“I was more interested in the ordinary-sized guy in the middle,” David said, and all at once a part of Johnny-a deep, deep part-knew what the child was driving at, what the child was going to say, and that part moaned in protest.
“The guy in the gray shirt and the Yankees hat. The guy that showed me the China Pit from my Viet Cong Lookout. That guy was you.
“What crap,” Johnny said. “The same kind of crazed crap you’ve been spouting ever since—Softly, perfectly on key, and still holding the wallet out to him on one hand, David Carver sang: “Well I said doctor… Mr. M.D It was like being slugged square in the middle of the chest. The hammer spilled out of Johnny’s hand. “Stop it,” he whispered.
can you tell me… what’s aiim’ me… And he said yeah-yeah-yeah-”
“Stop it!” Johnny screamed, and the radio burped up another burst of static. He could feel stuff starting to move inside him. Terrible stuff. Sliding. Like an ava-lanche beginning under a surface that only looks solid. Why did the boy have to come. Because he was sent, of course. It wasn’t David’s fault. The real question was why couldn’t the boy’s terrible master let either of them go.
“The Rascals,” David said. “Only back then they were still the Young Rascals. Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Very cool. That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny.”
Images beginning to slide downhill through his mind while Felix Cavaliere sang, I was feelin’ so bad: ARVN soldiers, many no bigger than American sixth-graders, pulling dead buttocks apart, looking for hidden treasure, a nasty scavenger hunt in a nasty war, can tah in can tak; coming back to Terry with a dose in his crotch and a monkey on his back, wanting to score so bad he was half out of his mind, slapping her in an airport concourse when she said something smart about the war (his war, she had called it, as if he had invented the fucking thing), slapping her so hard that her mouth and nose bled, and although the marriage had limped along for another year or so, it had really ended right there in Concourse B of the United terminal at LaGuardia, with the sound of that slap; Entra-gian kicking him as he lay writhing on Highway 50, not. kicking a literary lion or a National Book Award winner or the only white male writer in America who mattered but just some potbellied geezer in an overpriced motor cycle jacket, one who owed God a death like anyone else, Entragian saying that the proposed title of Johnny’s book made him furious, made him sick with rage.
“I won’t go back there,” Johnny said hoarsely. “Not for you, not for Steve Ames or your father, not for Mary, not for the world. I won’t.” He picked up the hammer again and slammed it against the ore-cart, punctuating his refusal. “Do you hear me, David. You’re wasting your time. I won’t go back. Won’t! Won’t! Won’t!”
“At first I didn’t understand how it could have been you,” David said, as if he hadn’t heard. “It was the Land of the Dead-you even said so, Johnny. But you were alive. That’s what I thought, at least. Even when I saw the scar.” He pointed atJohnny’s wrist. “You died… when7 1966. 1968. I guess it doesn’t matter. When a person stops changing, stops feeling, they die. The times you ye tried to kill yourself since, you were just playing catch up. Weren’t you.” And the child smiled at him with a sympathy that was unspeakable in its innocence and kind ness and lack of judgement.
“Johnny,” David Carver said, “God can raise the dead”
“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that,” he whispered. “I don want to be raised.” But his voice seemed to reach him from far away, and curiously doubled, as if he were coming apart in some strange but fundamental way. Frac turing like hornfels.
“It’s too late,” David said. “It’s already happened.”
“Fuck you, little hero, I’m going to Austin. Do you hear me. Fucking AUSTIN!”
“Tak will be there ahead of you,” David said. He was still holding out the wallet, the one with the picture of Johnny and David Halberstam and Duffy Pinette standing outside that sleazy little bar, The Viet Cong Lookout. A dive, but it had the best jukebox in the ‘Nam.
A Wurlitzer In his head Johnny could taste Kirin beer and hear the Rascals, the drive of the drums, the organ like a dagger, and how hot it had been, how green and how hot, the sun like thunder, the earth smelling like pussy every time it rained, and that song had seemed to come from every where, every club, every radio, every shithole juke; in a way, that song was Vietnam: I ivasfeelin’ so bad, I asked my family doctor just what I had.
That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn it, Johnny.
“Austin,” he whispered in a feeble, failing voice. And still there was that sense of twinning, that sense of twoness.
“If you leave now, Tak will be waiting for you in a lot of places,” David said, his implacable would-be jailer, still holding out his wallet, the one in which that hateful picture was entombed. “Not just Austin. Hotel rooms. Speaking halls. Fancy lunches where people talk about books and things. When you’re with a woman, it’ll be you who undresses her and Tak who has sex with her. And the worst thing is that you may live like that for a long time. Can de lach is what you’ll be, heart of the unformed. Mi him can mi. The empty well of the eye.”
Iwon’t! he tried to scream again, but this time no voice came out, and when he struck at the ore-cart again, the hammer dropped free of his fingers. The strength left his hand. His thighs turned watery and his knees began to unhinge. He slipped onto them with a choked and drown-ing cry. That sense of doubling. of twinning, was even stronger now, and he understood with both dismay and resignation that it was a true sensation. He was literally dividing himself in two. There was John Edward Mar-inville, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t want God to believe in him; that creature wanted to go, and understood that Austin would only be the first stop. And there was Johnny, who wanted to stay. More, who wanted to fight. Who had progressed far enough into this mad super-naturalism to want to die in David’s God, to burn his brain in it.and go out like a moth in the chimney of a kerosene lamp.
Suicide! his heart cried out. Suicide, suicide!
ARVN soldiers, war’s deadeyed optimists, looking for diamonds in assholes. A drunk with a bottle of beer in his hand and his wet hair in his eyes, climbing out of a hotel swimming pool, laughing as the cameras flashed. Terry’s nose bleeding below her hurt, incredulous eyes while a voice from the sky announced that United’s flight 507 to Jacksonville was boarding at Gate B-7. The cop kicking him as he writhed on the centerline of a desert highway.
It makes me furious, the cop had said. It makes me sick with rage.
Johnny felt himself leave his own body, felt himself grasped by hands that were not his own and turned out of his flesh like change from a pocket. He stood ghostlike beside the kneeling man and saw the kneeling man holding his hands out.
“I’ll take it,” the kneeling man said. He was weeping. “I’ll take my wallet, what the fuck, give it back.”
He saw the boy come to the kneeling man and kneel beside him. He saw the kneeling man take the wallet and then put it in the front pocket of the jeans beneath the chaps so he could press his hands together finger-to—finger, as David had done.
“What do I say.” the kneeling man asked, weeping. “Oh David, how do I start, what do I say.”
“What’s in your heart,” the kneeling boy said, and that was when the ghost gave up and rejoined the man. Clarity streaked into the world, lighting it up-lighting him up—like napalm, and he heard Felix Cavaliere singing I said baby, it’s for sure, I got the fever, you got the cure.
“Help me, God,” Johnny said, raising his hands to a place where they were even with his eyes and he could see them well. “Oh God, please help me. Help me do what I was sent here to do, help me to be whole, help me to live. God, help me to live again.”