“A flower!”
“Well, anyway … he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book, Orchid Blood, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know? And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered. It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped. Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think they’re too eager to work with him again.”
“He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?” Beevers asked.
“I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,” Poole said.
“You think they’re not the same?” Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee. “Really.”
When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading light and picked up his copy of A Beast in View.
At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted and sent to basic training in the South. The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars, and Beasley accepts.
After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country toward Thailand.
Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.
Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others—Poole had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of Nat Beasley, the running grunt.
The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were new soldiers like himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary as winces.
Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his life?
Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy eyes at Michael, said, “Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta stone,” and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.
Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control device.
Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.
Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.
The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.
Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.
3
The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway. The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General had brought her to America—and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.
For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own way; she liked to speak in communiqués; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.
“Didn’t you think I was worried about you?”
“You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Because you don’t own me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am. You’re like a little boy, you know?”
He let that one pass.
“Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging out with the guys.”
“That just says that you’re jealous, Maggie.”
“Maybe you’re not so dumb after all,” Maggie said, and smiled at him. “But you have too many problems for me.” She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.
“Are you saying you don’t love me?”
“You don’t stop loving people, Tina,” she said. “But if I moved back in with you, pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me—you’re so guilty, you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.”
“You want to marry me?”
“No.” She watched his suspicious, surprised response. “I said, you have too many problems for me. But that’s not the point. How you behave is the point.”