CHAPTER 31
rom his wicker throne in front of the Verbivore, Tony had a clear line of sight to the Fedder. More specifically, to the bench on theF south side of the fountain where Theo carried out his bestowals.
Tony had seen Theo and Minnette when they sat there together.
And Theo and Kendrick.
And Theo and Ellen.
And Theo with Basil, Junior, Bun, Frankie, and others.
It was obvious to Tony that the téte-à-tétes were not accidental, but he kept his questions to himself for a while. The little he knew of Theo satisfied him that, whatever the old fellow was doing, it must be something useful, good, or, at worst, harmless.
Eventually, he did ask Theo about the fountain encounters.
It was a sunny morning. The two of them were sitting alone outside the Verbivore. Tony was well into his second cigarette of the day.
“Theo, explain something to me. I’ve got a clear view of the fountain from here, and I see you over there a lot. You’re always with somebody, and y’all always seem to be talking about something important. So, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing over there?”
Theo nodded. “I don’t mind at all, but would you keep it between the
two of us?”
“Sure.”
“Actually, Tony, you already know. I told you already about giving Ellen her portrait. Remember? Well . . .”
Theo told Tony the story of the epiphany in the Chalice. “Giving the portraits is my life’s work at this point.”
Even Tony the contrarian couldn’t help but be touched by the old man’s thoughtfulness. He shook his head in mild disbelief, patted Theo’s knee, and strung together a litany of phrases and questions that were intended to be compliments. “Well, that beats all. I’ll be damned.
Who on earth thinks of something like that? That’s crazy as hell, and it’s awfully nice of you, but Theo, really, I mean, really, why on earth
does anybody do something like that?”
Theo smiled. Nodded skyward. Laughed.
“I’m serious, Theo. Let’s have a real conversation sometime. I want you to tell me why you do that. I want to know.”
“‘Twould be my pleasure, Antony. My pleasure.”
That hoped-for conversation did eventually occur. Sort of.
“Theo, do Mafia bosses like you drink brandy? I’ve got a special bottle I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Let’s open it tonight. I’ll close the shop and lock the door, so we can meet without the Loafers hanging around and interrupting. Eight o’clock work?”
Actually, eight was on the late side for Theo, but he offered no alternative.
“Eight o’clock it is. What can I bring?”
“Yourself and an empty glass.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Forget the empty glass. Just bring yourself.”
At the appointed time, Theo walked into the Verbivore, stood at the door as Tony locked up, and navigated his way through stacks of books to the chaotic space known as Tony’s office, where a pair of comfortable chairs awaited them. A small table, two glasses, and a bottle were within arm’s reach of both chairs. A lamp on Tony’s desk created an island of warm light around which books of every size, shape, color, and texture stood sentry.
The space had the gravitas, if not the decor, of a confessor’s booth.
Tony poured brandy into the glasses. They raised them ceremoniously to each other’s health, took a sip, and then settled back into their chairs. For a half hour or so, they talked about life on Broadway and the acquaintances they had in common — Ellen, Shep, Simone, the Penny Loafers.
“I saw young Simone this afternoon,” Tony said. “He told me to tell you hello and said he’d still be happy to get with you sometime and talk about cello stuff. He’s a bright kid.”
“It takes a special mind to master that instrument,” Theo replied. “I hope I get to hear him play sometime.”
When they finished their first glass of brandy, Tony poured another for each of them. His eyes already glowed with the effects of the first.
“Theo, this is an old bottle. A friend of mine, a fellow grunt from Vietnam, gave it to me at a reunion we had when the Wall was unveiled
in Washington. You know the Wall?”
Theo nodded.
Fifty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty names on black granite had become an icon among American monuments.
“That was a helluva day, Theo. It’s amazing how a flat piece of stone can change your life, but that damn thing brought stuff up in me I’d been holding in for a long time. I’m still not sure why I went to see it, and I’m not sure I should have, but it probably did me some good. You ever fight in a war?”
“I lived on the fringes but never fought in one. I remember bits of the war in Spain from my childhood. And I was thirteen when World War Two ended. Thankfully, Portugal was on the sidelines; we remained neutral, you know. But we felt the effects long after it was over. How long were you in the military, Tony?”
“Too long. I was drafted. I didn’t really know what the hell it meant.
I don’t think any of us did. If we had, we probably all would have run to Canada. If somebody had shown us a film of what Vietnam really looked and felt like and then asked for volunteers, Uncle Sam couldn’t have fielded a baseball team.
“I was in for four years. Two here. Two there. Or maybe two there and the rest of my life here. A lot of us brought the jungle back home with us, and we’ve been there every day ever since. It was a helluva mess, Theo. That war messed up a lot of guys something terrible.”
Tony’s voice lightened, almost to cheerfulness. “Theo, you might not believe this, but before Vietnam I was a nice, quiet young man who read books and obeyed the rules. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t cuss. I was a bit of a nerd. I was planning to go to college, maybe on a golf scholarship, but all that changed when they drafted me. I couldn’t qualify for a deferment, and my parents didn’t have any pull, so I got shipped off to Basic. They shaved my head, gave me a new wardrobe, taught me a bit about being a soldier, and then sent me to Vietnam. I was what they called a ‘quickie.’ The Army needed lots of young fighters over there, so they sent us whether we were ready or not.
“I’d never shot a gun before, and here I was going into combat, in the
jungle, no less. I wasn’t excited about it, but it felt kind of manly — for about two days. I was in pretty good shape from walking on American golf courses, but god aw’mighty, was I in for a surprise.”
Tony took a long pull from his snifter and let the amber fire rest on the back of his tongue.
“The guy who gave me this brandy lives up in Illinois. We served together in First Infantry. The jungle totally ruined him. He’s been drunk, stoned, homeless, or in jail ever since he got back. That’s over fifty years. He got married a couple of times, but they both fell apart.
We hadn’t seen each other for years, until the Wall dedication, and when we saw each other, it was the weirdest thing. We shook hands and laughed like it was a high school reunion.
“And then, out of nowhere, we both started sobbing. All of a sudden, I think we both had visions of what we had lived through together. God, it was horrible.” Tony closed his eyes and groaned. “It was hell. It . . . was . . . hell.
“And it was like, when we saw each other, we were both thinking, did we really live through that? Were we really there? And I think we both hurt for each other. Then I grabbed him, and we held on to each other, and I swear it felt like we were begging for forgiveness or something, not just for being soldiers in that war but also for being part of a world that can do such godawful things.”
Tony closed his eyes, squinted, and squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and middle finger. He poured himself another generous portion of brandy.
By slow degrees, he was being transported to a realm of thatched roofs, rice paddies, and palm trees. The rasping hum of insects and the gummy heat of the tropical forest began to fill his sotted thoughts.
Muddy fatigues on bug-bitten skin. The scent of napalm. Ominous stares of villagers squatting on their haunches. Torn limbs and pained faces of wounded comrades. It all began to surface like smoky visions from a crystal ball.
“That fellow and I served at Ben Suc together. You ever heard of
that?”
Theo shook his head.
“Not many folks know about it. But it was a pretty hot area, near a
place called the Iron Triangle. We’d been out in the jungle on a mission for weeks, up to our asses in blood and pus and bugs, and soon as we got back to base, they told us we had to go on a big surprise mission the very next day, to this little village called Ben Suc. It was on the Saigon River.
“From the air, it was actually a pretty little place, at least until the war. There were lots of VC there — the bad guys — and it had been a thorn in our side, so the big bosses finally decided to deal with it once and for all. The mission was real hush-hush, didn’t even tell the South Vietnam army about it until the day it happened. We just woke up that morning and dropped hell on their heads.”
Theo listened without moving.
“The plan was simple. Attack, and capture or kill the bad guys, then evacuate the women and kids and old people, and then totally demolish the place. Bomb it, burn it, bulldoze it, just make it disappear. It wasn’t much of a fight, really. We went in on sixty helicopters. It only took fifteen minutes to land and offload every one of them. Pretty damn impressive. Most of the enemy ran when they realized what was happening, and when we landed there were mostly just women and children in the village, lots of ‘em. We were still on high alert ‘cause they had tunnels all over the place, but we didn’t have to do much
shooting.”
Tony swigged his brandy.
“I even made a friend, sort of, with this little kid on the first day we were there. Kids are amazing. At first, whenever we went into a village, even if we blew the place to hell, after a while the little kids would come out, and they’d start looking for things to play with — empty shell casings, plastic pipe, tarps — anything. We were their toy store. Can you imagine?
“Well, this one little kid, maybe five or six years old, was at a hut while his mother was packing her stuff to evacuate. We were going to airlift all of ‘em out over the next few days and relocate them. Well, I’m walking by and this little boy looks at me, and I sort of smile, which was not really like me, especially over there, but damn if he doesn’t smile back, and a little while later I notice he’s following me around.
And the whole time I could hear bombing and shooting in the distance
and sometimes close by, and it was a pretty chaotic situation. And this little kid just keeps following me around. I wasn’t paying him much attention; I was too damn busy, but I kept an eye on him. Even kids could hurt you over there, and we were always on edge around them.
But all he had on was a little raggedy-ass pair of shorts and no shirt, so I could see there weren’t any bombs or weapons strapped to him.”
Another swig.
“Late that first day, the little kid brought me an egg, like a sign of friendship or something. Just a plain old chicken egg, but that was kind of a big deal. I wanted to give him something, but I didn’t have any candy, and I couldn’t give him a knife or anything like that, so, Theo, get this: I gave him my good luck charm. It was all I had.”
Theo asked the obvious. “What was your good luck charm?”
“Don’t laugh. It was a golf ball. When I was in high school, I was on the golf team, and one day at practice, I hit a hole in one. Hole number twelve, Golden Country Club. Big deal, right? But I kept that ball with me all the time. I got teased about it a lot. Go to prom with a golf ball in your tuxedo pocket, and you’re setting yourself up to get ragged on.
Like I said, I was a bit of a weird kid.
“But I had that same golf ball with me in Vietnam, in the pocket of my fatigues. And I thought, well, if anybody needs some good luck over here, it’s probably that little kid. So, I gave him the golf ball. You’d have thought I just gave him the Hope diamond. I didn’t see him anymore that day. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of villagers that had to be evacuated, and there were people and farm animals and troops all mixed in together. It was dangerous as hell, and we knew there were still VCs in the area. It took three days to complete the evacuation. We were exhausted and we’d given the enemy plenty of time to organize an attack if they wanted to come after us. We were all on edge. Mad and jittery, that’s a dangerous combination.”
Tony paused, massaged his forehead, rubbed his eyes with a thumb and middle finger again, took a gulp of brandy, and trained his eyes on the air in front of him. “I’m talking too much.”
Theo sat in priestly stillness, struggling for something to say. Before he could conjure up anything, Tony resumed his story.
His words had become hesitant and sloppy. There were long, dense
pauses as his memory imported every emotion he had felt in the jungle near Ben Suc that day: exhaustion, terror, hatred, a tense anticipation bordering on nausea.
He was in a world far removed from Golden. The calm stillness of the Verbivore was a figment. Vietnam was his reality.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly through distended cheeks, then straightened his spine and sat back in his chair.
He gazed into his glass, eyes tightening and then opening widely, as if dragons were swimming in the brandy.
He was looking through the core of the earth to a rice paddy nine thousand miles and five decades away. Abruptly, he gasped like a man
seeing a ghost.
“Oh my god, no, stop.”
His hand, trembling slightly, squeezed the glass of brandy. Theo feared it might crack under the pressure.
The final scene from Ben Suc had begun to unfold in Tony’s mind. It was a scene from which he had fled all his adult life. He never knew when or how the “play” button would be triggered. Sometimes it was a nightmare. Sometimes a photograph or a line in something he read.
The vision had struck on one occasion in a grocery store, when his cart had nearly bumped into a child on the bakery aisle.
Now, with brandy dilating his veins and narrowing his thoughts, he heard the faint flutter of that awful film spooling through his mind. He shivered and took another hard pull from his glass, hoping to drown
the vision.
It had the opposite effect.
Tony resumed speaking. He never looked toward Theo.
“The next day, we were getting ready to load up the civilians and fly them away. Some of the women were bitching at us, and we were trying to help them carry their pots and their shovels and their stinkin’ pigs and trying to stay alert in case some gook showed up out of nowhere to throw a grenade at us.
“We got the last of the villagers lined up to leave. There were two or three hundred of them. There were two lines of them, about twenty yards apart, and a few of us walking between ‘em. It was still tense as
hell, and we were exhausted. Soon as we got everybody out, we were going to burn the place to the ground and return to base.”
Tony closed his eyes, pictured the lines of evacuees, and recalled the reciprocal bitterness of those moments — from soldiers to villagers and from villagers to soldiers — as they trudged to the helicopters. The sweat stung his eyes, blurred his vision. The weight of his gun and the weariness of recent days pulled his shoulders downward. Forty paces in front of him, a fellow GI also walked between the lines. Forty paces behind him, the same.
Tony heard a shout from the rear, a shout of panic. Villagers immediately crouched or fell to the ground, covering their heads.
“TONY, look out! Look out! LOOK OUT!”
Tony heard his name again, this time from in front of him. “Get down! Tony, behind you!”
A woman screamed, a shrill, catlike shriek of hysteria. The soldier behind Tony tried to train his gun on her. Tony turned. Sweat burned his eyes, but he saw a figure running at him. “TONY! GRENADE!
SHOOT! Tony, SHOOOT!”
Tony instinctively raised his gun and pulled the trigger. The assailant was feet away from him.
The shrill cry of the woman filled the air with insanity.
The air sprayed crimson as bullets tore at the attacker’s chest and
throat.
Their eyes met.
The small shirtless body of a child splayed onto the ground.
“Oh my god. Oh, god, no. No! Oh my god.”
A golf ball rolled from the little boy’s hand.
Tony shook his head over and over. Closed his eyes. Took several deep breaths. Moaned. Took another sip. Sat back again, spent.
An uneasy silence followed.
It might have been seconds or minutes before Tony, damp-eyed and in little more than a whisper, slurred an apology.
“I’m sorry, Theo. Ohh, I’m so sorry.” Long exhale. “I try not to let my mind ever go back there. I never talk about this to anyone.”
Theo nodded but said nothing. Tony took yet another long pull of brandy. Theo took a discreet sip. He had not been drunk since the day
of his daughter’s death, and he saw no reason to cross that line tonight.
Tony continued, his voice calmer but his words still fragmented.
“Theo, if nothing else, the war made me honest. Opened my eyes. It cured me of any romantic notions I had about the human race.
Creatures who are capable of doing the things that happened there don’t have much to brag about. It’s crazy what a jungle and fear and a gun and some misguided patriotism can bring out of a man. I’m afraid there’s a killer inside every one of us.
“Before Vietnam, I was just Dan and Mitzi’s boy, then all of a sudden, at least off and on while I was over there, I was a devil.
Vietnam was a world full of monsters, and I was one of ‘em. It scares me that the monster might still be in me somewhere.” He paused. “As bad as the guilt and shame and nightmares have been, in some way they give me hope that I still have a conscience and a heart, even if they’re screwed all to hell up. I hope so.
“I hate the politicians who sent us there. If there’s such a thing as righteous anger, sane hate, it’s for people like that. I hated what they did then, hate what they do now sometimes. But I don’t blame them for
what the war showed me about myself.”
Another pull from the glass.
And then a long silence. A cooling-down period.
As if to declare Vietnam over and done for this evening, Tony asked a question.
“Theo, you know what Ellen checked out the other day? Two books: Peter Pan and The Killing of Pablo Escobar. She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”
Theo raised his glass. “Here’s to Tony, who made it home from the jungle, so he could care for St. Ellen of the Promenade.”
Tony consented to the faint praise and raised his glass. They both took a sip.
“Have you always liked books?” Theo asked the question in hopes of further dispelling the intensity of the previous hour. Tony seemed all too happy to take the bait.
“Well, books are safe, aren’t they? Most of the time, anyway. But yeah, I’ve liked — loved — reading most of my life. My parents did too.
They always had lots of things lying around that even a kid could enjoy.
I think they did that on purpose.”
The two men talked books, shared something of their education and upbringing, and told some safe family stories. Tony spoke with surprising clarity for a man who had just consumed almost an entire bottle of brandy and who, only minutes before, had been so emotionally unhinged.
He and Theo even laughed a time or two and enjoyed, all in all, what Tony would later describe to the Penny Loafers as a “damn good conversation. Y’all should try it sometime.”
But the war never quite left the room. It hung like a fog around them, unmentioned any further but clearly present.
Muted street noise leaked in from the sidewalk, evidence that night life on the Promenade was well underway. For some out there, the night was still young. For Theo, it had exceeded one day’s energy.
He reached across the small table and patted Tony’s arm.
“Tony, I’m very grateful to know you. Thank you for sharing some of your story with me. I hope I didn’t ask too much.”
Tony nodded. “I don’t think you asked anything at all. I’m afraid I totally lost control. I thought we were going to talk about those secret meetings you’ve been having at the Fedder. And I was going to ask you
to talk about heaven, right?”
“Ah, yes. Maybe next time?”
“I guess if you talk about heaven, you’re going to talk about hell too.”
Theo raised a brow. “I have a feeling you might be able to teach me something about that yourself. I think you’ve had a big taste of hell already. I fear you believe that’s all there is. You seem much less convinced about the other possibility.”
Another short, thoughtful silence descended.
“You need some help getting home?” Tony asked. “Those three flights of stairs might be tricky.” It was a dubious offer from a man who was probably incapable of walking a straight line himself.
“It’s OK, Tony. If I can get out of this chair, I think I can waddle home by myself. If I can’t, I’ll sleep on a bench by the fountain. Thank you for letting me join you tonight. Next time we’ll meet at my place and I will introduce you to a wonderful bottle of port from my hometown.”
They said their farewells as Tony unlocked the door to the shop. Theo stepped out into the night and walked home to the sound of Basil’s music. Tony stepped back inside the Verbivore, noticed a bit of brandy in Theo’s glass, drained it dry, and turned off the light.
