Sharpshooter

by Chris Lynch

  “I came running. I had to. Had to see you guys …”

  I decide in this situation the best thing to do is to mock and ridicule Rudi. So that everything seems normal.

  “The Rudi peed his pants dance,” I sing, adding a crisp sorta conga dance thing. “The Rudi peed his pants …”

  But as I scramble my brain for rhymes to keep this going, I stumble on peed and need. He rushed here soaking wet because in his hour of need, his need was us.

  And so I cut the dance, and the song, and for a second there I almost give in to getting all emotional.

  But we all need some thing or other. That’s just how it goes. And this is how this goes.

  “Army, baby. The armored cavalry, just like my old man,” I say when Morris has the nerve to question my happiness. “Wait ’til I tell my dad. He always thought Morris’s pledge was an ol’ nancy pledge anyway.” Or he would have if he believed it was anything but a joke. “No offense, Morris.”

  “Of course not,” he says.

  “Now we got a real pledge, boys,” I say. “A man’s pledge.”

  I pick up Rudi’s notice off the ground and bring it to him. I present it, formal-like, then give him a perfect sharp salute that would make my father proud.

  Rudi is sniffling like a kid when he does his best to answer in kind. It’s not half bad, though wiping tears with his free hand compromises it a little bit.

  The four of us spend a few seconds looking out at the Boston skyline, and it feels like a big ol’ see-ya-later to the town. Then we turn to each other and lean into a spontaneous huddle, like a football huddle, like we are planning out the big play before we go out there and mow ’em down.

  Can’t wait to talk to my dad now.

  I passed my physical,” Rudi says, mixing pride and joylessness into a whole new emotion.

  “I know, man. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” he says.

  We are walking on Nantasket Beach, first of July, perfect summer day, perfect. The waves are crashing, the sun is scorching. The beach is mobbed, and the sounds of screeching kids in the sand and screeching seagulls in the air are identical. We are just passing into the atmosphere of Carousel Kitchen, in the shadow of the roller coaster, where the scent of the ocean collides with the scent of fried clams to slaughter every other scent into oblivion.

  “They probably didn’t even bother giving you a physical,” Rudi says, accusingly.

  “Well, yeah, they did,” I say. “You want some clams if I’m buyin’?”

  “Of course I’m wantin’ if you’re buyin’. So what’d you score, like, a million?”

  “You don’t get points, dumbo,” Caesar says, jumping on Rudi’s back and giving his skull machine-gun noogies.

  “I passed,” I say as we head to the clam stand.

  Caesar hops down off Rudi’s back as we wait to order. They do a little bit of fake boxing while I play the role of authority. I could almost be the father here, but the sizes don’t work. Rudi is almost my height, though not built as big. Caesar is shorter than us by four or five inches yet, though you might still guess he was the older of my two sons.

  Everyone everywhere is older than Rudi.

  We take our three boxes of clams to the seawall, to eat and watch the tide, to go forward and back and forward in our heads.

  “You excited about going, Rudi?” Caesar asks.

  “No, sir,” Rudi says, and stuffs three fat clams in his mouth like he’s trying to gag himself.

  “What?” Caesar says. He is his father’s son, his grandfather’s grandson and all that, so he has to work to understand the mindset.

  “Rudi’s a lover, not a fighter,” I tell Caesar as three girls in bathing suits walk past and smile at us.

  “Can’t you be both?” Caesar asks.

  “Can I be either?” Rudi asks, staring at the girls like they just emerged out of the sea with tentacles sprouting out of their heads.

  I am sitting between the two of them, on the wall, facing out to sea. The park, with the roller coaster, the screaming, the mad rides and games and crazy mental fun, is blowing hot breath at our backs. Waves are crashing ahead of us, but it’s the calm of the ocean farther out that catches my attention and holds it.

  What is going to happen to him?

  “I said” — Rudi is elbowing me — “can I have some of your drink?”

  “No. Get your own drink. You know I don’t like sharing drinks.”

  “So how come you didn’t buy drinks for us? You bought the clams. Doesn’t it make sense to buy drinks to go with the clams?”

  Caesar eats silently. He knows better. Rudi never, ever does.

  “Fried clams make you really thirsty, Ivan. You know that. I know you know that because you bought yourself a drink, so —”

  I smack him. I turn, go cross-eyed, and smack Rudi right across the back of the head, knocking him off the wall and into the sand six or so feet below.

  Caesar laughs so hard I believe I detect a clam oozing its way out his nose. Rudi manages to hit the beach and still keep his clam box upright.

  “Hey,” he snaps up at me. He scoops up a fried clam that managed to pop up and escape during the tumble.

  “Give it to the gulls, man,” I say wearily, because I know better but have to try anyway.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Rudi says, blowing on the thing like the Big Bad Wolf. “It came from the sand in the first place, didn’t it, when it was still alive?”

  I can feel it in my own mouth, the grains of sand grinding and crunching in Rudi’s teeth before he spits it out.

  Caesar and I laugh and fall over each other. Then Caesar holds out a clam, which Rudi jumps up and snags like he is in fact a seagull.

  “There,” Caesar says. “So you didn’t lose out in the end.”

  Rudi nods, very serious about the transaction and the rightness of it.

  Then he looks up at me, a kind of begging face I don’t want to see.

  “Don’t start,” I say, putting out a hand to pull him back up.

  “How could you really want to go to Vietnam, Ivan?” he asks as he gets to the top of the wall.

  I shrug, and the three of us start walking in the direction of the Paragon Park amusements. “I’m a fighting man,” I say. “Fighting men fight when they are called to do so.”

  “Fight people around here, then,” he says, and means it.

  The rides of Paragon Park are legendary, especially the roller coaster, the Giant Coaster. We have come here a few times each summer since we were old enough to make it down to Nantasket without parental supervision. We used to come with parental supervision, but it’s not at all the same.

  “It’s not the same, Rudi,” I say. “Even you know that.”

  “I know,” he says, and then he realizes what is happening. “I also know I will not be going on that thing.” He points his last floppy fried clam up at the Giant Coaster.

  “You have to be kidding,” Caesar says. Caesar never came to Nantasket with us all those times. He was just a kid. Now with him being thirteen and me shipping out, this felt like one of those things I needed to get around to.

  My brother is jumping up and walking backward and taunting Rudi like Muhammad Ali. “You goin’, Rudi. You goin’, you goin’ up.” He gestures up at the towering and thundering wooden roller coaster that sounds like it’s going to pull itself to pieces at every turn. And there are a lot of turns.

  It still gives me butterflies.

  Every time I come here I feel the same rush. But there’s more to it now. Because we have the coaster, which is ferocious, but then we have all the past stuff, the history. All the times we have taken the ride, stood up when we shouldn’t have. The girls we screamed at down on the ground to wait for us who were never there when we got down. The older guys we threw french fries at — who always seemed to be there when we got down. And the view of the sea, how you could almost taste the water, and the weird way the ocean salt and the shake and slam of the ride somehow made
you need a hot dog.

  Beck always pretended to be bored with the thrill ride but thrilled with the stars and clouds. Morris never pretended he was brave but never once chickened out, even when he already had a shirt spotted here and there with his own spittle.

  And Rudi.

  “Stop laughing!” he shouts at me now, like he shouted at me then.

  “You have to go on there this time,” I say, laughing and punching the air around his head.

  “He’s never gone on?” Caesar says, excited as a terrier pup. “Never, ever?”

  “Not quite exactly true,” I say.

  “I have so gone on,” Rudi insists.

  I laugh more.

  “Stop laughing,” he says.

  “Did he go on or not?” Caesar asks, slapping my arm.

  “I did!”

  “He did, he did. He just didn’t see anything. He suddenly turned into this circus contortionist, just at the point where the coaster slows right down. And ker-klink, ker-klink …”

  “Stop it, Ivan,” Rudi says, and raises his hand to his brow like he’s shading from the sun. “That’s what got me the first time.”

  “I know. That slow death of the sound and the stop-start and the yanking of the chain as you get pulled up to the highest point of the coaster and it seems like it’s stalled …”

  “I love that,” says Caesar.

  “Right,” I say. “And suddenly this guy becomes Gumby, bends himself every which way, with me laughing and pulling at him until he squirms himself right down into the foot well of the coaster car, I mean right down there like a dog, and he stays there, screaming and howling every single second of the way. People down on the ground, people all the way out on the beach, even, could hear Rudi’s screaming above all the other screaming. There were people pointing, cheering. I mean, it’s a big amusement park, for cryin’ out loud, it’s almost impossible to make a spectacle of yourself, right? But he’s screamin’ and wailin’…”

  “Until the end,” he says apologetically.

  “Until the end,” I say scoldingly.

  We are just about to the entrance to the rides area. Above us, and around us, the world is having a shouty, sweaty, fantastic day at the park.

  “What did you do to my shoes, Rudi? Hmmmm?” I wag my finger. “What did you do to Daddy’s shoes, bad dog, to make all the people laugh?”

  “I am really, really sorry for that, Ivan,” he says, still apologizing years later as if my shoes were still mucky. “I didn’t mean it. See, I was very scared …”

  Here is the thing I get about Rudi that makes all the difference. And it’s the thing I badly hope the North Vietnamese get about him while he is over there visiting their part of the world: Even when he has just done something to make you want to kill him, you look in his eyes and it makes you want to hug him.

  I hope they get that. I don’t really expect them to, though.

  Mostly, I don’t hug him, but I don’t blow his head off, either.

  “You can make it up to me,” I say, taking him by the arm and leading him to the ticket line.

  “Ivan, no,” he says. “No, I can’t.”

  He is covering his ears like we are in the middle of an air raid. Caesar has gone around the other side of him, and it looks as if we are hauling the Cowardly Lion to face the Wizard of Oz.

  “We’ll discuss it,” I say. It is only the entrance to the park itself he has to face yet. All the individual rides can be confronted on a horror-by-horror basis.

  “We’re not going on any of those baby rides on Rudi’s list, are we, Ivan?”

  “Of course not,” I say. It’s okay to be a little less gentle with Rudi now that he’s got a slice of sausage pizza in one hand and a box of taffy in the other. And watching through the window at Lehange’s as the big taffy-pulling machine turns over and over has enough of a soothing effect that Rudi agrees to some rides.

  Very particular rides.

  “There were no baby rides on my list.”

  “Um, Carousel? Um, Teacups?”

  “Right,” Rudi says, as if he is now making his big redemption move. He dashes to where the line is empty for the Kooky Kastle.

  Caesar looks at me, and I smile. It is hardly anything death defying, but I have always had a soft spot for the Kastle. It is a not-very-spooky train ride in the dark through this castlelike structure. It’s less fun than the Congo Cruise, which is a sort of darkened boat ride through a big head. Most of the thrills and chills on that are created by passengers rocking the boat, throwing stuff in the water, throwing people in the water, grabbing the cave walls so that the boat stops and the fumes from the fetid water nearly wipe out all the passengers. That sort of thing. Not at all Rudi’s cup of sludge.

  The Kastle, though, should be okay. We come up behind Rudi, who bounces from foot to foot with either anticipation or nerves. They both tend to look the same on Rudi.

  The ride is a continuous procession of unconnected cars, each holding no more than two passengers.

  “Now, this is more like it, huh, Rude,” I say, smacking his leg so hard the echo off the walls sounds like one of the sound effects.

  “Yeah,” he says, but even with this modest ride, even with this, I sense the tremor inside him.

  Frankenstein begins chasing an innocent lady around in a circle. She is out of his reach by about three feet. He has been that close for many years.

  “Relax, lady,” I call out. “I happen to know he runs exactly as fast as you do.”

  Rudi says nothing. I see his hands tightly squeezing his knees, and his head is down. Bats on elastic strings flutter past.

  He’s being so weird I’m actually getting creeped out in the Kooky Kastle for the first time since I was about six.

  “Rudi, what the —”

  “I’m thinking about not going!” he shouts, the words bouncing and bending around all the walls of the ride.

  I wait for them to settle. A mummy comes popping out of a coffin and I automatically punch the face, cracking it and bruising my hand.

  “Not going where?” I ask.

  “You know where.”

  “Help me out.”

  “You help me out, Ivan. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? Something needs to work the way it’s supposed to work right now.”

  I am staring at the side of his head as we go in and out of shadow and low light. Recorded howls and shrieks from overhead speakers barely register.

  “Not going where, Rudi?”

  “Never mind,” he says, nutty enough to be a part of the Kooky Kastle staff. “Never mind, never mind, never mind.”

  “Marines? Not going to the Marines?”

  “Marines isn’t a place, stupid,” he says, foolishly.

  “Hey, wiseguy,” I say, low in his ear, “if you recall, you weren’t asked to go anywhere.”

  “Vietnam. Aw, Ivan, even when I say the word … aw, Ivan … remember what I did to your shoes? I feel like I’m going to do it again, to everybody’s shoes in the world.”

  I have looked away from him now, straight ahead as the ride winds down, then away in the opposite direction. I feel him breathing, right on my neck in terrified little puffs.

  This would be that moment where you want to kill him but you can’t because you look in his eyes and he’s all Rudi on you and you just can’t kill him.

  So I won’t look at his Rudi eyes.

  Because I’m afraid I might see it different now.

  The ride comes to an end when this dummy zombie drops down out of the ceiling above and rocket blasts of air shoot you from left and right before the car punches through the doors and back out into the shock of the sunlight.

  Caesar is standing, laughing, on the platform as we pull up.

  “Let’s go again,” Caesar says, angling back toward the entrance as if we have already decided. “I just nearly pulled the head off that Dracula guy, and I bet I can get him this time.”

  “You go,” I say. “We’ll wait here.”

&
nbsp; “Chicken?”

  “Yes, Caesar, chicken,” I growl. “Go!”

  He is gone.

  There is a bench where old people and the lame sit to wait for more robust parkgoers to come off the ride. We sit there.

  “You don’t have a choice,” I say. I am trying to hold back my disgust, just because he is Rudi. I honestly don’t know if I can hold it for long, though. “What would you do?”

  “Run,” he says, as if he has actually put thought into this.

  I can feel my voice drop, though I don’t do it on purpose.

  “Say again?”

  “No,” he says, sliding down the bench away from me.

  “Have I told you about my father and General Patton?” I say.

  “Please don’t slap me, Ivan.”

  I stare out at the ocean. I listen to the sounds of people having the whole world of fun right here at Paragon Park, exactly like we would have been doing if this was last year and we were still kids in school.

  “You’re thinking of running.”

  “I am thinking of running.”

  I can hear my brother’s great big goofy kid laugh from here. I would know it from anywhere in the world, and I figure he’s about halfway through the Kastle and carrying a plastic Dracula’s head.

  “All right then, Rudi, man. So why tell me? Huh? You know what I’m gonna say. You know who I am. You and I both know what I’m gonna say. That fool driving the Chevy Impala over there knows what I’m gonna say.”

  The doors to the Kastle burst open and my brother, cackling, races past, carrying Dracula’s head. Running behind him is a chubby park employee Dracula without a plastic head.

  “Headless Dracula even knows what I’m gonna say.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rudi agrees.

  “You tell Beck you were gonna run?”

  “No.”

  “Morris?”

  “No.”

  “Hunh,” I say, and I will confess there is a part of this story that is converting my anger into pride. Just a small part, but it’s there. “You’d think you would tell those guys before you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? You’d think you’d be in Sweden or someplace before you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Why not tell the other guys, Rudi?”