Gone South (3 page)

“Okay, okay.” Steve brought out a battered wallet, opened it, and slapped a five-dollar bill into Curtis Nowell’s hand. “I’ll get it back sooner or later.”

“You boys ain’t got trouble enough, you gotta gamble your money away?” Joe sneered.

Dan set his cup down. A hot pulse had begun beating at his temples. “You laid a bet,” he said as he lifted a wintry gaze to the two men, “on how many corpses I left in ’Nam?”

“Yeah, I bet it’d be more than twenty,” Curtis said, “and Steve bet it’d be —”

“I get the drift.” Dan stood up. It was a slow, easy movement though it hurt his knees. “You used me and what I did to win you some cash, Curtis?”

“Sure did.” It was said proudly. Curtis started to push the fiver into his pocket.

“Let me see the money.”

Still grinning. Curtis held the bill out.

Dan didn’t smile. His hand whipped forward, took the money, and had it in his grip before Curtis’s grin could drop. “Whoa!” Curtis said. “Give it here, man!”

“You used me and what I did? What I
lived
through? I think I deserve half of this, don’t you?” Without hesitation, Dan tore the bill in two.

“Hey, man! It’s against the fuckin’ law to tear up money!”

“Sue me. Here’s your half.”

Curtis’s face had reddened. “I oughta bust your fuckin’ head is what I oughta do!”

“Maybe you ought to. Try, at least.”

Sensing trouble, a few of the other men had started edging closer. Curtis’s grin returned, only this time it was mean. “I could take you with one hand, you skinny old bastard.”

“You might be right about that.” Dan watched the younger man’s eyes, knowing that in them he would see the punch coming before Curtis’s arm was cocked for the strike. “Might be. But before you try, I want you to know that I haven’t raised my hand in anger to a man since I left ’Nam. I wasn’t the best soldier, but I did my job and nobody could ever say I’d gone south.” Dan saw a nerve in Curtis’s left eyelid begin to tick. Curtis was close to swinging. “If you swing on me,” Dan said calmly, “you’ll have to kill me to put me down. I won’t be used or made a fool of, and I won’t have you winnin’ a bet on how many bodies I left in my footprints. Do you understand that, Curtis?”

“I think you’re full of shit,” Curtis said, but his grin had weakened. Blisters of sweat glistened on his cheeks and forehead. He glanced to the right and left, taking in the half-dozen or so onlookers, then back to Dan. “You think you’re somethin’
special
’cause you’re a vet?”

“Nothin’ special about me,” Dan answered. “I just want you to know that I learned how to kill over there. I got better at it than I wanted to be. I didn’t kill all those Cong with a gun or a knife. Some of ’em I had to use my hands. Curtis, I love peace more than any man alive, but I won’t take disrespect. So go on and swing if you want to, I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

“Man, I could break your damn neck with one punch,” Curtis said, but the way he said it told Dan he was trying to decide whether to push this thing any further.

Dan waited. The decision was not his to make.

A few seconds ticked past. Dan and Curtis stared at each other.

“Awful hot to be fightin’,” Joe said. “Grown men, I swear!”

“Hell, it’s only five dollars,” Steve added.

Curtis took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled smoke through his nostrils. Dan kept watching him, his gaze steady and his face placid though the pain in his skull had racheted up a notch.

“Shit,” Curtis said at last. He spat out a shred of tobacco. “Give it here, then.” He took the half that Dan offered. “Keep you from tapin’ it back together and spendin’ it, at least.”

“There ya go. Ya’ll kiss and make up,” Joe suggested.

Curtis laughed, and Dan allowed a smile. The men who’d thronged around began moving away. Dan knew that Curtis wasn’t a bad fellow; Curtis just had a bad attitude sometimes and needed a little sense knocked into him. But on this day, with the sun burning down and no breeze stirring the weeds of Death Valley, Dan was very glad push had not come to shove.

“Sorry,” Steve told him. “Guess we didn’t think it’d bother you. The bet, I mean.”

“Now you know. Let’s forget it, all right?”

Curtis and Steve moved off. Dan took the Excedrin bottle from his pocket and popped another aspirin. His palms were damp, not from fear of Curtis, but from fear of what he might have done had that particular demon been loosed.

“You okay?” Joe was watching him carefully.

“Yeah. Headache.”

“You get a lot of those, don’t you?”

“A few.”

“You seen a doctor?”

“Yeah.” Dan put the bottle away. “Says it’s migraine.”

“Is that so?”

“Uh-huh.” He knows I’m lyin’, Dan thought. There was no need to tell any of the men here about his sickness. He crunched the aspirin between his teeth and washed it down with the last of his iced tea.

“Curtis is gonna get his clock cleaned one fine day,” Joe said. “Fella don’t have no sense.”

“He hasn’t lived enough, that’s his problem.”

“Right. Not like us old relics, huh?” Joe looked up at the sky, measuring the journey of the sun. “Did you see some hell over there, Dan?”

Dan settled himself back down beside his friend’s chair. He let the question hang for a moment, and then he said, “I did. We all did.”

“I just missed gettin’ drafted. I supported you fellas all the way, though. I didn’t march in the streets or nothin’.”

“Might’ve been better if you had. We were over there way too long.”

“We could’ve won it,” Joe said. “Yessir. We could’ve swept the floor with them bastards if we’d just —”

“That’s what I used to think,” Dan interrupted quietly. “I used to think if it wasn’t for the protesters, we could’ve turned that damn country into a big asphalt parkin’ lot.” He drew his knees up to his chest. The aspirin was kicking in now, dulling the pain. “Then I went up to Washington, and I walked along that wall. You know, where the names are. Lots of names up there. Fellas I knew. Young boys, eighteen and nineteen, and what was left of ’em wouldn’t fill a bucket. I’ve thought and thought about it, but I can’t figure out what we would’ve had if we’d won. If we’d killed every Charlie to a man, if we’d marched right into Hanoi and torched it to the ground, if we’d come home the heroes like the Desert Storm boys did … what would we have won?”

“Respect, I guess,” Joe said.

“No, not even that. It was past time to get out. I knew it when I saw all those names on that black wall. When I saw mothers and fathers tracin’ their dead sons’ names on paper to take home with ’em because that’s all they had left, I knew the protesters were right. We never could’ve won it. Never.”

“Gone south,” Joe said.

“What?”

“Gone south. You told Curtis nobody could ever say you’d gone south. What’s that mean?”

Dan realized he’d used the term, but hearing it from the mouth of another man had taken him by surprise. “Somethin’ we said in ’Nam,” he explained. “Somebody screwed up — or cracked up — we said he’d gone south.”

“And you never screwed up?”

“Not enough to get myself or anybody else killed. That was all we wanted: to get out alive.”

Joe grunted. “Some life you came back to, huh?”

“Yeah,” Dan said, “some life.”

Joe lapsed into silence, and Dan offered nothing else. Vietnam was not a subject Dan willingly talked about. If anyone wanted to know and they pressed it, he might tell them hesitantly about the Snake Handlers and their exploits, the childlike bar girls of Saigon and the jungle snipers he’d been trained to hunt and kill, but never could he utter a word about two things: the village and the dirty silver rain.

The sun rose higher and the morning grew old. It was a slow day for tickets. Near ten-thirty a man in a white panel truck stopped at Death Valley and the call went up for two men who had experience in house-painting. Jimmy Staggs and Curtis Nowell got a ticket, and after they left in the panel truck everybody else settled down to waiting again.

Dan felt the brutal heat sapping him. He had to go sit in his truck for a while to get out of the sun. A couple of the younger bucks had brought baseball gloves and a ball, and they peeled off their wet shirts and pitched some as Dan and the older men watched. The guy with the hand-lettered sign around his neck was sitting on the curb, looking expectantly in the direction from which the ticket givers would be coming like God’s emissaries. Dan wanted to go over and tell him to take that sign off, that he shouldn’t beg, but he decided against it. You did what you had to do to get by.

Again the young man reminded Dan of someone else. Farrow was the name. It was the color of the hair and the boyish face, Dan thought. Farrow, the kid from Boston. Well, they’d all been kids back in those days, hadn’t they? But thinking about Farrow stirred up old, deep pain, and Dan shunted the haunting images aside.

Dan had been born in Shreveport on the fifth of May in 1950. His father, who had been a sergeant in the Marine Corps but who liked to be called “Major” by his fellow workers at the Pepsi bottling plant, had departed this life in 1973 by route of a revolver bullet to the roof of the mouth. Dan’s mother, never in the best of health, had gone to south Florida to live with an older sister. Dan understood she had part interest in a flower shop and was doing all right. His sister, Kathy, older than he by three years, lived in Taos, New Mexico, where she made copper-and-turquoise jewelry. Of the two of them, Kathy had been the rebel against the major’s rigid love-it-or-leave-it patriotism. She’d escaped just past her seventeenth birthday, jumping into a van with a band of folksingers — “scum of the earth,” the major had called them —  and hitting the road to the golden West. Dan, the good son, had finished high school, kept his hair cut short, had become a carpenter’s apprentice, and had been driven by his father to the Marine recruiting center to do his duty as a “good American.”

And now Dan was waiting, in the city of his birth, for a ticket in the hot stillness of Death Valley.

Around eleven-thirty another panel truck pulled up. Dan was always amazed at how quickly everybody could move when the day was passing and tickets were in short supply. Like hungry animals the men jostled for position around the panel truck. Dan was among them. This time the call was for four laborers to patch and tar a warehouse’s roof. Joe Yates got a ticket, but Dan was left behind when the panel truck drove away.

As twelve noon passed, some of the men began leaving. Experience taught that if you hadn’t gotten a ticket by noon, you’d struck out. There was always tomorrow. Rain or shine, Death Valley and its citizens would be here. As one o’clock approached, Dan got into his pickup, started the engine, and drove through the charred-meat smoke for home.

He lived in a small apartment complex about six miles from Death Valley, but on the same side of town. Near his apartment stood a combination gas station and grocery store, and Dan stopped to go inside and check the store’s bulletin board. On it he’d placed an ad that said “Carpenter Needs Work, Reasonable Rates” with his telephone number duplicated on little tags to be torn off by potential customers. He wanted to make sure all the tags weren’t gone; they were not. He spent a few minutes talking to Leon, the store’s clerk, and asked again if Mr. Khasab, the Saudi-Arabian man who owned the store, needed any help. As usual, Leon said Mr. Khasab had Dan’s application on file.

The apartment building was made of tawny-colored bricks, and on these blistering days the little rooms held heat like closed fists. Dan got out of his truck, his back sopping wet, and opened his mailbox with his key. He was running an ad in the Jobs Wanted section of the classifieds this week, with his phone number and address, and he was hoping for any response. Inside the mailbox were two envelopes. The first, addressed to “Occupant,” was from a city councilman running for reelection. The second had his full name on it — Mr. Daniel Lewis Lambert — and its return address was the First Commercial Bank of Shreveport.

“Confidential Information” was typed across the envelope in the lower left corner. Dan didn’t like the looks of that. He tore open the envelope, unfolded the crisp white sheet of paper within, and read it.

It was from the bank’s loan department. He’d already assumed as much, though this stiff formality was not Mr. Jarrett’s style. It took him only a few seconds to read the paragraph under the
Dear Mr. Lambert,
and when he’d finished he felt as if he’d just taken a punch to the heart.

…
valued loan customer, however … action as we see proper at this time … due to your past erratic record of payment and current delinquency … surrender the keys, registration, and appropriate papers … 1990 Chevrolet pickup truck, color metallic mist, engine serial number…

“Oh my God,” Dan whispered.

…
immediate repossession …

Dan blinked, dazed in the white glare of the scorching sun.

They were taking his truck away from him.

W
HEN HE PUSHED THROUGH
the revolving door into the First Commercial Bank at ten minutes before two, Dan was wearing his best clothes: a short-sleeve white shirt, a tie with pale blue stripes, and dark gray slacks. He’d removed his baseball cap and combed his hair, and on his feet were black shoes instead of the workman’s boots. He’d expected the usual cold jolt of full-blast air-conditioning, but the bank’s interior wasn’t much cooler than the street. The air-conditioning had conked out, the tellers sweating in their booths. Dan walked to the elevator, his fresh shirt already soaked. In his right hand was the envelope, and in the envelope was the letter of repossession.

He was terrified.

The loan department was on the second floor. Before he went through the solemn oak door, Dan stopped at a water fountain to take another aspirin. His hands had started trembling. The time of reckoning had arrived.

The signature on the letter was not that of Robert “Bud” Jarrett. A man named Emory Blanchard had signed it. Beneath Blanchard’s signature was a title:
Manager.
Two months ago Bud Jarrett had been the loan department’s manager. As much as he could, Dan steeled himself for whatever lay ahead, and he opened the door and walked through.