Hearts In Atlantis (73 page)

“I like lots of people our age when they're one by one,” he said, “but I loathe and despise my generation, Sully. We had an opportunity to change everything. We
actually did. Instead we settled for designer jeans, two tickets to Mariah Carey at Radio City Music Hall, frequent-flier miles, James Cameron's
Titanic
, and retirement portfolios. The only generation even close to us in pure, selfish self-indulgence is the so-called Lost Generation of the twenties, and at least most of them had the decency to stay drunk. We couldn't even do that. Man, we suck.”

The new lieutenant was close to tears, Sully saw. “Deef—”

“You know the price of selling out the future, Sully-John? You can never really leave the past. You can never get over. My thesis is that you're really not in New York at all. You're in the Delta, leaning back against a tree, stoned and rubbing bug-dope on the back of your neck. Packer's still the man because it's still 1969. Everything you think of as ‘your later life' is a big fucking pot-bubble. And it's better that way. Vietnam is better. That's why we stay there.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely.”

A dark-haired, brown-eyed woman in a blue dress peeked around the corner and said, “So there you are.”

Dieffenbaker stood up as she came toward them, walking slow and pretty on her high heels. Sully stood up, too.

“Mary, this is John Sullivan. He served with me and Pags. Sully, this is my good friend Mary Theresa Charlton.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Sully said, and put out his hand.

Her grip was firm and sure, long cool fingers in his
own, but she was looking at Dieffenbaker. “Mrs. Pagano wants to see you, hon. Please?”

“You bet,” Dieffenbaker said. He started toward the front of the building, then turned back to Sully. “Hang in a little bit,” he said. “We'll go for a drink. I promise not to preach.” But his eyes shifted from Sully's when he said this, as if they knew it was a promise he couldn't keep.

“Thanks, Loot, but I really ought to get back. I want to beat the rush-hour traffic.”

•   •   •

But he hadn't beaten the traffic after all and now a piano was falling toward him, gleaming in the sun and humming to itself as it came. Sully fell flat on his stomach and rolled under a car. The piano came down less than five feet away, detonating and throwing up rows of keys like teeth.

Sully slid back out from beneath the car, burning his back on the hot tailpipe, and struggled to his feet. He looked north along the turnpike, eyes wide and unbelieving. A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: tape recorders and rugs and a riding lawnmower with the grass-caked blade whirling in its housing and a black lawn-jockey and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it. He saw an old man with a lot of theatrical gray hair running up the breakdown lane and then a flight of steps fell on him, tearing off his left arm and sending him to his knees. There were clocks and desks and coffee tables and a plummeting elevator with its cable uncoiling into the air behind it like a greasy severed umbilicus. A squall of ledgers fell in the parking lot of a nearby industrial complex; their clapping covers sounded like applause.
A fur coat fell on a running woman, trapping her, and then a sofa landed on her, crushing her. The air filled with a storm of light as large panes of greenhouse glass dropped out of the blue. A statue of a Civil War soldier smashed through a panel truck. An ironing board hit the railing of the overpass up ahead and then fell into the stalled traffic below like a spinning propeller. A stuffed lion dropped into the back of a pickup truck. Everywhere were running, screaming people. Everywhere were cars with dented roofs and smashed windows; Sully saw a Mercedes with the unnaturally pink legs of a department-store mannequin sticking up from the sunroof. The air shook with whines and whistles.

Another shadow fell on him and even as he ducked and raised his hand he knew it was too late, if it was an iron or a toaster or something like that it would fracture his skull. If it was something bigger he'd be nothing but a grease-spot on the highway.

The falling object struck his hand without hurting it in the slightest, bounced, and landed at his feet. He looked down at it first with surprise, then with dawning wonder. “Holy shit,” he said.

Sully bent over and picked up the baseball glove which had fallen from the sky, recognizing it at once even after all these years: the deep scratch down the last finger and the comically tangled knots in the rawhide laces of the webbing were as good as fingerprints. He looked on the side, where Bobby had printed his name. It was still there, but the letters looked fresher than they should have, and the leather here looked frayed and faded and whipsawed, as if other names had been inked in the same spot and then erased.

Closer to his face, the smell of the glove was both intoxicating and irresistible. Sully slipped it onto his hand, and when he did something crackled beneath his little finger—a piece of paper shoved in there. He paid no attention. Instead he put the glove over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Leather and neat's-foot oil and sweat and grass. All the summers that were. The summer of 1960, for instance, when he had come back from his week at camp to find everything changed—Bobby sullen, Carol distant and palely thoughtful (at least for awhile), and the cool old guy who'd lived on the third floor of Bobby's building—Ted—gone. Everything had changed . . . but it was still summer, he had still been eleven, and everything had still seemed  . . .

“Eternal,” he murmured into the glove, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with butterflies shattered on the roof of a bread-van and a stop-sign stuck, quivering, into the breakdown lane like a thrown spear. Sully remembered his Bo-lo Bouncer and his black Keds and the taste of Pez straight out of the gun, how the pieces of candy would hit the roof of your mouth and then ricochet onto your tongue; he remembered the way his catcher's mask felt when it sat on his face just right and the
hisha-hisha-hisha
of the lawn-sprinklers on Broad Street and how mad Mrs. Conlan got if you walked too close to her precious flowers and Mrs. Godlow at the Asher Empire wanting to see your birth certificate if she thought you were too big to be still under twelve and the poster of Brigitte Bardot

(
if she's trash I'd love to be the trashman
)

in her towel and playing guns and playing pass and
playing Careers and making arm-farts in the back of Mrs. Sweetser's fourth-grade classroom and—

“Hey, American.” Only she said it
Amellican
and Sully knew who he was going to see even before he raised his head from Bobby's Alvin Dark–model glove. It was old
mamasan
, standing there between the crotchrocket, which had been crushed by a freezer (wrapped meat was spilling out of its shattered door in frosty blocks), and a Subaru with a lawn-flamingo punched through its roof. Old
mamasan
in her green pants and orange smock and red sneakers, old
mamasan
lit up like a bar-sign in hell.

“Hey, American, you come me, I keep safe.” And she held out her arms.

Sully walked toward her through the noisy hail of falling televisions and backyard pools and cartons of cigarettes and high-heeled shoes and a great big pole hairdryer and a pay telephone that hit and vomited a jackpot of quarters. He walked toward her with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.

“I keep safe.” Holding out her arms now. “Poor boy, I keep safe.” Sully stepped into the dead circle of her embrace as people screamed and ran and all things American fell out of the sky, blitzing I-95 north of Bridgeport with their falling glitter. She put her arms around him.

“I keep safe,” she said, and Sully was in his car. Traffic was stopped all around him, four lanes of it. The radio was on, tuned to WKND. The Platters were singing “Twilight Time” and Sully couldn't breathe. Nothing appeared to have fallen out of the sky, except for the traffic tie-up everything seemed to
be in good order, but how could that be? How could it be when he still had Bobby Garfield's old baseball glove on his hand?

“I keep safe,” old
mamasan
was saying. “Poor boy, poor American boy, I keep safe.”

Sully couldn't breathe. He wanted to smile at her. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, that some of them had at least meant well, but he had no air and he was very tired. He closed his eyes and tried to raise Bobby's glove one final time, get one final shallow whiff of that oily, summery smell, but it was too heavy.

•   •   •

Dieffenbaker was standing at the kitchen counter the next morning, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, pouring himself a cup of coffee, when Mary came in from the living room. She was wearing her
PROPERTY OF THE DENVER BRONCOS
sweatshirt and had the New York
Post
in her hand.

“I think I have some bad news for you,” she said, then seemed to reconsider. “
Moderately
bad news.”

He turned to her warily. Bad news should always come after lunch, he thought. At least a person was halfway prepared for bad news after lunch. First thing in the morning everything left a bruise. “What is it?”

“The man you introduced me to yesterday at your buddy's funeral—you said he was a car dealer in Connecticut, right?”

“Right.”

“I wanted to be sure because John Sullivan isn't, you know, the world's most striking and uncommon—”

“What are you talking about, Mary?”

She handed him the paper, which was folded open to a page about halfway into the tabloid. “They say it happened
while he was on his way home. I'm sorry, hon.”

She had to be wrong, that was his first thought; people couldn't die just after you'd seen them and talked to them, it seemed like a basic rule, somehow.

But it was him, all right, and in triplicate: Sully in a high-school baseball uniform with a catcher's mask pushed back to the top of his head, Sully in an Army uniform with sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, and Sully in a business suit that had to hail from the late seventies. Beneath the row of pictures was the sort of headline you found only in the
Post:

JAMBO!

SILVER STAR VIET VET DIES IN CONN. TRAFFIC JAM

Dieffenbaker scanned the story quickly, feeling the sense of unease and betrayal he always felt these days when he read the death-notice of someone his own age, someone he knew.
We are still too young for natural deaths
, he always thought, knowing that it was a foolish idea.

Sully had died of an apparent heart attack while stuck in a traffic tie-up caused by a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck. He might well have died within sight of his own dealership's Chevrolet sign, the article lamented. Like the
JAMBO!
headline, such epiphanies could be found only in the
Post
. The
Times
was a good paper if you were smart; the
Post
was the newspaper of drunks and poets.

Sully had left an ex-wife and no children. Funeral arrangements were being made by Norman Oliver, of First Connecticut Bank and Trust.

Buried by his bank!
Dieffenbaker thought, his hands
beginning to shake. He had no idea why this thought filled him with such horror, but it did.
By his fucking
bank!
Oh man!

“Honey?” Mary was looking at him a little nervously. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “He died in a traffic jam. Maybe they couldn't even get an ambulance to him. Maybe they never even found him until the traffic started moving again. Christ.”

“Don't,” she said, and took the paper away from him again.

Sully had won the Silver Star for the rescue, of course—the helicopter rescue. The gooks had been shooting but Packer and Shearman had led in a bunch of American soldiers, mostly Delta two-twos, just the same. Ten or twelve of the Bravo Company soldiers had laid down a confused and probably not very effective covering fire as the rescue operation took place . . . and for a wonder two of the men from the tangled copters had actually been alive, at least when they came out of the clearing. John Sullivan had carried one of them to cover all by himself, the chopper guy shrieking in his arms and covered with fire-retardant foam.

Malenfant had gone running into the clearing, too—Malenfant clutching one of the extinguisher cannisters like a big red baby and screaming at the Cong in the bush to shoot him if they could, except they couldn't, he knew they couldn't, they were just a bunch of blind slopehead syphilitic fucks and they couldn't hit him, couldn't hit the broad side of a fuckin barn. Malenfant had also been put up for the Silver Star, and although Dieffenbaker couldn't say for sure, he supposed the pimply little murdering asshole had probably won one.
Had Sully known or guessed? Wouldn't he have mentioned it while they were sitting together outside the funeral parlor? Maybe; maybe not. Medals had a way of seeming less important as time passed, more and more like the award you got in junior high for memorizing a poem or the letter you got in high school for running track and blocking home plate when the throw came home. Just something you kept on a shelf. They were the things old men used to jazz the kids. The things they held out to make you jump higher, run faster, fling yourself forward. Dieffenbaker thought the world would probably be a better place without old men (this revelation coming just as he was getting ready to be one himself). Let the old women live, old women never hurt anyone as a rule, but old men were more dangerous than rabid dogs. Shoot all of them, then douse their bodies with gasoline, then light them on fire. Let the children join hands and dance around the blaze, singing corny old Crosby, Stills and Nash songs.

“Are you really okay?” Mary asked.

“About Sully? Sure. I hadn't seen him in years.”