A Matter of Honor

Chapter Fourteen

“You shouldn’t buy this junk food,” Duro Lasari said, looking at the tepid lasagna on his plate.

“I usually eat out or have a sandwich at my desk before I come home,” she said. She was smoking a thin brown cigarette and sipping red wine. “I’m not into eating, really.”

“This wine is different,” Lasari said, turning the glass to catch the candle’s reflection. “Bardolino is made mostly from Corvina and Molinara grapes, the north of Italy. I know a little something about wine, my father drank enough of it. But I know everything about pasta. You shouldn’t encourage them by buying this stuff.”

He poured wine into both glasses. “Cheers,” he said, “and thanks again for the roof over my head. It was raining like hell in Calumet City.”

“You’re sure no one followed you here? Lieutenant Weir was adamant about that.”

Lasari shrugged. “I drove in on the expressway, changed lanes a few times and did the last five miles on surface streets. My car is parked four blocks from here. I walked over, ducked in the alley behind the basement garage — there should be a lock on that door, by the way — rode up on the service elevator.” Lasari took a sip of wine. “I hope I have my priorities right. Maybe I should be worrying more about your boy friend than some bullshit tail. Technically I’m a felon, he’s a cop. Maybe I’m the hot hunch he’s working on for tonight.”

“Mark Weir is a friend, not a boy friend, not for years. And he’s a very straight guy.”

“If he came out of ’Nam with an honorable discharge, and if his old man’s top Army brass, why would he want to do anything for me?”

“He must trust you by intuition,” Bonnie Caidin said. “He was convinced the Vietnam war was a terminal mistake and had the guts to say so. Maybe he thinks you protested in a different way.”

“Okay, so I buy your lieutenant, a cop with compassion, but what about his father? To any bullshit Army brass, a deserter is about as welcome as dung on the flag.”

“General Weir has nothing to do with you or me, or any of this. I just mentioned his name because he might return my call tonight, and I plan to answer that phone. Under the circumstances, I don’t want to alarm you by talking to bullshit Army brass, as you call it.”

“I never even got within saluting distance of a general,” Lasari said. “I was in the arena of noncoms and slopes. But I’ve heard about Weir, or read about him.”

Caidin nodded. “Tarbert Weir always got himself talked about one way or another. He was a kind of folk hero in the sixties for the way he handled an Army division when half the South was practically under martial law. He called in all the northern protesters, the clergy, and the red-necked sheriffs, and the black activists and federal marshals, and gave them a speech that’s kind of a classic. Weir said the laws of the land applied to everybody, and if a priest or a nun physically or verbally assaulted marshals or cops who were doing a job, they’d end up reading their missals and saying their rosaries in the stockade. And vice versa. He made himself understood.”

“I heard more about his bucking General Westmoreland’s strategy, protests against phony body counts, that sort of cover up crap in ’Nam,” Lasari said. “Those riots and marches down South, I was just a kid back then.”

“So was I,” Caidin said, “but I checked the clips file at the Tribune on the general a few years ago. Up until he resigned, well, Weir’s file was thick as a bible.”

“You must have thought a lot of the son to check out his old man that way,” Lasari said.

“It’s how I make my living, listening to people, finding out everything I can...”

She snubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and immediately shook the pack for another, narrowing her eyes against the first puff of smoke. They were seated on suede cushions on opposite sides of a glass coffee table. The candles she had lit for Mark were burning low, and the room had a smoky odor of scented wax. Though the kitchen radio played softly and there was a runnel of rain on the big windows, the apartment seemed isolated to Bonnie Caidin, almost unnaturally still.

At the beginning, when Lasari had knocked on the door, she had felt panicked, wondering what she could talk about or do with this stranger during the long hours till Mark’s return.

Lasari, however, seemed indifferent to any social strain. He wore tight blue jeans, workboots and a plaid shirt. His windbreaker was neatly folded on a chair near the apartment door. He was as handsome as he had appeared last evening, Bonnie thought, dark hair, high, prominent cheekbones, and eyes that watched her with a concentrated, opaque intensity that made Caidin aware of the vulnerability of her own slim body, and the glow of warmth touching her skin. Lasari was neither reassuring nor threatening, just a strangely demanding presence in the intimacy of the apartment.

“If you’ll carry these plates to the kitchen,” she said, “there’s another bottle of Bardolino in the refrigerator.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

Moments later he put the new bottle on the table between them and seated himself, watching her. She smiled at him, but said nothing.

“You’re not going to talk because you expect me to talk, is that it?” Lasari said.

“I would like to know more about you.”

“Okay. You checked out the Weir family tree, so I’ll tell you about me, though it’s not the same neat and pretty package.” He picked up a candle and held it for her as she lit a fresh cigarette.

“I told you my father liked wine, Bonnie. Well, he liked it a lot. Finally he had a liver the doctors couldn’t fix, and he died from it. He spent his war in the South Pacific and came back with a lot of island crud in his psyche that he never really got over. He was a little guy, scared, pushed around. He always tried to work but too many nights he sat up with the bottle. He never seemed to make up his mind about whether or not he’d been a good enough soldier.

“He worked the tobacco sheds, but his drinking got him laid off. He had a little land, about eight acres his grandfather left him, and he started raising table crops, squash, snap beans, and after awhile he opened a stand in the front yard to sell produce on weekends. He hired a neighborhood kid to run it for him, and they started sleeping together.

“My father was thirty-eight when he got married, and my mother was fifteen and pregnant. She didn’t turn sixteen till I was about four months old.”

Caidin watched as Lasari’s dark, bladelike face turned thoughtful, noticing the hard look of challenge that touched his eyes.

“You won’t find Francis J. Lasari on file down at your newspaper. I wasn’t more than eight when he died, small and skinny like him, but I loved that man and respected him, no matter what he added up to. Some kind of inverse ratio at work, I imagine. The earlier things happen to you, the longer it takes you to forget them.”

“You’re full of little surprises, Duro,” she said. “First, ‘a rebel with discretion,’ now ‘inverse ratio’...”

“I was in a hospital,” he said.

“That’s a good non sequitur.”

“No, it follows. I had a lot of time for thinking, lying in bed, or stretched out on gurneys, waiting my turn at X-ray or therapy. There was an old man, a retired vet who pushed a cart of books around, real pablum — Zane Grey, old mysteries, how to raise mushrooms in your basement. I finally asked him for something else, and for the next months I got a different menu — opinion magazines, Mark Twain, Marcuse, the Bible, philosophical ideas that maybe I didn’t have enough education to evaluate or absorb at the time. It was like stockpiling. I collected information and ideas so I could take them out when I needed them. I began to understand myself. All the years I was in Wyoming I kept reading. So it was like an emotional dam broke inside me when I ran away that last time from Jackson Hole.

“When I found Luis Carlos, the old man I work with in Calumet City, I just talked my whole life out to him. I knew I was ready to quit being George Jackson. I’d named myself that after Jackson Hole and the fact that a lot of the dropouts and transients up there are just called ‘Hey, George.’

“I guess I told Carlos everything I’d heard, smelled, seen and dreamed in my whole life, especially about ’Nam, like I was postdating a diary. Carlos doesn’t speak much English, but he knew he was helping me.

“I told you my mother was just a kid when I was born. Well, she stayed a kid all her life, looked like one, acted like one. After my father died, there was always a man, a boy friend from town or hired help for the farm. Two or three of them I liked a lot. They taught me. I learned about dogs, gunning, fixing old machinery, but none of them stayed long enough for me to feel they belonged. I had to cooperate, keep out of the way. It was more like having a crazy sister than a mother. I never did feel right about her back then.

“When my mother came up to camp to see me before I left for ’Nam, she was only thirty-four years old, thin as a bean, blue jeans, boots, brass studs on her jacket. She looked like all the girls hanging around the GI bars that my buddies were sleeping with. I could have been sleeping with her myself if I didn’t know exactly who she was.”

He poured another inch of wine into his glass. “You want some, Bonnie?” She held up her nearly full glass and shook her head.

“When my mother died, I was still in the hospital in Denver. She was riding home from Durham on the back of some guy’s motorcycle and he rammed a truck. I got leave to go home, but I wasn’t in uniform at the funeral. Some of the locals said they’d missed me around town. One old timer made a joke out of it, thought I’d been to jail. Most of them didn’t know there was a war on.

“That night I went over to Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina is there, prettiest little southern town you could dream of. The jocks were having a big ‘Beat Duke’ rally on campus, regional basketball finals or something. I sat in a bar near campus watching a TV news report on ’Nam.” He paused. “This isn’t just your predictable, burnt-out vet story, Bonnie. Believe me, it happened.

“Everybody around me was talking about the basketball game, and I was listening to Cronkite and watching film clips and almost burning with the heat of those firefights around Chu Lai. I got the damndest feeling then, this is honest, I didn’t know which was for real for awhile. I was sure as hell aware of two worlds, but for a finger snap I couldn’t tell which I belonged to.

“I don’t even remember the plane trip back to Denver, and I didn’t feel a damned thing, no sadness, no grief, no sympathy for my mother. But what was really bad was that I was relieved to have her gone. It was like somebody’d shot my head full of novocaine. I couldn’t feel pain, remorse, guilt, anger — and I figured that for once that was a plus. I felt dead myself, and I didn’t mind feeling that way.

“I left the Army a few months after that. I didn’t make a big speech, I didn’t punch anybody out, I didn’t wait for a dark night. I just went AWOL. I packed my gear, drew my money out of the bank and got a cab to the Denver airport. It was March and there was still snow on the ground, and it was so cold inside the airport, the girl selling tickets was wearing gloves. The next flight leaving the airport was for Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and I took it. We made the trip over the mountains in a Beechcraft six-seater. It was so small and jammed with luggage that the pilot stashed my crutches beside him in the cockpit. It was snowing and early morning when we started to come down over Jackson. We passed over an elk herd, hundreds and hundreds of them huddled together, so deep in the drifts that I thought those antlers were bushes moving in the wind.”

Duro Lasari stood and walked to the windows. He was silent for a few moments, looking down at the boulevard and resting his forehead against the damp glass as if he felt fevered. “Those mountains were like walls against the world,” he said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to unwind in that silence after ’Nam?”

When he spoke again his voice was hard but controlled. “You can tell me to stop talking if you want, Bonnie, but you asked. I don’t really expect you understand, but I got myself so damned angry over there, trying to figure out who’d sent us halfway round the world, high school dropouts, Hispanics and ghetto bums fighting for jocks who’d rather stay home and beat Duke. If you think there were a lot of Phi Beta Kappas in my platoon, you’re reading the wrong duty roster, lady.”

His back was to her but she could see the outlines of his face, rigid with tension, reflected in the window pane. “We had collective IQs that would make good golf scores, in the low eighties. In my first month over there, outside Saigon, twenty-eight black guys took a latrine hostage. They captured it, Bonnie, charged us to use it. Fifty cents to piss, a dollar to crap. Otherwise you could just squat outside in the rain. That’s the American flag, the code of honor in action for you. Where the hell were the West Pointers, the brass who were supposed to be running our battalion? There was nothing in their goddamn Articles of War or manuals to handle it. If they’d tried to, they’d of been fragged and they knew it.

“A crazy guy, a recruit from Las Cruces, New Mexico, no older than I was, pulled the pin on a grenade and went in holding it in his hand. He told the black bastards that he didn’t think it was right to have to pay extortion for the exercise of natural functions. He shouted that we were all American citizens, all compadres. He told them he intended to use the facilities for nothing. If they objected, he said, he’d give them just five seconds to make their peace before they met the Great Mother Fucker in the sky, then he’d roll that grenade right under a commode.

“Okay, those heroes said Las Cruces could use the latrine, but the guy had to get rid of the grenade first. He tried to lob it outside the compound, but it caught the top of the wire fence and killed two native kids hanging on to watch the action. Two dead kids and one crazy patriot serving a life sentence in a federal pen...

“That was one of the funny stories about ’Nam, Bonnie. I was just a private, but I had to judge ’em as I saw them. If the Pentagon planners couldn’t keep the damned privies open, how could we trust them to run the rest of the war?”

He slapped his open palm sharply against the window pane, then turned to look at her. “Delayed stress reactions, you’ve heard a lot about it. Well, it’s real. I figure it’s like undulating fever. You believe you’re over it, you’ve got your memories under control and then something happens to trigger the whole goddamned thing over again.

“Do you know what got to me tonight? Do you know what makes me want to get out that door and start running all over again? Just this. Why in hell am I putting my fate in the hands of someone I don’t know, some officer named Lieutenant Mark Weir, who out of the goodness of his college-educated, liberal heart is going to help this fucking deserter?”

Suddenly it seemed to Bonnie that his voice, low and harsh now, was vibrating and echoing through every corner of the apartment. As he stood staring down at her, obviously waiting for an answer, the rock music from the kitchen radio sounded ominously bright, an unreal, counterpoint background to this raw anger.

“I can’t answer that, Duro,” she said. “I just believe that he will.”

Duro Lasari began to pace up and down the room, his clenched fists so deep in his jeans pockets that the belt pulled low around his hips, the worn denim stretching tight across his buttocks. He was breathing slowly and deeply as if to calm himself, almost unaware of Bonnie Caidin’s presence. Suddenly he turned and looked at her directly.

“I’m sorry I criticized your lasagna back there,” he said, his tone almost normal. “For about a year my mother kept company with a man who was a chef in Durham. His specialty was Italian. He made a fine lasagna.

“And about my mother,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said all the things I did. I got to think differently about her in Jackson. One day, the third spring I lived there, I was out jogging, working to build up those damaged leg muscles, and the sides of the road were full of wildflowers. You get a lot of them in the mountains after all that snow, field daisies, columbine, red gilia. I knew my mother was buried in the Baptist cemetery outside Durham, but in my mind I just brought her up there to be with me, and buried her right there in that peaceful place. I had to be honest with myself. I knew damned well she was nicer to me than most sixteen-year-olds saddled with an unwanted kid. And if I wanted all those flowers for her, I must have loved her, too, wouldn’t you say?”

He moved closer to her, bending a little so he could look into her face. “I just remembered,” he said. “The name of that special lasagna the guy made is Lasagna al fiorno, and the trick is that you use diced chicken livers instead of regular hamburger meat and a special kind of creamy sauce...”

“Why are you doing this,” she asked.

“Doing what, Bonnie?”

“Why are you talking to me about cooking and wildflowers?”

“Because,” he said, “you’re so damned scared of me, you’re trembling. I saw your reflection in the window, all huddled up like a kid. I tried to stop myself. You’re just damned terrified, stuck ten stories up with a strange man you’ve only seen twice in your life. I didn’t mean to start shouting, I didn’t mean to do this to you.”

“I don’t believe I’m afraid of you, Duro,” she said. “You made me remember some angers of my own, that’s why I’m trembling.”

“Those two guys in uniform in the picture next to the radio? Are they your brothers? They look like you...”

Bonnie nodded. “They were my brothers, not twins, just eighteen months apart. Funny, the taller one was really the younger. They were both in the Air Force and both got killed in training accidents in the same month, one in Florida, and the older one in a special program at Camp Pendleton. When we were a family our dinner table was like a fiesta, night after night. My parents sold the big house almost right away, put me to live with an aunt so I could finish New Trier high school. They moved to a two-bedroom condo in Naples, Florida. The second bedroom is always occupied. It’s a kind of shrine to their sons.

“I suppose that’s why I loved Mark Weir so fiercely when I did,” she said. “He was like a miracle to me, so beautiful. He’d been there and come back. He was alive.

“And maybe you wonder why I keep my brothers’ picture next to the coffee pot where I’ll see it every morning. Well, I want to remember them, to talk to them and tell them day after day after day how sorry I am about what happened to them, to all of them. It’s important they understand that. Bonnie Caidin is sorry. I wouldn’t want them to hate me.”

Lasari poured more wine into her glass and moved it toward her on the glass coffee table. “Does your landlord turn the heat down after eleven, or something? It’s so damned cold in here.”

He walked to the chair near the door and picked up his folded jacket, rubbing it between his big hands for a few minutes as if to work a little friction heat into the fabric. Then he came over to Bonnie where she sat on the floor and draped the jacket over her shoulders. She took the long sleeves and knotted them across her chest.

“No one could hate you, Bonnie,” Lasari said.