Ray

XXV

EVERYBODY I love is in the jet. We try New York, but it’s no good. I’ve got the.32 machine pistol that I killed a gook in the head with. He was dead and he had a hand grenade in his hand. But he threw a knife into the neck of Larry. We were all fueling at Ton Sa Nut. Fifteen F-4s all in line. You couldn’t ever kill enough of them. Vietnam was like fleas.

Never had a whore in Saigon. Never gambled my money. Quisenberry and I mainly just talked ourselves to sleep, then dropped Dexedrine when the horn sounded.

Harry King was flight control one night at the Tuscaloosa airport and brought Don in on autopilot from Chicago after he’d turned the plane in a storm and fainted.

Ray is out here with his beeper on his leg, just watching the planes come in over the blue lights, for no reason except to find my meditation again. Somehow the AM waves are getting into my beeper and I hear “Eleanor Rigby” from the Beatles. Where do all the lonely people come from? Ray is starting to sound like a man who was once a disk jockey. Because he’s run-down. I’m full of dopey tears and just as groping and lousy as the next citizen.

So I just wander into flight control. Harry’s very lonely with all the Teletypes. What in the hell comes in but an F-4 from the National Guard in Birmingham. He touches down, then off, wheels it out, gone at five hundred miles per hour. Beautiful Phantom.

“How you been, Harry?”

“Ray! Goddamn, you’re here I”

Here looking at the flat charts of the flight territory all over the world and Harry, still wearing his tie from WW II. He’s driving his crummy Toyota since the gas crunch and we talk about that. We share one of those huge TV dinners made for two. Not much to do here now.

The beeper sounds and it’s Rebecca.

“What?”

“Nothing, really,” she says. “I handled it. I’d just sort of like you to run back here and dick me.”

“I don’t have it in me,” I say.

“Okay. There’s another message, from Westy.”

“Put her on,” I say.

“I just cured three creeps with a light assist from your buddy, Doctor Litchens. You can’t imagine the swine I’m going to have to do a number with tonight.”

“Put Westy on.”

It was fifteen minutes. Harry and I were finishing up the chicken on the plate when she called. I hadn’t heard a straight and clear message from her in three months.

“Ray? Raymond Forrest?” My first two names.

“I hear you, darling.”

“Ray. We can make lovesies again.”

“Holy Christ!”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to be lovely all over you again.”

I was so entranced I forgot Harry King was right there beside me. You never get a whole conversation over the beeper like this unless you got somebody relaying it. Rebecca did it and was listening in.