‘You know something, Loot?’ Sully asked. ‘We’ve uncovered some clear legacies of the Vietnam experience here.’ He popped up a finger. ‘Vietnam vets get cancer, usually of the lung or the brain, but other places, too.’
‘Like Pags. Pags was the pancreas, wasn’t it?’
‘Right.’
‘All that cancer’s because of the Orange,’ Dieffenbaker said. ‘Nobody can prove it but we all know it. Agent Orange, the gift that keeps on giving.’
Sully popped up a second finger — yer fuckfinger, Ronnie Malenfant would undoubtedly have called it. ‘Vietnam vets get depressed, get drunk at parties, threaten to jump off national landmarks.’ Out with the third finger. ‘Vietnam vets have bad teeth.’ Pinky finger. ‘Vietnam vets get divorced.’
Sully had paused at that point, vaguely hearing canned organ music coming through a partially opened window, looking at his four popped fingers and then at the thumb still tucked against his palm. Vets were drug addicts. Vets were bad loan risks, by and large; any bank officer would tell you so (in the years when Sully had been getting the dealership up and running a number of bankers had told him so). Vets maxed out their credit cards, got thrown out of gambling casinos, wept over songs by George Strait and Patty Loveless, knifed each other over shuffleboard bowling games in bars, bought muscle cars on credit and then wrecked them, beat their wives, beat their kids, beat their fuckin dogs, and probably cut themselves shaving more often than people who had never been closer to the green than Apocalypse Now or that fucking piece of shit The Deer Hunter.
‘What’s the thumb?’ Dieffenbaker asked. ‘Come on, Sully, you’re killing me here.’
Sully looked at his folded thumb. Looked at Dieffenbaker, who now wore bifocals and carried a potbelly (what Vietnam vets usually called ‘the house that Bud built’) but who still might have that skinny young man with the wax-candle complexion somewhere inside of him. Then he looked back at his thumb and popped it out like a guy trying to hitch a ride.
‘Vietnam vets carry Zippos,’ he said. ‘At least until they stop smoking.’
‘Or until they get cancer,’ Dieffenbaker said. ‘At which point their wives no doubt pry em out of their weakening palsied hands.’
‘Except for all the ones who’re divorced,’ Sully said, and they both laughed. It had been good outside the funeral parlor. Well, maybe not good, exactly, but better than inside. The organ music in there was bad, the sticky smell of the flowers was worse. The smell of the flowers made Sully think of the Mekong Delta. ‘In country,’ people said now, but he didn’t remember ever having heard that particular phrase back then.
‘So you didn’t entirely lose your balls after all,’ Dieffenbaker said.
‘Nope, never quite made it into Jake Barnes country.’
‘Who?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Sully wasn’t much of a book-reader, never had been (his friend Bobby had been the book-reader), but the rehab librarian had given him The Sun Also Rises and Sully
had read it avidly, not once but three times. Back then it had seemed very important — as important as that book Lord of the Flies had been to Bobby when they were kids. Now Jake Barnes seemed remote, a tin man with fake problems. Just one more made-up thing.
‘No?’
‘No. I can have a woman if I really want to have one — not kids, but I can have a woman.
There’s a fair amount of preparation involved, though, and mostly it seems like too much trouble.’
Dieffenbaker said nothing for several moments. He sat looking at his hands. When he looked up, Sully thought he’d say something about how he had to get moving, a quick goodbye to the widow and then back to the wars (Sully thought that in the new lieutenant’s case the wars these days involved selling computers with something magical called Pentium inside them), but Dieffenbaker didn’t say that. He asked, ‘And what about the old lady? Do you still see her, or is she gone?’
Sully had felt dread — unformed but vast — stir at the back of his mind. ‘What old lady?’
He couldn’t remember telling Dieffenbaker, couldn’t remember telling anybody, but of course he must have. Shit, he could have told Dieffenbaker anything at those reunion picnics; they were nothing but liquor-smelling black holes in his memory, every one of them.