The Night In Question (2 page)

Givens looked from one to the other of us. “Now hold on here,” he said. “Let’s not blow this all out of proportion. This is a live-and-learn situation. This isn’t something a man should lose his job over.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Mrs. Givens said, “if he’d done it right.”

Which was a truth beyond argument.

I cleaned out my desk. As I left the building I saw Givens by the newsstand, watching the door. I didn’t see his wife.
He walked up to me, raised his hands, and said, “What can I say? I’m at a loss for words.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him.

“I sure as heck didn’t mean to get you fired. It wasn’t even my idea to come in, if you want to know the truth.”

“Forget it. It was my own fault.” I was carrying a box full of notepads and files, several books. It was heavy. I shifted it under my other arm.

“Look,” Givens said, “how about I treat you to lunch. What do you say? It’s the least I can do.”

I looked up and down the street.

“Dolly’s gone on home,” he said. “How about it?”

I didn’t especially want to eat lunch with Givens, but it seemed to mean a lot to him, and I didn’t feel ready to go home yet. What would I do there? Sure, I said, lunch sounded fine. Givens asked me if I knew anyplace reasonable nearby. There was a Chinese joint a few doors down, but it was always full of reporters. I didn’t want to watch them try to conjure up sympathy over my situation, which they’d laugh about anyway the minute I left, not that I blamed them. I suggested Tad’s Steakhouse over by the cable car turnaround. You could get a six-ounce sirloin, salad, and baked potato for a buck twenty-nine. This was 1974.

“I’m not that short,” Givens said. But he didn’t argue, and that’s where we went.

Givens picked at his food, then pushed the plate away and contemplated mine. When I asked if his steak was okay, he said he didn’t have much appetite.

“So,” I said, “who do you think called it in?”

His head was bent. He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. “Boy, you’ve got me there. It’s a mystery.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Nope. Not a one.”

“Think it could’ve been someone you worked with?”

“Nah.” He shook a toothpick out of the dispenser. His hands were pale and sinewy.

“It had to be somebody who knows you. You have friends, right?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe you had an argument, something like that. Somebody’s mad at you.”

He kept his mouth covered with one hand while he worked the toothpick with the other. “You think so? I had it figured for more of a joke.”

“Well, it’s a pretty serious joke, calling in a death notice on someone. Pretty threatening. I’d sure feel threatened, if it was me.”

Givens inspected the toothpick, then dropped it in the ashtray. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

I could see he didn’t believe it for a second—didn’t understand what had happened. The words of death had been pronounced on him, and now his life would be lived in relation to those words, in failing opposition to them, until they overpowered him and became true. Someone had put a contract out on Givens, with words as the torpedoes. Or so it appeared to me.

“You’re sure it isn’t one of your friends,” I said. “It could be a little thing. You played cards, landed some big ones, then folded early before he had a chance to recoup.”

“I don’t play cards,” Givens said.

“How about your wife? Any problems in that department?”

“Nope.”

“Everything smooth as silk, huh?”

He shrugged. “Same as ever.”

“How come you call her Dolly? That wasn’t the name in the obit.”

“No reason. I’ve always called her that. Everybody does.”

“I don’t feature her as a Dolly,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was watching me.

“Let’s say Dolly gets mad at you, really mad … She wants to send you a message—something outside normal channels.”

“Not a chance.” Givens said this without bristling. He didn’t try to convince me, so I figured he was probably right.

“You’re survived by a daughter, right? What’s her name again?”

“Tina,” he said, with some tenderness.

“That’s it, Tina. How are things with Tina?”

“We’ve had our problems. But I can guarantee you, it wasn’t her.”

“Well, hell’s bells,” I said. “Somebody did it.”

I finished my steak, watching the show outside: winos, evangelists, outpatients, whores, fake hippies selling oregano to tourists in white shoes. Pure theater, even down to the smell of popcorn billowing out of Woolworth’s. Richard Brautigan often came here. Tall and owlish, he stooped to his food and ate slowly, ruminating over every bite, his eyes on the street. Some funny things happened here, and some appalling things. Brautigan took it all in and never stopped eating.

I told Givens that we were sitting at the same table where Richard Brautigan sometimes sat.

“Sorry?”

“Richard Brautigan, the writer.”

Givens shook his head.

I was ready to go home. “Okay,” I said, “you tell me. Who wants you dead?”

“No one wants me dead.”

“Somebody’s imagining you dead. Thinking about it. The wish is father to the deed.”

“Nobody wants me dead. Your problem is, you think everything has to mean something.”

That was one of my problems, I couldn’t deny it.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what did you think of it?”

“Think of what?”

“My obituary.” He leaned forward and started fooling with the salt and pepper shakers, tapping them together and sliding them around like partners in a square dance. “I mean, did you get any feeling for who I was? The kind of person I am?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing stood out?”

I said no.

“I see. Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me, what exactly does it take for you to remember someone?”

“Look,” I said, “you write obituaries all day, they sort of blur into each other.”

“Yes, but you must remember some of them.”

“Some of them—sure.”

“Which ones?”

“Writers I like. Great baseball players. Movie stars I’ve been in love with.”

“Celebrities, in other words.”

“Some of them, yes. Not all.”

“You can lead a good life without being a celebrity,” he said. “People with big names aren’t always big people.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but it’s sort of a little person’s truth.”

“Is that so? And what does that make you?”

I didn’t answer.

“If the only thing that impresses you is having a big name, then you must be a regular midget. At least that’s the
way I see it.” He gave me a hard look and gripped the salt and pepper shakers like a machine gunner about to let off a burst.

“That’s not the only thing that impresses me.”

“Oh yeah? What else, then?”

I let the question settle. “Moral distinction,” I said.

He repeated the words. They sounded pompous.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I have a feeling that’s not your department, moral distinction.”

I didn’t argue.

“And you’re obviously not a celebrity.”

“Obviously.”

“So where does that leave you?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Think you’d remember your own obituary?”

“Probably not.”

“No probably about it! You wouldn’t even give it a second thought.”

“Okay, definitely not.”

“You wouldn’t even give it a second thought. And you’d be wrong. Because you probably have other qualities that would stand out if you were looking closely. Good qualities. Everybody has something. What do you pride yourself on?”

“I’m a survivor,” I said. But I didn’t think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.

Givens said, “With me it’s loyalty. Loyalty is a very clear pattern in my life. You would’ve noticed that if you’d had your eyes open. When you read that a man has served his country in time of war, stayed married to the same woman forty-two years, worked at the same job, by God, that should tell you something. That should give you a certain picture.”

He stopped to nod at his own words. “And it hasn’t always been easy,” he said.

I had to laugh, mostly at myself for being such a dim bulb. “It was you,” I said. “You did it.”

“Did what?”

“Called in the obit.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You tell me.”

“That would be saying I did it.” Givens couldn’t help smiling, proud of what a slyboots he was.

I said, “You’re out of your ever-loving mind,” but I didn’t mean it. There was nothing in what Givens had done that I couldn’t make sense of or even, in spite of myself, admire. He had dreamed up a way of going to his own funeral. He’d tried on his last suit, so to speak, seen himself rouged up and laid out, and listened to his own eulogy. And the best part was, he resurrected afterward. That was the real point, even if he thought he was doing it to throw a scare into Dolly or put his virtues on display. Resurrection was what it was all about, and this tax collector had gotten himself a taste of it. It was biblical.

“You’re a caution, Mr. Givens. You’re a definite caution.”

“I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

“Relax,” I told him. “I’m not mad.”

He scraped his chair back and stood up. “I’ve got better things to do than sit here and listen to accusations.”

I followed him outside. I wasn’t ready to let him go. He had to give me something first. “Admit you did it,” I said.

He turned away and started up Powell.

“Just admit it,” I said. “I won’t hold it against you.”

He kept walking, head stuck forward in that turtlish way, navigating the crowd. He was slippery and fast. Finally I took his arm and pulled him into a doorway. His muscles bunched under my fingers. He almost jerked free, but I tightened my grip and we stood there frozen in contention.

“Admit it.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll break your neck if I have to,” I told him.

“Let go,” he said.

“If something happened to you right now, your obituary would be solid news. Then I could get my job back.”

He tried to pull away again but I held him there.

“It’d make a hell of a story,” I said.

I felt his arm go slack. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Just that one word.

This was the best I was going to get out of him. It had to be enough. When I let go of his arm he turned and ducked his head and took his place in the stream of people walking past. I started back to Tad’s for my box. Just ahead of me a mime was following a young swell in a three-piece suit, catching to the life his leading-man’s assurance, the supercilious tilt of his chin. A girl laughed raucously. The swell looked back and the mime froze. He was still holding his pose as I came by. I slipped him a quarter, hoping he’d let me pass.

B
.D. carried certain objects. He observed in his dispositions and arrangements a certain order, and became irritable and fearful whenever that order was disrupted. There were certain words he said to himself at certain moments, power words. Sometimes he really believed in all of this; other times he believed in nothing. But he was alive, and he gave honor to all possible causes.

His name was Benjamin Delano Sears, B.D. for short, but his friends in the unit had taken to calling him Biddy because of his fussiness and the hennish way he brooded over them. He always had to know where they were. He bugged them about taking their malaria pills and their salt tablets. When they were out in the bush he drove them crazy with equipment checks. He acted like a squad leader, which he wasn’t and never would be, because Sergeant Holmes refused to consider him for the job. Sergeant Holmes had a number of sergeant-like sayings. One of them was “If you don’t got what it takes, it’ll take what you gots.” He had decided that B.D. didn’t have what it took, and B.D. didn’t argue; he knew even better than Sergeant Holmes how scared he was. He
just wanted to get himself home, himself and his friends.

Most of them did get home. The unit had light casualties during B.D.’s tour, mainly through dumb luck. One by one B.D.’s friends rotated stateside, and finally Ryan was the only one left. B.D. and Ryan had arrived the same week. They knew the same stories. The names of absent men and past operations and nowhere places had meaning for them, and those who came later began to regard the pair of them as some kind of cultish remnant. And that was pretty much how B.D. and Ryan saw themselves.

They hadn’t started off as friends. Ryan was a lip, a big mouth. He narrated whatever was happening, like a sportscaster, but the narration never fit what was going on. He’d complain when operations got canceled, go into fey French-accented ecstasies over cold C-rats, offer elaborate professions of admiration for orders of the most transparent stupidity. At first B.D. thought he was a pain in the ass. Then one morning he woke up laughing at something Ryan had said the night before. They’d been setting out claymores. Sergeant Holmes got exasperated fiddling with one of them and said, “Any you boys gots a screwdriver?” and Ryan said, instantly, “What size?” This was regulation blab, but it worked on B.D. He kept hearing Ryan’s voice, its crispness and competence, its almost perfect imitation of sanity.

What size?

Ryan and B.D. had about six weeks left to go when Lieutenant Puchinsky, their commanding officer, got transferred to battalion headquarters. Pinch Puchinsky saw himself as a star—he’d been a quarterback at Penn State, spoiled, coddled, illegally subsidized—and he took it for granted that other men would see him the same way. And they did. He never had to insist on an order and never
thought to insist, because he couldn’t imagine anyone refusing. He couldn’t imagine anything disagreeable, in fact, and carried himself through every danger as if it had nothing to do with him. Because hardly any of his men got hurt, they held him in reverence.

So it was in the nature of things that his replacement, Lieutenant Dixon, should be despised, though he was not despicable. He was a proud, thoughtful man who had been wounded twice already and now found himself among soldiers whose laxity seemed perfectly calculated to finish him off. The men didn’t maintain their weapons properly. They had no concept of radio discipline. On patrol they were careless and noisy and slow to react. Lieutenant Dixon took it upon himself to whip them into shape.