Hearts in Atlantis(163)

'So you didn't entirely lose your balls after all,' Dieffenbaker said.

'Nope, never quite made it into Jake Barnes country.'

'Who?'

'Doesn't matter.' Sully wasn't much of a book-reader, never had been (his friend Bobby had been the book-reader), but the rehab librarian had given him The Sun Also Rises and Sully had read it avidly, not once but three times. Back then it had seemed very important - as important as that book Lord of the Flies had been to Bobby when they were kids. Now Jake Barnes seemed remote, a tin man with fake problems. Just one more made-up thing.

'No?'

'No. I can have a woman if I really want to have one - not kids, but I can have a woman. There's a fair amount of preparation involved, though, and mostly it seems like too much trouble.'

Dieffenbaker said nothing for several moments. He sat looking at his hands. When he looked up, Sully thought he'd say something about how he had to get moving, a quick goodbye to the widow and then back to the wars (Sully thought that in the new lieutenant's case the wars these days involved selling computers with something magical called Pentium inside them), but Dieffenbaker didn't say that. He asked, 'And what about the old lady? Do you still see her, or is she gone?'

Sully had felt dread - unformed but vast - stir at the back of his mind. 'What old lady?' He couldn't remember telling Dieffenbaker, couldn't remember telling anybody, but of course he must have. Shit, he could have told Dieffenbaker anything at those reunion picnics; they were nothing but liquor-smelling black holes in his memory, every one of them.

'Old mamasan,' Dieffenbaker said, and brought out his cigarettes again. 'The one Malenfant killed. You said you used to see her. "Sometimes she wears different clothes, but it's always her," you said. Do you still see her?'

'Can I have one of those?' Sully asked. 'I never had a Dunhill.'

On WKND Donna Summer was singing about a bad girl, bad girl, you're such a naughty bad girl, beep-beep. Sully turned to old mamasan, who was in her orange top and her green pants again, and said: 'Malenfant was never obviously crazy. No crazier than anyone else, anyway . . . except maybe about Hearts. He was always looking for three guys to play Hearts with him, and that isn't really crazy, would you say? No crazier than Pags with his harmonicas and a lot less than the guys who spent their nights snorting heroin. Also, Ronnie helped yank those guys out of the choppers. There must've been a dozen gooks in the bush, maybe two dozen, all of them shooting away like mad, they wasted Lieutenant Packer and Malenfant must have seen it happen, he was right there, but he never hesitated.' Nor had Fowler or Hack or Slocum or Peasley or Sully himself. Even after Packer went down they had kept going. They were brave kids. And if their bravery had been wasted in a war made by pigheaded old men, did that mean the bravery was of no account? For that matter, was Carol Gerber's cause wrong because a bomb had gone off at the wrong time? Shit, lots of bombs had gone off at the wrong time in Vietnam. What was Ronnie Malenfant, when you got right down to it, but a bomb that had gone off at the wrong time?

Old mamasan went on looking at him, his ancient white-haired date sitting there in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap - yellow hands folded where the orange smock met the green polyester pants.

'They'd been shooting at us for almost two weeks,' Sully said. 'Ever since we left the A Shau Valley. We won at Tam Boi and when you win you're supposed to roll, at least that's what I always thought, but what we were doing was a retreat, not a roll. Shit, one step from a rout is what it was, and we sure didn't feel like winners for long. There was no support, we were just hung out to dry. Fuckin Vietnamization! What a joke that was!'

He fell silent for a moment or two, looking at her while she looked calmly back. Beyond them, the halted traffic glittered like a fever. Some impatient trucker hit his airhorn and Sully jumped like a man suddenly awakened from a doze.

'That's when I met Willie Shearman, you know - falling back from the A Shau Valley. I knew he looked familiar and I was sure I'd met him someplace, but I couldn't think where. People change a hell of a lot between fourteen and twenty-four, you know. Then one afternoon he and a bunch of the other Bravo Company guys were sitting around and bullshitting, talking about girls, and Willie said that the first time he ever got French-kissed, it was at a St Theresa of Avila Sodality dance. And I think, "Holy shit, those were the St Gabe's girls." I walked up to him and said, "You Steadfast guys might have been the kings of Asher Avenue, but we whipped your pansy asses every time you came down to Harwich High to play football." Hey, you talk about a gotcha! Fuckin Willie jumped up so fast I thought he was gonna run away like the Gingerbread Man. It was like he'd seen a ghost, or something. Then he laughed and stuck out his hand and I saw he was still wearing his St Gabe's high-school ring! And you know what it all goes to prove?'

Old mamasan didn't say anything, she never did, but Sully could see in her eyes that she did know what it all went to prove: people were funny, kids say the darndest things, winners never quit and quitters never win. Also God bless America.

'Anyway, that whole week they chased us, and it started to get obvious that they were bearing down . . . squeezing the sides . . . our casualties kept going up and you couldn't get any sleep because of the flares and the choppers and the howling they'd do at night, back here in the toolies. And then they'd come at you, see . . . twenty of them, three dozen of them . . . poke and pull,back, poke and pull back, like that . . . and they had this thing they'd do . . . '