Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “Over the phone, with a credit card. You can pick up the ticket at the airport.”

  “Wow,” said Jack. “A credit card? Amazing.”

  Was he really so naïve? With Jack you never knew. But as Cindy said, remembering this conversation later in life, nobody in Jack’s family had ever had a credit card, or even a checking account. He was not only the first Adams to go to college, but also the first to ride on an airplane.

  “And now look at him,” she said. “No wonder Danny wanted to fight for America.”

  *Note on Methodology. This woman was interviewed early in Jack Adams’s public life by an operative of ours posing as a tabloid journalist. He paid her a modest sum for her reminiscence, but her chief reward was the opportunity to betray secrets. An intelligence report, the literary form with which I am most familiar, is seldom an eyewitness account, but rather a synthesis of one or many such accounts. So also in this narrative: I am not omniscient, but if I was not there, what I write is based on the firsthand reports of reliable witnesses who met the characters and heard the words they spoke with their own ears. It is not my plan, in this memoir, to keep anything I know from you. Of course, I didn’t know everything, and it must be remembered that Jack lied to everyone about everything, and that some of our informants undoubtedly lied about Jack’s lies. In any case, I report what I know and all that I know and, like a good intelligence officer, do not guess at what I do not know. You are under no such restriction.

  2 In those days Danny was the famous one. Everyone in Tannery Falls knew that Danny was leaving for the war, and they gave him no peace. He had come home a hero so many times that the people who had cheered him from the grandstand took it for granted that he would do so again.

  On Danny’s last night in town the three of them fled across the border of his celebrity to a roadhouse in a town twenty miles away. The roadhouse was small and dark. The four-piece band, dressed in powder-blue polka-dot dinner jackets, was led by a blind pianist who sang bouncy dance tunes of the 1940s in a foggy tenor.

  “Hey, wow, merry-go-round music,” Danny said.

  He ordered a boilermaker and drank it down in a gulp, then swept Cindy onto the dance floor. The tune was “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Danny was a terrific dancer. He held her close, whirling theatrically to the music. Fred and Ginger. It was all a joke—a signal, Cindy knew, that Danny did not want to get serious on his last night home.

  As soon as they sat down, Danny called for another boilermaker. Cindy did not usually drink, but tonight she had two or three gin-and-Squirts—a lady’s drink, the bartender said. Jack drank Coca-Cola as usual. Danny was soon quite drunk, and as the evening wore on he became steadily drunker.

  Danny, doing imitations of friends and teachers, told stories about their high school days. He made them laugh.

  Finally Cindy interrupted. “I don’t want to talk about the past,” she said.

  Danny said, “Is that right? Well, let me tell you something, Cindy. I don’t want to talk about the future.”

  “I know you don’t. That’s why Jack is here. Will you listen to him?”

  “I know what Jack has to say,” Danny said. “It’s an immoral war. The U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines are just one big lynch mob, napalming the poor harmless Viet Cong who never did nobody no harm. It’s my duty to oppose this war, not take part in it. We’ve got to oppose the system in order to change it. Right, Jack?”

  Jack said, “You seem to understand the issues.”

  Danny reached across the table and grasped Jack’s lapel, pulling him toward him. “What I understand, Jack, is that all that’s just a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “You and your pals don’t give diddly-squat what happens to the Vietnamese or anybody else except yourselves. You don’t want to go because you’re afraid to go. You think you’re too good to go. Too noble, too fine, too educated, too fucking valuable. Every time you open your mouths you tell the whole world how much better you are than everybody else. That’s why you’re so willing to let the niggers and the white trash die for you. ‘This guy didn’t even finish high school, so blow him up—it isn’t like he’s got a future anybody would want to live through anyway.’”

  “Danny,” Jack said, “that’s fascist propaganda and you know it.”

  “Yeah? Well, I guess I’ve been brainwashed into a fascist by the army.”

  “You said it, not me. Let’s talk sensibly for a minute, okay?”

  “So you can tell me what?” Danny said. “That only a bonehead like me would go to a war like this? That I can get out of it just like you did, no sweat? All you have to do is lie, cheat, and let some other poor dumb son of a bitch be a war criminal on my behalf? No thanks.”

  “Danny, it’s the government that’s lying and cheating and sending young men to useless deaths. Why should you be one of them? You’re worth your weight in moral gold. Don’t let Nixon murder you.”

  “Nixon?” Danny said. “How about your old man? He started it, right?”

  Jack jumped as if he had been struck. Color drained from his face. He said, “Thanks, Danny.”

  Cindy was puzzled by Jack’s reaction. Danny had kept Jack’s fantasy about his parentage a secret from her.

  “Sorry, Jack,” Danny said. “That was a low blow. But I just don’t want to hear any more crap about this. I’ve been listening to it for four years at Kent State. Those fuckers aren’t conscientious objectors who can’t bring themselves to kill. They want the other side to win—that’s what they really want. And I don’t want to listen to it on my last night with you two.”

  “Danny,” Jack said. “Nobody’s asking you to join the Movement. Just don’t get yourself killed for the wrong reasons. That’s all Cindy is asking.”

  “I know what Cindy’s asking. But I won’t do it. I’m under orders. I’m going to Vietnam, and I want my country to win the war. I do, folks, I do. So let’s drink, dance, and be merry, for tomorrow I’ll be a mass murderer.”

  The band was playing a slow tune. Danny pulled Cindy onto the dance floor. She wept as they danced. Watching them—Danny gazing down into Cindy’s sad face, Cindy smiling back—Jack felt a sob forming in his chest. By the time they came back to the table, he was wiping away tears.

  Jack said, “Danny, listen. I wish I could go with you.”

  Danny gazed at him, wide-eyed. “No shit, Jack, do you? You want to go to war?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  Danny was grinning, that carefree smile that made Cindy’s heart turn over. “But you’re fighting temptation?” he said. “Jack, I know you. You wouldn’t go to war if the other side was an all-girl orchestra.”

  The tension broke. Jack laughed. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  “The question is, does it work both ways? I don’t care how many Communists you fuck, but will you still love me if I kill one?”

  Jack said, “Danny, cut it out.”

  “No, you two started this. Let’s let it all hang out. The difference between you and me is simple: You’re afraid of getting hurt. You’ve been that way all your life. Isn’t that right?”

  Jack looked to Cindy, as if for help. She returned his look with a cold stare. But she intervened. “Danny,” she said, “the subject of this conversation isn’t Jack. It’s you and me. If I could, I’d hide you in the attic till the war’s over.”

  “I know,” Danny said. “That’s because you just don’t get it, Cindy. There is no choice.”

  “But, Danny, there is a choice. You don’t have to do this. Jack isn’t doing it.”

  “I’m not Jack. I love Jack, no shit. I do, I always have. But I know him. Jack, you’re a coward.”

  Cindy said, “Come on, Danny. Cowardice isn’t the subject under discussion.”

  “It’s not? What is—good old common sense?”

  “Yes, for Christ’s sake!”

  Jack was fascinated. He said, “Wait. Let him finish.”

  “Thank you,” Danny said. “To continue, Jack is yellow. He always has been. We al
l know it. Me especially. I’ve been fighting his battles all his life. But Jack can’t help that. He was born the way he is, smart as a whip, backbone like a noodle. Me, I’m good at sports, fast as a striped-ass deer, brave as a fucking lion. Dumb as a stone. I’ll crash into anything—three hundred pounds of doped-up motherfucker in football pads, stone wall, chain saw, doesn’t matter. I don’t give a shit about physical danger. I never have.”

  “Machine gunners and defensive linemen aren’t the same thing,” Cindy said.

  “To me they are. I can’t help that. I was born that way. Just like Jack was born the way he is. Get the point?”

  “No,” Cindy said.

  “Then good luck to you both.”

  The blind tenor was singing “Good Night, Ladies.”

  Danny said, “One more boilermaker.”

  Danny sank his shot glass into the beer, steelworker style, and drank. In the singer’s mirrored sunglasses, Cindy saw Danny’s reflected image, drinking from his glass with one hand while playfully mussing up Jack’s hair with the other.

  The two boys were looking into each other’s eyes, smiling faintly, as if they knew something that no one else could ever know. Cindy realized that she was out of the picture, that she had no place in this moment. These two really did love each other, and Jack was just as afraid of losing Danny as she was, and for the same reason: Danny was his other half. Nothing could possibly be the same without him.

  Danny said, “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think there’s any difference between you and me, Jack. Your fear is no different from my guts. It’s what God gave us when he made us. Maybe there’s some mysterious purpose that’s about to be revealed. Like I said, there’s no choice, because God has already made the choices for us. Jack, Cindy—I want to go to Vietnam. It’s just the way I am.”

  Cindy said, “Okay. Then go.”

  Danny said, “Don’t worry, Jack. I’m not going to get killed.”

  He was telling Jack not to worry. He’d come back and fight his battles for him, just as he always had done.

  Cindy realized that she was never going to get Jack out of Danny’s life, or out of her own. Never.

  3 Danny was too drunk to make love to Cindy on their last night together, and he slept on in the morning long after Cindy was awake, so they had no time to themselves before Jack came for them in Cindy’s car. It was a brand-new Ford, a graduation present from Cindy’s parents. Jack had driven it home the night before, after dropping them off in front of her parents’ house.

  Danny’s plane left in the late afternoon. He insisted that Jack drive him and Cindy to the airport, fifty miles away over twisting back roads. He himself was too hungover to drive, and though Cindy wanted to spend their last hours alone together, he told her no. He did not want her to come home alone in the dark. Especially not in a state of emotion after saying goodbye to him. What if she had an accident, alone on those dark and lonely roads?

  “God knows what might happen,” he said.

  In order to fly on the cheaper military fare, Danny wore his uniform. He had come home from camp wearing civilian clothes. Cindy gasped when he came downstairs in his green trousers and blouse, his khaki shirt and black tie, his clumsy, thick-soled patent-leather shoes, an expert rifleman’s badge on his chest.

  This was reality. Cindy bit her fist and ran upstairs, fending him off when he tried to stop her, and locked herself in her room.

  She did not come out again until Jack rang the doorbell. In the car, there was silence between the lovers. Jack kept quiet, too, driving while Danny and Cindy sat in the backseat staring out the windows, not even holding hands. Jack stopped the car once or twice so that Danny could get out and vomit. He was a beer drinker; whiskey made him sick, and he had drunk a lot of it the night before.

  The plane was several hours late. They waited in the restaurant, where Danny, still silent, had several beers to cure his hangover. Cindy, made reckless by anger and anxiety, matched his silence with one of her own and also matched him drink for drink—gin-and-Squirt against Budweiser. Jack drank Coca-Cola.

  When at last Danny’s flight was called, he stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and shook hands with Jack. Danny gathered him into a bear hug.

  “Be careful crossing the street,” he said.

  “You too,” Jack replied, eyes brimming.

  “No sweat,” Danny said. He pulled him closer and whispered into his ear. “But take care of Cindy. She’s pissed off and she’s loaded. So watch it.”

  Jack nodded.

  Cindy glared at him. He said, “Cindy, I’ll be out front in the car.”

  At last Danny put his arm around her and they walked together to the gate. Cindy tried to kiss him, but he drew back. Danny said, “No kisses. I don’t want the taste of puke to be the last thing you remember about me.” He patted her on the cheek and turned away. She knew him, she read his meaning in his eyes: That’s all you get, baby.

  He was punishing her for locking herself in her room. She understood this, and as he disappeared into the plane, a stranger to her in his uniform, she was overwhelmed by anger, pain, unspeakable love, and—most of all, just as Danny had intended, the son of a bitch!—guilt.

  4 Cindy was weeping unashamedly when she came out of the terminal. Jack opened the door for her, but she slammed it shut and got into the backseat. She curled up in the fetal position, her back to Jack, her body wracked by sobs. Jack put the car in motion. After a while she fell asleep, one hand falling to the floor, one long leg extended, blond hair tumbling.

  When they were about halfway home, Cindy woke up and shouted, “Stop the car.”

  She was choking, hand clapped over her mouth. Jack pulled over. Cindy burst out of the car, retching violently.

  “Shit, oh shit!” she moaned. She fell to her knees, vomiting helplessly, then dropped to all fours. Her unbound hair swung in the path of the vomit. She tried to sweep it out of the way with one hand, but the gesture was hopeless. Jack gathered up her hair. She pushed him away.

  “Fuck you, Jack!” she said. “You’re no friend of mine.”

  She staggered toward the car, lost her balance, and fell onto the blacktop on her knees. She howled in pain, beating her fists on the pavement.

  A car went by at high speed in the opposite direction, rocking their parked vehicle on its springs. A few moments later another car approached, then slowed down almost to a stop, with Cindy in its headlights. The passenger, a middle-aged woman, rolled down her window and looked out at Jack, memorizing his face.

  “What’s the problem here?” she said.

  The driver, pad and pencil in hand, was writing down the license number. Jack felt a stab of panic. All his life he suffered from an irrational, poor boy’s fear of policemen. He felt like a fugitive in America, as if old Joe Kennedy might find out at any moment who he really was and send the cops to put him away on some trumped-up charge so he wouldn’t embarrass the family.

  Cindy got to her feet and waved drunkenly at the woman. “It’s okay,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Cindy responded with another tipsy wave.

  “Beautiful girl like you!” the woman said. The car drove on.

  Jack said, “Come on, Cindy. Time to go home.”

  “No,” Cindy said. “Got to sober up.”

  “Cindy, let’s go home. Really.”

  “‘Really,’” Cindy said, mocking his new Eastern accent. “It’s my fucking car, and I say no. My mother hates Danny enough already.”

  Cindy got into the backseat again and immediately fell asleep, or seemed to. Cars roared by on the narrow road, blowing their horns. Sooner or later a sheriff’s cruiser or the Ohio State Patrol would come along. The Patrol were bastards; there was no telling what they might do. Jack started the car and drove on until he saw a strip-mine entrance he recognized. It led into a labyrinth of old roads and mines. He had taken girls there before. He turned in, drove to a spot he remembered, and switched off the e
ngine.

  The moon had come up. Cindy, sleeping on her side on the backseat, lay in its buttery light like an odalisque. Even drunk, even smelling of vomit, even unconscious, she was as pretty as a picture. She was snoring.

  Jack lay down on the front seat and went to sleep himself.

  How much later he did not know, he jerked awake. In the backseat Cindy was fighting herself awake, arms flying, hands clawing. Her eyes were tightly closed.

  “Cindy!”

  She stared wildly at Jack.

  He said, “Cindy, it’s okay. It’s me.”

  “Jack,” she said, “I dreamed he was dead.”

  “It was a dream. You’re okay. Danny’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

  Cindy didn’t seem to hear. She wailed, “Oh Jesus! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

  Jack did not know what to say to her, so he smiled, always his best weapon. Eyes streaming, Cindy climbed over the front seat and sat down beside Jack.

  She was trembling violently. She said, “Jack, hold on to me. I feel like I’m falling apart.”

  Gingerly, Jack put his arms around her. She hugged him back, shaking, Jack thought, as if she were freezing and only the warmth of another body could save her. He imagined she was thinking of Danny. After a few moments she relaxed, then fell asleep.

  Almost immediately she woke with a start, crying, “Don’t let me fall asleep. I don’t want to be in that dream again.”

  Jack said, “Okay, I’ll turn on the radio.”

  They listened to music for a while. Cindy made no attempt to move away from him. Finally, intending to push her gently away from him and start the car, he kissed her lightly on the forehead. She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to understand who he was and what he wanted.

  Then she kissed him, chastely, on the lips. Jack kissed her back, lightly. She responded. Up to this moment Jack had not had a sexual thought, at least not one he felt he could act on. But the kiss triggered the essential Jack. He was overcome by desire. He kissed Cindy lingeringly; she accepted his tongue, then turned her head violently aside, as if she were the one who tasted vomit.