'I heard you went to Vietnam, but - ' She stops, sensing danger.
'You thought it was hype. No, I went there. Could have stayed out, if I'd wanted. But I volunteered.'
'You volunteered to go to Vietnam?'
Uncle Enzo laughs. 'Yes, I did. The only boy in my family to do so.'
'Why?'
'I thought it would be safer than Brooklyn.'
Y.T. laughs.
'A bad joke,' he says. 'I volunteered because my father didn't want me to. And I wanted to piss him off.'
'Really?'
'Definitely. I spent years and years finding ways to piss him off. Dated black girls. Grew my hair long. Smoked marijuana. But the capstone, my ultimate achievement - even better than having my ear pierced - was volunteering for service in Vietnam. But I had to take extreme measures even then.'
Y.T.'s eyes dart back and forth between Uncle Enzo's creased and leathery earlobes. In the left one she just barely sees a tiny diamond stud.
'What do you mean, extreme measures?'
'Everyone knew who I was. Word gets around, you know. If I had volunteered for the regular Army, I would have ended up stateside, filling out forms - maybe even at Fort Hamilton, right there in Bensonhurst. To prevent that, I volunteered for Special Forces, did everything I could to get into a front-line unit.' He laughs. 'And it worked. Anyway, I'm rambling like an old man. I was trying to make a point about helmets.'
'Oh, yeah.'
'Our job was to go through the jungle making trouble for some slippery gentlemen carrying guns bigger than they were. Stealthy guys. And we depended on our hearing, too -just like you do. And you know what? We never wore helmets.'
'Same reason.'
'Exactly. Even though they didn't cover the ears, really, they did something to your sense of hearing. I still think I owe my life to going bareheaded.'
'That's really cool. That's really interesting.'
'You'd think they would have solved the problem by now.'
'Yeah,' Y.T., volunteers, 'some things never change, I guess.'
Uncle Enzo throws back his head and belly laughs. Usually, Y.T. finds this kind of thing pretty annoying, but Uncle Enzo just seems like he's having a good time, not putting her down.
Y.T. wants to ask him how he went from the ultimate rebellion to running the family beeswax. She doesn't. But Uncle Enzo senses that it is the next, natural subject of the conversation.
'Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me,' he says. 'Oh, we have plenty of excellent people in the next generation. But after that - well, I don't know. I guess all old people feel like the world is coming to an end.'
'You got millions of those Young Mafia types,' Y.T. says.
'All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I'm old and wise.'
This is a fairly shocking thing for Uncle Enzo to be saying, but Y.T. doesn't feel shocked. It just seems like a reasonable statement coming from her reasonable pal, Uncle Enzo.
'None of them would ever volunteer to go get his legs shot off in the jungle, just to piss off his old man. They lack a certain fiber. They are lifeless and beaten down.'
'That's sad,' Y.T. says. It feels better to say this than to trash them, which was her first inclination.
'Well,' says Uncle Enzo. It is the 'well' that begins the end of a conversation. 'I was going to send you some roses, but you wouldn't really be interested in that, would you?'
'Oh, I wouldn't mind,' she says, sounding pathetically weak to herself.
'Here's something better, since we are comrades in arms,' he says. He loosens his tie and collar, reaches down into his shirt, pulls out an amazingly cheap steel chain with a couple of stamped silver tags dangling from it. 'These are my old dog tags,' he says. 'Been carrying them around for years, just for the hell of it. I would be amused if you would wear them.'
Trying to keep her knees steady, she puts the dog tags on. They dangle down onto her coverall.
'Better put them inside,' Uncle Enzo says.
She drops them down into the secret place between her breasts. They are still warm from Uncle Enzo.
'Thanks.'
'It's just for fun,' he says, 'but if you ever get into trouble, and you show those dog tags to whoever it is that's giving you a bad time, then things will probably change very quickly.'
'Thanks, Uncle Enzo.'
'Take care of yourself. Be good to your mother. She loves you.'
22
As she steps out of the Nova Sicilia franchulate, a guy is waiting for her. He smiles, not without irony, and makes just a hint of a bow, sort of to get her attention. It's pretty ridiculous, but after being with Uncle Enzo for a while, she's definitely into it. So she doesn't laugh in his face or anything, just looks the other way and blows him off.
'Y.T. Got a job for ya,' he says.
'I'm busy,' she says, 'got other deliveries to make.'
'You lie like a mattress,' he says appreciatively. 'Y'know that gargoyle in there? He's patched in to the RadiKS computer even as we speak. So we all know for a fact you don't got no jobs to do.'
'Well, I can't take jobs from a customer,' Y.T. says. 'We're centrally dispatched. You have to go through the 1-800 number.'
'Jeez, what kind of a fucking dickhead do you think I am?' the guy says.
Y.T. stops walking, turns, finally looks at the guy. He's tall, lean. Black suit, black hair. And he's got a gnarly-looking glass eye.
'What happened to your eye?' she says.
'Ice pick, Bayonne, 1985,' he says. 'Any other questions?'
'Sorry, man, I was just asking.'
'Now back to business. Because I don't have my head totally up my asshole, like you seem to assume, I am aware that all Kouriers are centrally dispatched through the 1-800 number. Now, we don't like 1-800 numbers and central dispatching. It's just a thing with us. We like to go person-to-person, the old-fashioned way. Like, on my momma's birthday, I don't pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CALL-MOM. I go there in person and give her a kiss on the cheek, okay? Now in this case, we want you in particular.'
'How come?'
'Because we just love to deal with difficult little chicks who ask too many fucking questions. So our gargoyle has already patched himself in to the computer that RadiKS uses to dispatch Kouriers.'
The man with the glass eye turns, rotating his head way, way around like an owl, and nods in the direction of the gargoyle. A second later, Y.T.'s personal phone rings.
'Fucking pick it up,' he says.
'What?' she says into the phone.
A computer voice tells her that she is supposed to make a pickup in Griffith Park and deliver it to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise in Van Nuys.
'If you want something delivered from point A to point B, why don't you just drive it down there yourselves?' Y.T. asks. 'Put it in one of those black Lincoln Town Cars and just get it done.'
'Because in this case, the something doesn't exactly belong to us, and the people at point A and point B, well, we aren't necessarily on the best of terms, mutually speaking.'
