Ray

XIX

THERE ain’t nobody here and the fog is rolling around. For a moment I’m entering a zone of Edgar Allan Poe privacy. The border of vague in a semi-German or Greek swamp. Rising sins from my past are coming up and haunting my insides, and there’s this miserable dew on my buckle loafers. Look here, I’m an important doctor on a mission, I don’t have to wait here for creepy phantom business. Then I hear the hiss and the voice.

“Over here, Ray.”

“Give me a light.”

Out in the park I see Uncle Buster with a bloody face. He’s breathing pretty well. But he’s in shock. Healthy and large for a wino. I tell the man with the flashlight to raise the feet.

First dawn I have seen in fifteen years, twenty years, twenty-three years. I was a Boy Scout at Camp Kickapoo. I was smoking grapevine in the cabin and Mr. DeLard called me out: “If I ever have to call you out again, Ray, even though you’re a Life Scout, I’ll have to dismiss you from the troop. You’re supposed to be a leader, and here you are smoking.”

I have always needed a great exhaust system. DeLard had his Luckies on the top of his knapsack. He was a hairy, frantic man. I went back in the cabin and lit up another piece of grapevine, because I had information. This here was the only time ever I was mean — with information. Mr. DeLard ran into the cabin. He had a Scout suit on and was forty.

“Okay. I warned you.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You’re out of the troop.”

“No, I’m not! We live next to you, Mr. DeLard. My dad bought a high-power telescope for my astronomy badge. I turned it around to your bathroom and me and my dad and mother saw you beating your meat!”

Many Scouts in the cabin heard this. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been mean. I was always gentle until people shot at me.

I was a Life Scout, very solid. I knew how to start a fire, eat raw minnows, mold, and worms when it got down to survival. Then I went into Explorer Scouts, which led to flying in the Civil Air Patrol, which led to training on the T-33s in Biloxi, which led to the F-4 Phantom, and I could speak a little French and I was a captain when Edward was gone in the gray-pearl over Hanoi, which is what Tom Wolfe called it, and he was right.

With the Rolling Stones on the tape on my right side and the whole U.S. hugging my back in this hot cockpit, I’m throwing off my mask as I see the MIG-21 come up after the gooks shot my commander Edward down.

Channel 16. “Daya, menta, menta, casa, casa, casa, casa, casa!” International jet talk. Telling the gook pilot to get out of the air or I’ll bury him.

He still rises.

“Vaya casa, vaya casa.” Go home or you’re dead, son. I’ve got everything on me, and this plane and me will make you burn if you stay up here twenty more seconds.

But he comes up twirling like a T.

Well, hell. I want him! I turn the Rolling Stones all the way up, all the states of the U.S. shine behind me.

He’s in the scope. I’m almost upside down and he’s trying to get back home but it’s too darned late.

“You speak English?” I say.

“Uh, yes.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“Used to be before Communist.”

“I want to know your name and how old before I kill you.”

“Lester Sims, twenty-three, lieutenant, Hanoi base.”

“Lester Sims?”

“Translating. Lu Gut. Trying to fly away.”

Then the buttons when he got into the middle of the scope. It’s so easy to kill. Saw him make the bright, white flower. It’s so fucking hard to live.

Big orange lights in rectangle on my carrier, the Bonhomme Richard. Lots of handshakes.

It was the start of what I’ve got, and no nooky, no poem, no medicine or nothing will make it go away. Jesus, my head!

Six years of medical training at Tulane. They said six to satisfy the med laws. I only had four. But four’s all it takes to get the drunk breathing good.

“Shit, he’s alive!” I said.

The fellow put down the flashlight.

By God, it was Charlie DeSoto. From the old days of Eileen and Charlie. He had a sad mustache and balding blond hair.

“I knew he was going to make it when I called you,” said Charlie. “I’ve got him and two more uncles in town. This one’s a lush and a teenager hit him over the head with a two-by-four. The little punk is over at his grandmother’s house and I’ve got the thirty-eight, like I told you. Eileen has left me, and I really don’t care anymore.”

I walked over to the house with the light in the parlor. It was four in the morning. I knocked on the door and the grandmother opened it. I asked for the phone. While I was calling for the ambulance, the criminal walked up. He was a big innocent-faced frat boy in an Izod shirt.

“I’ll tell you, these scummy winos come out there and scum up the view of the park. It’s more than you can take.”

I said, “Bring me the thing you hit him with.”

“Sure. Hey. Tomorrow you’ve got to come up to the Sigma Chi house and have some beers with us. Some of the brothers said you were a keen teacher in Am Civ.”

The service answered.

“It’s just one of those things,” said the student when he got back with the thing.

I bashed the fuck out of his ribs with it and his grandmother screamed.

We put them both in the ambulance.

I healed everybody.