It fell in lazy revolutions, and the fattening sound of its drop was like the sound of something vibrating endlessly in a tin tunnel. It fell toward Sully, its uneasy shadow now starting to focus and shrink, his upturned face its seeming target.
‘INCOMING!’ Sully screamed, and began to run. ‘INNCOMMING!’
The piano plummeted toward the turnpike, the white bench falling right behind it, and behind the bench came a comet’s tail of sheet music, 45-rpm records with fat holes in the middle, small appliances, a flapping yellow coat that looked like a duster, a Goodyear Wide Oval tire, a barbecue grill, a weathervane, a file-cabinet, and a teacup with WORLD’S
GREATEST GRANDMA printed on the side.
‘Can I have one of those?’ Sully had asked Dieffenbaker outside the funeral parlor where Pags was lying in his silk-lined box. ‘I never had a Dunhill.’
‘Whatever floats your boat.’ Dieffenbaker sounded amused, as if he had never been shit-scared in his life.
Sully could still remember Dieffenbaker standing in the street by that overturned kitchen chair: how pale he had been, how his lips had trembled, how his clothes still smelled of smoke and spilled copter fuel. Dieffenbaker looking around from Malenfant and the old woman to the others who were starting to pour fire into the hooches to the howling kid Minis had shot; he could remember Deef looking at Lieutenant Shearman but there was no help there. No help from Sully himself, for that matter. He could also remember how Slocum was staring at Deef, Deef the lieutenant now that Packer was dead. And finally Deef had looked back at Slocum. Sly Slocum was no officer — not even one of those bigmouth bush generals who were always second-guessing everything — and never would be. Slocum was just your basic E3 or E4 who thought that a group who sounded like Rare Earth had to be black. Just a grunt, in other words, but one prepared to do what the rest of them weren’t. Never losing hold of the new lieutenant’s distraught eye, Slocum had turned his head back the other way just a little, toward Malenfant and Clemson and Peasley and Minis and the rest, self-appointed regulators whose names Sully no longer remembered. Then Slocum was back to total eye-contact with Dieffenbaker again. There were six or eight men in all who had gone loco, gone trotting down the muddy street past the screaming bleeding kid and into that scurgy little
‘ville, shouting as they went — football cheers, basic-training cadences, the chorus to ‘Hang On Sloopy,’ shit like that — and Slocum was saying with his eyes Hey, what you want? You the boss now, what you want?
And Dieffenbaker had nodded.
Sully wondered if he could have given that nod himself. He thought not. He thought if it had come down to him, Clemson and Malenfant and those other fuckheads would have killed until their ammo ran out — wasn’t that pretty much what the men under Galley and Medina had done? But Dieffenbaker was no William Galley, give him that. Dieffenbaker had given the little nod. Slocum nodded back, then raised his rifle and blew off Ralph Clemson’s head.
At the time Sully had thought Clemson got the bullet because Slocum knew Malenfant too
well, Slocum and Malenfant had smoked more than a few loco-leaves together and Slocum had also been known to spend at least some of his spare time hunting The Bitch with the other Hearts players. But as he sat here rolling Dieffenbaker’s Dunhill cigarette between his fingers, it occurred to Sully that Slocum didn’t give a shit about Malenfant and his loco-leaves; Malenfant’s favorite card-game, either. There was no shortage of bhang or card-games in Vietnam. Slocum picked Clemson because shooting Malenfant wouldn’t have worked.
Malenfant, screaming all his bullshit about putting heads up on sticks to show the Gong what happened to people who fucked with Delta Lightning, was too far away to get the attention of the men splashing and squashing and shooting their way down that muddy street. Plus old mamasan was already dead, so what the fuck, let him carve on her.
Now Deef was Dieffenbaker, a bald computer salesman who gave Sully a light with his Zippo, then watched as Sully drew the smoke deep and coughed it back out.