Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Sometimes his heart whispers to him that the blood doesn’t matter, that she got away from that small frame house long before the final acts of insanity were committed there. At other times he believes what the police believe—that she and Fiegler slipped away from the others only after the first shootout, before the house was surrounded; that she either died of wounds suffered in that shootout or was murdered by Fiegler because she was slowing him down. According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cook-ing in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.
Willie touches the photo of the burned-out house on Benefit Street . . . and suddenly a name comes to him, the name of the man who maybe stopped Dong Ha from becoming another My Lai or My Khe. Slocum. That was his name, all right. It’s as if the blackened beams and broken windows have whispered it to him.
Willie closes the scrapbook and puts it away, feeling at peace. He finishes squaring up what needs to be squared up in the offices of Midtown Heating and Cooling, then steps carefully through the trapdoor and finds his footing on top of the stepladder below. He takes the handle of his briefcase and pulls it through. He descends to the third step, then lowers the trapdoor into place and slides the ceil-ing panel back where it belongs.
“Do you hear what I hear,” he sings softly as he folds the steplad-der and puts it back, “do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste?”
Five minutes later he closes the door of Western States Land Ana-lysts firmly behind him and triple-locks it. Then he goes down the hallway. When the elevator comes and he steps in, he thinks,
“Also cinnamon,” he says out loud. The three people in the eleva-tor car with him look around, and Bill grins self-consciously.
Outside, he turns toward Grand Central, registering only one thought as the snow beats full into his face and he flips up his coat collar: the Santa outside the building has fixed his beard.
MIDNIGHT
“Share?”
“Hmmmm?”
Her voice is sleepy, distant. They have made long, slow love after the Dubrays finally left at eleven o’clock, and now she is drifting away. That’s all right; he is drifting too. He has a feeling that all of his problems are solving themselves . . . or that God is solving them.
“I may take a week or so off after Christmas. Do some inventory. Poke around some new sites. I’m thinking about changing loca-tions.” There is no need for her to know about what Willie Slocum may be doing in the week before New Year’s; she couldn’t do any-thing but worry and—perhaps, perhaps not, he sees no reason to find out for sure—feel guilty.
“Good,” she says. “See a few movies while you’re at it, why don’t you?” Her hand gropes out of the dark and touches his arm briefly. “You work so hard.” Pause. “Also, you remembered the eggnog. I really didn’t think you would. I’m very pleased with you, sweetheart.”
He grins in the dark at that, helpless not to. It is so perfectly Sharon.
“The Allens are all right, but the Dubrays are boring, aren’t they?” she asks.
“A little,” he allows.
“If that dress of hers had been cut any lower, she could have gotten a job in a topless bar.”
He says nothing to that, but grins again.
“It was good tonight, wasn’t it?” she asks him. It’s not their little party that she’s talking about.
“Yes, excellent.”
“Did you have a good day? I didn’t have a chance to ask.”
“Fine day, Share.”
“I love you, Bill.”
“Love you, too.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
As he drifts toward sleep he thinks about the man in the bright red ski sweater. He crosses over without knowing it, thought melting effortlessly into dream. “Sixty-nine and seventy were the hard years,” the man in the red sweater says. “I was at Hamburger Hill with the 3/187. We lost a lot of good men.” Then he brightens. “But I got this.” From the lefthand pocket of his topcoat he takes a white beard hanging on a string. “And this.” From the righthand pocket he takes a crumpled styrofoam cup, which he shakes. A few loose coins rattle in the bottom like teeth. “So you see,” he says, fading now, “there are compensations for even the blindest life.”
Then the dream itself fades and Bill Shearman sleeps deeply until six-fifteen the next morning, when the clock- radio wakes him to the sound of “The Little Drummer Boy.”
1999
1999: When someone dies, you think about the past.
Why We’re in Vietnam
When someone dies, you think about the past. Sully had probably known this for years, but it was only on the day of Pags’s funeral that it formed in his mind as a conscious postulate.
It was twenty-six years since the helicopters took their last loads of refugees (some dangling photogenically from the landing skids) off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and almost thirty since a Huey evacked John
