She stopped, and I thought for a moment she was going to break down; her one hand clutched the cup of hot chocolate, the other was on the table, trembling. My instinct was to hold that trembling hand-to give her some support. I didn’t know her well enough to do that, of course-but then we’d been through a war together, hadn’t we? A one-eyed war, so I followed my instinct and took her hand, and she gave me a quivery little smile that said she hadn’t taken my gesture the wrong way, and she got her story going again.
“Mom said she could help me, help us, my kid and me, but she also said certain arrangements would be necessary and that she would call me later, after the… arrangements were made. Four hours dragged by. Then the phone rang again, and I picked it up and it was Mom. What my mother told me seemed strange to me, but I didn’t argue. I was glad for the help. Anyway, she said I wasn’t to come to Des Moines-that’s where my family always lived-but was to meet her at an address in Port City. I didn’t know she’d even ever been to Port City. But that was where we’d be living from here on out, according to Mom. She wouldn’t explain why, only said she’d tell me more later, after we were settled in.”
Here she paused again, looking down into the cup of hot chocolate like she was looking for tea leaves to read.
“What I later found out was that an ‘old friend of the family’ who lived in Port City was interested in my kid, and wanted to make sure the boy was given the ‘best possible care.’ Those words: best possible care. Only this old friend wanted to remain anonymous. I had an idea who this person was, but I thought I better not make waves… at least not when I found out my boy was to be sent to this famous clinic, in New York.
“Still, several things were really bothering me. Mom and me were supposed to stay in Port City. We weren’t to follow the boy back east to the clinic. There was no reason given for this, it was just a… condition. And so as to stay as anonymous as possible, our benefactor insisted on making all his arrangements with Mom-that made me sure I knew who it was but Mom always denied it. I… never pressed the issue. My kid came first.”
Now her voice started to catch every few words; the blue eyes were moist.
“Last night… last night I spent the evening with a friend of mine. Since I didn’t have a car, my friend offered to drive me home, to Mom’s house, where I’ve been living. Half… half a dozen blocks from home the air started to fill with black smoke. The sky was… it was orange. Our house was in flames.”
She was squeezing my hand, now; she didn’t seem to know she was, but she was.
“I… I jumped from the car before it even stopped, and started running. As I was running I saw a couple firemen trying to carry a burning sofa out of the… the blaze. On the sofa was… was what I could only make out as a… ch-charred lump. Which the firemen put from the sofa onto a stretcher, to put it in the ambulance that was backed up on the sidewalk. I looked closer, and… the charred lump… was Mom.”
And now she cried. Finally she cried.
I started, “You don’t have to…”
But she went on. Choking back the tears, their wet trails shiny on her face, like thin narrow ribbons.
“Mom’s hair was burned off, only short black stalks of it were still there. Her skin was showing through the burned strips of clothing that were on her, and h-her skin was ash-gray, where it wasn’t black. Her face was so… so burned it swelled three times normal size. It…”
“Stop, Janet,” I said. “Don’t put yourself through this.” I’d taken a paper napkin and was dabbing at her face, drying the tears like a parent; she didn’t seem to know I was doing it.
“They didn’t let me ride in the ambulance with her. They said she had to go to the University Hospital, in Iowa City, where they have this burn unit. They sent me to my friend’s house to stay the night; a doctor came with me to give me sedation, but I wouldn’t let him. Five hours later I called the hospital and a doctor told me that my mother’s condition was critical but that there was something weird about the nature of her condition: There were definite signs that led them to believe my mother was beaten-badly-before the fire.”
And she looked at me with blue eyes that weren’t moist anymore; they were cold and clear and, somehow, frightened and frightening at the same time.
Then Meyer came in, and said her bus was there. She got up quickly to go, and I followed along, getting in a couple quick questions, getting back a couple quick answers. One of them was “Yes,” when I asked if she’d call me when she got back from Iowa City, and let me know how she and her mother were making out.
Then she was just this pale sad face in a bus window, gliding away from me.
FOUR
Ten minutes after Janet Taber’s bus left for Iowa City, John’s bus pulled in.
He stepped off the bus, two heavy bags in each hand and a clothes bag over one arm, and the smile under his sunglasses said he saw me. The sunglasses were wraparound goggles, two huge silver mirrors reflecting the sun, and the smile was John’s usual white dazzler, so the main impression of him at first glance was all sunglasses and teeth.
Not that the rest of him wasn’t striking at first glance: there was the way he was dressed, too. He had on black leather pants and a yellow-dyed buckskin coat-they were big on the West Coast for a week or two that year-with the longest hanging fringe I’d seen since the day Roy Rogers came to town when I was six. An open-collared blue shirt was showing under the coat, and a gaudy multicolor scarf was tied in a confident knot around his neck. Only his short black hair, his erect posture and the stride he used as he approached me might tip you to his being an Army sergeant arriving home on leave.
We clasped hands firmly and used our free hands to grip each other’s shoulder.
“Hello, Mal.”
I looked at his clothes and shook my head and laughed, and that patented smile of his gradually fizzled into an embarrassed grin.
“John,” I said, “you do tend to overcompensate when you’re out of uniform, don’t you?”
“Come on, I’ve been stationed in California, Mal, you know that.” His smile edged over onto one side of his mouth. “And I’ve always been one for mixing with the natives.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” I said. “You dress like that hoping some hard case in a bar’ll call you a hippie and hand you an excuse for breaking a table over his head.”
“Mal, you don’t really think that.”
“Of course, some of it may have to do with a uniform not having the charm it once had for those young California girls.”
“Maybe a little,” he admitted.
That was not to mention, I thought, the certain kind of girl a uniform still can attract in California, something John had learned all too readily out there several years before, prior to our leaving for his first (and my last) Vietnam tour. Like too many guys to mention, John got hit by one of those pretty hustlers who marry service men, milk them while they’re overseas and then divorce them. In John’s case it was even worse: his had a kid by somebody else while he was gone, which didn’t do his head a lot of good.
I reached down and picked up one of his bags and left him with the other bag and the clothes-carrier. He gathered them up, then turned and looked across the four lanes of Mississippi Drive, standing on his toes to see beyond the railroad tracks to the waterfront parking lot, where the edge of the river was lapping up onto the cement incline. The river was smooth today. John turned back and his smile said glad-to-be-home, and he said, “You got a car, kid?”
“Yeah, it’s up the block.”
“Lead the way.”
“Forward march, you mean?”
“Don’t get cute.”
We walked a few steps and John said, “Is it cold, or am I just used to that sunny weather?”
“It’s cold.”
“Why’re you stopping?”
I had stopped in front of a battered yellow Rambler, three or four years old. “Because,” I said, “this is my car.”
“This is your car.”
/>
“That’s right.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’d have to be.”
We stowed his stuff in the back and John said, “Whatever made you pick a self-proclaimed lemon like this?”
“Saves money on gas,” I shrugged. “And it didn’t cost much to begin with.”
“But I thought your folks left you a bundle, Mal. And since when are you frugal?”
“Jesus, you Army types are a tactful lot, ain’t ya?”
I got behind the wheel and John got in on the other side and I pulled out of the parking place and drove half a block and waited at a red light.
“Tell you the truth,” I said, “I went through a lot of that cash my folks left me in the first year after they died. One of the things I wasted it on was one of those damn fiberglass ’Vettes, which I totaled within a month of buying it. Lately I’ve decided to make my money last a while, what’s left of it, so I can coast as long as possible without succumbing to taking-how you say? — gainful employment.”
The light went to green and I turned right on Second.
John said, “I had an MG out in California for a few months. The payments broke me, and the speeding tickets didn’t help, either. I was even in jail once.”
“How fast were you going?”
“Hundred ’n’ forty. I was dressed like this, you know? They treated me like garbage, until they found out I was an Army sergeant and then they almost apologized for stopping me. Hypocritical bastards.”
“But that was after they jailed you?”
“Just overnight. Didn’t have any identification on me. Jail was no big deal after living over one as long as I did.”
“That reminds me, your stepdad wants to see you. Want to swing by his office?”
“Naw,” he said, “just as soon grab a beer or something first. How about we go out to your place and shoot the bull?”
“Fine.”
We started up the gradual hill that Second Street turns into as it leads into the part of town called East Hill. Port City’s your typical quiet little middle-class, industrial river town, with twenty-some thousand residents, whose only mild claim to fame is having a famous ex-resident in Mark Twain. As Sam Clemens, Twain used to edit the Port City Journal and had a house along the river front that he said in later years provided the most beautiful front-porch view of the sun setting on the Mississippi he had ever seen; a couple years ago the old house was torn down to make way for a Skelly station.
I wondered if Janet Taber really would call me when she got back. It wasn’t just that she was attractive, though that had something to do with it; but the story she’d told me about her mother and the house burning down, not to mention my encounter with that one-eyed nightmare in the terminal, made her rather like the beginning of a fascinating serial running in a magazine, the kind where you’re afraid you might screw up somehow and miss the next issue.
“I said the town hasn’t changed much,” John said.
“What?”
“Christ, two years to catch up on and all you can do is sit there daydreaming.”
“Oh. Sorry, John. Just thinking.”
“This is where I’m supposed to say, ‘What’s her name?’”
I grinned.
“Nice?” he asked.
“Not bad. She’s been through all hell lately, so she wasn’t looking her best, I’d wager.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I pulled onto Grand Avenue, which brought us within a few blocks of my trailer, and said, “Do you believe in hate at first sight?” And I told him about Punjab.
The Rambler and my account of the bus station brawl sputtered to a simultaneous halt in front of my housetrailer. John kind of grinned when he saw the trailer, but that didn’t bother me.
I liked my trailer.
I didn’t mind that it was a dinosaur of its kind. Just because its dull aluminum hull was battered here and there didn’t mean it lacked a heart-didn’t you ever see The Wizard of Oz? — and it was roomy for its age, probably the biggest model made during its period of our distant history. The old guy who lived in it before me obviously thought a lot of it, too, having used it as a lake cottage for years and years, then hauling it up onto this landfill vacant lot and moving in for good after his wife died. He had taken the time and expense to panel the walls, and put in a modern kitchenette. In fact, if the old boy hadn’t died, he’d probably still be in it, but his son, who I bought it from, hadn’t been nearly so sentimentally attached to it.
“Going to bunk in with me?” I asked John, wondering whether or not to haul his stuff inside.
“No. I better stay with Brennan. You can drive me over there later, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
We started across the big yard, all its grass brown now with oncoming winter, toward the trailer. Even with its good size, the trailer looked small on the large and otherwise empty plot of land-an oversized beer can littering an undersized park. The neighborhood was otherwise middle-class residential, and my trailer was out of place-but nobody had wanted to build on the experimental landfill my trailer sat on. I figured that only after thirty years or so passed without my trailer sinking into the ooze would the folks I rented my space from want to move me out so somebody could build.
John and I made our way through the door and into my living room, which was cluttered with books and records and plates of half-eaten food.
“As you can see,” I said, “I spruced the joint up for you.”
John didn’t hear me; he was still thinking over the bus station brawl I’d just told him about.
I scooped up some of the plates and dumped them in my sink. John sat on the couch and glanced around at the posters covering my dark walls: a 2001 movie one-sheet; Jane Fonda in her pre-political Barbarella days; and a fantastic panorama called “Disneyland After Dark,” depicting an orgy attended by all the Walt Disney characters. None of this fine fantasy caught John’s notice; he was still mulling over my tall tale.
I grabbed a couple Pabsts out of the icebox and tossed him one, put a record by my favorite rock group of the moment-Deep Purple-on my turntable, sat down next to him, and changed the subject.
“How long you going to be home?”
“Huh?”
“I said, how long you going to be home?”
“Oh. A month.”
“Then you’re going to re-up?”
“Yeah. I mean, no.”
“I thought you were a career soldier, boy.”
“I am. I’m going into Air America.”
“The hell you say! You, a mercenary? You’re kidding.”
“No. I like combat. There’s still action in Asia. I want some.”
“You like combat pay, you mean. Or do you just have a death wish?”
John was stationed at a base called the “Rose Garden” (as in I-never-promised-you-a) and had been running missions along the Thailand and Vietnam border. As far as most Americans knew, our troops were out of the Vietnam conflict; but that just wasn’t really the case. Still, even the Rose Garden would be closing its gates soon, and soldiers like John, who, crazy as it seems, wanted combat, would have to go the mercenary route to stay in the game.
He said, “I don’t want to talk about it, Mal.”
“I know, I know. Your ex-wife racked up debts you got to pay. And combat pay with Air America beats hell out of Uncle Sam’s stateside duty pay. And you don’t want to start civilian life in debt. I know all the reasons, but it’s still crazy.”
“Do me a favor.”
“I won’t. I’m going to bitch about this the whole month you’re home. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford losing one.”
“Do me a favor.”
“Okay. You just got here, I realize that. You want to relax, I know, I know. I’ll back off. For now.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. But going back is crazy, John.”
John ignored me, sipped his beer. “Ever stop to wond
er what’s going to happen if you run into that guy again?”
“What guy?”
“That black guy at the station.”
“That’s a possibility better left unthought of.”
“Maybe. Maybe you better talk to Brennan about it.”
“Oh, Christ. That’s all I need. Listen, you give me your word you won’t mention this to him? I mean, he’s going to want to know about that phone call I made to him and I’m going to give him some phony song-and-dance, so don’t go messing me up with the truth.”
“I won’t tell him anything, Mal.”
“Good man.”
“Are you sure this blonde didn’t know the guy?”
“She said not.”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything she said make you think maybe somebody might have cause to sic him on her?”
I hesitated.
What Janet had told me was kind of in confidence, and with John’s stepdad being sheriff…
But John and I had always been open with each other and I wanted to keep him open with me, since I wanted to score some points with him and eventually talk him out of going in with the mercenaries and back to Indochina. So I told him what Janet Taber had told me.
“Jesus,” John said. “Has she talked to the police? If her mother really was beaten….”
“I assume she will,” I said. “She did say that the local people are investigating for possible arson.”
“The mother may have some answers,” John said.
“If the old lady is in as bad a shape as Janet said she was, I got my doubts about her ever answering anything again-in this world, anyway. How about we sit around and swap war atrocities to brighten things up a little?”
From my stereo, Deep Purple said, “Hush… hush…”
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