Warm Wuinter's Garden (33 page)

An hour later, as Peter neared New Haven, the
traffic grew heavier. Exhaust had colored the edges of the highway
a cuprous brown. The road was cracked and crazed from having
weathered too much traffic. New Haven’s skyline was much higher
than he expected. On the harbor side there were tall bank and
office buildings. The last time he had been in New Haven he was
nearing the end of his cross country drive after having been
discharged from the army hospital. For the second time that
morning, he was pleased to find a memory. He chewed on its edges
like a baby with a teething biscuit.

Back then, there had been a harbor filled
with aging tankers and rusty scows. And toll booths. He realized
that he hadn’t passed through any toll booths. Route 95 had been
riddled with them. The closer one got to New York City, the more
frequent were the stops. It had been as if the road were testing a
driver’s desire for the metropolis. Now, the booths were gone.

Peter braked hard to avoid being sideswiped
as Route 95 narrowed at its junction with Route 91. He realized
with a start that it had been more than fifteen years since he had
been in Connecticut. More than fifteen years since he had been
anywhere other than eastern Massachusetts, the Cape and Rhode
Island. He had shrunk his world in order to make more sense of it.
More sense than going thirteen thousand miles to shoot at the
shadowy flicker of bodies as small as children. He had made his
life on the narrowest tip of land on the edge of the continent. It
had seemed defensible back then when, after less than two weeks
back home out of the hospital and back home with his parents, he
had packed his new car and moved to Provincetown. Provincetown had
been a step back. An orderly retreat back to the simple pleasures
that he had had during his college summers.

Out from a nook, from where it had escaped
the night-wind, popped a small memory of a midnight sea breeze
wrapping itself around his sweaty neck and curling down inside the
front of his food flecked shirt. The grinding sound, like a
Coltrane solo gone berserk, as he dragged a garbage can across
Julian’s dark gravel parking lot to the dumpster. Looking back and
seeing a congress of moths caucusing as they decided how to
rearrange themselves on the screen door from which they had just
been disturbed. Ray’s laughter, giddy from fatigue, cascading
farther out the door than the yellow of the lights.

Peter and Ray had been roommates all through
college. They had worked together summers in Provincetown at
Julian’s. For four years, they had been inseparable. Drunk together
occasionally. Stoned together frequently. They had studied together
and double dated together. They had passed back tie dyed shirts and
cotton sweaters and Hunter Thompson and Richard Farina and
Eisenhower jackets and Dylan and Country Joe, Cream and Robert
Johnson and the snake’s head of a hookah and the deepest insights
of youth. They had argued over the importance of Che Guevara, the
Fugs and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and they had learned that no
fight was worth their friendship.

They had wound their friendship round and
round, braided and plaited more than a thousand days until it
became impossible to remember who was the creator and what the
created. They had graduated together, started living a fourth
summer in the bazaar streets of P town and then, in the space of
five weeks, each had received his draft notice.

Peter sucked in exhaust rich air and held it
until his lungs burned. He now realized that the emptiness inside
him was not truly empty. True, some thoughts, many memories, had
been tossed out after some unknown arbiter had decided that they
were useless or unworthy. And, others had been worn out. Rubbed and
worried like rosary beads until they’d lost their shape and
meaning. But underneath, in a deeper, darker spot were other lodes
cached many years before. Now, made aware of their presence, Peter
couldn’t remember if he had meant to hide them or just to put them
in a safe place.

Peter didn’t release his breath until hot
dots of red and silver sequins danced so fast across his eyes that
he couldn’t track the racing cars around him.

Ray had received his notice first. Although
they had talked all spring about what could happen upon graduation
when they would lose their 2 S student deferments and be re
classified as 1 A, it had never seemed quite real. They had spent
nights smoking dope and discussing late applications to graduate
school, or going to Canada, or filling up on methedrine or dozens
of egg whites or acid before going to the physical. Being crazy.
Being gay. Conscientiously objecting. Going to prison. But in the
end, when Ray’s letter came, they had been so amazed that a
stranger’s pen stroke on a piece of paper could compel such a
change in their lives that first Ray and, then, just weeks later,
Peter had decided to live out the fate ordained in that unknown
magician’s runic script.

The draft notice was more magical than
Aladdin’s lamp. A black squiggle scrawled above a stranger’s typed
name and a mystical world of furnace blast shimmery parade grounds,
four beat bass based drill songs, dull finished metal clips and
thick green webbing, cordite and carburetor smelling weapons ca
denced ca denced ca denced through the end of summer’s days. The
minutes dragged and the days flew by and each one was a step up the
short steep ramp of a transport plane. And as another handful of
minutes oozed out of a steamy afternoon, Peter had found his
thoughts canting back and forth like a dingy in a stiff breeze.
Eager one minute to meet a stranger and play a game of wits and
stealth. The next minute feeling that there were too many molecules
to his body. Everything was too large and too long. Wanting to trim
his nails and curl his fingers and hunch his shoulders and draw up
his knees until he was no bigger than a basketball. A ball, mottled
green and tan and brown, a ball that could roll unobserved beneath
a cover of green and black shadows in a stranger’s jungle. A minute
after that he was wondering what Ray was doing. Had Ray mastered
the obstacle course? Had Ray managed to escape to town for a night
of beer made heady with the froth of guilt? Would they meet over
there, smoke a joint, and wind another strand of memory?

The traffic funneling into New York pushed
aside Peter’s memories. He continued to hold his breath, but now it
was from concentration as he battled graffiti scrawled step-vans
careening from lane to lane and an unending stream of loosely
sprung Seventies behemoths hurtling toward the city. The highway
narrowed and narrowed again until the Jersey barriers pressed so
close to the passenger side of Peter’s car that he experienced the
same tingling sensation of being too large that he had remembered
earlier. A horn blared. In the next lane, close enough that Peter
could have added his own spray of rage to the black and red
challenges on its dented silver sides, a truck pushed itself close,
then closer until its bumper banged the bumper of the car ahead.
The wavering pitch of the horn began again and continued. Peter
looked up at the truck cab. A gravy skinned man with a sparse
mustache and two gold front teeth leaned out the passenger window,
extended his middle finger and yelled, “Up yours, hombre.” The
truck dropped back several feet, then surged forward and rammed the
car ahead. The car skittered. Its driver abruptly accelerated and
jerked the wheel hard to the right to jump into Peter’s lane. The
truck sped ahead with its horn crowing over its victory.

After that drama, Peter spent almost as much
time watching the rear view mirrors as looking at the road before
him. Each time a vehicle drew up close to him, he tightened his
grip on the wheel and stiffened his shoulders in preparation for
the shock that was to come. He began to feel terrified.

Just ahead, an old Chrysler, a mile long, its
original paint sunburned beyond recognition, black smoke spewing
out from deep under its frame, veered from the right lane to the
left. The driver’s side of the car kissed the Jersey barrier, a
tracer shell’s lariat of sparks snaked out, a hubcap leapt up into
the air, pitched sideways and flew back toward Peter looking like a
miniature space ship fleeing a dying world. He braked hard, heard a
horn’s blare, started to change lanes and heard another horn
screaming. He sucked his breath in and began to count.

After negotiating the Tri-borough Bridge and
the roller coaster bumps and curves of the FDR, Peter exited at
14th Street. Parked in a tow zone with the motor running, the
tourist worked to bring his breathing back to normal. Excess
voltage sputtered along the nape of his neck. Behind him, pent up
drivers gunned motors in anticipation of the light change and their
cross town charge.

After he regained some composure, Peter drove
around the Village until he found a parking place on Ninth Street.
He walked the streets that he and Ray had wandered through on their
visits to New York for the collegiate version of lost weekends.
Almost nothing looked familiar. The sidewalks and stoops were
cleaner than he remembered them; the people hanging out on the
streets were dirtier. His limp made him feel ungainly as he walked
quickly past the drunks and junkies in Washington Park. He walked
east to Broadway and then south toward SoHo. He crossed Houston. He
quickly glanced at the facades of buildings as he passed them. He
couldn’t remember the number of the building where he and Ray would
stay in the furniture free cavernous loft of Ray’s sister, Adele.
He thought it had been on the east side of Broadway. South of
Houston. South of Prince. Maybe south of… He had received a closely
lined, meticulously printed letter from Adele while he was at a
camp outside Hue. Ray’s squad had been driving along on patrol
working its way through a beer shipment when it had been ambushed.
In his drunkenness Ray had sprayed two of his buddies with bullets
before being wounded. There was some question as to which side had
shot Ray. In the hospital someone, maybe Ray himself, had detached
him from the respirator and he had suffocated. …And Spring. Maybe
south of Spring. He couldn’t remember. Nothing looked right. At the
time the letter came, he was drunk, too. It seemed impossible that
the details of an event that had occurred less than one hundred
fifty miles from him had had to travel more than twenty-five
thousand miles and take almost two months for him to be aware of
them. It had seemed impossible that Ray had been dead for weeks and
he couldn’t tell. Broome. That seemed too far. He could turn around
and walked back up Broadway. Look harder. Don’t be so careful about
pretending not to be looking. It wouldn’t make any difference. Even
if he found the building, there would be no chance that Adele Auden
would be taped to a mailbox.

Peter continued south, then turned east on
Canal Street.

Almost every time he and Ray had been in New
York, being ravenous from a night of dancing or from laying down
hours of table top percussion at a Village bar, they would burst
through the steam-etched doors of some three table noodle shop, bow
to patrons and cook alike and wolf down great smoking knots of snow
white rice noodles. With fingers stupid from drink or smoke, they
had used an exaggerated body English to guide chopsticks of lort
toward their laughing mouths. Then, with bellies full and the
streets empty, they would drift back to Adele’s and her sprung
couches.

As Peter drew closer to Chinatown, the
sidewalks became more crowded. When he looked at his watch it was
just past noon. The Retreat dining room would be beginning to fill.
He told himself that should call, but it seemed so far away. He
stepped from the sidewalk to stand between two cars in safety. The
crowds surged by him. He studied the nimbleness with which people
avoided one another. In Provincetown there was no such grace.
There, especially in the summer nights, people touched antennae
every few feet to see who would move aside. Here, in these narrow
dirty streets, there was a frenetic politeness and a strong sense
of isolation.

Peter’s breath caught and held. In the crowd
of people, nearly all small and round faced, he spied three young
men with narrow, bony faces and slight wiry bodies. He bent his
knees to draw himself down between the cars. On the middle man, on
the small knot of bicep muscle exposed below the turned up sleeve
of a black short sleeved shirt, was a large tattoo of a dragon.
Talking loudly through mouths filled with broken yellowed teeth,
the three men passed Peter without noticing him. He watched the men
until they disappeared in the crowd.

Peter crossed the street and walked quickly
in the opposite direction. In the next fifteen minutes, as he
reconnoitered Chinatown, he saw dozens more Vietnamese. In several
restaurant windows there were menus covered with the accented
letters of the Vietnamese alphabet. On the northern edge of
Chinatown he came upon a Vietnamese grocery.

Each time that he saw a Vietnamese face, his
body spilled out an unnamable energy. It held fear. And more.
Anger. Twisted love. Unwrapped memory.

Peter walked all over Chinatown, but nothing
seemed familiar. He began to wonder if any of those nights with Ray
had really happened.

After watching its entry way for several
minutes, Peter decided to eat at the Saigon Inn. He ordered nime
chow and a beef and noodle salad. As he waited for the rice paper
rolls filled with cold rice noodles, grilled shrimp and cilantro,
he drank from a glass filled with sweet beans and condensed milk.
As he ate the barbequed beef strips and noodles and holy basil
dressed with with nuoc cham sauce, he studied the people who had
been his friends and his enemy. He pondered why they had come to
live with the Chinese whom they hated with a memory which went back
more than a thousand years. He wondered if Ray had loved the food
the way he did. Would they have shared a dish of bo vien, the
ubiquitous beef balls, either there or here, either then or now, if
Ray had lived?