Hearts in Atlantis(156)

He cannot do anything . . . anything permanent ... to Officer Jasper Wheelock . . . but Slocum could. Yes indeed, Slocum could. Of course Slocum was black, but what of that? In the dark, all cats are gray . . . and to the blind, they're no color at all. Is it really much of a reach from Blind Willie Garfield to Blind Willie Slocum? Of course not. Easy as breathing, really.

'Do you hear what I hear,' he sings softly as he folds the stepladder and puts it back, 'do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste?'

Five minutes later he closes the door of Western States Land Analysts firmly behind him and triple-locks it. Then he goes down the hallway. When the elevator comes and he steps in, he thinks, Eggnog. Don't forget. The Aliens and the Dubrqys.

'Also cinnamon,' he says out loud. The three people in the elevator car with him look around, and Bill grins self-consciously.

Outside, he turns toward Grand Central, registering only one thought as the snow beats full into his face and he flips up his coat collar: the Santa outside the building has fixed his beard.

MIDNIGHT.

'Share?'

'Hmmmm?'

Her voice is sleepy, distant. They have made long, slow love after the Dubrays finally left at eleven o'clock, and now she is drifting away. That's all right; he is drifting too. He has a feeling that all of his problems are solving themselves ... or that God is solving them.

'I may take a week or so off after Christmas. Do some inventory. Poke around some new sites. I'm thinking about changing locations.' There is no need for her to know about what Willie Slocum may be doing in the week before New Year's; she couldn't do anything but worry and - perhaps, perhaps not, he sees no reason to find out for sure - feel guilty.

'Good,' she says. 'See a few movies while you're at it, why don't you?' Her hand gropes out of the dark and touches his arm briefly. 'You work so hard.' Pause. 'Also, you remembered the eggnog. I really didn't think you would. I'm very pleased with you, sweetheart.'

He grins in the dark at that, helpless not to. It is so perfectly Sharon.

'The Aliens are all right, but the Dubrays are boring, aren't they?' she asks.

'A little,' he allows.

'If that dress of hers had been cut any lower, she could have gotten a job in a topless bar.'

He says nothing to that, but grins again.

'It was good tonight, wasn't it?' she asks him. It's not their little party that she's talking about.

'Yes, excellent.'

'Did you have a good day? I didn't have a chance to ask.'

Tine day, Share.'

'I love you, Bill.'

'Love you, too.'

'Goodnight.'

'Goodnight.'

As he drifts towards sleep he thinks about the man in the bright red ski sweater. He crosses over without knowing it, thought melting effortlessly into dream. "Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,' the man in the red sweater says. 'I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187. We lost a lot of good men.' Then he brightens. 'But I got this.' From the lefthand pocket of his topcoat he takes a white beard hanging on a string. 'And this.' From the righthand pocket he takes a crumpled styrofoam cup, which he shakes. A few loose coins rattle in the bottom like teeth. 'So you see,' he says, fading now, 'there are compensations for even the blindest life.'

Then the dream itself fades and Bill Shearman sleeps deeply until six-fifteen the next morning, when the clock-radio wakes him to the sound of 'The Little Drummer Boy.'

1999: When someone dies, you think about the past.

WHY WE'RE IN VIETNAM

When someone dies, you think about the past. Sully had probably known this for years, but it was only on the day of Pags's funeral that it formed in his mind as a conscious postulate.

It was twenty-six years since the helicopters took their last loads of refugees (some dangling photogenically from the landing skids) off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon and almost thirty since a Huey evacked John Sullivan, Willie Shearman and maybe a dozen others out of Dong Ha Province. Sully-John and his magically refound childhood acquaintance had been heroes that morning when the choppers fell out of the sky; they'd been something else come afternoon. Sully could remember lying there on the Huey's throbbing floor and screaming for someone to kill him. He could remember Willie screaming as well. I'm blind was what Willie had been screaming. Ah Jesus-f*ck, I'm blind!

Eventually it had become clear to him - even with some of his guts hanging out of his belly in gray ropes and most of his balls blown off - that no one was going to do what he asked and he wasn't going to be able to do the job on his own. Not soon enough to suit him, anyway. So he asked someone to get rid of the mamasan, they could do that much, couldn't they? Land her or just dump her the f**k out, why not? Wasn't she dead already? Thing was, she wouldn't stop looking at him, and enough was enough.

By the time they swapped him and Shearman and half a dozen others - the worst ones - to a Medevac at the rally-point everyone called Peepee City (the chopper-jockeys were probably damned glad to see them go, all that screaming), Sully had started to realize none of the others could see old mamasan squatting there in the cockpit, old white-haired mamasan in the green pants and orange top and those weird bright Chinese sneakers, the ones that looked like Chuck Taylor hightops, bright red, wow. Old mamasan had been Malenfant's date, old Mr Card-Shark's big date. Earlier that day Malenfant had run into the clearing along with Sully and Dieffenbaker and Sly Slocum and the others, never mind the gooks firing at them out of the bush, never mind the terrible week of mortars and snipers and ambushes, Malenfant had been hero-bound and Sully had been hero-bound too, and now oh hey look at this, Ronnie Malenfant was a murderer, the kid Sully had been so afraid of back in the old days had saved his life and been blinded, and Sully himself was lying on the floor of a helicopter with his guts waving in the breeze. As Art Linkletter always said, it just proved that people are funny.