He shrugged. So no pillow. That means there’ll be noise.
Somewhere down the street, someone set off another string of Chinese firecrackers, the same kind I had enjoyed so much as a little boy during New Year’s. My mother would light up the long red string, and I would plug my ears and screech along with my mother in the patch of garden next to our hut while the serpent leaped this way and that, consuming itself from tail to head, or perhaps it was head to tail, ecstatically ablaze.
It’s just one shot, I said after the firecrackers ceased. No one’s coming out to see what happened, not with all this noise.
He looked at his watch. All right, then.
He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and kicked off his sneakers. I opened my door, got out, closed it softly, and took my position at the other end of the carport, next to the path leading from the sidewalk to the apartment’s mailboxes. The path continued past the mailboxes to the two ground-floor apartments, the entrance to the first one ten feet down. Poking my head around the corner, I could see the lights of the apartment through the curtains of the living room window, pulled shut. A tall wooden fence lined the other side of the path, and above it rose the wall of an identical apartment complex. Half of its windows were bathroom windows, and the other half were bedroom windows. Anyone at the windows on the second floor could see the path leading to the apartment but would not be able to see into the carport.
Bon walked on socked feet to his position, in between the two cars nearest to the path, where he knelt down and kept his head below the windows. I looked at my watch: 8:07. I held a plastic bag with a yellow happy face and the words THANK YOU! on it. Inside were the firecrackers and the oranges. Are you sure you want to do this, son? my mother said. It’s too late, Mama. I can’t figure a way out.
I was halfway finished with a cigarette when the major appeared at the carport for the last time. Hey. His face broke into a puzzled smile. He carried his lunch box in his hand. What are you doing here? I forced myself to smile in return. Lifting the plastic bag, I said, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop this off.
What is it? He was halfway to me.
A gift for the Fourth of July. Bon emerged from behind the car by which the major was walking, but I kept my gaze on the major. He was within three feet when he said, Do they give gifts on the Fourth of July?
The expression on his face was still puzzled. When I offered him the bag with both hands, he leaned forward to peer at its contents. Behind him Bon walked up, noiseless on his socked feet and gun in hand. You didn’t have to, said the major. When he put his hands on the bag, it was the moment for Bon to shoot. But instead of pulling the trigger, Bon said, Hey, Major.
The major turned around, gift in one hand, lunch box in the other. I stepped to one side and heard him start to say a word when he saw Bon, and then Bon shot him. The report echoed in the carport, hurting my ears. The major’s skull cracked when his head hit the pavement, and if the bullet had not already killed him, perhaps the fall did. He lay flat on his back, the bullet hole in his forehead a third eye, weeping blood. Move, Bon hissed, tucking the gun into the waistband of his pants. As he knelt down and rolled the major onto his side, I leaned over the body and picked up the plastic bag, its yellow happy face freckled with blood. The major’s open mouth was wrapped around the shape of his last word. Bon tugged the wallet out of the major’s hip pocket, stood up, and pushed me toward the car. I looked at my watch: 8:13.
I pulled out of the carport. A numbness descended on me, beginning from my brain and my eyeballs and extending to my toes and fingers. I thought he wasn’t going to see it coming, I said. I just couldn’t shoot him in the back, he said. Don’t worry. He didn’t feel a thing. I was not worried about whether the crapulent major felt a thing. I was worried about whether I felt a thing. We said nothing more, and before we reached our apartment, I pulled into an alley where we replaced the license plates. Then we went home, and when I took my sneakers off I saw spots of blood on the white toes. I took the shoes into the kitchen and wiped them off with a wet paper towel before I dialed the General’s number from the phone hanging by the refrigerator, its door decorated with the twin columns of my divided self. He answered on the second ring. Hello? he said. It’s done. There was a pause. Good. I hung up the phone, and when I returned to the living room with two glasses and a bottle of rye, I found that Bon had emptied the contents of the major’s wallet onto the coffee table. What do we do with this? Bon asked. There was his Social Security card, his state ID (but no driver’s license, as he did not have a car), a wad of receipts, twenty-two dollars, a handful of change, and some photos. A black-and-white one showed him and his wife on their wedding day, very young and dressed in Western garb. He had been fat back then, too. There was also a color photo of his twins at a few weeks of age, genderless and wrinkled. Burn them, I said. The wallet I would dispose of tomorrow, along with the license plates, the plastic bag, and the ashes.
When I handed him a glass of rye, I saw the red scar on his hand. Here’s to the major, Bon said. The medicinal taste of the rye was so awful we had a second drink to wash it away, then a third, and so forth, all while watching television specials celebrating the nation’s birthday. It was not just any birthday, but the bicentennial of a great, brawny nation, a little punch-drunk from recent foreign excursions but now on its feet again and ready to swing, or so proclaimed the chatterati. Then we ate three of the oranges and went to bed. I lay down on my bunk, closed my eyes, knocked my knees against the rearranged furniture of my thoughts, and shuddered at what I saw. I opened my eyes but it made no difference. No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major’s third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.
CHAPTER 7
I confess that the major’s death troubled me greatly, Commandant, even if it does not trouble you. He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world. In Saigon, I could have depended on my weekly visits to the basilica with Man to discuss my misgivings, but here I was alone with myself, my deeds, and my beliefs. I knew what Man would say to me, but I just needed him to say it to me again, as he had on other occasions, such as the time I passed to him a cartridge of film recording the heliborne assault plans of a Ranger battalion. Innocent men would die as a result of my actions, wouldn’t they? Of course men will die, Man said, masking his words behind his folded hands as we knelt in a pew. But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much.
I shivered in the humid climate of the basilica while the dowagers droned. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made. Little surprise, then, that revolutionaries needed natural heat sometimes. Thus, when I received an invitation to a wedding not long after the crapulent major’s demise, I accepted with enthusiasm. Sofia Mori was my curious guest to this reception for a couple whose names I had to check on the invitation before greeting them. The bride’s father was a legendary marine colonel whose battalion fought off an NVA regiment during the Battle of Hue with no American assistance, while the groom’s father was the vice president of the Saigon branch of Bank of America. His family had fled Saigon on a jet chartered by Bank of America, thus avoiding the indignity of the refugee camps. The most distinctive thing about the vice president, besides his air of effortless distinction, was the Clark Gable mustache playing dead on his upper lip, an adornment favored by southern men who fancied themselves debonair playboys. I had received an invitation since I had met the man several times in Saigon as the General’s aide. My status was indicated by how far I sat from the stage, which is to say very far. We were positioned near the restrooms, buffered from the scent of disinfectant only by the tables for the children and the band. Our companions were a couple of former junior officers, two mid-tier bank executives who had found lower-tier jobs with Bank of America branches, an in-law who looked inbred, and their wives. In dire times I would not merit a seat, but now we were more than a year into our American exile, and flush times had returned for some. The Chinese restaurant was in Westminster, where the man with the Clark Gable mustache had settled his family in a ranch-style suburban home, a demotion from his villa in Saigon but many rungs above almost all the evening’s attendees. Westminster was Sonny’s town, and I spotted him at a table several rings closer to the center of power, Clark Gable’s attempt to ensure positive press coverage.