”Well,” he said, ”how can you be so sure if you didn`t really see?
Sounds to me you`re taking the word of the U.S. government and nobody in their right mind does that.” He shook his head. ”All I`m saying is what if, what if they sent back the wrong body and he`s still down there? Still wandering around the tunnels.” He rocked on his heels. ”Maybe he`s happy down there. Maybe he likes it. You think of that? He never hated the gooks, anyway, not enough, and you got to just do it, not think.” Roy began to walk along the rail again. He looked down at me and grinned. ”You got to move like the river, you got to rush like the wind.” He held out his arms, as if he was reaching for something. His voice rose. ”Hand me a volcano, man. Light me a Piccolo Pete. Give me a Roman Candle.” I passed him the Roman Candle and he lit it with his cigarette. The fuse hissed. Roy pointed it to the sky as the tip opened with a kick of blue flame. He leaned back and went into a windup, making circles with the flame–once, twice, three times–before he sent it up. It rose higher and higher and then, hanging frozen in the air for a long moment, all whites and reds against the night sky, turned on itself and began finally to fall. Suddenly Roy saw something else, caught it out of the corner of his eye. He jumped to the sidewalk. I turned around.
A black-and-white idled at the curb. I heard the flap of Roy`s jacket, the spit of gravel under his shoes. But I just stood there like a fool, my heart pounding. There were street lamps spaced along the bridge about every hundred feet or so, and each time Roy passed under one I kept half expecting, half hoping for him to look back, maybe wave me on. Any kind of sign would`ve done. But he never stopped. Never even turned around. The last time I saw Roy Lambert he was crossing the bridge and then he disappeared back under it. Down to the river, back to the tunnels. Over the railing, on the concrete below, the Roman Candle lay busted on the concrete, the tube uncoiled but still sending out sparks of red and white.
As the cop slipped out from behind the wheel I saw that it was my father`s partner, the man with the big ears. He shined his flashlight in my face. He sighed.
”I thought a cop`s son would know better,” he said. ”How much you been drinking?”
”I just had one beer.”
”Who you kidding?” he sald.
”Nobody,” I said.
The police radio crackled.
”That`s right,” he said. ”Your friend, the rabbit. Why`d he run?”
”I don`t know.”
”He got something to hide?”
”I don`t know,” I said.
A Buick passed on the street and the driver slowed down and leaned over the wheel to get a better look at me. ”Wipe that smile off your face,” the cop said, ”and get in the car.” If I was smiling, I didn`t know it. The muscles around my mouth felt stiff, my lips numb. I started toward the patrol car.
”What`s that around your neck?” he said. ”What the hell are those things?”
My mother made me give up the necklace, it was ”sick,” she said, and what happened to it after that I have no idea. But I still sometimes feel it around my neck with the teeth resting on my chest, these gnarled little bits of bone. I still sometimes see myself in my old bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening again to the soft rush of cars as they passed on the freeway. I thought of my brother that night. I thought of Roy Lambert. I closed my eyes and fell asleep and when I woke my head was burning with fever. All that morning and the next I moved in and out of consciousness, waking only long enough to take the thick, dry aspirins that my mother lifted to my lips and swallow them with a wince and a sip of cool water. On the third day, in the evening, my father came by. I heard his footsteps in the hallway, and when the door was opened I felt the light on my eyelids, a pulsing, a flutter of splintered colors. ”Don`t wake him up,” my mother said. ”He`s still running a temperature. If lt doesn`t break by morning I`m taking him to the hospital.” Then the room fell dark again. She led him to the kitchen and offered him a drink. He pulled up a chair. The legs scraped the linoleum.
”You don`t have to worry about Roy Lambert,” he sald. ”He won`t be looking in anybody`s windows, not for a while anyway.
”What`d you do?”
”Exactly what I said.”
”Smart,” she said. ”Real smart. Now he has a good reason to get even.”
”Let him try.”
”Easy for you to say.”
”I don`t want him near our boy. We already lost one. You should thank me.” he sald. ”That punk could be a rapist.”
”How bad did you hurt him?”
”Bad enough.”
I heard her open a cupboard, then close it. ”One of these days,” she said. ”One of these days, Jack, you`re going to get thrown off the force.”
There was a long pause. I imagined he took a sip of his drink and that he used the time to carefully measure his next words. I heard the clink of ice against glass. He was twirling it around.
”Sally,” he sald, ”I`ve been thinking. I`ve been thinking pretty damn hard lately. The boy needs a man around the house and I`d like to come home.” ”This isn`t your home anymore.”
”Come on now,” he said.
”Come on nothing,” she said.
Again there was a long pause. Again there was the scraping of the chair legs on the linoleum, only this time he had to be getting up. ”We`ll take it slow then,” he said. ”How about a movie this Friday? We can go to Petrino`s for dinner. What do you say?” I bet he moved around the table to reach for her and I would bet that she stepped away.
”Sally?” he sald. ”Honey? What do you say?”
But I didn`t hear her say anything.
When my mother went to sleep later that night I got dressed, slipped out the door and headed for the tunnels. Roy`s car was where he usually parked it –under the Fourth Street bridge. But the windshield was shattered and the body looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. Inside the seats had been slit open with a knife and the headliner ripped down. I felt my heart speed up. I felt my mouth go dry. At the entrance to the tunnel I found the flashlight and made my way back to the vault, running when I could, slipping sometimes on the moss, once falling. ”Roy,” I shouted. as I got closer.
”Roy, it`s me.” But even then I think I already knew. The door to the vault was open and I shined my flashlight inside. The cot had been overturned. The TV cabinet had been smashed, the overstuffed chair slit open so that the guts of it hung free, and the Playboys were ripped up and scattered across the floor. I looked at the wreckage and I thought of my father, I thought of his fury and I saw his Irish face, all vicious and twisted with anger, the tight pale lips turned up in a grimace, his shirt sleeves neatly rolled to the elbow so he could swing his arms better, his club better. On his breath was the sour stink of whiskey, and his eyes, narrowed, hardly looked like eyes at all lost in the bloated and swollen flesh of his cheeks. The air smelled rotten. I heard a low rumbling noise that began in the dog`s stomach and worked its way up to the throat as a snarl. Its voice had grown deeper and I couldn`t tell right away, not for sure, if it was behind or ahead of me. It growled again, low and even, deep from its throat. ”Calm down, boy,” I sald. ”Calm down.” But any second, I thought, any second it was going to bite, put its teeth into my leg, my arm. The growling grew louder, closer. I shined the flashlight around the room, ahead of me, behind me, and that`s when I saw it. The other dog, the sick one. It lay on its side on the floor. The flesh had been gnawed from its bones but a few strips, dry and twisted, still held fast to the white bits of skull. Now the other dog came out from behind it, around from the foot of the cot, and snapped at me. I held the flashlight in its eyes and they glowed a yellowish white–phosphorescent. Its teeth were bared. It snapped at me again and I stepped back. ”You want it,” I said. ”you can have it. Nothing left anyway.” The dog lunged. Its teeth grazed my pants leg and I felt its warm moist breath on my ankle and I thought of kicking it, hurting it, killing it even. Instead I backed away, slowly, until I was out of the vault. The dog stopped in the doorway. I didn`t get much further. It was as if my stomach had a will of its own and wanted to come up out of my throat.
In the morning my mother came in to see how I was getting along. She sat on the edge of my bed and placed her hand on my forehead. Her skin felt cool and soft against mine. I`d slept fitfully, if I slept at all, but by dawn I knew my fever had finally broken. I told her I was feeling better, a whole lot better, and she let her hand slip from my forehead, down along my cheek. I told her I had a dream and that it was about Roy and that something bad had happened to him. She`d been smiling but at the mention of his name the smile disappeared.
”I don`t want you talking about him,” she said. ”I don`t want you even mentioning his name. Understand?”
”I understand,” I said.
”Good,” she said.
”But he`s okay?”
”Far as I know.
If I couldn`t get the truth from my mother, I would get it somewhere else. I would find Roy myself and ask him. But his car remained under the bridge. I never saw him in the tunnels and I looked. I thought if he wasn`t sleeping in his car or in the vault that maybe he had gone back to his mother. But that wasn`t so.
It was two weeks before I finally worked up the courage to ask Mrs. Lambert what had become of Roy. I paid her a visit in the afternoon. The day was hot and her screendoor was open and I could smell chicken frying in the kitchen. In the living room Mrs. Lambert sat on a brand new Lazy Boy chair in front of the TV. It was a big chair and she was a small, skinny woman, all bones and sharp angles, so that for a moment, from the side at least, she reminded me of a child. A game show was on and the sound was turned up high. I must have stood there a minute, looking in on her, trying to work myself up to say something. Between her fingers burned a cigarette, the ash growing longer, so long I thought it would break and fall. But she raised it to her lips in time, took a long last drag, then put it out in the ashtray balanced on the armrest of the chair. I thought she might have been a pretty woman at one polnt in her life, long ago, but now she looked old, a mean kind of old that came from too much bitterness. Finally she turned and took note of me.
”Look,” I said, ”I`m just wondering about Roy.”
”What about him?”
”You know. Where he`s at?”
”Why don`t you ask your father?” she said.
My father had been in the wrong. I didn`t know what to say.
”ITm sorry about him,” I said.
”Sorry don`t pay the hospital bill.”
She lit another cigarette and stared at the TV again.
”What hospital is he at?” I sald.
She turned in her chair and looked at me wlth those little eyes of hers. She had shaved the brows and penciled them in. I saw the bones in her forehead.
”He`s gone again,” she said. ”God bless his soul he makes it home. Two times around is pushing your luck, wouldn`t you say?” I nodded. I thought now that I should leave, and I would have if she had paused a second longer. ”I don`t know what your parents told you and I don`t care. But your brother never would`ve been half the soldier my boy Roy is, even if he ever made it to the front. I know what he was made of and it wasn`t the same stuff.”
”What`re you talking about?” I said.
”He just didn`t have it.”
”What`re you talking about?” I said, louder.
”Don`t you raise your voice to me,” she said. ”You can just get the hell out of here.”
”My brother died fighting,” I said. ”He killed all kinds of people before they could take him down.”
Mrs. Lambert looked at me again. She looked at me hard. I know now in those few seconds before she spoke that if she was any of kind of woman she would`ve had to think against it, and maybe if my father had never beaten the hell out of Roy Lambert and put him in the hospital she would`ve kept silent. ”You can believe any thing you damn well please,” she said. ”We all got to believe, I guess. Believe, sometimes, just to believe.” Then she turned and looked at the TV. ”Now you go remind your father,” she said.
”You go remind him if he forgot.”
I left then and went back to the tunnels. I didn`t want to talk with my father. I didn`t want to talk with my mother. I wanted to give the one dog a proper burial and the other a meal. I had been feeding it over the weeks, leaving it dry food and table scraps when I could. But every time I tried to get the corpse the other dog stood over it, snarled and snapped at me. Once I thought I had made friends with it again, where I could almost pet it. But when I stepped just a little too close it growled and bit at me. Then one day, this day now years past, I came back and found it was gone. I don`t know if it lived or died, or if like the pet cayman that gets flushed into the sewer it found its way into the darkness to grow and thrive on the rats and the human waste. But it is possible. It could be down there now, and in a way a part of me still is. The war ended before I was old enough to enlist, yet I believe I would`ve made a fine soldier, as my brother and Roy had, and though I know it`s senseless and selfish to wish the blood had poured a little longer so that I could`ve been a part of it, I nonetheless feel I was somehow denied.
Roy didn`t return, but neither was his body ever found. I believe he made his home there. I believe that he`s alive and well. Every now and then I imagine the great rush of water from the winter storms, pouring down off the streets and into the gutters, and the tremendous noise it makes slapping against the tunnel walls. Every now and then I hear the sound of it, like the keen of an animal that has never seen the sky, coming from somewhere out of the darkness. I hear it over and over again until I can`t catch my breath.
