Roll back ten more and Sully was a kid growing up in Harwich, palling with Bobby Garfield and wishing that Carol Gerber would look at him, John Sullivan, just once the way she
always looked at Bobby.
In time she had looked at him of course, but never in quite the same way. Was it because she was no longer eleven or because he wasn’t Bobby? Sully didn’t know. The look itself had been a mystery. It seemed to say that Bobby was killing her and she was glad, she would die that way until the stars fell from the sky and the rivers ran uphill and all the words to ‘Louie Louie’ were known.
What had happened to Bobby Garfield? Had he gone to Vietnam? Joined the flower children? Married, fathered children, died of pancreatic cancer? Sully didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that Bobby had changed somehow in the summer of 1960 — the summer Sully had won a free week at the YMCA camp on Lake George — and had left town with his mother. Carol had stayed through high school, and even if she had never looked at him quite the way she had looked at Bobby, he had been her first, and she his. One night out in the country behind some Newburg dairy-farmer’s barnful of lowing cattle. Sully remembered smelling sweet perfume on her throat as he came.
Why that odd cross-connection between Pagano in his coffin and the friends of his childhood? Perhaps because Pags had looked a little bit like Bobby had looked in those bygone days. Bobby’s hair had been dark red instead of black, but he’d had that same skinny build and angular face . . . and the same freckles. Yeah! Both Pags and Bobby with that Opie Taylor spray of freckles across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose! Or maybe it was just because when someone dies, you think about the past, the past, the fuckin past.
Now the Caprice was down to twenty miles an hour and the traffic stopped dead farther up, just shy of Exit 9, but Sully still didn’t notice. On WKND, the oldies station, ? and The Mysterians were singing ’96 Tears’ and he was thinking about walking down the center aisle of the chapel with Dieffenbaker in front of him, walking up to the coffin for his first look at Pagano while the canned hymns played. ‘Abide With Me’ was the current ditty wafting through the air above Pagano’s corpse — Pags, who had been perfectly happy to sit for hours with the .50-caliber propped up beside him and his pack on his lap and a deck of Winstons parked in the strap of his helmet, playing ‘Goin Up the Country’ over and over again.
Any resemblance to Bobby Garfield was long gone, Sully saw as he looked into the coffin.
The mortician had done a job good enough to justify the open coffin, but Pags still had the loose-skinned, sharp-chinned look of a fat man who has spent his final months on the Cancer Diet, the one they never write up in the National Enquirer, the one that consists of radiation, injected chemical poisons, and all the potato chips you want.
‘Remember the harmonicas?’ Dieffenbaker asked.
‘I remember,’ Sully said. ‘I remember everything.’ It came out sounding weird, and Dieffenbaker glanced at him.
Sully had a clear, fierce flash of how Deef had looked on that day in the Ville when Malenfant, Clemson, and those other nimrods had all of a sudden started paying off the morning’s terror . . . the whole last week’s terror. They wanted to put it somewhere, the howls in the night and the sudden mortar-shots and finally the burning copters that had fallen with their rotors still turning, dispersing the smoke of their own deaths as they dropped. Down they came, whacko! And the little men in the black pajamas were shooting at Delta two-two and Bravo two-one from the bush just as soon as the Americans ran out into the clearing.
Sully had run with Willie Shearman beside him on the right and Lieutenant Packer in front of him; then Lieutenant Packer took a round in the face and no one was in front of him. Ronnie Malenfant was on his left and Malenfant had been yelling in his high-pitched voice, on and on and on, he was like some mad high-pressure telephone salesman gourded out on amphetamines: Come on, you fuckin ringmeats! Come on, you slopey Joes! Shoot me, ya fucks! You fuckin fucks! Can’t shoot fa shit! Pagano was behind them, and Slocum was beside Pags. Some Bravo guys but mostly Delta boys, that was his memory. Willie Shearman yelled