Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (31 page)

Derrick flattens the first of them with a straight shoulder block he pulls from his high school football days, then catches another with an elbow to the throat. By the time they've figured out what's happened, he's gone, and the little girl and her giant brother are smashing straight into them, the whole gang collapsing in a spitting pileup of limbs and “Motherfuckers!”

You can't run for long in cowboy boots. Derrick wears them because he doesn't run, that's one of the benefits of carrying a gun. He hits the steps to an abandoned brick building and smashes into the plywood nailed over the door, falling through the rotted wood, shoulder first.

A foyer. Derrick sliding into the blackness, scooting the wall, hoping the flooring's still intact. He moves two rooms deep into the ruin, and then stops and hunkers down on his knees. Then he stays like that, quieting his breathing, until his legs prickle, hurt, burn, and go numb under him. And then he closes his eyes and lets himself sink into the dense tedium of the wait.

There's this feeling Derrick gets in his chest since they put the pacemaker in. It feels like the current has created a hollow space where his heart should be, like the pacemaker is expanding its electromagnetic field, driving the tissue out. He pays attention to that feeling.

Sitting still is a skill that he perfected in Vietnam. But it's not a skill he learned in Vietnam. It's a skill he learned from his father.

It was after Derrick's mother died, flattened by a coal truck while walking her Maltese, that Derrick's father sold their house in the small Eastern Kentucky town where they'd lived, and the two of them moved into the cabin. Now Derrick realizes how quickly that move took place, but at the time there was only his father's guiding hand on his shoulder as he carried his small box of personal belongings inside. His legs trembling, threatening to betray him altogether.

The walls of the cabin were lined with books frequently removed and reread, but never rotated. And guns and traps that were always oiled for a use that never came. Not that Derrick's father was forced to keep these things in the cabin. Derrick's mother might even have had enjoyed some hint of his father's presence in her house. But Derrick's father didn't compromise with domesticity.

The books on the walls were serious books. Books that Derrick's father first began to read during an undistinguished tour in Korea. Books about men making war, not because they believed in war, but because they believed in manhood. Books that Derrick's father would read aloud, standing erect in one of his gray department store suits, his neatly trimmed mustache greyly immobile over his cultivated Kentucky drawl. He was a schoolteacher.

Derrick sat pinioned in the monotonous repetition of those books. Because they contained the only things worth knowing, his father said. And because, though Derrick hated his father every minute of every day, there was no time he hated him as much as when he read aloud. The stupefying boredom of the reading sent Derrick into a reverie. He imagined himself removing every single gun from the walls and shooting his father in the face with each of them, one right after the other.

Time to move. Derrick stands, feels his pockets. Wherever his gun has disappeared to, he still has his Zippo lighter. He sparks it every few feet. Drywall chunks, shattered light fixtures, dead squirrels, piles of trash. He swims through the stench of death and garbage. Finally, a back door, and he erupts into a small backyard heaped with busted furniture, gulping at the night air, and then slings himself over the backyard fence into an empty alley. He scoots with his head below the fence line until he sees a window with a low lamp burning back in the recesses. He bangs on the door. “Police.”

“I've got a gun,” a man's voice calls back.

“Me too,” Derrick says, “And I'm police. You got the count of two afore I start shooting through the door.”

The door opens. He's young and white, with a soul patch and greasy black hair, and he's holding a huge cap and ball Colt 1851 Navy revolver. Derrick grabs it out of his hands.

“You ain't got a gun of your own?” the kid says.

Derrick puts the revolver in half-cock and checks the cylinder. Loaded, except for the chamber under the hammer. His father had one just like it, hanging on the wall. It'd been passed down from father to son from the first Kreiger anybody bothers remembering. Who, according to family lore, rode with Forrest during the war, and after. “How old are these percussion caps?” Derrick asks.

“I don't know what that means, percussion cap,” the kid says, and walks absentmindedly into the living room and sits down on the couch. Everything in the room is dilapidated crushed red velvet, like it was all looted from a single antique store that specialized in halftrashed Louis XV knockoffs. “I've had it maybe five years and I ain't done nothing to any caps, I can tell you that. I didn't even remember I had it until this shit started.”

Derrick slumps into one of the chairs. He rubs his eyes, sparks rioting behind his lids. “What's your drug?” he says to the kid.

The kid gives him a bemused look. “My drug?”

Derrick looks at him.

The kid crosses one leg over the other and holds onto his knee. “Heroin,” he says.

“Heroin.”

“Not what you were looking for?”

Derrick raises the revolver.

“I might be able to help you out is all,” the kid says. “We have parties, and sometimes people leave things. That's how I ended up with the gun.”

“Coke,” Derrick says, squinting over the front sight at the boy's forehead.

“Okay.” The kid stands and sort of floats out of the room.

Derrick lays the revolves in his lap and closes his eyes. He listens to his heartbeat, takes stock.

Derrick had been on the Tac Squad for a year, part of a plainclothes unit working street crime. After leaving his father's house, police work had seemed like a natural fit for him. But it was a pale imitation of what he'd done in Vietnam, and the soldier in him hated the policeman he'd become. Closing down block parties, breaking up corner streetwalkers, shutting down curbside drug dealers. He broke his head open nightly on the senselessness of it all. And he was suspended yesterday, which he knows has got to have something to do with him waking up in this fix.

It was one of Over-The-Rhine's late-night jazz clubs, about three weeks ago. African masks on the wall, militants hammering out plans for the revolution. She was a big, rolling woman with a raucous face, and when the Tac Squad rousted the joint on a marijuana tip, she'd thrust her face right up against his, called him a pig, and spat into his mouth. It was pure reflex when Derrick headbutted her, but it was a good one, cracked two of her front teeth.

She'd gotten a lawyer, of course. They always did, but they never won. The reason Cirillo had suspended him had nothing to do with the head butt. Cirillo suspended him because he'd been ordered to take Derrick on the Tac Squad, and Cirillo didn't have any use for Vietnam vets. He'd told Derrick the first day that if he pulled any of that cunt Vietnam shit, he'd be off the squad faster'n he could say post-traumatic stress disorder. He was a World War II veteran, the Pacific Theater, and he had the same opinion of Vietnam vets that he had of asylum inmates.

Derrick didn't protest the suspension. He just sat there in his chair while Cirillo read off the paperwork, his face like an exploded ham, his eyes pink and brown and gristly. He just sat there and imagined himself removing every single gun from the walls of the precinct and shooting the motherfucker in the face with each of them, one after the other.

And, then, when Cirillo was done, Derrick dug his back-up gun out of the glove compartment, strapped it on, and drove down to the Dancin' Bay, where he drank well bourbon until he couldn't do anything but sit at the bar, watching the pickled eggs jiggle to tunes from the jukebox.

One of Derrick's father's favorite refrains was how men are changed by war. But Derrick knows that's horseshit. A way for old men who no longer believe in the greatness of war to sell books of war, and war itself, to the young. Men are not made by war, men make war. And if there was any deeper truth in Vietnam, it was the terrific wonder of war itself. The pyrotechnics, the jet fuel fires, the fully-automatic weapons, the drugs and the jungle shadows, the camp wives. It was being entirely free of that air-conditioned hell back home. It was a carnival riot in a country you couldn't help but love completely and hate completely from the moment you landed.

Some nights Derrick will sit and look through the few photographs he has, the boy who looks back at him already scraped as clean and raw as a pig just after slaughter. His face gaunt and hard and his eyes huge-pupiled. And that little combat grin, restrained but twitching on his face, threatening to explode free.

Derrick knows what that look means. From time to time, he catches it in the faces of other soldiers in photographs. And it's on the face of almost every bomber pilot he ever saw, especially after they've just completed a run. It's not the look of duty or sacrifice. It's the look that comes of watching bombs detonate across hundred-yard swaths of earth, of watching an entire countryside erupt in flames, people scattering under you like cockroaches. It's the look of free and unrestrained carnage. Of free kills.

The shame of it drove lesser men than Derrick to suicide when they returned. Derrick, he just makes sure he doesn't dream. Because he can't handle knowing that he'll never have that kind of freedom again. And that he'll never again be able to unknow exactly what freedom is, and what it cost him.

Sitting in the bar, drinking, Derrick couldn't even shake his head at his suspension from the Tac Squad. At the idiocy of the things he's asked to do, and the restraints under which he's then told to do them. There isn't one of his superiors who wouldn't gladly round up every black person in Over-The-Rhine, stick a burlap sack over each of their heads, and file them one by one down into the Ohio River.