Читать книгу Gettysburg - Kevin Morris - Страница 13

Ninety minutes later, the threesome was hunched on the heavy stools at the Ivy’s small bar with a fresh round of gimlets. Reynolds was in the middle. They had not wanted to leave one another when the check came, and the waiter signaled they should adjourn to the bar. Aside from a few vacationers having tea over on the patio, they were the only customers left in the restaurant.

“The last thing anyone will expect,” said Reynolds, “is that this show will have substance. A real level of depth to it.”

“That is so true,” said Delaney.

“He so smart,” said Marisol. “How can we do that?”

“But we still want it to be sexy,” said Delaney.

“Yes, sexy. It must be, more than anything else, sexy.”

“Well, the two of you are so sexy,” said Reynolds.

“Raynahldo!” said Marisol.

“Reynolds!” Delaney said, mock slapping him at the same time.

They all had sips of their drinks. There was a long pause as they each went up into their heads.

“Life is so funny,” Reynolds said finally.

“I know,” said Delaney. “Wait, how do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I grew up on a battlefield, you know? It’s so far away now. I used to study the great generals. I knew so much about it. I was a tour guide.”

“You were a tour guide?” said Marisol. The girls cracked up.

“With the hat and a uniform and everything?” said Delaney.

“Oh, shut up,” he said. “What hat? Who wears a hat?” The girls crumbled in laughter. He kept going. “No, I wore a white shirt and tie. It was in the old days, when guides didn’t wear uniforms. I tried to look like a professor.”

Delaney recovered. “Was it a place from Revolutionary times? Like George Washington?”

“Did you talk about James Madison?” Marisol chimed in. They were like a weird chorus in a show in a gay bar. Reynolds paused for a second. Where did she get James Madison? He let it pass.

“No, I grew up in Gettysburg. The Civil War.”

“Abraham Lincoln,” said Marisol.

“Very good,” he said.

“All y’all Yankees love Abraham Lincoln,” said Delaney.

“You don’t?” he said.

“Oh, I’m just trying to be funny, Mister Man,” said Delaney. “You have to tell us more.”

He fell into memory. He thought about long afternoons with families from Ohio or Maryland, a mother and a father with two or three kids, sometimes the neighbor’s kid. He had learned the art of the canned speech there, which would serve him well, first with girls in high school, then in college, then in law school, and most of all with women in Hollywood. Reynolds remembered it as a time before he got cynical; when he gave his best every day because these people had spent their hard-earned money to come see their heritage. They hadn’t gone to Ocean City or the Poconos; they were there, at Gettysburg, at the crossroads. They were using their limited time, their week of vacation from the insurance company or the phone company or Honeywell, to pay homage. He took that seriously.

Each tour took three hours. Larger groups moved through the park on a bus. Reynolds could do private tours, where he just jumped in the station wagon with the family and told the father where to stop. The National Park Service was very loose back then—once you passed a test, you were thrown on the schedule. The park gave him general rules to follow, but as long as Reynolds kept the tours on time and went on a more or less chronological path, he could direct the tour around the battlefield as he wished. His vast knowledge had been gained the way most boys learn the infield fly rule in baseball or the concept of a first down in football—that is, by osmosis, by just being conscious.

Reynolds’s goal was to make the people feel as though they weren’t getting the same old boring history lesson. He showed them the site just off Little Round Top where the soldiers, North and South, had congregated around a campfire the night after the second day. He brought a canteen with a dent in it that his parents had given him for his fifteenth birthday. He ended each tour in the trees to the west of Cemetery Ridge, where the Confederate soldiers had gathered before Pickett’s Charge, on the third and final day, just prior to the hour of combat that would decide the battle, the war, and the future of America and the world.

Delaney and Marisol watched Reynolds talk and nodded along. The story flowed out of him, and he was surprised to learn he didn’t feel intimidated or strange telling it. They made him feel comfortable in a familiar way. He ignored the fact that he was drunk.

“It’s so nice to meet with you two,” he said, in the sappy way that comes with being blitzed. “It’s so nice to meet two people who are in it for the right reasons. We are all the same, in a way.”

“I was just thinking the exact same thing,” said Delaney.