The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (70 page)

“Look where we are. We fought and shed blood for this nation and look where we are. I’m looking for a few good men,” Rambo said, and smiled at the tall, skinny guy nearest him. But the skinny man plucked at his beard nervously and never looked up from the ground. Some of the older guys, one black, had done tours in Southeast Asia, but they had stood clear of the others who were liars. For an instant Rambo had felt something in him sink, the feeling he got when no one believed him. But Rambo quickly caught himself.

“This is America! The land we laid down our lives for!” What Rambo had liked was that he didn’t have to do much talking. They all knew what it was about. They had fought and suffered for the U.S., but the U.S. had no place for them. Rambo saw them nodding their heads, all eyes on him; except the older ones who were drifting away, walking west down the arroyo. At a certain age you wore out. That was all there was to it. Rambo had seen it in veterans all the time. So young ones who did all the lying about Vietnam worked out better actually. What had to be done now required young men. Because after a certain age, a man learned to fear the sound of bullets as they split bones.

“THE DAY WILL COME when I’ll need volunteers to head units,” Rambo had said carefully, because he didn’t want to scare them off like some nut case. He stood and watched their faces and waited to see who would step forward. He had begun to use silence. All eyes were on him. Rambo could tell a number of them thought he was crazy. As if they could judge! All of them were thin with scraggly hair and patchy beards. Most of them were white, but a few were brown and black. They all slept on cardboard in the bottom of the arroyo. They had been waiting for someone like Roy. They knew him when they saw him, and no name or nickname mattered. A leader for them was what was important to the men.

Roy didn’t want to confuse their minds with talk about the future. They would be ready when the moment was right. Roy didn’t want anything premature. The nickname Rambo had been a little premature.

Roy walked a distance west along Twenty-second Street to vacant land that was still desert bushes and cactus. He liked to sit in the desert alone, away from lights so he could see the stars more clearly. The sight of the millions and millions of stars had always got Roy’s thoughts channeled in the direction of man and God. How puny and vicious men were. Was God to blame or was man ruined?

All questions and no answers had been Roy’s life up until that night. But when Roy had returned from his walk in the desert, he knew what he would do. Everything was beginning to fit together; all these years Roy’s life had been scattered, and now suddenly he had seen how all the parts were going to fit together. Trigg has a sign-up program too. Now Roy carries a manila folder full of patient information-release forms. Donors in the monthly program were examined by a doctor periodically. The idea was to get a healthy and dependable source of blood products. Once Roy had asked Trigg if he had had to dump any plasma or blood because of AIDS. Trigg had laughed and rolled his wheelchair in a slow circle. “It’s a whole new ball game now,” he had said. In the beginning the feds and of course, the public, had been slow
to catch on. Whole-blood and plasma products were too valuable to dump simply because of unverified reports and rumors. By the time the government had sent out bulletins with precautionary guidelines, Trigg had emptied his freezers. A short time afterward, fire had swept through Tucson Blood Products, and Trigg had left the old company’s name in the ashes. Trigg wanted no AIDS victims’ lawsuits.

New laws, new rules, new regulations, new tests, new procedures—all of it cost money. Recruitment and screening were critical. Trigg paid Roy to go out and find donors. Roy started with the city parks in the morning when the homeless men were at the water fountains washing up; by noon Roy would have worked his way south to the church kitchen and the sandwiches on Fifteenth Street. Roy used the soft sell. He didn’t know any other way to get men to sell blood or plasma every week. He told them up front he was getting fifty cents a head for their names if they showed up at the plasma donor center.

Roy wore the beret and the combat boots because he had to walk the arroyos and big washes to find the campsites and lean-tos. Even when he did not wear his camouflage pants, the green beret and the combat boots had been enough. Right away they wanted to talk about the war.

Roy had known a number of assholes and crazies who had been to Vietnam or the Gulf. They had not been “talkers” for one thing; that separated them from the liars. But he had watched them listen and stiffen with rage while skinny, pimply boys lied and bragged. Crazies let their silence simmer, sometimes for years; then all at once their silence exploded in the faces of all the liars.

What difference did it make years later whether a man had actually served in Vietnam and was now wandering the streets, or only repeated stories he’d heard from older guys who had been in combat? Roy was not going to pass judgment on what were lies and what were truths. The U.S. had used false figures; the enemy body count had been inflated.

No, Roy would never humiliate the skinny, young “Vietnam vets” who had signed up with him for twice-weekly visits at the plasma center. In America a man needed some kind of story to explain himself, to explain why he was here and how he had got here. The only good they would realize from that war were the stories.

Roy had read the mimeographed newsletters piled on a card table inside the Methodist soup kitchen where social justice and social activism were the name of the game. It had been simple dollars and cents. America’s wealth had bled away during Vietnam; now the U.S. was buried
in debt. So Roy could not bring himself to expose the skinny, young impostors in filthy camouflage pants and field jackets. Because they had all been casualties of that war, all Americans no matter how young, even the unborn.

Roy could sense Trigg’s growing attachment to him as a “captive audience” for Trigg’s endless monologues about how much he was worth, meaning “assets” and how much he had bought at pennies on the dollar from government liquidations of real estate once owned by little savings banks established only to go belly-up. The best way to rob a bank was to own one. Roy had nodded his head and had pretended to be impressed because a plan was beginning to take shape, and Roy wanted to learn as much as he could about Mr. Trigg. Trigg blabbered on and on about profit-loss, percentages, and world markets, but Roy was thinking about the man in the wheelchair. Roy wanted nothing Trigg owned, not the Mercedes, not the big house with the special therapy pool, not the cashmere socks or the rich bitch who sat on Trigg’s face.

The world market was definitely changing. Real estate was going to take a dive.

Trigg congratulated himself on his wisdom and foresight in getting into the biomaterials industry. “Biomaterials,” not new antibiotics or drugs, were going to be the bonanza of the twenty-first century.

“Biomaterials?” Roy asked questions because he liked to watch Trigg preen and condescend to answer him.

“Biomaterials! Not just plasma, not just blood!” Trigg could not contain his excitement. The vodka had taken over, and Trigg listed to the left in his wheelchair as he attempted to be buddy-buddy with Roy and leaned toward him as he whispered loudly:

“Biomaterials!” Biomaterials—the industry’s “preferred” term for fetal-brain material, human kidneys, hearts and lungs, corneas for eye transplants, and human skin for burn victims.

Roy had heard rumors about Tucson before he ever hopped the freight train in Baton Rouge. Hoboes said Tucson had communist priests and terrorist nuns and even the Methodist churches in Tucson were communist. Then Roy heard the opposite too, that just outside Tucson the U.S. military had begun to create a “bastion of strength” to run the length of the U.S. southern border. In Baton Rouge stories circulated about the mysterious recruiters in white shirts, dark blue suits, and dark glasses who were looking for “good soldiers” willing to relocate to Tucson.

The afternoon Roy had hopped off the freight train in downtown Tucson, a group of homeless activists had been taking showers on the steps of City Hall. His first night in Tucson, Roy had watched himself shave and shower on the local TV news at the men’s shelter where he had gone with the other “shower protesters.” Roy had not stayed at the men’s shelter long. As the weather had cooled and the autumn rain storms came in November, Roy could see there were old men and sick men who needed the shelter. As he listened to Trigg run on about growth and opportunity, Roy had recalled the other reason he could not live at the men’s shelter. The homeless activists had wanted Roy to “become” involved in the struggle.

Roy had not answered them. He had packed his razor and toothbrush in the pockets of his field jacket and moved into a cardboard piano crate in the arroyo off Eighteenth Street. Roy had got Trigg to buy him a bicycle for his recruitment work, and as winter brought more and more drifters and homeless from the snow in the north, Roy had begun to carry two notebooks with him as he signed up “clients” for the biweekly bonus program. He carried Trigg’s notebook and he carried the homeless army’s notebook. He was not afraid to write the words
Homeless Army
across the notebook cover; he felt the excitement rise up into his chest and throat, and he felt his heart beat faster at the word
army.

The skinny, starving Mexicans who managed to reach Tucson had to find people willing to let them sleep in a shed or chicken coop, otherwise the Border Patrol got them. The cardboard boxes and tin shelters under the mesquites along the Santa Cruz were filled with white men, though occasionally a Yaqui Indian with land on the Santa Cruz River rented camp space to blacks and Indians. Roy wrote down all the names and did not bother to note which were “phony” and which were “real” Vietnam veterans. What was past did not matter. What was important was how the men felt right then. Roy was looking for men who were incensed, who were outraged, at the government. He was not interested in the “shower activists” with their protests and polite lawsuits to acquire shelter for the homeless.

Trigg used to ask Roy what he did with his money. Trigg was repulsed by Roy’s cardboard and plastic held together with corrugated tin. Roy always smiled, shook his head, and told Trigg nothing. Trigg never pressed because Trigg had to do all the talking anyway. Trigg claimed he was only making money because he wanted to save enough to design and build a computerized walking machine; this had been
Trigg’s dream since the day he had learned his spinal cord was severed. This dream of Trigg’s had also led him to buy the small private hospital in Verde Canyon. Trigg bragged about his plans to diversify; Trigg wasn’t going to make the same mistake other real estate investors had made. “You don’t know anything about Verde Canyon, do you?” Roy shook his head. Actually he had been reading through Trigg’s files methodically and knew exactly
what
Verde Canyon was all about. Money. Verde Canyon was a rehabilitation hospital for alcoholics and drug users.

Roy had read the hospital’s prospectus to shareholders. Trigg had shrewdly chosen a New Age theme for the brochure enclosed with the financial report. The brochure reverently described the cleansing, healing powers of the Sonoran desert. The Verde Canyon Hospital would depend chiefly on contracts from federal and state court systems to provide court-ordered “treatment” in lieu of jail. The advantages of sentencing a person to “treatment” rather than jail had a more hopeful outlook, although “treatment” was far more expensive than simple incarceration. Trigg had been rather careless with the keys to filing cabinets; Roy had learned a great deal about Trigg and was still learning. The night-watchman job meant a dry, warm place to sleep during Tucson’s winter rains. But Roy had also begun to spend more time around the plasma donor headquarters because the cold weather had sent hundreds more homeless men south, more men who wanted to look up to Roy, men who wanted Roy to lead them against injustice. They all knew him by the other name. He refused even to utter it. His men might call him any number of names; if one nickname was Rambo, Roy didn’t let it mean anything.

THE GROWING BAND OF HOMELESS “Vietnam vets” in the lean-tos along the arroyos and the Santa Cruz River had left Roy tense and self-conscious. Tension was inevitable because the men knew and Roy knew that he had something important to say to them, that he had something that would explain what it was they must fight for.