Tomcat in Love

by Tim O'Brien

  I outlined for Mrs. Kooshof the spiritual background of the occasion; I explained to Laurel that (contrary to earlier appearances) I was not at present living completely alone.

  Both gals nodded their appreciation.

  “So then,” I said jovially, and clapped my hands. “Off to bed. Hope the two of you enjoy your little seance.”

  To this, Mrs. Kooshof responded with scant enthusiasm. She riddled me, in fact, with eye bullets as Laurel rummaged through her handbag and plucked out a booklet chronicling the origins and history of the United Church of Jehovah. The girl placed it on Mrs. Kooshof’slap.

  “Must run,” I murmured, beginning to rise.

  “Must stay,” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  I sat back. “Well, fine—for a few moments, perhaps.”

  Laurel seemed perplexed. The girl giggled prettily, gestured at the booklet in Mrs. Kooshof’s lap. “I wasn’t expecting … I mean, I sort of thought this would be a one-on-one witness.” She paused and tugged at her skirt. “Anyway, maybe you can tell me something about your religious targets.”

  “Religious what?” said Mrs. Kooshof.

  “What the Lord wants for us,” said Laurel. “Spiritual goals and all that. It’s awful darn important to have good targets to aim for.” She clasped a hand to her daunting left breast. “Salvation—that’s one of my own biggies. And to lose four pounds.”

  My surly housemate glowered at me. “William Tell’s mistress,” she muttered.

  “Pardon?” said Laurel.

  “Lose four pounds. And what exactly do you weigh, my friend?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. One twenty-six, probably.”

  “And how old are you?”

  Laurel blinked. (To keep smiling in the face of such inquisitorial pressure, I thought happily, had to rank supreme among the girl’s long list of credits.) “Twenty-three,” she said, “but I don’t see why—”

  “That’s my target,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “To be twenty-three. To weigh one twenty-six. Apparently it’s what you need to impress the men of this world.”

  There was a moment of starchy silence.

  “Well, honestly,” Laurel said, “I don’t mean to make trouble or anything. I’m just here to witness and recruit, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Mrs. Kooshof. “Target practice.”

  It was high time, I decided, to retire for the evening. I pushed to my feet. “You really must excuse me”—I yawned—“but tomorrow is a busy, busy day.”

  With an exhausted wave, I adjourned to the bedroom.

  Soon I was without troubles. Dreamland: the windy beaches of Fiji. (I spotted your ex-husband at one point. Or was he I? In which case, who would you be?)

  Not until after midnight did I awaken, alone beneath the sheets, disoriented and very, very thirsty.

  Strolling into the kitchen—most fortunately garbed in my ruined satin robe—I found Laurel and Mrs. Kooshof enjoying the spirituous manufacture of Mr. James Beam. Neither bothered to glance up as I filled a tumbler with ice water. “So why do you stay with him?” Laurel was asking, as if I were some nocturnal repairman, to which Mrs. Kooshof wearily replied, “Love, love, love—God, how I hate the word!. But it was love. It is. Every woman on earth, they’d all say, ‘Dump him, just get away.’ Everybody except that one blind bitch who’s actually in it. In love.”

  Refreshed, I sallied back to dreamland.

  (Morning, Early Afternoon)

  Thursday, July 4.

  Up at the first thunderous crack of dawn.

  Bracing shower. Pat dry. New blade for my razor. Caution required. Close shave. Clean white undershorts, clean white socks, tan chinos, green polo shirt. (Green as in Go.) Then out to the kitchen for a breakfast of toast and coffee.

  And what a splendid summer morning! Barely a cloud. Heat to come. No traffic. No pedestrians. Serene as the soybeans. July the Fourth—a day of rocketry and reckoning.

  I carried my coffee to the big picture window in Mrs. Kooshof’s living room, also the living room of my youth, where for some time I conducted a nostalgic survey of the small-town scenery before me. Swept sidewalks. Trimmed hedges. Tidy patios. July butterflies. St. Paul’s kitty-corner across the street. (Brooding brick edifice. God help me, I am forever the quaking Catholic.) A stop sign still dented from the expulsions of Herbie’s old Roy Rogers BB gun. The gutter in which my father dropped dead. (Unrepentant. Still no airplane engine.) Mrs. Catchitt’s barn-red house, flag flying, miniature windmill, the environs smothered under a great summer-burst of flowering botany.

  From my glassy vantage I had no angle on the Zylstra homestead, but with little effort I envisioned the tycoon’s insolent Mercedes bragging about itself in the driveway.

  Simple jealousy?

  Yes.

  Fury?

  Yes.

  But.

  But something more. Namely this: my pain now had a sweet, distinctly exhilarating aspect. I had shed my professor’s skin, and it was time now for simple, unsophisticated vengeance, as in the glory days of Rome.

  Payback, as in Nam.

  Mrs. Kooshof rose at 7:35 A.M. (Foggy-minded I may have become, yet to the end I remained a cut or two above the average inexact historian. I could be trusted with detail.) It was 7:35 on the dot. She sat down to breakfast in her midnight-blue negligee, my favorite.

  “Love, love, love,” I said.

  “That was the bourbon talking.”

  “Nonetheless?”

  She did not look up from her oatmeal. “Nonetheless, I want you out of here. Not a joke.”

  “But we haven’t—”

  “There isn’t any we. I know you can’t believe this, Thomas, or even hear it, but I need you to walk away.”

  “I am not,” I told her, “a walker-outer.”

  “Ride. Run.”

  “Donna, I can’t—”

  “Donna?”

  “Well, certainly.”

  She sighed. “Nice try. What a manipulator.”

  “It was not a ‘try.’ ”

  “Oh, well.”

  “Oh, well, what?”

  “Just oh, well,” she said. “I loved you, Tom, but love isn’t everything. There’s a wonderful thing called peace of mind. I need some.”

  Velocity again.

  Just before noon I managed to “score,” as they say, a packet of Joker’s Wild firecrackers from an enterprising young arms trafficker in the playground at Perkins Park. Ten years old, tops, the freckled little felon played dumb as I mentioned a series of escalating dollar amounts.

  The boy vetted me with cool suspicion. “Depends on what you’re after,” he said softly, as if our conversation might be bugged. “What do you want?”

  About this I was uncertain. I rolled my shoulders and said, “Killer junk, the usual.”

  “Real money?”

  “If you insist.”

  The sinister towhead appraised me for a moment, then muttered an improbable and completely gratuitous expletive that made me pine for a bar of soap. “I seen you on TV. Captain Nineteen, he isn’t some stupid old crybaby.”

  “Who cried?”

  “You did.”

  “I plainly did not,” I said, and glared down upon him. “Let’s see the goods.”

  “Let’s see your wallet.”

  I obliged—there was no alternative—after which the avaricious hoodlum led me across the playground to a sliding board. He looked over his shoulder, bent down, and opened up a cardboard caisson stuffed with the latest high-tech munitions. One had to be impressed; here, in tidy bundles, was sufficient firepower to bring down Baghdad: cherry bombs, sparklers, skyrockets, snake coils, numerous bundles of factory-fresh Joker’s Wild firecrackers.

  The little delinquent grinned at me with contempt. “You aren’t gonna cry, are you?”

  “Certainly not. Joker’s Wild, if you please.”

  The deal was thus done. He handed me the ordnance, I handed him a sum of funds sufficient to keep Lorna Sue in noodles for life. W
hen I turned away, the boy laughed.

  “Captain Crybaby,” he said.

  “Listen, you malicious little prick—”

  “Right on TV, man. You bawled and bawled.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Did!”

  “Absolutely did fucking not,” I growled, then rapidly exited the playground, armed to the teeth, stalwartly whistling an old Vietnam marching ditty as I headed for the wars. July the Fourth. Call me patriotic.

  In the garage, doors safely barred, I removed the makeshift rag fuses on my mason jars, replaced them with the costly but much more up-to-date Joker’s Wild firecrackers.

  Then blank time: I recall nothing of the next hour or so. I was told, well after the fact, that I had left a somewhat garbled message on the answering machine of Dr. Harold Schultz, M.D., Quack. That I was spotted by a nosy neighbor—the antiquated Mrs. Catchitt, I am almost certain—climbing the apple tree alongside the Zylstra house. That my face was smeared with what appeared to be charcoal. That I was dressed in military fatigues. That I carried binoculars. That I looked “deviant.” Nonsense, most of it.

  I do recall returning on foot to Perkins Park for an explosives test. My old combat fatigues, yes. Charcoal, yes. But far from deviant.

  It was now 3:10 P.M.

  My arrogant, nouveau riche arms dealer looked on from the top of his sliding board as I placed one of the rigged mason jars in the huge communal sandbox. New respect blossomed in the boy’s eyes.

  I lighted the fuse, moved away in haste, threw myself to the ground at the foot of the sliding board.

  A few lifetimes passed.

  It was 3:12 P.M. when my mason jar blew a hole in the Fourth of July.

  I sneered at the cringing young crimemaster.

  (Talk about crybabies.)

  “You have been fucking,” I yelled, “with a fucking war hero!”

  Once more, for the final time, I digress. One or two loose (and hair-raising) ends require knotting, in particular those stemming from my wartime adventures in the verdant mountains of Southeast Asia.

  (1) I did not, as may have been incorrectly surmised, actually dispatch anyone during my brief combat sojourn of 1969. Close but not quite. My ex-comrades Spider, Death Chant, Wildfire et al., in fact survived my wee-hour retaliatory air strike, as they were meant to, for I had called in grid coordinates a good two hundred meters from the mountain villa. Scorched their minds, yes—shrank their supersoldier testicles—which for a batch of betraying Greenies was revenge aplenty.

  (2) There was, of course, a price to pay. Somewhat peeved, the boys returned from the bush and looked me up not two nights later. Hoisted me from my cot. Poncho over my head. Hands bound. Led me out to the base perimeter. Made a show of a firing squad: leveled weapons, last requests, ritual commands. Yet not for an instant did I take any of it seriously, nor would I grovel or apologize or emit so much as an entreating whine.

  “Dead white meat,” said Goof.

  “For the flies,” said Bonnie Prince Charming.

  But it was ridiculous—like the war itself, like the bulk of human experience as I have rather cynically come to know it. A pitiful, unfunny joke. Little boys playing war. (Or a little boy, in my case, playing love.) For the record, however, it is important to note that I comported myself with dignity throughout the entire incident, not once flinching, standing my incredulous, disbelieving ground in the face of an inane eternity. I shocked myself. (If only Herbie had been there to witness it. For once—with style—I was his equal in matters macho. What had gotten into me? How and why such unexpected mettle? I will never know, I suppose, and I can only guess that my short-lived gallantry had its roots in simple statistical probability. Sooner or later even the cowardly mouse will roar.)

  Afterward, the boys treated me to a beer.

  “Bravo,” said Wildfire.

  “Huzzah,” said Goof. “Our ballsy bud.”

  “Yeah, and that bombing stunt of yours,” said Spider, “it was just pure outfuckingstanding, right up to snuff, evil as the stars. We shat monkeys, man. All of us, we pooped zee wet icky poop.” He clapped my back. He smiled. “You realize, of course, that now well have to kill you for real?”

  “Not right this instant,” said Tulip.

  “No way,” said Bonnie Prince Charming. “Right this instant we’re toasting your brave ass.”

  “We’ll kill you later,” said Goof.

  “Mucho, mucho later,” said Spider, who had adopted the cartoon lilt of gay San Juan. “After zee war. The years flit by, maybe you forget, maybe you almost forget, but then—poof—in zee dark of daylight …” He smiled again. “The cost of courage. You were supposed to scare.”

  “I can still do it,” I said. “I’m capable.”

  Spider nodded. “No question about it. But too bad. Your golden opportunity, tiger, and you blew it—couldn’t just chicken out like the world-class chickenfuckingshit you truly are.” He popped open a fresh beer, took a swallow, and generously passed it over to me. We were seated in a crowded NCO club. The music was drums, the clientele post-weary weird. “And for us, you see, there is now zee great big problema of honor. We pooped fat monkeys. Goof here, the guy’s got busted eardrums. You almost on-fucking-purpose killed us.”

  “One more chance. I’ll scare.”

  Spider clucked his tongue. “Sensible, but so, so sorry. A tough turn of events, but you’ve come up against the burden of the brave. Irony, I guess. It’s like a law or something. Chicken out, you’re fine. Act the hero, man—even once—and you just fucking know you’ll have to do it all over again.” He sighed. “What a universe.”

  “This Bud’s for the brave,” said Bonnie Prince Charming.

  “Watch your back,” said Goof.

  “Forever,” said Spider.

  (3) Over all these decades, in other words, I have had to live with the consequences of a single, senseless act of valor. (It was an accident, for Christ sake!)

  (4) I am not, of course, a simpleminded determinist, and I do not wish to blame the war for my subsequent emotional troubles, or try to make more of this business than it was. Yet it was something. The “burden of the brave,” as Spider aptly called it. (Recall, if you will, the issue of unplugged telephones. Obscenities in my sleep. Separate marital bedrooms. A certain subtle frenzy to my life.)

  Who knows, in the end, how much this episode contributed to my eventual difficulties?

  Some. Probably more than some. But this much for certain. There has been a Spider crawling through my thoughts for the past quarter century, a Death Chant buzzing in my ears.

  ——

  It was no coincidence, therefore, that on that hot, hazardous Fourth of July, in late afternoon, a somewhat portly Spider strolled into Mrs. Kooshof’s garage and stood watching me stow my six remaining bombs in a cardboard box. How long he had been there I cannot be sure.

  “Tommy, Tommy,” he murmured, then chuckled. “Up to old tricks.”

  Well, I thought.

  Zee dark of daylight.

  A startling development, of course, yet hardly a surprise. I had been dreading this for years, well over two decades, and plainly he had taken care to select the right occasion: this fatal afternoon and none other. Still, as I looked up at him, I could not withhold a little moan. Framed by the garage door, a sheen of bright summer sunlight behind him, he seemed to float toward me without ordinary means of locomotion.

  I stood up, wiped my forehead, shook his hand. “You’re here to kill me?”

  Spider laughed and flicked his eyebrows. “Well, hey, that would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it?” He glanced at my bombs. “Come on, Captain Nineteen, let’s you and me take a space walk.”

  “At the moment I’m—”

  “Oh, I know, I know. We’ve been keeping tabs.”

  He wrapped a chubby arm around my shoulder, led me out of the garage and down the sidewalk. (A gliding sensation—what a sleepwalker must feel.) A distinct faintness overcame me as we made our way to a tavern just off Main
Street. I ordered a pair of vodka tonics, Spider the pretzels-and-a-pitcher special.

  I blinked and looked straight at him. “Keeping tabs? What, exactly, does that mean?”

  He laughed.

  “A hobby, you could call it—checking in now and then. And I’ll say one thing, it’s been a deluxe education watching you wreck your sorry little life.” He lifted his glass. “Cheers.”

  I waited a moment. “What about killing me?”

  “Oh, that. For crying out loud, man.” His eyes glistened. “Took it to heart, did you?”

  “I did. You haven’t answered me.”

  He seemed to be enjoying himself, sitting back, slowly destroying a mouthful of pretzels. “The thing is, I can’t be real definitive here. Maybe we’ll kill you, maybe we won’t. If I go ahead and tell you it’s all a joke—a big goof—well, jeez, that’ll take something special out of your life. Suspense, you know? That over-the-shoulder feeling.” He smiled widely. “Best to leave it vague, keep you on your tippy-toes.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Oh, you know—mainstream America. Tulip coaches basketball, Death Chant runs this nifty boutique. Me, I’m fat. I sell pianos. War’s over.”

  “That’s it?”

  “More or less. Peace on earth.”

  I looked at him hard. “What about the burden of the brave? It was a question of honor, I thought.”

  Spider shrugged. “Yeah, well.”

  “Yeah, well?”

  “Right, don’t lose sleep. Anyhow, Tommy, it looks to me like you got enough problems as it is. Mental distress. Bombs. That’s why I’m here, in fact—to add to your problems. Rev up the pressure.”

  He gave me a chilly, unnerving stare, then stood up and moved off toward the men’s room. It was five minutes before he returned. “Fucking prostate, Tommy. Getting old.” He laughed. “Where were we?

  “Pressure,” I said. “Whether to kill me or not.”

  “Right, right.”

  “And where do we stand on that?”

  Spider frowned. “Like I say, the whole point is to keep it vague. Makes life interesting.”

  “Interesting?” I said.

  “Well, yeah, here’s the thing,” said Spider. “For the rest of us, Tommy, the war’s history—gonzo—but in this really nifty way you’ve kept it going. That life-and-death edge, man, it gives meaning to everything. Keeps you in contact with your own sinnin’ self.” He chuckled again. “Thanks to me, you’re still in the Nam, still up in those creepy mountains. Seriously, I miss all that.”