“Yes, yes, fine.”
She typed clatteringly. She turned to the papers, rifling them. “Damn this file,” she said, slapping it shut, and she turned back to the screen.
“The next page refers to follow-on medical conditions as a result of wounds received in action. Your POA has no wounds listed.”
“That’s right.”
“Hell fire, look at that foot,” Elroy said. “Take off your shoe and show it to her.”
“My shoe is my affair.”
“Show it.”
“I see no record of in-country injuries anywhere in your file. Did we miss something, sir?”
“Damn right, you did,” Elroy said.
The dog in Elroy’s lap shrieked. Tilly reached over his belly and rubbed her snout.
“Show her the goddamn foot,” Elroy said.
“I see a record of treatment for a gunshot wound to a lower extremity in February 1974.”
“That’s the one,” Elroy said, “but you got the date wrong.”
“The injury lists as stateside after term of service.”
Rarely, as now, Elroy witnessed Tilly’s dark and self-contained eyes revert to the uncertainty of a sort of youth, even to the want of advice—not from Elroy and not from inside himself. The one whose advice he sought was present but not visible and spoke only to him.
Elroy said, “He has a Purple Heart for that foot.”
The officer looked at Elroy. She looked at Tilly.
Tilly said carefully, “First it’s the refined flour that gets my sugar up, now it’s an herbicide.”
“How do you misplace a Purple Heart?” Elroy said. “Even I have a Purple Heart.”
“Thank you for your service, Sergeant.”
“He has two of them, actually,” Tilly said. “Brave man, our Ellie.”
“No Purple Heart lists here. That’s not—that’s not a mistake. This was a postservice injury. It was the only other time your father appeared at a VA facility.”
“I thought you had a Purple Heart.”
“I didn’t get any Purple Heart,” Tilly said.
“How can you not have a Purple Heart? I thought you got shot in the service.”
“Nope,” Tilly said to the officer as if it were she who had asked the question. “I didn’t get shot in the service, I got shot in the foot. Isn’t that what it says?”
“Left lower extremity,” she said.
“What color does it say my eyes were?”
“Brown.”
“What did I weigh?” he asked reluctantly.
“A hundred fifty-two pounds at discharge.”
Tilly sunk in his chair. “Gosh,” he said.
“You were all muscle,” she said. “I need an email address.”
“I hear they’re easy to get.”
She turned to Elroy. “How do we make him more cooperative?”
“He isn’t on email,” Elroy said.
“What do you do when you buy stuff online?” she asked.
“He uses my email. Then I have to call him from a war zone and tell him, Congratulations, his package has shipped. Do you need a credit card? He uses mine, then he pays me back when I’m here.”
“You fly in the dark, Mr. Tilly.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you a black helicopter person or a Roswell cover-up person?”
“He’s a distrustful cuss is what he is,” Elroy said.
“Without an email, the system won’t let me go to the next screen.”
“Just put mine in,” Elroy said.
“Anybody needs me, they knock. What’s so hard?”
“For the record, ma’am, that ain’t the case. His condo complex has a security guard who’s all ‘None shall pass.’” Elroy spelled out the address while Tilly faced the dog in Elroy’s lap and made a gesture that was like a man recounting the length of a trout he’d thrown back. The dog jumped to him and landed with two paws square on either thigh, then circled twice, tottering as the paws slid and the nails zipped along his corduroys, then found her balance, folded her hips, and sat, the forelegs upright. She looked up at her master; at the others; at her master again, preferring him. She probed with her nose in his jacket close under his arms and snuffed the glandular, minty, dry-leaf odor that was him and him alone. He took a cheeseburger bun from his pocket and fed it to her.
“Says you play piano,” the officer read.
He turned to Elroy. “This is embarrassing,” he hissed.
“If you develop a peripheral neuropathy that interferes with your piano,” the officer said, “we can get you a benefit for lost wages.”
“He doesn’t play it for money,” Elroy said. “He doesn’t even play it if he thinks anyone in the house is awake to hear.”
“Is he very good?” the officer asked.
“Reckon you do anything much as he plays, you get good,” Elroy said.
“Is he just able, or does he play like Liberace where he feels the music?”
“He can put the knife in you for real. But the face is absolute zero Celsius. You ever see that Lang Lang?”
“I can’t say I know what that is,” the officer said.
“Lang Lang is a clown,” Tilly said.
“There’s a Chinese piano player on YouTube with hair that’s all 1982, and Mr. Tilly likes him but he doesn’t like the faces he makes,” Elroy said. “Mr. Tilly hears the music on the inside.”
“Let me point out I haven’t left the room,” Tilly said.
“Don’t you want to know what folks’ll say after you’re dead, about how you were and what you did?” Elroy asked.
“Nossir,” Tilly said.
“No curiosity at all?” the officer asked.
“Why, is there a benefit for that?”
“Didn’t you ever want to know?” Elroy said.
“I never did.”
“Why not?”
Tilly again looked at the officer as if it were she who had asked the question and said, “Everybody has to be so important.”
“Everybody is important, Mr. Frade—” Her eyes squeezed shut; she shook her head. “Tilly, I mean Tilly.”
At first it seemed the blood had merely left the old man’s face. Then something more anatomically improbable, that the flow of blood had reversed. He went white, then whiter, so white he was bluish like skim milk. The facial features bedeviled, helpless. Elroy and the officer waited for him to crack wise, but the shirty tone had left him. The flesh about the eyes swelled.
“Now I’m mad at myself,” she said.
“It’s nothing, ma’am,” Elroy said.
“I’m usually good at names,” she said. “That’s why I’m good at my job. Your father looks as if his heart’s stopped working. Sir, everybody is important. But the clerk in Kansas City who made this file should get fired. There are two men in here!” She required both hands to lift the faded green folder and slam it on the table with contempt. Her accessories jangled. “There’s Mr. Tilly and some Mr. Frade, and the papers are so mixed up I can hardly tell the two of you apart.”
“She didn’t mean nothing by it, sir,” Elroy said.
Mavis, watching, extended her face and licked her master’s throat.
Tilly looked at the service officer. “Frade,” he said. “Not Vollie Frade?”
“Ay, Dios mío. Did you know him? That’s the nickname all over the documents.”
“Was he assigned to the Twenty-sixth Marines at Dong Ha?”
“Yes, by goodness, that’s the one. Was he a friend of yours?”
Tilly’s look of urgent discourse with invisible counselors had never been more vivid. His defenseless voice said, “Can I ask what happened to him?”
“You can ask. I can’t say,” she replied.
“You won’t say. The man is requesting a simpl
e favor,” Elroy said, but even in the certain grip of his temper he knew he had misunderstood something.
“Ma’am, I don’t need to know anything personal,” Tilly said. “Just the outlines.”
Finally she said, “He died.”
The dog watched the old man.
Slowly the blood came into his face. “He died?” Tilly asked.
She rifled the papers and extracted one. The desk lamp behind her betrayed the watermark. “Sir, in 1971. I really can’t show you the document. It says Death Location, Vietnam Conflict Military Zone 1, Quang Nam. It says Killed in Action, Explosive Device.”
“He died,” Tilly said to no one present. He seemed to smile.
And to Elroy’s ongoing catalog of Tilly’s inscrutabilities and of his own discredited first assumptions about him, Elroy added another: that this Vollie Frade whom the officer was describing had not been a friend whose death demanded Elroy’s condolence with Tilly, but had been his enduring enemy.
“He’s dead,” the old man said with relief.
“But Vollie wasn’t his real name,” the officer said.
“That’s right,” Tilly said, “it was Eugene.”
* * *
• • •
THEY LEFT THE VA. Elroy got in the passenger side of the Lincoln and put three Ambien under his tongue to start adjusting to Bagram time and passed out before they made it through Algodones.
When he awoke, darkness subsumed his air-conditioned containerized housing unit somewhere in the moonless sandbox of Kunduz. Then he swung his naked feet onto the Berber carpet and plunged into the living room of the old man’s Los Alamos condo. A shallow recollection came to him from sometime in sleep of Tilly taking his arm amid the gloaming in dry wind and hoisting him out of the car over his shoulder while his own feet wobbled under him. Then another recollection, maybe a dream, of the old man yanking at his socks.
He stood up, famished. The room spun. For solid food in the kitchen he found only jumbo packs of freeze-dried pork noodles, cholesterol-free wasabi peas in individual-serving-size foil envelopes, nothing that had been alive within the year. He pulled on his socks and boots, and he got in the Lincoln amid a hypnotic delirium intending to see if the Quickie Mart was still open in White Rock. The radio announcer welcomed the restless; the rovers; the waking dreamers; the all-night crews of central, north-central, and northeast New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristo peaks to easy listening at 2:23 A.M. Mountain Standard Time. Elroy tried to back out of the driveway, but the accelerator was stuck. Then he realized he had been stomping the parking brake. He got out of the Lincoln and went inside and ate some canned tuna instead, in front of the computer, on which ads suggested that, life being short, he have an affair; and trainers hated this man for revealing the only dietary supplement that burns abdominal fat while you sleep; and with one click Christians could mingle for free; and these Russian sluts were starved for cock.
He put in his camo earbuds and watched Lang Lang play a Chopin prelude while twisting and swaying and making sex faces. Then he followed the link to a suggested video and watched Arthur Rubinstein play the same prelude in 1958, with an iron bar for a spine and an angelic white cadaverous face; then Vladimir Horowitz played it in 1977, the eye pouches drooping, the slow running of his nose the only tell that the head controlling the music might also be receiving the music and be changed by it; then Elroy clicked to the search field and typed Bishkek and enchilada, which led YouTube to suggest a video he himself had uploaded and disguisingly tagged. The view count of 112 confirmed that no one else but he had yet watched his video. And he waited through an ad for the new Chrysler 200, Imported from Detroit, and when the ad finished, the video at first showed only his own knees while he lay on the condo sofa between deployments the year before, feigning sleep but in fact positioning the camera of the clandestine cell phone that was making the video. A jumble of sofa pillows. A blur and a glare while the focus adjusted. Then the gas-burning simulated fireplace, in the next room from where he sat at this moment, and the stony figure behind the baby grand piano. The lens zoomed on Tilly’s illegible face while the old man finished playing the “Cataract Rag.” Then a pause and cough, a rebalancing of the torso. Then Tilly began that same Chopin prelude, while the muted football game on the adjacent television projected blue flashes on him, and the image taken by the phone bobbed with Elroy’s breath, and Tilly played the last chord and pumped the pedal and played the chord again emphasizing one of its constituent notes, then again emphasizing another, and another, probing the chord for some tone or meaning, while nowhere in his face could be seen the merest suggestion of what he hoped to hear.
At the computer Elroy was still wearing his ACU boots, with carbon-composite toes, half laced, when Mavis, having spied the lighted screen, appeared outside the sliding door and sat in the star glow, waiting to be noticed, listening to the desert sounds, wanting in. The smug dog who got to live here without ever having asked permission. She yipped, plaintive. He got up and slid open the door. The happy dog reared back on her haunches preparing to leap. He waited for her to leave the ground, opening her forelegs to embrace him, before he swung his boot and punted her in the ribs. She screamed, sprawled, tumbling midair. With a luscious crack she struck the high stucco wall that surrounded the compound.
He slid the door closed. He lay on the sofa in the dark, in the wilderness between consciousness and sleep, now and again allowing an eye to open and check if the dog had returned to the door, but she did not. It started to snow.
By morning the piñon branches sagged with the heavy snow and dripped in the sun, which had already rounded off the crests of the drifts. The two men drank coffee on empty stomachs, standing under the portal and not talking. Then Tilly said to the air, “Where is Mavis?” flatly as if he knew the air would answer she was dead, as if he had foreseen the time and way she would be killed but would not hold the killer to account. And this refusal of Tilly’s to accuse Elroy of what Elroy already somehow distantly knew he had brought about, but had not done or lived, as if not he but his boot had punted the dog, this refusal—either because he would not blame Elroy for what he always knew Elroy would do, or because he wanted to hang Elroy on the hook of his deed by withholding from him even the comfort of being accused—now caused Elroy for the first time to ask his heart, What have I done?
From nowhere Mavis appeared, breaking the snow beneath her paws, one foreleg folded up to the ribs, hobbling. She approached Elroy’s boots. She sat and bent and kissed them. She let the weak paw down and sat firm in her bones, upright.
They all three got in the Lincoln and after an hour stopped for breakfast at a place on the south side of Santa Fe that occupied little more than a lean-to attached to a gas station and where the green chile tasted tangy and thin before it blew up like kerosene afire in the mouth. Elroy ordered only coffee, and the waitress thanked him for his service, and Tilly asked with seemingly thoughtless sarcasm if he hadn’t learned to eat without staining his uniform. Elroy said he was only trying to reset his hormones by fasting on travel days until he got to the new time zone.
This remark, offered in explanation, not defense, woke the old man from a kind of sleep. “Do you know what?” Tilly said. “I didn’t need to have said that.”
“Ain’t no thing.”
Tilly watched his chile as if reading it. “It was unnecessary. I don’t like the tone I take with you sometimes. You’ve come a long way. You deserve my respect.” He seemed about to say something more but didn’t.
Elroy, already weak with hunger, pinched a slice of bacon from Tilly’s plate and dipped it in the chile and ate it. Tilly offered him the whole plate—eggs, beans, meat—pushing it toward him, insisting he wasn’t hungry himself, and Elroy’s resolve left him and he wolfed it all while Tilly sipped his coffee. Then Elroy noticed a crinkle in his thigh pocket and undid the Velcro and found a fifty in there and dashed to the gas station and returned with
ten Ca$hta$tic lottery tickets and gave half of them to Tilly and attacked the silver polymerized ink of his own tickets with his thumbnail—hope, the wildest high there was—and when Tilly, looking appalled and sick at the expense, refused to touch or even look at the tickets Elroy had given him, Elroy took them back and scratched the ink frenziedly, saying, “You can’t win if you don’t play,” promising Tilly the winnings from these last five tickets, and Tilly only looked on with exasperation in his eyes, or else the vapors of the chile had irritated them, and it didn’t matter, every one of the tickets was a loser.
Then they drove on to the Albuquerque Sunport, and Elroy redeployed, and Tilly continued driving another hour south to the city of Socorro.
15
The Lincoln left Interstate 25 and rolled through downtown Socorro and turned into the parking lot of the Olde Camino Real Regency Professional Pueblo, an assemblage of one- and two-story stucco buildings nestled amid potted indigo bush, drought-tolerant grasses, red and yellow succulents, and arranged around rock-garden courtyards. At one of the spaces designated Guests of FLV, LLC, Tilly’s Lincoln slowed to a crawl and its directional came on. But it did not turn into the parking spot. Before it stopped moving, its directional shut off. The Lincoln seemed to change its mind and instead continued out of the parking lot and headed westward away from the town on U.S. Highway 60.
The parking space the Lincoln had nearly used belonged to one of the newest client relations offices in the FLV network—more formally, the FLV Wealth Partners network, a spin-off of the conglomerate formerly known as Frisk Lambert Ventures, which had dissolved itself nine years earlier into its constituent aerospace, procurement, water and wastewater infrastructure, defense engineering, and private wealth divisions. With assets under management of $4 billion, FLV Partners might have found itself a niche in the venture capital communities and had made efforts in that direction under its former parent during the 1990s. The results, while not as calamitous as those of other late arrivals to the VC business, failed to impress the board or investors. However, despite losses, the increasingly geriatric client base had shown remarkable loyalty to the company even through the collapse of the tech bubble, and thereby made the private wealth division a valuable brand to spin off. At the same board meeting where it became clear that the directors who had long advocated getting rid of private wealth would finally prevail, the logic immediately became clear for the broader vivisection the firm would accomplish in early 2002; after which the separate divisions crawled away in separate directions in search of bolder returns, especially those foreseen by its defense engineering outfit, which was busily positioning itself to serve both American and allied defense establishments’ pending, urgent needs—with luck perhaps urgent enough to justify a no-bid-contract basis—in view of imminent, protracted wars.
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