Linger (2 page)

I don’t tell him that for a while it was a Mexican restaurant in Berryville. Not long. Not after Dunlinger heard it was doing okay. I don’t tell him about the kid named Carlos whose father ran the restaurant. But I think of Carlos every day of my life.

Movie Star sits hugging his knees, socks on his hands because it is so cold. Tomorrow the day’s heat will kill us, but at night it is freezing.

Movie Star says if I want to learn more than
mañana,
a good way is to learn a Spanish song.

He sings,

“
Ya que para despedirme,

Eres tan solo un sueño.
”

I copy it down because I like what it says.

It goes,

Keep from saying farewell,

For you are only a dream.

I think of Lynn. Sometimes I wonder if I was fascinated by her just because she was Dunlinger’s daughter. I had in my lifetime exactly three conversations with Lynn. One about how Joan holds her bell with one paw when she hunts, and goes on three legs…. One about removing the toilet plunger from the downstairs Ladies’ after it was plugged up, because it looks bad in there…. One about how she bets she will remember Christmas at Linger no matter what any future Christmas is like because her father really knows how to make Linger magic then. Agreed.

I wouldn’t mind having a beer, but there’s no booze anywhere since it is prohibited in this country. Even
Playboy
is.

We drink Sharp’s nonalcoholic beer, not the same and it’s usually warm.

Movie Star says, What if the Iraqis decide to lay it on us first, like tonight?

I say, The only thing I’m really afraid of is the mines.

What if they use gas? Movie Star persists.

We got gas masks, I say.

What if it’s not that kind? What if it’s some new thing that just has to be in the air and your bones turn to jelly?

I change the subject, ask him how often Amy writes.

He says he doesn’t get a letter every day but she sends one every day.

“Does your Lynn write every day too?”

I shrug, lie. I got one from her, though. She could have written it to anyone.
Well, tell me what it’s like over there
kind of thing.

Off in the distance we see a line of camels moving across the desert on a route marked by cyalume light sticks, the kind I used to keep in the glove compartment of my old Mustang in case I got lucky.

Break it in half and there was this soft little green light girls loved.

Once one said she’d heard about me, that I was just a makeout artist, and she wasn’t going to risk getting AIDS.

I had the name but not that big a game.

The girls I really liked I never got the nerve to ask out. So I’d pretend I didn’t even see them, or I’d whistle at them through my fingers, like a hardhat, yell out my car window, “Yo! Baby!”

But I never whistled at L.D. I never let on how I felt about her, to anyone. I didn’t even tell Gary, though I think he had a crush on her himself.

Down the way someone’s playing that song again on Desert Shield Radio, the 91st Psalm.

You will not fear the terror of the night.

I wonder if I’ll die without ever knowing what someone like Lynn Dunlinger says when you kiss her.

“W
HAT DID SHE HAVE
on?” my mom said.

“How would I know? This green thing.”

“A dress?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“She’s home for Christmas vacation early this year. Her school’s let out early.”

“Mom, did you hear what I said? Bobby and her are writing.”

“Bobby and
she
are. Who said
she
was? Did she say
she
was writing to
him
?”

“What did you think she’d do? Bobby probably wrote her that he was homesick and he needed a letter.”

“Did she
say
she wrote him?” Mom persisted.

I couldn’t remember. After she dropped her little bombshell about hearing from Bobby, I was too busy trying to look like that didn’t surprise me, that it’d take more than that to turn
me
around.

I told Mom she didn’t have to
say
she was writing him. Who wouldn’t write him? Have to be an Iraqi who wouldn’t, a Russian, not, believe me, a Dunlinger. They had the biggest flag in town, and Mr. Dunlinger was American Legion, Rotary, Lions, go down the lists, he’d be there.

Mom said, “Oh, yes, she would have to say she was writing to him before I’d believe it.”

My father piped up then, “
I
believe it! What I have trouble believing is
Bobby
writing
her.
I thought he was through with all Dunlingers forever!”

“I knew Bobby’d never stay mad at Mr. D.,” said Mom. “Those two were thick as thieves, never mind their little falling out.”

We never knew what it was really about, but there was a rumor around that Bobby and Mr. Dunlinger fought over something to do with a Mexican restaurant called Mañana. It opened down on the canal one summer, and I remember being surprised when Bobby said Dunlinger called the owner a “wetback.”

One of Dunlinger’s rules at Linger was no one on the staff could make any ethnic slurs, or tell any jokes about minorities, not even gays. He said the only name for anyone who walked through the front door was “customer,” and anyway, he always added, I don’t like bigotry of any sort!

I’d even heard Dunlinger put them out of business, and that Bobby quit because of it. But that didn’t really seem like my brother. Bobby wasn’t that kind of hero. He’d mop up the floor with anyone who went after me, and he’d stick by little kids up against a bully, but he’d never been into causes. You can bet he’d never have joined the Army if he’d thought he’d have to fight a war.

My father said, “Well, if Bobby
is
writing Lynn, he’s got a lot of competition.”

“Like Thayer Drake,” I said. “He was waiting for her after the party.”

“She dates others like her,” said my father. “Home from school for the holidays she gets Gloria Yee and they double date. You know the rules. They’re to protect her.”

My father seemed pleased at that idea.

Sometimes I couldn’t believe Bobby and I were Charlie Peel’s kids. He had a slightly wimpy way about him, maybe from years of looking up to Dunlinger, or maybe it was the rimless glasses he wore, and the fact he was mostly always in a suit and tie. He was shorter and thinner than both Bobby and me, too, and his blond hair was gray now and thinning.

We had his blue eyes, but any sparkle reflected in them came from Mom. She kept her hair blond with the help of Clairol, and her spirits high on an overdose of optimism.

You’d see the two of them together, you’d think she hadn’t married her first choice and he had.

“Lynn Dunlinger wouldn’t be writing Bobby and going with Thayer and the others at the same time, would she?” my mother asked.

Dad heaved a sigh, “She’s just
writing
him! Lynn doesn’t
go
with anyone. You
know
that, Wanda.”

“What exactly did she say?” my mother asked me. “Start from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”

“Okay,” I said, “Lynn Wonderful Dunlinger, with her laughing green eyes, in a green silk dress, black shoes, long black hair down her back, breath smelling minty, sidled up to me at the party and saidddddddddddddd …”

My father shot me a look, but my mother was listening as pleased as though I was telling a fairy tale.

“What? Said what exactly? What did she say?”

—F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF
Private Robert Peel

Saudi Arabia

She said to look for a Christmas box, but in her letter there is no photo so maybe I never said send one. All the guys seem to have them in their helmets, or in their cammie pockets.

We have moved out of our tanks into four-man tents. We all made a Christmas tree from a camouflage tent suspended from a pole. Hung with all colors of stick lights, looks real authentic from a distance.

We played a little sandlot football, and we’ve got lots of sand to play in too. It is everywhere, in everything, a fine sand like a ton of talcum powder has been dropped on us.

Movie Star says what he’ll miss on Christmas Day is the tamales his mother makes, that she goes all out for the holiday and they have everything Mexican, tortillas and stuff.

His father plays guitar in a group called La Raza and his mom is a school principal. Besides his four brothers he has one little sister.

His girlfriend, Amy, sends him photos of herself and is everything he has bragged that she was and then some!

Her father does not like that Movie Star is chicano.

What is your girlfriend’s family like toward you, he wants to know? I tell him no problem. (HA!)

B
ERRYVILLE WAS JUST
a little Pennsylvania town, no more than about eight thousand people, and we all knew everyone’s business.

We all knew the only man in town speaking out against our boys going over to defend the Persian Gulf was Mr. Raleigh, the English teacher.

He’d say he was for the boys but against the buildup over there.

He’d wear a yellow ribbon but not a flag.

He’d say when will we ever learn, and he’d say it was going to turn into another Vietnam.

Nights Mr. Raleigh played both piano and violin at Linger. He was divorced and lived at Flynn’s boarding house, down near Waffle Waffle, so I suppose he didn’t mind being in the restaurant every night. He got a good meal, which meant he could eat anything from the menu, unlike us galley slaves who got macaroni and cheese or turkey hash, or some other leftovers.

He was the youngest teacher at B.H.S., twenty-four, and a star swimmer in his college days, even though one leg was a lot shorter than the other. On his right foot he had to wear a heavy, black shoe with a built-up heel, and still he bobbed when he walked.

In his classroom he’d printed on the chalkboard:

DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL!

SAY SOMETHING PROVOCATIVE!

WAKE UP YOUR PASSIONS!

CHANGE!

One added since the crisis in the Persian Gulf said:

FEEL FOR OTHER PEOPLE!

The story went that his little boy was almost a vegetable, institutionalized somewhere, and that his wife couldn’t take it and had run off, leaving him to cope.

Redheaded, he had cobalt-blue eyes you could see across a room. He still smoked. Camels, the same stupid brand Mom used to be hooked on. Mr. Dunlinger would give him these little lectures about it. Not lectures about not wanting him to do it in Linger, but ones about not wanting him to die young.

“We like you, Jules,” he’d say. “We want you alive.”

I always thought Dunlinger missed having a son. First he favored Bobby, then it was Jules Raleigh.

Mr. Raleigh could have passed for his son, too. Dunlinger had the same rugged build, hair that was not red but certainly rust colored, and that sort of tough look to his body and face that Mr. Raleigh had.

If you saw him sitting down, you’d figure Mr. Raleigh for someone who would be out on the football field, not this fiddler standing at a table in The Regency Room, playing “Claire de Lune” while people ate prime ribs.

Sometimes, late at night, in The Grill, Mrs. Dunlinger would go up and whisper something to him, then stand by his piano and sing some of the old, slow songs: something Barry Manilow wrote, or Billy Joel or The Beatles: “Mandy” or “Leave a Tender Moment,” maybe “Yesterday.”

Her blond hair was a lot lighter than Mom’s, almost white, and she had this high soprano voice you don’t expect to hear singing one of those songs. The novelty of it carried her for a while. But most people knew if she wasn’t Ned Dunlinger’s wife, she wouldn’t be up there trilling her heart out. Still, most people liked her. She was one of these “good ole gal” types, someone you’d describe as a good sport, or a good heart—whatever it was, there’d be good in front of it. She liked clothes, and she always looked sexy in these slinky gowns she’d pour herself into weekends, sometimes strolling around with a gardenia pinned to her hair.

Whenever she got up to sing, Mr. Dunlinger always stopped what he was doing and listened, chin in his hand, sometimes eyes a little teary.

You never knew what she’d turn up in, but Mr. Dunlinger wore the same thing every night. A black dinner jacket (white in summer) and black pants. A red rose in his lapel.

He knew everyone by name, knew all the current jokes, never told an off-color one, but always left his customers laughing, even when the joke wasn’t that funny. People were somehow delighted by any attempt of his at wit, same as they were when a president would show even the slightest sense of fun, relieved that, after all, he was like everyone else.

My dad’d say, “He’s a character, our Mr. D.”

“What’d he do now?” My mother’d turn down the sound of the TV with the remote control.

“It’s not what he did, it’s what he said.”

“What?” and there would actually be color coming to her cheeks, excitement starting to dance in her eyes, for it was Dunlinger time, folks!

The old man was about to get out the shaker, pour some whiskey sours, and sit down to talk about THEM.

And I’d be out of there.

That was what was going on this December afternoon a few days before Christmas and a day after the employee party at Linger.

I left the house early and walked up the hill to the restaurant. I’d go in and fool around in the kitchen. Sometimes I’d head up to the lounge, where I’d catch Mr. Raleigh having a smoke, and we’d talk about Bobby. He was always trying to figure out what made Bobby join the Army so suddenly.

I remember once he said, “I never thought Bobby’d put himself in the way of that much control.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said. “I don’t think Bobby did, either.”

“Remember when his hero was James Jones, the writer?”

“Sure. He read everything he wrote. I always thought that’s where he got the idea to join the Army.”

“I think he was just mad at something,” said Mr. Raleigh. “Bobby’s not the soldier type. He didn’t want to fight like James Jones. He wanted to write like him.”