He crouched by the window and listened shuddering to the sound of ripped high-voltage wires out there stroking the darkness, humming closer and farther, feeling along the darkness after fear. The voltage sucked along the shaft of fear toward any heart emanating it and burned the soul right inside it. That was the True Death. Thereafter nobody lived in that heart, nobody saw out of those eyes. The stench of such burning floated in and out of the room all night.
As soon as a little daylight came up, the flies started taking off and landing around the room. The radio on the windowsill said, “I’ve got the guys here today from the Kitchen Cinq. You’ve heard the music of the Kitchen Cinq, known primarily for their ‘happy sound.’ Fellas, what about the name? Where did the name come from?”
“Well, Kenny, the name was brewed up for us by our manager, Trav Nelson. And we just kind of liked it, so—”
“And how about the way you spell it? C-I-N-Q, that’s unusual.”
“That spelling means the number five in the French language. And there are five of us, and the way it’s pronounced in French you say ‘sank.’ And we’re all from Texas, so we pronounce it kind of like that too—’Kitchen Sank.’”
“And you’re known for your ‘happy sound.’ “ “I’d say that’s just a result of various personalities, Kenny, because we’re all generally pretty happy folks.”
“And I’d be happy to talk all day with you, but we’re gonna say goodbye, stay happy, and thanks.—The Kitchen Cinq. Five happy guys. This is Kenny Hall and the ‘In Sound,’ for the Military Radio Network.”
“So long, Kenny, and thanks to you too.”
“Let’s get back to the music.” He let the music play.
“What’s burning?” he asked, although he knew.
“I don’t want you to mention burning ever again. You’re on that twenty-four hours.”
“Very good.”
“It’s the fucking punk, man, the Mustique. You gotta know that’s all it is.”
“Got it. Mustique.”
“The fucking green spirals they set on fire for the mosquitoes? Somebody’s burning it downstairs. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, James?”
“You’re doing fear,” James warned him. “Hear the hum?”
“Oh, man.”
“Vanquish fear.”
Joker sat beside him on the bed.
“I think I have to say this: you are fucking fucked-up, man.”
“Giant discovery.”
“Well, I mean—can’t you cool it down?”
James shrugged. No profit in continuing this stupid little conversation.
Ming came in from another universe somewhere and said, “You want noodoos?”
“No, I don’t want no fucking noodles.”
“Can we go noodoo place?”
“No, I said no. You think I want to watch a pack a Gooks eating with their faces?”
“I need some money, Cowboy.”
James said, “Goddamn slippery fucking wiggly fucking noodles.”
Her stare was like a lizard’s. “Gip me money, Cowboy. Tell him gip me money,” she said to Joker, “my sister is so hungry, and her stomach is hurting.”
Joker took the little girl on his knee and said, “You’re just as pretty as two new aces.”
The kid said something in Gook and Ming answered in English: “He kill some people.”
James told her to quiet her kid down.
Ming said, “Boo-coo fuck you,” and took the kid outside somewhere.
Joker said, “That ain’t her sister.”
“She says it’s her sister.”
“It’s probably her kid.”
“Either way it ain’t no thang.” He stood and walked over and unzipped his fly and made water into a blue chamber pot with red flowers on it in the corner. There wasn’t any indoor plumbing. He didn’t see where she made water. When she wanted to piss she went downstairs someplace.
Joker said, “Let’s go. Listen to me, man—Cowboy? Cowboy?—I know how this shit goes.”
“I gotta believe you.”
“There’s a difference between downtown and the bush.”
“Whichever one, it ain’t real life.”
“I didn’t say that. Will you listen to what I’m saying? You can’t come downtown no more.”
James headed for the door. “Take the wheel, baby! I got no hands!”
It was dark, but it wasn’t that late. Joker watched over him while they walked a long way to the Red Cross and stood in line a long time. When it was James’s turn on the telephone, Joker left him alone while he talked to his mother. He’d hardly said hello before regretting he’d called. She sobbed in torment.
“We haven’t heard from you in I don’t know how long. I don’t know if you’re alive or dead!”
“Me neither. Nobody does.”
“Bill Junior’s gone to prison!”
“What’d he do?”
“I don’t know. A little of everything. He’s been there almost a year, since last February twenty.”
“You don’t know what month you’re in? It’s January.” She sounded angry. “What are you laughing over?”
“I ain’t laughing.”
“Then who was it just now laughing in my ear?”
“Bullshit. I didn’t laugh.”
“Don’t use that toilet-talk on my telephone.”
“Don’t it say ‘shit’ somewhere in the Bible?”
“Get your tongue out of the toilet. I’m your mother telling you. Your mother who doesn’t even know where you are!”
“Nha Trang.”
“Well, thank the Lord,” she said, “that he delivered you out of Vietnam.”
Now somebody laughed. Possibly himself, though nothing was funny.
Early in the morning of February 20, 1970, Bill Houston cruised in a state-owned van with two corrections officers and three other miscreants down Route Eighty-nine toward Phoenix, having served twelve months of a one-to-three-year sentence of incarceration in the Florence prison, not at all clear in his mind as to why, exactly, he’d been jailed, or why released. Apparently since the day of his homecoming from the navy a pile of charges had stacked up: a term of probation for stealing a car, a suspended sentence for assault, which meant getting into a fight when cops were around to arrest you for it, and a warrant out for failure to appear on a shoplifting charge; and then the theft of a single case of beer, twenty-four cans, had crashed it all down on his head. Drinking, strolling through an alley off Fourth Avenue, he’d seen the rear door of a tavern propped open by a delivery of Lucky Lager, and he’d taken a case off the top. This was supposed to be his lucky beer, but it had brought him horrible fortunes. He’d been two blocks away, waiting at a DON’T WALK sign like an honorable citizen—shifting the case from his left to his right shoulder, and plotting where to find refrigeration for these things—when the squad car caught up to him. A couple of hearings, a month in County, and off to live behind walls fifteen feet high.
Heading for prison one year ago, carried in perhaps this very van with these same officers toward the just reward his mother and teachers had promised him, he’d felt excited and grown-up. Was it true they tried to stab you and rape you in the joint? Then why hadn’t he seen such stuff in the Maricopa County Jail? Not that he worried. He’d never lost a fight in his life and looked forward to beating up as many people as tried to make a punk out of him. On the other hand, these were killers and such, and they had nothing to do but exercise and train in there, if that’s what they wanted. Best to keep his head down. Learn a valuable skill. Maybe he’d take up leather tooling, belts and moccasins, cigarette cases. After all, he was known on the street as Leather Bill. Did they let you make sheaths for knives? He had doubted the possibility.
Assigned to the medium-security barracks, he found the inmates no meaner than those he’d bunked with in the sheriff’s jail and the food a little better. They had a quarter-mile track for running, as well as an extensive set of weights. His second day there he played left field in a ball game and drove in two runs and hit a homer. Nine full innings—only eight men to a side, but they had all the equipment, including headgear for the batters and full protection for the catcher.
By the third month inside he felt at home. From this distance, the things he thought he’d miss looked small. His jobs had demanded his soul and in return had given him poverty, the women he’d dealt with had quickly turned to irritants. Liquor had brought him high times but propelled him often into the arms of the police. Among free citizens his stomach had ached constantly. He hadn’t felt like swallowing anything but booze. But from the day of his arrival he was hungry and focused like a hound on each coming meal. He put on fifteen pounds, all muscle—push-ups and sit-ups every morning, fifty of each. Four days a week he lifted weights. On Saturday afternoons he boxed, and a couple of former pros had taught him that brawling was an art. His wind was good, and he could take a punch. He was the best Bill Houston he’d been since he’d left the navy.
Westward now, home to Phoenix, back the way he’d come. The rising sun at his back, he sailed toward a life he couldn’t imagine. They’d given him the phone number of his parole officer, a check for twenty dollars, and the clothes he’d been arrested in thirteen months before. He surveyed the road ahead, the desert frozen in morning light, flat and green after the winter rains, the highway black and perfectly straight through the van’s front window, and felt an adventure moving beneath him, as when he’d watched the southern California coast growing insignificant from the railing of his first cruise at age seventeen.
In Phoenix he entered the first bar he found and got with the first woman who was halfway nice to him. She said she was an epileptic, and that seemed about right. Every couple of hours she took a pill, a downer, Seconal. She had several bottles of them all to herself and claimed they were prescribed. It took her only two beers to get tipsy. He had to talk to her for a long time.
They ambled along the streets. She wanted him to walk on the outside, the curb side, because, she insisted, if he put the lady on the outside that meant he was pimping her. She seemed to know all about that, but she didn’t ask for money. When they went up to her room in a hotel overlooking the Deuce, the neighborhood around Second Street, it turned out her Seconal was undependable. In the night the bed started shaking. He said, “What is it?” She said, “I had a seizure.” She seemed confused about who he was. He said, “Is there any beer left?” They’d bought only one six-pack; he found its cardboard carrier flattened under his naked ass. “I’d better go see my family. I just got out of prison,” he said.
The night had cooled off. He walked through the Deuce. He would have sat down for a nap, but by now the dawn was near, the pavement had grown chilly, and the bums who’d slept on the sidewalk with their heads resting on their arms were already stirring awake, commencing to walk through the silent streets without a destination. Bill Houston joined the parade of souls waiting for the sun.
He walked himself sober and stayed that way until after his first meeting with his parole officer in a building downtown on Jefferson Street, abstinence from alcohol being a condition of his early release. No one was checking, however, and he soon fell back into his old ways, pulling himself together on Tuesdays for the weekly confrontation with the man who could send him back to prison with a phone call. His PO, Sam Webb, a portly young citified rancher type, who called Houston “a downtown cowboy,” got him employment as a trainee. Two months into his freedom Houston showed up for the meeting with whiskey on his breath, but Webb only sneered at the offense. “I could get you jailed for the weekend,” he said, “but they’d just let you go again. They need the cells in Florence for the meaner boys.”
Houston finished his training and began drawing full wages. He drove a forklift at a lumberyard, the biggest such concern in the Southwest, it was claimed, not counting California. All day from massive trucks to massive sheds he moved tons and tons of puke-smelling fresh-cut boards, and he never built anything but rectilinear stacks, and little by little he dismantled them. Others put the wood to use. He just watched it go by. Hardly socializing though drinking plenty, staying out of trouble, living almost as a solitary, feeling reluctant, somehow, to become himself again, he worked at the lumberyard well into the spring until his longer and longer absences rendered him nearly useless, and they fired him.
The mission had made sense until it had been accomplished. They’d turned up nothing. They sought a secure place to spend the night. An encampment of Special Forces had turned them away. In all likelihood, the presence of Special Forces alone had cleared the area of activity, but no one had been briefed as to their presence. On the basis of obsolete intelligence the six Lurps had dosed up and fared forth when they should have been sleeping in Nha Trang. The mission made no sense.
The incident was more of an assassination than an ambush. For the last half kilometer James had taken point. The night was starless, but the darkness knew what it knew. He followed it. After a few hundred paces more the darkness would widen and they’d have reached a place they knew about where they could break and wait for dawn, possibly call for extraction.
A gun opened up behind him in three short bursts. He fell and crawled back the way he’d come, but stopped a few yards along because his life forked sharply leftward exactly there. Leaves fell down on him as the others returned fire. Feet pounded on the trail. A grenade banged into the trees and he jammed his face into the dirt as it exploded. He rolled left into the bush, following the lifeline, and looked for flashes from across the trail. Nothing. The firing had ceased. The screeching of insects had stopped. The moment was strong and peaceful. The air had ringing depth. Every last particle of bullshit had been incinerated.
He slithered forward through the exhilarating lacerations of the bush until he heard one of his own crawling on the trail, and clicked his tongue. He heard a moan. He smelled shit. The moaning rose to a song but drew no fire.
“Man down! Man down!”
“On the trail! On the trail!” It was Dirty’s voice. James heard boots on the trail and fired three covering bursts and stopped. A man squatted over the wounded one.
“Grab an ankle. Let’s go.”
“Fuck it. There’s no cover.”
Joker strolled up the trail as in a public park. “It’s over.” He put himself at the trailside with his gun at the ready. “It was just one fucker is all.”
“Bullshit.”
“I saw every flash. I never looked down.”
Dirty said to the hurt one, “Look here, look at me!”
“I can’t see nothing but bullshit.”
“Bakers!”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Dirty. It’s me. Don’t shut your eyes!”
“Fuck, I’m not in the world, man. I’m not.”
“You’re here. You’re okay.”
“I don’t feel it. It’s bullshit.”
“You’re here.”
“I don’t feel the world, man.”
“Who threw that grenade?”
“Me,” Joker said. “Fucker pulled the trigger three times and boogied.”
“His eyes are empty.” Dirty leaned close to smell for breath. “Fucked,” he said. “Good and fucked.”
All five of them were here now. James took point again and each of the others took an arm or a leg and dragged Bakers’s corpse to the clearing they knew of three hundred meters down the trail.
“Tag his ass.”
“He went from the feet up. He died right out of himself.”
“But I like what he did, man. He stayed himself.”
“Yeah?”
“He didn’t bug and turn into a little child, man,” Dirty said. Dirty himself was weeping.
James hadn’t known Bakers too well. Gratitude and love filled him that Bakers had eaten it instead of one of the others. Especially himself.
“We’ll catch somebody from one of these villes and make the message known.”
“Fuck the dinks. It’s them Green Berets. Do you believe that shit?”
“No, I do not.”
“If they’d let us in their perimeter, this man right here would be alive. This man would be laughing.”
“Let’s call and get him out.”
“Dirty, man, it’s over, man.”
“Leave that radio alone.” Dirty thumbed his selector loudly.
“S’, señor! I will not touch the fucker.”
“Who’s coming with me?”
Dirty and Conrad went hunting, and the other three stayed with the corpse.
“This guy died because those fuckers wouldn’t let us in their perimeter.”
“Next little Beanie I see in town, I’m gonna follow him around till I can stick him in his fucking back.”
“Let’s call a strike on their cowardly asses.”
James squatted with his back against a tree trunk and rolled a smoke with some grass in it. Licking the paper he could taste the gunmetal on his fingers.
He stood up and lit it as the others bunched around him to hide the glow.
“Did you hear what he said about bullshit? He knew. He knew.”
“His back’s blown out anyway.”
“Good for him. Otherwise it’d be life in an electric chair. That’s the sentence, man. You motorvate by blowing in a tube.”
“It’s lower down than that. He’d have his arms.”
“I wouldn’t use no wheelchair. I’d swing around by a harness in the ceiling.”
James left them and sat against the tree again. He didn’t want to talk about such things while his brain ballooned and finally cooled off. He put his head back and looked at the sky. Darkness, nothing, the pure nothing, just quiet electricity. The soul of everything. “I don’t believe that shit,” he said.
“Them little Beanies got every corner of their program stuck down real tight.”
“They don’t do shit. Got zero in their sacks.”
“Let’s call in a strike on their cowardly fucking asses.”
James said, “Come here,” and the others came close and squatted around him. “I need me a Chinese grenade. Soon as I get me a Chinese grenade I’m gonna frag those motherfuckers into dead red meat.”
“To night?”
“Right as soon as I get one.”
“Conrad’s got one.”
“I know.”
“Let’s put some smoke in their night. Take out about twenty a those motherfuckers.”
Conrad appeared among them as silently as a thought.
“You back?”
“Just me.”
“Where’s Dirty?”
“He’s got a woman.”
James stood up. “Let me have that han’gernade.”
“What.”
“You know what I’m talking about. That Chinese thing.”
“I’m taking it home.”
“Home where?”
“Home home.”
“Fuck home.”
“For a souvenir.”
“You can’t take a han’gernade back to the world.”
“Well, fuck. Anyway.”
“I’ll get you another one.”
Conrad carried it in his breast pocket. James reached in and wrestled it out. “You coming with me?”
“Where to?”
“Back to where them Beanies are taking a snooze.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“I will if you wait around for the interrogation.”
Dirty came back escorting a small naked creature into the field of James’s night-vision as into a circle of firelight. She had a shiny lower lip that stuck out as if somebody had just called her a bad name. She seemed angry enough to kill, if she’d had a weapon in her hands. They held her down and the others took turns with her, but Dirty was already done and James wanted to keep himself mean for his personal Zero Hour with the Green Berets. When the others were finished she no longer needed holding down. James fell on his knees and put the point of his Bowie knife against the woman’s belly and said, “What’s your rank, sojer? You ever been showed what to do with one a these, sojer? You ever seen one before, sojer? What’s your rank, little sojer? What are you looking at? Do you think you’re my mother? You’re my mother, but who the fuck is my father?” He interrogated her until his hand was too weak to keep hold of the hilt.
Phoenix seemed to Bill Houston a much bigger city these days. Suburban developments had scattered themselves out across the desert. The traffic was fierce. Many mornings the horizon lay under blankets of brown smog. Whenever it all weighed him down too heavily he took a line and a couple of hooks and sat by one of the wide irrigation canals where catfish waited in peaceful ignorance of the twentieth century. He’d been told they came down from the Colorado River, and he’d been advised to use chunks of frankfurter for bait and a plastic bobber to keep his hook just touching bottom, but he didn’t have a bobber, not even a rod or reel, and he never had any luck. It didn’t trouble him. Waiting and hoping, that was the point, watching the water pass through the ancient desert, considering its travels. Often Houston stayed late spying on the folks who arrived and went in that lonely place, until he was able one night to surprise three hippies doing a dope exchange and rob them of three hundred fifty in cash and a brick of Mexican reefer wrapped in red cellophane. Staring at his trembling machete, the boys told him it was mediocre Mexican dope, regular quality, nothing special, but he could certainly have the stuff. He let them keep it, though he might have found a way to sell it himself. There was a line. He’d bully young kids and he’d steal from them, he might even have stabbed one if he’d had to. But he’d never deal drugs.
Near closing time he stood on the sidewalk in front of a bar’s open doorway bathed in its warm liquor-breath, the country music from inside getting at him, cutting him. A little man came out swearing and trying to close the gaps torn in his T-shirt by an assailant. A skinny rat, too old to be fighting, with a bleeding mouth and one eye swollen shut. He smiled like a punished child. “This will cure me. This is the end.” Many, many times Bill Houston had promised himself the same.
Captain Galassi expressed concerns about James’s self-esteem, which he pronounced self-steam. He wasn’t a boy-captain, he was the real thing, here since ‘63, field-commissioned and all that, but he’d let himself develop a concern for James’s self-steam, and expressed it, while Sergeant Lorin sat nearby with his fists on his thighs, expressing nothing.
“What’s your first name, Corporal?”
“James.”
“I’m going to call you James instead of Corporal, because you’ll be a civilian here pretty quick. And anyway, in my eyes, you are no soldier. You got anything to say to that?”
“No.”
“They beat you up real bad, didn’t they? They fucked you up pretty good. Do you think you’re gonna get a Purple Heart for that?”
“I already got one. And that was bullshit too.”
“See, James, those are soldiers. Those are fine men. Matter of fact, my sister married a Green Beret. They know what they came here to do, and they’re getting it done. They know who the enemy is, and they’re not gonna kill their own people. They’re people who if their own people try to fuck them up, if an American tries to fuck them up, even throws a grenade in their lap, they don’t kill that American, because that American is not their enemy. They just fuck him up some, because that American is a fucking son of a fucking bitch.”
James made no comment.
“Beat you like you deserved. Are you still pissing blood?”
“No, sir.”
“Can you take solid food?”
“I don’t require no food.”
“Are you gonna tell me you didn’t toss that item?”
“I didn’t throw any grenade.”
“Fucker just plopped down out of the sky.”
“I don’t know fuck-all about no grenade. I’ll tell you this about them Green Berets: they’d as soon leave their people out in the bush to get killed when people ask can we stay in your perimeter. And one of our guys did get killed. Did she divorce him?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“What’s your first name?”
“That’s none of your business too.”
“Okay, Jack. You ain’t no soldier to me either. Not if you back them piece-of-shit Special Forces against your own Lurps. Fuck you, Jack.”
“You know what I think? I think the sergeant and I are gonna take you out back and work some shit on you like the Green Berets.”
“Some Green-Beret-style shit,” Sergeant Lorin said.
“I’d just love it. Let’s go.”
“Apologize to the captain.”
“I apologize, sir.”
“Apology accepted. James, I think you have lost your control and your ability to reason in this difficult atmosphere of the pressure of warfare. Don’t you?”
“I think that’s real possible.”
Captain Galassi lit up a Kool. The Quonset hut’s air conditioner didn’t filter entirely the smells from outside, good American smells, grease, frying potatoes, frying meat, reasonable-smelling latrines, not latrines full of slopehead dink Gook shit. Captain Galassi exhaled a cloud of smoke and overlaid the smells.
Screwy Loot would have offered him a Kool. James wished himself back in the days of old Screwy Loot, when the officers were the only crazy ones.
“Can I smoke, sir?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m fresh out.”
“Then I don’t think it’s gonna be possible.”
“Then I won’t.”
“What twisted you? Did you take a lotta Ell, Ess, Deeeee, boy?”
“I don’t use no drugs. ‘Cept as indicated.”
“Indicated by who? Your dealer?”
“By the requirements of the mission, sir.”
“You mean speed.”
“I mean what I said, is all.”
“You mean you’re a little Speedy Gonzales. Are you aware how fucked you are? You have long-range reconned straight out beyond the borders of sanity. You gotta go home.”
“I just signed on another go.”
“You won’t be staying. I don’t want you in my war.”
James said nothing.
“The knees of your pants are a mess.”
“I’ve been digging, sir.”
“Or knee-walking drunk on Trang Khe Street four nights ago.”
“Four nights ago? I do not know, sir.”
“How come you don’t go to the Midnight Massage no more with the guys?”
No answer.
“You got yourself something steady. Little steady woman on Tranky Street. Were you on Trang Khe Street four nights ago?”
“I think so. I don’t know.”
“I think so.”
“Or were you on patrol.”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened.”
“When? On Tranky?”
“On the patrol where a woman was murdered, you fucking murderer.”
James suddenly hated these two sonsofbitches because if they were going to go ahead and do this he should have been given a chair, and a cigarette.
“What happened to that local, James?”
“Anybody got wasted they were hostiles, is all.”
“Were you on that patrol?”
“No.”
“Four nights ago?”
“No.”
“No? Address me as sir.”
“Who snitched us?”
Sergeant Lorin said, “None of your business.”
“Somebody’s a liar.”
“Somebody’s a liar about what?” the sarge said. James waited for the captain to speak. “Did you do this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Goddammit, man, you will address me as sir.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Did you do this, or not?”
“I don’t remember which night was what, sir. I think I drank too much beer last week.”
The sarge said, “Had him a wicked jag on.”
“Do you like beer, James? Well, there isn’t any beer in Leavenworth.”
“Have you been there?”
“I got friends there.”
“Don’t sass me.”
“Apologize to the captain.”
“I apologize, sir.”
“What did you do to that woman?”
“She was VC.”
“Bullshit.”
“She was a VC whore.”
“Bullshit.”
“She’s a whore, and this is a war. Sir.”
“Don’t tell me what this is. I know what it is. I think.”
“So do I.”
“Do you intend to do a fourth tour?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, sir. No more for you.”
“Sir, I’ve got patrol at seventeen hundred.”
“Patrol? Jesus Christ. Number one, we don’t send guys with their ribs taped up and their arm in a cast out on patrol.”
“It’s a sling. It ain’t a cast. It comes off.”
“Number two: We don’t send civilians out on patrol.”
“I ain’t a civilian.”
“Well,” the captain said, and such anger gripped him that he slurred his words, “do you mind if I tell you that if you’re not a civilian you haven’t heard the last of this? I’m gonna take stock of this, I will get back to you, you haven’t heard the last of this. I will get back to you. Maybe a lot of people will be getting back to you. Maybe the whole army will be getting back to you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? Are you being insubordinate?”
“I’m just saying something.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you saying?”
“That you think you’re gonna get back to me, but I don’t think you’re gonna get back to me, because she was a whore, and this is a war. And that’s what happens, because this is a war, because this is not just a war.”
“Well, which is it? Is it a war, or is it not just a war?”
“I’m just telling you.”
“You little punk. I was in this war before you learned to jerk your meat. All right?”
“All right.”
“All right,” said the captain. For thirty seconds they just stood there doing nothing.
James said, “Sir, Captain, I gotta go, I gotta boogie.”
“No, James, you don’t. Jesus Christ. Patrol?”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Galassi stood up. He stepped smartly to the door of the Quonset hut, grasped the knob, and opened it wide. Outside, the dust, the noise of trucks, helicopters—a heavy, gray day—”Sergeant,” he said, “speak to this man.” He left and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving things relatively quiet again under the air conditioner’s hum.
The sarge sat down at the captain’s desk and offered James a seat. But not a cigarette.
Lorin said, “You could’ve wasted as many as four of those motherfuckers.—Well, I know, the only one got hurt is you.” After a while Lorin said, “But this business with the woman.”
“Shit goes on all the time.”
Lorin just looked at him. Stared at him. Said, “James.”
“What.”
“No. You tell me what.”
James said, “I mean, where did this shit about a woman come from, what is this shit doing in my movie?”
“You like your movie?”
“It’s kind of like where I have these sensors. And the minute the shit starts my mind snaps on in Technicolor. Like I have these sensors.”
“So you just want to keep on keeping on?”
“Watching your Technicolor movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Till you eat shit and die?”
“Yeah.”
“Right there I kind of agree with you, James. I don’t really think it’s highly advisable to turn you loose on the United States. I’d say keep you right here till you get killed. But if it ain’t bass-ackwards, it ain’t the U.S. Army, is it?”
“We do it all in the dark, Sarge. Mistakes get made.”
“Yeah, they do. But this little mistake with the woman is traveling right straight up the captain’s ass. And then with the fragging thing, you’re sticking out all over.”
“Can you spare me a toke?”
“In a minute. I’m telling you something.”
“Okay.”
“So I think it’s the real deal, Cowboy. I think you’re gonna have to go home.”
“Home?”
“Home where you came from.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’re a mess.”
“I’m a mess.”
“If you don’t want a ticket out of hell, then you ain’t regular in your mind no more, are you, sojer?”
“If you’re talking, I gotta listen. You always did have your finger right smack on the thing, man.”
“Uncle Ho done died, buddy. You won the war. It’s over.”
“Yeah?”
“Pack up. Go home. Right now.”
“Now?”
“Absolutely. Get to Tan Son Nhut and get on a MAC flight and go. Just go. I’ll furlough you, and after you’re there we’ll work all the paper to make it permanent.”
The sergeant took out a cigarette. He offered James one and lit both out of a matchbook from the Midnight Massage. He said, “It’ll be honorable.”
“What will?”
“The discharge.”
“Oh … Yeah. Honorable?”
“Honorable Discharge.”
“If you say so.”
“I say Honorable. And I always will.”
In the middle of June, Bill Houston bailed his brother James out of jail. James had reached Phoenix a couple of weeks before but hadn’t gotten in touch with anyone until he’d been arrested for simple assault, and then he’d called their mother. As James came out past the bailiff’s desk, he was smiling. Otherwise he looked sketchy, like something might get him from behind.
“First of all, I ain’t smiling because I’m proud. I’m smiling because I’m glad as hell to get out.”
“You’re lucky I had a few bucks.”
“Sorry for you spending it this way.”
“Usually I’m on my ass, but lately things have been breaking a little different for me.”
“Looks like you put on a little weight.”
“Well—I was in Florence.”
Out on the street James ducked his head and squinted against the light.
“I appreciate this, Bill Junior. No lie.”
“Family better count for something. Because nothing else does.”
“You got that right.”
“You ready for a burger?”
“Does the Pope wear a dress?” James expelled a wad of tobacco from his mouth and it bounced on the pavement like a small turd. “How much did you pay the bondsman guy?”
“A hundred. And if you don’t do right and show for court, I owe him a thousand.”
“I’ll do right.”
“I kind of hope so.”
“I’ll pay you back the hundred too.”
“Don’t sweat it. Just when you can.”
Bill Houston reached his right hand cross-draw to dig in the left pocket of his jeans for the keys.
“You got a car.”
“Yep. It’s a Rolls.”
“No shit?”
It was an old Lincoln with a hood like the deck of an aircraft carrier. “Yeah, it ain’t a Rolls. But it rolls when you push on the gas.”
He took James to a McDonald’s and got him three of the biggest they had and two chocolate shakes. James ate fast and then sat there with his arms crossed on his chest, mad-dogging everybody.
“Hey.”
James belched loudly.
They talked about their mother. James said, “How old is she, anyways?”
“She’s fifty-eight at least,” Bill said, “maybe fifty-nine. But she seems like she’s past a hundred.”
“I know. Yeah. She does. She has for a long time.”
Bill said, “So—I’m called Bill Junior. But did something ever occur to you? It occurred to me a long time ago.”
“What.”
“There ain’t no Bill Senior.”
An old man at the next little table asked them: “How old are you boys?”
They looked at each other. The old man said: “I’m sixty-six. You know—Route Sixty-six? Like that. Sixty-six.”
“Fuck yourself,” James said.
Bill Houston observed James dipping snuff. He took a wad from the tin, shoved it down inside his cheek, shut the lid, wiped his fingers on the underneath of his pants leg.
“The bondsman said this was the fourth time in two weeks the cops rousted you for fighting, so they finally had to charge you.”
“That what he said?”
It pissed Bill Houston off, it irked him unreasonably, that James would playact an old soldier, as if he’d explored some mysterious region and been tortured there.
“You want another burger?”
“I’m all right.”
“Really? You’re all right?”
“Yeah.”
“The evidence is pointing the other way.”
The day after James got out of jail he went to a small office where a fat, sad man helped him fill out some forms. He said the checks would start in about four weeks if everything didn’t go too wrong. The man told him about a place downtown that might give him further benefits, and James went to see about it, but they wanted him to stand in line there and fill out more idiotic forms.
For several days he was permitted to stay in a hostel on the east side, on Van Buren Street, the street of outlaws and whores, thirty blocks from where his mother had lived before he’d left for Southeast Asia. Perhaps she still resided there.
In the mornings he set out walking, rarely stopping. To the west lay factories and warehouses. In other directions the city gave way to suburban tracts, empty desert, or irrigated farmland. It was early in the desert summer, hot, but dry. He wore a straw cowboy hat and kept the sun behind him all day, asking in restaurants for water. When it came down ahead of him he turned and went the other way. Only half of him was plugged in. The rest was dark. He could feel his sensors dying.
James didn’t get in touch with Stevie. She came to see him just before he left the hostel for good, and they went out for drinks, but he railed at her so unflaggingly in the Aces Tavern that the bartender shouted at James to leave, and Stevie stayed, saying that she’d seen what he wanted to show her and that she got the message and refused to go anywhere with a man who repaid her kindness with curses and abuse. As the bartender strong-armed him into the night James looked back and saw her crying, swaying in the light of the jukebox. Thirty minutes later Stevie found him standing in front of the state insane asylum at Twenty-fourth Street, looking in through the barred gate at the wide lawns, which in the illumination of the arc lamps looked uniformly silver and magical. She’d finished crying. She told him she couldn’t stop loving him. He swore to her he’d get a job.
He’d made it out of the war with just short of four hundred dollars cash. He rented an apartment in a plywood sort of building called Rob Roy Suites and bought a Harley in many pieces which he commenced to assemble in the living room and knew he’d never complete. He hated his neighbor across the court, a diesel-dyke with a bad mouth. You could tell she used to be sexy but had always hated men. James didn’t know what to do. What did these good souls want you to do? Most evenings he went to a bar just a few blocks down the street where you could almost always get into a fight, or he drank port wine from plastic cups in places full of ripped-up old alcoholic men. He waited for his checks to start. When they started, he bought a Colt .45 revolver, a real six-shooter. He was pretty sure he would eventually shoot the woman living across the way but he felt there was nothing any human power could do about it.
After a month at the Rob Roy Suites he moved to the Majestic Palms Apartments on Thirty-second Street half a block above Van Buren. Each morning he sat by the shadeless window naked, jiggling his knees, and watched a tremendously fat black guy in a circus-tent T-shirt cross the street from wherever he dwelt and open up the Circle K on the corner.
James walked the neighborhood and passed the slack whores on the bus stop benches and shouldered past the old crones taking their minuscule paces forward through the intersections and observed the Mexican women in their tall spiked heels and tight pink pants, who looked for sale but really weren’t.
He sits at a bus stop. He drags on a Kool. He spits between his feet. In his fingers he holds the neck of a half pint of Popov vodka, his head bowed low under the crashing irrelevance of these millions of monsters and their games.
An older guy sitting next to him with a newspaper open across his knees, reading in the glaring sunlight, squinting, began to curse these people undermining the military effort in Vietnam. “Those boys are doing right. They’re our boys. They’re doing right,” he said. James felt as if he could sure use a cigarette, and said so. “I don’t smoke,” the man said. “Don’t even drink coffee. I was raised as a Mormon. Yep. Raised as a Mormon. But I don’t believe in it now. You know why? Because it’s phony.” James repeated he’d like a cigarette, and the man got up and walked away. And a dog came along and stopped and looked at him and James said, “You got a face, buddy,” and he scratched its ears and he said, “Yeah, buddy, you got a face.”
One night in the Aces Tavern he ran into his older brother Bill and Bill’s old friend Pat Patterson. Patterson had just come out of the Arizona State Prison in Florence, where the two had been acquainted. He was a slender, erectly postured young man who looked like he’d landed here intact from the rockabilly fifties, his hair combed in a ducktail and his short sleeves turned up above his triceps, and his collar turned up too.
Bill explained to his brother a little bit about prison: “You got your guys, and they got their guys, depending on your skin color. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s who’s who—who’s the people next to you. And you owe them.”
“I know about it.”
“I know you know about it. You sure do. You’ve had experience on both sides of a gun.”
“But what I’m saying—you must’ve had a lot of experiences.”
“It never happened. It never happened.”
Bill Junior turned his glass in his hands and frowned. “It kind of rubs me wrong how you act, James.” He cleared his throat, made sure the bartender wasn’t looking, and spat on the floor. “Like, ‘James is back in the world. And the world is a big old zit so James wants to piss in its face.’ How long are you going to stay an asshole?”
“Till something convinces me different.”
Bill drained his glass and got up and wandered out the door.
Patterson said to James, “Here’s a question for you: Is this the Aces Tavern as in, Man, I got four Aces? Or is this Aces Tavern as in, This tavern belongs to a cat named Ace?” He pointed to the barmaid, saying, “She’s a young, hot little machine.” James agreed she was little, but she was long past young. The flesh under her arms wobbled as she plunged beer mugs into the sink and shook the drops out and placed them on a towel. James pointed it out. “I ain’t watching her arms,” Patterson said. “I’m watching her ass wiggle.”
“I better go see what Junior’s up to.”
“Fuck that boy. He’ll be just fine.”
James went out on the sidewalk, but Bill was gone. There was only a young man out front bothering the citizens who passed, trying to sell the shirt off his back. James retreated into the Aces and rejoined Patterson, who asked if James had a gun, and James said he had one.
“Wadn’t you a Lurp over there in the Vietnam?”
James said yes.
Patterson intended to rob a casino some folks ran in an isolated house out near Gila Bend and wondered if James would like to make some money. Patterson explained that robbing a casino out in the desert, in the night, would have some of the quality of warfare. James said, “All right.”
They’d been told the patient was a child, but he was a grown man in his thirties, Vietcong, probably. At this point the men who’d brought them to the patient described him as a farmer who’d unearthed an unexploded artillery round. From the nature of the injury—one arm mutilated, the rest of him apparently shielded—it seemed likely he’d meant to salvage the device in order to turn it against its American manufacturers. How the patient had sustained his injuries made no difference to Dr. Mainichikoh, and certainly Kathy didn’t care. With the doctor, in his Land Rover, she got around the villes more freely than she might have if she waited to go with any of the WCS teams, and by her assistance as his nurse she paid her fare. Among the villes Dr. Mainichikoh was known as “Dr. Mai,” which, with a certain upward inflection, could mean “Dr. American,” and today this had led to confusion—Kathy, clearly the Anglo, was presumed to be the physician, and the villagers took the little Japanese man accompanying her to be her nurse. Mai made no attempt to disabuse them except by seizing the situation and giving orders. She liked working with him. He was resourceful—a requirement, given the lack of resources—and good-humored to the point he seemed quite insensitive to grim facts. She understood he was rich, from a Tokyo import-export family. Whether they did business with Vietnam she didn’t know.
The two men who’d conducted them here had established a kind of facility shaded by a canvas tarp. They had the patient laid out on a bloodstained table of boards and lumber rounds and told Kathy they were ready to sterilize the implements immediately. As Dr. Mai began his examination they began to grasp his true role, and they asked him if now they should get the fire going. He told them yes, right away.
Amputation had been pretty well completed by the injury itself, but the forearm remained connected by a bit of bone, muscle, and flesh below the elbow. On a day so hot and without instruments to measure at what point on the limb arterial deficiency had begun, determining what to take and what to leave was guesswork, but Dr. Mai had a deep faith in his own ability to judge the extent of devitalized tissue. “He can keep the elbow,” he said. “It’s a small explosive. If it’s a land mine, well, you’d better take the whole limb, isn’t it? Because it’s going to die.” She might have argued that since this was the patient’s only chance for surgery, higher was better and maybe the whole arm should go, but Dr. Mai wasn’t addressing her. He talked to himself habitually, always in English. “This man is quite strong. A good one. Not even in shock.” The patient stared straight up at the canvas sheet protecting them from the sun and seemed determined not to lose consciousness. A dozen or so shrapnel lacerations on his face and chest had already been excised and sutured with tailoring thread. One, on the cheekbone, had just missed taking his left eye.
They had only Xylocaine, but the doctor cheerfully effected an axillary block of the brachial plexus and went to work while Kathy dabbed away the sweat on his face with a bandanna sterilized in rubbing alcohol.
The patient’s two comrades squatted by a tree not far off, ready to fetch whatever might be needed, as if they had anything to fetch. The man’s family kept out of the way in one of the hooches, all but a toothless mamasan who enacted a ritual of private significance only a few meters away, out in the relentless sunshine, in the smoke of the charcoal fire and the steam from the pot where the instruments boiled: a dance of ominous hesitations, and sudden leaps, and arabesques. Dr. Mai permitted the display without comment, and Kathy welcomed it as boding well for the patient. The idea that among the ragged, the crazy, the whirly-eyed, the frothing-at-the-mouth, among the sideways, among the mumblers, shufflers, laughers, a bit of loving scrutiny would turn up the blessed poor in spirit, the burned visionary, the holy vagrant—she’d always entertained it, this romance.
Dr. Mai lifted his machete from the cauldron and poured half a quart of alcohol all over it and said, “Banzai.” Kathy laughed and pulled back the skin in the direction of the elbow. “In the time of your Civil War,” Dr. Mai said, making the initial cut and beginning to work circumferentially through the first layer of flesh to the fascia beneath, “amputation was a very gruesome business to perform. Now we can be optimists.”
“My Civil War?” she said. “Do you mean the American Civil War?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Canada,” she said. “I’m Canadian.”
“I see. Between the Union and Confederate.”
“The Canadians weren’t part of that war.”
“I see—Canada.”
“You know I’m from Canada.”
“Yes. But I thought Canada is from the United States.”
“We’re north of there.”
“So often north, south. Not so often east and west civil war.”
She released her grip on the skin, and when it retracted Dr. Mai, pressing down with his palm on the blade’s back and rocking the handle up and down, cut through the fascia and the first layer of muscle, and as each layer retracted he cut through the next. Wherever he encountered a blood vessel Kathy clamped it with thread. With her hands she applied upward pressure on the proximal muscle stump. After the deep muscles had retracted the doctor took his saw from the cauldron and went at the bone while she irrigated the site with saline from a large syringe.
The doctor brushed the severed arm from the table onto the earth between his feet and picked up the bandanna and wiped his face, while one by one Kathy pulled the major nerve stumps forward and cut them as high along as could be reached. One of the arteries still bled, and she tied it off again.
She cleaned and repacked the implements while Dr. Mai took the crazy old woman’s hand and danced a little jig with her. He’d made a good concave stump—he was an excellent technician and had a genuine medical sixth sense—but Kathy wondered if they should have left so much of the arm. In fluent Vietnamese the doctor instructed the patient’s companions in caring for the stump and preventing retraction of the skin by the use of adhesive tape and an Ace bandage. He just wasn’t equipped to plaster-cast the arm’s remainder and fashion a ladder splint and stockinette and wire retractor and all the rest, but it didn’t matter. One look at the patient’s face told you he’d survive. Kathy had seven one-quarter-grain syrettes of morphine in her kit and left them all with him because you could see this man would survive.
Dr. Mai stepped to the Land Rover and took his canteen from the front seat and enjoyed a long drink and brought it back to Kathy. She declined.
“I don’t see you drink enough water, Kathy.”
“I get plenty.”
“You’re well adjusted to the tropics. How long did it take you to adjust?”
“I lived in the PI a couple years before I ever came here.”
“You’ve been here five years, isn’t it?”
“Five years. Almost.”
“Yes. How long will you stay?”
“Until it’s over.”
On a sunny November morning just two weeks before he went away to prison, James married Stevie at the courthouse.
His family came to watch. In a churchgoing dress with puffy shoulders, his mother looked like the Okie she was. Brother Bill wore a white sports coat over a white T-shirt, and as the family all stood before the magistrate he sweated as if he were on trial, while young Burris smirked and giggled like a girl, and resembled one, too, with hair grown almost to his shoulders.
Stevie’s parents believed she was marrying a criminal. At first they made promises to attend, but in the end they stayed away.
As the newlyweds left the courthouse the groom could see the Deuce, the section of Second Avenue where the bums rolled in the gutters, and beyond the Deuce the neighborhood where he lived.
Afterward they barbecued small sirloin steaks in South Mountain Park. Bill Junior got red-eyed drunk, and Burris, who might have been fourteen but looked no older than eleven, smoked cigarettes openly. Their mother stayed off in a corner, ready to preach at all who’d listen, or rehearse the family’s tragedies.
The wedding didn’t change much. James kept living in his apartment and Stevie stayed on at her parents’ while James dealt with charges of aggravated assault and armed robbery. He’d pled innocent and made bail, but soon he’d appear again before the judge and change his story and receive his sentence. Not much doubt attached to his prospects. Nevertheless, his court-appointed attorney insisted on taking the process through all its steps in order to get the best deal from the prosecutor. James and the rockabilly Pat Patterson had done all right to begin with, but their luck had run out and the police had arrested them without incident outside a tavern about an hour after their fourth robbery. Patterson, a parolee, had gone directly back to Florence.
On this, his first felony offense, and thanks to his war record, James could expect to serve no more than three years, probably more like two. Stevie swore she’d wait. James might have run away to Mexico, but he was tired, very tired.
Four days from sentencing, four days from prison food, ten days married, and still never having tasted a meal cooked by his wife, James went looking for breakfast on South Central Avenue. He sat in a diner among a handful of demented customers, a man grimacing, another man swearing, and ordered an egg. The chubby probably Chinese proprietress stood by the register having breakfast, eating her oatmeal out of a coffee mug. She tore off half a slice of bread in her teeth and gnashed it down, carrying on with a full mouth in what she must have thought was English, but James couldn’t understand a word—she had that whining, nasal way of talking. Suddenly he very vividly smelled and tasted Nha Trang.
He was distracted by the man in the booth next to his table, who sat sideways with his legs out in the aisle. “I am all souped-up on speed. Yes,” he said very quietly, “I am a speedy little boy.”
“I’m not in the shape of mind to find that interesting,” James said.
“You know where I was seven hours and twenty minutes ago? I was home. You know where home is? San Diego. Know what I was doing? Standing in front of a mirror—full-length mirror, okay?—stark-naked, with a .357 in this hand, holding it to my head just like this. I’m gonna shoot myself. Do you believe me?”
James put his fork down.
“Yeah. Had a little problem with the gambling. Little? Fuck. It took every fucking thing I owned. Wife. Kids. House. I’m bankrupt. She got the house. And a million years of payments on it. Fuck. Ready to blow my brains all over my sister’s bedroom. Yes indeed. Fuck yes. But I didn’t want my sister coming home to a mess like that—or I didn’t have the balls to shoot myself, let’s admit it. So I’m thinking I need to come up with a way of ending this horror show that’s quick and painless and they won’t know I was the one who did this to myself. So I got dressed and I decided here’s how I’ll go out, I’ll get in that little foreign job, little VW bug, small car, sister’s car, ain’t my car. So I got in it and fired it up and headed east on Interstate Eight, my friend, out of San Diego, and I put on my high beams and I told myself the first semi truck flashes his lights at me I’m gonna swing into him head-on, take myself out kamikaze-style. And I had both hands on the wheel the whole way, man, didn’t take my hands off except to scratch my nuts or thumb the cap off a bottle of bennies and shake a couple more down my throat. And I tell you what. That whole ride, three hundred and fifty miles at least, nobody once flashed their lights at me, sir, not one person, there was not a single incident of anybody flashing their lights at me. And that’s a miracle. It’s a miracle I’m sitting here alive. I don’t know what it means. But I’m alive. That’s all I know. And I don’t know anything more on this earth except that. I am alive.”
He didn’t appear to be on any kind of bennies. He looked very calm and stayed quite still, with his right leg draped over his left knee and his hands clasped gently before him on his thigh. His eyes were red, but they brimmed with the light of love. He ordered white toast without butter and tore small pieces from it and fed them between his lips. Struck a match and lit a cigarette and tossed the matchbook onto his plate.
James said, “Took you a suicide run.”
“Yeah. Sure did.”
“I been on a couple runs like that.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey. You still got your gun? You want me to shoot you?”
The man looked dapper in a tweed sort of sports jacket over a thin beige sweater, pale blue pajama bottoms, and flimsy cloth house slippers. He took a reflective drag on his cigarette. “I left the gun at home,” he said.
Bill Houston took his brother James out for a talk the day before his final court appearance. He invited him to a coffee shop rather than a tavern; James had better understand the matter was serious. “Look, you never know. All I know is you want to stay out of max, because somebody’s always cutting up in there, and they’re always locking you down. So while they have you waiting for classification, talk about your education constantly. Any counselors, those guys, anybody like that talks to you, you say ‘education, education.’ You want to finish high school, you want to learn a skill. Just talk about stuff like that, and they’ll put you in medium. Medium is where you want to be. It’s more relaxed. People aren’t so crazy. You’re on the yard just about anytime you want. It’s good. Believe me, you don’t want max.”
“Who all’s in there?”
“Where? Medium?”
“Florence. Anywheres, medium or max.”
“Well—lots of folks.”
“Is the old man in there? Your father?”
“He ain’t my father. He’s your father.”
“Whoever’s father. He in there?”
“Yeah. He’s over in max. No. I think he got out.”
“You pretty sure about that?”
“Yeah. I think he got out. She quit visiting, anyways.”
“She don’t go no more?”
“Not since I got out. Far as I know. So her husband must be somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere else.”
Bill left his younger brother with a final handshake, not sure he’d gotten himself across successfully, and headed downtown to check on work at the day-labor office, or hang around the park. The desert autumn had come, time for pruning the orchards. He watched men cutting away at the olive trees along the avenues with moaning chain saws and felt it all happening inside him.
He wished for a motorcycle. Wondered if stealing one was difficult. Walked around looking for one outside the taverns, then inside the taverns for happy hours and deals on port wine. As a vintage, port was nobody’s favorite, but people forced to consider these things, like himself, had calculated that it offered the highest proof per penny. “Thick and sickly sweet,” a middle-aged woman said, toasting him sadly. “Not you!” she said. “I mean the port. It’s sweet. You look sour. I’m sour too.” Her problem was, she told him, that her son-in-law had died in Vietnam. Houston said he had a brother just back from there. “No. Really? Come here,” she said, “I gotta make an introduction,” and led him by the hand to a booth to meet her daughter, widowed by the war after a long year’s separation from the boy she’d married only a week before he’d shipped. He’d been killed near the end of his tour. Houston looked at wedding photographs. Not his idea of a party. The ladies bought a round. The young widow drank too many beers, but rather than breaking down crying, she told how she’d cried at her young husband’s funeral, was glad she’d cried, had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to cry. She’d spent these last ten days since the news had come in a state of relief. Now she wouldn’t have to welcome him home and get to know him all over again. In her husband’s absence, she’d changed a lot. She hadn’t known what to do about that. At the funeral they’d presented her with a flag folded into a triangle. “Yeah, I got a flag.”
“No shit. A flag? Oh, you mean an American flag. Old Glory.” Houston had his leg pressed along the length of her thigh.
“Well, they don’t call it Old Glory, do they? It’s something else.”
“It’s something else, I think. Yeah.”
“The Stars and Bars or something.”
“My little brother was over there. Infantry. Won himself a Purple Heart.”
“Really? The Purple Heart?”
“Sure thing.”
“What happened to him?”
“He stepped on a booby trap in a tunnel. One of them punji sticks. Or he ran into it or something.”
“Wow. Gee.”
“It could’ve been worse. Them little VC make some wicked-ass booby traps. His was just a bamboo sliver, really. But it’s a wound. It’s worth a Purple Heart.”
“So, wow. Was he a tunnel rat?”
“I don’t know what he was. He ended up with the Lurps. Man—I used to hold him down and drip spit on his face. You know—drool it and slurp it back.”
“Eew!” said both women together.
“That’s how us sailors handle them Lurps.”
“Eew!”
“Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?”
“My husband divorced me,” the mother said. “That feels the same as if he died. Except they don’t give you a flag, and I still think about killing him every day.”
“Is that your dad she’s talking about?” Houston asked the girl.
“According to the doctors,” she said.
As soon as her mother got up to visit the bathroom Houston said, “You want to go to a sleazy motel and watch some TV or something?”
“If you got the money, honey, I got the time.”
“Look here. See what this is?”
“It’s a Kennedy half a dollar.”
“That’s it, my life savings. I’ll stick it up my ass for fifty more cents. I’ll break a bottle over my head.”
“I got the money, honey. I’m getting war insurance.”
The girl leaned against him and touched her fingers lightly to his chest hair. The desert nights dipped well below fifty Fahrenheit, but Bill Houston went bare-skinned under a black leather jacket. His name on the street was Leather Bill. The rest of his wardrobe were jeans and boots wrecked by the abrasions of life.
“Better find the exit before Mom comes back,” the girl said.
When he opened his eyes in the morning, it developed she’d found the motel’s exit sometime earlier. A man with a mission would have rolled out first, and gone through her purse. Instead he’d snuggled down in dreams he couldn’t remember.
He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease. But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out.
When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? He stayed under the covers in the chilly, Lysol-smelling room until the management knocked on the door. He asked for ten minutes, showered, and went back to bed to wait for the knock that meant business.
James had a roommate, another veteran, a biker named Fred, and Fred’s Harley, which occupied most of the living room. James noticed one day that his friend hadn’t been around in a while, maybe in as long as a month or even two months, and as a way of summoning him back, if he was still alive, James perpetrated the mystical sacrilege of straddling Fred’s Harley and turning the ignition key. Three kicks and it started explosively and sat beneath him growling and shuddering. He let out the clutch and it leapt straight into the wall and he found himself lying beneath it on the living room floor. He could hardly get the machine upright on his own—too much drinking and too much sitting around; he was a mess. No wonder he lost so many fights. But he enjoyed losing, enjoyed a sort of righteous lethargy while he curled in a ball and somebody kicked him in the head and back and legs, enjoyed lying with his face in his own blood while voices cried, “Stop it! That’s enough! You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” because they were wrong. They hadn’t come anywhere close to killing him.