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‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’
It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.
Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.
With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…
‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’
It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?
Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.
‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’
For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.
‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’
He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.
‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’
Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.
Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.
Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. ‘Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,’ Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.
Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.
All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.
After Mrs Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, ‘See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Conor said, laughing.
Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. ‘Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.’
‘Back off,’ Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.
At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.
‘Ain’t you a neat little fucker,’ he said.
Conor slammed his toolbox shut. ‘Do you have many friends, Woyzak?’
‘Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt you.’
‘Forget it.’ Conor stood up.
‘So you were over there too?’ Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.
‘Yeah.’
‘Clerk-typist?’
In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.
‘What outfit were you in?’
‘Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.’
Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over a loose grave. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.
He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.
For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.
Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.
He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.
Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘I got nowhere else to go,’ Conor said.
Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.
For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underbill’s picture.
The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M. O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.
He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.
There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.
The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.
‘Dengler!’ Conor says in his dream. ‘Dengler, look at the lieutenant!’ That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!’
Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.
Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.
Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters – they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.
‘Okay this morning, Red?’ Roehm asked.
‘Right as the dew, man.’
Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.
Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.
Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?’
Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. ‘You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.’
The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? ‘Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,’ he said.
‘A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.
‘Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures – you asshole.’
‘I knew Cotton,’ Conor said. ‘I was with him when he bought it.’
‘I don’t care who took the pictures – I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.’ Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. ‘You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.’
‘We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all –’
Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.
‘PUSSY!’ he screamed.
‘I thought you liked pussy,’ Conor said.
‘I’m a good taper!’ Woyzak shouted.
Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs Daisy hovered behind the contractor.
Woyzak smiled weakly at her.
‘That’s enough,’ Roehm said.
‘I can’t work with this asshole,’ Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.
‘This guy was edging me on,’ Conor protested.
‘Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,’ Mrs Daisy said nervously. ‘He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.’
‘Who’s the taper, anyhow?’ Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. ‘I only want to do my job.’
‘But look how he’s doing it, man!’
Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.
He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs Daisy, who giggled.
In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against a bare wall. ‘That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like a sailor on a three-day drunk – I’m doing what I can for him.’ He looked at Conor, but could not meet his eyes for long. ‘I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t. You’re a good little worker.’
‘I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.’ Conor shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.
‘I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.’
Summer was a long time coming but Conor said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.’
Roehm awkwardly waved him away. ‘Stay out of the bars.’
2
When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why he was still alive.
He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to ‘Resident’ and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope bearing a New York postmark.
Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick – middle-aged and sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it again, and found a note: All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)
3
After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might bundle it up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided on the refigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.
He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush, and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.
Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in. He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job because of that asshole Woyzak than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable, which called for another drink.
Eventually the bar filled up. Conor stared at a nice-looking woman until he began to feel like a coward and got off his stool to talk to her. She was in training to do something in computers. (At a certain point in the evening, about sixty percent of the women in Donovan’s were in training to do something in computers.) They had a few drinks together. Conor asked her if she would like to see his funny little apartment. She told him he was a funny little guy and said yes.
‘You’re a real homebody, aren’t you?’ the girl asked Conor when he turned on the light in his apartment.
After they had made love, the girl finally asked him about the lumps spread across his back and over his belly. ‘Agent Orange,’ he said. ‘I sort of wish I could teach them to move around, spell out words, shit like that.’
He woke up alone with a hangover, wishing he could see Mike Poole and talk to him about Agent Orange, wondering about Tim Underhill.
8 Dr Poole at Work and Play (#ulink_6fc07c65-d9b5-5397-ba46-da3cb64c3f80)
1
‘Well, here it is,’ Michael said. ‘There’s a medical conference in Singapore next January, and the organizers are offering reduced fares on the flight over.’
He looked up from his copy of American Physician. Judy’s only response was to tighten her lips and stare at the ‘Today’ show. She was eating her breakfast standing up at the central butcher-block counter while Michael sat alone at the long kitchen table, also of butcher block. Three years before, Judy had declared that their kitchen was obsolete, insulting, useless, and demanded a renovation. Now she ate standing up every morning, separated from him by eight feet of overpriced wood.
‘What’s the topic of the conference?’ She continued to look at the television.
