Hearts In Atlantis

from the sky and the rivers ran uphill and all the words to “Louie Louie” were known.

What had happened to Bobby Garfield? Had he gone to Vietnam? Joined the flower children? Married, fathered children, died of pancreatic cancer? Sully didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that Bobby had changed somehow in the summer of 1960—the summer Sully had won a free week at the YMCA camp on Lake George—and had left town with his mother. Carol had stayed through high school, and even if she had never looked at him quite the way she had looked at Bobby, he had been her first, and she his. One night out in the country behind some Newburg dairy- farmer’s barnful of lowing cattle. Sully remembered smelling sweet perfume on her throat as he came.

Why that odd cross-connection between Pagano in his coffin and the friends of his childhood? Perhaps because Pags had looked a little bit like Bobby had looked in those bygone days. Bobby’s hair had been dark red instead of black, but he’d had that same skinny build and angular face . . . and the same freckles. Yeah! Both Pags and Bobby with that Opie Taylor spray of freckles across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose! Or maybe it was just because when some-one dies, you think about the past, the past, the fuckin past.

Now the Caprice was down to twenty miles an hour and the traf-fic stopped dead farther up, just shy of Exit 9, but Sully still didn’t notice. On WKND, the oldies station, ? and The Mysterians were singing “96 Tears” and he was thinking about walking down the cen-ter aisle of the chapel with Dieffenbaker in front of him, walking up to the coffin for his first look at Pagano while the canned hymns played. “Abide with Me” was the current ditty wafting through the air above Pagano’s corpse—Pags, who had been perfectly happy to sit for hours with the .50-caliber propped up beside him and his pack on his lap and a deck of Winstons parked in the strap of his helmet, playing “Goin’ Up the Country” over and over again.

Any resemblance to Bobby Garfield was long gone, Sully saw as he looked into the coffin. The mortician had done a job good enough to justify the open coffin, but Pags still had the loose-skinned, sharp-chinned look of a fat man who has spent his final months on the Can-cer Diet, the one they never write up in the National Enquirer, the one that consists of radiation, injected chemical poisons, and all the potato chips you want.

“Remember the harmonicas?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“I remember,” Sully said. “I remember everything.” It came out sounding weird, and Dieffenbaker glanced at him.

Sully had a clear, fierce flash of how Deef had looked on that day in the ’ville when Malenfant, Clemson, and those other nimrods had all of a sudden started paying off the morning’s terror . . . the whole last week’s terror. They wanted to put it somewhere, the howls in the night and the sudden mortar-shots and finally the burning copters that had fallen with their rotors still turning, dispersing the smoke of their own deaths as they dropped. Down they came, whacko! And the little men in the black pajamas were shooting at Delta two-two and Bravo two- one from the bush just as soon as the Americans ran out into the clearing. Sully had run with Willie Shearman beside him on the right and Lieutenant Packer in front of him; then Lieutenant Packer took a round in the face and no one was in front of him. Ron-nie Malenfant was on his left and Malenfant had been yelling in his high-pitched voice, on and on and on, he was like some mad high-pressure telephone salesman gourded out on amphetamines: Come on, you fuckin ringmeats! Come on, you slopey Joes! Shoot me, ya fucks! You fuckin fucks! Can’t shoot fa shit! Pagano was behind them, and Slocum was beside Pags. Some Bravo guys but mostly Delta boys, that was his memory. Willie Shearman yelled for his own guys, but a lot of them hung back. Delta two- two didn’t hang back. Clemson was there, and Wollensky, and Hackermeyer, and it was amazing how he could remember their names; their names and the smell of that day. The smell of the green and the smell of the kerosene. The sight of the sky, blue on green, and oh man how they would shoot, how those little fuckers would shoot, you never forgot how they would shoot or the feel of a round passing close beside you, and Malenfant was screaming Shoot me, ya deadass ringmeats! Can’t! Fuckin blind! Come on, I’m right here! Fuckin blindeye homo slopehead assholes, I’m right here! And the men in the downed helicopters were screaming, so they pulled them out, got the foam on the fire and pulled them out, only they weren’t men anymore, not what you’d call men, they were screaming TV dinners for the most part, TV dinners with eyes and belt-buckles and these clittery reach-ing fingers with smoke rising from the melted nails, yeah, like that, not stuff you could tell people like Dr. Conroy, how when you pulled them parts of them came off, kind of slid off the way the baked skin of a freshly cooked turkey will slide along the hot liquefied fat just beneath, like that, and all the time you’re smelling the green and the kerosene, it’s all happening, it’s a rilly rilly big shew, as Ed Sullivan used to say, and it’s all happening on our stage, and all you can do is roll with it, try to get over.

That was the morning, that was the helicopters, and something like that had to go somewhere. When they got to the shitty little ’ville that afternoon they still had the stink of charred helicopter crewmembers in their noses, the old lieutenant was dead, and some of the men— Ronnie Malenfant and his friends, if you wanted to get right down to particulars—had gone a little bughouse. Dieffenbaker was the new lieutenant, and all at once he had found himself in charge of crazy men who wanted to kill everyone they saw—children, old men, old mamasans in red Chinese sneakers.

The copters crashed at ten. At approximately two-oh-five, Ronnie Malenfant first stuck his bayonet into the old woman’s stomach and then announced his intention of cutting off the fuckin pig’s head. At approximately four- fifteen, less than four klicks away, the world blew up in John Sullivan’s face. That had been his big day in Dong Ha Province, his rilly big shew.

Standing there between two shacks at the head of the ’ville’s single street, Dieffenbaker had looked like a scared sixteen-year-old kid. But he hadn’t been sixteen, he’d been twenty-five, years older than Sully and most of the others. The only other man there of Deef’s age and rank was Willie Shearman, and Willie seemed reluctant to step in. Perhaps the rescue operation that morning had exhausted him. Or perhaps he had noticed that once again it was the Delta two-two boys who were leading the charge. Malenfant was screaming that when the fuckin slopehead Cong saw a few dozen heads up on sticks, they’d think twice about fucking with Delta Lightning. On and on in that shrill, drilling phone salesman’s voice of his. The cardplayer. Mr. Card-Shark. Pags had his harmonicas; Malenfant had his deck of fuckin Bikes. Hearts, that was Malenfant’s game. A dime a point if he could get it, nickel a point if he couldn’t. Come on, boys! he’d yell in that shrill voice of his, a voice Sully swore could cause nosebleeds and kill locusts on the wing. Come on, pony up, we huntin The Bitch!

Sully remembered standing in the street and looking at the new lieutenant’s pale, exhausted, confused face. He remembered think-ing, He can’t do it. Whatever needs to be done to stop this before it really gets going, he can’t do it. But then Dieffenbaker got it together and gave Sly Slocum the nod. Slocum didn’t hesitate a moment. Slocum, standing there in the street beside an overturned kitchen chair with chrome legs and a red seat, had shouldered his rifle, sighted in, and blown Ralph Clemson’s head clean off. Pagano, standing nearby and gaping at Malenfant, hardly seemed aware that he had been splattered pretty much from head to toe. Clemson fell dead in the street and that stopped the party. Game over, baby.

These days Dieffenbaker had a substantial golf-gut and wore bifocals. Also, he’d lost most of his hair. Sully was amazed at this, because Deef had had a pretty full head of it five years ago, at the unit’s reunion on the Jersey shore. That was the last time, Sully had vowed to himself, that he would party with those guys. They didn’t get bet-ter. They didn’t fuckin mellow. Each reunion was more like the cast of Seinfeld on a really mean batch of crank.

“Want to come outside and have a smoke?” the new lieutenant asked. “Or did you give that up when everyone