“Leave it alone,” Vance said experimentally, gesturing at the small pile of crushed-up pill residue on the piece of cardboard behind them.
The bartender sighed. “Come on, bro. Get out of here, what are you going to do?”
It was a good question, and one for which Vance didn’t have an answer. He felt like a child interrupting adults in the middle of something he didn’t understand, which was more or less exactly what was happening. His childish response was to reach out and swipe at the cardboard—a cloud of white pharmaceutical dust momentarily hovered in the air and then was gone.
“Goddamn it,” the guy yelled, and he pushed Vance against the wall. He bounced off and used the momentum to uncork a wild right hook that caught the guy square in the face. Why, then, did Cindy yelp? Why did she drop to the ground? The bartender, completely unscathed, looked down at her. He shook his head and said, “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said, holding her jaw.
“I’m sorry,” said Vance. “Oh God, I’m sorry…”
The bartender pulled her up and said, “Would you please get him the fuck out of here?”
“Come on, Vance,” she said, holding him by the shoulder and attempting to maneuver him out the door. The cardboard Coca-Cola box on the rack across from him was stained with its own syrup. One gleaming, viscid drop hovered in the air, suspended on an impossibly fine thread. It’s love, he thought, my God, love.
———
They were in the car, driving. Reds and yellows and blues smeared by outside the window, the primary tones of city night. Vance turned to her and said, “I was just trying to help.”
“My hero.”
“I’m sorry.”
Then they were moving through the hotel lobby, leaning in an elevator, entering the room. She put him in bed and turned the TV on. The room spun crazily. She was gathering things from the nightstand, zipping a suitcase shut. She kissed him on the forehead and straightened. “Bye, Vance,” she said.
“Wait,” he said, managing to prop himself up on his elbows.
“What?”
“Can we talk?”
“About what? I don’t think so.” But she sat beside him on the edge of the bed, looking away from him toward the TV. He stroked the wisps at the back of her head that had pulled free of her topknot. They floated in the draft of the air-conditioning like the delicate tendrils of some underwater plant, damp toward the roots from the sheen of sweat coating the nape of her neck.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I’m starting over.”
“In Denver? Now?” On the TV there was news footage of tanks rolling through an ancient city of white-orange sand, past blackened husks on the side of the road. The images, a reminder of the greater world outside his fuddled mind here in this dark room, clarified his thoughts and sobered him a little.
“Why not?”
“What about Richard?”
“Tell him I said good luck. I left a note.” She pulled away to stand again, but he held her arm. “What,” she said again.
“Don’t go,” he said. “I love you.”
She laughed, a note that was mocking but not entirely cruel. “What a sweet weirdo you are. You don’t know me.”
“I do.”
“You don’t know anything. I spent years watching people at their worst—guys who probably had wives upstairs sleeping who would hire prostitutes, people with plastic convention tags who’d blow through their family life savings in thirty minutes at the blackjack table. No one knows anything about anyone.”
In an impulse he didn’t fully understand and regretted as soon as he’d acted upon it, Vance pulled the scrunchie off her topknot; the pink of her scalp was just visible before she whipped her head around, reaching for her hair.
“What in the fuck.”
“I know you.”
The expression on her face was not what he would have hoped for in response to these intimacies. It was a look of incredulous disgust, an ugly look, close to a sneer but containing less amusement, and it concentrated years’ worth of disappointment and anger and various other emotions, none of them good, in its crenellations and divots and furrows.
“I can help you,” he said, helplessly. He was reminded of a song by that title that his father used to play all the time when he was very young. I can help, the man sang, over a background of horns, mariachi guitars, and breathy female ahhs, pleading his usefulness: If you got a problem, don’t care what it is, if you need a hand, I can assure you this—I can help, I got two strong arms, I can help. It would sure do me good, to do you good. Let me help.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“What?” He pushed back on the bed, away from her.
“My father and you, and all your help help help. Who do you think you are? Some knight on a quest? Sir Vancelot?”
“Stop it.”
“Here, let me help you.”
In one motion, she threw her right leg over him and pulled up her skirt. She scrabbled at his corduroys, and he was pushing against her, but she was pressing down against him with an irresistible, inhuman strength. She got him free of his pants and with a little gasping exhalation forced him inside her. With one hand flat against the headboard, and the other brushing away the protesting tangle of his arms, she ground hard, back and forth. His eyes, he realized, were closed. When he opened them, her face was cast in shadow, and he was glad for that.
He shut them again, submitting to what was happening, which was easy, since he couldn’t believe it really was. In the darkness of his mind, he again saw the clogged tributary of boats, felt his own small vessel bob beneath him, buffeted by innumerable wakes. Then with a nearly imperceptible slip, he broke free of the flotilla and picked up speed, pulled along by a great warm current that held the middle of his boat in its grasp. Faster and faster he sped, past the shoreline with its ruffled outline of water grass and cattails, the current and river and his own boat becoming a unified whole, a single vector speeding him toward the water’s mouth, a boundless ocean.
A shockwave of fresh disbelief dispelled this vision and lent him the strength to force her off, beside him in the bed. Just in time—he twisted away, shuddering. She got up and grabbed the suitcase, turned the TV off, stood there a moment. He closed his eyes again.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and she was gone.
———
She took two quick lefts to escape the immediate vicinity of the hotel, then turned onto a tree-lined side street. Suitcase trailing her like a faithful dog, she clicked over a bridge spanning a small river, and on the other side found herself entering a commercial district tailored to the tastes of young, white professionals. Irish pubs and Mexican cantinas fought a vicious land war for retail space. Young men, mostly wearing the same uniform of khakis, oxford shirt, and white hat, clowned past, drunk on a Friday night, happy. And why shouldn’t they be? The future, for the moment, was theirs.
The moment was hers, as well. She felt the smooth plastic cover of the checkbook in her pocket. Richard’s checkbook, taken from the nightstand. Hers now. She wasn’t sure how many checks she would have to write to get on her feet here, to start over and get the debt collectors off her back, but she was pretty sure Richard’s ass could cash it. She wouldn’t get caught—she thought of the book in her suitcase, with his autograph on the front page. And she was very sure he wouldn’t turn her in.
He owed her, after all. The last ten years had been, in various ways she was only just beginning to understand, a response to him. She didn’t blame her father directly, but his large presence lurked behind many of the compulsions and tendencies that had conspired to bring her where she was. Her addictiveness, perpetual dissatisfaction, fear of abandonment and desire to be left alone, the hole in the middle of her person that cried out with the forsaken intensity of a supermarket orphan for something or anything to fill it up one more time—it was not hard to see Richard’s influence on these traits, and many others, since he had all of them himself. For better or for worse,
and mostly worse, she was her father’s daughter.
He wanted to be there, he’d said. He wanted to help—fine, he could help. He could help her start a new life, a free life: free from addiction, free from debt, free of bad relationships and broken promises, free of the lifelong resentments and grievances that followed her like the suitcase trailing her now. You can be there for me, she’d wanted to say in the diner, but not on your terms—not when and how it’s finally convenient for you, you fucking asshole.
She pushed into a slavishly Anglophile yuppie gastropub—the kind that featured Arsenal F.C. memorabilia and sold wild-caught fish and organic chips for sixteen bucks—and approached a clutch of businessmen standing around. As was the case with all men in groups, they resembled twelve-year-old boys at a school dance, emanated the same awkward hormonal throb. She assumed their loosened ties were meant to signal that work was done for the week and it was playtime, baby. In here, it’s always happy hour.
To the youngest and best-looking one, she said, “Buy me a drink.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because it’s my birthday.”
The men laughed. The guy said, “I’ll need to see some ID, of course.”
She pulled her ID out of her purse and showed him. He said, “Yesterday.”
“Close enough, I’m still celebrating.”
He shrugged and said okay and bought her a fruity shot, the taste of which made her hate him even more. She drank it, then left without a word, to the amusement and consternation of the hooting douchebags behind her. Richard had forgotten her birthday again, she considered—maybe that had something to do with all this, too.
The Friday-night crowd swelled around her as she neared downtown—in front of the façade of a large art deco building, a stage was set up on which a bunch of paunchy white dudes mangled “Whipping Post.” People pushed past, and she rejoiced in it, becoming part of the throng, the multitude. Faces like the ones she’d watched on camera for so many years moved by her, each one frozen for a moment, pitched back in laughter or anger or dull confusion, and she wondered what someone watching her from above, looking at her face, might think. Would they know anything, be able to divine something about her, her life, or her mistakes? No. No one knows anything about anyone, she thought, and for the second time that day was struck with the feeling that she could start over—that nothing, in fact, would be easier. Denver, why not? She dragged her suitcase into the hot jostle, for the moment immensely pleased.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The sea at Nha Trang was that shade of luminous turquoise that only appears in travel agency ads behind a woman in a white bikini. The sand, too, was white and soft—a sand of forgetting that meant escape from the world and from worry, the kind you imagined laying a towel down on and screwing a sweating rum drink into. We were set up in a row of wooden barracks that opened directly onto the beach. It was hard to believe there was a war going on, despite our having marched through the jungle for a week, despite our malaria and jungle rot, despite the peeling white colonnades of the South Vietnamese Air Force administrative headquarters—our temporary station awaiting further orders. Despite planes taking off and landing on the two nearby airstrips night and day. They might have been passenger jets bringing in vacationers.
Probably it was just the easiest secure place for us to decamp for a little while before going on to whatever was next, but it felt like a reward for shooting up the village. Or rather, for eliminating NVA combatants at Vien Dinh. The rest of the platoon seemed to be in high spirits, lounging on the sand and treating the whole thing as a holiday, but when we were off-duty I mostly stayed inside. I’d caught a fever on the march to Nha Trang, and I sat in the barracks during hundred-degree days, as if I could sweat it out of me (the barracks seemed like a Swedish sauna anyway, constructed as they were from untreated lumber with a long bench against the rear wall). The wood grain would swim before my eyes, like a river of faces surfacing and drowning, surfacing and drowning. Eventually I would emerge for a breath of air, only to feel repulsed by the serene beauty of my surroundings and go back inside.
During this time, I developed a twin pair of ideations—obsessions, it would probably be fair to say. The first was Berlinger. On the march from Vien Dinh to Nha Trang, Berlinger and I had brought up the rear, with me positioned behind him. For two days, a thick silence had been as much a part of the atmosphere we moved through as the humidity. When I tried to engage him, even in inane conversation about sports and girls, he ignored me, just whittled away on his figurine. When I caught glimpses of it, I could see it was becoming more detailed, with little hands, and features emerging from its blank face. In response to his silence, I found myself imagining pulling my rifle up and shooting him in the wet spot between his big shoulder blades, how easy it would be.
When we first got to Nha Trang, I went to visit him in the brig. The brig was a small area located in the basement of the administrative building, past a depressing antechamber full of World War II–era gray-green file cabinets. I signed in with a young, smiling Vietnamese sentry and stood in front of Berlinger; he sat on an upturned white plastic bucket that, according to the label, formerly contained bean curd. I remember thinking it said bean crud the whole time I was down there. There was a window on one side of the room and no bars—the only thing keeping him here, in fact, was the jolly teenage guard who lit a cigarette and watched us.
“Mitch,” I said. He didn’t say anything. “Come on, this is childish.”
“Nanny nanny, boo boo,” he said.
“It’s not going to be so funny when you get court-martialed.”
“Go away, Lazar, I got nothing to say to you.”
I stewed on it—the arrogant nerve of him, the big silent martyr. In my fever dreams, I saw his sainted face watching over me from a shadowed hill, the big wedge of his crew cut like an arrow pointing down. During this period, I simultaneously became, as a subsequent psych report would read, “Negatively Fixated on Lester Hawkins.” Negatively fixated—I fucking hated him. I mean, I had never liked Hawkins, none of us had—he was dumb and loud and always cruising for approval. But ever since the village, he’d been intolerable. Like lots of other guys in the unit—myself included—he had been triumphant after mowing down the NVAs. Unlike most of us, though, he had continued braying about it throughout our final push to the coast. Worse, he had taken one of the tan hats—hard topped with a wide floppy brim—from a dead body, and entertained himself with periodic and extremely unfunny imitations of Charlie on patrol, Charlie making fucky-fucky, Charlie eating with phantom chopsticks, Charlie getting blown away by us. He didn’t seem to have any of the native reservations, the niggling doubts, that eventually caused most of us to shut our mouths, or write long boring letters home, or speculate about the Yankees in ’71. Or maybe the callous bravado was his way of dealing with it—that would have been the charitable view. But watching him in the mess, shoveling food into his face while he talked, the tan hat just a little big for his head, I somehow found myself incapable of forming the charitable view.
Instead, I singled Lester Hawkins out for a hatred purer than any I’ve known before or since. I believe at the height of it, for the three weeks we were in Nha Trang, I would have murdered him if I’d had the opportunity and means. Partly, it was the lack of anything else we had to do—twice a day, on a rotating basis, four men were sent out on a two-hour recon sweep up into the nearby foothills. That was two hours, every other day, in which we were occupied. Otherwise, we played cards, went swimming, jacked off, worked out, convalesced, and waited for our next marching orders. Or, in my case, sat alone in the barracks nursing irrational hatred like a suckling babe at my swollen tit.
It got to where I blamed Hawkins for everything. Not just the killing, which we’d all taken part in besides Berlinger, but for Vietnam, and my deployment there. I saw him as the kind of oblivious shithead who thought the war was a good thing, who’d vote for Nixon upon safely returning home—as he inevitably
would, because careless dolts like him always made it back. I watched him cleaning his M-15 in preparation for patrol, smiling with pleasure like he was in for a rare treat. I watched him as he swam in the bay, and hoped he’d get eaten by a shark, if there were sharks here. I watched him do pull-ups on the side of the canteen and drink beer and make his dumbass jokes, all the while wearing that goddamn hat.
I was in the barracks reading—a Time magazine with Ali McGraw on the cover in a floral-print dress—when Hawkins poked his head in. The hat sat back on it at a rakish, relaxed angle. “Lazar?” he said. His deep Delta accent stretched my last name out to four or five syllables.
“What?”
“Some of us guys are getting a poker game together, you want in?”
“Suck my dick, Lester.”
“What?” he said. His bland face registered total shock. In that instant, I realized two things, closely related. First, I realized that the animosity that had welled up in me was so fierce, I had assumed he must have sensed it; more than that, I had assumed he must have felt that way himself. How could he not have seen it, like stink waves off a cartoon character? Second, I realized he had no idea. I was just another grunt to him, one of the crew, a weirdo who mostly kept to himself. The fact that he had no idea made me hate him even more.
I rolled out of bed and walked to where he was standing. The look on his face changed, from confusion to a slow, wide grin. He figured I was fucking with him. He was so guileless, so unprepared for what was coming his way, that he didn’t even flinch or move when I punched him in the face.
Now, let me tell you this. I am not much of a fighter, have been in three fights, in fact, my whole life. If any punches were thrown in these fights, they were perfunctory, flailing. But this was a real punch, with real meaning in it. I reached behind me, through the walls of the barracks, through Nha Trang village, up into the ridge overlooking the bay, through a hundred miles of jungle, all the way back to that gulley where the bodies now decomposed in a pit of quicklime. I clutched those bodies in my hand like a blackjack, and I threw the punch with all the force a human body could muster. He fell backward out of the Quonset hut, and landed twitching on sand. The hat flew up in the air and fluttered down several feet away, like a drab bird alighting. I made a beeline to the clinic. I told them I was worried I’d killed Hawkins; I was certain I’d broken my hand—I’d heard the bone snap.
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