ONCE WHEN JACK RYAN WAS THIRTEEN, he hung from the roof of their apartment building, four stories above the alley, to see if he could do it. The first time he tried it, he didn’t hang all the way. He sat down on the edge, in the back of the building where there was no cornice, and rolled over and held on with his chest and forearms, his face close to the dry tar surface of the roof and his legs over the side. He pushed himself up, pressing his hands flat, until he could hook a knee over the edge and the rest was easy. He walked around the roof for a while, taking little breaths and letting his hands hang limp and flexing the fingers, the way a sprinter does before he turns and walks over to his lane and sets himself on the starting block. It was a summer morning and he was alone on the roof, above the round tops of the elms and the peaks of the houses and the chimneys and television antennas. He could hear cars on Woodward Avenue a half black away and a car below him in the alley moving slowly, squeaking, taking a long time to pass the building. When he was ready, he moved to the edge of the roof again and sat down with his legs hanging. He could do it and knew he could do it if he was careful and didn’t let himself get scared or do anything dumb. But just knowing he could do it wasn’t enough.
After, he would put on his dark blue sweatshirt with the cut-off sleeves and his baseball cap that was creased and squared the right way and go to Ford Field for practice. He would stand seven feet off third base in the sun and dust during batting practice and, with each pitch, crouch a little with his arms hanging loose, then wait for the next pitch, adjusting the squared cap, looking down at the good pocket in the Japanese glove and smoothing the ground in front of him with the toe of his spikes.
After practice and after lunch, sometime in the afternoon, he would bring some guys up on the roof and before they knew what he was doing he would be hanging from the eaves trough, four stories up. He could see their faces as he pulled himself up.
Do it or don’t do it, he thought, sitting there that morning, and he did it: rolled over on his stomach and let himself down gradually, holding the edge of the trough, which was round and comfortable in his hand and didn’t sag, until his arms were stiff above him, his toes pointing to the alley. Count to ten, he thought. He counted to five slowly, then began counting faster and almost started to pull himself up too quickly. But he made himself relax again and pulled himself up slowly, carefully, until his arms were over the edge and he was lying on his chest.
When he was up, away from the edge of the roof, he thought: Why tell anybody? If you can do it and know you can, what more do you want? That was a funny thing, he never did tell anybody or even hint at it. He kept it to himself. But every once in a while he would take it out and think about it.
He thought about it several times that morning while he raked the beach.
“If you’re not doing anything tonight,” Mr. Majestyk said, “stop in and watch some TV.”
“I don’t know. I might do something.”
“What’s her name?” Mr. Majestyk grinned, sticking a hunk of pork chop in his mouth. Chewing it, he said, “McHale’s Navy is on. That son of a bitch-you ever watch it?”
“I’ve seen it.”
Donna had set the table on the porch: pork chops, scalloped potatoes, peas, applesauce, beer, homemade bread, fruit Jell-O for dessert. Ryan could hear her in the kitchen doing the pans.
“It reminds me of when I was in the service,” Mr. Majestyk said. “It isn’t real, McHale’s Navy. I don’t mean we did things like McHale’s. But it reminds me. You know the Seabees?”
“I think so,” Ryan said.
“C.B. Construction Battalion. We maintained this airstrip on Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands. You ever hear of it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“New Guinea?”
Ryan nodded. He could picture it on the map, above Australia.
“Okay, north of New Guinea maybe four hundred miles,” Mr. Majestyk said. “That’s the Admiralties. We’d take and make bracelets and watchbands, you know, I.D. bracelets-all out of stainless or aluminum and put in these cat-eyes you get from the gooks. Little round stone like half a marble, brown, black, and white, maybe some green. Then we’d sell this junk to the Navy Air Force guys and, Christ, clean up. Just junk, but the hotshots would trade you a bottle of whiskey you could get thirty-five bucks for, for a piece of junk. The First Cavalry, they secured the island before we got there. But not on horses.”
“They’re in Vietnam,” Ryan said. “I know they don’t have any horses.”
“This place,” Mr. Majestyk said, “they went in I think on the west side of the island, where it was all coconut trees and crap; then these Seabees would knock the goddamn coconut trees down with bulldozers to cut machine gun lanes. There was a story-these guys, the First Cavalry, were still there before they went up to the Philippines and we used to sell them all kinds of crap-they were trying to take the airstrip, dug in on one side, and these Japanese Geisha babes would come walking across the strip toward them bare naked, not a stitch on, honest to Christ, and these guys would yell, ‘Throw up your hands.’ But they wouldn’t do it, they’d just keep on coming. So they let go wham, wham-started shooting them down, and as the babes fell these grenades started going off that the babes were holding in their armpits. See what they were going to do? Get in among the American guys and then just lift up their arms.”
“Really naked, uh?”
“Not a stitch on.”
“They probably made them do it.”
“Well,” Mr. Majestyk said, “you know you always think of the American guys doing brave things, but the guys on the other side they must’ve done some brave things too.” Mr. Majestyk finished his Jell-O, scraping the rim of the dish. “Were you in the service?”
“I tried to enlist, but I got turned down. This buddy of mine went in and got into Special Forces, but they wouldn’t take me. I wrecked my knee in school playing football and then I wrecked my back.”
“You had an accident with it?”
“No, it was just sore for a while, my back. Then one time I got out of the shower-I was playing Class C ball then-”
“You played ball?”
“In high school and then Class C.”
“Yeah? I managed a team in Legion.”
“I never played Legion. I played high school and Detroit Federation. Then Class C down in Texas. I was getting out of the shower and dropped the towel. I bent over to pick it up and it was like somebody put an icepick in my back-you know, down the lower part?”
“Sure, I had that.”
“I was in bed two weeks. I couldn’t move. You try to roll over it’s the worst pain you ever had.”
“Yeah, that’s the sacroiliac.”
“This doctor said I had a slipped disc.”
“Sure, the sacroiliac, right down at the base of the spine,” Mr. Majestyk said. “I’d get it and go to this osteopathic doctor. He’d work on it and I’d feel good as new.”