Linger (9 page)

Secrets are mysteries still.

You’ll have your way, you will.

“I
SAW YOUR BROTHER’S
picture in
The Berryville Record
,” Sloan said. “By the wishing well at Linger?”

“Yeah.” Mr. D. had never had to hire a public-relations man; he was better than any professional. “That’s Bobby…. Didn’t you ever see him before?”

“I think he waited on us a few times. My father loves going to Linger when he can afford to. It’s a big deal to him, but not to me.”

“Why don’t you like it?”

“I don’t eat that kind of food.”

“That’s right,” I said.

Then I finally lunged at her.

We were in the back of Dave Leonard’s Pontiac while Dave took a walk through the snow with Laura Greer. For his birthday she’d given him a bottle of Old Spice.

“Go easy,” Sloan said.

There wasn’t much leg room, so I was on my side, leaning into her, with my coat and gloves still on, even though Dave had left the motor running.

“Don’t do that with your tongue,” she said.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t flick your tongue like a snake at my lips.”

“Forget it!” I said. I sat back and took off my gloves. I said, “Like a snake! Give me a break!”

“That’s not the way to kiss,” she said.

“You don’t like someone to use his tongue?”

“I’m not talking about someone. I’m talking about you, Gary. You kissed me that way the last time, too!”

“Okay, okay, I won’t use my tongue.”

“You can use your tongue. Don’t flick it.”

“I didn’t know I was flicking it.”

“Let me show you something,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me. She kissed me for a long time, long enough for me to imagine she was Lynn Dunlinger. I kept my eyes closed. I could hear Phil Collins singing “Another Day in Paradise.” I thought, I’ll say.

She finally said, “See?”

“Yes. I see,” I said. I didn’t even open my eyes. She was still right next to me. We kept kissing. I thought Ling was a good name. I wished I’d come up with that name for Lynn before he had.

Sloan finally sat back when we heard Dave and Laura coming toward the car.

She said, “What do you think about when you kiss me?”

“About you. What do you think about?”

“I won’t tell you. I’d lie.”

“Maybe I’m lying. Maybe I don’t think about you.”

“You shouldn’t lie.” She laughed.

I laughed too. There was some moonlight and she looked good. Her black hair fell to her coat collar, and she had on a white silk scarf and these gold loop earrings. Her eyes looked like she was enjoying being with me.

“You never said what you thought of the movie,” she said.

We’d gone to see
Awakenings
, about some mental patients who were like zombies until they took a drug that brought them back to life for a while.

“I liked it,” I said.

“That’s the kind of man I’d like to marry,” she said. “The doctor who did all that important research.”

“I’d like to marry a woman like that,” I said. I got that from Lynn, who was always saying women could do what men could, always making her father say chair
people
and service
people.

“Wow, Gary! You’re right!” Sloan said. “I should have said I’d like to
be
that kind of doctor, not that I’d like to marry that kind of doctor.” She gave me this smile. “I didn’t expect to hear that from you.”

“I’m full of surprises,” I said.

Dave opened the door and said, “You guys ready to go home? Laura has an eleven o’clock curfew.” He stank of Old Spice.

Sloan said she had to be in by then, too. She’d taken off one of her gloves and put her hand in mine.

When I left her at the door, I said, “How about this Saturday? Do you want to see
The Grifters
?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I laughed and we kissed, a quickie.

I went down her front walk feeling I’d left the snake with the flicking tongue behind me.

Maybe I’d even left Lynn Dunlinger behind me.

Something had definitely happened to me that night.

“Like what?” Dave said when I told him something had.

“She didn’t rattle me,” I said.

I was laughing to myself: thinking rattlesnake.

“What’s that grin for? Hey, Gary, did you make out?”

“I’m not going to tell you. I’d only lie.”

Dave gave me a punch. “I thought you’d get a lecture on disarmament. I bet Laura, and she said no, it’d be on Planned Parenthood.”

“What about you?” I said.

“She doesn’t light my fire, Gary. I’m going for Lolly Newman this weekend.”

“Easy does it,” I said.

I was in a good mood when I got home.

I figured I’d get a Coke and go up and listen to some music in my room. I had the new Vanilla Ice album,
To the Extreme.
I might listen to Depeche Mode’s
World in My Eyes,
too.

When I got inside the house, I could hear CNN blaring in the living room. It was all that was ever on anymore. What happened to Johnny Carson and Jay Leno?

I was going to sneak up to my room when Dad called out, “Come on in here, Gary We’re celebrating.”

They had a bottle of Korbel champagne opened, and Mom raised her glass and grinned. “The war’s over, Gary!”

A
BOUT YOUR PEN PAL
, Lynn Dunlinger
, I wrote Bobby.
Today I saw her coming back from Lingering Pines with this guy in the snow, and something about the two of them was so different it’s hard to describe, but if I were you I wouldn’t count on her, Bobby, if you know what I mean.

It was Friday afternoon around four, and the sun was setting, so there was a sort of blue haze over them. They were walking close together: Mr. Raleigh going along in that awkward up-and-down way he walked. She was looking up at him, laughing, and just for a minute he stopped and looked down at her, even though it was snowing hard. Their coats were covered with it. He must have said something, who knows what? But they just stood there facing each other, and I think anyone could tell what was with them.

Then he lurched back, picked up some snow in his gloves; and she saw he was making a snowball, so she did, too.

There wasn’t any more to it than that: this big snowball fight began, and they were running toward Linger, laughing, she was chasing him, and it was hard for him in the snow, that was all.

But I never saw a moment frozen like that, one that said it all, except maybe in the movies, with violins swelling in the background, some kind of passionate symphony tipping off the stupid public that in case they didn’t get it, this was something
hot
going on with these two.

I was watching out the kitchen window, my hands in soapy water, doing the pans because the cook wouldn’t do cleanup and the guy that usually did was a no-show that day. He had a brother in Desert Storm and he’d been celebrating since the cease-fire.

Lynn had just gotten in from Faith Academy. I’d seen the taxi pull up some time ago. Her suitcase was still out in the hall near the wishing well.

The Dunlingers weren’t there yet. They’d gone to the Peace Celebration down at Holy Trinity.

What I didn’t know, until dinner, was that my father had seen them too.

“Bobby’s got some competition, is my bet,” he said. “I saw Lynn Dunlinger frolicking in the snow with Jules Raleigh this afternoon, and they looked very much like a couple.”

“A couple of what?” my mother asked.

“They looked like they were enjoying themselves,” my father said, which was a lot like saying the Pope looked Catholic.

“Jules Raleigh may think they were enjoying themselves,” my mother said, “but she’s got only Bobby on her mind. You don’t write a poem like that one day and the next day get interested in a clubfoot years older who plays piano in a bar.”

My father winced. He said, “Wanda, Wanda.”

“If Jules Raleigh’d had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in Kuwait, and we wouldn’t have anything to celebrate.”

“That’s right,” I said. “A lot of people would still be alive, there wouldn’t be oil spilling into the sea or oil-well fires mucking up the environment, and Bobby’d probably be down in Texas drinking beer with his buddies nights.”

Walk with ducks and you start to waddle, I thought to myself. It wasn’t Jules Raleigh at work on me, or Lynn either, because I’d been listening to them sound off through most of the war. It had to be a recent influence; the snake charmer herself, Sloan Scott.

“Tell that to Bobby when he comes home,” my mother snapped. “Tell Bobby his little brother didn’t appreciate what he did for his country.”

Then my dad told us the head of Rotary, who’d won the end-of-the-war pool, was contributing his winnings to Linger for a party honoring all the servicepeople in the county.

He said, “Mr. D. said we’ll wait for Bobby to come home to have it, though. Bobby’s going to be the centerpiece!”

“That’s wonderful!” my mother said. “I’m going to write Bobby tonight and tell him. It’s going to make it a lot easier for Lynn and Bobby if Mr. D. approves.”

My father said he didn’t think Mr. D. knew anything about them.

“But don’t tell me he’d object now,” said my mother. “Bobby’s coming home a hero!”

I’ll never forget us sitting at that table, eating Mom’s pot roast, having that discussion. Probably just as we’d sat down, the captain was picking up the phone and giving the overseas operator our number.

I remember when it rang I was going to answer, but my father got up because he didn’t like my friends calling me during the meal. He’d tell them to call later.

I heard him say yes, he was Charles Peel, and then he gave this happy wave at us, pointing to the mouthpiece, expecting it to be Bobby.

Mom was on her feet when we heard him say, “Yes, Robert Peel is my son.”

I felt for a minute the way I’d felt once when we were in Dave’s car and we went into a skid, and the car began turning around, and we didn’t know yet if we’d go over, hit a tree, hit another car; it was just very quiet and we were in this limbo for a few seconds, my heart caught in my throat.

“Then he’s alive,” my father said.

My mother was standing as close as she could get to the receiver, and my father put his arm around her.

“Thank God!” he said. “Thank you!” he said.

When he hung up, he said, “He’s all right! He was wounded is all. He was wounded during a firefight with Iraqi tanks.”

“Is he coming home?” My mother was crying.

W
E ALL THOUGHT THE
war was over,
my brother said on the tape.
Some of the guys were sleeping in the back of the Bradley, since our day had begun at three
A.M.
I’d just finished an MRE and was writing in my notebook.

Movie Star was upfront driving. We had no idea we were heading into battle.

A guy beside Movie Star said, “Tracers.” His voice was so calm. He was probably seeing a blaze of tracers in his thermal sights … and then he threw his radio headset down and shouted this time: “We’re hit!”

We felt like we were being blown up and there was screaming and smoke, then red flames. The ammo aboard began exploding.

Movie Star was trapped in his seatbelt until the fire burned it away. Before he rolled out of there, he managed to unlock the ramp. That’s how I got out.

He is burned badly. I am not that bad off, not like him, anyway.

Sugar took the force of the round and did not make it.

I will be in this hospital temporarily, then shipped out to one stateside. Mom and Dad, please don’t plan to travel to where I am. I need time to recoup before we get together. I’ll see you and Gary soon. Don’t worry. Love you. ’Bye!

I
AM STILL TRYING
to get in touch with Movie Star,
my brother said on the tape.
Be sure and call me if any mail comes there for me…. The Army didn’t tell you everything about that night, and that is okay too. There will be plenty of time to fill you in when I get home. I am doing fine although I have lost the hearing in my right ear, and my legs and back are healing slowly from the burns there. But I am improving fast, they tell me, so it won’t be long now.

“I wonder if he got my letter about Lynn Dunlinger yet,” I said. “I wish I’d never mailed it.”

I’d told Sloan everything. She was the only one I did tell. I’d gotten in the habit of going over to her house on Thursday nights to watch
Beverly Hills 90210.
Her mother would make strawberry Jell-O with bananas and miniature marshmallows on top. Between us we could eat five or six dishes of the stuff. Maybe we were trying to deaden our raging hormones.

Sloan said, “Do they forward mail from here to Saudi Arabia then back to Denver?”

Bobby was at Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center outside Denver, Colorado.

“Sure they do. But I don’t know how long it’d take to catch up with him.”

“What does he say to you on the phone?”

“We can’t talk. Mom and Dad are there. He says to study, make good grades, stuff like that, stuff one of the cool, cool Peel brothers would never say.”

“Can’t you ask Lynn if she hears from him?”

“She hasn’t. Not in a long time. She wrote him, though.”

“Oh, she’s all heart.”

“It’s not her fault. Ever since she heard he got wounded, she’s felt rotten.”

“She strung him along. She should.”

“She didn’t string him along. You don’t understand.”

From the living room we could hear Sloan’s father laughing at something Rush Limbaugh had to say. It was his favorite radio program. Sloan’s mother taped Rush every day so he could listen nights.

Sloan’s father was a contractor whose business had slowed up because of the recession. He’d fought in Vietnam, and he said when he got back from “’Nam,” he changed out of his uniform in the men’s room at the San Diego airport so he wouldn’t get dirty looks, that war was so unpopular.

When he wasn’t talking about how thanks to Bush this country had finally learned how to kick ass, he was right there in the next room listening to Rush and keeping his eye on Sloan and me. We’d watch TV in the sun parlor. He was making sure nothing went on between us. He didn’t know how much could go on when our eyes met, or our hands touched, or our bodies sat side by side. It wasn’t sex and it was. By the time Saturday night rolled around, the backseat of Dave’s Pontiac seemed as luxurious as a honeymoon suite with a round bed and a heart-shaped tub. We’d grab each other. It was sex and it wasn’t.