“Everything's okay,” Louie calls to Henry. “Very good food. Wonderful food. That's why we come back.” To the waiter he then says, “Just follow my lead,” and then he lowers his cane and sits back down. Chet and Bobcat gather up the empty plates and go over and pile them on the waiter's tray.
“Anybody else?” Louie asks. “Anybody else got a story about his first time?”
“Uh-uh,” says Chet while Bobcat sets himself the pleasant task of polishing off Less soup.
This time, as soon as the waiter comes out of the kitchen carrying the rest of their order, Chet and Bobcat get right up and go over to the dumb fucking gook before he can even begin to forget and start approaching the table again.
And now it's out there. The food. The agony that is the food. Shrimp beef lo mein. Moo goo gai pan. Beef with peppers. Double-sauteed pork. Ribs. Rice. The agony of the rice. The agony of the steam. The agony of the smells. Everything out there is supposed to save him from death. Link him backward to Les the boy. That is the recurring dream: the unbroken boy on the farm.
“Looks good!”
“Tastes better!”
“You want Chet to put some on your plate, or you want to take for yourself, Les?”
“Not hungry.”
“That's all right,” Louie says, as Chet begins piling things on Less plate for him. “You don't have to be hungry. That's not the deal.”
“This almost over?” Les says. “I gotta get out of here. I'm not kiddin', guys. I really gotta get out of here. Had enough. Can't take it. I feel like I'm gonna lose control. I've had enough. You said I could leave. I gotta get out.”
“I don't hear the code word, Les,” Louie says, “so we're going to keep going.”
Now the shakes have set in big-time. He cannot deal with the rice. It falls off the fork, he's shaking so bad.
And, Christ almighty, here comes a waiter with the water. Circling around and coming at Lester from the back, from out of fucking nowhere, another waiter. They are all at once but a split second away from Les yelling “Yahhh!” and going for the waiter's throat, and the water pitcher exploding at his feet.
“Stop!” cries Louie. “Back off!”
The women shelling the peas start screaming.
“He does not need any water!” Shouting, standing on his feet and shouting, with his cane raised over his head, Louie looks to the women like the one who is nuts. But they don't know what nuts is if they think that Louie's nuts. They have no idea.
At other tables some people are standing, and Henry rushes over and talks to them quietly until they are all sitting down. He has explained that those are Vietnam veterans, and whenever they come around, he takes it as a patriotic duty to be hospitable to them and to put up for an hour or two with their problems.
There is absolute quiet in the restaurant from then on. Les picks at a little food and the others eat up everything until the only food left on the table is the stuff still on Les's plate.
“You done with that?” Bobcat asks him. “You not gonna eat that?”
This time he can't even manage “take it.” Say just those two words, and everybody buried beneath that restaurant floor will come rising up to seek revenge. Say
Here come the fortune cookies. Usually they love that. Read the fortunes, laugh, drink the tea — who doesn't love that? But Les shouts “Tea leaf!” and takes off, and Louie says to Swift, “Go out with him. Get him, Swiftie. Keep an eye on him. Don't let him out of your sight. We're gonna pay up.”
On the way home there is silence: from Bobcat silence because he is laden with food; from Chet silence because he long ago learned through the repetitious punishment of too many brawls that for a man as fucked up as himself, silence is the only way to seem friendly; and from Swift silence too, a bitter and disgruntled silence, because once the flickering neon lights are behind them, so is the memory of himself that he seems to have had at The Harmony Palace. Swiff is now busy stoking the pain.
Les is silent because he is sleeping. After the ten days of solid insomnia that led up to this trip, he is finally out.
It's when everybody else has been dropped off and Les and Louie are alone in the van that Louie hears him coming round and says, “Les? Les? You did good, Lester. I saw you sweatin', I thought, Umm-umm-umm, no way he's gonna make it. You should have seen the color you were. I couldn't believe it. I thought the waiter was finished.” Louie, who spent his first nights home handcuffed to a radiator in his sister's garage to assure himself he would not kill the brother-in-law who'd kindly taken him in when he was back from the jungle only forty-eight hours, whose waking hours are so organized around all the others' needs that no demonic urge can possibly squeeze back in, who, over a dozen years of being sober and clean, of working the Twelve Steps and religiously taking his meds — for the anxiety his Klonopin, for the depression his Zoloft, for the sizzling ankles and the gnawing knees and the relentlessly aching hips his Salsalate, an anti-inflammatory that half the time does little other than to give him a burning stomach, gas, and the shits — has managed to clear away enough debris to be able to talk civilly again to others and to feel, if not at home, then less crazily aggrieved at having to move inefficiently about for the rest of his life on those pain-ridden legs, at having to try to stand tall on a foundation of sand — happy-go-lucky Louie laughs. “I thought he didn't have a
But when it came time to return, Les refused. “Isn't it enough that I sat there?” “I want you to eat,” Louie said. “I want you to eat the meal. Walk the walk, talk the talk, eat the meal. We got a new goal, Les.” “I don't want any more of your goals. I made it through. I didn't kill anyone. Isn't that enough?” But a week later back they drove to The Harmony Palace, same cast of characters, same glass of water, same menus, even the same cheap toilet water scent emitted by the sprayed Asian flesh of the restaurant women and wafting its sweet galvanic way to Les, the telltale scent by which he can track his prey. The second time he eats, the third time he eats
Outside The Harmony Palace, high fives all around. Even Chet is joyous. Chet speaks, Chet
“Next time,” says Les, while they're driving home and the feeling is heady of being raised from the grave, “next time, Louie, you're gonna go too far. Next time you're gonna want me to
But what is next is facing the Wall. He has to go look at Kenny's name. And this he can't do. It was enough once to look up Kenny's name in the book they've got at the VA. After, he was sick for a week. That was all he could think about. That's all he can think about anyway. Kenny there beside him without his head. Day and night he thinks, Why Kenny, why Chip, why Buddy, why them and not me? Sometimes he thinks that they're the lucky ones. It's over for them. No, no way, no how, is he going to the Wall. That Wall. Absolutely not. Can't do it. Won't do it. That's it.
Dance for me.
They've been together for about six months, and so one night he says, “Come on, dance for me,” and in the bedroom he puts on a CD, the Artie Shaw arrangement of “The Man I Love,” with Roy Eldridge playing trumpet. Dance for me, he says, loosening the arms that are tight around her and pointing toward the floor at the foot of the bed. And so, undismayed, she gets up from where she's been smelling that smell, the smell that is Coleman unclothed, that smell of sun-baked skin — gets up from where she's been lying deeply nestled, her face cushioned in his bare side, her teeth, her tongue glazed with his come, her hand, below his belly, splayed across the crinkled, buttery tangle of that coiled hair, and, with him keeping an eagle eye on her — his green gaze unwavering through the dark fringe of his long lashes, not at all like a depleted old man ready to faint but like somebody pressed up against a window-pane — she does it, not coquettishly, not like Steena did in 1948, not because she's a sweet girl,
