“Oh.”
“Cut it off a Jap at Corregidor. He wasn’t even dead yet, just lay there with his bottom half blown off by a sub-Thompson. His eyes didn’t flinch or nothing when I took the ear.”
“Oh.”
“Those Japs were tough. Had to give them that, they were tough. Why haven’t I seen you before?”
I gave him the general rundown.
“You’re son of the woman in Doc Warden’s place, huh?”
He’d started clipping away with the scissors, which made me nervous, so I didn’t answer for fear of distracting him.
“I hear your mama’s a real pistol.”
I had no idea what that meant, so again I didn’t answer, but March had his speech worked out and anything I said wouldn’t have mattered.
Since then, I’ve discovered there are some people who think one little spot in their life was real and everything else is just meaningless time killing. I’ve met sports heroes like that, and a couple of women obsessed with late pregnancy and childbirth.
March was that way about World War II. He was in the Twenty-fourth Division in Sydney, Australia, then in New Guinea where he saw Japanese who had been cannibalizing their dead. He spent thirty-one days in a hole with another guy.
“That was on Davao. These officers came along and told us they needed the hole and we had to get out but I said, ‘Forget it, sir.’ Front lines weren’t like Fort Bragg. Officers don’t mean nothing up there.”
“Leave the back kind of long.”
He switched to the electric buzzing razor which at least couldn’t draw blood. “Let me give you some advice, son. You’re not too old to hear advice, are you?”
“Right now I need all the advice I can get.”
“Find yourself a war. Not a police thing like we’re piddling with over in Asia, a real war where you can test your mettle and find true men who are true friends.”
“I don’t know many men.”
“There’s nothing like lying in the mud next to a guy all night, knowing you’ll probably die in the morning, to cement a friendship.” He waved the razor in the direction of his picture wall. “Those are my closest relatives. No one who hasn’t been in a war knows the meaning of trust.”
“Are you leaving some on the back?”
March spun the chair around and stared me in the eye. “You hear me, son.”
“Find a war and make friends.”
“That’s right. Test yourself, son. Life means something when you know it can end with one bullet. Be a man, son.”
“Find a war,” I said.
“You’ll never live till you kill someone who’s out to kill you.”
“That’s true.”
I started into the White Deck but this scattered-looking, gangly man in glasses charged out of the Dupree Art Gallery and said, “You’ve been to the Twenty-one Club.”
He had on dark slacks instead of blue jeans which, in GroVont, made him stick out like a foreigner. I said, “I’ll be fourteen this summer.”
“I mean Fifty-seventh Street, the Guggenheim, the Algonquin Hotel, Baghdad on the Hudson. New York City.”
“I saw a game at Yankee Stadium once.”
“At the very least you are aware of life east of Cheyenne. Come look at my paintings.” He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his long nose and stared down at me eagerly. Any grown-up who wanted to talk to a kid had to be desperate, which made me leery of the deal.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m Dougie Dupree. Perhaps your mother has spoken of me.” He held his hand out for a shake.
“You know my mother?”
The stunned-by-Lydia look came in his eyes. “Come see my works.”
I shrugged and followed his back into the gallery. A card table in the middle of the room was covered by some kind of board game deal involving black-and-white marbles. Paintings of the mid-size type filled the walls. Almost all Teton pictures in this highly visible light, three or four had cheap margarine-colored sun rays pouring down the canyons. One showed a cowboy trying to lasso a skinny little pinto with its ribs showing. The cowboy and horse both looked fairly pitiful.
“I did that one,” Dougie said. The price was $1,300.
“Do you get many customers?”
He pushed up his glasses. “In the summer they move like popcorn. There’s no one at all this time of year, but my uncle owns the place. He doesn’t understand on-season, off-season, so he makes me stay open.”
“Oh.”
“He lives in Florida.”
“That explains it.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit in this room all winter wearing slacks instead of jeans and wishing I was in New York. “How do you know Lydia?”
His eyes got all sly. “We’ve dated casually.”
This surprised me. No one likes a mom who keeps secrets, besides, Lydia never does anything casually. I decided Dougie was lying in his teeth.
He sat at the table and looked sadly down at the board game. “You know the difference between me and your mother?”
I wondered why he played with marbles.
“We both feel superior to the provincial hicks of this area, but she enjoys feeling superior and I don’t. Lydia probably wouldn’t like Manhattan, she couldn’t feel superior there.”
“She could too.”
“I crave intellectual equals, challenging minds. I hate being a snob in this jerkwater outpost of aboriginal quaintness.”
“Lydia likes being a snob.”
He stared at the marbles a long time, as if he’d forgotten I was there. I suppose he was thinking of some flashy club in New York City where the men wore slacks and the women respected brains. I couldn’t decide whether to slip out the door or stay put.
Suddenly, Dougie smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to know go, would you?”
I thought he said “no go,” which didn’t make any more sense than what he did say.
He nodded at the marbles. “Go is an ancient Oriental game which tests the human mind to its very limit—
