When Willie shipped out, old mamasan stayed. Old mamasan hung right in there. During
the seven months Sully spent in San Francisco’s Veterans Hospital she had come every day and every night, his most constant visitor in that endless time when the whole world seemed to smell of piss and his heart hurt like a headache. Sometimes she showed up in a muumuu like the hostess at some nutty luau, sometimes she came wearing one of those grisly green golf-skirts and a sleeveless top that showed off her scrawny arms . . . but mostly she wore what she had been wearing on the day Malenfant killed her — the green pants, the orange smock, the red sneakers with the Chinese symbols on them.
One day that summer he unfolded the San Francisco Chronicle and saw his old girlfriend had made the front page. His old girlfriend and her hippie pals had killed a bunch of kids and job-recruiters back in Danbury. His old girlfriend was now ‘Red Carol.’ His old girlfriend was a celebrity. ‘You cunt,’ he had said as the paper first doubled, then trebled, then broke up into prisms. ‘You stupid fucked-up cunt.’ He had balled the paper up, meaning to throw it across the room, and there was his new girlfriend, there was old mamasan sitting on the next bed, looking at Sully with her black eyes, and Sully had broken down completely at the sight of her. When the nurse came Sully either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her what he was crying about.
All he knew was that the world had gone insane and he wanted a shot and eventually the nurse found a doctor to give him one and the last thing he saw before he passed out was mamasan, old fuckin mamasan sitting there on the next bed with her yellow hands in her green polyester lap, sitting there and watching him.
She made the trip across the country with him, too, had come all the way back to Connecticut with him, deadheading across the aisle in the tourist cabin of a United Airlines 747. She sat next to a businessman who saw her no more than the crew of the Huey had, or Willie Shearman, or the staff at the Pussy Palace. She had been Malenfant’s date in Dong Ha, but she was John Sullivan’s date now and never took her black eyes off him. Her yellow, wrinkled fingers always stayed folded in her lap and her eyes always stayed on him.
Thirty years. Man, that was a long time.
But as those years went by, Sully had seen her less and less. When he returned to Harwich in the fall of ’70, he still saw old mamasan just about every day — eating a hotdog in Commonwealth Park by Field B, or standing at the foot of the iron steps leading up to the railway station where the commuters ebbed and flowed, or just walking down Main Street.
Always looking at him.
Once, not long after he’d gotten his first post-Vietnam job, (selling cars, of course; it was the only thing he really knew how to do) he had seen old mamasan sitting in the passenger seat of a 1968 Ford LTD with PRICED TO SELL! soaped on the windshield.
You’ll start to understand her in time, the headshrinker in San Francisco had told him, and refused to say much more no matter how hard Sully pressed him. The shrink wanted to hear about the helicopters that had collided and fell out of the sky; the headshrinker wanted to know why Sully so often referred to Malenfant as ‘that cardplaying bastard’ (Sully wouldn’t tell him); the headshrinker wanted to know if Sully still had sexual fantasies, and if so, had they become noticeably violent. Sully had sort of liked the guy — Conroy, his name was —
but that didn’t change the fact that he was an asshole. Once, near the end of his time in San Francisco, he had come close to telling Dr Conroy about Carol. On the whole he was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t know how to think about his old girlfriend, let alone talk about her (conflicted was Conroy’s word for this state). He had called her a stupid fucked-up cunt, but the whole damned world was sort of fucked-up these days, wasn’t it? And if anyone knew how easily violent behavior could break its leash and just run away, John Sullivan did. All he was sure of was that he hoped the police wouldn’t kill her when they finally caught up to her and her friends.