Brickie loved Peter Gunn because Gunn was a private detective who dressed cool and had a lounge-singer girlfriend and sometimes in the lounge there were real-life famous jazz musicians playing. I would rather have been watching Sugarfoot or Bat Masterson, or Brickie’s other favorite show, Behind Closed Doors, which was based on the experiences of an actual U.S. naval intelligence officer who caught spies and busted up Russian plots, but for some reason it had gone off the air. Brickie, who knew the guy the show was based on, said either he’d run out of stories or the Russians had gotten him. But I let Brickie have his way, and if we watched Peter Gunn I’d get to stay up later.
“Okay, mister,” Brickie said. “Let’s get this operation over with before our show comes on.”
“Rats, Brickie. I don’t want to!”
“I don’t want to, either, but what we want doesn’t particularly matter. What your grandmother wants is law. As you ought to know. Give me that foot.”
I stuck out my leg across his lap. “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” he said, putting on his reading glasses.
“That’s such a giant lie!”
Brickie chuckled, unwrapping a clean towel in which Dimma had left the instruments of torture: a gleaming sewing needle and tweezers, cotton balls, and peroxide. “All you have to do is hold still, and I’ll have it out in a second.”
“Oh, sure.” I was trying not to cry.
Picking up Dimma’s sterling table lighter, Brickie clicked it and held the needle in the flame to sterilize it. Then he unceremoniously poked the needle into my foot, and, of course, I shrieked and tried to jerk away. He had a good grip on me, though. “Could you try being just a little stoic?”
“What’s that?” I whimpered.
“Stoic means you try to endure things that hurt and don’t let them bother you.” He dug around and squeezed the inflamed spot, drawing pus and blood.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” I yelled. “Stoic sounds like stupid to me.” I was about to say that he should be sorry for torturing me since I’d nearly died, but I thought better of it. I tried to concentrate on the top of Brickie’s head, where his faded red hair had thinned so I could see the tender geography of his scalp, the moles and age spots, which gave me a pang. Even though at the moment I was angry with him for tormenting me, I would miss him if I were dead. It also crossed my mind to ask about why he was being mean to my father, suing him—I was thinking about jail and wondering if Daddy had the money to avoid it—but I thought better of that, too.
Brickie traded the needle for the tweezers and plucked the splinter out, holding it up triumphantly. “Mission accomplished!” Then he rubbed some peroxide in the wound—hard—with a cotton ball, causing another “Ow!” and stuck a Band-Aid on it. “Dr. Dimma was right—it was infected. See—that took all of four minutes, you big baby.” He laughed and patted my leg.
“Hmpf. The next time you get something cut open I’m going to laugh at you. Like your hemorrhoids.”
“I would not advise that,” Brickie said. “Now let’s have some Honeymoon and watch the show.” He went to the kitchen to get our ice cream and I used the time to soak a new cotton ball in peroxide and stroke it across my hair, thinking I might achieve a blondish Troy Donahue look. Elena would love it. I wished I could dye it the platinum color of my mother’s hair, but that would mean smearing revolting blue glop that smelled like rotten eggs on my head.
Brickie returned with two big bowls. “Are you sure Peter Gunn won’t be too frightening for you?” he teased.
“The only thing I’m frightened of right now is you,” I said. He gave an ice-creamy chortle and we waited for Peter Gunn to begin. “I hope you managed to have some fun at the beach before you were so tragically wounded.”
I thought, If you only knew, but said, “I met one of the guys who dropped the bombs on Japan.”
“Really.” He seemed interested. “Was it your father’s friend from Baltimore?”
“Umm…Lieutenant Beser?”
“He’s a hero. That’s nice that you got to meet him.”
“I don’t get it about heroes. He didn’t save anybody.”
“Well, what he did put an end to the war, so he saved a lot more Americans from dying.”
Just what my father had said. I thought about our war reenactments, like the cruel debacle with Kees and Piet and their Airstream. “We like war, but is playing it the same as guys having real wars? I mean, why do people keep having them?”
“You boys playing war is different—you’re just children, and you like winning, like a baseball game. There are real wars because people have to protect what’s important to them. And war is terrible; no one ‘likes’ it.”
It didn’t seem so different to me. “But America likes winning, too.”
Brickie shook his head. “There’s always going to be a lunatic around to start something, like Hitler, and something has to be done about it. Americans don’t start wars, we end them.”
“Why can’t we just do like the Romans? You just put the presidents and kings and dictators in a ring, like gladiators, and let them fight it out. Whoever doesn’t die wins, and all the regular people don’t have to get killed.”
“It just doesn’t work that way. But philosophically, it’s a good idea.” I was glad to get some credit for a change.
Brickie plucked at a nostril, and, feeling that I now had the moral high ground, I said, “Stop picking your nose, Brickie.”
“I am not picking my nose, John. I had an itch. And you’re certainly not one to talk about nose-picking.”
I still had my doubts and persisted with my interrogation. “But it seems like people do like war. Beau Shreve said his dad said that American spies knew that Pearl Harbor was going to happen, but nobody tried to stop it because we wanted to get in the war.”
“Yes, I know that theory. It’s very complicated, son. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
I hated that answer, which I often got from my grandparents. “Why do we make such a big deal about Russian spies? Don’t we spy on everybody, too?”
Brickie sighed. “Why don’t you eat your ice cream? I’m spying on your bowl right now, and you’re letting it melt.”
“I like it all melty, like a milkshake. That’s the best way to eat it.” I stirred it around and stirred around some thoughts in my head. “So if you think I should eat my ice cream before it melts because that’s the best way to do it, and I don’t believe that, it’s like Commies and Americans—we have to fight about whose way is the best, and make everybody do it the same?”
“Good God, son. How many Cokes did your grandmother let you have today?”
“Three,” I said. “It would have been four but Estelle took one away from me. Do you know any spies? Do you know somebody named Guy Fitch?”
This seemed to take Brickie aback, but he said, “How do you know that name? No, I don’t know him. And nobody knows who spies are because they have to keep their jobs secret.”
“Maari Andersen thinks you’re a spy.” This was a lie; it had been the Shreve boys who’d said it, but I knew they’d beat the crap out of me if I told on them and got them in trouble.
Brickie laughed. “Well, consider the source of that ridiculous idea. Maari needs to be worrying about her…unusual family, not yours. I think you know what I mean.”