Marine Corpse (4 page)

“Get to it, Stu. What do you want me to do?”

“Okay. Sorry. I’ll be keeping notebooks and I need a place to store them safely until I’m done.”

“Here is fine with me.”

“Good. That’s all I wanted.”

“Will you be mailing them, or dropping them off, or what?”

“I’ll get them here, one way or another.” I stood up and moved around my desk, giving Stu no choice but to rise also. I shook hands with him and gentled him out of my office. He staggered only a little. Then I went off to play golf.

I
T WAS NEARLY NOONTIME
on a Monday three weeks later when Julie, my secretary, opened the door into my office and gave me that eyebrows-raised shrug of hers that said, “Don’t blame me.”

“There’s a Mr. Altoona here to see you?” she said, lifting the inflection to make a question of it.

“I don’t know him. Do I?”

“No. You don’t know him. He says you know what it’s about.”

“Well, I don’t. So let’s find out. Send him in.”

She stood back in the doorway and murmured, “This way, please.”

The man who shuffled past her wore a bulky tweed topcoat that came nearly to his ankles and heavy leather boots that looked several sizes too big for him. A rim of shaggy white hair encircled his head, leaving the top pink and bare. His eyes were pale and watery. He stood just inside the doorway, glancing uncertainly from Julie to me.

“Mr. Altoona, this is Mr. Coyne,” she said, a little grin tapdancing at the corners of her mouth.

“Not Mister, my dear lady,” said the man in a voice like a dull hacksaw working on a length of copper pipe. “It’s just plain Altoona. Altoona is what they call me, after the singularly insignificant metropolis in Pennsylvania whence I hail.”

He bowed to Julie, who winked at me as she closed the door on us. The man extended his hand to me. I took it. It felt small and bony in my grip. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. Abruptly he bent over and hugged his chest with both arms. He gurgled and groaned, straining as if he had the dry heaves, and then exploded in a spasm of coughing—great, long, wracking fits punctuated by desperate wheezing intakes of breath. I put my arm across his shoulders and steered him to the sofa, where he collapsed, his head between his knees. His seizure sputtered and died like a truck running out of gas, leaving him panting and red-faced. He wiped his nose and eyes on the ragged sleeve of his topcoat and smiled apologetically at me.

“A thousand pardons, sir,” he puffed. “Consumption, as they liked to call it in the literature of the nineteenth century. TB, you know. Many of us suffer from it.”

“Would you like a drink?” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say except to ask him who “us” was.

“Ah, for medicinal purposes. Excellent, sir.” I went over to the cabinet. “What’s your pleasure?”

“My pleasures, sir, are catholic. The grape and the grain, the potato and the juniper berry.” He smiled. “Whiskey. Neat, if you please.”

I poured a drink and carried it to him. He accepted it with both hands, sipped, and sighed. “Ah. That helps.” He settled back into the sofa and regarded me expectantly.

I sat in the armchair beside him. “Are you being treated for your disease?” I asked. He waved his hand dismissively. “After a fashion.”

“I would say that you ought to be hospitalized.”

“Yes. I’ve been told that.” He sipped his drink, and I nodded. He had politely advised me not to pry.

“Well, then. How can I help you?” I said.

From the folds of his topcoat where, I assumed, it had been tucked up into his armpit, he extracted a large manila envelope. He held it out to me. “From our mutual friend, Cutter,” he said.

I took it from him. Inside I found a red spiral-bound notebook. Stu Carver’s notes. I flipped through it. Stu’s writing was virtually indecipherable, pencil scrawls as if done hastily in the dark from an uncomfortable position. The notebook was about half full. I closed it and slid it back into the envelope and looked up at the old man. “Thank you,” I said. “He said he’d be sending me some of these. And how is he?”

Altoona grinned. “Oh, he’s quite well, considering. He’s been studying us, you know. He has taken me into his confidence. Anthropology has always fascinated me. Cutter calls himself a sociologist, and, frankly, the distinction between the two so-called sciences has always eluded me, but if I remember my Margaret Mead, I believe the anthropologist inclines toward the study of obscure alien cultures. And that is surely what our friend Cutter is engaged in.”

I had to smile at his ornate syntax. “And you…?”

“I’m what Cutter calls a bum,” he smiled. “Oh, yes. One of his subjects, as well as an ally of sorts. He has found me a most willing, if marginally helpful, collaborator.”

“He’s got you running errands for him,” I said, tapping the envelope that contained the notebook.

“He indicated that you would, ah, take care of me.”

“And I will. Shall we have some lunch?”

He nodded. “Most assuredly.”

I put Stu’s notebook into my office safe. Then Altoona followed me out of my office into the waiting room, where Julie looked up from her typewriter. “We’re going to lunch,” I told her.

Altoona seized her hand and bent to it, brushing it with his lips. “It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Madame,” he murmured.

Julie grinned. “You are a gentleman, sir.”

We walked to Marie’s, my favorite little Italian restaurant, in Kenmore Square. Altoona clomped along slowly in his big boots, and I had to adjust my pace to his. Halfway there he had another coughing attack, and I held him as he leaned against a store window until it passed.

“You should wear a hat,” I told him.

“You sound like my sainted mother,” he wheezed. “Actually I’ve got a thick skull,” he added, tapping his bald pate. “Plenty of insulation up there already.”

Marie greeted us at the door. She hugged me and we kissed each other’s cheeks in the European manner. I introduced her to Altoona, and she leaned toward him to accept his kisses, ignoring, as I knew she would, his shabby attire. Then she led us to my regular table in the corner. Altoona shrugged off his topcoat and draped it over the back of his chair. Under it he wore a faded red flannel shirt, with a blue sweatshirt underneath showing at his throat. Thick black and white striped suspenders held up his pants.

The day’s specials were listed on a chalkboard. Altoona read them aloud, pronouncing the Italian words with tongue-trilling relish and translating them for me—first into French, then into English.

We each ordered a bowl of vermicelli—“little worms,” Altoona told me—with a pesto sauce, a side order of deep-fried eggplant in beer batter, green salad, hot bread. Marie, as usual, provided a half carafe of red wine on the house. I poured each of us a glass, leaned back to light a cigarette, and lifted my glass to him.

“Your health,” I toasted.

He nodded. “Not the best. But I thank you for the wish.” He touched his glass to mine. “To beautiful women.”

I smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

We tipped our glasses. “An aggressive little vintage,” he pronounced, after sniffing, sipping, and sloshing it around in his mouth. “Clever, but not at all deceitful.”

“You must be an interesting subject for our friend,” I said.

“He has made a study of me, yes. I think I have confused him. I am giving him some lessons.” Altoona peered at me as if he had told a joke that I didn’t get. “You are curious about me, Mr. Coyne.”

I nodded. “Yes, I guess I am.”

He sipped his wine. “I told you I was a bum, and that is true. It’s a generic term, ‘bum,’ and it encompasses a multitude of sins, both of commission and omission. We so-called bums are as various as—well, as attorneys, for example. We are also called the ‘homeless’ by bureaucrats whose sense of propriety deters them from plain talk, but to put perhaps too fine a point on it, the term is less serviceable than ‘bum.’ I, for example, have a home, and even a family of sorts. I reside at the mission at St. Michael’s. I sweep the floors and do a few other odd jobs—nothing terribly taxing, mind you—and dutifully go through the motions at the daily Mass. In return I am given a cot to sleep on, a clean towel and a shower each morning, a new razor every week, oatmeal and coffee for breakfast.”

He paused to sip his wine again. He did it delicately, without thirst, and I felt certain that at some time in his life he had known how to enjoy fine things. But now the erupted capillaries on his nose and across his cheekbones revealed a different sort of appreciation. “Now—Cutter,” he continued, running his forefinger across his lips, “Cutter is looking for something he calls typical. He’s moving around, doing his research, and some nights he doesn’t find a cot, and some days he gets in line too late for a chit and misses a meal. This seems to please him.” He shrugged. “He’ll learn. Our culture is more complex than he knows. Wheels within wheels. Hierarchies. But he’s a bright enough young man. Too eager, perhaps, to come to conclusions, too impatient with evidence. And he has yet to learn how to become invisible, to merge. As for me, what I have is as good as the hospital. Better, in many important ways. At least I’m free.”

“The hospital?”

“A state mental facility, Mr. Coyne. It was my home for several years.” His eyes twinkled. “Then I was deinstitutionalized. Kicked out. No longer certifiably crazy enough. Between us, it was their standards that changed, not me. So now I sweep floors for bed and board, and I get prayers instead of pills for what ails me, and the prayers seem to work about as well as the pills did.”

Marie’s waitress, wearing the uniform of the place—a clean white blouse and very tight blue jeans—brought our salads, and we ate them in silence. When he finished, Altoona dabbed at his mouth with the corner of his napkin and refilled our wine glasses. “I know Cutter isn’t his real name,” he said. “Of course, Altoona isn’t mine, either. Most of us, you see, realize we aren’t the men—or the women—we once were, or thought or hoped we might become. People without homes are people without the need for names. Our names are our shorthand, and a way to sever painful old ties. No one really cares about our names, anyway. The phenomenon of anomie—namelessness, rootlessness, homelessness—that so delights the sociologists.”

“You are a learned man,” I observed. I wanted to ask him about his time in the mental hospital, for surely this man was bursting with erudition, and if there was something wrong with his mind, it wasn’t evident to me.

“Every morning, after I sweep up, I stroll over to the public library to commune with the newspapers,” he went on, as if he had read my mind. “It’s warm there. I feel comfortable, and nobody seems to mind. I like to know what’s happening in the world, even if there isn’t much any of us can do about it.” He cocked his head. “So, Mr. Coyne. What do you think about this business in Haiti?”

The question startled me. I found something surreal about sitting at a table in a fine little Italian restaurant in downtown Boston discussing current affairs with an old man in a raggedy topcoat who had spent time in a mental hospital, and who cheerfully called himself a “bum.”

“I suppose I hold what is generally called the conventional, knee-jerk, liberal view,” I said, realizing as I began that I wanted to appear intelligent to this man, and that I feared I wouldn’t. “Communism may not be the worst thing in the world for Haiti. Even the Cuban brand of communism. I know the figures. The average per capita income in Haiti is something like eighty-five dollars. Ten percent literacy. Which makes ninety percent illiteracy. Haiti is the poorest, most backward, unenlightened nation in the Western Hemisphere. And its people have been oppressed forever. Too much witchcraft. First Papa Doc, then Baby Doc, now the juntas, one after the other. All of them propped up by American—dare I say it?—by American imperialistic interests. Just like Batista’s Cuba, right? Cheap labor to sew cowhides onto baseballs. This revolution is still going on. I think it’s a real, legitimate people’s revolution, and I really think it’s time we got the hell out of it. They deserve a chance, at least, to join the twentieth century, and they won’t do it as long as we continue to give support—military, economic, diplomatic, whatever—to corrupt, self-serving regimes. Listen. I hope they can finish this thing they’ve started. And Cuba just may be their best model. We should pull out.”

My words sounded in my ears like a series of lectures I’d heard as an undergraduate years earlier from a self-avowed Marxist economist, reflecting then on recent events in Cuba. The words were fresh and exciting in 1960. Now they sounded stale.

“I don’t support the administration’s opposition to human rights, or the desire of American business interests to maintain the status quo there for the sake of cheap labor,” I finished lamely.

Altoona cleared his throat. “I have given the matter considerable thought,” he said, implying, it seemed to me—and with good cause—that I hadn’t, “and I believe that this so-called revolution is not about human rights or democracy or the twentieth century at all, nor would its success mean progress for the people of Haiti. It is, quite simply, a not even thinly veiled communist takeover, orchestrated by the minions of Moscow via Havana, with the obvious aim of replacing one tyranny with another, only this new one less friendly to our own interests. All the abstractions confuse the simple issue: Which tyranny ought we to favor? It’s fundamental
realpolitik
, Mr. Coyne.”

“The people there seem to support the communists.” I shrugged. He had me, I knew. There’s so much more logic to realism than there is to idealism.

“I doubt if the people know what’s going on,” he answered. “The people, of course, are ignorant, superstitious, short-sighted fools. In Haiti, just as in the rest of the world. They don’t know what’s good for them. How could they? No, our government is right. And the liberal press once again is tragically wrong.” He smiled at me. “‘Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.’ That’s Yeats, Mr. Coyne.”

“Jefferson said that a revolution every twenty years fertilizes the tree of liberty,” I replied, a futile try, I realized. “Something like that, anyway.”