Hearts In Atlantis

or if fuckin Peasley had done it. Sully wanted it to be Peasley but knew it could have been him; sometimes, especially in those days B.V. (Before Viagra) when he failed at sex almost as often as he succeeded, he got mad. Fortunately, when the lady awoke, she couldn’t remember, either. She remembered what he’d looked like with his underwear off, though. “How come you only have one?” she’d asked him.

“I’m lucky to have that,” Sully had replied. His headache had been bigger than the world.

“What’d I say about the old lady?” he asked Dieffenbaker as they sat smoking in the alley beside the chapel.

Dieffenbaker shrugged. “Just that you used to see her. You said sometimes she put on different clothes but it was always her, the old mamasan Malenfant wasted. I had to shush you up.”

“Fuck,” Sully said, and put the hand not holding the cigarette in his hair.

“You also said it was better once you got back to the East Coast,” Dieffenbaker said. “And look, what’s so bad about seeing an old lady once in awhile? Some people see flying saucers.”

“Not people who owe two banks almost a million dollars,” Sully said. “If they knew . . .”

“If they knew, what? I’ll tell you what. Nothing. As long as you keep making the payments, Sully-John, keep bringing them that fabled monthly cashew, no one cares what you see when you turn out the light . . . or what you see when you leave it on, for that matter. They don’t care if you dress in ladies’ underwear or if you beat your wife and hump the Labrador. Besides, don’t you think there are guys in those banks who spent time in the green?”

Sully took a drag on the Dunhill and looked at Dieffenbaker. The truth was that he never had considered such a thing. He dealt with two loan officers who were the right age, but they never talked about it. Of course, neither did he. Next time I see them, he thought, I’ll have to ask if they carry Zippos. You know, be subtle.

“What are you smiling about?” Dieffenbaker asked.

“Nothing. What about you, Deef? Do you have an old lady? I don’t mean your girlfriend, I mean an old lady. A mamasan.”

“Hey man, don’t call me Deef. Nobody calls me that now. I never liked it.”

“Do you have one?”

“Ronnie Malenfant’s my mamasan,” Dieffenbaker said. “Some-times I see him. Not the way you said you see yours, like she’s really there, but memory’s real too, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Dieffenbaker shook his head slowly. “If memory was all. You know? If memory was all.”

Sully sat silent. In the chapel the organ was now playing some-thing that didn’t sound like a hymn but just music. The recessional, he thought they called it. A musical way of telling the mourners to get lost. Get back, Jo-Jo. Your mama’s waitin.

Dieffenbaker said: “There’s memory and then there’s what you actually see in your mind. Like when you read a book by a really good author and he describes a room and you see that room. I’ll be mow-ing the lawn or sitting at our conference table listening to a presenta-tion or reading a story to my grandson before putting him in bed or maybe even smooching with Mary on the sofa, and boom, there’s Malenfant, goddam little acne-head with that wavy hair. Remember how his hair used to wave?”

“Yeah.”

“Ronnie Malenfant, always talking about the fuckin this and the fuckin that and the fuckin other thing. Ethnic jokes for every occa-sion. And the poke. You remember that?”

“Sure. Little leather poke he wore on his belt. He kept his cards in it. Two decks of Bikes. ‘Hey, we’re goin Bitch-huntin, boys! Nickel a point! Who’s up for it?’ And out they’d come.”

“Yeah. You remember. Remember. But I see him, Sully, right down to the whiteheads on his chin. I hear him, I can smell the fuck-ing dope he smoked . . . but mostly I see him, how he knocked her over and she was lying there on the ground, still shaking her fists at him, still running her mouth—”

“Stop it.”

“—and I couldn’t believe it was going to happen. At first I don’t think Malenfant could believe it, either. He just jabbed the bayonet at her a couple of times to begin with, pricking her with the tip of it like the whole thing was a goof . . . but then he went and did it, he stuck it in her. Fuckin A, Sully; I mean fuck-in-A. She screamed and started jerking all around and he had his feet, remember, on either side of her, and the rest of them were running, Ralph Clemson and Mims and I don’t know who else. I always hated that little fuck Clemson, even worse than Malenfant because at least Ronnie wasn’t sneaky, with him what you saw was what you got. Clemson was crazy and sneaky. I was scared to death, Sully, scared to fucking death. I knew I was supposed to put a stop to it, but I was afraid they’d scrag me if I tried, all of them, all of you, because at that precise moment there was all you guys and then there was me. Shearman . . . nothing against him, he went into that clearing where the copters came down like there was no tomorrow, but in that ’ville . . . I looked at him and there was nothing there.”

“He saved my life later on, when we got ambushed,” Sully said quietly.

“I know. Picked you up and carried you like fucking Superman. He had it in the clearing, he got it back on the trail, but in between, in the ’ville . . . nothing. In the ’ville it was down to me. It was like I was the only grownup, only I didn’t feel like a grownup.”

Sully didn’t bother telling him to stop again. Dieffenbaker meant to have his say. Nothing short of a punch in the mouth would stop him from having it.

“You remember how she screamed when he stuck it in? That old lady? And Malenfant standing over her and running his mouth, slopehead this and gook that and slant the other thing. Thank God for Slocum. He looked at me and that made me do something . . . except all I did was tell him to shoot.”

No, Sully thought, you didn’t even do that, Deef. You just nodded your head. If you’re in court they don’t let you get away with shit like that; they make you speak out loud. They make