We Are Not in Pakistan (23 page)

Larry goes exploring. The hobby room is on the third floor. Needlepoint and knitting at one end, workbench with tools at the other. A slender young woman in spike heels comes out of a small office. He would have preferred someone with her neat classic looks for his son instead of the dumpy bo-he-me-an that boy married. The woman says her name is Ann. He tells her his. She is the Activities Coordinator and can teach him to use “the net.”

“What do I need a net for?” Larry says. “Ain't goin' fishing.”

She waits till he's stopped laughing.

“Most people want to check the obituaries,” she says, as if promising a child a treat.

He sits down in the chair beside hers, facing the monitor. He notices her bare ring finger. Up close, her skin is like Trudy's when Trudy was between thirty and forty. This woman should be married. He wishes he had a younger son to whom he could introduce her.

“Your perfume — what's it's name?” He's always had a sensitive nose.

“Celine Dion.”

“Frog perfume,” he says. “Knew it.”

“She's French-Canadian.”

“Same difference.”

“You want to learn?” she says.

He may as well find some old friends. “Make sure my name isn't listed,” he tells Ann. She pecks at the keyboard.

“You can go right by the ones with that Star of David beside them,” Larry says. “Don't have any Jew friends.”

Larry's own obit will be like his older brother Eddie's, with the Stars and Stripes beside his name. After that he won't have to see the flag burned or trampled by un-American peace “warriors” moaning about unilateralism and flying the UN flag higher than the flag of their own country.

When he leaves, Ann shakes Larry's hand and tells him her last name as if he were deaf, which, despite his other ailments, he is not. “Bernstein.”

Jews can be so over-sensitive.

A few days later, the woman across the way in number 102 is talking so loud Larry comes out into the hall in his skivvies. She doesn't want the young administrative assistant sticking up an eight-by-ten photo of young Bush on the wall near her door.

“Put it up with the Halloween decorations,” says the woman.

The boy bites the inside of his cheek. Like Eddie when he didn't know what he was supposed to do.

“Let
me
have that,” Larry says. “I'll put it up in our living room.”

The boy shrugs, hands it over and slouches away.

Larry stands with his belly hanging slightly over the waistband of his shorts, wishing the hall felt warmer. He points to his scar and tells the woman from 102 how he got his Purple Heart from taking a bullet after the kamikaze, during the strafing. He was fighting the Good War, sacrificing time he could have spent drinking beer and kissing Trudy. Eddie was killed in action off the coast of North Africa, he tells her. “We get behind our President in a time of war. The government always knows something we don't.”

“You line up right behind Bush along with the other sixty-two percent, sheep all of you,” she says. “You approve of him, just like the Germans got behind Hitler. And look what happened to them — they followed that madman right over the edge. I didn't vote for your smiley warmonger, nor did the majority in this country.”

“So Al Gore would have done a better job of dealing with terrorists?”

“It's Bush who's the terrorist,” she says, and slams the door.

Larry takes the Bush photo in and tells Trudy all about it. He gives it to her, but Trudy doesn't put it up in his living room or outside his door. Not that day, nor the next. And she smiles at the peacenik next time she passes her, smiles with Larry right beside her as he escorts her to the dining room. That smile is good for an hour of bickering like he and Trudy haven't had in years.

Larry thinks “terrorist” again when he visits Dr. Bakhtiar, the raghead at the adjoining medical clinic, who has checked his pacemaker every month since he and Trudy got on the waiting list for their condo. He can't not think “terrorist” — he's been watching enough Fox and CNN to hear it every three minutes. He gives his
Medicare and Medigap cards to the terrorist's secretary, the girl who calls herself a medical assistant.

“Just don't send the bill to me,” he says, and laughs.

She doesn't look up.

Nothing's free. Larry would like to tell Dr. Bakhtiar that freedom isn't free, either. It took young men like Eddie — strafed by the Luftwaffe — and him with his Purple Heart to hand it to the likes of the raghead. On a platter.

He takes one of the straight-backed chairs in the waiting room and grabs a
Newsweek.
The cover photo shows a GI standing someplace in Iraq, whining, “What's Plan B?” That man probably can't imagine things Larry can, like being captured by Germans and digging trenches or being tortured in a POW camp in Japan.

Dr. Bakhtiar's pension's going to be bigger than his own, and Larry doesn't like that one little bit. He bets the raghead got a scholarship someone like Ronan could have gotten, if Ronan had ever wanted to go to college. Larry is glad there won't be much left in Social Security for the raghead's retirement — except that means there won't be much left for Ronan either.

Goddamn immigrants nowadays, they have it easy.

Larry's pacemaker kicks in. He's remembering how his grandpa bought a hundred and sixty acres from the land office for ten dollars after he passed through Ellis Island, how he paid two dollars to the land agent, cleared the land, built a home and farmed five years to keep it. Larry still has the land patent that transferred the title for six dollars, signed by Abraham Lincoln.

Doctors didn't send their bills to Medicare in his grandpa's day, either. You got sick and you paid. Often you — or the doctor, if he was a soft touch — went bankrupt. Medicare is progress, even if the pharmacist gets Larry his Coumadin pills from Canada.

Sitting alone in Dr. Bakhtiar's examination room, Larry's
almost bicepless arms dangle from a blue cotton smock tied behind his neck.

Maybe the raghead kills Americans slowly, turning up the heartbeat, turning up the pace, till millions of hearts drop dead from exhaustion.

His son's going to drop dead from exhaustion — moving so fast he doesn't have time to get his computer to remind him to call Trudy.

Dr. Bakhtiar comes in at last.

The raghead doesn't apologize for keeping Larry waiting. Brown hands flip through Larry's chart. Dr. Bakhtiar's black brush moustache bobs as he purses his lips.

Larry has never noticed Dr. Bakhtiar's touch the other times he's been examined, but today the doctor's hands feel as soothing as Trudy's on his chest.

Larry pulls away:
the raghead could be gay.

Dr. Bakhtiar says the cholesterol that has hardened the walls of Larry's coronary arteries is thickening, “like an octopus squeezing your heart. Be more careful — eat margarine, take walks.”

Larry says, “I haven't eaten margarine since the war.”

“Which one?” the raghead says.

Larry realizes he's serious.

“World War II. You've heard of it?”

“Ah well, we've had so many since then.”

“Skirmishes,” says Larry. There's the ship he so often sees in his mind, Eddie at the rail, with that Rhett Butler moustache he was growing back then. Eddie standing on a deck by the lifeboats, waving his cap. That moment before the explosion and the smoke.

Dr. Bakhtiar says nothing.

He has nothing to say.

•   •   •

A week later, Ronan comes to visit. Twenty years old, in his McDonald's cap, the logo shirt stretched tight across his muscles. The Elvis grin he had at three. He tells Larry his heart is telling him to marry his girlfriend.

Twenty years old and just dying to hand over his freedom to a wife and babies.

“What's her name?” Larry asks, stalling. This is what Ronan, his grandson Ronan, wants to do with his freedom — the freedom that cost him a bullet, cost him a brother who could have shown him how to grow this old?

It gets worse: the girlfriend's name is Maria. “You're going to marry a Mexican?”

“She's Catholic,” says Ronan.

“So's the Pope,” says Larry, “but we don't have a lot of wops in our family. Older than you, I bet?”

“No, she's eighteen.”

“I was eighteen when we got married,” says Trudy. Larry yearns for the old closed kitchen. “And you were twenty,” she finishes.

The boy isn't asking Larry's permission. He's telling him.

Ronan puts his arms around Larry. “Bye, Granddad.”

All the times Ronan put his arms around him before. All the times he carried Ronan when that boy got tired.

When Ronan is gone, Larry goes up to the hobby room.

He has learned to Google. He can't find a law against them getting married.

There has to be one. There ought to be one.

When he returns to the apartment, Trudy says she thinks Ronan and Maria have already been sleeping together.

“That's her problem,” says Larry.

“Oh, it'll be his too,” Trudy says. “A paternity test is all it takes.”

He could swear Trudy is feeling better than he is, but she doesn't feel up to cooking much. She wants to go downstairs to the dining room every time there's music, which is almost every night. But the residents' talk kills his appetite — their organs have lives and histories of their own.

“It costs us six ninety-nine apiece,” Larry says. “I can't afford it every night.”

“Remember when we'd jitterbug till three in the morning? You held me up on the floor.” says Trudy. “It's not like you have to learn tap-dancing. Just live a little.”

That's what Eddie used to say. Maybe she's still Eddie's girl.

After lunch the next day, Trudy is taking a nap. Larry cannot stand one more nap. He doesn't want to be babysat by television. He doesn't want to play Bingo in the lounge. He's read
Prevention
and all his
Reader's Digest
magazines. It's raining and he can't go for a walk like the raghead advised.

Back to the hobby room, to the white screen, the little box at its centre. He sits down in the plastic chair in front of it.

Trudy, Eddie. Eddie, Trudy. All Eddie had to do was last a few more hours in the water and rescuers would have picked him up. And he would have come home.

Trudy might have married him, even if he had been wounded. Then she might have lived a little. Jesus.

Larry takes his glasses from his pocket and polishes them against the ribbing of his shirt.

When the kamikaze hit Larry's ship, Eddie kept him going all night, yes he did. Larry was damn well going to tread water in the Pacific longer than Eddie had in the Mediterranean. He wouldn't
let his mother get another telegram saying her son was missing in action. And after a whole year, another telegram informing her he was killed in action. He didn't know if Trudy had mourned for Eddie — she was only seventeen, after all — but he swore he wouldn't let her mourn a second time. And he swore he'd propose to her if he ever made it out of the water.

Ten thousand dollars insurance and compensation of five thousand — that's what Eddie was worth to his parents, said the government. But what happened to those lifeboats? How long was he in the water — longer than Larry? Why wasn't he rescued, as Larry was? How come no one ever contacted Larry through the Legion or Navy in almost sixty years to say, Hey buddy, you know that ship, the
Paul Hamilton.
I was on it, and I survived. I remember your brother …

Someone must know. Someone must remember Eddie.

Larry types “Edward Reilly” in the little white box. A fine name, but there are Reillys aplenty out of Ireland; he adds the ship's name and hits Google Search.

As he blinks, Eddie's name comes right up in front of him.
Personnel Lost at Sea.

Larry clicks left, clicks right, hitting anything underlined, ignoring that his pacemaker has kicked in.

Here's something. He leans forward and reads.
April 20, 1944: The SS Paul Hamilton was torpedoed by a Junker JU-88 off the coast of Algiers. It carried high explosives and bombs along with five hundred and four men.

What stupidity.

No wonder Eddie's body and those of his mates were “non-recoverable.”

Scrolling and clicking further, Larry learns that a British steamship loaded with explosives and cotton bales exploded in Bombay docks, sank eighteen merchant ships and injured over a thousand in April 1944. That a Japanese Navy destroyer was torpedoed by a
US submarine and one hundred and thirty-six died, also in April, 1944. But these do not cause his tears.

Eddie.

He prints what he can, turns off the light and heads back to his apartment. He stops opposite the peacenik's door. In that second, he remembers what he said: “The government always knows something we don't.”

A singer, bass player and guitarist play on a stage in the corner of the dining room. Larry watches Trudy's foot beating time to the music. She's one elegant lady in her light pink jacket dress and pearls. And even if she was Eddie's girl once, Larry's the one she married. He's hidden the printouts under his mattress, because he wouldn't know how to comfort her if she cried.

The singer would look better in any colour but black. Most young women would look a lot better in any outfit that isn't black, but they seem to follow some Taliban dress decree.

Some of the residents in wheelchairs can't even clap between songs. On the bulletin board, Larry read the names of those who have “passed on.” Two people added to the population of the dead today. Two who won't take up any more food, clothing, shelter, social security or medical care.

Time to take the raghead's advice — he'll take a walk before it gets dark. Leaving the building, Larry stays in its shadow alongside the lawn.