Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

And like I've said — although I never said it to anyone — I thought Bobby was a fucking idiot, and on several important levels (and not because it was Vietnam, because Vietnam wasn't Vietnam yet, at least to us back here), but to my amazement nobody considered what he was doing to be a terrible idea, not even Ma, who seemed to think going into the service was like an extended sleepaway camp, and not even Pop, who thought Bobby should spend a year or two and take in the sights of Southeast Asia and just come back and lace up his old spikes for St. John's or the Columbus Clippers, no problem whatsoever.

Like everybody in our neighborhood Bobby was patriotic enough but it wasn't love of country or sense of duty or anything else so fudgeably grand and romantic that made him do such a thing. For no matter how excellent he was at something (and there were many somethings besides baseball, like acting and singing and then drawing, which I remember all the girls adoring, because he'd sketch them to look as lovely as they'd ever be, accentuating their eyes or lips), Bobby had a habit of cutting short his involvement before anything really great could develop. He was what people these days would term a grazer, a browser, a gifted Renaissance kid who never quite wholly commits (one could maybe think ADD). But really, if I have to say it, Bobby was Bobby because he didn't ultimately care. It wasn't a nihilistic streak, nothing dark like that, but rather a long-ingrained insoluble indifference, which sprang from how easily he could do things, like pick up any instrument, or a new sport, or have a beautiful girl fall in love with him, with what was always this effortless sparkling performance of Himself, which he was mostly unconscious of, and thus why most people instantly championed and loved him. And so you could think his predraft enlistment was just another circumstance to be easily sailed through, but I have thought that what it really was was Bobby pushing the venue, pushing the para-meters to include, finally, the chance of testing his mortality.

Which turns out is what many of us otherwise self-tucked in chronic safety will do, and with surprising regularity, whether we're aware of it or not.

If Bobby were still alive it is almost certain that he would have ended up running Battle Brothers; although we were seven years apart (Ma had two miscarriages between us), I would have simply put in a few years until Bobby was old enough and then gone off on my own and probably pursued something to do with flying. Although I always dreamed of being an ace of a P-47 Thunderbolt (long ago manufactured by Republic down the road in Farmingdale) or a Grumman F9F

Panther like in The Bridges at Toko-Ri, I didn't end up applying to the service academies and thus had no genuine shot at being a fighter jock and having a subsequent career as a big-jet commercial captain. I do believe I would have been like a few guys you hear about around the hangar lounge who try to climb the ladder themselves, average Andys who just love flying so much that they wait for their chance to pilot commuter puddle-jumpers or regional mail runners or even just drag those message banners above the South Shore beaches that say MARRY ME ROSALIE or MAKE IT ABSOLUT. Or if I didn't quite do that maybe I'd have my own little travel business, by handle of My Way Tours, offering eight- and fifteen-day guided re-creations of all of Jerry Battle's favorite trips ("Serengeti Supreme," say, or "Blue Danube"), because anyone knows that the best way to make a living is to spend the workaday hours submitting to your obses-sions and that everything else is just plain grubby labor. But that's the life of the charming and the lucky and the talented (i.e., people like Bobby), and for the rest of us perfectly acceptables and okays and competents it's a matter of persistence and numbness to actual if minor serial failure and a wholly unsubstantiated belief in the majesty of individual destiny, all of which is democracy's spell of The Possible on us.

Still, and though Pop would never agree, Bobby would have probably run Battle Brothers into the ground. I can say this because he was always too generous, and would have undoubtedly bid too low for jobs and been a soft touch with the crews and not cut enough corners when he could with the customers or the vendors and who/whatever else there was holding down our margins. I'm no natural business whiz and the worries never once kept me up at night but Battle Brothers was the whole of Pop's life and in the sum of it pretty much mine. I think my career-long effectiveness came from the fact that I could funnel all of my frustrations and exasperations and notions of self-misprision into just the right kind of fierce mercenary pressure, which I could reserve until called for and then unvalve on some poor sucker caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Christ I could holler. Mostly, though, I was just in a pissy mood. Some of the guys, I know, would kid around and refer to me as Jerry Not So Merry or Jerry Sour Berry (their other, non-public names for me I'm sure much more rank and vile). At the annual landscapers' association banquet (last year emceed by the dashing Jack Battle at the Brookville Country Club), I never particularly associated too well, always choosing to sit with the newer contractors on the periphery and pretend I didn't know anybody. The Pavones and Richters and Keenan and Ianuzzis would hold their royal blowhards court and roast each other and get fresh with the hired girls and undoubtedly scuff up the putting green with their drunken fisticuffs, these overtanned, blunt-fingered guys upon whom I would wish a horrid pox or blood plague but who in fact weren't unlike us Battles at all.

Bobby was the one who would have fit right in; he was ever willing to tolerate those he considered to be any kind of comrade in arms, and not at all for business reasons. I don't know where he got this need to be part of the crowd, part of the gang, as neither Pop nor I is so constituted, but then again he was universally adored, and after we had his memorial service there came together what amounted to a big block party for him in our old neighborhood, which wasn't thrown by us, as Ma for once in her life didn't much feel like putting out a spread for company and went right up to her bedroom to change into her nightgown and take a few pills for sleep. Pop trudged clown into our finished basement and clicked on the talk radio extra loud, and though I don't like to think about it probably just played with his 1/175-scale USS Arizona, which took him at least three years to make, painting included. Daisy refused to come, as she despised funerals and cemeteries and was back in Long Island with the kids, and so I moped around the kitchen for a bit until I heard music coming from the street.

When I went out there I was amazed to see how large and festive the gathering was — it was more a celebration than a wake, some kind of commencement, like a demigod had been approved to ascend Mt. Olympus. Everybody was hauling out their extra card tables and chairs and setting out the Pyrex casseroles of baked ziti and lasagna and sausages and stuffed clams and bean salad that was probably just their family dinners. They had a keg of beer for the men and jugs of blush wine for the ladies, and the kids were playing Red Rover and Kick the Can at the end of our coned-off street, and even a couple of cops had stopped by for a cold one. Basically it was like one of those Saturday night city street fairs except there weren't any flashing string lights or cotton candy machines or necking couples, though I do remember seeing a kid puking on the Rados-cias' garage door, probably having filched too much leftover Lambrusco.

Everybody was hugging me and friendly in a way I had never known them to be friendly, which, if I have to be honest, was clearly not so much about condolence or sympathy but rather whatever they might have sensed of Bobby as residually expressed in me (he had those sparkly eyes, too, and the same wavy dark hair). But none of it was unpleasant or even sad, and I can tell you that I felt more comfortable and at ease that evening on 149th Street than in all the years growing up there as a not unhappy youth, because when you're among others and don't have to be exactly in your own skin it can be the strangest blessing, not to mention the added effect of feeling an afterglow as warm-hued as Bobby Battle's. (Perhaps this explains my love of travel, because when you're walking along some quay or pi-azza or allee there's an openness and possibility and that certain intimacy with strangers which is near impossible on an American street or food court, the scale still hunched and human.) Guys were toasting me and making sentimental speeches about Bobby's honey singing voice and stunning bat speed, and the ladies were the ones who seemed to be putting on a serious buzz, as I'd be passed from one to another in a rope line of tangos, and then later that evening when almost everybody had folded up camp and gone inside for the night, a woman named Patricia Murphy came up to me and told me she had gone out with Bobby for a little while during middle school and asked if I would walk her to her car.