Warm Wuinter's Garden

by Neil Hetzner

  Peter braked hard to avoid being sideswiped as Route 95 narrowed at its junction with Route 91. He realized with a start that it had been more than fifteen years since he had been in Connecticut. More than fifteen years since he had been anywhere other than eastern Massachusetts, the Cape and Rhode Island. He had shrunk his world in order to make more sense of it. More sense than going thirteen thousand miles to shoot at the shadowy flicker of bodies as small as children. He had made his life on the narrowest tip of land on the edge of the continent. It had seemed defensible back then when, after less than two weeks back home out of the hospital and back home with his parents, he had packed his new car and moved to Provincetown. Provincetown had been a step back. An orderly retreat back to the simple pleasures that he had had during his college summers.

  Out from a nook, from where it had escaped the night-wind, popped a small memory of a midnight sea breeze wrapping itself around his sweaty neck and curling down inside the front of his food flecked shirt. The grinding sound, like a Coltrane solo gone berserk, as he dragged a garbage can across Julian’s dark gravel parking lot to the dumpster. Looking back and seeing a congress of moths caucusing as they decided how to rearrange themselves on the screen door from which they had just been disturbed. Ray’s laughter, giddy from fatigue, cascading farther out the door than the yellow of the lights.

  Peter and Ray had been roommates all through college. They had worked together summers in Provincetown at Julian’s. For four years, they had been inseparable. Drunk together occasionally. Stoned together frequently. They had studied together and double dated together. They had passed back tie dyed shirts and cotton sweaters and Hunter Thompson and Richard Farina and Eisenhower jackets and Dylan and Country Joe, Cream and Robert Johnson and the snake’s head of a hookah and the deepest insights of youth. They had argued over the importance of Che Guevara, the Fugs and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and they had learned that no fight was worth their friendship.

  They had wound their friendship round and round, braided and plaited more than a thousand days until it became impossible to remember who was the creator and what the created. They had graduated together, started living a fourth summer in the bazaar streets of P town and then, in the space of five weeks, each had received his draft notice.

  Peter sucked in exhaust rich air and held it until his lungs burned. He now realized that the emptiness inside him was not truly empty. True, some thoughts, many memories, had been tossed out after some unknown arbiter had decided that they were useless or unworthy. And, others had been worn out. Rubbed and worried like rosary beads until they’d lost their shape and meaning. But underneath, in a deeper, darker spot were other lodes cached many years before. Now, made aware of their presence, Peter couldn’t remember if he had meant to hide them or just to put them in a safe place.

  Peter didn’t release his breath until hot dots of red and silver sequins danced so fast across his eyes that he couldn’t track the racing cars around him.

  Ray had received his notice first. Although they had talked all spring about what could happen upon graduation when they would lose their 2 S student deferments and be re classified as 1 A, it had never seemed quite real. They had spent nights smoking dope and discussing late applications to graduate school, or going to Canada, or filling up on methedrine or dozens of egg whites or acid before going to the physical. Being crazy. Being gay. Conscientiously objecting. Going to prison. But in the end, when Ray’s letter came, they had been so amazed that a stranger’s pen stroke on a piece of paper could compel such a change in their lives that first Ray and, then, just weeks later, Peter had decided to live out the fate ordained in that unknown magician’s runic script.

  The draft notice was more magical than Aladdin’s lamp. A black squiggle scrawled above a stranger’s typed name and a mystical world of furnace blast shimmery parade grounds, four beat bass based drill songs, dull finished metal clips and thick green webbing, cordite and carburetor smelling weapons ca denced ca denced ca denced through the end of summer’s days. The minutes dragged and the days flew by and each one was a step up the short steep ramp of a transport plane. And as another handful of minutes oozed out of a steamy afternoon, Peter had found his thoughts canting back and forth like a dingy in a stiff breeze. Eager one minute to meet a stranger and play a game of wits and stealth. The next minute feeling that there were too many molecules to his body. Everything was too large and too long. Wanting to trim his nails and curl his fingers and hunch his shoulders and draw up his knees until he was no bigger than a basketball. A ball, mottled green and tan and brown, a ball that could roll unobserved beneath a cover of green and black shadows in a stranger’s jungle. A minute after that he was wondering what Ray was doing. Had Ray mastered the obstacle course? Had Ray managed to escape to town for a night of beer made heady with the froth of guilt? Would they meet over there, smoke a joint, and wind another strand of memory?

  The traffic funneling into New York pushed aside Peter’s memories. He continued to hold his breath, but now it was from concentration as he battled graffiti scrawled step-vans careening from lane to lane and an unending stream of loosely sprung Seventies behemoths hurtling toward the city. The highway narrowed and narrowed again until the Jersey barriers pressed so close to the passenger side of Peter’s car that he experienced the same tingling sensation of being too large that he had remembered earlier. A horn blared. In the next lane, close enough that Peter could have added his own spray of rage to the black and red challenges on its dented silver sides, a truck pushed itself close, then closer until its bumper banged the bumper of the car ahead. The wavering pitch of the horn began again and continued. Peter looked up at the truck cab. A gravy skinned man with a sparse mustache and two gold front teeth leaned out the passenger window, extended his middle finger and yelled, “Up yours, hombre.” The truck dropped back several feet, then surged forward and rammed the car ahead. The car skittered. Its driver abruptly accelerated and jerked the wheel hard to the right to jump into Peter’s lane. The truck sped ahead with its horn crowing over its victory.

  After that drama, Peter spent almost as much time watching the rear view mirrors as looking at the road before him. Each time a vehicle drew up close to him, he tightened his grip on the wheel and stiffened his shoulders in preparation for the shock that was to come. He began to feel terrified.

  Just ahead, an old Chrysler, a mile long, its original paint sunburned beyond recognition, black smoke spewing out from deep under its frame, veered from the right lane to the left. The driver’s side of the car kissed the Jersey barrier, a tracer shell’s lariat of sparks snaked out, a hubcap leapt up into the air, pitched sideways and flew back toward Peter looking like a miniature space ship fleeing a dying world. He braked hard, heard a horn’s blare, started to change lanes and heard another horn screaming. He sucked his breath in and began to count.

  After negotiating the Tri-borough Bridge and the roller coaster bumps and curves of the FDR, Peter exited at 14th Street. Parked in a tow zone with the motor running, the tourist worked to bring his breathing back to normal. Excess voltage sputtered along the nape of his neck. Behind him, pent up drivers gunned motors in anticipation of the light change and their cross town charge.

  After he regained some composure, Peter drove around the Village until he found a parking place on Ninth Street. He walked the streets that he and Ray had wandered through on their visits to New York for the collegiate version of lost weekends. Almost nothing looked familiar. The sidewalks and stoops were cleaner than he remembered them; the people hanging out on the streets were dirtier. His limp made him feel ungainly as he walked quickly past the drunks and junkies in Washington Park. He walked east to Broadway and then south toward SoHo. He crossed Houston. He quickly glanced at the facades of buildings as he passed them. He couldn’t remember the number of the building where he and Ray would stay in the furniture free cavernous loft of Ray’s sister, Adele. He thought it had been on the east side of Broadway. South of Houston. Sout
h of Prince. Maybe south of… He had received a closely lined, meticulously printed letter from Adele while he was at a camp outside Hue. Ray’s squad had been driving along on patrol working its way through a beer shipment when it had been ambushed. In his drunkenness Ray had sprayed two of his buddies with bullets before being wounded. There was some question as to which side had shot Ray. In the hospital someone, maybe Ray himself, had detached him from the respirator and he had suffocated. …And Spring. Maybe south of Spring. He couldn’t remember. Nothing looked right. At the time the letter came, he was drunk, too. It seemed impossible that the details of an event that had occurred less than one hundred fifty miles from him had had to travel more than twenty-five thousand miles and take almost two months for him to be aware of them. It had seemed impossible that Ray had been dead for weeks and he couldn’t tell. Broome. That seemed too far. He could turn around and walked back up Broadway. Look harder. Don’t be so careful about pretending not to be looking. It wouldn’t make any difference. Even if he found the building, there would be no chance that Adele Auden would be taped to a mailbox.

  Peter continued south, then turned east on Canal Street.

  Almost every time he and Ray had been in New York, being ravenous from a night of dancing or from laying down hours of table top percussion at a Village bar, they would burst through the steam-etched doors of some three table noodle shop, bow to patrons and cook alike and wolf down great smoking knots of snow white rice noodles. With fingers stupid from drink or smoke, they had used an exaggerated body English to guide chopsticks of lort toward their laughing mouths. Then, with bellies full and the streets empty, they would drift back to Adele’s and her sprung couches.

  As Peter drew closer to Chinatown, the sidewalks became more crowded. When he looked at his watch it was just past noon. The Retreat dining room would be beginning to fill. He told himself that should call, but it seemed so far away. He stepped from the sidewalk to stand between two cars in safety. The crowds surged by him. He studied the nimbleness with which people avoided one another. In Provincetown there was no such grace. There, especially in the summer nights, people touched antennae every few feet to see who would move aside. Here, in these narrow dirty streets, there was a frenetic politeness and a strong sense of isolation.

  Peter’s breath caught and held. In the crowd of people, nearly all small and round faced, he spied three young men with narrow, bony faces and slight wiry bodies. He bent his knees to draw himself down between the cars. On the middle man, on the small knot of bicep muscle exposed below the turned up sleeve of a black short sleeved shirt, was a large tattoo of a dragon. Talking loudly through mouths filled with broken yellowed teeth, the three men passed Peter without noticing him. He watched the men until they disappeared in the crowd.

  Peter crossed the street and walked quickly in the opposite direction. In the next fifteen minutes, as he reconnoitered Chinatown, he saw dozens more Vietnamese. In several restaurant windows there were menus covered with the accented letters of the Vietnamese alphabet. On the northern edge of Chinatown he came upon a Vietnamese grocery.

  Each time that he saw a Vietnamese face, his body spilled out an unnamable energy. It held fear. And more. Anger. Twisted love. Unwrapped memory.

  Peter walked all over Chinatown, but nothing seemed familiar. He began to wonder if any of those nights with Ray had really happened.

  After watching its entry way for several minutes, Peter decided to eat at the Saigon Inn. He ordered nime chow and a beef and noodle salad. As he waited for the rice paper rolls filled with cold rice noodles, grilled shrimp and cilantro, he drank from a glass filled with sweet beans and condensed milk. As he ate the barbequed beef strips and noodles and holy basil dressed with with nuoc cham sauce, he studied the people who had been his friends and his enemy. He pondered why they had come to live with the Chinese whom they hated with a memory which went back more than a thousand years. He wondered if Ray had loved the food the way he did. Would they have shared a dish of bo vien, the ubiquitous beef balls, either there or here, either then or now, if Ray had lived?

  Peter drew back from his thoughts when two small men, no bigger than children, tried to make their way through the restaurant’s narrow screen door. The door was pushed to the limits of its hinges and banged repeatedly against the greasy wall as the two men, each with a leg amputated, maneuvered their crutches to get inside the doorway. They were so engrossed in talking that they seemed oblivious to the commotion they were making.

  Peter forced himself to breathe. He tried to turn his eyes away from the men as they made their erratic way among the closely placed tables and chairs. He felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders draw themselves into knots. His hand tightened around the chopsticks until he thought they might break. Each time a crutch caught on the leg of a chair, each time a patron bent forward from his chair to make more room, each time a brick colored rubber tip fought for purchase on the greasy chessboard of the floor, he expected that all patience, all suffering, all acceptance would end. He would watch a small calloused hand hold hard to something solid. He would watch an uninjured leg plant itself for support. He would hear a rising moan of frustration keen up from a chicken ribbed chest until it burst forth as a scream that would mingle with the scared shouts and the crash of shattering glass as first one crutch and then a second flailed back and forth and up and down against the heads and shoulders, platters and bowls, glasses and bottles that were always in their way. Brightly colored bits of basil and carrot and coriander would fly through the air. Spumes of pale yellow soup would wash across the distended tendons of the hands of jabbering men as they pushed themselves out of the way of danger. The long black hair of the two women seated just there would shine from droplets of oil which would have splashed on them. The rail of the crutch would hit the thin bridge of the tiny nose of the old mottle skinned woman chattering there with her toothless mouth. The sound of cantaloupes dropping to the floor would dun his ears as the crutches thonked against the heads of those too stunned or slow to move.

  The men reached a table, pulled out chairs with the tips of their crutches, clumsily sat down and clattered their crutches into the corner behind them.

  Peter’s chest hurt. Vietnam had been filled with cripples. Feet and legs and hands and arms and eyes and ears had been but a partial harvest of the war.

  Memories burst from buried places.

  A one legged woman, her good leg tied to a bicycle pedal with a harness of cloth so that she could both push and pull, making erratic Ss as she rode from side to side up a narrow climbing road. An old man with a black plastic sleeve of PVC pipe fitted over a stump making a trail of footprint, circle, footprint, circle trail in the dusty road. A smiling black eyed boy straining noodles from a big pot with a long handled wire strainer attached to a piece of wood that was strapped to a stump that ended just below his elbow. Bits and pieces of people had been left throughout the country, so, to go on about their business, the wounded took up other bits and pieces of the materiel of war and fashioned arms and legs and lives.

  As he had.

  As he had not.

  He didn’t know which was the answer.

  Had he been crippled or only injured? Or was it one and he thought the other? Or, was the jury still out?

  Within days of landing in Viet Nam he had begun to wonder why the whole country did not just explode in a huge tantrum of frustration and anger. What force kept people meekly tending rice paddies and spreading feed to fowl while bombs burst and fires burned and strangers careened past their homes in a frenzy of destruction? Each additional day he had felt the trigger drawn tighter. He had thought each mortar shell, each bursting flare, each whistling missile and unseen passing plane, each jeep bouncing its white hot beams of accusation along a sleeping village road must be the final, critical erg that would cause the whole country to explode in indignation at the discounting and disruption of its lives. He would see a cripple and a second and a third in a ten minute walk and know their u
nfurling fury soon must smother him. He had tried to stay drunk. The alcohol held some, most of the fear in abeyance, kept it just at the perimeter of his defenses, a murky, jerking movement not quite beyond the edge of vision.

  Until Ray died. Then, he stopped drinking and the fear slid in. And he knew he was going to join Ray. He knew that not drinking was not enough to break the grip of fate. He was caged. Fear banged its cup along the bars. So, he smoked. A haze of dope. But, fear wreathed round his face while his eyes dilated in vigilance and streamed with complex tears. He smoked until each hit brought nothing but more panic.

  Then, he stopped and counted days. And half and quarter days. Until he knew that counting days, too, only courted fate. So, he had pushed the numbers away. Instead, he worked. And prayed. He worked. And read. And folded and refolded his mouldering clothes. And worked. And packed and repacked his kit.

  And then…

  Peter paid his bill, looked a final time at the cripples in the corner as they shoveled noodles toward their laughing mouths before he hurried through the doorway.

  Peter walked quickly and decisively without knowing where he was going. He raced through the bread and coffee smells of Little Italy. He turned east and hop-scotched the bodies of the drunks and junkies and sleeping slow-wits on the sunny side of Avenue A. He pushed his way through crowds milling in front of butcher shops and barricaded windows filled with underwear. He didn’t slow to the importuning of the homeless thieves who sold their improbable booty in a makeshift market along a block of abandoned buildings. He careened in and out of unceasing foot traffic. There were victims everywhere he walked. Of this or that. Of him or her or it or them or, mostly, self. He hurried past the armless and legless. The jobless. The sightless. The useless. The childless. The thoughtless. The heartless. The lifeless.

  His feet throbbed as the pavement pounded back against his soles. He was exhausted, shaky. He had the urge to lie down and rest his cheek against the warm oily sheen of the sidewalk, but, instead, he broke into a hobbled run toward his car. Afternoon traffic was heavy as he left the city and drivers’ actions bespoke their wounds.