Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “Sonny, I can have Mr. Dellavedova’s driver escort you back to Sleepy Hollow Lane.”

  “Sis, I’ll be fine,” Sonny said. He was beginning to shake.

  “Sergeant Salinger,” she said, like a drillmaster, and had one of her minions find him an empty chair, while Sonny continued to shake.

  “Doris, do you remember the bananafish?”

  “What bananafish?” she asked, growing concerned about her brother’s sanity.

  “It was one of the rare times, ya know, when Dad was nice—at Daytona Beach. He told us that story when we were wading in the water.”

  “Jesus,” Doris said, “you must have been two.”

  “I was older that that,” Sonny said. “Dad was the real daredevil. He’d plunge us into the water, like some crazy baptism, and tell us about the bananafish when we came up to breathe.”

  Doris was still skeptical. “What the hell are bananafish, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure, sis. They swim into holes, looking for bananas.”

  “That’s silly,” Doris said. “Bananas can’t grow in the sea.”

  “But Dad’s bananafish did—only the bananafish never survive the hunt. They grow so fat they drop dead. That’s what I remember of Dad and Daytona Beach.”

  And Sonny sat right in the middle of Doris’ basement bazaar as men and women maneuvered around him, searching for bargains and free gifts, nearly knocking him over, until he was caught in the crush and the crowd carried him along with his chair. Sonny was in a kind of free fall, with hats and coats fluttering around him like headless horsemen on Sleepy Hollow Lane. He had no idea where he would alight, and with whom.

  He must have been near the escalator, because he tumbled onto that movable track. Somehow he’d lost his chair. And he seemed like the lone passenger on this descent—it was a curious ride. Whole landscapes passed in front of him. But nothing made sense, really. He was in the canteen at the Villa Oberwegner one moment and in a forest of white pines the next. Then he was at Slapton Sands, digging graves for the unburied dead caught in that miscue, where GIs landing on the beach were fired upon by Allied warships and massacred in their footsteps. And it was Sonny’s task to collect the dog tags and hide every trace of their existence. He watched himself sobbing. Sonny had his own arc of time on the escalator, could wheel in and out of his past as passenger and participant. He was Sonny Salinger, not little Alice in her subterranean wonderland, but he still had to endure some kind of plunge into a metal rabbit hole at Bloomingdale’s bazaar.

  He was back at Tiverton Castle again, prince of his lordly room in the tower. No one could contradict him, not the generals or the ambulance drivers. He went about in his jeep, visiting those refugees who had been plucked from their homes because of the training exercise and put into a relocation camp near the castle; these were the ones who had no relatives to take them in—the lonely and the lost. The one solace he had was a small treasure of Hershey bars. He was like some pirate from the Fourth Division, distributing whatever bounty was on hand. The widows and orphans grabbed at him with a wistful smile. “Father Christmas in May, dearie. A bit late in the season, aren’t ye?”

  And he watched his own wistfulness in the reflection off the escalator rails. And then the landscape vanished in a wisp.

  He could feel the silk of his prayer shawl and also see himself wearing it. He’d sniffed human flesh on fire, and it clung to his nostrils on this ride. And then time slowed to a crawl on the escalator, and he was with Hitler’s giant, Otto Skorzeny, at the CIC canteen in Weißenberg. But the location and the subjects were all scrambled. Otto was his rebbe in an SS uniform, and Sonny was a bar mitzvah boy with chevrons and a prayer shawl.

  “Scarface, you have nothing, nothing to teach.”

  “And you, I suppose,” said this chimera of Otto the Terrible, “have nothing to learn.”

  “I’d like to learn about bananafish.”

  “There’s no such creature,” the chimera cackled in Sonny’s face. “It’s all vanity—and madness of the mind.”

  It’s not madness, Sonny thought, and even if it is, the copyright is mine.

  As he bumped along on the escalator, Sonny realized that he wasn’t at the canteen in Weißenberg, but inside the muster room of the Central Park Precinct, with its panoply of stables. And the muster room wasn’t filled with detectives and members of the horse patrol, but with Sonny’s fellow Jewish Injuns from summer camp in Maine, lads he hadn’t seen in years. The SS giant had insinuated himself into this group as counselor in chief of Camp Wigwam, with his scars and bloodred Nazi armband. He was a fiendish sultan and grand rabbi of his own congregation of camper commandos.

  Crazy as it sounded, Otto must have taught him another kind of Torah, because Sonny’s songs had come back with each bump of the metal stairs. He could recite, and sing, and bless every camper in his own ride toward manhood. Whatever music he had lost in the carnage at Slapton Sands, at Hürtgen, and among the smoldering corpses at Kaufering IV had come back. He could hear it on the movable stairs, like dancing metal bones in his dead ear.

  “I am Sonny Salinger,” he shouted, “and I sing to my heart’s content.”

  And then fat Otto disappeared, as if time could cannibalize and devour the living and the dead, and Sonny was back inside the ruined basilica at Echternach; despite all the babel of the Downstairs Store, that agony of constant shoving in the desperate search for goods, Sonny could still hear the songs and prayers of the vanished monks and priests, a chorus that went fainter and fainter, until it was an almost imperceptible chant that flew right out of the fashion islands themselves, as if the bargain basement had become a basilica and somehow Sonny had stumbled into God’s own department store.

  Doris found him on the bottom stair of the escalator.

  “Sonny, what happened? Jesus, you disappeared.”

  She grabbed at him, and they both landed on the floor of the basement’s second tier, with Doris a prisoner in her own palace. A pile of corsets covered her legs, as if girdles and scarves had become runaway items in all the human wind of a basement sale.

  “I miss Grandpa,” Doris said, laughing and crying. “I wish he could have come from Chicago with his missing eye.”

  “Doris,” Sonny said, “he’s eighty-six.”

  His sister wasn’t impressed. “He came to your bar mitzvah, didn’t he?”

  “That was fifteen years ago.”

  “So what?” she said, with someone’s shoe in her face. They crawled into a neutral corner and sat there like a pair of penitents beside the escalator that was crammed with people, half mad in their search for the biggest bargain.

  Grandpa Simon had recognized Sonny’s talent, that desperate need for silent songs—that was his real Torah. Sonny didn’t have much of a choice. He had nowhere else to go but Sleepy Hollow Lane. He had his dog, his army-issue typewriter, his toilet seat, Sol’s bananafish, and that single shaft of light. Even as he rose out of that corner with Doris and battled his way back into the crowd of shoppers, he knew he’d have to descend into a long, long winter of words.

  “Sonny, where are you?” Doris asked in a sudden panic.

  “Sis, I’m right here.”

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