Caidin nodded. “Tarbert Weir always got himself talked about one way or another. He was a kind of folk hero in the sixties for the way he handled an Army division when half the South was practically under martial law. He called in all the northern protesters, the clergy, and the red-necked sheriffs, and the black activists and federal marshals, and gave them a speech that’s kind of a classic. Weir said the laws of the land applied to everybody, and if a priest or a nun physically or verbally assaulted marshals or cops who were doing a job, they’d end up reading their missals and saying their rosaries in the stockade. And vice versa. He made himself understood.”
“I heard more about his bucking General Westmoreland’s strategy, protests against phony body counts, that sort of cover up crap in ’Nam,” Lasari said. “Those riots and marches down South, I was just a kid back then.”
“So was I,” Caidin said, “but I checked the clips file at the Tribune on the general a few years ago. Up until he resigned, well, Weir’s file was thick as a bible.”
“You must have thought a lot of the son to check out his old man that way,” Lasari said.
“It’s how I make my living, listening to people, finding out everything I can...”
She snubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and immediately shook the pack for another, narrowing her eyes against the first puff of smoke. They were seated on suede cushions on opposite sides of a glass coffee table. The candles she had lit for Mark were burning low, and the room had a smoky odor of scented wax. Though the kitchen radio played softly and there was a runnel of rain on the big windows, the apartment seemed isolated to Bonnie Caidin, almost unnaturally still.
At the beginning, when Lasari had knocked on the door, she had felt panicked, wondering what she could talk about or do with this stranger during the long hours till Mark’s return.
Lasari, however, seemed indifferent to any social strain. He wore tight blue jeans, workboots and a plaid shirt. His windbreaker was neatly folded on a chair near the apartment door. He was as handsome as he had appeared last evening, Bonnie thought, dark hair, high, prominent cheekbones, and eyes that watched her with a concentrated, opaque intensity that made Caidin aware of the vulnerability of her own slim body, and the glow of warmth touching her skin. Lasari was neither reassuring nor threatening, just a strangely demanding presence in the intimacy of the apartment.
“If you’ll carry these plates to the kitchen,” she said, “there’s another bottle of Bardolino in the refrigerator.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
Moments later he put the new bottle on the table between them and seated himself, watching her. She smiled at him, but said nothing.
“You’re not going to talk because you expect me to talk, is that it?” Lasari said.
“I would like to know more about you.”
“Okay. You checked out the Weir family tree, so I’ll tell you about me, though it’s not the same neat and pretty package.” He picked up a candle and held it for her as she lit a fresh cigarette.
“I told you my father liked wine, Bonnie. Well, he liked it a lot. Finally he had a liver the doctors couldn’t fix, and he died from it. He spent his war in the South Pacific and came back with a lot of island crud in his psyche that he never really got over. He was a little guy, scared, pushed around. He always tried to work but too many nights he sat up with the bottle. He never seemed to make up his mind about whether or not he’d been a good enough soldier.
“He worked the tobacco sheds, but his drinking got him laid off. He had a little land, about eight acres his grandfather left him, and he started raising table crops, squash, snap beans, and after awhile he opened a stand in the front yard to sell produce on weekends. He hired a neighborhood kid to run it for him, and they started sleeping together.
“My father was thirty-eight when he got married, and my mother was fifteen and pregnant. She didn’t turn sixteen till I was about four months old.”
Caidin watched as Lasari’s dark, bladelike face turned thoughtful, noticing the hard look of challenge that touched his eyes.
“You won’t find Francis J. Lasari on file down at your newspaper. I wasn’t more than eight when he died, small and skinny like him, but I loved that man and respected him, no matter what he added up to. Some kind of inverse ratio at work, I imagine. The earlier things happen to you, the longer it takes you to forget them.”
“You’re full of little surprises, Duro,” she said. “First, ‘a rebel with discretion,’ now ‘inverse ratio’...”
“I was in a hospital,” he said.
“That’s a good non sequitur.”
“No, it follows. I had a lot of time for thinking, lying in bed, or stretched out on gurneys, waiting my turn at X-ray or therapy. There was an old man, a retired vet who pushed a cart of books around, real pablum — Zane Grey, old mysteries, how to raise mushrooms in your basement. I finally asked him for something else, and for the next months I got a different menu — opinion magazines, Mark Twain, Marcuse, the Bible, philosophical ideas that maybe I didn’t have enough education to evaluate or absorb at the time. It was like stockpiling. I collected information and ideas so I could take them out when I needed them. I began to understand myself. All the years I was in Wyoming I kept reading. So it was like an emotional dam broke inside me when I ran away that last time from Jackson Hole.
“When I found Luis Carlos, the old man I work with in Calumet City, I just talked my whole life out to him. I knew I was ready to quit being George Jackson. I’d named myself that after Jackson Hole and the fact that a lot of the dropouts and transients up there are just called ‘Hey, George.’
“I guess I told Carlos everything I’d heard, smelled, seen and dreamed in my whole life, especially about ’Nam, like I was postdating a diary. Carlos doesn’t speak much English, but he knew he was helping me.
“I told you my mother was just a kid when I was born. Well, she stayed a kid all her life, looked like one, acted like one. After my father died, there was always a man, a boy friend from town or hired help for the farm. Two or three of them I liked a lot. They taught me. I learned about dogs, gunning, fixing old machinery, but none of them stayed long enough for me to feel they belonged. I had to cooperate, keep out of the way. It was more like having a crazy sister than a mother. I never did feel right about her back then.
“When my mother came up to camp to see me before I left for ’Nam, she was only thirty-four years old, thin as a bean, blue jeans, boots, brass studs on her jacket. She looked like all the girls hanging around the GI bars that my buddies were sleeping with. I could have been sleeping with her myself if I didn’t know exactly who she was.”
He poured another inch of wine into his glass. “You want some, Bonnie?” She held up her nearly full glass and shook her head.
“When my mother died, I was still in the hospital in Denver. She was riding home from Durham on the back of some guy’s motorcycle and he rammed a truck. I got leave to go home, but I wasn’t in uniform at the funeral. Some of the locals said they’d missed me around town. One old timer made a joke out of it, thought I’d been to jail. Most of them didn’t know there was a war on.
“That night I went over to Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina is there, prettiest little southern town you could dream of. The jocks were having a big ‘Beat Duke’ rally on campus, regional basketball finals or something. I sat in a bar near campus watching a TV news report on ’Nam.” He paused. “This isn’t just your predictable, burnt-out vet story, Bonnie. Believe me, it happened.