Flashback

The couple ate some soup with him—Val had the sense that they’d already eaten but were keeping him company to be polite—and asked him some questions. Trying to keep the answers vague, Val told them about how he’d come into town on a truck convoy with his grandfather.

“Where is your grandfather now, Val?” asked Harold.

Kicking himself for giving out so much information—at least he hadn’t told them he’d come from L.A.—Val said, “Oh, visiting some relatives. I’m supposed to hook up with him later. That’s why I needed to borrow a phone. To let him know where I am.” Wanting to change the subject, Val looked around between mouthfuls of soup and biscuits and said, “This tent village is full of families. It looks a lot friendlier than the Hungarian Freedom Park and others Leonard—my grandfather—and I walked by today.”

He told the couple about the men who’d followed them, obviously intent on robbing them. But Val didn’t mention that he’d chased them away by showing a gun.

Dottie waved her hand. “Oh, those parks along Speer Boulevard are terrible places. Terrible. They’re all just single men—the New Bonus Army, they call themselves—and I doubt if one of them is above theft or rape. The city of Denver pays them a weekly stipend so that they don’t create a riot. It’s blackmail and it’s not right.”

Val grunted and ate.

As if to shift to a happier topic, Dottie Davison said, “Did you walk past the old Denver Country Club and see all those blue tents?”

“Yeah, I think I did notice that,” said Val, helping himself to another fresh biscuit.

“Very strange,” said the woman. “There have been thousands of Japanese soldiers camping there for two months now. They never come out. No one knows why Japanese soldiers would be here in Denver… while our own boys not much older than you are over in China fighting for them.”

“Japanese?” said Val. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dottie. “We have a Japanese lady here with her children and grandchildren—she’d married a nice American marine on Okinawa and came back with him years ago, but he died—and she tells us that she heard those soldiers talking, the sergeants or officers or whoever they are shouting at the troops, and they were all speaking Japanese.”

“Weird,” said Val.

“Oh, they have tanks in there and other sort of armored… things… and those airplanes with the wings that fold up and down and that fly like helicopters.”

“Ospreys,” said Harold. “They’re called Ospreys.”

“Weird,” Val said again.

When he was finished, Val sat there feeling full and sleepy and a little stupid, sure of what he had to do, but not sure of how to do it. He needed to tell the Old Man to bring as much money as he could—Val needed that $200 old bucks for the fake NICC—and then he needed a private place to do it.

To shoot my father, came the phrase from the more honest part of Val’s exhausted and overloaded mind.

His first plan had been to steal a phone, tell the Old Man to meet him with the money, take the money, and just shoot him here in the park. Nobody need know he’d ever been here.

Except… when Harold and Dottie had asked his name, he’d given it to them. He’d even mentioned Leonard by name. He’d done everything but give them his goddamned fingerprints.

So it would have to happen somewhere else.

“You look worn out, son,” said Harold. “These are both clean. Why don’t you lie down a spell there in the shade of the vestibule awning? It’s getting hot out here in the sun.”

The older man gave Val a pillow with a clean pillowcase—how could they keep things clean and ironed-looking living homeless out here in the park? Val wondered—and a thin, gray blanket.

“No, I’m good,” mumbled Val, but the shaded area in the grassy vestibule area just outside their oversized tent did look cool. He lay down for just a minute so he could think through what he had to do and what sequence he had to do it in. The breeze came up and he folded the blanket over himself.

Val awoke hours later—he had no watch but it seemed to be almost dusk—and cursed himself. He was such a fuck-up.

“I guess you were tired after all,” said Dottie, who had something heating up on the grill over their campfire. Whatever it was, it smelled good.

Val threw off the blanket. For a second upon awakening, he’d forgotten the pages of indictment in the colored folders he’d found hidden in his old man’s cubie—forgotten the fact that his father had conspired to have his mother killed. Any thought of hunger disappeared as that obscene revelation came back to him like black goo flowing out of a backed-up sewer pipe.

“Can I borrow your phone to make a call?” he asked the woman. “It’s a local call. I don’t have the money right now, but I’ll pay you back later.”

“Phooey on paying back,” laughed Dottie. “We all get a chance to pay back in different ways, to different folks. Here’s the phone, Val.”