin
Billy Jack
.” Sully couldn't remember hearing The Doors once in Vietnam; it was always The Strawberry Alarm Clock singing “Incense and Peppermints.” On some level he had known the war was lost the first time he heard that fuckin piece of shit on the commissary jukebox.