“Everybody around me was talking about the basketball game, and I was listening to Cronkite and watching film clips and almost burning with the heat of those firefights around Chu Lai. I got the damndest feeling then, this is honest, I didn’t know which was for real for awhile. I was sure as hell aware of two worlds, but for a finger snap I couldn’t tell which I belonged to.
“I don’t even remember the plane trip back to Denver, and I didn’t feel a damned thing, no sadness, no grief, no sympathy for my mother. But what was really bad was that I was relieved to have her gone. It was like somebody’d shot my head full of novocaine. I couldn’t feel pain, remorse, guilt, anger — and I figured that for once that was a plus. I felt dead myself, and I didn’t mind feeling that way.
“I left the Army a few months after that. I didn’t make a big speech, I didn’t punch anybody out, I didn’t wait for a dark night. I just went AWOL. I packed my gear, drew my money out of the bank and got a cab to the Denver airport. It was March and there was still snow on the ground, and it was so cold inside the airport, the girl selling tickets was wearing gloves. The next flight leaving the airport was for Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and I took it. We made the trip over the mountains in a Beechcraft six-seater. It was so small and jammed with luggage that the pilot stashed my crutches beside him in the cockpit. It was snowing and early morning when we started to come down over Jackson. We passed over an elk herd, hundreds and hundreds of them huddled together, so deep in the drifts that I thought those antlers were bushes moving in the wind.”
Duro Lasari stood and walked to the windows. He was silent for a few moments, looking down at the boulevard and resting his forehead against the damp glass as if he felt fevered. “Those mountains were like walls against the world,” he said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to unwind in that silence after ’Nam?”
When he spoke again his voice was hard but controlled. “You can tell me to stop talking if you want, Bonnie, but you asked. I don’t really expect you understand, but I got myself so damned angry over there, trying to figure out who’d sent us halfway round the world, high school dropouts, Hispanics and ghetto bums fighting for jocks who’d rather stay home and beat Duke. If you think there were a lot of Phi Beta Kappas in my platoon, you’re reading the wrong duty roster, lady.”
His back was to her but she could see the outlines of his face, rigid with tension, reflected in the window pane. “We had collective IQs that would make good golf scores, in the low eighties. In my first month over there, outside Saigon, twenty-eight black guys took a latrine hostage. They captured it, Bonnie, charged us to use it. Fifty cents to piss, a dollar to crap. Otherwise you could just squat outside in the rain. That’s the American flag, the code of honor in action for you. Where the hell were the West Pointers, the brass who were supposed to be running our battalion? There was nothing in their goddamn Articles of War or manuals to handle it. If they’d tried to, they’d of been fragged and they knew it.
“A crazy guy, a recruit from Las Cruces, New Mexico, no older than I was, pulled the pin on a grenade and went in holding it in his hand. He told the black bastards that he didn’t think it was right to have to pay extortion for the exercise of natural functions. He shouted that we were all American citizens, all compadres. He told them he intended to use the facilities for nothing. If they objected, he said, he’d give them just five seconds to make their peace before they met the Great Mother Fucker in the sky, then he’d roll that grenade right under a commode.
“Okay, those heroes said Las Cruces could use the latrine, but the guy had to get rid of the grenade first. He tried to lob it outside the compound, but it caught the top of the wire fence and killed two native kids hanging on to watch the action. Two dead kids and one crazy patriot serving a life sentence in a federal pen...
“That was one of the funny stories about ’Nam, Bonnie. I was just a private, but I had to judge ’em as I saw them. If the Pentagon planners couldn’t keep the damned privies open, how could we trust them to run the rest of the war?”
He slapped his open palm sharply against the window pane, then turned to look at her. “Delayed stress reactions, you’ve heard a lot about it. Well, it’s real. I figure it’s like undulating fever. You believe you’re over it, you’ve got your memories under control and then something happens to trigger the whole goddamned thing over again.
“Do you know what got to me tonight? Do you know what makes me want to get out that door and start running all over again? Just this. Why in hell am I putting my fate in the hands of someone I don’t know, some officer named Lieutenant Mark Weir, who out of the goodness of his college-educated, liberal heart is going to help this fucking deserter?”
Suddenly it seemed to Bonnie that his voice, low and harsh now, was vibrating and echoing through every corner of the apartment. As he stood staring down at her, obviously waiting for an answer, the rock music from the kitchen radio sounded ominously bright, an unreal, counterpoint background to this raw anger.
“I can’t answer that, Duro,” she said. “I just believe that he will.”
Duro Lasari began to pace up and down the room, his clenched fists so deep in his jeans pockets that the belt pulled low around his hips, the worn denim stretching tight across his buttocks. He was breathing slowly and deeply as if to calm himself, almost unaware of Bonnie Caidin’s presence. Suddenly he turned and looked at her directly.
“I’m sorry I criticized your lasagna back there,” he said, his tone almost normal. “For about a year my mother kept company with a man who was a chef in Durham. His specialty was Italian. He made a fine lasagna.
“And about my mother,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said all the things I did. I got to think differently about her in Jackson. One day, the third spring I lived there, I was out jogging, working to build up those damaged leg muscles, and the sides of the road were full of wildflowers. You get a lot of them in the mountains after all that snow, field daisies, columbine, red gilia. I knew my mother was buried in the Baptist cemetery outside Durham, but in my mind I just brought her up there to be with me, and buried her right there in that peaceful place. I had to be honest with myself. I knew damned well she was nicer to me than most sixteen-year-olds saddled with an unwanted kid. And if I wanted all those flowers for her, I must have loved her, too, wouldn’t you say?”
He moved closer to her, bending a little so he could look into her face. “I just remembered,” he said. “The name of that special lasagna the guy made is Lasagna al fiorno, and the trick is that you use diced chicken livers instead of regular hamburger meat and a special kind of creamy sauce...”
“Why are you doing this,” she asked.
“Doing what, Bonnie?”
“Why are you talking to me about cooking and wildflowers?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re so damned scared of me, you’re trembling. I saw your reflection in the window, all huddled up like a kid. I tried to stop myself. You’re just damned terrified, stuck ten stories up with a strange man you’ve only seen twice in your life. I didn’t mean to start shouting, I didn’t mean to do this to you.”
“I don’t believe I’m afraid of you, Duro,” she said. “You made me remember some angers of my own, that’s why I’m trembling.”
“Those two guys in uniform in the picture next to the radio? Are they your brothers? They look like you...”
Bonnie nodded. “They were my brothers, not twins, just eighteen months apart. Funny, the taller one was really the younger. They were both in the Air Force and both got killed in training accidents in the same month, one in Florida, and the older one in a special program at Camp Pendleton. When we were a family our dinner table was like a fiesta, night after night. My parents sold the big house almost right away, put me to live with an aunt so I could finish New Trier high school. They moved to a two-bedroom condo in Naples, Florida. The second bedroom is always occupied. It’s a kind of shrine to their sons.