And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. ‘Ahem!’ He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue. ‘You, young man,’ Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. ‘Am I right about something?’ Daisy asked. ‘You were in Vietnam, right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Conor said, prepared for trouble.
‘Good man,’ Daisy. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. ‘I knew I was right.’
It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall – killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.
For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bomb-site – chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, ‘Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.’ The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.
Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.
Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.
Here was the A Shau Valley – the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing uphill in a single winding column, planting their feet in that same old mud. (Dengler: Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the craziest son of a bitch in the valley.) Boy soldiers flashing the peace sign in a jungle clearing, one with a filthy strip of gauze around his naked upper arm. Conor saw Dengler’s burning, joyous face in place of the boy’s own.
Conor looked at a haggard, whiskered face trying to grin over the barrel of an M-60 mounted in a big green Huey. Peters and Herb Recht had died in a chopper identical to this one, spilling plasma, ammunition belts, six other men, and themselves over a hillside twenty klicks from Camp Crandall.
Conor found himself staring at the cylindrical rounds in the M-60’s belt.
‘I guess you recognize that copter,’ Daisy said.
Conor nodded.
‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’
It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.
Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.
With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…
‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’
It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?
Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.
‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’
For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.
‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’
He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.
‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’
Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.
Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.
Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. ‘Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,’ Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.
Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.
All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.
After Mrs Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, ‘See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Conor said, laughing.
Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. ‘Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.’
‘Back off,’ Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.
At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.
‘Ain’t