Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

He said, “I’ll need a hand.”

  Jack thought he meant that he wanted him to break the news, prepare Cindy before Danny came on the line. But then Danny threw back the sheet and Jack saw what had happened to him, and he understood what kind of help Danny really needed. Half of his body—the body that had been such a wonder, such a gift—was frozen, scarred, numb to commands from Danny’s brain.

  Jack helped Danny into the chair and wheeled him out to the pay phone by the elevators. Jack placed a collect call and handed the phone to Danny.

  Jack heard Cindy’s voice shrieking, “Yes! I accept!” And then shouting, “Danny! Danny!”

  Danny held the mouthpiece against his chest. His eyes were fixed on the pay-phone box. Jack knew that he wanted to hang up, but he was too far below the phone to be able to reach the hook, and he could not get up on his own.

  He said, “Jack, help me out.”

  Jack shook his head, then locked the wheels on Danny’s chair and walked away, out of earshot.

  Danny said, “End of the fucking world.” Then he put the phone to his ear and said, “Hi. It’s me.”

  He talked to Cindy for more than an hour, weeping most of the time. At the end of it, he waved the phone at Jack, asking for help. Jack walked over and hung up the phone.

  Danny said, “Thanks a lot, buddy. You just dropped me on the flypaper. She’s coming tomorrow.”

  Jack wheeled Danny back to his bed and helped him in. He covered him up. He said, “I’ll be back.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Maybe not tomorrow, though.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “You mean she didn’t send me her love?”

  “I told her you got here first,” Danny said. “The rest was silence.”

  “Does this mean I don’t get to be best man?”

  “Don’t ask,” Danny said. “At least the two of you were right about the one thing you ever agreed on. I never should have gone to ‘Nam. Wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He grinned. “Lost at least ninety miles off my fastball.”

  Jack’s eyes filled with tears. He said, “Danny, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” Danny said. “You weren’t there.”

  3 One Thursday evening, Jack, finishing a long Jesus joke, failed to notice that the floor of the ward had just been mopped. Syringe in hand, he slipped, fell down, and impaled his hand on the needle.

  Sitting on the floor, staring at the blood on his palm, he said, “That’s what I get for trying to walk on water.”

  After that the men called him Jesus.

  When they caught their first glimpse of Cindy, they were stunned by her beauty and her love for Danny. After she left, the loud soldier on the other side of the ward said, “Hey, Miller, is that the chick Jesus forced you to call up on the telephone?”

  “That’s her,” Danny said.

  “What a friend you have in Jesus,” said the man. “Holy Jesus, what a friend.”

  Cindy and Jack took care not to meet. She drove to Bethesda every weekend, bringing books and magazines and a picnic cooler full of Ohio treats: ham loaf sandwiches, makings for sloppy joes in a wide-mouth thermos, double-sweetened apple pie, jam made from her father’s red raspberries. She and Danny picnicked on the grounds of the hospital. She pushed his wheelchair for miles along suburban streets where magnolia and azalea and oleander bloomed in the soft spring sunshine. She made friends with the nurses, who showed her an empty room where she and Danny could find privacy. Gently, against his will, she drew him back to lovemaking. His beautiful tawny skin was now the color of entrails, dead-white, butcher-red, bruise-blue. If she wept over what had happened to him, she did it after she left. As far as Danny could tell, his injuries made no difference to her; what was left of Danny’s body was still Danny’s body.

  Three or four nights a week, when Cindy was attending her law-school classes in Columbus, Jack came to see his friend. He, too, brought treats—pizza, mostly, and sometimes take-out food from Chinese restaurants. Soon he was bringing food and other items for the other men. His nickname, which began in derision, took on another meaning. He gave his office phone number to the men, and if they called with a request—“Hey, Jesus, bring us out two buckets of fried chicken from the Colonel!”—he would do as they asked without fail.

  Where the wounded were concerned, he developed an almost otherworldly kindness. Danny had many operations, and while he recovered Jack was always by his bedside in the evenings. While Danny slept, Jack would read to the illiterate, write letters, make phone calls to straighten out matters of the heart that were a worry to one man or another. He would run errands. All this he did on his own time, after he had completed his eight hours of duty on Thursday, or on other days when he came to see Danny.

  Danny said, “How come all these corporal acts of charity, Jack? You got something on your conscience?”

  “No, it’s déjà vu,” Jack replied.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You were Walt Whitman in an earlier life, bandaging wounds and kissing the boys good night?”

  “Not really. I got my start in a place like this.”

  “You did? When was that?”

  “When Mom met Dad.”

  Danny cocked his head, eyes alert and skeptical. After all these years, did Jack still believe that JFK had boffed his mother in a navy hospital and he was the result? Looking into Jack’s face, as Irish as his own, Danny grinned. “Oh, yeah, almost forgot,” he said. “The Camelot Kid.”

  Everybody on the floor knew that Jack was a draft dodger, but as time went on, few held it against him. “You done the right thing, Jesus,” they told him. “‘Nam was no place for a fuckup like you.” But they liked him—his humanness, his sense of his own ridiculousness, the way he chattered all the time. And as in so many other instances, this had something to do with Danny. He was the captain of the surgical floor just as he had been captain of the team. There were many reasons to admire him: his good looks, his good humor, Cindy.

  Also, his deeds in Vietnam had surfaced—not because Jack had betrayed his confidence, but because Danny had been overheard telling Jack the details by a man in the next bed who knew a truthful battlefield story when he heard one. Jack did make sure that everyone knew that Danny had been a great athlete who had had a shot at pitching in the major leagues. That Danny had not been decorated, or even thanked, for actions that should have won him the Medal of Honor confirmed every sardonic lesson that war had taught the other men. To Jack, it made the pathetic consequences of Danny’s wounds even more poignant. The plastic surgeons were aware of Danny’s legend—Jack made sure of that, too—and they did their best work for him.

  But something more than his friendship with Danny was involved in Jack’s popularity on the floor. This was his extraordinary gift for making people like him—for insisting that they like him because he simply could not live with disapproval. As with Danny, so with the whole world: No matter what the situation, Jack made himself lovable so as to have the option of letting himself be loved. It was not necessary for him to love in return. He got everything he needed from being loved.

  They liked his friendship with Danny. Most of them never had visitors, but Jack came to see his friend almost every day. To pass the time, the two of them studied for the law-school admissions exams together, Danny asking Jack questions, then Jack asking Danny. Jack said Danny was helping him, but they saw through that: What Jack was really doing was getting Danny ready to take the exam, too. And when the time came, he did take it, right in the hospital, with Danny telling a volunteer the answers and the old lady marking them down for him.

  Not only that, they knew that Jack was a swordsman. At first they were skeptical. Success with women was the last thing they would have suspected about him. Danny told them about Jack’s conquests in high school; he told the story of the girl in the New York restaurant. “You telling us Jesus just followed her down the hall and she handed him her panties and he whomped her just like that in the ladies’ room?”<
br />
  “While her husband finished his coffee.”

  “Any witnesses, man?”

  “Afterward Jesus had the panties and she had a big smile. What can I say?”

  There were resentments: “Fuckin’ draft dodger just the same.”

  But Danny said, “That’s right, and look what he missed.”

  Nobody contested the point. Jack himself never referred to the war. He knew that the distance between the two sides was too great ever to be crossed. He knew, too, that if it weren’t for Danny not one of the wounded men would ever have spoken to him. But they did speak to him, and Jack found ways to respond without giving offense. He talked sports, a subject in which he had almost no interest. From Capitol Hill he brought them brand-new dirty jokes and racy stories about the famous. He invented for their amusement a comic Tannery Falls, Ohio, a one-man Punch-and-Judy soap opera in which Jack played three thousand roles, every one of them in a different voice.

  “Speak in tongues, Jesus!” the men would cry when he got going. And afterward they would say, “That Jesus oughta be on TV. He’s running for Savior!”

  Before Jack parted from them, he wrote down every single name and address, along with other details. And then he forgot them until he needed them. Years later, on TV, he remembered everything about them and talked to them in the same old way, no matter how much things had changed. They were flattered, but it was a politician’s trick. Jack had a liar’s memory; he stored every word he spoke because he could not afford to forget it, and had no more trouble remembering it than truthful people experience in recalling the truth. It, too, is sometimes elusive.

  “Same old Jesus!” the men said when he wheeled them out into the klieg lights long afterward and, holding back the tears, told the world how they had taught him the meaning of sacrifice and forgiveness.

  They knew better, but that made no difference. They could see that Jack believed it was the truth, and in a way they were sorry that it wasn’t, now that he was famous.

  Two

  1 The next winter, a few weeks after he entered Harvard Law School, Jack’s Grandmother Herzog died, leaving him alone in the world—at least on the Tannery Falls side of the family. She was buried from the same funeral home in which Jack’s mother and Homer Adams had been laid out side by side twenty years before. Looking down on the blue-haired, rouged old woman who wore her rhinestoned eyeglasses even in death, Jack realized that he had no memories of her whatsoever except for the kissing of his mother’s corpse. All the years he had lived in her house as a lost princeling had vanished from his mind; he had never belonged there. The house remained, long since sold to pay for Mrs. Herzog’s nursing-home care, but Jack did not go by for one last look.

  Danny, now living with Cindy in the little house in Columbus, came to the funeral. It was a graveside service. Apart from the minister, a stranger to Jack, the two friends were alone with the coffin at the cemetery. Danny walked with difficulty over the frozen ground. After a year of surgery he had been discharged from the army. He was able to get around without help, but his right hand was a claw and he walked with the aid of an aluminum crutch. He was learning to write with his left hand, against the day, a few months in the future, when he would enter law school at Ohio State.

  They ate lunch together in the diner where they had hung out as boys. Danny ate clumsily with his left hand; Jack had to put the ketchup on Danny’s hamburger. Townspeople—men and women who had lived for the Friday nights in autumn when Danny Miller carried the ball against the prettier, more prosperous towns that surrounded Tannery Falls—watched in funereal silence from their stools at the counter. One woman, unknown to either boy, ran weeping from the diner.

  Danny still went to twice-weekly physical therapy sessions at a veterans’ hospital. He had machines at home on which to exercise; he lifted weights, swam, stretched. After a while he would have more surgery. He had no complaints; he had trained all his life, commanding his body to do more than it was designed to do. Therapy was just another form of training.

  Jack said, “Do you think about the baseball thing?”

  “What might have been?” Danny replied. “No. Cindy’s the athlete now. She plays tennis three times a week. Against a girlfriend, she says, but she comes home pretty sweaty.”

  “Maybe she’s playing a lesbian.”

  Danny snapped his good fingers. “That’s it. What a relief.”

  Danny and Cindy had been married in the chapel at Walter Reed with two patients from the floor as witnesses. Except for the army chaplain, a Baptist who refused a plastic champagne glass of the cold duck Cindy had brought for the celebration, no one else was present—especially not Jack. They had gone to a motel in Bethesda for the night. Cindy had insisted on making love with the lights on. I’ll do all the work, she had said. Like hell you will, said Danny. But she had.

  Danny told Jack nothing of this. He asked what Harvard was like.

  “About what you’d expect,” Jack said. “I’m the only dumb one there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Danny said. “You’ll fake ’em out.”

  “The funny thing is, half the law school will never actually practice law,” Jack said. “I’m not sure I will.”

  “Sure you will, for a while,” Danny said. “Win a famous case, run for governor. Maybe we can be partners.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “I’m serious,” Danny said. “You’ll be the courtroom guy, saving the widows and orphans. I’ll chase the ambulances.” He mimed a man on crutches, moving at top speed.

  Keeping it light, Jack said, “Where does Cindy fit into this plan?”

  “She’ll back me up with a paycheck from another firm.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “In that case,” Danny said, “don’t get yourself kicked out of Harvard for porking the dean’s daughter. We’ll need that Ivy League diploma on the wall.”

  Was Danny serious? Jack did not know and Danny gave no sign.

  The people of Tannery Falls had taken up a collection and given Danny a brand-new Chevrolet with hand controls as a coming-home present. He drove Jack to the airport. He was still a fast driver.

  “Been down this road before,” Danny said as they passed the abandoned strip mines.

  2 We had friends in the circles in which Jack now traveled, and Peter was very pleased with the reports we received from them. Jack was turning out to be every bit the chameleon that Peter’s intuition had suggested he could be. His brains, his personality, and his dazzling mendacity carried him from triumph to triumph. Perhaps these were small triumphs, but they were triumphs nonetheless.

  This was as true at Harvard Law School as at any of his previous way stations. Our friends had helped him in the beginning, but before long he had several perfectly legitimate mentors on the faculty. Although he was not among the leading scholars in his class, their influence won him a place on the Harvard Law Review. They took him to their clubs, invited him home, introduced him to visiting legal celebrities. The Harvard establishment liked Jack; it was as simple as that. By the middle of his second year he had become one of them.

  This, in particular, pleased Peter. Gazing at a glossy photograph of the staff of the Law Review, Jack smiling in the front row, he exclaimed, “Just like Alger! He was a member of the Cane Club at Johns Hopkins; he also was elected to the Review at Harvard Law. The photos are remarkably alike, everyone in a suit, a row of snobs, with Jack and Alger blending right in and standing out at the same time.” Peter was quite carried away. “They even stand alike—look!” he said. “Entirely at home yet entirely out of their element.” I wanted to say, Jack should be warned about this resemblance. I said nothing.

  Apart from watching him in a loose sort of way—we did not want to draw attention to him among our American friends, either—we left Jack to his own devices. That, too, was part of the plan. The fundamental idea when manufacturing an agent of influence is (forgive me if I repeat myself) to let him live a normal life—establishing crede
ntials, making friends, establishing not cover but face value. We gave him no money, no advice, no help. At least not overtly or at first hand. There was no need to instruct our friends in the unconscious underground to do what they could for him. They had already adopted him as one of their own and designated him Deserving Poor Boy of the Year. The price of their patronage was moral guidance. Gently but in many different ways they reminded Jack where his good fortune came from and what was expected from him in return. Just as every good Swiss keeps his rifle at home, ready to spring into action at any hour of the day or night to repel an attack on the Heimat, so every good progressive must be prepared at a moment’s notice to transform himself into a white corpuscle and rush to the point of infection to attack any germ of heresy or doubt that infiltrates the body of the revolution.

  As in all other outward things, Jack was obedient to Peter’s injunction to separate himself from the radical left. The antiwar movement died the moment American troops were removed from Vietnam and the draft ceased to be a threat to radicals, so it was not so very difficult for Jack to keep his distance.

  The problem was, the sexual revolution seemed to be dying, too. Nearly four years had passed since Heidelberg. Though she still invaded his dreams, Jack never thought of Greta now, and the sexual tricks that she had taught him were all but useless at Harvard and in Washington. The women he met now were ex-Movement chicks who had been transformed by feminism into lobbyists, journalists, congressional staffers, advocates of one kind or another, environmental activists. All were attempting to live the life of the raised consciousness, in which political virtue was everything, intimacy a vestige of slavery. Sex to them was what it had been to Jack before Greta—pleasurable but soon over and disconnected from such absorbing questions (impenetrable to Jack) as boycotting Nestlé products because that company’s baby formulas discouraged breast-feeding in Africa. Jack did not live the life of a monk, but his couplings were infrequent, unpredictable, and per functory, as if his partners had developed a troubling symptom, diagnosed it as sexual desire, and ordered an orgasm from the pharmacopoeia of radicalism.