Hearts In Atlantis (72 page)

The reunions started with music and the smell of barbecues (a smell that always vaguely reminded Sully of burning helicopter fuel) and with cans of beer in pails of chipped ice and that part was all right, that part was actually pretty nice, but then all at once it was the next morning and the light burned your eyes and your head felt like a tumor and your stomach was full of poison. On one of those mornings-after Sully had had a vague sick memory of making the dj play “Oh! Carol” by Neil Sedaka over and over again, threatening to kill him if he stopped. On another Sully awoke next to Frank Peasley's ex-wife. She was snoring because her nose was broken. Her pillow was covered with blood, her cheeks covered with blood too, and Sully couldn't remember if he had broken her nose or if fuckin Peasley had done it. Sully wanted it to be Peasley but knew it could have been him; sometimes, especially in those days B.V. (Before Viagra) when he failed at sex almost as often as he succeeded, he got mad. Fortunately, when the lady awoke, she couldn't remember, either. She remembered what he'd looked like with his underwear off, though. “How come you only have one?” she'd asked him.

“I'm lucky to have that,” Sully had replied. His headache had been bigger than the world.

“What'd I say about the old lady?” he asked Dieffenbaker as they sat smoking in the alley beside the chapel.

Dieffenbaker shrugged. “Just that you used to see her. You said sometimes she put on different clothes but it was always her, the old
mamasan
Malenfant wasted. I had to shush you up.”

“Fuck,” Sully said, and put the hand not holding the cigarette in his hair.

“You also said it was better once you got back to the East Coast,” Dieffenbaker said. “And look, what's so bad about seeing an old lady once in awhile? Some people see flying saucers.”

“Not people who owe two banks almost a million dollars,” Sully said. “If they knew  . . .”

“If they knew, what? I'll tell you what. Nothing. As long as you keep making the payments, Sully-John, keep bringing them that fabled monthly cashew, no one cares what you see when you turn out the light . . . or what you see when you leave it on, for that matter. They don't care if you dress in ladies' underwear or if you beat your wife and hump the Labrador. Besides, don't you think there are guys in those banks who spent time in the green?”

Sully took a drag on the Dunhill and looked at Dieffenbaker. The truth was that he never
had
considered such a thing. He dealt with two loan officers who were the right age, but they never talked about it. Of course, neither did he.
Next time I see them
, he thought,
I'll have to ask if they carry Zippos. You know, be subtle
.

“What are you smiling about?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“Nothing. What about you, Deef? Do you have an old lady? I don't mean your girlfriend, I mean an old lady. A
mamasan
.”

“Hey man, don't call me Deef. Nobody calls me that now. I never liked it.”

“Do you have one?”

“Ronnie Malenfant's my
mamasan
,” Dieffenbaker said. “Sometimes I see him. Not the way you said you see yours, like she's really there, but memory's real too, isn't it?”

“Yeah.”

Dieffenbaker shook his head slowly. “If memory was all. You know? If memory was
all
.”

Sully sat silent. In the chapel the organ was now playing something that didn't sound like a hymn but just music. The recessional, he thought they called it. A musical way of telling the mourners to get lost. Get back, Jo-Jo. Your mama's waitin.

Dieffenbaker said: “There's memory and then there's what you actually see in your mind. Like when you read a book by a really good author and he describes a room and you see that room. I'll be mowing the lawn or sitting at our conference table listening to a presentation or reading a story to my grandson before putting him in bed or maybe even smooching with Mary on the sofa, and boom, there's Malenfant, goddam little acne-head with that wavy hair. Remember how his hair used to wave?”

“Yeah.”

“Ronnie Malenfant, always talking about the fuckin this and the fuckin that and the fuckin other thing. Ethnic jokes for every occasion. And the poke. You remember that?”

“Sure. Little leather poke he wore on his belt. He kept his cards in it. Two decks of Bikes. ‘Hey, we're goin Bitch-huntin, boys! Nickel a point! Who's up for it?' And out they'd come.”

“Yeah. You remember.
Remember
. But I
see
him, Sully, right down to the whiteheads on his chin. I hear him, I can smell the fucking
dope
he smoked . . . but mostly I see him, how he knocked her over and she was lying there on the ground, still shaking her fists at him, still running her mouth—”

“Stop it.”

“—and I couldn't believe it was going to happen. At first I don't think Malenfant could believe it, either. He just jabbed the bayonet at her a couple of times to begin with, pricking her with the tip of it like the whole thing was a goof . . . but then he went and did it, he stuck it in her. Fuckin A, Sully; I mean
fuck
-in-A. She screamed and started jerking all around and he had his feet, remember, on either side of her, and the rest of them were running, Ralph Clemson and Mims and I don't know who else. I always hated that little fuck Clemson, even worse than Malenfant because at least Ronnie wasn't sneaky, with him what you saw was what you got. Clemson was crazy
and
sneaky. I was scared to death, Sully, scared to fucking death. I knew I was supposed to put a stop to it, but I was afraid they'd scrag me if I tried, all of them, all of
you
, because at that precise moment there was all you guys and then there was me. Shearman . . . nothing against him, he went into that clearing where the copters came down like there was no tomorrow, but in that 'ville . . . I looked at him and there was nothing there.”

“He saved my life later on, when we got ambushed,” Sully said quietly.

“I know. Picked you up and carried you like fucking Superman. He had it in the clearing, he got it back on the trail, but in between, in the 'ville . . . nothing. In the 'ville it was down to me. It was like I was the only grownup, only I didn't feel like a grownup.”

Sully didn't bother telling him to stop again. Dieffenbaker meant to have his say. Nothing short of a punch in the mouth would stop him from having it.

“You remember how she screamed when he stuck it in? That old lady? And Malenfant standing over her and running his mouth, slopehead this and gook that and slant the other thing. Thank God for Slocum. He looked at me and that made me do something . . . except all I did was tell him to shoot.”

No
, Sully thought,
you didn't even do that, Deef. You just nodded your head. If you're in court they don't let you get away with shit like that; they make you speak out loud. They make you state it for the record
.

“I think Slocum saved our souls that day,” Dieffenbaker said. “You knew he offed himself, didn't you? Yeah. In '86.”

“I thought it was a car accident.”

“If driving into a bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour on a clear evening is an accident, it was an accident.”

“What about Malenfant? Any idea?”

“Well, he never came to any of the reunions, of course, but he was alive the last I knew. Andy Brannigan saw him in southern California.”

“Hedgehog saw him?”

“Yeah, Hedgehog. You know where it was?”

“No, course not.”

“It's going to kill you, Sully-John, it's going to blow your mind. Brannigan's in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's his religion. He says it saved his life, and I suppose it did. He used to drink fiercer than any of us, maybe fiercer than all of us put together. So now he's addicted to AA instead of tequila. He goes to about a dozen meetings a week, he's a GSR—don't ask me, it's some sort of political position in the group—he mans a hotline telephone. And every year he goes to the National Convention. Five years or so ago the drunks got together in San Diego. Fifty thousand alkies all standing in the San Diego Convention Center, chanting the Serenity Prayer. Can you picture it?”

“Sort of,” Sully said.

“Fucking Brannigan looks to his left and who does he see but Ronnie Malenfant. He can hardly believe it, but it's Malenfant, all right. After the big meeting, he grabs Malenfant and the two of them go out for a drink.” Dieffenbaker paused. “Alcoholics do that too, I guess. Lemonades and Cokes and such. And Malenfant tells Hedgehog he's almost two years clean and sober, he's found a higher power he chooses to call God, he's had a rebirth, everything is five by fucking five, he's living life on life's terms, he's letting go and letting God, all that stuff they talk. And Brannigan, he can't help it. He asks Malenfant if he's taken the Fifth Step, which is confessing the stuff you've done wrong and becoming entirely ready to make amends. Malenfant doesn't bat an eyelash, just says he took the Fifth a year ago and he feels a lot better.”

“Hot damn,” Sully said, surprised at the depth of his anger. “Old
mamasan
would certainly be glad to
know that Ronnie's gotten past it. I'll tell her the next time I see her.” Not knowing he would see her later that day, of course.

“You do that.”

They sat without talking much for a little while. Sully asked Dieffenbaker for another cigarette and Dieffenbaker gave him one, also another flick of the old Zippo. From around the corner came tangles of conversation and some low laughter. Pags's funeral was over. And somewhere in California Ronnie Malenfant was perhaps reading his AA Big Book and getting in touch with that fabled higher power he chose to call God. Maybe Ronnie was also a GSR, whatever the fuck that was. Sully wished Ronnie was dead. Sully wished Ronnie Malenfant had died in a Viet Cong spiderhole, his nose full of sores and the smell of ratshit, bleeding internally and puking up chunks of his own stomach lining. Malenfant with his poke and his cards, Malenfant with his bayonet, Malenfant with his feet planted on either side of the old
mamasan
in her green pants and orange top and red sneakers.

“Why were we in Vietnam to begin with?” Sully asked. “Not to get all philosophical or anything, but have you ever figured that out?”

“Who said ‘He who does not learn from the past is condemned to repeat it'?”

“Richard Dawson, the host of
Family Feud
.”

“Fuck you, Sullivan.”

“I don't know who said it. Does it matter?”

“Fuckin yeah,” Dieffenbaker said. “Because we never got out. We never got out of the green. Our generation died there.”

“That sounds a little—”

“A little what? A little pretentious? You bet. A little silly? You bet. A little self-regarding? Yes sir. But that's us. That's us all over. What have we done since Nam, Sully? Those of us who went, those of us who marched and protested, those of us who just sat home watching the Dallas Cowboys and drinking beer and farting into the sofa cushions?”

Color was seeping into the new lieutenant's cheeks. He had the look of a man who has found his hobby-horse and is now climbing on, helpless to do anything but ride. He held up his hands and began popping fingers the way Sully had when talking about the legacies of the Vietnam experience.

“Well, let's see. We're the generation that invented Super Mario Brothers, the ATV, laser missile-guidance systems, and crack cocaine. We discovered Richard Simmons, Scott Peck, and
Martha Stewart Living
. Our idea of a major lifestyle change is buying a dog. The girls who burned their bras now buy their lingerie from Victoria's Secret and the boys who fucked fearlessly for peace are now fat guys who sit in front of their computer screens late at night, pulling their puddings while they look at pictures of naked eighteen-year-olds on the Internet. That's us, brother, we like to watch. Movies, video games, live car-chase foot-age, fistfights on
The Jerry Springer Show
, Mark McGwire, World Federation Wrestling, impeachment hearings, we don't care, we just like to watch. But there was a time . . . don't laugh, but there was a time when it was really all in our hands. Do you know that?”

Sully nodded, thinking of Carol. Not the version of her sitting on the sofa with him and her wine-smelling
mother, not the one flipping the peace sign at the camera while the blood ran down the side of her face, either—that one was already too late and too crazy, you could see it in her smile, read it in the sign, where screaming words forbade all discussion. Rather he thought of Carol on the day her mother had taken all of them to Savin Rock. His friend Bobby had won some money from a three-card monte dealer that day and Carol had worn her blue bathing suit on the beach and sometimes she'd give Bobby that look, the one that said he was killing her and death was sweet. It
had
been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.

“We filled up our wallets on the stock market and went to the gym and booked therapy sessions to get in touch with ourselves. South America is burning, Malaysia's burning, fucking
Vietnam
is burning, but we finally got past that self-hating thing, finally got to like ourselves, so
that's
okay.”

Sully thought of Malenfant getting in touch with himself, learning to like the inner Ronnie, and suppressed a shudder.

All of Dieffenbaker's fingers were held up in front of his face and poked out; to Sully he looked like Al Jolson getting ready to sing “Mammy.” Dieffenbaker seemed to become aware of this at the same moment Sully did, and lowered his hands. He looked tired and distracted and unhappy.