Part 14 (1/2)

15.

DOE.

I finished my drink and said good night. My room on the third floor had a dormer window with a chintz loveseat and coffee table in front of it, a vintage TV set, a double bed, and ceilings so high you could fly a kite in it. Everything-the drapes, walls, carpeting, sills, and baseboards-was a combination of green and white. The room looked like it had been designed by a rampant garden club. I got out a bottle of amaretto and poured myself a couple of fingers.

Burned out, my bones aching with jet lag, I couldn't erase the images of the night from my mind. Tagliani and Stinetto in the icebox. Mrs. Tagliani's monitor going deeeeeeee right in front of my eyes. The haunting tape of two killers delivering their coup de grace and the b.l.o.o.d.y back wall of Draganata's house. I had seen worse, but never in any civilized place I could remember.

Then I looked at the note I had picked up at the desk. The handwriting was so precise it could have been calligraphy. I recognized it immediately and the old electricity streaked from my stomach to my throat.

”I know you are here,” it said. ”I'll be in the boathouse at Windsong, tomorrow night, 9 p.m. Please. D.”

She must have written it before she went into the restaurant, before I had seen her downstairs.

I suppose you always remember the good things in life as being better than they really were. To me, Dunetown was a slow-motion movie shot through a hazy lens. Everything was soft, the reflections glittered like stars, and there were no hard edges on anything. It was the end of adolescence and being exposed to the sweet life for what was an instant in my time. It was living high, dancing at the country club, open cars and laughter and cool nights on the beach.

Fat City is what it was.

And it was Doe Findley.

Doe Findley had risen out of my past like a specter. For twenty years she had been the hope in my nightmares, a gauzy sylph brightening the dark corners of bad dreams like the nightlight at the end of a long, dark hall.

I thought about that boathouse and about Doe, dancing tightly against me to the music from the radio as we fumbled with b.u.t.tons and snaps and zippers. I couldn't remember the song now, but it had stayed with me for a long time before Nam erased it.

The thought of her spread through me like a shot of good brandy. She was the memory of that lost summer, the last green summer I could remember. It had all vanished that fall on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon in Sanford Stadium.

It's funny, Teddy and I used to joke about those days later in Nam. Anything for a laugh over there. I remember Teddy once saying to me, ”Y'know something, Jake, we should have been born a little earlier or a little later. Our timing was terrible. Think about it-we played during three of the worst seasons the Bulldogs ever had. You remember what our record was for those three years?” Did I remember? h.e.l.l, yes, I remembered. ”Ten, sixteen, and four,” I answered with disgust. ”Yeah,” he said, ”and the season after we graduated, Dooley came in and they had a seven, three, and one. Now we're here. See what I mean? A dollar short and a day late, that's us.”

Looking back on it, he was right. Maybe we were just jinxed from the start. That Sat.u.r.day that changed my life, I was going wide to the right with Teddy in front of me and I made one of those hard stopping turns I had become known for. The foot hit wrong. I could hear the ankle go before the pain knocked my back teeth loose. It sounded like a branch cracking. All I remember after that is the backfield coach staring down at my face, saying, ”s.h.i.+t! So much for this halfback.”

I got the letter from Chief Findley while I was still in the hospital. ”Too bad, son,” it said. ”Keep the car. Doe sends her regards.” The pink slip for the MG was attached. That was it. That's how I found out what an ex-running halfback with a b.u.m ankle is worth in Dunetown. Findley had been my sponsor. They couldn't pay us for playing football at the university, but there was always some rich alumnus willing to provide a sports coat now and then, a car, a summer on the hose. Sometimes even a daughter.

She didn't even send a card.

Twenty years. I hadn't seen or heard from her since, not even when Teddy was killed. I can understand that; I can understand not being able to deal with that kind of pain. h.e.l.l, I can understand it all. When you love someone you forgive everything.

I had kicked most of the other monkeys off my back, all but Doe. I couldn't purge her from my fantasies, what was left of them. Vietnam was bad for the soul. It was bad enough, what you saw and did, but the worst thing was what you thought. You get over the rest of it but you never forget what it does to the soul. Teddy Findley was the best friend I ever had, from the day I arrived at Georgia until the day in Saigon that he bled to death in my arms. Teddy was a golden boy. Teddy hadn't hit a false note. He was Chief's hope for immortality. The plan was perfect: football for four years at Georgia, show what the kid could do, then law school somewhere in the north to erase the jock image. Then back to take over the reins and keep the Findley hand in the Dunetown pot.

Vietnam screwed it all up. Instead of Harvard Law School, Teddy ended up in Nam with me, a couple of shavetail lieutenants doing the best we could to keep sane and alive.

Then all of a sudden Teddy was dead and the moment it sank in that he was dead, what I thought was: Christ, Teddy, how can you do this to me, how can you leave me to tell Doe and Chief about this?

I still remember thinking that. I have pretty much erased everything else from my mind, but I still remember that when Teddy died, I didn't think about Teddy, I worried about me. That's what I mean about Nam and your soul.

Eventually, of course, I wrote the letter. I told them what I knew Chief wanted to hear.

I created the lie and I wrote the letter and I never got an answer, not even an acknowledgment that he had received it.

So I started forgetting in earnest. Football heroes exist only on bright fall afternoons, and pretty girls stay young only in picture frames.

Except there was Doe, who hadn't changed a bit. She still had that young, amazed look she'd had in the early sixties. Still had the long, golden hair. Silk. Slim, firm body. b.r.e.a.s.t.s that some women would pay a fortune to try to imitate. Skin like cream. And suddenly she was no longer out of reach. She wasn't a sylph or a fantasy; she was as painfully real as a s.h.i.+n splint and just a phone call away.

And now, twenty years after the fact, she expected me to come trotting to the boathouse like it never happened.

Meet her in the boathouse? Who am I kidding, of course I'd meet her in the boathouse. I'd walk from Pittsburgh to meet her in the boathouse.

s.h.i.+t.

I got in bed with a copy of Donleavy's Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule and read myself to sleep. At two a.m. the phone woke me up. I put the book on the table and turned off the light.

The phone rang twelve times before it finally quit.

f.u.c.k it, it had to be bad news.

16.

BAD DREAMS.

I had the dream again that night. The first time in four or five years. It had been so long I had forgotten it. It had started a year after I got back from Nam. I understand that's normal. It's called delayed nocturnal shock or something like that. At first it was just this one persistent dream. I could never remember all of it, just bits and pieces. After a while it was such a familiar nightmare that I knew I was dreaming and it didn't bother me as much.

Then it changed.

The way it starts, I am in a hang glider soaring over a city. It could be Saigon, but I don't recognize it. Suddenly people on the ground are shooting at me. I can't see them, but the bullets are tearing through the wings of the glider. Next the bullets are hitting me. They bounce off as if my skin were bulletproof. I don't feel the bullets. I don't feel anything. I don't hear anything either. This is a silent dream. The next thing I remember, I see Teddy. He is on top of a ridge and he's running. I don't know what he's running from. Maybe he's running toward something. He starts waving at me. I try to soar down to pick him up, but the glider won't move up or down. Teddy starts screaming at me, this soundless scream. I feel desperate to get to him. Finally I get out of the seat of the glider and I hang over the side and let go and I fall. There's no ground, just me, falling through an empty s.p.a.ce.

Then I wake up.

After a while it began to get more complicated, after I got used to it and it didn't bother me anymore.

There were other hang gliders trying to collide with me. The other gliders were black and the pilots were all masked. It was like an obstacle course in the sky. Before I got comfortable with that version, the people in the other gliders started taking off their masks. One was my mother. Another was a fifth-grade schoolteacher whom I had not see or thought about for fifteen years. Another was my father, only a face in a photograph to me. Then the parish priest in the New Jersey town where I was born. I couldn't remember his name; all I could remember about him was that he had ”silent collections”-that meant folding money, no silver. It used to make me angry. And there was also a captain named Grant, a martinet Teddy and I had served under in Nam when we were still second lieutenants.

They were all yelling at me, but of course I couldn't hear anything. It was a silent horror movie that never ended.

A couple of years later, when I was working the street in San Francisco, I became friendly with another patrolman who had served in Nam. His name was Winfield. He was a black guy and he was taking college courses in psychology because he thought it would help him make detective.

One night over too many beers we started talking about dreams, so I told him mine and he gave me a nickel's worth of Psychology 101: ”Your values are all f.u.c.ked up, Jake. One thing is, you think you're different. s.h.i.+t, join the club. I figure it like this: it was one way here, the other way over there, okay? You get a lot of guilt over such s.h.i.+t. Gets so you're afraid to trust anybody because you don't want them to find out. It happened to us all, man. What you do, see, you decide what makes sense to you. Settle for that and f.u.c.k everything else.”

After that we talked a lot. The dreams got fewer and farther between. Finally they stopped.

That night in Doomstown I had the dream again, only this time it wasn't Teddy running on the ridge.

It was Franco Tagliani.

17.