Hearts in Atlantis(171)

'Hey American, you come me, I keep safe.' And she held out her arms.

Sully walked toward her through the noisy hail of falling televisions and backyard pools and cartons of cigarettes and high-heeled shoes and a great big pole hairdryer and a pay telephone that hit and vomited a jackpot of quarters. He walked toward her with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.

'I keep safe.' Holding out her arms now. 'Poor boy, I keep safe.' Sully stepped into the dead circle of her embrace as people screamed and ran and all things American fell out of the sky, blitzing I-95 north of Bridgeport with their falling glitter. She put her arms around him.

'I keep safe,' she said, and Sully was in his car. Traffic was stopped all around him, four lanes of it. The radio was on, tuned to WKND. The Platters were singing 'Twilight Time' and Sully couldn't breathe. Nothing appeared to have fallen out of the sky, except for the traffic tie-up everything seemed to be in good order, but how could that be? How could it be when he still had Bobby Garneld's old baseball glove on his hand? .

'I keep safe,' old mamasan was saying. 'Poor boy, poor American boy, I keep safe.'

Sully wanted to smile at her. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, that some of them had at least meant well, but he had no air and he was very tired. He closed his eyes and tried to raise Bobby's glove one final time, get one final shallow whiff of that oily, summery smell, but it was too heavy.

Dieffenbaker was standing at the kitchen counter the next morning, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, pouring himself a cup of coffee, when Mary came in from the living room. She was wearing her PROPERTY OF THE DENVER BRONCOS sweatshirt and had the New York Post in her hand.

'I think I have some bad news for you,' she said, then seemed to reconsider. 'Moderately bad news.'

He turned to her warily. Bad news should always come after lunch, he thought. At least a person was halfway prepared for bad news after lunch. First thing in the morning everything left a bruise. 'What is it?'

'The man you introduced me to yesterday at your buddy's funeral - you said he was a car dealer in Connecticut, right?'

'Right.'

'I wanted to be sure because John Sullivan isn't, you know, the world's most uncommon - '

'What are you talking about, Mary?'

She handed him the paper, which was folded open to a page about halfway into the tabloid. 'They say it happened while he was on his way home. I'm sorry, hon.'

She had to be wrong, that was his first thought; people couldn't die just after you'd seen them and talked to them, it seemed like a basic rule, somehow.

But it was him, all right, and in triplicate: Sully in a high-school baseball uniform with a catcher's mask pushed back to the top of his head, Sully in an Army uniform with sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, and Sully in a business suit that had to hail from the late seventies. Beneath the row of pictures was the sort of headline you found only in the Post:

JAMBO!

SILVER STAR VIET VET DIES IN CONN. TRAFFIC JAM

Dieffenbaker scanned the story quickly, feeling the sense of unease and betrayal he always felt these days when he read the death-notice of someone his own age, someone he knew. We are still too young for natural deaths, he always thought, knowing that it was a foolish idea.

Sully had died of an apparent heart attack while stuck in a traffic tieup caused by a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck. He might well have died within sight of his own dealership's Chevrolet sign, the article lamented. Like the JAMBO headline, such epiphanies could be found only in the Post. The Times was a good paper if you were smart; the Post was the newspaper of drunks and poets.

Sully had left an ex-wife and no children. Funeral arrangements were being made by Norman Oliver, of First Connecticut Bank and Trust.

Buried by his bank! Dieffenbaker thought, his hands beginning to shake. He had no idea why this thought filled him with such horror, but it did. By his f**king bank! Oh man!

'Honey?' Mary was looking at him a little nervously. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes,' he said. 'He died in a traffic jam. Maybe they couldn't even get an ambulance to him. Maybe they never even found him until the traffic started moving again. Christ.'

'Don't,' she said, and took the paper away from him again. Sully had won the Silver Star for the rescue, of course - the helicopter rescue. The gooks had been shooting but Packer and Shearman had led a bunch of American soldiers, mostly Delta two-twos, in just the same. Ten or twelve of the Bravo Company soldiers had laid down a confused and probably not very effective covering fire as the rescue operation took place . . . and for a wonder two of the men from the tangled copters had actually been alive, at least when they came out of the clearing. John Sullivan had carried one of them to cover all by himself, the chopper guy shrieking in his arms and covered with fire-retardant foam.

Malenfant had gone running into the clearing, too - Malenfant clutching one of the extinguisher cannisters like a big red baby and screaming at the Gong in the bush to shoot him if they could, except they couldn't, he knew they couldn't, they were just a bunch of blind slopehead syphilitic f**ks and they couldn't hit him, couldn't hit the broad side of a f**kin barn. Malenfant had also - been put up for the Silver Star, and although Dieffenbaker couldn't say for sure, he supposed the pimply little murdering ass**le had won one. Had Sully known or guessed? Wouldn't he have mentioned it while they were sitting together outside the funeral parlor? Maybe; maybe not. Medals had a way of seeming less important as time passed, more and more like the award you got in junior high for memorizing a poem or the letter you got in high school for running track and blocking home plate when the throw came home. Just something you kept on a shelf. They were the things old men used to jazz the kids. The things they held out to make you jump higher, run faster, fling yourself forward. Dieffenbaker thought the world would probably be a better place without old men (this revelation coming just as he was getting ready to be one himself). Let the old women live, old women never hurt anyone as a rule, but old men were more dangerous than rabid dogs. Shoot all of them, then douse their bodies with gasoline, then light them on fire. Let the children join hands and dance around the blaze, singing corny old Crosby Stills and Nash songs.