Carry Me Home (73 page)

Click. Hands, wrists, forearms, change, turn into green-rubber lettuce, leaf lettuce, uncured rubber, smelly, sticky. He retreats. He is not of them, has not transformed. They are people. He has known for a thousand years, they, the green and red, ghastly, gruesome, grotesque, rubberized pliables in pain and fear are people. He forces the boat back toward the first shore, but he cannot leave. His feet, ankles, have transformed, have stuck. He strains. Terror. Someone is talking calmly, softly from just behind. “Don’t be afraid, Tyler Mohammed. You don’t have to struggle against us.” His face, he can see his face rubberizing, the eyes stretched vertically to eight, ten, sixteen inches long, his head melting. He screams. He turns toward the calm voice. “Ha,” he thinks. “They don’t expect this. No one has ever attacked them.”

Click. From somewhere, a hemlock branch is in his hands. Not a branch with prickly needles but a staff sharpened to a spear point. He jumps to the nearest boat, thrashes through broken horrified souls toward the helmsman. The storm tosses the craft. He stumbles but surges forward, stumbles again, reaches the helm. The helmsman has vanished.

Click. Fast. Faster. He wills the craft toward the far shore. Faster. The cries of pain, the fear, the woe of the melting dripping cabbage faces straining to break from him, him the helmsman, to remain adrift in pain rather than to face the unknown shore.

“Bad trip, Man?”

Blank stare. Slack jaw.

“Hey, Man, bad trip, huh? You freaked out, Man. You’re a real freak-out, Man. Ha! Freak-Out Man.”

Tony looked out from their squat. Then he looked back at Ty, then back out from their box. They were in San Jose, above Santa Clara Street, downtown—not old, inner-city blight East Coast downtown, but still there were alleys, dumpsters, boxes. Their box was on the flat roof of a three-story building, over a shoe store and wallpaper outlet and respectable apartments. The rooftop was safe, defendable. To one side were the boxes of Frankie “the Kid” Denahee and David “Wildman” Coffee. Sheldon “Fuzzy” Golan and Big Bro Boyson were set up to the other. The roof was OP, NDP—observation post, night defensive position. To the third-floor tenant, if they were quiet, their presence was okay. At each first light they flatten the boxes, drop to the fire escape, split up, withdraw to the park across from the courthouse or wander the few blocks to San Jose State College where Big Bro likes to leer at the coeds. They do not hang together but disperse singly or in pairs. Tony, Fuzzy, Wildman, or the Kid take turns pairing with Big Bro Boyson because Big Bro is immense and dark black and his large round face and huge jaw attract suspicion.

It was now Tony’s turn, not just to hang with Big Bro, and not just this day. But outside the law, outside the civilized fringe of society’s petticoat, with these homeless brothers and cousins, it became Tony’s turn to function. Big Bro had been a Marine. Frankie had served with the 25th Infantry Division; Wildman with the 4th; Fuzzy with the Big Red One. Their numbers, their names, their squats changed, shifted, yet they’d become an informal network watching out for each other. They called Tony Pisano the Catcher from
The Catcher in the Rye
—whatever happened in the field was fair play but should they come too close to the edge, the Catcher, unobtrusive, no questions asked, was there to catch, to protect.

“Bad trip, Man?” Tony repeated.

Still Ty did not respond. Tony folded back the newspaper, continued reading the story inside. In Saigon there had been violent antigovernment riots. Tony had followed the story since November first. Demonstrators and police had clashed repeatedly. President Thieu’s repressive policies and government corruption had been denounced by leaders of South Viet Nam’s opposition. Thieu had responded by firing three of his four corps commanders and had promised to ease restraints on the press. Simultaneously he had accused the demonstrators of trying to undermine the government. Moscow responded to the unrest by pledging increased aid to Hanoi.

Tony did not tell Ty what he was reading. Nor did he mention it to the others. He knew Wildman would freak. Wildman had been a POW for ten days. He and sixteen others had been cut off and captured. During that time he witnessed his closest friend’s decapitation. He saw three guys tied, stretched, eaten by rats. Of the seventeen, thirteen attempted to escape. Wildman, or so his story went, was one of six survivors. He’d been discharged in 1968, had lived on the fringe since ’71.

Tony knew that Fuzzy, if he read the news, would also freak, want to take action. “You know, Man, they always sayin, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Or they thinkin, ‘Won’t happen here.’ Or they aren’t thinkin at all cause they don’t have a fuckin clue. IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!”

Tony had said nothing the first time, perhaps nothing the second, but Fuzzy was focused. “What?” Tony had finally responded.

“Terrorism, Man. Disrupt domestic tranquility, Man. It’s goina happen here cause we’re goina make it happen.”

“Who you aimin at?” Tony asked.

Fuzzy ignored his question. “You know phu-gas?”

“Gas and soap gel,” Tony said. “Like napalm.”

“Yeah. Big cans, Man. Drums. Stick a soup can in the bottom with a small sponge soaked in gasoline. And two wires. Fill the drum one-third with phu-gas. Cap it. Cover it with gravel en shit. Cheap, Man. Set em up all over the city. Wire em together, then send the spark. Gas in the soup can evaporates and gives you a perfect explosive gas-air mix that’ll fire off the whole god fuckin damn drum. Cheap. Just one here, one there. Blow away a few innocents. You watch, Man. When they can’t stop me, Man, you watch this fuckin government come tumblin down.”

“Yeah.” Tony had said. Fuzzy was still in the field.

“Yeah.” Fuzzy’s eyes lit.

“Then what?” Tony had asked.

“Then what the fuck,” Fuzzy had answered.

“Yeah,” Tony had said.

“I could use garbage cans,” Fuzzy said.

“Unlimited supply,” Tony nodded.

Fuzzy bit his lip. Brooded. Tony said no more.

“Whatdaya think?” Bobby was almost giddy. He’d been banging his head against the wall for eight days attempting to jar loose a decision, and finally an answer had come late on a November afternoon as he and Sara sat in the office-mobile in the parking lot of a dilapidated shopping center in Novato, the town south of San Martin. Parked in front of the A & W Root Beer stand, they sat sipping root beer floats, eating cheeseburgers and french fried onion rings to sate Sara’s craving, with soft vanilla ice cream in a cup on the floor for Josh. “A and W Energy Systems,” he said.

It had been a difficult week, adjusting to having been fired, first blaming himself, then rationalizing that Henry Alan Harrison was an idiot, then finally telling Sara, “I don’t distrust my ability to do the work, but I’ve got to learn how to present it.”

“A and W Energy Systems?” Sara giggled. She too verged on giddy. “Andrassy and Wapinski. But people will think it’s something powered by root beer fizz.” They laughed together.

“Maybe W and A,” Bobby said.

Besides the adjustment to being fired they had had to deal with the crisis of Pewel’s health. Bobby had been terrified. To him it was worse than the incident thirty months earlier because then he had believed in his grandfather’s strength, but now he doubted the old man’s resilience.

“Hydrochlorothiazide and Digoxin,” Linda had explained to him at midweek. “They did a full work-up. His left ventricle’s enlarged.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The left ventricle’s the one that pumps the blood to the lungs,” Linda had answered. “When a part of the muscle is insufficient, that part enlarges to compensate for the weakness. They think they can control it with medication.”

“Can he come home?” Bobby had asked.

“Probably by the end of the week.”

Earlier that afternoon Bobby had spoken again with Linda who was at High Meadow. Pewel was in his barn office, she’d said, working on a design for a hospital bed that could lower to sixteen inches off the floor as well as raise to forty-eight inches. “‘So a man like me, damn it’”—Linda quoted Pewel—“‘don’t feel imprisoned way up there on them islands. It’s undignified having to have a nurse help you out of bed when, if the damn thing was normal height, you’d just get up by yourself.’”

Sara glowed in the light from the A & W sign. Her skin was radiant, her hair shiny. She was four and a half months pregnant. She leaned toward him. “I’ve got it!”

Josh nuzzled his snout between them.

“Say it again,” Sara said.

“What?”

“You know, when humans overcompete for resources ...”

“Oh. You mean the stuff I was writing about if we could build energy-efficient, self-sufficient, cost-effective shelters and transportation systems.”

“Yes. To lower people’s ... How did you put it?”

“To lower the competition for resources by lessening our dependence on fossil fuels.” Bobby paused. Sara curled her fingers like a charades player attempting to draw out a respondent. “Ah ... auto fuel consumption drives up petroleum costs in the Third World and forces people to burn their forests for fuel. Environmentally efficient energy systems are beneficial, both immediately to the user, and also over time because they help alleviate international tension decreasing the need for war.”

“See!” Sara was excited. She bounced in her seat, massaged her fingers deeply into Josh’s thick coat. “You said it twice: ‘environmentally efficient energy systems.’”

“Um!” Bobby too was excited. “Environmental Energy Systems.”

“Oh, I like that. Bob, I like that. Your own business.”

“Me too! Environmental Energy Systems, 101 Old Russia Road, San Martin ...”

He let Tyler Mohammed give him a tab of acid but he did not drop it. Fuzzy whipped on him a nickle bag of dew but he did not smoke it. Instead he brooded in his squat, in emotional isolation, brooded about his old man, about the old man always being angry at him, always being disappointed, except when he was in The Corps. Then the old man had had trepidations but he’d been proud.

It was November 10th, Tony’s twenty-seventh birthday, the 199th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Tony watched Ty crash through consciousness into the wherever. “Snore softly, Bro,” he mumbled. He crawled from the box, quietly sidled past Big Bro Boyson, out cold, on the roof. Tony turned, came back, covered Boyson with a piece of carpeting they’d found. Then he moved to the edge, sat on the parapet. Most city lights were out. The late news was over. From the roof Tony could see the bluish light of a TV in a room on the second floor of a building across the street. Snore softly, Bro, he thought. Dream softly, Bro. Make the tunnel go away. Let the children run. Let their mother duck. Let the car crash into an abutment instead of jumping ...

On the street there were two people, teenagers, he thought, two girls. He watched them glance back over their shoulders, then dash across to his side of the street. They brought a smile to his face, how they were dressed in bell-bottom dungarees with bells large enough to conceal small dogs, and one in a tank top even though it was too chill for that. They scurried to the corner, turned, retreated, ran into his alley, disappeared in the darkness. Don’t mean nothin, he thought. Then he saw three men across the street. “What the fuck.” Something in Tony Pisano was grating. One of the men had a bat. His mind began racing. The street was safe, had been safe, but things were changing. Are they after me? he thought. Would they bring attention to the roof squats? He crouched behind the parapet, glanced to the boxes, low-crawled to the alley side, peered over the side parapet. He could not discern young girls from dumpsters. His paranoia spiked. He fell back to hands and knees, began puffing, feeling drained, feeling as if he needed to lie flat, in a prone firing position, maybe crawl into a shell. He moved to the front corner, craned his head out over the parapet. Again Tony ducked, froze. His arms trembled.

Then Tony heard, “Back this way, Man.”

“Yeah. They gotta be.”

“Damn whore.”

“Last time she does that, Man.” The three men laughed.

Tony peered over. The men moved into the alley. He could see one hanging back. The other two disappeared into the dark. Tony shivered. His teeth chattered. He thought, vaguely, he could rouse Big Bro, Wildman. He could ... Then he thought, somehow he deserved this, deserved for things to be shitty, for atrocities to follow him. It was natural. It was supposed to be like this. Then, “Like fuckin hell.” The words shook from his clamped jaw. “Like fuckin hell.” The words, quiet, came from his gut. He was still trembling when he dropped over the edge, softly, to the fire escape, softly dropping to the second-floor balcony above the alley. The man with the bat was silhouetted against the opening to the street. No one else was visible. Tony hugged the wall, stood stock still. He heard movement at the dumpsters below him but it was too dark to see. Then, “Ha! Gottcha! Com’ere.”

“Let me go!”

“You owe me—”

“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!!” The explosion was Tony’s voice, so full of violence, the young man leaped, jolted back; the watcher at alleymouth stumbled, dropped back, back-pedaled to the far side of the street. The man with the bat crouched into a fighting stance. Tony was silent, frozen, rigid. One of the girls began crying.

Then, from the man with the bat. “Just grab her and let’s go.”

And from the roof. “LEAVE HER. LEAVE OR WE’LL BLOW YER FUCKEN HEADS OFF!”

“Hey”—nervous, backing out—“hey. I’m goin, Man. Hey, we’re outta here.”

November passed. Viet Nam was creeping back into the news. Busy men like Wapinski missed the onset, ignored the page 32, then page 12, then page 8 stories, but idle men, men of the street, of the grates and rooftops, men with time to spend, talked amongst themselves of their suspicions. By mid-December they began to stir. Phuoc Long Province: Don Luan and Bo Tuc cities came under heavy attack and were overrun. Song Be Airfield, Duc Phong, Firebase Bunard all were hit. Gerald Ford, Congress, did nothing. America prepared for Christmas. The men of the street stirred.

“I been there, Man. I fired shells from Bunard,” said Frankie “The Kid” Denahee.