No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “Nothing,” he said. “Why?”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders and laughed nervously. After they said goodnight, Billy went to the corner of the loft where the piano had been before they moved it upstairs and stood looking at the night. He then sat next to Lurleen on the couch, where she was watching a film. He sat looking at the TV, but she knew he wasn’t really paying attention to the film and was instead deep in his mind, torturing himself. He waited until the credits began to roll and was pretty sure that Fawn and Caitlin were asleep and said he had to speak to her, but that they ought to go up on the roof.

  “No, Billy,” she said, sensing that something wasn’t quite right. “You have that strange look on your face. I don’t want to go up there if you’re going to start going off. I’m still heartsick with all that stuff, baby. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  “No, honey, there’s nothing wrong. I ain’t gonna do nothing,” he said. “I’m okay. I just gotta talk to you. It’s, like, heavy and everything. I don’t want it around the kids. That’s all.”

  “Then let’s go for a walk. We can go over to SoHo and sit and have a drink if you want.”

  “That’d be okay,” he said. “But I don’t want nobody to hear me. So maybe we could just sit on a bench over by the Pitt Street Pool or something.”

  “That’s fine, but we have to wait until Vidamía and Cookie and Cliff get in before we go out. Is that okay, baby?”

  “That’s cool,” he said.

  It hurt that she didn’t trust him about the roof, but, hell, he’d given her plenty of reasons for mistrusting him. It was like an illness that lingered and made the body uncomfortable with pain and twinges of aching, like an agony that invaded the muscles and made them lethargic for fear that motion could only be a precursor to further torture. Sitting still at least provided some respite from the onslaught of the affliction. And yet the pain wasn’t your ordinary kind of pain, neither with its chronic lingering nor its sharp intrusion into consciousness. It was more akin to being in the dark and suspecting that somewhere within the darkness there was a beast waiting to slash deeply with its claws into your flesh. He could feel the darkness coming, and he once again saw Joey’s life ebbing away and saw his own hand, where the empty places were, the flesh torn and bloody and the fingers missing.

  54. Back from the Jungle

  He sat next to Lurleen and relaxed, waiting for the children to get home before he and Lurleen could leave. Some days were better than others, but still, every once in a while he would sit for hours absolutely motionless, his mind fixed upon an object and wishing that there was some way for him to quit existing without causing Lurleen and the children trouble. The doctors called it depression, but he knew it was a curse for letting Joey die. There had been times when he had gone up on the roof and stood, seven stories above the city, on the narrow wall, rocking in the wind, unable to step back onto the roof or let himself fall forward into the void. Other times, he had walked along the wall, each step daringly carefree, as if he were walking on a sidewalk or in a park and not on twelve inches of concrete a hundred feet above the pavement. He’d read about something like that in a book by Norman Mailer, something about a man doing the same thing as a test of his courage. His wasn’t a test of courage, he thought, since he couldn’t decide to end his life. There were times when he closed his eyes and walked a few steps as in a trance before seeing Fawn or Caitlin at his funeral, and himself laid out in his one suit, his eyes closed forever. But perhaps he’d be too smashed up and the casket would be closed, as it must have been with Joey when they shipped him back, and they’d never see him again. And maybe that was the best thing that could happen, because he wasn’t doing them any good. He couldn’t earn enough money to provide for them other than getting them together and playing music, and even that had been Lurleen’s doing.

  Once, about three years before, as he walked on the ledge, eyes closed, he stumbled, falling onto the tar-covered roof, where he banged his head on a fallen television antenna, opening up a gash on his cheek. He’d touched his face and upon seeing the blood saw Joey’s entrails spilling out of him as he held him, and he banged his fist on the roof and then on his head until he could no longer feel the pain, the blows making his head ring as he tried to drive the images away. As his rage subsided he lay on the roof and cried silently, not for Joey but for his own life, and for his children.

  About an hour later, when the agony had subsided, he’d gone to the edge of the roof where he had stumbled and found a knob of concrete where a brick had been shoddily replaced. He noted that it was three bricks away from the corner of the roof. Had he not stumbled, his next step would have been taken in a void and he would fallen to his death. The thought sobered him, and he never again tried walking on the edge, with his eyes closed or open. A few weeks later he told Lurleen about what he’d done and felt worse when she told him she’d watched his entire dance with death.

  “Just that one time?”

  “No,” she’d said. “Four or five times. The first time, I came up to talk to you about what the doctor said about Fawn’s condition. When I got up to the roof you were already on the wall.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” he’d asked, helplessly.

  “I didn’t think saying anything would help. I thought you’d be angrier and then you might really do it.”

  “Then why did you follow me up to the roof the other times?”

  “It’s stupid, but I thought if I was near I could pull you back with my love,” she said and burst out crying, the sobs making her chest heave and her skin turn blotchy.

  “Maybe you did,” he said, almost inaudibly, abstracted from the moment, his mind already racing away from the situation. He’d said he was sorry and held her against him, smoothing her hair.

  But he still thought of taking his life. Walking across Houston Street once he had an overwhelming desire to lie down in the path of the oncoming traffic. Oftentimes he’d walk across the Williamsburg Bridge with the express intention of climbing over the edge and letting himself fall into the river. Something always held him back, and he thought that maybe it was God’s doing—that if he hadn’t died in Vietnam, then God must have a purpose for him and therefore he should remain alive.

  And yet God didn’t interfere in that manner. He knew enough about religion to recognize that God had given human beings free will. At times he felt no desire to remain alive and yet each time he’d wanted to end his life, he’d been unable to. Something other than free will or God’s design was at work in preventing him from taking the plunge, but he couldn’t imagine what it was. If it wasn’t God pulling him back, and it wasn’t his own doing, what was it? He imagined the flight through the air. He’d read about the suicides of people who had jumped from New York bridges. Some people had come out of the experience alive, and he worried that he’d be one of those. But there wasn’t much chance of survival if he let his body float freely and made no attempt to dive into the water. He’d heard some people say that hitting the water from that height was just like hitting concrete.

  On the other hand, he might fall in such a way that he entered the water cleanly and perhaps would be knocked out and regain consciousness when his body was too deep to be able to surface. So he would drown. He imagined the sensation and held his breath until he nearly fainted, which reminded him of diving into the sea when he’d go swimming out on Long Island Sound and he’d keep going down until he had hardly any breath left and then tried making it back to the surface, his lungs straining, pulling one more bit of oxygen from the depth of his life in order to survive, the exercise leaving him frightened and drained, but strangely alive.

  All this speculation amounted to little, for there was something tugging at him and he didn’t know its origin. And for the past year, each morning when he woke up and came out of his room, the first thing he saw was that enormous grand piano sitting in the corner of the loft like a leviathan figure, daring him to sit down again and attempt to make music. Why
had Vidamía done it? After the novelty of the birthday party and that evening of playing and celebration, he had begged her to have them take the piano away. But all the children had insisted that he had to keep the piano, and there was no reasoning with them.

  The day after he told Vidamía that she should send the piano back, or sell it, Cookie and Vidamía met him at the elevator as he was stepping out of it, and they begged him to please keep the piano, the two of them hanging on to him, their arms through each of his, making him go back into the elevator, and then Cookie closed the doors and took him up to the roof. Back then, the roof was still an ordinary New York City tar roof. They had now fixed it up with the extra money from the store, getting thick planks for a floor and making benches and bringing up potted trees, even a coconut palm, which was doing quite well, its fronds opening and the trunk thickening so that it was now nearly four feet tall. He still couldn’t believe that Vidamía had spent nearly nine thousand dollars on the piano and that she and Cookie had then hit on the idea of opening up a video store. Even kids could do things like that, while he went on day after day doing odd jobs and earning just about enough money to take care of himself.

  He was now glad they had prevailed upon him to keep the piano. One day, about three weeks after it arrived, when Lurleen and the kids had gone back to their school routine and Vidamía had gone home to Tarrytown, he had walked by the piano and, as if the instrument possessed a magnet, was pulled to it. He lifted the lid off the keyboard, slid onto the bench, and began playing, losing himself in the pleasure of the music. He played a blues progression and then improvised on it, finding that in the simplicity of the tune he could let his left hand walk freely as it always did while his right could play the melody without too much of an effort. The only snags came when he had to hit some chords. But he found that he was able to solve the problem by playing more rapidly and imagining that all he was doing was avoiding playing with the middle and pinkie finger of his right hand. Very much as Vidamía had said, he began to develop a three-fingered technique for playing the right hand.

  He had sat down at the piano that morning at 8:15 a.m., shortly after Lurleen left for school, and he played the entire morning before taking a break for lunch. He was still sitting there at 3:45, when Fawn, Cookie, and Cliff walked in. Coming up on the elevator, they heard the piano and knew it was their father playing a variation of “Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen,” and Cookie said, “Listen! He’s playing. Don’t make noise.” They had let themselves silently into the loft and stood transfixed, listening to Billy Farrell play, his eyes closed and his body bent over the keyboard.

  Cookie motioned for them to sit on the floor of their library room and listen to their father. She then went to the phone in the kitchen and called up Vidamía in Tarrytown. It was Monday and Vidamía wasn’t due in the city until the weekend, but Cookie held the phone for Vidamía to listen. “Vee, he’s playing, listen,” she said. About a minute later she asked her sister if she could hear him. Vidamía was on the other end, crying.

  “That’s beautiful, Cookie,” Vidamía said. After Cookie hung up the phone, she and Cliff and Fawn sat on the floor of the library until Lurleen returned at 4:30, after picking up Caitlin from the day-care center when she finished work at school. Unbeknownst to Billy, he had treated them to over an hour of his virtuosity. Accomplished musicians themselves, they were left awed by their father’s brilliance.

  “He played everything so beautifully, Mama,” Cookie had said. “Like

  ‘’Round Midnight,’ ‘Autumn in New York,’ ‘Speak Low,’ ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye,’ and a whole bunch of other stuff. I didn’t know he knew so many songs from memory.”

  Lurleen nodded and said that their father was a remarkable musician.

  “One of a kind,” she’d said.

  It was one o’clock in the morning when Vidamía, Cliff, and Cookie walked in, dutifully on time, and went immediately to the refrigerator. They turned on the television and switched it immediately to MTV. It was as if they were programmed to eat and watch videos, Lurleen thought as she accepted kisses from them.

  “Your father and I are going out for a walk,” Lurleen said, as they started for the door. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  “Mama!” Cookie said.

  “I just don’t want you to get careless at the store tomorrow.”

  “We’ll be fine, Mama,” Vidamía said as the door closed.

  Billy and Lurleen walked several blocks, until they got to Delancey Street, and then continued along until they reached the Williamsburg Bridge. They went up on the walk, ambling along quietly in the warm summer night, the air fresh and the city lights magnificent as they went farther up on the bridge. Above them, the full moon illuminated the river far below, making the surface of the East River shimmer as if minute stars had been dropped into the water. They stopped and he pointed to a sailboat in the distance. It looked like a ghost, since the boat itself wasn’t visible from their vantage point and all they could see was its tiny wake trailing beneath the sail like a small playful marine animal. He placed an arm around her and kissed her. Lurleen knew there was something the matter because his mouth had the bitter, burnt-out taste it took on when he was truly worried. The taste disappeared only when they were in bed and he was able to relax.

  “I’d like to have a boat,” he said. “I’d just get in it and go around the Battery and then up the Hudson to the beginning of the river. We could all go on the boat and have a picnic and sail it up the East River into Long Island Sound and go swimming there.”

  “That sounds like a fine idea, Bill.”

  “My dad’s partner, Tom Rafferty, had a boat,” he said, sadly. “One summer I worked on it. We took people fishing out on the Sound. My mother called and said he had a heart attack and has to have a bypass operation. I should go see him sometime.”

  She thought this odd, since he never talked about his father, avoiding the issue whenever it surfaced. That he would want to establish contact with his father’s partner seemed contrary to everything she knew about him. Perhaps he thought that this was expected of him, but she quickly discarded that notion. She knew him too well; it had to mean something else. He’d go because it was his duty.

  He didn’t say anything more for a while and just held her, her back to him, getting harder as he played with her breasts. She felt herself stir but didn’t let herself go beyond that, sensing that something wasn’t right. An airplane flew by overhead, perhaps heading for Kennedy Airport. The sailboat was no longer visible. She had always been in tune with him. Her pregnancies had announced themselves and she had known the following morning that life would soon stir in her, her body tuned totally to his. As she knew then, she now knew that something dramatic was to take place and she tried to relax. She had to be absolutely patient and not frighten him back into himself.

  Ultimately the urgency of the moment got the better of her. She decided to take a chance, though she knew it was like reaching out over a precipice to try and help him back up before he plunged down forever.

  “Did something happen at the VA today?” Lurleen asked, easing herself out of his embrace and facing him.

  “Sort of, I guess. I ran into this guy, Castillo,” Billy said calmly.

  “From your outfit?” she said, letting out a sigh of relief.

  “Yeah, he was in another platoon,” he said. “He said there were no Viet Cong or regular North Vietnamese Army people in the area when Joey got it.”

  “But you knew that,” she said.

  “Yeah, but not for sure.”

  She knew it was difficult for him to say “Viet Cong” instead of “gooks,” because that’s how everyone around him referred to them.

  “How did he find out?”

  “He said after Joey got it and they took me away, they swept the perimeter looking for VC, but there was no one around. That wasn’t surprising, because they came and went, but they didn’t find any trace of their having been there for a while. I’d always thoug
ht the area was pretty secure. We had gone back to a safe area and were waiting reassignment to go in-country one last time. Castillo told me today that word came back that the fragments they took out of Joey were ours, so they knew that it was our own guys that did it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine why they’d want to get Joey. We were just gonna go get some smoke. He was friends with everybody. Other than the three guys from Chicago I told you about, everybody was cool with Joey. Nobody had a grudge against him. Nobody. Anyway, Castillo said that after I came back to the States something similar happened, except that it got botched up and the dude saw who it was that was trying to get him.”

  “Who was it?”

  “These dudes that ran a drug operation over there. It was superorganized, like the Mafia. Man, you couldn’t believe these guys. They bought heroin big time in Saigon and distributed it like they do here. Anyway, they got caught, and one of them ratted on the others to get a deal.”

  “And that guy said that they had been responsible for Joey’s death?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, at least you know it wasn’t the Viet Cong.”

  “Yeah, but I still feel responsible. I didn’t have to cross the rice paddy there. I was just in a hurry cause we’d run out of smoke and I needed some. A dude told Joey that we could get the smoke real cheap from some dudes cause they had to unload it quick, so I told him let’s go, and he wanted to go around the rice paddy, and I said it didn’t matter because the area was secure, and there was a path that divided the rice paddy, I told him. I was smoking ten or twelve times a day. Sometimes, when we were in-country I was totally fucked up. ‘Let’s go on through it and save time,’ I said. ‘Suppose the gooks sneak up on us?’ he said. ‘No, man. Forget the gooks,’ I said. ‘It’s secure. Let’s go, man.’ Joey shrugged his shoulders and followed me. We could see the guys on the other side waiting for us. It wasn’t the guys that was gonna sell us smoke. It came from the woods on the side. Bam, just like that.”