Stone Junction (50 page)

Amid their farewells, he slid out. Just before closing the door, Daniel said, ‘Drop it in a river.’ Even Chester seemed puzzled by the remark.

Daniel stepped back to let the truck pull away, but it didn’t budge. Muffled inside the cab, Chester barked frantically. Irma rolled down the window, calling excitedly, ‘You forgot your balling ball! Chester saw it! Understands everything, just like I told you.’

Daniel lifted the bowling bag through the open window. ‘Wish I had Chester’s mind,’ he said. ‘Pretty dumb to forget your means of livelihood. Thanks again. Take care.’

He watched the taillights disappear back toward Las Vegas. He knelt to unzip the bowling bag, shielding the Diamond’s light from traffic, though the road was empty. He looked into the Diamond. ‘You don’t want me to let you go, do you? I’m the one, aren’t I? If so, help me. Help me. Please, please help me.’ He vanished with the Diamond.

Around midnight, without warning, Daniel’s concentration buckled and collapsed. He tried to tighten his focus but there was no power left. Overwhelmed, it took him a terrifying moment to gather himself and imagine him and the Diamond returned. The entry back was ragged. Daniel had no idea where in the world he was. On his knees, he stared at the Diamond, wondering where the spiral flame had gone. He heard a faint roar to his right. He turned, blinded by a ball of light hurtling toward him. He dove to the side, wrapping his body protectively around the bowling bag just as the driver of the black Trans-Am stood on the brakes and skidded into a one-eighty, stopping a hundred and fifty yards down the road. As the car headed back, Daniel zipped the bowling bag shut. The driver pulled onto the opposite shoulder and swung across the divider and stopped beside Daniel. For a moment the long blond hair made Daniel think it was a woman. He was sharply disappointed when a stocky man in his mid-thirties wearing cowboy boots, Levis, and an army fatigue jacket stepped around the car and said, ‘What in the name of fuck was
that
all about?’

‘What?’ Daniel said with puzzled innocence, getting to his feet.

‘Didn’t you
see
it, man? There was this huge fucking flash of light and
bam!
There you were, this weird glow all around you.
No fucking
way
you could miss it.’

Daniel said, ‘I was squatting down when I heard you coming and stood up real sudden – might have been the headlights reflecting off the case here, lots of bright metal, might have caught the light perfect.’

Slowly shaking his head, the blond man stared at Daniel and his belongings. He shrugged. ‘Maybe I was having a ’palm flashback. Looked like the true item to me, though. Fuck, who cares, huh? Why sweat the little shit when Death knows your address, that’s my motto.’

‘It’s a good one,’ Daniel said.

‘So, what is it, you hitching here or what? I’m going west till dawn, then I turn around and head back.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. He picked up the attaché case and bowling bag.

The blond man said, ‘What are you got up as there, anyway? You the Wandering Bowler or what?’

‘I’m a professional bowler and a religious zealot,’ Daniel explained.

‘Yeah, just about anything beats the fuck out of working.’ He opened the door for Daniel.

‘How about you?’ Daniel said, slipping inside. ‘You’re out late for a nine-to-five man.’

‘I repair slot machines at the Shamrock. Swing shift, two to ten. Gives me the hard side of midnight and early morning to ride patrol.’

‘What are you patrolling for? Or
against
, if that’s the case.’

‘My old employer,’ the man said. ‘Death. I used to be Death’s Chauffeur.’

‘For true?’ Daniel said. He didn’t feel like listening to bullshit.

‘Straight skinny, brother; mortal fact. Let’s get it rolling here and I’ll tell you how it is.’ He shut the door.

‘Great.’ Daniel barely said it aloud, but he couldn’t decide if he felt ironic. ‘Don’t sweat the little shit,’ he reminded himself. ‘Ride on through.’

The blond man’s name was Kenny Copper. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, a judge had presented him with a choice between two years on the county labor farm for disturbing the peace/resisting arrest/assault on a police officer – which the court saw as a cluster of offenses, not a logical progression of self-defense – and immediate enlistment in the marines. He landed in Saigon eight months later, a PFC rifleman with Baker Company. Within the week they were shipped to Khe Sanh.

He told Daniel as they rocketed northwest on 95, ‘I put my head up the Dragon’s ass, man, and I saw the World of Shit. The Cong were shelling the holy fuck out of us. We sent out a couple of recon patrols just for drill; never saw the dudes again. Anything that touched the airstrip got blown away. No Med-Evac. No replacements. They air-dropped rations and ammo, but whatever came down outside our perimeter – which was about half the shit they dropped – that was Christmastime for Charlie. We owned Hell; Charlie owned everything else. But here’s the twister, Herm, your basic cold fuck – we were just
bait
for the trap, dead and stinkin’ meat,’ cause they
wanted
the Cong to mass for a siege, get ’em all heaped up on us, and then bring down the hammer. Real neat thinking, huh? Real swift. I mean, the gooks didn’t whip our ass by being dummies, not that you needed a Ph. D. in chemistry to figure it out, right? The Cong kept the pressure tight enough to choke, but they didn’t overcommit. So
we
went down, not any fucking hammer.

‘It wasn’t too bad at first. I’d brought a pound of Buddha weed in on the chop – fifty Yankee dollars on any street corner in Saigon – and that cut us some slack between the shit-rain and fire-fights. Everybody on base knew our bunker was Boogie City. Black dude I booted with, name was Donnell Foxworth – Arson, we called him, ’cause he said he specialized in burning pussies to the ground – Arson had two ammo boxes full of primo sounds. Motown, Hendrix, the Doors, Dylan, Stones, you name it. Between the Buddha weed and the music, the troops stayed loose.

‘And man, we needed some
serious
morale boosting, because the gooks had the high ground, their mortars and light artillery locked down on us dead zero, like frogs in a tub. Whenever they took the notion, day or night, for two minutes or twenty hours, they sent down a shit-rain of fire. You never been there, man, you just
can’t know
what it’s like to hear incoming, incoming, incoming till that shrill death whine has your blood howling like a gut-shot dog; your whole fucking body peeled back to bare nerves; your asshole puckered so tight that when it finally relaxes you crap your chaps; Dylan turned up loud on the deck, screaming in your ear, ‘Well
HOW
does it
FEEL!
to be on YOUR
OWN!
’ – I tell you true, if a round didn’t blow you away, the rest of it did. I don’t give a fuck if you had all the weed in ’Nam and a sound system that’d cave in your skull –
all
the smack;
all
the pussy in the world. Just
no way
you could keep it from getting too real. Constant sickening fear.

‘About the third week, they really started pounding it in, and the perimeter turned into Sapper City. Try sleeping when them mortars are walking the dog all over you, when you know there’s someone outside who’d love to slit your throat. I was holding on to myself in a muddy trench, literally had my arms wrapped around me, curled against the dirt wall, down with some killer gook dysentery, gagging on the smell of my own fear, shit pants, powder, smoke, exploded earth and bodies, when we took one inside, about half a football field down from where I was hunkered. Concussion fucking near blew my brains out my ears. I pushed myself up on my knees and looked up into the rain and the night, stunned so fucking bad I was wondering if I could see
way up
there
the
actual
point where the rain started to fall. I was looking hard when a white square came fluttering down beside me. The second I touched it I knew what it was. Though I would have given anything not to look, this was something I was supposed to see. A guy in our outfit, Billy Hines, young guy from Missouri, real quiet, kinda bashful, was married to some seventeen-year-old sweetheart named Ginnilee whose first letter to him in-country said she was pregnant from his last leave. She’d sent a picture her mother had taken of her standing on the front lawn, the small house in the background out of focus. Written on the back, it said, “Wife with child. Never forget I love you. Ginnilee.” And her face … oh man, so young and hopeful and brave, the sweetest little strawberry-blond with freckles, man, fucking
freckles
, and all you had to do was see the light around her face to know she was pregnant. Chester wore it on his helmet. One time I asked why he didn’t tuck it away where a pretty lady like that wouldn’t get so jungle-scuzzed and rained on, and he said’ – Kenny’s voice began to quaver – ‘he said, “She’s my good-luck charm. She’s gonna shine me right on through all this shit, home to her and the baby.” And man, when I picked her picture up out of the mud and
saw
her, man,
saw
her all the way to my soul, I vanished somewhere inside myself. You know what I mean, man?
Left
the premises. Stepped
out
.’

In the headlight glare of an oncoming semi, Daniel caught the wet flash of tears on Kenny’s cheeks. He wiped at his own. Nothing he could have said seemed adequate.

Kenny glanced at him, then back to the road. ‘The doctors told me I was gone about three weeks, but that don’t count the one it took before they got me out of Khe Sanh on a chop that was crazy enough to come in. “Shell shock,” some of the docs called it, or “catatonic shock.” I didn’t bother to tell ’em I’d been all right until I looked into her face. But I don’t give a fuck what the doctors want to call it, I
know
what it was. It was a limbo trance. Until my spirit could get itself together again, heal itself, the rest of me was not real, and my ass was up for grabs.

‘And that’s when Death snagged me for his personal chauffeur, dressed me in a white satin suit and put me behind the wheel of his black, ultra-swank seventy Caddy limo.’ Kenny paused and glanced at Daniel again. ‘You following this shit?’

‘So far,’ Daniel said.

‘I don’t
see
Death, right? He always rides in the back, behind a smoked-glass partition with this tiny little slot just over my right shoulder. He’d get in, I’d start the limo, he’d slip a stiff white card through the slot with a name on it – no address, just the name – and I’d go find the person. Don’t ask me
how
’cause I have
no
fucking idea. Just
knew
. I’d find the person, park, Death would get out and be gone a minute, then he’d get back in and slip another name through the slot. No food, water, sleep, piss, shit – one name after another.

‘At first, when I was still on the fire base, I knew some of the names, guys in my outfit. And there were some Vietnamese names, too. After a while I didn’t know any of the names. But I fucking always knew where to find them.

‘Then one night driving along there’s a huge flash of light behind us, like an ammo dump getting off, and when I glance back the light’s just right somehow so I can see through the partition into the backseat, see Death. He’s a skeleton all right, man, with this mad, hungry, lonely grin, but forget the Grim Reaper shit,’ cause he’s wearing a business suit, one of them sharp, pinstriped jobs, and his finger bones, every one of them, is crusted with diamond rings.

‘The next card comes through the slot, I don’t even have to look to know my name’s on it. When you see Death, Death looks back, and there’s millions of fucked-up people to chauffeur him around.

‘I didn’t think twice – if I was going down, I was gonna take that motherfucker with me. So I stood on the gas until we were howling through the dark and then I jerked the wheel hard right and hit the door rolling.

‘But I didn’t get him. He’s got some kind of dual controls in the backseat there, and I hear the brakes lock before I clear the car. Now feature this, man: I don’t hit the road, the bushes, nothing – I’m just falling through space. All I can concentrate on is the image of Ginnilee’s face. I look into it, into her eyes and her smile and her dreams and the life inside her, and I don’t know whether I’m imagining, remembering, or actually seeing her, because when I stop falling and open my eyes, I’m looking at this ugly old nurse who growls, “About time, soldier. There’s a war on.” But they sent me home to the VA.

‘Not many know what Death looks like, what kind of wheels he has. Those that do have a responsibility to ride patrol and waste the motherfucker on sight. No questions. No answers. I got my piece from ’Nam under the seat. When I see him, I’m gonna blast them diamonds off his fingers, blow him down to dust.’

Daniel said, ‘You think you can kill Death?’

‘I don’t know. But I sure as fuck can try.’

‘Almost have to,’ Daniel said softly. He leaned back in the seat and shut his eyes. He tried to imagine Ginnilee’s face but he was too weary. He opened his eyes only to be blinded by the high beams of an oncoming car. As it passed, Daniel, struggling to refocus, thought he caught a glimpse of a black limo. He wheeled to look out the rear window, telling Kenny, ‘I got an eyeful of headlight, but I think that might have been it, the black limousine.’

‘Fuck, man, are you on drugs? That was a red seventy-seven Toyota.’

Daniel watched the taillights move closer together as they faded in the distance. From what he’d seen, the car was long, low-slung, black. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Relax, man,’ Kenny reassured him. ‘It’s a crazy story to get behind, I know. Hard news. Cut the spook loose in ya is all. Remember, I
drove
the fuckin’ limo; I’d know it blind.
That
was a red seventy-seven Toyota – bank it.’

Daniel turned back around on the seat. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s your call, your patrol – only trying to help out.’

‘I roger that, bro’, and much obliged. Fuck, man, you were crying with me there during the war stories – think I don’t know you’re on my frequency? I pick up every hitchhiker I see on patrol, and I tell ’em all about Ginnilee’s face and that gone month driving Death around. Some of them say nothing, some tell me I’m full of shit, some humor me like I’m some sort of war-psychomoron, and almost all of them decide that they’d rather stand on the empty desert highway than ride another mile with me. Maybe one out of a hundred has even a little fucking tiny tear to shed, has the
heart
to cry because it hurts. And you’re one of them, man. You ever seen Death?’