Max Collins - Target Lancer

The cafeteria, on the first floor of an apartment building, was no bigger than your average luncheonette, just a modest food-serving counter with a diner-style window on the kitchen and a cluster of Formica tables on its linoleum floor. A few white-collar workers were mixed in with the blue-collar, more men than women. A bouquet of scrambled eggs and syrup wafted, and the clatter of dishes, silverware, serving containers, and trays mingled with morning conversation to make nonmelodic, percussive music.

I went to the skinny cashier in his white shirt and black bow tie and asked to see the manager, got a bald guy in a brown suit, whispered that I was following up on Lieutenant Moyland’s suspicious character, and got nodded toward a table for four where a pale, muscular little guy with a butch haircut sat solo.

That’s who I’d figured for the role, but confirmation was always appreciated. I slid a tray along the counter, got some scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and orange juice from unhappy women in hairnets, left a buck with the morticianish cashier, and threaded through the well-populated little place, heading for the butch haircut by the backward EAT RITE painted on the front window.

As I pretended to move past the guy, I paused and noticed the USMC eagle-and-anchor tattoo on his left forearm, the sleeves of his tan work shirt rolled to the elbow.

He was looking at his own plate of eggs and bacon and potatoes and toast, but I grinned at him as if I already had his attention and said, “Semper fi, Mac.”

He glanced up into my waiting smile. His face was oval, but the butch gave it a squared-off look, his eyes big and blue and dull under a shelf of high forehead and cartoonish ink-slash eyebrows, his nose pug, his mouth small and pinched, chin dimpled, ears sticking out like an afterthought. His initially blank expression blossomed into a small smile-small because of the size of his mouth.

“You an ex-Marine, too?” His voice was high-pitched, his words rushed, tumbling onto each other.

“Are you ever really an ex -Marine?” I asked. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all! Sit right down. Always up for jawin’ with a fellow jarhead.”

I set my tray down opposite and sat, then extended my hand across our breakfasts. “My name’s Heller. Nate Heller.”

He clasped it. Firm. “Thomas Vallee. Friends call me Tommy. You must be local-I can hear the Chicago in your voice.”

“There’s some in yours, too.”

He shrugged, picked up a piece of bacon, snapped it in two, munched. “I grew up northwest of here. Just moved back from New York after a couple years away.”

“Work in Uptown or maybe Ravenswood?”

“Naw. Downtown, in the Loop. Printing plant. I’m a lithographer. You?”

“I’m in sales.” I nibbled a corner of burnt toast. “So where did you serve?”

Some pride came into his expression. “Korea,” he said, and shoveled some eggs in.

“You don’t look old enough.”

“I’m almost thirty.”

“That’s still not old enough for that war.”

He got a goofy little grin going. “So I lied about my age. I said I was eighteen but I was only fifteen.”

I laughed, sipped some juice. “I lied, too-but I had to shave some years off, to get in. I was in the big one.”

The dullness had left the blue eyes; they glittered with interest now. “Yeah? Where did you serve?”

“The Pacific. Guadalcanal.”

“No shit. You must have seen some real action.”

“Some,” I said, as casual as Audie Murphy trying to impress a starlet. I had a bite of eggs, then added, “I’d be lying if I said I had an easy time of it.”

“Nobody does. You get wounded?”

“Nothing serious, but, uh … they sent me home on a Section Eight. I went a little Asiatic.”

All of that was true, by the way. I’d gone home due to what they used to call shell shock and later termed battle fatigue, but was really just good old-fashioned crazy.

He was nodding. “Yeah, I got discharged, too. Didn’t get a Section Eight, but I talked to my share of Marine Corps shrinks, I’ll tell ya.”

My frankness had opened him up.

He was saying, “See, a mortar went off, right by me, and I got a concussion.” He tapped his head. “Got myself a steel plate in my scalp.”

“That’s rough.”

“You think that’s rough? Right after I get out, I manage to get myself into a damn car crash … not sayin’ I wasn’t partly to blame. I’d knocked back a few, and was out of sorts, ’cause I’d just been in, well, a kind of bar fight. Anyway, I wound up in a coma for three months.”

“You’re kidding. That is rough.”

“Tellin’ me ? Hell, I came out of it like a baby. Had to learn to walk, talk…” He held up his knife. “… even how to use a knife and fork. My old man had to teach me every basic skill of livin’, all over again. And you know what? It … it killed him.”

His eyes were moist.

“How do you mean, Tommy?”

“Hard to talk about. Day, very damn day, that I felt like I was myself again, like I could go out in the world and be a real man … he falls down dead with a goddamn heart attack. It just ain’t fair. Ain’t fuckin’ fair … excuse the French.”

A busboy stopped to collect our trays. Vallee exchanged smiles with the kid.

“That’s a lousy break, Tommy. What did you do?”

“I’ll tell you what I did. In ’55, I re-upped, is what I did. Got myself a second hitch.”

“After a medical discharge?” And a plate in the head?

He shrugged. “I must’ve healed up, at least enough to suit them. Not to say I didn’t hit my share of potholes, and, like I said, those shrinks made a hobby out of my ass.… Only served another year and a half or so before I got discharged, once and for all.”

“Any medals for your trouble?”

His chin raised a little, propelled by pride. “Purple Heart and oak-leaf cluster. How about you, Nate?”

“Purple Heart. Silver Star.” Also true. Not a card I like to play, but perfect for this game.

His eyes popped. “Silver Star! You’re the genuine article, man! That is goddamn impressive. I have to shake your hand.”

We already had, hadn’t we? But we did it again.

“Tommy, what made you enlist so young?”

“Oh, I always wanted to be Marine, long as I can remember. My older cousin, Mike, he was a Marine. He was a great guy. And I guess I was like every kid who watched Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers on TV–I loved to play guns.”

“Still like guns?”

“Oh yeah. I still go shooting. I, even, uh … well, I own a few. How about you?”

“I do a little shooting now and then.” I finished the orange juice. Breakfast hadn’t been bad, for cafeteria food. “Good to hear you have a trade, Tommy. Some military guys can’t seem to readjust to civilian life. They just can’t let go.”

He shrugged, his eyes twinkling. Yes, twinkling. “I keep my hand in.”

“Yeah? How is that possible?”

He leaned in, conspiratorially. “In New York … just between us gyrenes?… Would you believe I trained anti-Castro guerrillas?”

“This was before the Bay of Pigs?”

“Naw! We lost a hell of a lot of good men there, though, didn’t we?”

“Who were you training exactly?”

“Cuban exiles. They want their country back. They want a free Cuba! Don’t you?”

“Where in New York did you train guerrillas?”

“Well, not in Manhattan!” He giggled. That’s right, giggled. “Long Island. Ever hear of Levittown?”

I had heard of Levittown, and a more unlikely place for guerrilla warfare training I could not picture.

Vallee was saying, “No, this is today , Nate, this is going on right now. There’s a war going on, you know. A secret war. Against the Communists. You ever hear of the John Birch Society?”