Keeper of Dreams (65 page)

Only it wasn’t just that, either. Cause if Danny had listened to me, if he’d headed for the door like me, we’d both be dead. Everybody in that place was dead, or had pieces blown off them a lot worse than fingers, you know. I’m the only guy walked out of that place. And if Danny hadn’t bent over to give that kid a candy bar, if he’d run for it like I was running for it, you wouldn’t be here and neither would I. It was just like he fell on a grenade to save his buddy in a foxhole. And sometimes I even think that he
knew
he was doing it. I mean, he’s the one who taught
me
to look for a
kid like that, he taught
me
to get out of there, only when the time comes he doesn’t even see it? Come on. I think he knew. I think he chose between me and him, or anyway he knew that the only way I’d live is if I had protection, and he decided my life mattered.

And when I get to thinking that way, for a long time I thought, Wrong, Danny I. Keizer. Wrong. My life wasn’t worth saving. I haven’t done one thing important enough to be worth you or anybody else dying for. That’s why I never came to the Wall before. I couldn’t face him.

And then they blow up the World Trade Center and you come home and you start talking about volunteering so you can fight the way Pop did in World War II and the way I did in Vietnam and I realized for the first time. I looked at you and I thought, No way are those bastards going to take you away from me, but then I looked at your sisters and your mother and I thought, What if they blew up the school where one of my girls was? Or the grocery store when your mom was shopping? And I knew you had to go, ’cause you thought it was right, and if you went, I knew you might die because that happens, guys die, there’s a wall full of guys here who died.

No, hell no, I didn’t bring you here so you’d change your mind. I brought you here because I finally knew I could face Danny. Because I
had
done something with my life. I really
was
worth saving.

You. You’re the thing I did. You and your sisters. Your mom and I had you all, and I worked all my life paying the bills and I also tried to raise you decent, we both did, and whether it was because of us or in spite of us, you’re a great kid, you’re a good
man
, and your sisters, they’re terrific, too, and I knew I could face Danny cause I had you here with me.

See, I taught you how to type, but I also taught you how to shoot, because it isn’t my choice. It’s your choice. But right here at this wall, here’s my guardian angel. I wanted him to meet you. I don’t know where you’ll go or what you’ll do, but I’d like to think you got somebody with you like I did, watching over you. Because I know you’ll do right, but when it’s all over, I don’t want your name on a wall somewhere. I want you to come home to me, just as bad as Pop ever wanted me to come home. You do whatever you think is right, but let Danny watch over you, and if he sometime whispers in your ear, then by God you listen, you hear me?

When “50 WPM” first appeared in an anthology of stories about the Vietnam War and its aftermath (
In the Shadow of the Wall: An Anthology of Vietnam Stories That Might Have Been
, ed. Byron R. Tetrick), this “author note” was included with it. Even now, I really have nothing more to add:

I didn’t serve in Vietnam. Born in 1951, I wasn’t eligible for the draft until the lottery came along, and my number was above the cutoff. By then—1969—the war had already been declared pointless by a government that was now sending soldiers to Vietnam to die just to save face for America, the sort of cause I have never thought worth the expenditure of more than six bucks and a hangnail.

So I spent those years of my life either as a theatre student at Brigham Young University or as a missionary in São Paulo, Brazil, reading every-thing about the war but experiencing nothing. Yet I am a lifelong student of matters military and was not an opponent of the war as originally sold to the American people; I cared and care about what happened in Vietnam, and have shed my share of tears at the Wall. How could I write about Vietnam and the Wall, when I had no personal experience there and did not pay any price myself, though I was of that generation?

I struggled with that issue for months, wanting to contribute a story, but not knowing what sort of story I had a right to tell. And then I realized—I should write, not about the kind of war that most of the guys whose names are on that wall were fighting, but the kind of war that I would inevitably have fought, had I been drafted. Physically soft and not particularly skilled at anything the infantry needs, and highly unlikely to be tagged as having the leadership that makes one an officer, the only thing that stood out was my typing. I was fast. No, let me get technical here, I was
damn
fast, and accurate, too. There’s not a chance that I would have seen action. Even if I went to Vietnam, I would have been in an office somewhere. This story, then, is about the kind of war I might have fought, though none of the characters in it are in any way like me.

When Rainie Pinyon split this time she didn’t go south, even though it was October and she didn’t like the winter cold. Maybe she thought that this winter she didn’t deserve to be warm, or maybe she wanted to find some unfamiliar territory—whatever. She got on the bus in Bremerton and got off it again in Boise. She hitched to Salt Lake City and took a bus to Omaha. She got herself a waitressing job, using the name Ida Johnson, as usual. She quit after a week, got another job in Kansas City, quit after three days, and so on and so on until she came to a tired-looking café in Harmony, Illinois, a small town up on the bluffs above the Mississippi. She liked Harmony right off, because it was pretty and sad—half the storefronts brightly painted and cheerful, the other half streaked and stained, the windows boarded up. The kind of town that would be perfectly willing to pick up and move into a shopping mall only nobody wanted to build one here and so they’d just have to make do. The help-wanted sign in the café window was so old that several generations of spiders had lived and died on webs between the sign and the glass.

“We’re a five-calendar café,” said the pinched-up overpainted old lady at the cash register.

Rainie looked around and sure enough, there were five calendars on the walls.

“Not just because of that
Blue Highways
book, either, I’ll have you know. We already had these calendars up before he wrote his book. He never stopped here but he could have.”

“Aren’t they a little out of date?” asked Rainie.

The old lady looked at her like she was crazy.

“If you already had the calendars up when he wrote the book, I mean.”

“Well, not
these
calendars,” said the old lady. “Here’s the thing, darlin’. A lot of diners and whatnot put up calendars after that
Blue Highways
book said that was how you could tell a good restaurant. But those were all fakes. They didn’t
understand
. The calendars have all got to be
local
calendars. You know, like the insurance guy gives you a calendar and the car dealer and the real estate guy and the funeral home. They give you one every year, and you put them all up because they’re your friends and your customers and you hope they do good business.”

“You got a car dealer in Harmony?”

“Went out of business thirty years ago. Used to deal in Studebakers, but he hung on with Buicks until the big dealers up in the tri-cities underpriced him to death. No, I don’t get his calendar anymore, but we got two funeral homes so maybe that makes up for it.”

Rainie almost made a remark about this being the kind of town where nobody goes anywhere, they just stay home and die, but then she decided that maybe she liked this old lady and maybe she’d stay here for a couple of days, so she held her tongue.

The old lady smiled a twisted old smile. “You didn’t say it, but I know you thought it.”

“What?” asked Rainie, feeling guilty.

“Some joke about how people don’t need cars here, cause they aren’t going anywhere until they die.”

“I want the job,” said Rainie.

“I like your style,” said the old lady. “I’m Minnie Wilcox, and I can hardly believe that anybody in this day and age named their little girl Ida, but I had a good friend named Ida when I was a girl and I hope you don’t mind if I forget sometimes and call you Idie like I always did her.”

“Don’t mind a bit,” said Rainie. “And nobody in this day and age
does
name their daughter Ida. I wasn’t
named
in this day and age.”

“Oh, right, you’re probably just pushing forty and starting to feel old. Well, I hope I never hear a single word about it from you because I’m right on the seventy line, which to my mind is about the same as driving on empty, the engine’s still running but you know it’ll sputter soon so what the hell, let’s get a few more miles on the old girl before we junk her. I need you on the morning shift, Idie, I hope that’s all the same with you.”

“How early?”

“Six a.m. I’m sad to say, but before you whine about it in your heart, you remember that
I’m
up baking biscuits at four-thirty. My Jack and I used to do that together. In fact he got his heart attack rolling out the dough, so if you ever come in early and see me spilling a few tears into the powdermilk, I’m not having a bad day, I’m just remembering a good man, and that’s my privilege. We got to open at six on account of the hotel across the street. It’s sort of the opposite of a bed-and-breakfast. They only serve dinner, an all-you-can-eat family-style home-cooking restaurant that brings ’em in from fifty miles around. The hotel sends them over here for breakfast and on top of that we get a lot of folks in town, for breakfast
and
for lunch, too. We do good business. I’m not poor and I’m not rich. I’ll pay you decent and you’ll make fair tips, for this part of the country. You still see the nickels by the coffee cups, but you just give those old coots a wink and a smile, cause the younger boys make up for them and it’s not like it costs that much for a room around here. Meals free during your shift but not after, I’m sorry to say.”

“Fine with me,” said Rainie.

“Don’t go quittin’ on me after a week, darlin’.”

“Don’t plan on it,” said Rainie, and to her surprise it was true. It made her wonder—was Harmony, Illinois, what she’d been looking for when she checked out in Bremerton? It wasn’t what usually happened. Usually she was looking for the street—the down-and-out half-hopeless life of people who lived in the shadow of the city. She’d found the street once in New Orleans, and once in San Francisco, and another time in Paris, and she found places where the street used to be, like Beale Street in Memphis, and the Village in New York City, and Venice in LA. But the
street was such a fragile place, and it kept disappearing on you even while you were living right in it.

But there was no way that Harmony, Illinois, was the street, so what in the world was she looking for if she had found it here?

Funeral homes, she thought. I’m looking for a place where funeral homes outnumber car dealerships, because my songs are dead and I need a decent place to bury them.

It wasn’t bad working for Minnie Wilcox. She talked a lot but there were plenty of town people who came by for coffee in the morning and a sandwich at lunch, so Rainie didn’t have to pay attention to most of the talking unless she wanted to. Minnie found out that Rainie was a fair hand at making sandwiches, too, and she could fry an egg, so the workload kind of evened out—whichever of them was getting behind, the other one helped. It was busy, but it was decent work—nobody yelled at anybody else, and even when the people who came in were boring, which was always, they were still decent and even the one old man who leered at her kept his hands and his comments to himself. There were days when Rainie even forgot to slip outside in back of the café and have a smoke in the wide-open gravel alleyway next to the dumpster.

“How’d you used to manage before I came along?” she asked early on. “I mean, judging from that sign, you’ve been looking for help for a long time.”

“Oh, I got by, Idie, darlin’, I got by.”

Pretty soon, though, Rainie picked up the truth from comments the customers made when they thought she was far enough away not to hear. Old people always thought that because
they
could barely hear, everybody else was half-deaf, too. “Oh, she’s a live one.” “Knows how to work, this one does.” “Not one of those young girls who only care about
one thing
.” “How long you think she’ll last, Minnie?”

She lasted one week. She lasted two weeks. It was on into November and getting cold, with all the leaves brown or fallen, and she was still there. This wasn’t like any of the other times she’d dropped out of sight, and it scared her a little, how easily she’d been caught here. It made no sense at all. This town just wasn’t Rainie Pinyon, and yet it must
be
, because here she was.

After a while even getting up at six a.m. wasn’t hard because there
was no life in this town at night so she might as well go to bed as soon as it turned dark and then dawn was a logical time to get up. There was no TV in the room Rainie took over the garage of a short-tempered man who told her “No visitors” in a tone of voice that made it clear he assumed that she was a whore by nature and only by sheer force of will could he keep her respectable. Well, she was used to letting the voice of authority make proclamations about what she could and couldn’t do. Almost made her feel at home. And, of course, she’d do whatever she wanted. This was 1990 and she was forty-two years old and there was freedom in
Russia
now so her landlord, whatever his name was, could take his no-visitors rule and apply it to his own self. She saw how he sized up her body and decided she was nice-looking. A man who sees a nice-looking woman and assumes that she’s wicked to the core is confessing his own desires.