Hearts in Atlantis(162)

'Religiously.'

CHAPTER 28

Dieffenbaker nodded. 'Vietnam vets all have trouble with their teeth and they all read the Post. If they're in the Post's fallout area, that is. What do you suppose they do if they're not?'

'Listen to Paul Harvey,' Sully said promptly, and Dieffenbaker laughed.

Sully was remembering Hack, who'd also been there the day of the helicopters and the 'ville and the ambush. Blond kid with an infectious laugh. Had a picture of his girlfriend laminated so it wouldn't rot in the damp and then wore it around his neck on a little silver chain. Hackermeyer had been right next to Sully when they came into the Ville and the shooting started. Both of them watching as the old mamasan came running out of her hooch with her hands raised, jabbering six licks to the dozen, jabbering at Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Mims and the other ones who were shooting the place up. Minis had put a round through a little boy's calf, maybe by accident. The boy was lying in the dirt outside one of the shitty little shacks, screaming. Old mamasan decided Malenfant was the one in charge - why not? Malenfant was the one doing all the yelling - and ran up to him, still waving her hands in the air. Sully could have told her that was a bad mistake, old Mr Card-Shark had had himself a morning and a half, they all had, but Sully never opened his mouth. He and Hack stood there watching as Malenfant raised the butt of his rifle and drove it down into her face, knocking her flat and stopping her jabber. Willie Shearman had been standing twenty yards or so away. Willie Shearman from the old home town, one of the Catholic boys he and Bobby had been sort of scared of, and there was nothing readable on Willie's face. Willie Baseball, some of his men called him, and always affectionately. Sully had no idea why.

'So what about your problem, Sully-John?'

Sully came back from the Ville in Dong Ha to the alley beside the funeral parlor in New York . . . but slowly. Some memories were like the Tar-Baby in that old story about Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit; you got stuck on them. 'I guess it all depends. What problem did I say I had?'

'You said you got your balls blown off when they hit us outside the 'ville. You said it was God punishing you for not stopping Malenfant before he went all dinky-dau and killed the old lady.'

Dinky-dau didn't begin to cover it, Malenfant standing with his legs planted on either side of the old lady, bringing the bayonet down and still running his mouth the whole time. When the blood started to come out it made her orange top look like tie-dye.

'I exaggerated a trifle,' Sully said, 'as drunks tend to do. Part of the old scrotal sack is still present and accounted for and sometimes the pump still turns on. Especially since Viagra. God bless that shit.'

'Have you quit the booze as well as the cigarettes?'

'I take the occasional beer,' Sully said.

'Prozac?'

'Not yet.'

'Divorced?'

Sully nodded. 'You?'

'Twice. Thinking about taking the plunge again, though. Mary Theresa Charlton, how sweet she is. Third time lucky, that's my motto.'

'You know something, Loot?' Sully asked. 'We've uncovered some clear legacies of the Vietnam experience here.' He popped up a finger. 'Vietnam vets get cancer, usually of the lung or the brain, but other places, too.'

'Like Pags. Pags was the pancreas, wasn't it?'

'Right.'

'All that cancer's because of the Orange,' Dieffenbaker said. 'Nobody can prove it but we all know it. Agent Orange, the gift that keeps on giving.'

Sully popped up a second finger - yer f**kfinger, Ronnie Malenfant would undoubtedly have called it. 'Vietnam vets get depressed, get drunk at parties, threaten to jump off national landmarks.' Out with the third finger. 'Vietnam vets have bad teeth.' Pinky finger. 'Vietnam vets get divorced.'

Sully had paused at that point, vaguely hearing canned organ music coming through a partially opened window, looking at his four popped fingers and then at the thumb still tucked against his palm. Vets were drug addicts. Vets were bad loan risks, by and large; any bank officer would tell you so (in the years when Sully had been getting the dealership up and running a number of bankers had told him so). Vets maxed out their credit cards, got thrown out of gambling casinos, wept over songs by George Strait and Patty Loveless, knifed each other over shuffleboard bowling games in bars, bought muscle cars on credit and then wrecked them, beat their wives, beat their kids, beat their f**kin dogs, and probably cut themselves shaving more often than people who had never been closer to the green than Apocalypse Now or that f**king piece of shit The Deer Hunter.

'What's the thumb?' Dieffenbaker asked. 'Come on, Sully, you're killing me here.'

Sully looked at his folded thumb. Looked at Dieffenbaker, who now wore bifocals and carried a potbelly (what Vietnam vets usually called 'the house that Bud built') but who still might have that skinny young man with the wax-candle complexion somewhere inside of him. Then he looked back at his thumb and popped it out like a guy trying to hitch a ride.

'Vietnam vets carry Zippos,' he said. 'At least until they stop smoking.'

'Or until they get cancer,' Dieffenbaker said. 'At which point their wives no doubt pry em out of their weakening palsied hands.'

'Except for all the ones who're divorced,' Sully said, and they both laughed. It had been good outside the funeral parlor. Well, maybe not good, exactly, but better than inside. The organ music in there was bad, the sticky smell of the flowers was worse. The smell of the flowers made Sully think of the Mekong Delta. 'In country,' people said now, but he didn't remember ever having heard that particular phrase back then.