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riotous pink and bilious green, in funny-looking
     bow ties and pale double-breasted suits. It was sort of like the Emperor’s New Clothes—nobody
     had the balls to tell Protestant millionaires they looked ridiculous. (Conor was certain
     that none of these people could be Catholic.) Bow ties! Red suspenders with pictures
     of babies on them!
    Conor couldn’t help smiling to himself—here he was, almost flat broke, thinking he
     ought to pity a rich lawyer. Next week he had a job taping sheetrock in a remodeled
     kitchen, for which he might earn a couple hundred dollars. Harry Beevers could probably
     earn double that sitting on a barstool, talking to Jimmy Lah. Conor looked up, his
     sense of humor painfully sparkling, and saw Michael Poole looking at him as if the
     same kind of thought had occurred to him.
    Beevers had some typical bullshit up his sleeve, Conor thought, but Michael knew better
     than to fall for it, whatever it was.
    Conor smiled to himself, remembering Dengler’s word for people who never experienced
     dread and took everything for granted: “toons,” as in cartoons. Now the toons were
     runningeverything—they were scrambling upward, running over everything in their way. These
     days it seemed that half the people in Donovan’s, Conor’s favorite South Norwalk bar,
     had MBAs, put mousse on their hair, and drank blender drinks. Conor had the sense
     that some enormous change had happened all at once, that all these new people had
     just popped out of their own television sets. He could almost feel sorry for them,
     their morality was so fucked up.
    Thinking about the toons depressed Conor. He felt like drinking a lot more even though
     he knew he was getting close to his limit. But wasn’t this a reunion? They were sitting
     around in a hotel room like a bunch of old men. He drained the last of his beer.
    “Give me some of that vodka, Mikey,” he said, and lobbed the empty beer bottle into
     the wastebasket.
    “Attaboy,” Pumo said, raising his glass to him.
    Michael made a drink and came across the room to hand it to Conor.
    “Okay, a toast,” Conor said, and stood up. “
Man.
It feels
good
to do this.” He raised his glass. “To M.O. Dengler. Even if he was a Mexican, which
     I doubt.”
    Conor poured ice-cold vodka into his mouth and gulped it down. He felt better instantly,
     so good that he downed the rest. “Man, sometimes I can remember shit that happened
     over there like it was yesterday, and the stuff that really did happen yesterday,
     I can’t hardly remember at all. I mean—sometimes I’ll start to think about that guy
     who ran that club at Camp Crandall, who had that gigantic wall of beer cases—”
    “Manly,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.
    “Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all
     that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did,
     the way he acted.”
    “Manly belonged behind a counter,” Beevers said.
    “That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything
     lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife,
     kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage …” Conor stared into
     space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life—Manly would be great in suburbia.
     He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a
     fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that
     in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam …
    A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separatedfrom the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make
     noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in
     the column froze. A sniper known as “Elvis” had been dogging them for two days, and
     Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor