Hearts In Atlantis (64 page)

“Yes, sir,” Blind Willie says.

“Who was your CO?”

“Captain Bob Brissum—with a
u
, not an
o
—and above him, Colonel Andrew Shelf, sir.”

“I heard of Shelf,” says the man in the open coat. His face suddenly looks different. As he walked toward the man on the corner, it looked as if it belonged on Fifth Avenue. Now it doesn't. “Never met him, though.”

“Toward the end of my run, we didn't see anyone with much rank, sir.”

“If you came out of the A Shau Valley, I'm not surprised. Are we on the same page here, soldier?”

“Yes, sir. There wasn't much command structure left by the time we hit Dong Ha. I pretty much rolled things along with another lieutenant. His name was Dieffenbaker.”

The man in the red ski sweater is nodding slowly.
“You boys were there when those helicopters came down, if I've got this placed right.”

“That's affirmative, sir.”

“Then you must have been there later, when  . . .”

Blind Willie does not help him finish. He can smell Wheelock's cologne, though, stronger than ever, and the man is practically panting in his ear, sounding like a horny kid at the end of a hot date. Wheelock has never bought his act, and although Blind Willie pays for the privilege of being left alone on this corner, and quite handsomely by going rates, he knows that part of Wheelock is still cop enough to hope he'll fuck up. Part of Wheelock is actively rooting for that. But the Wheelocks of the world never understand that what looks fake isn't always fake. Sometimes the issues are a little more complicated than they appear at first glance. That was something else Vietnam had to teach him, back in the years before it became a political joke and a crutch for hack filmwriters.

“Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,” the graying man says. He speaks in a slow, heavy voice. “I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187, so I know the A Shau and Tam Boi. Do you remember Route 922?”

“Ah, yes, sir, Glory Road,” Blind Willie says. “I lost two friends there.”

“Glory Road,” the man in the open coat says, and all at once he looks a thousand years old, the bright red ski sweater an obscenity, like something hung on a museum mummy by cutup kids who believe they are exhibiting a sense of humor. His eyes are off over a hundred horizons. Then they come back here, to this street where a nearby carillon is playing the one that goes I hear those sleighbells jingling, ring-ting-tingling
too. He sets his bags down between his expensive shoes and takes a pigskin wallet out from an inner pocket. He opens it, riffles through a neat thickness of bills.

“Son all right, Garfield?” he asks. “Making good grades?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“Public school?”

“Parochial, sir.”

“Excellent. And God willing, he'll never see Glory Fuckin Road.” The man in the open topcoat takes a bill out of his wallet. Blind Willie feels as well as hears Wheelock's little gasp and hardly has to look at the bill to know it is a hundred.

“Yes, sir, that's affirmative, God willing.”

The man in the topcoat touches Willie's hand with the bill, looks surprised when the gloved hand pulls back, as if it were bare and had been touched by something hot.

“Put it in my case or my ball-glove, sir, if you would,” Blind Willie says.

The man in the topcoat looks at him for a moment, eyebrows raised, frowning slightly, then seems to understand. He stoops, puts the bill in the ancient oiled pocket of the glove with
GARFIELD
printed in blue ink on the side, then reaches into his front pocket and brings out a small handful of change. This he scatters across the face of old Ben Franklin, in order to hold the bill down. Then he stands up. His eyes are wet and bloodshot.

“Do you any good to give you my card?” he asks
Blind Willie. “I can put you in touch with several veterans' organizations.”

“Thank you, sir, I'm sure you could, but I must respectfully decline.”

“Tried most of them?”

“Tried some, yes, sir.”

“Where'd you V.A.?”

“San Francisco, sir.” He hesitates, then adds, “The Pussy Palace, sir.”

The man in the topcoat laughs heartily at this, and when his face crinkles, the tears which have been standing in his eyes run down his weathered cheeks. “Pussy Palace!” he cries. “I haven't heard that in ten years! Christ! A bedpan under every bed and a naked nurse between every set of sheets, right? Naked except for the lovebeads, which they left on.”

“Yes, sir, that about covers it, sir.”

“Or uncovers it. Merry Christmas, soldier.” The man in the topcoat ticks off a little one-finger salute.

“Merry Christmas to you, sir.”

The man in the topcoat picks up his bags again and walks off. He doesn't look back. Blind Willie would not have seen him do so if he had; his vision is now down to ghosts and shadows.

“That was beautiful,” Wheelock murmurs. The feeling of Wheelock's freshly used air puffing into the cup of his ear is hateful to Blind Willie—gruesome, in fact—but he will not give the man the pleasure of moving his head so much as an inch. “The old fuck was actually
crying
. As I'm sure you saw. But you can talk the talk, Willie, I'll give you that much.”

Willie says nothing.

“Some V.A. hospital called the Pussy Palace, huh?”
Wheelock asks. “Sounds like my kind of place. Where'd you read about it,
Soldier of Fortune
?”

The shadow of a woman, a dark shape in a darkening day, bends over the open case and drops something in. A gloved hand touches Willie's gloved hand and squeezes briefly. “God bless you, my friend,” she says.

“Thank you, ma'am.”

The shadow moves off. The little puffs of breath in Blind Willie's ear do not.

“You got something for me, pal?” Wheelock asks.

Blind Willie reaches into his jacket pocket. He produces the envelope and holds it out, jabbing the chilly air with it. It is snatched from his fingers as soon as Wheelock can track it down and get hold of it.

“You asshole!” There's fear as well as anger in the cop's voice. “How many times have I told you, palm it,
palm
it!”

Blind Willie says nothing. He is thinking of the baseball glove, how he erased
BOBBY GARFIELD
—as well as you could erase ink from leather, anyway—and then printed Willie Shearman's name in its place. Later, after Vietnam and just as he was starting his new career, he erased a second time and printed a single name,
GARFIELD
, in big block letters. The place on the side of the old Alvin Dark glove where all these changes have been made looks flayed and raw. If he thinks of the glove, if he concentrates on that scuffed place and its layer of names, he can probably keep from doing something stupid. That's what Wheelock wants, of course, what he wants a lot more than his shitty little payoff: for Willie to do something stupid, to give himself away.

“How much?” Wheelock asks after a moment.

“Three hundred,” Blind Willie says. “Three hundred dollars, Officer Wheelock.”

This is greeted by a little thinking silence, but Wheelock takes a step back from Blind Willie, and the puffs of breath in his ear diffuse a little. Blind Willie is grateful for small favors.

“That's okay,” Wheelock says at last. “
This
time. But a new year's coming, pal, and your friend Jasper the Police-Smurf has a piece of land in upstate New York that he wants to build a little cabana on. You capeesh? The price of poker is going up.”

Blind Willie says nothing, but he is listening very, very carefully now. If this were all, all would be well. But Wheelock's voice suggests it isn't all.

“Actually, the cabana isn't the important part,” Wheelock goes on. “The important thing is I need a little better compensation if I have to deal with a lowlife fuck like you.” Genuine anger is creeping into his voice. “How you can do this every day—even at
Christmas
—man, I don't know. People who beg, that's one thing, but a guy like you . . . you're no more blind than I am.”

Oh, you're
lots
blinder than me, Blind Willie thinks, but still he holds his peace.

“And you're doing okay, aren't you? Probably not as good as those PTL fucks on the tube, but you must clear . . . what? A grand a day, this time a year? Two grand?”

He is way low, but the miscalculation is music to Blind Willie Garfield's ears. It means that his silent partner is not watching him too closely or too frequently . . . not yet, anyway. But he doesn't like the anger in Wheelock's voice. Anger is like a wild card in a poker game.

“You're no more blind than I am,” Wheelock repeats. Apparently this is the part that really gets him. “Hey, pal, you know what? I ought to follow you some night when you get off work, you know? See what you do.” He pauses. “Who you turn into.”

For a moment Blind Willie actually stops breathing . . . then he starts again.

“You wouldn't want to do that, Officer Wheelock,” he says.

“I wouldn't, huh? Why not, Willie? Why not? You lookin out for my welfare, is that it? Afraid I might kill the shitass who lays the golden eggs? Hey, what I get from you in the course of a year ain't all that much when you weigh it against a commendation, maybe a promotion.” He pauses. When he speaks again, his voice has a dreamy quality which Willie finds especially alarming. “I could be in the
Post
.
HERO COP BUSTS HEARTLESS SCAM ARTIST ON FIFTH AVENUE.
”

Jesus
, Willie thinks.
Good Jesus, he sounds serious
.

“Says Garfield on your glove there, but I'd bet Garfield ain't your name. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts.”

“That's a bet you'd lose.”

“Says you . . . but the side of that glove looks like it's seen more than one name written there.”

“It was stolen when I was a kid.” Is he talking too much? It's hard to say. Wheelock has managed to catch him by surprise, the bastard. First the phone rings while he's in his office—good old Ed from NYNEX—and now this. “The boy who stole it from me wrote his name in it while he had it. When I got it back, I erased his and put mine on again.”

“And it went to Vietnam with you?”

“Yes.” It's the truth. If Sullivan had seen that battered Alvin Dark fielder's mitt, would he have recognized it as his old friend Bobby's? Unlikely, but who could know? Sullivan never
had
seen it, not in the green, at least, which made the whole question moot. Officer Jasper Wheelock, on the other hand, was posing all sorts of questions, and
none
of them were moot.

“Went to this Achoo Valley with you, did it?”

Blind Willie doesn't reply. Wheelock is trying to lead him on now, and there's noplace Wheelock can lead that Willie Garfield wants to go.

“Went to this Tomboy place with you?”

Willie says nothing.

“Man, I thought a tomboy was a chick that liked to climb trees.”

Willie continues to say nothing.

“The
Post
,” Wheelock says, and Willie dimly sees the asshole raise his hands slightly apart, as if framing a picture. “
HERO COP.
” He might just be teasing . . . but Willie can't tell.

“You'd be in the
Post
, all right, but there wouldn't be any commendation,” Blind Willie says. “No promotion, either. In fact, you'd be out on the street, Officer Wheelock, looking for a job. You could skip applying for one with security companies, though—a man who'll take a payoff can't be bonded.”

It is Wheelock's turn to stop breathing. When he starts again, the puffs of breath in Blind Willie's ear have become a hurricane; the cop's moving mouth is almost on his skin. “What do you mean?” he whispers. A hand settles on the arm of Blind Willie's field jacket. “You just tell me what the fuck you mean.”

But Blind Willie continues silent, hands at his
sides, head slightly raised, looking attentively into the darkness that will not clear until daylight is almost gone, and on his face is that lack of expression which so many passersby read as ruined pride, courage brought low but somehow still intact.

Better be careful, Officer Wheelock
, he thinks.
The ice under you is getting thin. I may be blind, but you must be deaf if you can't hear the sound of it cracking under your feet
.

The hand on his arm shakes him slightly. Wheelock's fingers are digging in. “You got a friend? Is that it, you son of a bitch? Is that why you hold the envelope out that way half the damned time? You got a friend taking my picture? Is that it?”

Blind Willie goes on saying nothing; to Jasper the Police-Smurf he is now giving a sermon of silence. People like Officer Wheelock will always think the worst if you let them. You only have to give them time to do it.

“You don't want to fuck with me, pal,” Wheelock says viciously, but there is a subtle undertone of worry in his voice, and the hand on Blind Willie's jacket loosens. “We're going up to four hundred a month starting in January, and if you try playing any games with me, I'm going to show you where the real playground is. You understand me?”

Blind Willie says nothing. The puffs of air stop hitting his ear, and he knows Wheelock is getting ready to go. But not yet, alas; the nasty little puffs come back.

“You'll burn in hell for what you're doing,” Wheelock tells him. He speaks with great, almost fervent, sincerity. “What I'm doing when I take your dirty money is a venial sin—I asked the priest, so I'm
sure—but yours is mortal. You're going to hell, see how many handouts you get down there.”

Blind Willie thinks of a jacket Willie and Bill Shearman sometimes see on the street. There is a map of Vietnam on the back, usually the years the wearer of the jacket spent there, and this message:
WHEN I DIE I'M GOING STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN, BECAUSE I SPENT MY TIME IN HELL.
He could mention this sentiment to Officer Wheelock, but it would do no good. Silence is better.