What We Are (30 page)

M
Y
U
NCLE
is waiting for me on the porch of the guesthouse, crosslegged on the cement, back to the stucco wall, the terra-cotta angel that he had shipped over from Calabria directly above his head. He's got a bottle of Jack between his legs, he's in a V-neck T-shirt and an old pair of faded Wrangler blue jeans, and he's got so much pain on his face that I can't look him in the face as I say, “Hey, hey, Uncle Rich. You're like a reservation wino in a Sherman Alexie novel.”

He smiles. “Who the hell's that?”

“No one,” I say, guiding him up the walk, “that you'll ever meet.”

“Just waiting till you got back, nephew.”

“Why didn't you go inside?”

“Oh, no. Nonsense. That's your little rental now.”

“I don't pay a thing, Uncle.”

“Nonsense, nonsense. Anyway, I haven't set foot in there in years.”

I key the lock, open the door, say, “Well, come on inside your guesthouse.”

He ducks under the bridge of the door as if he's entering a cave of deathly peril, that's how polite he is. I switch on a light and my uncle scans the living room: all my stuff—sleeping bag nd pillow
on the floor, three collared shirts, three pairs of pants folded on the couch, several stacks of books in the corner, and atop the highest book a plastic bottle with the Treetop label wrapped around its gut. My uncle walks over to the literature, scans the titles, says, “Why don't you give Achilles and the boys their own room?”

I look out the bay window and realize something about my stay in the guesthouse: there are two rooms in the back whose doors I've never opened. Through the window I can see the rows of magnolia trees and the furled hills and the man-made lake with the splinter of a dock, and I know it's more than just scenery to me: I don't want to be alone in a room without a view if I don't have to. It's not institutional either. I may have always been this way: anytime I'm enclosed by a box of walls, I'll go right to the window, pop it, let in the air, and breathe in with tragic relief this oxygen connection, probably fictive, that I have with the outside world.

“I don't like to be alone in there,” realizing right when I say it that it contradicts everything I believe about the beauty of solitude. If I can find beauty in a gutter, why not an empty room? Why not a toilet?

“You haven't even gone back there, have you?”

“No.”

“Either room?”

“Nah.”

“For chrissake. And the head? You piss and shit by the lake, right?”

“Nah,” I say. “I piss on the side of the house. What do you think I am: uncivilized?”

“Jesus.”

“Can I have tomorrow off, Uncle?”

“For what?”

“I got court.”

“For that thing you got into?”

I nod.

“Yeah. No problem. I'll tell Chinaski myself in the morning.”

“He doesn't need to know about me.”

“I'm the boss, nephew. I don't need to explain my decisions for anything. Not to you, not to him.”

“True.”

We're both sitting on the stools by the tile counter looking out on the significant corner of San José he calls his property. This is his, his,
his
, and no one else's. The concept is strange to me. The claim of
mine
starts with the Tonka truck at six, lunch box at nine, dirt bike at twelve, high school sweetheart at sixteen. Don't touch, or else. I mean, how much land does a man need? When it comes down to it, six feet by three feet, six feet deep.

My uncle puts the bottle to his lips, hits the Jack, gasps. “So what is it? Why won't you go back there?”

“I'm trippin'. I've been trippin' my whole life. I mean, I wanna see and maybe be a part of the world, yet I won't open up the doors.”

“Because they'll slam in your face, nephew?”

“No. That doesn't bother me at all.
Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed
. No, I think it has to do with the other doors that have already been opened.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't want them to diminish in value. I want them to mean something. And they won't mean shit if I keep opening more of them.”

“I know what you're saying.”

“Everything'll get washed out.”

“I get you.”

“So you've felt that, too?”

“Sure. I mean, one of the things that's so attractive about business is that no matter how much time I spend there, I don't care anything about it. There's no purity there to dilute. It's a game. I don't see how it can be anything more than that. Math, numbers, luck. There's hard work, yes, but to me it's just patience. Tolerance. Who
can put up with the most amount of people's shit? That's the question. And the answer is me.”

“And that's good?”

“Sure. Well, maybe. I haven't had any kind of epiphany since Vitnam. Is that good? Again: maybe. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying I can read the signs. Nina could, too. She knew. Like you. But shit, I haven't opened a door in three decades.”

“Maybe you're worse off, Uncle, than someone with no ties like me. I don't have anything, but I'm mobile. You're stuck with what you've got, and maybe that destroys your soul.”

“Nephew, I'm convinced that life in this place destroys the soul period.” He offers me the bottle and I take it. “But guess what? Things are looking up. You're my first employee in over twenty years that matters to me beyond the bottom line.”

“Who was the last?”

“Your Aunt Lanell.”

I remember Kelly Clannonite's claims, don't want to go near his pain. Whether he caused it or not, why dig my nails into the wound? I don't ask him about Aunt Lanell; he doesn't ask me about his sister, my mother. That's the deal. “I'm glad I'm at the West.”

“She was my best worker,” he says. “She coordinated everything, a true multitasker. She could've handled eight kids with ease.”

I nod. I don't know what to say except, “I guess I never really see her around, Uncle.”

“Oh, I'll show you some other night. Probably when I've got a little more than this one bottle to drink. But let's talk about you, nephew. What is your big dilemma?”

I think it over. I want to be straight and to the point, honest, respectful of my uncle's curiosity and superior amount of planet time, yet no ad hominem attack on myself. I want to be evenhanded, like a Supreme Court judge. “My dilemma is I have no dilemma.”

“Don't play word games with me.”

“I'm not. I'm serious. I don't feel the urgency to do anything.”

“What about the job?”

I look over at my uncle, embarrassed by his hope. “The job?”

“Yeah. Is it going okay?”

“Sure.”

“Sure?”

“Going great.”

“Well, once you get your stuff together,” he says, “I was thinking about handing the business over to you.”

I can't pretend any longer. “Give it to someone else, Uncle Rich. Someone who can appreciate the gift. All day long at that place I feel like I'm St. Sebastian post–arrow encounter. Please please please don't give it to me. You deserve a better legacy.”

“And what about when you were locked up?” he says, not skipping a beat. My last statement hurt him, though I can see he's already resigned to rewrite his will. He's a businessman all right, unfazed, at least outwardly, by the day's potential emotion. “That must have given you something to believe in.”

“Even there I was just walking around for chrissake, saying, ‘Well, this is an interesting place, isn't it? What a brilliant social experiment.'”

“Yeah, well.” He lifts the bottle, thinks it over. “It wouldn't be like that if you got hit.”

“What?”

“If you'd seen the abyss.”

I lean forward, smiling, and show him the forty-stitch scar across my temple. “Does this count?”

“Jesus, nephew,” he says, passing me the bottle. “I had no clue with that silly beanie you're always wearing. How come you didn't say anything?”

“That's what I'm saying, Uncle. It doesn't matter. I don't say anything now and I didn't say anything then. When it happened, my brain
was ordering my hands to fire at the cat and I was definitely firing at him—I got off some straight lefts and a hook, muscle memory of boxing back in the day—but I got this feeling that it was no big deal really. I was leaking blood like a busted faucet. Then afterward when I was lying there in the blood and my body was doing everything to keep itself going, another part of me was just watching the thing go down, not an out-of-body experience or anything religious like that, but an
in
-of-body; I felt in order for once, it was actually antireligious, as if there were nothing in the world wrong with getting cracked over the head with a steel dustpan. I could rationalize why the guy would want to do it; I could rationalize why I would fight back; I could understand why I might die or, if I lived, why
he
might die, but I couldn't really praise anyone, couldn't really indict anyone, and that's wrong.”

“It is.”

“It's fucking wrong.”

“You've played too many roles, nephew. You know too much.”

“'Cept I don't know myself.”

“You don't have a self.”

The only answer to a statement like that is to assault the cells of the larynx with Jack, saturate the funnel of the liver in liquor, let the eyes water and the nostrils flare, let the heart burn from the infernal heat of alcohol fire, let the arms and fingers go numb. Don't think, don't think, don't think on the accurate nature of your uncle's statement; get dumb, amnesiac. Don't ponder the mandatory nihilism of the century, don't wonder about the future of the story you love, of the species, this people, this place. Take another shot of Jack, anesthetize your head, and believe that nothing is finalized. Keep the hope alive in suspension, in mid-float, against all the evidence you've heard, you've seen, you've felt, and you know. And then take another right hook from Jack. And another.

“When I was in Southeast Asia,” my uncle says, and my ears perk up. The camera is off me. I pass him the bottle. “I thought
I understood about life and death. And maybe I did. But coming back here ruined all that clarity. I'm not sure I'm a wiser man now. I know more, I'm positive of that, but I'm not sure I'm wiser.”

I wait, reach over, take the bottle of Jack. I know something big is coming from my uncle, but for some reason I can only wait. I don't want to facilitate his pain if I can help it. If. To hell with the therapeutic sell of confession. I say, carry it around unresolved in your gut, and if it doesn't dissolve in the acid of the stomach at least you've got a wound to believe in forever.

“My unit was involved in the greatest battle of the war.”

“Hamburger Hill?”

“Yeah. 101st Airborne. Screaming Eagles. Jesus. I can see them all as if it were yesterday.”

“The NVA?”

“Well, I can see them too. But I meant my brothers. I can see my old brothers-in-arms.”

“What were their names?”

He shakes his head. “They all died. They were just kids. Shit. Every medic I knew died that day.”

“You were the only one that survived?”

“Maybe.”

He violently takes back the liter of Jack, and some of the golden juice spills on its way over. He hits it hard, like a post-marathon bottle of Gatorade. A lot of time passes between us, so much so I can hear the tick of the clock on the wall I'd like to smash into a state of silence; I can hear my uncle's sluggish breathing; I can hear his sudden crying. It's so fast and blurry and anti-business that by the time I look over he's recovered. Just like a flash rain in the monsoon season of the very Southeast Asian nation he's mourning. If it has to happen, that's the kind of crying I like. Miss me with that stuff. I'm wicked as hell. I do my best to rebel against the next unholy thought, the one that's been sitting there in the fore of my brain for several
minutes thumbing for a ride: this shit is so trite. This theft of a John Wayne moment.

Out, out, out
!

“You know, nephew, I went back for a second tour.”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“The shit that affects us ain't ever that complex, is it?”

“I don't know, Uncle. Things seem to have changed.”

“Yeah, let's not talk about that. Your fucked-up generation.”

“Okay. More than fine by me. But why'd you go back?”

He hits it again and says, “To get killed.”

“Yeah?”

“Honorably.”

“Yeah.”

“I chickened out at the Hill, see? I got sick on 'em. Faked it, took to the bed. I was like that little punk in
Patton
who goes yellow. I wish Patton could've been there to slap me. I would've given him a commendation.”

“Yeah.”

“A fucking coward. I should've died up there with my brothers. Like I was meant to.”

I know better than to say,
No one's meant to
. So I don't say anything at all, though I do want a shot. But I don't reach out. I don't reach out for it any longer.

T
HE JUDGE IS THE SON
of another nation, but he's a proud American through and through. The Honorable Barrett Nguyen believes in the system. He says so, over and over and over again, a slightly detectable Mekong twang in his otherwise impeccable accent. He looks sharp, man: square head, square cut hairdo, square shoulders, square soul. The man is the consummate square. He has all the faith in the system that a native son like me was born to lack. He believes in the blind lady with the teeter-totter scale in her hands. If this guy has anything to do with it, I'm gonna get hanged.