Linger (4 page)

His father’s in the petrochemical industry, and he’s been all over the Middle East.

He says the only way you could vote in Kuwait was to be male and have a male relative there before 1920. And alcohol is okay there. No rivers or lakes or railroads: just desert. He says the Kuwaitis suck, they’re the greediest people in the Gulf region!

Just what I want to hear while I wait to die for them. Just kidding, God! I’m not ready.

I
GUESS YOU’RE NOT
going to send a picture,
my brother wrote Lynn,
but thanks a lot for the Christmas box…. I’m out here at night in the desert smelling of Elite and nuts. I have never read Stephen King. Is he a favorite of yours? We have a lot to learn about each other, don’t we?

You mentioned Mr. Raleigh in your letter so I guess he’s still playing up at Linger. Since you don’t go to B.H.S., you must run into him at your father’s place.

You know the song “Linger” that Mr. Raleigh wrote and everyone likes to sing? It was really written to Joan, the cat, did you ever hear that? I think its real name is even “Joan’s Song.”

One Saturday afternoon when we were setting up for dinner, she came sneaking into The Grill with this yellow parakeet in her mouth, dead. It belonged to old Mrs. Leogrande from next door. Mr. Raleigh was fooling around at the piano, trying to write one of his
s
ongs. No one could get Joan out from under The Market Basket. So Mr. Raleigh said let her stay there since she’ll be in for it soon enough. He called out, “Have fun while it lasts, Joan.
”

And he starts to sing. You know how it goes, I think. “What won’t last won’t go fast, Not here
…
” et cetera.

Anyhow, tell Mr. Raleigh I send greetings from the garden spot of the Middle East. Tell him I remember the day he wrote “Joan’s Song,” okay? You should listen to it sometime thinking of your killer cat devouring the bird except for a few yellow feathers. Your Desert Shield dude needs a photo. Enclosing one of me and my boys.

By that time, my brother was signing his letters to her
Love.

That Christmas Day while he was getting ready to move deeper into the desert, we were heading into New York City for our annual outing with Uncle Chadwick.

I didn’t look forward to these outings because we had to listen to Uncle Chad boast of his million-dollar deals, all accomplished because he had “the smarts.” I missed my brother, who could always bring him down with a new lawyer joke (Bobby’d collect them for this occasion), like Uncle Chad, why did the elephant in the forest stop to eat a huge pile of lion dung? … You give up? Because he’d just swallowed a lawyer, and he wanted to get the bad taste out of his mouth.

Everyone in the family had the idea that just because I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be like Uncle Chad, but I’d gotten my ambition from watching
L.A. Law,
not from watching my uncle spill Chivas Regal on his Ralph Lauren jacket as he pounded a table to make the point he was the best corporate troubleshooter in the whole U.S. of A.!

I think he used to impress Bobby way back; then Bobby grew out of it.

We were always treated by him to the annual Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall, then early dinner somewhere.

I think of how my brother used to slump down in his seat and complain that he couldn’t stand to hear
The Nutcracker
one more time, and that The Rockettes dancing across the stage in unison, in their red-and-green tutus, made him want to barf. But that was just Bobby’s act. He had long ago assigned himself the role of Grouch on Family Outings.

I think it was a way of sticking by our dad, too, since Uncle Chad was always out to prove to Mom and us boys that he was the better Peel.
We’d
landed the runt of the litter.

We were in a Chinese, restaurant, after, and Uncle Chad was ordering for us, as if egg foo yung, pork lo mein, and chicken delight were must-try dishes we would never have had the sophistication to think of on our own.

And the pu-pu platter came first, aflame and bearing little paper parasols stuck into steamed dumplings.

He’d eat with chopsticks and chide us for not eating with them. After a few drinks, there’d be noodles next to the scotch stains on his jacket, duck sauce on his silk tie.

“So Bobby’s really over there,” he said.

“He wanted to be in the Army,” my father said, sighing.

“You know, this was where I had lunch with Bobby some two or three years ago.”

“When he came in to see Guns N’ Roses that time?”

“One of those groups. That’s when I told him how to fix Mañana so Linger wouldn’t have any competition.”

We just looked at him. What did Bobby have to do with Mañana?

Mañana had been this little yellow shack, serving chicken and beef dishes with rice, and big pitchers of wine called sangría.

The only foreign food in Berryville, until this place opened, was Italian. We all wondered if a Mexican café could make it.

My father told my uncle, “Dunlinger lost a few dinners that summer, nothing serious.”

“He was worried, though,” my mother said. “When they set up that pretty little garden with the twinkling lights, he was worried.”

“You see, this place had some competition once, too, right across the street,” said Uncle Chad. “I told Bobby how this place took care of
their
competition. A little rumor got spread that the newly opened China Kite ought to be called China Cat, since they were serving dead stray cats from Times Square…. A few cat corpses, skinned, were found in their garbage pail.”

There was a powerful silence for a second or two.

Then my mother said, “Mañana Meow.”

That was the name that had been painted all over Berryville that summer, the same time there’d been the rumor about the stray cats the place got from the fields near the Canal.

“Is that what Bobby renamed it?” Uncle Chad chuckled.

“Bobby never—” my dad started to say.

My uncle snorted. “I told Bobby: People will believe
anything
about an ethnic place; just get the rumor going. Koreans eat cats for a fact, and I bet they do down Meh-hee-coh way, too…. Did it work?”

My father was shaking his head as though he couldn’t believe it.

“Mr. Dunlinger felt awful about that rumor,” said my mother.

“Bull merde, Wanda. Your Mr. Dunlinger probably gave Bobby a bonus!”

“This is the first I even heard about it,” my father said. “Bobby never mentioned anything about Mañana.”

“You were the last to know when he joined the Army, too, Charlie. I was the one who told him to get on the horn immediately and call you.”

“He knew I wished he’d finish high school first.”

“A kid’s got to do what he’s got to do,” said Uncle Chad, who’d had two wives but no kids.

“Look where it got him,” my mother said. “He’s sitting in some desert in Saudi Arabia.”

“We aren’t going to war, Wanda,” said Uncle Chad, “and that boy is having the experience of a lifetime. Nothing that exciting will ever happen to Bobby again!”

On the way back to Pennsylvania, I sat in the back listening to R.E.M. through headphones. I kept thinking about Mañana down by the Canal, everyone saying the mosquitoes would come up from the water nights and drive any customers crazy … or maybe it was Mr. Dunlinger who said that.

I remember once going by after a movie and my mother said, “Look!”

There were these colored lights, and a fellow in a big sombrero was playing a guitar. Couples were dancing out on the stones, under the stars.

I remember my mother saying, “I never saw that in Berryville before!” And I remember seeing a kid I figured was about my own age in a red shirt and dark pants playing castanets. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked like a boy trying to look like a man; his face was too young to carry it off. Later I wondered if he was that Carlos Elizondo the papers wrote so much about.

Late that Christmas night we stopped for coffee and cake at this new place that had just opened when you crossed from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

My mother and father loved going into new restaurants, comparing them with Linger.

My father finally brought up Mañana.

“Dunlinger
was
bothered by that place, wasn’t he?”

“Charlie, Mr. D. felt sick about those rumors. Bobby too! You know Bobby has no hatred in him. None. He didn’t have then and he doesn’t have now!”

“I’m not talking about hatred,” said my dad.

“Bobby thought it was funny, I think.” I put in my two cents, even though I couldn’t remember what Bobby’d thought about it at the time. “People were going by that place in their cars calling out the windows: ‘Meow! Meow! Meow!’”

“Bobby would know it wasn’t funny,” Dad said. “And you know it wasn’t funny, Gary. That was the beginning of the end for Mañana, Mr. Elizondo,
and
his boy, Carlos!”

My mother said, “Well, don’t blame Bobby! You just said yourself he had no hatred in him.”

“You said that, Wanda.
I
said I wasn’t talking about hatred.”

“What
are
you talking about then?”

“Bobby liked to pretend nobody and nothing ever impressed him, but Mr. D.
did
! You know how Bobby fought him. He never fought anyone that way but Mr. D.!”

“That’s being impressed by somebody? Fighting him tooth and nail?”

My father shook his head. “That’s caring.”

“That’s news to me,” my mother said.

“We’re his parents, his family,” my father said. “He loves us somewhere inside him, but he could be indifferent to us, too. To most people…. But name me the one person Bobby wasn’t
ever
indifferent to. Who was that?”

Nobody had to say who and nobody did.

—F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF
Private Robert Peel

Saudi Arabia

We keep moving, columns of hummers winding across the sand, our bedrolls and tents tied down. It’s clammy cold.

Movie Star, Sugar, and me are the youngest soldiers in the outfit. A lot of the others are mothers and fathers, reservists who never figured they’d get called up for active duty, much less for this war in the desert! Who did?

But we have left the women behind now. They join a Marine Maintenance Unit, repairing our M1 tanks, Bradleys etc., the first time an Army unit has been attached to another branch of the armed forces in combat. Marines have put a limit on how far forward females will go.

We are expecting war now, expecting the Iraqis to head straight our way, and we’re issued our antitank weapons and keep our chemical suits and masks close.

Last night Movie Star said he wanted to have a lot of kids, but Sugar said not him. He said he wasn’t going to do to any kid what was done to him, and he said, “I don’t mean I ever got beat up or that stuff, my old man never got near enough to touch me. He’d never even look me in the eye….” And he imitated him, got us laughing, as he does a lot!

Then Sugar asked us did we want to know about these wonderful people whose country we are saving called the Sabahs? I knew something was coming, because he is sort of a sardonic guy, and he goes, “Beautiful Kuwait is ruled by a noble merchant family called Sabah,” in this musical tone…. His father knew one of the Sabahs very well, played golf with him a lot. This guy only wore a bathrobe one time. Later he would throw it out, a big, heavy, terry-cloth robe, just toss one away after every bath, or shower, or swim, and it wouldn’t be laundered, just thrown away. He said everyone in the whole family had a Mercedes, even the daughters who didn’t drive, each one had her own convertible that servants drove them in.

Sugar said they’re all like that: rich, smug, spoiled rotten. The emir is probably off in London gambling while we fight his war, Sugar said. And this Kuwait is only the size of New Jersey; 90 percent is sand!

Movie Star keeps telling him to “cork it.” He says he’s heard enough crap about Kuwait. He’s edgy anyway.

Movie Star says he has the feeling he’s not going to get out of this alive, and Sugar says he has it, too, and it comes and goes. He says it’s only natural, probably everyone has it at one point or another.

The trouble with me is it takes a long time for things to sink in. I’m like Dad that way. I’d say Why do you let Dunlinger talk to you like you’re shit? Dad’d say Is he talking to me that way, Bobby? I hear him but I’m not sure he means any disrespect.

So I hear the hummers, and the planes, and the winds whipping sand into my face, and I think I’m hearing war but I’m not sure I hear “Taps.”

I wonder if Lynn asked Mr. Raleigh about “Joan’s Song.”

She was never there late at night when everyone in the place would sing it. How did it go now, can I remember?

What won’t last won’t go fast,

Not here.

What is bad won’t feel sad

In here.

So linger awhile, let’s see that smile,

Secrets are mysteries still.

You’ll have your way, you will.

Time is slow, do not go

From here,

And the scheme is a dream

In here.

So linger, so stay, it’s always today,

Secrets are mysteries still.

You’ll have your way, you will.

No one points a finger

When you are in Linger,

Not here,

Not in here,

Never here….

Mr. Raleigh said since Barry Manilow wrote “Mandy” to his dog, he could write a song for Joan.

H
AVE YOU BEEN GETTING
my letters regularly?
my brother wrote
. I am writing once or twice a week, Lynn. So far I have the first one you wrote, the postcard, and the one inside your Christmas box, not that I’m not thanking you for writing me when you can get around to it because I am.

I gulped when I saw what Mr. Raleigh’d copied out on his chalkboard.

At the bottom it said it was from a speech made by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, to members of the 102nd Congress, on the question of whether to let President Bush send out troops into war.