Given World (11 page)

Darrell was his team’s point guard in high school. Since we met after he’d already graduated, I never saw him play in an actual game, but I was sure he’d been a star. Sometimes we’d messed around on the court at my school, where he’d found and claimed me that rainy afternoon, and the way he moved and spun and pivoted and shot made me dizzy, made my heart hurt remembering. He was so graceful, so tall, so
good
.

I wondered if our son would grow up to play basketball, but didn’t think it was possible, since he’d been born so early and maybe wouldn’t grow like a normal kid. But maybe it didn’t work that way, and he’d catch up, get big, like his father. Wherever he was now. Wherever they both were.
If
they both were. But I was not thinking about them, or where they were.

A jungle, however imaginary and probably wrong, appeared; I bit my lip, hard—a reminder to stay in the present. Vietnam was supposed to be far away—a lifetime away—someone’s life, at any rate. Montana too. It did not occur to me that I might be too young to be thinking in terms of lifetimes.

Now that we were in the light, I could see Primo was blind in his right eye. It had that milky look, bluish white, like frozen pond water in winter. There was some scar tissue around it, and trailing off across the top of his cheek. His ear was a little mangled too.

I touched my own cheek, near the corner of my eye. “What happened?”

“ ’Nam,” he said.

“What?”

“ ’Nam. Vietnam.”

Damn.
“Oh.” I felt sick. Like I had conjured up the place with my stupid daydreaming. I put my fork down next to my plate and sipped some orange juice. I should have been ready, though. It should have been obvious. “How?”

“White phosphorus. Our guys accidentally threw some too close, and my face got in the way.”

“What’s white phosphorous?”

“It’s a chemical thing. It lights shit up. Mostly it burns. Sets a village or the woods or a rice paddy on fire and kills people. You can’t put it out with water. It’s nasty.” He turned toward the window, and the fog. “Like that, at first,” he said, pointing with his chin. “Only brighter. They called it Willy Peter, like it was supposed to be your pal or something. It wasn’t mine, except I got to come home early, so maybe in a way it was.” He lit a cigarette, still looking away. “Fucked up pal, though.”

He picked up his coffee cup and set it back down again without drinking from it.

I said, “Sounds like napalm.” Mick had told me about it, in one of his letters. He thought whoever invented it was sick in the head.

“More or less,” Primo said. “Part of the SOP, actually. Of torching human beings.”

“SOP?”

“Standard operating procedure. It was wicked messed up.”

“That’s what my brother says.” I looked down at my pancakes, afraid Primo could see that the present tense was a big, fat lie.

“Well, he’s right. I guess he was there. Who with?”

“Twenty-Fifth Infantry. Củ Chi. They made him a tunnel guy.”

“A rat, you mean. Little.” Compared to Primo, I figured, a lot of them would have qualified as little. But Mick really was. He never got much taller than I did: like five foot six and a bit. Five eight, maybe, in his boots. And he was skinny, wiry.

“I guess so,” I said. “A rat.” It was hard for me to think of Mick as a rat, even though he’d seemed kind of proud of it. He was more canine than rodent. But the tunnel dogs were real dogs. German shepherds. Mick had one for a while, but it died.

“Can we talk about something else?” I was mashing what was left of my breakfast with my fork. I wondered if Primo could feel how much I wanted to bolt, or blow, or just melt through the Naugahyde seat and the floor, seep down the cliff, dissolve into the sea or float off to Asia.

He said, “Sure. How about the sun? How about I take you to see it in person?” He knew. I could hear him knowing.

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes for a few seconds. “I think,” I said, “that would be really nice.” I looked outside, where it was only now getting light enough to see the water. The gulls quarreled over fish and the fog stayed, utterly still and seemingly permanent.

When we got back to the truck, Primo pulled a microphone from its holder on a radio mounted to the dash. He pushed a button on the side and said, “Eighteen-fifty to dispatch.”

After a minute, a female voice came back through the speaker. “Nothing for you, Primo. Spot and clear?”

“Spot time five fifteen. So far nothing down or open. Not clear yet.”

“Ten-four, eighteen-fifty.”

“Ten-four.” He put the microphone back and the truck in drive. “Looking good, so hold on, kiddo. We’re going for a ride.”

“Okay.” I sat down on the bundle of papers and grabbed onto the edge of the grate, not sure what to expect but relieved to be moving in a definite direction with an actual purpose: to see the sun. I’d believe it when I had to put my blue sunglasses on.

Primo detoured briefly to deliver a dozen or so newspapers on one dead-end block just off Geary. He kept the doors of the truck open, and swapping hands every so often pitched papers out both sides with amazing accuracy, landing them on steps, under gates, and one on an upstairs fire escape. I was amazed at how effortless he made it look. I wanted to be able to do that. He said he’d teach me. If I stuck around.

As we headed east, the fog began to dissipate; by Divisadero it was completely gone. The Mission was wide awake, brilliant, and uncontained. It was about six when we hit Twenty-Fourth Street, where shopkeepers were sweeping and hosing down the sidewalks, filling great wooden vegetable bins, setting out five-gallon plastic buckets full of flowers. I could smell the flowers from the truck, and a bunch of other things I couldn’t identify but which obviously were things to eat. I was still full from breakfast, but my mouth watered anyway.

Primo took me to a Mexican grocery store, where I bought tortillas, cheese, oranges, bananas and bread. A whole grocery bag full, for three dollars. The tortillas were so fresh the plastic package was fogged up, steamy. I held it to my face to feel the damp warmth on my skin. I stopped again in front of the vegetable bin as we were leaving, dazzled by the array of chilies—the sheer number of colors and shapes—but I didn’t buy any because I was a little afraid of them. Primo showed me, for future reference, which ones were the hottest: tiny yellow ones he said would burn like white phosphorous.

“You could use these as a weapon,” he said, his gravelly laugh turning a few heads. I wondered how he could joke like that, but still it seemed a perfectly natural thing for him to say.

He appeared to know everyone on the block, or to be known by everyone, and most of them called him Primo. A few, like he’d said, called him T.C. or Tony. When I asked if he lived nearby, he pointed to a set of windows above one of the shops across the street. “
Mi casa,
” he said. I could see white lace curtains, tied back with pieces of red ribbon. I figured that was a woman’s touch and asked if his wife was home.

“Nope. She lives with her sister.”

“Why?”

“Long story. Boring, too.” He laughed, but it didn’t sound the same as it had before. It was quicker, closer to choking, really, than laughing. He lifted the grocery bag out of my hands and headed toward the truck. “Time to get back to work,” he said. “We’ve probably messed around just long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“Hit some traffic. Get some second calls.”

“Calls for papers?”

“Exactly.” He looked sideways at me out of his good eye. “You’re a smart cookie, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. But it was nice, him saying so.

He set the bag on the floor of the truck and asked me to wait while he ran into his apartment for something. He was gone about ten minutes, and when he got back, we sat while he rubbed his eyes and adjusted the mirrors four or five times.

“Sleepy,” he said. “I always get sleepy right about now.” I was wide awake, but then, I figured, I was way younger, and there was so much to look at.

When we finally started moving, I asked him, “So how come everyone calls you Primo?”

“It means cousin, kind of, or first, I guess. I was born first. I have another brother named Anthony. Antonio, actually. After my dad.”

“Your dad named both of you the same thing?”

“Yeah. He would have named us all that, even the girls, but my mom wouldn’t let him.”

“She wouldn’t?” I said. Primo looked at me, his eyebrows raised. I couldn’t help but grin.

“Smartass.”

I nodded. “So I’ve been told. What do they call the other Anthony?”

“Tony.”

“Oh.” I was disappointed, thinking maybe there was another word like Primo for a second son with the same name.

“Nope,” Primo said. “We weren’t going to call him Segundo. That would be as bad as calling someone T.B.” When I laughed, it felt surprising and familiar, like something I’d done when I was young.

“What should I call you?”

“Primo. That’s what my posse calls me.”

Posse. I waited.

“I’ll let you in if you’re lucky. Keep your nose clean.”

“I’ll do that.”

I told him my real name. We were at a light. It turned green but he didn’t go right away. I looked, and his eyes were closed and his head leaned back against the metal grate behind him. Someone honked. His whole upper body jerked, and he moved his foot from the brake to the gas pedal.

“I like it,” he mumbled. “But I was sort of getting used to Tinker Bell.” Just as though there had been no break in the conversation, and he hadn’t fallen asleep at an intersection.

“I answer to pretty much anything,” I said, wondering if sleep-driving was a common occurrence among newspaper drivers, or if it was a special talent only Primo possessed.

•  •  •

I kept sleeping in my car, because I was not ready to give up the ocean yet, knowing the sun did in fact exist here and that it wasn’t so terribly hard to find. Besides which, I didn’t really have any place else to go. Primo showed me where the Y was in the Sunset District, and introduced me to a girl who worked the desk in the evenings and would let me in so I could shower and wash my hair. He found me most mornings, picked me up so I could ride around with him.

One of the kids called in sick a week or so after Primo and I met, so we threw his two routes: 170 papers on six or seven blocks. I already knew by then the basic process of folding and banding, and Primo taught me how to wing the papers, sort of like a Frisbee, snapping my wrist so they’d go where I aimed them, and sometimes they did. The buildings with open entryways were the easiest shots, of course, since there was nothing in the way. Gates were harder, but they had their openings too. I began to see the spaces under them, at the very top and between the bars as their weak spots, places to attack. Primo drove both sides of each block, calling off addresses, and I threw. If a gate came all the way to the bottom or the bars were too close together, I jumped out of the truck to fit the paper through one gap or another. When there were several tough ones in a row, Primo drove slowly alongside as I trotted down the fog-damp sidewalks, arms loaded, feeling like a one-girl assault force.

I was concentrating so hard I didn’t even notice the sun. Primo had to point it out to me.

“Check it out,” he said, motioning with his chin. I stopped dead, screeching to a halt, looking a lot, I bet, like Wile E. Coyote.

“Holy shit,” I said, throwing a paper straight up in the air.

Primo shook his head. “You can’t swear around me like that. My virgin ears.”

“Sure.”

When we were done, he gave me five dollars.

“For what? No.” I handed it back.

“Yes.” He stuffed the bill into the hip pocket of my blue jeans, caught my hand, and held it to keep me from reaching in to get it out. When I gave up and said okay, he let go.

At last call he dropped me off at my car. I thought about taking a nap, but the sun was too bright and tempting, so I went to the beach. I was always surprised at how empty it was. That day only a few people strolled down by the water; one guy throwing sticks for his dog, a big black Lab who bounded into the surf over and over, came out, shook the water off and stood panting and shivering until it was time to rush the waves again.

I sat on a piece of wood that looked a lot like the burnt remains of a railroad tie, wondering how it could have gotten there. I remembered walking on the railroad tracks at home with my brother or with Darrell, or alone, thinking I might walk those tracks all the way to the coast, but when it came time to go, it was the Greyhound that took me. I tried to imagine what it would be like to still be there but couldn’t wrap my brain around the baby, or the gone-away boys; anything I imagined about home at all would probably be just another lie I knew better than to tell myself. The only things I could picture clearly were Mick’s bedroom, the kitchen, and my dog Cash, who had never chased a stick into the ocean, and never would.

Later, when the fog started to roll in, I drove around until I relocated a library I’d been to once before. I prowled the stacks, feeling thiefish, like I meant to steal something, though I knew I didn’t. I asked the librarian if I could check out a book, but she asked for my address and I didn’t have the presence of mind to make one up. When I left it was with—inside my wolf sweatshirt—
A Separate Peace
, a book I’d loved in high school and would bring back to the library as soon as I’d read it again. I could still so distinctly see one image from it, of a boy standing on the limb of a tree—a silhouette against the sky—and then falling.

Later that week, Primo invited me over for dinner. His place was small and there wasn’t much in it, but it was comfy enough. There was one real bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen with a little closed-in porch behind it. The porch had its own door to the outside: steps leading to a tiny yard full of weeds and ornamental flowers and plants gone wild. I was particular to the bougainvillea and its papery petals that came in so many outlandish pinks and reds and oranges; I’d seen them all over town. “Is that the official plant of San Francisco?” I pointed to a red one near the back, an especially unruly one that had climbed up and over the fence. Like it was trying to escape.