Take No Prisoners (36 page)

(No, there was one thing about her that changed. She gave up smoking after she'd been properly introduced to Dad. He had moral compunctions about women smoking.)

What else did she look like?

She looked like Tania. That's all the description necessary. Certainly it's the only real description I can come up with.

Born in Scotland, midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh and a bit to the north of both, she'd been raised in a village that sounded more like a few houses, a shop, a pub and a post office than anything you'd recognize as a settlement. About the family business she was always charmingly imprecise: I got the impression her father wasn't really a farmer and not really a trader, but somewhere midway between both and a bit to the north, just like where they lived.

Somehow she'd ended up training as a dancer in London, and had come to New York as an understudy in a touring production of something by Chopin, or maybe it was Delibes. But then she'd sprained her knee (did I not mention the slight limp with which she walked ever after? it was something I had a hard job remembering, even as I watched her) and after that there could be no more question of her pursuing a career as a dancer, except perhaps along Eighth Avenue, a performance art she wasn't prepared to countenance. So she turned instead to production. She already had a work visa, and she was able to wangle that into an assistant position somewhere far enough off Broadway it was probably in the middle of the Hudson.

That was not too long before she found me.

Dad and the army laid on a hell of a military wedding, I'll give them that, even though he hid his disapproval of this "Bohemian" so deeply and effectively that it was the first thing strangers became aware of when they met him. She turned to costume design so we could be together as I finished college and then wherever around the country the army's whim took me.

My posting to Iraq represented the first time we'd spent more than a day apart since our wedding.

Dad's eyes were watery with pride as he wished me
bon voyage
. He put on all his old medals, the better to show off the puffing of his chest.

"Go serve your country and kill those heathen motherfuckers, son."

I'm surprised the stare Tania gave him didn't boil the flesh from his bones.

~

"I don't care what you say, sir. I think that's liquor."

Tania and I looked at each other in frustration. Behind her face, the depth of the molded plastic window frame gave me the illusion I was looking out not upon sunset-painted clouds but upon the ocean floor, where weirdly colored coral formations sprouted.

The chief stewardess, who looked like an advertisement for the Aryan race after a teenager had doctored it with Photoshop, had spied the plastic bottle full of glucose solution sitting on the fold-down tray in front of me and gotten it into her head that I was sipping scotch or brandy through the bottle's built-in straw. On these planes, she'd informed us coldly, it was a Federal Offense to drink any alcohol except that sold to us at great cost by the cabin crew.

"I strongly advise you, sir, not to drink any more out of that bottle," she concluded, fixing us in turn with a stare borrowed from an old Gestapo movie. "Know what I mean?"

She flounced off down the aisle, doubtless to phone her mother for a good weep.

Tania began to giggle. So, after a few moments, did I. My laughter felt very distant from me, but the emotion was perfectly genuine. Adversity was bringing Tania and me closer together than we'd been in months.

We'd navigated Newark International with the usual dehumanizing and, in my case, emasculating hindrances. The clerk at check-in had seemed sickened by my vulgarity in putting my elbows on the counter in front of him. The security people had taken one look at my dark face and my truncated arms and decided I was obviously a mad Arab suicide bomber – who else would go around with his hands missing, after all? We'd dissuaded them from the full body-cavity search, but they'd done just about everything else they could think of. We'd discovered the eateries and drinkeries behind the security gates all worked under the assumption that their customers could carry their own plates and glasses; burdened by our duty-free bags and our carry-on luggage, Tania had done her best to cope for two, but even so there was a corner of the hall that was going to be forever beer-stained. After she'd fed the both of us, there were still two hours to go before departure; I got through the first hour okay but eventually confessed I needed a leak, so there was a whole round of further complication when we found the disabled bathroom was closed for repairs ...

I was dreading our arrival in the airport at Glasgow, where presumably we'd have to go through the entire rigmarole all over again.

"Put it this way," said Tania, reading my thoughts, "it couldn't possibly be any worse."

"You bet?" I said, though in fact I agreed with her.

"Have a nice glug of glucose, Quinn. It'll make you feel better. If that nasty lady comes back I'll deal with her."

I chuckled again. Tania was grinning. Before Iraq, her grin had always made me chuckle. It was one of our countless ways of making love.

Time passed.

We watched a movie in which Cameron Diaz waggled her rear end at the camera. No change there. I slept for a while. A different stewardess, younger, woke me up to ask if I wanted a breakfast that I took one look at and didn't, although I accepted the coffee and the plastic demi-tasse of orange juice.

"I'm lucky," I said to Tania as she peered out the window into the beginnings of sunrise to see if Scotland were visible yet.

She turned from the window, surprised. "It's been a long time since I've heard you say that, Quinn."

I knew she was expecting me to tell her I was lucky because I had her, so instead I said: "There are countless other poor assholes who've come back who would envy me for having got off so lightly."

Her face fell, but she rallied. "Taken you a while to realize that, hasn't it?"

"And at least we've got enough money to cope," I went on. Dad might have decided I was a lost son, but either he'd forgotten to cancel his monthly allowance to us or it was his way of cancelling out his guilt for the abandonment.

"That certainly makes it easier," she said, nodding, her eyes narrowing.

I felt the corners of my mouth twitch, even though I was trying to stop them doing so.

She saw.

"You're a bastard, Quinn Hogarth," she said, the disguised offendedness draining out of her eyes, leaving behind sparkle. "But I knew that when I married you."

She took one of my ears in each hand and dragged my head towards her for a kiss.

"Say it," she whispered in my ear.

"Those are the least important things of all," I murmured back to her. "You're my luckiness, Tania, and always will be."

"You don't know the half of it," she said.

~

The airport in Glasgow was a bit of a disappointment – which was to its credit. Our adrenaline levels had geared themselves up for another dose of Newark International, only worse because of being in a foreign country. But there was neither subservience nor bored resentment and suspicion on display. The place was about a tenth the size of its Newark counterpart, which might explain some of this – not all. The attitude of the various uniformed officials seemed to be that we were all equal colleagues in achieving a common aim, which was to get arrivals through the bureaucracy as quickly and comfortably as possible.

Tania joined me in the All Other Passports line at immigration. When the guy at the counter saw her UK passport he frowned and was halfway through pointing her toward the queue for EU nationals when he realized why she was here.

"The business in Iraq?" he said, nodding toward my stumps. His accent was quite thick, and totally different from Tania's non-accent, but I had no difficulty understanding him.

"Yes." I tried to soften my curtness with one of those instant smiles in which I specialized.

"I'm sorry you had the evil luck to be sent there," he said offhandedly, shrugging as he stamped my passport.

I caught my breath. It was exactly the right thing he'd said. No overweening sympathy. No gung-ho denunciations of towel-heads. Just a sort of acceptance and sharing of my misfortune.

He looked me in the eye. "I hope you're bringing the lady back home to stay. It's an ill thing when all the best and prettiest ones get taken away from us."

I laughed. "Just a holiday, I'm afraid."

He shrugged. "Ah, weel."

"Is everyone in Scotland like this?" I asked Tania later, jerking my head toward the terminal building we'd just come out of.

"No," she said with a smile, looking around her for the taxi rank. We'd decided beforehand that it'd be silly to try negotiating the buses into the city center, me with my handlessness and Tania with all the luggage. "But a lot of them are. It's a more laid-back country than you're used to, Quinn. And freer."

As the taxi driver loaded our cases and bags into the trunk of his big black vehicle, he told us he'd take us to Glasgow Central, where our hotel was, for twenty pounds.

"Twenty pounds?" I hissed to Tania as we settled ourselves into the back seat and she reached across me for the tongue of my seat belt. "That's well over fifty bucks! It's only about ten miles, isn't it? He's ripping us off."

"Some things are more expensive here," she replied, jiggling the belt's tongue into its socket. "A lot of things. Just get used to it."

"But ..."

"Think of it as your payment for medical insurance."

That ended the discussion.

Everything in Scotland seemed to be smaller, more enclosed-feeling than at home, I mused during the drive into the city. The dinky little airport. The three-lane highway whose lanes seemed narrower than I'd have expected. Most of the cars were actually
cars
: there were hardly any SUVs on the road. The transport trucks and buses seemed half the size of real ones. The overall effect was to make me feel I'd strayed into a model of the world, somewhere slightly enchanted. I recognized the sensation. It was the same as I'd felt when visiting miniature villages as a child.

Tania and a uniformed valet whipped us from the taxi into our hotel – which was not so much next to as half-inside Glasgow Central Station – through registration and up to our room. As she stowed away our clothes in drawers and a wardrobe I gazed out the window onto a vista of the railway station, sensing again that odd magic, this time because the double-glazing muffled into silence all but the very loudest of noises. I could hear the announcements over the loudspeakers, but only very faintly and fuzzily, as if they were a long way away and I was wearing faulty earplugs. There was far more grime than would have been tolerated in a station back home. From where I stood, high above, the passengers scurrying around in obedience to their own motivations were as incomprehensible as roaches on an unswept kitchen floor.

"Are you tired?" said Tania from behind me.

I turned and saw she was sitting on the bed, hands between her knees, all our kit and caboodle safely tidied away into appropriate places where I'd be unable to find any of it unassisted. On the bedside table, beside the telephone, lay a stick pen; there was one beside every phone at home, too. It was there for me to pick up in my teeth and dial with in the event of emergency. Next to the pen she'd put one of the bottles of bourbon we'd got at the duty free in Newark, as well as a carton of cigarettes I hadn't realized she'd bought. She'd opened the carton. A pack of Basics lay on the coverlet beside her.

"Smoking?" I said. "I thought you gave that up."

The edge of her mouth quirked. "Your father's three thousand miles away."

"Even so."

"Even so, I've not got anything to light the damn' things with. And I'm too shagged out to go downstairs and get a box of matches from the lobby."

I nodded toward the table underneath the window. Alongside the slightly creased advertisement-stuffed tourist guide to Glasgow, the hotel stationery and the anachronistic blotter, were a book of matches and an ashtray.

"Compliments of the house," I said, trying to keep any judgmental note out of my voice.

"Just be a dear and bring ..." She stopped. Resignation crossed her face as she heaved herself to her feet. "Sorry, I forgot."

She tossed the book of matches onto the bed and went into the bathroom, where I could hear the clattering of glass. A moment later she emerged with a tooth-mug.

"Cigs. Booze. Sleep," she said, gesturing at the bourbon. "The recipe for a happy wife, right now."

We kicked off our shoes and lay side by side on the bed, drinking the raw whiskey. Tania had rinsed out my plastic cup, getting rid of the remains of the glucose drink and replacing it with neat bourbon – to the brim; she wasn't a woman who believed in doing chores twice when once would do. I don't know why we hadn't bought scotch in Newark. Maybe it would have seemed blasphemous, or something, to bring a bottle of scotch to Scotland. I made a resolution to get some in the morning, or, if we woke early enough this evening, tonight. But just at this moment, lying together in what was for me a brand-new country and for Tania a long-abandoned homeland, the bourbon seemed perfectly in keeping. It was a symbol. We were using up, so that we would eventually piss away, the last vestiges of all the emotional and intellectual encumbrances we'd brought with us. I even smoked a couple of her cigarettes – the first time I'd smoked since the stolen guilts of adolescence – although they made my head spin and she laughed at my coughing.

Later, a little clumsily, we got off the bed and I watched her as she bent to pull back the sheets. She undressed me for sleep, and then undressed herself. I don't know if it was the booze or the tiredness or the fact that we were shedding our old selves just as we'd shed the noises of America, but for the first time in four months we made love.

We did this a little clumsily too, but that didn't matter.

~

Two days later, we were driving away from Glasgow, heading roughly northeastward. Tania seemed far more at ease behind the wheel of the rental car than she ever did driving the Nissan at home. Maybe it was that the driver seat was on the opposite side; maybe it was just because the car was that little bit smaller in every respect. I don't know. Whatever the case, I myself had found the differences initially disconcerting, then within a few minutes strangely liberating. They were part and parcel of the past forty-eight hours or so. We'd spent most of one day just wandering around, picking up a few things (including a bottle of Laphroaig) in the Glasgow shops; we'd spent most of the second day in the Burrell Collection, where I gazed at the foreignness of the Scottish exhibits while Tania gazed at the foreignness of everything else. In between, we'd eaten two excellent Indian meals and a bad hamburger meal. We'd also made love half a dozen times more, another rediscovery of the ancient arts.