Free Twice Told Tales by Daniel Stern Page B

up?”
    “I didn’t! I signed you up.”
    He wheeled around briskly, his round face—an angel’s face except for the shadow-beard that would never go away, always back by lunchtime—ignoring the pushing of those tough, stubby, chubby hands, zipping his wheelchair across the room to the window overlooking Fourth Avenue. He slammed it shut.
    I jumped. Sudden noises get to me. Not that I ever saw real combat. I was always in the back streets of town making deliveries—personnel, matériel—sometimes deliveries, sometimes pickups—but every now and then one of those little babies would whistle by. A few of those and you stay jumpy a long time.
    Gideon turned on the air-conditioning but he kept sweating. Working that wheelchair was work. Now they’ve got these automated ones, electronic, but Gideon’s gone. I don’t think he would have wanted them anyway. He liked resistance.
    “Look,” he said. “This is going to be one very good book and a lot of people are going to buy it. But the funny thing about a book is: somebody’s got to write it. Till that happens nobody can buy it or read it.”
    “Pretty funny,” I said. “And you think I need this little manual here, to write it?”
    Gideon twisted his lips in a weird way; not a real smile and certainly not what you’d call a sneer. It was an internal smile. For all his tough act Gideon was very internal. He was talking to himself a lot when he talked to you.
    “You think you can write this book because you were there? Because of all the right word-sounds—Nam, wasted, gook, whatever, because they were your natural language for three years …”
    “Four.” I loved to catch him.
    “And because you had the experience.” He ploughed ahead as if I hadn’t said anything. “Because you wore that green beret.”
    “Because I was there,” I said. “And you ought to know the difference by now—I was A.I.D. Agency for International Development. They just let me wear the green beret for laughs.”
    He looked at his watch.
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
    Gideon knew I wasn’t supposed to drink anymore. But he always pushed you to the limits. He wouldn’t use an expression, “Buy you a coke,” while he drank his whiskey sours. That would have been too gentle, too easy on you. It would have sent the wrong message to himself and his soul. You felt he was always sending messages to himself and his soul. Sometimes I deliberately tried to get in the way. This time I said, “You going to have one of those whiskey sours of yours?” while he struggled, alone, to get his jacket on and then swing his briefcase, heavy with manuscript, onto his lap. I hated to think what that struggle with inanimate objects might be like in the winter: scarf, gloves, overcoat, all to be gotten on with a lower body frozen stiff, forever.
    “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
    “That drink marks you World War II just the same as my addiction to white alcohol and what the Government likes to call “substances” marks me and my war.”
    He laughed and hit the sidebar of his wheelchair. “This marks my war,” he said.
    We went to the Cote Basque. Gideon always took us to posh places for lunch, drinks, dinner. “Small salary big expense account,” he said. “That’s publishing.” But Cote Basque was his favorite for another reason, as well. Gideon always had at least two reasons for doing anything. But he only told you one. Sometimes he didn’t tell you any. With the restaurant it was simple. They didn’t want cripples in wheelchairs depressing their patrons. Once they made that clear to Gideon they had him for life. He had not been shot in the spine, flown back from Germany to endure eighteen operations, and consigned to a wheelchair, all in order to have some clown in a tux tell him where he could or could not sit in a restaurant.
    He’d told me about the loud arguments with the manager—after which they were sure he’d never come back again—but there