According to Spitz, the villagers who lived near the base were paddy niggers. Manny’s platoon had a good sergeant who’d suggested to the lieutenant that he might want to deescalate the rhetoric a hair, but Spitz, who took all advice as a challenge to his authority, stepped it up and deployed the term in the presence of all races of troop, holding the eye of any Black soldier who might take issue. He managed to further distinguish himself by displays of piety, praying aloud in the mess, engaging Christian leadership initiatives around the camp, holding meetings Wednesday nights to read passages from the scripture. In his spare time he got blow jobs from the girls who hung around the gate. Manny had his opinions just like everyone else, but he minded his own business. He followed orders and adhered to the military code of behavior. The lieutenant was too much personality for Manny, too often proclaiming what he was or wasn’t to actually be anything at all.
Paddy niggers, Spitz had said from his perch on the sandbags, shaking his head every so often at their primitive stupidity. The previous night’s shelling had finished their rice fields once and for all. Their animals had been shot, blown up, or appropriated long ago, and their village itself had been reduced to a seam of mud that reeked from the base’s latrine runoff. Where in hell they think they’re going? the lieutenant wondered aloud.
No one, least of all Manny, called up to him, Hey, boss man, look sharp! as he stood like an olive drab Statue of Liberty atop the escarpment, tracking the villagers through his Nash-Kelvinators. A decent lieutenant never would have been up there in the first place, wearing his collar bars, no less, but there he was, scanning to see if his hooch boy was bugging out, and if half the men were praying that a VC sniper was dialing in on his forehead, the other half weren’t going to take the high road and hold it against them.
All the same, they jumped when the binoculars exploded, at the thudding sound of the slug crashing through glass and plastic, the flying black wedges of plastic and metal and the gray and pink spray of his head webbed out all over the bags behind him, and after he’d begun to fall, there’d been the crack of the rifle rolling across the red, white, and blue side of the valley. Someone had mailed that shot from a long, long way off. Down on the access road, the villagers hit the deck.
Manny had peered through an embrasure and seen the villagers lying in the road, mounds of gear atop their backs. American tracers were flying over them but not a one moved. He didn’t understand them when they spoke at him, always in a frenzy, always shouting, always desperate, and though his heart went out, what could he do? He was scared shitless, too. A few of them who provided goods and services were allowed in and out of camp, but Manny didn’t want anything to do with them. Seemed like bad luck. The lieutenant had let them tidy his tent and service his needs, and yep, sure enough, look how that turned out.
After Spitz got killed, command flew in another cardboard cutout to replace him; clueless, but at least the new one washed his own fatigues and didn’t fraternize with the locals. Manny’s tour was up by the time that lieutenant was killed.
Mr. Saltwater might have been there, he was thinking. Manny recognized the sickness hanging about him, the ineffable detachment. There were rumors about the man, of course, that he’d been Army intelligence or CIA. Manny knew better than to believe chatter from the tenants, but you could get a bead from the old ladies who dressed up and put on hats just for the ride down to the mailboxes. They’d been around. They knew things. Mr. Saltwater’s wife was nice enough. The kid was polite. Deliveries of books, mostly. Pizza on Sunday night. When spoken to, Manny nodded or shook his head, as appropriate. He was himself affable, didn’t know nothing about nothing, except that from where he stood, Saltwater was an odd bird. Fair tipper, though Madam appeared to handle that end of the business. No one would ever accuse Saltwater of wearing out the finish on the front desk. Manny classified him the same as everyone else who lived in the building. Standard New York grade-A nutjob.
Mr. Saltwater, sir? Manny called into the howling wind, the snow clotting on his coat.
My father turned his head slightly, but his eyes remained locked on the figure in the distance.
Sir, anything happen out here?
Nope, my father said.
Uh-huh, Manny said. If there’s anything I can help you with, you’ll let me know?
Absolutely, my father said. He reached over and gave the doorman’s woolen arm a squeeze. I’m alive! he added.
Very good, sir.
There’s an issue with the chute on fourteen. Brunn, my father said. I had to get these fish out of the apartment. I did a real number on them. Had to get them out of the building.
Yes, sir, I can take that down to the incinerator for you… Manny didn’t bother to finish. It was February, the dead cord of winter wrapped tight around a dark matrix, ice atop snow atop ice atop snow, and they were standing in a blizzard. What the hell was he standing in a blizzard for?
Why don’t we just pitch the bag, Manny said, and get back inside?
Roger that, my father said. He casually tossed the bag toward the street. The wind spiked it into the snowbank.
For all Manny cared, my father could stand in the snow until he froze to death, as long as he went across the street to do it. But standing on the sidewalk in front of the Apelles, my father had made it a financial issue for Manny. If something were to happen—and it would, even in a blizzard, it would, god help him, that would be his luck, wouldn’t it, at best Mr. Saltwater would only get mugged, mugged by the only mugger out in the whole city, and a man like him would probably fight back, which all the libertarian types did, which would guarantee blood, which would find its way back to Manny’s hands, his neglect having resulted in a tenant’s beating, and there’s only so much the union can do in a situation like that—Manny would be culpable, so he, too, would have to stand in the snow and wind freezing his ass off until this nutjob decided to conclude his meditation, or whatever he was doing. Assault might be the least of Manny’s worries. My father, it occurred to him, was the type who might die from exposure because he got lost in his own head.
The streetlights were horizontal. Manny was losing contact with his toes and ears. He clamped his teeth together and bounced on the balls of his feet.
My father wasn’t much better off. After the initial blaze of heat that came in the moments after the incident with the taxi, his trapezius had clinched tight against his neck, an ammoniac ache transmitting up to his skull and down the trapdoor to his spine. He was snorting vigilantly to counteract the copious streams of snot escaping his nostrils, and his jaw was set in concrete.