I lifted Quincy Morton from Detroit, Michigan, put Hoang over my shoulder, and turned, starting toward the trench again. The smoke enveloped everything, and it was as if we disappeared. I slogged forward into the darkness; the heat pressed against my back like a steam iron, and the weight of the two bodies slowed me down to a crawl in the mud that collected under my combat boots.
I remembered the blocking sleds at USC and the grueling two-a-days under the California sun, squared my shoulders, put my head down, and pulled.
I had taken a good seven steps when somebody ran into me. He bounced off and must have fallen to the ground, so I released the swabo corpsman only for a second to try and help whoever had fallen, but the swabo misinterpreted the movement and grabbed my arm just as I saw the barrel of the AK-47 rising up and into my face. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have my rifle.
He fired, the cicada sound of the machine gun coming unwound as I fell with the whistling rush of the bullets flying beside me; I came down on him hard and could feel him trying to get the automatic loose from under me, but I’d yanked a hand free and could feel his throat. Everything was wet, and we slithered there against each other.
He was kicking, but the weight of all three of us didn’t allow for much movement. I tightened my grip on his larynx and felt the cartilage begin to give as his voice box collapsed and pressed into the air cavity of his esophagus. I couldn’t hear anything since the explosion, but I could imagine that I could still hear the spittle. He must have gargled like a baby working itself up for a full-blooded scream.
It never came.
He wasn’t moving and wasn’t breathing, but I still wasn’t sure if he was dead.
I lay there on top of him, retching, coughing, and finally vomiting.
I spit and cleared my mouth and felt for the two men who lay beside me, feeling the corpsman’s hands grabbing my arm. I got to my knees and then my feet, picked them up again, and staggered forward into the smothering rain. I gathered momentum, realizing that if we stayed out there in the open for much longer, we were dead.
The NVA had overrun the garrison and were headed for the wire; we were only a few steps ahead of them. I could feel my boots digging into the goose-shit ground, and what adrenaline I had left propelled me as we blew through the swirls of the remaining smoke-and mist-clogged night.
I continued to push off with each stride growing just a little bit longer, and with the mantra I will not die like this... I will not die like this... I will not die like this....
Men rose up ahead, but I didn’t have time to fight them all so I just continued on, blasting forward and taking them with me. The biggest was at point and tried to shrug down like a running back looking for a hole in the line, but I was too much weight with the two bodies I carried and took him as I lost my footing and carried us over the edge of a flat world.
We fell, and I could finally hear the weapons firing around me and the curse words, thankfully, in English. I opened my eyes but could only see the reddish rainwater that filtered between the stacks of soggy sandbags and Henry. He was cradling his brow with blood fil-tering through his fingers as he laughed and shook his head with that bitter secret-survivor smile.
He spoke out of the side of his mouth as he fired the CAR-16 over the lip of the trench, the flame from the 5.56’s barrel extending from the black metal like the eyes of some deflated jack-o’-lantern. The blood was still seeping from his head where I’d hit him, when he looked at me.
“When I said run till you reach something, I did not mean me.”
* * *
She tossed part of a crust to Dog, who was sitting in the hallway to my left. We watched as the beast took the baked dough and swallowed it in two bites.
“Because it’s your turn, and there isn’t anybody else.” She didn’t look satisfied with my answer, but she was relatively happy that I’d brought dinner before I headed back to the ranch to check on Cady.
Vic sipped her Rainier beer and watched as the giant folded the last slice of his pizza, stuffing it into his mouth behind the impenetrable curtain of black hair, and chewed. He had eaten all of his own pie and all but the one slice Vic had picked at and the three slices I’d devoured of another. He’d chugged the liter of pop that we’d provided and finally lay back on the bunk and covered his eyes with his arm.
Vic studied him for a moment and then spoke. “So the one night I’m going to sleep in the jail, you’re going home?” I didn’t say anything. She watched me as I took a sip of my beer. “Sure you don’t want to stick around?”
“One of us can’t leave this room.” I glanced at the prisoner, now snoring softly. “And under the circumstances . . .”
She shrugged. “This is the shittiest pizza I’ve ever eaten.”
I continued to watch the Indian. “He seemed to like it.”
“He lives under the highway; I’m not so sure his culinary sensibilities are all that refined.”
I peeled the
R
on the label of my beer bottle with my thumbnail. “Saizarbitoria thinks I’m a racist.”
“That’s okay. I think you’re a slave driver.” She pushed her ball cap back; the hat was a sign that she was having a bad hair day—something that I had learned not to mention. “Why?”
“I was kind of hard on this Tuyen fellow today.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” I looked at the glue strip where the label had peeled away. “I don’t know, maybe it is prejudice. He was in the Black Tigers and STRATA.”
She stared at me. “And for those of us who weren’t born until after the Age of Aquarius, what the fuck does that mean?”
“Black Tigers were the South Vietnamese version of our Special Forces, and STRATA was a program that dropped these guys behind enemy lines. There were, I think, about a hundred of them and about a third never made it back.”
“So this guy’s one bad motor scooter?”
“Could be.” I took a deep breath. “His English is good, better than any Vietnamese speaker I’ve ever heard....” It was silent too long, so I changed the subject. “Anything from Quincy, over at the VA?” She lowered her beer bottle and looked at me as I stood and gathered the detritus, setting the two empty pizza boxes and bottles on the counter.
“He’s on vacation in the garden spot of garden spots, Detroit, and won’t be back until first thing tomorrow. I told them somebody would be by.”
“Did you ask them if they were missing a seven-foot Indian?”
“I did, but the twit I was talking to didn’t really come forth with much.”
“You want to ride over to Sheridan with me tomorrow morning?”
“No.” She stood, considering me as I stopped in the doorway, and then leaned back against the minifridge door. “Not after sleeping on the jail floor all night . . . alone.” I watched her as she approached me—the way the uniform hung in all the right places, the lush, hanging-gardens-of-Babylon quality of her general physique. “It’s the uniform, right?”
“No, it’s not the uniform.”
“I mean . . . because it’s okay. I mean some guys are freaky, and they like a woman in uniform, but you’re not.”
We were standing in the doorway, just out of the giant’s line of sight, and somehow the conversation we’d been meaning to have was even worse here. “Not what?”
“Freaky.”
“No, I’m not.” She was standing close, and my back was against the wall in more ways than one. She put a hand out and touched my sleeve, running her fingers up my arm and feeling the embroidery at the sheriff ’s patch. Those eyes turned up to me. I could smell her, all of her, and started remembering that night in Philadelphia again. “Look . . .”
Her face was about eight inches from mine. “What?”
“I just . . . I don’t know if...”
In the dim light of the hall, her eyes shone, and I found myself studying the haloed glow. “What?”
“What we did, that one time, was out of context and now we’re back...”
She slowly went up on tiptoe and her hand trailed to the back of my neck as she pulled, and the distance between our faces decreased. “What’a ya say we slip out of these uniforms and get out of context again?”
I brought my hands up to the small of her back and felt her shiver like a colt.
Contrary to popular belief, the best kisses don’t start lip to lip. This one started at the scar at my collarbone, nibbled its way up the muscles at the side of my neck, and paused at my jaw. I was having trouble breathing when I heard her moan, and it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else, somewhere east and not so long ago. I turned my face to allow our lips to meet, but she’d frozen and had turned her head toward the holding cells.
We both stood there breathing, and her voice caught. “I think the prisoner is waking up.”
I nodded and watched as her arm and face slipped away. I caught her and pulled her in with one hand, placing the tip of my chin on top of her head and holding her there for just a moment, not talking. I felt her sigh and then loosened my grip.
“I guess I better get back in sight.”
I watched as she moved the folding chair and sat in plain view of the Indian, who immediately quieted down.
“If it makes you feel any better, I was thinking about asking you out on a date.”
Her head rose, and the dark gold of her eyes again shone, the lengthy canine tooth exposed like an ivory warning flare. “A what?”
I could feel my courage heading for the hills. “That’s what we used to call it back in the old days—dating.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” I’m pretty sure my face was taking on a little color, but I braved it through and went back to pick up the trash from the counter. “What do they call it now?”
The half-smile smirk stalled there like a cat playing with a mouse as she looked up at me. “Sport fucking.”
I lingered beside her for a moment and then glanced at the big Indian before heading out. It just seemed like our timing was never right. She waited till I was halfway down the hall before calling after me. “You sure you go? Me love you loooooooooong time....”
8
I took Cady with me to make the sixty-six-mile loop over to Sheridan after we’d worked out in the morning. We were just passing Lake DeSmet along I-90 with Dog seated between us. She had her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up on the seat the way she always did.
I noticed she’d dressed for Michael’s arrival later that day in a bright turquoise broomstick skirt and a black-sequined, cap-sleeved T-shirt. She was wearing a stylish straw cowboy hat with a leather strap adorned with conchos and lots of feathers on top of her auburn hair. Her earrings matched her skirt. Biker/cowgirl haute couture. She glanced up at me and continued to pet Dog. “Don’t make fun of my hat.”
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You were thinking about it.”
I set the cruise control and settled back in my seat. “It’s a very nice hat.”
“Don’t.”
I glanced at her. “What?”
“You were going to try and be funny.” She took a deep breath and looked out her window and back down the Piney Creek valley.
This is the point where as a father you’re supposed to say something—the right thing—and I wondered what that might be. She was obviously nervous about Michael’s arrival, and it was my duty to assuage some of the anxiety. “You look great.”
Her head dropped, and I waited. “I’m wearing the hat because of the scar.”
“Oh, honey . . .”
“I just thought at first . . .” She was silent for a moment, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say. “My hair is too short; I haven’t gotten enough sun. . . .”
“You look great, honest.” I passed an eighteen-wheel truck and steered back in our lane. “It means a lot to you, this visit?”
She reached out and adjusted the air-conditioning vent, then readjusted it back to the same position. “Yes.”
There was something I’d been meaning to talk with her about, and this was the closest to an opening I’d gotten. I’d decided that as a parent I would adopt a relationship with my little redheaded, large-eyed daughter that was based on an unrelenting truth, and it had become the only language we both understood. “Well, this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to spend some time really getting to know each other even if it’s just a couple of days.”
I was hoping it sounded better to her than it did to me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
It hadn’t.
“I just think it’ll be a good visit; before, you had these roles—he was a police officer and you were a victim. . . .” I glanced over and then quickly returned my eyes to the road. “It was a hospital and then it’s been phone calls. I just think this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to be in a more natural setting and really get to know each other.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘really,’ meaning we don’t know each other now?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Really?”
It seemed to me her mind was rapidly getting better. I tried my last hope, the authoritarian patrician voice of reason. “Cady . . . ”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
We drove the next twenty minutes in silence as I took the second Sheridan exit, turned off Main, and made the gradual ascent to the Veterans Administration. The VA had taken over Fort Mackenzie, and it was in a gorgeous spot on a plateau just north of town with vast, feathering cottonwoods and solid, redbrick buildings. We passed the unmanned guard shack and the rows of conifers stretching shadows across the pavement, and she decided to talk to me again. “So how come I never met this Quincy Morton guy?”
“He was before your time.”
“More stuff that happened before I was born?” She glanced around as I wound my way through the fortlike buildings. “So, you had a hard time after the war?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a hard time.... It was a confusing time, and I was looking for some answers. Quincy wrote me and said he was transferring to Sheridan from Detroit.”