“Yeah, you heard right. I want it. I want what you got. You can give it to me. Or I can take it.”
“It don’t work that way, man. The Dragons, you get elected president.” He turned and saw the others at the corner, all watching him. “You can join — then, who knows? The guys in the crew like you, and I decide to pack it in, maybe you end up president. But you don’t get the gig with a blade.”
“I become president,” Rojo said, “I get your wife, too? She’s pretty, man. I dig her. I—”
Shank slammed into him, crashing him against the window, reaching desperately for his hands. He locked a hand on Rojo’s left wrist. The knife was in the other hand. And then Rojo was whirling, squirming, a high-pitched animal whine coming from inside him, and Shank heard shouts and a scream, all the while smashing at Rojo, tumbling, using every move he’d ever learned. And then he heard the shots. Pap-pap, two of them, pap-pap-pap, three more. And Rojo stopped moving. Shank rolled off him and started to get up, and couldn’t, and then saw the blood, all over his hands and his stomach. And his wife’s forlorn face. And Little Willie John, crying, and whispering:
“It’s okay, it’s okay, brother, it’s okay. You gonna live, man, you gonna live. It’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Shank said, a high ringing in his ears, the world turning white, faces bleaching out, and heard Maria saying: “Goddamn you, baby, goddamn all of you.”
BILLY FITZGERALD IDOLIZED HIS father and nobody in the neighborhood could blame him. Paulie Fitzgerald was, after all, a hero of the war. In the bars, in the veterans’ clubs, they all knew the story well: how Paulie had gone to Korea in that first brutal winter of the war, when the ground froze to iron, and how his outfit was cut off in the night and the flanks were overrun, and how Paulie fought off the Communists all by himself, killing eleven of them, until help arrived in the morning. Billy knew the story as well as anyone, although his father was a modest man and didn’t talk about it much, except when he was drinking.
“Let’s just say it was terrible,” his father would say. “War is hell, kid. War is hell.”
But there were medals and ribbons in the top drawer of the bureau in his parents’ bedroom and, in their way, they were enough. Sometimes when nobody was home, when Billy was a boy, he would take them out and examine them. The Bronze Star. The Distinguished Service Medal. The Purple Heart. They thrilled Billy and, handling them, he would imagine his father, young and tough, with a machine gun in his hands, marching across barren hills, and then fighting hard through fear and blood to save his buddies. Sometimes, Billy would wear the medals, pinning them to his chest, as his father did on Memorial Day, when he marched with the other veterans. In some important way, the medals made Billy feel directly connected to that larger, braver world that seemed to exist only in movies.
“I don’t talk about it,” his father said one night, after coming in late from Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, across the street. “But I must have fired three hundred rounds. Cohen got it, and Lloyd, and Charlie Ramirez, and I kept shootin’ and the Commies kept comin’ and I thought the night would never end.”
In 1971, when Billy was eighteen, he felt it was his duty to volunteer for the army. His mother cried and protested, and his younger brothers told him not to do it, but Billy insisted that as the oldest son he had no choice. In his time, his father had done his duty; now it was Billy’s turn.
At night in basic training, he was tormented by fear, afraid that in a crisis he would never be as brave or as tough as his father. He would falter. He would cry. He would break and run. But in the end, none of that happened. Billy was assigned to Germany, not Vietnam, and his father remained secure as the only hero in the family.
“You’re better off,” his father said. “That goddamned war’s just not worth fightin’.”
This was on a night in Rattigan’s, as Paulie stood with friends at the bar, while a ball game droned away on TV. His son was in uniform, leaving in the morning.
“What outfit were you with anyway, Dad?” the son said.
“First Cav,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. That was long ago and far away.”
Then there was basketball excitement on TV, the others shouted, the conversation shifted. In the morning, Billy left for Germany. He came back almost two years later with a German wife, tall and blond and placid, and announced that they were moving straight to California. He took a job at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, went to night school on the GI Bill, learned drafting. Once a year, he came back to New York with his wife, and then with his kids, and each time his father was fatter. Chins multiplied; blue veins blossomed on his nose; his belly made him look as if he’d swallowed a safe. Billy had to explain to his children that under the layers of flesh there was a man who had once been young and tough and a hero.
