“Don’t forget Clearwater,” interjected Ann Dooling. “What a zoo—all those college kids!”
The couple’s voices bore like titanium augers into Mr. Gash’s skull. When the woman remarked for the third time upon his “modern hairstyle,” Mr. Gash enthusiastically immersed himself in another daydream. He imagined the Doolings writhing from toxic jellyfish stings; imagined he was listening to them not on a sunny beach but in the cool dark privacy of his own apartment, in 5.1 Dolby Surround sound.
He imagined the Doolings on a 911 emergency tape.
“Aren’t you warm in that suit?” Ann Dooling asked.
Oh, part of him wanted to peel off the houndstooth coat and let the Doolings eyeball his gun; wanted to watch their jaws drop as he snatched it from the holster and leveled it to their shiny cocoa-buttered foreheads—the yappy goobs rendered speechless at last…
But it was broad daylight and nearby on the sand were children playing Frisbee. So Mr. Gash tossed his beer can, turned away and tromped disgustedly to the car.
He made it halfway across the old bridge when he spotted another station wagon coming fast the other way; a Buick Roadmaster woody, the mother of all wagons, carrying another couple, another black dog with its head out the window.
Mr. Gash reflexively braked. Then he thought: Fuck that. I’m all tapped out on tourists today. What he needed now was a stack of porny magazines and a bottle of Meyer’s. So he kept driving, away from Toad Island.
Tomorrow, Mr. Gash told himself. Tomorrow I’ll come back to check out the Roadmaster.
In the spring of 1966, two brothers went to Vietnam. One came back a hero, the other came back a casualty. Doyle Tyree was riding in an army Jeep when it turned over, ten miles outside of Nha Trang. The driver, a sergeant, died instantly. Doyle Tyree suffered a broken leg and grave head injuries, and he was airlifted stateside to spend six weeks in a VA hospital. To his everlasting torment, the Jeep accident had not been caused by hostile fire but by recklessness. He and his sergeant had polished off a case of Hong Kong ale and decided to go carp fishing in a flooded rice paddy—carp fishing after dark in a combat zone! All because Doyle Tyree was homesick for Florida and worried out of his mind about his little brother, Clint, who was playing sniper somewhere out in the steamy highland fog, among the Gong and the leeches and the cobras.
They had grown up on a fine little bass lake, all the Tyree boys, but it was Doyle and Clint who could never get enough of the place—after school and Saturday mornings, and Sundays, too, when church let out. And it wasn’t the fishing so much as the good hours together and the unbroken peace—the breeze bending the cattails, the sunlight shimmering the slick-flat water, the turtles on the logs and the gators in the lilies and the querulous calls of the meadowlarks drifting down from the pastures. Doyle Tyree was wretched with longing and loneliness when he suggested to his sergeant that they go carp fishing that evening, not even knowing if there were carp or any other damn fish in the flooded-out rice paddy; knowing only that in the twilight it reminded him of the lake back home. So they’d cut down bamboo shoots for poles and bowed sewing needles into hooks and for bait swiped a bread loaf from the mess, then grabbed up their remaining bottles of ale—bitter and piss-warm, but who cared?—and set off to catch some major motherfucking carps. The dirt road was unlit and potholed but ultimately it was the damn goat that did the job, some sleepy peasant’s runaway goat. When the sergeant swerved to avoid it, the Jeep flipped (as those army Jeeps would do) and kept on flipping until an ox-drawn wagon stopped it as conclusively as a concrete wall.
And Doyle Tyree awoke in a chilly white room in Atlanta, Georgia, with steel pins in his femur and a plate in his head and more guilt and shame on his twenty-five-year-old soul than seemed bearable. He asked to return to duty in Vietnam, which was not unusual for soldiers injured under such circumstances, but the request was turned down and he was handed an honorable discharge. So back to Florida he went, to wait for his heroic little brother. Only after Clint returned safely from the jungle, only after they’d hugged and laughed and spent a misty morning on the family lake, only then did Doyle Tyree allow the breakdown to begin. Within a week he was gone, and nobody knew where.