The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  It wasn’t It. It was—according to its plaque—a bronze statue of the jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. Bix wielded his trumpet like a weapon, holding it upside down, pointing the reproachful mouthpiece out at the city that adopted then killed him. Richard sat for a while on Bix’s cement plinth, pulling from his brown bag and resting his legs before the return journey to the hotel. No such luck, he thought—no one’s going to do this for you.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I sat behind that wall, in the shadows, until the first light of dawn lit the plaza like a gray pail of dirty water thrown into the street. The rising sun was obscured behind the army building, still hidden behind its gated sprawl. I kept thinking about Berlinger, whether he would approve of what I was doing. On that subject, what was I doing? Had I really planned on finding Endicott and killing him? The whole thing seemed ludicrous, like the plot from a film I’d seen long ago and copied, this climactic act of dumb valor that would bring order to things. But seen in daylight, it was impossible.

  I put the gun back in my pack, stood, and stretched, every muscle in my body twanging with fatigue. My mind was completely blank—what to do next was utterly unfathomable. Turning myself in to the guards was the obvious and easiest choice, but some part of me resisted. It would be too easy, and everything would be for nothing. Fueled by a few dim embers of righteous anger, and by a very real need for food and water, I crept through the rear of the ruined building.

  Doglegging right down the nearest street, I immediately saw the mistake I’d made. The street curved inward toward the army building, and driving directly toward me down the cobblestones was a jeep. I scanned for side streets, for any kind of cover, but there was nothing, nothing to do but keep walking, head up. Just a soldier out on forty-eight hours’ furlough—a bit dirty, true, disheveled after a long night, but otherwise unremarkable. The jeep stopped alongside the building, and the passenger door opened. Endicott got out.

  For a second, we stared at each other in a kind of pure, primal embarrassment. He took in my appearance: the Dolphins shirt, the dirt and muck on me, wild white eyes blinking in the light. He said, “Lazar?”

  “Hello, sir,” I said. I could feel the corners of my mouth draw back in a grinning rictus of shit-eating guilt. “I came looking for you.”

  “Okay, well. You found me.” He glanced at the guy driving the jeep, then over at the distant MACV guards. “Why don’t you come inside with us?”

  “Where?”

  “Into admin. We’ll get you set up.”

  The jeep’s driver watched us with a curious expression. He wore a white cotton shirt, and sweat beaded his fat face like tiny, ornamental jewels. In one motion, I slung my bag sidewise across my chest and stuck my hand into the opening.

  “I came to see you, sir. I have something for you, sir.”

  “Drop it.” He fumbled for his sidearm, but it was too late. The look on his face was, I only realized in that instant, the look I’d come here for: fear, yes, but not just fear—his face seemed to sag inward as he capitulated to the fact of his own death and, furthermore, the strange truth that I would be the one who killed him.

  I pulled out Berlinger’s wooden figurine and held it in front of me. Endicott’s pistol was halfway drawn, and he held it at his waist in a pose of uncertain violence. For a moment, I saw him raise it regardless, pull the trigger, a flash of light, nothing. The other man got out of the car and said, “Chris? What is this?”

  “Go around front and get a guard, would you?” he said.

  The fat man disappeared around the front of the building. I still held the trembling figurine in both hands. With bashful hesitation, Endicott took it from me. He turned it over a couple of times and looked up. “I don’t understand.”

  Without looking, I turned and ran. I ran back into the corkscrew maze through which I’d come the night before. Looking back once, I saw what might have been Endicott and one of the guards, their mouths open in hoarse pursuit. Taxis hurtled by. Two young girls—out far too early or far too late—stood in an alcove sharing a cupped cigarette. Distant voices called, American in their flat, drawling vowels, but the sound faded to nothing as I zagged randomly down every side street I could take. A thin crowd surrounded me, the last stragglers of a red-light district in the horrible white glare of day. I ducked into the closest place that seemed open, a tin-sided warehouse that still bustled with voices and transactional chaos.

  The place was crowded near the bar, but it was empty where the tables were. I ordered a small bottle of Suntory cognac, the only zip liquor whose name I knew, from an exhausted-looking waitress. She brought me the bottle, and I sank into the chair, black plastic covered in condensation. On the wall to the side of me, an old print of The Wild One flickered and jumped. The projector was powered by a generator with an alternating putter and roar, like one of the old British motorcycles on-screen. The film itself was silent. Marlon Brando pulled into frame and stared wistfully in the direction of the exit, as though he wanted to get the hell out of there. I couldn’t blame him. It was already getting hot outside, and it was hotter inside, thanks to the lack of air circulation and air-conditioning, and the combined body heat of the thirty or so hookers and johns going about their business at the bar in the rear of the place. Every inch of my body was slick with sweat, including parts of my body I never knew had sweat glands: the soles of my feet, my elbows, teeth, eyeballs. I nodded off and woke up minutes, hours, later. It hadn’t been that long—Brando was still up there, brooding hugely. I sat there and drank and gradually noticed a voice coming from over my left shoulder. I realized I’d been hearing it for a while without registering it. The voice seemed to have followed me out of sleep. It was faint but familiar, and I strained to hear it over the shouts of the johns and the whirring clack of the projector.

  It was Berlinger. At first I thought he was at the bar, talking loudly to the bartender, probably fucking with him, but when I turned he wasn’t there. When I turned back to the movie, his voice became louder, and after this happened a couple of times, I realized that it was like with those floater things that you can’t look at directly or they disappear. He was there in the periphery, in a space in between here and somewhere else. When I turned halfway with my head just so, I could see him sitting there behind me, elbows on knees, big shoulders hunched in anticipation of vicious fun waiting to be had. I turned back and watched the movie, and his voice behind me got louder and louder.

  “What the fuck are you doing here,” he said.

  “Watching a movie.”

  “Don’t be cute, Lazar.”

  “I’m not. It’s The Wild One.” The close-up of Brando’s face was geological. You half expected a tiny eagle to go flying past the twin orbits of his eyes, the lunar caverns of his cheekbones.

  “You’re fucking up is what you’re doing. How’d you find me?”

  “You found me.”

  “Same difference.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You think I did?”

  “Did?”

  “I’m dead, you know that.”

  “I’m sorry. What’s it like?”

  “Not that bad. You think it’s going to hurt, but by the time you realize what’s happened, it’s over. You just have to lie there for a little while and cry, boo-hoo. Easy-peasy.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some NVA irregular shot the truck with a homemade mortar from three hundred feet. Lucky fucking shot. I went all the way from the back through the windshield, stung like a son of a bitch. One time in Manhattan when I was a kid, I climbed up this cedar tree by my elementary school and accidentally pulled down a hornets’ nest. Like that, but not as bad, really.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “I’ll tell you what you don’t do, don’t fucking desert and hitchhike all the way to Saigon to ambush your CO, and then hand him a fucking figurine.” He laughed, that barrelly laugh I remembered from when we first got to base camp in Bao Loc. He laughed and laughed, a
nd laughed more. “Oh my God.” He sighed, finally, with pleasure. “That was a good one.”

  I was crying. He said, “Hey, Lazar. Come on, take it easy. What’s the matter?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “I should have killed him.”

  “Why, to prove a point? Look where that got me.”

  On the wall beside me, Brando swung at a cop; from the back of the room, by the bar, a bottle shattered with a pop, and someone yelled. It was as though the spirit world was invading the real one, or vice versa. “I think I’m going crazy.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Stop apologizing to me, Goddamn it. Do you even know what you’re sorry for? You think you got me killed? I got myself killed, dummy.” In my peripheral vision, I saw the corners of his mouth turn up in a cruel smile. “You’re not responsible for that, you Tennessee shit donkey. You’ll be lucky if you’re ever responsible for anything your whole life.”

  I turned the bottle up until the bottom was dry and clear against the light of the movie screen. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I tell you what to do, that’s why I’m here. You listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go back and tell them exactly what happened. Tell them you got drafted and were afraid for your life. Tell them you ambushed some VC and some villagers, too. Tell them you held me prisoner. Tell them how I died and you felt guilty as hell and ran away to Saigon and wound up hiding outside army headquarters, and how you gave Endicott a wooden soldier. Tell them you got chased and wound up in a brothel bar talking to my ghost and that I sent you back. Tell them exactly that. It’s perfect, don’t change a thing.”

  ———

  The memoir closed in Vance’s hands with a little puff that emulated the sigh of content melancholy he felt upon finishing a book he liked. Ideally, he thought, the pleasure of completion should be exactly equaled by the pain of parting company with someone whose company you enjoyed. Another kind of pain, the real kind, coursed through his sprawled body—after nearly twenty-four hours of sleep, his joints felt like they’d been arc-welded together. He put the book down on the nightstand and moved stiffly to the window, where he braced himself and arched his wooden back, staring down five floors at the city street. It was time to go to the reading, but he didn’t want to go back out there.

  He called his mother. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Where are you?”

  “New York.”

  “Wow. Are you having fun?” She sounded incredibly distant, like she was talking into a satellite phone on the deck of some weather-blasted explorer ship in the Arctic.

  “I went and saw Dad yesterday.”

  “What? How?”

  “I found him online. It wasn’t hard.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “And?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Nothing. Restoring old cars. Seems good.”

  “Are you staying with him?”

  “No, I already had a hotel. Just wanted to see how he was doing.”

  “And he seemed like he was doing good?”

  “Yeah.” He stared out the window, thinking about which direction was east, thinking about his father’s hair, the whorl in it like weather. The woman had seemed very nice. Bless this home and all who enter it. This is the day that the Lord has made. “He seems really good. He says hello. I have to go, Mom, there’s a thing in thirty minutes.”

  He hung up and got dressed. The young Richard on the book’s cover peered stupidly up at him, and for the thousandth time he tried and failed to square the boy with the man. But it was impossible—too many years, and too much damage, had come between. What unrecognizable version of himself lurked in his own future? Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, the idea of someday being a completely different person wasn’t the worst thought.

  ———

  The reading area at Argosy Booksellers was on the third story, a newly renovated room with polished hardwood floors and a small podium set in the corner in front of rows of leather-bound volumes of—at a glance—Thackeray, Austen, Stendhal, Diderot, Cervantes, both Jameses. It was hard to tell if this was for ironic effect or not, since an upcoming events placard featured a celebrity chef and a NASCAR driver who’d written a children’s book. For the last hour, Richard had been standing at Stan’s side, near the stage, shaking hands with various fans and well-wishers. He stood there and said things, and whoever was standing in front of him laughed and nodded. Fortified by the drinks he’d had earlier in the dark little bar next door, he felt better or at least capable of functioning more or less as he was expected to; the panic that had been nipping at his heels all day had been beaten back and sat snarling at a safe distance.

  He’d finally met Dana, his publicist, even larger and more voluble in person. When they shook hands, she’d taken a quick whiff of his breath. Also his editor, Kathleen: a very nice, very thin woman in a black pencil skirt, who embraced him like a long-lost relative. She said how happy she was for him, how well the book was doing, how proud everyone at Black Swan was. She said they were starting a promotional push for various awards, two of which he’d heard of. It was all very nice indeed, and he really did wish his attention wasn’t mostly focused on the window behind her and his intense urge to jump through it.

  She brought him out of his daze by asking, “What are you going to read?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You should do the ambush scene.”

  “I thought maybe a short story.”

  “No, you have to read from the memoir. No question.”

  Then the bookstore functionary he’d been introduced to was at the mic, making a gushy, overlong introduction, and then everyone was looking at him, and Kathleen patted his arm, and he shouldered his way through the crowd to the stage. It was standing room only, and as he reached the podium, the crowd in front of him looked like one organism, a creature with a hundred heads. He pulled the novel out of its Kinko’s box, set it on the podium, cleared his throat, and read:

  I am alone. We all are, children of the universe, all. We come from dead stars and are destined to return to them…

  He read Vance’s novel for ten long minutes, despite the increasingly loud murmur of dissent that filled the room. When he was finished, to a smattering of confused applause, he put the pages down and stared out at the crowd, which stared back at him. He picked out Eileen in the back of the room, her brow furrowed and lips pursed in an effort not to laugh. A voice rang out in the middle of the crowd.

  “Why don’t you read your own book?” Although Richard couldn’t see the acne-ridden forehead or the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fishing lure, he recognized the grinding, adenoidal tone.

  “Hey, Vance,” he said into the microphone. A relieved chuckle went through the crowd: this was clearly some sort of inside joke. “I like yours better than mine, that’s why. I read the whole thing last night. It’s not perfect, but it’s real, at least.” A cardboard stand-up of his book’s cover wobbled flimsily by the entryway.

  No one spoke. He pointed to the stand-up and said, “What I’m saying is, none of it happened. It’s bullshit.”

  The words surprised him as he spoke them. How true they were and how momentarily unburdened he felt saying them. He realized just how much time and energy he’d spent telling himself that it wasn’t bullshit at all or that there was enough mitigating truth in it to make it not entirely bullshit or that, if it was bullshit, it was a type of bullshit that was truer than simple truth and lots of other similar bullshit. He realized he’d spent as much time and energy, probably more, simply not thinking about it.

  He was also surprised to learn that a hush falling over a crowd actually sounded that way. It was as though a physical thing—an invisible layer of some kind of heavy silt—had been dropped from the ceiling on everyone. Everyone look
ed at him. They were, he realized, searching for a sign in his face that it was a joke or waiting for a mitigating statement. He reflexively located Eileen again, now shaking her bent head with an incredulous look he’d seen a lot of over the years. Just when I thought you couldn’t sink any lower. He put the manuscript back in its box and walked out into the crowd, which parted for him. He handed it to Vance and looked around at the newly individuated faces—Vance, Stan, Kathleen, an older man wearing a bomber jacket with insignias from places he’d served—then walked through them. Eileen reached for his sleeve on the way out, but he had momentum working for him, along with an intense desire to fuck right off. He spiraled down an iron staircase, ducked out the front door, and immediately doglegged back under the sidewalk scaffolding into the stygian darkness of a neighboring shithole.

  “Back so soon,” said the woman behind the bar without looking up from the sink full of glasses she was washing. She’d been washing them when he was there before as well—the apparent endlessness of her labor in the painted black of the room created the impression that this was a sort of purgatorial space. Maybe by the end of the night he would be chained to the bar with an eagle tearing out his liver. But no, he thought, that wasn’t purgatory, and, anyway, he could do a perfectly decent job of tearing out his liver himself.

  He peeled off several twenties and fanned them out in front of him. “Set me up with a bottle of Bushmills and a glass, if you would.”

  She wiped her hands on the rag that dangled from her front jeans pocket and bent over the bar on tattooed forearms—the left a harp and the right a bow and arrow. “What does this look like to you, the Wild West?”

  She poured a glass of whiskey neat, set it in front of him, and relieved him of a bill. From the cash register, as she made change, she gestured to the outside world—the still light of late afternoon—and said, “Little early to be throwing the top away, don’t you think?”