Asshole or not, Dr Conroy hadn’t been entirely wrong about Sully coming to understand old mamasan as time went by. The most important thing was understanding — on a gut level
— that old mamasan wasn’t there. Head-knowledge of that basic fact was easy, but his gut was slower to learn, possibly because his gut had been torn open in Dong Ha and a thing like that just had to slow down the understanding process.
He had borrowed some of Dr Conroy’s books, and the hospital librarian had gotten him a couple of others on inter-library loan. According to the books, old mamasan in her green pants and orange top was ‘an externalized fantasy’ which served as a ‘coping mechanism’ to help him deal with his ‘survivor guilt’ and ‘post-traumatic stress syndrome.’ She was a daydream, in other words.
Whatever the reasons, his attitude about her changed as her appearances became less frequent. Instead of feeling revulsion or a kind of superstitious dread when she turned up, he began to feel almost happy when he saw her. The way you felt when you saw an old friend who had left town but sometimes came back for a little visit.
He lived in Milford now, a town about twenty miles north of Harwich on I-95 and light-years away in most other senses. Harwich had been a pleasant, tree-filled suburb when Sully lived there as a kid, chumming with Bobby Garfield and Carol Gerber. Now his old home town was one of those places you didn’t go at night, just a grimy adjunct to Bridgeport. He still spent most of his days there, on the lot or in his office (Sullivan Chevrolet had been a Gold Star dealership four years running now), but he was gone by six o’clock most evenings, seven for sure, tooling north to Milford in his Caprice demonstrator. He usually went with an unacknowledged but very real sense of gratitude.
On this particular summer day he had gone south from Milford on I-95 as usual, but at a later hour and without getting off at Exit 9, ASHER AVENUE HARWICH. Today he had kept the new demo pointed south (it was blue with blackwall tires, and watching people’s brakelights go on when they saw him in their rearview mirrors never failed to amuse him — they thought he was a cop) and drove all the way into New York City.
He left the car at Arnie Mossberg’s dealership on the West Side (when you were a Chevy dealer there was never a parking problem; that was one of the nice things about it), did some window-shopping on his way across town, had a steak at Palm Too, then went to Pagano’s funeral.
Pags had been one of the guys at the chopper crash-site that morning, one of the guys in the Ville that afternoon. Also one of the guys caught in the final ambush on the trail, the ambush which had begun when Sully himself either stepped on a mine or broke a wire and popped a satchel-charge strapped to a tree. The little men in the black pajamas had been in the high toolies and man, they had opened up. On the trail, Pags had grabbed Wollensky when Wollensky got shot in the throat. He got Wollensky into the clearing, but by then Wollensky was dead. Pags would have been covered with Wollensky’s blood (Sullivan didn’t actually remember seeing that; he had been in his own hell by then), but that was probably something of a relief to the man because it covered up the other blood, still not entirely dry.
Pagano had been standing close enough to get splattered when Slocum shot Malenfant’s buddy. Splattered with Clemson’s blood, splattered with Clemson’s brains.
Sully had never said a word about what happened to Clemson in the Ville, not to Dr Conroy or anyone else. He had dummied up. All of them had dummied up.
Pags had died of cancer. Whenever one of Sully’s old Nam buddies died (well okay, they weren’t buddies, exactly, most of them dumb as stone boats and not what Sully would really call buddies, but it was the word they used because there was no word invented for what they had really been to each other), it always seemed to be cancer or drugs or suicide. Usually the cancer started in the lung or the brain and then just ran everywhere, as if these men had left