The Big Bounce

  When he was up, away from the edge of the roof, he thought: Why tell anybody? If you can do it and know you can, what more do you want? That was a funny thing, he never did tell anybody or even hint at it. He kept it to himself. But every once in a while he would take it out and think about it.

  He thought about it several times that morning while he raked the beach.

  “If you’re not doing anything tonight,” Mr. Majestyk said, “stop in and watch some TV.”

  “I don’t know. I might do something.”

  “What’s her name?” Mr. Majestyk grinned, sticking a hunk of pork chop in his mouth. Chewing it, he said, “McHale’s Navy is on. That son of a bitch—you ever watch it?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  Donna had set the table on the porch: pork chops, scalloped potatoes, peas, applesauce, beer, homemade bread, fruit Jell-O for dessert. Ryan could hear her in the kitchen doing the pans.

  “It reminds me of when I was in the service,” Mr. Majestyk said. “It isn’t real, McHale’s Navy. I don’t mean we did things like McHale’s. But it reminds me. You know the Seabees?”

  “I think so,” Ryan said.

  “C.B. Construction Battalion. We maintained this airstrip on Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands. You ever hear of it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “New Guinea?”

  Ryan nodded. He could picture it on the map, above Australia.

  “Okay, north of New Guinea maybe four hundred miles,” Mr. Majestyk said. “That’s the Admiralties. We’d take and make bracelets and watchbands, you know, I.D. bracelets—all out of stainless or aluminum and put in these cat-eyes you get from the gooks. Little round stone like half a marble, brown, black, and white, maybe some green. Then we’d sell this junk to the Navy Air Force guys and, Christ, clean up. Just junk, but the hotshots would trade you a bottle of whiskey you could get thirty-five bucks for, for a piece of junk. The First Cavalry, they secured the island before we got there. But not on horses.”

  “They’re in Vietnam,” Ryan said. “I know they don’t have any horses.”

  “This place,” Mr. Majestyk said, “they went in I think on the west side of the island, where it was all coconut trees and crap; then these Seabees would knock the goddamn coconut trees down with bulldozers to cut machine gun lanes. There was a story—these guys, the First Cavalry, were still there before they went up to the Philippines and we used to sell them all kinds of crap—they were trying to take the airstrip, dug in on one side, and these Japanese Geisha babes would come walking across the strip toward them bare naked, not a stitch on, honest to Christ, and these guys would yell, ‘Throw up your hands.’ But they wouldn’t do it, they’d just keep on coming. So they let go wham, wham—started shooting them down, and as the babes fell these grenades started going off that the babes were holding in their armpits. See what they were going to do? Get in among the American guys and then just lift up their arms.”

  “Really naked, uh?”

  “Not a stitch on.”

  “They probably made them do it.”

  “Well,” Mr. Majestyk said, “you know you always think of the American guys doing brave things, but the guys on the other side they must’ve done some brave things too.” Mr. Majestyk finished his Jell-O, scraping the rim of the dish. “Were you in the service?”

  “I tried to enlist, but I got turned down. This buddy of mine went in and got into Special Forces, but they wouldn’t take me. I wrecked my knee in school playing football and then I wrecked my back.”

  “You had an accident with it?”

  “No, it was just sore for a while, my back. Then one time I got out of the shower—I was playing Class C ball then—”

  “You played ball?”

  “In high school and then Class C.”

  “Yeah? I managed a team in Legion.”

  “I never played Legion. I played high school and Detroit Federation. Then Class C down in Texas. I was getting out of the shower and dropped the towel. I bent over to pick it up and it was like somebody put an icepick in my back—you know, down the lower part?”

  “Sure, I had that.”

  “I was in bed two weeks. I couldn’t move. You try to roll over it’s the worst pain you ever had.”

  “Yeah, that’s the sacroiliac.”

  “This doctor said I had a slipped disc.”

  “Sure, the sacroiliac, right down at the base of the spine,” Mr. Majestyk said. “I’d get it and go to this osteopathic doctor. He’d work on it and I’d feel good as new.”

  “It doesn’t bother me much now,” Ryan said. “But every once in while I know it’s there.”

  “Well, you don’t have to go in the service.”

  Ryan spooned his Jell-O, not looking up. “I don’t know, I thought maybe I might like it.”

  “Well,” Mr. Majestyk said, “the service is all right if you like that kind of life.”

  As they were finishing, one of the beer drinkers from No. 11 came in, knocking first on the screen door, and asked Mr. Majestyk if he could cash a check. Mr. Majestyk said he’d be glad to and the guy from No. 11 wrote one out for a hundred dollars.

  Ryan watched Mr. Majestyk go into the living room. He watched him open the cabinet above the desk and take out a metal box. He watched him count out several bills, then close the box and turn the corner into the hall.

  “You always think you’ve brought enough,” the guy from No. 11 said, “but you always need more.”

  “That’s right,” Ryan said.

  The guy from No. 11 was looking into the living room.

  “You got a nice place.”

  “If you like purple,” Ryan said.

  He remembered Mr. Majestyk saying his daughter from Warren had picked out everything. The place wasn’t decorated like a house in the north woods at all. There was purple-looking carpeting, only lighter. Purple and yellow and gray drapes. A purple-and-black-striped couch with silver streaks, or threads, in it, and two matching chairs. On the table in front of the window there was a lamp made out of driftwood. There were prints on the walls of streets that were probably supposed to be in Paris, with white frames. There was a hunting dog picture, too, over the black marble fireplace. There was a white portable Sylvania TV and facing it, Mr. Majestyk’s chair. It had to be his chair, a black vinyl Recline-O-Rama, because Ryan could see Mr. Majestyk sitting in it in his undershirt watching TV with a picture pillow of the Mackinac Bridge behind his head. His daughter from Warren, Michigan, may have decorated the house, but Mr. Majestyk himself must have added all the signs on the built-in cupboard doors and other places:

  DANGER, MEN DRINKING

  THERE’S ONLY ONE THING

  MONEY CAN’T BUY—POVERTY

  I MISS IKE. HELL, I EVEN MISS HARRY

  And over the desk the miniature red carpet with the gold crest. OFFICIAL RED CARPET WELCOME. WE’RE MIGHTY GLAD YOU CAME!

  The signs were all right, but they didn’t seem to go with the furniture. That was it, the place looked like it should be in Detroit, not up here. He should have, like, maple furniture you could put your feet on and a stone fireplace with the white stuff between the stones, the mortar.

  Ryan watched Mr. Majestyk come into the living room from the hall. He opened the metal box again, taking a roll of bills out of his pocket.

  “I don’t want to put you out,” the guy from No. 11 called in.

  “No trouble at all,” Mr. Majestyk said.

  There was a piece of vacant frontage next to Mr. Majestyk’s house. It wasn’t owned by Mr. Majestyk, but he told Ryan to police it up anyway and bury all the debris. It was close to the Bay Vista and looked lousy with the beer cans and what was left of beach parties. Ryan fooled around with it, picking up cans and throwing them into the brush where the V.C.’s were dug in. He’d have to get the bulldozer to clear the heavy stuff, the charred logs and stones, and to dig a hole with. Come across the beach with the blade high, as a shield against the V.C. automatic weapons. Imagine doing th
at, cutting the machine gun lanes while the mothers were shooting at you.

  He picked up a beer can, took two half steps, and threw it on a line into the brush.

  “Nice arm,” Mr. Majestyk said. He was at the edge of his front lawn; Ryan hadn’t seen him come up.

  “I used to have one. I don’t know where it went.”

  “What’d you play?”

  “Third mostly. Three summers in Class C. Then two summers I didn’t play because of my back. I tried out again in June; my back felt okay and I figured I could make it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But just two years out of it, sitting around, made a difference.”

  Mr. Majestyk grinned. “You feel it already. Just wait, buddy.” He looked up at the sky and said then, “It’s going to rain. When it starts to blow like that.”

  Ryan looked up. “The sun’s out.”

  “Not for long,” Mr. Majestyk said. “You might as well go into town and get the paint; you won’t be able to work outside.”

  “What paint?”

  “Paint. What do you mean, what paint?”

  “How do I know what paint you’re talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Mr. Majestyk said. “How will that be?”

  Dumb bastard. He was right about the rain, though. Ryan had the windshield wipers going before he was halfway to Geneva Beach. By the time he was in town and had found a place to park, the sky was overcast and the rain was coming down steadily.

  There was more traffic for a weekday, more people with the same idea: in town because there was nothing to do. People, mostly kids and teenagers, running for stores and standing in the doorways, the cars creeping along and stopping double-parked to let them out or pick them up. It was funny how people didn’t like to get wet. Ryan walked, he didn’t hurry; and if he got wet, so what? What was wrong with getting wet?

  He got the paint, then stopped in the drugstore for cigarettes, a bottle of Jade East, and the new issue of True. Coming out he saw the sky was clearing, brightening, with the sun beginning to show. He put the paint in the back of the station wagon, got in, and started the engine. A little sooner maybe, or later, he probably would have missed Billy Ruiz, but there he was coming toward the car, running hunch-shouldered and grinning. Billy Ruiz got in and slammed the door.

  “Man, I thought you left!” He was touching the seat and the edge of the dashboard. “You got a car!”

  “The guy I work for.”

  “Work—where you working?”

  “A place out the Beach Road.” Ryan hesitated, watching Billy Ruiz and seeing the surprise and the grin still on his face. “The Bay Vista.”

  “Sure, I know where that is. You work there, uh?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Man, pretty soft.”

  “I’m not staying there, I work there.”

  “Yeah, with all that stuff walking around in the bathing suits, uh?” Billy Ruiz’s grin stretched wider. “Don’t tell me, baby.”

  “It beats picking cucumbers.”

  “Anything would beat it.”

  “You almost got them in?”

  “A few more days,” Billy Ruiz said. “They bring out these nice boys from Bay City and Saginaw as pickers yesterday? Christ, they can’t pick their nose. Half of them don’t show up this morning.”

  “More work for you.”

  “I got enough. Hey, you didn’t hear about Frank?”

  “What’d he do now?”

  “He got laid off.”

  “Come on, you’re shorthanded.”

  “I mean it. He’s been drunk all the time, you know, with the money? He don’t show up yesterday. He don’t come out this morning, so Bob Junior fires his ass and tells him to get out.”

  “What’s he drinking for?”

  Billy Ruiz frowned. “Because he’s got money, what do you think?”

  “Dumb bastard.”

  “Sure. Tell him that.”

  “Did he go home?”

  “He say his truck won’t make it to Texas.”

  “All he’s got to do is get on a bus.”

  “You can’t tell him anything, that guy.”

  Ryan drove Billy Ruiz to the migrant camp—to the road leading into the camp—dropped him there and headed back to Geneva thinking about Frank Pizarro and his slick hair and his sunglasses and his big mouth. Frank Pizarro was a mistake. He’d remember him with all the other mistakes he had made and promised never to make again. It was easy to make promises, but, God, it was easier to fall into things.

  He turned at the Shore Road and at the last second turned left again at the first block and came up behind the IGA store. There were so many cars in the parking lot he had to drive in to get a look at the throwaway stack of boxes and cartons near the door. And when he saw it, it was a pile of boxes like any pile of boxes. It could have been the same pile that was here Saturday—except that he didn’t see a red Stroh’s beer case.

  Driving out the Beach Road, he kept thinking about the beer case, wondering about it, until he told himself to either do something about it or forget it, but quit thinking. He couldn’t trace an empty beer case that had been thrown away two days ago, so forget about it. What he couldn’t forget completely was Frank Pizarro. He shouldn’t have ever let him get close. He should have known Frank Pizarro the first time he ever saw him. It wasn’t a good feeling to have something hanging over you. Something you shouldn’t have done but did.

  Or something you should have done but didn’t. He remembered it as soon as he saw the girl from No. 5.

  He had put Mr. Majestyk’s car in the garage and was walking up the lane behind the cabanas to his room when he saw the girl and remembered it. She was backing out of her carport, edging out, in her shiny tan Corvair. Then she was looking right at him, waiting for him to reach her.

  “I wondered—I thought you were going to fix my window.”

  He wouldn’t have remembered her if she had not been coming out of No. 5. She was dressed up: white beads, a white beaded clip in her hair, sunglasses with white rims and little pearls, made up and dressed up, sweater and purse on the seat next to her.

  “The window,” Ryan said. “Listen, I haven’t forgotten. I got tied up.”

  “Do you think tomorrow?”

  “First thing.”

  “Well not too early. I am on vacation.” She laughed.

  “Anytime you say.”

  “Fine, then.” She hesitated. “Can I give you a lift? I’m going into Geneva.”

  “I just got back.” She didn’t look bad. About third string, but not really bad dressed up.

  “Well, then, thank you,” Virginia Murray said and backed out a little more, slowly, before finally pulling away.

  What was she thanking him for?

  The back door to No. 5 and the window that was supposed to be stuck were right there. Ryan looked at the window, not closely but from a few feet away. He walked off toward his room.

  Later on he went up the road to the A & W Drive-In for cheeseburgers and root beer and then played a couple of rounds of Putt-Putt golf. The redhead from No. 9 was there with her little girl, the woman in tight slacks and big white earrings and a band in her hair. She looked pretty nice, but Ryan let her go; he didn’t like the idea of the little girl there. By the time he got back to the Bay Vista, it was after eight. A couple of men were on the patio smoking cigars and some kids were playing shuffleboard, but most of the people were inside now, playing cards or putting kids to bed. He thought about stopping in to see Mr. Majestyk, but then he thought, What for? So he went to bed with True, the Man’s Magazine. He read “The Traitor Hero France Forgave,” skipped “The Short Happy Life of the Kansas Flying Machine,” and got partway through “Stalin’s $10 Million Plot to Counterfeit U.S. Money” before he said the hell with it and picked up his sneakers and went out.

  8

  * * *

  HE LIKED BEING ALONE. Not all the time, but when he was alone, he liked it. He liked it now with the surf co
ming in and the wind stirring in the darkness. He could be alone on a beach anywhere. The houses back up in the trees were dark shapes that could be the huts of a village. The boats lying on the beach could be sampans used by the V.C. The word was they had brought in a load of mortars and automatic weapons, Chicom supplied by the Chinese, and he was on a one-man recon patrol up north of Chu Lai somewhere; get in and chart the V.C. ammo dumps and radio positions to the fleet sitting five miles out in the stream. It was funny people were afraid of the dark. What some guys did in the war, Underwater Demolition or the Special Forces guys, moving through the jungle at night with an M-16 and their faces black, one false step and you’ve got a pungi spike up your behind. And some people would be afraid to be out here. If you could buy the nerve to sneak up on people who were waiting to kill you, then it wasn’t much to sneak up on people who were afraid of the dark. It was funny, but it was also a good thing people were afraid of it.

  You got used to it, that was all. You made up your mind you were going to be good at it and not panic. It was something you developed in your mind, a coolness. No, cooler than cool. Christ, everybody thought they were cool. It was a coldness you had to develop. The pro with icewater in his veins. Like Cary Grant. Pouring champagne for the broad or up on the rooftop and the guy with the steel hook instead of a hand coming at him, he’s the same Cary Grant. No sweat. That was good when he threw the guy and as the guy fell his hook scraped down the metal slant of the roof, making sparks.

  Cary Grant was a good jewel thief. But it never showed what he did with the jewels after he stole them. There was an Armenian guy in Highland Park who would take TV sets, clothes, furs, things like that; but what if you brought him a $100,000 diamond necklace? “Harry, I got this $100,000 diamond necklace. What’ll you give me for it?” Could you see Harry?