Hearts in Atlantis(157)
Somebody kill me, he had screamed on that bright and terrible afternoon. Somebody shoot me, for the love of God just let me die.
But he hadn't died, the doctors had managed to save one of his mangled testicles, and now there were even days when he felt more or less glad to be alive. Sunsets made him feel that way. He liked to go out to the back of the lot, where the cars they'd taken in trade but hadn't yet fixed up were stored, and stand there watching the sun go down. Corny shit, granted, but it was still the good part.
In San Francisco Willie was on the same ward and visited him a lot until the Army in its wisdom sent First Lieutenant Shearman somewhere else; they had talked for hours about the old days in Harwich and people they knew in common. Once they'd even gotten their picture taken by an AP news photographer - Willie sitting on Sully's bed, both of them laughing. Willie's eyes had been better by then but still not right; Willie had confided to Sully that he was afraid they never would be right. The story that went with the picture had been pretty dopey, but had it brought them letters? Holy Christ! More than either of them could read! Sully had even gotten the crazy idea that he might hear from Carol, but of course he never did. It was the spring of 1970 and Carol Gerber was undoubtedly busy smoking pot and giving blowjobs to end-the-war hippies while her old high-school boyfriend was getting his balls blown off on the other side of the world. That's right, Art, people are funny. Also, kids say the darndest things.
When Willie shipped out, old mamasan stayed. Old mamasan hung right in there. During the seven months Sully spent in San Francisco's Veterans Hospital she had come every day and every night, his most constant visitor in that endless time when the whole world seemed to smell of piss and his heart hurt like a headache. Sometimes she showed up in a muumuu like the hostess at some nutty luau, sometimes she came wearing one of those grisly green golf-skirts and a sleeveless top that showed off her scrawny arms . . . but mostly she wore what she had been wearing on the day Malenfant killed her - the green pants, the orange smock, the red sneakers with the Chinese symbols on them.
One day that summer he unfolded the San Francisco Chronicle and saw his old girlfriend had made the front page. His old girlfriend and her hippie pals had killed a bunch of kids and job-recruiters back in Danbury. His old girlfriend was now 'Red Carol.' His old girlfriend was a celebrity. 'You cunt,' he had said as the paper first doubled, then trebled, then broke up into prisms. 'You stupid f**ked-up cunt.' He had balled the paper up, meaning to throw it across the room, and there was his new girlfriend, there was old mamasan sitting on the next bed, looking at Sully with her black eyes, and Sully had broken down completely at the sight of her. When the nurse came Sully either couldn't or wouldn't tell her what he was crying about. All he knew was that the world had gone insane and he wanted a shot and eventually the nurse found a doctor to give him one and the last thing he saw before he passed out was mamasan, old f**kin mamasan sitting there on the next bed with her yellow hands in her green polyester lap, sitting there and watching him.
She made the trip across the country with him, too, had come all the way back to Connecticut with him, deadheading across the aisle in the tourist cabin of a United Airlines 747. She sat next to a businessman who saw her no more than the crew of the Huey had, or Willie Shearman, or the staff at the * Palace. She had been Malenfant's date in Dong Ha, but she was John Sullivan's date now and never took her black eyes off him. Her yellow, wrinkled fingers always stayed folded in her lap and her eyes always stayed on him.
Thirty years. Man, that was a long time.
But as those years went by, Sully had seen her less and less. When he returned to Harwich in the fall of '70, he still saw old mamasan just about every day - eating a hotdog in Commonwealth Park by Field B, or standing at the foot of the iron steps leading up to the railway station where the commuters ebbed and flowed, or just walking down Main Street. Always looking at him.
Once, not long after he'd gotten his first post-Vietnam job, (selling cars, of course; it was the only thing he really knew how to do) he had seen old mamasan sitting in the passenger seat of a 1968 Ford LTD with PRICED TO SELL! soaped on the windshield.
You'll start to understand her in time, the headshrinker in San Francisco had told him, and refused to say much more no matter how hard Sully pressed him. The shrink wanted to hear about the helicopters that had collided and fell out of the sky; the headshrinker wanted to know why Sully so often referred to Malenfant as 'that cardplaying bastard' (Sully wouldn't tell him); the headshrinker wanted to know if Sully still had sexual fantasies, and if so, had they become noticeably violent. Sully had sort of liked the guy - Conroy, his name was - but that didn't change the fact that he was an ass**le. Once, near the end of his time in San Francisco, he had come close to telling Dr Conroy about Carol. On the whole he was glad he hadn't. He didn't know how to think about his old girlfriend, let alone talk about her (conflicted was Conroy's word for this state). He had called her a stupid f**ked-up cunt, but the whole damned world was sort of f**ked-up these days, wasn't it? And if anyone knew how easily violent behavior could break its leash and just run away, John Sullivan did. All he was sure of was that he hoped the police wouldn't kill her when they finally caught up to her and her friends.
Asshole or not, Dr Conroy hadn't been entirely wrong about Sully coming to understand old mamasan as time went by. The most important thing was understanding - on a gut level - that old mamasan wasn't there. Head-knowledge of that basic fact was easy, but his gut was slower to learn, possibly because his gut had been torn open in Dong Ha and a thing like that just had to slow down the understanding process.