Linger (12 page)

“Come to think of it, I’ve been there!” Lynn said.

“I didn’t know you were there.”

“The Willow School in Montpelier. We went there. Then we went tobogganing.”

I remembered the weekend he went tobogganing.

“You saw his son?” Sloan said.

“I saw him. What there is to see. He doesn’t recognize anybody, can’t speak, can’t do anything for himself. He’s five going on three months.”

“I feel so sorry for Mr. Raleigh,” said Sloan.

Lynn had started up again. We were up to forty in a twenty-mile zone, heading around a corner past a STOP.

The first time I realized Lynn was crying was when Sloan passed her a Kleenex.

“Thanks,” Lynn said. “I guess I’ve got to try and get his address through Willow.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That’s not going to be easy. They know I’m not related. They’re very strict about who gets what information up there. I’ve already made one try.”

“We’re way past the speed limit,” I said.

She reached beside her and tossed back a manila envelope. “I’ve been meaning to give this to you, Gary.”

“What is it?”

“Maybe someday anything to do with the Gulf War will be historic. And probably Bobby would like those.”

I opened it and peeked inside. “You don’t want them?” I said.

“What are they?” Sloan asked me.

“They’re all of Bobby’s letters,” Lynn said. “Someday he might appreciate having them.”

“Someday,” I said.

“I didn’t give them to your mother because I figured she’d think I was this heartless bitch, giving back the letters her soldier son wrote me.”

“You figured right. I wouldn’t say anything to her, either, if I were you.”

“They’re not like love letters or anything.”

“Well, he hardly knew you.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? All the times I saw him around Linger, I can’t remember having one conversation with him. I thought he thought I was spoiled.”

“You?” I said.

“Spoiled?” I said.

April 10, 1991

D
EAR MR. SWEET,

Your letter was forwarded to me. I’m Robert Peel, and as you know your son and I were buddies in Bravo Company, in Operation Desert Storm.

I am recovering now, and on my way home soon. Yours is the first letter I am writing myself since the war, for I have had to ask the nurses or volunteers to help me write or tape.

We called your son Sugar. We is me and Augustin Sanchez, who is also on the mend in a hospital in New Jersey. We called him Movie Star.

You would maybe like to know Sugar didn’t die without getting a few of them personally. We all got a lot of them firing at them or running over them, but on the first night in the Iraqi desert, after a breach and attack with eighty Iraqis and their commander surrendering to us, we were resting up when we saw these dismounts come into our thermal sights.

A bad sandstorm had started up. We could see only 200 or 300 meters ahead with the naked eye, but we could see 900 meters ahead with the thermal sights. And there were these dismounts. Those are dismounted infantry men, maybe spies, or maybe armed with rocket-propelled grenades: tiny targets that show up in a visual, Nintendo-like TV image, and these three would move, stay still, move, stay still in this little dance on the black-and-green screen we watched.

Sugar didn’t want to kill them. He had blown up tanks and run over those in trenches, but not loners like this. He asks the Lt. Col. could he fire ten meters to the left? And he does and they’re coming. You never know if they’re out to surrender, because most of them up close are. So he hits near the right now.

Then we see them headed toward a Bradley, and Sugar says he’s going to blast their asses.

The thermal sights pick up heat, and when these guys got it, we watched the bodies go from green to black, meaning they were cold/dead.

He was a good friend, always making us laugh, singing us songs he made up, reciting poems, telling us about Kuwait and his life before the Army.

When he got it, Sugar bore the brunt of a Silver Bullet, a Sabot that only one of our Abrams fires.

Officially, so far, the Army says he died in a fire-fight with Iraqi tanks, but it was “friendly fire,
”
a not-uncommon occurrence in this or any other war.

I am sure the Army will make a correction ultimately.

He deserved his Purple Heart, and I will never forget him. Please accept my deepest sympathy.

Sincerely,

Robert Peel

I
CAME IN FROM
a cold April rain, dripping on the floor of Linger’s lobby, Mr. Yee yelling at me, “Hey, you go around to the back. We just did these floors!”

“I have to give this to Mrs. D.”

It was the new Kitty Kelly biography of Nancy Reagan. I’d picked it up from The Berryville Library for her.

“I’ll give it to her.”

“Let me.”

She was always good for five dollars when you went out of your way to do her a favor.

“You’re money mad,” Mr. Yee said.

Then I noticed he had Bobby’s picture under his arm.

“Where are you going with my brother?”

“I’m putting him back here in the lobby.”

“How come?”

“Mr. Dunlinger says it’s not right in the bar.”

Above Bobby’s head the sign said Day 46.

Mr. Yee said, “Mr. Dunlinger thinks it’s depressing. The war is over now, officially. Your brother could be another two, three months.”

“Why isn’t it depressing in the hall then?”

“People don’t drink in the hall. We had fights starting about the war. We had the ones who said we should have gone in and got Saddam Hussein, and the ones who said not another one of our boys’ lives was worth that…. Then there were some fights starting about Jules, why he isn’t here anymore.”

“Does anyone know the real reason?”

Mr. Yee looked at me. “The real reason?”

“What the fight with Mr. D. was about?”

“It was about Mr. D. not being able to take his talk about the war. About what we did to Iraq.”

Mr. Yee looked right into my eyes. He’d been there the night Dunlinger fought with Jules. He
knew,
but he wasn’t letting on that he did.

He said, “We’re going to put the picture in here. Maybe it’ll stop arguments.”

He hung Bobby’s picture near the wall thermostat.

I waited on the doormat until I wasn’t dripping wet, and then I went down the hall and knocked on Mrs. D.’s door.

She was drinking a cup of tea. She’d moved her white wicker chaise down from Lingering Shadows. Her face brightened when I put the book down on her desk.

“Did you hear Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers and then told President Reagan what he should do?”

“I heard something like that.”

“I liked Ronnie, though. He always made me feel good when I’d see him getting out of the helicopter on the White House lawn. He always touched her, always.”

She was going into her purse, getting out her wallet.

Sloan and I had finally worked out a deal about dating. We went Dutch, but we could also treat each other to something special.

She was teaching me to dance,
with
someone instead of up in my room by myself, and she’d gotten me the new Enigma album that included “Sadeness Part I.”

So I got her Mariah Carey’s, with “Someday” on it.

Mrs. Dunlinger passed a five across to me and said, “And thank you for not spreading the gossip, Gary. Lynn tells me you know about everything.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I will never forgive Jules.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry if Bobby got the wrong impression, too. That’s also unforgivable.”

“Lynn didn’t do anything, really.”

“Lynn never
does
anything, but things seem to happen because of her.” She shoved a large sheet of paper across her desk and said, “What do you think of this?”

It was an ad layout.

NO, WE DON’T HAVE DOGGIE BAGS AT LINGER!

“Since when?” I said.

“Read on,” she said. “This is my husband’s newest idea, and I think it’s his best.”

No, we don’t, and we’re sorry.

We have Take Homes, instead, for we believe there shouldn’t be any waste at a time when we have our homeless right down on Railroad Avenue … at a time when even those of us with homes are saving up to put our kids through college or take that well-deserved vacation down South (see America first!).

We encourage you to take everything home (except the silver, please). Maybe you’ll drop off one of our T.H.’s to someone without a roof over his head, on your way home, or maybe late at night you’ll have a family picnic in the kitchen. (Fido might even get a bite, after all.)

So ask for a Take Home. We’ll add an extra roll, an extra cookie—something to surprise you, and make you glad you came to LINGER.

I looked up at her and she smiled. “Like it, Gary?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“My husband thinks it’s time people felt good about themselves again. Winning the war was the start of something. Now we’ll feed our own people and we’ll get back to old family values.”

Then she said, “Wait until you see what we’ve planned for Bobby for his Fourth of July party!”

“If he’s home by then.”

She dug into her purse again.

“Look,” she said.

She handed me a postcard from Denver.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. D.,

Can’t wait to see those fireworks!

Sincerely,

Bobby

D
EAR ROBERTO,

How about this beautiful, new handwriting of mine, hmmmm?

All your letters are greatly appreciated.

When I get out of here, I will be actually writing you with a few of my toes, this is for real! They are sewing them on my hands.

Maybe they should sew my foot in my mouth
—
since I told my father how we got hit, I think he is ready to bomb Bush or something like that.

Hey, guess who is my secretary? Someone who wants to meet you after all she’s heard of you. That’s right, my Amy.

She has not missed a day here, and even her old man has come to see me, too. She says Hey, don’t call him an old man. Someday he’s going to be our kids’ grandfather, and then you can call him that.

I would like to see you, yes. We can do that when I get all this surgery completed. Maybe I’ll even get time off in between. I would like to meet Lynn, too, and have us all together.

But you never say how you are. How are you, Roberto?

Do you want to learn to dance yet?

Your good pal,

Gus Sanchez

I
T WAS A MONDAY
afternoon in early June, and Bobby was expected home that evening.

Mom and Dad had gone into Philadelphia to get him. I worked at Linger after school, nervous and excited at the thought of seeing him.

I filled up a T.H. bag with leftover pasta from the kitchen, dropped in some Caesar salad, rolls, and a few Tollhouse cookies, and went over to Sloan’s.

Her father was down at the American Legion, watching the ticker-tape parade in New York City for General Schwarzkopf and the troops.

“This is a little dessert in the spirit of celebration,” said Mrs. Scott. She was carrying in Jell-O, red raspberry, with the little white marshmallows on top of some blueberries.

She said she had to let out some pants for the Berryville High Marching Band, who were playing at Linger after the Fourth of July Victory Parade downtown.

Bobby was being featured in the parade. Then Linger was having the big party in his honor.

“I hope he likes me,” said Sloan. “What if he doesn’t?”

I said not to worry, he’d like her. She was beside me on the rug in the sunroom. She had on some new stuff: white cotton jeans with a gold chain belt, a gingham blouse and pink leather cowboy boots. She’d started wearing perfume ever since I’d talked about Lynn’s. She wore something called Patchouli.

We were watching MTV and doing homework. Axl Rose was prancing around the stage barechested with his tattoos up and down his arms, in red-white-and-blue stars-and-stripes tight shorts. Slash was dancing around him with his hair in his eyes, working his guitar.

I was trying to cram for my final French exam, and Sloan was doing an essay called “Could Economic Sanctions Have Worked in Ousting Iraq from Kuwait?”

It was guaranteed not to be read aloud by Mrs. Burke, who had Mr. Raleigh’s job permanently now and steered far away from any political discussions.

We’d work, watch, break for a hot clinch; work, watch, break. When we heard the Labs barking, we ran to the door, afraid someone passing would be bitten.

Sloan was saying, “I thought Daddy took them with him.”

We stood in the open doorway as Pete and Repeat leaned their paws against the Linger Lincoln, parked at the curb.

Lynn didn’t want to come in; she wanted to drive around. And Sloan wanted to finish her paper.

I said I’d take a ride with her if she’d drop me off. I expected the family back with Bobby around eleven.

“I found him,” she said. “He was in Vermont, after all. I went up there last weekend. Daddy thought I was in Boston with my roommate.”

She had on that same DKNY baseball cap pulled down on her forehead, a short black-leather skirt, and a white T-shirt.

I said, “Well? What happened?”

“He’s got this tacky room on the first floor of this place, and he came to the door when I rang his bell, and he just looked at me. I said can I come in, and guess what he said? He said ‘I suppose so.’ Do you believe that?”

“I believe anything.”

“‘I
suppose
so,’ Gary.”

She wasn’t in a mood to drive fast, and I was glad of that.

I liked the smell of the car, and the beginning-of-summer aromas: the lawns coming in, the trees blossoming. It was finally dark, but there was a moon.

I said I was sorry. What else could I say?