The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (17 page)

“Stinky sure hasn't been around lately,” I said to her later.

“And he won't be,” she said. “I've permanently banned him.”

“How come?” I asked, wondering if Jake had said anything.

“He told me he decided he was going to tip only every other round,” Vera said. “And I told him I had decided that he could go to hell.”

The Trojan War raged for nine years, and the stories of it are drenched in death. In
The Illiad,
Homer tells us that the earth streamed with blood and the funeral pyres for the fallen warriors burned continuously.

Our war was nothing like that war. Our war seemed to happen mostly inside the TV and mostly at night.

We watched the reporter on our screen, dashing in a snappy, many-pocketed vest as lights like fireworks rose in the night sky behind him. These were the Scud missiles being launched. We never saw them land—just flashes of light in the featureless dark. We never saw anyone dead. The war we saw inside
our televisions every night was clean and rather quiet. It stayed inside that box.

In January, Tom got inside the box on account of an antiwar city ordinance that he was promoting to make the town a safe haven for military deserters. We watched Tom being interviewed on the ten o'clock news, talking about opposing the war. It was clear from the beginning that the television interviewer thought Tom was nuts, a traitor, a fool.

“We have no right to kill people just because they have oil and we want it,” Tom said.

“What about the argument that we're bringing civilization to a barbarous people?” the TV interviewer asked. “The argument that we're bringing them peace?”

“In the nose cone of a missile?”

“Many in the United States government assure us that this will bring lasting peace to the Middle East,” the interviewer said. “This will be the war to end all wars there.”

“What Middle Eastern war has ever done that?” Tom asked. “The one in 1919? The one in 1920? In 1953? In 1963? The Crusades?”

The interviewer remained impassive. “Perhaps it isn't particularly useful to dwell on the past,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-three is awfully ancient history. The president assures us that this war will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity for the region.”

“We will bomb the world into peace?” Tom asked.

“Can you explain for our viewers why you are opposed to liberation and democracy in the Middle East?” the interviewer asked.

Over the next few days, the local newspaper featured a series of letters to the editor that fairly frothed in vitriolic indignation at Tom's remarks. Most of them suggested he be imprisoned for
treason or shipped back to Russia where he came from, which made Tom laugh because he was, in fact, from Kansas.

One Friday, there was a protest outside his store—a dozen or so people holding signs and American flags and singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in the cold sunshine. It was organized by one of the local churches. My ex-neighbor Orla was in the little crowd of protestors, holding one end of a banner that said, “Psalm 109: 9–13.” Her husband, Lem, was one of three people kneeling on the sidewalk, eyes closed and hands clasped in fervent prayer. They had planted themselves directly in front of the Che poster—“Better to die standing than to live on your knees.” We watched them out the front windows of Tia's.

“What's Tom doing?” Charlie Blue asked, coming out of the kitchen and wiping his hands on a dishtowel.

“He brought them coffee awhile ago,” Jake said, “but they wouldn't even talk to him. Then he had to leave to take Rosalita to a checkup. I'm watching the store for him.”

We all looked at him.

“What?” Jake said. “I can see the store from here. Nobody's going in there now anyway.”

“What does ‘Psalm 109: 9–13' mean?” Rafi asked.

Pancho closed his eyes and in a deep, solemn voice recited, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him, neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.”

“Jesus!” Rafi said, sounding surprised—maybe because people were actually praying for Tom's death out in front of his store or maybe because Pancho could apparently quote Bible
verses extensively, a talent formerly kept hidden.

“I looked it up earlier,” Pancho said.

“Jesus,” Rafi said again.

We watched them until dinnertime, when they packed up and went away.

The war started to come home to me now in a way that it hadn't back when Hank had taken to wearing his army jacket in the summer heat. Now the low-scudding clouds of winter seemed ominous, and the feeble, winter-gray daylight had a waiting quality to it, like it was just barely holding at bay the flocks of Stymphalian birds that would be let loose on us as soon as the sun set. I thought I could feel them waiting for us behind the sky. I thought of Pancho lying on the dock staring up at the sky.

Sometimes it was frightening to be in the bookstore. Tom had become a lightning rod. Every day, irate people drove by and yelled things out of their car windows or came into the store itself, angry or sullen or righteous. He met them with an equanimity that often just enraged them more. He said he relished the opportunity for conversation. But at the end of the day, he sometimes came into the Cave for a beer, and his eyes looked very, very tired. Some of the professors stopped sending their students to the Hammer and Sickle for their textbooks. Tom spent so much money that month repairing broken windows in the store that he had to have a special meeting with his loan officer at the bank to get the money to pay the glass company. I began to think he was awfully brave.

Stinky drove by and shouted just about every day, but as far as I know he never had the nerve to go in and speak to Tom face to face. He must have done his drinking at one of his other
regular bars because he never tried to come back into the Cave. Hank never mentioned Stinky's name and was always carefully quiet if anyone else did. He knew that Vera was keeping a suspicious eye on him, and he made sure to tip well and to keep his mouth shut.

Socrates says that the entrance to the cave is a long way up from the place where the prisoners are kept. The tunnel is dark and gets darker and colder the farther the freed prisoner travels from the fire. For a long time, he only gropes his way through. The freed prisoner keeps going forward, though, feeling his way in the darkness. Socrates doesn't tell us why. It must be a lonely time and a frightening one for the prisoner. But perhaps he understands that there is no other way out.

I started to feel it was part of my job to protect Tom, although I wasn't sure how to go about doing that, other than sitting around on the couch in the bookstore and waiting for something to happen. I wasn't the only one, it seemed, who felt this way, and one or two of us were almost always hanging around the store. Although we didn't come right out and say it to each other, our paranoia was getting to us, and conversations that seemed casual weren't casual at all.

“I thought I'd just go over to Tom's for a while,” Charlie Blue would say during the lull between lunch and happy hour. And we would watch out the plate-glass window of Tia's until he came back. And then, not too much later, Jake would get up and stretch and not say anything to anybody but would amble
across the street and disappear inside the bookstore door. Or just about at Tom's regular closing time, Rafi and Vera would exchange a look and Rafi would head out the back door and reappear awhile later.

“Everything okay?” Vera would nonchalantly ask, and Rafi would nod and she would try to look like she hadn't been worried.

I was sitting on the front steps of the bookstore one morning at opening time when Tom drove up in his beat-up old car. He smiled with his kind, tired eyes when he saw me.

“It's sweet,” he said, “and I appreciate it.” His voice was soft, and he reached out a hand to help me up. “But you-all don't have to watch over me, you know.”

“I know,” I said. But I went into the bookstore after him anyway and stayed there all morning.

To cheer us all up, Rafi started making a special after-work drink at the Cave that involved running a pint of rum through the coffee maker to heat it up and then mixing in sugar and a squirt of lemon juice from a lemon-shaped plastic bottle he kept in a corner of the cooler. The warm steam from the rum would hit all the soft tissues in your mouth and nose and make them tingle before you even took a drink, and the lemon juice cut the coffee-maker grease almost completely. After we locked the doors at night, we would whip up a batch and sit together at the corner table and close our eyes and sip slowly and sigh.

I sat next to Danny, leaning into him, not even playing cards but just watching the game and shooting the breeze. We talked about various things: the worst beer we ever drank and the best place to drink it, the time Pancho accidentally peed on an
electric fence, possible names for Tom's baby, Greek mythology, what we would like to eat right now if only someone would bring it to us.