The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 11

“The cuckoo, she's a pretty bird, Lord she warbles as she flies . . .

— the radio in Elisabeth’s car

Summer solstice, 1988.

Kevin was in the coffee room with the other hamsters as the boss told a funny story, biting the skin around his fingernails and trying to laugh in the right places. The only thing on his mind, besides what dicks his co-workers were and how long it would be before he was the one holding court, was his wife’s wedding rings.

Not worth much, not even their weight in gold. But he and Elisabeth hadn’t slept together in almost five weeks, a circus had come to the old man’s house across the alley, and she seemed unperturbed that the rings were missing.

One and one and one is three. And the funny story wasn’t all that funny.

 “. . . the people in the apartment downstairs start banging on the apartment door – ‘TURN THE GODDAMN WATER OFF! OUR CEILING IS FALLING DOWN!’”

The coffee room of Muggins Financial, a strip mall storefront where men in itchy suits sold 29.9% loans to the poor and the stupid—erupted in laughter.

                                                        -o-

“God was just here, Basilio, right here. But you were over in the corner counting your sins and you missed him . . .”     

Vonnegut’s Dresden was consumed by real fire whereas Basilio’s My Lai was no more than poetic indulgence, an insult to true veterans. The former believed that a soldier must want something in every story told, even if only a tumbler of kerosene. The latter wasn’t sure what he wanted.

Half-ass fame—big in 21224, big in 21231, shooting for 10028—or happiness?

Baltimore or Barcelona?

Elisabeth or Nieves?

Basilio was young enough—just 30 but 17 in his rock and roll heart, trudging through the last months, though he didn’t know it, of treating his problems with marijuana—to think he could have it all.

He had not yet met the wise man who would tell him—in the wake of Elisabeth and Nieves’ sudden and simultaneous disappearance—that you cannot be in the picture and gaze at the picture at the same time.

Because Basilio spent his days painting—in generations to come, his work would preserve a city nearly as ruined as Dresden—it took him decades to believe what Martick had tried to explain.

That even if you were someone for whom the world made exceptions, you can not be in a picture and look at the picture at the same time.

But maybe—maybe, maybe, maybe for Basilio had not yet been struck sober in his grief.

[When he controlled it, he couldn’t enjoy it. When he enjoyed it, he couldn’t control it.]

Maybe you can have both if the canvas, like the fresh one in front of him right now, was blank.

Elisabeth had spent the last two days circling the Baltimore Beltway like the hands of an un-sprung clock; kids buckled in the piece-of-shit station wagon Kevin said was the best he could do for her, radio tuned to the weather station. Anything to keep from going home.

Nieves was in the alley behind G&A Coney Island hot dogs, a worm on a hook while men with nets stood by to catch the fish about to eat her.

When his cousin’s dealers began calling the house at all hours, Basilio turned off the ringer on Grandpop’s rotary wall phone; a real hunk of post-war hardware, an object blunt enough to bludgeon to death someone you loved.

The phone had not rung now for five days, leading the old Spaniard to believe— when he thought about it at all—that there was no one left who wanted to talk to him.

The house was silent as the cop cars blocked off each end of the alley behind the hot dog diner; Grandpop asleep in his seat at the kitchen table and Basilio trying to get something going below the hole in the roof.

Canvas empty like a question.

If this is a war story, what do the combatants want?

                                                                    -o-

When the police moved in, Highlandtown’s corner boys—the ones Nieves believed to be friends because they took her on all-night dirt-bike rides through the city—roared away in five directions.

North through the Patterson Park, south toward the harbor, east into the cinderblock wilds of Dundalk, west for downtown . . .

And one they’d invented for moments like this, leaving Nieves against the wall with a bag of dope in one hand, what was left of the pawn shop money she’d gotten for the engagement ring and her lover’s wedding band on her left hand.

Tipped off by a neighborhood cop to whom he loaned his own money at 6 percent, Kevin met the paddy wagon at the Southeastern District lock-up to add theft charges the ones brought by the State of Maryland.

Fair and unfair: possession of a controlled dangerous substance and solicitation for prostitution.

Handcuffed, Nieves turned to spit at Kevin on her way into the station house and though her phlegm fell short, the desk sergeant added attempted assault to the record.