He still works, and I have some money saved, so sometimes we still eat. Sometimes we’ll end our binges on a weekend and go up to Potrero Hill to play softball. Someday I’ll find photos: both of us smiling, his arm wrapped proprietarily around my shoulders, my ball cap pulled down low. Someday I’ll run into people we know, who will say, “We always wondered what you were doing with that guy.”
“I wondered myself,” I’ll say, but I’ll be lying. I know exactly what I’m doing.
One bad night’s next morning, about two months in, he takes me to the farmers’ market, by way of apology. I manage not to think about Cole, watch a hundred people try not to notice the black eye, and when he starts yelling at me for taking too long to pick out an avocado, I walk away and hide in a carport up the hill. If it weren’t for the shiner, I could have stood it, but with it, and all those people knowing, there was no way. I watch from my hiding place as his truck goes by, and don’t know what to do next. The bar seems a pretty clear choice, though, once I consider my options.
It all comes to a screeching, non-cartoon halt when I come home later, lit just enough, to find a trail of lingerie in the dining room and a young hooker with a paring knife waiting for me in the bedroom. The girl is scared, and I mouth the words, “Don’t fucking talk. Where is he?”
The girl points to the bathroom. I hold my hand out, whisper, “Go.” The girl hands me the knife, handle first, and leaves with our bedspread wrapped around her.
When he comes back, he is not the least bit ashamed — he’s livid, self-righteous, a prick, as usual. “Where’s Angel?”
“Went to poop and the hogs got her, I guess.” I can’t do Lu’s delivery, but I can feel her there, so close behind me there’s no space between us at all. Dumb thing to say, regardless.
He hesitates; almost has the good sense to know something’s up. I never talk back. But he’s too high, too practiced at what he thinks comes next. When his hand goes up, I get him across the belly. I’m not going for the kill, just a semi-deep flesh wound, one all-encompassing payback.
I call 911. “Send the cops too,” I tell the dispatcher. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to want to take me to jail.”
Before they get here, I grab his saxophone, stand over him, hold it up and say, “You don’t know how to play this.” He moans. I try to feel sympathetic.
The public defender does his job and gets me mostly off on self-defense, though an argument can be made, and is made, either way. The guy is good, and the jury doesn’t really give a shit about the perp or the victim.
I do a couple of months, and when I get out go by to thank the lawyer.
“Plans?” he asks.
“See if they’ll let me work at the bar again, I suppose.”
“You have a place to live?”
“I know someone who’ll let me crash for a while.”
“Getting high much?”
“Nah.” I tell him what my counselor says. “Jail’s a fairly effective intervention program.”
“So I hear,” he says, and nods. “What ever happened to that guy? By the way.”
“I hear he went home and tried to kill his brother.”
“Paying it forward?”
“Something like that.”
He asks me where I’m from. Originally. I say Montana. He wants to know if I have people there. I say I do.
“You ever think getting out of this city might be a good idea?”
“Nope. Never thought that.”
“Really?”
Really. I don’t even know if I’m lying. Maybe people will quit asking me impossible questions. Maybe he’s right, and I should get out of here. I know the way. I know that highway still goes.
For a while I sleep on Frank’s couch, and occasionally crawl into bed with him when I can’t get warm. We try making it a few times, but my knees keep slamming shut, like my hip bones are spring-loaded. I know I’m driving him crazy, so I go. He says I don’t have to but he’s wrong.
I get my job back, tending to the masses. For a long time no one asks where I’ve been, but when someone finally does, I say, “Was I gone long? Did you miss me?” She cocks her head, gives me a quizzical look and half a smile. I say, “You can’t miss me if I won’t go away.” Still smiling, she shrugs and nods, takes her beer to a table by the front door.
God, I’m funny.
I dig in, maintain, decide I’m going to get my shit together. I see Frank. I don’t see him. He lets me do what I want and I don’t judge him for it. He says that’s good of me, and we laugh. Time, it goes by. It’s a process. I remember almost every day that makes up this time. One day a letter comes, from Gail, in Montana. I can’t place her and then I can, and it is just a flash: a seventeen-year-old love-stricken girl patting me on the head. Me growling, or something comparable. She says now she is forty, and she feels her life slipping away. She sends newspaper clippings that talk about Senate hearings, POWs, and MIAs.
A mismatched cadre of senators and congressmen are convinced the government has information about soldiers, still alive and held captive in Vietnam. I don’t know. For what? She tells me in the letter that they’ve created an office to collect information, inform families, keep track of these things. There are “family meetings” in different places around the country, where you can go and hear about the progress they’re making, the people they’ve found, all of them dead and in pieces.
There’s a meeting in Seattle next month. She wants to know if I want to meet her there. Yeah, right. Only if they bring Mick to it. Alive and whole.
I write back, say thank you for the information. She’s still in Montana, teaching in Great Falls. She sends a bracelet with some other guy’s name on it. MIA 1971. I send her a postcard of the Pacific Ocean, say, “This is where I am now. This is where I came to forget. I can’t help you. I can’t help either one of us.” I don’t tell her I recently went to jail for stabbing someone, though if I did, it might make her stop writing.
Against my better judgment, I go to the library and do more research. They are compiling a list of missing soldiers with descriptions of where they were last seen, what they were doing, what probably happened to them. Plane and helicopter crashes. Many drownings, which I did not expect. Hardly anyone went missing in the tunnels. Mick was always special that way. Not like the other dogs. He used to say that about Cash when Cash did something goofy, like collect rocks or bark at them. He probably didn’t think it applied to him, but it did. He was nothing like the other dogs.
I read about the tunnels, how the guys went in with nothing but a pistol, and the blade of a bayonet to check for booby traps. They had miners’ lamps, which made them perfect targets. But in Mick’s case, no one heard a shot, an explosion, a cry for help or of pain, nothing. He went in and he didn’t come out. At least not where they were waiting.
A few years later, when they were done with the Red River Delta and Hanoi, the B-52s headed south to carpet bomb Củ Chi, from where we’d been getting our butts kicked for a long time. Tết and all that. Mick was gone, somewhere, by then. Or he wasn’t, and became part of the carpet. Or maybe he’s in Saigon playing Russian roulette, waiting for Robert De Niro to come and take him back to the Smokies. Or the Rockies, their long-lost cousins to the west.
• • •
In spite of Gail and her letters, I’m being really good, getting a little cocky even, thinking, again, maybe I’ll go to college and get out of booze and babysitting. So, of course, some whacked-out patron I’ve cut off vaults the bar and knocks me down the basement stairs. To remind me not to be so goddamn sure of myself. Frank comes to collect me.
Something in me wants to slap his sweet face and so-nearly-contented loneliness. I don’t know if that’s what kind of girl I’ve become, but at least I know I don’t want it to be. He puts ice on the bruises and gives me brandy.