We Were Beautiful Once Read online

  We Were Beautiful Once

  Chapters from a Cold War

  Joseph Carvalko

  We Were Beautiful Once

  Copyright © 2013, by Joseph Carvalko.

  Cover Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Carvalko.

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Sunbury Press, Inc., Subsidiary Rights Dept., 50-A West Main St., Mechanicsburg, PA 17055 USA or [email protected].

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Sunbury Press, Inc. Wholesale Dept. at (717) 254-7274 or [email protected].

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  FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America

  February 2013

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62006-171-8

  Mobipocket format (Kindle) ISBN: 978-1- 62006-172-5

  ePub format (Nook) ISBN: 978-1-62006-173-2

  Published by:

  Sunbury Press

  Mechanicsburg, PA

  www.sunburypress.com

  Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania USA

  Dedicated to

  -----

  The soldiers who end wars

  leaving on the battlefields

  their bodies,

  minds or spirits,

  and

  their loved ones who

  live without an answer

  to where they may be found

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction inspired by real events and real people. It draws upon the experiences of soldiers who served in the Korean War and the families they left behind. I have taken liberties with names, places, and geography, to weave multiple stories into a cohesive whole to explore the burdens ordinary people take on in times of war and carry for the rest of their lives.

  Prologue

  When the Monsignor died, Sister Annagail, his housekeeper for 60 years, discovered a manuscript in his dresser that contained names, places and events she thought she recognized, and although it read like fiction, it included the following prefatory letter:

  Nature consigns to every child a body, a mind and an emotion and sets them adrift to sow that one feature claimed exclusively theirs alone: their identity, the essential part of them, the self, one human and one soul that congeals and anneals under the weight of events, tempered by the good and the bad, actions and reactions, objects and subjects, by which life exposes and draws together its parts. And, the possibility exists that through the carelessness and perfidies of others, an identity so formed can be deformed and finally denatured to evaporate into naught, zero, a cipher. I bore witness to the destruction of such a self and now within the limits of time granted by the powers of the Almighty, I am duty bound to explain, in disregard of that sacred trust vested in me as confessor, my complicity in a well-deserved killing.

  Mgr. Francis X. Ryan, S.J.

  Enders Island, 2010

  Too Far To Bridge

  November 1983

  IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN DRESSED in the only suit he owned Jack walked to St. Patrick’s, its luminous steeple and lesser spires guarding the sanctity of the old neighborhood, where priests had flung open the doors from the stronghold allowing faint voices from a practicing choir to waft into the street. He climbed the granite stairs, entered its massive doors and blessed himself in holy water from the eight-sided font, the gateway to a cavern of pews, crosses and an assortment of saints iconized in marbleized plaster. At the foot of the altar he folded his long legs and knelt beside three wrinkle-faced ladies in black babushkas, rosary beads tangled between the fingers of their boney, translucent hands. Jack listened to Acts of Contrition coming from the dark stall where penitents left their sins behind, and when the prayers fell silent, he lifted himself from the company of the old ladies and entered the confessional to speak to God through a priest’s ears, to try once again to dissolve the most grievous of his sins. The church bell struck eight times when Jack’s turn came to enter the confessional.

  “Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession.”

  “Proceed my son.”

  “I’m not sure where to start, but I’d kept secret from Julie what I knew about Roger Girardin. She waited for him her whole life.” Jack sat quietly, head down looking at his hands. “Like I said, I don’t know where to... ”

  “Tell me, what is it?”

  The words stuck in Jack’s throat. “I lied, I lied to Julie, I lied to myself... .”

  The hour passed, and Jack felt he had purged himself from the sins and guilt of a lifetime. He took three short breaths.

  “Father, Father, I have this dream where I’m at a station. I hear laughing, then it sounds more like horns, sorrowful ones, a locomotive, whooshing out of time, a stationmaster hollers arrivals of men coming home. Roger steps off the train. I'm standing there. He doesn't see me... walks right passed and I lose him in the crowd.”

  “Jack, what can I say? Put all that as far behind you as you can. You have regrets, but they’re about things in the past you cannot fix. Every man regrets something.”

  Following the string of Hail Marys meted out by Father Ryan, Jack kneeled in the rearmost pew taking swigs from a pint of gin he had tucked in his back pocket. He prayed to St. Cronan for deliverance, feeling he had come full circle, not knowing much more about the great mysteries of life than he knew as a child. The bell struck the half-hour and Jack crossed himself again. Through a haze of perfumed incense and candle smoke, he walked past a relief of Magdalene borne by the angels to the exit where Father Ryan waited to lock up for the night. He gave Jack a stiff pat-on-the-back. Jack stopped, took in a yawning breath, and slowly exhaled.

  “Father, we’re like air to the world, it breathes us in, faults and all, to keep itself going and when it takes what it needs... it simply breathes us out.”

  White shirt opened at the neck, sleeves rolled above his elbows, Jack walked away from the church looking down to avoid cracks in the sidewalk. Street after street passed unnoticed: South, Kossuth, River, then left up Asylum, mumbling, “... how fitting, sanctuary or nuthouse.” He reached the soot-laden red bulk of the railway station, where at its entrance a blind bum in 101st Airborne fatigues cried out, “Hey, buddy, got two bits?” Rather than take the darkened stairwell to the upper platform, Jack took the promenade dotted by lamps encased in fog-like cysts, two hundred yards of poured concrete, straight ahead, long strides, no cracks leading directly to the edge of the dimly lit eastbound platform—quiet and empty except for two men in a far corner in London Fog raincoats with briefcases. The stationmaster’s wooden bellow broke the peace.

  “Westbound Track Two, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.”

  In the background, running heels tapped against the hard surface. He looked back before stepping to the sharp edge of the platform. He gazed into the bed of silver rails reflecting parallel worlds running four feet apart: the gap too far to bridge. Each occupied a different space, each channeled that blinding light, a sun, a god, the erratic flash from the one-eyed locomotive, candlepower, china blue sliver, bedazzling, a frozen eye staring without seeing. The chasm met him at the gate of Eternity, hurling the remains of a man onto the vacancy of a roadbed. Except for the squealing brakes and the fading rhyth
m of leathered soles against concrete, the station resumed its incandescent solitude.

  The Terrifying

  July 1983

  “8, 7, 6, 5... 8, 7, 6,” JACK MUMBLED, “... 5, 8, 7... 6, 5... ”

  Suddenly a soldier in a brown parka jammed the butt of a Russian carbine into his shoulder blades hollering something in Chinese.

  “What’s your bitch!?” Jack snarled.

  “He’s telling you to shut the fuck up,” the guy next to him grumbled.

  A loud explosion followed and two men were seen sprawled on the ground, one missing legs and the other missing his brains now covering a fresh layer of snow in a splash of grays and reds.

  Jack saw himself walking to a chicken wire fence where a man stood with a .45 caliber pistol, standard Army issue. “Give me that goddamn thing,” he yelled.

  “Trent, I’m Trent, Jack. I’m Trent!”

  Jack grabbed a chunk of the man’s hair and pulled him against the barbs.

  Men in brown parkas approached. Jack straight-armed the one closest. The other came from the side and hit him with a night stick, sending a wood block wallop reverberating through the frigid air. He fell limp, unable to wake up as he was dragged across an icy field, where an ever-enlarging fresh snowpack filled his nostrils, his windpipe, to play out the recurring nightmare and panic of suffocating in a forgotten hell hole.

  Suddenly, Jack opened his eyes to silver light and hissing from a TV that had lost its reception. He stumbled to the front window, lifted the slat in the blind and looked out where rain poured down in velvet sheets, vertically twisting in the orb of the street lamp, and in the near distance he could see the dim lights from the badlands where urbanized junk, junkies and speculators inhabited the night’s shadow as they slipped past stripped cars, the strip joints, empty cans of Sterno and Spam, fifty-gallon drums, tin garbage cans, and fast-food wrappers blowing freely. And, he saw beyond where gulls with dirty wings flapped over rain soaked tenements he knew as a boy. It was different then—before Bridgeport had been left behind the rest of the America, before her colors faded, before her tired humanity became hidden in shadows black and white, to waste away in deflowered flatlands, among factories in rubble as far as the eye could see.

  He looked up Willa Street and saw the Ford still parked with blue-gray smoke coming from the muffler. Trembling, he poured himself a tumbler of gin, gulping it down before slumping on the couch, to wait it out.

  Jack Be Nimble

  July 1983

  “C’MON, C’MON, SOMEONE’S GOTTA KNOW SOMETHING. Everything points to him being there. Somebody’s gotta know what happened to him,” Nick shouted just before closing the office and letting Mitch and Kathy go before Jake’s happy hour ended. They hadn’t managed to track down Jack O’Conner, but it dawned on Nick to let up on what were essentially two college kids: Kathy a final year law student and Mitch a recent law grad awaiting his bar results. And, his other reason for shutting down the office was to have supper at home with Diane, with whom he hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words since an argument about why she paid for their son Jamie’s Boy Scout trip to Lake George, rather than the electric bill. As tensions thawed over dinner, Nick and Diane watched a segment that Nick had helped the local station put together covering the upcoming trial.

  “Well, you’re certainly getting attention,” Diane conceded, as she cleared the remains of a tuna casserole.

  “It might just help tie up some loose ends.”

  Later, Nick reflected that Diane was right. The case was getting attention and he knew that fact could play for or against him. Reaching down into his desk drawer, he pulled out a dusty glass and a bottle of Glenmorangie single malt he reserved for those times when he was about to don the chainmail and poleaxe of the gladiator. He knew enough about the game to have an idea of how it would play out, but in little more than a week, and for the first time, he’d step into the arena for the other side. In pursuit of what? Truth? Justice? So far it hadn’t felt any different than battling on the side of the king he’d gotten used to in the VA cases.

  He had poured his fifth shot of the 25-year-old scotch by the time he thought back to the blindfolded chess tournament his father had taken him to in Brooklyn in the fifties. He remembered the frisson of excitement surrounding the Hungarian mastermind, which had stemmed as much from his ability to keep straight the moves of a dozen ongoing matches, as his being the latest prize in Cold War defections. Nick was thinking through the possible permutations the trial could take when the phone rang. With an unsteady hand he grabbed it before the second ring could wake up Diane.

  “Nick, Walter here, from WNVS. Did I wake you?”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “I just thought you might like to know we’ve had several calls tonight.”

  “Oh?” Nick sat up, alert.

  “Lots of the usual stuff, support and thanks for remembering the vets, but you know there’s always a couple of ’em out there with too much time on their hands, real sticklers for getting the details right.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah, this guy must have been out there, too. I’ve got a name. Hold on.”

  Nick could hear papers rustling.

  “Here it is—name, name, oh yeah, name: Johnny Fitzgerald. Let’s see, he complained about it being the 24th Army Division and not Regiment, he said that O’Conner was on the left, not the right in the photo and goes by the name of Prado, not O’Conner, and, let’s see, that Pyoktong, Korea was 57 kilometers, not—”

  “Wait! What?”

  “That it was the 24th?”

  “No, the O’Conner bit.”

  “Oh, that O’Conner was on the lef— ”

  “Yeah, yeah—”

  “... and goes by the name of Prado and that... ”

  Now Nick was fully awake.

  “That’s it, Walter. Walter, thank you very much. I owe you one.”

  By Tuesday morning Mitch had located a “Jack Prado” on Willa Street, but all attempts at calling him proved fruitless. Later in the week Nick drove over, rang the bell, knocked and peered through the dirty front window. He would have been more surprised had someone answered. Because the trial was about to start, Nick did not have time for cat and mouse games, so he asked Mitch to prepare a subpoena and his secretary Sophie to find a sheriff to park in front of the house to serve him, if he showed-up. All Nick needed was to talk to O’Conner, aka Prado, to see if he had anything useful to say.

  ***

  It was nearly 9:30 when Jack took his last swig from his usual one cup of coffee at the Silver Streak Diner. As he turned the page in the Bridgeport Post, the heavyset waitress whom he had known since high school poured cup number four. “Ya want some breakfast Jack?”

  Without taking his eyes off the sports page he answered, “Nah, not today, Mol.”

  “Jack, if you get any thinner, you’re gonna blow away.”

  “Yeah, just ain’t much hungry these days.” He reached for his cigarettes, pulled one out, put it between his lips.

  “It’s not my business, but ya need a good woman.”

  Jack grinned, the cigarette butt dangling from the side of his mouth. “Yeah, that’s it, Mol, a good woman. Ya ready?”

  “Huh! I wouldn’t have ya... too moody.”

  Jack lit the butt, rolled up the half-pack into his tee-shirt sleeve, paid his bill and started back to the house, hearing in the distance the dog across from where he lived barking up a storm. Within fifty feet of his door he saw an older model, black, four-door Ford parked in front. It looked like a retired state police car, the kind people picked up at auctions. On his porch stood a giant of a man in a brown suit. Jack slowed down, put his hands in the back pockets of his Levis, kept his eyes on the man, and within a few feet of the porch, yelled, “Yo, Mack, can I help ya?”

  The man turned. He had a flat mug with jowls that made Jack think: St. Bernard. “Yeah, lookin’ for Jack Prado O’Conner, you him?”

  “Who wants to know?”
/>   The man stepped toward Jack. “I’m here to hand him something.”

  As the man got closer, Jack backed up. He had to be 6’5”, three hundred pounds, probably a football player, he thought.

  “You O’Conner?”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “You O’Conner?” he insisted, stopping within an arm’s length of Jack; too close for comfort.

  Jack surveyed the hulk top to bottom. “Yeah, so who wants ta know?”

  The man stretched out his arm. “It’s a subpoena. Appear in court tomorrow at ten.”

  “What’s this about?” Jack asked, pulling in the envelope.

  “It’s all there, much as I know.”

  Before he opened it, Jack grumbled, “My goddamn wife again, what the hell’s she want now?” He tore open the envelope, letting it fall to the ground, and read the document, top to bottom. Reflexively he gulped, “Can you tell me why they want me?”

  “Can’t tell you much, Mister.”

  “Well who wants to talk to me?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but probably the lawyer that hired me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Nick, Nick Castalano, over on Main and West.”

  The man looked on for a few seconds. “Here’s a buck to make sure you’ve got enough to get ya there,” he said matter-of-fact. He got into his car, drove away, noise from his faulty exhaust swamping-out the dog’s bark. Jack, taken aback by what he had in his hand, ambled to the house in a stupor.

  The Barnum Line

  LATER THAT DAY AN ORANGE BUS APPROACHED the corner of Willa Street and Barnum Avenue, on the same side of the street as the Silver Streak. Julie stepped off the bus and squinted at the slice of pinkish sun about to set into the warm July night. While she waited for the light to turn green, a breeze blowing off the sound flapped her full skirt. With one hand she held the hem against her knees, so it would not work its way up her thighs, and when she stooped over, the wide patent leather belt around her waist dug into a midriff thickened with middle age. She had bought the beige silky rayon outfit from Goodwill, where the saleslady, in a nearly identical dress, had told Julie it accentuated her small bust line. In the fitting room’s full-length mirror, her eyes were drawn to the shadow beginning to form beneath her jaw line, so she missed how the dress flared out at the hips. She ran her hands over her cheeks. She was still pretty, but because of her age, more times than not, only annoying men with large bellies asked her to dinner. She always refused.