“What kind of man is Jim these days, Mr. Golly?”

“What kind of man?”

He was fading fast. Again she hadn’t asked the right kind of question. A nurse’s shoes squeaked behind her. Yet somehow it was the question.

“What kind of man, Mr. Golly?”

It felt familiar, what Jon Golly whispered fiercely as he closed his eyes.

“You said it yourself. Jim is my brother.”

CHAPTER 30

“He’ll do nicely, yes,” Fanta said.

He sandbagged Jim Golly one more time, after the man’s monologue on martyrdom, global population shift, and coral reef bleaching had rounded back to the homeless young man hired to water Golly’s sod roofs.

Fanta’s pig valve fluttered dangerously. Night approached. Between gypsy moth shrouds, he could see a lopsided moon rising in a darkening blue sky.

“But Jim,” he resumed cautiously, easing into the twist he hoped would tilt Golly off course, reviewing in his mind’s eye the famous Life magazine photographs of Thich Quang Duc’s suicide in the middle of a Saigon thoroughfare.

Every person Fanta knew had seen the photos. He had been with friends in junior high school, appalled and enthralled at a table in the school library. First the elderly monk’s religious brothers had doused him in gasoline. Then Quang Duc had set himself ablaze, slowly turned black, and tipped over.

“You realize,” he said to Golly now, “that Thich Quang Duc lit himself on fire in 1963. I’m guessing that you think his sacrifice ended the war, but it was only 1963.”

Golly frowned and stiffened. Fanta glanced behind. The dog had departed. He clung to his purpose. Golly’s timeline was off. His understanding of the burning monk’s motive was apocryphal, twisted to serve his self-interest. Fanta knew the history well. Quang Duc had protested the Diem regime’s mistreatment of Buddhists, not the war. His death had sparked change, but not the kind that Golly falsely remembered.

“From the standpoint of U.S. involvement, Jim,” Fanta continued, “Quang Duc’s suicide represented actually more of a beginning. More of an accelerant. That was the moment when John F. Kennedy stepped into quicksand and sent in ‘military advisers.’ That happened just months before Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. Quang Duc on fire ended nothing. His death was a beginning.”

He watched Golly seethe at the correction. But Fanta’s accuracy was personal. Seven long years after Thich Quang Duc’s martyrdom, as Fanta lay broken in a mud puddle iridescent with swirls of Agent Orange, the insanity of the war in Vietnam had just been peaking.

“It was Kim Phuc,” Fanta continued his correction of the record. “It was the picture of Kim Phuc that ended the war. Much later, 1972. Remember her? She was the naked little girl burned by napalm, wailing in pain and terror as she ran down the road.”

Golly trembled, glaring at Fanta.