Fatal Light (10 page)

“So who was your guests?” The middle of the night in the watch room, Perelli talking in his underwear, T-shirt and white boxer shorts, thick hairy legs down to black socks and regulation spit-shined oxfords propped up on a desk.

“Don't sit around like that, Perelli. Somebody's liable to come in here.”

“Cops, wasn't they? CID?”

“They didn't say exactly.”

“Oh, shit. What you do?”

“Nothing at all, Perelli. They had the wrong man.”

Perelli dropped his feet and opened one of the desk drawers, took out a candy bar and held it aloft. “My little stash. Midnight nourishment.” He began to peel the wrapper. “So what you do?”

“I told you: it was a mistake.”

“Bullshit, man. But it's OK, if you don't wanna tell your ole buddy Perelli.” He took a bite. “You know,” he said, chewing, “I was meaning to tell you. Scored me some maximum slope trim night before last. Prime cut.”

“That so.”

“Absolutely, man. And you know what? You'll love this. Know what?”

“What?”

“You'll love this. Broad's got her goddam bush dyed blond.”

I looked at him, waiting.

“I shit you not.” Perelli's teeth were brown from the chocolate. “Blond, man.”

“So?”

“Well, shit, here's this cute little dink, what? Eighteen? Nineteen, maybe? Black hair, black eyes...you're checking her out now, moving the eyes down, nice little dink titties, and there it is. Goddam yellow pubic hair. Weirdest thing.” Perelli took another bite of his candy bar and chewed with his mouth open. “So what do you think? Strange or what?”

I shrugged. “Just a touch. Entertainment.”

Perelli gazed off as if he had heard something of philosophical import. After a moment he nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Possibly so.” He shoved the last of the candy into his mouth.

I said, “A little something to remember her by. Something to bring you back for next time.”

He stood, stretched. “Well,” he said, “I know where to find her.”

“Be sure you pay her.”

“I paid her, asshole. Fucking bleeding heart.” Perelli scratched through the fly of his shorts and moved to the doorway of the watch room. “You think your buddies might be back to take you to jail?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Nothing I can do about it anyway.”

Perelli nodded. “Well, that's the truth.” He balled the candy wrapper, threw toward the trash can, missed. “Anything I can do, just let me know.”

“Just get out of here, Perelli. Take a walk.”

Perelli shrugged, sliding off into the corridor in his white underwear and black shoes. I turned off the lights and sat alone at the watch desk in the dark, listening to traffic move on the street.

A fading field of vision, the world as it was meant to be that was finally nowhere to be found, lost of its own accord. A calamity of secrets in a mythical land where death was only a faint breathlessness in the quiet smoky shade of banyan trees. I would search my memory for Mary's face and the sound of her voice to find the glancing blow, the way truth can fail in the wake of time. I tried to dream about things that would persist. Things that might live on their own, impervious to change and random violence. I told myself there was something enduring and ageless about colors, and in the jungle I looked for them, counted them: magenta, scarlet, sienna. The blush of frangipani blossoms and heliotrope wheels of inch-high asters. Green, depths of green, iridescent and diffuse, the skin of canopied light all around us.
There are one thousand four hundred and thirty-six distinct shades of green in the typical rain forest,
an instructor told us at Jungle Warfare School.
White people can discern only twenty-eight of these shadings,
he added after a moment. I watched for them: emerald, sage, aquamarine, chartreuse, lime. Green as an apple, as the sea, as my helmet, as the filigree dragonflies that would land on the toes of my boots. Green as the river I was born beside.

When I thought of the jungle from Saigon the colors bled. Green had vanished. Elephant grass blurred and danced under the whip of helicopter blades. Yellow heat rose in a dream of empty air.

I went to see Lwan and found her gone. Apartment vacated. I tried to talk to the landlady but she did not—said she did not—speak English. She waved me off, irritated. Cursing. At the bar where Lwan worked her partner said she went back to the country, to see her family. Her father had been hurt in an American bombing raid. Where in the country? What village? Her partner did not know, shrugged, turned away.

Lwan had never said where in-country she was from. I had never asked. I walked the streets, realizing she was gone and I had no way of finding her, of even thanking her for the simple and hard-won things she had offered. Decency, comfort, innocent refuge. The street moved around me, alive with secrets, and I remembered a dream in Lwan's bed, an edge of memory riding in my chest, clairvoyant heart, each sound born to its resonance and Lwan's body's night curved to mine, openhanded as she waved me into a boat. I looked for a moment at the river fog before pulling in the rope, pushing off and out, drinking rain and oaring against the tide of my lungs, arms winging an open dark as I wheeled the light of the stream, levitating, two slow voices lit by star-filled water, sailing.

Dear Mary,

Was there a beginning to this story of the line? Standing on line, waiting in line. The line is a military invention, you know, a bureaucratic conspiracy designed to convince individuals they are anonymous and insignificant. Being anonymous and insignificant is fatiguing, and once you're tired enough you'll do anything. For anybody. One of the last days in the bush we came through a ville that had been wasted—razored and burned off. The bodies were piled to rot in the center of the village, rats and stench already there. At the edge of the clearing the sun was dropping in an elegant fan of muted rose that I might call lovely if I thought my feelings were intact. As though a hook can take you from behind and at the moment of impact you can't be sure if it's ecstasy or a pain so old and sure of your body it knows how to imitate ecstasy. And in this country there may be no difference.

All my love.

I was discharged from the United States Army in a hot room filled with other men being discharged, men exhausted by their faith in survival, their belief in the possibility of another day. A fading portrait of Richard Nixon hung between limp flags, behind a sergeant stamping forms in triplicate while I stood in front of his desk. The sergeant turned his chair to face a heavy gunmetal-gray typewriter on the desk leaf.

“Home address?” The sergeant's fingers poised over the keyboard.

I recited my parents' address, a memory of empty roads and uneasy tranquillity as I identified my home of record, the house I had grown up in and had given up as lost, as if I stared down a tunnel in a dream. As if my memories of a typical street in a typical town were only imagination, a legend of childhood deep in summers of rivers and old trees and trains, of distant voices.

Watching out the plane window I saw clouds coming apart in high pink winds. Against the sun some of the clouds looked the color of blood, and I was surprised at how calmly I thought of being wounded, lying in the mud with pantleg gaping and drooling, not sure if I had a leg, waiting for help. It was as if I
were a blind animal in a canyon, alone on the landscape, following a silent river by the feel of water on my feet.

The plane's engines droned a steady line in my brain. Eventually I slept, dreaming briefly of a coffin. I was inside. I found I could stand up, wondering where the body was. The air was warm and fragrant, not what I expected, a lush and fluid darkness, inviting, receptive. I woke suddenly when an announcement scratched over the public address system. It was the middle of the night and I knew I would not sleep again. I patted breast pockets for cigarettes, felt the letter, took it out. The last letter I received in-country.

 

Dear Son,

Brenda was home for a visit last weekend. Isn't it amazing your little sister is a freshman at college? She's changed since you saw her last, grown up and pretty. She got three B's and two C's and your father said that was good enough for first semester. She says she wants to major in home economics. Your brother is still with that building firm but he and Marilyn are having their troubles we don't know if they'll stay together. Bad news—Buffy the neighbor's little calico cat you remember was killed last week. Mrs. Harmon said they came home and found her right there on the doorstep. She said the cat was just torn apart. We think it's a dog, that big shepherd from down the street I think. He was always a mean one. Well it's time for your father to come through the door and I've got supper on the stove so I better go. We all love you here and think of you often so take care of yourself as I know you will and come home safe. I pray for you every night.

Love, Mom.

We lost altitude over the water until the water was alive again and the aircraft met the runway flashing on a grunt and shiver of metal plates and tire squeak, hangars sliding the airfield's edges and California opening a flat sun-burnt haze forever, glinting over the hammered silver of the wings.

Inside the airport the PA system piped an orchestral version of “Norwegian Wood” and I walked along the rows of old women enclosed by shopping bags, mothers shouting at small children, soldiers drooping asleep in front of coin-operated televisions. A window the length of the concourse opened onto the runways as one of Braniff 's pink and ochre jets tipped up and left earth, glittering in the sun. A woman with a suitcase on wheels bumped me, excused herself, and moved on and I blinked in the luminous corridor, following signs down a carpeted incline to the luggage carousels. When I recognized my duffel bag I pulled it off the conveyor, away from the crowd and to the end of the exit line. The business of any day at an airport all around me, the place and the people and the nature of the business well-lit and clean and comfortably efficient. It was a bright and alien world and I felt as if I had no idea where I might be.

“Do you have a claim check, sir? For the bag?” A uniformed woman at the gate of the baggage claim area.

I showed the stub.

“Thank you,” she said, looking past me to the next in line. I stepped through the gate like a man getting out of prison, confused by the sudden wealth of choice and space. I shouldered the bag and walked in the same direction as everyone else. I walked a hundred yards and realized I did not know where I was going and sat down on a bench and watched the crowds traffic past.

I sat on the bench and told myself to relax. You're home. You're going home. I took a breath.
You're going to visit your grandfather, and then you're going home.
There was a public telephone next to the bench. I could call Mary, I thought. I could call the folks. I sat and looked at the phone. A woman moved in and picked up the receiver, dropped two coins, glanced at me absently as she dialed. She was beautiful in the strangely perfect manner of a magazine photograph. She began to talk but I could not hear the words. She looked at me again, this time smiling briefly, and tossed her chestnut hair like a mane, the hair catching light as it moved. I looked away.

After a few minutes she hung up and clicked past in high heels. I stood and picked up my duffel bag and walked, and when I came to an airport bar called The First Stop I went in and sat in a booth in the rear.

 

I drank tequila straight up with beer chasers, drank quickly at first, slowing as the alcohol waded into my blood. The lights in the bar grew auras; the bar girl's face seemed bigger than before when she came to ask if I wanted another round. I shook my head and she walked back to the bar. I watched her go and something in her walk reminded me of one of my sisters and I thought OK, I'll call home. At least I'll do that. I stood and had to reach for the table as the room dropped to one side in my head, slowly drifted upright again. I laughed, propping my duffel bag on the seat of the booth. I pointed unsteadily at it. “Don't go away,” I said. “I'll be right back.”

Two men in business suits in the next booth glanced up from their martinis, annoyed. I grinned at them, waved, and turned to make my way down the short hallway to the back of the bar, where a pay phone hung on the wall. I called my parents' number, collect.

My father answered, accepted the call. “Hey, old man,” he said brightly. “You just get in?”

“Just got in,” I said, slurring.

“You all right? Sound a little rough there.”

“Well,” I said, “matter of fact I've had a few drinks.”

“Hey, celebrating. Saying goodbye to a few of your buddies?”

“That's it exactly, Dad.”

“I remember. I've been through it. Feels good, getting out. No doubt about it.”

“Yeah. “

“So you all healed up? Back on your feet?”

“Yeah. Good as new.”

“Great. That's a relief. Really. Your mother's been worried sick. Ever since we got the news you'd been hurt.”

“Good as new,” I said again. I could see my father on the step stool in the kitchen, beside the counter, beige cardigan hanging open, unlaced tennis shoes.

There was a pause. I waited, my own breathing amplified on the wire. As if I were suddenly alone. The conversation was sobering me.

“So what's the itinerary,” my father went on. “When do we see you?”

“Well,” I said, “getting ready to head out... .”

“Where are you?”

“San Francisco.”

“Hey, good town to get out in.”

I looked down the hallway to the bar and into the screen of light in the corridor. “Yeah,” I said. “Seems like it.”

“So, anyway?”

“Thought I'd see Grandpa first. On the way and everything.”

My father didn't speak for a moment. “Well, if that's what you want.” He hesitated again. “Your mother'll be disappointed. I can tell you that.”

“I'm OK,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“Well, sure, but we want to see you—”

“Just that Earl's place is right on the way, I can drop in and touch base with him. Just a couple days.”

My father had turned away from the phone as I was speaking to say
He's home. He's in San Francisco.
There were remote voices, and my father came back on the line. “Terry just came in. You wanna say hello?”

“Dad, listen...just say hello for me, OK?”

“What, a few drinks in you, you can't say hello to your sister? It's been three years!”

The men in business suits from the booth next to mine came into the hallway, walking straight at me. A wisp of fear started at the base of my spine. The men glared at me, squeezed past into the men's room. I took a breath.