A Matter of Honor

Chapter Sixteen

Lasari walked once more to the big window, craning his neck as if to look down into the street. Bonnie Caidin said, “Six o’clock is what Mark told me, Duro, and that’s what he meant, give or take a few minutes. Time won’t pass any faster by watching for him.”

“I’m not looking. I’m listening,” Lasari said. “It sounds like a cat with its back broken down there.” A thin, cracked wail, swelling and growing louder, sounded up from the street. In front of the building it seemed to pause in peak crescendo, then move on.

“That’s a police siren, or maybe an ambulance,” she said. “I’m never sure which.”

“Why would a police car be on this street?”

“They’re all over the city all the time,” Bonnie said. “Chicago’s a lively town. Mostly I don’t hear them, we’re ten stories up, you know. It depends on how the air carries the sound. In the summer you probably wouldn’t hear it. But tonight there’s wet pavement and high winds, it’s just the combination that does it.”

“I’m more accustomed to quiet,” Lasari said.

“All those mountains, all that open space. How did you make a living in a little town like Jackson, Duro?”

“It’s not that small,” Lasari said. “Three thousand or more regulars, but in the winter the skiers come in, in summer there’s campers. And then people like me, lots of them. I don’t mean deserters, just drifters. It’s cowboy country. You can mind your own business, stay just as quiet as you want to be.”

“Did you work for someone?”

“I worked a little for everybody. I couldn’t come up with ID and I couldn’t risk getting on a payroll. First few months I helped out an old hippie, he’d been in Jackson since the fifties. We made pole-pine and rawhide chairs to sell to tourists. In spring, I’d get on the local work crews to mend the split log sidewalks in town. The wood gets chewed up and warped from wet and cold, and all those cowboy boots all winter. In clear weather, I could pick up work cutting firewood. All you need is a permit to cut all the windfall you can haul out of the woods. Eventually I bought my own chainsaw and I’d go halves with someone who owned a truck. For the last four seasons I worked at ski lodges repairing snowmobiles. I got to be a specialist on Yamahas.”

“You make it sound so simple, like a big camp.”

Lasari shrugged. “Not really. The first winter in town, I thought I’d starve to death. I wasn’t in top shape when I left Fitzsimons. I hadn’t had enough rehab on my leg. Slogging through snow with damaged muscles, that can make you feel you’re wearing solid lead boots. The first few months in Jackson, my leg felt on fire most of the time. I had to do easy things. For awhile I slopped out the Silver Dollar Bar at night. It’s in an old hotel. I’d do glassware, the tables and floors, and then I’d polish up the two thousand thirty-two real silver dollars they’ve got imbedded in the old bar. These dollars are a big tourist come-on, makes everybody feel rich.”

“Did you live at the hotel?”

“No. I didn’t make that kind of money. There was always someone in town with something to rent, a house trailer, a room over a garage. I spent the last four winters there in a wooden house right across from the town library. An old lady owned it, Mrs. Snipes, she’s from Denver and couldn’t take the hard winters in Jackson any more. I kept the house clean for her, it was just a little place, saw that nobody broke in, mended anything that got broken. It was only one story high and every once in a while, when she’d hear about a big snowstorm, she’d send me a postcard to ask me to climb up and shovel off the roof. She was always afraid the old house would cave in.”

He paused. “At first I was just able to walk with a limp, then I worked up to running. In the end, I could even ski a little, pretty damned good, actually.

“I bought a pair of Head skis from a friend who was going back to Miami. He’d had special safety clamps put on to hold the boot, took away a lot of the knee strain.” Lasari looked thoughtful. “That clamp, which is called a ‘Lupo,’ had a patent pending number on it, 5885257-019. Funny how unimportant names and numbers like that stick in my mind. Sometimes I think the inside of my head must have tapes like a cash register. You ski, Bonnie?”

“No,” she said.

“What I meant to explain was that I was George Jackson up there. I knew in my heart I was hiding but I felt completely free. I didn’t feel like I was on the run, I didn’t feel like a deserter. I was living as somebody else and, as I see it now, I was healing inside and out.

“There must be a hundred millionaires living on big spreads in that part of Wyoming, cattlemen, oil, minerals, but I got to feeling there was no one richer than I was. It was all one big, beautiful thing. No one owned those mountains or forests any more than I did.”

“Why didn’t you stay there, Duro? Why didn’t you stay George Jackson?”

“It happened slow at first, and then it happened fast, and I’m not sure I can explain it, Bonnie. Maybe I wasn’t as good at being alone as I imagined, because the more I read, the more I thought — the more I got to wondering about Durham Lasari. He had to be for a reason. I began wondering whether or not if it wouldn’t have been better if I’d been killed in Vietnam, an honorable casualty, not a deserter.”

“I can’t believe you mean that,” Caidin said.

“It was a slow process, like I said, but it was a conclusion I almost arrived at. You see, there’s a little park in the heart of Jackson, maybe a block square, with an entrance at each corner. To go into the park, on any pathway, you have to walk under twenty-foot arches of elk antlers all piled up and hooked together, horns shed by the wild elk each spring. Tourists like to have their pictures taken there, but for me that park became an obsession, a magnet. Those gateways, all those gray, twisted, pointed horns were like big crowns of thorns. It was like Christ was there, a suffering place. It got so I’d visit that park every day of my life, even when it was fifteen below.”

He had begun to pace again, his hands pushed deep in his pockets, as if he were keeping them under control. “See if this makes any sense to you, Bonnie. In the dead center of that park is a memorial to all the war dead of Teton County, a base made of big mountain stone and then a four-sided plaque with names on it. At the very top there’s a little bronze statue, not a soldier, not a marine, but a cowboy in chaps on a bucking horse and the cowboy has his hat in his hand and his head is bowed. You know he’s not going to make it.

“You have to squint to read the names on those plaques because the bronze has gone black with weather. There are three hundred names there, maybe more, veterans who died in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam.

“And this is what I wonder if you can understand, Bonnie. That memorial became part of my life. If I had to work late, I’d go there after dark. I memorized every name on that monument like they were my buddies. It was like a spiritual thing, like I wanted to be close to them. Their deaths hurt me. I think I prayed for them. I began to wonder why my life was spared, why I was alive. I didn’t know if I should be happy or guilty, but I sure as hell was feeling something.

“Then one day it was like a mirage, a trick of the eye. I found the spot on that memorial where my name could or should have been — between LaRue, J. D., Colonel, World War II and Laughrey, T. W., Sergeant, World War I. I could almost read it there. D. F. Lasari, Private, Vietnam...”

“I know what you’re saying,” Bonnie said softly. “You wanted to be accounted for, you wanted to put your true name up there, Durham Francis Lasari, United States Army.”

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted to be myself. I didn’t want to be George Jackson forever. I didn’t want to be running scared for a lifetime and I didn’t want to be ashamed.”

He looked down at Bonnie intently, not speaking, lost in his own thoughts. She poured the last of the second bottle of Bardolino into the glasses and then bent over one of the low candle flames to light a cigarette.

“You might as well tell me the rest of it, Duro. You left Wyoming almost a year ago, you’ve been living and working in Calumet for months, and yet you didn’t come over to the Vets’ Bureau till last evening.”

Lasari sat down beside her on the rug, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He pulled at the stiff denim of his jeans with two fingers, loosening the fabric where it stretched tight over his upper thigh. He took the glass of wine she offered and nodded his thanks.

“It wasn’t until weeks later that I really knew what happened to me.” He reached over and put his big hand over Bonnie’s as it rested lightly on the beige carpet. “It was like everything you hear about, delayed shock reaction, flashback anxiety, the terrors of ’Nam, of getting hit, hurting, bleeding, all that self-loathing that built up in the hospitals...”

“I’m listening,” she said softly.

“It was last March, still deep in winter up there. A friend of mine sprained his wrist skiing so I took over for him. He was night maintenance at the Snow King Resort. The sauna there is open till midnight, so I went in about a quarter to twelve to start clean-up. I had a pail and brushes and antiseptic to sluice down the redwood.

“There was still one guy there, sitting on the top shelf with a towel around him, a big fellow with sandy hair. He was quiet, and it was hot as hell in there, but I could feel him looking at me. I had on a pair of swim trunks, nothing else, and he was watching every move I made. Just another queer, that’s what I thought at first. A lot of jocks get a kick out of swinging both ways, especially out of town, and I knew that. So I decided to hurry up and cut out of there.

“I started to wash down the shelf just below him. Then I realized what he was staring at was not me, but the scars on my leg. On the lower calf, it doesn’t show much, just a little zigzag like red lightning. But the big one, the wound that gave me trouble, is high up on my thigh, mostly on the inside; the ammo came in right below the crotch and came out the other side. I remember I looked down at myself that night and saw the heat of the sauna had reddened up the natural skin leg so the scar almost stood out by itself, like purple crayon on paper.”

“Which leg was hit?”

He took her hand and brought it onto his right leg. Taking one linger, he guided it to trace his calf, then the outside of his thigh and then the inner side.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, as she moved her hand over the denim.

“No, you couldn’t do that,” he said. “As it healed, it all pulled together, the whole area got smaller. Now the big scar is about six inches long and about three inches at the widest part.”

He paused and looked at Bonnie’s small, pale hand, motionless except for a slight movement at the tips of the fingers.

“Out of nowhere, Bonnie, the man in the sauna said, ‘You’ve healed up nicely, soldier. ’Nam, right? About eight or ten years ago a high velocity rifle, probably an AK-47. It would take one of those to fracture the leg, blow out the muscle, do that kind of destruction.’

“ ‘Soldier,’ he called me. I stood there. I couldn’t run or answer him. It wasn’t just aphasia. The guy knew so much about me, I felt completely vulnerable, like someone paralyzed or dying. He kept talking, told me why the outer ridges were that color, all reddish blue, and the healed, covering skin gray, almost shiny, like you could see through it.

“ ‘Four pins in the bone,’ I remember he said that and then, ‘They probably sewed you up too fast in ’Nam and that could cause a deep infection. Who did the final job on you? It looks like Fitzsimons, Colonel Brown’s work. Brown could give you a clean leg like that...’

“I hadn’t said a word, Bonnie, and the man was reading me like a map. He knew what had happened to me. I was sick, I panicked. It was like I was in ’Nam all over again. One of the hardest blows to a soldier, psychologically, is to have to admit he was hit, that the magic didn’t work for him. Some people can never face it. A buddy in the hospital had lost both legs to a land mine. He could never say the world ‘leg’ to me, to the doctors, to anyone. He called those stumps ‘the girls.’ One leg he called Agnes, the other one Irma. The only way he could discuss treatment, rehabilitation, pain, anything, was to say ‘since Agnes left me,’ or ‘now that Irma is gone.’ He could have stood being jilted by women, but he couldn’t stand to admit his own body had betrayed him.

“I didn’t want the guy in the sauna to know about me. I didn’t want to admit what had happened. I wanted to shout at him — who are you, how do you know me? Are you Army, somebody they sent after me? Nothing came out but my face must have showed what I was feeling.

“The man said, ‘I’m sorry, soldier, I didn’t know you felt that way. I’m a doctor at St. John’s, an orthopedist. I just wanted to talk to you...’

“Bonnie, I threw the bucket of cleaning water onto the coals, made steam all over the place, and ran out. I wasn’t even sure then he was a doctor, that he wasn’t following me. The last thing I remember was the man shouting after me, ‘Remember, soldier, you can live with it...’

“At six the next morning I caught the first bus out of Jackson. I went south to Phoenix, then west to San Diego. It took me weeks to convince myself the man was a true medic, that he wasn’t out looking for me. Eventually, I got to Calumet City and decided I didn’t want to run anymore.

“I’d be a fool to get myself a prison sentence if I don’t have to. That’s why I came to your office last night, to find a solution. The scars on my legs. I’ll always have them, I know that. The scars on the inside, well, they’re just not as raw as they used to be. I’ve got myself believing what the doctor said, ‘Soldier, you can live with it.’ I’m convinced, Bonnie, I can work it out.”

Against the rough cloth of his jeans Bonnie’s hand looked almost like the hand of a child, the nails rounded and pink, without a trace of polish. Lasari bent forward suddenly and kissed it.

“Except for Carlos, I’ve talked to you more than I’ve talked to any person in my whole life,” he said.

She sat very still, watching him, and the sound of her breathing was light and shallow in the quiet room. “Duro,” she said, “I’d like to look at your scars, I’d like to touch them.”

“As long as you’re not sorry for me.”

“It’s not that at all,” she said, “I want to know more about you.”

“Can we go into the bedroom, Bonnie?”

“That’s what I meant,” she said.