“Hey,” I said. “If you can wonder about the material nature of a ghost when you don’t believe in them, I can be afraid of them when I don’t believe in them.”
“I was just wondering what people who did believe in them thought.”
“Sure,” I said. “No. I just think it’s a nice spooky sort of way that people have to pretend that things, that people, don’t just, you know – go.”
“Yup,” my father said. “That sounds right.”
I gave the engine another tug, and it sputtered, but this time with greater promise. Then it roared itself to life. “So what were you always screaming about when you were a kid, then?” my father yelled.
Actually he had started the sentence out just talking in a normal tone, in the near silence. But when the engine roared he’d had to yell. He finished the sentence out – himself nearly screaming. I just shrugged at him across the boat, exaggeratedly, in reply. Then I turned the boat around, pointing it back to Henry’s dock.
There was no use talking now, with the engine on.
That evening Gerry called from Fargo. He couldn’t come in August, he said, like he’d planned, but would try for October instead.
My father shook his head, and gave my shoulder a half-hearted squeeze.
“I can last till spring,” he told me. “October is still plenty of time.”
But by seven o clock that night, with the mixture of beer and pills in his head, my father was nearly catatonic on the couch, and Henry departed to his bedroom, without TV. I went upstairs too and left my father alone.
The next morning he could not get out of bed, and all the liquor had been emptied from the house.
“I have a cold,” my father said. He looked like hell. I warmed up some soup at noon, but he wouldn’t touch it. “Take it away,” he growled at me.
Toward mid-afternoon, I told him I was going to the store and did he need anything?
“A priest,” my father said.
“You’re Protestant,” I told him, “and you don’t believe in God.”
“That was dumb of me,” my father said. “That was cocky. I shouldn’t have been so cocky. Don’t you be so cocky,” he said.
He didn’t drink at all that day, and it was very quiet in the house. But then, the next day, he got up saying that he was feeling much better.
“Wow!” he told me. “I really felt like death. Now I know how it feels, anyway. It’s bad,” he said. “It’s worse than I thought.”
In the early afternoon we drove to Massena and picked up my father’s prescription. “It’s the alcohol. I can’t drink it like I used to,” my father complained. But on our way back, still on the American side, he stopped at the liquor exchange and got a couple more bottles of something. I didn’t go inside. And I didn’t say anything when he got back to the truck, and so we drove in silence, until my father said, “What? You don’t want to hear any stories?”
“Not really,” I said.
“No?” He seemed mean. “Got any for me?”
I ignored him, but then he told me one anyway, even though I hadn’t wanted one, or asked.
“So, one time,” my father said.
5
The four of them are in Danang, and Teddy says, “Let’s really rip it up tonight.” They’re getting antsy as hell. They drink steadily for most of the evening and then they smoke a joint. It’s the fattest one they’ve ever seen, and for a while they just pass it around, unlit. It’s Owen who rolls. “That’s craftsmanship,” Napoleon tells him.
“We’re gonna be sitting on another planet,” Teddy says. A little fiercely.
They don’t watch each other this time, but let each man hang on for as long as he likes, and hold his breath for whatever duration. Sometimes they splutter and cough out the smoke. It’s embarrassing if they choke hard.
There’s a certain curiosity tonight: each thinking about what Teddy had said. About how high it might be possible to get. If it might be a measurable distance from the place that they are.
Napoleon has the same feeling for a moment as when he first arrived in the country. When he was, for all intents and purposes, AWOL. And so he tells the other guys about that as the joint gets smoked down to a little more than half its size. Everyone laughs out loud really hard. Napoleon laughs so hard that it occurs to him that he may not be able to stop. But the prospect is, in itself, so funny, that it makes him laugh even harder. What if it really does stick? They’d send him home, for sure. They’d have to. Imagine. Discharged for medical reasons. Incessant laughter, sir. Unstoppable, it seems, the doctor would say, sticking a popsicle stick in his mouth, which would already be open, on account of him laughing so hard. Nope. This boy’s not fit to fight.
Wouldn’t be bad. No – think of it – it would be great! Only then he guesses it might be a dishonourable discharge. Laughing. That would be a bummer. Would it? He loses the thought. What would be dishonourable? Dis – honour. The word presupposes a certain thing.
Much later Napoleon gets up and walks very slowly back to his bunk. He holds onto the wall sometimes, in the pitch-dark, like he’s scaling a cliff. Sometimes he holds so tightly onto the rough cement that later he will notice that the tips of his fingers are raw, and wonder why. He looks for cracks that might prove a firm hold, then he finds his bunk and lies down.
He is so happy to be lying down – to have, against all odds, travelled the great distance of the room and come to rest now, in just this way – that he wants to account for himself somehow. The way that he is – each small part, seemingly so disparate – in some way, a singular, moveable body; resting, but alive. The way that he’s been blown that way, as accidental as a star; by chance, by some cataclysmic, unreckonable force, greater than himself. The way that he has perhaps already long ago been extinguished – so that his own thoughts are in fact only an echo of someone else’s, or his own. The way that he, scattered into a thousand, inchoate, diffusive directions … he, a singular thing, a particle – a part-icular – body, still hurtling itself objectively through space and time, has yet, by accident, come to rest somehow, briefly, now. His feet, for example. Resting only a short distance apart from one another, and yet taking up two entirely different sections of the bed. Or rather not taking up: displacing, in fact, no bed at all. Think of it! To have displaced objectively nothing, his whole life! To have simply hurtled through – an impenetrable, impenetrating thing. The feet, for example. The legs, the knees …
But then suddenly that’s all there is. Just that: the knees. And then again: the knees, the knees. He can go no further. There is no sensation any longer, no knees at all that he can find, but only this repetition, this stutter of a noise in his head.
Is this then – the final diminishing? The last echo of thought in his head? The whole world shakes now. Stutters, and pounds.
If it is he never would have picked it for himself. He wouldn’t have dreamed it up even if he’d had another hundred billion years. Interesting that it will be like that, when it comes. If now. If ever. Nothing you could ever see coming. Even if you lay in your own bed for a hundred years, just waiting. Even if you counted out the seconds, the semi-seconds, of its passing, pausing at each wearisome metronomic tick, saying, now, then now, then now, it would still somehow occur in the middle of everything: between the revolution of one millisecond and another, a surprise, even then.
Still, it is not so bad, and he remains. Perhaps that is all it ever is. To just, finally, give up on the progression, the constant click-clicking forward. To pause, to stay put, to be remained of yourself; to become that remaining.
“Well, what was it?” I asked. Because he just left me there, that way. Just broke off then, at what seemed to be halfway through the story. Left himself, lying in that bed, thinking well if this is the end …
“We were under mortar attack,” my father said. “I would have figured it out if I’d have had any of my wits about me.”
“What should you have done?”
“Oh, I don’t know,
I guess climbed under the bed or something, shit my pants, I don’t know. There wasn’t anything that I could have done right then much different than I did. I was happy in the morning when I figured it all out. Then we went somewhere else.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I don’t know. I really can’t remember the name of anything. Danang, but that’s about it. Maybe if I looked at a map or something, but I really don’t think even that would help. I don’t think I ever really knew where we were. They never told us, or anything. It was just up, down. We got our orders, climbed into planes, choppers, got into the backs of trucks – and then we got out. We did what we were told, it was all the same fucking country. We didn’t care. It wasn’t like sightseeing or anything.”
“I know that,” I said.
“It just didn’t mean anything to us, is all,” my father said. “Where we were. We just got dropped off and that was it, that was Vietnam. There we were – and you’d know it, too. Clumsy! Jesus! You knew where we were!” He took a sip off his cigarette. “Johnson got piped in once, and he says, Viet Cong can sit in a hole for a couple of days with nothing to eat and drink, where our boys can’t go twenty minutes without wanting a smoke and a cup of coffee …” My father stuttered out the words in imitation of the static of a radio. “It was like any government work that way,” he said. He gave a short bark of a laugh. Then, “Well, no. Not quite. I don’t know, Honey,” he said, and turned to look at me for the first time in a while. He’d been talking out the window. “I’m a poor – I’m a poor source,” he said. “I’ve a real poor memory for the place.” He paused again and then said quickly, as if with the next sentence he wished to get rid of the thing entirely, “Imagine absolute fucking chaos, then that’s it, you got it.” When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “Honestly, I think you’d be better off watching the movies. Brando. In Apocalypse Now, for instance.”
I thought he was joking, and I gave a short laugh. “What?” I said.
“Yeah,” my father agreed, “just like that. Insanity. My stories are all and then, and then, and then, when it didn’t happen like that to me.” He breathed in, “Yep,” he said. In the way Henry did, nearly swallowing the word. “You might hear a name,” he said, “but you didn’t have a map. We were just like elephants, crashing around. Elephants, working for the government. Wanting coffee and smokes.”
That night my father beat Henry and I soundly in a game of euchre, which we played three-handed. Then, just before he clicked out the kitchen light and made his way to bed, saying, “Well, that’s it for me, folks. I’m turning in,” he reached again into his secret store of poetry and song lyrics and movie quotations that he kept at the back of his brain and, laying his hands one on top of the other, he lifted his head dramatically, and closed his eyes.
“Remember me when I am dead,” my father said, “and simplify me when I am dead.”
He paused, then asked us, beaming: “Who said that? Where did that come from?” He’d opened his eyes again, and began looking back and forth between Henry and I, enthusiastically, as if we were contestants and he was the game-show host.
“Sounds like poetry,” Henry said.
I nodded agreement. “The words of a rank sentimentalist,” I said. But I liked it. It made me feel happy and sad at the same time. And also like maybe everything was not such a big mystery after all.
“Yeah,” my father could have said to me, then, following my lead: “Why?” So that I could say back to him: “Why do you interfere with my little romance?”
He always remembered better than me.
But that time my father let the reference slide, and it drifted away like the words of the poem that he had remembered, which had come from nowhere.
There was no score on the ball game between the Red Sox and the Orioles. Henry turned it off and reached for a chunk of newspaper to read from my father’s pile until the second game of the night came on.
My father scratched a dozen or so more words into his crossword, one right after the other, suddenly inspired. Then he lay down his pen and clicked off the light, saying that to us about “turning in.”
Very soon afterward I also made my way to bed, leaving Henry alone to watch the late-night game on TV.
6
Napoleon is never certain when he becomes aware of what’s next; of when one moment ceases to be itself and becomes another. Has he been wandering around in circles this whole time, or has he been sitting? And if sitting, how sitting? Propped up by some object?
But at some point it happens. There is a point at which he knows.
Some of the guys are shouting now, or swearing, or shaking their fists. Bean is there too. But he is no more formidable now, nor less, than any of the other men. Involuntarily, Napoleon covers his ears. But really, there’s not many of them. It can’t be much noise. If he pays attention he can count them. One. Two. Three. Four at the most. He looks around for Owen. For Hill, for Teddy. But he doesn’t see them. It’s been half a day now since they’ve been milling around. Since the chopper came, went. Since these orders, which are not orders. Which are just a low buzz, a sort of racket in his brain. Once, Napoleon is nudged in the boot by a big guy named Mike who has always to Napoleon resembled a very thin bear. He’s got a great big head, and sad, slow eyes. Now, he nudges Napoleon, touching Napoleon’s boot with his own. The contact causes Napoleon to wince in pain. His feet are the fucking sorest in the world.
“We’re going back?” Mike asks. His big bear eyes move, watery. Unfixed in his head.
“That’s the command.”
Napoleon’s voice is sour in his mouth. He comes across mean and that’s a surprise because he doesn’t feel mean. Another question is asked, but Napoleon doesn’t hear it, and only shakes his head at the bear, imitating the bear’s own gentle side to side.
It only seems like more because he can’t decide any longer who’s who, and because they are making so much noise.
The ones that aren’t making noise, like he and the bear, are just standing or sitting around like dumb-asses.
A guy named Pike is one. He’s a small guy who really looks like a fish, with a squished-up mouth and buggy eyes. That’s not why they call him Pike, though. That really is his name.
The other guy is Looch. A big Italian. It turns out (one time Napoleon caught a glimpse of the guy’s red tape on the end of his gun) that Looch is short for Luciano or something. He was surprised when he saw that, to think that guy had a real name too.
The last guy they call Tiny, but really he’s a great big motherfucker. From Jersey. An Irish with the real name Francie. Always talking about that. Being from Jersey and an Irish, and a great big motherfucker to boot. It’s these guys that are making most of the noise, and at first Napoleon’s unable to actually see Bean; he just knows he must be there. But then he does see him, and without knowing what he’s doing, or why, Napoleon gets up and walks over to him, and says something, which even to himself he cannot identify.
No one either agrees or disagrees with whatever it is that Napoleon has said, or what Bean has then said in reply. And then they go.
Napoleon goes. His feet hurt more than ever.
On the outskirts of the village they come across a small hooch, and as the squad approaches they can see three or four women crowded under its low awning. One of the women is holding a child, and there are about five or six more children crowded behind. Their heads appear and then disappear at revolving angles, in the low and heavily shadowed region at the back of the hooch. Their eyes, when they do appear, are very large in their heads, like they must see things twice over.
Everything seems like that. As though it has already happened. As though it has already frozen itself into the shape that it had, and now will continue to hold.
But then with a jolt – an actual physical jolt, as Bean pushes past him to enter the hooch – Napoleon realizes that the thing is alive and moving toward some end. That he is part of the thing. That he may in fact be the thing. He feels
sick to his stomach, but only in the way that he has felt all along, since he arrived here, off the passenger plane. Only now he knows what the sickness has been.
And there he’d been, thinking of his feet, for Christ’s sake. And now Bean inside the hooch. Bean hitting the women on their backsides with the butt of his gun. Bean taking the baby from the mother’s arms. That cry. That single note.
The butt of his gun where his name, like theirs, must be emblazoned in red.
Or, Napoleon wonders. Might that be a privilege of rank? An anonymous gun?
The women leap up at the touch of the gun, and out of the hooch, so that they stand in front of it now, in the grass. The children, too, come out of hiding, exposed, and stand as though at great distances from one another. It is like he is looking at everything the wrong way round, through the butt end of a telescope. Everything turned inside out now, and upside down. Christ, Christ, Napoleon thinks, and again a voice appears in his throat, but again he cannot make out what it says, or what Bean has replied. He only notices the way that Bean has started to sweat – in patterns – through his shirt.
Tiny’s like a horse at the gate. The women stand barefoot in the grass. Napoleon doesn’t want to look at their faces, but then he does.
The Lieutenant has by now made a small but precise mark on the young woman’s arm, where he grabbed her in the place where the baby had been, and steered her into a small clearing, adjacent to the path. He lifts his gun but finds that it has already been fired, so he puts it down.
The shots have rung out, yes, but in the past tense. The moment erased somehow.
And then Owen. A long, infinitesimal second later. And three words, which Napoleon hears this time, and then another sound, like a loud blow to the brain, and Owen, drifting. As though in slow motion. Owen falling. Continuing to fall.
The Sentimentalists Page 11
