Hearts In Atlantis

his gut was slower to learn, possibly because his gut had been torn open in Dong Ha and a thing like that just had to slow the understanding process down.

He had borrowed some of Dr. Conroy’s books, and the hospital librarian had gotten him a couple of others on inter-library loan. According to the books, old mamasan in her green pants and orange top was “an externalized fantasy” which served as a “coping mecha-nism” to help him deal with his “survivor guilt” and “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” She was a daydream, in other words.

Whatever the reasons, his attitude about her changed as her appearances became less frequent. Instead of feeling revulsion or a kind of superstitious dread when she turned up, he began to feel almost happy when he saw her. The way you felt when you saw an old friend who had left town but sometimes came back for a little visit.

He lived in Milford now, a town about twenty miles north of Har-wich on I-95 and light-years away in most other senses. Harwich had been a pleasant, tree-filled suburb when Sully lived there as a kid, chumming with Bobby Garfield and Carol Gerber. Now his old home town was one of those places you didn’t go at night, just a grimy adjunct to Bridgeport. He still spent most of his days there, on the lot or in his office (Sullivan Chevrolet had been a Gold Star deal-ership four years running now), but he was gone by six o’clock most evenings, seven for sure, tooling north to Milford in his Caprice demonstrator. He usually went with an unacknowledged but very real sense of gratitude.

On this particular summer day he had gone south from Milford on I-95 as usual, but at a later hour and without getting off at Exit 9, ASHER AVENUE HARWICH. Today he had kept the new demo pointed south (it was blue with blackwall tires, and watching people’s brake-lights go on when they saw him in their rearview mirrors never failed to amuse him—they thought he was a cop) and drove all the way into New York City.

He left the car at Arnie Mossberg’s dealership on the West Side (when you were a Chevy dealer there was never a parking problem; that was one of the nice things about it), did some window-shopping on his way across town, had a steak at Palm Too, then went to Pagano’s funeral.

Pags had been one of the guys at the chopper crash-site that morn-ing, one of the guys in the ’ville that afternoon. Also one of the guys caught in the final ambush on the trail, the ambush which had begun when Sully himself either stepped on a mine or broke a wire and popped a satchel-charge strapped to a tree. The little men in the black pajamas had been in the high toolies and man, they had opened up. On the trail, Pags had grabbed Wollensky when Wollensky got shot in the throat. He got Wollensky into the clearing, but by then Wollensky was dead. Pags would have been covered with Wollen-sky’s blood (Sullivan didn’t actually remember seeing that; he had been in his own hell by then), but that was probably something of a relief to the man because it covered up the other blood, still not entirely dry. Pagano had been standing close enough to get splat-tered when Slocum shot Malenfant’s buddy. Splattered with Clem-son’s blood, splattered with Clemson’s brains.

Sully had never said a word about what happened to Clemson in the ’ville, not to Dr. Conroy or anyone else. He had dummied up. All of them had dummied up.

Pags had died of cancer. Whenever one of Sully’s old Nam buddies died (well okay, they weren’t buddies, exactly, most of them dumb as stone boats and not what Sully would really call buddies, but it was the word they used because there was no word invented for what they had really been to each other), it always seemed to be cancer or drugs or suicide. Usually the cancer started in the lung or the brain and then just ran everywhere, as if these men had left their immune systems back in the green. With Dick Pagano it had been pancreatic cancer—him and Michael Landon. It was the disease of the stars. The coffin was open and old Pags didn’t look too shabby. His wife had had the undertaker dress him in an ordinary business suit, not a uni-form. She probably hadn’t even considered the uniform option, despite the decorations Pagano had won. Pags had worn a uniform for only two or three years, those years like an aberration, like time spent in some county joint because you did something entirely out of character on one bad-luck occasion, probably while you were drunk. Killed a guy in a barroom fight, say, or took it into your head to burn down the church where your ex-wife taught Sunday school. Sully couldn’t think of a single man he’d served with, including himself, who would want to be buried in an Army uniform.

Dieffenbaker—Sully still thought of him as the new lieutenant— came to the funeral. Sully hadn’t seen Dieffenbaker in a long time, and they had had themselves quite a talk . . . although Dieffenbaker actually did most of the talking. Sully wasn’t sure talking ever made a difference, but he kept thinking about the stuff Dieffenbaker said. How mad Dieffenbaker had sounded, mostly. All the way back to Connecticut he kept thinking about it.

He was on the Triborough Bridge heading north again by two o’clock, in plenty of time to beat the rush-hour traffic. “Smooth movement across the Triborough and at key points along the LIE,” was how the traffic-reporter in the WINS copter put it. That’s what copters were for these days; gauging the flow of traffic in and out of America’s cities.

When the traffic started to slow just north of Bridgeport, Sully didn’t notice. He had switched from news to oldies and had fallen to thinking about Pags and his harmonicas. It was a war-movie cliche, the grizzled G.I. with the mouth-harp, but Pagano, dear God, Pagano could drive you out of your ever-fuckin mind. Night and day he had played em, until one of the guys—it might have been Hexley or even Garrett Slocum—told him that if he didn’t quit it, he was apt to wake up one morning with the world’s first whistling rectal implant.

The more he considered it, the more Sully thought Sly Slocum had been the one to threaten the rectal implant. Big black man from Tulsa, thought Sly and the Family Stone was the best group on earth, hence the nickname, and refused to believe that another group he admired, Rare Earth, was white. Sully remembered Deef (this was before Dieffenbaker became the new lieutenant and gave Slocum that nod, probably the most important gesture Dieffenbaker had ever made or ever would make in his life) telling Slocum that those guys were just as white as fuckin Bob Dylan (“the folksingin honky” was what Slocum called Dylan). Slocum thought this over, then replied with what was for him rare gravity. The fuck you say. Rare Earth, man, those guys black. They record on fuckin Motown, and all Motown groups are black, everyone know that. Supremes, fuckin Temps, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I respect you, Deef, you bad and you nationwide, without a doubt, man, but if you persist in your bullshit, I going to knock you down.

Slocum hated harmonica music. Harmonica music made him think of the folksingin honky. If you tried to tell him that Dylan cared about the war, Slocum asked then how come the mulebray muthafucka didn’t come on over here with Bob Hope one time. I tell you why, Slocum said. He scared, that’s why. Fuckin candyass har-monica-blowin mulebray muthafucka!

Musing on Dieffenbaker rapping about the sixties. Thinking of those old names and old faces and old days. Not noticing as the Caprice’s speedometer dropped from sixty to fifty to forty, the traffic starting to stack up in all four northbound lanes. He remembered how Pags had been over there in the green—skinny, black-haired, his cheeks still dotted with the last of his post-adolescent acne, a rifle in his hands and two Hohner harmonicas (one key of C, one key of G) stuffed into the waistband of his camo trousers. Thirty years ago, that had been. Roll back ten more and Sully was a kid growing up in Harwich, palling with Bobby Garfield and wishing that Carol Ger-ber would look at him, John Sullivan, just once the way she always looked at Bobby.

In time she had looked at him of course, but never in quite the same way. Was it because she was no longer eleven or because he wasn’t Bobby? Sully didn’t know. The look itself had been a mystery. It seemed to say that Bobby was killing her and she was glad, she would die that way until the stars fell