His mother was fixing him some beans and eggs at the stove, and she turned around with a strange expression on her face, as if she was wondering herself why she had named him Claudel. After a few seconds she said, “It was your father named you. I wanted to call you Claude if you were a boy and Claudine if you turned out to be a girl. But he said no. Not that he didn’t like both names. He said, ‘Let’s call it Claudel, regardless of whether it’s a boy or a girl. No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’”
“I can remember him saying that,” Claudel’s mother said, “just like it was yesterday. ‘No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’ But that’s your father, you know. All over. He likes to be efficient. When he was young and talked more about what he believed, maybe because he wasn’t so sure of himself then and had to hear himself say things out loud before he could really believe they were true, he used to say, ‘Too much is as bad as too little. Worse.’”
Right then and there at the breakfast table, Claudel finally got to understand his father’s philosophy of life. If the old man believed that too much was as bad as, or worse than, too little, and if that belief had led him to give his son a name like Claudel, which he must have known would be an embarrassment to the boy for a long time, then the old man must have a pretty bleak view of life’s offerings. It wasn’t quite as bleak as Chisholm’s Law, say, but it wasn’t exactly optimistic either.
Your philosophy tells you what the world is like, gives you the long view, so to speak. And your principles tell you how to live in that world. And Claudel’s father was telling him that the world was a tough and miserly place, and that the best way to live in that place was to be careful and relentlessly efficient. Don’t waste a thing, don’t take anything for granted. Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because tomorrow might never come, and just in case it does, you better have something done today or else you’re going to get beat tomorrow.
A hard view, Claudel knew. But when he was nineteen it seemed right to him. He loved his father and admired him, even though of course he thought his father was a little cracked on a few subjects, like spitting and throwing stones. But basically he thought his father knew the world a lot better than he himself did. The old man had pulled a hitch in the Navy in World War Two out there in the South Pacific, and after the war he’d worked for a few years down in Boston in the shipyards as a welder. At nineteen the son figured he’d do better listening to the father and taking on the father’s philosophy of life than he would trying to work up one of his own. So he didn’t mind being called Claudel anymore. Now that he knew there was a good reason for it.
2
Then he went off to Vietnam, and over there he learned a lot about the world that made him start to question his father’s viewpoint, because what he saw over there made him start to believe in Luck. His father’s philosophy had no place in it for Luck. But the war was teaching Claudel that there were lucky people, like him and the other guys who didn’t get killed or blown half to bits, and there were unlucky people, like all those Vietnamese farmers, say, whose houses and land and children and whole families were getting wiped out for no reason they could name. Half the time they couldn’t even see the bombers that dropped the bombs on them. It was like God was bombing them, instead of some foreigner looking into a bombardier’s sight at 40,000 feet.
Claudel wasn’t stupid, and he could see that the only difference between these farmers and the farmers back home was that one group was unlucky and the other group was lucky. And since he could see that, so far, he was a member of the lucky group, he started to expect more out of life than his father’s philosophy had said he would get.
He could remember when it first came wholly clear to him that he was one of the lucky ones. His outfit used to sit around at night guarding the 105 howitzers with their M-14 automatic rifles, talking and smoking and looking out at the darkness for signs of life (signs of death for them, so they had to look very carefully). What they were looking for was flashlights. They never knew why, but those guys out there in the black pajamas were carrying flashlights. Every once in a while somebody would see a fleck of light way out there in the jungle, like a firefly, only half a mile away, and he’d start firing his M-14 full steam, and in a second everybody else would be blasting away at the jungle. They weren’t supposed to fire those things except at an enemy they could see, but the guns were fun to shoot, because they were recoiling automatics and the barrel slid back onto a gas cartridge that took the recoil, so they would fire these things and just sit there watching the barrels slamming back and forth practically in their laps while the bullets soared through the night like stars. Then, after the shooting had stopped, all the men would be grinning. There’d be a sudden silence, and Claudel would look around and all his buddies would be grinning at nothing, and he’d realize that he was grinning at nothing too.
One night, though, after the shooting had stopped, he looked around him as usual and saw they were all grinning as usual, and all of a sudden they heard a baby crying. It was stone silent otherwise, so they could hear its bawling clearly even though it was coming from someplace way out there in the jungle. It went on and on, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. It started to make them edgy and nasty-tempered, and a few of the guys cursed the baby’s mother for being out there in the night in the first place. A few other guys cursed the enemy for being out there with guns and booby traps, which were keeping them from going out and finding the baby and bringing it in to safety. And a few others cursed the enemy for setting the whole thing up. They said it was a trick to draw them away from the camp into an ambush in the jungle. That sounded plausible, but they weren’t sure, so they just kept on being bothered by the baby’s crying, which went on and on and seemed to grow louder and louder. Until finally one of the soldiers, a big square-faced guy from Chicago, jumped up and started firing his automatic into the bushes, as if he had seen a flash of light out there someplace. Then the others started firing with him, watching the barrels leap back and forth while the tracer bullets made icy arcs across the sky and dove into the darkness of the jungle a mile and a half away.
After a few minutes they stopped firing and sat down again. This time, when Claudel looked around, no one was grinning. Everyone wore a dark, somber expression on his face, and Claudel knew he looked the same as they did. That’s when he started thinking he was lucky. He was young. It’s how you explain things that are too complicated to explain. You call it Luck. Either you’ve got it or you haven’t got it, but if you’ve got it, use it. That was the first principle of his new philosophy. If you’ve got it, use it.
3
So by the time he got home again, he was raring to go, hot to get started making big money, buy a fast and fancy car, get himself a pretty girl and maybe marry her and buy one of those sixty-five-foot mobile homes to live in. And he did precisely that. He got himself a job as a lineman for the Public Service Company and started pulling in a couple hundred bucks a week with overtime. Then he got himself a loan from the bank and bought one hell of an automobile, a white ’68 GTO convertible that made everybody in town turn around and think a minute. He moved for a while with several different girls from town, one of them the daughter of a doctor, and after about a year he married Ginnie Branche, who ran Ginnie’s Beauty Nook out on Route 28. They had a big wedding, lots of presents, electric blankets, electric corn popper, waffle iron, all the usual things you need, and moved right into a baby-blue sixty-eight-foot-long mobile home out on Skitter Lake. It was a fancy new Longwoods, one of the first mobile homes to come out with a cathedral ceiling and teak-wood paneling in the living room. And after that, every morning when Claudel woke up in the master bedroom with that pretty young woman lying next to him, he’d slowly look across the room at his Danish modern bedroom suite, on to the framed pictures of mountains and streams, to the wall-to-wall green shag carpeting, the fancy fiber glass draperies shimmering in the morning breeze, and out the window to his GTO parked in the driveway, its top down, a huge white bird with its wings folded, and he’d say to himself, “Claudel Bing, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”