Hearts In Atlantis (67 page)

Willie touches the photo of the burned-out house on Benefit Street . . . and suddenly a name comes to him, the name of the man who maybe stopped Dong Ha from becoming another My Lai or My Khe. Slocum. That was his name, all right. It's as if the blackened beams and broken windows have whispered it to him.

Willie closes the scrapbook and puts it away, feeling at peace. He finishes squaring up what needs to
be squared up in the offices of Midtown Heating and Cooling, then steps carefully through the trapdoor and finds his footing on top of the stepladder below. He takes the handle of his briefcase and pulls it through. He descends to the third step, then lowers the trapdoor into place and slides the ceiling panel back where it belongs.

He
cannot do anything . . . anything
permanent
 . . . to Officer Jasper Wheelock . . . but Slocum could. Yes indeed,
Slocum
could. Of course Slocum was black, but what of that? In the dark, all cats are gray . . . and to the blind, they're no color at all. Is it really much of a reach from Blind Willie Garfield to Blind Willie Slocum? Of course not. Easy as breathing, really.

“Do you hear what I hear,” he sings softly as he folds the stepladder and puts it back, “do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste?”

Five minutes later he closes the door of Western States Land Analysts firmly behind him and triple-locks it. Then he goes down the hallway. When the elevator comes and he steps in, he thinks,
Eggnog. Don't forget. The Allens and the Dubrays
.

“Also cinnamon,” he says out loud. The three people in the elevator car with him look around, and Bill grins self-consciously.

Outside, he turns toward Grand Central, registering only one thought as the snow beats full into his face and he flips up his coat collar: the Santa outside the building has fixed his beard.

M
IDNIGHT

“Share?”

“Hmmmm?”

Her voice is sleepy, distant. They have made long, slow love after the Dubrays finally left at eleven o'clock, and now she is drifting away. That's all right; he is drifting too. He has a feeling that all of his problems are solving themselves . . . or that God is solving them.

“I may take a week or so off after Christmas. Do some inventory. Poke around some new sites. I'm thinking about changing locations.” There is no need for her to know about what Willie Slocum may be doing in the week before New Year's; she couldn't do anything but worry and—perhaps, perhaps not, he sees no reason to find out for sure—feel guilty.

“Good,” she says. “See a few movies while you're at it, why don't you?” Her hand gropes out of the dark and touches his arm briefly. “You work so hard.” Pause. “Also, you remembered the eggnog. I really didn't think you would. I'm very pleased with you, sweetheart.”

He grins in the dark at that, helpless not to. It is so perfectly Sharon.

“The Allens are all right, but the Dubrays are boring, aren't they?” she asks.

“A little,” he allows.

“If that dress of hers had been cut any lower, she could have gotten a job in a topless bar.”

He says nothing to that, but grins again.

“It was good tonight, wasn't it?” she asks him. It's not their little party that she's talking about.

“Yes, excellent.”

“Did you have a good day? I didn't have a chance to ask.”

“Fine day, Share.”

“I love you, Bill.”

“Love you, too.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

As he drifts toward sleep he thinks about the man in the bright red ski sweater. He crosses over without knowing it, thought melting effortlessly into dream. “Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,” the man in the red sweater says. “I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187. We lost a lot of good men.” Then he brightens. “But I got this.” From the lefthand pocket of his topcoat he takes a white beard hanging on a string. “And this.” From the righthand pocket he takes a crumpled styrofoam cup, which he shakes. A few loose coins rattle in the bottom like teeth. “So you see,” he says, fading now, “there are compensations for even the blindest life.”

Then the dream itself fades and Bill Shearman sleeps deeply until six-fifteen the next morning, when the clock-radio wakes him to the sound of “The Little Drummer Boy.”

1999: When someone dies, you think about the past
.

When someone dies, you think about the past. Sully had probably known this for years, but it was only on the day of Pags's funeral that it formed in his mind as a conscious postulate.

It was twenty-six years since the helicopters took their last loads of refugees (some dangling photogenically from the landing skids) off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and almost thirty since a Huey evacked John Sullivan, Willie Shearman, and maybe a dozen others out of Dong Ha Province. Sully-John and his magically refound childhood acquaintance had been heroes that morning when the choppers fell out of the sky; they'd been something else come afternoon. Sully could remember lying there on the Huey's throbbing floor and screaming for someone to kill him. He could remember Willie screaming as well.
I'm blind
was what Willie had been screaming.
Ah Jesus-fuck, I'm blind!

Eventually it had become clear to him—even with some of his guts hanging out of his belly in gray ropes and most of his balls blown off—that no one was going to do what he asked and he wasn't going to be able to do the job on his own. Not soon enough to suit him, anyway. So he asked someone to get rid of the
mamasan
, they could do that much, couldn't they? Land her or just dump her the fuck out, why not? Wasn't she dead already? Thing was, she wouldn't stop
looking
at him, and enough was enough.

By the time they swapped him and Shearman and half a dozen others—the worst ones—to a Medevac at
the rally-point everyone called Peepee City (the chopper-jockeys were probably damned glad to see them go, all that screaming), Sully had started to realize none of the others could see old
mamasan
squatting there in the cockpit, old white-haired
mamasan
in the green pants and orange top and those weird bright Chinese sneakers, the ones that looked like Chuck Taylor hightops, bright red, wow. Old
mamasan
had been Malenfant's date, old Mr. Card-Shark's big date. Earlier that day Malenfant had run into the clearing along with Sully and Dieffenbaker and Sly Slocum and the others, never mind the gooks firing at them out of the bush, never mind the terrible week of mortars and snipers and ambushes, Malenfant had been hero-bound and Sully had been hero-bound too, and now oh hey look at this, Ronnie Malenfant was a murderer, the kid Sully had been so afraid of back in the old days had saved his life and been blinded, and Sully himself was lying on the floor of a helicopter with his guts waving in the breeze. As Art Linkletter always said, it just proved that people are funny.

Somebody kill me
, he had screamed on that bright and terrible afternoon.
Somebody shoot me, for the love of God just let me die
.

But he hadn't died, the doctors had managed to save one of his mangled testicles, and now there were even days when he felt more or less glad to be alive. Sunsets made him feel that way. He liked to go out to the back of the lot, where the cars they'd taken in trade but hadn't yet fixed up were stored, and stand there watching the sun go down. Corny shit, granted, but it was still the good part.

In San Francisco Willie was on the same ward and
visited him a lot until the Army in its wisdom sent First Lieutenant Shearman somewhere else; they had talked for hours about the old days in Harwich and people they knew in common. Once they'd even gotten their picture taken by an AP news photographer—Willie sitting on Sully's bed, both of them laughing. Willie's eyes had been better by then but still not right; Willie had confided to Sully that he was afraid they never
would
be right. The story that went with the picture had been pretty dopey, but had it brought them letters? Holy Christ! More than either of them could read! Sully had even gotten the crazy idea that he might hear from Carol, but of course he never did. It was the spring of 1970 and Carol Gerber was undoubtedly busy smoking pot and giving blowjobs to end-the-war hippies while her old high-school boyfriend was getting his balls blown off on the other side of the world. That's right, Art, people are funny. Also, kids say the darndest things.

When Willie shipped out, old
mamasan
stayed. Old
mamasan
hung right in there. During the seven months Sully spent in San Francisco's Veterans Hospital she had come every day and every night, his most constant visitor in that endless time when the whole world seemed to smell of piss and his heart hurt like a headache. Sometimes she showed up in a
muumuu
like the hostess at some nutty
luau
, sometimes she came wearing one of those grisly green golf-skirts and a sleeveless top that showed off her scrawny arms . . . but mostly she wore what she had been wearing on the day Malenfant killed her—the green pants, the orange smock, the red sneakers with the Chinese symbols on them.

One day that summer he unfolded the San Francisco
Chronicle
and saw his old girlfriend had made the front page. His old girlfriend and her hippie pals had killed a bunch of kids and job-recruiters back in Danbury. His old girlfriend was now “Red Carol.” His old girlfriend was a celebrity. “You cunt,” he had said as the paper first doubled, then trebled, then broke up into prisms. “You stupid fucked-up
cunt
.” He had balled the paper up, meaning to throw it across the room, and there was his
new
girlfriend, there was old
mamasan
sitting on the next bed, looking at Sully with her black eyes, and Sully had broken down completely at the sight of her. When the nurse came Sully either couldn't or wouldn't tell her what he was crying about. All he knew was that the world had gone insane and he wanted a shot and eventually the nurse found a doctor to give him one and the last thing he saw before he passed out was
mamasan
, old fuckin
mamasan
sitting there on the next bed with her yellow hands in her green polyester lap, sitting there and watching him.

She made the trip across the country with him, too, had come all the way back to Connecticut with him, deadheading across the aisle in the tourist cabin of a United Airlines 747. She sat next to a businessman who saw her no more than the crew of the Huey had, or Willie Shearman, or the staff at the Pussy Palace. She had been Malenfant's date in Dong Ha, but she was John Sullivan's date now and never took her black eyes off him. Her yellow, wrinkled fingers always stayed folded in her lap and her eyes always stayed on him.

Thirty years. Man, that was a long time.

But as those years went by, Sully had seen her less and less. When he returned to Harwich in the fall of '70, he
still saw old
mamasan
just about every day—eating a hotdog in Commonwealth Park by Field B, or standing at the foot of the iron steps leading up to the railway station where the commuters ebbed and flowed, or just walking down Main Street. Always looking at him.

Once, not long after he'd gotten his first post-Vietnam job (selling cars, of course; it was the only thing he really knew how to do) he had seen old
mamasan
sitting in the passenger seat of a 1968 Ford LTD with
PRICED TO SELL!
soaped on the windshield.

You'll start to understand her in time
, the headshrinker in San Francisco had told him, and refused to say much more no matter how hard Sully pressed him. The shrink wanted to hear about the helicopters that had collided and fell out of the sky; the headshrinker wanted to know why Sully so often referred to Malenfant as “that cardplaying bastard” (Sully wouldn't tell him); the headshrinker wanted to know if Sully still had sexual fantasies, and if so, had they become noticeably violent. Sully had sort of liked the guy—Conroy, his name was—but that didn't change the fact that he was an asshole. Once, near the end of his time in San Francisco, he had come close to telling Dr. Conroy about Carol. On the whole he was glad he hadn't. He didn't know how to
think
about his old girlfriend, let alone talk about her (
conflicted
was Conroy's word for this state). He had called her a stupid fucked-up cunt, but the whole damn world was sort of fucked-up these days, wasn't it? And if anyone knew how easily violent behavior could break its leash and just run away, John Sullivan did. All he was sure of was that he hoped the police wouldn't kill her when they finally caught up to her and her friends.

Asshole or not, Dr. Conroy hadn't been entirely wrong about Sully coming to understand old
mamasan
as time went by. The most important thing was understanding—on a gut level—that old
mamasan
wasn't there. Head-knowledge of that basic fact was easy, but his gut was slower to learn, possibly because his gut had been torn open in Dong Ha and a thing like that just had to slow the understanding process down.

He had borrowed some of Dr. Conroy's books, and the hospital librarian had gotten him a couple of others on inter-library loan. According to the books, old
mamasan
in her green pants and orange top was “an externalized fantasy” which served as a “coping mechanism” to help him deal with his “survivor guilt” and “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” She was a daydream, in other words.

Whatever the reasons, his attitude about her changed as her appearances became less frequent. Instead of feeling revulsion or a kind of superstitious dread when she turned up, he began to feel almost happy when he saw her. The way you felt when you saw an old friend who had left town but sometimes came back for a little visit.