They kept him half a year. He was released after an honorable peace was not achieved, after the evacuation. Returning home he had been fouled up in red tape, routinely questioned by a military psychiatrist, dismissed. It had been three weeks, only that, since the big C-141 and Gia Lam airfield.
He examined the pawnshop window again.
Enough of this, he thought. He turned to face her.
Her legs were long, slightly bowed. jeans lapped her toed-in boots.
She’d be good with a horse. One hand was tensed in the pocket of a cheap black nylon parka. Passing headlights periodically hit her face-wide with strong, jutting bones. Not pretty yet, a kid trying to look old. Jailbait. She stared back at him through traffic. She was carrying a knotted bundle.
He had seen so many with their children, possessions, animals tied in cloths across their backs, under their breasts, bundles dragged in frail carts. He had seen them bolting under fire, arms wrapped around small packages. Some of the packages, loosely held the way hers was, exploded. Henry Lamartine Junior carried enough shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, to set off the metal detector in the airport. He had been physically searched there in a small curtained booth. When he told the guard what the problem was, the man just looked at him and said nothing, dumb as stone. Henry had wanted to crush that stupid face the way you crumple a ball of wax paper.
The girl did not look stupid. She only looked young. She turned away.
He thought that she might walk off carrying that bundle. She could go anywhere. Possibility of danger. Contents of bundle that could rip through flesh and strike bone. It was as much the sense of danger, the almost sweet familiarity he had — Mod with risk by now, as it was the attraction for her that made him put his hands out, stopping traffic, and cross to where she stood.
He turned out to be from a family she knew. A crazy LamaTtine boy.
Henry.
“I know your brother Lyman,” she said. “I heard about you.
How’d you get loose?”
“I’m like my brother Gerry. No jail built that can hold me either.
” He grinned when she told him her name.
“Old Man Kashpaw know you’re hanging out on NP Avenue?”
Albertine took his arm. “I’m thirsty,” she said.
They walked beneath the cowgirl’s lariat and found a table in the Round-Up Bar. After two drinks there they moved down the street, and kept moving on. Somewhere later that night, in the whiskey, her hand brushed his. He would not let go.
“You know any bar tricks?” she asked. “Show me one.
He dropped her hand and she made it into a fist and shoved it in her pocket. She still clutched her bundle tight between her feet, under the table. He got three steak knives and two water glasses from the bartender and brought them back to the table.
He set the glasses down half a foot apart. Then he inter lapped the knives so they made a bridge between the glass lips, a bridge of knives suspended in air.
Albertine looked at the precarious, linked edges.
She was nervous, but she didn’t recognize this feeling, because it was part of a whirl in her stomach that was like excitement.
When Henry and Albertine left the bar it was very late, past last call, past closing. The streets were quiet. He put his arm around her and she stumbled once beneath its weight.
A small black-and-white television flickered on a high shelf behind the hotel desk. President Nixon’s face drooped across the screen. The night clerk took Henry’s ten-dollar bill, and threw it — NOW into the cash drawer and sleepily shoved a pen and lined slip across the counter toward him. The clerk was a mound of flesh tapering into a small thick skull. Waiting for the soldier to sign, he yawned so hugely that tears sprang from his eyes. It did not interest him that the man and girl, both Indian or Mexicans, whatever, signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Howdy Doody and were shacking up for the night.
Whatever. He yawned again.
Mother fucker, Henry thought, lazy motherfucker, aren’t you?
Drunk, he had taken a violent dislike to the man. I could off this fat shit, he told himself But Albertine was there. “Advise restraint, ” he said out loud. She didn’t seem to hear. The place was well off the avenue, and the short upstairs hall was quiet. Henry steered her easily before him, touching her shoulder blades through the bunched padding in the nylon jacket. He shook the thought of the fat clerk away, far as possible.
“Angel, where’s your wings,” he whispered into her hair.
“They should be here.” He pressed the ends of his fingers hard against her jutting bones.
Her laugh was high and soft. He fumbled for the key. He was not used to having keys again and always forgot where he put them.
Groping, patting, he fished the room key from his jacket and put it to the lock. She was poised, half turned from what she might see when the door opened. He waved her in. Once she entered and stood in the hard overhead light, he saw that she was bone tired, sagging from the broad sawhorse shoulders down, her hair wrenched in a clump by the barrette.
He was drunker than she was. She had stopped after a few and let him go on drinking, talking, until he spilled too many and knew it was time to taper off.
There was no table lamp. He turned off the overhead light and left on the one over the bathroom mirror.
“Warma use the head?”
At first she shook her head dumbly, no, and looked at the floor.
But then I can close the door and he’ll be out there, she thought.
ME RING
ML: She walked past him. He heard water rush into the sink. The other sounds she tried to hide made him smile. Women are so fucking cute sometimes it hurts. It really hurts.
Don’t ever want to come out of here. She leaned her forehead on cool tile.
“When angel showers,” he was singing to her closed door, come your way.
They bring the flowers that bloom in May.”
He steadied himself on the iron bed rails, tried to pull his boots off, went to his knees.
“Keep looking for a bluebird and listen…. I know by God is sing in there. I heard you. It sounded like rain on a you were p tin roof Then he was beating his chest lightly, like in the cold mission church he had served in when he was eight.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof He tried to stand.
Hearing the sounds of a toothbrush he swayed backward, laughing. It sounded ridiculous. Sitting on the floor, stiff legged, he took off his boots and socks, then stood up warily to ease off his pants, unbutton his shirt. He set the bottle of Four Roses on a chair where he could reach it and turned down the covers on the bed. Then he crawled in and watched the crack of light around all four sides of the bathroom door.
“it was rehung a size too small,” he said in a loud critical
“Or else it shrunk in the frame.” He laughed again.
voice.
He is out of his mind.
She came through the door, put some clothes down neatly folded, and disappeared again. “if I close my eyes and imagine very hard what you’re doing …” He addressed the bottle, then unscrewed the top.
With his eyes shut he drank the rough whiskey. It left a sweet burn going down, and when he looked again his vision had narrowed.
He said those men took trophies. Skin pressed in the pages of a book.
There was often a stage in his drunkenness where his eyesight tunneled, like looking through the wrong end of binoculars. He had to be very careful now to remember where he was. He did not dare take his eyes from the shrinking door. “Please …, ” he urged the dark room, “don’t … ” fearing something might break the concentration.