The World Played Chess, page 21
I contemplated making up a story, but only briefly. I got a sense William knew what I had done and that he would see right through any bullshit. After nearly two months working together daily, he knew who I was and who I was not. William, on the other hand, was difficult to know and difficult to predict, as were the things he would say. So, although embarrassed, I shrugged and told the truth. “I apologized.”
William gave this some thought, but I couldn’t read his expression.
“There were four of you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, starting to feel small.
“How big was he?”
Still shrinking. I had no doubt what William would have done. “Not much bigger than me. Probably weighed more, but not a lot.”
More contemplation. Then William asked, “Did you say anything?”
“No.”
“Did your friends?”
“They said they didn’t.”
“So why did you apologize?”
I let out a sigh. “To let the guy save face. I figured the girl put him in a corner.”
“Of course she did.” William laughed. Then he said, “Either that, or one of your friends said something.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe we should have taught him a lesson. I mean, two of my friends are big. Really big. They would have killed the guy on their own.”
William nodded. “But nobody did.”
“No.”
“And nobody admitted they said anything.”
“No.”
“Shitty situation to put you in, if one of them did say something.”
I shrugged and swiped at the condensation on the outside of my glass. “I didn’t care.”
“Yeah, you did,” William said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
“You might need new friends,” William said.
And there it was. The reaction I could never predict. “They’re good guys,” I said, backpedaling. “Like I said, I think this guy was just looking for a fight to impress his girlfriend. I think she put him up to it.”
William nodded. “But the question is why? I think you already figured that out. Someone said something.”
“Maybe,” I said again. “But I wasn’t going to fight the guy just so he could save face . . .” I paused. William waited. I shook my head. Why was I bullshitting? “The truth,” I said, “is I’ve never been in a real fight.” I shrugged and left unsaid the obvious.
William let almost a minute pass, staring at the people in the bar before he reengaged me. “You know the definition of a hero?”
I figured I could make up one on the fly. “Someone who acts without considering his own safety?”
“Someone too stupid not to consider his own safety and gets himself and other people killed,” William said, sounding adamant.
Again, not the answer I’d been expecting. I let William’s statement sit a moment, not quite certain what it meant. Finally, I just asked, “You think I did the right thing?”
“Never get in a fight if your heart isn’t in it. You’ll lose. Especially if the other guy has something to fight for. This guy did. His honor. You didn’t. You’ll get yourself and others killed.”
I nodded. Made sense.
“It’s like Vietnam,” he said, although I had already deduced it. “None of us had our hearts in the fight. What was the point? Why was I supposed to care about a war in a country halfway around the world? How did it impact me? The government couldn’t give us an intelligent reason why we were dying over there. They kept saying we were stopping the spread of communism.” He frowned. “What does an eighteen-year-old care about the spread of communism?”
He doesn’t, I thought, but didn’t say.
William stared at me, as if looking straight through me. Then he asked, “Why’d you tell me that story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just wanted to hear what you’d say.”
He nodded. “Was it what you expected?”
My turn to chuckle. “No.”
“What did you expect?”
“I figured you would have beat the crap out of the guy.”
William smiled, but it was pensive. Then he said, “Like that hulk at the softball game?”
“Yeah,” I said, still chuckling.
“Only because fighting was what I was brainwashed to do,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t have a choice to fight or not fight. I couldn’t back out or back down. My country put me in that position. Kill or be killed. Period. But you had a choice,” he said. “And you made the right choice. The smart choice. And that takes a lot more guts than anything I did because I had to.”
That made me feel good. For some reason, though, I said, “Sometimes I wish I was more like Todd, with that badass saunter of his.”
William got quiet, a queer expression on his face. “You think Todd walks like a badass?”
“You don’t? He saunters like Arthur Fonzarelli.”
“It’s not a saunter,” William said. “It’s a limp.” William looked as though he was uncertain what more to say. Then he said, “He got it in Vietnam.”
“What happened? If I can ask?”
William sipped his drink. “You can ask and since Todd told me, I’ll tell you. Todd had been outside the wire for weeks on search and destroys. When he got back to his base, they rotated in a new lieutenant. Officers rotated out every six months, just when they finally had enough experience to know shit.”
“Why?”
William sat forward. “Because Vietnam was the only war we had going on, and the military had promised all these guys if they went to officer candidate school, they’d get the chance to lead. So they rotated officers in and out as a way to get them experience, except Vietnam was nothing like the classroom, and the VC were not like any enemy we’d ever faced. This was a guerilla war, and most of the guys rotating in didn’t know shit and wouldn’t until they lived through it. If they lived through it.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
William laughed. “It made no sense. That’s the point. It was idiotic.”
“So, what happened to Todd’s leg?”
“Todd’s platoon was supposed to get time off after they got back, but this twenty-three-year-old pissant firebrand out of West Point thought he was going to win the war on his own and he tells the platoon they’re going back out, that Charlie’s making another big push and he wants to beat Charlie to the punch. Nobody was buying the bullshit anymore. Todd said guys flat out refused to go, and this lieutenant threatened that anybody who refused to go would be sent to the military jail at Long Binh, which was a real shithole.”
I just listened. I didn’t feel it was my place to ask any questions.
“Todd only had three months left. He didn’t want to end up in jail, but he said he had this strong feeling that if he went outside the wire again, he wasn’t coming back. You get that feeling, a sixth sense. Todd said he was sure this ass was going to get him killed. The night before they were to go out, he was in his bunker, drunk and high and tripping. He took out this metal rod he kept in his rucksack and handed it to one of the guys in the bunker. Then he put his boot on a chair and told the guy to break his leg.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
William nodded. “This guy, also messed up, whacks the leg. Todd doesn’t know how many times, because he thinks he passed out. Said he woke up on a stretcher with the lieutenant running beside him, yelling that he’d see to it that Todd received a court-martial and was sent to a military prison.”
I had misjudged the saunter, just as I’d misjudged the toothpick to be an accoutrement of a badass. Far from it.
“What happened to the guys in Todd’s platoon, the ones who went out?”
“They got ambushed. Half the guys died, including the lieutenant.”
“Todd was right. He knew.”
“We all knew,” William said. “Over there, it was just a matter of when.”
August 18, 1968
I was raised Catholic. I learned how to pray the Our Father and Hail Mary and the Glory Be so I could say the rosary. I made my First Confession and my first Holy Communion, and I was confirmed at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church. I went to a Catholic grammar school and a Catholic high school, and I went to mass Sundays with my family. The marines are the first time I’ve spent significant time with guys who are not Catholic. In my platoon we have Protestants, Lutherans, Baptists, Jews, a few agnostics, Latter-Day Saints, even a Muslim.
When I left for boot camp, my mother gave me a gold cross on a chain to protect me. I’ve worn it every day, and when I first arrived in-country, I prayed every day. I prayed all the time. You can’t help it.
At first you ask God politely. Bless me, God. Keep me safe.
Simple prayers.
Then marines start dying, young men just like you, young men who believed with all their heart in the same God. Young men who prayed to the same God to protect them. I went from the simple prayers and requests to asking God to make sense of it, to make sense of all the young men dying.
I questioned God. Why didn’t you listen to them? Why did they die?
My brothers are stepping on mines and booby traps and mortar rounds. They’re getting shot up and blown up no matter how hard they pray.
I made deals with God.
If I live, I swear, God, I’ll go to church every day when I get home. I’ll become a priest. I’ll quit drinking, quit smoking dope.
But my brothers continue to die, almost every day now. The NVA has resorted to guerilla tactics, and they’re good at them. We can’t even find them. The officers tell us it’s because their numbers are dwindling, that we’re winning. Really? Because every day I wake I see our numbers dwindling.
Then I got angry. I yelled at God.
Where are you? Why aren’t you listening? Why do I even bother to pray if you aren’t going to listen, if you’re going to let guys die?
Still more die—friends you thought would never die are suddenly gone. I’m not any better than them, and worse than some, so I figure it’s just a matter of time before my number’s up. It’s just fate. It’s just bad luck. It has nothing to do with praying. Nothing to do with the guy upstairs. He isn’t even here.
I understand now why Cruz told me not to make friends, but how do I not? I mean, I hump with these guys every day, we sleep together in foxholes, pull guard duty together at night, and shoot the shit. I don’t want to know them, but I do. I know the names of the small towns from all over the country from where they came. I know their family members and their girlfriends.
They’re just like me.
They pray, just like me.
And they die.
Maybe like me.
Finally, I gave up.
No more deals with God.
No more bargains.
No more prayers.
I’m not going to pray if you’re not going to listen.
Like thoughts of home, I pushed the thought of a benevolent God out of my head until, finally, I stopped thinking about God altogether.
He simply doesn’t exist.
Am I worried about hell?
I’m in hell. God can’t send me anyplace worse than here.
And I don’t need God. Because I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if I live or die.
I no longer fear death.
It no longer scares me.
It no longer has power over me.
I walk in the valley of death and I fear no evil.
Because I am the evil.
And that is an omnipotent feeling.
Chapter 19
July 26, 1979
As the subcontractors performed their jobs at the Burlingame remodel, I suspected I was no longer needed, and Todd would have been justified to lay me off. But I’d also come to learn that wasn’t his way. I had worked hard for Todd and I guessed he felt a sense of loyalty to me. William told me one afternoon that I had saved Todd money on the remodel and it now looked like he would make money, especially after the owner agreed to pay more for upgrades he and his wife wanted.
Todd also bid tile jobs, kitchen and bathroom rip-outs, and other small remodels, even retiling around the trim of a partially drained pool. I performed the prep work on these jobs so William or Todd or both could arrive with materials and hit the ground running. It meant long days, but long days meant more money. It also meant I went out less with my high school buddies. They left for Giants games or parties while I remained at work. A couple had already left for school. Others vacationed with their families. I had stopped drinking during the week and felt better for it. I was also getting eight hours of sleep. By contrast, William’s physical condition and his emotional state worsened. His clothes seemed to weigh on him, as did the work. He stooped, bent over, and he rarely called me Vincenzo. One afternoon when he took off his shirt, I was shocked at the muscle mass he had lost. He was also becoming unreliable. When William didn’t show up at Nini’s, Todd would drive back home to call him, while I waited in the truck. When Todd came out of his house, it seemed William always had an excuse.
On one occasion I expressed my concern about William’s physical condition to Todd and asked if he was okay.
“Monica threw him out a few weeks ago,” Todd said, referring to William’s girlfriend.
“Where’s he been living?” I asked.
“He’s sleeping on some friends’ couches and living in his El Camino,” Todd said.
Nowadays the term “homeless” has a different connotation given the large homeless populations found in most cities, but the basics remain the same. William didn’t have a place to live.
“I have a room above my garage,” Todd said. “I’ll let him stay there if he can’t find anyplace else.”
The following day, when William showed up at Nini’s, he told me I should drive my own car to the jobsite, that he had errands to run after work. As I passed his El Camino, I noticed bags of clothes and other items. I felt bad that he was embarrassed. After what he’d been through, he had no reason to feel embarrassed about anything.
The jobsite was a master bathroom remodel in Redwood City. We found dry rot in the studding in the walls and the subflooring. Dry rot, I was told, cannot be ignored or go untreated. It starts with water intrusion that becomes a fungus that eats at the wood and worsens with time if ignored.
“It’s like cancer,” William said, using his boot to step on a weakened floor joist. His foot went through the joist like it was sawdust. “If you don’t cut it out, it spreads and eventually destroys the entire structure.”
I wondered if the same thing was happening to William, if Vietnam was rotting him from the inside, and I wondered what might happen if it went untreated.
We had a plan to treat dry rot. We showed the homeowner the problem and took pictures to document it, then we cut out the infected lumber and installed pressure treated studs and joists, which were resistant to dry rot, and replaced the subflooring. Because dry rot was prevalent in older bathrooms but hidden behind the walls and subflooring, Todd told his clients the cost would be billed on a time and material basis. That meant the owner paid for the materials, as well as William’s and my hourly wages to perform the work.
Despite all this, it didn’t mean the homeowner would be happy. People never were when the cost of a job increased. The wife on this particular job told us to stop work and called her husband, who we assumed called Todd. William and I sat outside in the shade of a large eucalyptus tree waiting for the papal blessing to continue. As per usual, I sat on one of our five-gallon plastic buckets, and William squatted on his haunches, smoking a cigarette.
“Whatever happened to that cute Italian girl in the house next door?” William asked. It was the first time he’d brought up Amy DeLuca in weeks.
“She went home to New York,” I said again.
“Anything happen between the two of you? You looked like you were getting along at pizza that night.”
A part of me wanted to tell William about that night, that Amy and I had returned to the house and the pool, but I knew Amy had just needed to get her mind off her ex-boyfriend, and I’d been a convenient distraction, nothing more. I also didn’t get the sense William was all that interested. He was just making conversation and had something else on his mind.
“Nah,” I said. “She was leaving that Sunday, and she has a boyfriend in Manhattan. She was just looking for something to do because her cousin’s boyfriend was complaining they didn’t get to spend any time alone.”
“Too bad, Vincent. Nice Catholic Italian girl would have made Mama Bianco happy.”
“How do you know she was Catholic?”
“Her family’s Italian and she’s from Queens. She’s Catholic.”
I smiled. “She was too old for me anyway.”
“That’s the best kind. They can teach you.”
I laughed. “I’ll bet.”
William flicked his cigarette ashes.
I decided to ask William a question I had asked earlier that summer. “How come you don’t wear your cross anymore?” I asked. “The one you said your mother gave you.”
William sucked his cigarette. He’d previously said he lost the cross, but I didn’t believe he had. This time, though, he said, “I gave it to a guy who had a use for it. I no longer did.”
“Oh.”
William took a moment, as if debating whether he wanted to say more, and in that moment I realized asking again had been a mistake, that William had lied for a reason. A part of me hoped he wouldn’t tell me what happened, but then he said, “I told you Bean usually walked point?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Except some nights Cruz made Bean take a break and we’d switch off taking the point.”
“Okay.”
“We went out one night and it was my turn to take point, but Tommy, this guy from Minnesota, he asked me to switch because the next day was his birthday and he didn’t want to walk point on his birthday. He said it was bad luck. So I said, ‘Sure.’ What do I care, right?”
“Right.”
“We called Tommy ‘Forecheck’ because he was a big hockey guy. Played in college and the semipros, and he was talking about playing when he got home, said he had a tryout with the Minnesota North Stars. Big mistake.”
