Keeper of Dreams (64 page)

Which wasn’t me.

I had fun, it just wasn’t the same fun. Come on, you know your gran, she’s Baptist through and through and that means I never even
danced
when I was growin’ up and I sure as hell never smoked or drank, and as for women, well, there wasn’t no double standard in my parents’ house, they said a boy should be just as virgin as a girl till he was married, and my pop let it be known that if I wanted to keep my dick it was going to stay inside my pants and not go gettin’ anybody pregnant. And I wasn’t one of those kids, the second he’s away from home, he goes wild. I may not be as die-hard Baptist as my folks were, but I was then, and no way was I going to go out whoring and drinking with Danny I. Keizer and his cronies.

So Danny sees I’m not going, of course, and he asks why and I tell him, not judgmental or nothing but still, you know, how it was against my Christian upbringing. The other guys just groan and I figure I’m gonna get a hard time, but Danny, he just puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Good for you, got more brains than all the rest of us put together.” They still go out, mind you, and I stay in, but he didn’t let ’em give me any crap about it, they just went and I just didn’t and after a while they kind of liked it that way, it meant they had somebody sober when they got back to, you know, help get the booze and the vomit off ’em and get ’em to bed. And believe me, there was nothing I saw about their condition when they came back that made me want to take up drinkin’ or whorin’ or smokin’ dope.

But one day Danny says to me—and it wasn’t that long after I got there, either—he says, “Let’s go to a place I know and have lunch.” So we go to this canteen about three blocks away, they served pretty good food and there were reporters there too so you knew it was a place where you wouldn’t puke or get the runs from eating the food. Always crowded. And Danny sat me down and I said, I can’t afford to eat in no restaurants, and he says, “I can afford to buy this restaurant because my father is a car dealer in Minnesota and he makes so damn much money he can give thousands of dollars to politicians which is why I’m here.”

And I says, Your pop got his politician friends to send you to Nam?

And for a second he didn’t know I was joking but then he did and he says, “Very funny, Deacon.”

I hated it when they called me that, and I says to him, My pop
is
a deacon and I’m not.

And he says, “I’m sorry, man. I guess I just keep saying the wrong thing, is that it?” And then he tells me about how he had his college deferment,
but he was such a screwup he ended up getting kicked out of college and about fourteen seconds later he was drafted, because his dad was a Democrat but the local draft board was mostly Republican and they hated him big time. His dad didn’t even try to get him out, he just pulled some strings—and Danny said it was Hubert Humphrey who pulled ’em, and maybe his dad even said it was, but I mean, come on, Hubert Humphrey was Vice-President of the United States, who the hell would listen to
him
? Anyway, Danny only typed, like, negative twenty words a minute because he made so many typos, but they assigned him to the typing pool anyway, and the way he tells it—the way he told it—the guys in charge of the typing pool kept trying to get him kicked out and the orders kept coming back that Danny was a
permanent
member of the typing pool, so finally the only way they could keep things going smooth was to put him in charge of the typing pool himself. Or anyway that’s how he told it. But I also think it had something to do with him being just, you know, a likable guy. The officers around him, they liked working with him, so they promoted him. That simple.

I liked him, too. Couldn’t help it and I didn’t try not to. Even though I knew he was a hard drinker, and I figure half those half-American Vietnamese kids they talk about must look like Danny, he never talked about that kind of thing with me. Never even swore—hell, I swore more than he did, my pop used to say he came from a long line of Swearin’ Baptists, and he didn’t care if I swore, too, as long as I never did it in front of my mother, which I never did. Though they said a lot worse things than just swearing, which I never could bring myself to say. Anyway, he never talked rough around me at all, never even swore. Just talked about . . . everything else. Everything except the war.

He asked about my family, how I grew up, and finally I says to him, Am I, like, a sociology project or something? And he says to me, “What I hope is that you’re a friend,” and then he made a face so I’d know that he meant it but he wasn’t queer or anything, but after that he told me every-thing about his own life and his family and everything. Every lunch, or almost every lunch. Every lunch that some officer didn’t take him along to lunch with
him
, Danny would take me down to lunch with him, and he always paid, even though I tried to pay my share, he just laughed and said, “Somebody stateside bought a Chevy from my dad today for five hundred bucks more than he should’ve paid, so lunch is on him.”

And all the time we were talking, he kept giving me advice. On the streets of Saigon, he’d say, “Don’t ever go in there, you get VD just from window-shopping,” and he’d say, “Look out for little kids with their shirts buttoned up, cause the VC like to strap grenades to them and send them over to GIs to blow them up.” He told me the parts of town never to go into, and he especially told me all kinds of stuff about what it was like in combat. What the booby traps looked like, how walking point is the safest place because the VC always wait till you’re past their ambush so they can kill the main bunch of guys in the middle, how if you hate your lieutenant all you got to do is salute him and he’s a dead man, some VC sniper’ll get him. And all the time I’m thinkin’, How the hell do
you
know about combat, Mr. Danny I. Son-of-a-Guy-Who-Owns-Politicians?

And I guess he knew I was skeptical because he says to me, “Bobby, this isn’t like other wars. Desk jobs aren’t safe here. Just cause you don’t take a rifle to work doesn’t mean the other guy isn’t trying to kill you. They love nothing better than killing GIs walking around Saigon, thinking they’re safe. You’re never safe. We’re all combat troops, and the guys who don’t realize it are the ones who’re gonna die. That’s why I ask every guy I know who’s been in combat, I ask ’em how to stay alive and they tell me because anything can happen. One day they’re gonna come into our office and hand out weapons and say, Congratulations, boys, you’re all infantry now, and they’ll take us out and get us killed
unless
we got some idea what we’re doing.”

That’s when he told me he was my guardian angel. “You’re going to amount to something, Bobby,” he says to me. “You need to stay alive.”

And I just laughed cause what does it matter what happens to a boy from Hickory, except to my mother and daddy, but he says, “No sir, it’s the way you type. Maybe at first your pop made you learn, maybe you hated it then”—cause, see, I already told him about that—“but the way you type now, that’s ambition. You got to be the best. That’s in you, to be the best. So that means you’re worth keeping alive. So I’m your guardian angel. My job is to teach you what you got to know to stay alive in this war.”

I says to him, My daddy already saw to it I know what I need to know, but he says, “Every soldier needs a guardian angel, it’s the only way you get through the war, I promise you.” And I says, Who’s your guardian
angel, Hubert Horatio Humphrey? And he says to me, “I got no guardian angel, God doesn’t waste time on screwups like me,” and I says, If you believe in Jesus he’ll forgive all your sins, and he says, “I like Jesus too much to ever repent of my sins, cause as long as I don’t repent, he doesn’t have to pay for them,” and that was pretty much the end of our discussion of religion.

He never took advice from me, though. Like when he typed, he was fast, but he wasn’t very accurate. Typos on every order he ever sent out. I tried to tell him to slow down so he wouldn’t make mistakes, and he just said, “Faster I type, faster they’re out of here.” And when I told him I thought that stunk cause a mistake on those orders could get somebody killed, he just looks at me like I’m crazy and he says, “Bobby, even when the orders are exactly right they get somebody killed.” Afterward I thought of all kinds of things to say to that, like how maybe if the orders were right the guys who died might accomplish something first, but I never said it to him cause I knew with him it was all the same. He didn’t want my advice cause he didn’t want anybody’s advice cause he didn’t care enough to want to get better at anything. Except staying alive.

So he’d come back to that guardian angel thing now and then. “Don’t do that,” he’d say. “This is your guardian angel speaking.” And then I’d laugh and sometimes I’d do it anyway and sometimes I wouldn’t—you know, just stuff like going out in a jeep with a guy when we had a pass, or going up to a kid and giving him a candy bar. “Listen to me, Bobby, and someday I’ll save your life.”

So we were sitting in that very restaurant, the first one he ever took me to, and there’s the usual crowd, all kinds of soldiers and reporters and Vietnamese businessmen and officers and whatever, and I see this kid come in, little beggar kid, they come in, you know, to beg, cause the doors are open with ceiling fans, the place wasn’t air-conditioned, I mean this was Vietnam, we didn’t even have air-conditioning in Hickory in those days. So I see this little beggar kid, and I’ve seen a hundred just like him, five hundred, only there’s something wrong. He’s going from table to table just like they did, only I keep watching him, not even thinking about why, I’m listening to Danny, only I can’t take my eyes off the kid.

And Danny says, “What’re you looking at?” and he turns and sees the
kid and he waves the kid over to our table and he pulls out a candy bar to give him and all of a sudden I know.

“His shirt’s buttoned up,” I says to Danny, and without even thinking about it, I’m standing up, I stood up so fast I knocked my chair over and I remember somebody cussing cause my chair fell against him, and I says, “Danny, no, his
shirt’s buttoned up
.” But it’s like Danny doesn’t even hear me, he’s holding out the candy bar to the kid and the kid’s right there in front of him and I’m around the table, reaching for him, grabbing to pull him away, and at the exact moment that Danny is between me and the kid, the kid blows up.

Wasn’t even grenades, they said, it was high-tech explosives. It was a big enough deal it made the papers back in the States. Mostly I think because reporters got killed. Hell, everybody in the place got killed or so blown up they were in the hospital for months, they strapped enough explosives on the kid that people were killed on the street outside, that’s how bad it was.

Except me. They told me it was a miracle that all that happened to me was getting three fingers blown off.

Only it wasn’t a miracle, it was Danny. He was right between me and the kid. He took the whole blast that was meant for me. I mean, I got knocked back fifteen feet and I blacked out, it’s not like
nothing
hit me, my head hit the floor so hard I had a concussion and it took a month for my ears to heal, but I was no more than six feet from the kid, I should have been dead, blown to bits like those other guys, but there I was lying on the floor and when I came to—and I was only out for, like, a couple of minutes—when I came to, everything was silent, cause of my ears, you know, and when I tried to get up my head hurt, but I had to see if Danny was OK, you know? I had to see about Danny. And I sit up and I got stuff smeared all over my eyes but I wipe them off and I look and the whole place looks like a tornado hit a meat locker, it’s all bloody and pieces of people are everywhere and I’m thinking, This is combat. Danny was right, the war is everywhere and this is combat.

Only the one thing I don’t see is Danny. And I start to get up to see if maybe he got thrown over me, you know, right over my head so he’s behind me, only as I get up my clothes move wrong and I think, my legs are cut off inside my pants, I mean that’s what it looked like, I was getting up
only my clothes didn’t move right, and then I realize, those aren’t my clothes. I pull at them and I’ve got another whole uniform spread out on my body like somebody had held it up against me to see if it fit. Only it was torn open in front, it was really only just the back half of a uniform, and then I recognize the shirt, the stripes on the sleeve, the way they were rolled up. It was Danny’s uniform. It got blown clean off him. Or he got blown clean out of it. And the stuff I wiped off my face, that was probably . . . that was.

Oh God. Oh God. This is why I don’t tell the story. He saved my life, see? I had got around behind him to pull him away from the kid, and it just happened that he was exactly, he was so perfectly between me and the kid that he took it all for me. Everything. Except where I was reaching my right hand around to grab him. What happened to my hand, that’s what would have happened to my whole body except for Danny. He was my guardian angel.

No, not just because he took it all for me. Think about it. Lord knows I had plenty of time to think about it. A month in the hospital, and then coming home with my damn Purple Heart and Pop calling it my million-dollar wound till I got so sick of it I moved out and went to college just to get away from home, and the whole time I was thinking about Danny, and he really
was
my guardian angel, because if he hadn’t told me to watch out for kids with their shirts buttoned up, if he hadn’t pounded it into me that when you see something like that you just get out, you don’t talk about it, you just
go
—I mean, I would’ve still been sitting at that table. Maybe getting something out of my pockets to give the kid. The only reason I was exactly behind Danny was because I was on my feet getting the hell out of there the second I realized that kid had his shirt buttoned up.