by M. J. Bosse
I watched Virgil as he circulated from group to group. His is an open, innocent face, that of a deadly reporter. I caught up with him while he was standing with a couple identically dressed in splashy beach wear, hooked my arm in his, and gave him a loud wet kiss on the mouth. I knew that he knew I had done this for the couple’s benefit, but I also knew that he forgave me my impulsive acts of exhibitionism. After all, I have to deal with a Nebraskan middle-class background, and Virgil is wise enough to realize I must work through it somehow, on my own.
When the couple moved away, I told him how groovy he had been to smoke that pipe on this day.
“What pipe?”
“The one you gave Don.” We looked at each other and were all alone for a moment on the patio; then I said airily, “Toodle-oo.”
I walked over to three Vassar-type girls with their heads together. They weren’t much older than I was, but they had their hair done in an over-thirty style and their slacks weren’t bell-bottomed. I joined right in, and one of them, a good-looking brunette, asked me in a buttery but rahthah culchahed voice would I care for a drink. Obviously they had me down for a hippie, so what the hell, I wouldn’t disappoint them. “Like, this is my scene,” I said, and I pulled out the pouch again. They watched in feigned boredom while I rolled a joint like a hard-bitten old wrangler. Then the brunette, who seemed the grooviest of the three, asked if she could have a puff. The other two smirked scornfully. I watched the brunette drag on it nervously like a kid sneaking a smoke in a tree, and I said, “Jesus, not that way; you’re wasting it.” I took the joint back and inhaled down to my toenails. Wow. I showed them.
It was twilight then, a lovely warm orange glow in the sky, made more orange for me by the grass I had smoked. From another patio drifted the smell of steaks cooking, and I felt terribly at home, having the smell of charcoal steaks embedded in my Nebraskan bones. I walked aimlessly among the crowd, overhearing good old Martin telling a woman how he had stabilized himself through psychoanalysis, the liar. Mrs. Halliday, having shifted to martinis, was barely able to negotiate and leaned on the patio table with the help of a little woman in a heavily padded swimsuit. Well, it was a party.
*
I was standing alongside a gray-bearded man with sly eyes, both of us listening to a freckled lady tell of guests parachuting into a party she had recently attended, when all of a sudden a loud shout of Goddamn! zoomed through the evening air. In the dusk, just beyond the patio, two men were facing each other on the lawn, and one of them quite obviously was wearing a dashiki. The other man, almost as tall but much thinner, was in white dinner clothes and came swaying after Henry, who had turned away and was approaching the patio. Dinner jacket shouted Goddamn! again and then I heard him add, anxiously, “Why be so sensitive? Huh?” Henry kept coming like a young African chieftain, and everyone on the patio held his breath as Dinner Jacket kept pace, crying out, “Why so sensitive? Huh?” Henry almost reached us when Dinner Jacket, with a grunt of exasperation, reached out and grabbed the dashiki. “I didn’t mean anything, so why be—”
And that was all, brother. Because with one incredibly fast motion Henry had him by the wrist and had brought him down to his knees. It all happened in one absolutely beautiful curve of movement, a speedup of Henry’s balletic grace in Tai Chi Chuan. And there they were: Henry holding the wrist delicately it seemed, as if taking a pulse, and Dinner Jacket on both knees, mouth open in an O of astonishment, eyes round and staring up. Then Henry let him go, turned toward us again, and strode through the patio—I mean, we all parted like the Red Sea—and disappeared around it toward the parking lot. Without saying a word, Virgil motioned to me and helped Martin up from the table, where he was kind of slumped. Soon the three of us were following Henry. I heard Dinner Jacket, behind us, explaining excitedly that he had merely asked about the significance of that goddamn robe. The last I heard from the patio was Dinner Jacket’s voice—thin, subdued, but hysterical—asking his friends what had he done wrong? I could guess what Dinner Jacket had done wrong. He must have peered like some kind of anthropologist at the dashiki and asked questions nicely calculated to put Henry in his place as a cultural artifact to be studied, classified, and analyzed. When we got to the car, Henry was leaning against it, waiting for us. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quietly.
“Then by God, we won’t talk about it!” Martin slurred enthusiastically, and he gave Henry a playful cuff on the arm. It was a wonder that the huge man didn’t let him have it, after all that had happened, but Henry just backed away a step. Martin when drunk is not exactly subtle. Then Virgil flicked his hand out and lightly touched Henry on the cheek. That meant something, that was a steadying thing to do, and Henry smiled. I felt a sudden twinge of helplessness and jealousy. Not only my sex but my color had left me out of their scene.
Our return trip seemed much longer than our morning ride out. Virgil drove. Martin kept turning around from the front seat to say, “Don’t hate me” to Henry and me, as if we had any reason to hate him. But maybe a drunk’s like a child and grooves to sensitive vibrations. Maybe he was saying Don’t hate me only to Henry. By the time we entered the city, Martin had passed out, so Henry offered to let us off and drive Martin home. When we stopped in front of our building, I turned and kissed Henry on the cheek. “It’s good of you to drive him home,” I said.
Henry didn’t smile.
“Let it alone, brother,” Virgil said as he slid out of the driver’s seat. When Henry was behind the wheel, Virgil leaned in through the window and again touched his cheek lightly. “Let it alone.” Henry nodded solemnly and drove away, tires screeching.
In our apartment, I instantly threw my arms around Virgil and clung to him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me.
“This racial thing. Will it come between us?”
“If we let it.”
I pulled free of him. “We never talk about race and all that.”
“We’ve never had to.”
I could feel my eyes brimming. “Should we?”
Virgil walked over to the desk and filled the Woodstock he had given Don. He lit it, and we both watched the smoke rise. “We care about Don’s death,” Virgil said, “right?”
“Of course we do.”
“Rather than discuss race the way some people discuss sex, as if it were an impenetrable mystery to hassle over, why don’t we do something?”
“What can we do?”
“We can work for something.”
I walked over and sat on the arm of his overstuffed chair, where he was puffing on the pipe. “Groovy.” I smiled down at him.
“For something old-fashioned,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Justice, for example. Honor. There was a time when a man’s friends upheld his honor. If he was killed, his friends found out why. Was his good name involved? Was he killed by accident? Had justice been served?”
“Wow.” I placed my hands on Virgil’s shoulders. “That is old-fashioned.”
“Are you with me?”
“With you?” I leaned against Virgil, his face against my breasts, my hands up in the rough texture of his dark hair. “I love you,” I whispered, and I felt his fingertips begin to travel with a kind of exquisite slowness along my thighs.
*
Virgil, devil that he is, hadn’t prepared me for the visitor we were to have the next day. I had been up early to buy a new bowl for the turtles, and they were in their new home, sort of paddling around in the water while I stood over them, wearing nothing but my panties because of the heat, and Virgil was sitting with his file cards at the desk, when the doorbell rang. Virgil put down his notes and casually informed me that that must be Edgar Gear.
“Whoever that is,” I said. I threw on a work shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Someone from Alpha.” Virgil opened the door just as I finished buttoning the shirt, and in limped the short, balding young man I had seen at the cemetery talking to Virgil. He took Virgil’s ou
tstretched hand, pumped it a rather feeble once, hardly nodded my way, and plummeted down on the couch. He looked mousy, ill at ease, probably uptight.
Virgil said, “She’s okay,” and Edgar Gear nodded once, glancing quickly around the room.
He declined my offer of coffee, and here we were again, just the way we’d been with Mr. Smith. Out of spite, because Virgil had sprung this meeting on me, I almost asked him if he wanted me to get out the pad and pencil. But I didn’t. From the look of him, I figured Edgar Gear would bolt if I did.
“I appreciate your coming,” Virgil said in his most charming voice; he can get a tone soft and insinuating, like those hypnotists’.
“I figured—” Edgar Gear stopped and looked at me.
“Really, she’s okay. She’s my girl,” Virgil explained gently.
“Well, sir, I figured it was my duty to come. Alpha’s got to stick together. Is that right, sir?”
“That’s right, Edgar.”
“I was kinda surprised seeing someone from Alpha at the cemetery.”
“Lieutenant Stuart and I were friends.”
“Yes, sir. Well—” He glanced around quickly again, as if expecting someone to jump out at him. “You wanted to see me?”
“As I told you yesterday, Edgar, I want to talk about Lieutenant Stuart.”
Edgar Gear ran a hand nervously through his thinning brown hair. Until then I hadn’t realized just how young he was. Not much more than twenty, and was he uptight! He kept fidgeting, working his mouth around. Had he been a soldier?
“Look—” Virgil began again after a long silence.
“Sir?”
“Lieutenant Stuart and I were close friends. I want to know why he died.”
Edgar Gear swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.” Then he added in a rush, “There was this guy come to see me the other day. I live over in Brooklyn, you know? And he comes snooping around the apartment house and my mother don’t like it.”
“Was the man’s name Smith?”
“He saw you too, sir?”
“He’ll probably see everybody from Alpha on the East Coast.”
Edgar Gear blinked rapidly.
“Now, Edgar, tell me about you and Lieutenant Stuart.”
“He saved my life once.”
“Well, that’s two of us. He saved mine at Khe Sanh.”
“No kidding. I didn’t know that.”
“We were humping boonies, and this VC pops up. Lieutenant Stuart got him or I wouldn’t be here to tell about it.”
“He was some soldier.”
“That he was, Edgar. When did you last see him alive?”
“A couple weeks ago. He told me meet him there.”
“At his apartment?”
“At this bar. He told me meet him for a couple beers.”
“And you brought him something from Japan?”
Edgar Gear blinked.
“Yes, sir”
“From a girl?”
Edgar nodded. “I had a couple days there before coming home, and I saw her for him.”
“He wrote and asked you to do that?”
“Yes, sir. I looked her up in Tokyo. I’d have done anything for Lieutenant Stuart.”
“We both would. Now tell me about meeting her.”
“She lives in a swell place. She used to work this dance hall.” Edgar glanced quickly at me. “But Lieutenant Stuart changed all that, sir.”
“She told you so?”
“Yes, sir. Without his help she wouldn’t’ve got out of that dance hall. He got her out of there.”
“He sent her money?”
“That’s what she told me. I could tell she was nuts about him. She wants to go to school and learn to make stereo components. Great opportunity for a Jap girl.”
“Now, Edgar, about the package—”
“She give it to me and said give it to him when I got to New York. She said—” Edgar paused thoughtfully, an idea squeezing up his pale features. “She said it—”
“You mean the package?”
“Yes, sir. It belonged in the family, but she wanted him to have it. Begged me to be careful with it, and I said I would.”
“Did she tell you what was in the package?”
“She said a dylee.” Edgar Gear put his hand to his mouth so he could giggle. I didn’t believe such a shy kid had been a soldier and killed anybody. “What she meant was”—Edgar turned to me for the first time—“a diary.”
“Was the package the size of a diary?” Virgil asked, and when Edgar seemed puzzled, Virgil reached over to his desk, picked up a sheet of typing paper, and said, “Or this size?”
“The size you got there. Maybe bigger. I could tell it was a lot of papers.”
“How?”
“It was kind of soft, except at the corners. They was square.”
“Probably a cardboard support.”
“That’s it, I guess.”
“So it couldn’t have been an object. By that I mean an object inside a box?”
“No, sir, it wasn’t no object in a box.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know that, sir.”
“You didn’t take a look?”
“No, sir, not me. It was wrapped real good, like I said; did I say so? Anyway, it was sealed and tied with plenty of cord. And it was Lieutenant Stuart’s, not mine. I wouldn’t’ve touched it for nothing. That cord wasn’t untied or that seal broke until I handed it to him in this bar.”
“In the bar did Lieutenant Stuart take out the contents?”
“He broke the seal and looked inside and closed it again.”
“How did he behave?”
“Sir?”
“After he looked inside the package, what did he say or do?”
Edgar Gear blinked and skittered his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. He—ordered another drink. He said,”—Edgar’s face brightened—“‘Let’s celebrate.’”
“And you did.”
“We had a couple of beers and talked old times. Did you know Aldrich Hayes? He was in our platoon. Tall guy.”
“I remember him.”
“Day before I left, he lost both legs. Both at the hips.” For an instant Edgar’s face changed in a way that made him look much older.
“I am sorry to hear that,” Virgil said.
“Yeah,” Edgar said, and he added, “Shit.”
They sat in silence awhile. I was glad not to have their images of all that killing and death.
Finally Virgil asked him if anything else had happened at the bar.
“No, sir. We had a couple beers, like I said. Lieutenant Stuart seemed real happy to get the package and that’s all.”
They talked a little longer, but there wasn’t much more to say, and so Edgar Gear left—a short, balding kid who limped and who seemed afraid of his own shadow; whose scared and shifty eyes would haunt my dreams that night.
*
After he was gone, Virgil stood in the doorway and listened a long time to his retreating footsteps on the stairs. Then he came in and sat brooding in his armchair. Without asking, I rolled us joints and lit his for him. We smoked in silence, and when I began feeling the effects, I said, “Was that kid for real? I mean, he didn’t look as if he could fight his way out of a paper bag. Virgil? What’s the matter?”
He had just grimaced, and raising the joint, he took an earth-shaking drag. “I remember Aldrich Hayes.”
“It was a terrible thing.”
“He was a brother. Came from Chicago, I think. He was powerfully built, much like Henry. I remember he painted this on his helmet: yeah, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i shall fear no evil, for i am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”
I laughed. “Groovy.”
“He’ll need his sense of humor now. Hayes wanted to play professional football someday. Sounds like a terribly sentimental war movie, doesn’t it?” Virgil said bitterly, visibly trying to hold his emotion in.
I went to him, kis
sed him, sat on the arm of the chair, and held his hand as if he were a child. After a long time, he roused himself and stared at me from eyes a little out of focus because of the grass.
“All right, then, we know a few more facts about Don,” he said. “We know for certain that he got a package from Ikuko.”
“Which he paid for—and he must have paid plenty if she’s living in ‘a swell place in Tokyo.’”
“She told Gear it was a diary.”
“Don’t you think he looked?”
“No. You saw him.”
“You’re right—he wouldn’t look.” I went into the kitchen for jelly beans, which taste good after you’ve been blowing grass. “What did she mean by the family? She told him the diary belonged in the family.”
“That puzzled me too. But of course, sometimes in the Army you call your unit your family, and Ikuko knew that. She was a clever girl.”
“What was she really like, Virgil?”
“Like any girl caught up in a war economy. She had a pimp when she wasn’t living with someone from Vietnam. Don got her through a sergeant.”
“Like buying and selling cattle,” I had to say, recalling one of my private fantasies in which I am forty, broke, and selling myself on street corners to brutal old fat men.
“Don cared for her. She wasn’t especially pretty, but she had a manner, an aura, about her. The only thing was, she seemed neurotically obsessed about her ancestry. She swore she could trace it back centuries. Girls in the dance hall disliked her for it. Nobody believed her stories except Don.”
“He honestly did?”
“I’m sure he did, and he was hardly of a trusting nature.”
“No true Virgo is. So maybe,” I added, “that business about the family means her family.”
Virgil didn’t seem to have heard me. He leaned forward suddenly as if someone had struck him in the back. “That sergeant,” he said.
“The one who got Don Ikuko?”
“He was a camera bug. His name was—” Virgil snapped his fingers impatiently. “Henderson. That’s it. Henderson kept a camera and even in combat he was known to haul it out. He risked his life with that thing. He could have been court-martialed—but out there you do pretty much as you please. He was one of Don’s sergeants.”