‘Ah, good. I speak a little English, too,’ says the officer. Then he continues in what he surely has no idea is Sheldon’s native language. ‘I thought maybe you were American,’ he says.
‘Interesting outfit he’s wearing there,’ says the police officer.
‘Wiking. Likes Norway very much.’
‘I see,’ says the officer. ‘Interesting, though, that he has a big Jewish star on his chest.’
‘Ah, yeah. Studied Jews and Wikings in school ze same veek if you can tink of a reason vhy. Vanted to be both. I am grandfather. How to say no? Last veek Greeks. Next veek maybe Samurai. You have grandchildren?’
‘Me? Oh, ya. Six.’
‘Six. Christmas is very expensive.’
‘Tell me about it. The girls only want pink things, and nothing is the right size. And how many cars can you buy for a boy?’
‘Buy the boy a watch. He’ll remember. The Christmas and you. Time is against us old men. We might as well embrace it.’
‘That’s a fine idea. A fine idea indeed.’
Sheldon asks, ‘Am I driving too fast?’
The officer smiles. ‘Not too fast, no. Have a nice day.’
‘Danke. Nice day for you, too.’
As the Volvo drives off, Sheldon puts the tractor back into gear.
‘Hold on back there,’ he shouts. ‘We’re going to find someplace to bunk down for the night. And we need to ditch this rig.’
Saul returned from his first tour of duty on a Pan Am commercial jet from Saigon to San Francisco. He was twenty-three years old. Eighteen hours before boarding the plane in civilian clothing — a novel by Arthur C. Clarke in his jacket pocket — he had shot a VC in the stomach with his M 16. The man was in a squad of three dressed in black, and was setting up a mortar. The engine on Saul’s boat was off, and they were drifting. The Monk saw them first and nodded in their direction. Saul wasn’t a sharpshooter like his father, but he was the first to distinguish the shape of the men from the shadows of the trees and the light from the canopy. He fired a burst of three rounds, and one of them hit the unknown person in the stomach. The other men scattered. His men went ashore afterwards and collected the mortar. They found the VC that Saul shot. He had a second bullet in his head, put there at close range.
The boat puttered back to port after the mission. There was a small farewell celebration for Saul involving beer, rock music, and dirty jokes. After dropping off his gear and rifle, filling out a pile of paperwork, and slipping into the clothes he’d come with to Vietnam, he was taken by bus to the airport and sent off to America.
Or a kind of America.
He read on the plane and fought sleep. There could be no peaceful sleep, because he had not known a truly peaceful sleep in over a year. He too often had nightmares about the things he’d seen and what he’d done. He suffered from the way his mind tried to make sense of it all. The hum of the plane cabin was seductive, and lulled Saul into a reverie, which was a dangerous place. Because reverie is the land where monsters dwell.
On the plane, he watched other men drink the free vodka and cognac. He thought to do the same, but his Jewish DNA conspired against him. The alcohol would only make him sleepy without bringing release.
Saul looked at a man in the row across the aisle for some kind of recognition. He had a strong chest and neck. He wore grey slacks and a wrinkled blue shirt that hadn’t been ironed before he got on the plane. There were three tiny bottles of gin in front of him, and no reading material. He felt Saul looking, and looked back. Their eyes met briefly, but then he turned away.
The America he landed in was San Francisco in 1973. It was filled with colours and music, interracial couples, and flamboyant homosexuals. No one spat on him or called him a baby killer. But as he walked past them with his crew cut and duffle bag, and they walked past him with long hair and tinted glasses, each regarded the other as some kind of odd and exotic animal, as distant and unfamiliar as a creature from a mystical zoo.
The only experience he could liken it to was landing in Vietnam over a year before. He’d met the riff-raff of conscripted America at boot camp, but it didn’t prepare him for the layers, patterns, and perplexities he found in Vietnam. For the interweaving stories and motives, moods, and memories of all these people.
He didn’t understand the Navy. He didn’t understand Saigon. He couldn’t make sense of the silent shopkeepers or the treasonous VC. He was confused by the communists and their Buddhist families.
He tried to see some glint of familiarity in the eyes of a woman — a teenager, really — as she shot at him, a month after he arrived, from beside a thatched hut in a muddy village, and just before she was burned alive in a torrent of fire spewed from the flamethrower carried by the Monk.
Custom dictated that Saul thank him after this took place. He had opened his mouth to try, but the Monk just turned away.
He understood — vaguely, and with some partial information pieced together from the papers and the military and former soldiers and rumours and newsreels — what the war was about. But he had no idea what these people were about. Somehow the war was the product of what all these people were doing when they woke up each morning. But what they did seemed insane, and so the war — the term used for the theatre-piece he was involved in — became an abstraction, just as it became more vivid and tangible.
Unable to understand the big picture, he tried to take in the small storylines. The relationship with a buddy. The reason the colonel was rumoured to cry himself to sleep. What his father might make of all this.
On the plane ride home, he imagined different ways he might discuss these things with his father, who had spent years in Korea with the Marines. They’d be more than father and son when he returned. They’d also be veterans of foreign wars: American vets who’d seen action — boys who’d passed through a looking glass. They were both altered and permitted by ancient and universal tribal law to speak in new ways, and command respect and authority that is not permitted to those who haven’t been baptised in the fires of war.
Over time, Saul was able to sort out the people he met in Vietnam, and learned to place them into categories. These are on my side. And those are not. These can be reasoned with. And those cannot. Eventually, a category emerged that he could slot himself into as well. It was a box that was built by his father, and it was labelled — on the outside at least —
Saul was in San Francisco for only one night before heading back east. He took a cab to a cheap motel near the airport, and watched TV all night while drinking Coke and Fanta from the mini-bar. Between eight and eleven, he watched
He was out-processed the next day in a surprisingly brief visit at the base, and before he could realise that he was now a civilian with nothing to do and no one to report to, he was already on a plane towards Manhattan.
When he arrived at the front door of his parents’ apartment in Gramercy, the sun was high and the city smelled good. He looked at the doorbell with his parents’ name in it — a name he momentarily forgot was also his own — and considered whether to press it.
Without knowing why, or stopping to question the impulse, he turned and went away.
‘He should be here by now,’ Sheldon had said to Mabel, who sat on a settee with both feet tucked underneath her, reading the
‘We didn’t set a time.’
‘We set a day. According to my perfectly serviced watch, that day is going to be over in less than an hour. And then he’ll be late.’
‘He’s been through a lot.’
