Given World by Marian Palaia Page B

he’d already graduated, I never saw him play in an actual game, but I was sure he’d been a star. Sometimes we’d messed around on the court at my school, where he’d found and claimed me that rainy afternoon, and the way he moved and spun and pivoted and shot made me dizzy, made my heart hurt remembering. He was so graceful, so tall, so good .
    I wondered if our son would grow up to play basketball, but didn’t think it was possible, since he’d been born so early and maybe wouldn’t grow like a normal kid. But maybe it didn’t work that way, and he’d catch up, get big, like his father. Wherever he was now. Wherever they both were. If they both were. But I was not thinking about them, or where they were.
    A jungle, however imaginary and probably wrong, appeared; I bit my lip, hard—a reminder to stay in the present. Vietnam was supposed to be far away—a lifetime away—someone’s life, at any rate. Montana too. It did not occur to me that I might be too young to be thinking in terms of lifetimes.
    Now that we were in the light, I could see Primo was blind in his right eye. It had that milky look, bluish white, like frozen pond water in winter. There was some scar tissue around it, and trailing off across the top of his cheek. His ear was a little mangled too.
    I touched my own cheek, near the corner of my eye. “What happened?”
    “ ’Nam,” he said.
    “What?”
    “ ’Nam. Vietnam.”
    Damn. “Oh.” I felt sick. Like I had conjured up the place with my stupid daydreaming. I put my fork down next to my plate and sipped some orange juice. I should have been ready, though. It should have been obvious. “How?”
    “White phosphorus. Our guys accidentally threw some too close, and my face got in the way.”
    “What’s white phosphorous?”
    “It’s a chemical thing. It lights shit up. Mostly it burns. Sets a village or the woods or a rice paddy on fire and kills people. You can’t put it out with water. It’s nasty.” He turned toward the window, and the fog. “Like that, at first,” he said, pointing with his chin. “Only brighter. They called it Willy Peter, like it was supposed to be your pal or something. It wasn’t mine, except I got to come home early, so maybe in a way it was.” He lit a cigarette, still looking away. “Fucked up pal, though.”
    He picked up his coffee cup and set it back down again without drinking from it.
    I said, “Sounds like napalm.” Mick had told me about it, in one of his letters. He thought whoever invented it was sick in the head.
    “More or less,” Primo said. “Part of the SOP, actually. Of torching human beings.”
    “SOP?”
    “Standard operating procedure. It was wicked messed up.”
    “That’s what my brother says.” I looked down at my pancakes, afraid Primo could see that the present tense was a big, fat lie.
    “Well, he’s right. I guess he was there. Who with?”
    “Twenty-Fifth Infantry. Củ Chi. They made him a tunnel guy.”
    “A rat, you mean. Little.” Compared to Primo, I figured, a lot of them would have qualified as little. But Mick really was. He never got much taller than I did: like five foot six and a bit. Five eight, maybe, in his boots. And he was skinny, wiry.
    “I guess so,” I said. “A rat.” It was hard for me to think of Mick as a rat, even though he’d seemed kind of proud of it. He was more canine than rodent. But the tunnel dogs were real dogs. German shepherds. Mick had one for a while, but it died.
    “Can we talk about something else?” I was mashing what was left of my breakfast with my fork. I wondered if Primo could feel how much I wanted to bolt, or blow, or just melt through the Naugahyde seat and the floor, seep down the cliff, dissolve into the sea or float off to Asia.
    He said, “Sure. How about the sun? How about I take you to see it in person?” He knew. I could hear him knowing.
    I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes for a few seconds. “I think,” I said, “that would be