Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

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 that, cutting the machine gun lanes while the mothers were shooting at you.