by Steve Amick
“Wow,” he said. “I like the sound of that sumac lemonade.”
“Oh, you’ve tried it?”
He said he hadn’t, but he was sure it was good, otherwise why would anyone make it? “That name,” he said. “I love the sound of it.” Then he did an odd thing: he raised his wristwatch to his lips, pressed a tiny button on the face and repeated the phrase: “Sumac lemonade.”
Then he said he was going to have to pass on sponsoring anything. Something about liquid assets these days. Maybe next year.
He bought ten raffle tickets for a total of twenty dollars. She’d had better luck with Bob Beirnbaum, the creepy used record dealer. She thanked Noah Yoder for his time, put on her hat and left.
Talking into his watch like he’s Dick Tracy, she thought, disgusted. What kind of world is it where a squirrelly little guy like that gets to be friends with someone like David Letterman—meanwhile I have to drive around shilling for the Chamber of Commerce? She made a mental note to shoot herself in the brainpan if she was still doing this job five years from now.
37
ROGER DRINKWATER WAS A PEACE-LOVING MAN. So much so that he made it a personal tradition to spend the Fourth of July in Canada. This despite being a Vietnam vet and, as such, entitled to a spot every year on the VFW local float, next to the WW II geezers like Arnie Stack and Gad Holsinger. He’d never stuck around and joined the parade in the twenty-five-plus years he’d had a right to, and this one coming up, July 4, 2001, would be no exception. He already had the entire holiday weekend bookended in red marker on his calendar, a whole month ahead of time. This annual retreat down to Detroit and over into Windsor was not made as a perverse comment on those who shirked their duty and hightailed it to the safety, round bacon, full-frontal strip clubs and all-night doughnut shops of that slightly foreign land, and not as a Native American, as a nose-thumbing to the holiday itself, which offered no freedom for those who were already here, indigenous, but just simply to avoid the goddamn fireworks, which drove him fairly up a tree. It was just all too loud and unnerving.
Oddly, gunshots never bugged him much. Maybe because the association for that sound went way, way back, long before Nam. He’d been hunting the woods around Weneshkeen and Lake Meenigeesis since he was just big enough to drag the gallery gun with the Bondo-ed gunstock his Uncle Jimmy Two-Hands gave him. (Sold him, really. The price: the first three birds he bagged. Which was fine with Roger, since it was all he could do to carry the gun, let alone game.) He still hunted, and the wild turkey and venison jerky he sold locally had grown to about forty percent of his yearly income. So the sound of guns wasn’t a problem. It was too deeply embedded in his life, in his sense of “normal,” to even register as a blip.
Part of that, too, was that he didn’t actually hear a lot of steady gunfire in and around Rach Soi, where he’d operated as a Navy SEAL. They were rarely that close to the action. They had a platoon leader who didn’t exactly show a lot of initiative, especially in terms of brainless bravado. They tended not to go out bushwhacking, improvising, as much as the other units. When they struck, it was tactical, usually at remote riverside installations that were necessarily not in combat mode, not on the alert. They captured the occasional VC, took him back blindfolded for questioning, kept it all fairly bloodless. Lots of demo work—blowing VC staging areas—hooches and docks and radio huts. Infrastructure stuff. More det work, less wet work, was how their skipper put it, referring to the fusing they used, “det cord,” and the CIA advisers’ term for the grisly, throat-slitting stuff—“wet work”—that they avoided. Sometimes, during these missions, floating down a river on a rubber bladder, greased black as an oil tanker tragedy, they heard the distant thrush of gunfire, skirmishes way in the hills, as menacing as a Western on the neighbor’s TV.
So that wasn’t what got under his skin, what gave him the jitters and made him feel like one of those cliché shell-shockers you saw on the made-for-TV movies, everything in slow-mo. There did exist certain sounds capable of triggering that in him, and he hated the way it made him feel out of control. He didn’t freak and scream and do the cold sweat thing—act like someone who would be played by Mel Gibson—but still, it made him feel a little screwy.
One sound was explosions. Fireworks did it. And he was no stranger to explosions, as a former demo export. But now he preferred to avoid them. Occasionally, he taught Guardsmen up in Grayling, and though the colonel there wanted very much to hire him to teach some underwater demo, he’d declined and stuck instead to stealth swimming, marine survival, SCUBA, snorkel and salvage diving.
The other sound that ground his nerves was the jet-skis. Not that he required a specific memory from Nam to be annoyed with jet-skis—the average human being with half a marble in his head could manage to hate the sound of jet-skis—but beyond this, and the annoyance of almost getting creamed every time he tried to go for a swim, they sounded, to Roger, way too much like the Nakon Gnat, a tiny two-stroke motorcycle manufactured in North Korea. It was like a cheap version of the little Hondas made famous, around that same time, back in the States with the Beach Boys or whoever, singing about scooting around on dates. But where the famous little Hondas had plastic leg fairings, the Gnats were made out of recycled tin, not even repainted, so that it looked, from a few meters off, like an ornate patchwork design or multicolored marbling, but if you looked closely, you could see where the tin cans had been mashed together to form the refabrication—snatches of peas and turnips and gory beets. The low purchase price was the draw: the bikes went for roughly the market value of two geese (a method of denomination he never quite got the hang of, having no point of reference since he never knew the relative goose price of any of his belongings back in Michigan). They were everywhere in Saigon, like Vespas in Rome, bicycles in Beijing. They sounded, as his bunkmate Coots put it, “like a lawnmower trying to buttfuck a pig.” In other words, like a jet-ski.
And now the sound of jet-skis drove him up a tree. It also drove him back, if he wasn’t careful, to one lousy spring day in Saigon.
IT SEEMED LIKE THERE WERE BLOSSOMS in the air, even though they were in that armpit Saigon, and the only thing he could see for sure in the air were the walls and walls of laundry hanging across the streets and the sweaty-looking ducks hanging in the market, dead as something in a museum. He didn’t see blossoms, of course, and didn’t bring it up, because Coots and Miller, his two best buddies, whom he was on leave with, were way too involved with their discussion of what factors constitute a better blowjob and where they were going to purchase one and how much they were willing to shell out, to hear anything about blossoms. Still, he would swear he smelled something different that day. It was spring, at least according to the Playmate calendar back in his hooch, and he supposed it might be possible they were near some blossoms. Maybe some collateral blossomage or whatever had blown loose and entered the city.
It made him think of the cherry orchards starting up back home in Michigan, vonBushberger’s and the rest, and the wild strawberry paczki his Grandma Oshka made that time of year, with “ditch berries” he gathered for her, along the paved county road, and he didn’t want to think about that. So he thought instead about the blowjob debate going on and how he might politely stay out of the proceedings without looking like he disapproved and without getting razzed and called “queerbait.”
And it was here that he now thought he first glimpsed something, though he could never decide if he saw it then and remembered it later, or if he only invented the image after the fact: two scowling stick-figure kids, skeleton-jawed, passing their café table on a motorbike, slow enough that the engine almost stalled, swooping by in a lolling arc, shirtsleeves flapping, heads turned, checking them out, the barrel of something long and black slung over the shoulder of the kid in back.
Some birdlike headshrinker at the VA twenty-some years ago told him she thought his brain invented this part, that he hadn’t spotted the Kalashnikov at that point, but he’d convinced himself he had out of a sens
e of guilt. She said he felt bad for surviving and so he wanted to beat himself up that he hadn’t been alert enough. Personally, Roger preferred the theory that things were just real fucked up over there.
If he did see it, it was only a flash and he was the only one. Coots and Miller were too distracted by the pair of hookers. They’d just arrived at an acceptable price for the blowjobs and the girls were trying to get them up from the table and get on with it, over to a side alley, not far, just in view of the table, where a dirty burlap rag hung for privacy. Roger kept staring at the burlap rag, wondering if anyone was waiting behind it. The burlap looked like the exact place, if there was any chance the bubonic plague still existed, that the spores might be hiding. He thought, Come on, guys. That rag alone is reason enough for me to decline.
Coots and Miller had moved past trying to razz him into joining them. They were now debating which of the girls was going to blow which one of them. The point of contention, apparently, was the teeth. Roger couldn’t see it. The girls looked almost like twins to him, but Miller pointed out that one of them had some very long sharp twisted teeth up front that looked like they could lacerate some serious dong. “No way I’m going with Snagglepuss,” he said, and then quoted the cartoon cougar, “I mean, ‘Exit! Stage left!’ on that action, pal. No thank you, man.”
Coots suggested the girl he wanted could blow them both, offering it to him as if it were the gentlemanly thing to do, but Miller said, “No way. That’s queer.”
They were about to flip a coin when a sound rose up from above the general din—it was a Nakon Gnat emerging from an alley just down the street and raising its pitch, the flimsy engine gunned full throttle. The crowd cleared, the kid on back now sitting sidesaddle, swinging something around in his arms, leveling it.
Roger tried to scream but all that came to mind was Exit! Stage left! and of course he didn’t yell that.
38
AS FOR BEING POLISH, there was only one time Roger had visited Hamtramck, his grandmother’s hometown on the edge of Detroit. This was several years ago, returning from Canada and his yearly Fourth of July exit, stage right.
It didn’t go so well.
He was thinking he’d just drive through, make a couple passes through the main drag, Joseph Campou, just take in the sights and smells. But then he saw a name he recognized: Zubreski’s. His Grandma Oshka had spoken of a restaurant called Zubreski’s, once owned by her uncle, Peebo Zubreski. Zubreski—those were her people. Of course, that was almost a hundred years ago now. The place looked old enough to be the original building, though, at this point, it could’ve been owned by the Korean mafia for all he knew.
He parked and went in. It was all dark wood and bad yellow sconce lighting that was maybe supposed to resemble old-fashioned gaslight. It smelled like his grandmother’s kitchen, plus cigar and beer, and seemed like a museum, the fixtures dark and wooden—a museum of bread, perhaps, with that ever-present just-baked smell in the air. Right in the front hallway, hung among the framed photos, was a Detroit News article from 1943, during the race riots. It showed a mob of white men, their faces twisted in rage, savagely attacking a bloody black man under a marquee that said Roxy. A tipped car burned behind him. Roger thought that if he put his thumb up and covered the guy getting the beating, you could convince yourself these guys were at the ballgame, cheering the Tigers. He reconsidered, just for a second. Maybe he should turn around and leave.
The place seemed to be in a mid-afternoon lull. Except for two men and a large woman in a fake inky wig, Imelda Marcos–style, at the bar at the far end, the restaurant was empty, so he seated himself at a tiny table near the front.
“What can I do for you, chief?”
A lot of people, Roger reminded himself, say chief. He looked up to a kid no older than twenty-two, twenty-three, reddish face, blond hair, a little heavy in a white shirt and gummy-looking apron. He couldn’t judge if the guy had meant it as a generic form of address, like skipper, or captain, or pal, or if it was just a nasty and tired-out racial slur. He did have an order pad in his hand. But then again, he wasn’t raising it to write on it. It was just in his hand, remaining low at his side. So Roger wasn’t sure. He couldn’t tell.
“This is Zubreski’s, right?”
“You here to see someone?”
“Not really,” Roger said. “Just to eat.”
The guy started to take the menu away from him. “We just serve Polish food.”
Roger held on to it. “Do you serve barszcz z uszkami?”
The guy sort of blinked. Roger thought he looked like an extra on that old TV show, Mister Ed, when someone heard the horse talk but wasn’t sure whether or not to believe their ears. Not amazed yet, just waiting for more information. He always found that show boring and he didn’t feel any less patient about it now that it was happening in real life and he himself was the talking horse. “Your barszcz,” he said. “You serve that z uszkami or is it just—?”
The guy said, “You know it’s not so much what we serve or how we serve it, but who we serve. You follow?” He looked over his shoulder, slowly, toward the bar, then back and said, “And frankly, I don’t ever recall us serving Apaches.”
Roger noticed now he was chewing gum. Snapping it. It had suddenly appeared along with the attitude, something he kept tucked down under his tongue, ready to go. An optional accessory.
Where the hell did he get Apache? In Michigan?
Roger said, “Bring me the barszcz, however you make it, flaczki . . . po warszawsku, if possible . . . and maybe, if you have it, a map of the U.S., so I can show you how you’re off by about, oh . . . two thousand miles or so.” He squeezed out a smile, something he rarely did even when surrounded by friends, in a place where he was welcome. He folded his arms, sitting back in the chair. “And hey, easy on the cream, okay?”
The waiter winced, took a loud long breath, hissing through his nose, turning and checking over his shoulder, back toward the others at the bar. Then he faced front again and leaned on the table, putting his weight on it, rattling the silverware. “Look, if you go right now, we can chalk this up to a bad judgment call and no harm done. I mean, we don’t come to wherever the hell you live and stink it up, do we?”
“Yes,” Roger said, nodding for a long, deliberative time, “you do.”
Roger waited for it. The waiter continued glaring.
There was movement already, a shadow in his periphery, and he wasn’t going to wait for this guy’s entire family to show up and pile on. They’d have to lay hands on him first—fine. He’d allow that, to establish who went first. But not much more than that. Not pinning him down.
The two guys from the bar were standing over him now, big-bellied slabs—one behind him, one beside, the waiter still right in front, grinning now. He heard him mutter, “Scvenia poscudna”—dirty pig—and then there it was, hands on his shoulders, firm on his arms.
Roger let the back of his chair handle the guy directly behind him, jammed back fast into the guy’s nuts as he rose, elbow out, and caught the guy to his right flank under the chin, pushing this one back off his feet, with blood spurting from his nose. But the guy was lucky he just got elbow, because in his other hand, coming up, Roger held the serrated steak knife. (It never failed: any place where the idea of sensible eating was laughable, you would find the steak knife already on the table, ready to go.) His right hand clutched the waiter straight in front of him by the ear, tipping his head to the side and down, and he made one quick pass with the left and backed away.
A sound came out of the waiter as he clutched the side of his head. Roger imagined the sounds he was trying for were actually “My ear! My fucking ear!” but what came out was more of a “nnnNNNAAHHH!! NNNAHHHHH!! NNNNAAAHHHH!”
The two on the floor started to get up, but he flashed the steak knife. He still had one thing to say. He repeated Chief Joseph One-Song’s famous quote: “You have all been a great disappointment.” Only he said it in Polish: “Wszyscy byliscie bardzo rozczar
owujacy.” The two still on the floor, the waiter bent over a chair, a red hand mashed against his sticky head—they all looked up, stunned: talking horses to the nth degree. He got the hell out of there.
He was already on I-94, well past Ann Arbor, when he realized he was still gripping the ear. It actually wasn’t all that bloody. He imagined most of the arteries were more on the skull side of the head, very little in the ear itself. And those arteries were probably being closed at that moment in the trauma ward at Henry Ford Hospital. Or, if the owners of Zubreski’s didn’t want to cause a stir, sewn up back in the kitchen by some ethically questionable doctor they had in their pocket.
It seemed wrong to just throw it away, a human ear and all, so he hung on to it and when he got home, strung it up in his smokehouse. After about six months had passed and there were no police inquiries and no appearance in town of slabby, ruddy-faced Slavic types nosing around, he took the ear down and put it in a padded envelope and dropped it in a public mailbox, addressed to Zubreski’s Restaurant, Hamtramck, MI, no return address, and with a note inside, unsigned: Thought this should go back where it belongs.
39
IT DIDN’T COME WITH A LOT OF FANFARE. One evening, as soon as his daughter got the road stand closed, before his wife was even ready with dinner, Brenda said they should all come down to Miki’s camper because he had an announcement. Von had a feeling and he was right. Miki and Brenda stood together on the doorstep of the little mobile lab, their combined weight working the shocks, and announced they were engaged. Just like that. Then Miki broke out the saki and tiny ornamental cups.
As just plain wrong as the whole deal was, the saki was probably the worst of it. Von knew it could get you hammered, fast, but at some point, the power to inebriate becomes irrelevant—if urine got you wasted, he wouldn’t want to drink much of that, either.