Hearts in Atlantis(148)

CHAPTER 26

ROBBED OF BENEFITS BY A GRATEFUL GOVERNMENT, 1973

LOST HOME, 1975

ASHAMED TO BEG BUT HAVE A SON IN SCHOOL

THINK WELL OF ME IF YOU CAN

He raises his head so that the white light of this cold, almost-ready-to-snow day slides across the blind bulbs of his dark glasses. Now the work begins, and it is harder work than anyone will ever know. There is a way to stand, not quite the military posture which is called parade rest, but close to it. The head must stay up, looking both at and through the people who pass back and forth in their thousands and tens of thousands. The hands must hang straight down in their black gloves, never fiddling with the sign or with the fabric of his pants or with each other. He must continue to project that sense of hurt, humbled pride. There must be no sense of shame or shaming, and most of all no taint of insanity. He never speaks unless spoken to, and only then when he is spoken to in kindness. He does not respond to people who ask him angrily why he doesn't get a real job, or what he means about being robbed of his benefits. He does not argue with those who accuse him of fakery or speak scornfully of a son who would allow his father to put him through school by begging on a streetcorner. He remembers breaking this ironclad rule only once, on a sweltering summer afternoon in 1981. What school does your son go to? a woman asked him angrily. He doesn't know what she looked like, by then it was four o'clock and he had been as blind as a bat for at least two hours, but he had felt anger exploding out of her in all directions, like bedbugs exiting an old mattress. In a way she had reminded him of Malenfant with his shrill you-can't-not-hear-it voice. Tell me which one, I want to mail him a dog turd. Don't bother, he replied, turning toward the sound of her voice. If you've got a dog turd you want to mail somewhere, send it to LBJ. Federal Express must deliver to hell, they deliver everyplace else.

'God bless you, man,' a guy in a cashmere overcoat says, and his voice trembles with surprising emotion. Except Blind Willie Garfield isn't surprised. He's heard it all, he reckons, and a bit more. A surprising number of his customers put their money carefully and reverently in the pocket of the baseball glove. The guy in the cashmere coat drops his contribution into the open case, however, where it properly belongs. A five. The workday has begun.

10:45 A.M.

So far, so good. He lays his cane down carefully, drops to one knee, and dumps the contents of the baseball glove into the box. Then he sweeps a hand back and forth through the bills, although he can still see them pretty well. He picks them up - there's four or five hundred dollars in all, which puts him on the way to a three-thousand-dollar day, not great for this time of year, but not bad, either - then rolls them up and slips a rubber band around them. He then pushes a button on the inside of the case, and the false floor drops down on springs, dumping the load of change all the way to the bottom. He adds the roll of bills, making no attempt to hide what he's doing, but feeling no qualms about it, either; in all the years he has been doing this, no one has ever taken him off. God help the ass**le who ever tries.

He lets go of the button, allowing the false floor to snap back into place, and stands up. A hand immediately presses into the small of his back.

'Merry Christmas, Willie,' the owner of the hand says. Blind Willie recognizes him by the smell of his cologne.

'Merry Christmas, Officer Wheelock,' Willie responds. His head remains tilted upward in a faintly questioning posture; his hands hang at his sides; his feet in their brightly polished boots remain apart in a stance not quite wide enough to be parade rest but nowhere near tight enough to pass as attention. 'How are you today, sir?'

'In the pink, motherf*cker,' Wheelock says. 'You know me, always in the pink.'

Here comes a man in a topcoat hanging open over a bright red ski sweater. His hair is short, black on top, gray on the sides. His face has a stern, carved look Blind Willie recognizes at once. He's got a couple of handle-top bags - one from Saks, one from Bally - in his hands. He stops and reads the sign.

'Dong Ha?' he asks suddenly, speaking not as a man does when naming a place but as one does when recognizing an old acquaintance on a busy street.

'Yes, sir,' Blind Willie says.

'Who was your CO?'

'Captain Bob Brissum - with a u, not an o - and above him, Colonel Andrew Shelf, sir.'

'I heard of Shelf,' says the man in the open coat. His face suddenly looks different. As he walked toward the man on the corner, it looked as if it belonged on Fifth Avenue. Now it doesn't. 'Never met him, though.'

'Toward the end of my run, we didn't see anyone with much rank, sir.'

'If you came out of the A Shau Valley, I'm not surprised. Are we on the same page here, soldier?'

'Yes, sir. There wasn't much command structure left by the time we hit Dong Ha. I pretty much rolled things along with another lieutenant. His name was Dieffenbaker.'

The man in the red ski sweater is nodding slowly. 'You boys were there when those helicopters came down, if I've got this placed right.'

'That's affirmative, sir.'

'Then you must have been there later, when . . . '

Blind Willie does not help him finish. He can smell Wheelock's cologne, though, stronger than ever, and the man is practically panting in his ear, sounding like a horny kid at the end of a hot date. Wheelock has never bought his act, and although Blind Willie pays for the privilege of being left alone on this corner, and quite handsomely by going rates, he knows that part of Wheelock is still cop enough to hope he'll f**k up. Part of Wheelock is actively rooting for that. But the Wheelocks of the world never understand that what looks fake isn't always fake. Sometimes the issues are a little more complicated than they appear at first glance. That was something else Vietnam had to teach him, back in the years before it became a political joke and a crutch for hack filmwriters.