Now Fletcher looked at him. Mickey chewed and swallowed, and drank the last of his Coke; his mouth and throat were still dry, and he chewed ice.

  “You fuckers were better on horseback. Had to look at them.” Duffy raised his tattooed arm and swung it in a downward arc, as though slashing with a saber. “Wooosh. Whack. Fuckers killed them anyway. Look a Cheyenne kid in the face, then waste him. I’m talking Washita River, pal. Same shit. Maybe they had balls, though. What do you think, Fletcher? Does it take more balls to kill a kid while you’re looking at him?”

  Fletcher finished his beer, lowered it quietly to the bar, looked away from Duffy and slowly took a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. He left the pack and lighter on the bar. Then he took off his wristwatch, slowly still, pulling the silver expansion band over his left hand. He placed the watch beside his cigarettes and lighter, drew on the cigarette, blew smoke straight over the bar, where he was staring; but Mickey knew from the set of his profiled face that his eyes were like Duffy’s earlier: they waited. Duffy took the sunglasses from his hair and folded them, lenses up, on the bar.

  “You drinking on time, Fletcher? The old lady got your balls in her purse? Only guys worse than you fuckers were pilots. Air Force the worst of all. Cocksucking bus drivers. Couldn’t even see the fucking hootch. Just colors, man. Squares on Mother Earth. Drop their big fucking load, go home, good dinner, get drunk. Piece of ass. If they could get it up. After getting off with their fucking bombs. Then nice bed, clean sheets, roof, walls. Fucking windows. The whole shit. Go to sleep like they spent the day—” He glanced at Mickey, or his face shifted to Mickey’s; his eyes were seeing something else. Then his voice was soft: a distant tenderness whose source was not Mickey, and Mickey knew it was not in the bar either. “Landscaping.” Mickey put the last third of the hot dog into his mouth, and wished for a Coke to help him with it; he looked at Al, who was still gazing above his head, so intently that Mickey nearly turned to look at the wall behind him. The other two men were silent. They drank, looked into their mugs, drank. When they emptied the mugs they did not ask for more, and Al did not move.

  “All those fucking pilots,” Duffy said, looking again down the bar at the side of Fletcher’s face. “Navy. Marines. All the motherfuckers. Go out for a little drive on a sunny day. Barbecue some kids. Their mothers. Farmers about a hundred years old. Skinny old ladies even older. Fly back to the ship. Wardroom. Pat each other on the ass. Sleep. Fucking children. Fletcher used to be a little boy. Al never was. But I was.” His arms rose above his head, poised there, his fingers straight, his palms facing Fletcher. Then he shouted, slapping his palms hard on the bar, and Mickey jerked upright: “Children, man. You never smelled a napalmed kid. You never even saw one, fucking chopper-bound son of a bitch.”

  Fletcher turned his body so he faced Duffy.

  “Take your shit out of here,” he said. “God gave me one asshole. I don’t need two.”

  “Fuck you. You never looked. You never saw shit.”

  “We came down. We got out. We did the job.”

  “The job. Good word, for a pussy from the Air fucking Cav.”

  “There’s a sergeant from the First Air Cav’s about to kick your ass from here to the river.”

  “You better bring in help, pal. That’s what you guys were good at. All wars—” He drank, and Mickey watched his uptilted head, his moving throat, till his upper lip stopped the lime, and ice clicked on his teeth. Duffy held the glass in front of him, just above the bar, squeezing it; his fingertips were red. “All fucking wars should be fought on the ground. Man to man. Soldier to soldier. None of this flying shit. I’ve got dreams. Oh yes, Charlie.” But he did not look at Mickey. “I’ve got them. Because they won’t go away.” Again, though he looked at Fletcher, that distance was in his eyes, as if he were staring at time itself: the past, the future; and Mickey remembered the tattoo, and looked at the edges of it he could see beyond Duffy’s chest: the end of the eagle’s left wing, a part of the globe, the hole for line at the anchor’s end, and lis written on the fluttering banner. He could not see the block letters. “I tell them I’m wasted, gentlemen. The dreams: I tell them to fuck off. They can’t live with Agent Orange. They just don’t know it yet. But fucking pilots. In clean beds. Sleeping. Like dogs. Like little kids. Girls with the wedding cake. Put a piece under your pillow. Fuckers put dreams under their pillows. Slept on them. Without dreams too. Not nightmares. Charlie Mickey here, he thinks he’s had nightmares. Shit. I ate chow with nightmares. Pilots dreamed of pussy. Railroad tracks on their collars. Gold oak leaves. Silver oak leaves. Silver eagles. Eight hours’ sleep on the dreams of burning children.”

  “Jesus Christ. Al, will you shut off that shithead so we can drink in peace?”

  Al neither looked nor moved.

  “Duffy,” Fletcher said. “What’s this Agent Orange shit. At Khe San, for Christ sake. You never got near it.”

  “Fuck do you know? How far did you walk in ’Nam, man? You rode taxis, that’s all. Did you sit on your helmet, man? Or did your old lady already have your balls stateside?”

  “I hear you didn’t do much walking at Khe San.”

  “We took some hills.”

  “Yeah? What did you do with them?”

  “Gave them back. That’s what it was about. You’d know that if you were a grunt.”

  “I heard you assholes never dug in up there.”

  “Deep enough to hold water.”

  “And your shit.”

  Duffy stepped back once from the bar. He was holding the glass and the ice slid in it, but he held it loosely now, the blood receding from his fingertips.

  “You want to smell some grunt shit, Fletcher? Come over here. We’ll see what a load of yours smells like.”

  “That’s it,” Al said, and moved toward Duffy as he threw the glass and Mickey heard it strike and break and felt a piece of ice miss his face and cool drops hitting it. Fletcher was pressing a hand to his forehead and a thin line of blood dripped from under his fingers to his eyebrow, where it stayed. Then Fletcher was coming, not running, not even walking fast; but coming with his chin lowered, his arms at his sides, and his hands closed to fists. Mickey swept his books toward him, was gripping them to carry, when two hands slapped his chest so hard he would have fallen if the hands had not held his collar. He was aware of Fletcher coming from his left, and Duffy’s face, and the moment would not pass, would not become the next one, and the ones afterward, the ones that would get him home. Then Duffy’s two fists, bunching the shirt at its collar, jerked downward, and Mickey’s chest was bare. He had sleeves still, and the shirt’s back and part of its collar. But the shirt was gone.

  “Fucking little asshole. You want jungle? Take your fucking jungle, Charlie.”

  With both hands Duffy shoved his chest and he went backward, his feet off the floor, then on it, trying to stop his motion, his arms reaching out for balance, waving in the air as he struck the wall, slid down it, and was sitting on the floor. From the pain in his head he saw Duffy and Fletcher. He could see only Fletcher’s back, and his arms swinging, and his head jerking when Duffy hit him. Al had gone to the far end of the bar, to Mickey’s left, and through the opening there, and was striding, nearly running, past the two men who stood watching Duffy and Fletcher. Mickey tried to stand, to push himself up with the palms of his hands. Beneath the pain moving through his head from the rear of his skull, he felt the faint nausea, the weakened legs, of shock. He turned on his side on the floor, then onto his belly, and bent his legs and with them and his hands and arms he pushed himself up, and stood. He was facing the wall. He turned and saw Al holding Duffy from behind, Al’s hands clasped in front of Duffy’s chest, and Mickey saw the swelling of muscles in Duffy’s twisting, pulling arms, and Al’s reddened face and gritted teeth, and Fletcher’s back and lowered head and shoulders turning with each blow to Duffy’s body and bleeding, cursing face.

  His weakness and nausea were gone. He was too near the door to run to it; in two steps he had his hand on its knob and remembered his books and binder. They were on the bar, or they had fallen to the floor when Duffy grabbed him. He opened the door, and in the sunlight he still did not run; yet his breath was deep and quick. Walking slowly toward the bridge, he looked down at his pale chest, and the one long piece of shirt hanging before his right leg, moving with it, blending with the colors of his pants. He would never wear the pants again, and he wished they were torn too. He wanted to walk home that way, like a tattered soldier.

  Land Where My Fathers Died

  For James Crumley

  GEORGE KARAMBELAS

  IT WAS A cold night, and I was drunk. I couldn’t get a ride at Timmy’s when they closed, and I had a long way to walk. It was after one o’clock, and I kept thinking of my warm bed. I could see it in front of me, like it was ahead of me on the sidewalk, like those guys in a desert that see water that isn’t there. A mirage, it’s called. You can see it sometimes on a highway in summer. I thought about summer.

  I lost my car. It was an old Pontiac, eight years old next year, that sucked gas. First the exhaust system went, rusted out, and I paid for that. Then it was a new starter, then the carburetor had to be rebuilt and I paid for all that and was broke. Then the transmission started to go and I said fuck it and sold it for junk. Fuck them at Timmy’s. Fuck Steve. Fuck Laurie. Fuck George, they say, let him walk a hundred miles in fifty below just to sleep. Well, fuck them too, I said.

  Maybe out loud. I was that drunk. I wished I wasn’t. I wished I had gone right home soon as I got all the dishes washed and the pots scrubbed out and hung from the beam. I still would have frozen to death walking home, but I’d be in bed. And Timmy’s is on the other side of the river so it was a longer ways to walk and I had to cross the bridge going and coming back, and the bridge is long on foot, and the wind was coming down the river. It’s the chill factor. You never know how cold it is. The thermometer outside the window will say nineteen, but then you go outside and the cold comes blowing and it’s like twenty below. That’s the story: it’s nineteen but it’s like twenty below.

  I tried to walk straight, looking down at the sidewalk like it was a board over a big hole, but I was zigging and zagging from one snowbank to another. Once I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. I thought about if I had hit my head I could have stayed there and froze to death. But still I couldn’t get sober. I walked through the square about a mile above the river. Even the pizza shop was closed. We got a lot of pizza shops in this little town, mostly Italian, some Greek.

  When Steve gave last call at Timmy’s I started asking around for a ride. Nobody going my way. Who are they shitting? A night like this you can go out of your way for somebody. Up above the square I was walking past houses. Trees were in the yards in the snow and next to the sidewalk. Face it, George, I said to myself. Nobody’s ever gone your way. I didn’t like hearing that. I’m twenty-three. I started thinking about people that liked me. I got back to eighth grade, there was this Irish kid, but nobody liked him either. I got very sad walking under the big trees. No girl, not ever, and I don’t know why. I look in the mirror and I don’t know why. I’ve been laid, sure, but with sluts. It’s a wonder I never caught herpes or something. I saw the light on in Dr. Clark’s office. I was walking past it, and it was on my right, the road on my left. Then I stopped because I saw that I was seeing the light through the window but through the door too. Hey, I looked around: up and down the street, no cars, and up and down the sidewalk, of course nobody was out. Who would be but Eskimos and a dumb Greek.

  I went up his walk slow and casual, like a dude coming home. There was salt on it. I was doing everything but whistling, a Greek dishwasher coming home to sleep in a doctor’s office. It was a one-story brick building set back in the trees, a small office, a one-man operation. This was a neighborhood of big old wooden houses. They were dark. At the two front steps I stopped and looked again. I went up the steps and in the door, breathing hard with the booze. Everything was hard to do. This was the waiting room, and it was dark. Or the lights were off, but I could see the desk by the office door and the chairs along the walls; because the light was coming from the office and that door was open. I could see part of his desk in there, a corner and some of the top. To this day I don’t know what I had in mind. I was thinking money, but I think about money all the time. Every day, every night. I think I was hoping for drugs. But I was too drunk for any of it to make any sense and if I hadn’t been drunk I would have walked right on by. If I hadn’t been drunk maybe somebody would have given me a ride, maybe that’s it, maybe I drink too much. But that’s not it because in high school I wasn’t drunk or not much of the time and it didn’t matter. I’d go to the smoking area outside where the faggots made us go even if it was a blizzard and I’d look at the girls shivering around their cigarettes and they’d either look at me like the smoke made them blind or like instead of a mouth I had a boil under my nose. I’d go over to the guys and they’d start busting balls on me. Sometimes it’s friendly, it depends on how you say things. Bob the chef busts them on me all the time, but it’s friendly; he likes me, and he’s an old man. The guys at school weren’t friendly. So George, you going to ever shave, or what? He plucks them. All three, every week. I’d laugh with them. But I wouldn’t say anything back.

  I was still not walking straight. I got across the waiting room on a slant toward the door and stepped in and saw a dead man. I knew he was dead when I saw him. I’ve only seen my grandparents, all four, laid out in the coffins. But I knew he was dead. I think I said something out loud. I remember hearing somebody. It did not get me sober but it got me sober as I could get. He was on his back, dressed up in a suit, and there was blood dried on his mouth. It was open. I’ve never seen a mouth look so open, looser than somebody sleeping. His eyes were closed. One hand was resting on his belt buckle. He was not a very big man, on the thin side. I had never been to see him, we always went to Papadopoulos, our family, but I knew it was Dr. Clark. I had seen him around town in his Mercedes, and sometimes when I was washing dishes I’d look through the window to the dining room and he’d be there eating lobsters with his scrawny old lady. I started to get out of there when I saw the big pistol on the floor. It was lying right beside his face. I bent over and picked it up and I kept my eyes away from his that were shut. I put it in my coat pocket, a pea coat. A prescription pad was on his desk and I put that in the other pocket. Then I got out of there.

  I turned off the light switch by his door, and the office was dark. I had to feel my way across the waiting room. I think I was walking straight then. I had my arms out in front of me and moving, like a breaststroke, like I was swimming through the dark. My hands hit the front door. I opened it a little and looked at the street. A car passed. Then it was empty, and I was gone, shutting the door, and down the steps, holding the metal rail cold under my glove. Down his walk to the sidewalk.

  I didn’t think about the cold anymore. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t see my bed either. I saw his face on the floor looking up at the ceiling except his lids were down and there was nobody behind them. I saw his hand covering his belt buckle. The pistol was heavy in my pocket, and I was weaving again. I live in an old house that used to be one family’s house, all three stories, and now it is a lot of apartments. I went up to mine on the second floor and pissed, shivering, for a long time. Then I swallowed some anisette from the bottle and drank a beer while I took off my clothes. I put the coat over a chair, and left the gun in it. When I got in bed I could still see him and I was tense and breathing fast, curled up on my side under the covers, and I thought I would not sleep. Next thing I knew the sun was in the room and I had a dry mouth and a headache and I had to piss but I lay there remembering everything and thinking here I was with a dead doctor’s script pad and a big pistol I didn’t want to see. Then I got up and took it out of the coat pocket. It was an Army .45, and the hammer was cocked. I looked some more. The safety was off.

  ARCHIMEDES NIONAKIS

  Because it was probably not murder—someone hit Francis Clark on the jaw and apparently his head struck the desk as he fell—and because it seemed to involve bad luck more than volition, I sometimes thought George had done it, but it was a thought I could only hold in the abstract, for a few moments, until I imagined him in the flesh. Then I could not believe it, could not see George Karambelas punching anybody, much less a man with a loaded pistol.

  Then I believed the story he had just told me. I could still smell his story as I drove back to town from the prison. My car windows were up, and my clothes smelled of George’s cigarette smoke trapped in the counseling room, and also the vanished smoke, and words and breath it seemed, of the others who had sat or paced in that room with its two straight wooden chairs and old wooden desk with an ashtray long overflowed, and butts scattered on the desk top with burns at its edges where live cigarettes had lain, and burns on its top where they had been put out. I did not sit at the desk. I leaned against a wall without windows, and said: “I can’t believe how dumb you are.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “You got to make the jury believe it.” He did try to smile, as he tried to be friendly, but in his circumstance it is hard to do either. I don’t mean simply incarceration; or being charged with second-degree murder. George is one of those people who have nothing specific wrong with them, except that they are disliked, and it’s difficult to understand why. I don’t even know why I don’t like him. He is not very bright, but it isn’t that. So I stood breathing in that room and told him I would represent him, and that is why: I couldn’t bear disliking him for no just reason, and seeing him in that room too, and imagining him in the cell where probably already his cellmates didn’t like him either. I did not mention money, any more than I would look for a fish in a tree, but he said he would raise it. He did not go so far as to ask how much he ought to raise. I told him we’d talk about that when the time came. I listened to his foolish story again, and congratulated him again on at least burning the prescription pad, forced my hand into his, and fled.