No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “And you’re sure it wasn’t them.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. These guys just sold smoke and didn’t get involved in shit like that. Castillo said that the dudes selling smack copped to it.”

  “Did he say if the fellow explained why they were trying to get Joey?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense, honey.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That it was an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “Yeah, that they got the wrong dude.”

  “Joey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who were they after? You?”

  “No, not me. At least I don’t think so. They gave some other dude’s name, but Castillo said that didn’t make any sense because the dude’s name they gave was this guy Meléndez from the West Coast. A Chicano dude—and he’d gotten it about two months before. But the brass bought the story, and that was the end of the shit. I figured the guy trying to cut a deal when he ratted on his buddies threw them a bone and covered up for somebody else.”

  “And you’re still wondering why it happened?”

  “Yeah, like they got the wrong guy, but it wasn’t who the dude said. It’s really messed up, what they did.”

  “You think he was protecting someone else?”

  “Yeah, maybe. But it doesn’t matter. I still feel it was my fault, but I don’t know why. I’m kind of getting used to the idea that it could’ve happened anyway, while we were fighting Viet Cong, because whether we’d been there or someplace else, they would have tried doing us. But now that I find out that it was these dudes maybe if we had been going along the woods they would’ve seen that it was us and wouldn’t have fired. It was a rifle grenade, Castillo said. I’d thought it was mortar but it was a rifle grenade.”

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “You wanna walk to Brooklyn? I feel like walking. I can take you back if you want.”

  She said it was all right, they could walk to Brooklyn. It was a nice night and she didn’t mind. They walked some more, their arms around each other, the moon now higher and brighter, illuminating the Brooklyn docks. When they were almost in Brooklyn, he stopped and stood shaking his head. She asked him what was the matter, but she knew instinctively that he was finally going to emerge from his nightmare. There, in the middle of this beautiful summer night, Billy Farrell, her own true love, her pain-filled man, his brave heart broken, was going to come back from in-country, back from the jungle to be safe with her.

  55. The Lie

  Billy Farrell, his mind wandering through the corridors of his memory, the clock of his life inexorably marking time and his awareness becoming lost in a fog of denial, recalled once more the question Conroy had asked him at the VA. It was as if Conroy already knew the answer but wouldn’t tell him. He hated sitting with him, hated his smugness, his glass eye staring at him and not seeing him behind the thick glasses. Conroy’s right eye had been gouged out on a loose nail on the wall of an obstacle course in basic training, and so he never made it to Vietnam. Conroy had been discharged with full disability, gone on to college, majored in psychology and had gotten a master’s degree in counseling, which enabled him to work with returning fucked-up dudes like himself. He talked about Nam like he’d been there, but always a little self-consciously. He’d say things like, “When the Third Marines were in Da Nang …” or “One day at Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, the tower handled over one thousand landings and takeoffs in a twenty-four-hour period …” and then he’d add that he wasn’t in Nam but he’d heard enough about it to write a book. It was like he wanted to draw everything out of them to give himself a sense that he’d been there.

  As they walked back to Manhattan, Billy explained to Lurleen what had taken place earlier that afternoon at the VA:

  “So what really went down, man?” Conroy had said.

  “I told you. The Cong did my buddy. Ambushed us. The whole area was secure, but they snuck in like they always did. Could’ve been a couple of kids or some girls for all I know.”

  “Kids?”

  “You know, they sent kids sometimes.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just the way you said it.”

  “The way I said what?”

  “Kids. The way you said ‘kids.’ It’s like that’s the first thing you thought of.”

  “No, man. You took it the wrong way. I also said it coulda been a couple of girls.”

  “But first you said ‘kids.’”

  The rest of the fellows around the circle were nodding and Billy was starting to feel uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, okay. I said ‘kids,’” he replied. “What are you getting at, Conroy?”

  “Don’t get uptight,” Conroy said. “I’m just asking you a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you ever have to do a girl?” Conroy said.

  “No, but I heard of guys that did. They said the girls had guns. They didn’t give a fuck, the Cong women. They were just as tough as the guys. I don’t know if I could’ve. The whole thing was fucked-up over there, man.”

  “Were you ever present when shit went down and they shot a girl?”

  His head was hurting and it felt like the little plate in his skull was being hit by a hammer so that he heard, and felt, the clanking behind his eyes.

  “Leave me the fuck alone, mothafucka!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “I told you. No! What the fuck do you want from me, man? I don’t wanna talk about this shit.”

  “Are you sure it was gooks?”

  He hated when people used names for other people. Bobby Frazier from Atlanta was a nigger, Tim Kittrige from Little Rock was a cracker, Nick Ameruso from Boston was a guinea, Sean Quinlivan from Philadelphia was a mick, Frank Wojtasik from Chicago was a Polack, Kevin Kishimoto from Los Angeles was a Jap, Jimmy Eng from Sacramento was a Chink, George Breitig from Milwaukee was a kraut, Eddie Nielsen from Fargo was a squarehead, Marty Spiegel from Cleveland was a kike, and Joey Santiago from the Lower East Side was a spic. He was a mick, but he knew that. Yeah, Billy Farrell was a mick, a harp, a Paddy.

  Everybody had to have a fucking tag on his name, on his existence, as if just living wasn’t hard enough. On top of your pain you had to carry the pain that your people had brought with them to the country, and you had to wear the indignity—all the time.

  He recalled coming back to the city after Elsa had the baby, and talking to a few fellas who had been in Vietnam. They smoked pot, talked about women, drank beer, and told him there was this group called Veterans Against the War and that he should check it out and maybe demonstrate against the war, and he said maybe they were right. He joined the Veterans Against the War and went to a couple of demonstrations where they burned the flag and chicks were coming up to him offering to fuck him because they knew the kind of deprivation he’d gone through in the war and it was really brave what he was doing, protesting the war.

  He took one of them up on it, and they ended up in an apartment up on the West Side that she shared with about a half-dozen people. There was graffiti painted on the walls, and Chianti bottles holding candles. No furniture to speak of. People slept on mattresses on the floor and sat on cushions. There were posters from antiwar marches, pictures of Mao Tsetung, Ho Chi Minh, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton. Huey Newton reminded him of Rick Mallory, this guy from Port Arthur, Texas. Rick had tripped a wire and blown himself up, himself and three of his buddies. But he looked like the Black Panther leader. Light-skinned and handsome. Billy didn’t know him well, but they’d spoken about music. His father was a blues guitar player and had known Leadbelly. Rick Mallory said his father always called him Mr. Ledbetter.

  As he recalled it now, he thought the girl’s name was Gina, a pretty Italian girl from Bensonhurst who was studying political science at Brooklyn College. They had burnt incense, smoked grass, and gotten very high. She was giving him a massage, her strong hands kneading his shoulders as he lay on the mattress and she was a
stride him, her buttocks moving against his. Eventually, he felt very sleepy. As he relaxed, she turned him over and finished undressing him. She kissed him very gently and went down his chest and belly. She took him in her mouth and ran her tongue around the head of his dick until he couldn’t help himself any longer, sat up and went up into her like an animal. She kept repeating that he should do it harder. But he came, and she was disappointed, got dressed and left him to sleep. In the morning he woke up with some other girl next to him. Gina was nowhere to be found. Someone said she’d gone to work. He didn’t even ask where she worked. He came around to the demonstrations a few more times, but after a month or so he stopped showing up, because all he could think about was Joey lying in his arms, the life in his eyes fading, the whites of the eyes becoming a bluish yellow and his skin grayish and deathly, devoid of life.

  Conroy was calling his name, but he was locked in his mind and couldn’t respond. The walls had come up and he was in a bamboo cage that had been dropped into a hole in the ground; his body barely able to move, his knees to his chin, his arms grasping his tucked-up legs. The fellas talked about tiger cages, but those were different from the bamboo cages. He’d never seen a tiger cage, but he’d heard about them from a navy flyer they’d picked up in the bush. His carrier plane was shot down, and he and his navigator bailed out. The flyer had managed to parachute safely and hide but his navigator’s chute had gotten entangled in a tree, and the Viet Cong had captured him. The flyer watched helplessly as the captors put his buddy in a bamboo cage and carried him off. Billy heard later that tiger cages were concrete bunkers in the ground, but the image of the bamboo cage remained fixed in his mind as the true tiger cage. The Viet Cong must have assumed the plane had only one crewman, because they didn’t come looking for him. He hid in the tall elephant grass, and when night came he began traveling along the river, using his compass until one day he heard the chatter of an American outfit as they sat in a little wooded area before they marched down the road toward a village. Billy was out on patrol with his platoon and they rescued the navy flyer.

  They’d radioed their outfit, and about an hour later a chopper came and whisked the flyer away. Before the chopper arrived, they’d given him rations and cigarettes and he told them he’d been on the move for two weeks, mostly at night, eating grass and a little fruit after his rations ran out. He told them that he’d gone to school with Carl Yastrzemski, and then he told them about the tiger cage. When Billy Farrell got back to New York he’d wanted to look up the pilot, but was afraid he hadn’t survived the war, that he’d gone back to his carrier and had eventually been downed again and hadn’t made it back a second time.

  Sitting at the VA now, he felt as if he were in a cage, unable to move, and Conroy’s question pushing his head farther down until it was being driven between his knees and the pain in his head was threatening to crack his forehead open. He wanted to pound his head, but he’d been warned that he could injure himself badly by jarring the plate, and although he’d often wanted to end his life, he didn’t want to incapacitate himself and put an added burden on Lurleen and the children.

  They wanted him to talk about it, but there was nothing to talk about. He’d fucked up, fucked up like he always did. He had no business trying to play the piano, or getting married, or having kids, and he definitely shouldn’t have gone into the Corps. What the fuck good was he, anyway, if he had caused a buddy’s death. Because it had been his fault. He guessed Conroy was right and he’d been blocking it out all this time. But the last thing he needed was to talk about it. He didn’t believe it would do any good. What he’d told Elsa and her mother had been a lie, something to make himself feel good. Coming to the group and hearing others talk about their experiences made him recall the whole painful thing with Joey. Now Conroy wanted him to spill his guts, so he could make himself feel better about not having been in Nam.

  Conroy was crazy. Why in the hell would anyone in his right mind feel left out about going to war? Especially Nam. Everybody said it was the craziest fuckin’ war ever fought. You could as easily get killed by your own people as by the enemy. You could be in the middle of a fire-fight, having a protected position and an advantage in numbers and then you’d hear them screaming in the distance and before you knew it the shells were exploding all around you and the great big 20-millimeters from the Skyraider or Skyhawk jets’ machine guns were ripping into men right next to you. That had happened to a regular army outfit. Wiped out a whole platoon in a village that they had just taken. Or else a couple of outfits from the same brigade would surprise each other in the bush and some nut would panic and open fire and before everybody got a grip you had casualties on both sides. Friendly fire, they called it.

  Or else somebody didn’t like somebody else’s attitude, ambushed the poor bastard and blew him away. Fragging was one thing, but guys actually walked up and did a dude right there. He wasn’t going to talk about it. What was past was past and that was it. Why the hell had he gone into the Marines anyway? Butterworth was right. He had no business going in. And maybe Conroy was right about his attitude, maybe he was self-destructive. Conroy was like a vulture.

  “You know what’s underneath all my shit, Lynn? I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward. I don’t wanna go to Brooklyn. Let’s go back to Manhattan. I want to tell you there.”

  “All right,” she said, her heart beating twice as fast, knowing it was coming now. The tension she felt was similar to that of his climaxes, which were powerful, violent, emotional spasms, except that what was coming was enormous, much greater. He was quiet for a long time until they were once again in the middle of the bridge and heading back to Manhattan.

  Billy shook his head and raised his arms to the heavens and said, “I’m gonna be all right, Lynn.” And then it was like a torrent, the words coming out, at times garbled, other times so rapidly that she couldn’t keep up with everything he was saying; talking first about the reasons he’d joined the Marines, and then about what really happened to Joey. He was like a different person, like the person she imagined he’d be if he hadn’t been damaged by the war.

  “And I knew it all along so that the thing with Joey helped me cover it up. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I think so.”

  He talked about being scared because he’d been a very good musician, asking her to corroborate what was obvious when she heard him play. Even with his missing fingers he was a superb pianist. His left hand was genius, its capacity for rhythm and velocity outstanding. She heard him talk about being afraid that he wasn’t good enough and not knowing what scared him, that he was supposed to start playing in a club with a bassist and a drummer, just the three of them, and that they had even made a tape and studios were listening and all along he was dreading having to prove himself.

  “Why?”

  “At first I thought it was because I was white, but it wasn’t that. It was just thinking that I wouldn’t be able to play like all the greats. You know, feeling like, who the fuck am I? Some punk white kid from Mount Vernon, New York, wanting to be like Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell or pianists like that. It was like because I wasn’t black I wasn’t entitled. I guess the way I figured it, at least if you’re black you can let everything hang out and since black people get messed with so much, they don’t care and just play. That’s the way I wanted to be, because being around black people, I used to hear all kinds of stuff about the way people were treated. Crazy shit, like tar and feathering people, whipping them until their skin was raw flesh. This one cat showed me his back where some rednecks in Georgia had caught him coming home from school and had beat him with their belt buckles. He made me touch the scars and the skin. The skin was raised in big ugly welts. And lynchings. You know that song by Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit’?”

  “Yes, it’s about a lynching.”

  “Pop Butterworth says that people think that Billie Holiday wrote the song, but she didn’t. She just sang it. He says it was a Jewish guy in t
he Bronx. He told me about it. But, you know—shit like that.”

  “I understand,” Lurleen said.

  “So I got it into my head that it wasn’t enough that my old man had gotten killed when I was eleven years old. Hell, that shit happened to Irish cops all the time. That’s nothing compared to what happened to black people. I told myself that my old man would’ve wanted me to go and defend this country. I’m not kidding. And it wasn’t only that my old man would’ve wanted me to go. It was like the priests and nuns and everybody around me expected me to go.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No, no way. Forget it. Not her. She went crazy and even threatened to get a gun and shoot me in the legs. And my grandfather said he understood how I felt but that I ought to think it over, being I could probably get a deferment or something because I was the only son my mother had and her husband had been killed. I said that my mind was made up and I enlisted in the Marines. I was totally fucked up, Lynn.”

  “Oh, honey,” Lurleen said, hugging him as they walked. “It must have been awful.”

  “The worst part of it is that all I was doing was hiding from having to find out if I could really cut it out there. I mean Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans and a whole bunch of other white pianists had made it, but that didn’t mean shit to me. The man I wanted to sit next to was Monk. When they lined up the great pianists they’d have to say: Waller, Monk, Powell, Farrell. You know, shit like that. And it could’ve been different if fear hadn’t taken over. It hit me this afternoon on the way home from the VA group, Lynn.”