Hearts In Atlantis

9:45 A.M.

Halfway down the hall, he sees Ralph Williamson, one of the tubby accountants from Garowicz Financial Planning (all the accountants at Garowicz are tubby, from what Willie has been able to observe). There’s a key chained to an old wooden paddle in one of Ralph’s pink hands, and from this Willie deduces that he is looking at an accoun-tant in need of a wee. Key on a paddle! If a fuckin key on a fuckin paddle won’t make you remember the joys of parochial school, remember all those hairy-chin nuns and all those knuckle-whacking wooden rulers, then nothing will, he thinks. And you know what? Ralph Williamson probably likes having that key on a paddle, just like he likes having a soap on a rope in the shape of a bunny rabbit or a circus clown hanging from the HOT faucet in his shower at home. And so what if he does? Judge not, lest ye be fuckin judged.

“Hey, Ralphie, what’s doin?”

Ralph turns, sees Willie, brightens. “Hey, hi, merry Christmas!”

Willie grins at the look in Ralph’s eyes. Tubby little fucker wor-ships him, and why not? Ralph is looking at a guy so squared away it hurts. Gotta like it, sweetheart, gotta like that.

“Same to you, bro.” He holds out his hand (now gloved, so he doesn’t have to worry about it being too white, not matching his face), palm up. “Gimme five!”

Smiling shyly, Ralph does.

“Gimme ten!”

Ralph turns his pink, pudgy hand over and allows Willie to slap it.

“So goddam good I gotta do it again!” Willie exclaims, and gives Ralph five more. “Got your Christmas shopping done, Ralphie?”

“Almost,” Ralph says, grinning and jingling the bathroom key. “Yes, almost. How about you, Willie?”

Willie tips him a wink. “Oh, you know how it is, brother-man; I got two-three women, and I just let each of em buy me a little keepsake.”

Ralph’s admiring smile suggests he does not, in fact, know how it is, but rather wishes he did. “Got a service call?”

“A whole day’s worth. ’Tis the season, you know.”

“Seems like it’s always the season for you. Business must be good. You’re hardly ever in your office.”

“That’s why God gave us answering machines, Ralphie. You bet-ter go on, now, or you’re gonna be dealin with a wet spot on your best gabardine slacks.”

Laughing (blushing a little, too), Ralph heads for the men’s room.

Willie goes on down to the elevators, carrying his case in hand and checking to make sure his glasses are still in his jacket pocket with the other. They are. The envelope is in there, too, thick and crackling with twenty-dollar bills. Fifteen of them. It’s time for a little visit from Officer Wheelock; Willie expected him yesterday. Maybe he won’t show until tomorrow, but Willie is betting on today . . . not that he likes it. He knows it’s the way of the world, you have to grease the wheels if you want your wagon to roll, but he still has a resentment. There are lots of days when he thinks about how pleas-ant it would be to put a bullet in Jasper Wheelock’s head. It was the way things happened in the green, sometimes. The way things had to happen. That thing with Malenfant, for instance. That crazy motherfucker, him with his pimples and his deck of cards.

Oh yes, in the bush things were different. In the bush you some-times had to do something wrong to prevent an even greater wrong. Behavior like that shows that you’re in the wrong place to start with, no doubt, but once you’re in the soup, you just have to swim. He and his men from Bravo Company were only with the Delta Company boys a few days, so Willie didn’t have much experience with Malen-fant, but his shrill, grating voice is hard to forget, and he remembers something Malenfant would yell during his endless Hearts games if someone tried to take back a card after it was laid down: No way, fuckwad! Once it’s laid, it’s played!

Malenfant might have been an asshole, but he had been right about that. In life as well as in cards, once it’s laid, it’s played.

The elevator doesn’t stop on Five, but the thought of that happening no longer makes him nervous. He has ridden down to the lobby many times with people who work on the same floor as Bill Shear-man—including the scrawny drink of water from Consolidated Insurance—and they don’t recognize him. They should, he knows they should, but they don’t. He used to think it was the change of clothes and the makeup, then he decided it was the hair, but in his heart he knows that none of those things can account for it. Not even their numb-hearted insensitivity to the world they live in can account for it. What he’s doing just isn’t that radical—fatigue pants, billyhop boots, and a little brown makeup don’t make a disguise. No way do they make a disguise. He doesn’t know exactly how to explain it, and so mostly leaves it alone. He learned this technique, as he learned so many others, in Vietnam.

The young black man is still standing outside the lobby door (he’s flipped up the hood of his grungy old sweatshirt now), and he shakes his crumpled styrofoam cup at Willie. He sees that the dude carrying the Mr. Repairman case in one hand is smiling, and so his own smile widens.

“Spare a lil?” he asks Mr. Repairman. “What do you say, my man?”

“Get the fuck out of my way, you lazy dickhead, that’s what I say,” Willie tells him, still smiling. The young man falls back a step, look-ing at Willie with wide shocked eyes. Before he can think of anything to say, Mr. Repairman is halfway down the block and almost lost in the throngs of shoppers, his big blocky case swinging from one gloved hand.

10:00 A.M.

He goes into the Whitmore Hotel, crosses the lobby, and takes the escalator up to the mezzanine, where the public restrooms are. This is the only part of the day he ever feels nervous about, and he can’t say why; certainly nothing has ever happened before, during, or after one of his hotel bathroom stops (he rotates among roughly two dozen of them in the midtown area). Still, he is somehow certain that if things do turn dinky-dau on him, it will happen in a hotel shithouse. Because what happens next is not like transforming from Bill Shear-man to Willie Shearman; Bill and Willie are brothers, perhaps even fraternal twins, and the switch from one to the other feels clean and perfectly normal. The workday’s final transformation, however— from Willie Shearman to Blind Willie Garfield—has never felt that way. The last change always feels murky, furtive, almost werewolfy. Until it’s done and he’s on the street again, tapping his white cane in front of him, he feels as a snake must after it’s shed its old skin and before the new one works in and grows tough.

He looks around and sees the men’s bathroom is empty except for a pair of feet under the door of the second stall in a long row of them—there must be a dozen in all. A throat clears softly. A newspa-per rattles. There is the ffft sound of a polite little midtown fart.

Willie goes all the way to the last stall in line. He puts down his case, latches the door shut, and takes off his red jacket. He turns it inside-out as he does so, reversing it. The other side is olive green. It has become an old soldier’s field jacket with a single pull of the arms. Sharon, who really does have a touch of genius, bought this side of his coat in an army surplus store and tore out the lining so she could sew it easily into the red jacket. Before sewing, however, she put a first lieutenant’s badge on it, plus black strips of cloth where the name-and-unit slugs would have gone. She then washed the garment thirty times or so. The badge and the unit markings are gone, now, of course, but the places where they were stand out clearly—the cloth is greener on the sleeves and the left breast, fresher in patterns any vet-eran of the armed services must recognize at once.

Willie hangs the coat on the hook, drops trou, sits, then picks up his case and settles it on his thighs. He opens it, takes out the disas-sembled cane, and quickly screws the two pieces together. Holding it far down the shaft, he reaches up from his sitting position and hooks the handle over the top of his jacket. Then he relatches the case, pulls a little paper off the roll in order to create the proper business-is-finished sound effect (probably unnecessary, but always safe, never sorry), and flushes the john.

Before stepping out of the stall he takes the glasses from the jacket pocket which also holds the payoff envelope. They’re big wrap-arounds; retro shades he associates with lava lamps and outlaw-biker movies starring Peter Fonda. They’re good for business, though, partly because they somehow say veteran to people, and partly because no one can peek in at his eyes, even from the sides.

Willie Shearman stays behind in the mezzanine restroom of the Whitmore just as Bill Shearman stays behind in the fifth-floor office of Western States Land Analysts. The man who comes out—a man wearing an old fatigue jacket, shades, and tapping a white cane lightly before him—is Blind Willie, a Fifth Avenue fixture since the days of Gerald Ford.

As he crosses the small mezzanine lobby toward the stairs (unac-companied blind men never use escalators), he sees a woman in a red blazer coming toward him. With the heavily tinted lenses between them, she looks like some sort of exotic fish swimming in muddy water. And of course it is not just the glasses; by two this afternoon he really will be blind, just as he kept screaming he was when he and John Sullivan and God knows how many others were medevacked out of Dong Ha Province back in ’70. I’m blind, he was yelling it even as he picked Sullivan up off the path, but he hadn’t been, exactly; through the throbbing post-flash whiteness he had seen Sullivan rolling around and trying to hold his bulging guts in. He had picked Sullivan up and ran with him clasped clumsily over one shoulder. Sul-livan was bigger than Willie, a lot bigger, and Willie had no idea how he could possibly have carried such a weight but somehow he had, all the way to the clearing where Hueys like God’s mercy had taken them off—gobless you Hueys, gobless, oh gobless you every one. He had run to the clearing and the copters with bullets whicking all around him and body-parts made in America lying on the trail where the mine or the booby-trap or whatever the fuck it was had gone off.

I’m blind, he had screamed, carrying Sullivan, feeling Sullivan’s blood drenching his uniform, and Sullivan had been screaming, too. If Sullivan had stopped screaming, would Willie have simply rolled the man off his shoulder and gone on alone, trying to outrun the ambush? Probably not. Because by then he knew who Sullivan was, exactly who he was, he was Sully from the old home town, Sully who had gone out with Carol Gerber from the old home town.

I’m blind, I’m blind, I’m blind! That’s what Willie Shearman was screaming as he toted Sullivan, and it’s true that much of the world was blast-white, but he still remembers seeing bullets twitch through leaves and thud into the trunks of trees; remembers seeing one of the men who had been in the ’ville earlier that day clap his hand to his throat. He remembers seeing the blood come bursting through that man’s fingers in a flood, drenching his uniform. One of the other men from Delta Company two-two—Pagano, his name had been—grabbed this fellow around the middle and hustled him past the staggering Willie Shearman, who really couldn’t see very much. Screaming I’m blind I’m blind I’m blind and smelling Sullivan’s blood, the stink of it. And in the copter that whiteness had started to come on strong. His face was burned, his hair was burned, his scalp was burned, the world was white. He was scorched and smoking, just one more escapee from hell’s half acre. He had believed he would never see again, and that had actually been a relief. But of course he had.

In time, he had.

The woman in the red blazer has reached him. “Can I help you, sir?” she asks.

“No, ma’am,” Blind Willie says. The ceaselessly moving cane stops tapping floor and quests over emptiness. It pendulums back and forth, mapping the sides of the staircase. Blind Willie nods, then moves carefully but confidently forward until he can touch the railing with the hand which holds the bulky case. He switches the case to his cane-hand so he can grasp the railing, then turns toward the woman. He’s careful not to smile directly at her but a little to her left. “No, thank you—I’m fine. Merry Christmas.”

He starts downstairs tapping ahead of him as he goes, big case held easily in spite of the cane—it’s light, almost empty. Later, of course, it will be a different story.

10:15 A.M.

Fifth Avenue is decked out for the holiday season—glitter and fineryhe can barely see. Streetlamps wear garlands of holly. The big stores have become garish Christmas packages, complete with gigantic red bows. A wreath which must be forty feet across graces the staid beige facade of Brooks Brothers. Lights twinkle everywhere. In Saks’ show-window, a high-fashion mannequin (haughty fuck-you-Jack expression, almost no tits or hips) sits astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. She is wearing a Santa hat, a fur-trimmed motorcycle jacket, thigh-high boots, and nothing else. Silver bells hang from the cycle’s handlebars. Some-where nearby, carolers are singing “Silent Night,” not exactly Blind Willie’s favorite tune, but a good deal better than “Do You Hear What I Hear.”

He stops where he always stops, in front of St. Patrick’s, across the street from Saks, allowing the package-laden shoppers to flood past in front of him. His movements now are simple and dignified. His discomfort in the men’s room—that feeling of gawky nakedness about to be exposed—has passed. He never feels more Catholic than when he arrives on this spot. He was a St. Gabe’s boy, after all; wore the cross, wore the surplice and took his turn as altar-boy, knelt in the booth, ate the hated haddock on Fridays. He is in many ways still a St. Gabe’s boy, all three versions of him have that in common, that part crossed the years and got over, as they used to say. Only these days he does penance instead of confession, and his certainty of heaven is gone. These days all he can do is hope.

He squats, unlatches the case, and turns it so those approaching from uptown will be able to read the sticker on the top. Next he takes out the third glove, the baseball glove he has had since the summer of 1960. He puts the glove beside the case. Nothing breaks more hearts than a blind man with a baseball glove, he has found; gobless America.

Last but not least, he takes out the sign with its brave skirting of tinsel, and ducks under the string. The sign comes to rest against the front of his field jacket.

FORMER 1 LT. WILLIAM J. GARFIELD, U.S. ARMYSERVED QUANG TRI, THUA THIEN, TAM BOI, A SHAULOST MY SIGHT DONG HA PROVINCE 1970 ROBBED OF BENEFITS BY A GRATEFUL GOVERNMENT 1973 LOST HOME 1975

ASHAMED TO BEG BUT HAVE A SON IN SCHOOL

THINK WELL OF ME IF YOU CAN

He raises his head so that the white light of this cold, almost-ready-to-snow day slides across the blind bulbs of his dark glasses. Now the work begins, and it is harder work than anyone will ever know. There is a way to stand, not quite the military posture which is called parade rest, but close to it. The head must stay up, looking both at and through the people who pass back and forth in their thousands and tens of thousands. The hands must hang straight down in their black gloves, never fiddling with the sign or with the fabric of his pants or with each other. He must continue to project that sense of hurt, humbled pride. There must be no sense of shame or shaming, and most of all no taint of insanity. He never speaks unless spoken to, and only then when he is spoken to in kindness. He does not respond to people who ask him angrily why he doesn’t get a real job, or what he means about being robbed of his benefits. He does not argue with those who accuse him of fakery or speak scornfully of a son who would allow his father to put him through school by begging on a streetcorner. He remembers breaking this ironclad rule only once, on a sweltering summer afternoon in 1981. What school does your son go to? a woman asked him angrily. He doesn’t know what she looked like, by then it was four o’clock and he had been as blind as a bat for at least two hours, but he had felt anger exploding out of her in all directions, like bedbugs exiting an old mattress. In a way she had reminded him of Malenfant with his shrill you-can’t-not-hear-it voice. Tell me which one, I want to mail him a dog turd. Don’t bother, he replied, turning toward the sound of her voice. If you’ve got a dog turd you want to mail somewhere, send it to LBJ. Federal Express must deliver to hell, they deliver everyplace else.

“God bless you, man,” a guy in a cashmere overcoat says, and his voice trembles with surprising emotion. Except Blind Willie Garfield isn’t surprised. He’s heard it all, he reckons, and a bit more. A sur-prising number of his customers put their money carefully and rever-ently in the pocket of the baseball glove. The guy in the cashmere coat drops his contribution into the open case, however, where it properly belongs. A five. The workday has begun.

10:45 A.M.

So far, so good. He lays his cane down carefully, drops to one knee, and dumps the contents of the baseball glove into the box. Then he sweeps a hand back and forth through the bills, although he can still see them pretty well. He picks them up—there’s four or five hundred dollars in all, which puts him on the way to a three-thousand-dollar day, not great for this time of year, but not bad, either—then rolls them up and slips a rubber band around them. He then pushes a button on the inside of the case, and the false floor drops down on springs, dumping the load of change all the way to the bottom. He adds the roll of bills, making no attempt to hide what he’s doing, but feeling no qualms about it, either; in all the years he has been doing this, no one has ever taken him off. God help the asshole who ever tries.

He lets go of the button, allowing the false floor to snap back into place, and stands up. A hand immediately presses into the small of his back.

“Merry Christmas, Willie,” the owner of the hand says. Blind Willie recognizes him by the smell of his cologne.

“Merry Christmas, Officer Wheelock,” Willie responds. His head remains tilted upward in a faintly questioning posture; his hands hang at his sides; his feet in their brightly polished boots remain apart in a stance not quite wide enough to be parade rest but nowhere near tight enough to pass as attention. “How are you today, sir?”

“In the pink, motherfucker,” Wheelock says. “You know me, always in the pink.”

Here comes a man in a topcoat hanging open over a bright red ski sweater. His hair is short, black on top, gray on the sides. His face has a stern, carved look Blind Willie recognizes at once. He’s got a couple of handle-top bags—one from Saks, one from Bally—in his hands. He stops and reads the sign.

“Dong Ha?” he asks suddenly, speaking not as a man does when naming a place but as one does when recognizing an old acquain-tance on a busy street.

“Yes, sir,” Blind Willie says.

“Who was your CO?”

“Captain Bob Brissum—with a u, not an o—and above him, Colonel Andrew Shelf, sir.”

“I heard of Shelf,” says the man in the open coat. His face suddenly looks different. As he walked toward the man on the corner, it looked as if it belonged on Fifth Avenue. Now it doesn’t. “Never met him, though.”

“Toward the end of my run, we didn’t see anyone with much rank, sir.”

“If you came out of the A Shau Valley, I’m not surprised. Are we on the same page here, soldier?”

“Yes, sir. There wasn’t much command structure left by the time we hit Dong Ha. I pretty much rolled things along with another lieu-tenant. His name was Dieffenbaker.”

The man in the red ski sweater is nodding slowly. “You boys were there when those helicopters came down, if I’ve got this placed right.”

“That’s affirmative, sir.”

“Then you must have been there later, when . . .”

Blind Willie does not help him finish. He can smell Wheelock’s cologne, though, stronger than ever, and the man is practically pant-ing in his ear, sounding like a horny kid at the end of a hot date. Wheelock has never bought his act, and although Blind Willie pays for the privilege of being left alone on this corner, and quite hand-somely by going rates, he knows that part of Wheelock is still cop enough to hope he’ll fuck up. Part of Wheelock is actively rooting for that. But the Wheelocks of the world never understand that what looks fake isn’t always fake. Sometimes the issues are a little more complicated than they appear at first glance. That was something else Vietnam had to teach him, back in the years before it became a political joke and a crutch for hack filmwriters.

“Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,” the graying man says. He speaks in a slow, heavy voice. “I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187, so I know the A Shau and Tam Boi. Do you remember Route 922?”

“Ah, yes, sir, Glory Road,” Blind Willie says. “I lost two friends there.”

“Glory Road,” the man in the open coat says, and all at once he looks a thousand years old, the bright red ski sweater an obscenity, like something hung on a museum mummy by cutup kids who believe they are exhibiting a sense of humor. His eyes are off over a hundred horizons. Then they come back here, to this street where a nearby carillon is playing the one that goes I hear those sleighbells jin-gling, ring-ting-tingling too. He sets his bags down between his expensive shoes and takes a pigskin wallet out from an inner pocket. He opens it, riffles through a neat thickness of bills.

“Son all right, Garfield?” he asks. “Making good grades?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“Public school?”

“Parochial, sir.”

“Excellent. And God willing, he’ll never see Glory Fuckin Road.” The man in the open topcoat takes a bill out of his wallet. Blind Willie feels as well as hears Wheelock’s little gasp and hardly has to look at the bill to know it is a hundred.

“Yes, sir, that’s affirmative, God willing.”

The man in the topcoat touches Willie’s hand with the bill, looks surprised when the gloved hand pulls back, as if it were bare and had been touched by something hot.

“Put it in my case or my ball-glove, sir, if you would,” Blind Willie says.

The man in the topcoat looks at him for a moment, eyebrows raised, frowning slightly, then seems to understand. He stoops, puts the bill in the ancient oiled pocket of the glove with GARFIELD printed in blue ink on the side, then reaches into his front pocket and brings out a small handful of change. This he scatters across the face of old Ben Franklin, in order to hold the bill down. Then he stands up. His eyes are wet and bloodshot.

“Do you any good to give you my card?” he asks Blind Willie. “I can put you in touch with several veterans’ organizations.”

“Thank you, sir, I’m sure you could, but I must respectfully decline.”

“Tried most of them?”

“Tried some, yes, sir.”

“Where’d you V.A.?”

“San Francisco, sir.” He hesitates, then adds, “The Pussy Palace, sir.”

The man in the topcoat laughs heartily at this, and when his face crinkles, the tears which have been standing in his eyes run down his weathered cheeks. “Pussy Palace!” he cries. “I haven’t heard that in ten years! Christ! A bedpan under every bed and a naked nurse between every set of sheets, right? Naked except for the lovebeads, which they left on.”

“Yes, sir, that about covers it, sir.”

“Or uncovers it. Merry Christmas, soldier.” The man in the top-coat ticks off a little one-finger salute.

“Merry Christmas to you, sir.”

The man in the topcoat picks up his bags again and walks off. He doesn’t look back. Blind Willie would not have seen him do so if he had; his vision is now down to ghosts and shadows.

“That was beautiful,” Wheelock murmurs. The feeling of Whee-lock’s freshly used air puffing into the cup of his ear is hateful to Blind Willie—gruesome, in fact—but he will not give the man the pleasure of moving his head so much as an inch. “The old fuck was actually crying. As I’m sure you saw. But you can talk the talk, Willie, I’ll give you that much.”

Willie says nothing.

“Some V.A. hospital called the Pussy Palace, huh?” Wheelock asks. “Sounds like my kind of place. Where’d you read about it, Sol-dier of Fortune?”

The shadow of a woman, a dark shape in a darkening day, bends over the open case and drops something in. A gloved hand touches Willie’s gloved hand and squeezes briefly. “God bless you, my friend,” she says.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The shadow moves off. The little puffs of breath in Blind Willie’s ear do not.

“You got something for me, pal?” Wheelock asks.

Blind Willie reaches into his jacket pocket. He produces the enve-lope and holds it out, jabbing the chilly air with it. It is snatched from his fingers as soon as Wheelock can track it down and get hold of it.

“You asshole!” There’s fear as well as anger in the cop’s voice. “How many times have I told you, palm it, palm it!”

Blind Willie says nothing. He is thinking of the baseball glove, how he erased BOBBY GARFIELD—as well as you could erase ink from leather, anyway—and then printed Willie Shearman’s name in its place. Later, after Vietnam and just as he was starting his new career, he erased a second time and printed a single name, GARFIELD, in big block letters. The place on the side of the old Alvin Dark glove where all these changes have been made looks flayed and raw. If he thinks of the glove, if he concentrates on that scuffed place and its layer of names, he can probably keep from doing something stupid. That’s what Wheelock wants, of course, what he wants a lot more than his shitty little payoff: for Willie to do something stupid, to give himself away.

“How much?” Wheelock asks after a moment.

“Three hundred,” Blind Willie says. “Three hundred dollars, Offi-cer Wheelock.”

This is greeted by a little thinking silence, but Wheelock takes a step back from Blind Willie, and the puffs of breath in his ear diffuse a little. Blind Willie is grateful for small favors.

“That’s okay,” Wheelock says at last. “This time. But a new year’s coming, pal, and your friend Jasper the Police-Smurf has a piece of land in upstate New York that he wants to build a little cabana on. You capeesh? The price of poker is going up.”

Blind Willie says nothing, but he is listening very, very carefully now. If this were all, all would be well. But Wheelock’s voice suggests it isn’t all.

“Actually, the cabana isn’t the important part,” Wheelock goes on. “The important thing is I need a little better compensation if I have to deal with a lowlife fuck like you.” Genuine anger is creeping into his voice. “How you can do this every day—even at Christmas—man, I don’t know. People who beg, that’s one thing, but a guy like you . . . you’re no more blind than I am.”

Oh, you’re lots blinder than me, Blind Willie thinks, but still he holds his peace.

“And you’re doing okay, aren’t you? Probably not as good as those PTL fucks on the tube, but you must clear . . . what? A grand a day, this time a year? Two grand?”

He is way low, but the miscalculation is music to Blind Willie Garfield’s ears. It means that his silent partner is not watching him too closely or too frequently . . . not yet, anyway. But he doesn’t like the anger in Wheelock’s voice. Anger is like a wild card in a poker game.

“You’re no more blind than I am,” Wheelock repeats. Apparently this is the part that really gets him. “Hey, pal, you know what? I ought to follow you some night when you get off work, you know? See what you do.” He pauses. “Who you turn into.”

For a moment Blind Willie actually stops breathing . . . then he starts again.

“You wouldn’t want to do that, Officer Wheelock,” he says.

“I wouldn’t, huh? Why not, Willie? Why not? You lookin out for my welfare, is that it? Afraid I might kill the shitass who lays the golden eggs? Hey, what I get from you in the course of a year ain’t all that much when you weigh it against a commendation, maybe a pro-motion.” He pauses. When he speaks again, his voice has a dreamy quality which Willie finds especially alarming. “I could be in the Post. HERO COP BUSTS HEARTLESS SCAM ARTIST ON FIFTH AVENUE.”

Jesus, Willie thinks. Good Jesus, he sounds serious.

“Says Garfield on your glove there, but I’d bet Garfield ain’t your name. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts.”

“That’s a bet you’d lose.”

“Says you . . . but the side of that glove looks like it’s seen more than one name written there.”

“It was stolen when I was a kid.” Is he talking too much? It’s hard to say. Wheelock has managed to catch him by surprise, the bastard. First the phone rings while he’s in his office—good old Ed from NYNEX—and now this. “The boy who stole it from me wrote his name in it while he had it. When I got it back, I erased his and put mine on again.”

“And it went to Vietnam with you?”

“Yes.” It’s the truth. If Sullivan had seen that battered Alvin Dark fielder’s mitt, would he have recognized it as his old friend Bobby’s? Unlikely, but who could know? Sullivan never had seen it, not in the green, at least, which made the whole question moot. Officer Jasper Wheelock, on the other hand, was posing all sorts of questions, and none of them were moot.

“Went to this Achoo Valley with you, did it?”

Blind Willie doesn’t reply. Wheelock is trying to lead him on now, and there’s noplace Wheelock can lead that Willie Garfield wants to go.

“Went to this Tomboy place with you?”

Willie says nothing.

“Man, I thought a tomboy was a chick that liked to climb trees.”

Willie continues to say nothing.

“The Post,” Wheelock says, and Willie dimly sees the asshole raise his hands slightly apart, as if framing a picture. “HERO COP.” He might just be teasing . . . but Willie can’t tell.

“You’d be in the Post, all right, but there wouldn’t be any com-mendation,” Blind Willie says. “No promotion, either. In fact, you’d be out on the street, Officer Wheelock, looking for a job. You could skip applying for one with security companies, though—a man who’ll take a payoff can’t be bonded.”

It is Wheelock’s turn to stop breathing. When he starts again, the puffs of breath in Blind Willie’s ear have become a hurricane; the cop’s moving mouth is almost on his skin. “What do you mean?” he whis-pers. A hand settles on the arm of Blind Willie’s field jacket. “You just tell me what the fuck you mean.”

But Blind Willie continues silent, hands at his sides, head slightly raised, looking attentively into the darkness that will not clear until daylight is almost gone, and on his face is that lack of expression which so many passersby read as ruined pride, courage brought low but somehow still intact.

Better be careful, Officer Wheelock, he thinks. The ice under you is getting thin. I may be blind, but you must be deaf if you can’t hear the sound of it cracking under your feet.

The hand on his arm shakes him slightly. Wheelock’s fingers are digging in. “You got a friend? Is that it, you son of a bitch? Is that why you hold the envelope out that way half the damned time? You got a friend taking my picture? Is that it?”

Blind Willie goes on saying nothing; to Jasper the Police-Smurf he is now giving a sermon of silence. People like Officer Wheelock will always think the worst if you let them. You only have to give them time to do it.

“You don’t want to fuck with me, pal,” Wheelock says viciously, but there is a subtle undertone of worry in his voice, and the hand on Blind Willie’s jacket loosens. “We’re going up to four hundred a month start-ing in January, and if you try playing any games with me, I’m going to show you where the real playground is. You understand me?”

Blind Willie says nothing. The puffs of air stop hitting his ear, and he knows Wheelock is getting ready to go. But not yet, alas; the nasty little puffs come back.

“You’ll burn in hell for what you’re doing,” Wheelock tells him. He speaks with great, almost fervent, sincerity. “What I’m doing when I take your dirty money is a venial sin—I asked the priest, so I’m sure—but yours is mortal. You’re going to hell, see how many handouts you get down there.”

Blind Willie thinks of a jacket Willie and Bill Shearman some-times see on the street. There is a map of Vietnam on the back, usu-ally the years the wearer of the jacket spent there, and this message: WHEN I DIE I’M GOING STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN, BECAUSE I SPENTMY TIME IN HELL. He could mention this sentiment to Officer Wheelock, but it would do no good. Silence is better.

Wheelock walks away, and Willie’s thought—that he’s glad to see him go—causes a rare smile to touch his face. It comes and goes like an errant ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.

1:40 P.M.

Three times he has banded the bills into rolls and dumped the change into the bottom of the case (this is really a storage function, and not an effort at concealment), now working completely by touch. He can no longer see the money, doesn’t know a one from a hundred, but he senses he is having a very good day indeed. There is no pleasure in the knowledge, however. There’s never much, pleasure is not what Blind Willie is about, but even the sense of accomplish-ment he might have felt on another day has been muted by his con-versation with Officer Wheelock.

At quarter to twelve, a young woman with a pretty voice (to Blind Willie she sounds like Diana Ross) comes out of Saks and gives him a cup of hot coffee, as she does most days at this time. At quarter past, another woman—this one not so young, and probably white— brings him a cup of steaming chicken noodle soup. He thanks them both. The white lady kisses his cheek with soft lips and wishes him the merriest of merry Christmases.

There is a counterbalancing side to the day, though; there almost always is. Around one o’clock a teenage boy with his unseen gang of buddies laughing and joking and skylarking all around him speaks out of the darkness to Blind Willie’s left, says he is one ugly mother-fuck, then asks if he wears those gloves because he burned his fingers off trying to read the waffle iron. He and his friends charge off, howl-ing with laughter at this ancient jape. Fifteen minutes or so later someone kicks him, although that might have been an accident. Every time he bends over to the case, however, the case is right there. It is a city of hustlers, muggers, and thieves, but the case is right there, just as it has always been right there.

And through it all, he thinks about Wheelock.

The cop before Wheelock was easy; the one who comes when Wheelock either quits the force or gets moved out of Midtown may also be easy. Wheelock will shake, bake, or flake eventually, that’s something else he learned in the bush, and in the meantime, he, Blind Willie, must bend like a reed in a windstorm. Except even the limberest reed breaks if the wind blows hard enough.

Wheelock wants more money, but that isn’t what bothers the man in the dark glasses and the army coat; sooner or later they all want more money. When he started on this corner, he paid Officer Han-ratty a hundred and a quarter. Hanratty was a live-and-let-live type of guy who smelled of Old Spice and whiskey just like George Raymer, the neighborhood beat-cop of Willie Shearman’s childhood, but easygoing Eric Hanratty’d still had Blind Willie up to two hun-dred a month by the time he retired in 1978. And the thing is—dig it, my brothers—Wheelock was angry this morning, angry, and Wheelock talked about having consulted a priest. These things worry him, but what worries him most of all is what Wheelock said about following him. See what you do. Who you turn into. Garfield ain’t your name. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts.

It’s a mistake to fuck with the truly penitential, Officer Wheelock, Blind Willie thinks. You’d be safer fucking with my wife than with my name, believe me. Safer by far.

Wheelock could do it, though—what could be simpler than shad-owing a blind man, or even one who can see little more than shad-ows? Simpler than watching him turn into some hotel and enter the public men’s room? Watching him go into a stall as Blind Willie Garfield and come out as Willie Shearman? Suppose Wheelock was even able to backtrail him from Willie to Bill?

Thinking this brings back his morning jitters, his feeling of being a snake between skins. The fear that he has been photographed tak-ing a bribe will hold Wheelock for awhile, but if he is angry enough, there is no predicting what he may do. And that is scary.

“God love you, soldier,” says a voice out of the darkness. “I wish I could do more.”

“Not necessary, sir,” Blind Willie says, but his mind is still on Jasper Wheelock, who smells of cheap cologne and talked to a priest about the blind man with the sign, the blind man who is not, in Wheelock’s opinion, blind at all. What had he said? You’re going to hell, see how many handouts you get down there. “Have a very merry Christmas, sir, thank you for helping me.”

And the day goes on.

4:25 P.M.

His sight has started to re-surface—dim, distant, but there. It is his cue to pack up and go.

He kneels, back ramrod-stiff, and lays his cane behind the case again. He bands the last of the bills, dumps them and the last coins into the bottom of the case, then puts the baseball glove and the tin-sel-decorated sign inside. He latches the case and stands up, holding his cane in the other hand. Now the case is heavy, dragging at his arm with the dead weight of all that well-meant metal. There is a heavy rattling crunch as the coins avalanche into a new position, and then they are as still as ore plugged deep in the ground.

He sets off down Fifth, dangling the case at the end of his left arm like an anchor (after all these years he’s used to the weight of it, could carry it much farther than he’ll need to this afternoon, if circum-stances demanded), holding the cane in his right hand and tapping it delicately on the paving in front of him. The cane is magic, opening a pocket of empty space before him on the crowded, jostling sidewalk in a teardrop-shaped wave. By the time he gets to Fifth and Forty-third, he can actually see this space. He can also see the DON’TWALK sign at Forty-second stop flashing and hold solid, but he keeps walk-ing anyway, letting a well-dressed man with long hair and gold chains reach out and grasp his shoulder to stop him.

“Watch it, my man,” the longhair says. “Traffic’s on the way.”

“Thank you, sir,” Blind Willie says.

“Don’t mention it—merry Christmas.”

Blind Willie crosses, passes the lions standing sentry at the Public Library, and goes down two more blocks, where he turns toward Sixth Avenue. No one accosts him; no one has loitered, watching him collect all day long, and then followed, waiting for the opportunity to bag the case and run (not that many thieves could run with it, not this case). Once, back in the summer of ’79, two or three young guys, maybe black (he couldn’t say for sure; they sounded black, but his vision had been slow returning that day, it was always slower in warm weather, when the days stayed bright longer), had accosted him and begun talking to him in a way he didn’t quite like. It wasn’t like the kids this afternoon, with their jokes about reading the waffle iron and what does a Playboy centerfold look like in Braille. It was softer than that, and in some weird fashion almost kind—questions about how much he took in by St. Pat’s back there, and would he perchance be generous enough to make a contribution to something called the Polo Recreational League, and did he want a little protec-tion getting to his bus stop or train station or whatever. One, perhaps a budding sexologist, had asked if he liked a little young pussy once in awhile. “It pep you up,” the voice on his left said softly, almost longingly. “Yessir, you must believe that shit.”

He had felt the way he imagined a mouse must feel when the cat is just pawing at it, claws not out yet, curious about what the mouse will do, and how fast it can run, and what sorts of noises it will make as its terror grows. Blind Willie had not been terrified, however. Scared, yes indeed, you could fairly say he had been scared, but he has not been out-and-out terrified since his last week in the green, the week that had begun in the A Shau Valley and ended in Dong Ha, the week the Viet Cong had harried them steadily west at what was not quite a full retreat, at the same time pinching them on both sides, driving them like cattle down a chute, always yelling from the trees, sometimes laughing from the jungle, sometimes shooting, sometimes screaming in the night. The little men who ain’t there, Sullivan called them. There is nothing like them here, and his blind-est day in Manhattan is not as dark as those nights after they lost the Captain. Knowing this had been his advantage and those young fel-lows’ mistake. He had simply raised his voice, speaking as a man might speak to a large room filled with old friends. “Say!” he had exclaimed to the shadowy phantoms drifting slowly around him on the sidewalk. “Say, does anyone see a policeman? I believe these young fellows here mean to take me off.” And that did it, easy as pulling a segment from a peeled orange; the young fellows bracket-ing him were suddenly gone like a cool breeze.

He only wishes he could solve the problem of Officer Wheelock that easily.

4:40 P.M.

The Sheraton Gotham, at Fortieth and Broadway, is one of the largest first-class hotels in the world, and in the cave of its lobby thousands of people school back and forth beneath the gigantic chandelier. They chase their pleasures here and dig their treasures there, oblivious to the Christmas music flowing from the speakers, to the chatter from three different restaurants and five bars, to the scenic elevators sliding up and down in their notched shafts like pis-tons powering some exotic glass engine . . . and to the blind man who taps among them, working his way toward a sarcophagal public men’s room almost the size of a subway station. He walks with the sticker on the case turned inward now, and he is as anonymous as a blind man can be. In this city, that’s very anonymous.

Still, he thinks as he enters one of the stalls and takes off his jacket, turning it inside-out as he does so, how is it that in all these years no one has ever followed me? No one has ever noticed that the blind man who goes in and the sighted man who comes out are the same size, and carrying the same case?

Well, in New York, hardly anyone notices anything that isn’t his or her own business—in their own way, they are all as blind as Blind Willie. Out of their offices, flooding down the sidewalks, thronging in the subway stations and cheap restaurants, there is something both repulsive and sad about them; they are like nests of moles turned up by a farmer’s harrow. He has seen this blindness over and over again, and he knows that it is one reason for his success . . . but surely not the only reason. They are not all moles, and he has been rolling the dice for a long time now. He takes precautions, of course he does, many of them, but there are still those moments (like now, sitting here with his pants down, unscrewing the white cane and stowing it back in his case) when he would be easy to catch, easy to rob, easy to expose. Wheelock is right about the Post; they would love him. They would hang him higher than Haman. They would never understand, never even want to understand, or hear his side of it. What side? And why has none of this ever happened?

Because of God, he believes. Because God is good. God is hard but God is good. He cannot bring himself to confess, but God seems to understand. Atonement and penance take time, but he has been given time. God has gone with him every step of the way.

In the stall, still between identities, he closes his eyes and prays— first giving his thanks, then making a request for guidance, then giv-ing more thanks. He finishes as he always does, in a whisper only he and God can hear: “If I die in a combat zone, bag me up and ship me home. If I die in a state of sin, close Your eyes and take me in. Yeah. Amen.”

He leaves the stall, leaves the bathroom, leaves the echoing confu-sion of the Sheraton Gotham, and no one walks up to him and says, “Excuse me, sir, but weren’t you just blind?” No one looks at him twice as he walks out into the street, carrying the bulky case as if it weighed twenty pounds instead of a hundred. God takes care of him.

It has started to snow. He walks slowly through it, Willie Shear-man again now, switching the case frequently from hand to hand, just one more tired guy at the end of the day. He continues to think about his inexplicable success as he goes. There’s a verse from the Book of Matthew which he has committed to memory. They be blind leaders of the blind, it goes. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Then there’s the old saw that says in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Is he the one-eyed man? God aside, has that been the practical secret of his success all these years?

Perhaps so, perhaps not. In any case, he has been protected . . . and in no case does he believe he can put God aside. God is in the picture. God marked him in 1960, when he first helped Harry Doolin tease Carol and then helped Harry beat her. That occasion of sin has never left his mind. What happened in the grove of trees near Field B stands for everything else. He even has Bobby Garfield’s glove to help him remember. Willie doesn’t know where Bobby is these days and doesn’t care. He kept track of Carol as long as he could, but Bobby doesn’t matter. Bobby ceased to matter when he helped her. Willie saw him help her. He didn’t dare come out and help her himself—he was afraid of what Harry might do to him, afraid of all the kids Harry might tell, afraid of being marked—but Bobby dared. Bobby helped her then, Bobby punished Harry Doolin later that summer, and by doing these things (probably just for doing the first of them), Bobby got well, Bobby got over. He did what Willie didn’t dare to do, he rolled with it and got over, got well, and now Willie has to do all the rest. And that’s a lot to do. Sorry is a full-time job and more. Why, even with three of him working at it, he can barely keep up.

Still, he can’t say he lives in regret. Sometimes he thinks of the good thief, the one who joined Christ in Paradise that very night. Fri-day afternoon you’re bleeding on Golgotha’s stony hill; Friday night you’re having tea and crumpets with the King. Sometimes someone kicks him, sometimes someone pushes him, sometimes he worries about being taken off. So what? Doesn’t he stand for all those who can only stand in the shadows, watching while the damage is done? Doesn’t he beg for them? Didn’t he take Bobby’s Alvin Dark–model baseball glove for them in 1960? He did. Gobless him, he did. And now they put their money in it as he stands eyeless outside the cathe-dral. He begs for them.

Sharon knows . . . exactly what does Sharon know? Some of it, yes. Just how much he can’t say. Certainly enough to provide the tinsel; enough to tell him he looks nice in his Paul Stuart suit and blue Sulka tie; enough to wish him a good day and remind him to get the eggnog. It is enough. All is well in Willie’s world except for Jasper Wheelock. What is he going to do about Jasper Wheelock?

Maybe I ought to follow you some night, Wheelock whispers in his ear as Willie shifts the increasingly heavy case from one hand to the other. Both arms ache now; he will be glad to reach his building. See what you do. See who you turn into.

What, exactly, is he going to do about Jasper the Police-Smurf? What can he do?

He doesn’t know.

5:15 P.M.

The young panhandler in the dirty red sweatshirt is long gone, his place taken by yet another streetcorner Santa. Willie has no trouble recognizing the tubby young fellow currently dropping a dollar into Santa’s pot.

“Hey, Ralphie!” he cries.

Ralph Williamson turns, his face lights up when he recognizes Willie, and he raises one gloved hand. It’s snowing harder now; with the bright lights around him and Santa Claus beside him, Ralph looks like the central figure in a holiday greeting card. Or maybe a modern-day Bob Cratchit.

“Hey, Willie! How’s it goin?”

“Like a house afire,” Willie says, approaching Ralph with an easy grin on his face. He sets his case down with a grunt, feels in his pants pocket, finds a buck for Santa’s pot. Probably just another crook, and his hat’s a moth-eaten piece of shit, but what the hell.

“What you got in there?” Ralph asks, looking down at Willie’s case as he fiddles with his scarf. “Sounds like you busted open some little kid’s piggy bank.”

“Nah, just heatin coils,” Willie says. “’Bout a damn thousand of em.”

“You working right up until Christmas?”

“Yeah,” he says, and suddenly has a glimmer of an idea about Wheelock. Just a twinkle, here and gone, but hey, it’s a start. “Yeah, right up until Christmas. No rest for the wicked, you know.”

Ralph’s wide and pleasant face creases in a smile. “I doubt if you’re very wicked.”

Willie smiles back. “You don’t know what evil lurks in the heart of the heatin-n-coolin man, Ralphie. I’ll probably take a few days off after Christmas, though. I’m thinkin that might be a really good idea.”

“Go south? Florida, maybe?”

“South?” Willie looks startled, then laughs. “Oh, no,” he says. “Not this kid. I’ve got plenty to do around the house. A person’s got to keep their house in order. Else it might come right down around their ears someday when the wind blows.”

“I suppose.” Ralph bundles the scarf higher around his ears. “See you tomorrow?”

“You bet,” Willie says and holds out his gloved hand. “Gimme five.”

Ralphie gives him five, then turns his hand over. His smile is shy but eager. “Give me ten, Willie.”

Willie gives him ten. “How good is that, Ralphie-baby?”

The man’s shy smile becomes a gleeful boy’s grin. “So goddam good I gotta do it again!” he cries, and slaps Willie’s hand with real authority.

Willie laughs. “You the man, Ralph. You get over.”

“You the man, too, Willie,” Ralph replies, speaking with a prissy earnestness that’s sort of funny. “Merry Christmas.”

“Right back atcha.”

He stands where he is for a moment, watching Ralph trudge off into the snow. Beside him, the streetcorner Santa rings his bell monotonously. Willie picks up his case and starts for the door of his building. Then something catches his eye, and he pauses.

“Your beard’s on crooked,” he says to the Santa. “If you want peo-ple to believe in you, fix your fuckin beard.”

He goes inside.

5:25 P.M.

There’s a big carton in the storage annex of Midtown Heating and Cooling. It’s full of cloth bags, the sort banks use to hold loose coins. Such bags usually have various banks’ names printed on them, but these don’t—Willie orders them direct from the company in Moundsville, West Virginia, that makes them.

He opens his case, quickly sets aside the rolls of bills (these he will carry home in his Mark Cross briefcase), then fills four bags with coins. In a far corner of the storage room is a battered old metal cab-inet simply marked PARTS. Willie swings it open—there is no lock to contend with—and reveals another hundred or so coin-stuffed bags. A dozen times a year he and Sharon tour the midtown churches, pushing these bags through the contribution slots or hinged pack-age-delivery doors when they will fit, simply leaving them by the door when they won’t. The lion’s share always goes to St. Pat’s, where he spends his days wearing dark glasses and a sign.

But not every day, he thinks, now undressing. I don’t have to be there every day, and he thinks again that maybe Bill, Willie, and Blind Willie Garfield will take the week after Christmas off. In that week there might be a way to handle Officer Wheelock. To make him go away. Except . . .

“I can’t kill him,” he says in a low, nagging voice. “I’ll be fucked if I kill him.” Only fucked isn’t what he’s worried about. Damned is what he’s worried about. Killing was different in Vietnam, or seemed different, but this isn’t Vietnam, isn’t the green. Has he built these years of penance just to tear them down again? God is testing him, testing him, testing him. There is an answer here. He knows there is, there must be. He is just—ha-ha, pardon the pun—too blind to see it.

Can he even find the self-righteous son of a bitch? Shit yeah, that’s not the problem. He can find Jasper the Police-Smurf, all right. Just about any old time he wants. Trail him right to wherever it is that he takes off his gun and his shoes and puts his feet up on the hassock. But then what?

He worries at this as he uses cold cream to remove his makeup, and then he puts his worries away. He takes the Nov–Dec ledger out of its drawer, sits at his desk, and for twenty minutes he writes I am heartily sorry for hurting Carol. He fills an entire page, top to bot-tom and margin to margin. He puts it back, then dresses in Bill Shearman’s clothes. As he is putting away Blind Willie’s boots, his eye falls on the scrapbook with its red leather cover. He takes it out, puts it on top of the file-cabinet, and flips back the cover with its sin-gle word—MEMORIES—stamped in gold.

On the first page is the certificate of a live birth—William Robert Shearman, born January 4th, 1946—and his tiny footprints. On the following pages are pictures of him with his mother, pictures of him with his father (Pat Shearman smiling as if he had never pushed his son over in his high chair or hit his wife with a beer bottle), pictures of him with his friends. Harry Doolin is particularly well represented. In one snapshot eight-year-old Harry is trying to eat a piece of Willie’s birthday cake with a blindfold on (a forfeit in some game, no doubt). Harry’s got chocolate smeared all over his cheeks, he’s laugh-ing and looks as if he doesn’t have a mean thought in his head. Willie shivers at the sight of that laughing, smeary, blindfolded face. It almost always makes him shiver.

He flips away from it, toward the back of the book, where he’s put the pictures and clippings of Carol Gerber he has collected over the years: Carol with her mother, Carol holding her brand-new baby brother and smiling nervously, Carol and her father (him in Navy dress blue and smoking a cigarette, her looking up at him with big wonderstruck eyes), Carol on the j.v. cheering squad at Harwich High her freshman year, caught in midleap with one hand waving a pom-pom and the other holding down her pleated skirt, Carol and John Sullivan on tinfoil thrones at Harwich High in 1965, the year they were elected Snow Queen and Snow King at the Junior-Senior prom. They look like a couple on a wedding cake, Willie thinks this every time he looks at the old yellow newsprint. Her gown is strapless, her shoulders flawless. There is no sign that for a little while, once upon a time, the left one was hideously deformed, sticking up in a witchlike double hump. She had cried before that last hit, cried plenty, but mere crying hadn’t been enough for Harry Doolin. That last time he had swung from the heels, and the smack of the bat hit-ting her had been like the sound of a mallet hitting a half-thawed roast, and then she had screamed, screamed so loud that Harry had fled without even looking back to see if Willie and Richie O’Meara were following him. Took to his heels, had old Harry Doolin, ran like a jackrabbit. But if he hadn’t? Suppose that, instead of running, Harry had said Hold her, guys, I ain’t listening to that, I’m going to shut her up, meaning to swing from the heels again, this time at her head? Would they have held her? Would they have held her for him even then?

You know you would have, he thinks dully. You do penance as much for what you were spared as for what you actually did. Don’t you?

Here’s Carol Gerber in her graduation gown; Spring 1966, it’s marked. On the next page is a news clipping from the Harwich Jour-nal marked Fall 1966. The accompanying picture is her again, but this version of Carol seems a million years removed from the young lady in the graduation gown, the young lady with the diploma in her hand, the white pumps on her feet, and her eyes demurely downcast. This girl is fiery and smiling, these eyes look straight into the camera. She seems unaware of the blood coursing down her left cheek. She is flashing the peace sign. This girl is on her way to Danbury already, this girl has got her Danbury dancing shoes on. People died in Dan-bury, the guts flew, baby, and Willie does not doubt that he is partly responsible. He touches the fiery smiling bleeding girl with her sign that says STOP THE MURDER (only instead of stopping it she became a part of it) and knows that in the end her face is the only one that mat-ters, her face is the spirit of the age. 1960 is smoke; here is fire. Here is Death with blood on her cheek and a smile on her lips and a sign in her hand. Here is that good old Danbury dementia.

The next clipping is the entire front page of the Danbury paper. He has folded it three times so it will fit in the book. The biggest of four photos shows a screaming woman standing in the middle of a street and holding up her bloody hands. Behind her is a brick build-ing which has been cracked open like an egg. Summer 1970, he has written beside it.

6 DEAD, 14 INJURED IN DANBURY BOMB ATTACK

Radical Group Claims Responsibility“No One Meant to Be Hurt,” Female Caller Tells Police

The group—Militant Students for Peace, they called them-selves—planted the bomb in a lecture hall on the Danbury UConn campus. On the day of the explosion, Coleman Chemicals was hold-ing job interviews there between ten A.M. and four P.M. The bomb was apparently supposed to go off at six in the morning, when the building was empty. It failed to do so. At eight o’clock, then again at nine, someone (presumably someone from the MSP) called Campus Security and reported the presence of a bomb in the first-floor lecture hall. There were cursory searches and no evacuation. “This was our eighty-third bomb-threat of the year,” an unidentified Campus Secu-rity officer was quoted as saying. No bomb was found, although the MSP later claimed vehemently that the exact location—the air-con-ditioning duct on the left side of the hall—had been given. There was evidence (persuasive evidence, to Willie Shearman if to no one else) that at quarter past noon, while the job interviews were in recess for lunch, a young woman made an effort—at considerable risk to her own life and limb—to retrieve the UXB herself. She spent perhaps ten minutes in the then-vacant lecture hall before being led away, protesting, by a young man with long black hair. The janitor who saw them later identified the man as Raymond Fiegler, head of the MSP. He identified the young woman as Carol Gerber.

At ten minutes to two that afternoon, the bomb finally went off. Gobless the living; gobless the dead.

Willie turns the page. Here is a headline from the Oklahoma City Oklahoman. April of 1971.

3 RADICALS KILLED IN ROADBLOCK SHOOTOUT “Big Fish” May Have Escaped by Minutes, Says FBI SAC Thurman

The big fish were John and Sally McBride, Charlie “Duck” Golden, the elusive Raymond Fiegler . . . and Carol. The remaining members of the MSP, in other words. The McBrides and Golden died in Los Angeles six months later, someone in the house still shooting and tossing grenades even as the place burned down. Neither Fiegler nor Carol was in the burned-out shell, but the police techs found large quantities of spilled blood which had been typed AB Positive. A rare blood-type. Carol Gerber’s blood-type.

Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Not a day goes by that Willie doesn’t ask himself this question.

He turns to the next page of the scrapbook, knowing he should stop, he should get home, Sharon will worry if he doesn’t at least call (he will call, from downstairs he will call, she’s right, he’s very dependable), but he doesn’t stop just yet.

The headline over the photo showing the charred skull of the house on Benefit Street is from the Los Angeles Times:

3 OF “DANBURY 12” DIE IN EAST L.A.

Police Speculate Murder-Suicide Pact

Only Fiegler, Gerber Unaccounted For

Except the cops believed Carol, at least, was dead. The piece made that clear. At the time, Willie had also been convinced it was so. All that blood. Now, however . . .

Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Sometimes his heart whispers to him that the blood doesn’t matter, that she got away from that small frame house long before the final acts of insanity were committed there. At other times he believes what the police believe—that she and Fiegler slipped away from the others only after the first shootout, before the house was surrounded; that she either died of wounds suffered in that shootout or was murdered by Fiegler because she was slowing him down. According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cook-ing in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.

Willie touches the photo of the burned-out house on Benefit Street . . . and suddenly a name comes to him, the name of the man who maybe stopped Dong Ha from becoming another My Lai or My Khe. Slocum. That was his name, all right. It’s as if the blackened beams and broken windows have whispered it to him.

Willie closes the scrapbook and puts it away, feeling at peace. He finishes squaring up what needs to be squared up in the offices of Midtown Heating and Cooling, then steps carefully through the trapdoor and finds his footing on top of the stepladder below. He takes the handle of his briefcase and pulls it through. He descends to the third step, then lowers the trapdoor into place and slides the ceil-ing panel back where it belongs.

He cannot do anything . . . anything permanent . . . to Officer Jasper Wheelock . . . but Slocum could. Yes indeed, Slocum could. Of course Slocum was black, but what of that? In the dark, all cats are gray . . . and to the blind, they’re no color at all. Is it really much of a reach from Blind Willie Garfield to Blind Willie Slocum? Of course not. Easy as breathing, really.

“Do you hear what I hear,” he sings softly as he folds the steplad-der and puts it back, “do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste?”

Five minutes later he closes the door of Western States Land Ana-lysts firmly behind him and triple-locks it. Then he goes down the hallway. When the elevator comes and he steps in, he thinks, Eggnog. Don’t forget. The Allens and the Dubrays.

“Also cinnamon,” he says out loud. The three people in the eleva-tor car with him look around, and Bill grins self-consciously.

Outside, he turns toward Grand Central, registering only one thought as the snow beats full into his face and he flips up his coat collar: the Santa outside the building has fixed his beard.

MIDNIGHT

“Share?”

“Hmmmm?”

Her voice is sleepy, distant. They have made long, slow love after the Dubrays finally left at eleven o’clock, and now she is drifting away. That’s all right; he is drifting too. He has a feeling that all of his problems are solving themselves . . . or that God is solving them.

“I may take a week or so off after Christmas. Do some inventory. Poke around some new sites. I’m thinking about changing loca-tions.” There is no need for her to know about what Willie Slocum may be doing in the week before New Year’s; she couldn’t do any-thing but worry and—perhaps, perhaps not, he sees no reason to find out for sure—feel guilty.

“Good,” she says. “See a few movies while you’re at it, why don’t you?” Her hand gropes out of the dark and touches his arm briefly. “You work so hard.” Pause. “Also, you remembered the eggnog. I really didn’t think you would. I’m very pleased with you, sweetheart.”

He grins in the dark at that, helpless not to. It is so perfectly Sharon.

“The Allens are all right, but the Dubrays are boring, aren’t they?” she asks.

“A little,” he allows.

“If that dress of hers had been cut any lower, she could have gotten a job in a topless bar.”

He says nothing to that, but grins again.

“It was good tonight, wasn’t it?” she asks him. It’s not their little party that she’s talking about.

“Yes, excellent.”

“Did you have a good day? I didn’t have a chance to ask.”

“Fine day, Share.”

“I love you, Bill.”

“Love you, too.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

As he drifts toward sleep he thinks about the man in the bright red ski sweater. He crosses over without knowing it, thought melting effortlessly into dream. “Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,” the man in the red sweater says. “I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187. We lost a lot of good men.” Then he brightens. “But I got this.” From the lefthand pocket of his topcoat he takes a white beard hanging on a string. “And this.” From the righthand pocket he takes a crumpled styrofoam cup, which he shakes. A few loose coins rattle in the bottom like teeth. “So you see,” he says, fading now, “there are compensations for even the blindest life.”

Then the dream itself fades and Bill Shearman sleeps deeply until six-fifteen the next morning, when the clock-radio wakes him to the sound of “The Little Drummer Boy.”

1999

1999: When someone dies, you think about the past.

Why We’re in Vietnam

When someone dies, you think about the past. Sully had probably known this for years, but it was only on the day of Pags’s funeral that it formed in his mind as a conscious postulate.

It was twenty-six years since the helicopters took their last loads of refugees (some dangling photogenically from the landing skids) off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and almost thirty since a Huey evacked John Sullivan, Willie Shearman, and maybe a dozen others out of Dong Ha Province. Sully-John and his magically refound childhood acquaintance had been heroes that morning when the choppers fell out of the sky; they’d been something else come after-noon. Sully could remember lying there on the Huey’s throbbing floor and screaming for someone to kill him. He could remember Willie screaming as well. I’m blind was what Willie had been screaming. Ah Jesus-fuck, I’m blind!

Eventually it had become clear to him—even with some of his guts hanging out of his belly in gray ropes and most of his balls blown off—that no one was going to do what he asked and he wasn’t going to be able to do the job on his own. Not soon enough to suit him, any-way. So he asked someone to get rid of the mamasan, they could do that much, couldn’t they? Land her or just dump her the fuck out, why not? Wasn’t she dead already? Thing was, she wouldn’t stop look-ing at him, and enough was enough.

By the time they swapped him and Shearman and half a dozen others—the worst ones—to a Medevac at the rally-point everyone called Peepee City (the chopper-jockeys were probably damned glad to see them go, all that screaming), Sully had started to realize none of the others could see old mamasan squatting there in the cockpit, old white-haired mamasan in the green pants and orange top and those weird bright Chinese sneakers, the ones that looked like Chuck Taylor hightops, bright red, wow. Old mamasan had been Malen-fant’s date, old Mr. Card-Shark’s big date. Earlier that day Malenfant had run into the clearing along with Sully and Dieffenbaker and Sly Slocum and the others, never mind the gooks firing at them out of the bush, never mind the terrible week of mortars and snipers and ambushes, Malenfant had been hero-bound and Sully had been hero-bound too, and now oh hey look at this, Ronnie Malenfant was a murderer, the kid Sully had been so afraid of back in the old days had saved his life and been blinded, and Sully himself was lying on the floor of a helicopter with his guts waving in the breeze. As Art Link-letter always said, it just proved that people are funny.

Somebody kill me, he had screamed on that bright and terrible afternoon. Somebody shoot me, for the love of God just let me die.

But he hadn’t died, the doctors had managed to save one of his mangled testicles, and now there were even days when he felt more or less glad to be alive. Sunsets made him feel that way. He liked to go out to the back of the lot, where the cars they’d taken in trade but hadn’t yet fixed up were stored, and stand there watching the sun go down. Corny shit, granted, but it was still the good part.

In San Francisco Willie was on the same ward and visited him a lot until the Army in its wisdom sent First Lieutenant Shearman some-where else; they had talked for hours about the old days in Harwich and people they knew in common. Once they’d even gotten their picture taken by an AP news photographer—Willie sitting on Sully’s bed, both of them laughing. Willie’s eyes had been better by then but still not right; Willie had confided to Sully that he was afraid they never would be right. The story that went with the picture had been pretty dopey, but had it brought them letters? Holy Christ! More than either of them could read! Sully had even gotten the crazy idea that he might hear from Carol, but of course he never did. It was the spring of 1970 and Carol Gerber was undoubtedly busy smoking pot and giv-ing blowjobs to end-the-war hippies while her old high-school boyfriend was getting his balls blown off on the other side of the world. That’s right, Art, people are funny. Also, kids say the darndest things.

When Willie shipped out, old mamasan stayed. Old mamasan hung right in there. During the seven months Sully spent in San Fran-cisco’s Veterans Hospital she had come every day and every night, his most constant visitor in that endless time when the whole world seemed to smell of piss and his heart hurt like a headache. Sometimes she showed up in a muumuu like the hostess at some nutty luau, sometimes she came wearing one of those grisly green golf-skirts and a sleeveless top that showed off her scrawny arms . . . but mostly she wore what she had been wearing on the day Malenfant killed her—the green pants, the orange smock, the red sneakers with the Chinese symbols on them.

One day that summer he unfolded the San Francisco Chronicle and saw his old girlfriend had made the front page. His old girlfriend and her hippie pals had killed a bunch of kids and job-recruiters back in Danbury. His old girlfriend was now “Red Carol.” His old girlfriend was a celebrity. “You cunt,” he had said as the paper first doubled, then trebled, then broke up into prisms. “You stupid fucked-up cunt.” He had balled the paper up, meaning to throw it across the room, and there was his new girlfriend, there was old mamasan sit-ting on the next bed, looking at Sully with her black eyes, and Sully had broken down completely at the sight of her. When the nurse came Sully either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her what he was crying about. All he knew was that the world had gone insane and he wanted a shot and eventually the nurse found a doctor to give him one and the last thing he saw before he passed out was mamasan, old fuckin mamasan sitting there on the next bed with her yellow hands in her green polyester lap, sitting there and watching him.

She made the trip across the country with him, too, had come all the way back to Connecticut with him, deadheading across the aisle in the tourist cabin of a United Airlines 747. She sat next to a business-man who saw her no more than the crew of the Huey had, or Willie Shearman, or the staff at the Pussy Palace. She had been Malenfant’s date in Dong Ha, but she was John Sullivan’s date now and never took her black eyes off him. Her yellow, wrinkled fingers always stayed folded in her lap and her eyes always stayed on him.

Thirty years. Man, that was a long time.

But as those years went by, Sully had seen her less and less. When he returned to Harwich in the fall of ’70, he still saw old mamasan just about every day—eating a hotdog in Commonwealth Park by Field B, or standing at the foot of the iron steps leading up to the rail-way station where the commuters ebbed and flowed, or just walking down Main Street. Always looking at him.

Once, not long after he’d gotten his first post-Vietnam job (selling cars, of course; it was the only thing he really knew how to do) he had seen old mamasan sitting in the passenger seat of a 1968 Ford LTD with PRICED TO SELL! soaped on the windshield.

You’ll start to understand her in time, the headshrinker in San Francisco had told him, and refused to say much more no matter how hard Sully pressed him. The shrink wanted to hear about the heli-copters that had collided and fell out of the sky; the headshrinker wanted to know why Sully so often referred to Malenfant as “that cardplaying bastard” (Sully wouldn’t tell him); the headshrinker wanted to know if Sully still had sexual fantasies, and if so, had they become noticeably violent. Sully had sort of liked the guy—Conroy, his name was—but that didn’t change the fact that he was an asshole. Once, near the end of his time in San Francisco, he had come close to telling Dr. Conroy about Carol. On the whole he was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t know how to think about his old girlfriend, let alone talk about her (con-flicted was Conroy’s word for this state). He had called her a stupid fucked-up cunt, but the whole damn world was sort of fucked-up these days, wasn’t it? And if anyone knew how easily violent behavior could break its leash and just run away, John Sullivan did. All he was sure of was that he hoped the police wouldn’t kill her when they finally caught up to her and her friends.

Asshole or not, Dr. Conroy hadn’t been entirely wrong about Sully coming to understand old mamasan as time went by. The most important thing was understanding—on a gut level—that old mamasan wasn’t there. Head-knowledge of that basic fact was easy, but his gut was slower to learn, possibly because his gut had been torn open in Dong Ha and a thing like that just had to slow the understanding process down.

He had borrowed some of Dr. Conroy’s books, and the hospital librarian had gotten him a couple of others on inter-library loan. According to the books, old mamasan in her green pants and orange top was “an externalized fantasy” which served as a “coping mecha-nism” to help him deal with his “survivor guilt” and “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” She was a daydream, in other words.

Whatever the reasons, his attitude about her changed as her appearances became less frequent. Instead of feeling revulsion or a kind of superstitious dread when she turned up, he began to feel almost happy when he saw her. The way you felt when you saw an old friend who had left town but sometimes came back for a little visit.

He lived in Milford now, a town about twenty miles north of Har-wich on I-95 and light-years away in most other senses. Harwich had been a pleasant, tree-filled suburb when Sully lived there as a kid, chumming with Bobby Garfield and Carol Gerber. Now his old home town was one of those places you didn’t go at night, just a grimy adjunct to Bridgeport. He still spent most of his days there, on the lot or in his office (Sullivan Chevrolet had been a Gold Star deal-ership four years running now), but he was gone by six o’clock most evenings, seven for sure, tooling north to Milford in his Caprice demonstrator. He usually went with an unacknowledged but very real sense of gratitude.

On this particular summer day he had gone south from Milford on I-95 as usual, but at a later hour and without getting off at Exit 9, ASHER AVENUE HARWICH. Today he had kept the new demo pointed south (it was blue with blackwall tires, and watching people’s brake-lights go on when they saw him in their rearview mirrors never failed to amuse him—they thought he was a cop) and drove all the way into New York City.

He left the car at Arnie Mossberg’s dealership on the West Side (when you were a Chevy dealer there was never a parking problem; that was one of the nice things about it), did some window-shopping on his way across town, had a steak at Palm Too, then went to Pagano’s funeral.

Pags had been one of the guys at the chopper crash-site that morn-ing, one of the guys in the ’ville that afternoon. Also one of the guys caught in the final ambush on the trail, the ambush which had begun when Sully himself either stepped on a mine or broke a wire and popped a satchel-charge strapped to a tree. The little men in the black pajamas had been in the high toolies and man, they had opened up. On the trail, Pags had grabbed Wollensky when Wollensky got shot in the throat. He got Wollensky into the clearing, but by then Wollensky was dead. Pags would have been covered with Wollen-sky’s blood (Sullivan didn’t actually remember seeing that; he had been in his own hell by then), but that was probably something of a relief to the man because it covered up the other blood, still not entirely dry. Pagano had been standing close enough to get splat-tered when Slocum shot Malenfant’s buddy. Splattered with Clem-son’s blood, splattered with Clemson’s brains.

Sully had never said a word about what happened to Clemson in the ’ville, not to Dr. Conroy or anyone else. He had dummied up. All of them had dummied up.

Pags had died of cancer. Whenever one of Sully’s old Nam buddies died (well okay, they weren’t buddies, exactly, most of them dumb as stone boats and not what Sully would really call buddies, but it was the word they used because there was no word invented for what they had really been to each other), it always seemed to be cancer or drugs or suicide. Usually the cancer started in the lung or the brain and then just ran everywhere, as if these men had left their immune systems back in the green. With Dick Pagano it had been pancreatic cancer—him and Michael Landon. It was the disease of the stars. The coffin was open and old Pags didn’t look too shabby. His wife had had the undertaker dress him in an ordinary business suit, not a uni-form. She probably hadn’t even considered the uniform option, despite the decorations Pagano had won. Pags had worn a uniform for only two or three years, those years like an aberration, like time spent in some county joint because you did something entirely out of character on one bad-luck occasion, probably while you were drunk. Killed a guy in a barroom fight, say, or took it into your head to burn down the church where your ex-wife taught Sunday school. Sully couldn’t think of a single man he’d served with, including himself, who would want to be buried in an Army uniform.

Dieffenbaker—Sully still thought of him as the new lieutenant— came to the funeral. Sully hadn’t seen Dieffenbaker in a long time, and they had had themselves quite a talk . . . although Dieffenbaker actually did most of the talking. Sully wasn’t sure talking ever made a difference, but he kept thinking about the stuff Dieffenbaker said. How mad Dieffenbaker had sounded, mostly. All the way back to Connecticut he kept thinking about it.

He was on the Triborough Bridge heading north again by two o’clock, in plenty of time to beat the rush-hour traffic. “Smooth movement across the Triborough and at key points along the LIE,” was how the traffic-reporter in the WINS copter put it. That’s what copters were for these days; gauging the flow of traffic in and out of America’s cities.

When the traffic started to slow just north of Bridgeport, Sully didn’t notice. He had switched from news to oldies and had fallen to thinking about Pags and his harmonicas. It was a war-movie cliché, the grizzled G.I. with the mouth-harp, but Pagano, dear God, Pagano could drive you out of your ever-fuckin mind. Night and day he had played em, until one of the guys—it might have been Hexley or even Garrett Slocum—told him that if he didn’t quit it, he was apt to wake up one morning with the world’s first whistling rectal implant.

The more he considered it, the more Sully thought Sly Slocum had been the one to threaten the rectal implant. Big black man from Tulsa, thought Sly and the Family Stone was the best group on earth, hence the nickname, and refused to believe that another group he admired, Rare Earth, was white. Sully remembered Deef (this was before Dieffenbaker became the new lieutenant and gave Slocum that nod, probably the most important gesture Dieffenbaker had ever made or ever would make in his life) telling Slocum that those guys were just as white as fuckin Bob Dylan (“the folksingin honky” was what Slocum called Dylan). Slocum thought this over, then replied with what was for him rare gravity. The fuck you say. Rare Earth, man, those guys black. They record on fuckin Motown, and all Motown groups are black, everyone know that. Supremes, fuckin Temps, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I respect you, Deef, you bad and you nationwide, without a doubt, man, but if you persist in your bullshit, I going to knock you down.

Slocum hated harmonica music. Harmonica music made him think of the folksingin honky. If you tried to tell him that Dylan cared about the war, Slocum asked then how come the mulebray muthafucka didn’t come on over here with Bob Hope one time. I tell you why, Slocum said. He scared, that’s why. Fuckin candyass har-monica-blowin mulebray muthafucka!

Musing on Dieffenbaker rapping about the sixties. Thinking of those old names and old faces and old days. Not noticing as the Caprice’s speedometer dropped from sixty to fifty to forty, the traffic starting to stack up in all four northbound lanes. He remembered how Pags had been over there in the green—skinny, black-haired, his cheeks still dotted with the last of his post-adolescent acne, a rifle in his hands and two Hohner harmonicas (one key of C, one key of G) stuffed into the waistband of his camo trousers. Thirty years ago, that had been. Roll back ten more and Sully was a kid growing up in Harwich, palling with Bobby Garfield and wishing that Carol Ger-ber would look at him, John Sullivan, just once the way she always looked at Bobby.

In time she had looked at him of course, but never in quite the same way. Was it because she was no longer eleven or because he wasn’t Bobby? Sully didn’t know. The look itself had been a mystery. It seemed to say that Bobby was killing her and she was glad, she would die that way until the stars fell from the sky and the rivers ran uphill and all the words to “Louie Louie” were known.

What had happened to Bobby Garfield? Had he gone to Vietnam? Joined the flower children? Married, fathered children, died of pancreatic cancer? Sully didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that Bobby had changed somehow in the summer of 1960—the summer Sully had won a free week at the YMCA camp on Lake George—and had left town with his mother. Carol had stayed through high school, and even if she had never looked at him quite the way she had looked at Bobby, he had been her first, and she his. One night out in the country behind some Newburg dairy-farmer’s barnful of lowing cattle. Sully remembered smelling sweet perfume on her throat as he came.

Why that odd cross-connection between Pagano in his coffin and the friends of his childhood? Perhaps because Pags had looked a little bit like Bobby had looked in those bygone days. Bobby’s hair had been dark red instead of black, but he’d had that same skinny build and angular face . . . and the same freckles. Yeah! Both Pags and Bobby with that Opie Taylor spray of freckles across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose! Or maybe it was just because when some-one dies, you think about the past, the past, the fuckin past.

Now the Caprice was down to twenty miles an hour and the traf-fic stopped dead farther up, just shy of Exit 9, but Sully still didn’t notice. On WKND, the oldies station, ? and The Mysterians were singing “96 Tears” and he was thinking about walking down the cen-ter aisle of the chapel with Dieffenbaker in front of him, walking up to the coffin for his first look at Pagano while the canned hymns played. “Abide with Me” was the current ditty wafting through the air above Pagano’s corpse—Pags, who had been perfectly happy to sit for hours with the .50-caliber propped up beside him and his pack on his lap and a deck of Winstons parked in the strap of his helmet, playing “Goin’ Up the Country” over and over again.

Any resemblance to Bobby Garfield was long gone, Sully saw as he looked into the coffin. The mortician had done a job good enough to justify the open coffin, but Pags still had the loose-skinned, sharp-chinned look of a fat man who has spent his final months on the Can-cer Diet, the one they never write up in the National Enquirer, the one that consists of radiation, injected chemical poisons, and all the potato chips you want.

“Remember the harmonicas?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“I remember,” Sully said. “I remember everything.” It came out sounding weird, and Dieffenbaker glanced at him.

Sully had a clear, fierce flash of how Deef had looked on that day in the ’ville when Malenfant, Clemson, and those other nimrods had all of a sudden started paying off the morning’s terror . . . the whole last week’s terror. They wanted to put it somewhere, the howls in the night and the sudden mortar-shots and finally the burning copters that had fallen with their rotors still turning, dispersing the smoke of their own deaths as they dropped. Down they came, whacko! And the little men in the black pajamas were shooting at Delta two-two and Bravo two-one from the bush just as soon as the Americans ran out into the clearing. Sully had run with Willie Shearman beside him on the right and Lieutenant Packer in front of him; then Lieutenant Packer took a round in the face and no one was in front of him. Ron-nie Malenfant was on his left and Malenfant had been yelling in his high-pitched voice, on and on and on, he was like some mad high-pressure telephone salesman gourded out on amphetamines: Come on, you fuckin ringmeats! Come on, you slopey Joes! Shoot me, ya fucks! You fuckin fucks! Can’t shoot fa shit! Pagano was behind them, and Slocum was beside Pags. Some Bravo guys but mostly Delta boys, that was his memory. Willie Shearman yelled for his own guys, but a lot of them hung back. Delta two-two didn’t hang back. Clemson was there, and Wollensky, and Hackermeyer, and it was amazing how he could remember their names; their names and the smell of that day. The smell of the green and the smell of the kerosene. The sight of the sky, blue on green, and oh man how they would shoot, how those little fuckers would shoot, you never forgot how they would shoot or the feel of a round passing close beside you, and Malenfant was screaming Shoot me, ya deadass ringmeats! Can’t! Fuckin blind! Come on, I’m right here! Fuckin blindeye homo slopehead assholes, I’m right here! And the men in the downed helicopters were screaming, so they pulled them out, got the foam on the fire and pulled them out, only they weren’t men anymore, not what you’d call men, they were screaming TV dinners for the most part, TV dinners with eyes and belt-buckles and these clittery reach-ing fingers with smoke rising from the melted nails, yeah, like that, not stuff you could tell people like Dr. Conroy, how when you pulled them parts of them came off, kind of slid off the way the baked skin of a freshly cooked turkey will slide along the hot liquefied fat just beneath, like that, and all the time you’re smelling the green and the kerosene, it’s all happening, it’s a rilly rilly big shew, as Ed Sullivan used to say, and it’s all happening on our stage, and all you can do is roll with it, try to get over.

That was the morning, that was the helicopters, and something like that had to go somewhere. When they got to the shitty little ’ville that afternoon they still had the stink of charred helicopter crewmembers in their noses, the old lieutenant was dead, and some of the men— Ronnie Malenfant and his friends, if you wanted to get right down to particulars—had gone a little bughouse. Dieffenbaker was the new lieutenant, and all at once he had found himself in charge of crazy men who wanted to kill everyone they saw—children, old men, old mamasans in red Chinese sneakers.

The copters crashed at ten. At approximately two-oh-five, Ronnie Malenfant first stuck his bayonet into the old woman’s stomach and then announced his intention of cutting off the fuckin pig’s head. At approximately four-fifteen, less than four klicks away, the world blew up in John Sullivan’s face. That had been his big day in Dong Ha Province, his rilly big shew.

Standing there between two shacks at the head of the ’ville’s single street, Dieffenbaker had looked like a scared sixteen-year-old kid. But he hadn’t been sixteen, he’d been twenty-five, years older than Sully and most of the others. The only other man there of Deef’s age and rank was Willie Shearman, and Willie seemed reluctant to step in. Perhaps the rescue operation that morning had exhausted him. Or perhaps he had noticed that once again it was the Delta two-two boys who were leading the charge. Malenfant was screaming that when the fuckin slopehead Cong saw a few dozen heads up on sticks, they’d think twice about fucking with Delta Lightning. On and on in that shrill, drilling phone salesman’s voice of his. The cardplayer. Mr. Card-Shark. Pags had his harmonicas; Malenfant had his deck of fuckin Bikes. Hearts, that was Malenfant’s game. A dime a point if he could get it, nickel a point if he couldn’t. Come on, boys! he’d yell in that shrill voice of his, a voice Sully swore could cause nosebleeds and kill locusts on the wing. Come on, pony up, we huntin The Bitch!

Sully remembered standing in the street and looking at the new lieutenant’s pale, exhausted, confused face. He remembered think-ing, He can’t do it. Whatever needs to be done to stop this before it really gets going, he can’t do it. But then Dieffenbaker got it together and gave Sly Slocum the nod. Slocum didn’t hesitate a moment. Slocum, standing there in the street beside an overturned kitchen chair with chrome legs and a red seat, had shouldered his rifle, sighted in, and blown Ralph Clemson’s head clean off. Pagano, standing nearby and gaping at Malenfant, hardly seemed aware that he had been splattered pretty much from head to toe. Clemson fell dead in the street and that stopped the party. Game over, baby.

These days Dieffenbaker had a substantial golf-gut and wore bifocals. Also, he’d lost most of his hair. Sully was amazed at this, because Deef had had a pretty full head of it five years ago, at the unit’s reunion on the Jersey shore. That was the last time, Sully had vowed to himself, that he would party with those guys. They didn’t get bet-ter. They didn’t fuckin mellow. Each reunion was more like the cast of Seinfeld on a really mean batch of crank.

“Want to come outside and have a smoke?” the new lieutenant asked. “Or did you give that up when everyone else did?”

“Gave it up like everyone else, that’s affirmative.” They had been standing a little to the left of the coffin by then so the rest of the mourners could get a look and then get past them. Talking in low tones, the taped music rolling easily over their voices, the draggy sal-vation soundtrack. The current tune was “The Old Rugged Cross,” Sully believed.

He said, “I think Pags would’ve preferred—”

“‘Goin’ Up the Country’ or ‘Let’s Work Together,’” Dieffenbaker finished, grinning.

Sully grinned back. It was one of those unexpected moments, like a brief sunny break in a day-long spell of rain, when it was okay to remember something—one of those moments when you were, amaz-ingly, almost glad you had been there. “Or maybe ‘Boom Boom,’ that one by The Animals,” he said.

“Remember Sly Slocum telling Pags he’d stuff that harmonica up his ass if Pags didn’t give it a rest?”

Sully had nodded, still grinning. “Said if he shoved it up there far enough, Pags could play ‘Red River Valley’ when he farted.” He had glanced fondly back at the coffin, as if expecting Pagano would also be grinning at the memory. Pagano wasn’t. Pagano was just lying there with makeup on his face. Pagano had gotten over. “Tell you what—I’ll come outside and watch you smoke.”

“Done deal.” Dieffenbaker, who had once given the okay for one of his soldiers to kill another of his soldiers, had started up the chapel’s side aisle, his bald head lighting up with mixed colors as he passed beneath each stained-glass window. Limping after him—he had been limping over half his life now and never noticed anymore—came John Sullivan, Gold Star Chevrolet dealer.

The traffic on I-95 slowed to a crawl and then came to a complete stop, except for the occasional forward twitch in one of the lanes. On the radio ? and The Mysterians had given way to Sly and the Family Stone—“Dance to the Music.” Fuckin Slocum would have been seat-bopping for sure, seat-bopping to the max. Sully put the Caprice demonstrator in Park and tapped in time on the steering wheel.

As the song began to wind down he looked to his right and there was old mamasan in the shotgun seat, not seat-bopping but just sit-ting there with her yellow hands folded in her lap and her crazy-bright sneakers, those Chuck Taylor knockoffs, planted on the disposable plastic floormat with SULLIVAN CHEVROLETAPPRECIATES YOUR BUSINESS printed on it.

“Hello, you old bitch,” Sully said, pleased rather than disturbed. When was the last time she’d shown her face? The Tacklins’ New Year’s Eve party, perhaps, the last time Sully had gotten really drunk. “Why weren’t you at Pags’s funeral? The new lieutenant asked after you.”

She made no reply, but hey, when did she ever? She only sat there with her hands folded and her black eyes on him, a Halloween vision in green and orange and red. Old mamasan was like no ghost in a Hollywood movie, though; you couldn’t see through her, she never changed her shape, never faded away. She wore a woven piece of twine on one scrawny yellow wrist like a junior-high-school kid’s friendship bracelet. And although you could see every twist of the twine and every wrinkle on her ancient face, you couldn’t smell her and the one time Sully tried to touch her she had disappeared on him. She was a ghost and his head was the haunted house she lived in. Only every now and then (usually without pain and always without warning), his head would vomit her out where he had to look at her.

She didn’t change. She never went bald or got gallstones or needed bifocals. She didn’t die as Clemson and Pags and Packer and the guys in the crashed helicopters had died (even the two they had taken from the clearing covered in foam like snowmen had died, they were too badly burned to live and it had all been for nothing). She didn’t disappear as Carol had done, either. No, old mamasan contin-ued to pop in for the occasional visit, and she hadn’t changed a bit since the days when “Instant Karma” was a top-ten hit. She had to die once, that was true, had to lie there in the mud while Malenfant first drove his bayonet into her belly and then announced his inten-tion of removing her head, but since then she had been absolutely cruisin.

“Where you been, darlin?” If anyone in another car happened to look over (his Caprice was surrounded on all four sides now, boxed in) and saw his lips moving, they’d just assume he was singing along with the radio. Even if they thought anything else, who gave a fuck? Who gave a fuck what any of them thought? He had seen things, terrible things, not the least of them a roll of his own intestines lying in the bloody mat of his pubic hair, and if he sometimes saw this old ghost (and talked to her), so fuckin what? Whose business was it but his own?

Sully looked up the road, trying to spy what had plugged the traf-fic (he couldn’t, you never could, you just had to wait and creep for-ward a little when the guy in front of you crept forward), and then looked back. Sometimes when he did that she was gone. Not this time; this time she had just changed her clothes. The red sneaks were the same but now she was wearing a nurse’s uniform: white nylon pants, white blouse (with a small gold watch pinned to it, what a nice touch), white cap with a little black stripe. Her hands were still folded in her lap, though, and she was still looking at him.

“Where you been, Mama? I missed you. I know that’s weird but it’s true. Mama, you been on my mind. You should have seen the new lieutenant. Really, it’s amazing. He’s entered the solar sex-panel phase. Totally bald on top, I mean shiny.”

Old mamasan said nothing. Sully wasn’t surprised.

There was an alley beside the funeral parlor with a green-painted bench placed against one side. At either end of the bench was a butt-studded bucket of sand. Dieffenbaker sat beside one of the buckets, stuck a cigarette in his mouth (it was a Dunhill, Sully observed, pretty impressive), then offered the pack to Sully.

“No, I really quit.”

“Excellent.” Dieffenbaker lit up with a Zippo, and Sully realized an odd thing: he had never seen anyone who’d been in Vietnam light his cigarette with matches or those disposable butane lighters; Nam vets all seemed to carry Zippos. Of course that couldn’t really be true. Could it?

“You’ve still got quite a limp on you,” Dieffenbaker said.

“Yeah.”

“On the whole, I’d call it an improvement. The last time I saw you it was almost a lurch. Especially after you got a couple of drinks down the hatch.”

“You still go to the reunions? Do they still have them, the picnics and shit?”

“I think they still have them, but I haven’t been in three years. Got too depressing.”

“Yeah. The ones who don’t have cancer are raving alcoholics. The ones who have managed to kick the booze are on Prozac.”

“You noticed.”

“Fucking yeah I noticed.”

“I guess I’m not surprised. You were never the smartest guy in the world, Sully-John, but you were a perceptive son of a bitch. Even back then. Anyway, you nailed it—booze, cancer, and depression, those’re the main problems, it seems like. Oh, and teeth. I never met a Vietnam vet who wasn’t having the veriest shitpull with his teeth . . . if he has any left, that is. What about you, Sully? How’s the old toofers?”

Sully, who’d had six out since Vietnam (plus root canals almost beyond numbering), wiggled his hand from side to side in a comme ci, comme ça gesture.

“And the other problem?” Dieffenbaker asked. “How’s that?”

“Depends,” Sully said.

“On what?”

“On what I described as my problem. We were at three of those fuckin reunion picnics together—”

“Four. There was also at least one I went to that you didn’t. The year after the one on the Jersey shore? That was the one where Andy Hackermeyer said he was going to kill himself by jumping from the top of the Statue of Liberty.”

“Did he ever do it?”

Dieffenbaker dragged deeply on his cigarette and gave Sully what was still a Lieutenant Look. Even after all these years he could muster that up. Sort of amazing. “If he’d done it, you would have read about it in the Post. Don’t you read the Post?”

“Religiously.”

Dieffenbaker nodded. “Vietnam vets all have trouble with their teeth and they all read the Post. If they’re in the Post’s fallout area, that is. What do you suppose they do if they’re not?”

“Listen to Paul Harvey,” Sully said promptly, and Dieffenbaker laughed.

Sully was remembering Hack, who’d also been there the day of the helicopters and the ’ville and the ambush. Blond kid with an infectious laugh. Had a picture of his girlfriend laminated so it wouldn’t rot in the damp and then wore it around his neck on a little silver chain. Hackermeyer had been right next to Sully when they came into the ’ville and the shooting started. Both of them watching as the old mamasan came running out of her hooch with her hands raised, jabbering six licks to the dozen, jabbering at Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Mims and the other ones who were shoot-ing the place up. Mims had put a round through a little boy’s calf, maybe by accident. The boy was lying in the dirt outside one of the shitty little shacks, screaming. Old mamasan decided Malenfant was the one in charge—why not? Malenfant was the one doing all the yelling—and ran up to him, still waving her hands in the air. Sully could have told her that was a bad mistake, old Mr. Card-Shark had had himself a morning and a half, they all had, but Sully never opened his mouth. He and Hack stood there watching as Malenfant raised the butt of his rifle and drove it down into her face, knocking her flat and stopping her jabber. Willie Shearman had been standing twenty yards or so away, Willie Shearman from the old home town, one of the Catholic boys he and Bobby had been sort of scared of, and there was nothing readable on Willie’s face. Willie Baseball, some of his men called him, and always affectionately.

“So what about your problem, Sully-John?”

Sully came back from the ’ville in Dong Ha to the alley beside the funeral parlor in New York . . . but slowly. Some memories were like the Tar-Baby in that old story about Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit; you got stuck on them. “I guess it all depends. What problem did I say I had?”

“You said you got your balls blown off when they hit us outside the ’ville. You said it was God punishing you for not stopping Malenfant before he went all dinky-dau and killed the old lady.”

Dinky-dau didn’t begin to cover it, Malenfant standing with his legs planted on either side of the old lady, bringing the bayonet down and still running his mouth the whole time. When the blood started to come out it made her orange top look like tie-dye.

“I exaggerated a trifle,” Sully said, “as drunks tend to do. Part of the old scrotal sack is still present and accounted for and sometimes the pump still turns on. Especially since Viagra. God bless that shit.”

“Have you quit the booze as well as the cigarettes?”

“I take the occasional beer,” Sully said.

“Prozac?”

“Not yet.”

“Divorced?”

Sully nodded. “You?”

“Twice. T hinking about taking the plunge again, though. Mary Theresa Charlton, how sweet she is. Third time lucky, that’s my motto.”

“You know something, Loot?” Sully asked. “We’ve uncovered some clear legacies of the Vietnam experience here.” He popped up a finger. “Vietnam vets get cancer, usually of the lung or the brain, but other places, too.”

“Like Pags. Pags was the pancreas, wasn’t it?”

“Right.”

“All that cancer’s because of the Orange,” Dieffenbaker said. “Nobody can prove it but we all know it. Agent Orange, the gift that keeps on giving.”

Sully popped up a second finger—yer fuckfinger, Ronnie Malen-fant would undoubtedly have called it. “Vietnam vets get depressed, get drunk at parties, threaten to jump off national landmarks.” Out with the third finger. “Vietnam vets have bad teeth.” Pinky finger. “Vietnam vets get divorced.”

Sully had paused at that point, vaguely hearing canned organ music coming through a partially opened window, looking at his four popped fingers and then at the thumb still tucked against his palm. Vets were drug addicts. Vets were bad loan risks, by and large; any bank officer would tell you so (in the years when Sully had been get-ting the dealership up and running a number of bankers had told him so). Vets maxed out their credit cards, got thrown out of gam-bling casinos, wept over songs by George Strait and Patty Loveless, knifed each other over shuffleboard bowling games in bars, bought muscle cars on credit and then wrecked them, beat their wives, beat their kids, beat their fuckin dogs, and probably cut themselves shav-ing more often than people who had never been closer to the green than Apocalypse Now or that fucking piece of shit The Deer Hunter.

“What’s the thumb?” Dieffenbaker asked. “Come on, Sully, you’re killing me here.”

Sully looked at his folded thumb. Looked at Dieffenbaker, who now wore bifocals and carried a potbelly (what Vietnam vets usually called “the house that Bud built”) but who still might have that skinny young man with the wax-candle complexion somewhere inside of him. Then he looked back at his thumb and popped it out like a guy trying to hitch a ride.

“Vietnam vets carry Zippos,” he said. “At least until they stop smoking.”

“Or until they get cancer,” Dieffenbaker said. “At which point their wives no doubt pry em out of their weakening palsied hands.”

“Except for all the ones who’re divorced,” Sully said, and they both laughed. It had been good outside the funeral parlor. Well, maybe not good, exactly, but better than inside. The organ music in there was bad, the sticky smell of the flowers was worse. The smell of the flowers made Sully think of the Mekong Delta. “In country,” peo-ple said now, but he didn’t remember ever having heard that partic-ular phrase back then.

“So you didn’t entirely lose your balls after all,” Dieffenbaker said.

“Nope, never quite made it into Jake Barnes country.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sully wasn’t much of a book-reader, never had been (his friend Bobby had been the book-reader), but the rehab librarian had given him The Sun Also Rises and Sully had read it avidly, not once but three times. Back then it had seemed very important—as important as that book Lord of the Flies had been to Bobby when they were kids. Now Jake Barnes seemed remote, a tin man with fake problems. Just one more made-up thing.

“No?”

“No. I can have a woman if I really want to have one—not kids, but I can have a woman. There’s a fair amount of preparation involved, though, and mostly it seems like too much trouble.”

Dieffenbaker said nothing for several moments. He sat looking at his hands. When he looked up, Sully thought he’d say something about how he had to get moving, a quick goodbye to the widow and then back to the wars (Sully thought that in the new lieutenant’s case the wars these days involved selling computers with something magical called Pentium inside them), but Dieffenbaker didn’t say that. He asked, “And what about the old lady? Do you still see her, or is she gone?”

Sully had felt dread—unformed but vast—stir at the back of his mind. “What old lady?” He couldn’t remember telling Dieffenbaker, couldn’t remember telling anybody, but of course he must have. Shit, he could have told Dieffenbaker anything at those reunion pic-nics; they were nothing but liquor-smelling black holes in his mem-ory, every one of them.

“Old mamasan,” Dieffenbaker said, and brought out his ciga-rettes again. “The one Malenfant killed. You said you used to see her. ‘Sometimes she wears different clothes, but it’s always her,’ you said. Do you still see her?”

“Can I have one of those?” Sully asked. “I never had a Dunhill.”

On WKND Donna Summer was singing about a bad girl, bad girl, you’re such a naughty bad girl, beep-beep. Sully turned to old mamasan, who was in her orange top and her green pants again, and said: “Malenfant was never obviously crazy. No crazier than anyone else, anyway . . . except maybe about Hearts. He was always looking for three guys to play Hearts with him, and that isn’t really crazy, would you say? No crazier than Pags with his harmonicas and a lot less than the guys who spent their nights snorting heroin. Also, Ron-nie helped yank those guys out of the choppers. There must’ve been a dozen gooks in the bush, maybe two dozen, all of them shooting away like mad, they wasted Lieutenant Packer and Malenfant must have seen it happen, he was right there, but he never hesitated.” Nor had Fowler or Hack or Slocum or Peasley or Sully himself. Even after Packer went down they had kept going. They were brave kids. And if their bravery had been wasted in a war made by pigheaded old men, did that mean the bravery was of no account? For that matter, was Carol Gerber’s cause wrong because a bomb had gone off at the wrong time? Shit, lots of bombs had gone off at the wrong time in Vietnam. What was Ronnie Malenfant, when you got right down to it, but a bomb that had gone off at the wrong time?

Old mamasan went on looking at him, his ancient white-haired date sitting there in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap— yellow hands folded where the orange smock met the green polyester pants.

“They’d been shooting at us for almost two weeks,” Sully said.

“Ever since we left the A Shau Valley. We won at Tam Boi and when you win you’re supposed to roll, at least that’s what I always thought, but what we were doing was a retreat, not a roll. Shit, one step from a rout is what it was, and we sure didn’t feel like winners for long. There was no support, we were just hung out to dry. Fuckin Viet-namization! What a joke that was!”

He fell silent for a moment or two, looking at her while she looked calmly back. Beyond them, the halted traffic glittered like a fever. Some impatient trucker hit his airhorn and Sully jumped like a man suddenly awakened from a doze.

“That’s when I met Willie Shearman, you know—falling back from the A Shau Valley. I knew he looked familiar and I was sure I’d met him someplace, but I couldn’t think where. People change a hell of a lot between fourteen and twenty-four, you know. Then one after-noon he and a bunch of the other Bravo Company guys were sitting around and bullshitting, talking about girls, and Willie said that the first time he ever got French-kissed, it was at a St. Theresa of Avila Sodality dance. And I think, ‘Holy shit, those were the St. Gabe’s girls.’ I walked up to him and said, ‘You Steadfast guys might have been the kings of Asher Avenue, but we whipped your pansy asses every time you came down to Harwich High to play football.’ Hey, you talk about a gotcha! Fuckin Willie jumped up so fast I thought he was gonna run away like the Gingerbread Man. It was like he’d seen a ghost, or something. Then he laughed and stuck out his hand and I saw he was still wearing his St. Gabe’s high-school ring! And you know what it all goes to prove?”

Old mamasan didn’t say anything, she never did, but Sully could see in her eyes that she did know what it all went to prove: people were funny, kids say the darndest things, winners never quit and quitters never win. Also God bless America.

“Anyway, that whole week they chased us, and it started to get obvious that they were bearing down . . . squeezing the sides . . . our casualties kept going up and you couldn’t get any sleep because of the flares and the choppers and the howling they’d do at night, back there in the toolies. And then they’d come at you, see . . . twenty of them, three dozen of them . . . poke and pull back, poke and pull back, like that . . . and they had this thing they’d do . . .”

Sully licked his lips, aware that his mouth had gone dry. Now he wished he hadn’t gone to Pags’s funeral. Pags had been a good guy, but not good enough to justify the return of such memories.

“They’d set up four or five mortars in the bush . . . on one of our flanks, you know . . . and beside each mortar they’d line up eight or nine guys, each one with a shell. The little men in the black pajamas, all lined up like kids at the drinking fountain back in grammar school. And when the order came, each guy would drop his shell into the mortar-tube and then run forward just as fast as he could. Run-ning that way, they’d engage the enemy—us—at about the same time their shells came down. It always made me think of something the guy who lived upstairs from Bobby Garfield told us once when we were playing pass on Bobby’s front lawn. It was about some base-ball player the Dodgers used to have. Ted said this guy was so fuckin fast he could hit a fungo pop fly at home plate, then run out to short-stop and catch it himself. It was . . . sort of unnerving.”

Yes. The way he was sort of unnerved right now, sort of freaked out, like a kid who makes the mistake of telling himself ghost stories in the dark.

“The fire they poured into that clearing where the choppers went down was only more of the same, believe you me.” Except that wasn’t exactly true. The Cong had let it all hang out that morning; turned the volume up to eleven and then pulled the knobs off, as Mims liked to say. The shooting from the bush around the burning choppers had been like a steady downpour instead of a shower.

There were cigarettes in the Caprice’s glove compartment, an old pack of Winstons Sully kept for emergencies, transferring from one car to the next whenever he switched rides. That one cigarette he’d bummed from Dieffenbaker had awakened the tiger and now he reached past old mamasan, opened the glove-box, pawed past all the paperwork, and found the pack. The cigarette would taste stale and hot in his throat, but that was okay. That was sort of what he wanted.

“Two weeks of shooting and squeezing,” he told her, pushing in the lighter. “Shake and bake and don’t look for the fuckin ARVN, baby, because they always seemed to have better things to do. Bitches, barbecues, and bowling tournaments, Malenfant used to say. We kept taking casualties, the air cover was never there when it was supposed to be, no one was getting any sleep, and it seemed like the more other guys from the A Shau linked up with us the worse it got. I remember one of Willie’s guys—Havers or Haber, something like that—got it right in the head. Got it in the fuckin head and then just lay there on the path with his eyes open, trying to talk. Blood pouring out of this hole right here . . .” Sully tapped a finger against his skull just over his ear. “. . . and we couldn’t believe he was still alive, let alone trying to talk. Then the thing with the choppers . . . that was like something out of a movie, all the smoke and shooting, bup-bup-bup-bup. That was the lead-in for us—you know, into your ’ville. We came up on it and boy . . . there was this one chair, like a kitchen chair with a red seat and steel legs pointing up at the sky, in the street. It just looked crapass, I’m sorry but it did, not worth liv-ing in, let alone dying for. Your guys, the ARVN, they didn’t want to die for places like that, why would we? The place stank, it smelled like shit, but they all did. That’s how it seemed. I didn’t care so much about the smell, anyway. Mostly I think it was the chair that got to me. That one chair said it all.”

Sully pulled out the lighter, started to apply the cherry-red coil to the tip of his cigarette, and then remembered he was in a demonstra-tor. He could smoke in a demo—hell, it was off his own lot—but if one of the salesmen smelled the smoke and concluded that the boss was doing what was a firing offense for anyone else, it wouldn’t be good. You had to walk the walk as well as talk the talk . . . at least you did if you wanted to get a little respect.

“Excusez-moi,” he told the old mamasan. He got out of the car, which was still running, lit his cigarette, then bent in the window to slide the lighter back into its dashboard receptacle. The day was hot, and the four-lane sea of idling cars made it seem even hotter. Sully could sense the impatience all around him, but his was the only radio he could hear; everyone else was under glass, buttoned into their lit-tle air-conditioned cocoons, listening to a hundred different kinds of music, from Liz Phair to William Ackerman. He guessed that any vets caught in the jam who didn’t have the Allman Brothers on CD or Big Brother and the Holding Company on tape were probably also listening to WKND, where the past had never died and the future never came. Toot-toot, beep-beep.

Sully hitch-stepped to the hood of his car and stood on tiptoe, shading his eyes against the glare of sun on chrome and looking for the problem. He couldn’t see it, of course.

Bitches, barbecues, and bowling tournaments, he thought, and the thought came in Malenfant’s squealing, drilling voice. That nightmare voice under the blue and out of the green. Come on, boys, who’s got The Douche? I’m down to ninety and a wakeup, time’s short, let’s get this fuckin show on the fuckin road!

He took a deep drag on the Winston, then coughed out stale hot smoke. Black dots began a sudden dance in the afternoon brightness, and he looked down at the cigarette between his fingers with an expression of nearly comic horror. What was he doing, starting up with this shit again? Was he crazy? Well yes, of course he was crazy, anyone who saw dead old ladies sitting beside them in their cars had to be crazy, but that didn’t mean he had to start up with this shit again. Cigarettes were Agent Orange that you paid for. Sully threw the Winston away. It felt like the right decision, but it didn’t slow the accelerating beat of his heart or his sense—so well remembered from the patrols he’d been on—that the inside of his mouth was drying out and pulling together, puckering and crinkling like burned skin. Some people were afraid of crowds—agoraphobia, it was called, fear of the marketplace—but the only time Sully ever had that sense of too much and too many was at times like this. He was okay in elevators and crowded lobbies at intermission and on rush-hour train plat-forms, but when traffic clogged to a stop all around him, he got dinky-dau. There was, after all, nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

A few other folks were emerging from their air-conditioned life-pods. A woman in a severe brown business suit standing by a severe brown BMW, a gold bracelet and silver earrings summarizing the summer sunlight, all but tapping one cordovan high heel with impa-tience. She caught Sully’s eye, rolled her own heavenward as if to say Isn’t this typical, and glanced at her wristwatch (also gold, also gleaming). A man astride a green Yamaha crotchrocket killed his bike’s raving engine, put the bike on its kickstand, removed his hel-met, and placed it on the oilstained pavement next to one footpedal. He was wearing black bike-shorts and a sleeveless shirt with PROP-ERTY OF THE NEW YORK KNICKS printed on the front. Sully estimated this gentleman would lose approximately seventy per cent of his skin if he happened to dump the crotchrocket at a speed greater than five miles an hour while wearing such an outfit.

“Bummer, man,” the crotchrocket guy said. “Must be an accident. Hope it’s nothing radioactive.” And laughed to show he was joking.

Up ahead in the far left lane—what would be the fast lane when traffic was actually moving on this stretch of highway—a woman in tennis whites was standing beside a Toyota with a NO NUKES bumper sticker on the left side of the license plate and one reading HOUSECAT: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT on the right. Her skirt was very short, her thighs were very long and brown, and when she pushed her sunglasses up, propping them in her blond-streaked hair, Sully got a look at her eyes. They were wide and blue and somehow alarmed. It was a look that made you want to stroke her cheek (or perhaps give her a one-armed brother-hug) and tell her not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was a look Sully remembered well. It was the one that had turned him inside out. It was Carol Gerber up there, Carol Ger-ber in sneakers and a tennis dress. He hadn’t seen her since one night in late 1966 when he’d gone over to her house and they’d sat on the sofa (along with Carol’s mother, who had smelled strongly of wine) watching TV. They had ended up arguing about the war and he had left. I’ll go back and see her again when I’m sure I can stay cool, he remembered thinking as he drove away in his old Chevrolet (even back then he’d been a Chevrolet man). But he never had. By late ’66 she was already up to her ass in antiwar shit—that much she’d learned during her semester in Maine, if nothing else—and just thinking about her was enough to make him furious. Fucking little empty-headed idiot was what she was, she’d swallowed all that com-munist antiwar propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Then, of course, she’d joined that nutty group, that MSP, and had high-sided it com-pletely.

“Carol!” he called, starting toward her. He passed the snot-green crotchrocket, cut between the rear bumper of a van and a sedan, tem-porarily lost sight of her as he hurried along the side of a rumbling sixteen-wheeler, then saw her again. “Carol! Hey Carol!” Yet when she turned toward him he wondered what the hell was wrong with him, what had possessed him. If Carol was still alive she had to be pushing fifty now, just as he was. This woman looked maybe thirty-five.

Sully stopped, still a lane away. Cars and trucks rumbling every-where. And an odd whickering sound in the air, which he at first thought was the wind, although the afternoon was hot and perfectly still.

“Carol? Carol Gerber?”

The whicker was louder, a sound like someone flicking his tongue repeatedly through his pursed lips, a sound like a helicopter five klicks away. Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him. He dodged backward in an instinc-tive startle reflex, but he had spent his entire school career playing athletic sports of one kind or another, and even as he was pulling back his head he was reaching with his hand. He caught the lamp-shade quite deftly. On it was a paddleboat churning downriver against a lurid red sunset. WE’RE DOING FINE ON THE MISSISSIPPI was written above the boat in scrolly, old-fashioned letters. Below it, in the same scrolly caps: HOW’SBAYOU?

Where the fuck did this come from? Sully thought, and then the woman who looked like an all-grown-up version of Carol Gerber screamed. Her hands rose as if to adjust the sunglasses propped in her hair and then just hung beside her shoulders, shaking like the hands of a distraught symphony conductor. It was how old mamasan had looked as she came running out of her shitty fucked-up hooch and into the shitty fucked-up street of that shitty fucked-up little ’ville in Dong Ha Province. Blood spilled down over the shoulders of the ten-nis woman’s white dress, first in spatters, then in a flood. It ran down her tanned upper arms and dripped from her elbows.

“Carol?” Sully asked stupidly. He was standing between a Dodge Ram pickup and a Mack semi, dressed in a dark blue suit, the one he wore to funerals, holding a lampshade souvenir of the Mississippi River (how’s bayou) and looking at a woman who now had some-thing sticking out of her head. As she staggered a step forward, blue eyes still wide, hands still shaking in the air, Sully realized it was a cordless phone. He could tell by the stub of aerial, which jiggled with each step she took. A cordless phone had fallen out of the sky, had fallen God knew how many thousands of feet, and now it was in her head.

She took another step, struck the hood of a dark green Buick, and began to sink slowly behind it as her knees buckled. It was like watching a submarine go down, Sully thought, only instead of a periscope all that would be sticking up after she was out of sight would be the stubby antenna of that cordless phone.

“Carol?” he whispered, but it couldn’t be her; no one he’d known as a kid, no one he’d ever slept with, had been destined to die from injuries inflicted by a falling telephone, surely.

People were starting to scream and yell and shout. Mostly the shouts seemed to be questions. Horns were honking. Engines were revving, just as if there were someplace to go. Beside Sully, the driver of the Mack sixteen-wheeler was goosing his power-plant in big, rhythmic snorts. A car alarm began to wibble-wobble. Someone howled in either pain or surprise.

A single trembling white hand clutched at the hood of the dark green Buick. There was a tennis bracelet on the wrist. Slowly the hand and the bracelet slid away from Sully. The fingers of the woman who had looked like Carol gripped at the edge of the hood for a moment, then disappeared. Something else fell, whistling, out of the sky.

“Get down!” Sully screamed. “Ah fuck, get down!”

The whistling rose to a shrill, earsplitting pitch, then stopped as the falling object struck the hood of the Buick, bashing it downward like a fist and popping it up from beneath the windshield. The thing poking out of the Buick’s engine compartment appeared to be a microwave oven.

From all around him there now came the sound of falling objects. It was like being caught in an earthquake that was somehow going on above the ground instead of in it. A harmless shower of magazines fell past him—Seventeen and GQ and Rolling Stone and Stereo Review. With their open fluttering pages they looked like shot birds. To his right an office chair dropped out of the blue, spinning on its base as it came. It struck the roof of a Ford station wagon. The wagon’s windshield blew out in milky chunks. The chair rebounded into the air, tilted, and came to rest on the station wagon’s hood. Beyond that a portable TV, a plastic clothes basket, what looked like a clutch of cameras with the straps all tangled together, and a rubber home plate fell on the slow lane and into the breakdown lane. The home plate was followed by what looked like a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. A theater-size popcorn popper shattered into glittering shards when it hit the road.

The guy in the Knicks shirt, the one with the snot-green crotchrocket, had seen enough. He started running up the narrow corridor between the traffic stalled in the third lane and the traffic stalled in the fast lane, twisting like a slalom skier to avoid the jut-ting side mirrors, holding one hand over his head like a man crossing the street during a spring shower. Sully, still clutching the lamp-shade, thought the guy would have done a lot better to have grabbed his helmet and put it back on, but of course when things started falling all around you you got forgetful and the first thing you were apt to forget was where your best interests lay.

Something else was coming down now, falling close and falling big—bigger than the microwave oven that had bashed in the Buick’s hood, certainly. This time the sound wasn’t a whistle, like a bomb or a mortar-shell, but the sound of a falling plane or helicopter or even a house. In Vietnam Sully had been around when all those things fell out of the sky (the house had been in pieces, granted), and yet this sound was different in one crucial way: it was also musical, like the world’s biggest windchime.

It was a grand piano, white with gold chasing, the sort of piano on which you’d expect a long cool woman in a black dress to tinkle out “Night and Day”—in the traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room, toot-toot, beep-beep. A white grand piano falling out of the Connecticut sky, turning over and over, making a shadow like a jelly-fish on the jammed-up cars, making windy music in its cables as air blew through its rolling chest, its keys rippling like the keys of a player piano, the hazy sun winking on the pedals.

It fell in lazy revolutions, and the fattening sound of its drop was like the sound of something vibrating endlessly in a tin tunnel. It fell toward Sully, its uneasy shadow now starting to focus and shrink, his upturned face its seeming target.

“INCOMING!” Sully screamed, and began to run. “INNCOMMING!”

The piano plummeted toward the turnpike, the white bench falling right behind it, and behind the bench came a comet’s tail of sheet music, 45-rpm records with fat holes in the middle, small appli-ances, a flapping yellow coat that looked like a duster, a Goodyear Wide Oval tire, a barbecue grill, a weathervane, a file-cabinet, and a teacup with WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA printed on the side.

“Can I have one of those?” Sully had asked Dieffenbaker outside the funeral parlor where Pags was lying in his silk-lined box. “I never had a Dunhill.”

“Whatever floats your boat.” Dieffenbaker sounded amused, as if he had never been shit-scared in his life.

Sully could still remember Dieffenbaker standing in the street by that overturned kitchen chair: how pale he had been, how his lips had trembled, how his clothes still smelled of smoke and spilled copter fuel. Dieffenbaker looking around from Malenfant and the old woman to the others who were starting to pour fire into the hooches to the howling kid Mims had shot; he could remember Deef looking at Lieutenant Shearman but there was no help there. No help from Sully himself, for that matter. He could also remember how Slocum was staring at Deef, Deef the lieutenant now that Packer was dead. And finally Deef had looked back at Slocum. Sly Slocum was no officer—not even one of those bigmouth bush gener-als who were always second-guessing everything—and never would be. Slocum was just your basic E-3 or E-4 who thought that a group who sounded like Rare Earth had to be black. Just a grunt, in other words, but one prepared to do what the rest of them weren’t. Never losing hold of the new lieutenant’s distraught eye, Slocum had turned his head back the other way just a little, toward Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Mims and the rest, self-appointed reg-ulators whose names Sully no longer remembered. Then Slocum was back to total eye-contact with Dieffenbaker again. There were six or eight men in all who had gone loco, trotting down the muddy street past the screaming bleeding kid and into that scurgy little ’ville, shouting as they went—football cheers, basic-training cadences, the chorus to “Hang On Sloopy,” shit like that—and Slocum was saying with his eyes Hey, what you want? You the boss now, what you want?

And Dieffenbaker had nodded.

Sully wondered if he could have given that nod himself. He thought not. He thought if it had come down to him, Clemson and Malenfant and those other fuckheads would have killed until their ammo ran out—wasn’t that pretty much what the men under Calley and Medina had done? But Dieffenbaker was no William Calley, give him that. Dieffenbaker had given the little nod. Slocum nodded back, then raised his rifle and blew off Ralph Clemson’s head.

At the time Sully had thought Clemson got the bullet because Slocum knew Malenfant too well, Slocum and Malenfant had smoked more than a few loco-leaves together and Slocum had also been known to spend at least some of his spare time hunting The Bitch with the other Hearts players. But as he sat here rolling Dief-fenbaker’s Dunhill cigarette between his fingers, it occurred to Sully that Slocum didn’t give a shit about Malenfant and his loco-leaves; Malenfant’s favorite card-game, either. There was no shortage of bhang or card-games in Vietnam. Slocum picked Clemson because shooting Malenfant wouldn’t have worked. Malenfant, screaming all his bullshit about putting heads up on sticks to show the Cong what happened to people who fucked with Delta Lightning, was too far away to get the attention of the men splashing and squashing and shooting their way down that muddy street. Plus old mamasan was already dead, so what the fuck, let him carve on her.

Now Deef was Dieffenbaker, a bald computer salesman who had quit going to the reunions. He gave Sully a light with his Zippo, then watched as Sully drew the smoke deep and coughed it back out.

“Been awhile, hasn’t it?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“Two years, give or take.”

“You want to know the scary thing? How fast you get back into practice.”

“I told you about the old lady, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“I think it was the last reunion you came to . . . the one on the Jer-sey shore, the one when Durgin ripped that waitress’s top off. That was an ugly scene, man.”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“You were shitfaced by then.”

Of course he had been, that part was always the same. Come to think of it, all parts of the reunions were always the same. There was a dj who usually left early because someone wanted to beat him up for playing the wrong records. Until that happened the speakers blasted out stuff like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Light My Fire” and “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” and “My Girl,” songs from the soundtracks of all those Vietnam movies that were made in the Philippines. The truth about the music was that most of the grunts Sully remembered used to get choked up over The Carpenters or “Angel of the Morn-ing.” That stuff was the real bush soundtrack, always playing as the men passed around fatties and pictures of their girlfriends, getting stoned and all weepy-goopy over “One Tin Soldier,” popularly known in the green as “The Theme from Fuckin Billy Jack.” Sully couldn’t remember hearing The Doors once in Vietnam; it was always The Strawberry Alarm Clock singing “Incense and Pepper-mints.” On some level he had known the war was lost the first time he heard that fuckin piece of shit on the commissary jukebox.

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. “Some-times 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 some-thing 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 mow-ing the lawn or sitting at our conference table listening to a presenta-tion 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 occa-sion. 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 fuck-ing 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 Con-vention 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 Ron-nie 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 Hedge-hog 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 fuck-ing 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 Dief-fenbaker 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 Malen-fant 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 sneak-ers.

“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 pud-dings 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 footage, 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 burn-ing, 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 dis-tracted and unhappy.

“I like lots of people our age when they’re one by one,” he said, “but I loathe and despise my generation, Sully. We had an opportu-nity to change everything. We actually did. Instead we settled for designer jeans, two tickets to Mariah Carey at Radio City Music Hall, frequent-flier miles, James Cameron’s Titanic, and retirement port-folios. The only generation even close to us in pure, selfish self-indulgence is the so-called Lost Generation of the twenties, and at least most of them had the decency to stay drunk. We couldn’t even do that. Man, we suck.”

The new lieutenant was close to tears, Sully saw. “Deef—”

“You know the price of selling out the future, Sully-John? You can never really leave the past. You can never get over. My thesis is that you’re really not in New York at all. You’re in the Delta, leaning back against a tree, stoned and rubbing bug-dope on the back of your neck. Packer’s still the man because it’s still 1969. Everything you think of as ‘your later life’ is a big fucking pot-bubble. And it’s better that way. Vietnam is better. That’s why we stay there.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely.”

A dark-haired, brown-eyed woman in a blue dress peeked around the corner and said, “So there you are.”

Dieffenbaker stood up as she came toward them, walking slow and pretty on her high heels. Sully stood up, too.

“Mary, this is John Sullivan. He served with me and Pags. Sully, this is my good friend Mary Theresa Charlton.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Sully said, and put out his hand.

Her grip was firm and sure, long cool fingers in his own, but she was looking at Dieffenbaker. “Mrs. Pagano wants to see you, hon. Please?”

“You bet,” Dieffenbaker said. He started toward the front of the building, then turned back to Sully. “Hang in a little bit,” he said. “We’ll go for a drink. I promise not to preach.” But his eyes shifted from Sully’s when he said this, as if they knew it was a promise he couldn’t keep.

“Thanks, Loot, but I really ought to get back. I want to beat the rush-hour traffic.”

But he hadn’t beaten the traffic after all and now a piano was falling toward him, gleaming in the sun and humming to itself as it came. Sully fell flat on his stomach and rolled under a car. The piano came down less than five feet away, detonating and throwing up rows of keys like teeth.

Sully slid back out from beneath the car, burning his back on the hot tailpipe, and struggled to his feet. He looked north along the turnpike, eyes wide and unbelieving. A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: tape recorders and rugs and a riding lawn-mower with the grass-caked blade whirling in its housing and a black lawn-jockey and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it. He saw an old man with a lot of theatrical gray hair running up the breakdown lane and then a flight of steps fell on him, tearing off his left arm and sending him to his knees. There were clocks and desks and coffee tables and a plummeting elevator with its cable uncoiling into the air behind it like a greasy severed umbilicus. A squall of ledgers fell in the parking lot of a nearby industrial complex; their clapping covers sounded like applause. A fur coat fell on a running woman, trapping her, and then a sofa landed on her, crushing her. The air filled with a storm of light as large panes of greenhouse glass dropped out of the blue. A statue of a Civil War soldier smashed through a panel truck. An ironing board hit the railing of the over-pass up ahead and then fell into the stalled traffic below like a spin-ning propeller. A stuffed lion dropped into the back of a pickup truck. Everywhere were running, screaming people. Everywhere were cars with dented roofs and smashed windows; Sully saw a Mer-cedes with the unnaturally pink legs of a department-store man-nequin sticking up from the sunroof. The air shook with whines and whistles.

Another shadow fell on him and even as he ducked and raised his hand he knew it was too late, if it was an iron or a toaster or some-thing like that it would fracture his skull. If it was something bigger he’d be nothing but a grease-spot on the highway.

The falling object struck his hand without hurting it in the slight-est, bounced, and landed at his feet. He looked down at it first with surprise, then with dawning wonder. “Holy shit,” he said.

Sully bent over and picked up the baseball glove which had fallen from the sky, recognizing it at once even after all these years: the deep scratch down the last finger and the comically tangled knots in the rawhide laces of the webbing were as good as fingerprints. He looked on the side, where Bobby had printed his name. It was still there, but the letters looked fresher than they should have, and the leather here looked frayed and faded and whipsawed, as if other names had been inked in the same spot and then erased.

Closer to his face, the smell of the glove was both intoxicating and irresistible. Sully slipped it onto his hand, and when he did something crackled beneath his little finger—a piece of paper shoved in there. He paid no attention. Instead he put the glove over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Leather and neat’s-foot oil and sweat and grass. All the summers that were. The summer of 1960, for instance, when he had had come back from his week at camp to find everything changed—Bobby sullen, Carol distant and palely thoughtful (at least for awhile), and the cool old guy who’d lived on the third floor of Bobby’s building—Ted—gone. Everything had changed . . . but it was still summer, he had still been eleven, and everything had still seemed . . .

“Eternal,” he murmured into the glove, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with butterflies shattered on the roof of a bread-van and a stop-sign stuck, quivering, into the breakdown lane like a thrown spear. Sully remembered his Bo-lo Bouncer and his black Keds and the taste of Pez straight out of the gun, how the pieces of candy would hit the roof of your mouth and then ricochet onto your tongue; he remembered the way his catcher’s mask felt when it sat on his face just right and the hisha-hisha-hisha of the lawn-sprinklers on Broad Street and how mad Mrs. Conlan got if you walked too close to her precious flowers and Mrs. Godlow at the Asher Empire wanting to see your birth certificate if she thought you were too big to be still under twelve and the poster of Brigitte Bardot

(if she’s trash I’d love to be the trashman)

in her towel and playing guns and playing pass and playing Careers and making arm-farts in the back of Mrs. Sweetser’s fourth-grade classroom and—

“Hey, American.” Only she said it Amellican and Sully knew who he was going to see even before he raised his head from Bobby’s Alvin Dark–model glove. It was old mamasan, standing there between the crotchrocket, which had been crushed by a freezer (wrapped meat was spilling out of its shattered door in frosty blocks), and a Subaru with a lawn-flamingo punched through its roof. Old mamasan in her green pants and orange smock and red sneakers, old mamasan lit up like a bar-sign in hell.

“Hey, American, you come me, I keep safe.” And she held out her arms.

Sully walked toward her through the noisy hail of falling televi-sions and backyard pools and cartons of cigarettes and high-heeled shoes and a great big pole hairdryer and a pay telephone that hit and vomited a jackpot of quarters. He walked toward her with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.

“I keep safe.” Holding out her arms now. “Poor boy, I keep safe.” Sully stepped into the dead circle of her embrace as people screamed and ran and all things American fell out of the sky, blitzing I-95 north of Bridgeport with their falling glitter. She put her arms around him.

“I keep safe,” she said, and Sully was in his car. Traffic was stopped all around him, four lanes of it. The radio was on, tuned to WKND. The Platters were singing “Twilight Time” and Sully couldn’t breathe. Nothing appeared to have fallen out of the sky, except for the traffic tie-up everything seemed to be in good order, but how could that be? How could it be when he still had Bobby Garfield’s old baseball glove on his hand?

“I keep safe,” old mamasan was saying. “Poor boy, poor American boy, I keep safe.”

Sully couldn’t breathe. He wanted to smile at her. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, that some of them had at least meant well, but he had no air and he was very tired. He closed his eyes and tried to raise Bobby’s glove one final time, get one final shallow whiff of that oily, summery smell, but it was too heavy.

Dieffenbaker was standing at the kitchen counter the next morning, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, pouring himself a cup of cof-fee, when Mary came in from the living room. She was wearing her PROPERTY OF THE DENVER BRONCOS sweatshirt and had the New York Post in her hand.

“I think I have some bad news for you,” she said, then seemed to reconsider. “Moderately bad news.”

He turned to her warily. Bad news should always come after lunch, he thought. At least a person was halfway prepared for bad news after lunch. First thing in the morning everything left a bruise. “What is it?”

“The man you introduced me to yesterday at your buddy’s funeral—you said he was a car dealer in Connecticut, right?”

“Right.”

“I wanted to be sure because John Sullivan isn’t, you know, the world’s most striking and uncommon—”

“What are you talking about, Mary?”

She handed him the paper, which was folded open to a page about halfway into the tabloid. “They say it happened while he was on his way home. I’m sorry, hon.”

She had to be wrong, that was his first thought; people couldn’t die just after you’d seen them and talked to them, it seemed like a basic rule, somehow.

But it was him, all right, and in triplicate: Sully in a high-school base-ball uniform with a catcher’s mask pushed back to the top of his head, Sully in an Army uniform with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve, and Sully in a business suit that had to hail from the late seventies. Beneath the row of pictures was the sort of headline you found only in the Post:

JAMBO!

SILVER STAR VIET VET DIES IN CONN. TRAFFIC JAM

Dieffenbaker scanned the story quickly, feeling the sense of unease and betrayal he always felt these days when he read the death-notice of someone his own age, someone he knew. We are still too young for natural deaths, he always thought, knowing that it was a foolish idea.

Sully had died of an apparent heart attack while stuck in a traffic tie-up caused by a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck. He might well have died within sight of his own dealership’s Chevrolet sign, the article lamented. Like the JAMBO! headline, such epiphanies could be found only in the Post. The Times was a good paper if you were smart; the Post was the newspaper of drunks and poets.

Sully had left an ex-wife and no children. Funeral arrangements were being made by Norman Oliver, of First Connecticut Bank and Trust.

Buried by his bank! Dieffenbaker thought, his hands beginning to shake. He had no idea why this thought filled him with such hor-ror, but it did. By his fucking bank! Oh man!

“Honey?” Mary was looking at him a little nervously. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “He died in a traffic jam. Maybe they couldn’t even get an ambulance to him. Maybe they never even found him until the traffic started moving again. Christ.”

“Don’t,” she said, and took the paper away from him again.

Sully had won the Silver Star for the rescue, of course—the heli-copter rescue. The gooks had been shooting but Packer and Shear-man had led in a bunch of American soldiers, mostly Delta two-twos, just the same. Ten or twelve of the Bravo Company soldiers had laid down a confused and probably not very effective covering fire as the rescue operation took place . . . and for a wonder two of the men from the tangled copters had actually been alive, at least when they came out of the clearing. John Sullivan had carried one of them to cover all by himself, the chopper guy shrieking in his arms and covered with fire-retardant foam.

Malenfant had gone running into the clearing, too—Malenfant clutching one of the extinguisher cannisters like a big red baby and screaming at the Cong in the bush to shoot him if they could, except they couldn’t, he knew they couldn’t, they were just a bunch of blind slopehead syphilitic fucks and they couldn’t hit him, couldn’t hit the broad side of a fuckin barn. Malenfant had also been put up for the Silver Star, and although Dieffenbaker couldn’t say for sure, he sup-posed the pimply little murdering asshole had probably won one. Had Sully known or guessed? Wouldn’t he have mentioned it while they were sitting together outside the funeral parlor? Maybe; maybe not. Medals had a way of seeming less important as time passed, more and more like the award you got in junior high for memorizing a poem or the letter you got in high school for running track and blocking home plate when the throw came home. Just something you kept on a shelf. They were the things old men used to jazz the kids. The things they held out to make you jump higher, run faster, fling yourself for-ward. Dieffenbaker thought the world would probably be a better place without old men (this revelation coming just as he was getting ready to be one himself ). Let the old women live, old women never hurt anyone as a rule, but old men were more dangerous than rabid dogs. Shoot all of them, then douse their bodies with gasoline, then light them on fire. Let the children join hands and dance around the blaze, singing corny old Crosby, Stills and Nash songs.

“Are you really okay?” Mary asked.

“About Sully? Sure. I hadn’t seen him in years.”

He sipped his coffee and thought about the old lady in the red sneakers, the one Malenfant had killed, the one who came to visit Sully. She wouldn’t be visiting Sully anymore; there was that much, at least. Old mamasan’s visiting days were done. It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed—not at truce tables but in can-cer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

1999

1999: Come on, you bastard, come on home.

Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling

On an afternoon in the last summer before the year 2000, Bobby Garfield came back to Harwich, Connecticut. He went to West Side Cemetery first, where the actual memorial service took place at the Sullivan family plot. Old Sully-John got a good crowd; the Post story had brought them out in droves. Several small children were startled into tears when the American Legion honor-guard fired their guns. After the graveside service there was a reception at the local Amvets Hall. Bobby made a token appearance—long enough to have a slice of cake and a cup of coffee and say hello to Mr. Oliver—but he saw no one he knew, and there were places he wanted to go while there was still plenty of good daylight. He hadn’t been back to Harwich in almost forty years.

The Nutmeg Mall stood where St. Gabriel the Steadfast Upper and Secondary Schools had been. The old post office was now a vacant lot. The railway station continued to overlook the Square, but the stone overpass support-posts were covered with graffiti and Mr. Burton’s newsstand kiosk was boarded up. There were still grassy swards between River Avenue and the Housatonic, but the ducks were gone. Bobby remembered throwing one of those ducks at a man in a tan suit—improbable but true. I’ll give you two bucks to let me blow you, the man had said, and Bobby had hucked a duck at him. He could grin about it now, but that nimrod had scared the hell out of him, and for all sorts of reasons.

There was a great beige UPS warehouse where the Asher Empire had stood. Farther along toward Bridgeport, where Asher Avenue emptied into Puritan Square, the William Penn Grille was also gone, replaced by a Pizza Uno. Bobby thought about going in there, but not very seriously. His stomach was fifty, just like the rest of him, and it didn’t do so well with pizza anymore.

Except that wasn’t really the reason. It would be too easy to imag-ine things, that was the real reason—too easy to envision big vulgar cars out front, the paintjobs so bright they seemed to howl.

So he had driven back to Harwich proper, and damned if the Colony Diner wasn’t still where it had always been, and damned if there weren’t still grilled hotdogs on the menu. Hotdogs were as bad as fuckin pizza, maybe worse, but what the hell was Prilosec for, if not the occasional gastronomic ramble down memory lane? He had swallowed one, and chased it with two hotdogs. They still came in those little grease-spotted cardboard sleeves, and they still tasted like heaven.

He tamped the hotdogs down with pie à la mode, then went out and stood by his car for a moment. He decided to leave it where it was—there were only two more stops he wanted to make, and both were within walking distance. He took the gym bag off the passen-ger seat and walked slowly past Spicer’s, which had evolved into a 7-Eleven store with gas-pumps out front. Voices came to him as he passed, 1960 ghost-voices, voices of the Sigsby twins.

Mumma-Daddy havin a fight.

Mumma said stay out.

Why’d you do that, stupid old Bobby Garfield?

Stupid old Bobby Garfield, yes, that had been him. He might have gotten a little smarter over the years, but probably not that much.

Halfway up Broad Street Hill he spied a faded hopscotch grid on the sidewalk. He dropped to one knee and looked at it closely in the latening light, brushing at the squares with the tips of his fingers.

“Mister? You all right?” It was a young woman with a 7-Eleven bag in her arms. She was looking at Bobby with equal parts concern and mistrust.

“I’m fine,” he said, getting to his feet and dusting off his hands. He was, too. Not a single moon or star beside the grid, let alone a comet. Nor had he seen any lost-pet posters in his rambles around town. “I’m fine.”

“Well, good for you,” the young woman said, and hurried on her way. She did not smile. Bobby watched her go and then started walk-ing again himself, wondering what had happened to the Sigsby twins, where they were now. He remembered Ted Brautigan talking about time once, calling it the old bald cheater.

Until he actually saw 149 Broad Street, Bobby hadn’t realized how sure he’d been that it would have become a video-rental store or a sandwich shop or maybe a condominium. Instead it was exactly the same except for the trim, now cream instead of green. There was a bike on the porch, and he thought of how desperately he had wanted a bike that last summer in Harwich. He’d even had a jar to save money in, with a label on it that said Bike Account, or something.

More ghost-voices as he stood there with his shadow lengthening into the street.

If we were the Gotrocks, you wouldn’t have to borrow from your bike-jar if you wanted to take your little girlfriend on the Loop-the-Loop.

She’s not my girlfriend! She is not my little girlfriend!

In his memory he had said that out loud to his mother, screamed it at her, in fact . . . but he doubted the accuracy of that memory. He hadn’t had the kind of mother you could scream at. Not if you wanted to keep your scalp.

And besides. Carol had been his little girlfriend, hadn’t she? She had been.

He had one more stop to make before returning to his car, and after a final long look at the house where he had lived with his mother until August of 1960, Bobby started back down Broad Street Hill, swinging the gym bag in one hand.

There had been magic that summer, even at the age of fifty he did not question that, but he no longer knew of what sort it had been. Perhaps he had experienced only the Ray Bradbury kind of childhood so many smalltown kids had, or at least remembered having; the kind where the real world and that of dreams sometimes overlapped, creating a kind of magic.

Yes, but . . . well . . .

There were the rose petals, of course, the ones which had come by way of Carol . . . but had they meant anything? Once it had seemed so—to the lonely, almost lost boy he had been, it had seemed so— but the rose petals were long gone. He had lost them right around the time he’d seen the photograph of that burned-out house in Los Angeles and realized that Carol Gerber was dead.

Her death cancelled not only the idea of magic but, it seemed to Bobby, the very purpose of childhood. What good was it if it brought you to such things? Bad eyes and bad blood-pressure were one thing; bad ideas, bad dreams, and bad ends were another. After awhile you wanted to say to God, ah, come on, Big Boy, quit it. You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well? What good was it to kiss a girl on the Ferris wheel when you were eleven if you were to open the paper eleven years later and learn that she had burned to death in a slummy little house on a slummy little dead-end street? What good was it to remember her beautiful alarmed eyes or the way the sun had shone in her hair?

He would have said all of this and more a week ago, but then a tendril of that old magic had reached out and touched him. Come on, it had whispered. Come on, Bobby, come on, you bastard, come home. So here he was, back in Harwich. He had honored his old friend, he had had himself a little sightseeing tour of the old town (and without misting up a single time), and now it was almost time to go. He had, however, one more stop to make before he did.

It was the supper hour and Commonwealth Park was nearly empty. Bobby walked to the wire backstop behind the Field B home plate as three dawdling players went past him in the other direction. Two were carrying equipment in big red duffel bags; the third had a boombox from which The Offspring blasted at top volume. All three boys gave him mistrustful looks, which Bobby found unsurprising. He was an adult in the land of children, living in a time when all such as he were suspect. He avoided making things worse by giving them a nod or a wave or saying something stupid like How was the game, fellas? They passed on their way.

He stood with his fingers hooked into the wire diamonds of the backstop, watching the late red light slant across the outfield grass, reflecting from the scoreboard and the signs reading STAY IN SCHOOL and WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT DOPE. And again he felt that breathless sense of magic, that sense of the world as a thin veneer stretched over something else, something both brighter and darker. The voices were everywhere now, spinning like the lines on a top.

Don’t you call me stupid, Bobby-O.

You shouldn’t hit Bobby, he’s not like those men.

A real sweetie, kid, he’d play that song by Jo Stafford.

It’s ka . . . and ka is destiny.

I love you, Ted . . .

“I love you, Ted.” Bobby spoke the words, not declaiming them but not whispering them, either. Trying them on for size. He couldn’t even remember what Ted Brautigan had looked like, not with any real clar-ity (only the Chesterfields, and the endless bottles of rootbeer), but saying it still made him feel warm.

There was another voice here, too. When it spoke, Bobby felt tears sting the corners of his eyes for the first time since coming back.

I wouldn’t mind being a magician when I grow up, Bobby, you know it? Travel around with a carnival or a circus, wear a black suit and a top hat . . .

“And pull rabbits and shit out of the hat,” Bobby said, turning away from Field B. He laughed, wiped his eyes, then ran one hand over the top of his head. No hair up there; he’d lost the last of it right on sched-ule, about fifteen years ago. He crossed one of the paths (gravel in 1960, now asphalt and marked with little signs reading BIKES ONLY NOROLLERBLADES!) and sat down on one of the benches, possibly the same one where he’d sat on the day Sully had asked him to come to the movies and Bobby had turned him down, wanting to finish Lord of the Flies instead. He put his gym bag on the bench next to him.

Directly ahead was a grove of trees. Bobby was pretty sure it was the one where Carol had taken him when he started to cry. She did it so no one would see him bawling like a baby. No one but her. Had she taken him in her arms until it was cried out of him? He wasn’t sure, but he thought she had. What he remembered more clearly was how the three St. Gabe’s boys had almost beaten them up later. Carol’s mother’s friend had saved them. He couldn’t remember her name, but she’d come along just in the nick of time . . . the way the Navy guy came along just in time to save Ralph’s bacon at the end of Lord of the Flies.

Rionda, that was her name. She told them she’d tell the priest, and the priest would tell their folks.

But Rionda hadn’t been around when those boys found Carol again. Would Carol have burned to death in Los Angeles if Harry Doolin and his friends had left her alone? You couldn’t say for sure, of course, but Bobby thought the answer was probably no. And even now he felt his hands clenching as he thought: But I got you, Harry, didn’t I? Yes indeed.

Too late by then, though. By then everything had changed.

He unzipped the gym bag, rummaged, and brought out a battery radio. It was nowhere as big as the boombox which had just gone past him toward the equipment sheds, but big enough for his pur-poses. All he had to do was turn it on; it was already tuned to WKND, Southern Connecticut’s Home of the Oldies. Troy Shondell was singing “This Time.” That was fine with Bobby.

“Sully,” he said, looking into the grove of trees, “you were one cool bastard.”

From behind him, very prim, a woman said: “If you swear, I won’t walk with you.”

Bobby swivelled around so rapidly that the radio fell out of his lap and tumbled into the grass. He couldn’t see the woman’s face; she was nothing but a silhouette with red sky spread out on either side of her like wings. He tried to speak and couldn’t. His breathing had come to a dead stop and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Far back in his brain a voice mused: So this is what seeing a ghost is like.

“Bobby, are you all right?”

She moved fast, coming around the bench, and the red setting sun smacked him full in the eyes when she did. Bobby gasped, raised a hand, shut his eyes. He smelled perfume . . . or was it summer grass? He didn’t know. And when he opened his eyes again, he could still see nothing but the woman’s shape; there was a hanging green after-image of the sun where her face belonged.

“Carol?” he asked. His voice was hoarse and uneven. “Dear God, is it really you?”

“Carol?” the woman asked. “I don’t know any Carol. My name is Denise Schoonover.”

Yet it was her. She’d only been eleven the last time he had seen her, but he knew. He rubbed his eyes frantically. From the radio on the grass the dj said, “This is WKND, where your past is always present. Here’s Clyde McPhatter. He’s got ‘A Lover’s Question.’ ”

You knew if she was alive she’d come. You knew that.

Of course; wasn’t that why he had come himself? Surely not for Sully, or not just for Sully. And yet at the same time he had been so sure she was dead. From the instant he’d seen the picture of that burned-out house in Los Angeles, he had been positive. And how that had hurt his heart, not as if he had last seen her forty years before, run-ning across Commonwealth Avenue, but as if she had always remained his friend, as close as a phone-call or a trip up the street.

While he was still trying to blink away the floating sunspot after-image hanging before his eyes, the woman kissed him firmly on the mouth, and then whispered in his ear: “I have to go home. I have to make the salad. What’s that?”

“The last thing you ever said to me when we were kids,” he replied, and turned to her. “You came. You’re alive and you came.”

The sunset light fell on her face, and the afterimage had dimin-ished enough for him to see her. She was beautiful in spite of the scar which began at the corner of her right eye and ran down to her chin in a cruel fishhook . . . or perhaps because of it. There were tiny sprays of crow’s-feet beside her eyes, but no lines on her forehead or bracketing her paintless mouth.

Her hair, Bobby saw with wonder, was almost entirely gray.

As if reading his mind, she reached out and touched his head. “I’m so sorry,” she said . . . but he thought he saw her old merriness danc-ing in her eyes. “You had the most gorgeous hair. Rionda used to say that was half of what I was in love with.”

“Carol—”

She reached out and put her fingers over his lips. There were scars on her hand, as well, Bobby saw, and her little finger was misshapen, almost melted. These were burn scars.

“I told you, I don’t know anyone named Carol. My name is Denise. Like in the old Randy and The Rainbows song?” She hummed a snatch of it. Bobby knew it well. He knew all the oldies. “If you were to check my ID, you’d see Denise Schoonover all up and down the line. I saw you at the service.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“I’m good at not being seen,” she said. “It’s a trick someone taught me a long time ago. The trick of being dim.” She shuddered a little. Bobby had read of people shuddering—mostly in bad nov-els—but had never actually seen it done. “And when it comes to crowd scenes, I’m good at standing all the way at the back. Poor old Sully-John. Do you remember his Bo-lo Bouncer?”

Bobby nodded, starting to smile. “I remember one time when he tried to get extra-cool with it, hit it between his legs as well as between his arms and behind his back? He bopped himself a good one in the balls and we all just about killed ourselves laughing. A bunch of girls ran over—you were one of them, I’m pretty sure—wanting to know what happened, and we wouldn’t tell you. You were pretty mad.”

She smiled, a hand going to her mouth, and in that old gesture Bobby could see the child she had been with complete clarity.

“How did you know he died?” Bobby asked.

“Read it in the New York Post. There was one of those horrible headlines that are their specialty—JAMBO!, it said—and pictures of him. I live in Poughkeepsie, where the Post is regularly available.” She paused. “I teach at Vassar.”

“You teach at Vassar and you read the Post?”

She shrugged, smiling. “Everyone has their vices. How about you, Bobby? Did you read it in the Post?”

“I don’t get the Post. Ted told me. Ted Brautigan.”

She only sat there looking at him, her smile fading.

“You remember Ted?”

“I thought I’d never be able to use my arm again and Ted fixed it like magic. Of course I remember him. But Bobby—”

“He knew you’d be here. I thought that as soon as I opened the package, but I don’t think I believed it until I saw you.” He reached out to her and with the unself-consciousness of a child traced the course of the scar on her face. “You got this in L.A., didn’t you? What happened? How did you get out?”

She shook her head. “I don’t talk about any of that. I’ve never talked about what went on in that house. I never will. That was a dif-ferent life. That was a different girl. That girl died. She was very young, very idealistic, and she was tricked. Do you remember the Monte Man at Savin Rock?”

He nodded, smiling a little. He took her hand and she gripped his own tightly. “Now they go, now they slow, now they rest, here’s the test. His name was McCann or McCausland or something like that.”

“The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that he always let you think you knew where the queen was. He always let you think you could win. Right?”

“Right.”

“This girl got involved with a man like that. A man who could always move the cards just a little faster than you thought he could. He was looking for some confused, angry kids, and he found them.”

“Did he have a yellow coat?” Bobby asked. He didn’t know if he was joking or not.

She looked at him, frowning a little, and he understood she didn’t remember that part. Had he even told her about the low men? He thought so, he thought he had told her just about everything, but she didn’t remember. Perhaps what had happened to her in L.A. had burned a few holes in her memory. Bobby could see how a thing like that might happen. And it wouldn’t exactly make her unique, would it? A lot of people their age had worked very hard to forget who they had been and what they had believed during those years between the murder of John Kennedy in Dallas and the murder of John Lennon in New York City.

“Never mind,” he said. “Go on.”

She shook her head. “I’ve said all I’m going to about that part. All I can. Carol Gerber died on Benefit Street in Los Angeles. Denise Schoonover lives in Poughkeepsie. Carol hated math, couldn’t even get fractions, but Denise teaches math. How could they be the same person? It’s a ridiculous idea. Case closed. I want to know what you mean about Ted. He can’t still be alive, Bobby. He’d be over a hun-dred. Well over.”

“I don’t think time means much if you’re a Breaker,” Bobby said. Nor did it mean much on WKND, where Jimmy Gilmer was now singing about the Sugar Shack to the tooting accompaniment of what sounded like a sweet potato.

“A Breaker? What’s—”

“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,” Bobby said. “This part might, so listen closely. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I live in Philadelphia. I’ve got a lovely wife who’s a professional pho-tographer, three lovely grown children, a lovely old dog with bad hips and a good disposition, and an old house which is always in desperate need of repairs. My wife says that’s because the shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot and the carpenter’s house always has a leaky roof.”

“Is that what you are? A carpenter?”

He nodded. “I live in Redmont Hills, and when I remember to get a paper, the Philly Inquirer is the one I buy.”

“A carpenter,” she mused. “I always thought you’d wind up a writer, or something.”

“I did, too. But I also went through a period when I thought I’d wind up in Connecticut State Prison and that never happened, so I guess things have a way of balancing out.”

“What was in the package you mentioned? And what does it have to do with Ted?”

“The package came FedEx, from a guy named Norman Oliver. A banker. He was Sully-John’s executor. This was inside.”

He reached into the gym bag again and brought out a battered old baseball glove. He laid it in the lap of the woman sitting next to him on the bench. She tipped it at once and looked at the name inked on the side.

“My God,” she said. Her voice was flat, shocked.

“I haven’t seen this baby since the day I found you over there in those trees with your arm dislocated. I suppose some kid came along, saw it lying on the grass, and just gleeped it. Although it wasn’t in very good shape, even then.”

“Willie stole it,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Willie Shearman. I thought he was nice. You see what a fool I was about people? Even back then.”

He looked at her in silent surprise, but she didn’t see his look; she was gazing down at the old Alvin Dark–model glove, plucking at the tangle of rawhide strings somehow still holding the webbing in place. And then she delighted and touched him by doing what he had done as soon as he opened the box and saw what was there: she lifted the baseball glove to her face and smelled the sweet oil-and-leather aroma of the pocket. Only he had slipped it on his hand first, without even thinking about it. It was a baseball-player thing to do, a kid-thing, automatic as breathing. Norman Oliver must have been a kid at some point, but he’d apparently never been a ballplayer, because he hadn’t found the piece of paper poked deep into the last finger of the glove—the finger with the deep scratch in the old cowhide. Bobby was the one who found the paper. The nail of his lit-tle finger poked against it and made it crackle.

Carol put the glove down again. Gray hair or no gray hair, she looked young again, and fully alive. “Tell me.”

“It was on Sully’s hand when they found him sitting dead in his car.”

Her eyes went huge and round. In that instant she did not just look like the little girl who had ridden the Ferris wheel with him at Savin Rock; she was that little girl.

“Look on the heel of the glove, there by Alvin Dark’s signature. Do you see?”

The light was fading fast now, but she saw, all right.

B.G.

1464 Dupont Circle Road

Redmont Hills, Pennsylvania

Zone 11

“Your address,” she murmured. “Your address now.”

“Yes, but look at this.” He tapped the words Zone 11. “The post office quit zoning mail in the sixties. I checked. Ted either didn’t know or forgot.”

“Maybe he put it that way on purpose.”

Bobby nodded. “It’s possible. In any case, Oliver read the address and sent me the glove—said he saw no need to put an old fielder’s mitt through probate. He mostly wanted me to know that Sully had died, if I didn’t know already, and that there was going to be a memorial service in Harwich. I believe he wanted me to come so he could hear the story of the glove. I couldn’t help him much with that, though. Carol, are you sure Willie—”

“I saw him wearing it. I told him to give it back so I could send it to you, but he wouldn’t.”

“Do you suppose he gave it to Sully-John later?”

“He must have.” Yet it did not ring true to her, somehow; she felt the truth must be stranger than that. Willie’s attitude to the glove itself had been strange, although she could no longer exactly remember how.

“Anyway,” he said, tapping the address on the heel of the glove, “that’s Ted’s printing. I’m sure it is. T hen I put my hand up inside the glove, and I found something. It’s really why I came.”

He reached into the gym bag a third time. The redness was going out of the light now; the remains of the day were a fading pink, the color of wild roses. The radio, still lying in the grass, played “Don’tcha Just Know It,” by Huey “Piano” Smith and The Clowns.

Bobby brought out a crumpled piece of paper. It had been stained in a couple of places by the glove’s sweaty innards, but otherwise it looked remarkably white and fresh. He handed it to Carol.

She held it up to the light and slightly away from her face—her eyes, Bobby saw, were not as good as they once had been. “It’s the title-page from a book,” she said, and then laughed. “Lord of the Flies, Bobby! Your favorite!”

“Look at the bottom,” he said. “Read what’s there.”

“Faber and Faber, Limited . . . 24 Russell Square . . . London.” She looked at him questioningly.

“It’s from the Faber paperback edition published in 1960,” Bobby said. “That’s on the back. But look at it, Carol! It looks brand-new. I think the book this page came from might have been in 1960 only weeks ago. Not the glove, that’s a lot more beat-up than when I found it, but the title-page.”

“Bobby, not all old books turn yellow if they’re kept well. Even an old paperback might—”

“Turn it over,” he said. “Take a look at the other side.”

Carol did. Printed below the line reading All rights reserved was this: Tell her she was as brave as a lion.

“That’s when I knew I had to come because he thought you’d be here, that you were still alive. I couldn’t believe that, it was easier to believe in him than it was to believe—Carol? What’s wrong? Is it the thing at the very bottom? What is that thing at the very bottom?”

She was crying now, and crying hard, holding the torn-out title-page in her hand and looking at what had been placed there on the back, squeezed into the scant white space below the conditions of sale:

“What does it mean? Do you know? You do, don’t you?”

Carol shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s special to me, that’s all. Special to me the way the glove is special to you. For an old guy, he sure knows how to push the right buttons, doesn’t he?”

“I guess so. Maybe that’s what a Breaker does.”

She looked at him. She was still weeping but was not, Bobby thought, truly unhappy. “Bobby, why would he do this? And how did he know we’d come? Forty years is a long time. People grow up, they grow up and leave the kids they were behind.”

“Do they?”

She continued to look at him in the darkening day. Beyond them, the shadows of the grove deepened. In there—in the trees where he had wept on one day and found her, hurt and alone, the next—dark had almost come.

“Sometimes a little of the magic sticks around,” Bobby said.

“That’s what I think. We came because we still hear some of the right voices. Do you hear them? The voices?”

“Sometimes,” she said, almost reluctantly. “Sometimes I do.”

Bobby took the glove from her. “Will you excuse me for a second?”

“Sure.”

Bobby went to the grove of trees, dropped down on one knee to get beneath a low-hanging branch, and placed his old baseball glove on the grass with the pocket up to the darkening sky. Then he came back to the bench and sat down beside Carol again. “That’s where it belongs,” he said.

“Some kid’ll just come along tomorrow and pick it up, you know that, don’t you?” She laughed and wiped her eyes.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe it’ll be gone. Back to wherever it came from.”

As the day’s last pink faded to ash, Carol put her head on Bobby’s shoulder and he put an arm around her. They sat that way without speaking, and from the radio at their feet, The Platters began to sing.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is a University of Maine in Orono, of course. I know because I went there from 1966 to 1970. The characters in this story are com-pletely fictional, however, and a good deal of the campus geography I have described never existed. Harwich is similarly fictional, and although Bridgeport is real, my version of it is not. Although it is dif-ficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.

I’ve also taken chronological liberties, the most noticable being my use of “The Prisoner” two years before it actually telecast in the United States—but I have tried to remain true to the spirit of the age. Is that really possible? I don’t know, but I have tried.

An earlier and very different version of “Blind Willie” appeared in the magazine Antaeus. It was published in 1994.

I want to thank Chuck Verrill, Susan Moldow, and Nan Graham for helping me find the courage to write this book. I also want to thank my wife. Without her, I never would have gotten over.