13th Valley (39 page)

That first New York week Egan had slept on the floor in the front room of Stephanie's apartment. He had lain on his back each morning and had watched her apply her make-up. She would rise early and spend a very long time preparing for the photographer for whom she modeled. She would sit on the floor before an aluminum ladder with one leg curled beneath her and the other bent and held just so, so she could steady her arm on her knee. On the ladder's second step there was a tiny lighted makeup mirror. On the first and third steps were bottles of cosmetics. By her right hip there was an ashtray and by her left a cup of coffee. Stephanie was never without a cigarette.

Egan could see her move clearly now, could see the room and himself. He was lying there pretending to be asleep. Watching Stephanie. She looks like a child playing, he had thought. She sang in that soft caressing voice and her thoughts seemed to frolic. He could hear her now. She braced her wrist upon her knee to apply mascara. Her hand trembled. They were thin hands with slender fingers and tiny wrists. Later Daniel's callused hands would hold them, almost engulf them.

“Take this,” she whispered the fourth morning. “To read while you sit on the piers and rest from walking amongst the longshoremen.” It was a copy of Gibran's The Prophet. That day he and Paul were rejected by twelve ships and that night they returned late. Pattie was gone for the evening and Stephanie had a friend in the second room. Paul and Daniel met him. He was older, thirty-five perhaps. To Daniel he seemed very dirty, greasy. He introduced himself as Lucifer then led Stephanie back to the second room again. Paul lay back and was snoring lightly within minutes. Daniel lay back. He listened. There are no sounds at first, then some kissing. Very soft music is put on the stereo. The kissing becomes louder. It echoes in Daniel's ears. He can feel the bastard's hands on the beautiful Stephanie. It is driving him mad. He wants to kill the greasy slimy shit. But—he cannot even stir. How can the college boy challenge the invited Lucifer? Simply because he is in love …

Egan raised his head. His teeth were clenched. The mothafucker stayed the night, he thought.

During the first week Daniel did not touch Stephanie, not even so much as a handshake, not until they said good-bye. Paul got berth on a ship to Amsterdam and Daniel went to work for Kirt Sontag. Sontag ran a small tugboat and commute shuttle from Pier 15 on the East River. He was the “biggest of the little and the littlest of the big” operators from the piers. He paid poorly but he asked little and he offered Daniel a room aboard the
John J. Murphy,
a small tug that had sunk in Boston harbor in 1960, but had been raised and salvaged by Sontag. By day the
John J. Murphy
transported painting crews and supplies to the Statue of Liberty. By night the boat became Daniel's personal refuge.

For a week Daniel worked for Sontag. The second day he discovered a bar across the street from Pier 15. It was long and narrow inside. To the left of the door there was a dark wood bar and to the right against the wall were several small tables. In the far back beyond where the bar ended there were four larger tables and beyond these a small kitchen. The bar was dark and cool. Carved teak wainscoting circled the narrow hall of the bar to a five-foot height. On the upper edge of the wainscoting at ten-foot intervals there were stained prints of the sea. It could not have been more picturesque to a small town college kid. The cook was called Cookie and he actually had a wooden leg and wore a black eye patch. When Cookie found Daniel was working for Sontag he dropped the price of a glass of beer to 15 cents, doubled the lunch portion and allowed Daniel to eat half a loaf of bread with butter during lunch.

It did not help.

Cherry sat up quickly causing the poncho beneath them to rustle. He handed Egan the radio handset and crunched back to the earth. Egan looked around. The jungle was very black.

Everything was still. He could distinguish no sounds close by. In the distance, in the valley somewhere, artillery shells were exploding, their peaceful rumbling echo relaxed him. He lay back silently. The clouds had thickened between him and the moon and it was now difficult to distinguish individual branches against the ash sky. She was there. All of her. Her eyes. Stephanie's eyes were blue-gray, clear and deep. Egan could see her eyes and he felt elated. Suddenly the world was back to absolutes. He was in love. She was a gently flowing life and she was with him.

Egan had left New York one week after beginning with Sontag. He felt angry. Paul's ship was two days at sea. Daniel went to the apartment late, after work, and collected his few things. Pattie said good-bye and they shook hands. Stephanie was not home but as he turned to go, she arrived. Pattie left and Daniel and Stephanie talked for a few minutes. He said he must leave and he kissed her good-bye. It was the first time they touched. He could feel the warmth of her moist lips. He could feel them now. “You've got silver eyes,” he had said. “No,” she had laughed gently, “they're gray.” “No,” he corrected. “They're silver.” They kissed again. His left hand was on her breast. “Good-bye,” he said. And he left. He hitchhiked to Alaska, he meandered down to San Francisco, he bummed his way to New Orleans. He spent the summer wandering, searching. He found many things yet nothing satisfied him. He had been trapped by the mystique that was Stephanie.

The moon broke through a hole in the cloud cover. Egan was very groggy. His eyes were closed. The new glint of light penetrating the canopy ignited the nightmare which had become perversely attached to all night dreams of Stephanie. The glint rose. Egan was in the jungle in the dream. The night was very black. Sappers had penetrated the perimeter undetected. The glint rises higher. There is a sapper by his side. There is a silver machete in the enemy's hand. Moonlight sparkles on the blade as the man raises the huge knife. The machete begins its quick strike toward Egan's face.

Egan bolted upright.

SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITIES

THE FOLLOWING RESULTS FOR OPERATIONS IN THE O'REILLY/ BARNETT/JEROME AREA WERE REPORTED FOR THE 24-HOUR PERIOD ENDING 2359 13 AUGUST 70:

AMERICAN UNITS COMBAT ASSAULTED INTO THE FIREBASE BARNETT AREA AT 0840 HOURS AND RELIEVED ARVN UNITS FOR OPERATIONS IN THE FIREBASE O'REILLY AREA.

RECON, COMPANY E, 7/402 ENGAGED AN UNKNOWN SIZE ENEMY FORCE 1500m SE OF BARNETT KILLING FOUR NVA. US CASUALTIES WERE ONE KILLED AND THREE WOUNDED. AT 0855 HOURS, VICINITY YD 198304, CO A, 7/402 DISCOVERED TWO ENEMY KILLED BY ARTILLERY. CO A WAS MORTARED AN HOUR LATER. THERE WERE NO CASUALTIES. AT 0940 HOURS BARNETT RECEIVED SEVEN MORTAR IMPACTIONS WITHIN THE PERIMETER. NO DAMAGE WAS REPORTED. AT 1440 HOURS RECON, CO E, 7/402 ENGAGED AN ENEMY FORCE WITH UNKNOWN RESULTS. ONE US SOLDIER RECEIVED MINOR WOUNDS.

ARVN UNITS MADE NO SIGNIFICANT CONTACT.

C
HAPTER
16

14 A
UGUST
1970

Everything went wrong on the 14th yet everything went right. To begin with the battalion TOC on the firebase did not make its standard wake-up calls. Brooks slept on. At 0400 El Paso, although he was awake with the radios, was dreaming about his mother. “Rafael,” she called to him as she had called to him ever since his father had been killed. “Rafael, come in and stay with your mother. Today, I am very tired.” “Isn't the priest with you tonight?” he snapped bitterly at her. “Rafael,” she called. “I am an old woman whose husband has abandoned her. Why has he abandoned me?” She speaks Mexican-Spanish yet her speech, even in her native tongue, is poor. The boy turns and walks away from her. He passes the priest as he walks from his mother's shack. The entire world is filthy. “How is she today?” Father Raul inquires. “She is bitter,” Rafael sneers. The background kaleidoscopes. They are outside the old church. Rafael says, “First she is bitter that the school takes me. Now she is bitter that the government takes me for the war.” To the side in a stage whisper he adds, “She does not understand. I have not told them. I have signed up to get away.” The priest is oblivious. The background becomes jungle though the old priest is still there, sitting deaf in an armchair. “They do not know,” Rafael laughs, “that I have extended.” It is a recurrent dream of which Rafael has told no one. During the entire dream El Paso did not look at his watch. The wake-up call from the TOC did not come. It is one of the very few times El Paso has ever faltered in his duties to Brooks and the company.

Rafael Jaoquin Pavura was raised in the torpid, sordid communal Mexican quarter of El Paso, Texas. He had been born to an old laborer and his young wife who were childless for the first ten years of their marriage. When the child was conceived the old man was well into his fifties and the impending event was not considered a blessing. Rafael was born in a jacal hut on the mesa west of Cuidad Juarez, far from the bullring and the cantinas, out on the flat arid wastelands. There the old man and the woman kept a small garden and stayed mostly to themselves. The summer of 1946 had been very hot and very dry and the plants had wilted early. In the first days after Rafael's birth and for two silent months the old man took to wandering in the barren lands. On a cool evening in early autumn the old man entered the hut, decisive, driven. He ordered his wife to pack whatever she might want to take and could carry. In the darkness they worked their way to the city and then across the Rio Bravo and north into the city of El Paso where they lost themselves in the shanties of the wetback villages.

There were no regular jobs and no place to settle and for five years the old man carried his son and the family wandered from hovel to hovel. The old man longed for the open barren lands yet the city and America offered many futures for his son that the mesa did not. It held forth the promise and anticipation of opportunity, the possibility of advancement, the promise of prosperity for future generations, the same promise America had held forth to all immigrants for over three hundred years. And the promises were very powerful in placating the old wetback. Something would happen, he told himself.

As a very young boy Rafael was allowed the freedom to wander unsupervised. At six Rafael was responsible for much of his own welfare and adept at coping with his ever-expanding world. The expanse of the Chicano community was unknown to his parents but everyone knew Rafael Jaoquin for he would dance through the streets and wander into homes. He would eat with a family he had never before seen and do it with confidence. When he would return or be returned to the shanty of his parents he would stay only long enough to tell his father of his adventures and then he would again wander off. Rafael listened to the stories of the farm workers who knew all the history of Mexico and knew all the people who had come north. He learned many of the stories and he would repeat them as though they were his. Older people loved to have him around and to listen to his stories and to laugh at his imagination but finally they would get tired and send him away. All except his papa.

A young priest once met the boy and listened, fascinated, for hours. He asked the boy about his home and the boy told the priest he was an orphan. For a week Rafael lived with Father Raul until the priest received word of a search and returned the boy to the old man and his young wife. The priest took an interest in Rafael's schooling and helped the old man obtain a night job at the canning works. At night the boy and the priest would watch the old man disappear through the wire gate and behind the chain link fence of the factory, and then the priest would bring the boy home and visit with the boy's mother while the boy was in bed.

Rafael worked for the priest, cleaning his room and sometimes the church and always delivering the messages the priest had for parishioners as he wandered through the streets telling and collecting stories. The boy loved the priest very much and he dreamed that some day he too would be a priest.

When Rafael was twelve his father died of heart failure. The old man had been moving heavy cases in the warehouse of the canning works and a high stack had toppled and trapped him. They had said he was not injured but the enclosure had frightened him and his heart had stopped. Father Raul arranged the funeral. The affair passed in near total isolation from the community. In a week the disturbance was settled, in a month forgotten. The only residual effect was a guarantee from the canning works pension that when and if the boy was ready to advance his education beyond that publicly provided, the funds would be available.