Linger (6 page)

Then we saw the signs that went with the shouts.

NO BODIES FOR BARRELS!

SANCTIONS … NOT SLAUGHTER!

HOW DID ALL
OUR
OIL GET UNDER

THEIR
SAND?

ALL FOR OIL

There was the big ex-Marine from Scott Contractors, carrying a placard that said,
MESS WITH THE BEST, DIE WITH THE REST,
but he was the only one there with that sentiment.

I knew most of the people. They were what Mr. D. called “the NOW crowd,” mostly women. You’d see them out demonstrating for abortion, various environmental concerns, AIDS support … or they’d be against some judge who was nominated for the Supreme Court, or the nuclear plant they wanted to build across the line in New Jersey, or hunting in The Pine Barrens, or gun ownership.

There was a local librarian; a woman who ran an amateur theater company; Osborne de la Marin the Fourth and his mother; my dentist’s wife; Mrs. Wheat pushing her quadriplegic Vietnam War veteran son; Pauline Wheat, the daughter; Sloan Scott, who I’d always had my eye on; and of course,
he
was there.

Mom said, “Jules is a fool! If I never knew it before, I know it now.”

“What are you doing?”

“Pulling over.”

“Mom, don’t start.”

“I didn’t.
They
did!”

She was parked before I knew it, and out of the car before I could finish asking her what she was planning to do. I got out, too, my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, hanging back, not wanting the scene.

“For your information, my boy is over there!”

“Then God help him!” said Leonard Wheat.

My mother calmed down a little. She wasn’t about to argue with a man who’d lost the use of his arms and legs in Vietnam. I heard her telling him what was wrong with his war was that people at home weren’t supportive. And I heard him tell her war was wrong whether or
not
the people supported it.

Then Mrs. Wheat got in on the act, and my dentist’s wife, so I stayed out of it, leaned against the car, and watched my breath freeze-frame my sighs.

Betty Chayka came down Osborne Street (named for the ancestors of Osborne de la Marin the Fourth) on her way to work at Berryville Video Store.

“Good for your mother!” she said.

Even in a down coat Chike was a sexpot. She just was. Something about her—I knew what Bobby meant when he said there were a lot of girls more beautiful, but not a one in Berryville with a better game.

I said, “Well, it’ll make her feel better, maybe.”

Chike laughed and bumped against me. “What would make
you
feel better?” She smelled like a women’s magazine.

“You would,” I said.

“You’re getting to look more like Bobby every day.”

“Yeah, but I’m not Bobby.”

She hooted at that and said, “You don’t have to tell
me
that! I know you’re not Bobby.”

Somehow she was insulting me, but I didn’t care. She did everything with a smile.

She said, “When you write him? Tell him I still like green light.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I don’t like any light at all.”

“Amateurs don’t.” She smiled and touched a gloved finger to my chin. “And tell Bobby I got yellow ribbons all over my old oak tree for him, okay?”

I could see Mom down the way surrounded by the group of protesters. I wondered if I should rescue her when I saw Mr. Raleigh take her by the arm and start back toward our car.

Mom was crying, and Mr. Raleigh said, “Better get her home, Gary.”

“
You
go home!” my mother shouted back at him. “Go home to Russia where you belong!”

I watched him stagger away on his built-up shoe. He always made me feel bad when I watched him walk.

“How’d Russia get into this, Mom?” I asked her when we got into the car.

She said, “He can go to hell!”

She’d never talked that way before, and when I looked across at her face, she didn’t look like herself.

Much, much later, I tried to tell myself that: She wasn’t herself. She didn’t do things like that.

—F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF
Private Robert Peel

Saudi Arabia

Both Sugar and Movie Star write “To Be Opened in Case of My Death” letters. Sugar’s is for his father. He says he’s going to write him: Looks like I had to die to live. Movie Star writes two: to his family and then to Amy. I don’t write one because it might bring it about.

But I think about one to Mr. D.

“They are coming up here and taking the food right out of our mouths,” he said. “Taking our ideas, our jobs, our land, and the ones who’re legal are taking our welfare. These are people who really mean mañana never comes if mañana means staying where they belong and making something out of their own land.

“What they lack,” he said, “is national pride. Do you see a flag of any kind hanging from that shack?”

I said, “They serve their own food, and they play their own music.”

“Bobby,” he said, “if I say the sky is blue, you point out the white clouds, and that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t like me to say wetback, but you never had to fight for a dream, work your ass off for one—give up college for one. When somebody older and smarter tells you something: LISTEN! Don’t always look for a contrary sentiment.

“LISTEN, Bobby!” he said. “
Learn!
That’s how you develop entrepreneurial skills. You don’t learn them at your daddy’s knee, or in school. You learn them from someone who’s got what it takes. You take what he’s got. You don’t tell him he doesn’t have it, and you don’t tell him what’s wrong with what he has. You listen and learn!”

“Okay,” I said, “but …”

“Okay,
Mr.
D.,” he said.

“Okay, Mr. D., but what can they do to us?”

“LISTEN AND LEARN, Bobby! They, be they from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia—and these are the ones moving in on us—be they from Ecuador or El Salvador, on and on: They are
encroaching
upon us. Do you know what that word means?”

“Moving in,” I said.

“Intruding is a better word,” he said, “intruding upon someone’s territory, rights, or time … or all three.”

“Just like the Japs have zapped us,” I said.

He said, “Mañana
we’ll
be beholden to little greaseball men in sombreros who look like dirty thumbs with hats on!”

M
Y NIGHT OFF. WE
ate at Linger, guests of Mr. D.

Mrs. D. was at Berryville Presbyterian Church fixing boxes for the troops, filling them with paperbacks, cans of Spam, M&M’s, cigarettes, socks, long underwear, et cetera.

We ate in The Grill so we could watch TV and Dan Rather, who was Mr. D.’s favorite news commentator.

I could hear “The White Cliffs of Dover” coming from The Regency Room where Mr. Raleigh was entertaining some of the regulars who always turn out on Tuesdays for the corned beef and cabbage Linger features.

“What you tell me about Jules is very disturbing, Wanda,” said Mr. D., “yet a man has a right to his opinions. But if he pulled any of that peace stuff up here, I’d deck him.”

I was chomping on my corned beef, trying to picture Mr. D. decking Jules Raleigh. I’d never seen him raise his hand to anyone, much less a cripple. He didn’t even raise his voice.

“I wish he wasn’t teaching kids,” said my mother.

“We don’t pay any attention to him,” I said. I was trying to defend him in my own way, but I suppose I was making it worse.

“Even my own little girl thinks our troops shouldn’t be over there, which makes me sad,” said Mr. Dunlinger. “But she says she’s not the only one at Faith Academy to feel that way, including some of the priests.”

“That’s hard to believe,” said my father.

“We had those priests, the Berrigans, during Vietnam, remember?” Dunlinger said. “They ransacked the Selective Service office and burned all the 1-A classification records.”

“This is no Vietnam,” said my mother.

I remember in class Mr. Raleigh said the government had learned from Vietnam that all the killing people watched nightly on TV turned them against the war. He said if there’s a war in the Gulf, the government will control the media. You’ll see a lot of fireworks but you won’t see people getting killed.

Mr. Dunlinger said to me, “At least you don’t have to worry, Gary. This will be all ancient history by the time you’re eighteen. You’ll go right off to college.”

One subject we carefully avoided around Mr. D. was Bobby. Okay if he brought it up, but we didn’t. Among ourselves we also didn’t bring up Mañana Meow now. All we cared about was Bobby getting back safely. Anything that had gone down before he was shipped to the Gulf was peanuts compared to what he was up against.

But ever since our dinner with Uncle Chad I kept trying to imagine what could have made Bobby use that cat thing against Mañana, what could have made him
care
that Linger was losing a little business, if it was?

Was my father right? Had Dunlinger had so much power over Bobby that he’d go to any length to impress him? … Was it because Bobby needed someone like Dunlinger to look up to, since our father was such a milksop?

After all, I’d had Bobby for a hero … until last Christmas dinner with Uncle Chad. Then I had my doubts about Bobby, for the first time.

And I kept remembering the kid in the red shirt smoking the cigarette, and though I only saw him that one time, it was in my head he’d been Carlos Elizondo.

“I had to help my father get this place underway—it was our dream. I never went to college,” Mr. Dunlinger said as though that was any news to us. He said it often enough for me to know that the next words would be
And I don’t think I turned out that bad.

“Not everybody has your entrepreneurial skills,” said my mother, who’d learned the last two words in the sentence from Mr. Dunlinger.

Himself said, “And I don’t think I turned out that bad.” He put his finger to his lips. Dan Rather had come on. We all began to give our attention to CBS, the TV competing with Mr. Raleigh’s rendition of that Tchaikovsky concerto I knew as “Tonight We Love.”

That started me thinking about Lynn Dunlinger and Mr. Raleigh. Not only had I kept what I knew secret, I’d even convinced Ollie Burns he’d been seeing things that night we went to
The Sheltering Sky.

I kept thinking of her eyes when she said, “Don’t tell,” and of my promising her I wouldn’t.

One weekend when the Dunlingers were still on vacation she’d spent her nights in The Grill watching him. He’d sung to her and sat with her on breaks. I kept looking from their faces to Mr. Yee’s, wondering why he couldn’t see what was going on between them. Maybe he could.

I was mulling that over as we sat there, and then Dave Leonard came out of the kitchen in his waiter’s uniform and shouted, “We’re at war!”

Mr. Dunlinger jumped to his feet and said we were nothing of the kind, but Dave insisted: “Watch CNN!”

The bartender switched the channel and we saw a picture of the reporter, Bernard Shaw, superimposed over a map of Iraq.

“This is extraordinary,” he was saying. “The lights are still on. All the streetlights in downtown Baghdad are still on. But as you look, you see trails of flashes of light going up into the air, obviously antiaircraft fire. We’re getting starbursts….”

We all sat there in shock listening, and when a man from the Pentagon came on to say the President would be going on television later, Mr. Dunlinger got to his feet. “I’m going downtown to get my Natalia,” he said. “We
are
at war.”

The violin was silent. So was everything but the television.

—F
ROM THE JOURNAL OF
Private Robert Peel

Saudi Arabia

“You have to outsmart these little varmints,” Mr. Dunlinger said. “Half of them can be picked up for being undocumented aliens. There’s a fine, you know, for employing undocumented aliens. That’s what half of them are who’re up here taking jobs away from good Americans,” he said.

He said, “Bobby, nobody ever handed me anything! I came up the hard way. I earned everything I have by the sweat of my brow, working alongside my father.”

“But you’re smart, too, Mr. D.”

“You bet your behind I’m smart! It’s not
just
hard work
ever
, Bobby.”

I remember I said, “Or my dad would have gone farther.”

He looked away from me.

He murmured, “He does what he does well enough.”

“I don’t aspire to be like him,” I said.

Mr. D. laughed hard at that. He said, “I never imagined you did
aspire
to be like him.” He said, “
Aspire
is a beautiful word, Bobby, if you’ve got the imagination and the guts to go with it.”

He said, “It’s not that I’m not amused by the China Cat idea. It’s just that these farfetched, fly-by-night schemes are usually pipe dreams.”

He put his big hand on my head and mussed up my hair, in that old good-dog-good style.

“But I appreciate it, Bobby. Your heart’s in the right place.”

I was thinking both things ought to do it. Mañana Meow plus the undocumented aliens. They had to have a few down there, didn’t they? If only out of sight, in the kitchen. It’d cost them, plus it’d make them even more unpopular: aliens taking our jobs!

“G
OD BLESS AMERICA,” MRS.
Dunlinger was singing. She was in The Regency Room that night in late January. In The Grill, Desert Storm was on CNN. No one wanted to watch any other channel.

Any family with a serviceperson who was assigned to the Gulf was entitled to a two-for-one dinner. One couple whose daughter was over there came from Philadelphia for filet mignon with mashed. Mr. Dunlinger had them sign her name on the honor roll in the hall, and he sent them two glasses of complimentary wine.

The walls were festooned with red, white, and blue crepe paper; the ceiling with yellow ribbons; and on every table by the salt and pepper, there was a little stand with a cotton American flag stuck in it.

“Did you put Bobby’s name on the honor roll?” Mr. Dunlinger asked me.

“No, Sir.”

“Well, do it! When this war is won, we’re going to have one bang-up celebration here, and everyone on that honor roll is going to be my guest!”