Mario Puzo - Fools die

Vallie kept a bottle of rye in the living room for her father and brothers when they came to visit. Neither Value nor I drank usually. But I didn’t know where the hell she kept the bottle.

“Wait a minute,” I said to the man crying before me. “You need a drink.” I found the bottle in the kitchen closet and got two glasses. We both drank it straight, and I could see he felt better, he composed himself.

And watching him, I realized that he had not come to give his thanks to the would-be saviors of his daughter. He had come to find someone to pour out his grief and his guilt. So I listened and wondered that he had not seen my judgment of him on my face.

He emptied his glass and I poured him more whiskey. He slumped back on the sofa tiredly. “You know, I never wanted to leave my wife and kids. But she was too lively and too strong. I worked hard. I work two jobs and save my money. I want to buy us a house and bring up my children right. But she wants fun, she wants a good time. She’s too strong and I had to leave. I tried to see my kids more, she won’t let me. If I give her extra money, she spends it on herself and not on the kids. And then, you know, we got further and further apart and I found a woman who liked to live the way I live and I become a stranger to my own children. And now everybody will blame me because my little girl died. Like I’m one of those flying dudes, who leave their old ladies just to follow their nose.”

“Your wife is the one that left them alone,” I said.

The man sighed. “Can’t blame her. She go crazy if she stay home every night. And she didn’t have the money for a baby-sitter. I could have put up with her or I could have killed her, one or the other.”

I couldn’t say anything, but I watched him and he watched me. I saw his humiliation at telling all this to a stranger and a white stranger. And then I realized that I was the only person to whom he could show his shame. Because I didn’t really count and because Vallie had smothered the flames burning his daughter.

“She nearly killed herself that night,” I said.

He burst into tears again. “Oh,” he said. “She loves her kids. Leaving them alone don’t mean nothing. She loves them all. And she ain’t ever going to forgive herself, that’s what I’m afraid of. That woman is going to drink herself to death, she’s going down, man. I don’t know what to do for her.”

There was nothing I could say to this. In the back of my head I was thinking, a day’s work wasted, I’d never even get to go over my notes. But I offered him something to eat. He finished up his whiskey and rose to go. Again that look of shame and humiliation in his face as he thanked me and my wife once again for what we had done for his daughter. And then he left.

When Vallie came home with the kids that night, I told her what had happened, and she went into the bedroom and wept while I made supper for the kids. And I thought of how I had condemned the man before I ever met him or knew anything about him. How I had just put him in a slot whittled out by the books I had read, the drunks and dopers who had come to live in the project with us. I thought of him fleeing from his own people into another world not so poor and black, escaping the doomed circle he had been born in. And left his daughter to die by fire. He would never forgive himself, his judgment far harsher than that I in my ignorance had condemned him with.

– -

Then a week later a lovey-dovey couple across the mall got into a fight and he cut her throat. They were white. She had a lover on the side who refused to stay on the side. But it wasn’t fatal, and the errant wife looked dramatically romantic in her huge white neck bandages when she took her little kids to the school bus.

I knew we were getting out at the right time.

At the Army Reserve office in the armory the bribe business was booming. And for the first time in my Civil Service career I received an “Excellent” rating. Because of my bribe rackets, I had studied all the complicated new regulations, and was finally an efficient clerk, the top expert in the field.

Because of this special knowledge, I had devised a shuttle system for my clients. When they finished their six months’ active duty and came back to my Reserve unit for meetings and two weeks summer camp, I vanished them. I devised a perfectly legal system for them to beat it. In effect I could offer them a deal where after they did their six months’ active duty, they became names on the Army Reserve inactive rosters to be called up only in case of war. No more weekly meetings, no more yearly summer camps. My price went up. Another plus: When I got rid of them, it opened up a valuable slot.

One morning I opened the Daily News, and there on the front page was a big photograph of three young men. Two of them were guys I had just enlisted the day before. Two hundred bucks each. My heart gave a big jump and I felt a little sick. What could it be but an expose of the whole racket? The caper had blown up. I made myself read the caption. The guy in the middle was the son of the biggest politician in the state of New York. And the caption applauded the patriotic enlistment of the politician’s son in the Army Reserve. That was all.

Still, that newspaper photo frightened me. I had visions of going to jail and Vallie and the kids being left alone. Of course, I knew her father and mother would take care of them, but I wouldn’t be there. I’d lose my family. But then, when I got to the office and told Frank, he laughed and thought it was great. Two of my paying customers on page one of the Daily News. Just great. He cut out the photograph and put it on the bulletin board of his Army Reserve unit. It was a great inside joke for us. The major thought it was up on the board to boost unit morale.

That phony scare threw me off guard in a way. Like Frank, I started to believe that the racket could go on forever. And it might have, except for the Berlin crisis, which made President Kennedy decide to call up hundreds of thousands of Reserve troops. Which proved to be very unlucky.

The armory became a madhouse when the news came out that our Reserve units were being called into the Army for a year’s active duty. The draft dodgers who had connived and paid to get into the six months’ program went crazy. They were enraged. What hurt the worst was that here they were, the shrewdest young men in the country, budding lawyers, successful Wall Street operators, advertising geniuses, and they had been outwitted by that dumbest of all creatures, the United States Army. They had been bamboozled with the six months’ program, tricked, conned, sold, never paying attention to the one little catch. That they could be called up to active duty and be back in the Army again. City slickers being taken by the hicks. I wasn’t too pleased by it either, though I congratulated myself for never having become a member of the Reserves for the easy money. Still, my racket was shot to hell. No more tax-free income of a thousand dollars a month. And I was to move into my new house on Long Island very soon. But still, I never realized that this would bring on the catastrophe I had long foreseen. I was too busy processing the enormous paperwork involved to get my units officially on active duty.

There were supplies and uniforms to be requisitioned, all kinds of training orders to be issued. And then there was the wild stampede to get out of the one-year recall. Everybody knew the Army had regulations for hardship cases. Those that had been in the Reserve program for the last three or four years and had nearly finished their enlistment were especially stunned. During those years their careers had prospered, they had gotten married, they made kids. They had the military lords of America beat. And then it all became an illusion.