Hearts In Atlantis (62 page)

With his fifth-floor office set to rights, Willie lowers the trapdoor in this one. Up here the trap is hidden by a small rug which is Super-Glued to the wood, so it can go up and down without too much flopping or sliding around.

He gets to his feet, dusts off his hands, then turns to the briefcase and opens it. He takes out the ball of tinsel and puts it on top of the Dictaphone which stands on the desk.

“Good one,” he says, thinking again that Sharon can be a real peach when she sets her mind to it . . . and she often does. He relatches the briefcase and then begins to undress, doing it carefully and methodically, reversing the steps he took at six-thirty, running the film backward. He strips off everything, even his undershorts and his black knee-high socks. Naked, he hangs his topcoat, suit jacket, and shirt carefully in the closet where only one other item hangs—a heavy red jacket, not quite thick enough to be termed a parka. Below it is a boxlike thing, a little too bulky to be termed a briefcase. Willie puts his Mark Cross case next to it, then places his slacks in the pants press, taking
pains with the crease. The tie goes on the rack screwed to the back of the closet door, where it hangs all by itself like a long blue tongue.

He pads barefoot-naked across to one of the file-cabinet stacks. On top of it is an ashtray embossed with a pissed-off-looking eagle and the words
IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE.
In the ashtray are a pair of dog-tags on a chain. Willie slips the chain over his head, then slides out the bottom drawer of the cabinet stack. Inside are underclothes. Neatly folded on top are a pair of khaki boxer shorts. He slips them on. Next come white athletic socks, followed by a white cotton tee-shirt—roundneck, not strappy. The shapes of his dogtags stand out against it, as do his biceps and quads. They aren't as good as they were in A Shau and Dong Ha, but they aren't bad for a guy who is closing in on forty.

Now, before he finishes dressing, it is time for penance.

He goes to another stack of cabinets and rolls out the second drawer. He thumbs rapidly through the bound ledgers there, passing those for late 1982, then thumbing through those from this year: Jan–April, May–June, July, August (he always feels compelled to write more in the summer), September–October, and at last the current volume: November–December. He sits at his desk, opens the ledger, and flicks rapidly through pages of densely packed writing. There are small variations in the writing, but the essence is always the same:
I am heartily sorry
.

He only writes for ten minutes or so this morning, pen scratching busily, sticking to the basic fact of the matter:
I am heartily sorry
. He has, to the best of his
reckoning, written this over two million times . . . and is just getting started. Confession would be quicker, but he is willing to take the long way around.

He finishes—no, he never finishes, but he finishes for today—and puts the current ledger back between those finished and all those yet to be filled. Then he returns to the stack of file-cabinets which serve as his chest of drawers. As he opens the one above his socks and skivvies, he begins to hum under his breath—not “Do You Hear What I Hear” but The Doors, the one about how the day destroys the night, the night divides the day.

He slips on a plain blue chambray shirt, then a pair of fatigue pants. He rolls this middle drawer back in and opens the top one. Here there is a scrapbook and a pair of boots. He takes the scrapbook out and looks at its red leather cover for a moment. The word
MEMORIES
is stamped on the front in flaking gold. It's a cheap thing, this book. He could afford better, but you don't always have a right to what you can afford.

In the summer he writes more sorries but memory seems to sleep. It is in winter, especially around Christmas, that memory awakens. Then he wants to look in this book, which is full of clippings and photos where everyone looks impossibly young.

Today he puts the scrapbook back into the drawer unopened and takes out the boots. They are polished to a high sheen and look as if they might last until the trump of judgment. Maybe even longer. They aren't standard Army issue, not these—these are jump-boots, 101st Airborne stuff. But that's all right. He isn't actually trying to dress like a soldier. If he wanted to dress like a soldier, he would.

Still, there is no more reason to look sloppy than there is to allow dust to collect in the pass-through, and he's careful about the way he dresses. He does not tuck his pants into his boots, of course—he's headed for Fifth Avenue in December, not the Mekong in August, snakes and poppy-bugs are not apt to be a problem—but he intends to look squared away. Looking good is as important to him as it is to Bill, maybe even more important. Respecting one's work and one's field begins, after all, with respecting one's self.

The last two items are in the back of the top drawer of his bureau stack: a tube of makeup and a jar of hair gel. He squeezes some of the makeup into the palm of his left hand, then begins applying it, working from forehead to the base of his neck. He moves with the unconcerned speed of long experience, giving himself a moderate tan. With that done, he works some of the gel into his hair and then recombs it, getting rid of the part and sweeping it straight back from his forehead. It is the last touch, the smallest touch, and perhaps the most telling touch. There is no trace of the commuter who walked out of Grand Central an hour ago; the man in the mirror mounted on the back of the door to the small storage annex looks like a washed-up mercenary. There is a kind of silent, half-humbled pride in the tanned face, something people won't look at too long. It hurts them if they do. Willie knows this is so; he has seen it. He doesn't ask why it should be so. He has made himself a life pretty much without questions, and that's the way he likes it.

“All
right
,” he says, closing the door to the storage room. “Lookin good, trooper.”

He goes back to the closet for the red jacket, which
is the reversible type, and the boxy case. He slips the jacket over his desk chair for the time being and puts the case on the desk. He unlatches it and swings the top up on sturdy hinges; now it looks a little like the cases street salesmen use to display their knockoff watches and questionable gold chains. There are only a few items in Willie's, one of them broken down into two pieces so it will fit. There is a sign. There is a pair of gloves, the kind you wear in cold weather, and a third glove which he used to wear when it was warm. He takes out the pair (he will want them today, no doubt about that), and then the sign on its length of stout cord. The cord has been knotted through holes in the cardboard at either side, so Willie can hang the sign around his neck. He closes the case again, not bothering to latch it, and puts the sign on top of it—the desk is so cluttery, it's the only good surface he has to work on.

Humming (we chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there), he opens the wide drawer above the kneehole, paws past the pencils and Chap Sticks and paperclips and memo pads, and finally finds his stapler. He then unrolls the ball of tinsel, placing it carefully around the rectangle of his sign. He snips off the extra and staples the shiny stuff firmly into place. He holds it up for a moment, first assessing the effect, then admiring it.

“Perfect!” he says.

The telephone rings and he stiffens, turning to look at it with eyes which are suddenly very small and hard and totally alert. One ring. Two. Three. On the fourth, the machine kicks in, answering in his voice—the version of it that goes with this office, anyway.

“Hi, you've reached Midtown Heating and Cooling,” Willie Shearman says. “No one can take your call right now, so leave a message at the beep.”

Bee-eep
.

He listens tensely, standing over his just-decorated sign with his hands balled into fists.

“Hi, this is Ed, from the NYNEX Yellow Pages,” the voice from the machine says, and Willie lets out a breath he hasn't known he was holding. His hands begin to loosen. “Please have your company rep call me at 1-800-555-1000 for information on how you can increase your ad space in both versions of the Yellow Pages, and at the same time save big money on your yearly bill. Happy holidays to all! Thanks.”

Click
.

Willie looks at the answering machine a moment longer, almost as if he expects it to speak again—to threaten him, perhaps to accuse him of all the crimes of which he accuses himself—but nothing happens.

“Squared away,” he murmurs, putting the decorated sign back into the case. This time when he closes it, he latches it. Across the front is a bumper sticker, its message flanked by small American flags.
I WAS PROUD TO SERVE
, it reads.

“Squared away, baby, you better believe it.”

He leaves the office, closing the door with
MIDTOWN HEATING AND COOLING
printed on the frosted-glass panel behind him, and turning all three of the locks.

Halfway down the hall, he sees Ralph Williamson, one of the tubby accountants from Garowicz Financial Planning (all the accountants at Garowicz are tubby, from what Willie has been able to observe). There's a key chained to an old wooden paddle in one of Ralph's pink hands, and from this Willie deduces that he is looking at an accountant in need of a wee. Key on a paddle! If a fuckin key on a fuckin paddle won't make you remember the joys of parochial school, remember all those hairy-chin nuns and all those knuckle-whacking wooden rulers, then nothing will, he thinks. And you know what? Ralph Williamson probably likes having that key on a paddle, just like he likes having a soap on a rope in the shape of a bunny rabbit or a circus clown hanging from the
HOT
faucet in his shower at home. And so what if he does? Judge not, lest ye be fuckin judged.

“Hey, Ralphie, what's doin?”

Ralph turns, sees Willie, brightens. “Hey, hi, merry Christmas!”

Willie grins at the look in Ralph's eyes. Tubby little fucker worships him, and why not? Ralph is looking at a guy so squared away it hurts. Gotta like it, sweetheart,
gotta
like that.

“Same to you, bro.” He holds out his hand (now gloved, so he doesn't have to worry about it being too white, not matching his face), palm up. “Gimme five!”

Smiling shyly, Ralph does.

“Gimme ten!”

Ralph turns his pink, pudgy hand over and allows Willie to slap it.

“So goddam good I gotta do it again!” Willie exclaims, and gives Ralph five more. “Got your Christmas shopping done, Ralphie?”

“Almost,” Ralph says, grinning and jingling the bathroom key. “Yes, almost. How about you, Willie?”

Willie tips him a wink. “Oh, you know how it is, brother-man; I got two-three women, and I just let each of em buy me a little keepsake.”

Ralph's admiring smile suggests he does not, in fact, know how it is, but rather wishes he did. “Got a service call?”

“A whole day's worth. 'Tis the season, you know.”

“Seems like it's always the season for you. Business must be good. You're hardly ever in your office.”

“That's why God gave us answering machines, Ralphie. You better go on, now, or you're gonna be dealin with a wet spot on your best gabardine slacks.”

Laughing (blushing a little, too), Ralph heads for the men's room.

Willie goes on down to the elevators, carrying his case in hand and checking to make sure his glasses are still in his jacket pocket with the other. They are. The envelope is in there, too, thick and crackling with twenty-dollar bills. Fifteen of them. It's time for a little visit from Officer Wheelock; Willie expected him yesterday. Maybe he won't show until tomorrow, but Willie is betting on today . . . not that he likes it. He knows it's the way of the world, you have to grease the wheels if you want your wagon to roll, but he still has a resentment. There are lots of days when he thinks about how pleasant it would be to put a bullet in
Jasper Wheelock's head. It was the way things happened in the green, sometimes. The way things
had
to happen. That thing with Malenfant, for instance. That crazy motherfucker, him with his pimples and his deck of cards.

Oh yes, in the bush things were different. In the bush you sometimes had to do something wrong to prevent an even greater wrong. Behavior like that shows that you're in the wrong place to start with, no doubt, but once you're in the soup, you just have to swim. He and his men from Bravo Company were only with the Delta Company boys a few days, so Willie didn't have much experience with Malenfant, but his shrill, grating voice is hard to forget, and he remembers something Malenfant would yell during his endless Hearts games if someone tried to take back a card after it was laid down:
No way, fuckwad! Once it's laid, it's played!

Malenfant might have been an asshole, but he had been right about that. In life as well as in cards, once it's laid, it's played.

•   •   •

The elevator doesn't stop on Five, but the thought of that happening no longer makes him nervous. He has ridden down to the lobby many times with people who work on the same floor as Bill Shearman—including the scrawny drink of water from Consolidated Insurance—and they don't recognize him. They should, he knows they
should
, but they don't. He used to think it was the change of clothes and the makeup, then he decided it was the hair, but in his heart he knows that none of those things can account for it. Not even their numb-hearted insensitivity to the world
they live in can account for it. What he's doing just isn't that radical—fatigue pants, billyhop boots, and a little brown makeup don't make a disguise. No way do they make a disguise. He doesn't know exactly how to explain it, and so mostly leaves it alone. He learned this technique, as he learned so many others, in Vietnam.

The young black man is still standing outside the lobby door (he's flipped up the hood of his grungy old sweatshirt now), and he shakes his crumpled styrofoam cup at Willie. He sees that the dude carrying the Mr. Repairman case in one hand is smiling, and so his own smile widens.