Suicide Wall

SUICIDE WA L L a novel by

Alexander Paul

PakDonald Publishing i

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Fallen Warriors Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to healing the wounds of war, and to Point Man, a non-profit Christian Ministry dedicated to helping Vietnam Veterans through their difficult lives and to prevent suicides. This book can be purchased by mail for $11.95 (US) plus $3 for shipping and handling. Please write: PakDonald Publishing, 6663 SW BeavertonHillsdale Hwy., Suite 175, Portland, OR 97225.

Edited by Tim Sills Book and Cover Design by Jeff Dayne Suicide Wall Copyright © 1993, 1996 by Alexander Paul Published by PakDonald Publishing 6663 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy., Suite 175, Portland, OR 97225 Second Printing, December, 1996 Printed in the United States of America This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Alexander Paul. ISBN 0-9642761-1-9

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Dedication This book is dedicated to my wife Lori, who gave me the courage to write it. It is also dedicated to the memory of Gerald, my friend who died there, to Dennis, Denny, Ron, Floyd, Roy and Larry, who went to school with me and died there, to Grant who died in pilot training, to Greg and Jerry who were wounded there, and to Jack, Karl, Brad, Bruce, Kenny, Dean, Steve and Tim—all my friends who went there and made it.

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Acknowledgement I want to thank my wife Lori for countless hours of reading my manuscript and for her excellent plotting ideas. I also want to thank Tim Sills, who went to Vietnam as a Marine medic and survived combat, for editing this work, and Jack Estes, another Marine combat veteran, the President of Fallen Warriors Foundation, who always provided encouragement as I struggled with this book. Thanks also to all the other vets who have helped me with the research for this book and without whom I could not have written it. I also want to make a special thanks to Fallen Warriors Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to healing the wounds of war, and to Point Man, a non-profit Christian Ministry dedicated to helping Vietnam Veterans through their difficult lives and to prevent suicides. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to Fallen Warriors and Point Man.

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According to some estimates, over 150,000 veterans of the Vietnam War have committed suicide since returning home. The list of names on the Vietnam Memorial is frozen forever. The suicides go on.

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CHAPTER ONE I wanted to feel in control of my life. After all, I’d just been fired. So when I walked into the kitchen I listened to my answering machine, which makes me feel connected to the world. There was only one message. “Big Al, Gene here. You going to Reno this year? I really want to go.” A truck made noise over Gene’s voice. “Hello? Sorry, I’m in a phone booth in John Day. I’ll call back tonight when you’re home. Hey, do you remember Brent Fletcher from your high school? He committed suicide last week. His service was yesterday in Bend. God, that’s the second guy I’ve known who went to Vietnam and committed suicide. It’s given me an idea for a ....” My machine only has a 45 second tape, so whatever else Gene wanted to say was lost. Brent had started at guard on our freshman basketball team at Stayton, Oregon, then moved over to Bend. He’d played at Southern Oregon College on a scholarship, but when he got into a fight during a game they took it away from him. He couldn’t afford college, got drafted and went to Vietnam. I saw him twice the rest of my life. He came into the IGA grocery store in 1968 where I was working evenings to get through college. He’d just returned and was talking to

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me when he spotted the mother of an old girlfriend. He ran over to her, picked her up and with a big hug shouted, “Mrs. Klein, I’m back. I made it! I’m home!” After that I didn’t see Brent again until our twenty year high school reunion in 1986. By then he wore a red, bushy beard and did construction contracts for the Forest Service up in the Malheur National Forest. Between sips of beer he told me he’d thrown a VC out of a chopper once during the war so the VC’s buddy would talk. Another time they’d been overrun and he chopped a guy’s head off with a trenching tool. Brent said it real cool, no emotion, like he had weeded his tomatoes that morning and had to trim some dead leaves. Now he had killed himself. I read a book once about the Vietnam Memorial, called Facing the Wall . It said more veterans had committed suicide after the war than had died in it. The list was still growing. I’ve always felt guilty about Vietnam. I didn’t go, I got out of the draft on bad knees. But my knees weren’t all that bad, so I’ve always felt dishonest about flunking the physical. That event set the tone for how I’ve lived since; legally, but not really honest. For example, one time I pushed a perfectly healthy friend around the World’s Fair in a wheelchair so we could cut in all the lines. I smoked dope in college, cheated on tests to get the grades, faked data on reports at work, inflated my tax deductions and never got caught. I have to admit all the fudging has helped me succeed. But this sly, successful living has left a bad taste in my mouth.

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I’m not naive; I know I’m not alone. In fact cheating as long as the ump doesn’t catch you seems to be the American way. But my dishonesty weighed me down all my life and the heaviest weight of all was the guilt about not going to Vietnam. Finally it got so bad I decided to be honest about everything in my life as a sort of penance for not going. Absolution by clean living. Go and sin no more. Of course, that’s why I lost my job. I went to find Jeri, my wife, to tell her the bad news. I hadn’t come home when I got fired in the morning. Instead I cleaned out my desk, then hung out at a restaurant until three. We own a big manufactured home, nearly 4,000 square feet. In fact, we own the whole trailer park. Our house sits near the entry road of the trailer park in order to keep track of what’s going on. We have a big landscaped yard with berms all around. The berms have trees on top for privacy. Our home is an oasis away from the factories just down Johnson Creek Boulevard. It was Jeri who transformed this place from bare ground to beauty. She put in trees, plants, fish ponds, a stainless steel sculpture by Lee Kelly and a little stream that runs through a pond and recycles using a pump. I figured Jeri was out back so I walked through the kitchen, the laundry room with dryer running, down the steps and through the breezeway that connects the house to the garage. It’s covered by a grape arbor. I love our grapes in the fall. They’re the big blue ones with the sour skin, yet under the skin they’re sweet and then in the middle they’re

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sour again. Concords. We had an arbor like this at our home in Corvallis when we first got married in college. And in the second grade in Gates, Oregon, I had one, so when I eat Concords I remember being newly married and being seven years old. The grapes and leaves were gone now, it was January, so I walked under a dark, bony bower of vines. Jeri was in the greenhouse, behind the garage. She’s lean, with straight black hair, pearly white teeth, one grey eye and one blue and is two years younger than me. We met in college at an anti-war rally, got married while we were still in school then went through a hippie time together. But afterwards we took up regular American living; making money and children. “Well?” She asked as I came in the door. She’d been saying “Well?” every day since my trip to CHQ, what we call Reynold’s Corporate Headquarters, to discuss what I’d done. “They fired me,” I replied with a sad look on my face. “Dan did me in. I suspect now that he lost his testicles in Korea and is taking it out on me.” She laughed. “How can you say that?” “Because his voice got so high in that meeting when he lied. And he always brags that he froze his balls off in Korea. Did you know he’s a member of the Chosin Few?” “The what?” “The veterans who survived the assault on the Chosin Reservoir formed a group called the Chosin Few to get recognition and honor themselves.”

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“Everyone who suffers in war deserves recognition and honor,” Jeri lifted a sad looking plant from its pot. “Fred should start the Khe Sanh Rats or something like that.” Fred is a former Marine friend of mine who survived Khe Sanh. They got shelled every day when they were surrounded by the Army of North Vietnam. He quickly learned that a rat in his foxhole could hear incoming shells before he did, so if the rat dove for cover, Fred did too. He told his buddies about it, but according to Fred there was a guy who didn’t believe in the rat. That guy lost the top third of his head one day when the first round came in. After that everyone watched rats. To this day, every time I see Fred I come close to tears, thinking of him there and the guy who didn’t believe in rats, sagging topless to the ground. “Fred just wants to forget the war,” she replied, “not form a recognition club.” She looked at me and said an amazing thing. “You just need to winter.” “What?” “Remember the worker at Reynolds who told you about when he was young? He used to winter in a rancher’s cabin in Montana if he’d saved $400 by the end of the summer? He’d buy salt, coffee, flour, potatoes, onions, beans and enough ammunition to shoot deer and elk? He could winter. That’s what you need to do.” “What a great idea,” I replied. “Sit in my chair, read, watch the rain and decide what to do with my life. Or finish the car.” Just winter. It gave me a sense of peace and freedom. It was so simple. I didn’t need to find a job right away, Jeri and

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I had seen to that with the trailer park. We’d get by on her part time real estate sales and the park income as I sought a new path for my life. But what would I do about Shana? “You could help me around here too, don’t forget,” Jeri volunteered. “I’m always swamped.” The only problem with wintering was Shana. I had to be honest with Jeri about this, now that I was being honest. “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “I said you could help me around here.” “I’ll help around here. Definitely.” I met Shana at work. The first time I saw her I started to shake. She had long blonde hair, big breasts, tiny waist and hips, a beautiful face and she was twenty six. Barbie alive. Barbie laughing. Barbie young and fresh as she went on a tour of our plant her first day at work. I’m amazed there weren’t industrial accidents for all the heads she turned. I checked production records later and noticed that they cobbled, that means ruined, three ingots on the Hot Line that day at the exact time she walked by. They usually don’t cobble three ingots in a week. At first Shana wasn’t interested in me. It was as if I was invisible to her when I’d go to her office in accounting to see her boss. She was the receptionist. But after awhile I let it be known that I owned the trailer park, hinted that it was probably worth a million, maybe more, which it is, and she saw that I was doing well in the company. After that she became very interested in everything I said, in fact, she made it seem more important and interesting than it really was. It was exciting to me to be so important, to have every

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word enthusiastically greeted by her fresh beautiful face and a peek at the breasts so poorly covered in her low cut blouse. She always seemed to have filing to do when I waited in her office until Ted, her boss, was free. Filing meant she had to do a lot of bending and kneeling in her miniskirt. It drove me crazy. We’d visit when I waited for Ted. No matter what she said, it seemed important and interesting to me because it emanated from that gorgeous young body and face. But most of what she has ever said to me is forgotten, blurred by sensory overload from my eyes and nose. She wore lots of perfume. I’m not sure of the name. It smells like rotting fruit mixed with spritzer. Her office was a quiet, sexual, olfactory garden in that smoky, noisy, unfriendly factory. She was so friendly and interested in me that it was easy to fall in love. I found it hard not to think of her all the time. “Just winter,” Jeri said, coming over and hugging me out of my Shana thoughts. She hugged with her forearms because she had gardening gloves on which were covered with dirt. And she didn’t press against me because she had her dirty white gardening apron on over her blue long sleeved Oregon State sweatshirt. “It’s going to be all right.” Just winter. What a great idea. Driving home I’d thought she’d be angry and want me to look for a new job right away. Even with the park income I’d have to get back to work fairly soon. After all, John needed his college money. And we’d sunk Jeri’s real estate commissions into the park, thinking my $6,000 a month income would pay for college.

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“Do you mind if I still go to Super Bowl Reno?” I asked. “I think you should go to Reno,” she walked back to the high table where she works on her plants. I don’t know what she does to the plants exactly. She’s organized though. The room is tidy, dead plants revive, everything stays green and all the plants look happy. She’s a grower. The trailer park was her idea. She’s in real estate, selling houses in the new developments around Gresham. She found the land for the park, got the loan, everything. She also got some big commissions to launch it. I did all the construction. I worked my butt off evenings and weekends. We sort of grew the park like she grows her garden, well planned and constantly fussed over. “Just have a budget in Reno. Don’t go crazy with your gambling,” she added. “Not like Erik last year,” I replied. “Besides, Super Bowl Reno is a combo trip. Guys, skiing, the shows, the game, good food. Gambling is only part of it.” I’ve never even invited Shana on my trips to Reno, although that would have been a lot of fun. None of the guys bring along their wives, girlfriends, secretaries, nothing. Strictly forbidden; if you bring a woman, you’re with her and it’s a guy trip. “I kind of feel sad, leaving Reynolds like this,” I said. “I had a lot invested in that place.” “You hated it and you know it.” Jeri was right of course, but I thought she’d be more upset about me getting fired. She was so nonchalant! Treating my firing like I’d lost an old shoe, and saying, “Oh, don’t worry, throw the other one

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away and get a new pair.” I wanted to reminisce and be sad and talk about the places I’d walked in those shoes. I wanted sympathy for losing my career. “I know I hated it. But I still feel sad. Maybe scared a little too.” “I’m sorry you got fired,” she said. “You need a proper hug,” she took off her gloves and apron, then came over and wrapped her sweatshirted arms around me. “I’ll pray for you and have my church group pray for you too.” “I don’t want them to pray for me,” I said. “I’ll get along just fine without them knowing anything if you don’t mind.” “All right,” she said in a small voice as she stepped away from me. That’s one thing about Jeri that’s bugged me for a long time. She’s a born again Christian and after she accepted Jesus she worked quite a while at converting me. I resisted though. I’m a non-practicing Episcopalian and I just get upset with this whole deal of accepting Jesus. It’s like she wants me to be possessed or something. “It’s good you’re on your own now,” she said cheerfully. “Why don’t we go out and have a celebratory dinner tonight?” “Celebration dinner? Where? Why?” “At Jake’s, like we did to celebrate closing the loan for the park. Only this time we’ll celebrate not having to live under Dan Wilson the rest of our lives.” That sounded good and suddenly I felt uplifted. She was putting life in perspective instead of letting me feel

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sorry for myself. It was three thirty in the afternoon on a week day and I was at home. I felt like I was playing hooky. I was free. “I’m going to work on the car for awhile,” I said. “I’ll call Jake’s for reservations. No more Dan Wilson,” I shouted. “That’s the spirit.”

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CHAPTER TWO I went to the garage and started working on the Cobra kit car I was building with John. You know, Dan Wilson always had big ideas. He’s operations Vice President for Reynolds Aluminum and I am, was, the Chief Engineer at the Troutdale plant. When the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, Dan thought it would be another Vietnam and drag on for years. He wanted to start making aluminum armor plating to fill the demand for tanks destroyed in battle. The problem with Dan’s idea was that our four machines for making armor plating, they’re called Salem Heat Treating Furnaces, had been used less and less since the mid-80’s. To make the volume of armor plating Dan forecasted would require a complete overhaul that I guessed would cost $8 million. These furnaces are beautiful machines. I love machinery, even though I’m not German; Germans really love machinery. Each furnace is four stories high and has a footprint on the ground of 2,000 square feet. They have big pits of water underneath the center and big gas furnace heaters in the four story towers. Five inch thick plates of aluminum that are ten feet by twenty feet are lifted by chains into the heaters, then dropped quickly into the water when they reach the proper temperature. This changes the crystalline structure of the aluminum. Then the plate of metal, all crinkled up like Saran Wrap, but flattish, is clamped on both ends in another huge machine and

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stretched out until it’s a flat plate of metal again, five inches thick, ten feet by twenty. All this makes the metal more resistant to sabot rounds; dense uranium slugs that tanks shoot at each other. The metal is also used for body frames on jets and other obscure things. “Dan, we should wait before we upgrade the Salems,” I argued in our first meeting after the Iraqi invasion. “We may never get involved over there. I’m aware of a lot of protests going on. There’s debate in the Senate. There’s a good chance we’ll just use sanctions.” “You know about all this protest because you’re against the war, aren’t you, Allen?” “I just don’t think our views on the war should affect our investment strategy,” I countered. “Which means you’re against it. Which figures, considering your history.” How I got out of the draft during Vietnam was common knowledge around the plant because I got a scholarship from Reynold’s to get my Master’s degree in industrial engineering. The rumor was that I wouldn’t have gotten the scholarship except for the fact that the other two candidates were likely to be drafted after they graduated. I let Dan bully me about my history. What else could I do? Quit? No, I’d kept my job despite worse things than Dan’s patriotic rants. “There’s going to be a war,” Dan went on. “Bush will make sure there’s no appeasement, like with Hitler in World War II. We’ll stand up and stop Hussein like we should have done with Hitler. Which would have happened

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back then except for people like you,” he said, staring at me and triumphantly adding the guilt of World War II to my life. I didn’t dare reply so he looked around with a grand smile and said, “It’s our patriotic duty to be ready to supply our military. Besides, this will be a big, big money maker. Allen, it’s up to your department to figure out exactly what it’s going to cost to get these Salem furnaces tuned up for that armor. I also want you to justify the repairs.” I didn’t object but I didn’t agree either and I had hoped to slip out of the meeting and stall Dan. But he’d have none of that. He came to my office after the meeting and shut the door. “I don’t want the wimps on the board to pull the plug on this the way you tried back there. There’s some antiwar types on the board too,” he said. “I want the demand forecast not to involve tank armor at all. So I want you to justify these repairs by padding the demand for the other products the Salems make. You’re good at this type of thing.” I didn’t know what he knew or didn’t know about other stuff I’d done like this. All for the good, mind you. When I padded numbers it was because I knew I was going to be right and I had been every time. I should explain. Industrial engineers are the guardians of the gates in our factory when it comes to spending money. A lot of times in my career I had to justify the purchase or repair of equipment when I couldn’t say precisely how much money it would save us. So I’d fake the data to justify the expenditure. I knew it was the right thing to do though, I have great intuition about

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this type of thing. But this Salem Furnace investment! Warning signals were going off. My intuition said there would be no big demand for tank armor in the near future. He saw my hesitation. “Justify this rehab or your career is over, hippie, no matter how much Burt likes you.” Well, that cleared up any confusion I might have had. The phone rang. We have phones everywhere in our house because the place is big and in case of emergencies with the park. It was Gene. He hadn’t waited until tonight. “Allen. You going to Reno this year?” “Every year, Superbowl weekend, we’re leaving tomorrow night. You interested?” “I think so. Tell me everything.” I gave him the details on the flights and hotel, then asked, “You’re really interested in going? You got pretty upset last time.” “I won’t lose my temper this time, I promise. Besides, I want to get out of here after Brent and all.” “That’s too bad about him. Did you see him much?” “Hardly, just around Bend occasionally. Sorry I didn’t let you know about the funeral.” “I couldn’t have come. Things have been pretty tense here and I lost my job today.” “He killed himself with a shotgun,” Gene completely ignored my job status problem. Didn’t anyone care about it? “There wasn’t much left of his head. They just went by his wallet I.D. actually. And his blood type.” “God, poor guy.” I was starting to feel ill so I gave him

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the travel agent’s number and he promised to call back to confirm he was in on the trip. “Allen, before you go, did you hear my idea?” “Idea?” “I told you all about it on your answering machine.” “It was cut off. The tape only allows a 45 second message. Is it long, Gene?” “Kind of.” “Why don’t you tell me on the flight? Or in Reno.” “Sure, that’s a good idea. I’ll call you back. I’m in on the trip though, just like the old days.” I first started going to Reno with Gene years ago, when he was a welder in Hood River. That first trip was the best. Just the two of us. We met at the airport bar at 5:00 on Thursday night before the Superbowl. It was already dark and the rain had been pouring for days. Travellers in the bar were making friends and getting drunk, waiting for late planes or no planes at all as the night would prove. “I brought it,” Gene had said as he took off his ‘49’ers baseball hat and revealed a quickly balding head surrounded by thinning black hair. He was fighting his hair loss with a full beard. “Brought what?” I asked as I waved to the bartender for another drink. He reached in his jeans pocket and took out a vial of shining black capsules. “Instant energy. Black beauties. Buzz fellows. My gambling partners,” he took the beer and put the vial back in his pocket.

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“Where’d you get those?” I asked. “The good doctor provides all.” We have a mutual friend, an emergency room doctor, who’d been a medic in Vietnam and had gone to Medical school afterwards. We called him Doctor Demento long before the radio guy took up that name because he was truly demented. Doc didn’t care about rules. He hated the government for Vietnam. So he lived by his own rules; don’t get caught, be good and true to your friends and get yourself and your friends high on days off. This was years ago, of course, before we all had kids and straightened up. Except for Doc. “He’s the evil doctor, not the good doctor,” I replied. We split one capsule on the plane during takeoff to enhance the thrill. They make the capsules in two parts, one two thirds the length of the capsule, the other shorter, so they overlap and stick one inside the other. Gene carefully pulled the two ends apart while I held my palm underneath to catch the droppings. He split it pretty clean and I licked up the tiny bit of powder that spilled while he took the full two thirds with his fourth beer of the night and I took the rest. It was crazy I suppose, but I’d just made Chief Industrial Engineer at the plant and had a big raise, so I was ready to sky up and party. We were going to play quarter slots first after checking in at Circus Circus. I told Gene to wait by the machines while I got some twenty dollar rolls of quarters. I wandered over dirty carpet through a maze of cigarette smoke, slot machines and flashing lights until I found a cashier, got

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$100 worth of quarters and headed back. When I returned, Gene was gone. Two hours later, I finally spotted him running from the blackjack tables to the roulette wheels. Not walking, actually running pretty fast. A pit boss was looking at him weird as I grabbed him from behind. “Gene, hold up, what are you doing?” “I was hot, really hot at Blackjack! I’m three hundred up already. But they switched dealers on me. Went from a cute girl to a Pakistani guy that looks like he would eat children for breakfast so I left. I gave him a dollar tip after one hand. Pissed him off. So now I’m going to Roulette. I’m on a roll.” But Gene never won for long. He took more speed and didn’t go to sleep at all Thursday night. I woke up when he came into the room at 8 Friday morning. He said he was going to sleep for awhile. I was barely awake half an hour later when he jumped out of bed to have a shower, took another black beauty...and declared sleep a waste of humanity’s time. He gambled straight through Friday and into Saturday. He finally collapsed in exhaustion at 4:00 am Saturday and slept until three on Saturday afternoon. Then he took more speed and gambled all Saturday night and into Sunday morning. Like I said, he slept through the Superbowl and I could barely wake him up to catch the plane. He was really grumpy on the flight home — he lost all his money. He missed work Monday after the Superbowl and slept on our couch until Tuesday morning when he left early to get back to work up in Hood River at seven am. After that,

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our Reno trip was always the same for him; win big at first, then lose it all. He’d save his change in a big jar during the year, then sort it out into plastic baggies in the fall while he watched Monday night football. He’d take all these baggies with him to Reno as a final stash after he depleted his other money and hit up his Visa card a few times. As he lost he’d get more and more angry, and I could keep track of his mood by the number of bags of change he had left. By the time he was on his final bag of nickels I knew not to say anything about how much I was winning. Because I am really lucky there. Every year I tap the place for two or three hundred dollars. It’s uncanny. I’ve always been lucky though. Flunking my draft physical was the pinnacle of my life’s luck. Remembering my luck reminded me to stop working on the car long enough to call Jake’s. I made reservations for seven thirty. Maybe dinner would be a good time to talk about Shana.

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CHAPTER THREE John came home while Jeri was having her shower. I was still working on the Cobra, getting a lot done and completely engrossed. It’s amazing what you can do if you get to put your working day energy into projects instead of your night energy. Why am I building a Cobra? When I was in High School I used to read Road and Trackroad tests over and over again. At first my favorites were the English sports cars. My father is English, so he biased me towards tight handling dream cars like the MG Midget, the Triumph Spitfire, the Austin Healy, the MGA, B, and B fastback, the bug eyed Sprite. God I loved those cars. When I was a sophomore in high school, my Dad bought an MG 1100 that we kept for a year. It was one of the first front wheel drive sedans in America. It handled beautifully, but was poorly geared, and revved too high for freeway driving. It kept overheating so he got rid of it and went back to Volkswagens, which was hard for a former Canadian soldier in WWII. The Germans had killed quite a few of his friends. “How the Hell did we win the war when we make such damned poor cars!” he used to shout at the MG1100 when it overheated and he was under the hood at the side of the road. One day an issue of Road and Trackcame that changed

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my love of British cars. The front cover showed a guy in his early forties sitting in a red sports car parked by the California ocean, on a bluff in Laguna by that Mexican restaurant, Las Brisas — The Breezes. He wore a red sweater with a white long sleeved shirt under it. The shirt was open at the collar so that he had dashing flares of white at his collar and sleeves. He was sitting in a red, 289 Cobra. What a car! I still have that issue stored carefully away. That Cobra could do 55 mph in reverse. Reverse! Its top speed was 150 miles an hour. It was everything I had learned to cherish; British body, handling, stiff steering, and everything I was starting to crave, 289 V-8, 271 horsepower and a Ford four speed transmission. For $5,300. So much money! I knew back then I’d never be able to afford that. Maybe someday. The problem was, I was right. All my life I wanted to get one of those, but my extra money never matched the appreciation of the car. Once, when John was born, I saw one advertised on a bulletin board in the hospital. A doctor was selling a 427 Cobra for $100,000. I couldn’t afford it and all it did was make me wish I’d gone into medicine instead of engineering. “Working on the car without me, huh?” John smiled. His handsome face, black hair and big frame seemed to fill the garage. When I turned 44, it hit me one day that no matter how much I ran or lifted weights or ate “heart smart”, I was going to die. End, fini, stop. So I started doing things that I wanted to do in my life but had always postponed. Like

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Shana for example, and the Cobra. If I wait too long, I reasoned, it will never happen. So I got back into surfing my old longboard, John and I bought the Cobra kit car, and I started making love to Shana. The car was almost finished now. “How’s the boy?” I asked. “Good, very good,” he replied. He was still dressed in his soccer gear and his cleats clacked on the floor as he sat on the steps. “Good practice?” I asked. “Two goals,” he replied nonchalantly. He started to untie his shoes and clean the mud into a bucket. “Must have been cold out there.” “I love mud ball.” I’d been his coach until the sixth grade and soccer had been our life. He went from a pudgy boy afraid of the ball to the fastest runner on the team, with long powerful thighs from me and lean calves from his mother. He was the best dribbler and highest scorer in the sixth grade. He could advance the ball, center it for another player to score, or shoot himself. He had what soccer coaches look for, that magic ability to score. After sixth grade he was beyond my coaching skills so I gave him up to classics league which combined all the best players in Portland. I am always sad in the fall when I drive by the field off 82nd Avenue by LaSalle High, where we used to practice. That fun lasted such a short time even though it seemed to last forever while it was going on. Now John is high scorer for Mount Hood Community College.

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We promised him that next year he’d go to Oregon State and play for Jimmy Conway. But that was before today. “How was your day?” John asked. “Well, I got fired,” I leaned under the hood. I was having a hard time with the bolts attaching the hood to the lifting bracket. “Fired? Geez, you’re not kidding?” “I wish I was,” I replied. He ran his hands through his black hair — it’s just like Jeri’s — and I filled him in. He was very upset. He’d been counting on our money to get him into OSU in case he didn’t get a scholarship. That’s one big gripe I have with honesty, it doesn’t make much money. Industrial engineers are the guys with stop watches, the efficiency experts. We’re the ones who measure the workers’ efforts and tell the board how productive the workers and the factory are. This is not as simple as figuring out if you’re profitable. At Reynolds we make aluminum and the price of the product swings around quite a bit, so at times we could be the most efficient factory in the world and lose money because prices are down. Other times we could be he laziest slugs going and make money hand over fist because prices are sky high. In a factory like ours, industrial engineers measure efficiency every month so upper management knows how we’re doing. But there’s a conflict in roles here for the industrial engineer; on the one hand we’re supposed to invent ways to make our factory more efficient, while at the same time, we get to set all the standards that determine how efficient we are. It’s like giving people printing presses

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that make U.S. currency, then telling them to only print what they need. People don’t have that much self discipline, which I learned during my first summer at the plant after getting my master’s degree. My first assignment as an industrial engineer was to do an exhaustive study of our finished product packaging area and reset production standards if necessary. I spent day after day learning all the workers’ jobs and what it took to get a coil of aluminum all wrapped up and ready to ship on a truck or rail car. After I got familiar with what was involved, I realized the workers were dogging it, going about half as fast as they could. So I published an honest report. Workers in packaging were performing at a 55% level of productivity rather than the 88% previously reported. I was proud of how hard I worked on that study and how accurate it was. I included about ten ideas for making the department more efficient, but gave it low ratings for current efforts. Sort of like getting a D at mid-terms in college along with a lecture from the professor that showed you how you could still get an A by finals if you applied yourself. But the morning my report reached the plant manager he came over red-faced and screamed at my boss. His office had a low wall and a plate glass window from the waist up, so he could have the door shut and talk with people in private, but I could see what was going on from my desk. The plant manager had spit coming out of his mouth while he shouted. I winced. The whole office could hear him yell even though the glass muffled the words. I got the drift of

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what he was saying because the sound of “cking” seemed to get through the glass a lot. The minute he left, my boss called me into his office and I sat where the plant manager had sat. I couldn’t take my eyes off all the saliva droplets on the table. My boss was in his late forties and I was only twenty-four, so he seemed ancient. He was a skinny little guy who’d come to Reynolds from U.S. Steel — a true professional of the industry and one of the few guys in the plant who wore a suit to work. The rest of us wore short sleeved shirts and casual jackets. My boss loved to smoke; I think it was because he was such a nervous person and it calmed him down. “Allen, the Plant Manager was just talking to me about your proposed new labor standards for the packaging department.” He had a lit cigarette in his ashtray. My boss put the cigarette to his lips and sucked so hard his cheeks pinched in and all the wrinkle lines in his face formed a perfect circle of lines pointing to the cigarette in the middle. His face got so narrow it reminded me of a preying mantis. I felt like a bug about to be pounced on by his skinny, threatening arms. “You probably didn’t know this, but the plant manager’s monthly bonus is tied to the productivity of the plant. If your report is correct and packaging is only 55% efficient rather than 88%, he’s going to personally lose $700 a month.” This was a lot back then. My salary was $1,050 a month and I was one of the highest paid graduates in my class. So I revised my report and said I’d overlooked some data and

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the workers were actually 98% productive. This increased the Plant Managers income almost as much as it was going to drop. He started to recognize me in the halls and out on the floor when he walked around inspecting the plant in his gold hard hat. I went from being an honest industrial engineer to a successful one in two days. I had a career now, the plant manager got a padded bonus and everything looked great to the stockholders. Of course we were cheating the stockholders; their company should have been making more money. But no one seemed to care. In fact, my philosophy of corporate America changed then from, “We are the caretakers of industr y for the stockholders” , to, “Screw em, let’s get ours first.” After several years of adhering to this holy grail of management, I was promoted to chief industrial engineer. I lived with my dishonesty by making sure that our plant actually became more efficient, mostly by purchasing automated equipment and laying off workers. It would have been better not to do this and to work with the union to improve worker’s efficiency, but we couldn’t get the union to cooperate. The problem was that none of us were working together. The labor unions had their strike power over us and constantly demanded more money and better conditions. What could we do, shut the plant down? In the end, management always gave in to their demands. For a while during my career they put me in charge of trying to recruit foremen from the factory floor. It was one of the training duties they gave us younger guys. Once I

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ended up talking to a guy who said it was crazy to become a foreman in management because you had to work more hours and got a fixed salary with no overtime pay. He said the only reward for all this stress and responsibility and hard work was that in the future you might get promoted into upper management, big money and recognition. I naively agreed with him and said that he could definitely advance and it would be worth the initial sacrifice. “There aren’t that many good paying jobs in this company,” he argued. “What do you mean?” “The money in this company is like a pyramid,” he said. “There’s a few high paying jobs at the top and then a lot of lower paying ones at the bottom. They tell all the foremen and all the guys like you that they have a shot at being the president or vice-president some day. But it’s impossible. There’s not enough openings.” Then he said since his children “could not eat bullshit”, he was going to stay in the union where he couldn’t be fired or laid off with all his seniority. After that conversation I went back to my office realizing I could get fired the second someone disliked me. I used to visit the same guy after that when I went past his work station. He was an inspector on the water immersion tank that sonic tested the big slabs of metal from the Salem Furnaces. He told me about his younger days wintering on $400 in Montana. I grew to envy his lifestyle. He started work at eight and ended at four every day, never

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attended meetings, never took worries home and had tons of free time for other interests. He hunted elk and kept his family freezer full of meat and fish. His children saw a lot of him, too. His independent attitude got me to listen when Jeri brought up the idea of building a trailer park for financial security years later. “John seems pretty upset about your getting fired. Do you think he’ll be all right?” Jeri asked in the car as we left for Jake’s. “He’ll be fine. Babysitting will be good for him. Take his mind off it.” There wasn’t much babysitting to do, really. Kiki was six and Nelson was nine. Besides, the kids could talk about my getting fired without us being there. “I don’t mean babysitting. Phil and Deedee are going out tonight so John will have to be responsible for the park, too.” They were our assistant managers. “He can call you on your cellular if there’s a problem,” I replied. Jeri checked the battery, then called John to tell him she’d have it in her purse on standby. Jake’s Famous Seafood Restaurant. The scene of celebrating the HUD loan to build the park. The night the loan closed we knew we would eventually be rich so Jeri’s attorney, not my attorney friend Jack, but a different guy, and Jeri’s lender who’d helped close the deal came with us. And since Jeri was behind all this, so did their wives. Jeri got big Cuban cigars for the men and smaller cigars for the women. When we got our drinks we toasted our deal and lit up. The smoke soon filled one whole corner of the room

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and even though smoking was allowed, that was too much. The chubby gay waiter who had earlier breezed through the fresh sheet menu came up and nervously said we’d have to extinguish or leave. But I didn’t mind putting it out. I’d had my celebration cigar in Jake’s. This time Jake’s seemed hollow. I’d lost my job. I wasn’t feeling triumphant. I was wintering, saving up $400 for beans and ammo. The prices on the menu seemed to jump at me, like warning signs on a highway at night leaping out at my car. Sturgeon from the Columbia, watch out! $23.95! Fresh salmon, ask waiter! I kept dodging through the prices until I settled for poached petrale sole and linguini, $8.95. The waiter sniffled in disgust at my order and applauded Jeri as she ordered the broiled salmon at $24.95, plus steamed clams appetizer, $13.45, yikes! and a bottle of wine, not cheap, a Firestone, $29.95. Compared to Jeri’s order, I felt like I had scheduled an enema instead of dinner. “Geez, you’d think you were happy I lost my job,” I said. “Big time spender Jeri!” “Is that why you didn’t order more?” “I guess. I’m feeling nervous about money.” I looked around the restaurant and everyone in the place seemed more successful and wealthy than me. All the women looked like successful attorneys or inheritors of massive timber fortunes and all the men looked like they could beat me up or buy our trailer park with their lunch money, but they wouldn’t because it was a bad investment and I wasn’t worth beating up. The whole atmosphere reeked of success

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— the crowded bar full of professionals throwing down pints of ale at four dollars a pop, sexy waitresses in white blouses and short black dresses, gay waiters walking briskly around earning bigger tip money than my former salary. It was all too successful, too moneyed, too much not a part of me, the new me — beans and ammo Al. “Don’t worry, we’re all right for money. You should be celebrating your new freedom in life. You’re going to find other work, Allen. There’s Esco, Boeing, Precision Castparts, Sequent, all those places. Or maybe something entirely new. Maybe real estate.” But the challenge of learning a new industry seemed too much to me. I didn’t want to have to go through that again. When I was younger I woke up every morning with adrenaline coursing through me and I couldn’t wait to start the day. Now that only happened mornings before we travelled somewhere like Hawaii. Nothing was exciting anymore. Except nights with Shana. “Yeah I guess I can find work,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to explain all my fears. The waiter brought the big bucket of steamed clams and the wine. I hate the whole ritual of opening the wine bottle and sniffing the cork. I figure they should make sure the wine hasn’t turned to vinegar before bringing the bottle out. I even spent some time once secretly smelling vinegar in the kitchen just so I would know what bad wine smelled like. I was afraid of pronouncing the wine drinkable and then finding out too late that it had actually turned to vinegar. He offered the cork to me but I handed it to Jeri

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and let her smell it and gave her the wine to taste too. Why not? She was going to drink it and right now she didn’t exactly seem like a helpless maiden waiting for her man to make sure the wine wouldn’t poison her. “Is there something else bothering you?” Jeri asked when he left. This was it. Why not tell her right now that Shana and I were going to get married? Make a clean break. Sell the Cobra to pay for John’s schooling and make up for my job loss, split the park income with Jeri and live with Shana in her apartment. With Shana’s job and my park money we could winter in style. Ski at Bachelor, go to Mexico. That was wintering. None of this beans and ammo lifestyle. But how to tell Jeri she’d have to go back to real estate full time and stay at the trailer park with the kids? She was so good and loyal to me. What was I thinking? And what about missing the kids? I was an idiot. Besides, I didn’t want to sell the Cobra. That was supposed to be me in that Road and Track cover. I was almost done and I wanted to give Shana a ride in it. But I should be fair to Jeri, tell her honestly that I didn’t love her anymore. But that wasn’t true either, I loved her, I just loved Shana more. At least I thought so. She excited me more. Like driving the Cobra instead of my Jeep. Then it happened. Shana walked into the restaurant with one of the guys from metallurgy. Young guy, maybe even younger than her. A puppy. Nowhere near as powerfully built as me. My arms are strong from windsurfing. My legs are strong from

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mountain biking. I was angry. Shana didn’t see me, but Jeri saw her. “Oh, you’ll never guess,” she said. “I’ll tell you some gossip about that girl over there. Do you see her? She just came in. Her name’s Shana and she works at your plant. Do you know her?” “I, uh, yeah, she’s Ted’s secretary,” I replied. The wine went down my throat the wrong way and made me cough. When I finally recovered, I could hardly speak, like I had laryngitis. “Don’t worry, I’ll just talk,” Jeri said. She seemed so happy, delighted to tell me something about Shana. My Shana. Who looked great by the way. Great, hell! She was gorgeous. Long blonde hair, tight white, short, one piece dress. Damn! I bought that for her! Why is she with that guy? “Did you hear what I said?” Jeri asked. “What?” “She was getting dressed and talking to a friend next row over from mine at the lunch time Nautilus workout today.” “Really?” Oh God. What now? “She was telling her friend about a guy that she was interested in. He’d lost his job recently and she had decided to dump him.” “Dump him?” my voice squeaked past my wine laryngitis. The dark wood paneling was closing in and the heavy linen napkin on my lap made me sweat. “Yes! I couldn’t believe it. She’d thought of marrying

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him but now with the job market and the uncertainty she wasn’t going to stick with him. And she’d met another cute guy at the plant who was really hot for her. He’s a good dancer she said. That must be him. He is cute, too.” God! Now Jeri liked the dancing puppy too! I hate dancing. “What did she say about the guy she dumped?” Did no one care that I got fired today? “That he was a loser and she didn’t know what she’d ever seen in him.” What she’d ever seen? Loser? All the stuff I’d given her? All the ski trips and the rendezvous at the motel at lunchtime were nothing? “So she didn’t say who he was?” I had removed the napkin but I was still sweating. “She said he was married and hadn’t told his wife. Can you believe what a creep he was? If that were my husband I’d poison him!” “Poison him?” I asked weakly. I needed wine but didn’t dare. “With some of my gardening chemicals. Some of them are tasteless!” She was telling me she knew. I couldn’t speak. She and I have an ongoing argument. She loves to watch the program Mystery on public television. It’s her Thursday night ritual. I hate the show. It’s my engineering, I suppose. I tell her there’s no such thing as a mystery on that show, not a true mystery at least, because you can tune into the program one hour from the start and know who did it. I tell

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her that true mysteries have no answer, no concrete way of getting proof — like, is there an after-life, which we also disagree on, she says yes, I say wait and see. Maybe that was one of Shana’s appeals. She was a non-practicing Catholic who wore T-shirts that said “Shit Happens!” But here was a mystery for me. I could ask Jeri if Shana had said who the husband was, and that if she knew it was me would she please tell me because I didn’t want to die of Wonder Fertilizer Pellets in my oatmeal tomorrow morning. But I couldn’t ask Jeri without spilling the beans about me and Shana. I especially didn’t want to do this since it sounded like Shana and I were finished, though I wanted to hear it straight from her — but I’m sure Jeri was being honest about it why not? My mind was racing. “Are you all right?” Jeri asked as she cleared a wisp of hair from her forehead. I like it when she wears her hair like that. I always have. It’s as if those wisps of hair can call in the wind or gravity to allow her to use that beautiful, careless gesture of pushing her hair away from her forehead. “I guess I’m just upset about the firing and everything.” “Do you want to leave? I could make us something at home. Breakfast for dinner?” And have to walk right past Shana and her new guy? The only way out was right in front of their table. “No, not at all, I’d like to stay here,” I replied. The waiter brought our dinner, fussed over serving Jeri hers but practically dropped mine on the table. I waited until he was rushing away, then said, “I want more bread and a beer.”

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“We have Full Sail, Budweiser, Widmer...” he tartly rattled off the beer list with his wrist sassily cocked at his beltline. “Widmer Hefeweizen and no twist of lemon,” I interrupted him. “I hate lemon and if you bring it with a lemon in it or anywhere near it you’ll have to bring me another one.” “Yes, sir.” He scurried away with a perturbed air. I can’t remember the petrale sole but I do remember that the wine and beer and water started to build up. I watched the back of Shana’s head a lot and wondered how I could get to the bathroom without confronting her. I even ordered blueberry cobbler with ice cream for me and chocolate tort for Jeri in hopes they would leave before us. “Now you’re spending extra on desert, Allen? I can’t figure you out sometimes,” Jeri observed. I mumbled that the petrale wasn’t filling and ate slowly but Shana was still there and I had to pee so bad I excused myself and walked past them. My brain doesn’t work well when I’m in pain so I didn’t think of telling Jeri to pay and meet me at the front counter until I was gratefully relieving myself and reading the Oregonian’s daily sports page tacked up on a cork board above the urinal. On the page was an ad for a cellular phone. The phone! “Zees is Clouseau calling.” “What? Who’s this?” Jeri asked. “I am calling you for a secret rendezvous.” “Allen? Is it you?” “Well who else would want a secret rendezvous?” I

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asked in frustration, breaking out of my Cloussea accent. “Sorry, I couldn’t figure out who it was. I thought it was that French Canadian in B-7.” She had every goddamned person and their trailer spot memorized! “Come on out and bring the tab,” I said with irritation. “All right. Don’t be angry. Why don’t you come back to the table?” “I peed on my pants,” I lied. I reached over from the phone booth by the restrooms to the bussing carts and dipping my hands into a water glass waved drops of water on my crotch. A couple looked at me strangely but I ignored them. “I’m embarrassed to walk around the restaurant. Can we just go?” I asked softly. “Is your prostate bothering you again?” “No it’s not my goddamned prostate,” I shouted. “I’m just drunk and it hit my pants.” The couple was really looking at me now. “Sorry. I hope you’re still interested in our rendezvous.” “Yes, I definitely am.” Jeri was sweet on the way home. She talked about the type of work I could do in the future and that she’d been thinking that if I wanted, I could just run the park and she’d go back to full-time house sales. “You’d do that? Full time and let me have the spare time at the park?” See, this is another thing that’s been bugging me about Jeri. After we developed the park she gradually cut back on her real estate sales while she managed the park. By the

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time it was full, she dabbled at selling houses just enough to keep her broker’s license. I was jealous of all the free time she had, considering it was mostly by my labor that she got into that position. Now I was amazed at what she was offering. “Sure, I think it would be fun. I’ve had a lot of freedom the last few years. You deserve some free time to explore your possibilities. Maybe even retire now and do something you’ve dreamed of.” “You must love me,” I said. “Of course I do. You’re a good father, kind, considerate. You never yell at me or fight and you’ve provided for us all these years. And I find you very attractive. Especially when you use your French accent and speak of a rendezvous.” If I was as short as I felt low right then I would have had an accident because I could never have seen over the dash. I started to get tears in my eyes. Here was Jeri, sticking with me, and Shana had just dropped me in my first day of unemployment! What had I been thinking of? “I’d kill you if you ever did what the girl from the office said,” Jeri added as she leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. “What’s that exactly?” I gulped hard. “You know, left me for a younger girl.” “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you,” I replied. Which was technically true, I hadn’t left her, just had an affair. Jeri glanced up at me funny and I wondered if I shouldn’t go out to the greenhouse that night and flush all those chemicals down the toilet.

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“Drive faster, I want to get home,” she said, reaching her hand out. “Oops, sorry, I forgot you were all wet down there. Are you sure you’re all right?” “I’m just fine. I just missed.” She started to nibble on my right ear lobe and I started shaving it on the yellow lights and worrying about a drunk driving ticket. There was a message from Gene on the answering machine when we got home. He had his reservations for Reno and was all excited to tell me about his idea on the flight. He said I’d like it, something about Brent’s death making him think about a suicide wall for veterans of Vietnam. The tape had been wobbling so his voice was going high-low-high-low and I didn’t catch all of his message.

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CHAPTER FOUR I hate four-thirty in the morning when I have anxieties. Especially money worries. They make me have to pee. And when I have prostate infections I always have to pee at exactly four-thirty but tonight I didn’t have that type of problem, although Jeri would probably ask me about it in the morning. She seemed more concerned about my prostate than my damn job loss. I looked out the bathroom window at rain sheeting down past the parking lot light. There’s no one around at four thirty in the morning. You could have sex that time of day on the center line of most freeways and not get hit. I couldn’t though. I’d worry there was a car coming. Money worries. No retirement plan anymore. Reynolds would give me my share of my pension plan but not the part the company had been pitching in. It’s not like I’d done a bad job for them either. In fact, because I felt guilty about always overstating our efficiency I worked really hard at getting in all that automated equipment. Of course, each time we automated some operation it meant blue collar workers were laid off, but nobody cared about them because they were all the new hires who had low seniority. After about ten years of this, the factory started to look like it was manned by a geriatric ward — there wasn’t a blue collar worker under 50 in the entire plant. In fact, if some project required heavy lifting we hired temps from outside.

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This was against our union contract but the union went along. After all, it was their guys being saved from hard labor. But I got curious one day and calculated that in another ten years the entire labor force would start retiring with full benefits and five years after our plant would be manned by nothing but twenty-year-old partially trained new hires who had no idea how to run all the complicated automated equipment we were buying. I actively promoted the trailer park then to augment my retirement plan. What retirement plan? That was shot now thanks to Dan and his damned furnaces. It didn’t help that Dan hated my guts. He hated everything about me; my beard, my Birkenstocks I’d change into at day’s end in my car from the heavy safety boots we had to wear, my gold frame glasses, my Volkswagen Camper van with its windsurfing gear on top, my rock climbing, my running, my mountain bike and especially my computer capabilities that kept my job secure. To enhance my job security after that conversation with the guy who didn’t want to be foreman, I started working late on the main plant computer that ran all our automated equipment. I put code into the software that crashed everything if I was gone for more than a week. It crashed gradually, so that if I took a two week vacation, everyone was really glad to have me back to look into the computer and fix everything. If I hadn’t been so useful, I’m sure Dan would never have allowed Burt Reardon, the plant manager, to keep me around.

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I rolled over in bed. Five-ten a.m. and I was still thinking about getting fired. I thought of waking up Jeri and having a rerun of our earlier cavorting but she was sleeping too peacefully. So I got to thinking about work again. Burt, the plant manager, had liked me actually. He was a former SAC pilot, a bomber captain at the age of thirty-two when I was an eighteen year old hippie war protestor. Burt dropped bombs on Vietnam for two years and always felt guilty for it. Vietnam and its guilt again. It affects nearly everyone that was alive then, because there were twenty seven million guys draft age during the war. I figure they had parents and girlfriends, so the war directly touched probably 110 million Americans. I think those people who say they don’t feel guilty about some aspect of Vietnam are in denial. We got drunk on a trip once and Burt said he wished he’d protested the war instead of drinking in the Phillipines between missions. He told me he had dreams during the war and afterwards that he was an angel outside his plane and when the bombs dropped he would follow them down and try to divert them from hitting women and children, but since he was a spirit being he couldn’t move material things. So he would just watch and cry as people got blown up. I was drunk and told him I felt guilty for not going to Vietnam, not helping my buddies. He said it wouldn’t have made any difference, the war would have turned out the same. He envied me for not going and having courage to protest. I think we ended the conversation wishing we were each other but glad we weren’t.

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Five-thirty. I tried to force myself to quit thinking. I’d be too tired and Reno was tomorrow. Today! That did it. I was definitely awake now. Adrenalin was zooming through me. It was exciting. It was Reno day! Thursday! Time to go gamble! But I don’t have a job anymore! I hate that Dan Wilson. Dan hated how I spent my money too. We had a golf tournament once, and in front of two of my engineers, Dan said, “Why do you insist on living in that piece of shit mobile home park you own?” Now that was a matter of pride with me. First of all, I think an owner’s footprints are his best management tool when it comes to owning investment real estate. That’s why we live there. Second, I don’t like the idea of being in debt, so why have a house mortgage as well as a loan on the trailer park? “You could afford a big mortgage, get a nice house in a subdivision somewhere. Then your kids could go to a nice school.” “They go to OES,” I replied. My workers were silent. They respected me. They knew the plant couldn’t run without me, although they didn’t know why. “What’s that?” Dan is from CHQ, Corporate Headquarters, and didn’t know about OES. “Private school,” I replied. “It’s a nice school, good college prep. Better than a public school.” “You’re weird,” he replied. “You live in a trailer park and yet you send your kids to private school.” This was when I wanted to keep my job, and couldn’t

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be honest with him. I only hoped that somewhere up the ladder there was someone abusing Dan, calling him a dumb turd in the elevator on the way to an expensive lunch and giving him indigestion all through it and that was why he picked on me now and why he was so wiry and smoked too much. So I said, “I just want to look after my tenants and get my kids a good education, Dan.” “And not be in debt,” he added. Debt was the instrument they used to control all of us. If you had a big mortgage, car payments and college debt, you weren’t about to take a big risk and start your own business. And you weren’t likely to change jobs and leave the company. Any job you got in the same industry paid the same and would result in moving. We’re a class of willing, indentured servants working for the company. We’re conned into owning big houses and big mortgages, careening from work week to weekend to the occasional vacation and the final goal of retirement, where we discover we hadn’t seen our kids grow up, didn’t really know what life was about and were now too old to enjoy much of what was left. Dan had teed up his ball by then. It was a short hole, par 3, and he looked at the green. Then without looking at me said, “Allen, give me my five, the wind’s against me.” He handed me his seven which I put in the cart. “You other boys, you’re regulars,” Dan went on. “You’ve got the car and the house and the loans. All with the company credit union. I know you’re not going to get up and leave me. But Allen here, he doesn’t owe anything, unless it’s to some drug dealer. Is that how you make your

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extra money, Allen?” He asked, looking at me at last. “No, sir,” I replied as I gave him his nine iron. “Probably not,” he replied as he looked at me, then squared up and looked at the ball. “You’re too chicken to do something like that.” He hit the ball hard. I guess he was worried that even with the five he wasn’t going to make it to the green. That nine Dan used is a beautiful club, the company gave him the set of heavy, wide faced Pings. The nine was designed for lofting the ball high and fast but less than 100 yards. The ball rose up beautifully, dead on to the pin, then dropped down about eighty yards from the hole, popped backwards with the vicious backspin the club put on it and came to rest. “Son of a bitch!” Dan shouted. “I’m getting under the ball way too much today.” He handed me the club and I quickly wiped it off and put it away. No one noticed what I had done. See that’s the problem, you can be satisfied, but can you be honest? It’s a long way from our place to OES and I’m the morning drive guy for Kiki and Nelson. I let John sleep — he only has afternoon classes on Thursday. Cartoons, cereal, clothes, raincoats for the grey morning — I got the little guys going and out the door. Down Johnson Creek Boulevard, across the rain filled Willamette River on the Sellwood Bridge. Kiki decided she wanted a roller skating party at Oaks Park for her birthday when we

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drove by the amusement park and I promised her I’d set it up. Kiki and I hugged and kissed goodbye but I had to be happy with a “Bye, Dad,” from Nelson. He never hugs me in front of his friends anymore. “Don’t forget my numbers,” he added. “Four and seven.” “And mine... mine is two... for my birthday,” Kiki smiled. I worked my way back over the West Hills, but for the first time since I’d been driving the kids to school I didn’t get on Interstate 5 for the commute to Reynolds. Instead I retraced my original route, quietly let myself into the house and crawled back into my cold side of the bed. If being fired was bad, it sure felt nice this time of day. “Breakfast in bed!” I woke up as she laid the tray next to me. Then I remembered her gardening supplies threat and breakfast in bed took on new meaning. “Scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, marmalade, butter, tea and coffee. Your favorite breakfast,” Jeri said. “Oh, and orange juice and Worcestershire Sauce for the eggs.” Was the Worcestershire sauce supposed to cover the taste of the poison? I was fully alert, guilty about Shana, appreciating my new life, worried about finding a job, wintering on beans and ammo and possibly dying of poison all at the same time. “This is your first day of wintering and the day you

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leave for Reno,” Jeri added. “You need some good nutrition for your new life.” She threw down the paper and opened the curtains. The rain had changed from a torrent to a drizzle, Oregon Mist, I call it. It comes down slowly so that you’re tempted outside, then you’re soaked all at once, all over, as if the clouds had slimed you. It would be good to get out of this, down to Reno and the high, dry desert. “Did you go riding in this rain?” She still had her biking tights on, but was in a dry sweat shirt. “It wasn’t bad. I used my mountain bike on the bike path. Look, I have your souvenir sweat shirt on from Diamond Peak. You got it last year, remember?” “You look nice in it.” It was sweet that she was wearing a souvenir from last year — like she was endorsing my going again this year. “Blazers lost,” she sat on the edge of the bed and read the Oregonian. “And Robinson got hurt.” “Not again,” I moaned. I drank some tea and started picking at the eggs. Did she know? If the poison was tasteless then it could be in the tea or coffee. I thought for a second of coming clean, of asking her if she knew and really wanted to kill me. And then it came to me that I would rather die than admit my affair just to find out. I also realized that Jeri wasn’t a murderer. She was too nice. If she knew, she wouldn’t be able to hide it from me, she’d be so mad. Besides, I was hungry. Dave came earlier than he’d promised, so my goodbye with Jeri was suddenly rushed.

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“Have a good time and don’t worry about anything,” she said as we hugged between Dave’s energetic bursts in and out of the house to get my stuff. He’s a weightlifter and does everything big and fast. I think it’s because he’s muscley, but not tall, so he swaggers to make up for it. He doesn’t need to, though. He’s so strong he could beat up me and everyone I know. “Jeri, you’re too nice to me,” I replied. “I know, I’m stupidly loyal.” “Smartly loyal,” I countered. “Be good in Reno. Call me. And stick to your budget.” God I felt guilty, driving away. But in a way I felt great. This was a new day. The Shana thing was over. Reynold’s was behind me. I felt like a free man. Going to Reno is a lot like going through a heavy snowstorm, losing your electricity and having neighbors spend the night because their house is colder than yours. The gambling is fun and exciting, of course, the skiing is great and the food is excellent. I love to fly, too. But all those things aren’t the allure of Reno. When you gamble for hours with the same strangers around you, like in blackjack or roullette, or craps, you start visiting with them. There’s gaps in the action and you talk about the dealer, the fact that the drink girl is well endowed and doesn’t come by often enough, or your opinion on the Superbowl. And when you start talking, you soon realize that all of you are suffering together, suffering from the fact that the odds are against you and you’re struggling to overcome them, suffering in the knowledge that all of you are foolishly full of hope.

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You could say it’s like war, which really bonds people together from what I’ve learned talking to my friends, but I’d say that is too extreme. None of us is going to die if we lose. So it’s less threatening than that, more like a big snowstorm when the power goes out, you have to burn wood to stay warm, the kids are in sleeping bags by the fireplace and you visit with your neighbors over Southern Comfort as you wait for the power to come back on so that life can be normal. The trouble is that normal means separate in modern life, it means denying that you are suffering or struggling in your life. It means desperately trying to make the world think things are just fine so that no one will think badly of you. Normal means cutting yourself off from most of what’s good about humanity — sharing and helping each other. Things aren’t normal in Reno and I like that. I think that’s the main reason I go there. I can visit with an optometrist or a miner or a title clerk and we can all laugh and struggle together. There’s still a barrier between us, of course. You can make sure a stranger gets his drink when the cocktail waitress comes if he’s gone to the bathroom, or loan him a cigarette, but you wouldn’t loan him money or visit with him after you’re done gambling. There are limits. But most barriers are down. I’m glad that Jeri understands this. I’ve explained it to her. She never seems angry with me when I go to Reno. Just tolerant, like it’s something I have to get out of my system once a year. And she’s not interested in gambling, she’s never once wanted to go with me.

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It continued raining on the way to the airport, upgrading from Oregon mist to wind-push rain, which is when the wind drives rain sideways across the road. Dave’s Isuzu rocked at times. Wind-push is the kind of January rain that lasts for days and produces good macrame by springtime. “Think it’s snowing in Reno?” Dave asked. “I know it is! Dumping. Pouring down. I called Heavenly’s ski phone.” “You always plan ahead,” Dave said. “Not really, I just got fired yesterday. I had all kinds of time today so I called Heavenly.” Talking about my getting fired only made me feel worse. I’d started going on this trip ten years ago when I got my big promotion to Chief Industrial Engineer, a position I was relegated to ever since, much to my frustration. But now with no job, Dave could tell I was feeling down. “Don’t worry, something will turn up in your field. If it doesn’t, there’s always real estate.” “You think so? Jeri is saying the same thing.” “You’re already a successful developer. You could just go out and do another trailer park, or do it for a fee for investors. There’s lots of possibilities.” Until he said that, I hadn’t really thought much about something outside my field. And as he said it I got that rush of adrenaline again. Excitement! Work that was interesting. I’d like to build another park. Of course I’d need Jeri’s help and advice. “Make a lot of money,” he added. “More than your old job.”

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“Like?” “Two, three, four hundred thousand a year, depending on how hard you want to work.” “Reno, here we come!” I shouted. Dave laughed and leaned forward over the wheel, his big, round weight lifting shoulder almost hiding his smiling face. I hadn’t seen Gene in more than a year and he looked the same physically. He hadn’t gotten any balder and his bull shoulders supported those long arms that hung down past his narrow waist and lean legs. He had a hawk nose and hawk eyes. I always thought his face looked like the Bad character from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . “How you doing, Gene?” We shook hands. “About as good as you can be when you drive into a tumor.” “Tumor?” Dave was confused. I introduced Dave to Gene and explained that Gene hated cities and often said that driving into Portland was like driving into a cancer tumor. Dave sort of laughed at that, then to smooth it over between themselves they chatted about weightlifting and people they might have known mutually in the athletic college west coast circles of the sixties. I watched for Jack and Erik. Jack is my attorney friend. He’s a great guy. Irish, red haired, lean as a rail and a former world class swimmer. He’s fun loving and semi-reliable. He goes on the Reno trip with me every year. He would sooner die than miss it. But in the

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summer he must tell me thirty times that he’s going to come windsurfing or long boarding with me and never does. So he’s semi-reliable. His yesses all sound the same so you can never count on the things he will do even if he says yes. Erik worked for me awhile. He’s dark haired with a big chin, just over six-foot with broad shoulders and looks like a model, in fact he did model for awhile but dropped it due to the gay scene. That’s when he came to work for me. He was 25 and soon saw there was no future at Reynolds. Start high and freeze forever, with 2 or 3% raises the rest of your life and promises that you can make it to the top someday. A few years ago the Russians got hungry for cash and dumped enough aluminum on the world market to drop the price from 60 cents to 30 cents a pound. It would have taken our plant five years running at full capacity to make as much aluminum as the Russians dumped. We almost had to shut the mill for that one. That’s what made Erik leave Reynolds. He’d gotten to know Jeri and she told him all about real estate and within two years of leaving he was making more than me. Which made me bitter about my career, but now that I was out it made me eager to follow Dave’s advice. I was going to be a real estate developer! Not a Donald Trump, or worse, one of those guys from the ‘70s with their open shirts and hairy chests topped by long gold chains, a Mercedes convertible and a trophy wife. I saw some of that type when Jeri first got into the business. Not me, I was going to be globally conscious. A developer wearing Birkenstocks and providing green spaces and toddler play areas and maybe even solar-heated pools.

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Jack and Erik came with their beautiful wives in tow to say good bye and it struck me that all of us were handsome, successful men with beautiful mates. Except for Gene of course. No woman had ever been able to stay with him more than three months despite the fact that he usually instantly fell in love with every cute young thing within a hundred yards. He stayed on the edge of our laughing, good-bye group and nodded politely during the introductions. I felt I should do more to include him. I remembered that he always felt isolated, like all the Vietnam Veterans I know. I walked over and said, “Come on Gene, let me buy you a drink.” The first time I met Gene we almost got into a fight. This was before Jeri and I had kids and towards the end of our hippie days. We were staying in Bend with a sorority girlfriend of Jeri’s. Her girlfriends weren’t married yet and five of them had rented a small house by the river. It was the Friday night before the Fourth of July and the house was party central for all single guys in Bend. I was outside, talking to friends, and came back in to get a beer. Jeri was nowhere to be seen but someone told me she was in the bedroom with a guy. The door was closed and when I went in, the lights were off, but I could just make out a guy at the end of the bed and Jeri lying on top of it. “Jeri, what the hell are you doing?” I shouted. “I’m getting a foot massage.” “No, you’re not, you’re coming out here right now!” I’m a pretty mellow person. My basketball coach in high

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school was always trying to get me to play angrier. I never got into a fight in high school. This was the first time Jeri had ever seen me so angry. She jumped up really fast and followed me out of that room with her shoes in her hand. We walked through the kitchen and sat against the wall of the detached garage in the back yard. “What were you doing?” I demanded. “He told me he learned Oriental foot massage in Vietnam. Then he offered to give me one. That’s all.” “Foot massage? God you’re stupid.” I jumped up. “I’m going to go in there and kick the shit out of that guy.” I wobbled to my feet, I’d had quite a few beers by then. “No, don’t. I’m sorry, it was my fault.” “Ahh, to hell with you, he wanted more than a foot massage and you knew it!” “No, don’t get in a fight. I told him I was married. But I shouldn’t have gone in the bedroom with him. I’m sorry.” “You really are?” “I’m only interested in you. You’re my husband,” she slipped her arm through mine. “Sit down and we’ll talk.” That was all I wanted anyway, so I sat down. But I didn’t talk to Gene for a long time after that. We got to know him better when ski season came around. I’d become friends with a guy in Bend and he had a small back room in his house that he wasn’t using and told us we could stay there free during ski season. With the savings Jeri and I were able to get a season’s pass at Mt. Bachelor. We brought a bed and mattress over in the fall to set up our room. When we got to the house we found that

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Gene had moved in with my friend. I felt upset for awhile, but I talked with Gene and realized that he was a decent guy. He even apologized for the party, saying he was sorry for moving on Jeri when he knew she was married. He said now that he knew who I was he wouldn’t try anything. We’d drive to Bend on Friday night and ski Saturday and Sunday. Gene enjoyed the routine of having us stay. We’d get to Bend about nine and he’d have cold beers and a snack waiting for us. He’d always help me bring our stuff into our little room, then after awhile we’d go out with Gene and his roommate for beers and pool. On Saturday night he’d wait for us and we’d go out to dinner or enjoy a meal he made. He loved to hunt and was always successful, so we’d often have elk, deer, chukkar or pheasant. Sometimes he’d prepare steelhead or salmon. After dinner we’d have a party at his house or someone elses; or go dancing at the local bars. After skiing on Sunday, he’d usually have coffee made for our long drive home. He amazed me by knitting an Afghan which he gave us in February and called a “late Christmas present”. He said he liked making Afghans because it soothed his jumpy nerves from the war. In spring, Jeri made a big Easter cake that we carried over in the trunk of our car. Gene’s bird dog, a Chesapeake, jumped into the trunk when we were carrying our stuff in and ate half the cake. We ate the half we scared him off of. By the end of the ski season, Gene and I were good friends. Gene didn’t ski, he hated most skiers, he called them “MPA’s”, municipal piss ants. It turned out that when he

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was in college at Central Oregon College in Bend before going into the Marines he had actually been one of the locals that drove around downtown looking for college skiers like me to beat up. They hated us coming over and dating the Bend girls. We compared notes and found that I almost got into a fight with one of his friends in 1967 at a dance held in the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall in Redmond, the next town over. Vietnam came slowly out of Gene. Most of the time we’d just drink beer and talk about sports, friends and trips he wanted to take. But every now and then he’d tell a story about his life or the war. It was hard to think of Gene being in the military while he told me these stories. His hair was down to his shoulders and he was a religious disciple of marijuana and beer. I listened and sympathized, probably because I’d come so close to joining the Marines myself and had friends who’d been Marines as well. As I listened to Gene it was like seeing a ghost of myself, what I could have been if I hadn’t stayed in school. And been lucky. It turned out he’d gone to college for awhile in California on a scholarship in track. But when he hurt his shoulder throwing the javelin he’d lost the ride and moved back to Bend. That’s when he went to COC and cruised for MPA’s on weekends. No wonder he hated us. He couldn’t even afford the cheap tuition at COC and had to drop out. Facing the draft, he’d volunteered for the Marines with a friend of his. He’d hope to be sent to Germany or stay in the US., but before he knew it, he was on a plane for Vietnam. The best days then were when the weather was so bad

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we wouldn’t go skiing. Then we’d all sleep in, listening to the storm howling outside and the blowing fan of the furnace inside. They had one of those vertical natural gas heaters in the little house. They’re supposed to be auxiliary heaters, but when the main furnace broke down the landlord had been too cheap to fix it. So during the entire winter the heater lived on high around the clock, October to April. I remember waking up and lying in bed feeling sorry for that heater, thinking that it needed a rest. Our room was off the kitchen, which had indoor-outdoor carpeting. One morning I got up to pee and was amazed to see a big slug crawling across the carpet from the kitchen cabinet to the refrigerator. I watched it for a long time and finally didn’t do anything about it and it escaped under the frig. Every alternative I imagined for it meant death. It was freezing cold outside, and it had probably got so cold under the cabinet it decided to head for the warmth of the space of the motor under the refrigerator. In its slug mind it must have thought of that enormous gap of rug as a pilgrimage to Mecca. I hoped it would make it. Later in the day Gene found the slime trail and swore, wanting to kill the invader, but I didn’t tell him anything about where it was and he quit looking for it. I think the best friends you make in your life are your roommates. You either get to like each other despite all your faults, or you can’t stand the other person and move out. Gene and Jeri and his friend and I became roommates on the weekends. I wanted to make our season’s pass pay off

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and the only way to do that was to ski a lot, so we ended up in Bend nearly every weekend. After all those nights and Afghans and beer and pool and talking I counted Gene as one of my best friends. The first drink on the way to Reno is the best. We always rendezvous early enough to wait in the bar out on the concourse for awhile. The last three years there’s been a cowboy and his friend waiting for the same flight in the same bar at the same time and this year he and I recognized each other and nodded, then raised our beers and simultaneously yelled, “Reno!”, and laughed. I lead the same life as a cowboy for four days a year. That makes me feel good. I bought everyone Bloody Mary’s with beer chasers and by the time we hit the plane my mood had gone from good to great. After takeoff Jack used the seat phone to call his secretary. Dave just picked up the receiver without dialing and in a husky voice asked, “What are you wearing?” When we were done laughing, Erik called his wife and she was pissed that he was wasting money so he hung up quick and looked embarrassed. Then Jack said it was “amazing how a six inch leash could cover such vast distances”. The 737 broke through the clouds, the sun hit the plane and everyone on board — all of us gamblers headed for Reno— gave out a big cheer as we hauled butt south for the tables.

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CHAPTER FIVE We usually bunk two to a room at Harrah’s, but with five of us I didn’t want Gene to be odd man out so I volunteered to stay with him. The bellhop showed us in. Gene went to look at the room while I started unloading my suitcase into the closet. “What kind of room is this?” Gene asked in an angry voice around the corner. “A room for two,” the bellhop replied. “Bull! Not the two of us!” Gene stuck his head around the corner. “Allen, did you see this? There’s only one bed in here! King sized, but only one.” His eyes were sort of bugged out. “Did you arrange this?” “No, we usually get two queen beds. I’m not supposed to be sleeping with you, just rooming with you.” The bellhop hurried out to find another room for us, “I thought you’d gone gay on me,” Gene said. “Not me, I’m in trouble for having too many women.” “What do you mean,” he asked. I ignored his question, I didn’t want to tell him about my affair. Jeri and Gene have been buddies for so long that I was worried he’d tell her about Shana. Besides, it was over, there wasn’t any point bringing it up. So I turned on the room television, then switched it to a pay porn movie. “That’s six bucks! They’ll charge the room!” Gene objected.

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“This isn’t our room,” I replied with a smile. “Oh yeah,” he sat down next to me on the bed to watch, but not too close. They moved us to the twentieth floor, down the hall from Erik and Jack. Dave’s room was adjoining theirs. Gene and I opened the curtains and looked down. Dirty snow framed the street far below and drunks weaved their way along the brownish grey sidewalk that framed a long row of souvenir stores and pawn shops. It was dark and harsh neon lights reflected off the odd possessions in the windows of the pawn shops. “Everything in those windows is a memory,” I said. “Someone’s violin from the fifth grade concert, an uncle’s pistol handed down when he died. It’s all washed up here like driftwood on a high tide, left by the people that carried them around.” “Man, you’re depressing me saying stuff like that! It’s just a pawn shop, Allen. A pawn shop just has recycled stuff that people don’t want anymore. That’s all. Not driftwood from life. I’ll tell you the thing down there that is sad, and that’s the street, the final stop if you screw up.” “Ronald Reagan’s concrete safety net,” I said. “I hated Reagan,” Gene replied. “He didn’t like us vets.” “What did he do to you?” “He was just another WWII era guy that didn’t like us cause he thinks we lost,” Gene replied. “This room’s nice,” he added, turning away from the window without explaining anymore about Reagan. “You always stay in nice

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places like this?” “Usually. It comes with the flight package.” “You’re rich,” he replied. “You don’t have any worries.” “That’s not true, I got fired.” “But you still have your trailer park.” “That’s true.” “What do you make off that place?” “Not much, not much at all, really.” “How much is not much to you? You can tell me, I won’t say.” “$4,000 a month net to us.” “$4,000 a month? That’s not much?” “Not really, not these days. It was great when I was working but now...” “You make more than me, that’s for sure. Did I tell you that a quarter of all Vietnam Veterans make less than seven thousand dollars a year?” “Many times, Gene, every time we talk about money.” “But that’s a lot of poor people, Allen. There’s over three million veterans of that war because it went on for so long. That’s at least 750,000 guys in poverty.” “Well, I wish there was something we could do for them, Gene.” “You don’t have to do anything for that money from the trailer park?” “Well not really much I guess...” “You’ve got it made,” he interrupted. “You’re a free man! You don’t have to work anymore at all. Ever!” “I don’t know about that, Gene. I’ve got the kids to put through school and our retirement to think of and living

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expenses. And I need to have a meaningful career. I can’t sit around a trailer park until I die.” “Man I would. I’d cozy up to a wood stove with a good book, save my money, hunt and fill the freezer, keep my expenses down, watch that money roll in and accumulate, invest it and smile, smile, smile.” Wintering. Gene could winter in good conscience. He’s a natural at it. “I’ve got friends that live out there,” he replied, looking down at the street. “There’s lots of vets from the ‘Nam that just can’t make it. Not all of us, mind you, but a lot.” “Why, do you think?” “When you run out of friends and money there’s nowhere else to go. They drink a lot. Numb the memories. I know these guys, they complain about how they got screwed over to anyone who will listen. But you can only feel sorry for someone for so long, even a good friend. After awhile you start to hate them and you’re willing to throw them out on the street. No one likes a whiner.” “You won’t have a problem then,” I replied. “You never complain.” “Maybe I should.” The phone rang, it was Jack and Erik. They were ready for dinner, gambling and a show. A show is the perfect way to get in the Reno mood. I was glad to leave the room. Gene was depressing me about Vietnam. He has a way of whining without acting like he’s whining. “Time to go,” I said. “Where we going?”

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I told him about dinner and the show, then went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I like to dress casually in Reno. Jeans, Nike lowtops, a Champion sweatshirt with an Izod underneath. My beard was trimmed, my greying hair at least not balding. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you about my idea,” Gene said as I was combing my hair. “What idea was that?” “I was going to tell you about it on the flight, remember?” “Oh, right. Sorry, I kind of got drunk. We’re going out now, though, tell me tonight.” “OK” he said. He looked crestfallen and started to turn. “What was it?” I asked. “Tell me now if you like.” “I want to build another memorial wall for Vietnam Vets in Washington D.C.” “Another one? It’s getting a little crowded with stuff there now, isn’t it? Even the women have a statue.” “I want to build one with the names of all the vets who committed suicide after they came back.” “Man, that wall would be bigger than the first one,” I objected. “You know about this?” Gene asked. “You knew already that more guys killed themselves afterwards than died in the war?” I told him about finding a book called Facing the Wallin Powell’s Book Store in Portland and my amazement that such an astounding statistic had received such little press in our country. It said over sixty thousand vets had committed

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suicide after coming home from Vietnam. “Only sixty thousand? You must have an old book. According to a book I read called Nam Vet , the total, and this is supposedly from the Defense Department, is over 150,000 men.” “150,000 veterans have committed suicide? Are you sure?” “Not really, I was curious and called the Department of Defense Public Affairs office and they said they don’t keep records. But the point is, there are a lot, and there should be an exact accounting of them.” “Even if it’s the number I read, closer to sixty thousand, it’s a lot of suicides.” “Most people don’t know about this, Allen. I think it’s one of the greatest tragedies in American history. The total of all U.S. combat deaths in World War II was about twohundred-ninety-two-thousand men. If something isn’t done to stop the suicides, more guys will have died as a result of Vietnam than World War II. So my idea is to build a second wall, a wall of redemption. This wall would be opposite the first.” I looked at Gene, he was looking off now, past the wall of our room, looking all the way to Washington DC. “White marble, longer than the black one because it will have more names on it. Pearly white, with gold letters for the names. And I would have a large plaque there, done tastefully, that said something like, We the people of the United States of America are r y that sor we sent our boys to Vietnam to die there or back here later for no reason. We are sor r y eternally and beg their forgiveness for wasting

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their lives on a senseless war . Then I would have the President and all of Congress and guys like Nixon and Kissinger affix their signatures on a Bronze plaque to show they meant it.” “Wow,” I said. “That would heal Vietnam forever in this country,” he added. “I just wish Johnson was still alive to sign it.” “You’ll never get the government to build a wall like that,” I replied. “Or a plaque either. A lot of people still believe the war was right to justify the sacrifice of the dead.” “You wait and see. I’ll succeed or die trying.” I grabbed my wallet, counted the five hundred in it, all the money I allow myself for Reno, then headed for the door. “You don’t have any speed with you like last time do you?” “No, why?” “Well, you did last time and I was worried you still did that sort of thing.” “Only marijuana now.” “What?” I asked, incredulous. “This is the nineties, no one does drugs anymore.” “It helps me relax.” “Gene, no offense, but if you get caught with that I’ll be implicated as well and I don’t want to get hauled off to prison for your drug habit.” “Oh don’t be such a tight ass,” he replied. He started to head towards the door. “I’m not a tight ass, I’m being sensible.” He reached for

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the door handle. “Look,” I said, grabbing his hand. He pulled his hand back as if my touch was a red hot stove. “You get rid of that stuff, or I move out of here.” He looked at me with squinted eyes. He’s shorter than me, but bulkier. I don’t know who would have won a fight, but probably him. He learned how to fight in the service. I haven’t been in a fight since the Sixth grade. “I’m not getting rid of my stash. It’s worth too much to me.” “All right, I won’t say anymore.” I went back to the phone and called Dave. He was still in his room and it was fine for me to move my stuff there. “Room’s all yours. I’ll move after dinner.” “Fine, have it your way,” Gene said in an angry tone. “All right, I’ll move now!” And with that I moved out of Gene’s room. We were divorced after twenty minutes of marriage. Which maybe is typical for Reno weddings. I couldn’t believe Gene was still doing drugs. He told me once he thought that DARE should stand for Drugs Are Really Excellent. It was funny at the time but I was starting to worry about him. He’d always been secretive about drugs. Years ago he’d left his entire stash of marijuana in a backpack in our basement when he went to Alaska for a year to work for his uncle on the pipeline roads. This was when we had a house with a basement, before the park was built. He came home after being gone a year and was staying at our house for a few days before going to Bend. He went to the basement one night and started yelling so I headed downstairs. He was running up the stairs where we met and shouted, “Did you steal my dope?”

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“What dope?” I asked. “In the picnic basket where I hid it. It’s half gone.” “How could I steal it if I didn’t know about it? Thanks for not telling me by the way, Gene.” “Well then who did?” We looked in the rattan picnic basket he’d put it in. I found a hole gnawed into the corner of the basket and the dope was indeed half gone. It was a big half too, he said he’d left at least ten lids in the big plastic bag. “Rats, Gene. It was rats.” “Rats?” I showed him the evidence, the hole gnawed in the basket. “I wonder why they stopped at half?” I asked. “Because they were the most stoned rats in the history of Portland.” We laughed hard for a long time. I’m not completely antidrug, I got through college like most everyone, doing marijuana for a year or so and speed whenever I studied for finals. But I haven’t done that since I had kids. How can you justify it with your kids when there is this big deal with DARE and just say no? But I have to be honest, those days were among the best times in my life. 1968, walking over to Greg’s second story apartment in the old triplex behind the Methodist church at Oregon State University to smoke pot. We were so careful not to let other people know. There was a whole fraternity of smokers on campus, men and women that all knew each other. We were “cool”. An in group. We didn’t drink beer, we didn’t do any alcohol, in fact, because that would dull the effect of grass. And we all dressed alike; a little omega

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sign sewed on a blue work shirt, or a yin and yang circle, or maybe a bandanna, just enough to show you were part of the pot group but nothing that made you look like an outand-out hippie. That would have been too radical. But that was then and this was the nineties and Gene was a dinosaur, so I moved out of his room. Dave and the others helped me carry my bags and skis to Dave’s room and then we were off on the town.

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CHAPTER SIX The Comstock has the best steaks in Reno and they’re under $10.00. The big casinos serve fantastic food for ridiculously low prices but they hide the restaurants away behind layers of slot machines, craps tables and beautiful girls. The restaurants are hidden so well I have never been able to find one seafood restaurant where we ate at on a previous trip. It served the best seafood I’ve ever had in my life and every year we look for it ... but it’s vanished. We walked from Harrah’s, which is an exercise in discipline since there are so many casinos, games and open doors. Yes, open doors that are actually walls of hot air blown from the ceiling to the ground, so you don’t even have to open a door to get in. But we made it past all of them, walked all the way through Comstock’s to the back where the escalator goes up to the restaurant. The escalator is decorated like a mining shaft complete with wheelbarrows, picks, shovels and full-sized wax miners finding gold. We left our name at the desk and were told we had a half-hour wait and they’d call over the casino intercom so we could gamble until then. Is gambling wrong? There’s so many things in life that are like gambling and they’re not illegal. Gambling’s illegal most places because people can get addicted to it and end up broke. But people are addicted to the rush of surfing, I have friends who live for the sport. And they’re mostly

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broke too because they spend so much of their time surfing and not working. I’ve always noticed that when you first arrive in Reno you’re fresh and have a winning energy that lasts for at least one night. Look at Gene, that first night on speed, running to the Roulette tables. He had energy and was winning. My theory is that when you’re fresh with home energy, you’re psychic. It happens with me the first night every time. We found an empty craps table at the Comstock. There were five of us and four guys running the table. We walked up to the table with our energy and our confidence and you could feel the dealers shift from cocky to nervous. It’s just like basketball when you’re coming from behind. You can feel the momentum of the game shifting. The other team has the lead but keeps watching the clock, hoping that time will run out and they’ll win. But it doesn’t. You keep running and pressing and having fun, and before the clock runs out you get the lead, then pull away and win. And that’s how we played the Comstock. We were from out of town on a Thursday night and we were the starting wave of the Superbowl crowd. We smelled of success and money. There’s so many bets you can make in craps that I don’t know half of them. The basic idea is to roll a seven or eleven on your first roll, but if you can’t, then something besides snake-eyes or three or twelve on your first roll. Then roll all the numbers except seven for a long time, and finally roll the number you first rolled. I made $420 starting from $40 in twenty minutes. Erik made $200 and Jack made

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$350. Dave only made $9, he goes with us but doesn’t gamble much. Gene wouldn’t say how much he made. We kept worrying we’d miss our table for dinner so finally we just left when I was way up on the table, only to find we could have gambled ten minutes more. We had accidentally acted on the classic advice of leaving while ahead. I could feel the dealers collapse mentally as we walked away. We had crushed them and now were leaving to spend their money at a different casino. This was the worst case for them; losing money and not having a chance to grind it back out of you with free drinks, large breasted cocktail girls, and time. After dinner we decided to take advantage of our free show package and went to Harold’s to watch Jay Leno. All except Gene. He hardly spoke at dinner, just glared at me from time to time and afterwards mumbled something about coming to Reno to make money and left us. We tried to talk him into it, but he was angry and wanted to be alone. I smiled at him and said see you later. He gets in these moods and it’s better to leave him alone. After awhile he mellows out. Jay Leno made us forget about Gene and everything else. Leno’s good doing a taped monologue, but you have to see him live in a nightclub to appreciate how funny he is. And mean. He ripped people up in the audience when he asked them what they did in their lives for work. One poor guy replied he was in the transportation business and Leno probed further with a grin and harmless sounding voice. It turned out the guy had a job driving

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automobiles off of railroad cars and parking them. When Leno had that he took off, imitating the guy burning rubber in the lot and grinding gears. After the show we gambled a little but gave it up. We were still sensible, if going to bed at one in the morning when you’re going to ski the next day is sensible. “Your friend Gene seemed pretty upset at dinner,” Dave said. “He’s moody — a Vietnam vet.” “He’s angry about the dope?” “Yeah, he thinks I’m a jerk for not staying with him.” “Well, I don’t blame you. I’m against drugs. They should lock all those dopers up as far as I’m concerned.” “You’re in the majority, Dave.” He was quiet for awhile. I had almost drifted off when he spoke again. “Does he smoke to forget about the war?” “I think so, though he’s never said. I think it has something to do with his buddy.” “His buddy?” “He joined the Marines on the buddy plan. During Vietnam you could join for two years with a buddy. Something like six months of training, 13 months in Vietnam...” “I thought you had to stay a year.” “Marines were 13 months. Anyway, you could be with your buddy the whole time. Boot camp, there and the six months or so duty afterward. His buddy died. I don’t know the details. That and other stuff is probably why he smokes dope.”

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“I broke my neck in gymnastics, that’s why I didn’t go,” Dave said. He had been in my fraternity when I was in college, though I never hung out with him. He was a beerdrinking wrestler then and I was a dope-smoking semihippie. Our crowds didn’t mix. It wasn’t until years later that he got me into weight lifting and we became friends. “Back then I thought it was too bad you didn’t die when you broke your neck,” I said. “You’re kidding.” “You were such a jerk in the fraternity, always getting into fights.” “I’m too old for fights now!” “Thank God.” “I was going to go to Vietnam,” Dave went on. “My dad was in the Air Force. I wanted to join the Air Force after college, but with my neck broken they wouldn’t take me.” “Do you feel guilty for not going?” I asked. “I don’t know if it’s guilty or sad. I wanted to go. It’s just that they wouldn’t take me. I even went down and talked to the Army recruiter and asked him if they would take me. At first they were excited but when their doctor saw my x-rays, they said no way.” “It figures you’d want to go” I said. “You like to fight.” “It would have been exciting,” Dave said. “You protested the war didn’t you?” “The war wasn’t right.” “How’d you get out?” “I flunked my physical,” I said. Which was true. “Like me then. What was wrong with you.”

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“Knees. My kneecaps grind.” I didn’t want to tell Dave the whole story. It was too long. “I’ve got to go to sleep now, Dave. I’m exhausted.” “Do you snore much?” he asked. “A lot.” “I’m sort of a light sleeper.” “Then you’re in trouble, Bud,” I said as I turned out my light. “I fall asleep in a couple of minutes, sleep all night and snore a lot.”

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CHAPTER SEVEN “Let’s go skiing!” I squinted at the voice. “Who is it?” “Me, big Al. Jack. Let’s go! I’ve called the ski report at Heavenly. It’s iced up there. Incline sounds better. The storm’s cleared, temperature’s...” Jack was standing at the doorway connecting our two rooms. We’d left them open the night before. I quit listening to him go on about the weather. He was already dressed in his ski clothes and was doing stretches as he chattered away. “You’re a chipper little fart,” I shouted. “Sorry,” Jack retreated into his room and I could hear him going on and on to Erik. Jack was the least experienced skier and therefore the most excited about it. I’ve skied so much I don’t get excited unless the conditions are perfect. “Morning Dave-O, how are you?” I looked closely at Dave and was startled. He has enormous muscles and always looks fresh and ready to wrestle. But this morning his muscles looked shrunken and his face was fuzzy. “Not so good,” he replied. “Didn’t sleep so well.” He was lying on his back and had a pillow under his head and two other pillows propped on each side of his head, covering his ears. “Did I snore?” I asked.

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“All night.” “And you never woke me up?” I asked, incredulous. “Nope, didn’t want to bother you.” “Dave, you’re the perfect wife. Too bad you’re a guy,” I replied with a laugh. I jumped up. “Ski day, I feel great! Jeri’s always waking me up from snoring. I slept all night, didn’t even wake up at four thirty in the morning to pee.” “Yeah, time to ski, I guess.” He echoed fatigue. “Maybe you should get some earplugs,” I offered. We made a lot of noise in the hallway carrying our boots and ski gear and cracking jokes. We didn’t care. We were manly men going skiing early. I glanced at Gene’s room. There was a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and I wondered if he’d pulled an all-nighter and just recently gone to bed. We thought of waking him but didn’t. There’s a McDonalds in the casino, in the basement. We got breakfast and decided to eat there to keep the car clean. It had snowed for two weeks but stopped the night we got there. Jack told us he’d heard on the radio that two snowboarders died at Heavenly during the storm the day before. They had fallen in deep, fresh snow. One had been only a few feet from a packed run. The bindings on snowboards don’t release unless you reach down and press the buckle to let your boot out. But when you fall in deep snow you end up hanging upside down and it’s hard to reach up and push on a buckle, even if you’re 22 and strong. “What a horrible way to die,” Erik said. He was close to

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their ages, so I think it got to him the most. “Life’s not fair, that’s what Jack Kennedy said,” I ventured. “Just a few days before getting shot,” Jack added. “Forget this death stuff,” Dave shouted. “Let’s ski.” That was Dave, you usually couldn’t get him to talk about much of anything serious before he demanded the subject be changed. As big and burly as he was, everyone agreed. Gene scratched his eyes and moaned, then rolled over and looked at his windup alarm clock. “God, 10. I feel awful.” He had gambled until six a.m., ate breakfast and was headed for bed when he heard Al and his buddies heading out for skiing. He didn’t want them to know he’d been up all night, so he’d turned out the light and planned not to get up if they knocked. He’d fallen asleep grumpy at his bad luck. He reached for the remote and spun through channels until he got to the Harrah’s How to Gamblechannel, then watched craps instruction. After awhile he rolled out of bed, raised his left arm and rubbed the sore shoulder, his old javelin shoulder. It was always sore. Operation, the surgeon had said after the MRI a year ago. But he didn’t have insurance and it would have interfered with his carpentry, so he let it go. With some Advil and ice on bad days it was manageable. But after twenty years, it was getting worse. “I need a joint,” he said to no one. He went to the closet and pulled out his suitcase, rolled a joint and lit it, then

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went to the window and cracked the long curtain. Sunshine glared through, making him wince. The street was white with snow and it hurt to look. “Allen and his no dope. He used to smoke with me at the Fourth of July parties. He’s a such a chicken. Four grand a month and he whines. What a wimp. If I had that kind of money I’d drive here in a new BMW.” He had a BMW, an old one that he’d bought from a neighbor in Sisters when he was working on his remodel home project and living in his trailer. That was his way, live in the trailer and work on a house he’d bought, or on a job, then move on when it was done or sold. The BMW cost three thousand five hundred and he’d driven it too fast all the time until he’d ended up sideways on the freeway one Saturday. It was a one car crash and with only liability insurance he hadn’t repaired it. His shoulder got worse from the impact and the car was stored under a tarp at a friends house. “A new BMW,” he mused. “The bank would loan me new BMW money on $4,000 a month.” The dope relaxed him and helped him remember last night. It had been a party while it lasted. Then things had gone to hell. Dinner was great, well the food was good, but he’d been angry at Allen. He’d felt perfect afterwards, the single beer at dinner amplified the half-joint he’d allowed himself and taken the edge off the black beauty he’d had on the plane. He’d learned that trick, take speed no later than two in the afternoon and peak it with coffee or Pepsi at the tables, then don’t drink at night except for a dinner

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beer. You had to take your drugs to maintain control, not get out of hand. That’s when things go bad, when they get out of hand. He’d learned that in Vietnam. If you didn’t keep your shit together, people started dying. Craps at the Comstock before dinner had been a great start, he’d ridden Allen’s lucky coat tails on that one by buying the numbers and adding two hundred to his bankroll. After dinner he’d come back to Harrah’s so that if he started winning he could get the money up to his room without walking the streets with too much cash. He planned to win big and had a grand with him. He picked a blackjack table and settled down to work. The first dealer was great, he was convinced for awhile she loved him and was cheating the house for him because all the cards came his way. Her name was Tracy, she was in her early thirties and had a sexy smokers voice. She also had long curly brown hair, long fingernails and big breasts. It was hard for Gene to concentrate on counting cards with her as a dealer but he didn’t have to, she kept feeding him good cards, 19’s and 20’s, and was always happy for him when he won. After awhile he was putting forty bucks out on two hands and winning both. He never counted cards, all he had to do was ask Tracy questions and let her bust. She was divorced, of course, with two kids and a little house outside town. Gene could see his life with Tracy stretching out before him. He’d wait until she got off work. They’d have drinks and dinner, then come back to her place, meet the kids, then he’d sleep with her. She’d give up her dealer career

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and move up to John Day after the wedding and they’d build a cabin. He could build log cabins, hunt and fish and she’d be good at drying meat and gardening. Then they’d have a baby, like Gene had always wanted. He’d make sure the baby grew up tough and ready to deal with the world. That was the problem with so many parents these days. They let their kids be too childlike and were too easy on them, instead of getting them ready for the tough life of being an adult. But the kids he had with Tracy would be different, tough like him. So he asked her if she wanted to have a drink after work. “I’m sort of tied,” she responded with that lilting voice. Her brown curls bobbed by her high cheek bones. “Tied?” “You know, a boyfriend. That’s him over there.” Gene looked around. He was at the next table and smiled at Tracy. He was her age, skinny, with a pony tail and a tattoo on his arm. He was no provider! Gene could see that at a glance. Good looking women were such fools, always going for a thrill instead of a provider. “What does he do?” Gene asked with an angry edge under his voice. When she said that he was in a band playing in Reno, Gene’s minds eye saw the log cabin coming apart log by log, flitting back onto his truck, getting driven backwards into the forest, then jumping up and becoming trees that Gene in reverse would unsaw to heal their horrible tragic wounds. The final scene was himself driving backwards out of the woods with a useless, happy

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smile on his face. Ponytail had made it a useless smile. Gene quit gambling big and started losing right away. Tracy went on break with Ponytail who Gene knew he could take apart in five seconds. Tracy’s replacement was an unsmiling Vietnamese guy with a scar from his left eyebrow to his nose. Gene tried rising to the challenge and bet a hundred bucks three hands in a row. He liked Vietnamese people but he lost all three hands so he muttered “Slope”, under his breath just loud enough for the dealer to hear. The guy didn’t deserve it of course, but Gene was mad about Tracy’s rejection and his losses. He’d dabbled on the slots for awhile, then decided to play roulette. He found a table that wasn’t too crowded and started to play colors. He listened for the psychic message, red, black, red, red. He bet five dollars and each time he won he pulled his winnings because he was still upset about Tracy and didn’t trust his instinct. Then some lady let her first winnings ride and hit two numbers in a row and screamed her guts out because she won over a thousand dollars on a one dollar bet. The table got crowded and that’s when everything fell apart. He had actually hit eight colors in a row and was mad at himself for not letting his winnings ride because it was obvious the table was hot and he could have made $1,280 off his original five dollar bet. Because he had been scared of losing he only had $40 to show for his luck. He hunched forward to focus on his next move as the dealer released the ball. Just then a young woman pushed up against him, shoving her left tit into his right ear so she

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could place her bet on 7. She stepped back and he turned around and smiled. “Sorry, but seven has been my lucky number all night. I had to leave the table for awhile.” She placed her hand on his shoulder as she apologized and then said,”Here we go,” so he turned around. Gene fought the excitement that swept over his brain like a hot flash as he looked at the number board. Sure enough, seven had hit four times already. And he had to get a bet in play or lose his place at the table. The blonde dealer in her late thirties was looking at him. There were lots of people wanting to use his stool and gamble. He put ten bucks on 7 as well as putting twenty on red to keep betting his colors. But the ball landed on a black number that wasn’t seven. He was disappointed, but she leaned forwar d again and smashed her left breast into his ear and he no longer cared that he was losing because each time his money was swept off the table by the dealer the girl behind would lean forward and play seven, and each time her entire left breast overwhelmed his right ear like a pillow inviting Gene to dream. He couldn’t think of anything to say and he certainly couldn’t focus on the intuition that had given him his previous wins. With each bet of hers he would bet a couple bucks on seven to prove he’d be a loyal husband, then played another five or ten or even twenty —- whatever was in his hands —- on colors. Of course, he didn’t win anything at all. But Gene didn’t care because this enormouslyendowed woman seemed intent on jamming her breast

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through his skull if he just sat there. He could have moved out of the way every time she started to come forward but he didn’t want to. It was just too pleasant. “I’m sorry to bash into you like that,” she apologized once. “It’s the highlight of my trip,” he mumbled. She acted like she didn’t quite hear him so he added, “I’m torn between being a gentleman and moving when you bet or sitting here enjoying it.” Again there was that puzzled look and he wondered if she was hard of hearing. He would have said more but the damned ball was rolling and he had to get a bet on the table or he’d lose his stool. He turned around and found there weren’t any chips in front of him or in his hand. He reached for his wallet which was nice because other parts of her anatomy were contacted by his elbow and wrist and the flush of that experience threw him off so much that he just took the first bill out of his wallet he could find and slapped it on black. The problem was it was one hundred bucks and the dealer allowed it but said no more bets just as the ball catapulted down and hit on the green 00. “Damn,” he said, realizing what he had done. Between the Vietnamese blackjack dealer and now this girl all that he’d won at craps with Allen and then with Tracy was gone. In fact, now he was behind on the trip. He’d squandered his early energy as Allen had warned him not to do. “I could buy you a drink,” she offered. He just wanted to stay with the status quo and keep gambling with her leaning into him all night. So he stupidly

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said, “They give you free drinks here, just tell them to get you the cocktail girl.” “I know,” she said in a Chicago accent. She didn’t bet again and after the ball dropped one more time she said, “Well, fun to gamble with you, see you later. We’re skiing tomorrow and I’ve got to get back to my girlfriends.” And she was gone. He still had the shakes and played colors a couple more times until it dawned on him that what she had wanted to do was buy him a drink and get familiar. He quit gambling, jumped up and started to look for her. She said she was going skiing. Had she just left for bed or was she gambling somewhere? He circled Harrah’s entire casino. This was easier than normal because they’d set up a wall of plywood to make a huge viewing area for the Superbowl in the casino so it was smaller than usual. But the place was still enormous and he couldn’t find her anywhere — too many nooks and crannies to hide in. He backtracked to the roulette tables and started searching more carefully, walking up and down rows of slot machines, electronic games of poker, blackjack and keno, slots to win a sports car, spin the wheel, banks of craps tables full of players. Halfway through his search it occurred to him that he could have taken a cab out to the Mustang Ranch and hired a girl to poke him in the head with her breast and it would have been cheaper than what he’d just done. Of course then he would have been tempted to screw

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the girl and they insisted on using rubbers there. Which he agreed with of course. Gene was so AIDS conscious that he hadn’t had sex in two years — all the horny girls he met seemed like potential HIV vectors. He wanted nothing to do with the Mustang club, though he’d been there before the war. Back then they hadn’t required condoms and all the girls looked like models. He checked his bankroll. He’d started out the evening with one thousand dollars and a mission that he had yet to fully tell Allen about and now he was down three hundred and was teased and horny and pissed that he’d lost so much. Now he had twenty-four-thousand, seven-hundred dollars left to achieve his goals with. Circus Circus, that was where he’d go. The cold outside surprised him and reminded him that it was still winter in the high desert, despite the earlier warmth when they had landed. He didn’t make it to Circus, it was just too long a walk in the cold without a coat, so he turned in at a place he’d never been before. It was some kind of monument to the 50’s and had a bee-bop motif, jukeboxes everywhere and classic 50’s giveaway cars on the slot machines. The whole place was ugly — weird wallpaper, unusual dealers, unappealing cocktail waitresses. There were salmon-colored walls with purple wainscotting and a green rug with orange highlights. Gene decided it had been decorated by a gay designer because he hated gays and only a faggot could have designed this place. He looked around and suddenly all the men there looked like gays and there were hardly any women in the place. It pissed him off

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— a casino for gays only! This was Reno and he was manly, after all, so he went over to a blackjack table. The dealer seemed normal, a girl, though it worried him it might be a guy dressed like a girl. He bet small and counted cards, trying to make a comeback. Gene ordered coffee although by now it was one in the morning. He wanted to get the last stretch out of the speed. He started counting cards effectively and before long it felt like he was hunting up in the desert. He used the plus/minus system, ignoring the seven through nine, just counting a minus one each time the face cards or tens or aces were taken from the table, and counting a plus one when two through six were taken away. He knew that if these small cards were played out of the deck the odds were high that the next deal would hold mostly face cards, aces or tens. This is when you bet big money and to increase your odds, played more than one hand so that you would have a much higher chance than the dealer of drawing a good hand. You had to be patient doing this and Gene was a patient hunter. He played alone a lot, but occasionally someone would come to the table and play for awhile. Once a young Arab came up and played a hundred bucks on a random hand. It was fascinating to see the whole thing unwind. The Arab had friends watching him play and he plopped a hundred in the bet circle when he came to the table. He remained standing and got his cards with Gene knowing all along that the deck was at minus four. It was going to be a lousy hand and there was no way Gene would have bet

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$100. Gene bet the table minimum of three dollars. The dealer gave the Arab an eight and a four, then the guy had to decide whether to hit or stand. He hit and broke. “Son of bitch!” he shouted. His friends groaned, then all talked excitedly in Arabic. The Arab put out twohundred. The deck was at minus three now and he got another bad hand, a fifteen. This time he took a card because the dealer had a four showing. He got a three and stood on eighteen. The dealer turned over an eight and started dealing herself cards, small cards, since Gene knew that was all that was left in the deck. She pulled out a two to get to fourteen, another two to get to sixteen. The Arabs hopes were rising now and he was starting to stand on his toes. Then she flipped over a five to hit twenty-one and scooped up the cards and his two-hundred. “Damn son of bitch,” the Arab shouted and again there was a hubbub of commiseration in Arabic. This time threehundred came out and when the dealer reshuffled, three hundred more came out on a second hand. One of the guys said something and then Gene noticed that two of the Arab’s companions were holding hands. Gene almost puked. Gay Arabs! The bastard deserved to lose. Gene knew what was coming — God’s vengeance. Gene bet three bucks and pulled a twenty. The dealer showed an ace and asked for insurance, the Arab looked at his friends who shook their heads so he didn’t buy any. Gene knew and bought insurance and sure enough the girl flipped over a Jack. Blackjack. “God damned son of bitch damnit” This time the Arab

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followed up his English curse with something in Arabic. A couple of his friends kind of gasped and then they all walked away in a somber mood. It was too much for Gene and he left too. He’d got back a hundred dollars after counting cards until four in the morning. Back in his room he couldn’t sleep, so he took a shower, and watched a movie. He was still awake when Allen and the boys tripped by on their way to the slopes. We left McDonalds and decided where to go while heading out of town in the Avis Jeep Cherokee. Jack suggested Northstar because that seemed to have the best conditions. He explained that he’d called around and found that as the storm ended in the night it had been followed by warm air. The south end of the lake had received rain until midnight. Then the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. As a result everything south was a sheet of ice with five feet of powder underneath. But Northstar was at the northwest end of the lake where it hadn’t rained and the snow might be good, so that was our destination. Jack drove the Jeep west on the Interstate as we sipped coffee and joked. I’d asked Dave and Gene not to tell the others that I’d been fired. There didn’t seem much point in it, no one seemed concerned or sympathetic, and I’d learned it was painful to bring up. So we talked about Erik’s career in appraisal. It dawned on me that even with my halfshare of the park income and my old salary of six thousand a month, I had been earning less than everyone else in the car. Erik boasted he’d just finished his first hundred-fifty-

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thousand year. A hundred and fifty. Jack laughed and said Erik would get close to attorney money if he got another seventy-five a year more, and Dave announced that he’d managed to save a hundred grand the previous year. And they had gone to Europe. I guessed he’d made over three-hundred-fifty thousand last year. I could feel my penis shrinking as we drove. “Watch out!” I shouted, but it was too late, the right wheels of the Jeep dropped into a large pothole and then bounced out the other side. There was a slamming noise, we were weightless and then airborne as the front tire of the Jeep hit the far side of the rut. It was a trench, a foxhole that a man could have been protected in, in the middle of the Interstate. The Jeep went up on its two left wheels and Jack turned to the left instinctively, slamming the Jeep down on the pavement, swerving back to the right and then more to the right as yet another hole loomed in front of us. Jack pulled over to the side of the road and examined the right tires. He was shaking as he got back in. “No flats.” “I love skiing!” Dave shouted as we all laughed. All of Nevada has become the warehouse district for the west coast due to the absence of an inventory tax. Nevada wanted to encourage industry and they came up with a great idea; they were close enough to California and the rest of the west coast that if they didn’t charge an inventory tax, businesses would store their wares in Nevada and ship out of state as needed.

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Someone decided to build a warehouse up in Truckee and as we drove by it, I exclaimed, “Look at that!” There was an enormous flat roofed warehouse off to our left with a crew of fifty men on the roof, removing the snow. There was a good seven feet of it and several sprays of snow hurtling in the air from snow blowers. The roof was so big it looked as if it would take days to clear. “Look at all that snow,” Erik said. They must have eight or nine feet of it in the mountains.” “Enough to start an avalanche,” I teased. I didn’t want to act scared but I was. That was a lot of snow. “Well let’s not go off the trail when we ski,” Erik advised. We pulled up the Northstar road. They have a special service in the parking lot where you can pay eight dollars and park right next to the lodge. It’s the only ski area I’ve ever been to that does this, usually the closest parking is given to early risers, but here it’s reserved for the money makers, which we were, except for me. There was a young, redhaired girl in a Northstar parka directing traffic in the lot. “Do you want the pay or free lot?” she asked when Jack stopped. “Which option allows me to visit with you longer?” Jack asked. “The pay lot,” she replied with a smile. “I’ll take that,” Jack said, digging in his wallet. “So what’s your name and where do you live?” She blushed and I leaned forward and asked. “Are you Irish?” “Yes, I am.” Another smile.

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“Then don’t tell him. He wants to marry you and you can’t because he’s Irish too and you’re related.” She smiled as Jack gave her the money. “So marry me,” I added. “I’m English.” “And me, and me,” Erik and Dave piped up from the back seat. “Marry me,” Jack said in a confiding tone. “I’m only part Irish.” She counted back Jack’s change. “Could I marry all four of you? I can’t decide.” “Sure, we’re all friends,” I said. “We won’t have to invite anyone else to the wedding. We’ll already be there.” She laughed and said, “You won’t mind one more person then, will you?” “You have a sister?” Jack asked. “I’ll marry her if she looks like you.” “No, my husband. I’ll be married to five men at once.” “That’s disgusting,” Jack said. “I can’t believe you’d do that, you have no morals,” I joked. We all waved good bye and she blew us a kiss as she laughed. “I love Reno,” Erik yelled as we pulled into the lot. “It was discovered by Colonel Reno,” I said. “Actually Colonel Renob, but he shortened his name,” Jack corrected. “So Reno is actually....” I paused. “Boner spelled backwards without the B,” we all yelled. We’d been doing this joke routine for years.

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Everything went well early on. Northstar village is a lovely collection of Swiss-style condos, restaurants and shops. We got our tickets, loaded on the tram and headed up the mountain. We started skiing the lower runs, Dave leading every time down. He’d been racing for most of the winter and I’d only gone a couple of times at Christmas so I didn’t try to pass him. It was a beautiful, sunny day, but the snow wasn’t as good as we’d hoped. There were balls of ice on the runs under the trees and you had to be careful because some places that looked like powder were actually perfectly frozen instead and if you wandered off the packed runs you were history. I didn’t start skiing until I was seventeen, and the first time I did it I knew I’d found my purpose in life. I resolved at the age of eighteen that I would put, “I skied enough,” on my tombstone. One year when I was going to OSU I joined the ski team because they had a program for five racers to buy a $300 season’s pass as a family so it only cost me $60. I hated racing though, and after our Christmas training camp I quit the team but kept the pass. My friend Andy, from Stayton, had moved to Bend to go to Central Oregon Community College the previous fall and was living in a shack that had been used to house a mill family in the twenties. It was fifteen-feet by eighteen and still managed to include a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room. I started going to Andy’s on Friday nights and crashing on the floor in my Sears Ted Williams Special sleeping bag. We’d ski Saturday and Sunday then I’d drive home late

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Sunday. I skied fifty-two times that year, including a spring break trip to Sun Valley. I know I’m a good skier from all that practice, so it irked me that Dave was constantly zooming out ahead with that smug look on his face. All trace of the fatigue my snoring had given him was gone. He just kept cruising past me no matter how much faster I pushed each run. I wanted to go on the upper chairs and get into some of that tasty powder, but the area had been closed for avalanche prevention. It was unnerving because you’d be standing in line and then hear a loud whump! thump! from high above. Each time we’d jump reflexively though we knew what it was. After awhile we started yelling, “Incoming!” at the top of our lungs after each blast. Finally the quad lift to the upper bowls opened. We shot to the bottom of it and were one of the first on. I tried leading us into the powder snow on our first run but it was wet so I returned to the hard pack and decided to try another route the next time down. Besides, Dave hadn’t followed me into the powder, he’d stayed on the hard pack so there wasn’t much point struggling in the powder if he wasn’t there to see me ski better than him. On the lift ride up I got stuck sitting under an ice ball that had formed on the chair during the storm and was now rapidly melting on me. I pulled my REI jacket’s hood up and sat all bundled up while the other guys chatted in the warm air and radiant sunshine. The chair stopped and we all groaned. There’s nothing

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worse that being hot to ski and then sitting in a stalled lift chair as you watch skiers hoot at you from below as they zip past. We were only about thirty chairs from the top, right over a steep mogul field. Behind us the slope levelled out in a meadow of untracked snow where the chair was no more than thirty feet above the snow. The chair started to move, and we expressed relief for a second, until we realized it was going backwards. It moved slowly at first, but gradually built up speed. We all gripped the chair and looked back as the chair really started to move. The mogul field zipped uphill and we were over the flats where a girl had fallen in deep snow. Beyond her was a grove of trees and then the start of steep terrain and ultimately, the bottom tower. You read occasionally about a lift running backwards and people dying as they get thrown from the chair when it goes backward through the loading area. The thought crossed my mind that I should bail now, over the meadow, before the trees. If it let go when I was hanging it would be only a twenty-four-foot drop and if I was lucky I could keep my balance and land on my skis. The problem was there was a retainer bar under our arms and I started to lift it but everyone was gripping it so it wouldn’t come up. I started to yell for everyone to let go of it when the chair stopped hard, as if God had reached out a hand and grabbed the thick metal cable and said, “Enough!” We swung backwards until we were almost parallel to the ground, then swung forward just as high, all of us grateful, especially me, that the safety bar was still in place to prevent a fall.

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I screamed from my gut. I’ve only screamed like that once before, when I jumped forty-five feet from the concrete bridge into the Little North Fork River and let loose a long uninterrupted scream from the bridge to the water only to realize I had no breath to hold as I went under. “God, that was awful!” I yelled. “We’re alive, Big A!” Jack screamed as we swung back and forth. We high-fived our fear and excitement away. “Take me to the tables,” Erik said in his Arnold Schwarzeneger voice, a smile spreading over his big chin and model-handsome face. “I have so much adrenaline I’ve got Allen’s winning energy now.”

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CHAPTER EIGHT Gene stopped short of finishing the joint, spit on his fingers, then pinched the end to put it out, wrapped it in a piece of aluminum foil and put it in his plastic bag. “Effective dope management 101”, he said to himself. He thought of taking half a black beauty. If he took only half now he’d be able to sleep by midnight. He looked at the capsule. “What the heck,” he popped the whole thing in his mouth, used some tap water to knock it down and hit the shower. The dope and speed hit him as the shower pounded his balding head. He dressed quickly, eager for another day. He went to his suitcase and pulled out five grand, then added two thousand more. This was the money from selling his land. Every thousand dollars was one of his beloved acres. He thought of the way the deer would cross his property in the early morning on their way back to their beds after feeding in the bottom lands by the Deschutes River. How the wind would howl in the winter over his bluff where he had planned to build his house someday when he was married and needed a place to raise his kids. Now it was just this pile of money in his suitcase. But he didn’t care. He had the mission from God and he was going to win. He knew it from the dream. God would transform his land into a Suicide Wall. Gene would be His instrument.

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He was going to win today, he could feel the rush of awareness coming over him from the speed. It was like the time in the jungle with the ambush set and the NVA coming into the kill zone. Everything glowed, everything was alive, everything was frosty. He decided to play craps again, it felt like the right thing to do. There were a bunch of people in the elevator heading down for breakfast and talking about what a great deal the buffet was but he wasn’t hungry. He left the elevator and found the table. It looked ready to be taken and the dollar minimum sign was up so he could start in easy and then increase his bets. The table limit was $10,000 which was more than enough for his purposes. All his money was in hundreds so he cashed in five, asked for a hundred in silver dollars and the rest in five, ten and twenty-five dollar chips, then racked it in the rails in front of him. On the next roll he started playing the field bet, betting small on a roll of 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11 or 12, just to get a feel for the table. He looked around at the other players and one guy immediately stood out, the guy rolling the dice who stood opposite the stick man and to the right of the dealer. The roller had a cowboy hat on and the dealers knew him by the first name of Sol. His pink five-hundred dollar chips filled two whole racks in front of him while hundreds filled the rest of the space. Gene estimated Sol had more than twenty-thousand dollars. Not enough for Gene’s project, of course, but as much as he needed to win today. Gene figured he had to win at least fifty-thousand to

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add to his own money. That would give him two-thousand a month for living expenses — twenty-four thousand for the year it would take — plus fifty thousand for the grand prize for the submission, and another eight-thousand for the ads about the wall design prize in the architectural magazines. No one would ignore that. He would have a national competition, a call for designs, they would all have to have a wall like he had described to Allen. But he’d also let the architects include a second sculpture and determine the position of the wall and the landscaping. And he, Gene Williams, no one else, would select the prize winning design. When he had that, he would send it to Congress, to the President and to all Veterans groups, especially Vietnam Veterans of America. That would get the articles going in the papers. He would make things happen and change the world, and in the end there would be a Suicide Wall in D.C. It would be longer than the black wall since it had to hold three times the names, all carved in the pearly white marble with gold letters. Yes. Maybe then everyone in America would realize what they’d done to him and his friends — maybe then they would do what they should have done long ago, give war veterans modest pensions for the rest of their lives. A monthly stipend for the years of abuse they suffered for a country that didn’t give a rat’s ass about them. “Soldier abuse”, like sex abuse or rape; draft a young kid and tell him to fight for his country, stick him out in the middle of the bush with less than half the men necessary, then not

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back him up when the shit hit the fan. “We should have been willing to nuke Hanoi if that’s what it took to win the war...” Gene muttered to himself. “Excuse me?” the young girl to his right asked with a smile. She had long brown hair that draped down towards the table even though she tried to push it back, beautiful olive skin, full lips, generous breasts and... a skinny husband to her right wearing a red baseball cap that said John Deere. Gene fell in and out of love in a two-second pause before saying, “Nothing, sorry, talk to myself.” “I do that too, sometimes,” smile, teeth flashing, Gene’s heart aching. If I had someone like that... Sol in the cowboy hat hit a seven after rolling for his point and the table groaned. There was a Vietnamese guy to John Deere’s right and he was next in line for the dice. At least he looked Vietnamese to Gene, though he was awfully tall for a Vietnamese. But Gene knew what Vietnamese looked like, and this guy was. He looked lucky, and seemed confident when he put a hundred out on the pass line, so Gene put twenty bucks on the pass line too. He crapped out on his first roll by getting a three. All the opening pass line bets were swept from the table. Gene was glad he was playing small. The Vietnamese put out another hundred, rolled an eight and got excited, but on the next roll hit a seven. He bent his head down and shook it in shame while the dice passed to John Deere. Gene knew this guy was a loser so he placed a five-dollar chip on the pass line. John Deere rolled an eight and then a

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few more numbers, then Sol bellied up to the table and made a lay bet of $1,200 against the numbers. Jeez, Gene said to himself. There was guts, a onethousand, two-hundred dollar lay bet for all six numbers meant Sol was a wrong-way bettor taking the same game as the house, betting against the dice, betting John Deere wouldn’t hit the numbers four, five, six, eight, nine or ten. If John Deere hit any of the numbers, Sol would lose on each. Sol was betting the guy would roll a seven, which he did the roll after Sol made his bet. Sol rolled his eyes in contempt, then leaned back and sipped his beer with satisfaction. After the commission of $60 to the house he’d just made $740. There was a long pause while the dealer paid Sol his winnings, the other dealer cleaned his end while the stickman paid off the center bets. Finally he passed the dice box to John Deere’s wife. “Next shooter,” the stickman said, looking at her. “No, not me, I can’t,” she protested. “Let him,” pointing at Gene. The stickman obliged, pulling the box with his long stick towards Gene’s position. Only the players touch the dice, never the stickman or the dealer. Gene looked in the young girl’s eyes, saw self-doubt there, but felt passion in her as well. She was a good woman. Then he looked at Sol, the wrong bettor, following in the tradition of Nick the Greek, hoping no one was hot and the table cold. It was time, Gene was wound up, locked and loaded. “Wait a minute, you can roll. It’s simple,” Gene

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encouraged her. “No, I’d be embarrassed.” “Do it for me. I’ll put twenty bucks on the pass line for you and you just roll.” He put twenty in front of her, then placed one-hundred on the line for himself. “We have money, mister. Go ahead, Bev, roll,” John Deere said with pride as he plunked two five dollar chips on the pass line and shoved Gene’s back at him.. “I want to add my twenty for her luck,” Gene said. “Here, twenty more,” the Vietnamese guy said. “You get double back you win.” He had a big grin that spread out beneath his black plastic glasses. He stooped forward stiffly, supported his weight on the table as if he had a sore back, and looked expectantly at the girl. “All right,” Bev said after her husband nodded agreement. She took two of the dice from the eight offered and smiled a thank you at Gene. “I’m on don’t pass for a grand,” Sol said, placing his chips on the table. The Vietnamese smiled and Gene knew this guy also felt the kill of Sol coming. “Plus one hundred more for the dealers, same way bet,” Sol added. “Thanks Sol,” they chimed, placing their hundred dollar chip up at an angle on Sol’s to show it was a dealer’s tip bet from Sol. That’s the cool way to tip the dealers in Reno. Not just flipping them money, but putting bets out for them, bets that run the same way as yours so you can psychically poison them against the house and for you. It works,

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especially if you give them a good bet like a pass line. The girl shook her right hand, her hair tumbled down in front of her face and she sent the dice flying to the opposite end of the table. She had to pull back her hair to see what she’d rolled, which was seven. A winner. “Honey, look!” she exclaimed. The table roared, John Deere smiled and the dice came back with a glum look at the end of the stick as the dealers watched their hundred don’t pass bet turn to dust. “We all ride,” the Vietnamese said. Gene, John Deere and the girl all obliged by leaving their original bets added to their winnings on the pass line. Sol countered with another grand don’t pass, and the second before she rolled, Gene asked for fifty on the three or eleven. She rolled eleven. “Hah!” Gene roared. That paid fifteen to one. He’d made seven-hundred-fifty dollars. “Man, look at that,” John Deere said as they pushed some of Sol’s chips over to Gene to pay his eleven bet, then took the rest and distributed it around the table to the various pass line bets. The Vietnamese smiled at Gene. “Good luck, sir,” the stickman said as he paid Gene’s bet. Gene threw them a twenty-five dollar chip. “Put it on the hard ways, boys, you’re going in with us and we’re going in hot and low.” “Whoo!” the Vietnamese yelled. Gene looked at him and smiled. The guy knew “hot and low”, a Huey coming into an LZ over the trees at full throttle with everyone

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sitting on their helmets to protect their balls against ground fire and the plastic baggy waiting to be ripped off the baby’s-ass-clean barrel as soon as you were clear of the flying dirt from the prop wash. The Vietnamese had to be a vet. He was the right age and looked like he’d been through a lot. Maybe he’d fought alongside Gene for the ARVN’s. “Yes, sir,” the stickman slid the money to the rectangle with the squares inside showing two twos, two threes, two fours and two fives. These were the even numbers hit the hard way by making a pair for four, six, eight or ten. They lost on a seven roll or by hitting a number the easy way. But they paid seven to one on the four and ten and nine to one on six or eight. You spread your money around the four boxes, too, so even if a six hit the easy way the rest of the numbers were still working. A favorite bet was when someone rolled a ten and that became the point. There are only three ways to roll ten again, six and four, the easy way, or two fives, the hard way. But the beauty of a ten the hard way is there are so few easy ways, so if you believe the roller is going to hit a ten, you might as well hope they hit it with two fives and play the hard way bet. Gene picked up his eleven winnings, let his pass line ride, it had grown to four hundred dollars, and held his breath as Sol played two, three, four, five thousand dollars on don’t pass before she rolled again. Eight popped off the far end. Perfect. “I’ll lay on the rest of the numbers except eight,” Sol said, pushing out ten thousand. The five grand don’t pass bet went behind the eight while the ten grand was

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distributed behind the four, the five, the six, the nine and the ten. Most of Sol’s pretty pink chips were now out on the table. “And I want a place bet of a grand for all the numbers with a hundred spread out for the dealers as well,” Gene added, pulling another eleven one-hundreds from his wallet. Sol glanced at Gene with his eyes in slits as the dealers busily made the change, counted out chips and distributed them for Gene on every number except the eight. Sol arched back from the table, his big silver belt buckle biting into the wood. Sol wore a black cowboy hat, a blue silk shirt with ivory buttons, a cowboy tie and jeans. Gene couldn’t see his boots but knew they were alligator. And Gene knew the guy was dead meat because the Vietnamese pulled out five-hundred and bet the same way as Gene. She started to roll, and roll and roll. Five, nine, four, six, nine, four, this time the hard way and the dealers even yelled because Gene had replenished his and their four the hard way with fifty each for him and them. With each roll of one of the numbers that Sol had taken a lay bet on they would take away money from Sol’s lay bet, then shove it, plus some from the house’s stack, to Gene and the Vietnamese, depending on the number hit. And after each loss Sol would rebuy that number, like a man reloading a single shot musket, trying once again to have the girl fall from grace with a seven and let him clean up on all the numbers at once. Gene pressed his winnings on each number the first

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time around, adding it to the number bet, then started taking the winnings after that. Thousands of dollars started to flow to him with each roll and his head felt hot and pressured, like it was going to blow off his shoulders. It felt like combat but without the release of firing or running and for a second he wondered it he was going to have a stroke. But the sick look on Sol’s face made him forget about his head and the pressure went away. The dealers didn’t care about Sol, they were winning as Gene bet for them. The house was losing, but not much, because Sol was paying most of Gene’s and the Vietnamese man’s wins with his lay bet losses. It was like a duel — Gene and the Vietnamese on one side, Sol on the other. The Vietnam Vet and loyal native sidekick versus the fake cowboy candy-ass. And they were kicking Sol’s ass. Big time. A tall young Mexican guy squeezed in next to Gene, between him and the girl, put ten dollars on eight the hard way and brown hair wonder goddess wife of John Deere hit the eight on the next roll, winning the hard way with two fours. Winning the pass line. The whole table screamed and the crowd that had now grown to five deep around it yelled as well. It didn’t matter that it was only 11:30 on Friday morning, this was Reno and money was being made. Heads turned towards the celebration from as far away as the quarter push machine by the front air door. They pushed the winnings out, for everyone but Sol that is, who had only a few small piles of money behind the points that hadn’t hit. What was good for the house was

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good for him, bad for the house, bad for him. “Give me a marker for another ten thousand, would you Freddy?” “Yes, sir, Sol. Right away,” the boxman said. Gene watched. He’d heard about big gamblers but had never seen one. Sol took the small white piece of paper the boxman handed him along with a pen, signed the marker, handed it back and ten thousand more in hundred dollar chips were slid to him. It made Gene look anew at the stack of chips in front of the boxman. They had always seemed like part of the furniture, the neat, brightly stacked chips starting with low denominations at the edge and rising higher all the way to the back. Thousands and thousands of dollars, at least a quarter of a million dollars sitting at each table. Millions in the whole casino. Opportunity was all around him. All he had to do was stay hot. Stay focused. It was time to bet bigger, to ride the wave he felt coming one more time. Sol wasn’t the only one who would lose this time. The house would too. “Think she’ll do it again?” the Mexican asked as he scooped up his winnings. “A long roll? No doubt,” Gene said. He waited for the girl to roll but saw that the Mexican stood with his back to the girl facing the far end of the table so he could see what the roll was. The problem was that he had squeezed up against the girl so tight that she was embarrassed to roll because she’d have to push her breasts into his back. “Hey, buddy,” John Deere objected but Gene moved faster.

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“Excuse me, boxman?” Gene asked. “Yes, sir.” They called him sir, now. He’d just made them a grand. “This gentleman has crowded into the young ladies spot here on the table and she can’t continue to roll. The table is full. Would you have him removed?” “Right away. Could you step back please, each player has a spot marked by the sections the chips hold, sir. You’ve squeezed in too close and one of our players is uncomfortable.” “What the hell?” the Mexican asked, looking at the boxman, behind him and the girl and then Gene. He stepped back slightly. “There, that’s enough room. Roll.” He commanded the girl. She looked away and then looked up at Gene. “Please move, sir. Or we’ll have to call security,” the boxman said. With the words “call security”, Gene sensed a movement on the edge of his vision. He’d never lost that ability to distinguish threat motion from casual motion. He watched as the drunk Mexican protested, he was angry now, and the pit boss who had been watching from behind the boxman spoke into a tiny microphone by his collar. The threat motion came up from behind and the Mexican’s throat was suddenly covered by a bulging elbow inside a white short sleeved shirt and connected to biceps and forearms nearly as thick as Gene’s thigh. “Come this way please, sir, and there’ll be no problem.” The Mexican started to come without a problem because

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he was being slightly lifted off his feet and he could only squeal “My cheeps and cigarettes,” as he receded from the crowd. Applause started to filter around the table. A second security man, as big as the first, young and strong with a black ponytail and a tattoo on the top of his hand, took the chips and cigarettes, the cigarette pack disappearing in his beefy fist like a cow had eaten it, then he sort of bowed at the young girl and offered the spot at the table back to her. “Thank you,” she said to him and Gene and added a smile. She touched Gene’s right hand with her left hand and it felt like it burned him. “No problem. Can’t have the best roller squeezed out of the game.” “Take your winnings from me before I roll again, mister, our stack is up to four hundred dollars now,” she shoved his twenty dollar encouragement bet plus the $160 winnings next to it. “What? That’s all yours.” “Are you sure?” “Do you still feel lucky?” “I’m not sure, why?” “If you do, then leave all that there, and keep rolling. It’s all yours anyway. If you don’t, you’d better tell me and we’ll leave.” “You’re positive about the money?” “Yes,” Gene replied. The girl pushed her long brown hair back and pulled her money towards her as she whispered to her husband. He looked at their winnings and nodded.

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The stickman started to mix the dice she’d been rolling with the others in the box before handing them back to her. “Hold it, mister,” Gene said, the stickman stopped. Even with a bad shoulder Gene was still a bull of a man, his forearms bulged from hammering. For years he had prided himself on being able to hammer with either hand and outlast the sheetrockers in their twenties with their maniac pace. But now Gene could only hammer right handed with his good shoulder. “Don’t mix the dice. We want the same ones.” Gene said. The stickman looked at the boxman. The boxman was in a suit instead of a white shirt and black vest like the other dealers. The boxman turned to the pit boss and said something. The pit boss nodded and the stickman said, “No change in dice,” as he passed them to the girl. “Danny, you switch,” the pit boss said to the stickman. “Go on break.” “Wait, wait,” Gene said again in a louder voice. “Don’t go screwing with the table. Here’s a hundred for him and a hundred for you if you freeze the table.” “Good luck, mister,” the pit boss said as he nodded his agreement, crossed his hands in front of his balls and made himself solid with his feet wide, as if to say the house was strong enough to withstand Gene’s and the girl’s luck. “But I don’t take tips, take it back or let it be the dealers,” he added. “Don’t throw away good money being a big George,” Sol said with a wry smile at Gene. George was casino

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language for a bettor that tipped too much. “Don’t make lay bets against my friend,” Gene answered. Sol’s face flushed in anger, then he said, “Give me another ten thousand marker Freddy and put five of it on don’t pass.” “Everything’s off coming out,” Gene said. “Yes, sir,” the croupier replied. If he’d had less money out there they would have probably scolded him and told him that the numbers were always off on the coming out bet but with the pile he’d bet and the pile he’d won, they politely confirmed his bets were off. Only Gene’s two thousand on the pass line was working. “Seven,” the croupier said in a weary voice, and the house paid while pulling Sol’s five-thousand bet on the don’t pass. “Shit!” Sol yelled. He rammed another thousand on the don’t pass space as Gene told the dealer to put his pass line bet into bigger chips and let it ride. It was now fourthousand. “Go baby,” Gene whispered to the girl. She shook hard and the dice flew and landed a ten. Ten was not an easy number to hit again but it paid off higher, so Gene bought the place bets on all the numbers, added maximum odds to his pass line bet and once again the girl rolled her magic. “A hundred for each of you on ten the hard way, boys,” Gene said, throwing out four one-hundred dollar chips. “The rest on ten the hard way for me.” He felt woozy, intoxicated, his heart racing, his head hot. Everyone ganged

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up on ten the hard way. The pit boss was standing on one leg now, his hand on his lips, an uncertain, philosophical look on his face. “Lay bets again,” Sol said. He pushed out his remaining money, asked for another five-thousand marker, signed it and put it on the table too. The tension mounted as she kept running off numbers, nine, six, five, but never the fatal seven. Each time Gene scooped up his winnings off the numbers and each time Sol swore as he lost and reloaded his wrong bets with more and more markers. “I don’t know what I should roll to win my money, mister,” the girl said to Gene. “What does it mean ten the hard way?” “You need a ten, but you should roll it with two fives.” “All right,” she said. “You going to do it now?” Gene asked. “I’ll try.” “Five-hundred more on ten the hard way for me and fifty for her.” Gene tossed the chips out and the stick slid them towards the bulging stack that now completely covered the square. They stacked Gene’s money to the side of the pile. “Don’t lose that,” Gene cautioned. “No, sir, ten the hard way for you and the pretty lady,” the stickman assured Gene, “We’ll remember, it’s our job.” She reached her hands back, shook the dice, looked at her husband, closed her eyes, threw, and one five came up as the other dice spun on its corner. Within the second that

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it took for the dice to stop, everyone leaned forward with a sudden surge as they all realized they were halfway there, and then it stopped, not on two, which would have killed them all, but on that lovely five. People screamed and jumped but at the same time held their positions to make sure they got paid off. Ten the hard way paid seven to one. It took a long time to pay everyone. “I no believe this,” the Vietnamese said to Gene from his corner. “It’s a wave,” Gene tried to explain over the noise. “They come in sets, like in the ocean.” The Vietnamese couldn’t understand and just smiled, then leaned on the rails and studied the table. Gene looked at Sol, who was signing for yet another marker. When the payoffs were done, Sol pushed his entire stack out on the pass line. That was a bad sign. Sol was switching to the girl’s side. The waves were over. The set was done. “Pull everything,” Gene said. They stacked his numbers bets in front of him, then helped him clean house, changing the smaller chips to the pink five-hundreds. He shoved them in his pocket. He’d won over twenty grand. He took the last five-hundred chip and slid it back to the dealers. “For you, boys,” Gene said. “Keep it or bet it, your call.” The three of them glanced at each other, then the stickman said, “Dealers bet don’t pass.”

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Gene smiled, fished in his pocket for a single silver dollar and placed it on the pass line. Then he leaned over to the girl. “Pick it all up, sweetheart, the good times are over.” “Do you think so? We’ve sure won a lot.” “You have close to a thousand there, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to lift it all and play a dollar,” Gene said. John Deere heard that, scooped up all the chips but refused the black and yellow hundred dollar chip, a honeybee, from Gene. “You’ve got to have a bet to roll, miss,” the croupier said. Before she could react, Gene put a silver dollar on her pass line and looked at Sol. “I’d pull that pass line, Sol,” he advised. Sol glared at him, then said, “Just roll.” Gene looked down the table. There was a lot of money out there on the pass line. Too bad. She rolled a six and then a five and people started to buy six the hard way and set up for a long roll and then she hit a seven. The table groaned and people started to drift away. The magic was over. An angel had come down and touched the table, kissed the lucky ones, then flown away. “Sorry, mister,” the girl said as they took away Gene’s dollar along with hers. “Sorry for what?” “I just lost.” “Lost? I just lost a buck. You did good. Thanks, both of you.” He nodded at the girl and her husband, looked up to

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find Sol and saw only the black cowboy hat walking angrily away from the table. Then Gene walked away as well. Time to go cash in and get this in the bank. A real bank, not his room. “Hey, you want drink? Beer, Cocktail?” the Vietnamese asked, touching Gene on his shoulder. “I done, table cold.” “Sure. And then some lunch.” “You like Vietnamese food?” “I love it. I was there during the war,” Gene replied. “My name Phong.” “I’m Gene.” They shook hands. “Were you in Vietnam during the war?” Gene was too curious to drop the subject. “I fought for America twelve years, I was Navy — SEAL and UDT.” Gene looked at him with disbelief, and wondered if he should just leave. “You don’t look all Vietnamese,” Gene argued. There was something different. Phong was too tall and his face was not all Vietnamese. “Half-Chinese,” Phong answered. He could see Gene was not convinced. “Here, you look,” he pulled out his wallet and showed Gene business cards, one said something about Underwater Demolition, another actually said SEAL and had Phong’s name on it. They looked official, but it seemed impossible. “How’d you get to America?” “UDT. I swam under big ships, look for mines left by VC divers. One day I find mine on bottom of destroyer. They clear everyone off, even out of buildings around

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harbor. Then I defuse. Captain grateful, so in 1975, when you leaving, he take me with them. First to Singapore, then Phillipines.” He laughed, his face merry and twisted at some memory. “Philippine bastards put me in jail, think I communist. I say no way, fought for America. They no believe me. Just like you. Finally they ask your Navy, then they let me come America. I citizen now.” “Did you bring a wife or family from Vietnam?” “No wife, no family there. I not stupid. Leave only father. Mother dead. I send father money now.” “Huh,” Gene said. No longer skeptical. “You big winner today. How much you make?” “Twenty-five grand,” Gene answered. “Whoo-whee,” Phong tossed his head back and laughed. “Lucky man, very lucky man. Big gambler.” “I miss Vietnam sometimes,” Gene said. “Some of the people were nice. And the food was great.” “You come my house, have food, wife cook up big Vietnamese food.” Phong said, standing up. “You come? I call wife?” Gene shook his head yes. Why not? “You should put money in bank,” Phong said as he drove his purple Dodge minivan out of downtown Reno. “Not safe to carry that.” No, it wasn’t, Gene realized. And here he was with a perfect stranger. He looked over at Phong with suspicion. Well, this guy would have a surprise if he tried anything.

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The four shot twenty-two derringer was where Gene always kept it, in a pouch he’d sewn into the back of his Jeans in the hollow of his back. “How far away do you live?” Gene grew more concerned as they headed north on 395 and it became a four lane freeway. What if Phong had called an accomplice and they were meeting in the desert? He couldn’t take out two guys or more that were heavily armed. Shit, I’m stupid, he thought. “Not far, Lemon Valley, five minutes.” True to his word, Phong pulled off at the Lemon Valley junction, left the shopping center and McDonalds behind and headed out into the sage brush and junipers. Gene relaxed. This was his country, just like Burns or Prineville. He could see a long way and there was no rain. He felt most comfortable in this country. Rain meant no air support. It had always meant death in Vietnam. But what if Phong pulled down a side road? “What kind of house do you have, Phong?” “No house. Trailer. Trailer park, you see.” They went over a gentle rise and Gene was surprised by the view. There was a big trailer park down on the left and on the right a vast housing project with a wall around it and small houses inside. “Here, home,” Phong pulled into the park then into a driveway and got out with Gene behind. Phong’s wife was younger and pure Vietnamese. He’d met and married her in the U.S. She had escaped by boat from Vietnam as a teenager. She spoke to Phong in

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Vietnamese, which Gene understood. “Foolish husband, why you bring home fat American to eat all our food?” “Make food, big food, this man wealthy gambler, big man. Was in Vietnam with Army. Wants Vietnam food. Go make now, woman! Impress him. Good friend. Good to have friend who is rich. Help son in future maybe.” Phong smiled. Gene relaxed and held back his smile as the wife bowed and scurried away to cook. Phong introduced his oldest son, then the two smaller girls as an afterthought. “Boy speak good English, good Vietnamese. He stay and help talk.” The son sat on the floor by his father. The son had a soft round face, a chunky body and a quick smile. “How long were you a Seal, Phong?” “Boy get beer then I tell you.” The son left and reappeared with two cans of beer and two glasses. He poured the beer and left the cans on the table. Gene took a sip, then stood up and grabbed the cans and crushed them, then sat back down. “You still worry about booby traps?” Phong laughed. “What?” Gene asked. “You crush cans so no can make booby traps.” “Yeah, I guess that’s why I still have that habit.” It took Gene back to the moment when he found the remains of the beer can that killed Kenny. They had gone through basic, and before that had an apartment and partied. And then they were in the Nam and surviving

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nicely until Kenny was on point and missed the thin string across the trail. The grenade slipped out of the beer can with the top cut off and fell in front of Kenny. The pin was out of course and it killed Kenny. “War over,” Phong laughed. “No more VC combing through US dump looking for uncrushed cans.” “You’re right. It’s just a habit.” Gene felt uncomfortable, so he repeated his question of Phong. How long was he in the SEALS? “Three years. I no like though. Too much killing. UDT better job.” “What did you do in the SEALS?” Gene asked. He was amazed. He’d thought 13 months in the Marines had been an eternity. “River patrol. We go up river, wait for VC to shoot at boat. Americans too eager. They shoot back. All die. I go far side of boat and call in help with radio. Helicopters, sometimes jets, they kill beaucoup VC.” “We used to call in artillery mostly, especially on night contact. I liked the Korean artillery best.” “Why you say?” “Because they were willing to make adjustments down to fifty meters. A lot of times in firefights we’d be so close we’d want to have them bring the guns in closer. But the American artillery would only make 100 meter adjustments and that would have brought the shells in on us. So we’d call the Koreans with the coordinates and they’d fire in and then adjust down fifty meters and blow the hell out of the VC. They saved our butts at least six times. I used to love

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hearing our radio operator say ‘Fire for Effect, they are running’. They’d blow them all away.” “Koreans hate Americans.” “What?” “Koreans hate Americans after Vietnam.” “Why?” Gene asked. “You leave Koreans behind when Saigon fall. I have friend in South Korean Embassy. He write to me when he released from prison by North Vietnamese. Your people flying from US Embassy in helicopters left big man, General Dai Yong Rhee. Last U.S. helicopters left with Marines April 30th, 1975, left him in crowd at Embassy. General Rhee go to Vietnam prison.” “Why did they leave him behind?” Gene asked. “They got so many Vietnamese out, why not the Koreans in the Embassy, especially a General?” “What you say?” Phong turned to his son who repeated the question in English, then in Vietnamese. “Ahh,” Phong smiled and patted his son on the head. He spoke in Vietnamese and his son translated. “My father’s friend said the US promised to take the Koreans and others, so they agreed to stay until the end and help with the evacuation. Then an order come from President Ford that only Americans were to be taken out, starting very early on the morning of April 30th. My father’s friend and the general were left behind.” “Doesn’t surprise me,” Gene said. “I’m sorry about your friend.” “Koreans hate Americans. No trust.”

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“I don’t blame them,” Gene responded. “Some good, some bad Americans. Soldiers good, politicians bad, I think.” Phong laughed. “What’s funny?” Gene asked. “At end of war, when North Vietnam soldiers drove tank through gates of South Vietnam’s Independence Palace, soldier carried flag into square and wave it around. Reporter from Reuters there asked his name. Soldier tells reporter his name is Nguyen Van Thieu.” Phong laughed again, too long, because he was drunk. “What’s so funny about that?” Gene asked. “Nguyen Van Thieu was also name of South Vietnam President. Communist soldier have same name.” “Oh yeah,” Gene said. “I forgot Thieu’s name.” Phong’s wife came in with some more beer. They drank and Phong told Gene of his work as a welder after the war, then when his back hurt too much, a diamond cutter. He’d hated that and bought a lobby convenience store in an office building in downtown Reno. The only bad part was stocking the freezer with pop, lifting and reaching while he was bent over. “Now I married to job selling coffee and cigarettes,” Phong smiled. “No more big shot.” Phong’s wife came in again and said the food was ready. Gene was pleased, it was traditional Vietnamese cooking, with dishes that had been simmered rather than stir-fried. She had even prepared a glazed butternut squash, using Nuoc Mam sauce, made from fermenting salted anchovies for six months, then mixed with lime juice, chili peppers,

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sugar and garlic. Only Gene and Phong and the oldest son ate, the wife attended to the little girls out of sight. “You have a good wife,” Gene said between bites of rice and fish. “She good, obedient.” Phong shook his head in agreement. “I’d sure like to have your setup,” Gene said. “Business, wife. You’ve got it made.” “Marry neighbor,” Phong said. “What?” “My neighbor young, blonde, small boy. Husband divorced. Marry her. She need husband. Provider. Good girl. Sexy.” “I don’t know about marriage. I’ll meet her, though.” “Suit yourself,” Phong shrugged his shoulder, rubbed his low back, they were sitting cross legged on mats on the floor. They ate more food and had more beers and became best of friends. At one point the wife came in and spoke angrily in Vietnamese. “Foolish man. Bring stranger, drink beer. Spend money. Gamble. Today Thursday, should be working.” “Go clean house, no yelling in front of friend,” Phong said in Vietnamese. “I have worker at store. I win big money today thanks to friend! He beaucoup lucky.” “You have a very good wife,” Gene spoke in Vietnamese when she left. Phong’s eyes went wide for a second and then he started to cackle and laugh. When he finally regained control, he poured more beer for them.

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“You need good wife too,” Phong said. “Come.” They walked over to the trailer house next to Phong’s. Phong was pretty drunk by now and he wobbled on the sidewalk as he stepped around a small tricycle and rang the doorbell. A gorgeous young woman answered the door with a big smile and “Hi, Phong.” She was everything Phong had promised and more. A build like Dolly Parton, not yet thirty, sparkling blue eyes, slim hips, and a small little boy hiding behind her shyly. “This Gene,” Phong waved at Gene, then laughed as he staggered from overgesturing. “I drunk. Day off. Gene big gambler, make twenty-five thousand dollars today.” “Twenty-five thousand?” the door opened and they climbed the stairs and went inside. It was a smaller trailer than Phong’s. Gene arranged, between Phong’s cackling laughter and small children running around — she ran a small daycare in her trailer — to pick her up at eight. He’d take her to dinner and then gambling. He’d even said something about paying for her gambling, too. Phong was finally too drunk to talk any more and said he wanted to nap, but before he could sleep his wife started yelling at him in the other room. Gene told the son to say good-bye and called a cab. He went next door but the neighbor was gone; her name was Darlene. The cab came down the street toward Phong’s and Gene waved. As he got in he could hear the quick, sing-song pitch of angry Vietnamese floating across the trailer park.

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CHAPTER NINE We skied to the end of the day, despite Erik’s joke about getting back to the tables to make good use of our adrenaline. The first run after the chair incident my legs shook from fear all the way down. But it was a perfect day. We started on cruiser runs off the frontside chair, then went to the backside chair. It was long and steep and there was plenty of snow covering the rocks. That’s often a problem with Tahoe, not enough snow. Most areas have snowmaking equipment, which seems ironic in the same mountain range that overwhelmed the Donner party with snow. My theory is we’ve cut so many trees since then the clouds don’t bother coming anymore because they know rain isn’t needed. Dave was very competitive — if I got in front of him he’d shoot ahead. I realized how angry I’d made him with a remark three years earlier. He and I had gone on a night skiing bus trip to Mt. Hood Meadows that was sponsored by our weight lifting club. The bus ride had been one long, continuous drink because we’d both brought airline bottles of rum and vodka. I hardly ever drink when I’m skiing but this was Dave and I, it was Friday night and we were riding a bus. There was still powder on the edge of the runs, and when Dave went in to use the facilities I rode up on the chair with another guy who said he liked skiing powder. He

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asked if I minded if he smoked and to my surprise lit up a joint when I said I didn’t. I declined his offer to share. He started to talk about secret little patches of powder that were left on the mountain. By the time we reached the top of the Daisy chair he’d convinced me we should traverse over to the top of the Red Chair, which was closed. He said there were no lights but you could still see, and we could ski down a powder chute he knew. I followed him down with the only light coming from the Daisy chair two runs over. It was spooky skiing behind him — I stayed back because the powder his skis kicked up blinded me. I was to his left, skiing the powder at the edge of some trees. We were getting close to the bottom of the hill and the lights from the lodge made the snow a pale lime green contrasting with black shadows. The ski patrol had stuck a metal pole in the snow at the bottom of the trees, I suppose to run a tape back up the hill to another pole to keep people from skiing through the woods when there was less snow. Anyway, the tape was gone, and when the young guy shot in front of me, his snow kicked into my face, giving me a wet kiss that blinded me for a fraction of a second until I emerged and found myself headed straight at the pole. It was pointed at my bellybutton and I was going about twenty miles an hour. My skis were on either side of it so I leaned right, pulled up my left ski and the pole shot past me, between my jacket and left arm. I’d screamed, glad to be alive, and it put me on edge. When Dave was with me again on the chair, he said I was really good and someday he planned to be as good as me.

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“You’ll never be as good as me, Dave,” I replied while thinking of how well I’d skied to avoid that pole. “What do you mean? Sure I will.” “We’re in our late thirties, I’ve probably skied seven hundred times in my life already. There’s no way you’ll ski that much the rest of your life. You’ll never catch up with me, because I’ll ski as much as you do each year and keep getting better myself.” He was quiet, and I didn’t know how much my bragging had angered him until today, on the outback chair at Northstar. He was racing every Wednesday night and skiing full weekends all winter long. He’d become obsessed with surpassing my skills. Now he was making his point by shooting ahead at every runout, going crazy fast — too fast for a sensible father. “Well Dave, you’re a better racer than me. I’ll give you that,” I said as we got on the chair. “I think I am a better skier than you now.” “Maybe in hardpack racing,” I replied. “But I still own the powder.” “I don’t ski powder,” Dave mumbled. I already knew that — he’d never be as good as me in powder. That’s all Jeri and I ski. We ski the storms and if the powder runs are skied out, we go into the trees. If the trees are skied out, we go out of bounds where no one has gone. We hoot and holler in the trees when we ski the powder. Shana is a beginner. I looked at a sign by the Northstar chair on our last ride up. I laughed. “Jack, read this sign.”

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He read it aloud, “Caution, this chair will sometimes run backwards after stopping. This is normal for our chairlift. Please excuse the inconvenience.” He looked at me and exclaimed, “A little late to warn us now, isn’t it? We were never in danger at all.” “It sure felt like it at the time,” I replied. We rendezvoused with Gene at six in his room, as we’d planned the night before over dinner. He was lying on the bed, pillows bunched behind his head, shoes off, grey and red logging socks on, watching the Bulls trash the Lakers in Chicago. This was the first year the Lakers were without Magic and the Bulls still had Jordan. “Yes!” Gene exclaimed as Jordan hit a three. “I gave up fifteen points on the Bulls and I’m still going to win.” He had a big smile on his face — I knew I didn’t have to count his change bags. He was winning. “How much have you got riding on the game?” I asked. “Only a grand,” he replied casually. Our mouths popped open as we looked at each other. “A grand, Gene? Isn’t that over budget?” Erik asked in amazement. The four of us always take a budget to Reno, mine was five hundred. Jack’s is a thousand, I have no idea what Erik’s is. To be honest I don’t think he honors his budget like I do. He likes to win and if he doesn’t he throws his Visa at Reno. I stop dead at $500. A grand seemed way over budget for a carpenter living in a trailer. “Today while you pussies were skiing I was making

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money. I’m twenty-seven-thousand, four-hundred and thirty-two dollars ahead. And I have a date tonight.” “Good God!” I said. “How?” “The date or the money?” We laughed, then crowded round as he related the story, Sol, the wave, the young girl rolling, how Phong had set him up with the girl next door. “She’s not a whore is she?” Erik asked. “Hey puppy, watch out or I’ll slap you down,” Gene bristled. “That wasn’t very nice, Erik. But I don’t think he meant to be offensive. Did you, Erik?” “No, I didn’t mean to offend you, Gene. I was honestly worried. Prostitution is legal down here. I was looking out for you.” “Don’t worry, Phong’s a straight-up guy. He was in the Nam and saved a destroyer from a mine. He wouldn’t set me up with a whore.” “Good, Gene. Sorry.” “What’s she like?” I was curious about any date Gene got. They ended in disaster sooner or later. “White, blonde, blue eyes. In her twenties.” “Is she a nurse?” I let it hang. This was yet another problem with Gene. “Nope, runs a daycare in her trailer.” “Can I see the money?” Erik changed subjects. “Sure.” Gene walked to his closet, zipped open his pack and pulled out forty-four five-hundred dollar chips, four honey bees and some cash.

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“Sol’s money,” Jack laughed. “It looks too small to be that much money,” Erik said, poking the salmon colored chips. They looked like Necco candies, without the thin coat of powdered sugar. “You should get that in a bank,” Jack counseled. “Tomorrow. I figured this was the easiest way to carry it around. Besides, I’m armed.” He twisted around and showed us the derringer at the back of his jeans. “Geez, can I see that?” Erik asked. “No,” Gene replied. “It’s my gun, only I touch it.” “I’m just going to look at it,” Erik said. “Look, Erik, you’re a nice guy. But this is a weapon. I don’t take out loaded weapons and show them in a room full of people. The safety on this is tiny, you could bump it off and drop it and kill someone. I know how to handle it. It stays with me and it doesn’t come out unless someone is going to die.” He spoke in a stern tone as he lectured and I could tell that Erik was really embarrassed with Gene treating him like a kid. “Never mind,” Erik said. It was an awkward moment. That was Gene. If there was an area he felt you were deficient in that he knew about, he took it upon himself to educate you. And he did it in a superior manner that belittled you. I’d gone through it once. I wanted to hunt chukars and he’d reluctantly agreed. Two nights before the hunt he informed me some of his regular hunting buddies were coming and I was too inexperienced to hunt with them. He said I could come and cook dinner for them and

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visit at night. I’d told him I wasn’t interested and went deer hunting on the coast with a buddy of mine. “I would definitely carry that money on you, Gene. Don’t trust it to the room.” I lectured him in an attempt to restore Erik’s pride. “Good advice,” Gene seemed to appreciate the chance to be humble. “I have some other money here, maybe I should move it, too.” “How much?” “Oh, that’s private.” He paused and sniffed the air. “Say, what smells like mold? You know, damp?” “Probably my ski pants, I got pretty wet today when the sun melted ice on the chair lift onto my pants and jacket,” I replied. “I hate that smell. I hate the smell of anything moldy. Reminds me of the Nam.” The other guys sprawled out to watch the game. I told Gene about our scare on the chairlift. Jack and Erik chimed in, saying it had made them think they were going to die. Dave called them pussies, saying that he knew we were safe all along but didn’t want to tell us. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think it matters, even if we weren’t in danger, if you think you’re going to die, that’s what matters. Right, Gene? If you think you’re going to die you’re just as scared as if you aren’t in any danger at all? In fact I was thinking about you right after it happened. I bet you had moments like that in the war, when you were scared and thought you were going to die.”

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What does he know about death?, Gene asked himself. Absolutely nothing. His mind drifted back. The screams are the worst. You think you’re going to die for sure then, when mortar rounds are coming in and guys get hit and start to scream. When the shells stop the screaming sounds louder. Then the gooks try to overrun you. The radio’s just static and the machine gun’s not up. That’s when you know you’re going to die — death all around you and you have to keep your head up because you must fire even when you don’t want to. You have to get the other guys to fire. “Yeah, you’re right Al, if you think you’re going to die, that’s what matters as far as giving you a scare.” I appreciated Gene’s support. Dave shifted uneasily. “And I’m still a better powder skier than you are, Dave.” I joked to ease his tension. “Are you now, big guy? We’ll see. I don’t think your knees can take much more of this pace.” This was probably true. Both my knees were puffy with water on them. “I’m going to get cleaned up,” Dave said. “There’s a full contact karate match tonight. Anyone want to go with me?” He asked in his full enthusiasm, crinkled smile, winking eyes, Let’s go guys! voice. But his suggestion fell flat. “I want to gamble with Gene,” Erik said. “I need to learn from an expert.” “Sure. A friend of Al’s is a friend of mine.”

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“I’d like to go too, Gene,” I said. Jack chimed in. He wanted to see a wave in action so Gene agreed that we could join him and his date. He would eat with her first, then meet us at nine at the Cal Neva locomotive. The rest of the group went to their rooms, leaving Gene and I together. “When do you pick her up?” “Seven thirty.” “What are you going to wear?” “Sweater, jeans, tenni-runners.” “No, no, no, Gene. You want to look nice. We’ve got to get a suit for you.” “A suit? I never wear one.” “She’s good looking, young and impressed by your money, right?” “I guess so, she seemed real interested in me.” “Let’s keep her interested,” I smiled. “I’m calling the front desk.” There were no clothing places open, but there were wedding chapels open twenty-four hours a day, with rental suits and tuxedos for the hurry-up-and-marry-us guests. I told Gene I’d help him pick out a suit, and left to change out of my ski clothes. “What’s the big hurry?” Dave asked. He’d been asleep on the bed in his ski clothes. He looked awfully tired. “Getting clothes for Gene’s date,” I replied. “Is he taking the Jeep?” Dave asked. “It’s trashed with ski stuff.” Erik had overheard our conversation and stepped into

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the adjoining doorway. “Yeah, and our skis are on top. Our skis might get ripped off,” Erik said, mocking Gene’s gun instructor voice. “And he’s not an experienced driver with skis on top of the car. Ski safety — he can’t drive our car!” “Erik, I’m sorry about the lecture you got from Gene,” I replied as Erik walked away. “Ski safety,” Dave emphasized. Erik yelled, “Gene’s an asshole,” from his room. “He is, you know,” Dave agreed. “My son owns a ton of guns and he’s plenty safe. In that situation he would have unloaded the gun and let Erik look at it.” “What can I say?” I shouted, so Erik could hear in the next room. “He’s got his problems” “I love you big guy,” he yelled back. “Can I come kiss you and make up?” “I’m shutting the door!” Dave shouted and he sprung up to close it. Erik was too fast and they met in the doorway, Dave pushing it shut, Erik pushing it open. Dave was stronger, despite the fact that Erik was twenty years younger. “I’ll sneak in and kiss both of you at three in the morning,” Erik shouted as the door slammed. Dave opened it. “If I let you kiss Allen now, will you promise not to kiss me tonight?” Erik said sure, came into the room, looked at me and said, “Too ugly,” and walked out. We laughed. “So what should Gene do about driving?” I asked as I stripped off my ski stuff. “Take a cab, I guess,” Dave suggested. “No, he’s got to be in control,” I said. “I know him. He

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hates not being in control.” I called the front desk, got the closest rental agency and rented a Lincoln Town Car on my Visa. The guy agreed to deliver it to Harrah’s parking lot. I showered, dressed and hustled back to Gene’s room. “Let’s go.” I said. “We need to get you into a suit.” I didn’t tell him about the Lincoln, it was waiting in the driveway of the parking lot. It was silver — with gold flecks in the paint and it stood in the aisleway with the motor running and water drops on it from the agency car wash. “Get in, Gene,” I jumped into the driver’s side.. “What’s this?” He got in and felt the soft leather seats. An FM station was playing on the radio and when the doors shut it felt like you were in a stereo shop’s demonstration room. All the noise outside was muffled away and the world was soft leather, new car smell and stereo-surround sound. “Wow!” Gene said. I told him what I’d done for him and he asked me what it cost. He reached in his pocket, peeled off two hundreds when I told him and tried to hand them to me. “That’s too much, Gene,” I said. “Just pay me when you return it.” “It’s for all your help, Allen.” “Hell, Gene. I’m doing it ‘cause I’m your friend.” They rented everything at the chapel — shoes, socks, the whole program. The guy asked Gene if he wanted to reserve the chapel, too and Gene made him laugh by saying maybe, but he had to get through his first date. He got a nice suit, not too formal, dark blue. He looked great with his

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outdoor tan, white shirt and conservative tie. She’d be impressed. I told him that I hadn’t expected to ever see him in a suit unless I was viewing his coffin. He said I wasn’t invited to his funeral and if I came he’d undie, get up and kick my ass. I told Gene to drive and he started to get into the Lincoln. “What are you doing?” I asked, stopping him on the curb. “Getting in to drive,” he replied. “Or are you going to chauffeur us.” “No, not the driving, Gene, your jacket. Never wear your jacket in a car. Take it off and hang it up so it’s not wrinkled.” “Oh. Good point.” “And put it on when you pick her up,” I advised. He dropped me off at the hotel and I watched the rounded, bulby top of the Lincoln disappear down the street. A lot of things in life don’t go like you plan them. We waited for Gene quite a while at the locomotive engine downstairs. CalNeva has thirty or so slot machines grouped around a quarter scale train, locomotive first, then some box cars and finally the caboose. The locomotive looked like everything else in CalNeva, tired and worn out. As we stood there and waited I speculated with Jack that CalNeva was owned by people who had inherited the place rather than built it because it looked like they sucked every dime out of the operation rather than putting some back in to keep it modern and clean. “You’re right,” he replied. “You having fun here Jack?”

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“I love this trip. It’s the highlight of the year. No one watching me, no partners, no clients, no court. I just relax.” “But I’m a client,” I countered. Which wasn’t really true. I’d used him for a few small matters. “The best kind, Big Al,” he slapped my shoulder. “The kind that drinks blackberry brandy with me.” He opened his ski jacket and exposed the top of a pint in his inside breast pocket. “Did I tell you I brought cigars for just this moment?” “You dog,” Jack grinned his evil, Irish, let’s-get-introuble grin. “Erik, care to join us in some brandy outside?” “And cigars,” I added. “No, you guys go ahead. I’m watching this blonde dealer. God, she’s cute.” “We’ll come back after a while.” Gene thought for a while that he’d missed the Lemon Valley turnoff as he headed north on 395 but the yellow glow of the McDonalds at the off ramp reassured him he was on the right track. There was no more yelling coming from Phong’s trailer when he pulled into Darlene’s driveway. He thought for a moment of stopping in to thank Phong but worried it would take an hour to say goodbye. Tomorrow, he resolved. He knocked on Darlene’s door. It made a horrible racket, the screen door was loose and clattered on the main door. That’ll need fixing, thought Gene. He was glad about the suit and the car the minute the door opened. She stood in the doorway in a short green

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dress. She had the best figure he’d ever seen. His eyes met hers. “Is that your car?” Darlene asked, looking at the Lincoln. “Sure.” “Oh, I’ve always wanted to ride in one of those!” she squealed. “Wait a minute, I’ll get my purse.” She rattled off instructions to her baby sitter, then bent over and kissed her little boy goodbye, making no effort at all to be modest and facing away from Gene as she did so. He stared at the black lace underwear. He looked closer and realized she wasn’t wearing nylons. She had a perfect tan. “Oh God,” Gene muttered under his breath. He was shaking worse than when he’d shot his first elk. She skipped down the stairs of her trailer and her baby sitter stood at the door with the little boy in her arms waving good-bye. Gene opened the door for Darlene and she slid over to the middle. He made a show of hanging his jacket in the back seat area, then got into the idling Lincoln. She pressed close against him as he drove. She had big hair, all styled frizzy out from her face — it felt sexy to drive and have these little aromatic tendrils from her head tickling his neck. She wore perfume that was like tropical fruit with a zing of spritzer. “Ooh, isn’t this such a lovely car!” she ran small hands with long, red fingernails over the seats, then stroked his forearm. “These are really expensive, nearly thirty-five thousand,” she said. “They are?” It started out as a question but he realized if this was his car he should know how much it cost, so he

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tried to change it so it would sound like, “They are.” a statement. But she caught the questioning tone and said, “Well, of course. You should know how much your own car costs.” She said it in a little pouting, scoldy voice that teased him and made him want her even more. “Oh, this isn’t my own,” Gene said. There was an Avis sticker in the front window, she’d be bound to see it. “This is a rental. I have a BMW at home.” Which was true. It wasn’t completely totalled so he’d towed it to Sisters and intended to get it running some day. “Oh, they’re even nicer. And more expensive,” Darlene said, twisting towards Gene in the seat so that her left breast rubbed against his right arm. As he pulled onto the freeway he realized he hadn’t driven with a hard-on since high school. He smiled. She chatted all about Reno as they drove. The best work out club, the best hotel, who had the best comp packages, who the big players were, the big-name entertainers. Where the best odds were, best golf course, ski area, housing district, biggest houses, wealthiest people in town — she was an encyclopedia of all that’s impressive in Reno. Allen had made reservations at a swank restaurant and Gene was again appreciative of his friend’s preparations. They had valet parking and Gene told the guy to be careful with the car. He was Darlene’s age and stared at her, but she flipped her hair and turned away from him and smiled at Gene as she took his arm.

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“Why do you care about where they park your rental car?” Darlene asked. “If you pay for the insurance it doesn’t matter what happens to it.” “I just have a respect for machinery,” he explained. “If you take care of machinery, it takes care of you.” “Oh, that’s good, I never thought of that,” Darlene said. Gene had never been with a date that could turn so many heads. The whole restaurant watched them go to their table and men continued staring once they were seated. Darlene would flip her hair in annoyance, like she was flipping them off, then smile at Gene to reassure him that he had her full attention. They chatted and laughed during cocktails. They sat side by side at an intimate booth and she was touching his hands and forearms, brushing her hair against his head and sometimes leaning her head on his shoulder. It was hard for Gene to concentrate. He couldn’t even fantasize about his future with her, like he’d done with Tracy the blackjack dealer. He just wanted it to be now forever. It’s hard to run a successful restaurant in Reno. The casinos practically give food away to get people inside, so if you find a good restaurant that’s not connected to a casino, you know it’s probably some of the best food in America. Darlene assured Gene they were in the best restaurant in town. The waiter buzzed around and talked a lot, trying to impress Darlene. It seemed to Gene that he came by more than necessary, and when he delivered their food he stuck around asking questions until he learned Gene was here

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with skiers. Then he started in with tales of being an acrobatic skier at Tahoe and his years on the trick skiing circuit. Darlene tuned him out and finally when he kept going on and on Darlene told him point blank to leave them alone because they wanted privacy. “So what type of work do you do, Gene, that you can gamble enough to make twenty-five thousand?” She wasn’t dumb. You have to start with some serious money to make twenty-five in craps. The rolls don’t last that long to start with fifty bucks and run it up. “I’m in construction.” They were finished eating so Gene sat back and lit a cigarette, then lit hers when she took one. The whole thing was too sexy, the way she held his hand and looked him deep in the eyes. “Where? Portland? High rises?” She shook her hair and blew the smoke away from them in a forceful gust with her lips pressed together. Then she turned to stare into Gene’s eyes. “No, John Day.” “I haven’t heard of that.” “It’s a small town. I actually work outside the town.” “What do you build?” “Log cabins.” “Those are nice,” she brightened. “How big is your crew?” “I work by myself,” Gene said with pride, “I don’t trust anyone with a cabin. I do it all myself. It takes a year a cabin.” “Oh.” Her voice was small and pouty. “So that’s all you do?” “Yup,” Gene said with pride. “That and hunt and fish and golf.” “Well how much does one cabin cost?” “I try to keep them under fifty-thousand,” Gene replied.

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He couldn’t see the wheels grinding in her brain as she calculated building costs. There had to be the electrical, tiles, roofing — materials excluding the hand-cut logs had to come to twenty-thousand. That left thirty thousand for Gene. Or maybe less. Retired! That was it. Gene had made it big and just dabbled in construction to keep busy. That explained everything, the hunting, the fishing. And his gambling money. “How much did you bring to gamble?” She refused to give up hope. Phong had said Gene was rich. “Twenty-five thousand. I’m here to raise money to build a wall.” She seemed so fascinated in him that he began to spill his guts — the dream of the wall, the land and how he’d sold it and everything else he owned and why he was here. He noticed that as he talked her body language seemed to change. She no longer was brushing against him. She still smiled and listened, but now she looked around at other guys. He tried to regain the magic and spoke with enthusiasm for Vietnam Veterans and their suicides. Nothing seemed to have an effect until he suggested they gamble and that he would buy her chips as he promised. Suddenly the big hair was back, brushing him, her hands were on him and he walked out happily for his rendezvous with Allen and the boys at CalNeva. The noise of CalNeva faded as Jack and I stepped onto the street to share brandy and cigars. The usual crowd of cars, tourists and locals filled Virginia Street, so we turned

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off and headed towards the river. Reno is a hot, lively town on a couple of streets but as soon as you walk away from the action it becomes another high desert town where nothing grows unless it is watered. A block from the strip we were alone and trading sips from his blackberry brandy. “So Big O, how’s life going?” “Going good, Big A, except I’m busy all the time.” “Busy all the time or you’re just talking bullshit? You can be honest with me.” I wouldn’t have been sympathetic for him at all except the brandy was making me feel generous. I’ve always been jealous of his money. He charges one-hundred-fifty bucks an hour. “All the time, Allen. I get to the office about seven in the morning and don’t usually go home until nine. Six days a week. It’s nuts. I don’t want to, it’s my own firm so I don’t have to impress anyone to make partner.” “Then why do it? Here, give me some more brandy. Why the hell do you work so hard when you make so much? Surely you can afford to stop and relax.” “Last month I billed twenty-seven thousand dollars.” “You made twenty-seven thousand dollars in one month! You’ve got the dream career of the world!” “No, I didn’t make it personally. I’m carrying the firm right now.” We’d reached the river and walked across the short span. I thought we should go down on the jogging trail but it looked dark so we stayed on the bridge. “You’re carrying the firm?” “Yeah, there’s four of us, and we split the fee income

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equally. The other guys are having bad years for various reasons so I’m carrying the firm. While I billed twentyseven they only chipped in ten all together.” I did some quick math in my head, that’s one thing I’m really good at, and the reason I’m good at card counting. Twenty-seven thousand split four ways... “Wait a minute, Jack, at $150 an hour, twenty-seven thousand is only 180 hours. But you worked nearly 300 hours last month according to what you say. You aren’t billing for all your time.” “Every hour in the office isn’t billable, Allen. I have to take a dump every now and then.” “You can’t afford to at one-fifty an hour,” I joked. “That would bug me, being worth one-fifty an hour,” I added. “You’d start counting how much it was costing you to watch Saturday morning cartoons with your two year old.” “If I had a two year old I wouldn’t care if it cost me a grand an hour,” Jack said. That was the sad thing about the guy. He would have made the best dad in the world but had no kids. I kept encouraging him to adopt. But it’s hard to give advice to someone that’s an attorney. They’re the advice givers, you can’t tell them anything. “But you’re right,” he went on. “After awhile you go to a party and instead of having a good time you’re thinking, this party just cost me a thousand dollars.” “I’d hate that,” I said. “Drives me crazy.” “So how much do you make a month, no wait, I can

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figure that out. Twenty-seven thousand plus ten thousand, divided by four... Jack, you’re still making nine grand a month after splitting it four ways. And maybe your partners will make more later.” “I don’t think they will, ever. And you’re forgetting overhead. Staff.” There were always a lot of women walking around his office when I’d pick him up for workouts. “I gross six grand a month before taxes.” “Only six? That’s what I make. Used to make.” For one second I’d forgotten I wasn’t going to tell him I’d been fired. “You get a promotion and didn’t tell me?” We’d reached the far end of the bridge and I hoped the sound of the river would muffle my answer. “Not exactly. Got fired.” Fired is a special word. It really travels well, even above the sound of traffic and water splashing over rocks in the river. “Fired? Mr. Reynolds Career got fired?” So we sat in the dark on the cold concrete bench by the bank building away from the strip and finished the brandy. I told him the story. He was a good friend. We ran out of brandy so we started smoking the cigars. Swisher Sweets like Clint Eastwood used to smoke in his spaghetti westerns. Jack made me laugh when he did his The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly music imitation as he lit up. “So you really admitted to the board that you had lied to them?” he asked. “Yup,” I said proudly. “I’m an honest man.” It felt good to be honest. The break was clean and good. They were in

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my past and I was looking at the future. Honestly. “I wish you’d asked me about it first,” he took a puff and looked away. He seemed tense, no longer on vacation. “What for?” “Allen, you could have some major liability problems.” “Liability?” “Sure. You falsified data, got them to invest eight million which turns out to be a waste of money. Maybe you even got a kickback from an equipment supplier. They could sue you to recover their damages. You’re a good target, you own a trailer park that’s worth quite a bit. I’d come after you.” “Oh, God,” I said. “It never occurred to me.” “Do they know about the park?” “Know? They’re jealous of it. They hate me for it. But wait a minute, it was Wilson’s fault. He told me to do the market demand the way I did.” “Which he denied, didn’t he.” “He’s a lying son-of-a-bitch.” “And you’re honest and you admitted that you lied to them.” “That’s right.” “You’re not too bright, Allen.” Me? The whiz kid, the computer genius? I was so good at figuring things out. At least I thought I was. “Do you have a copy of the report? I’d like to see it.” “At home.” “Maybe Jeri could fax it down here,” he said. “Fax it?”

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“To the hotel.” I was scared. He was really moving fast. “Tell me they’re not going to sue me,” I said. “Anyone can sue anyone, but don’t let it ruin your trip with worry. They probably won’t bother.” “I don’t think the park is worth that much anyway,” I argued, unconvinced myself. “Values have gone up though,” Jack said. “Now tell me again why you admitted all that to the board?” “Because I wanted to be honest, Big O. I’ve been sly and successful. I just want to be honest for once, to make up for all the guilt.” “I don’t know much, but it seems to me you’re bent on your own self-destruction instead of being honest.” “Self-destruction? This is good for me. I’m finally trying to live a decent life.” I was angry and he could see it. “OK, just wanted to help.” “Let’s get back to the casino,” I suggested. I didn’t feel too chipper after that. I thought Jack would have been a little more sympathetic. He was saying I was crazy, for criminy sakes! I’m not crazy. What I wanted was some more to drink, but Jack thought we should find Gene so we headed for CalNeva. All I could think of was the idea of getting sued by Reynolds. They had all that money and we were only making $4,000 a month. If I hired Jack at $150 an hour he could wipe that out in twenty-some hours! What would it cost me to go to court? Two weeks in court would be... Oh Lord, what had I done? It was going to cost me my trailer

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park for the clean feeling of honesty. It struck me then that all my guilt about not going to Vietnam was conditional. After the shooting was over and I was middle-aged, it was easy to imagine that I could have gone and survived and maybe even have been a hero. So I could toy with my guilt and sort of torture myself and think about how I’d let America down. But the truth was I didn’t want to go back then because I didn’t want to get my legs blown off, and as a young man I’d thought through the consequences more clearly, much better than I had considered the consequences of admitting to the board that I lied. Now I wished I’d lied again and wasn’t fired. It dawned on me that if I’d gone out one day in 1966 or ‘67 and impulsively joined the Marines, I’d have been killed and just before I died I would have thought, I wish I hadn’t volunteered. The truth about war is that none of the dead guys can write novels or make movies about how death sucks and war isn’t glamorous. I was smarter when I was younger. I didn’t care about John Wayne and the idiots that wanted me to fight. I cared about my legs and my stomach and my chest and my head. As we walked up Virginia Street I spotted a friend of mine. “Mickey!” I yelled. He looked up. “Big Al! Down here investing some of your money?” Mickey had been my stockbroker and a running partner for awhile. He was a great runner, a little Greek guy with a barrel chest. He’d won the Portland marathon one year when we were both younger. “This is Chuck.” He introduced a pleasant guy in his

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seventies who turned out to be Mickey’s brokerage partner. I introduced Jack and before we said good-bye, Mickey invited us to watch the Superbowl in his room at Harrah’s because he wasn’t leaving until early Monday morning and we had a noon checkout on Sunday. When we got back to CalNeva, Erik was gone from the locomotive and Gene wasn’t there, so we wandered upstairs and found them sitting at a single deck, three dollar minimum blackjack table. Jack and I were pretty drunk. There weren’t any other seats at the table or any other blackjack tables either. “Is that your money or theirs, Gene?” I asked, pointing towards his pile of hundred dollar chips. “Theirs of course, I’m unstoppable.” Gene squinted through the smoke of a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he motioned for another card. “What did you start with?” “Just a hundred.” There was a good thousand in chips in front of him. The dealer busted and he pushed a hundred of his winnings over to the girl. “This is Darlene,” Gene said. He introduced us. She was gorgeous. My eyes lingered on lovely thighs revealed by a short skirt. She was a lot like Shana only smaller and cuter and younger with sparkling eyes and a smile. Gene was doing very well for himself. She made a show of the introductions, then went back to gambling and losing Gene’s money. “We’ll see you guys later. Wave at us if a spot opens here. Jack and I will play craps where we can see you.”

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“All right,” Gene smiled. I could see he loved the situation. He was in command, dressed in that winner’s suit with an open collar and loosened tie. He was winning big and had a gorgeous chick by his side. I was happy for him. The suit and car were worth the trouble. “Al!” Erik said as I walked by. He was on the far right of the table, at the corner, with Darlene to his left and Gene to the left of her. “Yeah?” “How was the brandy?” He seemed really nervous and his voice was breaking. “Great, I’m feeing no pain. All ready to gamble. My knees aren’t a bit sore either.” “Oh, that’s good. Say, come here,” he leaned towards me, cupping his left hand over his mouth, so I leaned down to listen. “Gene’s date keeps rubbing my dick,” he whispered. “What!?” I wanted to look and laugh at the same time, but I was sensible enough to play it cool and do neither. “Don’t laugh, this is serious. That’s Gene’s date, but as soon as they sat down here she started asking me what I do and I told her. Ever since she’s been pushing up against me and then moved on to what I just said. I’m having a hard time controlling myself but I can’t get up and leave because I have such a horrendous boner.” “Well what do you want to do?” “Screw her!” Erik replied matter of factly “That’s why I took my ring off.” “Well, you can’t sweep the chips off the table and do it here, can you?”

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“Don’t make me laugh, Al. It’ll hurt and this is serious. She started getting affectionate as soon as she found out how much I made last year. Can you talk to Gene or something? I have to leave with her. Or she has to stop, one or the other.” “I don’t want to tell Gene. I’m sure he’ll kill you.” “Really?” Erik’s eyes got big. “Marines, Vietnam. You saw his derringer.” “Shit!” Just then the girl looked at me and smiled and I saw some motion in her hands as she reached under the table for her purse. I leaned back in curiosity and my eyes went beyond the purse and saw that her skirt had ridden up so high that I could see she had only the skimpiest black lace underwear on. They were the sexiest I had ever seen, a few dark spots and mostly mesh that revealed everything. I couldn’t bring myself to look away. As she got her purse she looked up, saw what I was doing, smiled at me and asked, “Like the view?”. I jumped back like I’d been hit in the nose and looked away as my heart pounded at full throttle. I remained looking away as I spoke to Erik and even gestured at another table once to make Gene think we were talking gambling or skiing or anything innocent. “God, Erik, this is serious, her skirt is so short and she doesn’t have any nylons on and...” “I know, I’ve seen and felt around.” “Let me think, I have to think, I’ll be back.” I walked away with half an erection myself, trying not to

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laugh. Jack was at the craps table and I grabbed his shoulder. “Get your chips and come with me. We have to talk. It’s urgent.” He looked at me with that attorney look of, is my client in trouble? I led him up the low flight of red carpeted steps into the bar between the tables and the sports book. Seven different games were being broadcast on the TV sets around the bar and people drank and watched most of them to follow their bets. When we got around the corner, I explained the situation. It took us awhile to quit laughing. Jack kept peeking around the corner, catching glimpses of Darlene. “What are we going to do?” I asked. “I don’t want to hurt Gene’s feelings.” “And we can’t have Erik get blue balls.” More laughing, the blackberry brandy was making us sillier than we should have been. I looked back at the table again. Erik had disappeared and Darlene was crossing the casino past the Top Hat restaurant, headed for the restroom. Nearly every head in the place tracked her progress like radar dishes on an incoming bogey until she disappeared into the women’s room. “She’s unbelievable,” Jack said. “Looks like Erik made his escape,” I replied. “I wonder where he went? He wanted me to show him how to count cards,” Jack said. “Maybe they’re talking in the horse room. Let’s see if we can find him before anything happens. Besides, you should see this.” I led him through the bar and past some slot machines to

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a huge room at the far end of the bar. The ceiling was twenty feet high and the room was a good two hundred feet long by eighty feet wide. The long wall opposite us had a board with long lines drawn on it. The board reached from our heads to the ceiling. It ran the length of the room and looked like a giant 3 by 5 ruled card with lettering across the top. Several ladders were hung from rails on the ceiling so the ladders could roll laterally along the board and workers could climb up and post race results. There were race track names — Santa Anita, Belmont, hundreds of them. There were also rows and rows of tables across the length of the room with wooden name signs on the tables. Each sign had a person’s name carved in the wood. The place was deserted. “Look at this, Jack. I found this last year. It’s the horse room. See the name boards? People gamble here so much they’re regulars with their names etched on those boards.” “It’s like having your name on a pew in the old churches,” Jack said. “This is a world, Al, an entire world,” Jack commented. “With a group of people known to each other, like the legal community in Portland. Or a church.” “This is a cathedral of horses.” We returned to the craps table. I could see from there over to the Blackjack table. Gene was gone too, so we settled into craps. I thought for awhile about a lawsuit, but soon the craps got my attention and I forgot about it. I was playing the don’ts against two older guys with baseball hats, then playing the numbers whenever a fat lady and her husband rolled. It’s my personality theory of craps. Anyone

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who looked lucky, I went with them, anyone unlucky, I bought the house’s position. “Al, have you seen Erik and Darlene?” Gene came up from behind and startled me. “No,” I answered truthfully. I suspected where they were but he didn’t ask. “I think they ran off together. That girl was hot for me until Erik came. It’s your fault.” “Right, Gene. It’s my fault if little Darlene runs off with Erik.” “He’s your friend.” “Any friend of mine is a friend of yours. Remember?” He realized he was being stupid and broke into a grin. “I guess not any friend,” he modified his position. Jack stayed quiet. He put great stock in not getting involved and not saying anything. He said his wife complained one time that she needed subpoena powers to have a conversation with him. Gene left. He didn’t want us to go with him. We gambled until about 1:30, Jack hit waves in Blackjack three times and we also hit the top of the deck bets where you get a seventeen to one payoff if you or the dealer gets a blackjack on the first deal from a new deck. I had five bucks on each of them when the dealer and I hit blackjack. I made $160 in one hand but finally exhaustion from skiing defeated my interest in gambling. “Al, look at this,” Jack came through the joint doorway of our rooms and handed me a note. “It was on our door. It’s for Erik.”

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“Erik, come see me when you get in. Gene,” I read aloud. “Yikes.” “At least we can be sure he doesn’t plan him physical harm,” Jack said. “Why?” “I’ve never heard of anyone inviting someone to their death using a sticky note pad that can later be used for evidence,” Jack joked. “Gene wouldn’t think that far ahead,” I said. “I better go calm him down.” Gene greeted me at the door wearing socks, jeans and a Raiders T-shirt. “Where’s Erik?” “I think he’s with Darlene.” “Probably out at her trailer right now balling his brains out like I should have been. Damn!” “Probably so, Gene. Before they split she was rubbing his crotch while they were playing blackjack.” “She was?” “Yup.” “You saw her do that?” “He told me.” “I’ll be damned.” “Why?” “Because she was doing that to me too.” “How the hell did she play blackjack?” I asked. “She played one handed. I wondered at the time why she used her right and then left hand.” “Because she was using her left and then right hand,” I

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answered. “God, he pisses me off. Nice friend you brought along, asshole.” “Gene, she wasn’t exactly your wife. They’re the same age, besides.” He turned from the door and I followed him into the room. He lay on the bed and I took a chair opposite him. “But he’s married! Why the hell couldn’t he leave her alone?” “Strikes me it was the other way around. Blame Darlene, not him.” “That would have been the first piece of ass I’ve had in a year and pretty boy runs off with her.” He threw a pillow across the room in disgust. “A year? Gene how have you gone a year?” “I’m afraid of AIDS! OK?” “You ought to take some of your twenty-seven grand and go out to Mustang,” I suggested. “Mustang? I don’t want to die of AIDS, just have sex.” “You’re too paranoid, Gene.” “It’s kept me alive this far.” “Yeah, you’re right.” I felt awkward and glanced around the room. The beautiful suit was draped over the back of a chair. “You going to return the suit, Gene? You should treat it nicer.” “Screw the suit,” he said. “The car? Where’s that?” I started to worry. All this stuff was on my Visa, after all.

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“In the hotel lot. I’ll take it back tomorrow. Along with the suit.” “Thanks...,” I paused, not wanting more confrontation, but wanting to close this matter of Erik. “You’ll let it go with Erik all right? Don’t hassle him. I brought your note.” I crumpled the note up and threw it on the bed. It made him angry. “That’s easy for you to say, Allen. Things have been fine for you your whole life. Wife, money, family, job, college — easy, easy, easy.” “That’s not true, Gene. I worked my butt off in college, then at Reynolds and starting the trailer park.” “Yeah, but you’re in the groove. Bankers will talk to you. People find you agreeable. Everybody’s scared of me, and bankers, hell, they wouldn’t even loan against my land.” “Well Gene, it’s hard to get a land loan. There’s no income on it.” He takes things personally, instead of understanding why people disagree with him or don’t want to do what he asks. “It doesn’t matter anymore, I sold it.” “You sold it? Why?” “Reasons. I’m liquidating my portfolio.” He liked to mock me with words I used by misusing them. He didn’t have a portfolio, just the house in Sisters and the land, the sacred twenty acres between Sisters and Bend that he’d bought years ago when everyone laughed. He’d got it for five-hundred an acre and now it had to be

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worth at least fifty thousand, maybe more. “What’d you get for it.” “Twenty-five grand cash. Zip, like that. It was a good investment.” “Geez, Gene it was probably worth fifty.” “Do you think?” It was the first time this trip I saw doubt in his eyes. It was there every now and then with Gene, despite his bravado. No matter how long he lived, Gene seemed to me to be an innocent about things like this. It was as if he was not paying attention to the right things in life. He was always distracted. “Who bought it?” “My realtor friend Kronmiller. I’ve known him for years. We play golf together.” “Let me guess, you just told him what you wanted for it, didn’t ask him to set a price?” “That’s right, why?” “He screwed you.” “But I told him I needed the money fast. I thought he was doing me a favor.” “Nope, you walked away from twenty-five grand.” “I’ll kill him,” Gene’s mouth twisted. “That’s almost how much I needed. Are you sure it was worth that much?” “If not more, Gene. I’ve told you to be careful. Why didn’t you call me?” “Oh right. Forget that. You’re not my dad. Besides your advice isn’t that great. Look at that apartment deal.” I looked away. I’d invested in an apartment

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development for a tax shelter in the late ’70’s. Gene had joined me and then it went bad. When the six year timeline came for selling it, Gene was supposed to make fiftythousand off his thirty thousand investment, but it wasn’t there. “Gene, I don’t control the world. The market went south on us.” “But you said I’d get out in six years with the profit.” “You made money on your tax savings during your big money Alaska days, remember? And why are you griping at me about things being easy, easy, easy? Look at you, making forty to fifty a year in the ’70’s in Alaska when I was struggling at Reynolds. You got that job through your uncle. Easy, easy easy!” “That was easy money, but now it’s gone and I have something important to do. I didn’t know the land was worth that much so I...” he stopped himself. “What a cheapass Kronmiller is. I thought he was my friend.” “You know what they say, Gene. I have plenty of friends. This is about money.” “God, I hate the world sometimes.” “I’m sorry, Gene. You’ve got to be more careful, not trust people.” “It was so simple in the Marines. We watched each other. There weren’t contracts and paper in the Nam, just your word. You knew they wouldn’t leave you. They’d always come back for you or die trying. Nobody screwed anyone over, ever. Except the government.” “A lot of days I wish I’d been there with you, Gene.”

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“What? The hippie war protestor?” “At least I was brave enough to demonstrate. A lot of guys didn’t do anything. I still feel guilty for not going. For a long time when I was in college I was going to join the Marines until I flunked my physical.” “So how did you get out of the draft, Al? You always say bad knees. But how did it happen exactly?” He turned and glanced at me, like a challenge. “The whole thing was a miracle, Gene. A series of coincidences. It started with sore feet.” I explained to him how I’d taken a PE class in long distance running in the fall of 1969 at Oregon State. Towards the end of the term my right foot hurt all the time so I got the name of a foot specialist in Salem and got an appointment for Christmas break. But by the day of the appointment I hadn’t been running for awhile and my foot didn’t hurt. I thought of not going, but my mother said her intuition told her I should go. “I felt the same, too,” I explained. “So I went. When I went in the building, it was a small, one story clinic, I saw a little sign in the yard that said Foot and Knee Specialist.” “The appointment was after Christmas and my mother had given me a weightlifting set for a present. She was a Sears catalog shopper from our days way up the Santiam Canyon in Gates where it was too far to drive to shop. All my clothes as a kid came from the postman and it was torture trying on everything and deciding to wear or not wear stuff because it was hard to send the stuff back.” “Same for me,” Gene nodded.

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“Anyway, I used the weights to get ready for skiing by putting a couple of twenty-five pound plates in a backpack and doing one-legged deep knee bends. My knees hurt, they popped and crackled.” “Anyone’s would!” Gene objected. “It turned out my feet were fine,” I said to Gene. “The doctor said my shoes were worn out. I wear out the heels unevenly when I run. He said to buy some new shoes and I could run all I wanted. But the funny thing is after he said I was all right, he asked if anything else was bothering me. I remembered the little sign outside. That said feet and knees?” Gene nodded that he remembered. “I told him about how my knees hurt when I did the deep knee bends with the weights. He laid me on my back on the exam table and wiggled my kneecaps around, which hurt like hell.” “He asked me if I’d been in the military and I told him no. Then he asked if I wanted to go in and I said, not particularly, some of my friends have already been killed.” “Then he shouted, ‘That God-damned war!’ He said it so loud it scared me. My regular doctor was a Seventh-Day Adventist and I don’t think he swore in his life. Then he added. Shouting even louder, ‘Using our children as Goddamned cannon fodder!’” “He was really excited, swearing like that. I was lying there on my back and was eyeing the door. He seemed crazy. Crazy and angry, like maybe his younger brother had died there.”

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“Weird guy,” Gene agreed. “Then he said, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that war any longer, son. I’m going to write you a letter that will get you out.’” “So that’s it?” Gene asked. “That got you out?” “Pretty much. But it was amazing how it happened. I don’t think I was supposed to go, Gene. I really didn’t think I was going to get out of the draft on my knees, despite what that doctor said. I mean, I was still skiing through Christmas break, although my knees always hurt. Jeri and I were engaged to be married right after that Christmas break, so she came down from Portland and stayed with me and my folks the rest of the vacation. We skied up at Hoodoo Ski Bowl. We were both excited about the possibility of me flunking the physical. Her old boyfriend had come back from Vietnam recently and she didn’t look forward to getting another man through the war... she never told him about me until he was safely back.” “You were nice not to Dear John the guy,” Gene commented. “I’m not a jerk, Gene. Like I said, I had friends that died there and other friends in Vietnam then. They deserved respect.” “Amen.” I told Gene the rest, how after Jeri and I got married I went up to Portland for my draft physical in early February. I met with a captain during the physical and he read the letter, then asked their own doctor for his opinion. This foreign doctor, he looked like he was from India, examined

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my knees and told the captain he didn’t know if they were bad or not. I followed the captain into his office. I was sitting there as he reread my doctor’s letter and I sighed a big sigh. I figured for sure he was not going to believe the Salem doctor. Which meant I was going to have to join the Navy for six years and go to OCS. The captain heard me sigh and asked what was wrong. “I told him, Gene, that I just got married, I’m serving as Engineering Senator at Oregon State and I’m behind in my school work. Now this.” “‘Well, son,’ he said to me. ‘You won’t have to worry about the U.S. Army messing up your life.’ He stamped a big rubber stamp on my file, handed me a blue card and told me to continue the rest of the physical. I was absolutely astounded. Just like that, a weird doctor, sore knees, this captain and I was a free man! I hadn’t even tried to get out. It just happened.” “You’re lucky,” Gene observed. “The last thing they had us do, after I knew I was out, was give us an intelligence test. I worked hard on it for a few minutes and then realized this was the first test in my life where it didn’t matter how I did, so I just randomly marked answers, A, D, C, C, B, like that, then read a novel I brought along. “ “The guys who were going to Vietnam had to spend the afternoon at the recruiting center in orientation, so the other flunkees and I left the test room after the test. I remember they said, ‘All those with blue cards leave now.’ Almost a third of us stood up. We all looked as healthy as

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the poor guys who passed the physical, who collectively groaned in disbelief. All of us flunking sort of looked at each other, then moved out quick, like getting off the road when a car is coming fast. I used a pay phone in the lobby and called my mom. The first thing she asked was where I was calling from. I told her and then she asked if military guys were around and I said yes so she said, talk real soft, don’t act amazed like you’re out, don’t celebrate or make anyone feel bad, just get the hell out of the building and shut up.” “She’s pretty smart,” Gene observed. “Totally. She was raised in the British Army her whole life, so I figured she knew about how the military mind works. And she was an officer in the Canadian Army in World War II. In fact, both sides of the family, my dad’s too, has been British Army for generations. So I took her advice.” “What did your Dad think of all this? Did he want you to go?” “He was an infantry combat veteran of World War II and the first person I ever knew who was against the Vietnam war. He was dead set against it in 1965. I remember reading a very stirring article about helping the Vietnamese when I’d just turned 17 and telling him I was thinking about joining the Marines. He told me the war was crazy, that the people I’d be helping were no more right than the ones I’d be fighting and he didn’t think the peasants cared who ran the government as long as they left the villagers alone.” “He was smart, too,” Gene noted. “Yeah, but when I told him I was worried about going

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he told me it wasn’t a very big war and that I’d probably get through it if I went. He said a hundred-thousand men died in one day in World War One and Vietnam wasn’t a meat grinder like that.” “It was if you were in the jungle,” Gene countered. “But if you’d gone into Navy OCS, you’d have probably been fine.” “Yeah, but I probably would have ended up going into the Marines to get it over with fast.” “The war or your life?” I laughed at Gene’s joke and told him the rest of the story. “I took my mom’s advice and didn’t even call Jeri to tell her the good news until I was out of the building. I started worrying that the phone was tapped, and that they would hear the disbelief in my voice when I told her I’d flunked the physical. So I went with the rest of the guys who had flunked. Most of us hung around an old amusement arcade across from the bus station for the rest of the afternoon, waiting for the guys who’d passed the physical to finish up. The Army gave us a meal ticket to eat lunch at the bus station. I had chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, a dinner roll, green beans and jello.” “You remember the meal?” Gene asked, incredulous. “Every detail, Gene. It was the celebration dinner of my emancipation from the Republic of Vietnam. I even said a silent prayer of thanks over it, though I wasn’t at all religious then. All the guys who had flunked had dinner at the Greyhound station. We didn’t eat together though, it was a private meal.”

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“Where did the guys who had passed eat?” “You know, it never occurred to me to ask. Maybe they bought them a better meal.” “No, they probably all ate together. Army style.” “Anyway, us flunkees got together after we ate and played at the arcade, we bowled mostly, you know those arcade mechanical bowling games? We bet fifty cents a game and one guy lost about five bucks. He bitched that he was unlucky. I told him that this was the luckiest day of his life and he sort of smiled and said yeah. The bus ride home was grim though, you had to be quiet about getting out of the draft so as not to offend the poor guys on the bus who had to go to Vietnam.” “We stopped at Woodburn, we didn’t go into the town, just pulled off the freeway at the edge of the off ramp. I’ll never forget this skinny blonde guy with long hair getting off the bus and running up that ramp. The sun was setting over the coast range and from our angle it was setting right behind the car at the top of the ramp he was running to, like setting over the promised land. I recognized him as one of the guys who had flunked. As he ran up the ramp he was waving and screaming ‘I got out!’, to a waiting car, it had to be his girlfriend or wife. She understood and flashed the lights and honked the horn and then got out and ran down the ramp. They hugged just like in the movies with the sun setting directly behind them. This was too much for everyone on the bus, even the ones who had passed, and we all started cheering and yelling, ‘All right,’ ‘Go man go’, and ‘Freedom!’”

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“What a great feeling,” Gene said. “That must have been the best day of your life.” “It was. I’d called Jeri from the Portland bus station between bowling games so she’d had time to get a keg of beer. She also made a cake, got all my friends over, even though it was a Tuesday night, and painted a poster of her hugging my knees. The caption on the poster said, ‘Love Those Knees’. We all got drunk because everyone knew I had an 86 lottery number and would have gone to Vietnam for sure.” “Amazing,” Gene said. “Just think, there’s millions of guys that got out one way or another.” “I could go on forever about guys getting out, Gene. One guy I knew took speed and stayed awake for a week, then ran twenty miles from Corvallis to Albany where he got on the bus to go up to Portland for his physical. When they took his blood pressure, it was over the limit. But they looked at him and couldn’t believe he had high blood pressure. They put him in a darkened room with a bed, told him to lie down on it and they’d come measure him later. He did deep knee bends and push ups until he heard someone coming down the hall. They took it again and he was still over, so they told him to rest some more. It went on all day like that. They even asked him if he was lying down or not and he lied and answered yes. Finally they gave up and he got out on high blood pressure.” Gene laughed. “It’s a wonder he didn’t have a stroke.” “Too good a shape for that. He was a mountain climber. Healthiest guy I’ve ever known! Another buddy of mine

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got up on the doctor’s desk at the physical and said he couldn’t wait to go over and kill gooks. He wanted to carry a machine gun and he said he’d level every Vietnamese there cause they were all really Viet Cong, sir!” “What happened?” “Flunked. Psychologically unfit.” Gene was amused by this, so I went on. “One guy at my physical showed up with his dick painted red white and blue like a barber’s pole. He stood there stark naked during the inspection part of the physical and wouldn’t do what they told him to, so a big sergeant came in and took him away for refusing to cooperate. Another guy went to prison, some went to Canada, all kinds of stories. The day I got out of the draft I really started feeling bad for all the guys who were going in my place, so I started going to the protest rallies and stuff that Jeri had been going to all along.” “You protestors just hurt the war effort,” Gene objected. “It made more of us die. And I don’t think it took guts to protest the war at all.” “Well, I’m glad I protested the war. At least I was doing something to end it. Jack says he feels guilty for not going to Vietnam and guilty for not protesting against it.” Gene laughed. “I feel guilty that I stayed alive and never even got wounded. Guilty that I killed civilians. Do you really wish that you’d been there with me?” “I do and I don’t. Looking back now, if I knew for sure that I would live, then I think, you bet, I would have gone. There are times when someone asks me if I went and I

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want so badly to say yes, I went, and hold my head up with pride. Then I say, ‘No,’ and they usually say something like, ‘Oh, it was hard back then.’” “That’s funny,” Gene said. “For years I’d lie and tell people I didn’t go. But now you’re right, attitudes have changed. I get respect from people, especially younger people like Erik, when I say I went.” “I was afraid of dying, Gene. That’s why I didn’t volunteer when I was younger. My fear of dying in Vietnam started in the summer of 1968. I’d met a girl in Sun Valley in the spring of that year. She lived in Minnesota and I visited her that summer. Had the hots for her.” “Young love,” Gene shook his head. “It didn’t work out so I left early. The flight back to Portland was a night commuter flight, it stopped in every state on the way. It was nearly midnight when we stopped in Lincoln, Nebraska. The captain said we’d be on the ground awhile. I was curious why we were stopping because we hadn’t stopped near the terminal at a jetway. Instead we’d stopped quite a way from the terminal. We were flying in a 727 with those rear stairs and I walked back and asked the stewardess if I could get out and walk around. She said, ‘Sure, just don’t wander off.’” Gene lit a cigarette. I don’t usually smoke but I felt like one now so I gestured to him. He threw me a cigarette and the lighter without a word. “I stretched at the bottom of the stairs and looked around outside the plane. The lights from the airport made it hard to see into the city and around us was all cornfields.

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The air was warm and smelled of corn when the wind blew. I heard a drum coming towards me and I looked back at the airport. A military color guard was coming out towards the plane. There was already a scissors jack hydraulic loader under the plane and it raised up under the cargo door. A casket was placed on the bed of the lift by the ground crew in the plane and it slowly lowered down. The light from the terminal shone off of the casket. It was a gleaming aluminum casket, Gene, with rounded corners for an aerodynamic look and ribbing to reinforce the side walls. When it reached the ground the color guard played the Star Spangled Banner and draped an American flag over the casket. I was the only person outside the plane watching all this, Gene. And there wasn’t one person there from the town or his family. This was just a private military ceremony, the greeting of the body. I bet the family didn’t even know about it. They just went to the funeral. But this moved me.” “I stood at attention with my hand over my heart like when we were in grade school pledging allegiance to the flag and I just bawled. I felt so bad for this young guy that had been killed in Vietnam. He was just like me, only now he was dead. They took the casket away, I don’t remember how, on a cart I guess. I just remember it disappearing towards the terminal with the soldiers marching and the drum tapping. Then I got back on the plane. I wiped my face real good and looked away from the stewardess so she wouldn’t see I’d been crying. After that, the times I thought of joining the Marines, I remembered that casket without a

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family, coming home to the cornfields he would never smell again.” “I thought at first that I was going to get killed for sure,” Gene said. “I was convinced that every day was my last one. But after a couple of months I got the hang of it and got more confident. Then towards the end we all knew we were going to make it for sure.” “How could you know that?” I asked. “I was in a CAP, a combined action platoon. It was made up of a rifle squad, fourteen marines and a navy medic. We fought alongside thirty eight South Vietnamese Popular Forces troops — basically villagers with M-1’s, grenades and nothing more. We Marines were the nucleus that held the platoon together. At first we fought the VC a lot, but towards the end everyone knew America was planning a pullout, including the VC, so they let it be known in our village that if we didn’t initiate any combat they wouldn’t either. It was a live and let live policy. They told our PF troops that after the war they wouldn’t mistreat them if they became passive. So everything got real safe for us and I knew I wouldn’t die in Vietnam.” “What would you do? Didn’t you still have to go on patrol?” “Sure, but our sergeant would take us a couple villes over and we’d drink banana wine, smoke dope and have prostitutes all night.” “Really?” I was amazed, the image I’d had of him was so different. “Yeah, sarge was good. Every hour we’d all get quiet

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and he’d call in, ‘No contact’, and then he’d sign off and we’d all laugh like we were playing hooky.” “Wasn’t that kind of chicken, Gene?” “Who gave a rip? We were all just trying to survive for our DEROS.” “What was that?” “Date of Expected Return from Overseas Service. The day you left Vietnam. Anyway, Allen, I wasn’t chicken. You were all protesting, we all knew America was pulling out. I put my life on the line more than once in that stupid country and the whole time Jane Fonda and all those pimps were talking to the North Vietnamese about peace. What good was it to go on patrol and fight? Everyone knew we were leaving.” “Still,” I chided. “Oh, Mr. John Wayne,” Gene said angrily. “What do you know about life? You’ve never killed anyone. You’ve never even killed a deer.” “Only with my car, despite my years of hunting.” This made Gene chuckle, then he became defensive. “You think I’m a coward, don’t you.” “Hell, Gene, maybe. I don’t know. What about the Vietnamese guys you were fighting with? Weren’t they getting screwed over by your private truce?” “They wanted it too!” Gene protested. “How could they? What happened to them when the U.S. pulled out?” “I think that they all went over to the VC’s,” Gene answered. “They knew it wasn’t us wanting to pull out. It

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was the politicians. We were betrayed by the politicians as much as them. And they were villagers, they knew that Saigon would never send any help to them once we were gone. We all just played it safe while the big politicians acted things out.” “Were you sad when you left?” “I liked those people, they were good people. I didn’t want to leave. But we all knew what was going to happen. You could just feel the VC ready to come in and pounce on the village and take it over. We all felt bad, we just hoped that by being peaceful before we left, the VC wouldn’t hurt anyone.” “You were that sure your villagers wouldn’t fight on?” I was amazed. “Hey, when we pulled out, they got all the medics together from all the platoons and said that the local militia needed medics and the Marines had agreed to leave some behind. So they wanted volunteers. I was watching. Not one guy stepped forward. Everyone that had been in the villages knew what was going on. I don’t think the officers had a clue.” “You’re not a coward, Gene.” “Oh, I know, I proved that over there. I’m content in my heart about my courage.” “I’m not,” I said. “I’ve always thought of myself as a coward for not going.” “Do you want my honest opinion?” Gene asked. “Sure.” “I think that if a person has never killed someone while

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he’s trying to kill you, then that person can’t really say he’s lived. At least you have to be shot at. Yes, I can definitely say that if you’ve been shot at you can say you’ve lived and you can appreciate life.” “But today you said, when I told you about the chairlift, you agreed with me and said that my getting scared was just like the war and making you think of how important life was...” “Oh, I was just covering for you and your stupidity, Allen. You haven’t been in combat and you don’t know shit.” “At least I’ve never committed treason.” I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I resented his comment. He was in his harsh lecture mode now, just like with Erik and the pistol, and I didn’t deserve it. “Treason?” Gene asked. “Sitting in those villages at night.” “Protesting the war was treason if you ask me,” Gene said angrily. “It wasn’t treason but it sure took courage to protest the war. A lot of people hated me for that. Nobody in Stayton understood. I went from being a local basketball hero to the dope smoking hippie war protester.” “So do you think I’m a coward for what we did at the end of the war?” “Not me, Gene. Who am I to judge? I’ve never lived, I’ve never killed anyone or been shot at.” He looked at me angrily, convinced that I was being sarcastic, using his words against him. But our eyes locked

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and he knew that I was completely serious. “If anyone’s a coward, Gene, it’s me. I could have gone. My knees were bad, but I still managed to jog for a few years afterwards although I always had water built up on them. All those guys that flunked the physical with me could have gone. But I didn’t. At least you went. That took courage.” “Damned right it did. At least at first. I fought, my friends died, Kenny died, I saved guys’ lives. Not his though. But after we knew we were leaving, it got pointless,” Gene looked away from me as he spoke. He was sitting on the bed, looking out across the city. “You know, Gene, I just realized. You were a war protestor.” “What, me? I never protested that war. I supported our troops.” “I think if troops on both sides declare a truce without their politicians agreeing then it’s a war protest,” I offered. “Oh, that.” It stopped him cold. “But I wanted to win the war. We weren’t protesting it. If they’d wanted to nuke Hanoi I would have helped load the bomb on the plane. What we objected to was knowing we were pulling out and then being expected to still go fight. That was stupidity.” “The entire war was stupid,” I argued “Why go there? It was a civil war. Why send troops and abandon them?” “Well, you’re probably right about abandoning troops, but as far as going there, I still think that it was right for America to help South Vietnam.” “Oh come off it, Gene. Why go there and try to stop

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communists? Communism died naturally.” “Not really,” Gene argued. “Even though we didn’t beat the Vietnamese I think we showed the Russians that every time another country fell we might get involved in saving it. I think it was just too expensive for the Russians to run war after war and try to convert the world to communism. Just like there’s not many Christians that go around proselytizing for Christ because it’s too much work. So after awhile I think the communists gave up. If America hadn’t gone to Vietnam, Russia wouldn’t have given up, and with every success they would have gotten stronger and more confident. It would have fed on itself. No, going to Vietnam, even though we pulled out, it stopped communism from sweeping the planet. But no one will ever give us credit for that. We just gave up in Vietnam.” “You have a unique view of history, Gene, although I don’t think you’re right. What I think is...” “Look, Allen, stop. It’s late and I know that I can never win an argument with you. You always wear me down logically and for a short time convince my brain that you’re right, but my heart feels like you’re wrong. After awhile I don’t agree with you anymore because I can’t remember what you said that convinced me. My heart says you’re wrong now, so just don’t start, OK?” “All right, Gene. There’s skiing tomorrow. Just don’t be pissed at Erik, all right? He’s just a puppy.” “Generation X.” Gene replied. “Maybe X stands for clueless.” “See you in your room at six tomorrow?”

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“Sure. I’ll have Darlene here, I bet, so don’t interrupt her blowjob.” I laughed. “You’re too crude about women, Gene.” “They never show me anything to respect.”

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CHAPTER TEN The next day we drove to Heavenly after another breakfast at McDonalds. As soon as we headed south on 395 we started to press Erik for information about his disappearance the night before. “First tell me Al, is Gene mad at me?” he asked. “He is, but he promised not to kill you,” I replied. “It was almost worth dying for,” Erik laughed. “And how was last night, young Erik?” Jack asked. Erik made a circle with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, then poked the index finger of his right hand in and out. “Lucky dog,” I said. “She’s gorgeous.” “We couldn’t wait until we got to her trailer,” Erik said. “What did you do, pull off at a rest area?” “No, we made it to the University of Reno and pulled into the parking lot there.” “A U screw!” I said. Everyone laughed. “Wait a minute, what car did you drive?” “This one, I have the extra set of keys, remember?” “When did you get back?” I asked. “I got back to the hotel at six this morning.” “How many times?” Dave asked. “Once.” “Only once! With a girl like that?” Dave asked. “Well how many times am I supposed to drive back?”

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“No, no, no, how many times did you screw?” Dave asked. “Oh, that! Seven.” “Seven!” We all groaned, then I twisted around and did pretend bows in the front passenger seat. “You are a manly man, Erikster,” Jack said. “We are humbled by your presence,” I added. “I vote that we give Erik our fortunes, wives and children and we all commit seppuku for we have no honor,” Jack said. “To hell with that,” Dave said. “Seven’s not a record for me.” “Then just Jack and I will give all our stuff to Erik,” I said. We were distracted for a moment because it’s hard to find the road that heads west over the mountains to Lake Tahoe. Once we were settled into the drive up the foothills, the conversation turned back to Erik. “So what is young Darlene’s exact understanding of your marital status, Erik?” Dave asked. Erik covered his mouth and coughed and said “Single”, all at the same time. We laughed. “We don’t have to commit seppuku now, Jack,” I said. “Erik has no honor.” “Shame, Erik, shame.” “I brought my cellular phone for emergencies,” Jack said. “We could probably call your wife now and tell her before she has breakfast. Get her prepared for Erik’s wedding to Darlene and all.” Erik just shook his head and groaned. He knew we would make him squirm the rest of the trip. “You guys are so old you wouldn’t know what to do with Darlene.”

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“He has a point,” Jack said. “I have personally forgotten what sex with a twenty-five year old is like.” “I feel guilty today,” Erik said with a wicked smile. “For insulting us?” I asked. “No,” Erik replied. Dave looked at him, then to me. “That means he’s arranged to see her again tonight.” “No!” Jack exclaimed, and Erik started laughing. “You double dog,” I said. “You’ll never learn to count cards,” Jack cautioned. “Who cares about cards and gambling,” Dave exclaimed. “Speaking of which,” I looked at Dave. “You didn’t gamble with us. How was your night last night?” “Let me tell you at lunch,” Dave said. “I want to try and nap so I can ski.” As Dave shut his eyes I made a loud snoring noise. “I’m going to kill you tonight if you snore, Big Guy,” he promised. We got to Heavenly and parked. They hadn’t put down salt in the parking lot and it was covered in mounds of ice. We stumbled towards the lodge. Dave lightened things up for us as we walked carefully in our ski boots. “I have a new name for Erik.” “What?” I asked. “The Magnificent Seven.” We all started singing the Marlboro theme song which was the song from that movie. For the rest of the vacation all we had to do to embarrass Erik was start humming the

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Marlboro music. Heavenly. This was the place where the two snowboarders had died. That plus the fact I’d never skied it before had me nervous. I rode the triple chair from the base on the California side with two teenagers from South America, a brother and sister. The run we were going up was the steepest, most moguled run I had ever seen and to make things worse, it was now a sheet of ice with exposed rocks and trees. The low elevation had turned the storm snow to rain and then the cold had made it into ice. “How the hell are we supposed to get down this?” I asked them. Blank smiles. “Hablar Ingles?” “No, senor,” they chimed. “Donde esta chairlift?” Where’s the chairlift? I asked. It was the only thing I could think of saying, asking if there was another way down the mountain besides this wall of death. “Aqui!” Here! the bright young girl offered. Well of course. Where’s the chairlift? You’re on it stupid. “Gracias,” I smiled like an idiot and looked away from them. I would be known as the old fool to them for years. My tension was not relieved until the top when Jack told me you could ride the tram down, or the chairlift if you wanted. I rode the chair down later. This was the second time I’d been scared by nothing on this trip and I was getting tired of it. The powder that fell the night before had turned into

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grabby slabby snow at Heavenly, even at the higher altitudes, so we stayed on the packed runs and, as usual, Dave was in the lead. But we were all tired from the day before so we decided to eat early and try having a beer to see if that would loosen us up. Once we decided to drink at lunch, Jack produced his flask on the chairlift. It was more blackberry brandy. On the next run we all thought we were skiing better, though I don’t think we were. We stopped at one of the lodges on the Nevada side of the mountain for lunch. It’s a big lodge tucked into a valley with several runs coming into it and a chair lift that takes you back up the mountain. As you ski towards it, you feel like you’re skiing home. We got our food, then Dave told us about the fight the night before. “You guys missed out,” he said between bites of cheeseburger. Dave eats the worst diet among us and looks the best. I’ve never been able to figure it out. He says weightlifting but I think he’s an alien. “Karate tournament, right? The main event was dedicated to a cop who was recently killed in the line of duty and it turned out I was sitting in the row directly in front of his widow. We started talking and she told me all about her husband getting shot by drug dealers.” “Hard luck,” I said. “How old was she?” “Mid-twenties.” “Any children?” “Yeah, two little ones. The fight’s profits went for her support.” “That was nice,” Erik said.

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“I gave her a hundred bucks,” Dave said. “And got her address in Reno so you guys could donate too.” “Will you send it to her if I give it to you?” I asked. “Sure.” I carry all my money with me all the time when I’m in Reno, and had over a thousand in my wallet. I gave Dave ten but then Jack gave him a hundred so I added fifty more. Erik gave him a hundred, so I reached in and gave him another forty to make mine a hundred. Dang! I was unemployed! I was trying to win bean and ammo money and now I was down a hundred to some lady I didn’t know. “Erik that’s two hundred bucks you spent since last night,” I teased. “Breakfast and lunch and skiing weren’t that much,” he countered. “I figure you went through a hundred bucks worth of rubbers last night,” I replied. “No wonder you’re skiing so bad this morning, Erik” Dave added. We laughed and ate for a while, then Jack said, “It’s so sad that guy died. I think they should legalize drugs in this country.” “You’re kidding,” I declared. “You’re an attorney and you think they should legalize drugs?” “This whole war on drugs isn’t working. And with mandatory sentences the jails are so full they’re releasing criminals to give the drug dealers space. It’s nuts!” “I think they should kill all drug dealers, like in Saudi Arabia,” Dave declared. “That would put a stop to it. And

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the jails wouldn’t be crowded.” “You’re such a mellow guy, Dave,” Jack observed. “No, I just talked to the widow of a guy who put his life on the line to protect our families and I think we should give drug dealers what they give us.” “But Jack has a point,” I said. “Alcohol related deaths are nearly fifty-thousand a year in this country, and I looked up cocaine related deaths once when I helped my son with a report in Middle School — only a couple thousand people a year die from cocaine.” “Geez, that’s not too many,” Erik observed. “Victimless crimes, like drugs and prostitution, should not be crimes at all,” Jack argued. “The Constitution should protect people’s rights to take whatever drugs they want in the privacy of their own homes. Alcohol, peyote, acid, morphine, I don’t care. It’s when their actions hurt other people that society should declare a crime has taken place.” “Like drunk driving.” “Exactly, that’s the worst one of all. So many innocent children are killed by drunk drivers. That’s who your cop should have died protecting us from, Dave. Drunk drivers.” “I’ll never win an argument with an attorney,” Dave said. “All I know is it just doesn’t feel right to think America would allow drugs like cocaine to be legal.” “Morals and laws are tied together,” I said. “We put more people in jail per capita than any other country in the world except South Africa.” “I think you’re nuts, Jack, saying drugs should be

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legal,” Erik said. He had confided in me at work that for awhile he’d been a full blown coke addict to the point of shooting it up. When he was telling me about it he started to get the shakes. He said it was the most exciting thing he’d ever done and if he talked about it too much he’d get all excited again, like looking forward to the best vacation of his life. I’d wanted to fire him after he told me, but after talking to the personnel manager found I couldn’t — that Erik wasn’t a problem unless he was using the drugs. “Why do you say I’m nuts, Erik?” Jack asked. “I used to use cocaine. I met some pushers. They are evil people.” “That’s the whole point, Erik,” Jack explained. “If you wanted drugs you could go to a doctor and get a prescription which you could fill at a pharmacy. It would be much cheaper than on the street so all these bad guys would be out of a job.” “Oh, good idea,” Erik reversed himself. “And no one would have to steal to afford drugs,” I added. “Or become a prostitute.” “Like I said, I’ll never win an argument with you guys,” Dave sat back in his chair with a disgusted look on his face. “What you’re saying sounds right. But it just doesn’t seem right that drugs should be legal in America.” “I agree,” I chimed in. “And I’ll toast that with a swig of my favorite drug. Beer!” I lifted my glass and laughed. “Beer, beer, beer, I love to drive and drink beer,” Erik said. “One hand on the bottle and one on the wheel...” Dave added. “I love to drive and drink beer!” Erik finished. I was regretting that I had taught him our college drinking song.

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“You guys are jerks,” Jack said. “That’s why people are getting killed by drunk drivers. If you ever met anyone who has lost a kid to a drunk driver you wouldn’t sing that song.” “Sorry,” Erik said. “I’ll toast skiing, though,” Jack tried to lighten things. He raised his glass and it broke the tension of our argument. “I’ll not only toast skiing, I’ll out ski all of you,” Dave challenged. “Let’s go, big guy.” “I’m with you,” I answered. It was my decision not to use the get-back trail that got Dave in trouble. I saw that the easy to ski cat track stayed up on the ridge to our left, then led to the groomed runs and the chair lift we wanted. But I also saw that the snow below us headed to the same chair and that it looked all right. But it was really cut up wet powder. I led our group down that way because I was tired of Dave shooting ahead of us all the time and being the perfect racer. I wanted to see how he could handle difficult snow. I went ahead of everyone and although the snow was tough to handle, my soft skis and years of skiing in Mt. Hood cement, our version of powder, were enough to get me through. I stopped to watch Dave and he came down in his racer’s crouch, turned once to his right with his weight on the outside ski — a fatal mistake on this stuff. He veered too sharply to the right, lost control and found himself with his weight still on his left ski as it twisted back uphill. His right ski flipped backwards and suddenly the skis were pointed opposite directions as he kept going fast to his left.

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The laws of physics dictated that this situation could not last long and it didn’t. He cartwheeled across the hill in one of the most spectacular falls I’ve seen. Maybe it was all his muscles because instead of collapsing in a ball he maintained a perfect cartwheel for about three complete revolutions before he collapsed into a ball of snow and flying skis and clothing. I was too far below him so Erik and Jack went to help. I skied to the bottom of the lift without falling, hit the restroom, came out and found the boys in the lift line. Dave was still cleaning snow out of his parka. “That stuff’s not so easy to ski on,” I volunteered, giving Dave a way to save face. “I just learned,” he replied. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. He knew I was still a better powder skier. Dave kept skiing in front of me on the packed runs though, and after a few more runs we got lost. I found another patch of shitty powder to lead him down. I guess I felt he needed another lesson. I was feeling good, really good, and decided to go down a crudded-up mogul field instead of following an easier packed run to the chair. Jack took one look, he was the weakest skier in our group, and decided to go the easy way. I led Dave and Erik down and it got bad quickly. There were six-foot moguls and they soon became a matter of survival. Dave almost fell after looping over a mogul and stabbing his pole into the top of it to keep his balance. He yelled when he pulled his pole out of the snow, but skied down the rest of the hill without trouble.

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“This arm feels weird,” Dave said as he skied up to me at the end of the lift line. I was feeling smug. “From your fall?” I asked. “No, just now when I was falling to my left I jabbed my left pole into that mogul to get my balance. I kept going and tried to yank the pole out but it stuck. When it finally came out I heard a popping sound coming from my arm and now it feels kind of weird, weak sort of.” “Maybe you pulled something,” Jack offered. If he hadn’t been an attorney he could have been a doctor because he’d gone through so many sports injuries in his swimming career. “Last week I was doing heavy cables for my pecs and the left side got away from me. It popped then, too,” Dave explained. “I think I’m all right though.” We skied more cautiously now that Dave was not leading anymore and after two more runs he decided to roll up his sleeve and take a look. It was ugly. His bicep was all curled up at the top of his arm. It made me sick to look at. “I think I’m done for the day,” Dave said. “But I still want to have my beer at the tram restaurant overlooking the lake.” We had our beers but we kept looking over at Dave’s arm even though it was back in his jacket. We were engrossed with the horror of his injury and worried about how bad it was. We talked about what to do on the way back to Reno, but Dave decided that since it was Saturday and we were leaving tomorrow he would wait until he got home to see

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his own doctor. Then he said it was lucky it wasn’t his right hand because he could still whack off. We all laughed and figured he was OK if he could joke about it. Saturday night is the big night in the casinos, and I gave up hope of playing single deck, dollar blackjack at CalNeva. It would be too crowded. I checked Gene’s room to see if he wanted to hot tub. Gene came to the door and right away I felt tension. I looked past him and there was this gorgeous girl on the bed, older than Darlene, but way younger than Gene, and a knockout besides. I wondered if Gene had arranged for a hooker to come in and be with him and was surprised when he walked back into the room and introduced her to me. She was his cousin, Crystal. I had no idea Gene had relatives in Reno. It figured though. Gene’s family had settled in the Oregon high desert, then spread out. He had relations in Grants Pass, Medford, Klamath Falls, John Day, Alaska — they all seemed to avoid big cities or places less than two hundred miles from the coast. Crystal followed this pattern perfectly, though it was hard to believe anyone so beautiful could have sprung from the same gene pool. We chatted for awhile and then there was a knock on the door. “That’ll be Rex,” Crystal said. Gene opened the door and her boyfriend came in. He was as alarming as she was good looking — taller than me with deep set black eyes, long stringy black hair, a leather vest with tassles on it, jeans, a wallet with a long chain attaching it to his belt and a brooding, unfriendly attitude. It turned out he was a

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struggling lead singer with a band. To survive he had a day job as a referee at a paintball field outside Reno. He had a nasty looking bruise on his cheek, a red circle with fine lines radiating inward and out. I finally had to ask about it. “I got hit by a paintball at close range,” was his explanation. I knew about paintball, we made the metal for the gun frames on the Salem Furnaces, but I’d never seen the results of being hit by one of them. While I sat on the bed Gene rolled two joints. I figured they were going to smoke so I left, telling Gene we’d get a table at the seafood buffet downstairs and they could join us. You have to wait a long time in line at the seafood buffet, but it’s worth it because it’s all you can eat and excellent food. We were near the front of the line when Gene and his pals arrived, and since we were big and the other people in line were retirees, they didn’t say anything when Gene’s party cut in with us. I think the thing that prevented them from objecting was Crystal’s boyfriend. When we got our table, Gene, Crystal and Rex attacked the food like it was their first meal in months. It had to be the dope. One of the features of the buffet was boiled prawns that you had to peel yourself. Gene’s group took huge platefuls of them and started feasting away. They got a big empty plate and started stacking the prawn shells on it. After awhile there was an enormous mound of carcasses complete with eyes and antenna’s and pincers that had long ago overwhelmed the confines of the plate. It became a game with them to stack their latest carcass on the top and

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see how fate would dictate the direction it rolled down. They laughed uncontrollably at what they were doing. I didn’t tell them they were doing a field experiment in chaos theory. They didn’t seem to be mathematicians. Their behavior was too much for me and my friends, so we left Gene with his relatives and a promise to meet later at CalNeva. We must have gambled for a couple of hours upstairs. Dave disappeared, saying he wanted to go dancing. Erik stayed with Jack and I. After awhile I get bored with Reno, I was about three hundred ahead on the trip and tired. I knew that if I gambled big I would lose. You lose when you’re tired. It was better to screw around and gamble small. Jack agreed, so we played all the weird machines — electronic keno, the slots, electronic poker. The three of us were playing quarter slots when an older lady, heavy, dressed in white slacks, a white sleeveless acrylic sweater and a bouffant hair-do, came down the row behind us with two young daughters. I was in the middle of their ages, the mom fifteen years older than me, the girls fifteen years younger. I kept looking at them and one of them kept smiling at me and pushing her long brown hair back as she watched her mother. Now the girls weren’t sensational mind you, especially when you could see mom and how their cute busty figures were going to fill out and become huge busty figures, but after hearing about Erik and Darlene and not being home, they looked pretty good. “These are my last four quarters, girls, then we have to go,” the mom said.

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I turned back to my machine, figuring Mom and the girls were history until I heard a bell ringing. “Whoo, what’s happening?” Mom asked. I turned around and saw the light was flashing on the top of the machine which meant the attendant was on the way. Quarters were streaming out of the machine like it had had too much to drink and had gotten the blind whirlies and was throwing up now. “It says you win one thousand two hundred quarters, mom.” The one who’d been smiling put her hand on my arm and asked, “How much is twelve-hundred quarters, mister?” I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t divide by four! By four! “That’s three-hundred dollars, miss.” Quarters continued to clang out and I noticed Mom take four of them, put them in the machine to her right, directly behind me, the one I was going to play soon and which I felt territorially in control of, and let the arm fly. Ringing again, more lights, more quarters. “This one says one-thousand, six-hundred quarters, Sherrillee, how much is that?” Mom asked. “How much is sixteen-hundred quarters, mister?” Sherrillee asked, sliding real close to me now. “That’s four-hundred dollars, miss.” I couldn’t stand it. They were all so dumb they didn’t deserve to be lucky and any interest I’d had in Sherrillee and her sister left with her not being able to divide by four. “I’m headed for home, Sir Jack, Erik,” I turned to them, “How about you guys?”

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“I’m with you, Al. One more day of skiing.” “You’re not going to watch the Superbowl tomorrow?” Erik asked. “I think I’d rather ski. The Superbowl is boring,” Jack replied. “Girls, that was my last four quarters, can you believe I won again?” I heard mom say as we walked away. “Now how much is it I win again?” There was no immediate answer so I imagine they’d already forgotten and now were looking for someone else to ask. There’s some high roller blackjack tables downstairs at CalNeva. I’ve never played them because they have one hundred dollar minimum bets. The three of us came down the escalators laughing about the quarter ladies and turned the corner. There was Gene, sitting at a table with his cousin Crystal and Mr. Paintball, M.P. I thought of him because I forgot his name. They were seated together at one of the hundred-dollar minimum tables. Chips were everywhere, pink ones — hundreds — but nothing smaller, in front of all three of them. Jack asked first. “Gene! Mr. Chips! What’s happening?” “They’re helping me make money faster,” Gene answered. “Don’t bother the gamblers, sir,” the dealer ordered. I looked up at the frostiest bitch dealer I’d ever seen in Reno. Black hair, thin, lean face, fifties, a flat chest under the white shirt uniform, massive rings on every finger, which were stained yellow from cigarette smoke. She was dealing from a three deck shoe which eliminated any

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advantage Gene had from counting cards. “I’m down a little but things are going good, Al.” She dealt out their hands and had a six showing. “Everyone sit,” Gene commanded, “she’s going to bust.” They did as he said and sure enough, she had a ten under and pulled another ten and busted. “How is it you allow him to run their hands?” I asked, astounded. “Gene, you can’t do that.” “He made arrangements with the house beforehand, sir. It’s his money. And please don’t bother the players by telling them what you think they can and can’t do or I’ll have to call security.” I shut up then, remembering what Gene had told me about the Mexican guy at craps getting thrown out by security. I looked around, wondering if Hulk was already on his way, but didn’t spot anyone. Gene pulled his winnings and left only five-hundred out, as did his cousin and M.P. Once again the cards came out of the shoe. They were all little cards, threes and fours and fives. The dealer only had a twelve and got up to sixteen before pulling a four. She beat everyone and they groaned, but Gene seemed strangely happy. “I’m counting, Allen, like you told me. It worked last night. I’m going for it now, it’s plus nine. That’s fantastic.” “But Gene, she’s got a three deck...” “Sir, no coaching the players. I want you to leave now,” the dealer said. “But!” I tried to say.

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Gene turned at me and looked worried for a second, like he wanted to ask me what was wrong, but I saw she was looking for the pit boss so I said, “Mam, don’t worry. I’ll go over there out of hearing and just watch.” Gene’s a big boy and after all, I love Cal Neva, the last thing I wanted was to get thrown out of there or even worse, arrested. Jack came with me while Erik stayed and watched silently. When Jack and I got away from the table, he asked, “What’s wrong, Al?” “Gene’s counting and admitting it and usually they throw you out if they suspect you’re counting. So I think they realize he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a three deck shoe, Jack! There’s three times the cards, so a plus nine is no big deal. It’s like plus three on a single deck which is all right, but nothing to bet the farm on. If Gene bets heavy, he’s screwed.” “I’ll try to tell him,” Jack said and he hustled discreetly back. I got up on the wheel of the locomotive hoping the slots lady wouldn’t see what I was doing but she did and kicked me off, so I went to the spiral metal staircase, climbed up and stood where I could see. Gene must have told Crystal and MP to each take two hands on the next deal because each of them had three grand on two circles, a total eighteen-thousand dollars bet! How much had Gene made? Where was he, in the hole or ahead? I no longer felt tired, just scared. I couldn’t make out the cards, only saw that they all

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seemed to be struggling, Gene especially and the dealer dealt herself a few more cards and then they all moaned and she started stacking all those pink chips tidily away as if she was doing nothing more than putting her silverware away after running them in the dishwasher. “God-damn it!” Gene roared. Jack came up to his shoulder real gentle and said something quietly in his best courtroom manner but Gene cursed and shoved Jack away and that made Jack mad. He’d seen where I’d gone and came over. “He won’t listen, Al. What should we do?” By now there were more pink chips out and also some changing of cash from Gene’s pocket. “Erik, come here,” we whisper-yelled. Erik moved quickly over to us from the table. He had to look up at us because Jack and I were now well up on the spiral staircase trying to see what was going on. A crowd was gathered around Gene’s table. The crowd was kind of subdued, but expectant, the way I imagine crowds used to be for hangings. “Christ, he just lost eighteen grand and he’s got thirty out there now,” Erik said. He kept looking over at the table and then to us like he was at a fire and wanted to talk to us but couldn’t tear his eyes from the flames. “He’s really angry and saying plus fifteen has got to be good for them.” “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” I said. “That dumb jerk doesn’t realize what’s happening. Erik, you’ve got to stop him.” “I’ll try, but he hates me cause of Darlene, remember?” I have to credit Erik, he’s brave. He went right up to

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Gene and in a loud voice, said, “Gene, you’ve got to stop and talk to Allen.” “Blow me, you jerk,” Gene said just as loud back to him. “And stay away from this girl, asshole. She’s my cousin.” It was the anger over Darlene, I know, but when Gene gets in these moods, he’s ugly. “Go to hell, Gene,” Erik shouted back. He sort of leaned into Gene, like if Gene tried anything, Erik was going to let into him, even though Gene was carrying that derringer. That was it, the pit boss was talking into his microphone and I could see the whole thing shaping up below me. It all happened so fast. Erik looked around — he has a black belt in Karate — and saw two enormous guys coming at him from left and right. Before I could do anything, he squatted down, then sprinted out the door that was to the left of us. He moved fast, I knew he still held the two hundred meter and cross country three thousand meter records at Seaside High School on the coast so I shouldn’t have been surprised by his speed. There was a lot of laughter from the room, then everything settled down. Gene said something and the dealer laughed and dealt the cards. An ace of spades is a big card, you can make it out from across the room, I could see it like a target. It’s the death card. The dealer had it, face up. “Insurance?” she asked. I couldn’t hear it, only saw her mouth form the word. Gene sort of half turned, like he wanted to see what I

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would advise, then changed his mind, turned to the dealer and shook his head no. She turned over a face card, and since none of them had a blackjack, that was it. He left fast, with his relatives in tow, and by the time Jack and I got outside I found Crystal and MP on the sidewalk, but no Gene. “Where did he go?” I went up and stood with Crystal and MP. Crystal pointed down Virginia Street and I could see the top of Gene’s bald head, moving fast, bobbing, because he was running and dodging people on the sidewalk. Then he was too far away to make out. “There he goes,” I laughed. “Let him go, it’s just Gene’s way. When life gets to him he runs away. That’s why we call him High Desert. He’s always leaving and hiding out in the desert.” “I don’t know, Al. I think we should find him,” Jack advised. “He’ll be all right. I tell you, he does this, he gets away from everyone.” “He’s your friend, Al, so it’s your call. But in watching him this weekend I’d say he’s slightly crazy, manic depressive.” “Really?” I couldn’t believe it. It was just Gene’s way. If there was something he couldn’t deal with, he’d leave, but he’d be back. “He lost everything but his truck,” Crystal said. “How much did he lose?” I asked.

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“The house in Sisters, the land, his trailer, his tools, everything.” She looked lame and shifted from foot to foot. “Not everything,” M.P. said. “I kept this out. I didn’t want him to lose it all. Here, you keep it for him.” He handed me two pink chips and my respect for MP went up. I knew Gene would be grateful for this thousand dollars. “He lost his land and his trailer?” I asked. “Yes,” there were tears in Crystal’s eyes. Her long curls of reddish-brown hair looked tired and ragged now, not exciting. “I told him not to bet everything but he said he’d had a dream that he would win enough for his Suicide Wall, and that God wouldn’t let him lose. I told him I didn’t think God had much to do with Reno.” “Did he say where he was going?” I looked back down the street, hoping to see him. But Gene was gone. “He said something about going to see Kenny. Is that a friend of his here in Reno?” Crystal asked. “Oh God,” I exclaimed. “What is it?” Jack asked. “Kenny was his best friend in the Marines who died in Vietnam.” “Oh, Gene!” Crystal exclaimed. MP grabbed her around the shoulders and held her as she cried. “I told you he’s mental,” Jack said, “Al, I’ve seen guys like this, Manic Depressives, they go from high to low. Just now Gene’s gone from a major high to a major low.” “We’ve got to find him,” I said. We called the cops and they said they’d keep their eyes out for Gene but they weren’t much help. When I tried to

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explain he was a Vietnam Vet they became less interested, like they didn’t care. Maybe they’ve seen too many of them, homeless or dead. Jack and I called the hotel and had them put a message on Gene’s phone, then we went back there and had the staff open the room, but he wasn’t in it. We got our ski jackets on, it was getting pretty cold, and started walking the streets, calling his name in the quieter parts. We ended down by Circus Circus and decided to search the casino there. Gene wasn’t to be found. It was nearly one in the morning so Jack suggested we get some coffee and food before we kept looking. We found an all night snack bar in Circus Circus and got a booth. “God, I feel so bad about Gene losing his money. I should have done something to stop him.” “Like what?” Jack asked. “They threatened to throw you out. You probably could never come back and gamble at CalNeva.” “Who cares? There are other places to gamble.” “But it’s our favorite,” Jack objected. “You know, what I did, it was exactly like Vietnam all over again.” “How’s that?” “Look at what Gene did. He had this belief, a strong belief, that what he was doing was the right thing. In the case of Vietnam, he volunteered, answered his country’s call. Tonight he believed in card counting. Both times he was stupid, at least to my way of thinking. It was stupid to go to Vietnam, it was a useless war, so it was pointless to

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answer your country’s call. And he was stupid to count cards on a three deck shoe.” “I agree, on both counts.” “But I didn’t do anything to stop Gene, nothing. During the war I protested, but I should have done more, like bombing recruiting centers or something desperate. And tonight I should have gone down there and grabbed Gene and pulled him outside, even if I got beat up by the security guys. Big deal, I would have saved Gene’s money at least. But you know, Jack, both times I just sat by and let Gene, and guys like him, suffer. I stood on that spiral staircase safe and unharmed, and peeked at Gene’s suffering, the same way I peeked at the war through my TV, safe and cozy in America. God, I feel guilty.” “Why do you feel guilty about the war, Al? Did you have friends that died there.” “Yes,” I replied. The waitress came, we ordered club house sandwiches and coffee, and I ordered pie. “Did a lot of your friends go to Vietnam?” Jack asked. “I never knew anybody that went.” “You didn’t?” I was amazed. “I grew up in a small town, Stayton. It’s a farming community. A lot of guys I knew went.” “Well what happened to them exactly that has made you so upset?” “Do you have a while?” “Sure,” Jack replied. “The first one to die was Harold Gant. Before I tell you about him though, I should tell you about my home town. I

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think that Stayton is like every small town in the country. Agriculture is its reason for existing. The small town of 5,000 residents was founded by a pioneer named Stayton, I even dated his great grand-daughter for awhile. She was such a nice person that from then on I thought the town was well named. The town and surrounding region was settled by German-Catholics. The town is flat with farmland all around and a cannery in the middle to process the farmer’s crops. A river, the Santiam, runs through the center of it. There’s a small brook that runs parallel to the river. The brook powered a woolen mill that closed down in the seventies after the war.” “The funny thing, Jack, about that town, was the rivalry between us non-Catholics and the Catholics. There were more of us non-Catholics, and we all went to Public School, so when we played their smaller private schools we always won. They hated us for that. And there was a rivalry also between the farm kids and the city kids. The farm kids mostly went into the service after school, while the city kids went to college or went to work in the mills or the cannery. Most of the guys that got drafted or went to fight were the farm kids who didn’t go to college.” “Harold was a farm kid. He was a year older than me and lived in the country in a little town called Aumsville. I had a PE class with him and he always ended up guarding me when we played basketball. I tried to show Harold some moves and how to play better defense but it didn’t do any good. My memory of him is leaping awkwardly at a fake pass I made and falling on the ground as I dribbled around

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him. He was such a nice guy though, he always laughed at himself and never got angry.” I kind of choked up then, before I went on. “He died in Vietnam. I read about it in the Stayton Mail one morning eating breakfast.” “It sounds like you hardly knew the guy,” Jack said. “Why do you care? I mean it’s sad that anyone died there, but it was a war.” “I liked him, Jack. Harold had a good heart. And I thought at the time, and still do, there for the grace of God, go I. My mother still has that copy of the Stayton Mail saved away.” “Anyone else die there?” Our food came so we dived into the sandwiches and talked between bites. “One other guy that I used to play basketball against. His name was Jimmy. He played forward at Cascade against me. We were enemies on the basketball floor, but in the summers we’d see each other at work at the cannery and run into each other at the VFW hall dances in Salem. We’d visit at the dances about the up coming basketball season. It’s funny really, how much psychic energy we used to put into twenty games of basketball. Who’d play, who’d start, who’d win state. Anyway, I lost track of him after basketball season in my Senior year and I didn’t see him that next summer. But the summer after I found out he’d joined the Marines after screwing around for awhile. That second summer after high school I saw him at the cannery. He’d gone off to boot camp, then came home on his 30 day leave

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before he went to Vietnam. His father had a berry farm and he was helping get the crop in. It was his leave before the war! He could have gone to New York or LA or anywhere and lived his life but he went home and drove a truck taking his dad’s berries to the cannery. I drove a fork lift at the cannery and unloaded farmers’ crops when they brought them in. The farmers would get their trucks weighed, we would unload the stacks of berries that were on pallets and put them in a cooling room. Then we’d load empty crates on their trucks and they’d get weighed again and leave. They were paid by the pound of berries brought in. Anyway, I started talking to Jimmy one time when he came in. Everyone else was at lunch, and there weren’t any other farmers in the yard, so we had plenty of time to talk between my trips with his berries to the cold storage room. He didn’t like me ... I was a long-haired hippie college student with a draft deferment. But because of our history in basketball he cut me some slack and talked to me while I unloaded his truck.” “He acted like he was superior to you?” “And disgusted with me. Like I was scum for not going. He told me he was headed for Vietnam and because he was acting so superior to me I told him I was sorry. He got really defensive and said not to be sorry, he was excited. He couldn’t wait to get over there and kill gooks. We had a conversation that was spread out over time because we could only visit while I was at his truck unloading berries. I’d drive them into the cooling building and stack them, then come out to get some more, and he’d be there by the

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truck. It gave me a chance to think of questions.” “‘What do you have against the gooks?’ I asked him. ‘I hate them, they’re killing our boys. I have to go help our boys,’ he replied. On the next trip I said, ‘If our boys weren’t there then you wouldn’t have anyone to go help.’ ‘They’re stopping the communists,’ he yelled back at me as I retreated with more of his dad’s berries.” “‘Maybe we should just wait until the communists invade America before we fight them,’ I yelled at him when I took his last load away. While I was in cold storage someone had come back from lunch and loaded him with empty crates, so he was gone when I came back out. I never saw him again. He got to Vietnam and was posted somewhere out in the boonies. He died his first week in the field in an ambush. He never even fired his gun.” “Never?” “First guy killed in the ambush,” I replied. “I can see how that would make you feel bad.” “I never even got a chance to wish him good luck,” I said. “I just made that stupid comment about not fighting the communists until they got to America. What a stupid thing to do. I didn’t dislike him. He was a nice kid. And I shouldn’t have made him feel bad. God, he was going over there for us. Right or wrong, he was doing his duty, answering his country’s call.” I’d finished my sandwich so we waited until the girl cleaned up and brought my pie before we went on. “I’ve always felt bad about Jimmy,” I said after the waitress left. “At first I was just mad at him for dying so

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stupidly. Then for a long time I masked my guilt by thinking that he died because he got his karma back in advance for hating the VC.” “Prejudged by the universe?” “Exactly.” “So maybe the universe, or God, or whatever, treats you based on the thoughts you carry around in your head instead of what you actually do,” Jack said. “Advance karma. I’m glad the legal system doesn’t run that way.” I laughed. “I hope the universe doesn’t run that way. Then there’s my friends who were wounded. Terry Morse got wounded in a firefight and was left for dead. He crawled out and made it back though. I heard he had to crawl for miles with a tourniquet he put on himself. He’s had a limp the rest of his life because his leg was shot up. I’ve never had the guts to call him and see him. He was on our basketball team my freshman year and he was a starter with me. I always want to remember him running like the wind and firing up those outside jumpers with that wicked grin on his face, not as a crippled middle-aged guy.” “Any others?” We ordered more coffee. “Grant Pearson. He was such a nice guy. He was in Boy Scouts with me in Mill City in the seventh grade, before we moved to Stayton. When we moved, his parents bought our house. Grant was sitting around a campfire in Vietnam with some troops who were drunk. One of them was waving a .45 around and Grant stood up and asked him to give him the gun because someone could get hurt. It was so like Grant, the good scout.”

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“What happened?” “The gun went off. I never found out if it was on purpose. It hit Grant in the stomach and he was paralyzed for life from the waist down. I never thought much of it for a long time until I drove by our old house to show my kids where I lived when I was a kid. There was an outside stairway on the house where I used to tie my shoes on Saturday morning to go play army with Grant. The stairs were gone and replaced by a ramp for his wheelchair. The reality of his condition had never hit home until then. I had to have my wife drive, I was so upset.” I talked with Jack awhile longer. I told him about a friend who died training in an F-4 Phantom and then about my friends who had gone there and made it back in one piece. To some it was an interruption in their lives, an inconvenience. For others it was an adventure. But for most, like Gene and Brent, who killed himself, it was an ongoing tragedy. “And then there’s the mystery guys,” I said. “Mystery guys?” “People who went but I never bothered to look up and see if they made it or not.” “Why don’t you try?” Jack asked. “Because I had bad vibes about them before they went and I’m afraid they died,” I said. I told Jack about how Jan Campbell came home on leave after boot camp before going to Vietnam. He and Brent Sheldon, who was on leave from the Navy, bought two gallons of wine and came to get me while I was studying for finals one Saturday night, when

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UCLA was playing for the NCAA Championship. I’d planned to watch the game and study, but here was Jan, wanting to party one last time before going off to fight. I might never see him again. So we went off to a dance at the VFW hall in Salem like we had the summer before and picked up some girls. I was in pre-law at Willamette and wasn’t into the scene. It seemed everyone there was in high school. I didn’t even drink, I decided to drive them around. So the two of them sat in the back seat with two of the horny girls and another girl sat up front with me. I parked the car up above Salem and the two guys got really drunk and were making out, then a cop pulled into the road behind us. I threw out one of the gallons of wine and started to drive away but the other gallon was in the trunk and the cop turned on his overheads. As we stopped, the girls informed us that they were all out on probation from juvenile detention. When he came to the window I gave him my license, but when he said he wanted to search the car I said he didn’t have a search warrant so I wouldn’t let him. “That was pretty gutsy,” Jack said. “I was desperate,” I replied. “An MIP was an automatic suspension at Willamette University which meant I would have been drafted then and there. He said he could arrest us and take fingerprints from the bottle. He also told me that the property we had parked on was state prison property and it was against the law for us to be there, so he had the right to arrest us. I caved in and opened the trunk

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and there was the bottle of wine.” Jack grimaced and I went on. The cop made everyone get out then and try to walk a straight line. I did it just fine and I told the officer I hadn’t been drinking, that I was helping a friend celebrate before going to Vietnam. Jan was next and he was the worst. When it was his turn he fell face down on the ground. I helped him up. “Come on Jan, try to walk a straight line.” “Ahh, what do I care,” Jan said. “What’s he going to do to me? Put me in jail? That’d be great. Or even worse, send me to Vietnam? Where I might die? Well, I’m going there anyway!” He laughed so hard at his own joke that he dropped to his knees. “I don’t think he can walk a straight line, sir.” “Let’s let him try one more time,” the officer replied. He was a county sheriff, his car was green with a big county seal on it. County Mounty, we called them. I was very respectful. One of the girls said she had to go to the bathroom really bad, so he told her to go ahead and she wandered off. Jan got up and tried to walk again and this time made a couple of steps before laughing so hard at his joke again that he fell back on the ground. The officer quit testing him at that point. I guess he’d called for backup when he stopped us, that or he had a buddy that was bored. As I was helping Jack into the car I saw another police car turning off the gravel road toward us. As he turned his headlights flashed on something white and his car came to a complete halt. The

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girl had walked to the end of the road to take a leak and her butt was directly in front of the second policeman’s car. The lights were on high and he didn’t continue driving towards us until she had finished and stood up and pulled up her pants. At the time I thought it was funny, but now it strikes me the policeman violated her. This second policeman talked to the first, then the first one came back and talked with Jan and Brent about Vietnam. I visited with the second one, told him I was at Willamette in pre law and asked him who had won the UCLA game. I also told him I was scheduled to play hoops for Willamette but my kneecap got kicked out of place in practice, so I was out for the season. They conferred with each other privately and then came back and talked to me. The guy who stopped me told me to open the wine from the trunk and pour it out. When it was empty he told me to dispose of it properly, that he didn’t like teenagers throwing out half-full bottles of wine and littering state property. After that he just told me to safely drive everyone home. “He let you go?” Jack was incredulous. “Yeah.” “My God, you were lucky.” “I know. I’ve been grateful ever since.” “And what happened to your friend Jan?” “I don’t know. I’ve always been afraid to find out.” “You’ve never found out if he made it?” Jack asked. “Like I said, I had bad vibes about him,” I replied. “He and Kenny Wonder.”

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“Another guy?” “He was a room-mate in college and became a helicopter pilot when he graduated. He was really smart, but uncoordinated, like Harold Gant. I was worried he would die, and I lost touch with the friend who kept us together. So I’ve never known about him either.” “Ghosts,” Jack said. “Ten ghosts,” I replied. “The guys who went to war that I knew. Four dead — two in the war, one in training, one by his own hand. Two crippled, one bad, one medium, two others I didn’t tell you about who are just fine but aren’t friends anymore because of the war. And the last two, unknown to this day.” “You should look up the guys you don’t know about.” “I don’t want to know. I just want to think of them as alive,” I replied. “So that’s it?” “It’s not all the people I knew that went to war. It’s just the ones that went there that I knew before. There are others I met afterwards, but only after they came back.” “So how many people do you know altogether who went to Vietnam?” “Twenty-three, I figured it out once, and that includes bomber pilots, chopper pilots, Seals, all kinds of guys.” “Geez, I can see why you’re upset about the war, Allen. You knew a lot of guys there. But that was a long time ago. Have you ever thought of getting counseling about it?” “Counseling? No, why?” “What you did at Reynolds with your honesty routine

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wasn’t very sensible and it makes me worry that you’re feeling too guilty about things. You should talk to someone about all this. Maybe remove the guilt and deal with life rather than making a big resolution for honesty. It’s fine to be honest, but it can also be pretty damaging. I’m worried you’re going to get sued by Reynolds as a result of what you did. I don’t want you to make other mistakes.” “I’ll think about it.” We searched around until almost two in the morning and kept calling Gene’s room and our room. Dave wasn’t around and Erik never answered. “Erik’s at Darlene’s” Jack speculated when I hung up the phone. “I bet he thinks the cops are looking for him and he doesn’t want to go back to his room.” “What a great excuse to get together again,” I joked. Despite fear over Gene, we laughed. We got back to Jack’s room at two and were totally exhausted. Jack dropped on the bed without taking off his clothes. I said, “I’ll check on Gene’s room, go ahead and get some sleep.” He just waved his hand and I turned out the light. I knocked on Gene’s door and to my amazement he opened it, walked back into the room and lay on the bed. “What’s that, Gene?” I asked as I sat on the chair opposite the bed. But I didn’t need an explanation. I knew what it was and it gave me a sick feeling and a rush of adrenaline. It was his .357 magnum that he bought for protection against grizzlies when he was building roads in Alaska. He’d shown it to me the time he hid the dope in our

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picnic basket in the basement. I was astounded then that you could fly with a pistol up to Alaska, and he’d said you can take pistols anywhere as checked luggage, no problem. Now here it was, flown down in his luggage to Reno to be in his hands. “It’s my .357,” he said. He spun the chamber, placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I winced against the inhumanly loud noise my brain expected and thought I had gone deaf when it didn’t occur. The click was barely audible above the television’s noise. “I can’t believe I lost all my money from my land,” he said. “I’m lucky now, though. That was my twenty-second attempt and I still haven’t hit the bullet.” “What are you doing, Gene?” “Russian Roullette, to test my luck.” “Aww Jesus, Gene, don’t do this. It’s just money, you can make more.” “I lost all my money, didn’t I? I don’t have my trailer or my tools. I can’t make more. This javelin throwing shoulder hurts all the time, and I’m getting old.” “I tried to warn you, Gene. You were playing a three deck shoe. Counting doesn’t work.” “Why?” he asked in that same simple way as he had when I explained that Kronmiller had cheated him on his land. I tried to explain statistics. He listened and I think he finally understood that with triple the number of cards in the deck the advantage of counting cards was diminished, and in addition, you have to get triple the positive count

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before it meant you could expect good cards to follow. Actually, Gene’s pretty smart, but he was educated poorly. “So the odds weren’t with me when I was betting heavy on all those positive numbers, huh?” “I’m afraid not, Gene, plus nine in a triple deck is just like plus three on a single deck.” “But it was plus fifteen,” he objected. “Yeah, I admit that’s high, but Gene, all you know then is that the odds are good a Blackjack or something good will be dealt. And that’s what happened. It’s just that the dealer had the blackjack and not you. That’s just luck. Cards.” He pointed the gun at the window and pulled the trigger to nothing more than a click which didn’t stop me from wincing. “Reno’s window’s are even luckier than me,” Gene laughed. “Don’t Gene, that bullet could land somewhere and hurt someone.” “Yeah, this is much safer for everyone concerned.” He spun the chamber and returned the barrel to his mouth. It had to go off sooner or later. “Don’t Gene, you’re going to kill yourself.” I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up. I felt fear and anger and regret. I felt like I was looking down at the both of us from some higher vantage point while at the same time being in the room. It scared me. “That’s the general idea of Russian Roulette, sooner or later, you die” he took the gun out of his mouth to answer and it hung in front of him. “You’ve got a lot to live for, Gene. Don’t kill yourself.”

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“What the hell do you know about what I’ve got to live for? I thought God wanted me to build that Suicide Wall in Washington. The dream was so convincing. I sold my land and came down here to win more, like in the dream, and I was supposed to get seventy-five grand, and now I’ve lost all the money. All of it. I was only twelve grand away, too.” “Why did you need so much money, Gene?” “Have a competition, give a fifty-thousand dollar prize for an architectural design, within the general idea I told you about, of course, with the white wall and the apology plaque. I wanted a sculpture, too, something that showed the frustration of war, a medic, maybe, helping a wounded guy, or even a full-sized Huey dustoff and inside it you could see Kenny just like he was the last time I saw him, his legs and arms blown off. He was on morphine on the floor waving those God-damned stumps and looking sad at me. Then they took off. I’m glad he died before they landed. He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that. I don’t know, I think they need a statue of something really grand and powerful that would show that war is not great, but also show how we fought so hard to stop communism and actually did stop it. Maybe even a combat museum of Vietnam, while the stuff is still around. You know, it’s all going to be lost someday, there won’t be Huey’s or M-16’s or bloops or any of that stuff! I don’t think they’ll ever build a museum to Vietnam though, Allen. Everyone just wants to forget that war, like a bad dream. No one wants to honor us.” “Well Gene, there are other things you can do in life

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besides build that wall. Just don’t kill yourself. That’s a waste.” “Nope, I’ve failed, Allen. I can’t work with my shoulder. I can’t find a woman who’s willing to live with me after she gets to know me. I’m sick of being lonely and hoping things will get better. Nothing’s come through for me. Nothing. You have no idea what it’s been like to walk in my shoes, so don’t tell me there’s hope any longer. I got screwed by this country, I got screwed in Vietnam and Kronmiller screwed me on the land and you should have explained better about card counting, too. Now it’s over, man, game over. I’m checking out with my bros. I don’t want to go on like I have been.” The gun returned to his mouth. No! I had to talk, get him to talk. “You’re not the only one that’s been screwed over,” I said. “If Vietnam was the start of all your problems, just remember, it messed up my life too.” “You? How did it affect you? You didn’t go!” The gun came out of the mouth again so he’d have room to talk. It was a small victory. I had to talk him out of this. “When I was little I lived in Mill City, next to the movie house.” “The old one there? That big aluminum Quonset hut?” The gun moved further away. “With the weeping willow in the parking lot.” “We used to go there when I lived with my uncle Ray in Idahna,” he said. The gun was forgotten for the moment. “I used to go there on Friday nights,” I continued. “It

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cost a quarter to get in. I’d meet my friends there and we’d watch army movies. Then we’d go play army all day Saturday. I spent more time fighting Germans in my life than the actual length of World War II.” “I did the same thing,” Gene laughed. A good sign. Make him happy. “Did you see that one movie about the Rangers?” he asked. “I loved that movie. I played Rangers for weeks.” “I had a pretend M-1,” Gene replied. “Man, I had a whole arsenal. I used to get guns for Christmas, my parents would order them out of the Sears catalog. I had a sniper’s rifle and a bolt action rifle made of wood ...” “That’s what I had for my M-1,” Gene remembered. “The bolt broke and when I took it out the rifle looked like an M-1. So it became my M-1.” “We even made a machine gun,” I went on. “We got a two-by-four and stuck a piece of pipe in the end for the barrel and put some wagon handles on the other end. Then my dad gave me an old camera tripod and I got a bicycle chain for the bandolier and bullets and then I cut a hole in it for the chain to go through. We used to set it up in the forest on a ridge and fire at my friends attacking up-hill. We used to play Army for hours.” “It’s a heavy squad when you’re carrying a machine gun and a light squad if you aren’t,” Gene looked down at the gun. “It’s based on the firepower supplied by the machine gun. If we were ever ambushed, the first thing we were supposed to do after taking cover was locate the enemy and

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get the machine gun firing a suppression fire. You’re supposed to get the enemy overwhelmed by the volume of your firepower, so he has to take cover. Then you can start to move and flank them and kill them all.” He looked up at me with such a sad look on his face. “That doesn’t work against booby traps though.” “They wouldn’t fight in the open?” “The VC just left presents for us. Beer cans with grenades in them, pungi sticks, ambushes. You can’t blame them. We had them overwhelmed. Kenny got it from a booby trap. A grenade in a beer can with a wire across the trail.” I wanted him not to think about the war, to think about what I said about Vietnam wounding me. So I turned away from what he was saying. “You know, Gene, before Vietnam, when I was little, I believed in myself. I believed in America and in my parents and their friends that fought in the war and defeated Hitler. We were the good guys, the liberators, there wasn’t a bad guy that America couldn’t beat. If there was a war to be fought to liberate the oppressed, that would be my purpose in life. And then along came Vietnam and they wanted me to go there and, you know, how we talked last night about it? I decided it was a stupid war and I got out of going. But I don’t think I’ve believed in myself ever since. I didn’t answer my country’s call. I let my country down and I let myself down. Ever since I got out of the war I’ve felt disappointed in myself. That’s what I meant when I said I was screwed over by Vietnam like you were. It set up a

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situation where I was supposed to go to war and I wasn’t willing to go because it wasn’t worth it, so now I feel like I chickened out.” “You sound like a Navy buddy of mine who felt guilty because he served on a destroyer that shelled Vietnam instead of serving with us and humping the bush. He felt really guilty until I told him that the sweetest sound in the world was that incoming artillery when you were in a firefight. When he understood how much I appreciated what he and guys like him had done for me, he felt a lot better.” “But you know what, Gene? I’ve thought about this a lot and I have ended up getting really mad at my parents generation. Vietnam and how it happened was their fault. We were totally screwed over by the World War II generation.” “How’s that?” “Well think about it. Could you even vote when you went to Vietnam?” “No. Too young.” “Exactly. They could vote. They had political power. Their entire generation set us up with expectations about ourselves and what we could do. When we bailed out of Vietnam we felt shame. We lost our ability to believe in ourselves. They took away your life just like they did Kenny’s and mine. The World War II generation should have decided either not to fight at all in Vietnam, or be willing to do whatever it took to win. But they didn’t do either, they just allowed a long war where we were all

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supposed to go and fight but not do what it took to win, and as a result they deprived us of the life we could have led if there hadn’t been a war in Vietnam, or if they’d let us win.” “They are a bunch of liars,” Gene said. He was angry now, not depressed, and the gun was resting in his lap. A lump of metal with a horrible future, or no future at all, depending on Gene’s whim. “Liars?” “They made us think we should be like John Wayne, good and pure and noble. They made us believe they were John Wayne, just because they won World War II. But that’s a lie. You know why?” “No.” “Because they were a bunch of cowards. They bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. But the John Wayne way to end World War II would have been to invade Japan and fight their army man to man. But those cowards didn’t. They took the chickens way out and nuked a bunch of civilians. They felt guilty as hell for that. But that whole generation put on a sanctimonious mask and lied to themselves and the world and said what they did was good because they stopped Hitler and won the war. Hell, Hitler had already been defeated when we nuked Japan. Who can feel good about nuking innocent little kids and old people?” “They found babies still alive suckling on their dead mother’s breasts,” I observed. “But as horrible as that was, I wanted us to do the same thing to Hanoi.”

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“You really did?” “Damned right. Put an end to the war. But who do you think were the generals and leaders saying no to that? None other than the big WWII veterans!” He was gesturing now and then with the gun which was unnerving, but better than the depressed Gene of a few moments ago with a gun in his mouth. “That was our biggest problem, they tried to fight another WWII without being willing to use nuclear weapons to win it. Remember I told you I fought in a combined action platoon for most of my tour? That was invented by a young guy with a fresh perspective on jungle warfare, a Captain in Phu Bai by the name of John T. Mullin, Jr. The Combined Action Platoons could have controlled all of South Vietnam and won the war. We didn’t even need to nuke North Vietnam, just fight the war in a new way. But Westmoreland said he didn’t have enough troops to fight like Mullin suggested. But I read there were two thousand, five-hundred villages in South Vietnam in 1967. At fifteen marines a village we would have only needed 40,000 marines, plus our support people, to control the whole country. We would have won the war by denying the VC food and taxes.” “Why didn’t we?” I asked. “Because Westmoreland didn’t think that was how we could win the war. He wanted to fight the NVA in the mountains instead of just control Vietnam’s population. He wanted to win a war of attrition, just like in World War II. So he and all the WWII types in the Joint Chiefs decided that

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what we were doing in the CAP’s didn’t count as batallion days in the field. That was the management measuring tool Westmoreland’s staff came up with to say who was effective in winning the war. So a lot of Marines had to abandon the CAP program and go out on Search and Destroy missions, humping new terrain in the bush, trying to find the enemy. Otherwise they would have said we Marines weren’t measuring up and doing our job. I read there was a Marine Brigadier General, Frederick J. Karch of the 3rd Marine Division, who was at the meeting where they introduced the idea of batallion days in the field. He wrote that it was the turning point in the war, when there was a shift from pacification and control of the population that would have won the war, to a big splashy war that would eventually end up with a lot of dead Americans and disaster. Karch was right, they had to divert most of our Marines to chasing ghosts and getting killed by booby traps. As a result we never implemented a big enough CAP program, even though we knew it worked.” “For some management performance measurement standard, this batallion days in the field, we squandered a chance to win?” I asked. “Exactly.” I was horrified. I was the master of management tools, measurement standards, performance standards. I knew they were all a bunch of crap. I had just learned that we could have won the war in Vietnam, we knew a way, but the same mentality that had invented management measurement tools and set unions against management had

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dabbled its hand into warfare and wasted a generation in Vietnam. “That’s just a symptom,” Gene said. He’d completely forgotten about the gun, at least I hoped so. “It was a way of looking at the world, they still have it, Reagan had it, Bush had it, winning the big war, but in a fair way. But using nuclear weapons isn’t fair. I think their whole generation feels so guilty about the way they won against the Japanese that they have wanted to win a war the fair way ever since. So they took us out in the bush, dropped us off, told us to fight people we couldn’t find, and then said they wouldn’t bomb or invade Hanoi to win the war. Then to top it off, every person in that country from five on up shot at us or booby trapped us and we had to kill nearly everything that moved for fear of dying ourselves. Then bingo, we’re the bad guys and our country hates us for trying to stay alive. God! It’s not worth living in this country.” The gun came back up now. “So the My Lai massacre was justified?” I asked. It was a challenge now, turn the conversation the other way, make him defend what had happened. “Damned right, kill ‘em all, how did we ever know who was shooting at us from the trees? My cousin’s boyfriend, you know, Rex?” Mr. Paintball. “Yeah?” “He says a lot of the good paintball players at his field are eleven and twelve. Young guys are good fighters. Killing them is totally justified. But we didn’t have to do that. We should have just nuked North Vietnam a couple of times

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and got it over, not wasted one soldiers’ life.” “Like they did in Japan,” I said. “There it is.” Gene pointed the pistol at me. My asshole puckered up tight and I was really breathing hard as he waved it towards the window. “Those World War II soldiers’ lives were worth saving! It was worth bombing Japanese babies to save American lives, wasn’t it? That’s what they said to justify dropping it. But were we worth saving by dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi? No! We were shit! They wouldn’t bomb Vietnamese babies to save our lives. Those World War II bastards are a bunch of worthless sons-of-bitches. And you know what? They look down on us now because we supposedly lost that war. But I’ll tell you, I guarantee you I could have taken any ten of those World War II pussies out in the bush with me when they were in their prime and they would have been peeing their pants by nightfall. We were fighting ghosts. And we could do it man, no doubt about it. We outgreased the gooks ten-to-one in the bush, on their terms. We were the best soldiers America ever had. Ever! And they say we lost that war! Those World War II chicken shit officers lost the war, if you want to call it a loss. And I lost all my friends. All because those World War II chicken shits didn’t want to feel guilty for nuking Hanoi. It was too easy, they felt guilty about beating Japan because it was too easy.” “Just like Desert Storm. It was too easy. No noble struggle,” I offered.

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“Well I’m sick of how they treated us and how they just walk around in parades now and smile and act like they won their big war and we’re just shit for giving up in the Nam. So unless you can think of some other great reason besides your getting screwed over by Vietnam too, I’m going to do something positive about my life. End it.” I looked at that evil gun in his hand and the five bullets on the table next to him. “Give me the gun, Gene.” “No way, man. It’s my gun.” “I’m not going to take it away, I’m going to take my chances too.” “What?” “You’re the one who said I don’t know shit about life because I haven’t been shot at. Well now I’m going to learn. Maybe then you’ll respect me and listen to me. If I can still talk.” “You’d really do that?” “Yup.” I’d do it for him. To save him. It was like going to Vietnam to save Gene. I’d finally do it, finally show him that I had the guts and I liked him enough, loved him enough, to risk my life for him. “Here you go, man.” He sat up and spun the gun around, giving it to me handle first. I took it and raised it towards my mouth. “Spin it first,” he advised. “I just hit an empty chamber remember? It reduces your odds not to spin. That’s the warning you didn’t give me about three deck blackjack my friend.”

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“Oh God!” I said. I spun the chamber. Then I had an odd clarity. A vision of truth. “You know, Gene, what you said about the World War II generation?” “Yeah?” “I think that we were the sacrifice of that generation. The blood sacrifice they made to atone for the guilt they felt about nuking Japan.” “Do you think so?” “Yup. They offered up their sons to fight the land war in Asia that they didn’t fight themselves. Vietnam was the sacrificial atonement for nuking Japan.” “They sacrificed their children, the thing most precious to them, to atone for their guilt,” Gene added. I put the barrel in my mouth. My hands shook and I had hot flashes. I didn’t have to do this at all. But I did. The odd thing was, that as the barrel touched my lips, it tasted of oil. Gene keeps his guns clean. The taste of the oil was in my saliva and I wondered if I should swallow it. It couldn’t be good for me. There might be germs in it. So I pulled the barrel back away from my lips and made a little ball of spit that I collected in my cheek for spitting out after I pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. “Oh man, you do have balls!” Gene said, standing up. “Hah! Look at you!” He smiled as he pointed at my crotch and I looked down. I’d peed my pants. “Jesus,” I said. I cackled in a high pitched voice and adrenaline zoomed through me. I was alive! It hadn’t gone off. “You didn’t have to pee, you know,” Gene said, reaching

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for the gun. “You’re not going to shoot yourself, are you Gene?” “No way.” I gave him the gun. “What do you mean, I didn’t have to pee?” “It was empty, see.” He tipped it back and emptied the chambers. A casing fell to the floor. “For safety I always keep the hammer on an empty shell casing. I just took out the live shells and kept the spent shell in the chamber. I’d spin and pull and see if I would have died. And for twentytwo times in a row I didn’t.” I hit him in the jaw as hard as I could. I’m a big guy but peaceful and I haven’t hit anyone since the sixth grade. Never needed to, I got so big no one picked a fight with me. It was an uppercut and he wasn’t expecting it and it connected perfectly, absolutely perfectly. He shot up and backwards and I saw his eyes roll back in his skull as he collapsed on the bed. The gun clunked on the carpet. I wanted to hit him again but he just lay there limply. “Gene?” I asked, holding my hand. My knuckles felt mushy and it hurt so bad I was crying. I knelt beside him. Guys have been killed by one punch, I’ve read somewhere. “Gene?” I shook him but he just lay there, limp, as if all life had gone. “Water, that’s it.” I got up and found the plastic ice bucket, filled it with water and threw it on his face, just like the movies. And just like the movies he sputtered and woke up. “You all right?” I asked, grabbing my knuckles again.

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He started to come around. He moaned, then said, “God you hit hard, that was the hardest I’ve been hit in my life.” “Really?” I asked, feeling proud. “Military training and bar fights and everything?” “Yup,” he replied, holding his jaw and struggling to his feet. “You really did it, didn’t you.” “Hit you?” “No, put a loaded gun in your mouth and played Russian Roulette to gain my respect.” “But it wasn’t loaded, you just showed me.” “You thought it was loaded, didn’t you?” “Of course.” “Then it was loaded. What you think, that’s what matters.” “But you said earlier that wasn’t true. Remember, when I was scared about the ski lift?” “Well, I lied because I’m an asshole and I knew it would hurt your feelings,” He was still holding his jaw. “What matters is that in your mind you believed you were taking that risk for me.” “I didn’t want you to kill yourself, Gene. You’re my friend.” “Semper Fi,” he replied, putting out his hand to shake. We shook, and I said, “Always faithful, I know. I came close to being a Marine remember? I admired that branch of the service the most.” “You are a Marine, Al.” “But I never joined, I never went to Vietnam,” I protested. “There’s not many Marines I know that would have

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stuck a loaded gun in their mouth to talk me out of suicide. You’ve got a lot of guts, man. I’m going to call you Marine the rest of my life.” His words washed over me like a redemption. It could only come from him, someone who’d been there. He was saying I was his equal as a man. Tears welled in my eyes as the emotion came out, all the guilt, the self-condemnation for thinking I was a coward all these years. But I wasn’t. I’d proved myself. I was a man. He came over and hugged me, then helped me sit on the bed. It was gentle, tender, a side I’d never seen. He got me a glass of water. “Sorry I did that to you,” he said at last. “It was mean of me, I have a mean streak.” “Mean Gene, my kids call you.” “They’re right.” We were quiet a long time, the stinging tears and the water helped. I felt a warm glow all over. “You’re not going to kill yourself now are you?” I asked. “I’m afraid of heights. I can’t jump off a bridge for you.” We laughed. “No. You risked your life for me. I have to honor that by keeping alive.” I wondered if that was from the Indian blood in his family, or a personal code he’d developed. In either case, it was fine with me. “I want to help you work on your wall, Gene. I think it should be built.” “You do?”

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“Yup. I’m not working now, and Jeri said I should just winter. I’ll help you get that wall built.” “How can we, how can I, without money?” “You can live with us. We’ll find another trailer. One that we can afford, not as nice as what you had, I’m afraid. And we’ll put you in a vacant spot. Then you and I can start working on this. There’s veterans’ groups on the computer networks. Believe me, there’s a lot of people out there who would like to see this built. We can raise money through donations and get other people to help raise everyone’s consciousness about the idea.” “Then maybe my vision in the dream was true.” “How’s that?” “The important thing wasn’t winning the money. It was getting the wall built. I think that’s going to happen now, if you’re behind it. You’re the persistent type.” He was right. One of my strongest personality traits is persistence. I hate quitting. Once I decide I’m going to do something, I succeed by wearing down the opposition. “Thanks. I won’t let you down. And we can find work for you too, Gene. There’s other work you can do besides physical work that bothers your shoulder.” “I’ll give it a shot. I like outdoors work, though.” “There’s easier outdoor work.” We shook hands on our arrangement and I turned to leave for my room. “Oh, you didn’t lose all your money. Rex saved these out for you.” Gene took the two pink chips. His eyes opened wide

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like he could go down and use that to win more money and I worried for a second that I should have given it to him on the plane. “This is great,” Gene said. “This is a new trailer that I can live in.” He had a big smile on his face. Gene was going to be all right. He opened his closet door to hide the chips in his luggage and there was the suit. He still hadn’t returned it, although at least he’d hung it up. I figured the car was probably still in the garage, racking up charges on my Visa. I was too tired to say anything. I went to my room. I was exhausted. But I had a new purpose in my life. A noble purpose. I was going to build a wall in Washington, D.C. White and pure marble, with gold lettering that remembered forever the veterans of the Vietnam war that committed suicide. I was still shaking from the scare of the gun.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN The room was completely black and I thought Dave was trying to get ahead on his sleep, but when I turned on the bathroom light and looked around the corner, he wasn’t there. I went to the door connecting the two rooms. Erik was gone and so was Jack, which surprised me. I figured for sure he’d be on the bed sacked out. It was like Midsummer’s Night Dream, things were happening and no one was where they were supposed to be. Except me, and being in my room alone and awake I felt as if there was a party going on somewhere that I hadn’t been invited to. Feeling lonely made me think of Shana. She never minded waking up in the middle of the night to have sex, so I figured it was all right to call her. But she wasn’t in, which depressed me more. She was probably shacking up with that young guy from work. I left a message on her machine. “Hi, Shana. It’s me. I don’t know if you saw me at Jake’s the other night. I was there. I heard through the grapevine you aren’t interested in me any more. I guess that’s why you were with that guy. You probably heard by now that I was fired. This is difficult for me, I’ve never had an affair before, so I don’t know how one is supposed to end. Even if this is over, I’d like to see you one more time. I liked you, no I can honestly say I loved you. I’m in Reno with my buds. I think I told you we go every year during the

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Superbowl. How about we get together early next week? I’ll call you Monday. Bye.” I felt kind of dirty and ashamed after calling. After all, I was supposed to be finished with her. But I have to admit it got my blood pounding, thinking about her and what we’d do if she was here. A wave of fatigue came over me and I lay down on the bed to rest until Dave came in. That was it, I’d do something with Dave, if he wanted, when he came in. I’ve only had a dream like this one once before. When I was in the third grade I’d played around a yellow jacket nest in the siding of our house, poking it with a straightened out metal coat hanger. I made an elaborate head mask for protection out of a brown paper bag and cellophane, and wore a heavy winter coat and gloves and jeans. At first the yellow jackets got all over me and stung my coat but they didn’t hurt me and I just kept bugging their nest. After awhile I realized they weren’t even coming out or landing on me and since it was a hot summer’s day, I started shedding clothing until I was down to my standard 1957 summer uniform of Converse tennis shoes, blue jeans and white T-shirt. Then they decided to attack me. I got stung twenty-one times and the neighbors — my mother was working and my Dad was gone — had to put baking soda all over me. That night I’d had a dream that a yellow jacket was flying right in front of my mouth and was just going to land on it and sting my lips but I couldn’t wake up. I reached a state of full consciousness but still had no control over my body. I was inside my body, perfectly awake, but unable to

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open my eyes. And all the time there was a yellow jacket threatening my lips. I screamed when I woke up. Now the dream was the same, but different. Now I held Gene’s pistol in my mouth and my right thumb was squeezing the trigger. My right arm and hand were working perfectly but they were doing something I didn’t want them to do. My left arm and the entire rest of my body were paralyzed and I couldn’t reach out and stop my right hand. My eyes were closed, but I could see the hammer going back as I had seen the pistol do earlier in the evening. The hammer snapped down and this time the gun wasn’t empty. There was a live shell in the chamber. My brain watched the whole thing in slow motion, like high speed photography of a pistol firing. The primer went off, then the gasses started to expand and the bullet started moving down the barrel. It was slow at first, but gained speed rapidly and the bullet was finally a blur as seen from the side. Then the viewpoint backed up and now it was showing my teeth and my tonsils. The bullet went in above the little hangy downy thing and into my throat then into my brain and out the back of my head carrying with it the remnants of my throat and my life and its memories and finally my lungs were working and I screamed as loud as I could — a scream from the bottom of my stomach. I woke up not only Dave but Erik and Jack in the next room. “Jesus, are you all right?” Dave asked, looming over me. The scream wouldn’t stop for a few seconds even though I knew it was Dave and I was alive and everything was fine.

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It was like my body had a will of its own and my conscious mind had nothing to do with its decision to scream. Jack and Erik ran into the room, which made me stop screaming and start laughing because Erik had a partial hard-on. Jack and Dave looked where I was pointing and started to laugh too, then Jack came over and asked what was wrong, so I told them the whole story of what happened in Gene’s room. They were all shaken up. “I thought I was going to kill myself.” “You were brave,” Dave said. “And totally insane,” Jack added. “You’ve got to see a counselor, Allen. Attempting suicide with someone is no way to talk that person out of suicide.” “It worked with Gene, didn’t it?” “Maybe for the time being. That boy’s got problems.” “Did you see anyone at the end of a white tunnel in your dream?” Erik joked. “The first end of anything I noticed was your hard-on, Erik.” “I am surprised that Happy Mike can do that after the last two nights.” Erik looked down at himself. “Down boy, down. Rest.” We all laughed hard. It felt good to be alive. “By the way, Dave, where were you when I came into the room?” I asked. “You don’t like gambling. Was there another karate match?” He smiled and said, “I personally delivered your donations, boys.” We couldn’t remember for a second, then Jack said.

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“You dog! A widow!” “I’m as low as they go,” Dave hung his head down and we laughed. “I think Gene is definitely Manic Depressive,” Jack pronounced when we settled down. “He’s crazy, he needs help.” “But he also went from way up to $25,000 down,” Erik offered. “Anyone would be depressed by that.” “He lost more than that,” I said. “That money was his trailer, his tools, his land.” “But if you’re sane you don’t let setbacks like that make you suicidal,” Jack argued. “First of all, you don’t believe that God will make you win and therefore you don’t bet all your money. I bring down one-thousand in gambling money, and I’m worth way more than twenty-five thousand dollars. You have to have a budget, and stop when it’s gone. Gene went over the edge.” “But he seemed fine when I left him. You think he needs help?” I asked. “I don’t know. I’ve got a friend, a psychiatrist at Good Sam, I’ll call him in the morning,” Jack offered. “You mean the morning, like right now? It’s 5:30,” Erik said. The curtains were shut and he went to open them. The view was of the mountains west of Reno. You could see the night skiing lights of Mt. Rose up there in the winter. They were off now though, the sky was glowing behind us and the hills were lighting up. “Oh no,” Jack groaned. “Let’s go skiing!” Dave said.

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“Oh great,” I replied. Years ago, I would have gone, but that was when I hadn’t skied much and I wanted to experience the mountain. But no new adventures were waiting for me now. “Not today,” I said. “I’ve got to rest. Besides, I want to watch the Superbowl and gamble some more.” “Come on you pussy,” Dave said. “I’ll never get back to sleep.” “Yeah, Al, sleep at home. We’re your buds. What the heck, it’s our trip of the year,” Erik said. “Count me out,” Jack said. “I’m with Al. I need some rest. Tomorrow will be a day from hell at the office. I’d rather gamble and watch the game.” Erik and Dave looked at each other. “I guess we’re the macho men.” “I’ll go if you carry my skis to the lodge,” Erik joked. “Oh no! I was going to ask you, I’ve got a screwed up arm, remember?” “I know,” Erik laughed. “Can you believe how good a skier I am, going with this bad arm?” Dave asked. “I’m way better than you, Allen.” “No you’re not, Dave. You’re just dumber than me.” “If I’m so dumb, why is it I’m employed and you’re out of work?” “Well, that’s true, but I sure wouldn’t go skiing with a shredded bicep. You should be in a hospital right now, not on a ski slope. What are you trying to prove?” Jack piped up. “You know, he’s right, Dave. That tendon needs to be reattached pretty soon or it starts to die

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due to lack of blood. Then they have a hard time reattaching it because they have to stretch the muscle until you get to the live part. Already they might have to bore through the bone and pull the tendon completely through to reattach it.” I don’t know if all that Jack said was true, but it had an effect, because Dave kind of looked sheepish and ill at the same time, and said to Erik, “Maybe they’re right. I should take it easy today.” “Then I and Happy Mike are going to return to dreamsville,” Erik said. “How come she didn’t let you spend the night, Erik?” I asked. “I told her I was married, after we were all done.” “See, Jack,” we shared a glance. “Guilt leads to honesty.”

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CHAPTER TWELVE We all slept in until ten, then woke Gene and went down to the Sunday brunch. We offered to buy him breakfast and were friendly and supportive on the way to the restaurant. It felt wonderful to stuff myself and not go skiing. But an awkward silence developed around Gene. I mean, how are you supposed to act around someone who lost so much money and was suicidal? No one talked about what happened last night, which reminded me about Vietnam. No one wanted to talk about that either. We made pleasant chit chat — skiing, and the Superbowl. Then Erik had an idea. “Hey Gene, how’d you do in that Lakers game?” “Bulls won.” “Did you make the spread?” “I think so.” “Did you cash in your ticket yet?” “Damn! It’s in my wallet. I never cashed it in!” “Another two grand, Gene. Things are looking up.” I was excited for him. “I just take it to the payoff window at CalNeva?” “And don’t play anything on the way in or out.” “Not me,” Gene said. “Today I’m going to play all my change. Just have fun.” Gene and I high-fived as he left and all of us relaxed when he was gone.

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“You never called Jeri to get a copy of your report for me did you?” Jack asked. “No.” “I don’t want to bug you about it, but I really need to see it. Call her, Allen. My intuition is bothering me. When you go up against a big corporation and they get pissed off, it’s like fighting the government. They have endless money and you don’t.” “Tell me they can’t sue me,” I said. “They fired me for God’s sake. Isn’t that their pound of flesh?” “Anyone can sue anyone, Allen,” Jack said ominously. I called Jeri and she was irritated. It was Sunday morning and she likes to sleep in. She said she’d fax the report, but I was stupid to worry. She also said Burt had called Saturday and was surprisingly friendly. He wanted me to call him. It seemed odd he’d be friendly if they were getting ready to sue me. As she woke up and talked she got less grumpy and started asking how things were going. I kept the conversation on skiing and gambling and didn’t mention Gene. I wasn’t prepared to tell her about sticking a pistol in my mouth. She was friendly and lovey and I realized I shouldn’t have called Shana again. Jeri was making me feel better about life. Helping me survive. As I walked back to breakfast I remembered the gun barrel in my mouth and tasted the oil again. “She’s faxing it.” “Great,” Jack said. “Don’t look so depressed, Allen.

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They haven’t sued you yet.” But it wasn’t the lawsuit. It was that taste in my mouth. It wouldn’t go away. I didn’t feel like gambling so everyone except Erik left for the casinos. “That was something, what you did for Gene,” Erik said between sips of coffee. “It was crazy.” “You said last night you did it because you felt guilty about not going into the service?” “Yeah, and to reach out to Gene.” “I’m curious. What was it like to live under the draft? I was born in the ‘60’s so I hardly remember anything about Vietnam, except my dad and mom watching TV and being angry.” “The draft was weird,” I replied. “Especially if you got a deferment for being in college, because if you did anything to lose your deferment it meant you were off to Vietnam as a grunt with a good chance of getting wounded or killed. It’s like disaster was close at hand for the smallest of rules being broken. I had friends that lost their scholarships and ended up going to Vietnam. All they did was lose their scholarship. That should have been the end of their consequences. But no, it meant you went to war. The same thing for getting a minor in possession of alcohol. You could get kicked out of school for that. So it added an edge, made you appreciate your life because it was held together by such fragile threads.”

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“It sounds like a friend of mine that was on probation,” Erik observed. “Probation?” “Yeah, for a drug offense. They put him on probation. He couldn’t do much of anything, especially commit another crime, even a minor crime, or he’d go to the slammer. So when he did drugs after that, he was super cautious not to get caught. He cherished his freedom.” “Freedom, that’s the word. Our freedom was always in jeopardy.” “You were all on probation,” Erik said. “For years.” “How long did the war last?” “From when I was 2, in 1950, to when I was 28, in 1975. “Geez, it started in 1950? I thought it was a ‘60’s thing.” “Truman sent 35 advisers to Vietnam in 1950, so it wasn’t really a major involvement until the ‘60’s, but it was America’s longest war. “I’m glad I wasn’t old enough to be drafted.” “There were 27 million men who were eligible for the draft. But in the entire war, about 3.3 million served, so it was a pretty small percentage of guys that actually had to go.” “How do you know all this stuff?” “Like I said, I’ve felt guilty about it for years. I read everything I could find about the war. One thing I found out that amazed me was at the time of the war Vietnam had the seventh largest population in the world, around forty million — just behind France.” “Man, I always thought it was this dinky, nowhere place.”

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“Small country, lots of people.” “Tough place to fight.” “Damn right. Kublai Khan tried to conquer it in 1257, and that war dragged on for 27 years. Finally, he sent in 500,000 Mongol warriors. The Vietnamese were out manned and had worse weapons, but they fought a guerilla war as they retreated south, and let the heat and disease and poor supplies eat up the Mongols. They made their last stand in 1284 along the banks of the Bach Dang River. They set a bunch of iron spikes in the water at low tide, then lured the Mongol ships in at high tide. When the tide went out, the ships were impaled and most of them sank. The Vietnamese killed most of the survivors.” “Geez. Tricky bastards.” “They were one of the few countries able to repel the Mongols. What’s amazing is, the Vietnamese used the same iron spike tactic in the same spot three-hundred-fifty years earlier against the Chinese and succeeded then too.” “What a history,” Erik observed. “They’ve almost been bred by survival of the fittest to win guerilla wars.” “Maybe,” I laughed. “All I know is we weren’t the first to get bogged down over there. After the Mongols, the Chinese occupied the country and the Vietnamese fought a guerilla war at night and won. The guy that beat the Chinese, Le Loi, is almost as popular in Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh. His lessons weren’t lost when they kicked out the French in the 1950’s.” “Man, I’m glad I was born too late to get involved in that whole thing,” Erik said as we got up to leave. “Twenty-

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seven-million men, all on probation — the biggest probation in history.” We went into the casino and found Jack and Dave. They’d looked around for the prettiest dealer and were playing roulette for a quarter a play and flirting with her. It was getting close to noon so I suggested we pack up and move into Mickey’s room to watch the game. I called to confirm we were coming. “Mickey, Allen here.” “Superbowl!” he yelled. “49er’s” I yelled back. “Have you seen Chuck?” he asked. “Your buddy, the older guy?” “He never came back to the room last night. I’m worried about him.” “He pulled an all-nighter and he’s seventy-two?” “Seventy-three.” “I hope I can do that when I’m seventy-three. Cause I can’t now,” I joked. When we got to Mickey’s the pre-game show was blaring. The overstuffed chairs and one of the beds had been dragged from the corner and spaced around the TV. I introduced Mickey and he told us to sit wherever we wanted except he needed the chair by the table. It was covered with betting slips from CalNeva, football magazines and a yellow notepad full of numbers and names. “Mickey, what is all this?” “Bets, running all the bets,” he said, putting on black

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reading glasses. “I’ve got ten buddies that wanted me to make bets for them. Not easy bets, points bets, like overs and unders.” “What’s that?” “Where you win if both teams point totals are less than the unders or higher than the overs.” “So you hope for a slow game or a blowout.” “And there’s tons of other ways, Cal Neva has thirty different bets working today, other places have more.” “Did Chuck show?” “He’s in bed, over there.” “Hi, Allen!” Came a cheerful voice from a bed jammed in the corner. “Chuck, where were you?” “I met some young dollies and we played Keno all night.” “Geez, Chuck, you better take it easy,” I advised. “You could have a heart attack.” “I can’t,” he replied just as cheerfully as before. “You can’t? What do you mean?.” “I had a triple bypass six months ago — cleaned out all my pipes. I can’t have a heart attack for at least three or four years.” I was astounded. If I’d had triple bypass surgery I would be eating mung beans and rice and praying a lot. “It was great, Allen. They were beautiful girls. We sat down there in the Keno room and they sat on both sides of me. We flirted and gambled and rubbed elbows from midnight to eight. Then I bought them breakfast and they

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went to their room.” Chuck half sat up in bed. “I felt like I was 18 again. It was great.” “But what about your sleep, Chuck?” “Hell, I’ll sleep at home where nothing’s going on.” I couldn’t argue. But somehow it made my Birkenstocks and yoga seem weak, my heart-healthy eating seem hesitant. Chuck was doing what I had done with the Cobra and Shana. Lived. Moved forward. Gone for it. I can’t remember what team the Fortyniners played, but the game never lives up to its hype. All I remember is Mickey and Chuck sitting at the table writing down the score with each touchdown or extra point, then moaning in agony or high-fiving. My mouth seemed to have that gun oil taste in it, so I found my luggage and brushed my teeth twice to make it go away. The game got down to the last few seconds. By that time Chuck had explained to us that he was in an office betting pool and if San Francisco scored and made the extra point, they would have a point total that ended in the number nine and he would win four thousand dollars. Someone for San Francisco caught the ball in the end zone, they made the extra point and the game ended. Chuck had won $4,000. We all hopped around the room, and Chuck jumped up and down on his bed. I don’t know why I was so happy, I’d bet on the Fortyniners but they hadn’t made the point spread, so I lost. My team won, but I lost. I had to brush my teeth once more to get rid of the oil taste before we checked out.

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Gene and I sat together on the ride home, at the back of the plane, alone. I told him about the gun dream and about how it was scaring me that I couldn’t stop thinking about the pistol in my mouth, especially the taste of the oil. “That’s why a lot of them commit suicide,” Gene said. “They keep thinking about what they did or how close they came to dying or about friends who died and how they didn’t. They can shut the thoughts off for awhile by drinking or sex or dope....” “Marijuana?” “Bingo,” Gene smiled. “My drug. But eventually you sober up and there it is, the kid in the village you shot because he wouldn’t stop when you told him to halt, the guy you shoved out of the helicopter, the nights out there waiting, a friend with his intestines hanging out like sausage.” I felt sick. “It never goes away. I hope your nightmare goes away. Mine never have.” “What are yours?” “I told you, watching Kenny in that dustoff lying on his back, waving the stumps of his arms and legs, looking at me. It’s crazy isn’t it? How could it blow off his arms and legs and not even touch his face? His face was dirty, but it was as perfect as a baby. And his eyes were so sad.” Gene became angry. “That’s why I want that apology plaque up there in Washington D.C. You know? Why did Kenny die? I remember when I first got there I thought

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Vietnam was so beautiful. White beaches, azure sea, cobalt sky, jungle like an emerald. And we were blowing the whole damned thing to hell! For what? I want that plaque by the wall to read,” “We are sorr y that we thought so little of our soldiers that we weren’t willing to drop the bomb to save their worthless lives. e W are sorry to be so sor ry assed stupid as to how to fight in Vietnam.” He paused, then looked at me. “I visited Kenny’s parents a couple of years after I got back. I didn’t know them very well. I went to Bend High School, he went to Prineville. We played football against each other and didn’t meet until afterwards, when he was living in Bend and partying. His parents had three flags flying outside their house when I drove up. I hadn’t expected that and it got to me. The U.S. flag, the state flag and the Marine Corps flag, big ones on nice poles that extended from the roof over the front porch. They had me in for a big dinner and wanted to know all about Kenny and what Vietnam was like. There were big pictures, eight-by-tens, of Kenny playing football in high school, at the Prom with a beautiful girl, playing baseball, swimming, riding his bike. Then another whole wall of pictures when he was little with his blonde hair and suntan and smile. I didn’t tell them how he looked when he died, or what happened. I just said he was killed instantly by a booby trap while he was walking point.” “His dad liked the fact that Kenny was good enough to be on point. I told his Dad stories about Kenny that made

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him real proud. He’d been a Marine in World War Two.” “That’s why you can never build an apology plaque like you’re talking about, Gene. It would kill his parents to have the government apologize for that war. Their belief that their son died for something is the only thing they have, the only hope they can cling to for the death of their son.” “You’re right,” Gene agreed. “Too many people lost too much in that war. To them it can’t be a mistake, their brains won’t allow it to be a mistake. A son, a friend, a leg, their lives, their eyes, their babies all twisted up from agent orange. How can all those people be convinced that the only thing left to them — that we were fighting a good fight, is a lie?” “They can’t Gene. They let their sons go because they loved their country so much. It makes me wonder about what we were talking about, the other night, when I said Vietnam was a blood sacrifice for not invading Japan.” “I think you were right.” “But I don’t think it was the parents’ fault, just the leaders of the country.” “Why do you say that?” “Well, all those parents, from World War II, when Vietnam started heating up in the ‘60’s and we sent in troops, probably none of them believed that we would lose and their sons would come to harm. Vietnam seemed so small and far away. How could they defeat us or kill our soldiers? We’d won World War II, for criminey sakes. We could beat some backwards little country in two days.” “Which was right, if we had tried.”

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“But our parents didn’t set the policy. The Generals and politicians did. Our parents were loyal Americans and went along, obeying their leaders in wartime. Which is what you’re supposed to do. Remember I said I was mad at my parents’ generation. I’m not anymore. Vietnam wasn’t their fault. It was the leaders. And my parents generation weren’t cowards for nuking Japan, because they didn’t vote to nuke Japan. Their leaders did it and told them afterwards.” “So are you saying that because no one’s to blame for the Nam we can’t have an apology plaque between the two walls?” “We can have a plaque,” I said. “I have an idea what it should say. Something that would respect Kenny’s folks.” “What?” Gene asked. “I need to write it down.” He went to the can and when he came back I showed him an envelope I’d scrawled on. “We the people of the United States of America, do declare that the war in Vietnam was fought without resolve. The people of the United States of America hereby pledge that America shall never again risk the lives of its soldiers in a war unless it is willing to prosecute that war with full resolve, even if that means the eventual use of weapons of mass destruction to end that conflict successfully. No soldiers shall be risked unnecessari,lyno soldiers shall be left behind, no war shall betestar d that will not be won by whatever means necessary. iThe etnamV Veterans who fell in combat and killed themselves waafter rds shall be our nation’s pledge that we will no longer go to war without esolvre.”

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Gene looked at me, then reached out his hand. “We can build a plaque with this on it, Allen. I know we can. No one can be against this. And it’s better than an apology, it’s a warning to future generations. If future lives can be spared by this, then Vietnam was not completely in vain.” “All the dead will have become a blood sacrifice to prevent a future Vietnam.” “The plaque will be in the middle, between the white wall and the black wall,” Gene said. “Between those who killed themselves and those who were killed in the field. Then the suicides will stop.” “And maybe bad wars.”

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN It was Monday morning, so I drove downtown to Jack’s office. It’s in the Benjamin Franklin tower. I call it that, actually it’s the KOIN tower now. It’s named after a TV station that uses it as headquarters. But the building was developed for Benjamin Franklin Savings and Loan, which I used as a little kid for my savings. They went under about ten years ago and had to sell the building. Going under. Going bankrupt. Going broke. I hadn’t slept well the night before. Once I got back to Portland the threat of the lawsuit seemed more real. Jack had asked for all the ownership papers too, and when we got in Sunday night he drove me home and got copies of everything from Jeri. Don’t worry, Jeri had said. All you have to do is winter. That was easy for her to say. I worried all night! Even woke up at three am instead of four-thirty. As well as worrying about the lawsuit I still found myself remembering the gun in my mouth, tasting the oil. The more I tried not to think about the gun, the more I thought about it. When I finally forgot about it, just like when the plane took off yesterday, wham, I’d realize I wasn’t thinking about it, be happy and the memory would come zooming back into my head. Then I’d get a big surge of fear running through me, thinking how it could have been loaded, the bullet in my chamber. It scared me that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

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I drove into the underground parking garage in Jack’s building. It cost $11.95 for all day, or $4.00 an hour. Four an hour — some people barely make that much in their jobs. It was starting already — our money would be gone. We were going under. I wouldn’t have a job, we wouldn’t own our own home, the kids would be in public school, Jeri’d be working her ass off selling houses. As I parked the car I wondered if Dave or Erik could use me. Normally I banter confidently with Jack’s receptionist when I wait for him. She gets me coffee then tells me her new jokes. I didn’t feel like joking today. She left me alone when she saw my mood. “Jack can see you now,” she said. Jack came out behind her and shook my hand. I don’t think we’d ever done that before — we’re buddies. He escorted me to his office. He works on the sixth floor in a large suite overlooking the Willamette river. Between him and the river is a big grassy park where people hang out, Waterfront Park. It was sunny and warm, a premature hint of spring. Lots of people were there, walking and sitting on the grass. Jack had some powerful binoculars on his desk, and as he walked around the desk he looked out at the river. “My goodness!,” he exclaimed. I looked out towards Mt. St. Helens, wondering if it was erupting again. He took the binoculars and pointed towards the river, then offered them to me. “Look, there, in the white, by the Alexis Hotel.” It took me a second, then I saw her. She was young and

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blonde and eating lunch. She wore a short skirt. “Beautiful, huh?” he sat back at his desk. “Yeah, nice.” I wasn’t interested. I was too scared about going broke to be interested in women. “Hold my calls, Janice,” Jack said into the intercom. Here it comes — we’re screwed. “I was amazed, Allen, looking through these documents Jeri gave me. First of all, after seeing the report you wrote, you’ve got some major liability problems. You make it clear that there will be a market for the aluminum and it’s not from tank armor. You’d be screwed in court.” I reached out with my hand still sore from hitting Gene and picked up a little box on Jack’s desk. The box was red and had Pick Me Upprinted on it. A loud, whiny voice came out of it and said, “Unhand me!” “It’s a joke, Allen. Don’t play now. This is important.” What did I care? I was screwed. Time just had to pass for me to become a bonafide screwee. “Allen, these other papers of Jeri’s are what really amaze me.” “Why?” “Well, you’ve always told me that you were co-owners of the park. But do you remember she had another attorney close this deal? I never saw the papers. Anyway, I found out that you aren’t an owner at all.” “What do you mean? We own it together.” “No you don’t, Allen, you don’t own it together. It’s in Jeri’s name.” “In her name?” “Not exactly, it’s a partnership, the architect owns a

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small piece of it, I guess she gave it to him?” “She didn’t feel his fee was enough, so she paid him more in ownership. He’s always been happy about it.” “Anyway, all the rest, 97% is hers.” “Well, that doesn’t matter does it? I mean we’re married.” “Allen, Oregon’s not a community property state. If it’s not jointly owned, it’s not yours. So don’t go getting divorced.” “Why not?” I wasn’t going to, but I didn’t like him telling me what to do. “You can if you want,” he sensed my defensiveness. “But don’t expect to see any money out of that park.” “Why not? I’d get half, I worked on it.” “You might get back wages as a settlement, but you sure wouldn’t get half.” “Christ, that’s terrible,” I said. I’d been screwed by my own wife. “No it’s not, it’s great!” Jack argued. “Why?” “Well, you’re not worth much more than your own savings and checking accounts. Reynolds isn’t going to come after you for that. You’re not worth suing.” Not worth suing. There was the truth of my life. I wasn’t even worth suing. “So just sit tight. They may threaten you, if they think you own half the park, but it will settle down once they see it’s hopeless.”

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I left Jack’s office and headed for lunch with Shana. I’d called her in the morning after I left home. She wanted to get together. I felt good and bad. I wasn’t going to be sued, but I wasn’t worth suing. Shana and I always used to go downtown because most of the people we know never go there. So we went to Roses Bakery because they usually put us in a big booth with lots of privacy. I had to wait in the lobby awhile. They had big mirrors from a carnival in the lobby, you look fat or tall or distorted in them. Shana looked beautiful when she came into the restaurant. She kissed me on the cheek when we hugged. I felt the arousal coming back. She made me feel old when we sat down — her bouncy energy seemed filled with sunshine from the outdoors, while I’d been inside stupidly amusing myself looking fat, then skinny. “Thanks for coming,” I said. “Thank you for calling me from Reno. You vanished from my life when you were fired and I was worried about you until you called. But what was this about us being over?” “I thought that’s what you wanted.” The waitress interrupted us and took us to a booth. I noticed a couple of young men looking at Shana. I had always liked the attention she got from other men, it made me feel young and studly. Now their attention depressed me. It reminded me there was an endless supply of suitors eager for Shana. “What I wanted?” she asked when we were alone.

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“You were with some guy at Jake’s.” “And you were with your wife,” she replied. “I saw you when I came in so I didn’t wave or anything.” “I didn’t think you even noticed me,” I answered, kind of pouting. “We were celebrating my getting fired.” “Why didn’t you come and tell me at work that you were fired? I thought you loved me. You told me you were going to leave your wife.” “I just had to get out of the plant, sorry I didn’t come by. And I was going to tell Jeri I was leaving her, but it was hard for me. I actually was going to tell her that night in the restaurant, then I saw you in the restaurant with...” “His name’s Phil.” “Whatever,” I said. “He’s just a friend, Allen. I needed someone to talk to. I felt so rejected by you. I thought if I was going to be your wife you’d tell me first that you’d been fired, so we could figure out what to do. But when I heard from someone else that you’d been fired I thought our relationship was a convenience for you at work, and now that you were leaving Reynolds you didn’t want me anymore.” “I’m sorry,” I apologized again. “I cleaned out my desk and...” “Went home,” she replied. “Home is where your heart is, Allen, not where you keep your stuff.” “But my heart was with you,” I said. “I just felt beat up.” “I’m not certain we’ll work out,” she sat back in the booth. “Why?” I felt confused. She was acting like she was still interested in me. Which was just the opposite of what Jeri

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had told me she’d said in the locker room at the club. “A couple of reasons. First, guys from your generation are just too emotional. Second, because I’ve found guys your age seem unhappy unless they’re with a woman from their own generation.” “That’s not true. I’m not that emotional. And I’m not some guy, I’m me. I love being with you. We have a great time together.” “But you look down on me,” she replied in a small voice. “And you are awfully emotional, Allen. You cry at nearly every movie we’ve been to.” She was right. I do cry at movies. I even cry at kid’s shows. “Well, I don’t look down on you, Shana.” “Yes, you do. I was a little kid when Kennedy was killed and I didn’t live through the draft or Vietnam or Kent State or any of the other things you tell me about. I used to think I could become part of that with you if I listened hard enough, but now I’ve realized it’s not me. It’s you.” “Now that’s not...” “Let me talk. You probably don’t realize it, but because you lived through all those things and I didn’t, you think I missed out. And that’s how I feel. My friends and I feel like there was a huge party that we were too late for. Remember how you said surfer friends of yours would tell you the surf was better yesterday just to make you feel bad? Well, your generation says that life was better yesterday, but I don’t think it’s because you want to make us feel bad. It’s just true. We should have been there! It was more exciting and

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fun. But we missed it. And because of that you feel sorry for me. You look down on me.” “Do you really think so?” “I know so. And it’s not on purpose. You don’t do it to be mean. You say it because you believe it, and you believe it because it’s true. And as a result the only women you can really love are ones who lived through those times with you, who experienced Kent State and protests, or had a brother that got out of the draft or died in the war.” “But I’m so attracted to you, none of that stuff matters.” “Yes it does. You look through Vietnam glasses at the world and you can’t escape it.” I reflected on what she was saying, then replied. “Maybe I’m just a coward and I’ve been afraid to admit what you’re saying.” “I don’t think you’re a coward. I’ve always thought you were very brave.” The waitress came for our order. We hadn’t even looked at the menus so we asked her to come back. Then we were busy for a few moments figuring out what to eat and giving her our order when she came right back. “So, where were we,” Shana smiled sweetly. “You were saying you thought I was brave.” “Absolutely,” she assured me. “Really?” I asked. I valued her opinion. Her opinion wasn’t colored by the Vietnam experience. And that thought made me realize, maybe Shana was right. Everything I thought about the world was shaped by my thinking about Vietnam and what I, what all of us, went

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through in that time. We couldn’t see the world the way Shana saw it. Was that a scar on my vision, or a deeper vision? But did I look down on Shana? I had always imagined us some day in the future driving down to Stayton to visit her parents on Thanksgiving, maybe with our own children. I always imagined us happy. But now that glimpse of our life together vanished. Not because I had given up looking for it but because she had discovered the truth about ourselves. About me. I felt a wave of relief come over me. Life with her was a possible future for me, but a disturbed one, because of the pain of leaving Jeri and the kids. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked. “What?” “You’re just sitting there. I assured you I thought you were brave and then you just sat there staring.” “I’m sorry. My brain is going a million miles an hour. I’m really upset. Reynolds might be suing me.” “Why?” she asked, all concerned. I thought of telling her, but realized she could be a witness if there was a trial. So I told her I wasn’t at liberty to discuss anything. “What do you want to do about us, then?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. Some bravery. “Well, where does that leave me? I think we’ve had an affair long enough. Do you still want to marry me?” “How can you ask me that when you told a friend of yours in the Nautilus locker room that you didn’t know what you saw in me?” I asked. There, it was out on the table.

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“Where did you hear that?” “Jeri told me the day I was fired. She was in the next row over at the club locker room and you were talking to a friend of yours.” “I never said anything like that! I was with Patty. All I said was I was hurt because you’d gone home to your wife instead of coming to me. If your wife overheard that I’m sorry. But I didn’t say anything about not being interested in you!” The mystery was solved. Even if Shana hadn’t said my name in the locker room that day, Jeri had put it together and knew about Shana, found out the afternoon I was fired. But Jeri lied to me, made up the story of Shana saying she didn’t know what she saw in me. Jeri lied to me to keep me. Jeri knew about Shana and despite my affair, still loved me. Jeri wanted to hang on to me. I felt angry at Jeri for lying, but relieved and grateful that she still wanted me. Or could it be that Shana was lying to me now? There was that possibility. It was her word against Jeri’s. The only person who could resolve that question was Patty, Shana’s friend. I couldn’t cross examine her. I was at a loss. “Can I trust you?” I asked. “I’ve always worried that you won’t marry me after I leave Jeri.” “I’ve always worried I couldn’t trust you and that you’d never leave Jeri,” Shana objected. “Let’s go get married right now.” I slumped in the booth. “You know I can’t. I have to get divorced before I marry you or I’m committing a crime.”

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“And you won’t. Ever. Because you need her,” Shana replied. “You need to live with your children. You don’t need me.” She looked sad. Was she lying or was she right? Would she marry me if I got divorced? How could I trust her? Then it struck me that if Jeri knew about Shana and still wanted me, then she loved me. Totally and absolutely. And if she didn’t know about Shana, if she’d overheard Shana saying she didn’t know what she saw in me, but hadn’t figured out I was the boyfriend that Shana was talking about, then Jeri still loved me anyway. Jeri was absolute, certain love, either way. Shana was confusion and mistrust and darkness. “Well, if I was misleading you all this time, I’m sorry. I think I really do love you.” “You just didn’t know all this time you loved her more,” Shana countered. “Neither one of us wanted to face it until now. I guess it’s because we always have so much fun together.” She smiled and it broke my heart. “I think about you all the time, you know that?” I smiled back and squeezed her hand. “But you don’t need me,” she repeated. “You can daydream about surfing all day, because it’s so much fun for you. But you don’t have to have it. You need air to live, though. All the time. Jeri’s your air.” She hadn’t said Jeri’s name before, ever. It was as if Jeri was sacred and Shana shouldn’t enter her universe by saying her name. It shocked me to hear her say Jeri’s name now. And I realized how right she was. Shana might be fun, but she wasn’t my wife, wasn’t the one that had gone through so

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much with me. She wasn’t the mother of my children. “You’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s leave,” she said. Her brave smile vanished as she stood up quickly and it looked like tears were forming in her eyes. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “I’ll find someone.” “I hope it’s someone good.” I paid and we stood outside in the cold wind. “I could have been as important to you as Jeri is, if you’d given me the chance,” she said. “I really loved you. All these years I’ve had guys falling all over themselves for me. And now you come along and I can’t have you and I love you desperately.” In my mood of distrust, even that was twisted in my brain. Was she really just saying that she was interested in me only because she loved a challenge and that as soon as she had me, she’d lose interest in me? “I’m sorry how this turned out,” I told her. “I really loved you.” “You love your long board and your skis too...” she laughed. “Sorry.” She turned and walked away without looking back. I felt hollow and relieved and very sad. When I got home I found another note about a message from Burt so I called him. Gene and Jeri weren’t around. “Allen, good to hear from you at last.”

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“What do you want, Burt? I’m fired, remember?” “It’s the computers, Allen. They’re acting up. I warned Dan and the board when they wanted to fire you. I’ve got an expert in here now, but he can’t figure out what’s going on. And the 112” mill on the Hot Line is cobbling nearly every ingot. We’re losing a lot of money. Is there any way you can come out?” “You want to rehire me?” “The board has authorized me to offer your job back to you, Allen.” I told him I’d be right there. It’s about a half hour commute. I left a message for Jeri and Gene on our answering machine. “Hi Jeri and Gene. It’s me, Allen. I’m back from my meeting with Jack. He said not to worry about getting sued. And when I got home there was a message from Burt, so I called him and they want me to come back. I’ll go listen to him but talk to you guys before I take the job. Sorry, Gene, I know you’ll understand. I promised you I’d work on the wall today. I’ll be back this afternoon and we can work on it then.” Gene and Jeri were out looking at mobile homes. Cheap ones. There’s a strip of used trailer dealers on 82nd Avenue and they’d hit four before stopping for lunch at Elmer’s Pancake House. “What do you think about the ones you’ve seen so far, Gene?” “I liked that one by the airport.”

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“This one?” Jeri pulled out a notebook. She’d brought along a notepad and a stapler and had written down details of each trailer Gene showed an interest in, then stapled the card of the salesman to the page to keep them organized. “Twenty-one feet, bedroom off the kitchen, second bedroom behind the bathroom?” “That’s the guy. It’s nice having that second bedroom when friends visit.” “I just wish it wasn’t so tacky looking. The neighbors are going to get angry.” “Why?” “Well, our policy has been not to allow trailers in the park. We want our place to look nicer so we insist that all the homes are on foundations, so they look like houses. I don’t know what Allen was thinking when he said you could stay in our park. I mean you’re welcome, but we don’t even have a vacant space.” “Would you rather I didn’t then?” There was an awkward pause while the waitress delivered sandwiches. “No, I’d like to have you. It’s just having you in a trailer is going to be awkward. I have an idea though.” “What’s that?” “Well, our garage is oversized. Allen wanted it that way so he could use it as a shop. I think that trailer you like would fit in there if Allen was willing to move his Cobra outside. We could put a car cover over it, then your trailer would fit inside. No one could object then.” “What about water and sewer and all that?” “Water we can run from the sink out there, and there’s

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a sewer hookup at the corner of the building, we could cut a hole in the wall and run the hose through it.” “That’d be great,” Gene smiled. “Then I could work on the trailer out of the rain.” “Work on it?” “It had a leak, there was caulking on the roof. I want to put some metal up there and seal it better.” “Sounds good to me.” “You guys are nice to help me out,” Gene smiled. “What happened in Reno? Allen won’t say anything. Just that you lost your money and need a place to stay. And that he’s going to help you with a project for veterans.” Gene put his sandwich down. He’d just taken a big bite of a club house on sourdough. He waved a finger for Jeri to wait, then drank some water before answering. “Allen needs to tell you. But basically, I lost all my money down there.” “You lost all your money?” “I sold everything I own except my truck and my guns. Even my tools. All I have now is three thousand cash.” “But that trailer is thirty-eight hundred!” “Allen told me this morning he’d cover what I was short.” “Allen? He’s got hardly... Never mind.” “Look, if you don’t want to do this.” “No, no, I’m sure Allen has a good reason, Gene. But why is he so generous to you when you went on some big gambling spree? No offense, but it wasn’t very smart gambling all your money.”

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“It’s not like that,” Gene answered. Then he explained everything — the death of Brent, the vision, selling the land, winning at first and the final disaster. He didn’t say anything about being suicidal and Allen saving him. That was up to Allen. He watched Jeri as he talked. She was so good looking. Lean, tanned, short black hair, grey eyes, high cheekbones, hardly any wrinkles even though she was in her forties. Allen was lucky. “And Allen is going to help you with getting this Suicide Wall under way?” “That’s what he said.” “What a noble thing to do!” “Do you like the idea?” She reached over and grabbed Gene’s hands. “Like the idea? Gene, I think it’s the finest, most generous thing Allen has been involved in during his whole life. He was always afraid to leave that stupid job at Reynolds even though he was always miserable there. You wouldn’t believe the amount of time he’s thrown into that Cobra and the sports he plays to escape his job. If he was a little braver he could find work that was more gratifying and put his time into that.” “Maybe it’ll be different now,” Gene replied. “I think he’s courageous. And he really wants to help me. But do you think my Suicide Wall is a good idea aside from the fact that working on it will be good for Allen?” “Absolutely,” Jeri said. “I think it’s something America needs. What was the wording that Allen suggested for that plaque between the walls?”

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Gene took out the envelope and read it again, the commitment by America not to war without resolve. “That’s perfect. A permanent reminder not to be stupid again as a country.” She looked out the window and didn’t speak for awhile. “I had a boyfriend in Vietnam.” “That’s what Allen said. All these years and I never knew.” “I never talk about it. Too painful.” “Allen said you waited until the guy was back in the States to tell him you wanted to break up.” “I was praying for him the entire time, day and night, to come home safely. I couldn’t write and tell him I was in love with Allen.” “How did you tell him?” “Allen told me that it was best to sit down with him once he got back and lay it out. Tell him that I’d met someone while he was gone and was planning to get married. He said not to give my old boyfriend any false hope that he could see me again and get me back. Just tell him I was glad he’d made it and that my prayers for his safe return had been answered.” “You did the right thing,” Gene said. “Do you think so? I’ve always worried that I should have talked to him more, like a decompression.” “You did right not breaking up while he was over there. That happened to my buddy Kenny and I think that’s why he died.” “Why?” “He’d always been real careful, you know, wanting to

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get home to her, but after he got the letter he didn’t seem to care any more. He was risking his life too much always taking point. It finally caught up with him.” “Poor guy,” Jeri said. “Were you convinced you wanted to marry Allen?” “Oh yeah, I was ready to settle down. Before I met Allen I wrote my boyfriend and offered to go to Hawaii during his leave and marry him there. But he said he didn’t want to. He wanted to go to Bangkok. A friend of his got out before him and visited me. He told me my boyfriend had gone wild with the whores in Bangkok. It put me off the idea of marrying him. I still prayed for him though.” “You were nice.” “It was hard in college, to have a boyfriend in Vietnam and belong to a sorority.” “Why?” “I was the only girl in the entire sorority that even knew anyone in Vietnam,” Jeri replied. “I was busy working on a student paper protesting the war and living in a sorority where no one even cared about the war. No one wanted to hear about it.” “They didn’t want any part of it,” Gene said. “It was a poor man’s war.” “These girls weren’t poor,” Jeri said. “They all had Daddies who were putting them through school.” She laughed. “I think that’s one reason I married Allen.” “Rich father?” She laughed. “No, but it was related to money. Allen was hard working and had a solid career ahead of him. I was

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running out of scholarship money and my parents couldn’t afford to help me. So Allen and I made a deal. We figured out how we could both get through school. We’d get married and I would quit school and support us until he graduated, then he would put me through school while he worked. Then we were surprised when he got a scholarship and I got a student loan, so his last year in grad school I got to go back to school. We liked that year the best.” “Why?” “We worked a lot on war protests that year.” “I can’t believe I’m such good friends with hippie war protestors. I hated protestors!” “But we only did it to get you guys home,” Jeri argued. “But it hurt the war effort,” Gene replied. “If no one had protested, we would have fought harder and finished the war.” “I don’t think so, Gene. There were an awful lot of troops there fighting hard and we weren’t winning.” “Not in the field there weren’t,” Gene said. “Besides, we could have always nuked Hanoi.” “That wasn’t done for fear of the Russians,” Jeri argued. “Not because of our protests.” “Maybe so,” Gene replied. “We’ll never know.” “We should have never gone,” Jeri said. “It was a religious war.” “Religious war?” “The religion of capitalism against the religion of communism.” “Those aren’t religions,” Gene argued.

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“Sure they are. They’re a viewpoint of the world, the correct way to live your life. And you know another thing? All these places where we interfere, like Nicaragua and Bosnia?” “Yeah?” “Well, we shouldn’t get involved. It’s just those countries getting themselves sorted out. Look at the wars between England and Scotland. Today we’d be saying we have to intervene and restore peace and elections. But because those battles took place in history, we don’t even care about them. I think those countries in South America or whatever are just sorting out who is going to be dominant in their society. And we shouldn’t get involved in helping them. No one helped Scotland. They were just defeated and that was the end of it. We shouldn’t risk American lives in these countries. There’s no point when there’s no right or wrong side.” “Pretty isolationist,” Gene said. “If it’s your son who is going to go off and get killed for some vague reason, then you tend to become very isolationist,” Jeri said. “You were smart to marry Allen and not your boyfriend,” Gene changed subjects. “Why do you say that?” “I read that over ninety-percent of Vietnam vets get divorced.” “That’s terrible.” “But true. They’re hard to live with.” “Thank God I married Allen. I’ve always felt guilty

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about my boyfriend though. I heard he got married, then divorced, then married and divorced again.” “Typical.” “I always feel guilty. I always think there was something I should have done to help him heal the wounds of war.” “There wasn’t,” Gene said. “A lot of guys were screwed up. Although I think that post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is a bunch of bullshit. They just aren’t tough enough.” “Do you think you’ve suffered from that?” “Me? No way. I’m too tough. I’ve left the war behind.” “That’s good, Gene. And now you’re working on this wall.” “Life’s going just fine,” Gene replied. “Now if I could just find a woman.” I parked in visitor parking at Reynolds. They brought one of the golf carts out to fetch me. Non-employees aren’t allowed to drive their cars into the plant. It felt funny needing an escort to get in. Burt had me come right in. I’d been thinking a lot about what I would say to him. I knew why the equipment wasn’t working properly. It was my program, gradually deteriorating everything. And of course the other guy couldn’t figure it out. Those lines of code were buried. I’d need time now to straighten it out, once and for all. I wanted to get honest. After some preliminary chat, I told him, “Burt, I’m not available to go back to work for you. I have some new

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commitments. But I could consult for a few months to get things working again. Then, if you like what I’ve done, you could keep me on a part time basis.” “I don’t know if the board will go for that, Allen. There’s another matter that figures in.” “Tell me,” I knew what was coming, so it didn’t have the shock value it was supposed to have. “Reynold’s corporate attorney advised me they are preparing a lawsuit against you. For the liability on this Salem Furnace fiasco. They blame you for defrauding the company.” Even though I was ready for it, reality still hit hard. My only real defense would be to go bankrupt. They’d give up then. It wasn’t even worth my time spending money on legal fees. “That’s a very serious matter, Burt. I wouldn’t have expected someone like you to even bring that up with me.” “I’m not comfortable with it, Allen, believe me. But they wanted me to tell you it was your only out. Come back to work at your old salary or get sued. I don’t like it.” He shifted back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. He may have liked me, he may have wished he protested the war, but when it came down to the true Burt, he was still a bomber pilot. Somewhere inside that man was the ability to fly over the planet, reach a target that other people had selected, and mercilessly drop bombs on people he couldn’t even see. Now he had dropped a bomb on me, for the good of the company. “You tell them they can sue me, Burt. But they won’t

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make money off it. I’ll just go bankrupt.” “But you’ll lose your trailer park, Allen.” I have to admit that Burt sounded concerned. He really did want me to come to work for him. He hadn’t wanted me fired in the first place. It wasn’t as if the Salem Furnaces would never be used. There was always a demand for the airframes and Burt liked having all his equipment in top condition. Which related to the most pressing problem at hand. His beautiful new automated computer controlled equipment was going to pieces all around him. It was like the factory was having a gradual lobotomy. Thanks to me. “I can’t lose my trailer park. I don’t own it.” “You sold it already? They were worried you’d do that. Is the money overseas already?” I would have loved to say I’d been that smart. That I had ensconced it in a Swiss account. That we were moving to Geneva to join our millions and educate our children. “No, Burt,” I laughed. “I never owned it. It’s in Jeri’s name.” “In her name?” Burt was incredulous. Then he smiled. “That’s better than Switzerland,” he laughed. “You sly dog. That’s so clever. Let the wife own it because she has no liability, let yourself take the exposure here at work. Pretty clever, Allen.” He grinned and took out a notepad and wrote down, I can read upside down, WIFE OWNS PARK, in big letters on a yellow tablet. “They’ll choke on this.” “I certainly hope so,” I said. “That’s what I planned when I structured the ownership that way.” It felt good not to be honest. Why tell him that Jeri had set it up this way?

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“You’re not worth suing,” Burt observed. He shook his head, then said, “Since we can’t get you back, what kind of consulting fee did you have in mind?” I had a fee that I’d been dreaming of all weekend. The same rate that Jack charged, plus ten dollars an hour for my ego. “One-hundred-sixty an hour,” I replied. “One-sixty an....?” Burt wrote ONE-HUNDREDSIXTY on the tablet under the WIFE OWNS PARK. Then I could see his mind doing the math. “Allen, that’s over twenty-thousand a month.” “I’ll only be here two months, Burt. It’s not like I’m going to be here the rest of my life. Not unless I make enough money for you that you want to keep me.” “I’ll call Dan and the board right now. To let them know.” He took the yellow tablet and swung it around to his credenza, then picked up the phone. “Hell, I don’t care what I pay, as long as things run smoothly in the plant when you’re done.” Oh they would, for sure. All that code would be gone. This was my chance though, while I was cleaning up all the bugs I had built into the system, to guarantee my security at the plant. I would do some of the projects I’d begged them to let me do years ago but had been turned down. If they started making more money after I worked on the computer, I was sure they would want me back, even if it cost them $160 an hour. Of course I couldn’t be sure, but I decided that was a risk I had to take. I could have jimmied my shut down code of course, make them need me twice a year or so. That thought was

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very tempting. After all, if they didn’t hire me back later, what would I do for money? It was difficult knowing I could just program their computer to need me every six months or so to guarantee my future income. But that wasn’t honest. I’d decided to make a stand, and I decided to do it where it was important, in my income. Burt changed his mind as he dialed and put the phone down. “I think I need to do a sales job on this, Allen. Why don’t I call you?” We shook hands. “I’ll get back to you as soon as we decide.” I saw Shana when I was being driven out of the plant on the golf cart. She was walking across the mill, looking cute in her white safety hat and plastic goggles and short skirt. She looked surprised to see me. We waved and smiled. I felt a tug inside but I knew I’d done the right thing. The honest thing. It felt good. “Hey Gene,” I said when I pulled into our driveway. He was outside the garage bay that held the Cobra and had the door open. There was a big blue tarp on the driveway and it was pretty clear the Cobra was headed for outside storage. “What’s going on?” “Jeri had the idea of me putting my new trailer in here. I bought one, it’s at the back of the court. As soon as I get your Cobra covered with the tarp I’ll pull the trailer in.” “Why don’t you put your trailer in one of the vacant spaces like I said.” “You don’t have any. They’re all rented. And she doesn’t want my trailer outside your house. Too tacky.” “Oh! Well it’s great we’re full at least. But what about

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my Cobra? I don’t want it rusting.” “Jeri told me to do this. If you don’t want me to, I won’t.” He was getting annoyed, he hates controversies. “Good idea,” I replied. I started into the house and then thought about it. He was my friend, but I’d rather have my Jeep sitting outside than the Cobra. And I didn’t want a fight with Jeri. Not now. “Look, just pull the Cobra into the next bay, that way you can have your privacy at the end of the garage and the Cobra won’t get wet. I’ll keep my car outside.” He agreed. I opened the next door over and he stepped into the Cobra and touched it off. He knows engines, he’d checked the oil before he started it to make sure it was ready to run. It cranked a couple of times, a metallic whining sound, then it fired up. Gene gave it a touch of gas, then let it rumble for a second. He looked at me with a big grin on his face, then raised the rpm’s and backed up enough to get it into the next bay. The wind whipped the exhaust and it smelled like fresh air and gasoline and excitement. “This car gives me a hard on. Let’s take it for a spin.” “Not licensed, no muffler.” “Chicken.” “Law abiding citizen,” I said. He revved it again, slid it forward into the middle bay, then tapped down hard once. The entire garage vibrated from the noise. God it was loud. “What is going on?” Jeri came out all alarmed. I’m sure the house was had been shaking too. “Moving your car, ma’am,” Gene said as he got out.

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“Will your car always be this loud?” Jeri asked me with an accusing look. “No, it doesn’t have a muffler now,” I responded. “Oh. I won’t ride in it if it’s this loud,” she added. “Don’t worry.” Gene walked off to get his trailer and I explained to Jeri how I wanted to keep the Cobra inside. The earlier sunshine was holding steady, but it was getting colder because the east wind was blowing and the sun sets about four-thirty this time of year. The shadows were already long. “This weather makes me want to go skiing,” Jeri said. “Let’s. I have plenty of free time.” “I like this wintering,” she hugged me and I felt warm and happy. Comfortable, like I was sitting down by a warm fire. Gene brought the trailer in and we spent the early evening hooking up his sewer and water and electric. When we were done we all went out to dinner to celebrate Gene’s new trailer. It was fun, although I have to admit Gene seemed kind of up tight around the kids and lectured them a couple of times for being unruly. He was right, of course, they get out of hand sometimes, but what the heck, I’m the one who showed them how to put paper napkins inside salt shakers to bug the next customer. After we got home he still seemed upset, and when I asked if he wanted to talk about the wall project he said he didn’t want to work on it in the house. We went out to his trailer with my portable computer. He made some tea with

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his little propane stove. He locked the door and said he liked having the trailer inside the garage, it made him feel safer, especially when all the doors were locked. It reminded him of staying safe in his closet all day which he’d done when he first got back from the Nam. “Check this out, Allen, this is one thing I love about my new trailer.” There was a slide out drawer right under his bed, near the pillow. He pulled it out and inside was the .357 magnum and a box of shells. “Perfect size drawer isn’t it? And I sprayed it today with silicone so it opens without squeaking. It’s important to stay quiet.” It bothered me seeing the gun again, but I was grateful that I didn’t taste the oil in my mouth any more. We hashed around some ideas. I talked about computer bulletin boards, contacting veterans groups, raising money and press releases. He got more excited after awhile, but when I suggested that he contact a fund raising company, he wasn’t willing to because he hated making phone calls. Ditto for calling veterans groups. I criticized him and said I didn’t want to do all the organizing, but that got him angry. I went back in the house.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN After going to bed I asked Jeri about not owning the park with her. “Well, we own it together, Allen. It’s not like I plan to leave you.” “Still, it’s not half mine on paper.” “Well, don’t you trust me?” “Sure,” I said. “But it’s not official. I feel stupid, like I was used on building this whole thing. Jack says if you left me I wouldn’t get anything.” “And if you were a co-owner and you left me you’d get half, wouldn’t you?” she asked. Well there it was. She wouldn’t tell me she knew about Shana and I wasn’t going to tell her either. “I’m not going to leave you. Ever,” I told her. “I love you. You’re like my air to me, “ to use Shana’s words. “I need you.” She rolled towards me and started kissing my ear and whispering. “If it’s any consolation to you, as soon as you’re clear of the threat of a lawsuit, I’ll change the papers and we can own the park half each.” “That would be the fair thing,” I replied. “Done,” she said. Then she got busy with other interests. The next morning the weather had turned back to rain.

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We decided to wait until the weather was better to go skiing so I settled into my first morning of true wintering. I’d taken the kids to school, Jeri was in her office working on trailer park stuff and Gene had gone off somewhere in his truck early. I was in my den, the electric heater humming away, slippers on my feet, reading the paper. Normally by this time at work I’d be getting out of the Tuesday morning production meeting full of anxiety. This wintering was great! I was reading the Oregonian and the Wall Street Journal was sitting on my desk all fat and juicy waiting for me to read it next. Then I was going to get to work on Compuserve, on the military forum, posting bulletin board messages to promote the Suicide Wall project. That’s when I got the call. “Allen, it’s Burt.” “Yes, sir. How are you?” “You sound cheerful.” “I should. I slept in and now I’m reading the paper.” “Sounds like Sunday.” “Every day is Sunday when you’re unemployed, Burt,” I replied. “You don’t have to worry about that, Allen. Corporate’s given me the go ahead on getting you back in here. But don’t breathe a word about the one-hundred-sixty an hour. That’s more than Dan Wilson makes.” It was hard not to scream in excitement. “And regarding that threat of the lawsuit, they said don’t worry about it.” “So I can have my attorney draft a release?”

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“A release?” Burt asked. “From liability. I’ll put it in my contract.” “Sure, I’m sure that’ll be all right. They said they weren’t going to sue you. I’ll sign that. Let them get mad at me. I want my plant running.” “When do you want me out there Burt? Keeping in mind my attorney will have to prepare an agreement between us first.” There was a pause and then a long sigh. “If you can’t start until your agreement is ready then so be it. We need you though, Allen. The damned Hot Line is wrecking our ingots. Maintenance has the plant shut down all the way from the ingot loading crane to the 80-inch mill.” What he didn’t say was that it was costing them about one-hundred-thousand an hour in lost production. So my services wouldn’t be too expensive, relatively speaking. Let’s see if Dan Wilson could get the plant running again. “I’ll call my attorney right away,” I promised. I hung up and yelled at the top of my lungs. Jeri and I almost collided in the hallway. I was jumping and yelling and kissing her as I explained. She was high-fiving and jumping around the living room with me. After awhile we were standing on opposite sides of the living room and shouting, “One, Two, Three, YES!” and then running at each other and high fiving, then going to the opposite corner and starting all over again. We did that a few times, then laughed and then I told her I had to call Jack. Calling Jack never felt so good. I told him to draw up a contract for one-hundred-sixty an hour, plus a release of

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liability from future, current and past acts of negligence, etc. Jack would know what to say that would get me off the hook about the Salem Furnaces. He said he could have it delivered by courier to Reynolds in two hours. I called Burt and said I should be able to make it by lunch. And even that felt good. Not, yes, sir, I’ll be right there, but, I’ll be there as soon as my attorney’s done. Even saying “my attorney” felt great. It was like I owned someone worth one hundred fifty an hour! Gene rolled in the driveway and I ran out to tell him the news. “Gene, guess what? I don’t have to worry about getting sued, and Reynolds wants to hire me back.” He put a bag of stuff down, and as he did, the contents fell out. “What’s this?” I asked. It was some black fabric. “I noticed you didn’t have any dash trim for the Cobra yet so I went out and bought you some black leather. I was going to put it on the dash the next few days to pay you back for doing all the Suicide Wall work that I can’t do.” “Geez, Gene, that’s nice of you.” I picked up the bag and looked in. It was nice leather too, rich black with a creamy backing. “And the Cobra smelled a little mildewy when I was in it yesterday. I’ll try to find out why and fix that too.” “You’re a nice guy, Gene. I’ll definitely work on the wall project, but you didn’t have to do this. I would have worked on it anyway.” True to his word, Gene started putting in eight to ten

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hour days on the Cobra, while I was heading off to Reynolds every morning trying to undo my handiwork at disrupting the plant and improving operations at the same time. I was actually getting there earlier in the day and staying longer than I used to. I had to — they were paying me $160 an hour! And they needed me. Every night when I got home, there was Gene, making me feel guilty. He didn’t say a word about it, but you could tell he was getting angry. I tried making some calls regarding the wall at work, but was having trouble getting through. The Department of Veteran’s Affairs has one number in D.C. and after twenty rings it turns into a busy signal. They never pick it up. There’s a number for the Inspector General, but it was a wrong listing with no new number. The final number, medical, is always busy. Always. Go figure. I’d hate to be a veteran seeking help. At night there was Nelson’s basketball and Kiki needed attention, not needed, I love playing with her — dollies, tea, anything she says. John liked to visit with me after the eleven o’clock news. Then the day was over with nothing done on the wall. This tense situation of not working on Gene’s project went on for a couple of weeks. All along Gene’s morale withered from living in town. He began to gripe about pollution and rain and crowds. I told him to hang on. After all, how often in my life was I going to make a hundredsixty an hour? This wasn’t going to last forever. I billed them each week and they paid the next day. I was upset

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when they introduced me to the new Chief Industrial Engineer, some guy from California who I learned was a Dan Wilson protege. Some of the industrial engineers that used to work for me came to my little office to talk about the new guy. There was a lot of grumbling among the ones who had hoped for the job, but nothing came of it. They were all cowards — most engineers are. They sit in back rooms and assume they know everything because they know a lot about a few technical things, but generally they loathe confrontation and as a result they never get paid what they’re worth. But I didn’t care anymore. Reynolds paid me weekly and they gave me a small room to work in with a lovely PC that hooked into the mainframe. I plodded away, reversing the shutdown code, making my work untraceable. Then, before I fixed everything so the mill was perfect, I turned my attention to information processing, a job I’d always wanted to do but they hadn’t been willing to fund. When I was done, the way the computer gathered and stored information was far more efficient. I wrote a memo to Burt and metallurgy that made it sound this was a necessary offshoot of my consulting. I was leaving them a present from the new, thirty five percent return on your investment, Al. Then I spent a few days going out to the Hot Line, talking to operators, verifying that the equipment wasn’t cobbling ingots anymore, asking for productivity suggestions. They seemed more open to me now that I wasn’t an employee. Toward the end of the second week things started to

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ease off at work and go to hell at home. I should have seen it coming I suppose. The kids were getting to Gene. Too childish for him, too playful. I spent an evening with him trying to work on the project, but he wanted to talk about Vietnam so I just listened. “The problem with kids being too childish, is that it’s dangerous.” “How’s that?” “Rules, there’s rules for a reason. Like once in ‘Nam. This kid came up to us. We had rules, tell them to halt in Vietnamese, then tell them again, then fire a warning shot in the air...” “And then?” “Shoot’em, they probably have a grenade in their pocket.” “God.” “I wasn’t all that tolerant though. Too many friends had been killed. So when this little guy didn’t stop after my yelling twice, I popped him off.” “You killed him?” “Damned right. It was him or me.” Was he deaf, maybe, Gene? I wanted to ask. Why not fire a warning shot? Did he have a grenade in his pocket, or a Coke he was trying to sell? But I couldn’t ask him that. It was long ago and far away and all done. Finished. Except Gene spent a lot of time in his little closet thinking about Vietnam. A few days later it got warm, warm in February, we get storms from Hawaii in winter that heat things up, the

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Pineapple express they call it. The heat prompted Nelson to get out his squirt gun when he came home from school. Nelson squirted Gene from behind and Gene grabbed the gun and squirted him back a lot more than Nelson had squirted him originally. Nelson came into the house saying Gene had been mean. I said I’d say something to Gene, but the little guy stopped crying and said no, he’d get even with Gene on his own. He’d show him. I was in the den reading and didn’t pay attention to his threat. That night Nelson left dinner early and hid in the garage. When Gene came out Nelson jumped from behind the Cobra and squirted him. I saw the whole thing through the door. Gene grabbed Nelson by the collar and twisted it hard so Nel couldn’t wiggle loose. I was up and running but too late and Gene grabbed the squirt gun and started squirting Nelson’s face and neck. Nelson started to cry. “Gene, let him go, damnit!” I shouted when I got to them. He kept his grip on Nelson. “What’s wrong, Nelson? Don’t cry,” Gene shouted. “If you do stuff like that you’ve got to learn to take the consequences.” “Gene, let him go!” Gene looked up, then pushed Nelson away. Nelson ran past me. “You’re mean, Gene!” he yelled, then flew into Jeri’s arms. “Your boys are pussies, Allen. They’re not tough. You’ve got to raise them tough.” “Go to hell, Gene.” I yelled. “If you think I’m raising

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my kids wrong then find a woman and have your own kids and raise them any way you like. But leave my kids alone!!!” He shoved me, hard, and I spun away and stumbled, but God I was mad. I jumped up and caught him hard in the jaw by coming over the top of his hands, it wasn’t as good a pop as in Reno but I moved his head sideways. I know he always thought he was tougher than me, but I could tell I’d made him wonder. And I was mad. I wanted to keep fighting. He glared at me, then ran into his trailer. I was wondering if he was getting his pistol, he looked so pissed. I ran into the house and shut the door. I locked it, then ran over and got the portable phone out of the cradle. “What’s wrong?” Jeri asked. “I think he’s getting his gun,” I yelled, “Take the kids into the bedroom.” “He’s not going to do that!” “He almost shot himself in Reno, Jeri! He’s crazy! Now get the kids in the bedroom and lock the doors. I’m calling the police if he tries to come back in.” That was enough for Jeri. Make no mistake, she loves those kids and would kill to protect them. I call her a she bear. So she grabbed those kids and ran in the bedroom so fast I couldn’t believe it. I was proud of her. She was my woman. She didn’t grab John though. He sprinted out of his bedroom right past her. When she shouted at him to come in the bedroom he said he was going to help me. Which I appreciated. I locked the patio door while John locked the front door

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and then we hid behind the couch with the portable phone. I heard the door to his trailer slam and started dialing, 9..., 1...., but then I heard the garage door opening and his truck starting. I peeked out the window and saw his tail lights disappear through the entryway of our park. He never came back. For his stuff or his trailer. We checked out the trailer. His .357 was gone and that seemed to be all he took. A few days later we got a letter. Dear Allen, dear Marine Allen, I should .say Thanks for the trip to Reno and for what you did for me, and for working on the wall project. A lot of families whose sons committed suicide will be forever grateful if you get it built. I bet you will. I hope you don’t think I’m boging out on you, but I think you’re going to get this built faster if I just get out of your . way Besides, I can’t stand it here in the valley, I had to get back to the desert. I’ll come back for my stuff if I need it. You’ll get the wall built and the wording for the plaque is perfect. Here’s a copy of the wording if you don’t have it. I think my work on this planet is finished. You’re a good friend. You would have made a good Marine. Cor rection, youar e a good Marine. I’ll always remember you as a Vietnam Vet. High Deser t I was mad at first that he didn’t apologize about Nelson. Later I started to worry about him. I showed the note to Jack. I called and then went to Bend to check with his friends. He’d come through and got stuff he’d stashed at

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their houses, then told all of his friends that he was headed back to John Day to work on a cabin. No one seemed to know the guy he was building for though, but they said not to worry — that Gene routinely disappeared into the desert. After I got things wrapped up at Reynolds and some extra money in the bank, I checked for awhile on building permits in Eastern Oregon. I organized a mailer on my computer, entered all the permit owners’ addresses, then printed a form letter asking about Gene. All the people replied and no one said they’d hired Gene. I even checked with the State Police. Nothing. They asked if I wanted to file a missing person report and I did. I started calling veterans’ groups and leaving messages on bulletin boards. Life settled into a routine of getting the kids off to school, reading the paper, doing some housework, then working on the Wall project and searching for Gene. I was curious about how many Vietnam Veterans had actually died as compared to other wars and made a lot of calls. The problem is, most vets killed themselves after they left the service, so no one knew how many vets of any war died by their own hand. But I got the definite impression it was a problem unique to Vietnam vets and that Gene’s number of at least 150,000 veterans killing themselves was a good one. People I started running into on Compuserve kept telling me sad stories. One guy painted his mother’s bedroom and then blew his brains out when he was done. He carefully put a pillow on the exit side of his head so the blood wouldn’t splatter the freshly painted wall. Then there

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was another case of a double suicide where a guy killed his wife, then himself. At first they thought it was murdersuicide until the coroner reported that the wife had actually lifted her breast to give the husband a clear shot at her heart. And there was a barber who finished a hair cut and then walked out in the path of a bus. No warning, just put his stuff down and walked right into it. At first I was fascinated by these stories but after a while I wouldn’t read them. It’s one thing to say 150,000 vets have killed themselves, another to listen to the tragic tale of each death. I’d often feel depressed after working on the Wall project, so Jeri and I would work out at the gym. I’d feel good enough after that to come back and hustle up computer consulting work or study for my real estate license. I wasn’t getting much interest in my consulting. Reynolds was appreciative of what I did but didn’t ask me back. So I was going to go into Real Estate. More lucrative. One day I found a computer bulletin board message about an organization called Point Man, which was for Vietnam Veterans. I called their number in Seattle. I was in my study and it was raining outside. Jeri was gone. “Hello, Point Man.” “Yeah, I’m calling about a friend of mine. He’s sort of vanished and I’ve looked everywhere for him.” “And he’s a Vietnam Vet?” “Yup.” “What’s his name?” I ended up telling the whole story about Gene —

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Brent’s death, the Suicide Wall idea, the trip. The guy said he was a counselor and he had plenty of time, so I went on and told him about the gun, the oil taste and Shana. It felt good to get it all out. “Now, you’re not a vet, right?” “That’s correct.” “But you’ve been doing a lot of self-destructive behaviors lately, right?” “Not that I know of,” I replied. The guy actually laughed, then listed what I had done that was self-destructive, starting with sticking a gun in my mouth to help Gene. I objected, saying it was to prevent a suicide, and he countered that no matter what the justification, potentially blowing your brains out was selfdestructive. I had to agree. Then he went on to say my affair with Shana could have destroyed my marriage and family. He even said I purposely got fired with my excessive honesty. He said my subconscious was trying to destroy my life because I felt guilty. “You sound to me like you have a severe case of not being there guilt .” “What’s that?” “It’s common in military personnel who served but were in support roles instead of combat.” I remembered what Gene said about his Navy friend who felt guilty for being safe on a boat while Gene humped the bush. “They feel guilty after the war because they weren’t making sacrifices like their comrades. Tell me, have you

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ever had any single car accidents? Driving fast or recklessly, and you wreck your car. That’s a sign of not being there guilt.” “No, not really. Although...” “Yeah?” “Well, in the summers when I was young I drove a fork lift truck at a cannery. Once I took a stupid chance to drive the wrong way down an aisleway, which another, bigger fork lift was using to load beans into a big hopper that fed the cannery. He had the right of way because the whole cannery depended on him loading beans into the hopper. We were never supposed to get in his way and were never supposed to go the wrong way on his special assigned roadway. But I took a chance of taking a shortcut instead of crossing his road safely and going the long way around. But he was coming right towards me and there was nowhere for me to turn in this aisleway to avoid an accident. Since he carried his box in the air while driving forward he didn’t see me stopped dead in front of him. The collision destroyed the protective roll cage on my forklift and almost killed me.” “Had any of your friends died in Vietnam before that time?” It all came back to me. Not a week before the accident my girlfriend Sharon had called me. She was sobbing on the phone and insisted that I drive over right away. The whole way over I figured that she was pregnant and we’d have to get married or even worse, that she wanted to break up with me. But it wasn’t that. She’d had a phone call from a good friend. The friend’s

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brother had just been killed in Vietnam. When I asked for his name, I was stunned to find out it was Jimmy, the guy I’d argued with only weeks before, the one on leave who wanted to kill gooks. I’d said to him if no one went to Vietnam in the first place he would have no deaths to avenge. He’d died his first day in the field in an ambush and had never fired his gun. The first day! It was a week after I found out about Jimmy that I almost died in my lift truck accident. I felt the hairs rise on my neck because I realized that when I put the gun in my mouth to save Gene it was exactly like the thought I’d had when I pulled into the other fork lift’s driving lane. Both times I’d had the same cavalier thought about my life, like, oh well, I hope I’m going to be all right. Both times I’d wanted to take my chances to see if I deserved to keep living. I had been unlucky that day driving. But I’d been lucky with Gene’s gun. I told the counselor all this. “You’re definitely suffering from not being there guilt. You have to get rid of it.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “I sure can’t go fight in Vietnam now.” “We are a Christian organization. We believe healing comes when a person accepts Christ into their life as Lord and Savior.” Not this Christian stuff again! Throughout my life I’ve been approached by Christian people in college, at work, and of course Jeri is always trying to get me to go to Church with her. “I don’t know that I’m interested in Christianity,” I

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replied. “Besides, what I want to do is find my friend. How is accepting Christ in my life going to help me locate Gene?” “If you join us you’re welcome to come to meetings and run an ad in our publication to find your buddy. And maybe you can minister Christ to him in the future if you find him. It would definitely help him.” Me minister to Gene? I thought back to a summer when I was in college. I was hung over and lying on the beach in Seaside and this gorgeous blonde girl came up and started talking to me. I thought it was great until she started evangelizing to me. I wanted to keep talking to her — she might like me if I did what she said. So I told her I was a heroin addict and that I was really upset about my life. Man, the sympathy that got me! I hadn’t even smoked marijuana at that point. I told her that I wanted to accept Christ into my life, then after I did I lied and told her that it was wonderful, that I felt great and that I would never do drugs again. She was happy for me, but she seemed odd. I realized she was so committed to her religion I’d never get anywhere with her sexually. And I was starting to feel guilty for lying to her, so I thanked her for helping me. But she wanted me to come to her church. She actually seemed interested in me, but I figured I wouldn’t be a good influence on her life so I told her I’d think about it. She asked for my phone number, and I gave it. She called me and even wrote once and sent her picture, but I never followed up.

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Those thoughts came flooding back to me when the Point Man guy asked me to accept Christ. Then I thought, I stuck a gun in my mouth to help Gene, I sure couldn’t hurt myself accepting Christ into my life, could I? I mean, Christ was a good guy, everyone agrees with that. It seemed to me I’d just allow Christ to be my friend. Why not? What would it hurt? “All right. I’ll do it. I’ll accept Christ.” I responded. “You’re smart,” the guy on the phone said. He told me to repeat after him and he said something like a prayer, asking God to forgive all my past sins. Then he had me say that I accepted Christ into my heart and my life as my Lord and Savior. It was pretty simple. “Do you feel different?” he asked. “To be honest, not a bit,” I replied. I felt disappointed. It would have been neat to have some white wave of wonderfulness sweep over me. “One other thing, before I let you go,” he said. “Sure.” “Use your power of prayer, my friend. God will forgive you of anything. Ask him to forgive you and he will. But remember, you have to forgive yourself.” “Forgive myself for what?” “For not going to Vietnam. That’s what you feel guilty about.” “I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Call again if you need help. We’ll keep an eye out for your friend.” “Thank you.”

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“Don’t forget to forgive yourself,” he added. Forgive myself. I didn’t know I needed forgiving. I didn’t go to war because I flunked my physical and didn’t volunteer afterward because I didn’t want to die. Still, the guy was right. I did feel guilty. I couldn’t resurrect the war, I’m too old to fight in any war now. Vietnam was gone. My chance of going to war in my life was gone. I’d done what I had done. Why torture myself constantly? I didn’t need to get up every morning and feel guilty for not going and thinking about the war and wishing I had gone and then throwing myself back to that time and thinking no, if I go, I’m going to die. I realized that ever since that time in my life a part of me had frozen itself there, as if I was making that decision fresh each day. But it was over. The Vietnam war was over. It was history. It was all long ago and far away and would never happen again. “I forgive myself for not going to Vietnam,” I said loudly. The words erupted from my body and surprised me with their power. “God please forgive me, for letting my buddies down and not going to Vietnam. Christ forgive me. And my friends who suffered and died, please forgive me — all of you — for not helping when I could.” It came gushing out of me. I felt like I was throwing up. I looked around my study and shuddered and knew I had to move. I started for the back yard. My whole body was shaking and tears were pouring out of me. I got to the back door. I went to the passageway between the house and the greenhouse and stepped under the grape arbor. The rain soaked me as I looked up at the grey sky. I felt as if my

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entire life up to that point had moved behind a clear plastic wall. I could see it and remember it, but it couldn’t touch me anymore. The burden of my life had vanished. The weight on my shoulders from Vietnam was gone. I could live my life now with joy and strength and pride. I raised my arms and let the cool mist cover me.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN Gene came back in the early fall to get his trailer and other stuff. By then I was working on my real estate license and he arranged with Jeri to come the day I was taking my test. I was mad at Jeri for hiding it from me. I wanted to talk to Gene about forgiving himself for going to Vietnam. But she had worried we’d get into a fight and when she explained that Gene didn’t want to talk to me, I forgave her. I didn’t want to see Gene until he was ready to see me. About a week later I was happy to get a letter from him. Dear Allen, I think it was best we didn’t see each other. I’m r y if soryou’re mad at me for sneaking all my stuff out of your place. I was worried we’d get into an argument. I want you to know I’m sor ry how I hurt Nelson. I was a jerk. I don’t know why I get so angry when kids goof off around me. Please let him know I apologize and that I don’t really think either one of your boys are pussies. I’ve got a tag for the “any-sex” elk hunt during second season in the Malheur Forest. I’m taking the trailer up early to scout so I think I stand a good chance of nailing one. If I do, I’ll come through town and give you part of the meat for all your help on the Wall project. How are things going? I trust you’ll continue with our ideas.

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I just wish I was better at organizing the way you are, but I’ll be eternally grateful if you can get the Suicide Wall built. You know, I’ve thought a lot about our talks. When I had this idea for Suicide Wall I was only thinking about all the guys who killed themselves after they got back. But we talked about the plaque between the walls that would be a pledge to never have a war like that again. I think in the end that would be the true value of Suicide Wall. It would show the country what it cost to go to war that way. Talking about costs. Remember how I told you that 25% of the Vietnam Veterans earn less than $7,000 a year? I don’t know how many guys that is, but it sure must account for a lot of the homeless. Anyway, when you’re working on the wall project, you might want to promote the idea that the government should give combat veterans a lifetime income. It would sure give our countryea mor accurate idea of what it costs to go to war. All those shattered lives. And it would probably take care of the homeless problemstoo. It’ hard to hold down a regular job after what we went through. You know, our whole generation was victimized by that . war If you went to the Nam, people think you were a murderer, and if you didn’t go, they think you were a coward. So none ofeus ar respected. We need that Suicide Wall to make people see this. I plan to be out of the woods and at Mark’s the night of. Nov 24th. I’ll call for sure, tell you about Jamaica! Remember, you’re a Marine now! Semper Fi, Gene

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I felt bad. I probably over-reacted when he got mad at Nelson. I called Bend but he’d already gone, so I had to content myself with looking forward to his call on the 24th. I notified the State Police that Gene was all right and they were grateful for my call. Gene’s letter made me feel guilty about not working hard enough on the wall project. I got to work on contacting architectural firms to see if anyone would be interested in doing design work as a donation. I couldn’t get much interest. The week Gene was in the woods it got really cold. There were some big storms in the Cascades, and a group of climbers was lost on Mt. Hood for two days during the whiteout. But I wasn’t worried about Gene. With his trailer he had plenty of shelter, and if anyone knew the woods, it was him. The 24th came without Gene’s call. The next morning I called Mark’s house. He told me he’d already alerted the State Police. He also said Gene had told him he was going to put the trailer up on Lake Butte, near the old lookout tower. I said I was willing to come over and help look, but Mark figured with Thanksgiving coming Gene had gone to stay with his folks in Roseburg. Either that or the Police would find Gene in camp butchering his elk. But the next morning Mark called me back. The police had found Gene’s trailer, but not Gene. They were going to organize a search with helicopters and infra-red sensors first, and if they didn’t find him, they’d go in on foot.

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I helped Jeri get ready for Thanksgiving. I like cooking turkey. My technique is to turn it upside down and let it bake a long time to get the meat tender. I love the whole atmosphere of Thanksgiving — winter is setting in, the house is weather tight and our gas fired cast iron stove warms the family room while we watch football. But this year I just went through the motions. It was impossible to make our house all cozy when Gene could be outside freezing to death. He should be here with us I thought, making crazy plans to find a girl in the Cayman Islands and bring her back here. Or visiting his valley friends before heading to Mexico for the winter; drinking beer, bragging, talking about Alaska or Vietnam or Jamaica or New Zealand. Jeri and I spent a lot of time talking about Gene and praying for him. I have to admit that I was enjoying going to church with her. I’d decided to get baptized. I felt a bond of love between us that hadn’t been there before, like we were more than man and wife now. Mark called after two days and said the choppers hadn’t found anything, and if I wanted to help, I should head over to his house. He was leaving the next morning at three a.m. for search headquarters in John Day. Jeri helped me pack. “Don’t get lost out there,” she hugged me so tight it squeezed my breath out. “Don’t worry. Maybe they’ll find him before I get there!” “Don’t you want any dinner at all?”

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“Huckleberry”, I smiled and she laughed and poked my tummy. I stopped at the Huckleberry Inn in Government Camp for dinner. I always eat their huckleberry pancakes no matter what time of day I go over the pass. I always have huckleberry pie ala mode for desert too. When I passed Ski Bowl I noticed that they were going to be open for the Thanksgiving weekend, which was an on off thing for that area since it sat at pass level and often didn’t have enough snow for an early opening. If it was snowing hard enough to get those guys open this soon, what would it be like at 6,200 feet where Gene was? I enjoyed the drive to Bend. For years Jeri and I have been coming over to Mt. Bachelor on the weekend to ski. I love the transition from the clouds and storms on Mt. Hood to the clear, starry sky of the high desert and the smell of Juniper on the table land above Warm Springs Indian reservation. I got to Bend about nine and Mark poured a glass of beer from the keg he kept in his second frig in the garage. It was his week to have custody of the twins. He read to them while I watched the news. The drive, the smells of Bend and the snow had lulled me into the feeling that this was just another ski trip. But I was jarred out of that mood when they mentioned the search for Gene on the television. I yelled for Mark and he and the kids ran out in their pajamas and watched the news about Gene.

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“Do you think ‘Mean Gene’ is dead?” Teddy asked. “Hey, don’t call him that,” Mark said. He looked at me guiltily. “You call him that yourself, Dad,” Justin accused. “Yeah, and you won’t let us be alone with him anymore either cause he’s mean to us.” We drank beer after the kids were asleep and talked about Gene. “Sorry about that ‘Mean Gene’ stuff,” Mark apologized. He told me about problems he’d had with Gene, much like mine and Nelson’s, and it felt good to know I wasn’t the only one who’d experienced difficulties with Gene around kids. But we didn’t dwell on that. We both counted Gene as a good friend. We were going to hit the sack early but Mark had to call his ex-wife. He hadn’t told her about wanting to leave early in the morning or about how she would have to come over and get the boys up for school. They got in a long fight, since this was going to foul up her schedule. “I guess that’s why we got divorced,” Mark said sheepishly after he hung up the phone. “I’m forgetful and she’s inflexible.” “Sorry.” “Oh well, we made good kids,” he laughed. I toasted that with my beer. They were good kids. I felt bad about the fight though and told Mark about the counselor, and accepting Christ and how it had changed my life and my relationship with Jeri. I knew it wouldn’t help with his ex but maybe next time around. After spilling

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my guts to him, he just laughed nervously and said, “Al, you’re weird.” When he saw I was offended he changed the subject and suggested we get to bed. We were out of Bend at three am. I felt like I’d never slept and I was glad when Mark told me he’d drive first so I could doze off. We took my jeep since he didn’t have a four-wheel drive. After a couple of hours I woke to the car bumping along horribly and for a second I couldn’t remember where I was. It was snow on the road making us bounce — snow driven over and made lumpy, then frozen hard in fifteendegree night air. This was desert we were crossing and hardly ever got snow. We stopped for gas and breakfast at Mt. Vernon cafe, a little oasis at the intersection of Highway 395 and Highway 26 that served truckers between Interstate 84 and Reno. The cafe was full of talk about Gene when we said we were friends who’d come to look for him. Evidently, several hunting parties had seen Gene earlier in the week and he’d told them he thought he was on to a small herd hanging out along the trail near Nipple Butte. The waitress told us the people who’d seen him had left the woods early when the storm had been forecast. We went through John Day, then turned north out of the valley on Highway 18 and headed into the mountains. Search Headquarters had been established on the gravel road that turned off toward the old ranger station. Oregon Department of Transportation crews had come in and

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plowed highway 18 up to that spot, but there was about three feet of snow on the road up to Gene’s camp a mile away. They’d brought in snowmobiles and I rode behind the county sheriff up to Gene’s trailer. He was a tough old bird, in his sixties, skinny, with a trooper’s hat on and a handlebar mustache that was yellowed at the edges from smoking. We spooked three elk cows and two calves on the way in and he raised his index finger and went bang at them before I even saw them. The sheriff had me poke my head into Gene’s trailer to confirm it was his. It smelled of Gene and moldy damp. I opened the secret drawer under Gene’s bed and the .357 was still there. The trail to Nipple Butte runs seven miles from the old lookout to the base of a rugged promontory. In the fall it’s close to heaven when you’re walking through the cold, sunny air as yellow Tamarack needles drift in the breeze making the ground look like it’s covered with a yellow frost. Now, in the winter, the trail was lost in the snow and the white of the snow made the Tamaracks look bare and dangerous. They started a search of the trail by ferrying us out every half mile and telling us to walk out straight from the trail and yell for Gene and of course look for him. They told me not to go more than an hour from the trail and to use a compass. There wasn’t much chance of getting lost though. The snow had stopped falling and the snowshoes left a wide trail in the snow. I didn’t like being out alone in the

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woods and I took a good deal of comfort in hearing Mark and another guy yelling occasionally off to my right and left. I was exhausted by the time the snowmobile ferried me back to the big tent for hot chocolate and dinner. I collapsed after dinner in my sleeping bag on a government-issue cot. A fire roared in the big tent’s wood stove. There were six of us in the tent, the sheriff and three national guardsmen plus Mark and I. We talked after dinner. “I’ve met Gene before,” the sheriff said. “And some of his clan.” “Sometimes I think everyone in Oregon knows Gene or one of his family,” Mark laughed. “Met him years ago, after he’d got out of Vietnam and was hunting with his dad and brother. He’d gotten lost then too, but found his way back to camp.” “I remember that time,” Mark said. “Did he tell you how he found his way back to camp?” the sheriff asked. “Yeah, pretty amazing,” Mark replied. Neither one of them spoke, and now all of us were curious, so I said, “What, you’re not going to tell us?” “It’s one of those Gene stories you don’t know if you should believe or not,” he looked at the sheriff. “You won’t think I’m weird if I tell this?” “I’ve heard of weirder.” “OK, well, Gene was hunting elk with his family up here, I’m not sure where though...” “By Fox Creek I believe,” the sheriff added. “And he got separated from his party. It was snowing

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and toward the end of the day he saw an elk and took a shot at it, then tracked it in the snow for awhile. He was worried he’d hit it and it was suffering. He never found the elk, and by the time he turned back it was dark and he was trying to follow his tracks in the snow with his flashlight. But the snow picked up so hard it filled in his tracks and it got to be a white out. He had no idea which way it was back to camp. He fired his gun three times, and settled in under a tree figuring he’d have to spend the night in the storm. He had been travelling light though, and didn’t have an emergency kit with a space blanket or anything and he started to get so cold he figured he die of exposure, so he got up and tried to find camp again.” “What’s a space blanket?” I asked. “Reflective metal foil with a plastic backing,” the sheriff said. “I’ll give you one in the morning. It could save your life.” “After walking a bit, Gene found a fresh set of tracks in the snow... real fresh, like someone was just ahead of him. He assumed it was someone from camp who’d heard his shots and was out looking for him, so he started yelling and running after the guy. But he came up over a rise and there was camp, the trailer’s lights glowing. He was sure happy to be home.” “So what’s so weird about that?” I asked. Mark and the sheriff exchanged glances. Then Mark said, “According to Gene, no one had heard his shots and come looking for him. They just figured he’d find his way home and with the wind, the sound had been muffled.”

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“Well, it must have been someone else,” I offered. “Nope, Gene had them come out and look. There were only two sets of prints, Gene’s and the mystery guy, and the footprints of the mystery guy ended at the front of the trailer. They didn’t go anywhere, they just ended right there. And none of them in camp had seen or heard anyone out there for days.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “What was it then?” “My wife says guardian angel,” the sheriff piped up. “I don’t know what to call it.” “Gene said it was a spirit. Towards the end he said he could see footprints being made in the snow, but there was no one in front of him.” “Oh, he’s just bullshitting you,” I replied. “I don’t think so,” Mark said. “It sure spooked him. He talked about it for days afterward.” No one spoke for awhile. Just before we said our good nights, I said, “Well, I hope that angel is looking over Gene now.” “Amen,” the sheriff added as he turned off the propane lantern. The wind pushed on the tent and coyotes howled. I prayed for Gene and wondered how much longer he could last out there. In the morning the drainage from my nose was frozen in my mustache because the fire hadn’t been stoked in the night. There was a thermometer hanging from the top of

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the tent and it read twelve degrees. We were let off halfway between each drop off point from the day before and spent the day hiking out and back, then starting halfway closer again until there were trails heading out away from the snowmobile trail every hundred yards. They found him in the early afternoon. Mark and I were escorted up to identify Gene before the chopper took him out. Circling birds gave away his location. He was in a small meadow in the center of a thicket of pine trees about three miles from the road. It was rough going getting in on foot with the blow down pine all over the ground. He was sitting cross legged next to a dead bull elk with a huge rack of antlers. New snow had covered the elk and Gene, but someone had brushed the snow off the side of the elk and Gene’s head and shoulders. The snow was bloody around the elk’s eyes where birds had been feeding but Gene wasn’t touched. His bull shoulders were sticking up naked. He looked peaceful. I looked closer and saw he didn’t appear to have a stitch on. “Is this your friend?” the sheriff asked. I stepped close and stared into Gene’s face. His eyes were closed but it seemed like any second they would pop open in one of those practical jokes he used to pull. “Yeah. How did this happen?” “Exposure,” the sheriff explained. “Sometimes, when people get lost, towards the end when they are close to dying they feel hot and take their clothes off. His clothes aren’t here, so I think what happened is he must have shot and gutted the elk, then headed back to the trail but couldn’t find it in the snow and dark. I think he must have wandered around awhile

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and found his tracks and got excited that he’d found the trail and decided to run to the trailer to get warm. You’ll notice it’s a gradual downhill into here, just like the trail is downhill back to his camp. I think he got hot as he ran and then went crazy and ended up throwing his clothes off. Unfortunately his tracks just brought him back here.” “Do you really think he was lost?” Mark and I shared looks of disbelief. I was incredulous. Gene couldn’t get lost in these woods. It was like me getting lost in my bathroom. The sheriff lit a cigarette and took a big pull. “The woods are strange. I had some friends once over to Baker that shot an elk and gutted it, then walked down to the creek to wash up. They left their rifles and coats by the elk because they were hot. But everything looks the same out here sometimes. They hiked back up to the elk, but couldn’t find it. They looked until dark, then had to walk to the top of the ridge to the logging road where their car was. Only when they got there did they realize the keys were in one of their coats. Had to break the window to get in the car and spent a cold night before the car’s owner walked out the next day. Had to call his wife in Oregon City to have her bring an extra set of keys.” “They ever find the elk?” I asked. “Not in four days of looking.” “Maybe someone stole their stuff and the elk,” I speculated. “You can’t steal a whole elk too easily,” he replied. I looked down at Gene. I had wanted to tell him about Jesus. I cried.

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The chopper came in and lifted him away. After the thumping clatter that always makes me think of not going to Vietnam vanished, the sheriff asked us if we wanted the antlers. “What?” I asked, not understanding. “Do you want the antlers?. Your friend shot a nice bull. The meat’s no good, but it’d be a shame to leave the antlers.” “What do you think, Mark?” “I say I want them, but I want them to stay here. Like a grave marker.” “Good idea,” the sheriff replied. We headed back to the trail and the snowmobiles and beyond them the highway and home. It struck me that as long as you know where you are, it’s like having a piece of home travel with you into the woods. I turned and looked back from the edge of the woods and realized I would never come to this spot again. Probably wouldn’t be able to find it if I tried. Gene’s death ground. Of all the places to die after all he’d been through. Bullets and bombs and Viet Cong and mortars and malaria didn’t get him. Just a slight confusion over which way home was. I looked one last time before I left. The elk’s stomach and antlers were sticking out of the snow, “Semper Fi,” I whispered. “I don’t know why that sheriff was pushing the idea that Gene was lost,” Mark said on the way home.

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“Why do you say that?” “Gene wasn’t lost,” Mark shifted in his seat and sipped some coffee. “I remember Gene telling me about that meadow. I’ve never been there with him and I didn’t remember it until we went in there, but I’m sure it’s the one he called peek meadow. Gene called it that because you could only get a little view of the meadow when you hid in the trees. He said the bulls liked to hide in those thick stands of pine during hunting season. And another thing, when Gene and I used to hunt together he was religious about putting orange tape in the trees to leave a trail back to his downed elk. I checked and those weren’t up either.” “You’re saying he committed suicide?” I asked. “Absolutely... as sure as I’m sitting here. But I don’t know why.” I told him why. I hadn’t told anyone about the Reno trip except Jeri, so I explained everything to Mark. The vision of the wall, Gene’s attempt to win money for it, losing everything, the room and the pistol. When I was done Mark added some stories that I hadn’t heard about Gene’s disastrous love affairs and how he got depressed being alone so much the last few years. We agreed that there was no reason to share this with the sheriff or anyone else. Let his family and friends think Gene was lost. It was a good way to die, pursuing happiness in the high country. I called that night and told Jeri. I could hear the kids crying in the background after I told her. I was surprised how well I slept at Mark’s. In the morning my covers were

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barely disturbed — I hadn’t turned all night. It was a long drive back to Portland and I didn’t stop at the Huckleberry. Civilization seemed oppressive after being so far into the woods. I laughed because it came to me that I finally understood what Gene meant when he said driving into Portland felt like driving into a cancer tumor. Nelson was home from school, sobbing uncontrollably. He tried to blame himself for Gene’s death, that somehow, if he hadn’t made Gene leave, Gene wouldn’t have gone hunting and wouldn’t have got lost and died. I told him nothing had stopped Gene from elk hunting since he was twelve except being in Vietnam. The next morning I got the final shock. It was an attorney, calling from Bend. He said I was the sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy Gene had taken out last March after the Reno trip. One million dollars, tax free. I couldn’t believe it, but when he said the police had found out about it and were asking questions about me, like I’d set up Gene’s death, it sunk home that I really was going to get one million dollars from Gene’s dying. The check came. I put it in a separate account that I had Jack draw up papers for — a non-profit foundation — Suicide Wall. Semper Fi, he’d said. I’m working hard on the wall now. When it’s built I’ll visit often. I’m going to make sure Gene’s name is on the wall, even though his death was listed as a hunting accident. I know better.

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And the design will be true to Gene’s dream; a white wall with gold letters, exactly the same size as the black wall, and as high, but running curiously three times as far, raising the question why is it so much longer? and answering it immediately by silently explaining that there are three times the names, all the suicides from Viet Nam. In the quiet grass between the walls there will be a plaque reminding future generations not to do to their sons what was done to us.

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RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA “We the people of the United States of America, do declare that the war in Vietnam was fought without resolve. The people of the United States of America hereby pledge that America shall never again risk the lives of its soldiers in a war unless it is willing to prosecute that war with full resolve, even if that means the eventual use of weapons of mass destruction to end that conflict successfully. No soldiers shall be risked unnecessarily, no soldiers shall be left behind, no war shall be started that will not be won by whatever means necessary. The Vietnam Veterans who fell in combat and killed themselves afterwards shall be our nation’s pledge that we will no longer go to war without resolve.”

The End

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Suicide Wall on the Internet

www.suicidewall.com

In an attempt to determine exactly how many Vietnam Veterans have killed themselves, and to memorialize their loss, the author has created a web site on the Internet. It provides information about veterans and veterans’ help organizations, and a databank to register the names and stories of veterans who committed suicide.

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About the Author

Alexander Paul was born in 1948 in Canada, became a U.S. Citizen and was raised in Oregon. He spent his high school years in Stayton, Oregon and attended Oregon State University. He received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in industrial engineering. Alexander is married with three children and lives in Portland, Oregon, and is currently working on a third novel about terrorism.

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