“When I climbed back up, Charlie started firing from the ville and the captain called in the arty,” he said. “Then we were all hauling butt. You remember? It was short. That’s when Martinez got it. So I just never said anything about it. The next day we got into that minefield. I couldn’t keep it all straight in my head anymore.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Lyle. You were a good soldier.”
“No, I told you before, I dug it down there. The ragin’ Cajun, sliding down the tunnel to give Charlie a red-hot enema. What a hand job.”
“I’ll give you some advice someone once gave me. Get Vietnam out of your life. We already fought our war. Let the people who made it grieve on it.”
“I don’t grieve. I believe I’ve been reborn. I don’t care if you accept that or not. I give those people out there something they ain’t found anyplace else. And I couldn’t give it to them unless God gave it to me first. And if He gave it to me, that means I’ve been forgiven.”
“What is it you give them?”
“Power. A chance to be what they’re not. They wake up scared every morning of their lives. I show them it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. I grew up uneducated, in foster homes, hustled drugs on the street, spent time in a couple of jails, washed dishes for a living with this crippled hand. But the man on high got my attention, and, son, I ain’t did bad. . . . Sorry, that word’s just one I can’t seem to get away from.”
“That sounds a little bit vain, Lyle.”
“I never said I was perfect. Look, make me one promise. Watch out for my sister. I suspect you’ve got personal feelings toward her anyway, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“She said you poked her when y’all were in college.”
I looked at the side of his face, the scars that leaked from one eye, then I gazed at the bayou and a black man fishing in a pirogue and drummed my fingers on the leather seat.
“I’d better get home now,” I said. “The next time you have information for me, I’d appreciate your bringing it to me at my office.”
“Don’t get bent out of shape. Drew made it with a lot of guys. So you were one of them. Why pretend you were born fifty years old?”
“I changed my mind. I really don’t need a ride all the way home, Lyle. Just drop me at the four-corners. I’m going to ask Bootsie to come in town for some crawfish.”
“Whatever you want, Loot.” He screwed the cap on his whiskey bottle, dropped it on the seat, and started the engine. “You might think I have a head full of spiders, but if I do, I don’t try to hide them from anybody. You get my meaning?”
“I want you to take this in the right spirit, Lyle. You don’t have the franchise on guilt about Vietnam, and you’re not the only guy who had his life set back on track by some power outside himself. I think the problem here is peddling it to other people for money.”
“You ever see a bishop drive a Volkswagen?”
“I’ll get off right there at the corner. Thanks very much for the evening.”
I stepped out onto the gravel road, closed the car door, and walked towa
rd a clapboard bar that vibrated with the noise from inside. Lyle’s fire-engine-red convertible grew small in the distance, then disappeared in the purple shadows between the sugarcane fields.
I had to wait to use the pay phone in the bar, and I drank a 7-Up at a table in the corner and watched a drunk black-haired girl in blue jeans dance by herself in front of the bandstand. Her undulating, slim body was haloed in cigarette smoke.
I hadn’t meant to be self-righteous with Lyle. I truly felt for him and his family and what they had endured at the hands of the father and the prostitute named Mattie, but Lyle also made me angry in a way that I couldn’t quite describe to myself. It wasn’t simply that he pandered to an audience of ignorant and fearful people or that he misused the money they gave him; it went even deeper than that. Maybe it was the fact that Lyle had truly been inside the fire storm, had seen human behavior at its worst and best, had made a mistake down in a tunnel that perhaps beset his conscience with a level of pain that could only be compared to having one’s skin ripped off in strips with a pair of pliers. And he sold it all as cheaply as you might market the plastic flowers that adorned the stage of his live TV show.
Yes, that was it, I thought. He had made a meretricious enterprise out of an experience that you share with no one except those who’ve been there, too. I don’t believe that’s an elitist attitude, either. There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut.
How do you tell someone that a drunk blue-collar girl dancing in a low-rent Louisiana bar, her black hair curled around her neck like a rope, makes you remember a dead Vietnamese girl on a trail three klicks from her village? She wore sandals, floppy black shorts, a white blouse, and she lay on her back, with one leg folded under her, her eyes closed as though in sleep, the only disfiguration in her appearance a dried stream of blood that curled from the corner of her mouth like a red snake. Why was she there? I don’t know. Was she killed by American or enemy fire? I don’t know that either. I only remember that at the time, I wanted to see a weapon near her person, to believe that she was one of them. But there was no weapon, and in all probability she was simply a schoolgirl returning from visiting someone in another village when she was killed.
That was my third day in-country. That was twenty-six years ago. I had news for Lyle. He might be honest about the spiders crawling around in his head, but he wouldn’t get rid of them by trying to sell them through a television tube. You offer them the real thing, Brother Lyle, you tell them the real story about what happened over there, and they’ll put you in a cage and take out your brains with an ice cream scoop.
CHAPTER 6
THE NEXT MORNING I telephoned Drew to ask her about the intruder in her kitchen, but there was no answer, and later when I went by her house she wasn’t home. I stuck my business card in the corner of her screen door.
As I drove back down East Main under the oaks that arched over the street, I saw her jogging along the sidewalk in a T-shirt and a pair of purple shorts, her tan skin glistening with sweat. She raised her arm and waved at me, her breasts big and round against her shirt, but I didn’t stop. She could call me if she wanted to, I told myself.
I drove home for lunch and stopped my pickup at the mailbox on the dirt road at the foot of my property. Among the letters and bills was a heavy brown envelope with no postage and my name written across it with no address. I cut the engine, sorted out the junk mail, then sliced open the brown envelope with my pocket knife. Inside were a typed letter and twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. The letter read: