“You just got eighty-sixed, Mr. Vickers,” Jo Anne said.
“I’m eighty-sixed from a teenage dump? How bad does it get?”
“It’s not funny, Daddy,” Darrel said.
“Quiet,” Mr. Vickers said. “I’m the one getting barbecued.”
“Take yourself and your father out of here, Darrel,” Jo Anne said.
Darrel’s eyes were the rheumy blue of marbles you might see in the murk at the bottom of an aquarium. They slipped across Jo Anne’s face and hair and throat and breasts, then lighted on her mouth. “Bitch,” he said.
“Hey! None of that!” Mr. Vickers said. He pointed at Jo Anne and me. “Soon as you close, we’ll go for a drink.”
“Where?” she said.
I couldn’t believe she would entertain the idea.
“A new club downtown,” he said. “Strictly class, no riffraff. They got good food.”
“Wait here.”
“No, we’re not going to do this, Mr. Vickers,” I said.
“Listen up,” he said. “We either settle this now, or I’ll give you a boxing lesson you won’t forget. With one hand, kid. In public.”
I heard a loud rattling and rumbling sound, like metal wheels grinding heavily on a hard surface. Jo Anne rounded a counter dragging a huge bucket sloshing with a foamy aggregate of gray water, Ajax, kitchen grease, liquid floor wax, Lysol, dirt, and the swab-out from the toilet bowls and urinals. The long, thick strings of the mop looked like clumps of dead eels among the bubbles.
She swung the mop across Mr. Vickers’s face, the strings wrapping around his head, saturating his face and chest, showering the next booth. He fell backward, landing on his spine, a piece of mop string curled on his cheek. She turned in a circle and swung with both hands and bounced Darrel off a table that was bolted to the floor. Before he could get up, she plunged the mop into the bucket and whipped it down on his head. The floor was sopping. Both father and son were gagging and spitting water and string, both slipping and struggling to stand, like drunk ice skaters. A little girl with her mother pointed and said, “Look, Mommy, funny men fall down.” A police car that had been passing by made a U-turn, its flasher on, its siren off.
Jo Anne prodded the Vickerses out the door, into the night, jabbing them in the face each time they tried to speak.
“The Golden Arches have nothing on us,” she said. “Come bac
k anytime. Bring the whole family.”
God, I loved Jo Anne McDuffy.
Chapter Fifteen
THAT NIGHT THERE was dry thunder in the hills, then lightning split the sky and hailstones came down like shrapnel on a tin roof. Nonetheless, I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of a place where I did not want to go. In the dream, the moon was down, the hills dark humps in the distance, the night still except for the wind and the Chinese blowing their bugles behind their lines. A command post was perched at the top of the grade above a meandering ditch piled with sandbags and reinforced by telegraph poles that had been sawed down by a railway track and dragged to the firing line. Far down the slope, trip flares popped in the sky, then swung inside their own heat and incandescence above a moonscape that contained not one blade of grass or cup of potable water, a piece of hell that contained no living thing other than the organisms dissolving the dead half-buried in shell holes.
Two soldiers were running through a byzantine network of trenches up the hillside, trying to get back to their lines from a listening post that a Chinese probe had stumbled on. Covering fire full of tracer round streamed over their heads. Then flamethrowers captured by the Chinese burst alight and arched over the trenches, filling the air with a smell like carbon monoxide and a whooshing sound, followed by a secondary sound like the mewing of a kitten.
In my sleep, I tried to fight my way out of the dream. I felt I was encased in mud or wet cement. I wanted to fill my head with alcohol or opiates or pornographic images to prevent what I was about to witness. The ground was shaking from the 105 rounds bursting on the hillsides to the north, then someone screwed up and an artillery round came in short and slammed me to the earth, ripping the breath from my lungs. My rifle flew from my hands. My steel pot scissored down on the bridge of my nose. My nostrils and mouth were clogged with dirt that stank of cordite. I knew I was about to die.
“Wake up,” a voice was saying.
“Medic!” I heard myself say.
“You’re having a dream,” the voice said. A hand shook my shoulder, then shook it harder. “It’s Cotton. You got the screaming meemies.”
“Where am I?”
“In the bunkhouse. Who’s Saber?”
“My best friend.”
“Some guy who bought it?”