TWENTY-SIX

Shorty sat with Quyn in Le Boudin, playing with her hair at the bar. He tried to make conversation with Moreau, who would only reply in French. When Shorty’s can was empty, Moreau silently replaced it, but otherwise he barely acknowledged Shorty’s presence.

‘Monsieur?’ said Shorty, eventually.

‘Oui?’ replied Moreau, wearily.

‘Can I have a receipt for my dinner?’ asked Shorty. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say that in French.’

‘Pourrais-je avoir un reçu, s’il vous plait,’ said Moreau, and descended into the cellar.

When he came back up, Shorty repeated his question in French.

‘Mais non,’ answered Moreau.

Quyn squeezed Shorty’s hand.

‘Why not?’ asked Shorty.

‘Because you are a cunt,’ said Moreau.

Quyn attacked Moreau with a stream of angry Vietnamese.

‘Well, he is,’ said Moreau. Then he answered her in Vietnamese.

‘I can guess your theory,’ said Moreau to Shorty. ‘You think I wrote letters inviting Nashville and Sergeant Caution to my bar, and signed them with kisses, perhaps because I am French. Because I will not say I saw Nashville when I did not, you suspect me of everything when I have done nothing.’

Shorty nodded.

‘But,’ said Moreau, ‘if you were to think for a moment’ – he arched his eyebrows, as if this were impossible – ‘you might realise it was the late Sergeant Caution who needed an alibi for his visits to my bar, and not Nashville, who was here every day and night, in the same way as you now inhabit my bar stool as if it were your own. It was Sergeant Caution who needed an excuse to fire his pistol in my bar, and Sergeant Caution who needed Nashville to return here to meet him for the fight Sergeant Caution was so eager to start. Simply because Nashville found the note upon his return to bed does not mean it wasn’t planted there earlier in the evening, when Caution was not to know that Nashville was already in my bar. Do you understand me, Mister Short-cock?’

Shorty wasn’t sure that he did.

‘Caution wrote the notes himself, Monsieur Maigret Minus,’ said Moreau.

Nashville received a letter postmarked Stillwater, Oklahoma. It didn’t matter where you were in the US Army – they could send you to get your balls blown off on a jungle patrol outside Dalat, or lock you in a shipping container with the KKK banging down the door in Long Binh – you couldn’t escape the news about the cat and the dog and the power bills, the neighbours, the yard and the football.

They had kicked Nashville out of the hospital and moved him back into his Conex. Every day, the guards promised to kill him, and pissed in his food. They weren’t all in on it – the black guards had their own thing – but the boys who called themselves the KKK ran Silver City at night, and Nashville knew they’d get him in the end.

Nashville scrutinised the bold, even handwriting on his envelope, as if there were several people who might contact him from Stillwater, Oklahoma, and he needed only to ascertain who had written that day, three weeks ago, when the letter had been mailed from the post office next to the liquor store, three blocks east of his father’s house, where sprinklers made rainfall rise from the ground.

The letter was addressed to the PMO’s office in Vung Tau. Nashville read the postmark and examined the stamps: ‘We Appreciate Our Servicemen’, with the Statue of Liberty and the Stars and Stripes. They came from a sheet, he decided, that his father kept in the drawer of his bureau, where he worked by his window and watched birds take seed from a feeder, as if the swallows and martins were his responsibility, his children.

Nashville was afraid of nothing but memories. He sat in the Conex with the letter, and listened to the footsteps in his mind as his recollections padded closer. At first, they seemed harmless, even wholesome. He remembered how his father, Robert Lee Grant, had taught him to swim in the Obion River, on fishing trips at weekends. Nashville used to pitch his tent on high ground above a creek. His dad would sleep in the truck, with the radio on.

That was enough. Nashville didn’t need any more, but he’d opened the door to the way things used to be, and now all the other memories would pile in and jump on him and beat him down.

When Nashville was ten years old, one Friday evening after dinner, Robert Lee drove to the garage to buy a pack of Kents. Nashville waited on the porch for him to return. For a month, he slept on the stoop in his blanket, curled up around his BB gun, to provide covering fire for his father when he escaped his kidnappers and came dashing back home.

Nashville didn’t believe Robert Lee had gone, because parents didn’t run away. His mother showed him a typed letter from an attorney, promising money. Nashville imagined the kidnappers had forced his dad to sign.

Robert Lee used to teach school. His subject was English and he coached the wrestling team. He left Nashville Hemingway and Whitman and a great and terrible strength.

His mom told Nashville that Robert Lee had taken another job, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Nashville found the town on a map, but could not imagine his father there, in his sports jacket and smiling brogues. He missed most of all the smell of his father’s pipe tobacco, and the power of his arms under his white cotton shirt.

After he had been six months in Stillwater, Robert Lee began to write, by hand. His letters arrived in pairs – one for Nashville, and one for his older brother, Rick. His dad told him about his new car – which was a Dodge – and the sunshine in Stillwater, then he had to go because there was somebody at the door, or he needed to finish marking papers, or he was up late and it was time to go to bed.

He said he was sorry for what had happened – as if it were an event, rather than a decision – but when Nashville was older he would understand.

But Nashville understood already why Robert Lee had gone to Stillwater, Oklahoma and left his family in Troy, Tennessee. It was because he thought he could get away with it.

Without his dad, Nashville felt his bedroom window was open and anything could crawl inside. At school, all the kids knew the wrestling coach had vanished, the English teacher had gone, and the town discovered it had always held suspicions about Robert Lee. He’d been a popular teacher but he had a distant look, like he wasn’t really listening. They used to think he had brought it back from the war, when he had been a captain in the Marine Corps. But now they noticed it in his boys. The Grants were born with it. It was as though they felt they were too good for the town, and if they didn’t like something everyone else had to put up with they could just jump in a car and leave for Oklahoma.

Nashville played out in the street past nightfall in the spring. He was in his own front yard when an older boy knocked out his teeth, to snuff out his spark.

His father wrote to Nashville, Whatever happens, you will always be my son. But Nashville was not the son of the wrestling coach any more, because the son of the wrestling coach would never have had his teeth punched out in his own front yard. That could only happen to the son of nobody.

Nashville took to boxing. He had his father’s balance and his own bottomless hurt. It helped him to punch a bag, or a mitt, or another boy. Nashville’s trainer, Harry Bragg, was a ruined fighter who found delight in the unsullied athleticism of hairless boys. Bragg knew how to give and take a punch, and felt that to be the only pious transaction in an impure world. There were few boys of Nashville’s weight boxing out of Troy, Tennessee, so Bragg would enter him in amateur competitions all around Obion County, for sparring practice. Nashville fought in Woodland Mills and Hornbeak, Samberg and Reeves, then the Golden Gloves in Memphis, Tennessee.

Nashville’s mom had brown hair and wore fawn shoes. Her eyes were chocolate, her freckles caramel and her legs tanned golden in the Tennessee sun. She wore short, pale blue dresses, like a blonde. She knew why Nashville’s dad had left her. She wouldn’t do the things he asked.

So his mother looked for men who’d come to her – a mechanic, a postman, a cop, a teacher at the school; but married, all of them – and she would do with them all the things she had not done to keep her husband, and when she was done they would walk away.

Nashville watched the men come and go as he shadow-boxed in the yard. He hung a bag of rags from the clothesline – printed with the insignia of the US Marine Corps, who never ran away, except from their families – and bothered and bashed it while he waited for Bragg to get back from his hardware store and open up the gym. When the men left behind clothes – an undershirt, or a pair of socks – he stuffed them into the bag.

His mom was careless of herself, but she guarded her children. If ever a man moved to hurt them – and some of these shameless, faithless husbands felt everything was theirs – she would withdraw. If he spoke badly of her boys, she would send him home unempty, and scared of what she might tell.

Nashville loved her, really loved her, but he wished he could be enough for her, like the war widows’ children who filled all the space in their mothers’ lives, with their faces that reminded of their fathers; Nashville thought that might be the problem, that she brought home other men’s faces so she wouldn’t only see his.

One day his mom had a screaming fight with Rick about the men. Rick, who had never loved her quite as fiercely as Nashville, yelled that he was going out, and he never came back. Nashville understood why Rick had done that, too. Because if Rick did it to their mom, it meant their dad had done it to their mom, and not to Rick. And it meant his dad had been right to do it, too. After all, everyone left their mom. She drove men away.

The next week, Nashville was fighting an Italian boy named Pierini for the West Tennessee bantamweight junior title. Nashville knocked him on his back twice in the first round. Bragg saw the change in him, that every punch was now a small murder. A bantamweight shouldn’t be able to hit so hard. Only black boys boxed that way in West Tennessee.

Pierini lay in the regional hospital, fed through tubes. His uncles said they would bury Nashville alive, so his mom sent him to live with his dad. His month in Stillwater, Oklahoma was a crater in Nashville’s memory and a scar across his heart. He’d thought maybe he could mend things but he broke them even worse. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, he earned the name Nashville, because he’d come from a town only one hundred and sixty miles away from that city, which made it the exact same place to the people of Stillwater.

When the Italian boy recovered, Nashville came home. He gave up fighting, played football and studied nothing, worked in a saloon as a bartender and bouncer – underage and oversized, the local boy who’d stopped Pierini – then enlisted in the army. He knew he’d get drafted, and he would be able to choose his own posting if he volunteered. He would’ve liked to be an engineer but he didn’t have the schooling, so he signed up for the MP so he would not have to kill anybody.

Nashville had been happy in the army. Since they’d taken him to Long Binh, he felt like he was drowning. But he could remember his father’s hands on the plane of his belly and the flat of his chest, under the water in the Obion River, steadying and supporting him, as if they’d never let him fall.

Nashville took off his shirt and laid it on the floor of the Conex. He didn’t open the envelope, but he tore the letter in half. He ripped each part in two, and halved it again. He shredded the paper and arranged it in a small mound over his shirt. Then he pulled out the matches he kept halfway up his ass, and struck the whole bundle against the side of the shipping container. They flared into a torch, and Nashville held the flame to the paper, and watched the smoke rise from his fire and find the spaces between the bars on his cell door.

That’ll bring them running.

The end was already written. All Nashville could do was choose the time. But when they burst in decked out like Casper the Unfriendly fucking Ghost, and tried to make Nashville kneel for the noose, he’d show those rednecks who was going to bow. He’d punch their heads through their fucking hoods just like the time he’d smacked the fight out of that greaseball and seen his wop eyes roll up in his dago head, and watched his empty body flop to the canvas like a limp slice of stale tomato.

When Pierini had gone down – the stinking spaghetti wop with black olive eyes and parmesan breath; Nashville had turned his face into a pizza – it was like Nashville’s soul had left his body. It soared above him and looked down on all the world, sated and elated. When the referee started his count, there was a big part of Nashville that was hoping the boy would never get up.

Nobody else knew, but he hadn’t been able to hide it from Caution.