The Reason You're Alive Read online

  When Hank started to cry, I got agitated, especially when he asked if any of my friends would mind looking after me for a few days. I said I could just go home for a while if he needed his space, but Hank said NO in a forceful way that made me jump.

  I could tell he was really struggling here, and that he thought I might start World War III if I was left home alone with all of my guns. Just to ease his mind, I told him I could probably spend a few days with my old Vietnam buddy Frank, the multimillionaire I told you about before. Hank said that would be great, so I got on it right away.

  In the guest room I called Frank’s home number, but I got his wife instead. “Goddamn it, Geneva,” she said. “I told you never to call here again!”

  Geneva was Frank’s younger mistress, who he kept in a fancy skyscraper apartment downtown at Two Liberty Place.

  I told Frank’s wife, Lynn, that it was David Granger calling, and that I was in the middle of an emergency. Because that bitch Lynn hates me, she hung up immediately.

  I hesitated before I called back. When Frank came to visit me in the hospital, he didn’t like the way I was treating the stupid nurses and doctors, and we got into a little fight about that. We hadn’t spoken since. So I was a little surprised when my phone started buzzing, and it was Frank.

  He asked if I was okay, and so I told him all about Femke’s surprise return and how the windmilling, wooden-clog-wearing motherfucker had forced me out of my current living arrangement with my son.

  “Why don’t you just go home?” Frank asked, so I told him that my son thought I was “a danger to myself and others,” and even though that was bullshit, Hank was under a lot of stress and I didn’t want him to worry about me.

  Frank asked me what I wanted from him, and I asked if we could just spend some time together maybe and could we use his mistress’s apartment, being that she was probably in the Caribbean doing a photo shoot anyway, because she was a model who spent most of the winter half naked in the tropics.

  When he didn’t answer, I told him that I wouldn’t be calling if I wasn’t in a really fucked-up place, and then I told him about how I sort of blanked out during dinner too, and maybe it would be good to be around another veteran for a few days. I had done the same for him many times whenever his bitch wife kicked him out of his mansion on the Main Line. He knew he owed me for that and more, so I just waited for him to man up, which he eventually did.

  “Jesus Christ,” Frank said, and then he told me to meet him in the Two Liberty Place lobby in an hour.

  I could hear Hank crying in his room, talking to Femke on the phone. I didn’t want to wake up Ella. I left my son a note on the dinner table saying I’d be with Frank, so there was nothing to worry about, and then I called a cab.

  The driver was a white guy, but he smelled pretty bad anyway. Kept farting and stinking up the whole car, which was just my luck. I didn’t tip him shit when we arrived at the shiny skyscraper.

  I lit up a cigarette on the sidewalk. The cabdriver hung around staring at me, trying to shame me for being cheap, so I walked back over to him and motioned for him to roll down the window. When he did, I said, “No one tips a farting cabdriver, so do yourself a favor and go get yourself some TUMS.”

  He drove away, and I was left alone with my Marlboro Light.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to smoke a cigarette on a city sidewalk just as the sun is coming up, but it is truly a magnificent experience. Hardly any cars on the streets. No pedestrians. A heavy quiet fills all of the spaces between the buildings, like one of Jessica’s blank canvases before she filled it up with all of the demons in her mind. I love smoking a cigarette in predawn Philadelphia. You don’t even need a gun to feel safe. One of the few great joys of my life, and so I had five or six smokes, switching hands, so that one could get warm in a pocket while the other allowed me to keep puffing, until Frank’s limo rolled up and he popped out in a suit and tie covered by a cashmere overcoat, all of which probably cost more than you make in a year.

  “I see you came dressed up,” he said. I was in full camouflage, and he knew that meant things weren’t good in my mind.

  I just nodded, and then we got some takeout coffee and went on up to his mistress’s apartment, which is better than any suite in any top hotel in the world. All leather furniture. Persian rugs, which, like I said, are classy. Sophisticated art that Frank buys off Hank, just to support his friend’s son.

  I should probably say that Frank claims to merely mentor Geneva. He says he has never fucked her and is fond of bringing attention to the fact that he is forty years her senior. But I think everyone—including Frank’s wife—knows that you don’t buy a one-point-five-million-dollar apartment for a woman you only mentor. No, you buy that sort of apartment for a model who has agreed to bump uglies with you on a regular basis, but that remains none of my business, so I don’t really discuss it with Frank.

  Even though it was early in the morning and neither of us had eaten, Frank broke out two Cohiba Esplendidos, which meant we were going to have a proper man talk. We did that out on the balcony, where there are heat lamps and these real bearskin blankets made from bears that Frank had actually shot and killed himself.

  Once we had the sticks going and the air was full of Cuban smoke, I let loose with some of my theories on the government and its connection to my brain surgery, outlining how the doctors were on the take and how the VA was no fucking help whatsoever, and Frank just sat there puffing away, looking out over Philadelphia from under his bearskin blanket and nodding every now and then. When our cigars were almost kicked, I realized that I had been talking for almost an hour and Frank hadn’t said a single word, so I asked him what he thought.

  He said I should have gone back to Vietnam with him, because it would have given me closure. I told him I couldn’t and never would be able to go.

  Then he brought up Clayton Fire Bear, which sort of caught me by surprise, since I didn’t even really remember telling Frank about that no-good red Indian motherfucker. I mentioned him to you a few times already. Fire Bear was the one who used to scalp Vietcong.

  “You really still have Fire Bear’s knife in your possession?” Frank asked when I didn’t say anything. “You kept saying his name in the hospital when you first woke up. You asked me to locate Fire Bear when I visited you postsurgery. Do you remember telling me about the knife?”

  I didn’t remember telling Frank to locate Fire Bear, nor did I remember anything else about my postoperation experience, but I sure as shit still had that big Indian’s knife, and I told Frank so.

  “Don’t you think you should give it back?” he said. Frank was always harping on closure when it came to me and all things Vietnam, so this conversation didn’t surprise me one bit. And yet he really didn’t understand the full scope of what he was asking me to do.

  Back in Vietnam, you could smell death and decay wherever Clayton Fire Bear went, because of the crusty Vietcong scalps hanging from his belt. I don’t even think his kind of Indian used to scalp people back in the day, but Indians sort of got lumped together in the jungle. I don’t mean that they stuck all the Indians into separate Indian platoons, but that non-Indian soldiers said the same shit to every Indian they saw in the jungle. We called them all “Chief,” which I’d later learn was offensive, and often times Indians would be given more dangerous jobs, like walking point, because everyone thought they had a sixth sense, when they didn’t have shit and could die just as easily as your average white soldier who had bought the bullet. And I would later learn that this wore on the Indian soldiers and made them feel low and excluded. So not only were they dealing with all the stress of fighting yellow men in the jungle, they also had to manage the misinformed expectations of their fellow US soldiers who had watched too many Hollywood cowboys and Indians on TV.

  I’m not going to tell you what tribe Clayton Fire Bear belongs to, nor am I going to tell you his real name, because he and I now have an understanding that I will not violate.r />
  I really did have the hunting knife Fire Bear used on his Vietcong victims. It’s housed in a beautiful leather sheath with his real last name written on it in what looks like fading green Magic Marker. It has a bone handle. Six inches of silver shine like a mirror. Out of habit, I always kept it sharp enough to split a hair. That knife had been with me for almost fifty years, and here is the official story of how it came to be in my possession:

  Back in the Vietnam jungle, when everyone finally got sick of the putrid smell of rotting human scalps, my superiors, in all their infinite wisdom, one day put me in charge of disciplining Clayton Fire Bear. From above came these orders: “Break the wild Indian.”

  On the particular base where this all went down, there was a raised platform of sorts where all of the men used to play cards and smoke. This wasn’t top construction, to say the least. The cracks were wide, and cigarette butts would fall through between the wooden boards.

  After I confiscated Fire Bear’s weapons, I made him strip. Then I tied the big Indian’s hands behind his back and, at gunpoint, made him slither around in the sand like a snake, wearing nothing but tighty-whities, picking up with his teeth—one at a time—all of the butts under the platform. Fire Bear had to lift his head high enough to deposit each butt into a metal bucket that the Vietnamese jungle sun had heated up enough to burn lips and cheeks. There were hundreds of sandy tar-filled butts, and the nipple-chafing task took all day. By the time he was done, Fire Bear was caked in sweat and dirt, his lips were crisscrossed with burns, and he couldn’t even stand without help.

  On his feet again, Fire Bear—gasping for breath and half delirious—asked for his knife back.

  I examined the weapon more closely.

  Rumor was, it was a genuine bear-bone handle. From the first bear my Indian nemesis had ever killed. His father made the knife for him to signify he had officially stepped over the thin line that separates boys and men, or some such mystical Indian shit.

  “What kind of bear?” I asked.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I had my orders, and so I kept the knife. Everyone was sick and tired of Fire Bear scalping pajama wearers, myself included. Plus he had disobeyed direct orders from above and needed to be put in his place. I did what I did for his own damn good.

  Fire Bear looked directly into my eyes and threatened to kill me if I kept the knife. He said he was going to do it in the future, when I least expected it—maybe even after the war ended, so the soil of his ancestors could drink my blood.

  His Indian mumbo-jumbo didn’t scare me one bit. Using the bear-bone knife, I cut the rope that bound Fire Bear’s hands and offered him a drink of water. He guzzled the entire canteen, spit on the ground, and, after he finally caught his breath, he again promised to kill me.

  That big Indian pulled his hair straight up, raised a finger to his forehead, and made the scalping motion. I stared him right back in his dark evil eyes and said, “I’ll be waiting for your red ass. Scalp me if you can. But you better make sure you finish the job, because I’ll end you if you don’t.”

  When I released him, Clayton Fire Bear immediately went AWOL—vanished into the jungle foliage—and I never did see him in Vietnam again. But that didn’t mean the gooks got him. A lot of soldiers disappeared in the jungle from time to time, only to reemerge when we least expected.

  Regardless, Fire Bear took up full-time residence in my mind. Sometimes he whispered death threats; other times he’d plead his case. He hadn’t done a goddamn thing to me. Without explanation, my superiors told me to break the Indian, and I obeyed, just like I followed orders when they said kill all the yellow men. I didn’t ask questions in the jungle. Little did I know I’d be asking questions for the rest of my life.

  I next saw Clayton Fire Bear in Kansas, right before they threw me into their secret loony bin. Like I said before, he was at Fort Riley. I saw him off in the distance—I was sure it was him on account of how fucking tall he was, and there weren’t a whole lot of Indians around, let alone tall ones. So I knew he had made it back alive to the States.

  “I spent decades wishing I had killed Clayton Fire Bear when I had the chance,” I told Frank as we sat on his mistress’s balcony, overlooking the City of Brotherly Love. “I used to see him in the shadows everywhere I went.”

  “Yeah, well, I located him.” Frank put the nub of his cigar into the crystal ashtray, which signified that he was finished, because he never puts his cigar down until he is done. “Like you asked me to do. I think the surgery reminded you that we’re all running out of time.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You need to make peace with Clayton Fire Bear,” Frank said, and then added that I still had something that didn’t belong to me, a big something, probably sacred to an Indian—the knife his father had made for him. And Clayton Fire Bear’s father was most likely dead now, which heightened the significance. Then Frank went on to say Fire Bear was still alive and living out west, but like I said before, I’m not saying where so that I can protect the innocent.

  The investigators Frank had hired said that Fire Bear wasn’t exactly scalping people anymore. He was a successful lawyer who had started his own firm, now twenty or so attorneys strong. I have to admit that I was proud of Clayton Fire Bear for making something of his life in America, especially considering he was Indian on top of being all fucked up by the Vietnam War.

  I don’t want to take anything away from the blacks who have survived slavery, but America has most definitely fucked the Indians too. Try to think of a black celebrity who has more money than you do. I bet you can think up a pretty long list. Now name a single Native American who is likely to have more money than you. The list gets a lot smaller, right? Our government tried to exterminate the Indians, and while the fucking scumbag Nazi party is no longer in power, the US government keeps rolling strong. I’m not rooting for America to fail anytime soon, don’t get me wrong here, but these sorts of thoughts keep this American patriot up at night.

  Frank was pushing me pretty hard to give back the knife, but while I was sympathetic to the historic plight of Indians here in the USA, my taking Fire Bear’s prize possession had nothing to do with his being an Indian and everything to do with exerting dominance over an out-of-control motherfucker in the jungle. If you don’t establish absolute total control over out-of-control motherfuckers when you are at war, you risk being killed or even worse.

  Also, being that I am considerate, I was actually concerned for Fire Bear’s current mental health. If I just showed up wearing camouflage one day, wanting to return the knife I took off him in the jungle fifty fucking years ago, I was definitely risking setting him off again, triggering all sorts of dark shit.

  Frank didn’t understand PTSD triggers because he never really did any fighting in Vietnam. He was always building things and doing positive stuff that still makes him feel good to this day.

  But there was one thing that had me interested in visiting Fire Bear that was hard to talk about. I tried to shield Jessica from a lot of the specific details I had experienced in Vietnam, because she already had enough horror-show shit playing between her ears, and so I never told her the worst parts, let alone names. I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell her that a huge motherfucking Indian had sworn to track me down and scalp me stateside. I wouldn’t have wanted Jessica to worry about that. And she absolutely would have, especially toward the end, when she really lost it.

  You probably already know exactly what happened to Jessica because it was in all the papers and you surely have access to those, and I also know you sneaky motherfuckers have been spying and keeping a file on me for decades too. This is all surely in there, but just to set the record straight, I don’t think Jessica was ever cut out for motherhood.

  After Hank was born, her depression worsened, even though I bought her a nice house and had the garage made into a studio for her and then stocked it with all of the best painting supplies money could buy.

  When she was
pregnant, we made love all the time. But once Hank came, that stopped completely. The doctors had told us that it takes some time to heal, and I was completely okay with that—willing to wait, taking Molly Palm and her five sisters out on private dates, if you know what I mean. But after eight or so months passed and it was clear that Jessica no longer wanted to have sex, I knew there was a big fucking problem.

  She did her best to be a good mother. Tried hard not to let Hank see what she was feeling on the inside. Instead she wore a mask daily until I’d come home from work. She had to serve us dinner and then put Hank to bed, but just as soon as our son’s bedroom lights were out, the smile would vanish and the crying would begin.

  The only thing that seemed to cure the sadness back then, in the early seventies, was the painting, so I would tell her to paint. I’d even wash and dry the dishes all by myself, even when the game was on TV, just so she could escape into her art.

  That worked for a few years, until Hank started to walk and talk and look like his biological father. The boy was so eager to please his mother, you almost got to feeling like he was trying to atone for the evil that brought him into the world. Little Hank would keep his room neater than any child should, always putting away his toys without being told. Bathing and brushing his teeth on schedule. Constantly washing his hands. Never getting his clothes dirty, because he never wanted to roughhouse with the other boys in the neighborhood. Hank was the quintessential momma’s boy, within eyesight of Jessica all day and night, wanting to help her. People used to praise Hank for being good, but he was too good, and Jessica knew it.

  They both loved art, and I used to love watching them sketch and paint together in Hank’s room or at the dining room table. But somewhere along the line, Jessica stopped wanting to share her escape with our son. I think it might have been when he started painting his mother obsessively. Hank might have been in the third or fourth grade. He painted more than a hundred or so portraits of her—none of them very good, and all of them depicting Jessica looking tired and sad and defeated. It was like the boy somehow knew what was coming, and it frightened my wife. She’d ask Hank why she never looked happy in his paintings, and he’d say he painted what he saw, just like she taught him to do. After a few months of this, Jessica forbid him to paint any more portraits of her, ripping the most recent one down from the refrigerator. Hank burst into tears, and Jessica locked herself in her studio for two days. I don’t even think she ate. When she finally emerged and rejoined our household, she was distant.