“Who you aimin at?” Tony asked.
Fuzzy ignored his question. “You know phu-gas?”
“Gas and soap gel,” Tony said. “Like napalm.”
“Yeah. Big cans, Man. Drums. Stick a soup can in the bottom with a small sponge soaked in gasoline. And two wires. Fill the drum one-third with phu-gas. Cap it. Cover it with gravel en shit. Cheap, Man. Set em up all over the city. Wire em together, then send the spark. Gas in the soup can evaporates and gives you a perfect explosive gas-air mix that’ll fire off the whole god fuckin damn drum. Cheap. Just one here, one there. Blow away a few innocents. You watch, Man. When they can’t stop me, Man, you watch this fuckin government come tumblin down.”
“Yeah.” Tony had said. Fuzzy was still in the field.
“Yeah.” Fuzzy’s eyes lit.
“Then what?” Tony had asked.
“Then what the fuck,” Fuzzy had answered.
“Yeah,” Tony had said.
“I could use garbage cans,” Fuzzy said.
“Unlimited supply,” Tony nodded.
Fuzzy bit his lip. Brooded. Tony said no more.
“Whatdaya think?” Bobby was almost giddy. He’d been banging his head against the wall for eight days attempting to jar loose a decision, and finally an answer had come late on a November afternoon as he and Sara sat in the office-mobile in the parking lot of a dilapidated shopping center in Novato, the town south of San Martin. Parked in front of the A & W Root Beer stand, they sat sipping root beer floats, eating cheeseburgers and french fried onion rings to sate Sara’s craving, with soft vanilla ice cream in a cup on the floor for Josh. “A and W Energy Systems,” he said.
It had been a difficult week, adjusting to having been fired, first blaming himself, then rationalizing that Henry Alan Harrison was an idiot, then finally telling Sara, “I don’t distrust my ability to do the work, but I’ve got to learn how to present it.”
“A and W Energy Systems?” Sara giggled. She too verged on giddy. “Andrassy and Wapinski. But people will think it’s something powered by root beer fizz.” They laughed together.
“Maybe W and A,” Bobby said.
Besides the adjustment to being fired they had had to deal with the crisis of Pewel’s health. Bobby had been terrified. To him it was worse than the incident thirty months earlier because then he had believed in his grandfather’s strength, but now he doubted the old man’s resilience.
“Hydrochlorothiazide and Digoxin,” Linda had explained to him at midweek. “They did a full work-up. His left ventricle’s enlarged.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The left ventricle’s the one that pumps the blood to the lungs,” Linda had answered. “When a part of the muscle is insufficient, that part enlarges to compensate for the weakness. They think they can control it with medication.”
“Can he come home?” Bobby had asked.
“Probably by the end of the week.”
Earlier that afternoon Bobby had spoken again with Linda who was at High Meadow. Pewel was in his barn office, she’d said, working on a design for a hospital bed that could lower to sixteen inches off the floor as well as raise to forty-eight inches. “‘So a man like me, damn it’”—Linda quoted Pewel—“‘don’t feel imprisoned way up there on them islands. It’s undignified having to have a nurse help you out of bed when, if the damn thing was normal height, you’d just get up by yourself.’”
Sara glowed in the light from the A & W sign. Her skin was radiant, her hair shiny. She was four and a half months pregnant. She leaned toward him. “I’ve got it!”
Josh nuzzled his snout between them.
“Say it again,” Sara said.
“What?”
“You know, when humans overcompete for resources ...”
“Oh. You mean the stuff I was writing about if we could build energy-efficient, self-sufficient, cost-effective shelters and transportation systems.”
“Yes. To lower people’s ... How did you put it?”
“To lower the competition for resources by lessening our dependence on fossil fuels.” Bobby paused. Sara curled her fingers like a charades player attempting to draw out a respondent. “Ah ... auto fuel consumption drives up petroleum costs in the Third World and forces people to burn their forests for fuel. Environmentally efficient energy systems are beneficial, both immediately to the user, and also over time because they help alleviate international tension decreasing the need for war.”
“See!” Sara was excited. She bounced in her seat, massaged her fingers deeply into Josh’s thick coat. “You said it twice: ‘environmentally efficient energy systems.’”
“Um!” Bobby too was excited. “Environmental Energy Systems.”
“Oh, I like that. Bob, I like that. Your own business.”
“Me too! Environmental Energy Systems, 101 Old Russia Road, San Martin ...”
He let Tyler Mohammed give him a tab of acid but he did not drop it. Fuzzy whipped on him a nickle bag of dew but he did not smoke it. Instead he brooded in his squat, in emotional isolation, brooded about his old man, about the old man always being angry at him, always being disappointed, except when he was in The Corps. Then the old man had had trepidations but he’d been proud.
It was November 10th, Tony’s twenty-seventh birthday, the 199th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Tony watched Ty crash through consciousness into the wherever. “Snore softly, Bro,” he mumbled. He crawled from the box, quietly sidled past Big Bro Boyson, out cold, on the roof. Tony turned, came back, covered Boyson with a piece of carpeting they’d found. Then he moved to the edge, sat on the parapet. Most city lights were out. The late news was over. From the roof Tony could see the bluish light of a TV in a room on the second floor of a building across the street. Snore softly, Bro, he thought. Dream softly, Bro. Make the tunnel go away. Let the children run. Let their mother duck. Let the car crash into an abutment instead of jumping ...
On the street there were two people, teenagers, he thought, two girls. He watched them glance back over their shoulders, then dash across to his side of the street. They brought a smile to his face, how they were dressed in bell-bottom dungarees with bells large enough to conceal small dogs, and one in a tank top even though it was too chill for that. They scurried to the corner, turned, retreated, ran into his alley, disappeared in the darkness. Don’t mean nothin, he thought. Then he saw three men across the street. “What the fuck.” Something in Tony Pisano was grating. One of the men had a bat. His mind began racing. The street was safe, had been safe, but things were changing. Are they after me? he thought. Would they bring attention to the roof squats? He crouched behind the parapet, glanced to the boxes, low-crawled to the alley side, peered over the side parapet. He could not discern young girls from dumpsters. His paranoia spiked. He fell back to hands and knees, began puffing, feeling drained, feeling as if he needed to lie flat, in a prone firing position, maybe crawl into a shell. He moved to the front corner, craned his head out over the parapet. Again Tony ducked, froze. His arms trembled.
Then Tony heard, “Back this way, Man.”
“Yeah. They gotta be.”
“Damn whore.”
“Last time she does that, Man.” The three men laughed.
Tony peered over. The men moved into the alley. He could see one hanging back. The other two disappeared into the dark. Tony shivered. His teeth chattered. He thought, vaguely, he could rouse Big Bro, Wildman. He could ... Then he thought, somehow he deserved this, deserved for things to be shitty, for atrocities to follow him. It was natural. It was supposed to be like this. Then, “Like fuckin hell.” The words shook from his clamped jaw. “Like fuckin hell.” The words, quiet, came from his gut. He was still trembling when he dropped over the edge, softly, to the fire escape, softly dropping to the second-floor balcony above the alley. The man with the bat was silhouetted against the opening to the street. No one else was visible. Tony hugged the wall, stood stock still. He heard movement at the dumpsters below him but it wa
s too dark to see. Then, “Ha! Gottcha! Com’ere.”
“Let me go!”
“You owe me—”
“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!!” The explosion was Tony’s voice, so full of violence, the young man leaped, jolted back; the watcher at alleymouth stumbled, dropped back, back-pedaled to the far side of the street. The man with the bat crouched into a fighting stance. Tony was silent, frozen, rigid. One of the girls began crying.
Then, from the man with the bat. “Just grab her and let’s go.”
And from the roof. “LEAVE HER. LEAVE OR WE’LL BLOW YER FUCKEN HEADS OFF!”
“Hey”—nervous, backing out—“hey. I’m goin, Man. Hey, we’re outta here.”
November passed. Viet Nam was creeping back into the news. Busy men like Wapinski missed the onset, ignored the page 32, then page 12, then page 8 stories, but idle men, men of the street, of the grates and rooftops, men with time to spend, talked amongst themselves of their suspicions. By mid-December they began to stir. Phuoc Long Province: Don Luan and Bo Tuc cities came under heavy attack and were overrun. Song Be Airfield, Duc Phong, Firebase Bunard all were hit. Gerald Ford, Congress, did nothing. America prepared for Christmas. The men of the street stirred.
“I been there, Man. I fired shells from Bunard,” said Frankie “The Kid” Denahee.
“Yeah?” Tony.
“Yeah. We built that sucker ... in sixty-six. Or ... Fuck! I don’t remember.”
“Yeah.” Pisano, quiet, helpless, resigned. “Hey Ty?”
“Huh.”
“Wapinski says we should go up there for Christmas. House-sit while he en his old lady go to Pennsy.”
“Fuck the Captain, Man. He jus gonna throw our shit out when he come back.”
“Roof’s gettin old, Man. He said he’d come pick us up.”
“Shee-it, Man. Then what? What if somebody take our squat, Man? Roof aint so bad. You stop playin Superman to every who-ah runnin from her pimp, you live easier.”
“T-n-T, Man. I thought you was wasted.”
“T-n-T, Bro.” They tapped knuckles, catchers in the rye.
December 18, on the road from San Jose to San Martin—“Hey!” Bobby said. He was at a loss for words. The distance between him and Ty and Tony had grown to a chasm. “It’s good to see you guys.”
“Long as you know it ain’t me,” Ty said.
“Um.” Bobby said.
“An nobody know I’m there.”
“Yeah. I understand. I didn’t know about the fraud charges until Tony told me.”
“They fucked me, Man. They saw a black livin in their neighborhood, they set him up. I didn’t fraud nobody. Not one sucka woulda lost one dime if they hadn’t set me up.”
“Um.” Bobby pursed his lips. Then he said, “So, it’s Tyler Mohammed now. No more Dorsey. No more Blackwell.”
“No more whitey names,” Ty answered.
They fell silent. Bobby didn’t know how to deal with him, and he was concerned with what Sara would think. Ty and Tony did not look dirty, but they were shabby. And they smelled. They had showered in a men’s shelter the night before but months on the roof or in the shelter had left a residue. Still, it was not the visual or the olfactory but the anger that disturbed Bobby. Tony seemed happy, almost manic. He’d had a string of questions about Grandpa Wapinski’s health, was disturbed when Bobby told him that Pewel had been readmitted to St. Luke’s for constipation, dehydration and alkalosis; and relieved that it had only been a five-day stay in which the doctors had changed Pewel’s diuretic.
“My true name”—Ty began unsolicited—“is Tyrone Dorsey Blackwell. My true name is Tyrone Blackwell Wallace. My brothers are Phillip and Randall Dorsey Simpson, and James Dorsey Wallace, and my sister is Shreva Wallace.”
“Wow!” Tony said. “You got a sister, huh?”
“I got a baby, too. Jessica.”
“You shittin me, Man,” Tony said.
“You stay in touch?” Bobby asked.
“No Sir. When you got no name, no address, you don’t stay in touch with no one.” There was a lag. Then Ty said, “They call us T-n-T in San Jose, cause Tony always blowin up and I’m always coverin his ass.”
“Ha!” Tony slapped Ty’s hand.
“But I ...” Ty was hesitant. “I shouldn’t be comin back here. They see Blackwell, they see Dorsey ...”
“It’ll be cool, Man,” Tony said. “They’re only going to see Ty Mohammed.”
“Shit! They ain’t gonna see nobody. I ... I don’t even know who I am.”
Bobby slowed for the tollgate before the Golden Gate Bridge. “So”—he snapped out—“who the fuck do you think you are?”
“I don’t fuckin know, Man.”
“Maybe you’re all of em,” Bobby said. Ty did not respond. Bobby continued. “Ty, you remember when you stayed with me on Deepwoods?”
“I remember, Cap’n. I remember thinkin I was goina get me a piece a the pie. Just like you.”
“Man, I’ve wanted to tell you this ever since then.”
“What?”
“When you drove away that last time. You remember, I’d come home from an appointment or something. You’d been watching TV the night before. And drinking and you’d left your boots in the middle of the room. That morning I stuck em in the garbage and went to work. When I came back you’d packed and were clearing out. I was angry. I don’t remember why. Maybe at Red. But I didn’t open my mouth. What I should have said then, about the boots, was not that it meant clear out but it meant pick em up and put em away. That’s what my mother used to do. Stick our stuff in the trash if she found something lying around. Damn it, Man. I didn’t mean for you to split. That’s been bothering me for three years.”
“Yeah?!” Ty stared at Wapinski.
“Yeah.”
“No shit?”
“I shit you not, my main man.”
“Thanks, Captain. Thanks, Bob.”
22
RETURNING WAS SCARY. FOR Ty to San Martin, for Bobby to Mill Creek Falls. He had not told his grandfather or anyone else back East about being fired, about going it on his own. And he had not told Sara that the County of San Martin had challenged his unemployment claim, that the checks they’d been counting on would not arrive. To save money Bobby had reverted to eating nothing but raw rice bits during the day while Sara was at school. He’d been losing weight again, worrying over every dime, hiding his worry from Sara who was frugal anyway, afraid if she knew their true financial picture she too might skimp, and pregnant, he did not want her to skimp, or to worry.
As they drove in from Williamsport, Bobby said, “I hope you like it. It’s not much. The house is pretty ratty and the farm’s been deteriorating for years.”
“Tony made it sound like the Garden of Eden,” Sara said. “And you know how I like hills. If you’d been a flatlander I don’t think I would have fallen for you.”
“Well, you’re lucky you did, lady.” Bobby chuckled, kept his eyes on the road, tried to keep it light.
“And why’s that?” Sara baited him.
“Cause you’re knocked up and you wouldn’ta wanted ta be seein Granpa lookin like that and not bein married.”
Then their first morning together at High Meadow and Sara’s introduction to the farm. It was cold, windy. The leaves were down, the trees gangly gray stalks in a gray sky. The ground was brown, dead, hard. Ice skimmed the pond except above the subterranean fracture where water from an artesian spring stirred the surface. “It was a great place to grow up,” Bobby said. They had descended to the pond, were slowly climbing to the apple orchard. Bobby held Sara’s arm, trying to steady her. “A great place to be a little boy.”
“I can do it.” Sara shook her arm free. “It’d be a great place for a little girl, too,” she added. They climbed on, entered the open-roofed orchard. Sara’s breath smoked before her face in small puffs. She blew a stream into a puff and watched the puff and stream dissolve into the dryness.
“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “in S
an Martin, I get the feeling God’s bored with what’s happening on earth and pretty soon he’s going to say, ‘That’s all folks,’ and that’s going to be it.”
“Maybe He said that a long time ago,” Sara said. She started walking again, climbing the south knoll toward its rounded peak. “What are those funny little birds? See them?”
“Oh. Ah, that’s either a nuthatch or a tufted titmouse. Or a junco.”
“Don’t ... you lived here all that time and you don’t know their names?”
“Oh”—Bobby turned to the birds—“I know their names. That’s Chuck. And that’s Diana.”
Over the next few days Bobby showed Sara the barn and Grandpa’s office and several of the old farmer’s designs; he brought her to the family cemetery where Grandma Wapinski and Aunt Krystyna were buried; together they explored the new fields and strawberry beds Tony had begun and the Sugar Shack with its new-fangled dumping and filter system. They climbed the back trail, pregnant as Sara was, cold as it was, past the old cabin and up the high ridge to the resplendent sugarbush and finally to the edge of the gap where Bobby told Sara about the far side, the Indian trail, the cathedral of virgin eastern hemlocks.
“Someday,” she whispered.
He smiled and they held each other and watched a male and a female cardinal rise from the gap and flit into the maple crowns from where their repeated shrills shook the entire sugarbush. Bobby engaged them with his own whistle—three beats, then four, then five—and the birds answered him in kind, then went back to their tiff. “Clarence and Anita,” he whispered to Sara.
On the twenty-second of December Sara met Linda Pisano. They hit it off immediately. Yet there was a distance between them Sara could not understand until Linda began to talk about Tony: “When he’s here, now, it’s like living with a total stranger.” The next day Sara met John Pisano, Sr. and Jo, who had come to High Meadow to bring Pewel a present: wool socks and insulated deerskin mittens because his feet and hands were now always cold. They were elated to meet Sara and to see that Bobby had “settled down.” And then the tension again: “Tony’s house-sitting for us right now,” Sara said.
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