Sons

January

There was, I had not expected, it appeared so suddenly, gray, shark-gray, shark-nosed, turbojets streaking fire from beneath swept-back wings, I was not sure, I thought at first, “Nine o’clock high!” I shouted to Ace on my left wing, but it was gone. I snapped my head around. “Did you see it?”

It came again. I could not believe there’d been enough time to execute a turn, but it, there, Colombo flying wing to the element leader shouted, “Jet above you, Ace!” and in that frozen moment Aces High burst into flame. The jet was gone. Streaking high over the formation, it swept up and out of sight, and I heard Ace yell, “I’m hit!” and Colombo shouted, “Where the fuck’d it go?” and I found myself unable to speak, unable to utter the commands a flight leader should have known to, Get out, I thought, “Ace!” I shouted, “What was that?” a pilot in one of the other planes asked.

We were fifty P-38s on a mission over Fiume, forty-eight actually because we had lost two to flak as we swarmed over the refinery, Ace in flames now, Get out, I thought again. He was on my left wing, slightly below me, and I could see the three big holes the shells had left at his wing joint, between the gondola and the engine nacelle, flames lashing up out of the shattered wing tanks, and Ace’s voice erupting into my headphones, “I’m on fire!” and I thought, Yes, I can see, and he screamed, “Selector valve! Fire in the cockpit!” and I thought Get out, Ace, ditch her, get out, get out, “Get out!” I yelled, “Fast!” I yelled, and saw him reaching forward and up for the emergency hatch release control and then suddenly pulling his hand back to slap at his flight suit, “I’m on fire!” he screamed, and I saw flames enveloping the cockpit as he rose from the armor-plated seat, still struggling with the release handle, desperately trying to get it open, “Hatch is stuck, Will,” he said very quietly, eyes wide above the oxygen mask, hands fluttering wildly, and in that instant the tanks blew. My own airplane rocked with the blast, I pulled my head to the right in reflex, left shoulder coming up protectively, and then immediately looked down to see that the right wing and nacelle of Aces High had sheared off in the explosion and was dangling helplessly from the boom, suspended for only a moment before it broke away completely and began falling toward the ground. The gondola was gone, there was only a jagged open hole where it once had been, blackened twisted metal like a gaping rotten mouth.

The demolished hulk of the airplane started a plunging deadfall.

There was another explosion when it hit the ground.

February

I woke up trembling.

In the dream, my brother-in-law Oscar had come to me in full tribal regalia, headdress bristling with feathers, strings of beads and bones dangling from his neck and spread across his chest, lifting his hand, extending one long brown linger, and solemnly intoning, “Why did you steal our lands from us?” I backed away from him, close to the open mouth of the drum barker, and shouted over its tumbling roar, “Why did you steal my sister?” but he kept moving closer to me, closer and closer until I thought I would fall into the drum and have my clothes torn from me, thought I would be tumbled and tossed until I came out at the opposite end stripped to my skin, naked and white. I sat up. I was wearing a flannel nightshirt, and the bed was cozy with the warmth of Nancy’s body, but I could not stop shaking. The image of Oscar lingered, and then faded slowly. I blinked my eyes against the approaching dawn. It was almost time to get up. It was almost time to get dressed for work.

I did not know what was happening to me. I guess maybe I had hoped to set Chicago on its car, become a paper tycoon within a week, branch out into New York and London, Paris and the world. I guess I’d nurtured, while listening to the pounding of the drum barker, wild dreams of owning countless mills, monopolies, cartels, the bark dropping down through the open still ribs and being whisked away together with remnants of the forest, twisted leaves and clinging dirt, my dreams soaring upward — Bertram A. Tyler, Chairman of the Board, I would smoke big cigars and hold meetings and they would whisper my name in the same awed breath as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. But I had been with Ramsey-Warner for almost ten months now, and whereas I was now earning twenty-seven dollars a week, I was still rolling logs over to the woodpecker, still caught between the pounding and the drilling and the grinding, a long long way from becoming the powerful magnate I imagined in my fantasies. In fact, I considered myself just a step outside the poorhouse door, what with eggs costing eighty-three cents a dozen, and bacon selling for fifty cents a pound, and butter priced at seventy-four cents a pound, and shoes (which you could get before the war for three or four dollars a pair) now selling for upwards of ten dollars. And even though prices were government-fixed for coal, milk, and bread, twenty-seven dollars a week didn’t go very far when there were two mouths to feed and two people to keep clothed against the bitter Chicago winter. (February so far had been a prize month, with temperatures recorded at six below zero, and the wind — as Nancy put it — “whistling to blow the marrow from your bones.”)

I got out of bed.

The floor was cold. I pulled on a pair of pants over my nightshirt, and then put on my slippers and went into the kitchen and banked the fire in the stove and shoveled in some coal from the scuttle, and then put up a pot of water to boil. The toilet was in the hallway outside, shared by us and the Grzymek family downstairs. Mr. Grzymek was a Pole who worked for the McCormick Reaper Works, across the railroad tracks and within walking distance of where we lived.

The seat was cold.

Everything in the building was cold at this hour of the morning. I squatted there with my nightshirt pulled up and my trousers hanging down over my knees, and I thought Bertram A. Tyler, Chairman of the Board, living in a two-unit structure (small, but terribly comfortable) with a toilet in the hallway (modern plumbing, though, all very nice), overlooking the Sanitary and Ship Canal on the edge of the city’s colored section, and boasting of a view that featured the House of Correction, the International Harvester Company plant, the railroad tracks of the P.P.C. & St. Louis, and Mr. Grzymek’s reaper works. Bertram A. Tyler wiped himself, pulled the flush chain, and went back into the apartment to wash and shave.

I longed for a luxury home on the lake, longed for membership in the Union League Club where, standing outside on the sidewalk, I had seen women in furs and men in tuxedos floating out like visions in the make-believe world I’d created beside the drum barker — what worries did they have about the price of food or clothing? I had tried to explain all this to Nancy, I had tried to tell her that the world was moving very quickly and we were standing still in it, and she had said, (this was before we’d gone to see a doctor) Do you think there’s something wrong with us, Bert, that we can’t have a baby?

Nancy, I had said, don’t you sometimes get the feeling it’s all rushing right by us? They’re putting a dial on the telephone, Nance, you won’t have to jiggle the hook any more and ask for an operator, you’ll get your number just by twisting a dial set right there in the base — Nancy, do you see what I mean? I went down to pick up my Victory medal at the armory last week, and I held it in my hand and looked at it, and it made me feel like a dinosaur. It’s as if the war happened a hundred years ago, Nance, it’s as if everything has already moved way out and beyond the war, we’re already living in a new era, only we haven’t yet caught up with it. Am I making any sense to you, Nance?

Well, she said.

Look, I said, it’s that everything seems to make me dizzy nowadays, I don’t mean physically dizzy. I mean not knowing which way to turn because as soon as I decide I’m in favor of something or against something else, it all changes in the next minute, and I’m not sure any more.

Bert, she said, you did get a raise, they at least know you’re on the payroll, they must have their eye on you.

Nancy, I’m not making myself clear to you, I said. I’m trying to tell you I don’t understand what’s happening in this country, and unless I can draw a sure bead on it, I’ll be standing alongside that damn drum barker, excuse me, for the rest of my damn life, excuse me. Do you know what’s going on? Does anyone? I get the feeling sometimes that everybody’s rushing someplace, only they don’t know where. And the worst part is that I’m standing still, we’re standing still. I used to think I’d own that mill inside of a year. Now I think I’ll be lucky if I get to operate a chipper inside of five years.

Well, Bert, she said, you’ve got to be patient.

I carried the kettle of hot water to the sink, turned on the light bulb over the mirror hanging there, and poured some water into the basin. Then I set the kettle down on the drainboard of the washtub, and stropped my razor, and worked up a lather in my shaving cup, all the while wondering how Oscar had got in my dream, I’d never stolen a piece of property from him in my life. The kitchen was beginning to warm up. There were only three rooms in the flat, the kitchen, the parlor, and the bedroom. The kitchen was in the center of the house, and the big black coal stove threw off a lot of heat, but rarely enough to warm up the bedroom which was on the northeast corner of the building and got some really terrific winds. Nancy had wanted me to buy a kerosene heater for the bedroom, but I’d heard of too many fires starting in those things, and I’d refused to do it. What annoyed me most, though, was that I couldn’t afford to get her one of the new electric heaters.

Well, I thought, at least we don’t have a baby to worry about too, and suddenly opened a big gash on my cheek. I looked up at God (hovering somewhere around the ceiling) and silently assured him I was only joking. I had never been a particularly religious person, but I was beginning to think more and more lately that I was being repaid by a vengeful deity for the sinful ways of my youth. Nor had I really believed what Dr. Brunner had told us; wasn’t it possible that I’d inhaled some of that rotten stale mustard gas lying in holes all over France, stinking of death, and that it had somehow messed up my insides?

Frantically, I wiped at my cheek with one of the good towels Nancy’s mother had given us when we got married. I’ll silently bleed to death here, I thought. When Nancy wakes up she’ll come into the kitchen and look down at me and say, Oh, Bert, you shouldn’t have! Nothing can be that terrible! I smiled at my own slashed face in the mirror. I was mortally wounded, getting blood all over my nightshirt and Nancy’s expensive towel, a near-pauper in a dead-end job in a city I despised, and all I could do was grin idiotically at myself, though I could not for the life of me see anything funny in our situation.

We had gone to visit Dr. Brunner one night at the beginning of January, Nancy clinging to my arm, her head ducked against the fierce wind as I led her up Twenty-sixth Street. He was a tidy little man wearing a long white coat, a stethoscope hanging from his neck, an air of sympathetic efficiency about him. But in spite of the fact that people were mentioning sex much more freely wherever you went these days, thanks to Dr. Freud, whose ideas about sublimation had quickly traveled from Vienna to New York to Chicago, I still found it extremely embarrassing to reveal to Dr. Brunner the things Nancy and I could not even comfortably discuss alone together. I kept turning the brim of my hat over and over in my hands, without looking at either him or Nancy, fumbling for words, certain that Nancy was blushing, and beginning to think we’d made a terrible mistake by coming here, we’d only been married nine months, why hadn’t we given it a little more time before running to a doctor? Dr. Brunner kept nodding all the while I talked, and once he said, “I know this is difficult for you,” and I said, “Yes,” and went right on talking, afraid that if I once lost steam I’d quit altogether. When I finished, the doctor said, “Good, I understand. Let me assure you immediately that there are many healthy young couples who find themselves in your identical situation. We may have nothing to worry about here. But let’s examine you both first, and make whatever tests are necessary, and then we’ll be able to tell better, eh?”

The examinations were a nightmare, I’d never been so embarrassed in my life. Dr. Brunner matter-of-factly told us afterward that he had found nothing wrong with my testicular size, and that his routine (!) internal examination of Nancy had revealed no pelvic defect, but of course he would be able to tell us more after he had taken an ejaculated specimen (which he wanted before I left the office) and also a post-coital specimen (Nancy would have to conic back the day after tomorrow) and had studied my sperm count and Nancy’s ovulatory temperatures (I could not believe I was hearing these things spoken by a man, doctor or not, in the presence of a lady! By turns, I wanted to melt into the carpet, cover Nancy’s good car, or strangle Dr. Brunner). Nancy and I were both silent in the trolley car on the way home. Her face was still flushed, she kept her muffed hands in her lap, she did not even glance at me. I was certain I had exposed her to the most humiliating experience of her life, and I silently vowed never to take her to Dr. Brunner’s office again. We went to bed without discussing any part of the horrifying incident, nor did we mention it at breakfast the next day, or at supper when I got home from work that night.

In bed, in the arctic zone of our northeast comer room, Nancy turned her head toward me and unexpectedly whispered something in my car.

“What?” I said, “I didn’t hear you, Nance.”

“I’m the one supposed to be deaf,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, I just...”

“Bert,” she whispered, “we have to make love tonight.”

“What?”

“I’m going to see Dr. Brunner tomorrow morning,” she whispered.

“Oh,” I said. We lay stiffly beside each other in the darkness. I could hear her expectant breathing, the sound of the water tap dripping in the kitchen, a train chugging along the tracks a mile away to the south. “Nancy,” I said, “are you sure you want to go back to him? Maybe we ought to...”

“Bert,” she whispered, “a person’s not worthy of the honeycomb if he shuns the hive because the bees have stings.”

I nodded in the darkness.

“Don’t you want to do it to me?” she asked.

“Yes, sure... what’d you say?”

“I feel like one of those women you told me about a long time ago,” she whispered. “The ones who jazz,” she whispered, and suddenly, surprisingly, began giggling, and threw herself into my arms, and kissed me with her mouth open.

At the end of January, we climbed the steps to Dr. Brunner’s office again, dreading what he might tell us. He shook hands with me, nodded to Nancy, and then led us into his consulting room, where we both took chairs opposite his desk. Dr. Brunner glanced at a sheaf of papers, moved a tongue depressor to the side of the desk where he neatly arranged it parallel to the edge of the blotter, cleared his throat, and told us that there was nothing wrong with either of us, the laboratory tests had shown the number and motility of my sperm to be normal (how casually he discussed my sperm in the presence of my wife!) and he had been able to determine from the daily record of Nancy’s oral temperature that she was indeed ovulating. In other words, we were both healthy and normal and not what could be even remotely considered an infertile couple. Very often, though, perfectly healthy normal couples like us could go for five years (Nancy winced) or even ten years (she turned to give me a swift hopeless glance) without having a baby, but then suddenly the woman would get pregnant, and would go on to have a dozen children after that, it was all a matter of patience. Nancy cleared her throat and asked the doctor whether the influenza might have had something to do with her not being able to conceive, and he said, “Nothing at all, Mrs. Tyler, I’ve just told you, there’s nothing wrong with either of you.” But she persisted, asking next about the encephalitis, and receiving the same response, and then telling him that she had come out of her illness a bit deaf, wasn’t it possible that something else — finally causing Dr. Brunner to shout (I remember thinking he would not have lost his temper that way if we’d been rich) “My dear child, I assure you you’re a healthy young horse, and that you can have children and probably will have children if only you’ll be patient.” Thank you, Nancy had said politely, and we left his office in silence.

As we walked down the narrow steps to the street outside, I said, “Well, Nance, we’ll just have to keep trying, that’s all. He says there’s nothing wrong with us.”

Nancy only nodded.

I remember thinking that if a woman could get pregnant just by nodding her head in a certain way, Nancy would have conceived right that minute on Twenty-sixth Street.

A paper mill is not an attractive place.

Aesthetically, Ramsey-Warner Papers, Incorporated, was perhaps as beautiful, say, as the prison at Joliet, with stacks puffing great billows of smoke onto the air, giant digesters rising like steel barn silos from the landscape, concrete buildings cramped side by side, each a different height and shape, some as tall and as narrow as machine-gun towers, others squat and lying close to the land, railroad sidings twisting past the mill or curving into it, freight cars clacking and clattering, huge rolls of stacked wrapped paper silently waiting, jackladders lifting logs onto stockpiles, chains clanging, wood looming in tangled pyramids, trucks and men in motion, everything painted a flat institutional gray, as bleak as February itself, as depressing as my own state of mind. I needed something to happen, but nothing ever did. And so I shouted my complaints over the tumbling bellow of the drum barker, and Allen Garrett shouted back, and in that way we made the days pass.

“I’m not siding with the radicals, Allen, but you can’t expect me to side with Palmer, either!”

“He’s a good man!”

“Oh sure! ‘My motto for the Reds is S.O.S. — ship or shoot.’ Is that a way for the Attorney General of the United States to be talking, like some ignorant uneducated greenhorn? ‘Ship or shoot,’ what kind of language is that for a man in high office?”

“You always quote only half!” Allen shouted.

“That is not half!”

“He also said, ‘I believe we should place them on a ship of stone, with sails of lead...’”

“All right, all right.”

“ ‘... and that their first stopping place should be Hell.’ That’s good language, Bert. It’s almost poetic.”

“Poetic or not, it’s crazy! Reacting this way to some kind of imaginary takeover of America...”

“It’s not imaginary, damn it!”

“... is just plain crazy. And I don’t care if you start calling me a Red or a Communist or...”

“Did I call you anything?”

“... whatever, I just refuse to get as crazy as everybody else in this country is getting. Do you know how many Communists there are in America?”

“Yes.”

“Why, if there are fifty thousand...”

“There’re more like five hundred thousand!”

“Oh sure, there are! Who’s counting them, would you like to tell me? And why aren’t we worrying about the Klan, that’s going around tarring colored people and hanging them, now that’s a terrible thing, Allen, that’s worse than what we were told the Germans were doing during the war. But instead — now here’s what I mean, Allen, here’s exactly what I mean...”

“I think you’d like some coon to get your job, that’s what I think.”

“No, you just listen to me. There’re two Dixieland bands right here in Chicago who wear the same costumes that the Klan docs, the same white sheets and hoods, you know, with the eye holes in them, and one of the bands calls itself The Phantom Four, and the other one’s The Night Riders. They’re both very good bands, I hear, but what happens to the whole idea of right and wrong, Allen, if you can wear the same costumes as killers and make music in them? Where’s the reality, Allen, do you see what I mean? What’s real?”

“These logs are real, the drum barker’s real, the mill is real. America is real,” he said.

March

I was in Saigon.

The Army had flown me (via a commercial carrier called Saturn Airways) to Cam Ranh Bay three days ago, with orders to report to the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry in Cu Chi, about eighteen miles northwest of Saigon, and not too distant from the Cambodian border. From Cam Ranh, a Chinook had lifted me to the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where I was billeted at a processing center called Camp Alpha, awaiting transportation.

There was a permanent party of about forty-five men on the post, the rest of us being soldiers in transit to base camps all over the country, or headed out on R and R tours. Peter Lundy was a guy from Stamford, against whom I’d played football when I was on the Talmadge team. He was in Army Finance now, and part of the permanent party at Tan Son Nhut. I met him in the mess hall my first night there. We talked a little about the old rah-rah days, and then he filled me in on the chow situation, and the girl situation, and told me how fortunate I was to have run into him because only permanent party were allowed off the post and into Saigon, but he thought he could get me past the security guards at the gate if I wanted to go in with him tomorrow afternoon.

He also told me that I had arrived in Vietnam at a particularly bad time weather-wise, since the country was blessed with a monsoon climate, which meant that there were only two seasons, the wet and the dry. The worst time of the year was between February and April, when the weather was hot and humid, as I may have noticed. He then went on to tell me some other pleasant little tilings about this prize nation we were saving for democracy, like the fact that the rats in Vietnam were as large as alley cats, and that there were twenty known species of poisonous snakes here, including cobras, kraits, and vipers, and that there were sharks in the coastal waters and leeches in the jungle underbrush, and mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue fever, not to mention spiders, bedbugs, scorpions, and cockroaches, an altogether delightful place. Not for nothing had Saigon been named Pearl of the Orient. I thanked Pete for the information, and made a date to meet him at four o’clock the next day. The night air, as he had promised, was oppressively muggy. In the distance over Saigon, I could see flares drifting brightly against the sky, like a summertime fireworks display over Playland. There was not much else to see. I went back to the barracks to write a letter to Dana, expecting to be bitten on the ass by a spider at any moment. I was asleep before lights-out.

The next day, we passed through the guards at the gate without any difficulty. Pete was known to them, and all that was required was a discreet nod from him; it was nice to have important friends in high places, even if the importance was only that of a slick-sleeve sergeant. I was wearing a boat-necked sports shirt and pale blue slacks, loafers and socks. Pete, who had been a pretty flashy dresser even back in the old days, had on a bright purple silk shirt that had been made for him when he was on Rest and Recreation in Hong Kong, together with a pair of beautifully tailored tan slacks and a pair of sandals he had bought for 1200 piasters on Le Loi Street. In the fifteenth century, Le Loi had waged ten years of guerrilla warfare against the occupying Chinese, finally driving them out of the nation and becoming a king, only to die of beri-beri in Hanoi six years later. It was an interesting comment on this new war five centuries later, that the street named after a famous Vietnamese hero was one of the two streets in Saigon notorious for the sale of black market goods.

We had our choice of transportation from Camp Alpha — taxi, minibus, or cyclo. My mother had once shown me pictures of herself and my father on their Atlantic City honeymoon, and they were both being pushed along the boardwalk in a big wheelchair with a canopy over it. A cyclo looked something like that, except that the man pushing it was not on foot. There were, in fact, several varieties of cyclo, and all of them were on display and being hawked by their drivers outside the base. The cheapest cyclo (five to ten pee for the ride into Saigon, depending on how strenuously you felt like arguing) was a wheelchair with a bicycle attached to it; you sat in the chair and the driver pedaled the vehicle from behind. A cyclo with an attached motorbike was twice as expensive to hire, and a Lambretta with a van behind it had a variable fare that depended on how many passengers were being carried, its capacity being eight. Pete and I chose two motorized cyclos at an agreed price of fifteen pee each. The exchange rate in 1966 was a hundred and seventeen piasters to the dollar, so when you considered that the ride into Saigon must have been four or five miles, for a fare of less than fifteen cents, we weren’t doing too badly. My driver, sitting behind me and wearing Army fatigues which he had undoubtedly purchased on either Le Loi or Nguyen Hue Streets spoke English reminiscent of the chop-chop variety invented by Chinese cooks in Gold Rush movies.

“You here long time?” he asked.

“Just got here yesterday,” I said.

“Oh, you like Saigon,” he said. “Much nice thing in Saigon. Number One town. Same like Paris.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Connecticut,” I said.

“You like Saigon,” he said. “Better than Kennycunt.”

As we came into the city, as the city opened before us the way a melody line will open into a wider exploration of theme, implemented by a full orchestration where there had earlier been only a piano statement; as Pete in his bright purple silk shirt purchased in Hong Kong and I in my boat-necked shirt purchased in New Canaan came into this city that was the Paris of the East, I experienced the oddest sensation of believing suddenly and with the sharpest sense of conviction, that the entire war was a put-on, that there really was no war in Southeast Asia, that the daily communiques from the battlefield (together with the ghoulishly required body-count of enemy dead) were comparable to the battle-action reports in 1984, Eastasia is winning, Eurasia is losing, War Is Peace, Saigon Is Schenectady.

There were, of course, clues in these traffic-cluttered streets that this was the capital of a nation at war, the Army jeeps, the two-and-a-half-ton trucks, the Skyraiders streaking contrails over head in a sky as blue as that of Talmadge in the spring. But the Army no longer required its officers or men to wear uniforms except while on active duty, and it was impossible to tell whether the hundreds of Occidentals riding cyclos or taxis or stepping out of buses or standing on street corners or ogling girls or idly looking in shop windows were civilians or servicemen since they were all dressed, like Pete and myself, in clothes that would have been acceptable at any second-rate American resort. The city did not look truly oriental. It had instead the half-assed appearance of a movie shot on the back lot in the thirties or forties, a Shanghai Gesture that didn’t quite make it for believability. Even the Vietnamese women, strikingly beautiful in their traditional ao-dais with paneled overdresses and satin trousers, seemed to have been supplied by Central Casting to satisfy the American stereotype of what an oriental woman should look like, long black hair and slanting brown eyes, narrow-waists, delicate smiles, a France Nuyen or a Nancy Kwan to play the romantic interest in a movie about a white man in love with a Negro girl (carefully disguised as a white man in love with an Oriental) the motion-picture clichés springing to life everywhere around us, these slender inscrutable lovely girls chirping to each other in singsong ululation on every street corner or shouting in pidgin English across the bedlam of tooting horns. Saigon was Dragon Seed and Macao and maybe even The General Died at Dawn, and I was Gary Cooper, grinning somewhat sheepishly when a Vietnamese male approached my cyclo to satisfy yet another stereotype, that of the working pimp in a sinful city. He had undoubtedly learned his trade in the years when the French still controlled this garden spot, there was the promise of Parisian sin in his eyes and on his mouth as we waited for the light to change, Quelques choses que vous desirez, monsieur? the master pimp peddling pussy and pornography. But he recited it instead the way they’d written it in the hack script about the Mysterious East, gold tooth flashing in his mouth, lopsided grin (what no pigtail?), “You like Number One fuck, GI, I fix?” I shook my head as the light changed, and he shouted after me, “You lousy Number Ten, GI,” and Pete yelled over from his cyclo, “That’s the gook version of the bestseller list.” To Pete, every Vietnamese in the country was a gook. The Vietcong were gooks, the ARVNs were gooks, the NVA were gooks, the Buddhists were gooks, the cyclo drivers, the bar girls, the policemen, the Prime Minister, each and all were only gooks. We moved slowly through tree-lined streets echoing Aix-en-Provence, designed by the French colonialists for a projected population of half a million people, and now trying hopelessly to cope with more than two million people, 150,000 automobiles and trucks, and another 500,000 bicycles and motorbikes. The sense of unreality persisted, was there truly a war being fought a hundred miles, fifty miles, twenty miles away? The horns honked, the lights changed, the cyclo drivers called to each other in Vietnamese over the roofs of Fords and Volkswagens, Toyotas and Triumphs, Citroëns and Chevrolets. I could not believe I was really here, but more than that I could not believe that here was real.

You could buy pot on any street corner in Saigon; the stuff grew wild in the countryside and even the school kids were selling it for five dollars a bag. This wasn’t the same nickel bag you got back home, though; here it contained about two ounces of the stuff, enough for maybe ten or twelve cigarettes. In a bar on Tu Do Street, Pete and I bought a bag from a girl who kept insisting she’d be fired if her boss knew she was peddling grass on the side. We told her we wouldn’t tell him if she didn’t, and then bought her another glass of Saigon tea for a hundred and fifty pee, which seemed to mollify her for a little while at least. There was a jukebox going in the bar, stacked with records that were a month or two behind what was being played in the States, all rock, country-western, and blues, old hits like The Dave Clark Five’s “Over and Over” and Herman’s Hermits’ “A Must to Avoid.” The bar was crowded with young guys in civilian clothes, most or all of them serviceman, I guessed — Negroes, whites, a few Koreans. (Pete told me they were Koreans; I thought they were Vietnamese.) A Negro standing alongside of us was very proud of the United States Army jungle boots he had bought in the black market on Le Loi Street, and kept showing them off the way a newly engaged girl shows off her diamond. They had cost him ten thousand pee, about eighty-five American dollars, but he was expecting to be transferred out to the boonies any day now, and he had heard of guys waiting six to eight weeks to get boots issued while meanwhile they were walking around in the paddies all day and getting seven kinds of jungle rot. It had been a hell of a lot easier to buy them on Le Loi Street, the Negro said, and then asked Pete and me if we thought he’d made a mistake. The girl draped on his shoulder said, “You no makee mistake, Lloyd, them Number One boots.”

“You think so, Annie?” Lloyd said.

“You jus’ lookee them line boots,” Annie said. “Hey, mistah, you tell Lloyd here them Number One boots.”

“Those are sure Number One boots,” I said.

The girl who’d sold us the grass came over just then and said, “Hey, Cheap Charlie, alia girls soooo thirsty, you wanna talk some?”

“He wants to fuck some,” Lloyd said, and Annie burst into tinkling laughter and buried her face in her hands.

“No talkee fuck,” the grass-girl said. “Alla girls soooo thirsty here, my goo’ness, le’s drink some nice tea, okay?”

“It’s getting awful,” Pete said. “You used to be able to go into any Saigon bar and work your points with these girls for the price of, oh, three, four glasses of tea — but then the tea only cost about eighty pee. What you were doing, you know, was trying to get yourself a steady shack, buying for the same girl every time you came in, hoping you could get to take her home one night. There’s an eleven o’clock curfew here, Wat, so most of these joints close around ten-thirty, quarter to eleven, and if you’re lucky and you get to take one of them home, why you can maybe get something good going, you know? You can rent places for these girls for about thirty bucks a month, and then all you got to do is, you know, bring home the usual crap, some C-rations every now and then, cigarettes, fans, goodies from the PX, and that way you got yourself a great thing going, a relationship, you know? I mean, you can always get laid in Saigon, there’s a hundred short-timers working this street, they’ll give you a quick one on a mattress out back for three or four hundred pee, but what a man needs is a relationship, Wat, that’s what he needs.”

“Hey, what you say, Cheap Charlie?” the grass-girl said.

“Fuck off, sister,” Pete answered. “We’re busy talking, can’t you see?”

The Buddhists came into the streets as flares filled the nighttime sky over the city. They had rallied outside Saigon’s brightly lighted Buddhist Institute, the Vien Hoa Dao, and now they marched in flowing white robes, followed by shouting citizens carrying hand-lettered banners and the saffron, red-striped flags of South Vietnam. There had been unrest in the streets ever since President Johnson’s February meeting with Premier Ky in Honolulu, at which time it had seemed to the Vietnamese that our wily Senate cloakroom negotiator had tucked their man into his vest pocket. But three days ago, on March 10, Ky had dismissed a Buddhist-supported general from his ten-man military Directory, and now the priests were out in force to demand the overthrow of his government. Riot policemen in Army fatigues and helmets flanked the route of march, expecting trouble, expecting perhaps the same kind of big trouble they had known on June 11, 1963. On that day, at the intersection of Le Van Duyet and Phan Ding Phung Streets, at nine o’clock in the morning, the Venerable Thich Quang Duc, a member of the Buddhist clergy, had set fire to himself, thereby giving undeniably visual form to the flaring anger of the priests, who claimed that the Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem was discriminating against the country’s sizable number of Buddhists, variously estimated as between fifty and seventy per cent of the population. Being an American raised in the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as it was euphemistically called, forgetting for the moment the centuries of strife behind that handy twentieth-century label) I had no idea what a Buddhist believed. There had once been a Buddha, true; very good, Wat Tyler. There had also once been a Confucius, and his teachings formed the basis of yet another Vietnamese religion. But it was there that beliefs such as Cao Dai, and Hoa Hao, and Taoism entered the picture and caused a Westerner like myself to become hopelessly mired in a culture as deep and as resistant as the muddy rice paddies through which we pursued our war, a culture that surely included the throngs of Buddhists and their followers who demonstrated in the streets now against the very government we were supporting.

A Mercedes-Benz convertible, ten thousand dollars on the hoof, was being rolled over, and someone ran up to it with a flaming torch, right arm back, wrist slightly bent, left arm out for balance like a tennis player coming in to return a powerful serve, swinging the firebrand in a wide arc and then releasing it and allowing it to sail through the open window of the overturned car. The convertible top caught, there was an expectant hush as the crowd awaited the inevitable, and then pulled back and ducked and ran as the explosion came and flames billowed up toward the sky. The riot policemen charged into the group of demonstrators, gas masks pulled down over their faces, wicker shields hooked over their arms and thrust forward to deflect the stones and tin cans being hurled at them. There was a hiss, a puff, a cloud of tear gas erupted in the middle of the street, and the crowd screamed, barefoot school children wearing shorts and white shirts, older youths in Army trousers and American sneakers, plastic bags appearing here and there among the crowd, pulled over heads in defense against the gas, had no one ever told these people about the Great American Plastic Bag Scare? There were television cameramen shooting footage for news programs to precede “The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson,” another explosion as a motorbike burst into flame. And then a slender Buddhist monk, pate shaved, raised his white-robed arms and strode on floating sandals into the crowd of dispersing followers while behind him a riot policeman approached with upraised club. “Behind you!” I shouted, and Pete grabbed my arm and said, “For Christ’s sake, Wat, keep out of it! This is gook business!” The club fell, a bright red gash appeared across the top of the priest’s head. He dropped to the sidewalk running blood, his white robe glowing eerily in the light of the flames from the motorbike nearby.

I had told my father during our unsuccessful Judge Hardy chat in the living room of our house last November that I was going to appeal my classification and ask to enter the Army as a noncombatant, but that was before I knew what was actually involved. I had thought it was merely a matter of running over to my local draft board the next day, showing them my classification notice, and saying, “I know I’m classified 1-A, but I’d like to change that now if it’s ail right with you. I’d like to be put in 1-A-O, which as you know means I object to taking up arms against an enemy, but I don’t object to military service in a noncombatant status. So will you please make the necessary changes?”

“You mean you want to appeal your classification?”

“Yes, I’d like it changed to 1-A-O.”

“You’re asking for an exemption.”

“I’m asking for reclassification.”

“You’re appealing your present classification and asking for an exemption.”

“Okay, yes.”

“Fill out this form. Mail it back to us within ten days.”

“All I’m asking...”

“There are no automatic deferments or exemptions. Fill out this form. The Selective Service will decide whether to accept or reject your appeal.”

It occurred to me, as I looked over the form for the first time, that it would have made an excellent mid-term examination for a graduate student in theology. I visualized a bare-assed southern Baptist, dunked into a river at infancy and subsequently raised as a God-fearing citizen, trying to cope with the complexity of language in the form, and finally throwing up his hands in despair — fuck it, I’d druther go fight. My own situation was not too dissimilar. To begin with, I knew beforehand that a Supreme Court decision in March 1965 had broadened the legal interpretation of the first question in Series II. RELIGIOUS TRAINING AND BELIEF, so that belief in a supreme being did not necessarily have to mean belief in God, but could instead mean “belief in and devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes, and a religious faith in a purely ethical creed.” I knew all about the Seeger case, and I knew about the decision, and I was therefore surprised to discover, as late as November 30 of that year, that the question “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” was still on the form. I recognized, of course, that I could answer “No” to the question if I so chose, supposedly without prejudicing my appeal, but I was honestly unprepared for the emphasis on religion throughout the remainder of the form. I was not a religious person. Oh yes, I had been in and out of the First Congregational Church every Christmas Eve as part of the ritual of singing carols around the enormous firehouse tree, and then going over for midnight mass, and I had also been there for services on the day after President Kennedy got shot, but I could not be considered a “churchgoer” in any sense of the word, nor had there been any really strong religious influences in our home (though my mother did try to get me interested in Ethical Culture and took me to a meeting in Stamford one Sunday morning). My objections to the war in Vietnam were purely moral, and it seemed to me unfair that I was now being asked to justify those beliefs by pretending they were religious — in other words, by lying.

For if I wanted to qualify for an exemption, I would have to answer questions like 7. Have you ever given public expression, written or oral, to the views herein expressed as the basis for your claim made in Series I above? If so, specify when and where, keeping in mind that the basis for any claim in Series I above had to be “religious training and belief.” I suppose I could have stretched a point, turned a corner in my mind that would have allowed me to explain as “religion” my sincere aversion to murder. But it seemed to me that this would have necessitated a duplicity that severely compromised my convictions.

I could not bring myself to complete the form.

I could not admit that I was a witch.

Besides, it was too late, the wheels were already grinding. That Wednesday, I received a notice from my local draft board, advising me to report for induction into the Army of the United States a week later. On December 8, 1965, I was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for eight weeks of basic military training, after which I went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for an additional eight weeks of Advanced Infantry Training. At the end of March 1966, I was flown to Saigon where I met an old football opponent from Stamford who told me all about the weather, the rodents, the serpents, the parasites, and the insects of Vietnam, and later showed me the whores, the pimps, the pushers, the profiteers, the protesters, and the policemen preserving law and order. The next morning, I climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half, and was escorted in convoy with fifteen other men to the base camp at Cu Chi.

Lloyd Parsons, the Negro who’d been showing off his jungle boots in the Saigon bar, was in one of the trucks with me.

April

Once you passed the target area, even if the mission was later scrubbed, it counted as part of your tour of duty, and the squadron clerk recorded it as such. In the Fifteenth Air Force, a tour consisted of fifty missions, after which you were entitled to be sent back to the States in one noncombatant capacity or another, usually as an instructor. (A fighter tour in the Twelfth Air Force consisted of a hundred missions, but that was because they were making shorter-range strikes, going out to dive-bomb and strafe, coming back to load up, going out again, three or four times in a single day.) You didn’t have to go home after your fiftieth mission. You could elect to stay and fly another tour, the way Archie Colombo did in February. He went to Rome for three weeks, and came back in March to join the squadron again. He was shot down flying the third mission of his second tour, which coincidentally was my fiftieth and final mission for the United States Army Air Force.

Colonel Spiller gave me the usual rah-rah pitch about signing over for a second tour, telling me that the war in Germany was almost over, hell, General Marshall had expected it to be over by last November, it was just taking a trifle longer, that was all. Patton’s Third Army had already crossed the Rhine and only last night Allied bombers had dropped 12,400 explosives and 650,000 fire bombs on Berlin, it was worth seeing through to the end, wasn’t it? Besides, there was the possibility that if I signed over for a second tour, I might be immediately discharged after we knocked off Germany, instead of being redeployed to the Pacific where I would have to fly my ass off against the Japs. I thanked Colonel Spiller for his consideration, knowing he had only my welfare in mind, but I told him that I was very tired just then and that I thought it might be nice to go home. The colonel looked me in the eye, the tic in his own eye beating erratically, and said, Sure, Tyler, I’ll okay the necessary papers. On April 3, 1945, two days after Easter, I left Foggia in an ATC airplane and after interminable stops at Iceland and Gander, finally landed at Michel Field, two miles northeast of Hempstead, Long Island.

There was the scent of imminent victory in the New York streets that April, much stronger, more easily sniffed than it had been in Italy. It was as though, paradoxically, the civilians knew more about the progress of the war than the men who were overseas fighting it, and thus informed could safely predict its early end. Even my father, when I spoke to him on the telephone from a bar in midtown Manhattan (the phones at the field had men standing in line ten deep) seemed to possess secret intelligence that the war, in Europe at least, would be over before the end of the month. I told him that I certainly hoped so, and then I asked about Linda and told him how anxious I was to see them both, but that I didn’t know exactly when I’d be getting to Chicago because the Air Force seemed to be fairly confused (situation normal) about what to do with all these returnees. My father asked if I wanted him to conic down to New York, and I said I didn’t think that was necessary, and he told me again how happy he was that I was home and safe, and asked me if I needed any money, and then said he hoped to see me soon, and to please keep in touch with him. The call ran seventeen minutes overtime. I went back to the bar where the ice was melting in my scotch, and asked the bartender to freshen my drink, and then walked over to the jukebox and put in a quarter and punched out five records, and went to sit down again. An Air Force captain was sitting at the far end of the bar, a jigger of whiskey and a glass of beer on the polished top in front of him.

I did not recognize him at first.

I looked him full in the face, and he looked back at me, and then we both turned away. I lifted my scotch and sipped a little of it, and listened as my first jukebox selection fell into place, a song new to me, its melody haunting, its lyric evocative, “... on a train that is passing through, those eyes...” and I drank silently, listening, and then ordered another scotch and glanced again at the captain. He was wearing a jauntily tilted crushed hat and he had a blond mustache and blue eyes, silver pilot’s wings over the left-hand pocket of his blouse. He turned toward me as though aware of my casual glance, his own look becoming one of scrutiny, and all at once he said, “Will?”

Our eyes met, his probing tentatively and uncertainly, mine searching for a clue. “Will Tyler?” he said, more confidently now, and I suddenly knew who he was, the face registered, the voice registered, “Michael?” I asked.

We were rising simultaneously off our stools, slowly, slowly, our faces cracking with wide grins, our arms coming up (“Michael?” I asked, “Michael Mallory?”) and we rushed toward each other like some crazy Klondike prospector brothers meeting in the middle of a muddy Main Street after months in the wilderness (“Michael, you son of a bitch!”) and threw our arms around each other and let out blood-curdling yells that must have shattered a dozen glasses behind the bar. We jigged all around that room, we threw our hats in the air, we put six quarters in the juke and turned the volume up full, and bought the bartender a drink when he complained, and laughed and slapped each other on the back, yelling over the sound of the music, roaring our amazement and our pleasure, “Let’s call my sister!” I shouted, “Let’s call Charlotte Wagner!” Michael shouted, our words tumbling over themselves, overlapping, You look great, When’d you get back, Where’ve they got you now, What were you

flying, How do you like my paintbrush, I’ve seen more hair on a strip of bacon, Hey, remember that night, Remember old Ronny Booth passing out on us, Remember those jigs chasing us out of Douglas, remember? remember? remember?

The party was being given for a bombardier who had lost an eye over Ploesti. Michael had met him at Fort Dix (where the poor bastard was being discharged with a Purple Heart), and he had invited Michael to the big bash tonight, promising him plenty of girls, booze, and music. Michael had assured him he would show, but then had lost his courage, and had wandered into the bar for a few fortifying drinks. We finally decided to brave it together, hero fighter pilots that we were, and we managed to find the Sutton Place address, a high-rise overlooking the East River, but then Michael chickened out again. I think he really was afraid of contact with, well, people who hadn’t been dropping bombs or firing machine guns. People.

So we stood on the edge of the river, and watched the shimmering reflection of a tug’s lights on the water, and Michael softly said, “Reminds me of the lake, doesn’t it you?” and I said, “Yes, it docs,” though I wasn’t really sure, I think anything that night would have reminded us of Chicago. Michael began talking all at once about how strange it felt to be back in the United States, and then asked me if I’d taken one of those returnee tests at Mitchel, and when I told him I hadn’t as yet, he went on to explain that the Air Force had developed a questionnaire to assist them with the enormous task of redeployment and that some of the responses given by bomber pilots and fighter pilots were pretty surprising, hadn’t I heard about that questionnaire?

“Well,” he said, “you might be interested in knowing that only twenty-eight per cent of the bomber pilots thought they should be shipped overseas again, whereas forty-six per cent of the fighter pilots figured they would be sent over and actually wanted to go.”

“So what docs that prove?” I said.

Michael shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.” He looked out over the water again. “I don’t remember all the figures, Will, but the guys who said they didn’t want to go overseas again gave a lot of different reasons. Some of them felt they’d already done their share of overseas duty — almost twice as many bomber pilots said that as fighter pilots. Or they just couldn’t take another tour either physically or mentally — the percentage was in favor of the fighter pilots on that one. Or...”

“You think they’re going to ship us to the Pacific?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said, and shrugged again. “There was another question on one of the tests, Will. This one was given only to enlisted men, maybe the Air Force didn’t want to hear what its flying officers had to say. Anyway, the question was ‘Do you ever feel this war is not worth fighting?’”

“What were the answers?”

“The majority, forty-five per cent, said ‘Never.’ Twenty-three per cent said ‘Once in a great while.’ Twenty-four per cent said ‘Sometimes.’ And eight per cent said ‘Very often.’” Michael paused. Turning to me, he said, “What would you have answered, Will?”

“I’ve never once thought this war wasn’t worth fighting,” I said. “Have you?”

Michael looked out over the water. Very softly, he said, “I was seared to death. All the time. Every minute. I kept thinking it’d catch up to me. I kept thinking it had to catch up. I kept thinking my grandfather got out of the Spanish-American War alive, and my father got out of World War I alive, but I wouldn’t get out of this one, I wouldn’t make it, Will, the world’s fucking idiocy would overtake me at last.” He sighed deeply then, and turned to me again, and I looked at his face in the light of the street lamps, and knew why I had not known him in the bar, and wondered suddenly what had taken him so long to recognize me.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t we go upstairs, huh? Might be a good party after all, what the hell. Come on, Michael, what do you say?”

“Sure,” Michael answered. He grinned suddenly, the old hell-raising grin I remembered, and linked his arm through mine and cheerfully said, “Off we go!” and together we turned from the river and walked directly into the building, past the doorman who called behind us, “Excuse me, gentlemen, whom did you wish to see?”

“Lieutenant Douglas Prine,” Michael answered.

“Yes, sir,” the doorman said, “that’s apartment 14B.”

In the elevator, a pimply-faced operator said, “You fellows just back from overseas?”

“Just back,” Michael said. “How can you tell?”

The elevator operator shrugged. “You can tell guys who’re just back. You see any action?”

“A little,” Michael said.

“Fourteen,” the elevator operator said.

She had hazel eyes and brown hair, and she came into the party at about one a. m., wearing a gray Persian lamb she had undoubtedly borrowed from her mother. Our host, Douglas Prine, a black patch over his right eye, helped her off with her coat, and then kissed her on the check and shook hands with her escort, a sallow-faced kid of seventeen or eighteen who stood awkwardly shuffling his feet and gazing into the living room, where all us grown-up soldiers and dolls were drinking and dancing and laughing. Michael Mallory was unconscious on the sofa, his head in the lap of a buxom brunette who huskily sang “Long Ago and Far Away” while idly running her fingers through his hair. The record player was indifferently spinning the cast album of Carousel, June bustin’ out all over the room as couples tried to dance to the hardly rhythmic beats of a Broadway orchestration. As I watched from a vantage point near the piano, the new girl said goodnight to her escort, who pecked her self-consciously on the cheek and then sidled out the front door. She stood hesitantly in the entrance to the living room as though trying to decide whether she should join the party, and then smiled and turned on her heel and started up the staircase leading to the second floor of the duplex. I bounded out of the living room.

“Hey!” I said.

The girl turned. She looked at me with vague bemusement, head tilted, brown hair falling loose over one eye à la Veronica Lake, the opposite eyebrow raised in imitation of God knew how many other movie queens. I had a sudden feeling of prescience, I thought I knew for one insane moment exactly what dumb thing she would offer in response, and I hoped against hope that she would not say it, but she lifted her eyebrow impossibly higher, and in a very young and hopelessly affected voice said exactly what I knew she would, “Hay is for horses.”

“Oh shit,” I answered, and snapped a smart salute at her, and then executed a military about-face, and marched into the living room. She came in directly behind me, but I didn’t know she had followed me until I turned from the bar, where I was refilling my glass, and found her standing at my elbow.

“Would you like to apologize?” she said.

“For what?”

“For what you just said.”

“What did I say?”

“You know what you said.”

“Okay, I apologize.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Goodnight.”

“Hey, hold it a minute.”

“What do you want?”

“You live here?”

“I live here.”

“Who are you?”

“Dolores Prine.”

“Oh. Is the guy with the patch your brother?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Why?”

“I like to know how old people arc.”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

“Which means you’re only seventeen.”

“If a person is almost eighteen, why yes, I guess that does mean she’s only seventeen, how clever of you.”

“Where’re you running to?”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired.”

“Big night on the town with your pale little boyfriend?”

“Yes, big night on the town.”

“Radio City Music Hall?”

“No, the Roxy.”

“What’s the Roxy?”

“It’s a theater. You mean you don’t know the Roxy?”

“I’m not a New Yorker.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Chicago.”

“Foo.”

“What do you mean foo? It’s a good city.”

“It’s not as good as New York.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. But no city in the world is as good as New York.”

“How about Ocracoke, North Carolina?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“A drink? I’m only seventeen.”

“You’re almost eighteen.”

She was only seventeen and still attending the McKeon School. I felt somewhat like Lazarus the following Monday waiting outside the building as little girls in uniforms came skipping down the steps into a New York April gilded with sunshine. “Aren’t you going to carry my books?” she asked, and I sensed that she was kidding me, but I took them anyway because I hadn’t yet learned to decipher the meaning in her hazel eyes, my mother’s own green with an overtint of the palest brown, flecked with pure cat’s-eye yellow, remarkable eyes that claimed complete attention whenever she spoke.

It was, of course, her youth that attracted me, though I myself was not yet twenty, born on June the sixth, nineteen hundred and twenty-five, A date to remember, my mother had often said when she was still alive, though generally she said it when I was being particularly abominable, fun in her eyes too, broad midwestern sarcasm, You don’t know how long we hoped and prayed, Will, you don’t know how your father and I longed for our first child, and then to be blessed with you, oh surely we were chosen, flinty green sparked with humor, and then a hug and a slap on the behind, I loved that woman, I loved her still.

Dolores Prine’s mother called her Dec, and her brother called her Lolly, and she asked me to call her one or the other because she hated the name Dolores, each diminutive sounding equally childish to my octogenarian cars, each reminiscent of a world I had left behind a long time ago, those walks home from Grace School in the afternoon, Michael Mallory cracking his dirty jokes and Charlotte Wagner bellowing her horse laugh in response, educated elbows and compliant breasts, ice cream sodas on Division Street, portable record players on the Oak Street Beach. The name Dolores conjured images of a tall Spanish lady, hair pulled back into a bun, mantilla falling in a lacy cascade from a high comb, eyes brimming with sorrow and pain, her walk erect and dignified, but each long stride so sensuous besides, a promise of surging passion under that long black skirt. But Lolly? Dee? Lolly was the child who skipped along beside me and prattled about the latest Woody Herman record, flicking her brown hair back and away from the eye it had been trained to cover, giggling unexpectedly, asking me if I ever killed a man, and then opening her hazel eyes wide (hand flicking at the falling brown curtain, fingernails revealed as bitten to the quick) when I said that I had been credited with four and a half enemy planes, “How can you shoot down only half a plane?” she asked. I explained to her that my wingman and I (it was amazing how I could mention his name without feeling pain any more), a fellow called Ace Gibson, from Reading, Pennsylvania, had shot down this one enemy airplane together, and therefore had to share credit for the kill, and she nodded in quick understanding and then said, “It must have taken guts,” and that was all. Lolly had become Dec in the crack of an instant, the girl child had become at least the adolescent and in the adolescent there was some promise of the woman. I wanted to put my arm around her narrow shoulders, wanted to hold her close and touch her breasts beneath the gray school jacket, green-gold crest over the left pocket, green tic separating the twin mounds under the white cotton blouse, so young, so very young. And yet Francesca could not have been much older, and I had done things to her, we had done things to her, so why did I feel so guilty now, why did I feel that if I touched this slender coltish thing beside me, I would be arrested and imprisoned for life? If she was only seventeen, then I was only nineteen; if I was almost twenty, then surely she was almost eighteen. I did not touch her. I carried her books like a tongue-tied oaf, discovering sunlight along the line down on her wrist where it jutted from the too-short sleeve of her jacket, and listened as she explained to me in all seriousness the tremendous sacrifices Clark Gable, James Stewart, and Tyrone Power had made for their country in wartime by giving up their profitable Hollywood careers and going off to fight. “It must have taken guts,” she said, and bingo, we were back in the third grade again, with little Lolly swallowing the linger paint and getting her frock all messy besides.

If the Air Force had permitted me to go back to Chicago while awaiting redeployment orders, I probably would never have seen Dolores Prine again after that awkward Monday. But at Mitchel Field there was only confusion and procrastination; everyone seemed to know that the war in Europe was rushing to a close, yet no one seemed prepared for its end. The Air Force could hardly allow an experienced combat pilot to go home for even a few days, because nobody knew what was going to happen once Germany surrendered; the Japanese might launch a wholesale Kamikaze attack against San Francisco, in which case we’d all be rushed to the West Coast. Since the Air Force didn’t know what the hell to do with me, all they asked was that I check in for formation each morning. If my orders had not yet arrived (and God only knew where those orders were supposed to be coming from), I was free to leave the field until formation the following day. It was a very sweet setup. Michael, enjoying the same country-club status at Fort Dix would take a bus in to meet me in the city, and together we wandered through those early April days, bright with sunshine, sparkling with just enough of winter’s lingering bite. As far as I was concerned, the war was already over. I did not for a moment believe I would be shipped to the Pacific, and I found myself talking to Michael about plans for the future — should I go into my father’s business, should I go to college, should I try writing — I had written some very good letters while I was overseas. Together, we explored our philosophies and our ideals, our hopes and our ambitions, usually in one or another of New York’s bars. I only mentioned Ace Gibson once, and that was because Michael and I had been talking to a lieutenant-commander in a Third Avenue bar, and the guy started telling us about a Dear John letter he had received, and it called to mind that other bar in Los Angeles, where a drunken captain in Supply had told Ace and me about his wife running off with the local — dentist, had it been?

It was Michael who suggested that we stroll over to McKeon and surprise the little Prine girl. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but we’d been sitting in a bar for close to two hours, and it was so beautiful and bright outside that it seemed a shame to kill the rest of the day that way. So we paid for the drinks, and then walked east toward Madison Avenue, and at three-fifteen were standing before the wide front steps of the school waiting for her to emerge. Michael seemed immediately at ease with her, even though I could not yet shake the thought that I was robbing the cradle. He cracked a few exploratory dirty jokes which caused her to burst into delighted laughter (I remembered all at once the day he told the Confucius Say joke in Lindy’s presence) and then asked her if she was old enough to drink beer, and when she said they wouldn’t allow her inside a bar unless she could show identification, went into a grocery store on Lexington Avenue (I guess it was; I was still unimaginably confused by New York’s simple layout of avenues and streets) and we walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a double-decker bus up to Fifty-ninth (outside the Plaza Hotel?) and walked into the park there and sat on the grass and drank the beer and spent the afternoon together.

It must have been five-thirty, a quarter to six, when we decided to take Dolores home before her mother called out the National Guard. We were coming out of the park when we passed an old man snuffling into his handkerchief (I don’t think we really noticed him at the time, I think he only registered in retrospect) and several yards behind him was a woman, a younger woman obviously in no way connected with the old man, and she was openly weeping. And the next person we passed had a stunned look on his face, and there was an odd ominous buzz on the air as we walked past the fountain outside the hotel, and Dolores suddenly turned to me and said, “Something terrible has happened. We’ve lost the war.”

A sailor was standing alongside the plate glass window of the department store on Fifty-seventh and Fifth, blinking as if trying to hold back tears. I went over to him and said, “What’s the...?” but before I could finish my question, he snapped to attention and threw a salute at me, and I patiently returned the salute, and then said, “What’s the trouble, sailor?” and he said, “The President is dead, sir.”

“What?” I said.

“Roosevelt,” he said.

“Roosevelt?” I said, and felt enormously stupid all at once, as if we were engaged in a baggy-pants vaudeville routine. He had told me the President was dead, hadn’t he? And the President was Roosevelt, wasn’t he? Then why had I repeated his name as though saying it aloud would deny the fact — no, he could not be dead, he had been President for as long as I could remember, he could not now be dead, we would lose the war, oh Jesus, we would lose the war and the world would be enslaved.

Dolores suddenly threw herself into my arms and began weeping against my shoulder.

It was then that I began to think I was falling in love with her.

The war in Europe, which had seemed so close to ending, now seemed fiercely determined to prolong itself. A rattle was sounding on the expectant air, signaling the death of something quite familiar, something almost loved, this war that had been with us for so long a time and which now refused to expire the way a proper invalid should have, coughing itself out in the stillness of the night. Our new President, Harry S. Truman, said, “Our demand has been, and it remains, unconditional surrender,” but Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris announced that despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there had been no substantial advances toward Berlin, and our closest units to the city were still more than fifty miles away. It was a time of dying, that April, beginning with the death of Roosevelt, the largest death I had known since my mother’s, and then dwindling into a series of anticlimactic smaller deaths as we awaited the ultimate collapse, the end of the European war — the deaths of cities, the deaths of rivers crossed, the deaths of bastions stormed and bunkers demolished, the death of an era. Into this time of dying, into this loud and raucous, constant and endless communique from the front, there was insinuated like a delicate flute refrain, the beginning of Dolores Prine and me, or rather (like the smaller deaths) a series of smaller explorations that were leading, we suspected, to a larger beginning for us both.

Troops of the Third Army were thirteen miles from the Czech border on the north and on the west, the Seventh Army pushed to within fifteen miles of Nuremburg, the Canadians advanced toward the Zuider Zee, the United States First swept northward through the Ruhr pocket and engaged in bloody street-to-street combat in Halle, the French took Kenl on the Rhine, and in a hamburger joint on Sixth Avenue, when I asked Dolores if she minded my eating onions, she answered, “Yes, I mind terribly,” and suddenly kissed me for the first time. The French marched to within ten miles of the Swiss border, the United States Seventh crossed the Fils River and took Weilhelm, we were ten miles from Bremen, we had occupied Bologna after a nineteen-month campaign, the Soviet High Command announced that Russian troops “had marched a thousand miles from the gates of Moscow” to capture Erkner at the eastern limits of Berlin, and in a taxicab heading for Sutton Place, I put my hand under Dolores Prine’s skirt, and she tightened her thighs on it at first, catching it and stopping my advance, and then opened slowly to my pressure, my fingers touching the mound bulging crisply beneath her cotton panties, “Will,” she said, “please,” but I did not remove my hand, the American armies were standing on the banks of the Mulde River, and the Russians were only forty-eight miles away.

Who was this girl?

I hardly knew.

Beautiful, yes, I thought she was perhaps the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, but I had thought that from the very start, when she’d walked into the apartment on the arm of her Lebanese rug salesman, and that had never changed. There was too, I suppose, the promise of passion in her hazel eyes, daring me, mocking me, a passion only partially unleashed — her twistings beneath me on the grass in Central Park, dusk falling, “We’ll get mugged if we don’t watch out, Will,” and a schoolgirl giggle — it was only a matter of time, she knew it, I knew it, and I dreamt each night at Mitchel Field of entering her and hearing her shriek aloud in ecstasy. That was there, then, the promised passion of Dolores my flamenco dancer, that and a suspected capacity for pain, too, which seemed equally Spanish in origin, though her father was Irish (“With a fifth of scotch thrown in,” he told me) and her mother was Dutch. But beyond the wild expectation of taking her to bed — she seemed to me the materialization of every pin-up picture I had hung on barracks walls from Mississippi to Italy and back again — was there really a beginning here, a gentle flute song floating on the wind of a dying April, was there really anything to love about this lovely girl? (She was, it occurred to me once, when I was feeling unusually Freudian, the total opposite of Francesca, the beauty of Foggia, and perhaps to me the symbol of everything clean, innocent, and alive, as opposed to everything soiled, corrupt, and dead — well, not the total opposite, I suppose, since the old man Gino had a cataracted eye and Dolores’ brother wore a patch over an empty socket. I didn’t too often think psychoanalytically, however, and I was probably dead wrong.)

She wrote poetry. She showed me one of her efforts several days before I finally took her naked on her quilted bed in the back bedroom of the Sutton Place apartment while her one-eyed brother was out dancing and her parents were visiting friends in Connecticut for the weekend and two Russian armies were pushing the Germans further back into Berlin. The poetry was terrible.

I told her what I thought of it — we were in a Chinese restaurant on the fringes of Harlem, she did know the city well, I had to give her that. She looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then asked, “What do you know about poetry?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Then how do you know it’s terrible?”

“It doesn’t move me.”

“It moves me,” she said.

“You wrote it,” I said. “Listen, you asked for my opinion, and I gave it to you.”

“I asked for your praise,” she said.

“I thought you wanted my opinion.”

“I don’t need opinions,” she said. “Every cheap critic in the world has an opinion, but only poets have ideas.”

“Excuse me, I didn’t know you were a poet,” I said.

“I’m not "

“Then what are we arguing about?”

“If you love someone, you’re supposed to say her poem is good.”

“Your poem is terrible.”

“Then you don’t love me.”

“Did I say that?”

“Do you love me?” she asked.

The first real contact was made on April 25, when a four-man patrol of the United States 273rd Regiment came upon a Russian outpost at Torgen on the Elbe, two miles west of the advancing American forces.

The bedspread had been quilted by Dolores’ mother. “We shouldn’t be here alone,” she told me, “maybe we’d better go out to a movie or something.”

“We’ve seen everything around,” I said. “We’ve been to twelve movies in the past week, if I never see another movie as long as I live...”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“It’s raining,” I said.

“Will...”

“Yes?”

“Don’t do this to me. Please.”

“Do what?” I said.

“If you don’t love me, then please don’t.”

“I never said I didn’t love you.”

“You never said you did, either.”

“Come here.”

“No. Please.”

“Come here, Dolores.”

“Don’t call me that. Please.”

“Lolly? Dec?”

“Please she said. “Please.”

“Come here, Dolores. I won’t touch you. I promise.”

“You will,” she said, and came to the bed.

On April 28, Benito Mussolini was shot to death by partisans in the village of Dongo on Lake Como, together with his mistress Clara Petacci and sixteen Fascist leaders. On the last day of April’s dyings, large and small, Il Duce’s body and that of Signorina Petacci were hung upside down from a steel girder in what had once been a gasoline station. Signs were placed above their bound feet, black-lettered onto white, proclaiming their names to the assembled populace. They were cut down later and taken to the morgue, but only after Mussolini’s head had been kicked to a bloody pulp by a crowd that once had cheered him in life. On that same day, in a bunker below the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide. The announcement from Berlin read, “At the head of the brave defenders of the Reich capital, the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. Inspired by a determination to save his people and Europe from destruction by Bolshevism, he has sacrificed his life.”

By that time, I was humping Dolores Prine day and night.

May

It was shortly after the end of my lunch hour at the mill when a runny-nosed kid came over from Building 17 to tell me that Mr. Moreland in Personnel would like to see me at two o’clock. I told him I’d be there, and then asked if he knew what it was about, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off across the yard with his hands in his pockets. Since it was then a quarter of two, and since the walk to 17 could conceivably take fifteen minutes (if a person had a cork leg) I advised Allen Garrett that I was going up to the executive building, and then put down my picaroon and left the conveyer belt.

Ramsey-Warner, like most paper mills, manufactured several grades of stock, and I had begun to understand during my year’s apprenticeship there that different types of pulp were blended to make those various papers. I guess you could say I was an essential employee in the manufacture of both groundwood and sulphite pulps in that it was I (along with Allen) who spiked the logs off the conveyer belt if we saw any defects in them, it being absolutely necessary for wood to be glistening clean before it was transported to either the chippers or the grinders. Mr. Moreland’s office was in the building behind 12-A, where the big grinders were housed. (All the buildings at the mill were numbered, and I was convinced that Joliet used the same identification system for its cell-blocks. I often wondered if the prison, unlike R-WP, Inc. had a building numbered 13.) On the way to Mr. Moreland’s office, I peeked into 12-A to see what was going on, figuring that if I was ever going to own this place, I had better familiarize myself with every phase of the operation whenever I had the opportunity.

There were twenty grinders in the room, each pair of them flanking a 3000-horsepower motor. If you looked at a grinder from a certain angle, it resembled the front of a locomotive, cylindrical, with a covered drive shaft jutting out of it where the locomotive’s headlight would have been, a metal plate somewhat like a cowcatcher just below it, and a narrow cylinder looking very much like a steam whistle, high up on the right. The first impression lost itself quickly enough in a labyrinth of pipes, dials, valves, and wheels, the clean logs moving on their conveyer belt to be fed into three metal pockets equipped with hydraulic plungers that forced the wood against the huge grindstone revolving inside the machine. The logs were ingested parallel to the face of the twelve-ton stone, the resultant friction against their sides separating the wood fibers and dropping a warm thick soupy pulp into the pit below. That was how the grinder worked. I had asked a hundred questions about it the first time I discovered Building 12-A, standing around and chatting with the guys who operated the machines and took the big empty pockets off the line for refilling whenever their contents had been ground away. One of those guys, a Swede named Bertil Äkeson (our private joke was always the same: “Hello, Bert,” and “Hello, Bert”), greeted me now as I poked my head inside the door. I went over to him, hoping he would be involved in some mysterious operation about which I could ask some casual questions without causing him to think I was after his job. But all we did for five minutes was discuss the wonderful weather we’d been having, and when he finally mentioned something about checking the stone pit temperature gauge, I couldn’t stay around to watch or I’d have been late for my appointment in Building 17.

I had been in Mr. Moreland’s office last April, when he’d hired me, and it seemed to have changed little in the intervening months. His desk, leather-topped walnut, dominated the room, sitting large and cluttered before the twin windows that overlooked the company’s digesters in the yard outside. There were glass-enclosed bookcases on the wall to the left of the entrance door, and three portraits (two of the Ramsey Brothers, Amos and Louis, and a third of Martin Warner) unevenly flanked the fireplace and mantel on the right. The walls were wood-paneled, the carpet was brown, the room was inviting and cozy in contrast to the cheerless gray exteriors of all the buildings at the mill. Mr. Moreland beckoned to the single chair angled before his desk. I sat.

“Tyler,” he said, “do you know how many strikes there were in America last year?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Two thousand, six hundred and sixty-five,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Four million men walked off their jobs, that’s a rather impressive figure, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here at Ramsey-Warner, we did not have a single strike in 1919”

“No, sir.”

“Nor do we intend to have one this year, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tyler,” he said, “Rumsey-Warner is letting you go.”

I don’t know what I had anticipated. I’d had no idea where his conversation was leading, no clue as to why he’d been throwing strike statistics at me. I guess I’d thought for a single soaring moment that he’d been telling me about Ramsey-Wamer’s good fortune only as a prelude to giving me a raise or a promotion, I guess that’s what I secretly thought and hoped. I looked at him now in stunned silence, his brown suit blending with the warm comfort of the room, his face impassive, brown eyes watching me from behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

“This is Wednesday...”

“Sir, did you say...?”

“... but you may draw your wages to the end of the week. I think you’ll agree that’s more than is called for.”

“Sir, I don’t understand...”

“Yes, what is it you don’t understand, Tyler?”

“I don’t understand...”

“We no longer have need of your services, I thought I’d expressed myself quite clearly.”

“But I thought...”

“Yes, what did you think, Tyler?”

“I thought I was doing my job, I thought...”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Moreland said.

“I’ve never missed a day, I’ve always...”

“Tyler,” Mr. Moreland said, “we do not want a strike here in 1920, is that clear?”

“Yes, but...”

“Your sympathies are well known around this mill. If you want my advice...”

“My sympathies?”

“A man can’t go around talking the way you do, and not...”

“What sympathies?”

“... expect word to get back to Management. There’s no place at Ramsey-Warner for radical ideas.”

“Radical?”

“Yes, radical, now damn it, Tyler, you’re trying my patience.”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m not a Communist, if that’s what you’re...”

“Did I say you were a Communist?”

“No, but...”

“I did not say you were a Communist, nor do I know whether you’re a member of the Party or not. It has been estimated by the National Security League, however, that there are 600,000 resident Communists here in America, and I can assure you, Tyler, that we don’t want any of them here at this mill. Now if you want my advice, you’ll draw your wages and be quietly grateful for our generosity, that’s my advice to you.”

“Sir,” I said, “this is America. A person can...”

“Yes,” Mr. Moreland answered, “and we’re damn well going to keep it that way.”

There was dazzling sunshine in the yard outside. It reflected from the flat gray of the buildings, so that the walls surrounding me seemed so many mirrors bouncing back light without image. Allen, I thought. Allen Garrett told them. Allen is the only person I’ve ever considered a real friend here, the only person with whom I’ve exchanged ideas, it must have been Allen who said I was a radical. Stunned, I walked across the sunlit yard and tried hopelessly to reconstruct every conversation we’d ever had. “They are little Lenins,” I remember quoting sarcastically, “little Trotskys in our midst,” this was at the beginning of the month, when we were talking about the New York State Assembly’s vote to expel its five elected Socialist members. Yes, of course, oh God, and Allen had quoted in rebuttal a clipping from the Times, sent to him by his uncle in New York, “It was an American vote altogether, a patriotic and conservative vote. An immense majority of the American people will approve and sanction the Assembly’s action,” and I had told him that the Times was crazy, and so was his uncle, and so was he. And hadn’t (no, it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t have been Allen who’d cost me my job) but hadn’t we argued only last week about those two Italians up in Massachusetts, whatever their names were, who had supposedly committed murder and armed robbery, but who were also — coincidentally — radicals who’d taken part in several strikes and who’d organized some kind of protest against the Department of Justice? Hadn’t I said, Oh God, what hadn’t I said, what hadn’t I felt free to discuss with my good friend Allen Garrett?

When I got back to the conveyer belt, he was rolling a log off toward the woodpecker. He squinted down at me from where he stood on the platform, sunlight slabbing his eyes, and said, “What’d Moreland want?”

“I’ve been canned,” I said.

“Why?” Allen asked, looking genuinely shocked.

I did not think it would be difficult to find another job.

We were in the midst of what seemed like lasting prosperity, and even though some gloomy forecasters were predicting a full-scale depression before the end of the year (based, I supposed, upon the recent collapse of farm prices) I could not imagine unemployment walking hand-in-hand with inflation. So in that second week of a Chicago May that quickened my step and elevated my spirits, I put on my best suit each morning, with a clean white shirt and collar, tic held in place by a stickpin made from a pearl my mother had given me as a wedding present, and went off to seek work. I left the house early every day, trying to get to as many mills as possible, but I was usually home by two or three o’clock, and it was Nancy who suggested that the Grzyimeks downstairs must have thought I was a gangster selling illegal whiskey or something, since I kept such elegant hours. I encouraged this idea all during my second week of job-hunting, tipping my hat to Mrs. Grzymek whenever I met her in the hallway, affecting the air of a very successful if somewhat shady businessman off to a strategy meeting, after which I would have lunch at the Commercial Club and then come home in time for an afternoon nap. But at the end of the second futile week of hunting, Mrs. Grzymek ran into Nancy at the butcher’s, and asked, “Has your husband found work yet?” puncturing even that balloon. We had fifty-six dollars in the bank when I lost the job, and by the last week in May, we were down to thirty-two. I was getting just a trifle nervous. Moreover, Nancy was beginning to nag me about not having seen the Garretts in all this time. Sounding like a phonograph record of my own arguments, and probably ticking off the points on her fingers one by one (we were in bed when she treated me to this particular sermon, and I could not see her in the dark) she explained that (1) I was reacting quite hysterically to a climate of suspicion and fear, (2) I was behaving as abominably as Mr. Moreland had, and (3) I was condemning and hanging poor Allen without even giving him the opportunity to defend himself. I politely said, “Pardon?” and rolled over and went to sleep. I had more pressing things on my mind than Allen Garrett’s supposedly injured feelings.

It was raining when I woke up the next morning. The bedroom was chilly and damp. I did not want to get out of bed. I did not want to travel in the rain to Ogden Avenue, where I had a job interview with a Mr. McInerny of Dill-Holderness International. But I thought of those thirty-two dwindling dollars in the bank, and I thought of how tempted I had recently been by a recurring classified advertisement in the Tribune for a washroom attendant at the Blackstone Theater. So I pulled on a pair of trousers over my cotton nightshirt, and went into the hall to perform my morning toilette, even as Bertram A. Tyler might have done in Paris, France, before leaving for his highly profitable automobile agency on the Avenue Neuilly. Then I shaved and dressed myself in the clothes that had so successfully fooled Mrs. Grzymek, kissed Nancy on the cheek, and went out into the rain. I was drenched before I reached the streetcar depot.

Mr. McInerny was a tolerable old bore who apprised me of the fact that forest products ranked seventh in the United States industry in this year of our Lord 1920, and would no doubt rise even higher on the scale in years to come. There are unlimited opportunities in paper for a young man who’s not afraid of hard work, he said. I assured him that I was not afraid of hard work, and then told him of my not inconsiderable experience in lumbering — the font, so to speak, of the paper industry (Ah, yes, the font indeed, Mr. McInerny said, nodding) — and of my apprenticeship at Ramsey-Warner, all of which seemed to impress him favorably. But at last he got around to the part of the interview I was dreading, “Why did you leave your last place of employment, Mr. Tyler?”

“I was let go,” I said.

“Why were you let go?” Mr. McInerny asked.

I had coped with this question on every interview I’d had during the past three weeks, debating whether I should lie in answer to it, knowing it would take nothing more than a telephone call to ascertain the truth of whatever I said, and finally developing a sort of compromise answer, a lie that wasn’t quite a lie, a truth that wasn’t quite that either.

“There was a personality conflict with another employee,” I said.

Mr. McInerny looked at me very closely. “What kind of personality conflict?” he asked, surprising me. On my last several interviews, the clever answer I’d evolved had not been challenged. I sat now in silence, wondering what to say next. “What kind of personality conflict?” Mr. McInerny asked again in his gentle boring voice.

“A man I worked with was making false accusations about me,” I said, and realized I would now have to define the accusations and do a dissertation besides on innocence defiled, realized in short that I’d already lost the job.

“What kind of accusations?” Mr. McInerny predictably asked.

“Well,” I said, figuring honesty was the best policy, “they thought I was a radical.”

“Who thought so?”

“Mr. Moreland who fired me.”

“Are you a radical?”

“No, sir.”

“How do I know you’re not?”

Throwing caution entirely to the winds, I said, “How do I know you’re not, Mr. McInerny?”

“I‘m not looking for work,” he answered.

We stared at each other in polite silence, Mr. McInerny smiling in his bored and gentle way, I knowing for certain that the smoke had gone all the way up the flue. Mr. McInerny shook hands with me, and promised to let me know his decision by the end of the week, but I knew I had not got the job. My suit, which had begun to dry out a little in his office, got soaked all over again the moment I stepped outside. With my luck, I was sure it would shrink to half its size before I got home. It had cost me thirty-five dollars and ninety-five cents less than a year ago.

It was still raining when I got off the streetcar. A tall slender girl wearing a white raincape was standing on the front stoop of my building, her dark head bent, studying the falling raindrops in the sidewalk puddles. She looked up as I approached, seemingly on the verge of glancing away again immediately, as though she had wrongly greeted too many strangers during her wait and was now ready to reject even the person she expected.

“Hello, Bert,” she said.

“Hello, Rosie,” I said, surprised. “What’re you doing out here in the rain?”

“Nancy asked me to stop by, but she doesn’t seem to be home.”

“Well, come on up,” I said. “No sense getting wet.”

“I would welcome a hot cup of tea,” Rosie said.

“Sure, come on up.”

We climbed the steps to the second floor in silence. There was the aroma of mustiness in the hallway, the steady sound of rain drumming on the roof, the angrier splash of the waterspout in the areaway. From the flat downstairs, I could hear the eldest of the Grzymek children practicing scales on the parlor piano, a dreary accompaniment to the rain. There was no light on our landing, save for the natural illumination from the airshaft window at the top of the stairs. I moved closer to the window, searching through my keys for the one to the front door, and then turned and felt for the keyhole. Rosie stood silently beside me. When I opened the door, she went into the kitchen and walked directly to the stove.

“Damn rain,” she said.

“I’ll bank the fire and put up a kettle.”

“I’d prefer a drink if you’ve got anything.”

“I think so.”

She did not take off her cape. She stood huddled near the stove while I shoveled coal into it, and then she reached into her bag for a package of Sweet Caps, shook one loose, lighted it, and blew out a long stream of smoke, almost as if it were a visible sigh.

“You should get a telephone,” she said. “For situations like this.”

“Can’t afford one. Especially now.”

“How’s it going, Bert?”

“Nothing so far.”

“You’ll find something.”

“Unless everybody already knows I’m a Communist.”

“You shouldn’t say that. Not even in jest.”

“Who’s jesting?” I said.

“Bert,” Rosie said, and then stopped. I turned from the cabinet near the stove, where I was rummaging through the bottles, but she only shook her head and puffed again on the cigarette.

“Looks like all I’ve got is some Rock and Rye a fellow at the mill made.”

“Fine,” she said.

“It’s sort of sweet.”

“I only need it to take off the chill.”

“Wait, here’s some scotch.”

The bottle was almost empty, the last of the wedding reception whiskey Nancy and I had brought from Eau Fraiche. I poured a little into the glasses and carried them to where Rosie was standing near the stove.

“To your finding work soon,” she said, raising her glass.

“Amen,” I said, and drank with her.

“Bert,” she said, and again shook her head, and puffed on her cigarette, and then lifted the stove lid and dropped the butt onto the coals. She walked to the table, put her glass down, turned to me, folded her arms across the cape, and said, “Bert, Nancy won’t be back until two o’clock.”

“What do you mean?”

“We arranged this between us.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to you.”

“Is this going to be about Allen?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t Allen come himself?”

“Because he doesn’t know anything about your fancied grievance.”

“Oh, is it fancied?”

“Yes.”

“Rosie,” I said, “I’ve been out of work for close to three weeks. I’ve got thirty-two dollars in the bank, and the rent’s about due, and that isn’t fancied.”

“Your grievance is.”

“I lost my job.”

“Allen had nothing to do with that.”

“Didn’t he? Then why hasn’t he come around?”

“Because he’s... no, I won’t tell you. It’ll only convince you you’re right.”

“What is it?”

Rosie shook her head.

“Well,” I said, “my feet are wet, so if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to change my socks and put on some slippers.”

“No!” she said sharply. “I told Nancy we’d have this settled by two, and damn it, we will!” She reached into her bag for another cigarette, struck two matches before she managed to get it going, and then glared at me angrily, as if I’d been responsible for her inability to light it.

“As for Nancy,” I said, “I never thought she’d be a party...”

“That’s right, start imagining things against your own wife, too.”

“No one asked her to start meddling in...”

“I did. Allen had nothing to do with your getting fired.”

“Then why hasn’t he been around to inquire about the state of my health? You still haven’t answered that one, Rosie.”

“He’s been busy.”

“Ahhhh. Poor fellow. I’ve been busy, too.”

“He got a promotion. He’s been trying to learn...”

“Marvelous!” I said. “What was it? A reward for turning in the anarchist?”

“That isn’t fair, Bert!”

“No? What’s fair? I’ll be begging in the streets if I don’t find a job soon. What’s fair, Rosie, you tell me!”

“Oh, give me another drink,” she said.

“The scotch’s gone.”

“Then give me some of that crappy Rock and Rye. You really get my goat, Bert, I’ve got to tell you.”

I walked back to the cabinet, found the bottle of homemade stuff, and carried it to the table. Rosie handed me her glass. I rinsed it out at the sink and then went back to where I’d left the bottle. The only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of the big clock on the shelf over the drainboard. The rock crystals banged against the side of the bottle as I poured.

“Thank you,” Rosie said. She raised her glass. “When shall I bring Allen?”

“Never,” I said.

“Bert...”

“Your husband is a liar and a rat. I don’t care if I never see him again as long as I live.”

“You stink,” she said, and drank. “Flffff,” she said, pulling a face. “This stinks, too.”

“Rosie,” I said, “why don’t you just go home?”

“I think I will,” she answered. She carried the glass to the sink and poured the Rock and Rye down the drain. Then she rinsed out the glass again, and put it on the drainboard. She checked her rouge in the mirror over the sink, touching one corner of her mouth with an extended forefinger, then turned and walked swiftly to the door. At the door, she said, “This isn’t the end, Bert,” and walked out.

Since I was not starring in a motion picture about virtue or courage rewarded, and since the age of miracles was otherwise dead, I did not hear from Mr. McInerny by the end of the week, nor did I get the job at Dill-Holderness. Instead, I drew twenty-six dollars from the bank to pay the landlord when he came around for the rent, and then I wired my brother-in-law Oscar in Arizona, asking him for a loan of a hundred dollars to tide me over until I could find a job. He sent the money by return wire. The telegraph operator asked me, “Are you Bertram A. Tyler?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Sender requires that you answer a question.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wants you to answer this question before I turn the money over to you.”

“Oh. Sure. What’s the question?”

“Name his tribe.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Name the sender’s tribe.”

“Oh... uh... Apache. No, wait, it’s... that’s right, Apache.”

“That’s right, Apache,” the operator said.

June

June 5, 1966

June 6, 1966

June 9, 1966

June 15, 1966

June 17, 1966

June 22, 1966

June 24, 1966

June 28, 1966

July

I suppose I felt that Dolores should have had at least some sort of patriotic understanding for the sacrifices made and still to be made, considering the fact that her brother had lost his eye flying a low-level bombing mission over Ploesti. But she surprised me by saying it would certainly be worth a few thousand dollars to get myself out of the Army, and if I knew how to arrange it, I should make the proper inquiries at once.

I knew how to arrange it and also where to arrange it. The word had been passing around Mitchel Field for months now, the hangar talk being that you could get a medical discharge, a safe assignment, a furlough extension, or a transfer merely by contacting the right people and crossing their palms with silver. I knew the talk was true, and I personally resented its authenticity. Mind you, I held no brief with the Army’s recently disclosed points system for discharge. It seemed to me that the scheme was heavily weighted in favor of two types of soldiers, those who were married and had children, and/or those who had received certain combat awards or decorations. Someone like myself, who had flown fifty combat missions over enemy territory with his hands and feet freezing and his head pounding, could muster only thirty-six points against the eighty-five required for discharge — a point for each month I’d been in the service, and another for each month I’d served overseas. The system was unfair, and it placed me in imminent danger besides of being reassigned to the Pacific to fight against the Japanese while some Army instructor stationed in Iowa got his discharge because he’d happened to sire three kids. But that didn’t mean I was ready to buy myself out of the Air Force.

My father had written in his most recent letter to me that the United States Government might be a little slow in redressing grievances, but that it always made good sooner or later, as witness the bill President Truman had just signed, whereby we would pay the Sioux Indians for ponies the Army had taken from them after the massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876. With a stroke of not unexpected sarcasm, my father had written, “I’m sure your Uncle Oscar, though he is but a mere Apache, will be terribly pleased.” Well, it was easy to become cynical about anything that had to do with the Army, but I sure as hell hoped it wouldn’t take them another seventy years to revise the points system. Anyway, the day after I received my father’s letter, I was glad I hadn’t been lured into buying a fake discharge. The way the Army had finally caught up with its pony thieves, the Air Force finally caught up with the two commissioned officers and six enlisted men who were involved in what was described as a “nefarious and scandalous racket.” The ring was arrested on July 6 at Mitchel Field; when I told Dolores that night about the furor on the base, she only shrugged and said, “You waited too long, love.”

The “love” was an affectation acquired from her brother, who had of course been stationed with the Eighth Air Force in England. The cynicism was her own, somewhat unsettling to discover in a girl who would not be eighteen until next month, especially when her opening line had been “Hay is for horses.” I suspected, though, that I was leaning a bit too heavily on that first impression, trying to create for myself the image of a beautiful dope. Because aside from humping her, which was delicious, I wanted no real involvement with Dolores Prine, and the easiest way to avoid any meaningful relationship was to convince myself she was incapable of tying her own shoelaces, which simply was not true.

Her older brother, Douglas, had graduated from Science (which Dolores assured me was the best high school in New York City) at the age of sixteen, and was in his second scholarship year at Columbia when the Army drafted him. Wearing his black patch with all the flair of a latter-day pirate, curly hair darker than his sister’s tumbling onto his forehead, he would fix me with his one good piercing eye blazing out of his head like fire from The Green Lantern’s ring, and engage me in polemic — political, religious, financial, artistic, it didn’t matter. He loved to argue, and more often than not he would draw Dolores into our heated debates as well, and together sometimes they would strike sparks long into the night while I secretly yearned to touch her, and she knew I did, and glanced shyly at me, slyly, as if to say, But you see, love, I can think as well. The arrest of the Mitchel Field ring sent Douglas off into a lecture on the moral dissolution of America, his thesis gaining vigor the following day when it was revealed in Chicago that the use of counterfeit red ration coupons had reached a new high, some 8,000,000 points having passed over the nation’s meat counters in June alone. Two days later, when federal agents in New York arrested twenty-four people on charges of selling or possessing narcotics, Douglas showed me the Daily News headline like a poker player exposing a royal flush, shouting at me as though I represented the system — “This is what I lost my eye for!” he screamed, and his mother came in from the kitchen and advised him please to calm down as his father was still asleep.

Mrs. Prine seemed more concerned with her son’s infrequent outbursts than with her daughter’s daily wanderings. School for Dolores had ended on June 15, but before then I had made arrangements with a corporal out at Mitchel to use his parents’ apartment on West End Avenue as soon as they left for Nantucket on the Fourth of July. I had been promoted to first lieutenant after the Fiume raid, which meant that I was now earning about two hundred dollars a month, when I added in my longevity pay and my subsistence allowance. I couldn’t very well pay the corporal an exorbitant amount for the use of the apartment, but he was willing to settle for ten dollars a week, plus whatever small favors I could extra-legally confer as an officer — passes, use of Army vehicles off the base, bar duty at the Club, where he hoped to meet higher-type broads. (This was all before the scandal broke; afterward, I was pretty damn careful about anything I signed for him.) In any event, Dolores and I spent a lot of time at the apartment, and her mother’s indifference to her whereabouts puzzled me. I asked Michael what he thought about it one day — this was before the Air Force transferred him out to Luke Field, where he was to begin training fledgling pilots — and he told me with a great deal of scholarly nodding of head and adjustment of imaginary spectacles that sexual mores were changing in America, harrumph, but that parents were still unable to visualize their children in situations any more compromising than those they themselves had experienced at the same age. Add to this the fact that Mrs. Prine was a phenomenally ugly woman who had probably never had a pass made at her in her life, and you could understand why she could not for a moment imagine, harrrrumph, what her nubile daughter was doing every day of the week, harrrrumph. I thanked Michael for his shrewd observation.

Mrs. Prine, now that I thought of it, was a singularly unattractive woman. Small-bosomed, narrow-hipped, near-sighted but too vain to wear eyeglasses, she squinted and flapped around the big Sutton Place apartment dictating letters to a temporary secretary who came in once a week, directing club activities and charities, arranging balls and parties, scattering papers like fallen leaves behind her, and constantly glancing back over her shoulder as though expecting something she had overlooked to grab her by the nape of the neck. It was reasonable to believe that the farthest thing from her mind was her daughter’s sexual initiation, and I was grateful for her indifference, but at the same time felt oddly guilty each time she squinted her greetings to me at the front door.

On his days off, Mr. Prine followed his wife around the apartment like the executive offices on a battleship, wiping a white gloved hand into the angled joining of bulkhead and deck, fluttering helplessly in her boiling wake, bald pate glistening, eyebrows raised in anticipation of the calamities she constantly predicted. Douglas towered over his father by a full foot and a half, and it was somewhat comical to see Mr. Prine coming sleepy-eyed out of the bedroom at two in the morning to ask his huge, one-eyed son, calmly and patiently, to please lower his voice. Mr. Prine was chief counsel for a firm that manufactured ladies’ girdles, corsets, and the like (“He’s very big in ladies’ underwear,” Dolores said to me one day in our West End Avenue bed, and then wiggled her eyebrows as I burst out laughing at the old old gag), and he was constantly being sent to negotiate contracts in Minnesota or Maine, coming home a week or ten days later to hear his wife forecasting some new impending disaster. He was invariably too busy to concern himself with what was happening to either of his children, a failing that pounded itself home with frightening suddenness at the end of the month, when the vague calamity his wife had been expecting descended with fury upon his household.

I should have suspected that something was wrong with Douglas from the start, but I assumed only that he was too bright for me, that he was aware of meanings too subtle for me to grasp. He had purchased a wire recorder shortly after his discharge, and was now engaged in filling spool after spool with recorded notes for a documentary radio program he hoped to submit one day to the major networks. Whenever I went to see Dolores, I would find her brother closeted in his room, surrounded by open newspapers and magazines, the radio blaring the news as he selected and snipped the articles or items he needed for his project. There was no mistaking the seriousness with which he approached his task, nor his conviction that he was embarked on something that would prove enormously valuable to the world in its post-war reconstruction. Sometimes, as he played back his assorted gleanings, his voice took on the mannered cadences of a Walter Winchell or a Gabriel Heatter, but he always seemed to realize when he was hamming it up, and excused himself by saying he had not yet overcome the theatrical lure of the microphone. For the most part, he read his items into the machine in his normal speaking voice, dispassionately, and I was honestly impressed by the logical order in which he had arranged his news fragments, and forced to respect the purposeful clarity of even those parts of his indictment with which I disagreed. An indictment it was, no question about that. Only occasionally did he veer from his thesis, as though he had absent-mindedly strolled off a path that wound through a formal garden to find himself entangled in a patch of weeds. But he always found his way back again, always managed to extricate himself, the flat recorded voice returning to recite the facts he was laboriously compiling.

That was in the very beginning.

He became convinced early in June that the Japanese would never surrender and that he would be called back into the service to do more bombing. He did not know how they expected him to look through a bomb sight again, he had only one eye, didn’t they realize that? Were they now redrafting blind men and cripples to light their war? The Japanese would never surrender, despite the pounding we were daily administering in the Pacific, and even if they did surrender, it was all for nothing.

“Look at this,” he would say, “look at this world we’re attempting to save, what’s the point?” He would pick up a clipping from his desk then and begin reading it in the portentous voice of a March of Time announcer, “July 8, 1945 — an American guard at the POW camp in Salina, Utah, today machine-gunned the tents of sleeping German prisoners, killing eight and wounding twenty, how are we any better than they? Look at this one, July 13, 1945” (the March of Time voice again) “the House Un-American Activities Committee today assigned an agent to investigate Representative Rankin’s claim that Hollywood is the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States, and that big names are involved in one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government. It’s the goddamn Palmer Raids all over again, have you ever heard of A. Mitchell Palmer?” (What newspaper is that from? I asked.) “Look at this stuff, Will, this is all fact, look at it. July 14, 1945 — Genera! Eisenhower announced today in Frankfort-on-the-Main that United States troops may now converse on streets and in public places with adult Germans, do you get the significance of that, Will? They were only allowed to talk to kids before this, but Eisenhower says the new move is a result of rapid progress in de-Nazification. I say if we’re talking to the Germans today, we’ll be sleeping with them tomorrow, the same way you’re sleeping with my sister. Oh, don’t look so surprised, I’m not blind, I’ve still got one good eye, buddy. Anyway, who cares? What you’re doing is only an infinitesimal part of the whole molecular structure.”

In bed one afternoon toward the end of July, Dolores said, “Now there’re these two buttons, okay? And if you push the one on the right a hundred million Chinese peasants will die immediately. You can save them all, though, by pushing the one on the left, but then I’ll die. Have you got it?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Which one would you push?”

“This one,” I said, and gently touched the nipple on her right breast.

Dolores looked down at herself and grinned. “You mean you’d sacrifice a hundred million Chinese just for me?”

“Two hundred million.”

“Yes, but only peasants.”

“Landlords, too.”

“Mandarins?”

“Even emperors!”

“You must really love me then.”

“Who said so?”

“I said so. What would you do if I told you I never wanted to see you again?”

“I’d come to your house and break down the door.”

“But I wouldn’t let you in.”

“If I’d already broken down the door...”

“Yes, but I’d call the police.”

“And get me sent to jail?”

“Why should I care? If you don’t love me...”

“I love to touch you,” I said. “Mmmm, where are those sweet buttons?”

“Will, please”

“I’m sorry.”

“You make me feel very cheap sometimes.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“You’re... you’re the first person I’ve ever done this with, you know, I’m not some... some damn old prostitute you picked up on Eighth Avenue.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I’m only seventeen.”

“I know.”

“You might try remembering that.”

“I will.”

“The same age as Juliet.”

“Juliet Schwartz?”

“Sure, Juliet Schwartz.”

“Now what are you going to do? Start crying?”

“Over you? Fat chance,” she said, and burst into tears.

“Juliet was only fourteen,” I said, and handed her a corner of the sheet. “Here. And besides, you’ll be eighteen next month.”

“That makes me some kind of hag, I guess.”

“No, it makes you a beautiful young lady.”

“Yeah, crap,” she said, and wiped her eyes on the sheet, and then reached for my khaki handkerchief on the night table, and noisily blew her nose. “I’m not a fool, you know,” she said. “My father’s a lawyer, you know.”

“I know he is.”

“I can get very mean if I want to.”

“Dolores, I can’t imagine a mean bone in your...”

“I hate that name.”

“But I love it.”

“But you don’t love me!”

“Do you want me to say I do?”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” I said.

“What?”

“I love you.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re only telling me that now because you’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I said. About statutory rape.”

“When did you say that?”

“I didn’t, but I had it all ready. I was going to say, ‘There’re only two things I have to say to you, Lieutenant Tyler,’ and then you’d say, ‘Yes, and what are those two things?’ and I’d say, ‘Statutory rape.’ But it didn’t come out that way because you got me so angry. Do you really love me, Will?”

“I adore you.”

“Yes, I adore you, too. Can you get a pass this weekend?”

“I doubt it.”

“Can you get tickets for The Class Menagerie?”

“Why? What’s...”

“For Friday night?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Daddy left for Los Angeles yesterday to negotiate another one of his panty deals, and Mother’s leaving for Easthampton Thursday. I thought we could spend the whole weekend together...”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

“Because if you wouldn’t admit you loved me, I was going to jump in the river.”

“I’ll get the pass, and I’ll get the tickets.”

It was easier to get off the base for the weekend than it was to get tickets to the play. But I managed both, and arranged with Dolores to meet her at the apartment at seven o’clock that Friday night. The bell rang at six-thirty. When I opened the door, I was surprised to find her standing there wearing a plaid skirt, loafers, and a white blouse, hardly appropriate attire for dinner and the theater afterward. She came into the apartment trembling and apologetic, telling me we couldn’t possibly go out, explaining that she would have called me if the apartment’s telephone hadn’t been disconnected for the summer, but she knew I was waiting for her, and so she’d caught a taxi, and it was still downstairs, and she’d run out of the house without her bag, could we please go back to Sutton Place at once?

In the taxicab, she explained that she had heard sounds coming from her brother’s room the night before, and had thought at first he was up late recording. But when she’d gone in to him, she’d found him sitting in the center of the bed staring at the opposite wall, mumbling what had sounded like gibberish at first, Tupelo Lass, Thundermug, Utah Man, Hell’s Wench, not understanding until her brother said the words King’s Ransom, which she recognized as the name of his airplane, and realizing all at once that he was reciting a partial roll call of the B-24s that had flown low over the Ploesti oil fields on the day he’d lost his eye. When he saw her in the room, he told her that his eye socket was bleeding and begged her to get him something to stop the blood, and she had sat on the edge of his bed, and taken his hand, and convinced him that he was home and safe, talking gently and quietly to him until he drifted off to sleep again. Today, he had seemed completely calm, had in fact gone for a walk in the park this afternoon, leaving his important project for the first time in months. But he had returned just as she was getting ready to dress, and when she greeted him at the door, he said to her, “Shave your head,” and went directly to his room where he turned on the radio full blast, in time for the six o’clock news. She was terribly worried now, feeling certain she should not have left him alone.

The apartment was still when we got there.

Dolores turned on the hall light. “Douglas?” she called.

There was no answer.

“Douglas?” she called again.

He was sitting in the living room near the piano, a blurred huddled shape in the velvet-covered easy chair, the carpet at his feet strewn with newspapers and magazines, the recorder resting on the piano top beside him. “Is that you?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “Listen to this,” he said, and suddenly snapped on the recorder, and turned to us with his unwavering Cyclops gaze as the spool began to unwind.

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea, the recorded voice said, the WPB has estimated today that the war cost us only $7,400,000,000 a month in the year nineteen hundred and forty-four, but the question we now ask and will continue to ask is what does that have to do with the price of fish, when glass eyes are going for a dollar a dozen? Perhaps you’d like to answer that one for us, Mr. Truman, while raising the American flag in Berlin, the same flag that was flying over Washington when we declared war, and telling everybody there that if we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind, in which case why have they stolen my eye and refuse to return it though I’ve mailed countless petitions, give me back my eye you sons of bitches, they’re buying soap in panic all over America, do they hope to wash away our sins, do they hope to wash away the blood, they’ve been warned there’s no shortage, is it true that the Nazis made Jews out of soap, why are we hoarding, do you know that General Minami says, and I quote in Japanese, I always quote, I have the facts right here at my fingertips, don’t try to con me, pal, I know you’re putting it to my sister, Japan, I quote, Japan will be ready to talk peace only when the whole of East Asia is freed from Anglo-American colonial exploitation and when Japan and other nations in the world are assured of a peaceful life based on justice and equality, so where’s my just and equal eye, did you look under the sofa, Lolly, do you remember once when I touched you in the tub and you began to cry, does he touch you, that prick, the Japanese have refused our ultimatum, I told you they would, listen to this, So far as the Imperial Government of Japan is concerned it will take no notice, of what I ask Premier Suziuki, no notice of what, of yellow men being bombed, of eyeless bombardiers sighting, dropping sticks and stones will break my bones and Lolly has no tits, who’s this William Z. Foster who was named chairman of the national board and Party, if there’s going to be one, why weren’t we invited, I’ll bring my cup and pencils, you can shove dimes up my ass and watch me dance the polka, the FBI has tracked down half a million draft dodgers, who would have dreamt, love, that so many Americans had no heart for this beautiful war, did you know that Henry Ford said today just before his eighty-second birthday that the nation and the world, I quote, are on the eve of a prosperity and standard of living that was never before considered possible, but ask old Hank what he was doing back in the summer of 1920 in Dearborn, Michigan, ask him how come, love, ask him should Jews buy his automobiles today, love, why not if they’ll soon be buying the ones the Nazis make, I’m so damn tired, folks, we’re running a little late, folks, the Japanese’ll never surrender, they know I haven’t got a chance with just one eye, oh Jesus Lolly my eye is bleeding again, oh Jesus Lolly save me, love, help me, love, save me (and then suddenly his real voice erupted over the litany coming from the recorder, his real voice burst into the room high and strident, Help, he screamed), Lolly save me help me save me (Help, oh Jesus, help!), and I remembered what Michael Mallory had confided to me so earnestly outside this building on the bank of the river, that he’d kept waiting for the war to catch up to him, kept waiting for the world’s idiocy to overtake him at last (Help, Douglas Prine kept screaming over the sound of the recorder).

He was taken to Bellevue Hospital the next day and committed on July 31 to Four Winds in Katonah.

August

I kissed Rosie.

I kissed her while inside the band played “Avalon” and Allen Garrett sat passed out at the table with his head cushioned on his folded arms, “I found my love in Avalon, beside the bay,” both of us huddled in the shadowed alleyway in the angle where the speakeasy’s kitchen and dining room joined, steam puffing from a vent onto the stifling August night, the aroma of roasting beef, “I left my love in Avalon, and sailed away,” her mouth opening, the taste of alcohol, and my hand sliding into and under the low corsage of her while dress, “You shouldn’t,” she said, and pressed herself to me.

I kissed her because when I’d been dancing with her earlier in the evening, she had pushed tight against me and I had felt myself growing hard and had wanted to hold her closer still, and was embarrassed even though everyone on the floor was dancing that way, I did not know what to do, I did not know what to think. I kissed her because I knew with certainty there was nothing beneath the white tulle but an underslip and knickers of the flimsiest stuff, kissed her because she had said to me the moment Allen passed out, “Let’s get some air, Bert.” I kissed her because she was dark and slender and wore rouge on her wide mouth and laughed very loud when anyone told a dirty joke and smoked cigarettes and drank far too much gin. I kissed Rosie because she was the complete and total opposite of Nancy my wife, whom I loved.

I kissed her, too, because grudges die hard, and I was still harboring a grudge against Allen Garrett.

I had found a job at last in June, but that had been entirely by accident, and every time I got to thinking about the close call I’d had, I started hating Allen all over again. I had asked Oscar for two additional loans of a hundred dollars each, which he had readily sent, together with the assurance that he would continue helping me for as long as I needed it. But the new loans put me three hundred dollars in the hole to my brother-in-law, and I didn’t like such a huge debt hanging over my head like a half-chopped tree. I had just about given up hope when I went out to the Circle Mill to apply for work as a loader. The job paid five dollars less a week than I’d been earning at Ramsey-Warner, but that turned out to be academic, anyway, because it had been filled by the time I got out to Joliet. I didn’t know what to do. I hated going home to face Nancy, I actually hated the thought of going home. I walked across the Circle yard breathing in all the familiar scents of a paper mill, hearing all the familiar sounds, and thinking maybe I should take Nancy and head back to Wisconsin, I could always get a job in the woods there, always make a decent enough living to support her that way. I guess I’d been walking with my head bent, hands in my pockets, and I only chanced to look up as I started out the main gate, and saw three fellows in suits like my own, standing on line outside a covered staircase that ran up the side of one of the buildings, its galvanized metal roof reflecting sunlight. I walked over to the line and asked the fellow on the end of it what was going on, and he told me they were hiring salesmen, and I said, Oh, and was ready to leave again, when I thought Well, why not a salesman, you’ve already considered cleaning out toilet bowls, haven’t you? and I got on the end of the line.

The man who interviewed me was named Gerald Hawkes, and he asked me six questions in rapid succession and then stared at me in silence.

Q: Have you ever sold paper products before?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever sold anything before?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever worked for a paper company before?

A: Yes.

Q: Which one?

A: Ramsey-Warner.

O: Why did you leave?

A: I wasn’t earning enough money.

Q: How much would you like to earn

A: Fifty dollars a week.

Gerald Hawkes blinked at me. He stroked his mustache. He fingered his stickpin. He got up and walked around his desk and came over to my chair and circled the chair and studied me, my suit, my shoes, my shirt, my tie, and then went back to his desk and sat again in the big leather swivel chair behind it, and fingered his stickpin and stroked his mustache.

“We’ll pay you ten dollars a week,” he said. “Plus commissions. You won’t be earning much in commissions at the start, but then neither will we be earning much in sales. When you’ve learned the territory, you should start making a lot more than the fifty you’re asking.”

“Will I have to travel?”

“Why, what’ve you got against traveling?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why’d you ask about it?”

“Because you didn’t mention anything about traveling expenses.”

“You won’t need traveling expenses, you’ll be selling to retail stores in the Chicago area. Can you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, which was true. But I had been living in Chicago for more than a year now, and had not driven a car since I’d left Wisconsin, and was really a little apprehensive about driving in Chicago traffic. I did not tell him any of these things, though. I was learning fast that one way to get a job was to sprinkle a few lies here and there among the petunias.

“Can you start work tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“Good. Report to Mr. Goss in Room 314 at eight o’clock.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Welcome,” Gerald Hawkes answered, and stroked his mustache.

I began working at the Circle Mill on a Wednesday morning. That Saturday night, Allen and Rosie came up to the South Lawndale flat bearing gifts — a turkey Rosie had roasted, and a bottle of gin her brother had made. (He had actually made two cases of the stuff, which qualified him as the biggest bootlegger I personally knew.) The visit was not unexpected. Nancy had prepared me for it, or, to be more precise, had bludgeoned me into accepting it. There was a lot of embarrassed foot-shuffling and eye-shifting when the Garretts arrived, but at last Allen and I shook hands like two schoolyard kids who had had a knockdown-dragout fistfight and were now reluctantly making up. We all toasted my new job (including Nancy, whom I had never before seen drinking hard liquor), and then we toasted Allen’s promotion, which I was still convinced he’d got by lying about me. Nancy and Rosie went out to the kitchen to warm the turkey and set the table. Allen and I sat opposite each other silently in the parlor.

He offered me a cigar, which I declined.

He cleared his throat.

He shifted his weight in the big easy chair.

Then he said, “Bert, no matter what you think, I never said anything to anybody about you being a radical.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“I believe you,” I said. But I didn’t.

The job was a good one. Circle ran a huge operation, with two mills on the West Coast, another in New York State, and of course the one in Joliet. Since the company manufactured a wide variety of paper products — newsprint, industrial papers, bond and writing and ledger and manifold papers, bags and boxes, book and offset papers, butcher’s wrap, you name it — my selling job took me to a great many different kinds of retail outlets, and I was certainly never bored. Circle’s main paper product that year, though (as was the case with ail of the Joliet mills), was wallpaper, and I guess I earned most of my commissions selling to the housewares sections of the big department stores, or to the smaller paint and wallpaper retailers scattered all over Chicago. By the end of my third week at Circle, I began to think that Allen had done me a big favor. My earlier ideas on how to become a corporation executive now seemed terribly naive. The way to get into the board room was not by spiking and rolling logs off the conveyer belt. This was the way. I found myself outlining a plan for my rise through the Circle Mill ranks, allowing three to live years for each phase of the escalation, from salesman to District Manager, in which position I would begin supervising salesmen, and fighting with plant managers for deliveries, and influencing mill schedules, and meeting regularly with management, and then moving up to Sales Manager where my salary would take a sudden jump and company stock would be offered to me, and then on to Vice President-Sales where I would undoubtedly come into conflict with the Vice President-Manufacturing because the next job upward on the ladder was Executive Vice President, third highest position at Circle, with only the Chairman of the Board and the President of the company above. This was 1920. If everything went as I expected it to go, I could become President of Circle by as early as 1932, but certainly no later than 1940. None of it seemed beyond my grasp. I was, perhaps, just an uneducated lumberjack from the Wisconsin woods, but (as I had once told Mr. Moreland) this was America, and I knew that here a man could become whatever he chose to become.

The Garretts entered my life only peripherally in those early days at Circle. We saw them socially perhaps once a week, sometimes less, and I knew that our friendship was dying a normal death, and that it might have been dead already had his betrayal not, paradoxically, spurred a renewed interest in it. What I had earlier regarded as his inquiring mind, I came to realize was only a sponge invariably absorbing the wrong opinions of others. I can remember one night in the parlor of the Garrett flat when I mentioned that Circle had given me a brand-new Ford to drive, and Allen suddenly began endorsing all the horse manure being printed in the Dearborn Independent, rising to his full height and telling us that the claims about an international Jewish leadership were absolutely true, that the Jews were hellbent on confounding and confusing and finally overcoming the Gentile world by creating wars, revolutions, and civil disorders, that the Jews were getting all the profits from the sale of illegal whiskey, the Jewish landlords were charging exorbitant rents, (he Jewish manufacturers were making all the shorter skirts responsible for our decadence (while Rosie’s skirt inched higher and higher every week), the Jewish producers were making movies about orgies and putting on filthy Broadway plays, the Jews were doing this, the Jews were doing that, the Jews in short were responsible for everything that was wrong in the nation and the world because, just as the Independent had reported, everything was “under the mastery of the Jews.” I didn’t argue with him. Nancy and I left early instead. I knew the friendship was dying, and yet I clung to it, telling myself at first that Allen really wasn’t too bad a fellow, telling myself that Rosie was good company for my wife, but wondering even then, I suppose, if I wasn’t just waiting for exactly what was happening now.

Now, two months and a little bit later, in an alleyway outside a speakeasy, I knew the sweet revenge of kissing Allen’s wife, hot and trembling in the sweltering summer night as a gang of kids went by in one of Mr. Ford’s tin lizzies, and inside the vocalist sang, “And so I think I’ll travel on, to Avalon.” She put her tongue into my mouth, she pulled her face away from mine and laughed, she arched herself against me, and said, “Where’d he park the car? Let’s get in the car, Bert.”

“Rosie,” I said, “we’d best go back.”

“No,” she answered, and took my hand.

In the rear of the Jeffery Sedan, the windows open, passing automobile lights intermittently illuminating the interior roof, Rosie lay back against the cushioned seat and lifted her dress above her waist and said, “Do you like my stockings rolled?” and I touched her legs, touched silk the color of her flesh (a year ago, two years ago, a century ago, girls wore stockings that were either white or black), “All the girls are doing it,” Rosie said. (Doing what? Turkey trot? The world had changed, everything had been changed by the war.) Her mouth in the darkness was bright with paint, there was a vapid smile upon it, would she later claim that she’d been drunk? The smell of homemade gin climbed into the steamy interior of that silent automobile, our alcohol-scented breaths rushing to merge a moment before we locked lips again, my hands under her dress, clutching at her. She reached up with her thumbs to hook the elastic of her teddies, and then pulled them down over her belly and her thighs. I could dimly see the pale whiteness of her skin and against it a narrow black triangle, “Kiss me,” she said, my hands on her flesh so warm beneath the white tulle, her legs opening now, her slender fingers pressing the back of my neck, I thought again of a silent forest (there was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist) and of a boy whose dreams in the violet dusk were proscribed by an insulated world, and I entered her, and she said, “What, Bert, what?” and I think I whispered, “I don’t know,” (and then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain) and I sought her mouth, sought that bright scarlet slash and drew from it whatever secrets Rosie knew, drew from it prognostications, scathing visions of what was yet to come, tasting of gin, long silken legs enveloping me, distant music swelling through the open car windows, “Here’s the Japanese sandman, trade him silver for gold,” (and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence).

I drove them home in the Chicago midnight.

There was the smell of gin in the automobile, that and a stronger scent, but Allen Garrett was unconscious on the back seat and incapable of detecting Rosie’s lingering feral aroma, incapable of knowing what I had done to his wife not a half-hour before. She sat beside me now with her legs recklessly crossed, coat open, skirt high on her thighs, the rolled stockings lewdly suggestive (a Chicago streetwalker had been quoted in last week’s newspaper as saying, “You can’t tell the ladies from the trollops any more.”) I did not think Rosie Garrett was a trollop, but I’m not sure I thought she was a lady, either. I knew only that I had taken her with an explosive violence I had never before experienced, and felt now the same confusing aftermath of shame and guilt I had known in France, when i’d failed to stop what was happening to that little girl. I told myself as Rosie sat beside me with her head thrown back against the seat, humming “Avalon” as though I needed reminders of what we had together accomplished in the space of five minutes, told myself that this was the first time and the last time, and knew even then that I was lying to myself. But I tried nonetheless to understand what was happening, because it all seemed to be part of the bewildering labyrinth that had been constructed around me without my knowledge or consent. I felt as though I had, in the past few months, become a very minor if not totally insignificant figure in a changing landscape over which I had no personal control, as though the events of my own life were only secondary to the much larger events taking place. But more than that, it seemed to me that the nucleus of my intimate universe had somehow become dislocated, the nucleus was no longer me, Bertram A. Tyler. I was, instead, only an expendable moon that could be burned to cinders in the upper atmosphere without being missed or mourned, in danger of being replaced in an instant by some other revolving satellite created in outer space from the boiling matter of our time. I was certainly blameless for what had happened (Rosie’s hand on my thigh now, fingers widespread; strangers at eleven, lovers at midnight) if I could point to the speed of the modern-day world as the source of my confusion, the dial on the telephone, the closed automobile, the shorter skirts, the more liberal drinking habits (in themselves a confusing paradox), the whole surging momentum of a nation rushing back to a “normalcy” quite unlike anything it had known before. I blamed all these things, and hoped to become blameless in the process, but the guilt persisted.

So I blamed Nancy as well, blamed her for not being here tonight but being instead in Eau Fraiche with her sister Clara, blamed her besides for being not as female as she might have been, even though the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with either of us (I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but I could not believe there was nothing wrong with her), told myself that somehow her inability to conceive a child made her less womanly, while knowing of course this was not true, and suspecting that perhaps there were passions in her I preferred not to explore lest she become in my mind the equivalent of a whore, neither a mother (which she could not become, it seemed) nor a respected wife. The deception having failed, the guilt and the shame persisting, I allowed the excitement to take complete control, allowed Rosie’s humming to envelop me, allowed her hand to work its way toward my fly, allowed her fingers to unbutton me and to enclose me while we drove slowly toward South Lawndale and Allen snored in the back seat.

And then we had a conversation that seemed to me representative of the precarious balance we were all trying to maintain between the simplicity we had known before the war and the sophistication rapidly engulfing us. With her hand curled around me, with her husband drunk and unconscious on the back seat of the automobile, Rosie Garrett casually asked, “How’s Nancy’s sister?”

“Still in bed,” I said, “but coming along.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Oh, just a bad cold is all. But she’s been running a fever.”

“She’s got how many children?”

“Two.”

“It’s terrible when the woman of the house comes down with something,” Rosie said.

“Especially when she’s married to someone like Ed.”

“What’s the matter with Ed?”

“Can’t stand anybody being sick. Gets absolutely furious, treats Clara like a dog just when she needs him most.”

“When’s Nancy coming back?”

“Wednesday, I think. Or Thursday. It depends on how Clara’s doing.”

“Will you come see me Monday night?”

“What?”

“Monday night. Allen’s staying late in Joliet.”

“I... don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we’d just better forget what happened.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll come see me.”

September

There were five rows of protective barbed wire around the base camp at Cu Chi, and the sandbagged bunkers were spaced at seventy-five-yard intervals inside the perimeter, with one man in each bunker during the daylight hours, and three at night. During the daytime, the line troops manned the perimeter. But between six p. m. and six a. m., two men from the rear echelon joined a single combat-experienced soldier in the bunker, and it was then that things got a little tense. Rear-echelon troops were inclined to shoot at anything that moved, and orders had come down from above that no one was to fire a weapon without permission from the sergeant or officer of the guard in the CP bunker, it being reasoned that the folks out there could be a returning friendly patrol as easily as some Vietcong infantrymen setting up a mortar. So whereas there were plenty of weapons in each bunker — M-60s and M-50s, grenade launchers, M-79s, Claymore mines, and of course our own pieces, the M-16s — we weren’t allowed to use them before we checked upstairs. It was a very comical war, all right.

The base camp at Cu Chi looked like a postage stamp from the air. Visualize those five rows of tangled barbed wire as the perforated edges of the stamp; and inside that the evenly spaced bunkers as the stamp’s border; and moving toward the center, the line-troop hootches with their wooden frames and screened upper halves and tented roofs as a second khaki-colored inner border; and then the body of the stamp itself, a geometric abstract with battalion headquarters to the southeast, and the mile-long air strip running perpendicularly off-center, and to the southwest the rear echelon hootches, a base within a base with its own mess hall and motor pool, its own orderly room and EM’s Club, its own showers and latrines and chapel — for those Remfs who had anything to pray about.

My own hootch was just inside the perimeter to the northwest, and it had a metal roof, which meant that it was very popular after dark, when all us guys would climb up onto it to watch the Night Show — the pyrotechnic display of the Hueys tiring tracer rounds, or of the mortars (ours and the V.C.’s) chewing up the countryside. Fresh back from the boonies, there was comfort in watching the action from a safe distance; it beat Batman all to hell. Some of the rear echelon hootches at Cu Chi were as sumptuously equipped as the Waldorf-Astoria, with electric fans, refrigerators, hot plates, lawn chairs, foot lockers (made by the gooks out of discarded tin cans, and sold at the PX) and even television sets. We were out in the boonies more than we were back at the base, however, and our hardback was only sparsely furnished. The only advantage this gave us over the Remfs was that our empty Spartan cells seemed infinitely larger than their crowded Playboy pads, even though they all measured about the same — thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. There were eight guys in my hootch, including Lloyd Parsons and myself.

Muhammed Ali, a man I enormously admired because he had announced to the world at large, “I don’t have no quarrel with them Vietcongs,” and then had been informed by the Illinois Boxing Commission that his spring title bout with Ernie Terrell was thereby canceled, later learning as well that he was persona non grata in such patriotic centers as Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Bangor, Maine, those guardian cities of America undoubtedly believing that a man who laid it on the line before millions of people each and every time he stepped into a ring was merely a downright yellow-bellied lily-livered coward for protesting his 1-A draft classification; Muhammed Ali, whom the press insisted on calling Cassius Clay despite his repeatedly slated preference for the Muslim name he had adopted; Muhammed Ali might have been surprised and pleased by the comfort in which we lived, exalted besides by the racial breakdown in our hootch, there being five white men and three Negroes present and accounted for, though I doubt he would have appreciated the democracy we experienced out in the boonies, where each of us, black or white, had a fair and equal opportunity of getting killed by them Vietcongs with whom, like Muhammed, many of us had no quarrel.

There were about twenty Chinooks and forty or fifty Hueys at Cu Chi and sometimes they coppered us to places that seemed a thousand miles away. The Air Force personnel at camp was limited to a dozen or so meteorologists, and so the fliers were Army pilots who would drop us in the middle of a clearing surrounded by jungle or rice paddy, and then go back to lay a short timer or two on a moldy mattress in a makeshift shack. Usually, though, we fanned out from the base in a radius no longer than twenty-five miles, going out on day-long patrols or ambushes, reconnaissance-in-force missions, and village sweeps that lasted for weeks and sometimes months, and then coming back to base for a day, or two, or four, and going out again. It was a very comical war, with no real front and with no place in Vietnam being positively secure against enemy action at any given time. Of the 190 guys in my company, I guess sixty per cent were smoking grass. In the hootch, the only one of us who wasn’t on pot was Lloyd Parsons, and maybe he had good and sufficient cause to avoid the stuff.

Lloyd was from 117th Street near Lenox Avenue, which he described as “New York’s fashionable Upper West Side, man.” He had begun smoking marijuana back in 1958, when it was still called Mary Jane, and before it was considered hip to bust a joint before dinner. He was twelve years old at the time, and a junior member in a bopping street gang called The Crusaders, which mounted regular armed forays into Spanish Harlem, a block and a half from its own turf. By 1959, The Crusaders ceased to function as an effective fighting unit, not because the Puerto Ricans had greatly depleted their forces, but merely because — of the gang’s fifteen charter members, and twelve members later recruited, and six junior members-in-training — only four of The Crusaders had not graduated from blowing tea to shooting heroin. (The Puerto Rican gangs were beginning to suffer from the effects of a similar escalation along about then, and so peace of a sort was achieved between the warring factors without benefit of intensive social work; nobody had time to go around breaking heads when he was trying to figure out where to get his next fix.) The gang broke up shortly thereafter, but not before Lloyd — at the age of fourteen — had become a confirmed junkie. He was busted for possession in the spring of 1962, while he was still a high school sophomore barely attending classes, and elected to be sent to Lexington for a commitment of at least four and a half months. He could not wait to get out of the hospital, and when he finally returned to his street in November, he immediately sought out his friendly neighborhood pusher and was back on the shit again within seventy-two hours. He stayed lucky until the beginning of 1964, when he was again picked up by the zealous detectives of the 28th Squad, and again sent to Kentucky. This time, because Lloyd had apparently learned something about himself in the intervening years, the cure was effective. He came back North in January of 1965, eighteen years old and determined never to go near narcotics again. His determination was strengthened by a little thing the United States had going over here in Southeast Asia. It seemed, Lloyd learned, that he could join the Army and enjoy an equality he had never known on the streets of Manhattan, while simultaneously being whisked away from daily contact with bad company eager to encourage and supply any new habit he might care to develop. He enlisted in February 1965, and made E-4 inside of a year. When I met him in Vietnam, he seemed very much his own man, confident that he would survive this war the way he had survived the war against the Puerto Ricans, certain there was a real future for him in the United States Army, where a man’s value was determined by the rating on his sleeve and not by the color of his skin. If anyone ever offered him a joint, Lloyd only shook his head politely, and said, “Thank you, no, I don’t smoke.” He was the coolest cat I’d ever met in my life. I think he considered me a friend.

In August, Dom Viscusi, a guy in our hootch, stepped on one of the V.C.’s punji sticks while we were on a vill sweep, the excrement-dipped, sharply-pointed bamboo piercing the sole of his boot and causing an infection that got him sent first to the 12th Evac Hospital on the base, and then to Japan for R and R, lucky bastard.

Rudy Webb was Dom’s replacement.

He arrived in September with about six or seven other guys who must have thought (the way I did when I first got there) that Cu Chi was really the boonies. I suppose it was, in relation to Saigon. But to us who had been there for a while, it was home, it was safe, and the boonies were out farther, the boonies were wherever they took us to fight. Rudy was an E-2, a short squat fellow with a weight lifter’s powerful build, crew-cut blond hair, and blue eyes slightly darker than my own. He came into the hootch somewhat shyly, the way most replacements did, and introduced himself to the other guys who were sitting around writing letters or listening to Armed Forces Radio on their transistors. He’d been flown over only last Tuesday, so we asked him the usual questions about the States and about the Saigon scene, and he answered us like fuzz being interviewed on a television news program, never once saying anything as simple as “We caught the crook” when it was possible to say, “We apprehended the perpetrator,” peppering his speech with words he surely understood, but making them sound like a second language. I guess he was trying very hard to create a good first impression among guys who had been living together for quite some time. But not knowing our separate backgrounds, and not wanting to take any chances, he came on like what I suspect he thought a college professor sounded like, and the results were a little ludicrous. Nonetheless, he seemed to be a nice enough guy, and I think all of us considered him a welcome addition to the hootch. Dom Viscusi had, in fact, been a terrible pain in the ass.

I did not get a chance to really talk to Rudy until evening chow, I was sitting alone at one of the mess hall tables when he came over and quietly asked, “Excuse me, is this seat occupied?”

“No,” I said.

“You mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you,” he said, and climbed over the bench. He was wearing his newly issued cotton jungle shirt and field pants, and he moved with the ponderous neatness of most very strong men, moving his muscles about like heavy furniture in a small room, adjusting his buttocks to the bench and his arms to the table. He ate as though he had come from a large family where it was imperative to finish everything in sight before somebody grabbed it off your plate. He did not look up at me again until he had devoured all the food on his tray, and then he raised his head and his eyes and abruptly said, “I’m not sure I caught your name this afternoon. I’m Rudy Webb.”

“Wat Tyler,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Wat,” he said, grinning boyishly and engagingly, and then suddenly looked at me with a puzzled expression, and asked, “How was that again? Wat?”

“That’s right. Well, Walter, really.”

“Oh, Walter

“But everyone calls me Wat.”

“Yeah?” he said, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “regardless,” and extended his hand across the table, slyly watching me to see if I’d caught his proper usage, no dolt mouthing nonexistent words was he, “it’s a real pleasure,” and took my hand in a firm grip, a good grip, not the kind some jocks gave you when they were trying to assert something by crushing your fingers to a pulp. “Where are you from, Wat?” he said, like a genial master of ceremonies on a television game show, trying to put a nervous guest at ease.

“Connecticut.”

“That’s very nice up there in Connecticut,” he said. “Whereabouts exactly?”

“Talmadge.”

“I don’t believe I know it. That anywhere near New Haven?”

“About halfway between New Haven and New York.”

“I’m from Newark,” he said. “New Jersey.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I got people in New Haven. Relatives.”

“I went to school there,” I said.

“Yeah? What school?”

“Yale.”

“Oh, yeah? The college there?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened? You flunk out?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I quit.”

“How come?”

“Just like that,” I said, and shrugged.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“I liked it fine.”

“Then why’d you quit?”

“It was a personal matter.”

“You knock up a girl or something?”

“No,” I said, and suddenly burst out laughing.

“If you did, who cares? This is Vietnam, we’re lucky we get out of here without having our asses cracked,” he said and, pleased by my spontaneous laughter, began laughing with me.

The red silk pajamas came as a surprise that night to everyone in the hootch. But it was Jimmy Wyatt, a black kid from Philadelphia, who started giggling when he saw them. Depending on what season it was, we slept either in our underwear or all our clothes, not because civilian pajamas were outlawed (they weren’t), and not because we were worried about additional laundry charges (most of us sent our laundry out to be done, the way American sailors on Chinese gunboats did in the early 1900s, preferring the native work to the slob jobs done by the PX or QM concessions), and not because we thought it might be necessary to pull on our pants in a hurry (we were all fairly confident that Charlie would never get through the perimeter), but merely because you didn’t wear pajamas in the goddamn Army. I had never seen a soldier wearing pajamas, not at Fort Gordon where I’d taken my Basic, and not at Fort Jackson where I’d had my AIT, and certainly not here in Vietnam. But Rudy Webb readied into his duffle that first night, and pulled out a pair of blazing red silk pajamas we later learned he had bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a big yellow dragon embroidered on the back, and without a sign of embarrassment or a word of introduction, put them on and then picked up his toilet kit and started heading out of the hootch toward the latrine. Jimmy Wyatt, who was tall and skinny and who had played center for his high school’s basketball team, was stretched out on his cot reading a comic. It got very cold at night in September, even when it wasn’t raining, and so Jimmy was fully dressed except for his boots, and he had wrapped his legs in a blanket besides, and he seemed very cozy and happy and thoroughly engrossed in his reading. His short-timer’s calendar hung on the wall behind him, the gatefold from last month’s Playboy, over which he had drawn a grid of tiny squares covering the girl’s body and representing the number of days to the end of his tour. Each time we got back from the boonies, Jimmy filled in more of the squares with his pencil. He had forty-two days to go, and the only open squares were on the girl’s huge breasts and belly. He turned a page in the comic as Rudy walked past, and I suppose the dazzling display of red silk caught his eye because he looked up and suddenly began giggling. Rudy stopped dead in his tracks, as though he had been anticipating some comment on his sleeping attire, and was now more than ready to deal with it. There was a smile on his face as he turned to Jimmy. I was writing a letter to Dana at the other end of the hootch, and when I looked up the first thing I saw was Rudy’s smile, and I remember thinking what an odd smile it was, and then he said, “What’s the matter, pal?”

“Man, those are some classy pajamas,” Jimmy said, giggling in his very high, almost girlish way.

“You like them, huh?” Rudy said, still smiling.

“Oh, yeah, man, I really dig them,” Jimmy said.

“Then what’s so funny?” Rudy asked, and the smile dropped from his face.

Still giggling, Jimmy said, “Nothing.”

“Then what the hell are you laughing like an idiot for?” Rudy said.

“Who’s laughing like an idiot?” Jimmy asked, and since he was no longer giggling, there was a certain comic validity to the question. In fact, I expected the whole thing to fizzle right then and there, expected it to pass into company lore, Remember the night ole Rudy Webb put on them red p.j.’s and skinny Jimmy Wyatt start laughing like a fool, and then they both rolling on the floor in tears, oh, man, we sure had some high old times in Vietnam, d’in we? Lloyd Parsons, who was sitting on his cot just opposite me, glanced up, and with a note of authority befitting the highest-ranking man in the hootch, said, “Hey, you guys, knock off the shit,” and that certainly should have been the end of it.

But without glancing at Lloyd, his eyes on Jimmy who was still stretched out on his bunk tensed now for a move, anticipating trouble, Rudy said, “Maybe he’d like to tell me what’s so fucking funny about my pajamas.”

“Hey, man, bug off,” Jimmy said, “you and your pajamas both. You was going out to brush your teeth, so why don’t you go brush them, huh?” He picked up his comic, searching for his lost place, and Rudy took one quick step toward him and slapped it out of his hands. It fell to the floor with a tiny flutter that crashed through the hootch like a mortar explosion. Jimmy lay still and silent for a moment. His hands were empty, but he deliberately held them frozen where they’d been when he was holding the comic. Slowly, deliberately, like a challenged gunslick, he raised his eyes to Rudy’s face, and then opened the blanket, swung his long legs over the side of the cot and stood up.

Rudy was waiting.

With the toilet kit still clutched in his left hand, he threw his right fist full into Jimmy’s face, sending him falling back onto the cot, and almost collapsing it. Dropping the kit and rushing up tight to the side of the cot, fists clenched, he waited for Jimmy to get to his feet again, but Jimmy was too smart to stand up into another punch. He swung out on the opposite side of the cot instead, giving himself the full clearance of the hootch aisle, and then backed cautiously toward the door to move outside, where he would have plenty of room to maneuver and where his longer reach might easily give him the edge in a jabbing fight. Rudy bounded out of the hootch, yelling something about the pajamas having cost him thirty-five dollars, and Lloyd and I both ran out after him, anxious to put an end to this thing; we had never had a fight in our hootch before, and we did not want one now. The two men were warily circling each other when we reached them. Lloyd stepped close to them and said, almost in a whisper, “Come on, you guys, save that for Charlie.”

“This is Charlie,” Jimmy answered.

They were referring, of course, to the Vietcong, the V.C., Victor Charlie in the Army’s phonetic alphabet, shortened by the fighting men of America, ta-ra, to plain old Charlie, the enemy out there in the boondocks. Or at least I was certain that Lloyd was referring to the men in the black pajamas, but I wasn’t too sure that Jimmy’s man in the red pajamas wasn’t quite another Charlie, a different Charlie, the Charlie who was the enemy back home in the really distant boonies of America, Charlie nonetheless, Mister Charlie the white man. For a startling moment, I wondered if the double meaning had been intended. We had never had any racial bullshit in our hootch, but news from home traveled very fast these days, and the race riots this month in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, Mississippi, and Christ knew where else had caused at least some consternation among the black troops. So maybe this was it, maybe Jimmy Wyatt had suddenly stopped worrying about the big Yellow-Red color war we were fighting out there in the boonies and was insisting instead on making his war very real and personal — stating it plainly in black and white, so to speak.

“We’ll settle this ourselves,” he said, and Rudy hit him.

There was no contest.

Rudy was a powerful man, and it was obvious from the start that he had also done some boxing back home in Newark, New Jersey. His first punch opened Jimmy’s lip. Jimmy flailed his arms the way he must have as a twelve-year-old on the streets of South Philly, landing only a few wild haymakers that hardly fazed Rudy, who kept moving in with his head ducked to deliver blow after solid blow to Jimmy’s body and head. Jimmy’s face was covered with blood, there was blood in his hair, blood on his shirtsleeves and on his trousers. Rudy was going for his eyes now, battering punches at first one eye and then the other, and I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s going to blind him.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said.

“I can take him,” Jimmy said, spitting blood, and Rudy hit him in the left eye again, opening a cut at least two inches long.

“That’s enough!” I yelled, and threw myself on Rudy.

I knew he was strong, but I didn’t realize how strong until his first punch connected. He hit me just below the heart, and I thought for a wild moment that his fist was going to bore a tunnel clear through to my back, tearing whatever flimsy tissues offered resistance, breaking ribs, ripping arteries, penetrating with the force of a shell fragment. I reached for my chest like a man in the midst of a cardiac seizure, clutching right hand crossing over, mouth open, gasping for breath, my left arm dangling at my side. Rudy hit me again, in the face this time, and as I staggered back and away from him, he whirled on Jimmy and clobbered him on the side of the head with a roundhouse punch that knocked him to the ground. I threw myself at Rudy again, certain now that he was going to kill us both and bury our bodies just inside the wire, throwing a punch that he easily knocked aside, and then feeling his fist collide with my throat just to the left of the Adam’s apple, another inch and I’d have been choking in the dirt. He hit me on the ear, and then threw a straight jab at my nose, and I felt blood gushing from my nostrils, and I thought how glad I was that Dana wasn’t here to see this, and then I heard Lloyd say, “Okay, Webb, that’s it.”

“You want some, too?” Rudy shouted, and whirled on him.

“Yeah, I want some, too,” Lloyd answered and reached into the top of his boot and pulled out a hunting knife, because Lloyd did not kid around, Lloyd had lived with danger all his life, and was too used to coming back from it alive.

Rudy stared at the knife.

“Okay,” he said.

“I can take him,” Jimmy said again, and tried to get up, and fell back to the ground on his face.

October

An old lady holding an open yellow parasol sat on a bench silhouetted against the cloudless sky and speckled water. I watched her from across the Drive, and saw her delicately rise, the sunlight filling the yellow silk for a final instant before she snapped the parasol shut, and hung it on her arm, and slowly walked away. Chicago, burnished with October’s gentle light, had been silenced by Sunday. Looking out over the lake while the waiting cab driver impatiently revved his engine, I could imagine a time centuries ago when La Salle stood on this same shore with an Indian named Chikagou, chief of all the Illinois country, and talked of furs and kettles, hatchets and knives. Had there been gulls against the sky then as there were now, crying into the stillness? Had La Salle here in “Portage de Checagou,” as he had spelled it in a letter, even remotely suspected the immensity or wealth of the land that lay to the west? For whatever you said about this city, however you compared her to New York, which was bigger and busier and had more restaurants and barber shops and easily as many gangsters, you could not take from her the certain knowledge that she was neither huddled nor crouched upon a tiny island, but towering instead on the brink of a continent. I felt the openness of prairies here. I fell space behind me and ahead of me and around me, the limitless space of a sky free of flak. I was happy to be home.

The driver honked his horn.

“Coming,” I said.

Nothing had changed.

The Tyler crest was still there, leaded into the frosted glass panel on the front door, green spruces against a blue sky. I rang the bell below the small brass Tyler escutcheon set in the richly carved oak jamb, and Linda opened the door and flung herself into my arms. My father came through the sliding doors from the living room, and smiled broadly and held out both his hands to me, and I thought, He looks the same, a trifle older perhaps, but essentially the same, nothing has changed. We went into the living room, and my father slid the doors shut behind us, and then poured scotch for himself and me, and a glass of sherry for my sister who was, after all, eighteen years old now, and going steady with a boy my age who expected to enter college as soon as he was discharged from the Navy.

“He wants to be an accountant,” Linda said.

“That’s very nice,” I said.

“You’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“His name is Stanley.”

“That’s nice.”

“I call him Stan.”

The glasses were passed around. My father stood in the middle of the room with the portrait of my mother hanging behind him over the fireplace mantel, not a good likeness, I had hated that picture even when she was alive. He raised his glass and said, “To Will,” and my sister echoed simply, “To Will,” and I said, “To all of us.”

My sister wanted to know whether New York was really as exciting as everybody said it was, and my father asked if I’d been to this or that restaurant which he went to whenever he was there on business, most of them too expensive for me. Linda went out to the kitchen to see how the new maid was managing with the roast, and my father and I talked some more about New York, and then he got around to asking me what my plans for the future were.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you expect to go to college?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said.

“What do you want to study?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“No.”

“I suppose you’d like to take it easy for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any school in mind?”

“No.”

“I imagine you’d be given preference at a school in Illinois.”

“Yes, I would imagine so.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“Mmm.”

My father poured a little more scotch into each of our glasses.

“I’m glad you’re home, Will,” he said.

Critical revision, he had called it.

I was eight years old and sitting at the dining room table in another house, Linda on my right with her elbow in my ribs as usual, my mother listening attentively, oddly silent. He was telling us about the paper industry, and of how he would not have risen to his present position (Sales Manager, I think it was) had he remained inflexibly committed to an original false notion. When the opportunity for critical revision had presented itself (remember those words, son, critical revision) he had eagerly seized it and, as a result, his entire life had changed. (All of this was terribly fascinating to an eight-year-old boy who was anxious to get upstairs to his comic books.) Critical revision, he said again, and I remembered hoping he would not go into another of his long-winded sermons, but he sure enough did, explaining that all too often people pursued a wrong idea with the same zeal and energy that could be devoted to the right one, developing a life style that was based upon a fallacy or a series of fallacies. Or worse yet, people and even nations — failing to recognize that once-worthy goals, causes, or ideas could become obsolete, being creatures of habit, and lacking this capacity for critical revision — remained steadfastly devoted to a way of life that was no longer a valid response to the times.

It was funny the way words meaningless to me then, despite my father’s eagerness to explain (my mother listening so attentively, as though he were telling her something private, not to be heard by the children, a glance exchanged at the table, their eyes meeting, had he said something to her that I did not understand, why had he been so insistent on defining the way of life a man chose, the way of life to which he irrevocably committed himself — well, never mind.) The words had meaning for me now because, home and safe, surrounded by all the things I had known through eighteen years of boyhood, I suddenly felt a lack of direction or will, and wondered whether it wasn’t time to engage in some of that critical revision my father had tried to promote those many years ago.

I told myself that what I missed most was flying. I had not been inside an airplane since I left Foggia early in April, and I wished now that I could climb the access ladder onto the wing of a Lightning again, open the top hatch and settle into the pilot’s scat, lock my safety belt and run through all the familiar pre-flight checks, battery switch on, cross-feed switch off, tank selector valves to outer wing on, half a hundred more burned into my memory through repetition. I longed to taxi out to the end of a runway, and then hold hard on the brakes and open the throttles, manifold pressure and rpm mounting, the airplane trembling around me, and suddenly let her go, release the brakes and allow her to roll away, speed building, fifty miles an hour, eighty, airborne at a hundred, memory taking over completely as I thought again about flying. I wanted to be in the sky again. I missed flying terribly, I told myself, and had no right to deny myself its pleasure any longer. So I went out to the Elmhurst Airport one day, and rented a twin-engine Beech for fifteen dollars an hour, and took her up and put her through some simple maneuvers, and then landed her, and went back home to the house on East Scott, still filled with an odd sense of deprivation.

I took out Charlotte Wagner that Friday night, and discovered that she wanted to talk exclusively about the old days at Grace School, recalling incidents I had either forgotten or never been a part of, remembering classroom jokes and school outings, student and teacher characters, all the games she had cheered, and even the cheers themselves, turning to me in the parked automobile, eyes glowing, to chant, “With a G! and an R! and an A! and a C! and an E! With a Grrrrace School...” and then pulling away when I tried to kiss her, and telling me I had never answered the postcards she’d sent me from Cape Cod in the goddamn summer of 1944! I called Sarah Cody the next day, and went to pick her up in high expectation because she had always been a fun-loving kid with a fine Irish sense of humor and adventure, and a smile that broke like a sunrise, with a good figure besides and a reputation for being pretty easy, or so Michael Mallory had reported. She was even prettier than I remembered, sleek black hair and a pert fresh mouth and sparkling blue eyes, the conjured image of every Irish lass who’d ever been kissed in a haystack, but she told me almost immediately that she had been scheduled to go out with a senior from Northwestern who had come down with a bad cold, and so I was extremely lucky that she was free, it being a Saturday night and all, and then expressed keen disappointment when I told her that what I had in mind was a movie when her original plans had been for dancing at The Empire Room. Sarah Cody, it seemed, was being dated almost every night of the week by university boys who found her ravishing, witty, sexy, responsive, inventive, brilliant, and nothing if not perfect. The movie was lousy. I did not try to kiss her goodnight because I didn’t wish to mar the flawless line of her lipstick. In desperation, I called Margaret Penner that Wednesday and said, “Hello there, Margie, this is Will Tyler, I don’t know if you...” and she hung up, small surprise. In an agitated state of extreme critical revision, I decided that perhaps I missed Dolores Prine, I guessed.

We had said goodbye one October night, huddled together in a hotel bed, Dolores warm and trusting and weeping in my arms as I let lies fall like autumn rain around us, gently pattering on the sodden leaves of what she thought was an undying love. Dolores, I said to her, I’ve never met anyone like you in my life, I hate to leave you now, but I’ve got to go back to Chicago, I’ve got to go home to find my roots again, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, I’ve been through a war, Dolores, and there are a lot of things I don’t yet know about myself or about what’s waiting for me in civilian life, and so I’ve got to go back, and I can’t take you with me, not yet, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, Maybe after I’ve been there a while, maybe after I’ve had a chance to find this person who is Will Tyler, to look at myself in the mirror (Yes, love) and come to terms with myself, know what it is I really want, why then maybe, Dolores, I can send for you and we can be together again, but not now, Dolores, can you understand that, not now (Yes, love, weeping) and made love to her again before dawn because if I was going to be a rat, if I was going to lie to this eighteen-year-old kid (Yes, love, yes) and cause her to believe that I would one day send for her, cause her to believe that this was not truly the end, not truly goodbye, then I might as well go whole hog, might as well be the consummate bastard, take all I could get from her before I left her flat, yes love yes love yes, and we said goodbye.

She had written eight letters to me, none of which I’d answered. I went upstairs to my room now, and read them over again. In the last letter, she had enclosed the snapshots we’d taken the day before I left New York. Clipped to the twelve prints was a slip of white paper with the single word “Remember?” scrawled onto it. I looked at the black-and-white photographs now, trying to reconstruct in my mind the exact moment when the camera’s shutter had clicked to freeze Dolores into one or another characteristic pose, realizing all at once that the girl whose pictures lay spread out beside me on the bed was not just one girl, not only Dolores Prine, but really a rather extraordinary and startling collection of girls: Dolores munching on a jellied apple, her hazel eyes opened wide in surprise as the camera clicked on a ravenous bite; Dolores striking a mock sexy pose against a lamppost on Lexington Avenue, coat open, one hand on her hip, the very image of a Parisian streetwalker, eyes slitted, mouth curled in sensuous invitation; Dolores gazing down at the river outside her building, sunlight caught in the shimmering web of her hair, her eyes all but closed, her face in silhouette as clear as alabaster, as soft as snow; Dolores leap-frogging a fire hydrant, legs akimbo, hair floating, eyes and mouth wide open, shrieking in girlish delight as the shutter clicked; Dolores angry and frowning because I had been saying, “No, your head a bit more to the right, that’s it, no, a little more, yes, perfect, no,” until she shouted, “Go to hell, Will!” just as I snapped the picture. I studied this crowd that was Dolores, trebled it, multiplied it by a thousand, converted it into a mob of Doloreses, and then reversed the procedure, condensing, solidifying this universe of girls into one alone, Dolores Prine, who seemed to me now the most marvelous girl I had ever known. In those frozen snapshots on the bed, I detected a pulsating life, and I wanted to hold it close and fierce, and never let it go again. I went into my father’s library, missing her desperately, telling myself that what I wanted to do was go down to New York for a few days, maybe a week, spend some time with her, nothing was happening in Chicago anyway. Dear Dolores, I wrote, and crossed it out, Dolores darling, I wrote, and crossed it out, and wrote Dear Dolores again, and then wrote, I’ve been here in Chicago for several weeks now, doing all the thinking I told you I’d have to do before corning to any knowledge of myself and, oh, shit, I thought, and crumpled the letter and threw it into my father’s wastebasket. I got up from the desk and began pacing the room, walking past the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, my eye traveling over books that must have been bestsellers when my father was about my age, stuff like Miss Lulu Belt by Zona Gale and The Valley of Silent Men by James Oliver Curwood, and Mooncalf by Floyd Dell and a very hot little number called Jurgen by James Branch Cabell, which I took from the shelf and thumbed through, finding a long underlined passage in it. I became curious about some of the other books then, and began leafing through them at random to see if my father had marked any more pages. Most of them looked unread. There was, however, a corner niche of World War I books which were dog-eared and heavily annotated. I carried some of those over to the desk and scanned the notes he had boldly scribbled into the margins, indignant outbursts like Nonsense! or This did not happen! sympathetic praise like Yes, God, yes! or I remember the stink, too! Intrigued, I found myself reading a paragraph in the middle of one book, and then turned back to the first chapter, and then moved from my father’s desk to the big leather chair near the Franklin stove, and suddenly lost all interest in writing my letters. That afternoon, I discovered that I did not miss Dolores and I did not miss flying.

What I missed was war.

I missed the uniform, and I missed the routine, and I missed being awakened in the pre-dawn hours and going to the latrine with a dozen other guys and shaving and putting on my flying gear and going to the briefing hut and being told that today we would provide penetration, cover, and withdrawal for another bombing raid. I missed the excitement, I missed the killing, I missed the war.

That night, I went out to get drunk.

I found a bar on the South Side that reminded me a lot of The Eucalyptus on Wilshire Boulevard, which Ace and I used to frequent a lot when we were hotshot pilots in Transitional Training and making the long haul down from Santa Maria every chance we got because there was so much sweet pussy in those Los Angeles hills. It was late, the jukebox was going, a few hookers were hanging on the bar, there was a pleasant hum, a familiar clink of glasses. I felt warm and cozy. I knew I would get drunk and that pleased me because I did not feel like thinking about my future, or wondering whether I’d go to college or go to New York or go into my father’s business or try writing or contact Pan-American to see if they needed a very good combat-experienced pilot to fly one of their airplanes. I didn’t want to think about anything. I merely wanted to get drunk and then go home to sleep.

I don’t know what was on the jukebox, I really can’t remember. I’d had two or three drinks already when the guy sitting next to me at the bar turned and said, “This is a nice number,” and I said, “I’m sorry, what...?” and he said, “This song,” and I listened for a moment, and then said, “Oh yeah, it is.”

“I’m a musician,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I play tenor sax and clarinet. I work with a little combo over on Woodlawn. Do you know a place called Frankie’s?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s where I work. Tonight’s my night off, though. It’s the chord pattern that makes a song good or not, you know. This one’s got a particularly good chart.”

“There’re so many new ones,” I said, “I can hardly keep up with them.”

“Especially when you’ve been away for a while,” he said. “That’s right, how can you tell?”

“I don’t know what it is, but a guy who hasn’t been wearing civvies for a long time looks really weird in them. Take me, for example. I look as if I just got out of prison last week, and this is the suit they gave me, do you know what I mean?”

“I know just what you mean,” I said, and began laughing.

“I was with the Fifth Army in Italy,” he said. “I just got back to Chicago in August.”

“I was with the Fifteenth Air Force,” I said. “Also in Italy.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Foggia.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near Bari. Down on the heel.”

“I didn’t get over to that side of the boot. We landed in Salerno.”

“No, Foggia was on the Adriatic side.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m glad all that shit’s behind me. What are you drinking there?”

“Scotch and water.”

“Bartender, let’s have another scotch and water, and a bourbon on the rocks here. My name’s Bob Granetta, I play under the name of Bobby Grant, you can call me both or either.” He extended his hand.

“Will Tyler,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Will.”

He was taller than I, leaner, with a thatch of curly black hair, dark brown eyes, a grin that climbed crookedly onto his face as he shook my hand briefly and then picked up his drink again. Leaning on the bar, he said, “How do you like being home, Will?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah, me too. I kind of got a kick out of Italy, you know. Hell, I ran into half my goombahs over there, it was like Christmas on Taylor Street. Were you born in Chicago?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Me too. Ah, thanks,” he said to the bartender, and then raised his glass. “Will,” he said, “here’s to rehabilitation or whatever the hell they call it, huh?”

“Here’s to it,” I said.

“Salute” he said in Italian, and drank. “When I think of some of that piss we were drinking overseas,” he said, “I get just sick thinking about it. Where do you live, Will?”

“Over on East Scott Street.”

“Oh boy, I’ve met my first millionaire,” Bobby said, and began laughing.

“No, not quite.”

“I’m only kidding. I used to walk that whole Astor Street neighborhood when I was a kid, though, wishing I could live in one of those great old houses. Are you living with your folks?”

“With my father and sister. My mother’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it was a long time ago,” I said, and suddenly realized that it was.

“I couldn’t stand living with my folks any more,” Bobby said. “I was in the Army for three years, you know, I couldn’t come back and all of a sudden have my mother telling me to pick up my socks. Pick up your own socks, I felt like telling her. So I have a place of my own now over on South Kimbark, do you know that area?”

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s a nice place, this guy I know helped me fix it up real nice. Also, it’s close to where I’m playing, which is very convenient. I don’t finish till three, four in the morning, later on weekends because we usually hang around to jam, you know. It’s great to be able to walk only two or three blocks and flop right into bed. How’s that scotch doing?”

“I’ll get the next round,” I said, and signaled to the bartender. “I feel like getting drunk tonight.”

“You and me both. We’re lucky we ran into each other. I hate drinking alone, don’t you?”

“Worst thing in the world.”

“Hate doing anything alone, matter of fact.”

“I had to fly that mother-fuckin’ airplane alone,” I said.

“What kind of plane did you fly, Will?”

“The P-38. The Lightning,” I said. “Bartender, another round here, please.”

“That’s a pretty plane,” Bobby said. “That’s the one with the tail like this, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, with the twin booms.”

“Yeah, that’s a great airplane.”

“A great airplane,” I said. “How come you didn’t get into an Army band?”

“Not good enough, I guess,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “You’ve got to realize the Army had its pick of some of the best musicians in the country. They were drafting guys from Benny Goodman’s band, Glenn Miller’s, even Al Di Luca’s — which happened to be the band I was playing with before they grabbed me. I’m sure you’ve heard of him,” he said, and laughed.

“Everybody’s heard of Al Di Luca,” I said.

“Certainly. So with all those musicians going in, there just weren’t enough Army bands to go around. Really, Will, you can’t win a war by sending people out to play ‘American Patrol.’”

“Here we go,” I said. “Drink up, Bobby.”

“Here’s to Al Di Luca,” Bobby said, “wherever he may be.”

“And here’s to...” I started, and shook my head.

“Yeah?”

“No,” I said, and drank.

“Have you got a quarter?” Bobby asked.

“Let me see.” I took out my change and spread it on my palm. Bobby picked up a quarter, and then went over to the jukebox. By the time he returned, I’d finished my drink and ordered another one. A hooker came over to chat with us about the weather, and Bobby matter-of-factly asked her how much it cost for the night and she told him it would be twenty-live dollars but that she didn’t French. If he wanted somebody who Frenched, he was barking up the wrong tree. He told her to go peddle her ass someplace else, and then ordered another drink and angrily said, “High-class whore, working a bar on Stony Island Avenue. What’s so special about her mouth, would you mind telling me?”

“They’ve been spoiled,” I said. “Too many servicemen around.”

“I’d rather go home and jerk off than risk getting a dose from something like that,” Bobby said.

“You and me both,” I said.

“Besides, there’re too many nice girls in Chicago.”

“Right.”

“Have you got a girl, Will?”

“Not here.”

“Where?”

“New York.”

“That’s a long way off.”

“Not even a girl, really.”

“What then, a boy?” Bobby said, and laughed.

“Not a girlfriend, I mean. Just somebody I was fucking steady.”

“What’s her name?”

“Well,” I said, and shrugged.

“Listen, I’m not going to dash down to New York and call her,” Bobby said, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Dolores,” I said.

“I knew a girl named Dolores in Georgia. Dolores Greenberg. I suspect she was the only Jew in the state. She was fabulous in bed.”

“So was mine.”

“Do you think maybe all Doloreses are marvelous in bed?”

“Maybe so.”

“Or maybe it’s just you and I who’re marvelous, and we made them look good.”

“Maybe, who knows?”

“Are you finished with your scotch? We’d better order another round.”

“Must be a hole in this glass,” I said.

“Listen,” Bobby said, and put his hand on my shoulder again, “why are we wasting a fortune for liquor here when I’ve got a bar full of the stuff at home? Why don’t we go up there, listen to some records, and drink all we want to, without having to call the bartender every two minutes. What do you say?”

“Well,” I said, “we’re here now, we might as well stay.”

“I’ve got some really good records,” Bobby said. “I don’t know if you dig jazz or not, but I’ve got stuff that goes all the way back to Jimmy Blythe and King Oliver. What do you say?”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d have a few more drinks and then head home.”

“Why? Is your Daddy waiting up for you?” Bobby said, and laughed.

“It isn’t that,” I said, “but we’re here now, what’s the sense moving?”

“Come on up to my place,” Bobby said.

We were facing each other now, we had turned our stools to face each other, our knees touched, our eyes met.

“Come on,” he said.

He put his hand on mine.

“Come on.”

I woke up to brilliant sunshine.

I was naked.

There were tiny spatters of blood on the sheet.

I could hear the shower running someplace in the apartment. I got out of bed and picked up my undershorts rumpled on the floor, and pulled them on and put on my pants and shirt and jacket and stuffed my tic into the pocket and hurriedly put on my socks and did not bother to lace my shoes.

In the street outside, I ran.

I kept looking back over my shoulder.

From a telephone booth on Cottage Grove, I placed a call to Dolores in New York, hoping I would catch her before she left for school. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” she said.

“Dolores? This is Will.”

“Will! Where...?”

“Dolores,” I said, “Dolores, I... I need you. Will you marry me, Dolores?”

“Yes,” she said.

November

It had been snowing heavily since four o’clock. A huge Election Day bonfire had been set in the middle of Sixty-third Street, and from Jackson Park, where I waited for Rosie, I could see the flames leaping up against the falling snow. There was a sharp wind blowing in off the lake. Sparks raced into the sky like incandescent flakes, and the marchers around the fire struggled to hold onto their makeshift signs as they bravely chanted their election slogan into the wind, “We Want Harding, We Want Harding!” Farther up the street, a second fire flared in the late afternoon darkness, and another chant joined the first, so that they merged bipartisanly in the blinding snow, “Harding, Cox, Roosevelt, Coolidge,” one becoming the other, indistinguishable.

I had come directly from the mill, telling Nancy beforehand that I might be home late tonight as I wanted to stop by the polls to see how heavy the voting was. I would not be old enough to vote until January, but she knew I was keenly interested in this presidential election, and readily accepted my alibi. From Joliet, I had called Rosie and asked her to meet me in Jackson Park at five o’clock, and she had said, “In this storm, Bert?” and I had answered, “Yes, Rosie, in this storm.” I stood hatless on the edge of the park now, my hair blowing, the snow thick underfoot and swirling in the air, clinging to my coat. My gloved hands were in my pockets. I was cold, and I was wet, and I had no stomach for this tryst, but it was something that had to be done, and I aimed to get it done today.

When we were relieved by the 5th Division in October 1918, and I received Nancy’s letter in Montfaucon, I got drunk with a worldly French corporal who told me he would never understand the American attitude toward marriage and sex, making it sound as if one were quite naturally exclusive of the other. He told me that no Frenchman in his right mind would dream of a life that did not include a garçonièrre and a pretty little lady with whom to share it on a rainy afternoon (he was, significantly, from Paris and perhaps his description of the French ideal did not apply to places like Les Eyzies or Vence). But he told me that before the war he had known at least half a dozen married American businessmen who had become utterly demoralized after falling in love in Paris. Since falling in love, and being in love, and making love were to the corporal the very essence of life, he could not fathom what seemed to him a juvenile, unrealistic, totally unsatisfying, and uniquely American approach to sex. He had demonstrated his premise by picking up two out of the three tavern whores and taking them both off to bed, he being a married man with four children, the youngest of whom was almost my age.

I was not in love with Rosie Garrett, of that I was certain, and yet I had been to bed with her at least a dozen times since that night in August, and had felt that same guilt described by the French corporal, felt a less understandable guilt for meeting with her now, as though we were lovers when in my heart we had never been anything like, when in my mind whatever had happened between us was already finished. I reached under my coat and fumbled in my vest pocket for my watch, clicked it open, studied it, snapped it shut angrily, and looked off at the orange-yellow flames searing the afternoon darkness. I had been driving since eight this morning, driving first through a Chicago gray with the threat of a storm as I went from store to store, and then driving out to the mill to chock on several shipments that seemed to have gone astray, and then driving all the way back from Joliet in what had become a fierce snowstorm. I was irritated now, and tired, and feeling foolishly guilty for an affair that had hardly ever been.

She came up behind me and gently looped her arm through mine, and smiled, her face wet with snow, her black fur hat crowned with white, I could remember her smile in the automobile that very first time, and in the stilling heat the strains of “Avalon,” too long ago, too tenuous a bargain to hold me to now.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, “the trolleys are all...”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“You must be frozen, Bert. Shall we go somewhere for coffee?”

“No, I don’t think we should take that chance.”

She turned to me and looked into my eyes, and nodded, and said, “All right, Bert. Can we at least sit down?”

I dusted one of the benches free of snow, and we sat side by side, Rosie with her hands in her black muff, I with mine in my pockets. We might have been strangers, and I suppose we really were.

“You sounded so desperate on the telephone,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine...”

“Well, I’ve got to talk to you,” I said.

“Nancy knows, is that it?”

“No. No, she doesn’t.”

“Allen doesn’t suspect a thing, if that’s what you’re...”

“No, that’s not it, either.”

“You look very handsome,” she said, “with all that snow in your hair.”

“Thank you. Rosie...”

“Yes, Bert?” she said, and brushed a snowflake from her cheek and then turned to me again. She knew what was coming, of course, they always know, women, there are sensors they possess that reach out and delicately probe, touching the core of the matter long before it is broached. Her face took on a pinched protective look, poor Rosie, poor dear Rosie married to a jerk and seeking God knew what from me. I wanted to say Rosie, please understand that I don’t want to hurt you, please understand that there’s a time to choose, dear Rosie, and this is that time for me. I can’t continue, Rosie, unable to look my wife in the eye, fearful that each time she says “Pardon?” she is questioning a fresh lie, I can’t do this to her, because I love her dearly. Forgive me, please, for taking what I took from you, and for turning it aside now, for seeming to spurn it now, I don’t want to hurt you, I truly don’t. But Rosie, please understand that there’s a way of life I cannot follow and yet remain the man I once hoped to become, still hope to become. Rosie, I wanted to say, please know that I can’t commit to this, I can’t give to it the energy or devotion it demands, it would destroy me, it would take whatever's good or real or honest in me and crush it forever. Rosie, I wanted to say, please understand. Rosie, I wanted to say, but she already knew, she looked at me with a small sad smile on her painted mouth, her black fur hat tilted precariously on her head, covered with a crooked crown of snow, she looked at me and waited for me to kill her.

There is only one way to say goodbye.

“Rosie,” I said, “I want to end it.”

I dreamt that night that I addressed a thousand deaf Indians in full battle regalia.

I dreamt that I mounted a platform, carrying a bass drum and a harmonica, and held up my hands for silence, and then hit the drum three times in succession and blew a sustained chord on the harmonica and held my hands up once again. When I began speaking, I spoke clearly and distinctly because all the Indians were deaf and had to read my lips — all of them were lip readers, so to speak. And since I had talked to them many times before, and since each time they had been fooled by my bass drum and harmonica into thinking I was only a song and dance man, I wanted to make absolutely certain that this time they understood me.

I dreamt that they watched me silently as I began to speak, their arms folded across their beaded chests, faces impassive, feathers rustling slightly in the wind. The sky behind them was blue, the platform rose from the center of a vast plain that stretched beyond me and the gathered Indians. My fine feathered friends, I said, I know that I am not one of your highly exalted paper tycoons whose every uttered syllable dears your normally clogged eustachian canals, I know in fact that my own beginnings were humble indeed, for where did I start if not with pulp, where I had to talk loud and talk fast to be heard over the pounding of the drum barker, where if not there? But listen to me, I dreamt I said.

Please, I dreamt I said.

Oh, I know that you have seen me standing here before you on many a previous occasion and perhaps you thought I was trying to sell you fraudulent medicine in glittering bottles, though I tell you now in all honesty my offers were sincerely made, and whatever small ills and tiny ailments I hoped to cure seemed terribly important to me. And should you now, my gathered tribal brothers, should you now fail to recognize the elixir because of what you once erroneously thought to be snake oil, well — the loss will be mine, of course; I am exposed alone to the angry wind here. But the loss will be even more seriously yours.

There was suddenly in my dream an enormous bonfire shooting sparks to the Chicago night, and more Indians dancing about it holding signs that read HARDING-COOLIDGE and chanting “We Want Harding, We Want Harding,” while white men stood beyond the circle of light proscribed by the flames and jeered and taunted, “Harding is a nigger, Harding is a nigger!” I held up my hands for silence while everywhere around us the white men passed their leaflets surreptitiously into the crowd, black type flaming against the orange and red of the fire:

“I ask you now,” a white man shouted, “is this the one you want in the White House, is this the one you would choose to lead this great nation to its proper destiny, is this the one you will vote for tonight against James M. Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the men who deserve to become the President and Vice President respectively of this our bountiful land, and not a person whose colored ancestry can be traced back through four separate lines! Do we want, I ask you, this blackguard in the White House?”

I dreamt I fell to my knees and said, But you do not understand, surely you do not understand. I am no longer involved with Rosie Garrett, I saw her only a baker’s dozen times, it was the heat, I beg you to understand it was only the dire heat that drove us near to crazy with temptation and desire, it was only the heat that caused our fornication, copulation, then and but a dozen times more in the parlor of her flat, but that was all, I swear to you!

The Indian chants rose from around the lire, sparks fled upward into the night, “We Want Harding, We Want Harding,” and now there was a cross-chant from the white men, “Cox, Cox, Tyler is a Coxman! Cox, Cox, Tyler is a Coxman!”

Wait, I dreamt I begged them, wait, please listen to me, I am a veteran of the Great War, ask these noble savages if I did not personally know Geronimo and Cochise, ask them if I did not fight bravely and watch my comrades fall, ask them if I am not now incensed by these false charges against Mr. Harding and determined to vote for him despite this vicious slander, although I am only twenty years old, having been born on the first day of January in the year 1900, and will not be eligible to vote until two months from now — but I would if I could, I swear to you! Please understand, I know you will understand, I do not speak with a forked tongue, I am no longer forking Rosie, I swear that to you, Nancy, please don’t cry, I am no longer seeing her, it is over, it is done.

“It is over, it is done,” the Indians chanted.

The white men faded into the distance, scattering their leaflets behind them, tossing them into the fire, flames of blue and green changing the colors on the redskins’ faces. The Indians stared at me. Behind them, the sky turned a promising mauve. There was music now, somewhat celestial, harps and violins, a gentle wind sweeping from some secret plain.

We are on the threshold, I said, of greatness, the threshold of greatness. We can go either way, you or I, we can take this treasure that we hold here in our hands, my friends, we can take it and squander it, toss it into the fire there where it will burn like those leaflets bearing malicious slander, libel — is there a lawyer among you, my tribal brothers? Is it libel or slander? Which one is printed and which one spoken? No matter. I tell you now that we can take this gift magnanimously bestowed upon us by a generous Lord, yours or mine — what do you call Him, my friends? Is it The Great Spirit? That’s a good name for a righteous God. I have nothing against your God, I tell you we are all one and the same and we all have the duty to make sure we do not squander this heritage of ours, do not scatter it to the winds or toss it on the flames. Side by side we have hunted the buffalo and defended our homes against the invaders from over the mountains, planted our corn and — no, my friends, wait, don’t leave, make no mistake, I do not come to you in Indian guise now, I do not come to you in feathers and buckskin, face painted, it’s just me, just Bertram A. Tyler, your old song-and-dance man, don’t be afraid, don’t leave yet, please wait, please listen.

I think you know what I’m about to tell you. I have the feeling that we’ve shared this dream together, shared it often enough before, lived it together for a long long time, and that we are too wise now to— Damn you, I’m losing my patience!

Shall I talk to you like the ignorant savages you arc, shall I promise dire happenings, heap curses upon your feathered heads, the witch doctor warning of what may come if you do not purchase from me this colorless, tasteless, odorless liquid I’ve naively labeled — well now, where’s the label, must have come unglued. There is no name for it then, my friends, you’ll just have to trust me, I suppose. You’ll have to drain bottle after bottle of this stuff, pour gallons of it into your systems to rid your bodies of the sores and chancres, purge the liver and the bile, make yourselves pure again, for Christ knows, The Great Spirit knows, we are sullied and scorned, we are on the edge of an abyss so deep it might just as well be bottomless. Take it, my tribal brothers, pull the cork and drink deep draughts, it will not hurt you, it can only help. For if you ignore my warnings, here then are the things that will happen to us, to you and to all of us, if you do not hear, if you choose to remain deaf to the music coming from somewhere out there — is there a musician among you? Can anyone tell me what that lovely instrument is?

Though you are brave, you will tremble before ghosts.

Though you are free, you will remain as slaves to the past.

Though you are provident, you will shun visions of the future.

Though you are considerate, you will slaughter your leaders.

Though you are wise, you will engage in thoughtless battle.

Though you would populate the earth with sons, you will send generations yet unborn to perish in their youth.

Though you would stand a hundred thousand years, you will witness the end of your nation instead, and neither it nor you will ever again rise from the ashes.

There was the sound in my dream of feathers blowing on the wind. And then one of the Indians stepped forward, came close to the foot of the platform in the light of the fire and, looking surprisingly like my brother-in-law Oscar, stared up into my face and said only, “Why did you steal our lands?”

December

There was, the surprise was complete, we realized instantly. I stopped, I, the noise, sudden automatic rifle and machine-gun fire coming from ahead and from one side of the jungle trail. Bravo had followed Alpha into an L-shaped ambush, the first fire-team fully contained within the right angle and caught in a deadly cross-fire, my team only partially enclosed with Rudy Webb and I just entering the long side of the trap. Everything screamed urgency — Hit it! Move! — but I did not leap instantly into the bushes on the left because I’d been caught in this kind of ambush before and had learned that the side of the trail from which no enemy lire came, the supposedly safe side, was often lined with angled punji stakes waiting to impale the man who hurled himself reflexively into the undergrowth. I hit the dirt where I was standing instead, and then crawled swiftly off the trail on my belly, elbows working, eyes scanning the ground ahead, and whirled to find Rudy beside me already returning fire.

I was Private Walter Tyler of Captain Finch’s D Company, 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry, 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. We had started Operation Ala Moana on the first of December, two weeks ago today, and were pushing now through the dense jungles in Nau Nghia Province, some thirty miles north-west of Saigon, where only yesterday we had found an enemy cache of 10 AT mines, 46 tons of rice, a ton of sugar, and 570 gallons of pickled fish.

(The jungle off the trail has not been booby-trapped. Wat Tyler hugs the ground, his M-16 on automatic, and fires long bursts into the trees across the trail. He hears someone calling for a medic. This one is going to be very bad, he knows that. He cannot imagine anyone in Alpha having survived the ambush, and he suspects that Bravo’s lead rifleman and the grenadier five meters behind him have also been hit and possibly killed. He recognizes the voice of the man yelling. It is Lloyd Parsons. But he cannot tell whether Lloyd himself has been hit, or is only calling for a medic to help the men ahead of him in the order of march.)

A mechanized unit had yesterday discovered seven bunkers and two tunnels in the area just to the rear of us, and had captured twelve 81-mm rounds as well as 11,200 small-arms rounds, more than a ton of rice, and a Russian-made radio. A recon patrol filing out into the jungle had reported back with the information that a V.C. base camp with two dozen buildings was located a mile to the southwest. Our march this morning was intended as an encircling maneuver, similar to the procedure we used in a vill sweep, where we surrounded a suspect hamlet during the night and then attacked at first light, hoping to catch Charlie before he left his woman and his rice bowl to go off into the jungle again. The difference here was that this was 0905 in the morning, and we were still a half-mile away from the enemy position, and Charlie had obviously known we were coming, Charlie had closed the trail and lined it with rifles and machine guns, and was determined now to annihilate each and every one of us. I heard Lloyd yelling for aid again, but nobody seemed to be going to him, and so I assumed our medic had been hit in the initial burst. Somewhere off on the left of the trail, I heard Jerry Randazzo, our RTO, radioing back for help, and then there was renewed intensive fire, and Jerry’s voice stopped. The jungle was still.

(Wat Tyler is wearing a fiberglas flak jacket over his cotton jungle shirt and field pants, leather-soled, canvas-topped jungle boots with holes for water drainage, black nylon socks, a helmet liner, and a steel pot with a camouflage cover on it. Hanging from his belt suspender straps are a first-aid kit containing gauze, salt tablets, and foot powder; an ammo pouch containing magazines for his automatic rifle; a Claymore pouch containing six M-26 fragmentation grenades and two smoke grenades; a bayonet, a protective mask, and two canteens of water. He is dressed for war, but he is frightened. He thinks he will be killed this morning.)

“Wat...” the voice was Lloyd’s, a whisper in the jungle stillness. “I’m hit,” he said, and the V.C. opened up again. There was no question of marksmanship here, the jungle was too dense, they fired only at the sound of his voice, spraying the undergrowth with automatic bursts, pausing only long enough to reload and doing that in an overlapping pattern so that the fire was constant. They had the machine gun going in there, too, adding its heavier clatter to that of the rifles, ripping through the leaves on this side of the trail some fifteen meters ahead. I did not think Lloyd had a chance, he was too deep inside the trap.

(Wat Tyler docs not want to consider the possibility that the entire squad has been annihilated, and yet he docs not hear any answering fire from this side of the trail, and he knows that an ambush such as this calls for heavy return fire, blind return fire, spray the bushes, spray the trees, rip the jungle apart, keep firing, keep hurling grenades, keep everything going until help arrives or until it becomes possible to withdraw. But no one else is firing.)

“Cover me!” I heard Lloyd shout up ahead, and suddenly a grenade exploded on the V.C. side of the trail, and Rudy and I began firing again as Lloyd pushed free of the hanging vines, stepping out of the tangled brush in a long loping stride, one arm bloody and dangling, the other pulled back to toss a second grenade. The V.C. machine gun opened up, cutting him down before he’d moved six inches out of the jungle, the grenade dropping in the center of the trail not a foot from where he fell. The explosion tore a hole in the ground and ripped off one of his legs. There was a tick of time, a hiatus the length of a heartbeat between the explosion and the renewed Vietcong fire. Lloyd was lying motionless in the center of the trail. The bullets kept striking his body, nudging it slightly with each soft steady plopping hit, as though trying in concert to roll him off the trail and back into the jungle. The ground around him was covered with blood.

(Wat Tyler is frightened. The one thing he docs not want to do is get killed in this stupid fucking war. In the eye of the camera, he sees himself as a terrified child crouched on the edge of a jungle trail, trembling on the narrow brink of death in the company of an idiot from Newark, New Jersey. He suspects that even now the Vietcong are moving their machine gun further up the trail so that they can fire directly across it into the thicket where he and Rudy are waiting. He docs not want to die this morning.)

“Let’s get the nigger before they do,” Rudy whispered to me.

“What?” I said.

“Your buddy. Let’s get him off the trail before these motherfuckers butcher him.”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“You want them to slice him up like a piece of meat?”

“He’s dead.” I said, “it’s too fucking late.”

“It could be you out there,” Rudy said.

“It isn’t,” I said.

“You coming or not?”

“I’m not.”

There were two things you did not do in Vietnam. I had learned both of those things from Lloyd Parsons, who had been my closest friend and who now lay dead on the trail fifteen meters ahead, with one of his legs blown off besides. The first thing you did not do was leave a dead or wounded buddy, it did not make any difference, dead or alive the Vietcong or the NVA would hack him to pieces and throw him in an open pit. The other thing you did not do was get yourself into a situation that looked suicidal. Suicide was for heroes, and there were hardly any heroes in Vietnam, there were only guys wasting time till they were short, only guys trying to stay alive. I was not a hero, and everybody else in the squad was dead, and going out there to get Lloyd’s body would be suicide. I was too scared to think.

“You coming, Tyler?” Rudy said.

His helmet was very close to mine, he nodded his head for emphasis as he whispered to me, and metal clicked against metal, and for an instant I thought of a Talmadge playing field and a football huddle, thought I would call a Roger-Hook-Go, after which we would run out there with rifles blazing and pull Lloyd off the trail before they cut him limb from limb, though one limb was already gone, wasn’t it, and Lloyd was dead. I wanted to stay alive. I did not want to die this morning.

“Let’s go, Tyler,” Rudy whispered.

On the other side of the trail, I heard movement in the underbrush, the snapping of twigs, the rustling of leaves. There was a small mechanical click.

“No,” I said.

(Wat Tyler remembers that he would not have died for Larry Peters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, either, and suddenly wonders if there is anything in this world that he would die for, and realizes just as suddenly that there are a hundred things, a million things he would live for, but none that he would care to die for, thank you. To Rudy Webb perhaps, it was important to pull the body of a black man off a jungle trail after he had been shot to tatters and had his leg blown off, but Wat Tyler does not see how he can help Lloyd now except by staying alive. He knows for certain that if he steps out of these bushes he will be killed in an instant. There is too much to do, he thinks, too much to live for. Go fuck yourself, Rudy Webb, he thinks, you and all the Rudy Webbs of America.)

“Up, Tyler,” Rudy said. “Up or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

I looked at him in amazement. He had turned the muzzle of his rifle toward my chin, and his finger was curled around the trigger. He was wearing a two-week beard stubble caked with jungle grime, and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat, and there was a thin line of spit running from one corner of his mouth, a dull glitter in his eyes. From across the trail, there came another small mechanical click.

“Jerry may have reached Battalion,” I said reasonably and calmly.

“Jerry reached shit” Rudy said. “They cut him down before he said two words into that fuckin’ radio.”

Lloyd had told me, a long time ago, “If you want to stay alive out here, you better start getting angry, Wat. You just listen to your old Uncle Lloyd. He knows all about being angry, ’cause he’s been angry all his goddamn life.” Rudy was angry now, angry at me, and angry at the Vietcong setting up their machine gun across the trail, and angry at Lloyd, too, I think, because it was Lloyd’s dead and riddled body that was making it necessary for Rudy to live up to a ridiculous code, Lloyd’s black and bleeding and smoking corpse that reminded Rudy he was only a man who could be likewise killed and possibly hacked to pieces afterward if good old buddies did not perform for him the service he was ready to perform for Lloyd — even if it meant putting a bullet in my head. There was something completely insane about this. He knew we would not last a minute if we stepped out of the bushes. He knew that we would be killed as dead as Lloyd, and that all of our bodies would be hacked apart, if that’s what Charlie had in mind this morning, and he also knew that the Cavalry might just possibly arrive in time, the Cavalry always arrived in time, didn’t it? There was a whole fucking battalion someplace in this jungle, eight hundred men who had heard all the shooting and who had maybe got Jerry’s radio message, eight hundred men ready to come to our rescue, so what the hell was his rush? I could not understand. I knew only that I did not want to get killed, and that I stood a very good chance of being killed in the next ten seconds, either by my side or their side, it would not make a hell of a lot of difference. A bullet in the head was a bullet in the head.

The machine gun opened up.

(Wat Tyler is hit. He sees Rudy’s face above him, the mouth opening in shocked surprise, the bridge of the nose dissolving into a slow motion shot of a red flower opening, and then Rudy is falling toward him, and the hanging jungle canopy begins to wheel overhead, Hold the ball, Wat tells himself in idiotic litany against the fear, Hold the ball, and clutches his rifle to him like a woman. Rudy’s helmet smashes into his face, his neck snaps back, he thinks for a moment he has broken something in his spine, and then the ground hits him, and he is splayed flat against the earth by a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle and bone.)

I clung to my rifle against my chest, I could smell the tumbled jungle floor, that’s right you little shits, I thought, kill your star quarterback, and smiled, and lay still and helpless, and thought suddenly of something Mr. Jarrel had said in American History I, about Giles Corey being pressed to death in Salem, Massachusetts, because he would not admit he was a witch, rock after rock being piled upon his chest, and all he ever said was, “More weight,” and had died for his refusal to betray his own conscience. I could not move, they had broken something inside me. I felt wet and sticky below the waist. I lay still and waited. An odd buzz hovered over the jungle. I could hear strange voices. I could not understand what they were saying. I thought of Dana. I listened to the voices in bewilderment and fear because I knew now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about what had happened to me, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my helmet. The buzz was incredible. Dana, I thought. Dana, I hurt. Dana, I love you. From the tail end of my eye, through a tiny wedge between my head and Rudy’s shoulder that was pinning it to the ground, I saw a pair of feet in sandals moving swiftly over the jungle floor, saw the bottoms of black pajamas stark against the brilliant sunshine.

(Wat Tyler sees the enemy soldier from a foreshortened angle, the camera shooting up the length of the black silk pajamas to the pinched and narrow face. There is no joy on that face. The camera holds on the tired eyes for only a moment. Wat stares into them, trying to understand something. He is not afraid, he only feels betrayed. And he hurts. He hurts very badly. Look, he thinks, why can’t we just, and the enemy soldier fires a short burst into Rudy’s back, and then swings the rifle past Rudy’s shoulder, and puts the muzzle against Wat Tyler’s cheek, and pulls the trigger.)