by Cataneo, D.
File Clerk 8
Nicky huffed and puffed into the kitchen. The envelopes clattered in his shaking hands. Mom was seated at the kitchen table and did not look up from her beadwork. Beadwork involved stringing exactly 467 orange plastic beads onto an twelve-inch length of elastic to produce a cheap necklace. A friend of Uncle Dominic’s from Brooklyn would send over big spools of elastic and huge cardboard boxes filled with thousands and thousands of beads. The guy paid Mom two cents for every necklace she put together. Beadwork was part of the effort to get money to move away from Eggplant Alley.
Nicky panted, “Mom! This guy, this creature, came after me in the lobby.”
“I’ve made two dollars today,” Mom said without a trace of pride. “That will make a nice down payment on a house, right? I never want to see an orange bead for the rest of my life.”
“He chased me from the second floor to the lobby. I think he was after the mail.”
“Anything in the mail?” Mom said over her shoulder.
Nicky shuffled the envelopes in his moist hand. Second from the top was an envelope with a red, white, and blue border. The envelope had a military postmark. The script writing on the envelope was Roy’s.
“Yeah,” Nicky said. “This.”
Mom dropped a string of beads, and forty-five minutes’ work unraveled onto the table. Mom grabbed the envelope. She took a seat, carefully peeled open the envelope flap, and extracted the letter. The letter was written on a slice of thin paper, which folded over Mom’s hands like a tissue. Mom chewed her lower lip as she read.
“Okay, okay. Good,” Mom said, nodding. She handed the letter to Nicky. “You want to see?”
“No, tell me what it says.”
Mom read off the main points. The weather was really hot in Vietnam. The place stank like the back alley of the Chinese Palace restaurant on Broadway. Roy was assigned as a file clerk at a huge base called Long Binh. Roy and some of his fellow soldiers at the base were thinking of playing stickball. Half the day he worked in an air-conditioned office.
“Look here,” Mom said, running her index finger to the last line of the letter. Roy had scribbled big: “I’m nice and safe!”
“That’s really, really good,” Mom said.
Nicky shrugged.
At five thirty, the door thunked open and the security chain jangled taut.
“What the hell is going on here? Let me in!” Dad boomed.
Nicky ran to the door, unhooked the chain.
“Dad! A creature, a fiend, came after me in the lobby,” Nicky said.
“There’s a letter from Roy,” Mom called from the kitchen.
Nicky said, “He looked like a real killer.”
Dad said, “Lemme see that letter.”
Dad was already reading as he felt behind him for a chair at the kitchen table.
“An air-conditioned office,” Dad said approvingly. “Maybe I ought to join up this summer. Not like when I was in the service. Jesus. An air-conditioned office. How do you like that? Somebody get me a beer.”
And that night, thanks to Roy’s letter, there was a change in the air. For the better.
Mom went to work on a meat loaf—just one meat loaf. Mom was back to normal.
Dad settled into his chair in the living room and unfolded his Daily News. Nicky went into the living room and got the television going. He turned the dial from channel to channel until he found what he was searching for: there was a musical on Channel 5. Two guys in sailor suits tap-danced on the fake deck of a fake ship.
Dad crumpled his newspaper in his lap. “Hey Nicky, for crying out loud. Switch that, will you? You know I can’t stand that stuff.”
Dad was back to normal.
Nicky was not normal. He was sad, disappointed, shocked, and ashamed. He had his own thoughts on the subject of Roy’s letter.
They were very private thoughts, the kind Nicky would never reveal to anyone, ever, not even to a best friend, if he had one. Nicky would not reveal these thoughts even to an imaginary friend. These thoughts were like dynamite, even more dangerous than Nicky’s imaginings of Becky Hubbard in a swimsuit. If Dad, just a few feet away, sipping a Ballantine behind the Daily News, could read Nicky’s mind, there would be big trouble.
No one would get it. No one would understand. Mom and Dad wouldn’t like this.
The truth was, Nicky hated Roy’s letter. That was supposed to be great news? That Roy was cooling off in a safe office, doing sissy work in the middle of a war? In Nicky’s way of thinking, if you go to war, you might as well do something besides file reports and shuffle papers. Going to war and doing paperwork was like joining the Yankees and refusing to play. Like going to Paris and skipping the Eiffel Tower. Like going to Disney Land and passing on the rides. What was the point?
Nicky knew something of war. He faithfully read the comic books Sergeant Nick and Battle Aces. He never missed an episode of the television show Combat! Once, he read a whole book on war, God Is My Co-Pilot. Nicky knew the horrors of war, and he thought they made great reading and terrific TV. Nicky wondered what sort of book Roy would produce about his war exploits: Paper Clips Are My Co-Pilot. Some joke. Nicky wanted Roy to come home with vivid accounts of stormed pillboxes and heroic stands and close calls. He wanted Roy to come home and speak gravely of the whine of bullets, the smell of gunpowder, the roar of artillery. Of flags snapping overhead. Of victory and glory.
Nicky recalled the night before Roy shipped out. Dad’s shouts. Roy’s yells. Mom’s sobs. The stupid porcelain monkey.
“All that,” Nicky muttered, his mind dropping into the past, to that terrible night. “To become a file clerk.”
Late in the afternoon on the day before Roy left for Vietnam, Nicky secretly peeked at the army orders on Roy’s bureau. They were right out in the open, next to Roy’s Yankee bobblehead doll. Nicky was excited and nervous to think that the official, no-nonsense United States Army wording was directed at his big brother: “Will proceed … report no later than 0800 … for civilian air transport to MACV …” Nicky also snuck a look at the plane tickets that would ship Roy from New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Tan Son Nhut AFB in the Republic of Vietnam.
Nicky thought, “Wow.” No one in the family had ever flown in an airplane.
Nicky ran his fingertips along the green wool and brass buttons of Roy’s army uniform, stiff on a hanger behind the bedroom door. Nicky touched the area above the left pocket. “That’s where the medals go,” he thought.
Later, as the sun set behind the aspirin factory, Mom happily put together Roy’s going-away meal (everyone was careful to not call it a last meal). As Mom cooked, Nicky read the Sunday comics on the floor and Dad watched the Yankee game. In these final moments of peace, the apartment smelled of frying eggplant.
Roy marched into the living room, cleared his throat, and asked Dad if he had a minute. Nicky looked up from the comics. Nicky was still startled by Roy’s army-regulation haircut. The buzz cut made him resemble Roy from the old days. It was like going back in time, and Nicky was comforted by the sensation.
“What is it?” Dad said, looking away from a bases-loaded rally by the Yankees.
“I ain’t going.”
“Ain’t going where?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“To Vietnam.”
“Some joke.”
Roy said, in a tone of voice straight out of big moments in black-and-white movies, “This is no joke.”
Dad slid forward in his easy chair. He nearly slid off the cushion.
“What is this? A gag? So where do you think you’re going?”
“To Canada. I have it all planned out.”
Dad said, “Planned?”
Roy said he had given the matter a lot of thought. He said the war was clearly a big stupid mistake. He said he had no desire to get shot, blown up, burned alive, dismembered, disemboweled, or beheaded for a big stupid mistake.
Dad said, “They didn’t ASK your opinion. They TO
LD you to go.”
“This is an unjust war.”
“Don’t give me that crap. What do you know of war?”
“Plenty,” Roy said. “I know it’s rotten.”
“Oh. An expert.”
“I took a walk through the VA hospital the other day. You should see.”
“The VA hospital?”
“Yeah. A friend. She knows a doctor there.”
“Oh. Oh-HO. I smell Margalo in this. I should have known.”
“What does that matter?” Roy said. “I ain’t going. And you can’t make me.” He sounded like Roy at age nine, a boy refusing to eat beets.
Dad said, “Sit down. Listen to me.”
“No.”
“Sit.”
“No. I’ll stand.”
“Sit down.”
“No.”
Dad stood. Roy sat on the couch.
Dad sat in his chair.
Roy stood.
Dad stood.
Roy sat.
Mom entered the room with a wooden spoon, dripping tomato sauce onto the rug.
“What in God’s name is going on?”
Dad said, “Roy and me need to have a discussion. But we’re doing a jack-in-the-box thing instead.”
“Nicky,” Mom said. She crooked her forefinger. “Come with me. Roy. You sit and talk with your father.”
Nicky and Mom listened from the kitchen table as Dad and Roy conducted their discussion. The discussion raged into nightfall.
“You will do your duty.”
“I have an obligation to NOT go.”
“Are you afraid? Is that it? Listen, we were afraid. We went.”
“You can’t even run your own life, I’ll be damned if you’ll run mine.”
“It’s that hippie girlfriend of yours, isn’t it? Am I right? That’s it, right?”
“This is my decision.”
“You will have to live with this the rest of your life.”
“At least I’ll have a rest of my life.”
“Don’t you want to be a man?”
“That’s just stupid.”
“I’m stupid? You’re the stupid one.”
And so forth.
Nicky sat at the kitchen table and listened to the voices rise and fall in the living room. Mom switched on the plastic radio. She turned off the burner under the pot of bubbling tomato sauce and turned off the burner under the skillet of sizzling eggplant. The tomato sauce ceased to bubble, went flat, and developed a hard skim. The eggplant slivers cooled, and the olive oil congealed. Nicky felt a wave of grief as he watched a promising happy hot meal turn cold and die.
Mom and Nicky jumped when Dad shouted loudly, “I WILL STUFF YOU ONTO THE PLANE MYSELF IF I HAVE TO.”
They giggled when the tenants downstairs banged on their ceiling with a broomstick, the apartment house signal for “Shut the hell up!”
“I don’t know who they are,” Mom said. “New people.”
Mom fixed coffee—instant. Brewed coffee was for happy occasions.
In the living room, a fist pounded the coffee table.
Followed by murmurs.
Then a thump against the footstool.
And silence.
Followed by the sound of a Sunday newspaper tossed high and fluttering.
“Only a fool would go over there. A total fool.”
“Was your mother’s brother a fool to go? To give his life for his country? Is that what you are saying?”
“That was a different war.”
“Oh, an expert. Listen, kiddo—war is war.”
“What if they gave a war and nobody showed up?”
“You got to be kidding. I think I’m gonna puke.”
Mom sat at the table and held on to her coffee with two hands, as if the cup might fly away. Nicky doodled on scrap paper. He drew tanks and airplanes and soldiers storming beachheads, the sort of doodles Roy once favored.
At last, Dad came into the kitchen. He smelled of hot sweat. Dad breathed like a man who had just run up five flights of stairs. His eyes were wide and watery and frightened.
“I don’t know what to do with that kid.”
“Where is he now?”
“In their room.”
Nicky pushed back his chair. He said he was going to the bathroom.
He went to the bedroom.
Roy lay on his bed, smoking a cigarette. With the military buzz cut, he looked precisely like Roy from the good old days. The Roy who gobbled up Sgt. Rock comics, the Roy who was glued to John Wayne movies, the Roy who wanted to be a fighter pilot when he grew up.
“Roy?”
“Forget it. I ain’t going,” Roy said quietly.
“I know.”
Nicky’s eyes were drawn to the plastic model ships on his bureau. Nicky picked up the USS Sullivans, a destroyer named after the five Sullivan brothers who went down on the same ship during World War II. Nicky had heard that story a million times. He had heard that story from Roy.
“Remember this, Roy? The Sullivans?”
“I don’t want a ship named after me, thanks. We already have a drink named after us.”
Nicky replaced the model on his bureau. Roy looked like his old self, from the old days. But he did not sound like him.
Nicky stretched out on his bed. The room was dark except for the light from the hallway. Roy finished his cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray balanced on his belly, and lit another one. Nicky heard the lighter scrape. He saw Roy’s face in the glow.
Roy said out of nowhere, “I ain’t going.”
The apartment door slammed. Moments later, familiar shoe steps rang on the courtyard walkway five stories below. Nicky raised up on one elbow and peeked through the curtain.
“Dad’s going somewhere.”
“Probably getting the cops to arrest me for desertion.”
“You don’t want to go to jail.”
“I ain’t going,” Roy said quietly.
They lay in the dark and neither of them said a word for a long while.
The apartment door slammed again. Dad appeared in the bedroom doorway. He balanced a pizza box in one hand. The smell of hot tomato sauce was soothing. Tucked under Dad’s arm was a porcelain statue of a monkey.
Nicky said, “Dad, what’s the …”
Dad said, “Roy. Come on out and have some pie.”
Roy sighed, put out his cigarette. He rolled off the bed.
“My last meal,” he grunted.
Nicky hopped happily out of bed to join the party. He was hungry for food. He wanted pizza pie. And he was hungry for fun and manly fellowship—tall tales, risqué jokes, and worldly secrets. He wanted the inside stories, the stories that the grownups must be telling when he walks into the room and they cease talking. He desperately wanted the story behind that monkey. He could barely wait …
Dad said, “Nicky, stay here. Roy and me need to have a talk.”
Nicky fell asleep without his supper. He thought, as he drifted off, “And I didn’t even do anything wrong.”
And the next day, in the beautiful spring morning, Roy loaded his duffel bag into a cab and was on his way to Vietnam, increasing the list of things that ruined Nicky’s childhood to five.
Nicky’s Fortune 9
This happened on a rainy Saturday morning, three weeks after Roy’s chicken-flavored, safe-and-sound letter.
Mom went to work cleaning out the refrigerator, which had been wheezing and rattling worse than usual. The noise kept Mom awake at night. The ancient Kenmore was crying for help. The freezer was overloaded with tinfoil packages of eggplant, ravioli, soup, cheesecake, stuffed peppers, chicken cutlets—leftovers from Mom’s cooking spree on the day Roy shipped out. The old white fridge could not take the strain.
“It’s a sin to throw out all this food,” Mom said. “Take these down to Mrs. Furbish. I’m sure the poor old woman needs food.”
“She scares me,” Nicky said. “Give it to Checkers.”
Checkers painfully lifted himself t
o his feet under the table. He panted. This was the dog’s breakfast he had been dreaming about his whole life.
“Get going,” Mom said.
Nicky rode the elevator, which was not stinky this morning. The Rosatto brothers had not paid a visit. Nicky shivered from the rock-hard frozen packages stacked in his bare arms.
Mrs. Harriet Furbish lived on the second floor. She was an Eggplant Alley legend. No one knew how old she was, but she didn’t look a day under 112. Mrs. Furbish was from the South. Nobody knew how she’d ended up in the Bronx. If you listened to whisper and rumor, she had been a witch, a nurse, a vampire, a seamstress, a professional bowler, a waitress, a gypsy, a sword swallower, a lion tamer, a swimmer of the English Channel, a genie from a bottle, and a onetime girlfriend of President Chester A. Arthur. When Nicky was four years old, Roy informed him that Mrs. Furbish was a cannibal, with a special taste for tender little boys.
Mrs. Furbish especially gave Nicky the creeps because of another rumor. She was reputed to be a crackerjack fortune-teller. One look in your eyes, and Mrs. Furbish knew all about your past, all about your future. Nicky’s stomach pretzeled at the very idea. He wasn’t worried about a scandalous past. To his regret, he didn’t have one. But he was stone-cold terrified of the future.
Nicky stood on Mrs. Furbish’s worn-thin welcome mat and knocked on 2-E. A television was going across the hall. Nicky looked over his shoulder. He worried about the Creature from the Second Floor. Nicky imagined the horrid little weasel behind one of the doors, squinting those bug eyes at him through the peephole. Nicky wished Mrs. Furbish would hurry.
From inside 2-E came a slow, muffled noise. Squeak … squeak … squeak. That was Mrs. Furbish, hurrying. Nicky recognized the sound of her wheelchair, a battered wicker porch seat fitted with bicycle tires.
A bolt unlatched, a lock turned, a chain jangled, and the door opened. Mrs. Furbish half looked at Nicky with watery eyes and said, “What you want?”
“My mom sent down some food.”
Mrs. Furbish scrunched up her prune face.
“Might as well bring it in. Put the eats in the kitchen.”
The tiny apartment was dark in the rainy morning. A tired grandfather clock tick-tocked sharply. Nicky looked. The clock had no hands.