That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny?”
“The Rascals,” David said. “Only back then they were still the Young Rascals. Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Very cool. That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny?”
Images beginning to slide downhill through his mind while Felix Cavaliere sang, I was feelin’ so bad: ARVN soldiers, many no bigger than American sixth-graders, pulling dead buttocks apart, looking for hidden treasure, a nasty scavenger hunt in a nasty war, can tah in can tak; coming back to Terry with a dose in his crotch and a monkey on his back, wanting to score so bad he was half out of his mind, slapping her in an airport concourse when she said something smart about the war (his war, she had called it, as if he had invented the fucking thing), slapping her so hard that her mouth and nose bled, and although the marriage had limped along for another year or so, it had really ended right there in Concourse B of the United terminal at LaGuardia, with the sound of that slap; Entragian kicking him as he lay writhing on Highway 50, not kicking a literary lion or a National Book Award winner or the only white male writer in America who mattered, but just some potbellied geezer in an overpriced motorcycle jacket, one who owed God a death like anyone else; Entragian saying that the proposed title of Johnny’s book made him furious, made him sick with rage.
