“Refill,” he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader—other people always counted on him to provide their good times.
“Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.” Conor swallowed another ice-cold bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial—Conor promised himself he’d find it, once they all got there.
Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious. Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio, who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.
But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer, a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.
Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of GQ. Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. “Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you make, down there in your restaurant?”
Conor slurred a little on best, but he didn’t think the others could hear it.
“Duck Saigon, probably,” Tina said. “At least, that’s my favorite right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.”
“You put that fish sauce on top of it?”
“Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.”
“I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,” Conor said. “Remember when we were over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.”
“We were eighteen years old back then,” Tina said. “Our idea of a great meal was a Whopper and fries.”
Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.
4
But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling “too much pressure.” This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the Village Voice.
“Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the Voice when you’re forty-one?” Pumo asked.
Conor had never read any page of any issue of the Village Voice. He shook his head.
“Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling for someone’s looks—‘Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s, we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call man with backpack. 581-4901.’ Romantic idealization—‘Suki. You are my shooting star. Cannot live without you. Bill.’ Romantic despair—‘I haven’t stopped hurting since you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.’ Masochism—‘Bruiser—No guilt necessary, I forgive you. Puffball.’ Cuteness—‘Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.’ Indecision—‘Mesquite. Still thinking. Margarita.’ Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to St. Jude. Numbers you can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself ‘Type A’—that’s Taipei, where she was born—but other times she’s ‘Leather Lady.’ Or ‘Half Moon’—that was for a tattoo she got last year.”
“Where?” Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. “On her ass?”
“Just a little below her navel,” Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.
“Maggie has a half moon tattooed on her pussy?” Conor asked. He wished he had been in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s thing—they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in “Terry and the Pirates”—he had to admit that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed round. She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair and clothes you bought already ripped.
“No. I told you,” Pumo said, looking irritated, “just a little below her navel. The bottom of a bikini covers most of it.”
“It’s almost on her pussy!” Conor said. “Is any of it in her hair? Were you there when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?”
“You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.” Pumo took a sip of his drink. “Maggie didn’t even blink.”
“How big is it?” Conor asked. “About half dollar size?”
“If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.”
“Oh, sure,” Conor said. “I can really see me doing that.”
Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers—something about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.
Beevers asked, “He was an ex-combat soldier?”
“Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,” Mike said, giving his little smile.
“This vet really remembered all about me and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?”
“He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.”
This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion, once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.
“Ridiculous,” Beevers said. “I can just about go along with him on the Congressional medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.” He looked down at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin—stuck it out. “But people know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.”
Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how people could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been there didn’t know exactly what had happened.