by Alfredo Vea
Suddenly a thought struck Reggie, causing him to stand silently for a moment, the gun in his hand lowered.
“Is you a virgin, Calvin? You a cherry, ain’t you? You ain’t touched my mama? You see my mama naked, ain’t you? You dead if you seen my mama.”
Calvin shook his head, no. Suddenly the smile returned to Reggie’s face.
“I know you dig the gook bitch. Go ahead, go get her. It’s easy—just do what she don’t want you to do. That’s how I learned. We partners, ain’t we? Sure, we be partners.”
Calvin turned away angrily and walked to the front door. His face was a grid map of agony and frustration. As he did so, he heard the sound of two sharp impacts and of glass breaking and falling to the floor. Little Reggie had smashed both of the cherished framed photographs with his gun. Reggie despised photographs; his mother’s home was filled with them. In the darkness, Reggie shouted out to Calvin to be on the lookout for cops.
Suddenly Calvin saw Persephone running wide-eyed through the kitchen, her panties around her right ankle. She was breathing hard and sobbing loudly. There were tears and mascara streaming down her face. Calvin watched her run through the front door and out into the street. Ten seconds later he watched as a cursing Little Reggie came hopping through the kitchen, zipping up his pants while holding a shoe in his left hand and the Glock in his right.
Persephone ran across the street in her bare feet. Her panties fell off as she ran and were blown beneath a car on the south side of Twentieth. When she reached the pay phone across the street, she lifted the receiver and began to dial 911.
Jesse placed his hand on Carolina’s knee. He leaned toward her until their faces were just six inches apart. He noticed that Carolina’s large eyes were even larger now. She was shivering. Jesse slowly began to realize how chilling these words could be to someone who had led a quiet and normal life. For an instant he considered stopping, but that was impossible now.
“At precisely the same instant in time, nearly thirty years before, on that ravaged hill in Vietnam, the Creole staff sergeant keyed the radio for his final call. He contacted Strongarm just as his tearful wife in San Francisco heard the dispassionate voice of the emergency operator. Back in the Amazon Luncheonette, Mai Adrong slipped out of the refrigerator, stepped past Biscuit Boy, and began to run toward her friend at the exact same time that her husband, Trin Adrong, began his run up the hill near Laos—a lifetime before. She approached Persephone just as the terrible shots rang out, both from Reggie’s Glock and from the rifle of a North Vietnamese soldier providing cover fire for her husband. Hearing both shots, she began screaming in the street, her mouth a perfect resonator for her husband’s last words: ‘TienLan! Tien Lan! Tien Lan!’
“ ‘Forward, comrades!’ She screamed the chilling NVA battle cry. ‘Tien Lan!’ When Mai reached the body of her dying friend—her dying sister—she flung herself forward to protect her with her own unmarked body. Persephone Flyer, in turn, threw her weakening arms around her friend and, sobbing and sighing, locked her lovely fingers together. In the same microsecond—in the same place—years before, the widower Trin Adrong threw himself headlong into the Salon des Refuses, into the outstretched, embracing arms of the American sergeant.”
Jesse’s gaze moved slowly across Carolina’s lovely face. Her eyes were filled with tears.
“As with all deaths hand to hand, for an instant in time the two men embraced and could have been mistaken for lovers. Face to face, their sweat and fear mixed with the molecules of charged air between their bodies. For a slice of a second they saw each other perfectly, they saw the face of the enemy as if in a mirror.
“For the thinnest slice of a confusing, then crystalline moment, one soldier caught a sullen glimpse of Persephone and the other saw poor Mai. In the street on Potrero Hill, the women, clutching each other, envisioned the image of their own husbands in the other’s dimming eyes. In the last instant before the satchel charge drove his atoms against those of the container box, the sergeant mouthed a single word into the radio handset.”
Jesse’s eyes rested on his own left hand. Carolina had placed her small hand upon his.
“Persephone spoke a single word into the phone before the bullet slammed savagely into her skull and cut through her brain, through her memories, through a hundred recipes.
“ ‘Amos,’ she moaned, just as death began in her. Her lips had formed their most precious word.
“ ‘Persephone,’ he grunted just as death began in him, just as all those nights of work performed by his parents in their marriage bed disintegrated into a fine, wet dust. He spoke her name as Trin’s glasses were blown from a faceless head, as his Bible flew and burned—the scrap of paper in the Creole’s jacket rising on the hot concussive wind, then settling into the Bible, somewhere in the book of Ruth.”
Jesse paused, gathering himself and forming the next few sen tences in his mind. Somehow they came easily, effortlessly. Carolina remained silent.
“Weeks later, a platoon of NVA would revisit the abandoned hill to reclaim their dead. A young soldier would find the glasses, the Chinese wristwatch, and the Catholic Bible in Vietnamese, and carefully close the book on an unreadable text; on a cryptogram—Persephone’s name and address in San Francisco, our city.
“Sergeant Flyer uttered ‘Persephone’ just as the dog tag and chain around his neck passed through him as though he were entirely without substance, as though the space between his atoms had increased a billionfold.”
Jesse reached into his pocket and pulled out a dog tag. He held it up for Carolina to see. She read the name of Amos Flyer.
“As he died, the chain and this dog tag pierced the metal container wall to hang undamaged on the other side—as though something, some small thing in all of the wars between humans, between men and women, must remain undamaged. In the midst of flames they each spoke the other’s name, fully wedded at last.”
Jesse stopped speaking for a moment. The effort to tell the story in its entirety was taking its toll.
“In the same instant that the first gunshot rang out, Mai came running from the Amazon Luncheonette, her bare feet bleeding and leaves of lemon grass streaming from her pocket. She was screaming Persephone’s name and some strange words over and over again into the night air. Though Reggie could not understand them, the words frightened him. They were words of immovable purpose moving.
“Turning away from Persephone’s body, Little Reggie saw Mai approaching and saw curious faces beginning to appear in the lighted windows of Twentieth Street. Shades were lifting, curtains were separating. Witnesses were watching. He didn’t hide his face; for some reason he wanted to be seen. He wanted identifications to be made. Closing his left eye Little Reggie began tracking Mai with the sights of the nine-millimeter, refusing to pull the trigger until the shot was clear and certain.
“When the small woman fell onto the body of her dying friend, when the embrace was perfect, he squeezed oft a single round. It would be enough. Reggie smiled to himself. Without knowing it, he began laughing out loud. This was even better than rape. This was better than love. Every witness heard the name ‘Calvin’ echoing through the streets and dove for cover as Little Reggie ran from window to window, pointing the gun as a grim warning.
“Suddenly he stopped, as though he had been surprised by something he saw. Slowly he lowered the gun and attempted to fire a third round toward the direction of the dying women. For an instant, Calvin thought he saw someone kneeling by the two bodies. When he looked closer, he saw only a single, dark mound of death. He could discern no distinct forms. A confused Reggie walked toward the luncheonette and gave the gun to Biscuit Boy. As always, it would be his job to clean it and hide it away.
“The Biscuit Boy, shivering with hatred, suddenly leveled the gun at Reggie, then pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, slamming a firing pin into an empty chamber. Reggie laughed at the impotent boy with his harmless gun, then the two ran south down Missouri Street toward home.”
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sp; Carolina had never been in a courtroom before. She had never heard a closing argument. She had always refused to take part in the staid and stylized combat that she considered to be Jesse’s substitute for the land war in Asia that so dominated his life. Jesse smiled at her. Carolina smiled back, wondering how it could be that such sensitive arguments and passionate words could flow from such an inaccessible, seemingly unfeeling man.
Suddenly the thought struck her. Perhaps only a man who had gone dead inside could speak so easily of death. Perhaps all the words had been learned by rote, an entire vocabulary taken from some arcane dialect of grief. How did Jesse feel about words? wondered Carolina. Were metaphor and symbol just another form of ammunition? She had always hoped otherwise, but the day would be coming soon when she would give up trying to understand him… or to love him.
“On the cold sidewalk, two women descended degree by degree until they were the temperature of the ambient air, of the soil. But in the last few seconds of their life they had found the answer to their fondest and most dreadful question. Gone were the fears and the endless speculations that had haunted their lives. Now they knew for certain how their dear young husbands had perished. Now they knew that they had always been cursed in their knowing. They understood that two marriages, worlds apart, had resulted in two more. The two women, like their husbands, embraced in death.”
Jesse pulled his eyes away from Carolina and turned them toward the now empty jury box.
“But before the final flicker of light was fully extinguished, both women heard a single voice, a single set of lips against their ears. A man ran through a haze of gun smoke, up to the women, just after the bullets found their targets. He was a man in rags and torn shoes. He wore a filthy army fatigue jacket and jungle boots. He kneeled down beside the women and spoke to them despite the hail of gunfire that sliced the air above his head.
“He blessed them even as claymore mines were being clicked off just beneath his position by squads of desperate boys. He tended his panicked flock despite the horrific moans of grief and pain around him, despite the roar of air support. He bent down unmindful of bullets at his shoulders and just above his hair. On Potrero Hill he had finally found the strength to open the body bags and bravely look upon the face of death.
“As a good field chaplain should, he absolved Persephone and Mai of their few sins, sending them from this shattered place to the placid arms of God. Then, after his final amen and shalom, he kissed Mai’s face and neck, her beautiful face and neck, and began to whisper.
“ ‘Je suis ici, mon amour,’ ”said Jesse, recalling the chaplain’s words as he had spoken them to the jury.
“ ‘Estoy aquí. C’est moi, Vô Dahn. Remember me? I am the one who is no one. If French were the universal tongue, my love; if only Oscar Peterson were really Oscar Fils de Pierre; if only there were Mexicans in space illegally dashing across Martian borders and Aztec soldiers in County Cork—then you would have a loving husband today, my dearest Cassandra. You would both be alive today.‘
“He touched the faces of the two women, closing their eyelids with his fingers. Before speaking his final words to them, he wondered, once again, what Mai had done since he left her in that small apartment in Hong Kong. After so many years, he had found his Vietnamese lover once again. He had always longed to see her, to touch her perfect skin. He had floated around her in recent years, swimming just out of sight, living just outside the perimeter of her life, wondering who she had become and how she had met the other Amazon woman.
“He kissed her one final time before running away. But as he ran, he resolved to perform a single act of mercy, a single act of violence.”
Jesse walked to the defense table and stood in front of his chair. He ended every closing argument at this spot. He turned to face Carolina.
“Like Abraham, he had heard the behest of heaven, but this time no angel would intercede. The third man, the ragged stranger, the army chaplain who testified before you, Carolina, and who so long ago abandoned his flock and his post on an anonymous hill in Vietnam, sobbed his final words to Mai before disappearing into the night: ‘You can love me less, but please love me forever.’
“Calvin Thibault is no soldier. There is too much humanity in him, and it is growing stronger each day. I asked the jury to set him free, Carolina, would you?”
Carolina nodded yes as he continued to speak. She would set him free.
“The brutal warrior in this case has already been punished. He shares the grim fate of his five victims. Little Reggie Harp was a creature of desire.”
Jesse walked back to Carolina and sat down even more weary than before.
“And when desire is stripped of humanity,” he said as his final words, “all that remains is war.”
14
a night in tunisia
On the third floor of the Hall of Justice, in a courtroom jammed with angry and saddened parents, Judge Steven Shaiken was in the process of sentencing defendant Jeremiah Bigelow, who had been convicted of thirty-four counts of child molestation.
“Quiet in the courtroom!” cried the bailiff in a vain attempt to intercept the scores of exclamations of grief, revenge, and rage that were flying across the courtroom and striking the back of the defen dant’s head. When silence fell there was a perfect grouping of invisible darts crowded into a cowlick bull‘s-eye.
“On court thirty-four,” said the judge wearily, “like all of the counts that preceded it, I find no reason to sentence you to the midterm, and given your past record and your cruel and heartless behavior in this case, I certainly find no reason at all to sentence you to the mitigated term. Therefore, you shall receive the aggravated term of eight years in prison for this the thirty-forth and final count. Now, sir, I think the arithmetic here is fairly straightforward. I never took algebra in high school, Mr. Bigelow, but I’ve got a feeling that some good, old-fashioned multiplication is all that’s needed here.”
One or two nervous laughs were quickly choked off in the audience of tearful parents and tiny victims. The judge adjusted his bifocals while he scribbled his computations on a sheet of yellow paper. At his desk below the bench, the clerk mimicked His Honor’s every move, including the snaking tongue that slid out of the left side of his mouth and wriggled with each phase of the computation.
Upon reaching a product, the judge retracted his tongue, sighed and drew a heavy line across the paper. Below the line was a single total. The clerk turned and whispered excitedly to the judge. The two were in agreement.
“Mr. Bigelow, the aggregate term that you must serve is two hundred and seventy-two years in state prison.”
A wave of applause grew from a tentative ripple into a tsunami that washed across the jury box and the defense table and drowned all decorum. Suddenly the defendant at the defense table began to quake with emotion, his shoulders heaving and his gray fingernails digging into the oak table where he had sat stoically for thirteen weeks of trial by jury. The defendant stood bolt upright. With his chest heaving he stared at the judge.
“Mr. Bigelow, I will now read your credit for time served into the record and then I will proceed to review your parole rights.”
“His parole officer’s grandfather hasn’t been born yet,” muttered the prosecutor smugly and almost beneath his breath.
Some parents of the victimized children began to laugh at the prosecutor’s remark, laughter that was a weak hybrid of relief and melancholy. The defendant had heard both the prosecutor’s remark and the derisive laughter in the audience behind him, and began to scream. His face turned beet red and his eyes welled with tears.
“You punish my desires,” he screamed while sobbing. “I can’t do that kind of time! You punish my desires! Two hundred and seventy-two years! I just can’t do that kind of time!”
Judge Shaiken’s face suddenly lost its official demeanor. Now an almost fatherly tenderness settled into his eyes as he removed his bifocals and looked down from the high bench into the tear-drowned eyes of the convi
cted man.
“Son,” he said softly, “the law of this land, in all of its wisdom, does not require that you do all of that time. Just do what you can, son. Just do what you can.”
Three floors below Jeremiah Bigelow, Jesse sat alone in the House of Toast. There was a cup of cold coffee in front of him that had a shiny film of rainbow-hued oil floating on its surface. Using a toothpick, Jesse was carefully probing the liquid in an effort to save a tiny gnat that had flown into the slick. He slowly lifted the gnat from the goo and set it down softly on a paper napkin that might serve to absorb the sludge. As he bent closer to watch the life-and-death struggle of the little insect, the table began to fill with lawyers. Like true defense attorneys, each new arrival at the table looked at the gnat and wondered if it could be saved.
“Jury’s out?” asked Newton, who already knew the answer to the question. “You can’t do anything about it now, man. All I want to know is: do you have a shot?”
Jesse nodded without looking up. Biscuit had a shot.
“Any requests for readback?”
It was the voice of Chris Gauger. Jesse shook his head.
“Not a peep,” said Jesse. “They slammed the door on that jury room and haven’t made a sound for five hours. They didn’t even ask to have the physical evidence.”
“They know what they’re gonna do,” added Matt Gonzalez, who was leaning over to see what Jesse was watching so closely. “Whatever the verdict is, they ain’t gonna wait three or four days to decide it. Is that some kinda mosquito?”
“No, it’s a gnat,” answered Jesse solemnly, “and I think he’s about to succumb to this coffee.”
Jesse tried to smile, but couldn’t. The pressure of the verdict wouldn’t let him. Calvin Thibault could die of old age in prison. It would be better than the death penalty, but not much better. Jesse looked around the table at his friends. They had come to support him, to distract him. Soon enough the stories would begin.