Fatal Thaw (9 page)

Silence. "That same day, Bobby Kennedy announces he's going to run for president."

Someone made a rude comment concerning Marilyn Monroe, and the animals were back in force.

"March 22. LBJ relieves Westmoreland."

The rafters of Bobby's house resounded with cheers. "And on March 31, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today withdraws from the 1968 presidential race!"

This time the cheering thundered through the cedar logs and up through the deck of the porch, joyless and unrestrained, a wall of raging sound. Mutt couldn't stand it and began to bark, and Kate locked a restraining hand in the fur of her ruff.

"We were there!" Bobby roared. "We were at Hue!" "The City of Perfect Peace!"

"Sometimes you have to destroy a city to save it!" "We were at the embassy in Saigon!"

"Send in the spooks to lead the counterattack!"

"Yeah! The fucking CIA oughta be good for some thing!"

"Spear carrier!" "Cannon fodder!" "Ass wipe!" "Yeah!"

"We were at Da Nang!" "Khe Sanh!"

"The ghost of Dien Bien Phu!" "Nha Trang!" "Tan Son Nhut!" Unsurprised, Kate heard a voice she recognized as George Perry's. "The battle for the body bags!"

"Yeah!"

"Gentlemen," Bobby roared, "here's to promotion through "Hear, hear!"

"Here's to the fucking Five O'Clock Follies!" count! We want a body count!" by Colonel Blimp!" "Here's to the fucking light at the fucking end of the fucking tunnel!" "Fucking A!"

"Here's to 206,000 more troops and another 15 tactical fighter squadrons!"

"And to another 30 MIAs!"

"Here's to fragging the fuckers up front!"

There was an unexpected pause, into which came voice that sounded aggrieved and a little bewildered. "B we won," he insisted. "We won Tet."

Someone must have hit the Play button on the stereo. The tape slipped a little, and then picked up in the middle of the song, singing whoopee we're all going to die. Someone began stamping his feet, they all joined in, and again the floor of the porch began to shake.

"Didn't we?" the voice said sadly, a plaintive question that reached Kate clearly through the door. "Didn't we win?"

The door jerked open. A sepulchral voice announced, "This is the end."

Kate took an involuntary step backward. The doorman had smeared black makeup beneath his eyes and wore combat fatigues fraying at knees and elbows. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of mescal, still with worm; with the other he raised a joint to his lips and sucked in. Kate didn't know him. She backed up another step and gave aningratiating and, she hoped, Non threatening smile. "I'm looking for Bobby." He looked at her without expression. Behind him the singing continued unabated.

"Who is it, Max?" A voice came from behind him. The owner of the voice wheeled into Kate's view.

"Well, hey, gorgeous!" Bobby roared. With a single shove he sent his wheelchair sliding down the ramp, and with a flick of large-knuckled, clever hands turned himself sideways and slid to a hockey stop in a shower of wet, grainy snow. He looked up at her with a grin. "Come to celebrate the retaking of Hue with us?"

"Bobby, I'm sorry," she told him, "I completely forgot what time of year it was. You want me out of here?"

He waved an expansive hand. "No problem. The Fifth Annual Twentieth Anniversary Celebration of the Tet Offensive is open to anybody, especially good-looking round eyes." He leered at her on his way back up the ramp, and she jumped out of the way. Bobby Clark drove his wheelchair like an offensive weapon.

The fatigue-clad figure holding the joint at shoulder arms hung around the perimeter like a green-and-brown ghost. His eyes were deeply set and vacant, the pupils dilated out to the edge of the iris. "Excuse me,"

Bobby said, "you met Max Chaney yet? No? Max Chaney, Kate Shugak. He works for Dan O'Brian; he's the ranger took Miller's place."

"Oh." Kate held out a hand. "Hi, nice to meet you." "My only friend, the end," Max Chaney replied. He took another toke, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, and without exhaling vanished back into the house. Kate only hoped he didn't swell up and explode.

"Ah, never mind him, poor bastard's carrying a hell of a load, what with-" A rifle went off somewhere. "Goddammit, you guys," Bobby roared, a bellow that echoed around the clearing and off the treetops. "I told you to cut that shit out! Everybody's jumpy enough with that craziness week before last! Cut it out!" There was no reply; neither were there any more rifle shots.

"What brings you here, sweetcakes?" Bobby waggled rakish eyebrows. "Am I about to get lucky?"

"You wish," she retorted. Affronted at being ignored, Mutt reared up and laved Bobby's face with a damp and loving tongue.

"Goddam, woman," Bobby roared, "you brung the wolf with you! How many times I gotta tell you, no goddamn wolves in the house!" He cuffed Mutt on the head. She grinned up at him, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. "Well, get outa the friggin' doorway, you're blocking traffic," he grumbled, shoving open the door. Kate was almost blown back by the blast of sound. With a single push of powerful black forearms, Bobby whizzed over to the stereo and turned it down.

There were protests, which he quelled with a single roar. "Shut the hell up, you noisy bastards! We got company!"

Half a dozen men looked up from various sprawling positions about the room. They were all in their early and dressed alike in jeans and T-shirts, some with fatigue caps, some with olive-drab jackets. The air was layered thickly with the smells of dope and alcohol and cigarettes.

Mutt made a beeline for the wood box. She nosed and pawed her way down through the kindling and the split logs and struck gold, bringing up a bone that looked vaguely mooselike in character and still had bits of meat and gristle clinging to it. She sat down at once to gnaw.

"Mutt!" Kate said, shocked. "Where are your manners?"

Mutt, without releasing her grip on the bone, rose and trotted over to rear up with both forepaws on the arms of Bobby's chair. She didn't quite know how to go about discharging her debt of gratitude without dropping the bone, and this she was clearly unwilling to do, so she growled around it as affectionately as she was able, causing several of the men to move closer to the door.

"Goddam, woman," Bobby roared, fending her off, "get this goddam wolf offa me!" Kate grinned and signaled Mutt down. "Goddam, woman!" Bobby roared again. "I don't know why I let either of you in the goddam house!"

"Me, either," somebody said. Kate knew that voice. "Bernie?"

A tall, skinny man with long, thinning hair bound back in a ponytail looked up from a Nintendo Game. Boy. "Hey, Kate.

"Wait a minute," she said. "Wait just a damn minute here. I know for a fact you weren't in Vietnam."

"Nope," Bernie agreed peacefully. "I was in the mall." Kate was mystified and looked it. "The mall?"

Bernie took pity on her. "The Washington, D.C. mall, in 1970, in company with about a million other people. I was also among the three thousand John Mitchell honored with tossing behind a chicken-wire fence for twenty-four hours, in direct contravention of our first amendment rights." He thought, his brow creasing. "Or was it fourth amendment? I was never really sure."

"A campus commando," Bobby told Kate, not without affection.

"Nope." Bernie gulped down the rest of his beer. The Game Boy beeped indignantly at him and he looked back at it. "Just somebody with a low lottery number, not enough stroke to get in the National Guard, and a distaste for tropical climates."

"Max Chaney you met," Bobby said, "and you know Jeff."

Jeff Talbot, a dark, lithe man who contrived to look dapper in blue jeans and a gray wool shirt, snapped a salute and grinned at Kate. "U.S.

Marine guard, American embassy, Saigon. At your service, ma'am."

His eyes wandered over her in lingering fashion, but she knew that with Jeff it was more genetic imperative than implied insult and she ignored it. "Hi, George," she said to the pilot.

"Hey, Kate," George said, waving a beer bottle at her.

"Long time no see."

"George was at Ton Son Nhut. Demetri Totemoff, Nha Trang, and Pete Kvasnikof, Pleiku."

"Hi, Kate, how's Jack?" Pete inquired. "He's fine," Kate replied.

"I'll just bet he is, now," Pete said, but he said it to him"Okay, guys," Bobby said, "'bout time to break this party up and run you off." There were groans and grumbles of protest.

"Hey, whaddaya want?" he demanded. "We done sung the `Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag.' At least three of you got wives, and, Jeff, I know for a fact you can't go Twenty-four hours without getting laid; your pecker'll shrivel up and die on you."

"Can't have that," Jeff said with his quick grin. He stood and drained his beer. "Thanks, Bobby," he said, reaching down a hand. "Good one, this year."

"Yeah." They did a jive handshake, complete with high and low fives, and Jeff left. The starting of his snow machine outside acted like a signal to the rest of the group, and one by one they lined up to thank Bobby and make their goodbyes.

"I'll be out to the Roadhouse to visit tomorrow," Kate told Bernie.

"Good." He gave her shoulder a poke. "See you then."

Max Chaney stuck out his hand, missing Bobby's by about a foot, stared right through Kate and drifted out the door like smoke. "Is he driving?" she asked Bobby in low voice.

"Nah. He flew down from the Step yesterday and Pete brought him out."

"Good." When the door closed behind Max, the last to leave, Kate inquired, "How'd it go this year?"

"All right." Bobby began emptying ashtrays into the garbage. "It's getting to be less like work and more like fun."

"About time." Kate found the broom and began sweeping. He looked up and said soberly, "Some of those guys have some awful goddam tough ghosts to exorcise. You're too young and you weren't there.

You don't know."

"I've been known to crack a book or two, and I've been listening to you for thirteen years," she. pointed out.

"You don't know," he repeated.

It was true, and Kate. was glad of it. "You seem relatively sane."

"I'm one of the lucky ones. I buried my ghosts with my legs," he said, without bitterness.

"What's so lucky about loosing your legs?"

"I was in the hospital for months. I had the chance to decompress. The other guys were in the jungle one day and in downtown San Francisco being called baby killers the next." He shook his head. "Grunt Rule Number 1. Never lose a war if you can help it. It upsets the folks back home."

She paused in her sweeping and looked at him. "So, when you throw a party like this, you're helping them to decompress?"

He shrugged. "We hang out, have a few beers, smoke a few joints, remember, talk, listen to music, yell, scream. Sometimes we pound on each other a little. We let off steam, take the edge off."

"Hasn't the edge dulled a little by now? It's been twenty-plus years."

"For some, yes, For some, no. For some on some days, yes. For some on some days, no."

"When I was little, I remember my father and Abel talking He shook his head. "No, Kate. They were Class of 45. Different thing."

"Different how? They got shot at, their friends died."".

"They came home to a parade, and a G.I. bill, and job preference, and if that wasn't enough, the Nuremburg trials showed them beyond a doubt that they'd fought the essence of evil and won."

"Bobby," she said, "something I've always wanted to ask you. Sometimes you talk like y'all was raised in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp, and at others you seem to have just sauntered out of Harvard Yard. What gives?"

He grinned at her, a teasing grin, and she knew that was the only answer she was going to get. "Okay," she said, resigned, "then tell me what Bernie gets out of coming to the Tet Annual?"

"Are you kidding? He looks at all of us and renders up thanks to the powers that be that he ran for Canada." He paused. "And we look at him and wish we had." After moment Bobby grinned again, a trifle lopsided this time.

"And this year, with that goddam McAniff blasting away at everything that moved, we needed it. It was definitely getting a little weird out. God knows we've had about all the weird we can take." He paused. "Sometimes "What?"

He looked at her, but his dark eyes were fixed on events long ago and far away, on a story that did not begin "once upon a time." "Sometimes, when another movie comes out, or they start up another program on television, or do another documentary on the vets, you get to feeling like you're never going to be able to clean the smell of the jungle off you." His forehead creased, and he said in low voice, "It's a funny thing, Kate. I can still smell it. can still taste it. You can taste death, you know. At Hue, the siege lasted a month. The bodies most of the time stayed where they fell, and rotted there. You could smell them every time you inhaled. You could taste it in your rations, drink it from your canteen. It was the last thing you smelled at night, the first thing you smelled in the morning. It was all around you. You couldn't get away from it, and you wouldn't, until you made more of it, until you'd killed enough people dead so that there was no one left to die."

It was the first time in their thirteen-year friendship she'd ever heard Bobby talk about the war. Kate blinked her eyes clear and said nothing.

"So," Bobby said briskly, reaching for the last over flowing ashtray, "that's pretty much it. Once a year we get together and get a little tanked and cuss the brass and the dopes in D.C., and remember the guys who didn't make it, and cheer the fact we did." He grinned at her. "It relaxes the tension better than a good massage."

Kate cast around for an equally lighthearted response. "That new ranger, whatsisname, Chaney, didn't seem any too relaxed to me."

"Yeah, well, he was higher'n two kites, and besides, he's recovering from more'n the Nam."

"Like what? Danny boy assign him to taking the trash out of the Park?"

Bobby looked up and he wasn't smiling. "He had a thing going with Lisa Getty." Mistaking Kate's sudden stillness, Bobby said, "Yeah, I know, who didn't have a thing going with Lisa Getty. But he was new in the Park and he didn't know that, and she wasn't done with him, so he thinks it was true love, and now his heart's broken." Bobby paused. "Did I ever tell you, I got a little of that?"