Hearts In Atlantis

It was a grand piano, white with gold chasing, the sort of piano on which you’d expect a long cool woman in a black dress to tinkle out “Night and Day”—in the traffic’s boom, in the silence of my lonely room, toot-toot, beep- beep. A white grand piano falling out of the Connecticut sky, turning over and over, making a shadow like a jelly-fish on the jammed-up cars, making windy music in its cables as air blew through its rolling chest, its keys rippling like the keys of a player piano, the hazy sun winking on the pedals.

It fell in lazy revolutions, and the fattening sound of its drop was like the sound of something vibrating endlessly in a tin tunnel. It fell toward Sully, its uneasy shadow now starting to focus and shrink, his upturned face its seeming target.

“INCOMING!” Sully screamed, and began to run. “INNCOMMING! ”

The piano plummeted toward the turnpike, the white bench falling right behind it, and behind the bench came a comet’s tail of sheet music, 45-rpm records with fat holes in the middle, small appli-ances, a flapping yellow coat that looked like a duster, a Goodyear Wide Oval tire, a barbecue grill, a weathervane, a file-cabinet, and a teacup with WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA printed on the side.

“Can I have one of those?” Sully had asked Dieffenbaker outside the funeral parlor where Pags was lying in his silk-lined box. “I never had a Dunhill.”

“Whatever floats your boat.” Dieffenbaker sounded amused, as if he had never been shit-scared in his life.

Sully could still remember Dieffenbaker standing in the street by that overturned kitchen chair: how pale he had been, how his lips had trembled, how his clothes still smelled of smoke and spilled copter fuel. Dieffenbaker looking around from Malenfant and the old woman to the others who were starting to pour fire into the hooches to the howling kid Mims had shot; he could remember Deef looking at Lieutenant Shearman but there was no help there. No help from Sully himself, for that matter. He could also remember how Slocum was staring at Deef, Deef the lieutenant now that Packer was dead. And finally Deef had looked back at Slocum. Sly Slocum was no officer—not even one of those bigmouth bush gener-als who were always second-guessing everything—and never would be. Slocum was just your basic E-3 or E-4 who thought that a group who sounded like Rare Earth had to be black. Just a grunt, in other words, but one prepared to do what the rest of them weren’t. Never losing hold of the new lieutenant’s distraught eye, Slocum had turned his head back the other way just a little, toward Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Mims and the rest, self-appointed reg-ulators whose names Sully no longer remembered. Then Slocum was back to total eye-contact with Dieffenbaker again. There were six or eight men in all who had gone loco, trotting down the muddy street past the screaming bleeding kid and into that scurgy little ’ville, shouting as they went—football cheers, basic-training cadences, the chorus to “Hang On Sloopy,” shit like that—and Slocum was saying with his eyes Hey, what you want? You the boss now, what you want?

And Dieffenbaker had nodded.

Sully wondered if he could have given that nod himself. He thought not. He thought if it had come down to him, Clemson and Malenfant and those other fuckheads would have killed until their ammo ran out—wasn’t that pretty much what the men under Calley and Medina had done? But Dieffenbaker was no William Calley, give him that. Dieffenbaker had given the little nod. Slocum nodded back, then raised his rifle and blew off Ralph Clemson’s head.

At the time Sully had thought Clemson got the bullet because Slocum knew Malenfant too well, Slocum and Malenfant had smoked more than a few loco-leaves together and Slocum had also been known to spend at least some of his spare time hunting The Bitch with the other Hearts players. But as he sat here rolling Dief-fenbaker’s Dunhill cigarette between his fingers, it occurred to Sully that Slocum didn’t give a shit about Malenfant and his loco-leaves; Malenfant’s favorite card-game, either. There was no shortage of bhang or card-games in Vietnam. Slocum picked Clemson because shooting Malenfant wouldn’t have worked. Malenfant, screaming all his bullshit about putting heads up on sticks to show the Cong what happened to people who fucked with Delta Lightning, was too far away to get the attention of the men splashing and squashing and shooting their way down that muddy street. Plus old mamasan was already dead, so what the fuck, let him carve on her.

Now Deef was Dieffenbaker, a bald computer salesman who had quit going to the reunions. He gave Sully a light with his Zippo, then watched as Sully drew the smoke deep and coughed it back out.

“Been awhile, hasn’t it?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“Two years, give or take.”

“You want to know the scary thing? How fast you get back into practice.”

“I told you about the old lady, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“I think it was the last reunion you came to . . . the one on the Jer-sey shore, the one when Durgin ripped that waitress’s top off. That was an ugly scene, man.”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“You were shitfaced by then.”

Of course he had been, that part was always the same. Come to think of it, all parts of the reunions were always the same. There was a dj who usually left early because someone wanted to beat him up for playing the wrong records. Until that happened the speakers blasted out stuff like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Light My Fire” and “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” and “My Girl,” songs from the soundtracks of all those Vietnam movies that were made in the Philippines. The truth about the music was that most of the grunts Sully remembered used to get choked up over The Carpenters or “Angel of the Morn-ing.” That stuff was the real bush soundtrack, always playing as the men passed around fatties and pictures of their girlfriends, getting stoned and all weepy-goopy over “One Tin Soldier,” popularly known in the green as “The Theme from Fuckin Billy Jack.” Sully couldn’t remember hearing The Doors once in Vietnam; it was always The Strawberry Alarm Clock singing “Incense and Pepper-mints.” On some level he had known the war was lost the first time he heard that fuckin piece of shit on the commissary jukebox.

The reunions started with music and the smell of barbecues (a smell that always vaguely reminded Sully of burning helicopter fuel) and with cans of beer in pails of chipped ice and that part was all right, that part was actually pretty nice, but then all at once it was the next morning and the light burned your eyes and your head felt like a tumor and your stomach was full of poison. On one of those mornings-after Sully had had a vague sick memory of making the dj play “Oh! Carol” by Neil Sedaka over and over again, threatening to kill him if he stopped. On another Sully awoke next to Frank Peasley’s ex-wife. She was snoring because her nose was broken. Her pillow was covered with blood, her cheeks covered with blood too, and Sully couldn’t remember if he had broken her nose