“Of course not,” I say.
“Didn’t I just call you a googly-eyed alien?” she says.
“Ah yes,” I say. “But a sympathetic googly-eyed alien.”
“Didn’t I scream a lot, too? At the little party you and your wife threw for us?”
“You were afraid for Arthur.”
“This is all new,” she says. “I never saw this coming.”
“Not even in the High Sierras,” I say.
She smiles at this. “You’re not offended? At how I’ve been acting?”
“No.”
“My mama had quite a few boyfriends over the years. I’d not call one of them sympathetic.”
“Or googly-eyed,” I say.
“Maybe one or two of them was that, toward the end.” Viola Stackhouse laughs.
Then her laugh breaks off and I know she is sitting on the edge of the great and wide chasm of what her life has been and I take her hands in mine and I touch her with my fingertips and I give her the beating of my heart.
“Oh my,” she says.
“Prepare for sleep now,” I whisper, trying to make my voice as deep and smooth as a Buick.
And I take her back to her place and I help her lie down and I wish very badly to have a chenille spread to wrap her in, but there is only so much that I can do, and perhaps it is all right, for she is already asleep.
It has been a long night. But my time is short. And I am a late-night gambler juiced on the thrill of the game. I have pulled the handle on the slot machine over and over and now I have a red white and blue eagle in the left-hand window and the other windows are still tumbling and I wait for the second eagle to fall into place. I need a big win and I need it soon. Then I have an idea I should have had before: speak to the mated pairs one after the other. So I awaken Arthur and he is sitting before me now. I am Viola’s husband. I am Arthur Stackhouse. I saw some pretty bad things in the war. I’m talking about the real war. The good war. But I basically came out of it with a free mind. It helped that we all knew it was for a righteous cause, which included our own families’ welfare. It really did. You knew in your bones that every wife and child in America, every mailbox and apple tree, was at stake. And it helped, too, somehow, to know you were in for the duration. None of this twelve-months-and-you’re-gone stuff, which I figure made it even worse for the boys in that other war, the dirty one, a couple of decades later. If you go to war and it’s not for anything you can see as important, no matter how much rhetoric they throw at you, and if you’re going to be out of the action in one year, win or lose, then it just has to make a big difference in your being able to deal with it. You never quite get safely into that place inside you that will let you kill and be killed.
Now, I don’t know any of that about the Vietnam War and the boys who went there, except as a bystander. That’s just how I figured it was, from what I read and saw on TV. But what I’m really trying to talk about here is myself, how I could go through what I did in France and Germany and then come back and put it out of my mind better than you might expect. My generation, after you got home, you never talked about it to anybody, and you held on tight to all the things you loved that you knew would’ve been seriously harmed if you hadn’t done what you did, and that helped make the bad stuff quiet down and eventually go away. So I was all right. For a few years.
Then all of a sudden I wasn’t all right. And I never have been since. And damned if it didn’t come about in peacetime on a hotel roof with a drink in my hand. Till a few years ago, when Louisiana floated those casinos in Lake Charles, my wife and I would go to Las Vegas twice a year. We did it every year since we were married, which was right after the war, in 1946. And there was a time in the early fifties when the government was doing all that testing of hydrogen bombs out in the desert. It wasn’t very many miles away from Vegas, where the testing grounds were, and for a while the casinos made a big promotion of it.
So in 1953 my wife and I were at one of the hotels. The Sahara maybe. Or the Sands. I don’t remember which one. But there was a rooftop party to watch a nuclear blast. We both had already lost what we’d budgeted ourselves to lose and we had another twenty-four hours in Vegas and this seemed like something interesting. So we went up and they had Miss Atomic there, who they’d chose in a beauty pageant that morning, and she was walking around in a swimsuit and high heels and she had an atomic hairdo, which was big and puffed up on the top of her head like a mushroom cloud, and they were serving something they called atomic cocktails, which I remember very clearly. It was vodka and brandy and champagne and sherry, the strangest mix of things, but it was pretty good and getting better with every sip I took.
Then it was time and they had one of those tuxedoed emcees from down in the floor showrooms and he was doing like an introduction. It was dusk, I think. That’s how I remember it. There was still a little light from the sun that had just disappeared but it was getting dark and this guy is going, Now ladies and gentlemen, playing the Sahara for one night only, the Hydrogen Bomb, let’s give him a big Vegas welcome with a round of applause. And then the emcee looks at his watch and starts counting backward from ten and people are applauding and I take a sip of my atomic cocktail and Viola is standing beside me and I’m looking out to the northwest, where the sky is still showing some light.
Then it happened. I wasn’t prepared at all. You read about this bomb in the newspapers and it’s supposed to have killed all those people in a couple of Japanese towns and so forth, and you see a newsreel in the movies and you watch the mushroom cloud and you think, This is some kind of bomb. Something like that. But all you’re doing is just that, thinking. Like thinking about war if you’ve never been there. You just don’t know jack shit. All of a sudden there’s this crown of light out there. You know it’s sixty, seventy miles away, but all of a sudden it’s there, this spray of white light, but it doesn’t register as white as all, if you’re used to thinking of whiteness as a clean thing. This is white like you’ve been wrong all your life about what death is. It’s not like closing your eyes and everything is black and that’s the way it stays forever. Suddenly you know death is white, and here it is and it doesn’t feel far away at all. It’s right here in your face, touching your eyes, which don’t close when you die but they look straight into this ghastly whiteness.
And then it fades a little, it pulls back, but something else is there in its place. And damn, you can see it. Even from here. It’s tiny from this distance, if you step back and look around you, if you can drag your eyes away and look up at the night sky, but you can’t do that. You have to see what’s there, and it’s a thing rising up where that whiteness was just a moment ago. And more than the worst of battle, more than the smell of cordite or burnt flesh, more than the sound of men’s voices blabbering in pain, more than the sight of torn limbs and gaping chests, that instant of light and that distant plume of smoke and the mindless smattering of applause on a hotel rooftop and the taste of champagne and sherry told me there was nothing but pain and then nothingness waiting for me in my life. I was thirty years old and I’d been through a terrible war but it wasn’t until that evening I realized what the end of life was all about.
And my wife put her hand on my arm and maybe she knew something terrible was happening inside me and maybe she didn’t. But I never said a word about this to her. I kept my battle face on and I sipped my drink and she and I went downstairs and I think I broke our rule that night. I think I lost another hundred dollars or so that we didn’t budget, and I knew I’d lose it. There was no way I’d win a penny that night. But I went through the motions. And I guess that did me some good, in a way. I went on through the motions of my life and here I am. And I never did say a thing about this to Viola. She wouldn’t understand. Or she would. Either way, we’d lose.