their immune systems back in the green. With Dick Pagano it had been pancreatic cancer —
him and Michael Landon. It was the disease of the stars. The coffin was open and old Pags didn’t look too shabby. His wife had had the undertaker dress him in an ordinary business suit, not a uniform. She probably hadn’t even considered the uniform option, despite the decorations Pagano had won. Pags had worn a uniform for only two or three years, those years like an aberration, like time spent in some county joint because you did something entirely out of character on one bad-luck occasion, probably while you were drunk. Killed a guy in a barroom fight, say, or took it into your head to burn down the church where your ex-wife taught Sunday school. Sully couldn’t think of a single man he’d served with, including himself, who would want to be buried in an Army uniform.
Dieffenbaker — Sully still thought of him as the new lieutenant — came to the funeral.
Sully hadn’t seen Dieffenbaker in a long time, and they had had themselves quite a talk . . .
although Dieffenbaker actually did most of the talking. Sully wasn’t sure talking ever made a difference, but he kept thinking about the stuff Dieffenbaker said. How mad Dieffenbaker had sounded, mostly. All the way back to Connecticut he kept thinking about it.
He was on the Triborough Bridge heading north again by two o’clock, in plenty of time to beat the rush-hour traffic. ‘Smooth movement across the Triborough and at key points along the LIE,’ was how the traffic-reporter in the WINS copter put it. That’s what copters were for these days; gauging the flow of traffic in and out of America’s cities.
When the traffic started to slow just north of Bridgeport, Sully didn’t notice. He had switched from news to oldies and had fallen to thinking about Pags and his harmonicas. It was a war-movie cliche, the grizzled GI with the mouth-harp, but Pagano, dear God, Pagano could drive you out of your ever-fuckin mind. Night and day he had played em, until one of the guys — it might have been Hexley or even Garrett Slocum — told him that if he didn’t quit it, he was apt to wake up one morning with the world’s first whistling rectal implant.
The more he considered it, the more Sully thought Sly Slocum had been the one to threaten the rectal implant. Big black man from Tulsa, thought Sly and the Family Stone was the best group on earth, hence the nickname, and refused to believe that another group he admired, Rare Earth, was white. Sully remembered Deef (this was before Dieffenbaker became the new lieutenant and gave Slocum that nod, probably the most important gesture Dieffenbaker had ever made or ever would make in his life) telling Slocum that those guys were just as white as fuckin Bob Dylan (‘the folksingin honky’ was what Slocum called Dylan). Slocum thought this over, then replied with what was for him rare gravity. The fuck you say. Rare Earth, man, those guys black. They record on fuckin Motown, and all Motown groups are black, everyone know that. Supremes, fuckin Temps, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I respect you, Deef, you bad and you nationwide, without a doubt, man, but if you persist in your bullshit, I going to knock you down.
Slocum hated harmonica music. Harmonica music made him think of the folksingin honky.
If you tried to tell him that Dylan cared about the war, Slocum asked then how come the mulebray muthafucka didn’t come on over here with Bob Hope one time. I tell you why, Slocum said. He scared, that’s why. Fuckin candyass harmonica-blowin mulebray muthafucka!
Musing on Dieffenbaker rapping about the sixties. Thinking of those old names and old faces and old days. Not noticing as the Caprice’s speedometer dropped from sixty to fifty to forty, the traffic starting to stack up in all four northbound lanes. He remembered how Pags had been over there in the green — skinny, black-haired, his cheeks still dotted with the last of his post-adolescent acne, a rifle in his hands and two Hohner harmonicas (one key of C, one key of G) stuffed into the waistband of his camo trousers. Thirty years ago, that had been.