Lucky Bastard (9 page)

The moon had come up. Cindy, sleeping on her side on the backseat, lay in its buttery light like an odalisque. Even drunk, even smelling of vomit, even unconscious, she was as pretty as a picture. She was snoring.

Jack lay down on the front seat and went to sleep himself.

How much later he did not know, he jerked awake. In the backseat Cindy was fighting herself awake, arms flying, hands clawing. Her eyes were tightly closed.

“Cindy!”

She stared wildly at Jack.

He said, “Cindy, it's okay. It's me.”

“Jack,” she said, “I dreamed he was dead.”

“It was a dream. You're okay. Danny's okay. Everything's okay.”

Cindy didn't seem to hear. She wailed, “Oh Jesus! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

Jack did not know what to say to her, so he smiled, always his best weapon. Eyes streaming, Cindy climbed over the front seat and sat down beside Jack.

She was trembling violently. She said, “Jack, hold on to me. I feel like I'm falling apart.”

Gingerly, Jack put his arms around her. She hugged him back, shaking, Jack thought, as if she were freezing and only the warmth of another body could save her. He imagined she was thinking of Danny. After a few moments she relaxed, then fell asleep.

Almost immediately she woke with a start, crying, “Don't let me fall asleep. I don't want to be in that dream again.”

Jack said, “Okay, I'll turn on the radio.”

They listened to music for a while. Cindy made no attempt to move away from him. Finally, intending to push her gently away from him and start the car, he kissed her lightly on the forehead. She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to understand who he was and what he wanted.

Then she kissed him, chastely, on the lips. Jack kissed her back, lightly. She responded. Up to this moment Jack had not had a sexual thought, at least not one he felt he could act on. But the kiss triggered the essential Jack. He was overcome by desire. He kissed Cindy lingeringly; she accepted his tongue, then turned her head violently aside, as if she were the one who tasted vomit.

But, as Cindy was to remember in years to come, she did not say
Stop;
she did not push him away.

Jack was moving her body, arranging their positions. And then, yes, he did what he had done so many times before in similar situations.

Cindy said, “Oh my God!”

But Jack had gone too far to stop, so he continued to the end, and through the haze of alcohol and grief, Cindy felt her body responding. She tried to make it stop. She was as limp as a rag doll; she felt incapable of movement. Nevertheless she was moving, responding. She fought against this. Owing to Jack's peculiar method of approach, Cindy was still wearing her panties. They had been twisted into a sort of tourniquet, shutting off the circulation in her left thigh. This was painful. She concentrated on the pain, tried to fill her mind with it. But her body took over, and though it was the last thing in the world she wanted to happen, she was taken by the wave.

5
Cindy had realized that Danny's furlough would coincide with her cycle of fertility. Before he came home, before she ovulated, she went to a gynecologist who removed the intrauterine birth-control device she had worn since adolescence. Cindy told Danny nothing about this, and as they made love every day, several times a day, he supposed that nothing could come of all this copulation except pleasure.

A week after Danny left for Vietnam, she missed her first period. Ordinarily this would not have upset her. Her cycle was irregular and she had been late many times in the past. When this had happened in the past, she and Danny always renewed their promise to each other that if she really was pregnant they would marry and have the child.

However, this child might very well be Jack's—and if it was, she realized that she was capable of killing it with no more thought than was required to crush an insect. There was no way to know which man was the father—the one she loved or the one she hated. Even after the child was born she could never be sure. How could she ever love it if she could never know for certain to whom it really belonged?

The desire for control was very strong in Cindy; it was her real religion. She had learned in Sunday school that good actions produced pleasant consequences and bad actions, unpleasant ones. All her life she had avoided unpleasant consequences by behaving herself, by planning ahead, by making things come out the way she wished. Now she was losing control of everything at the same time—her own body, her own life.

Cindy longed to hear from Danny. He had not called her from California before his plane took off for Vietnam. He had never written a letter in his life. The rational part of Cindy's mind told her that he had not called because he had not been able to get to a telephone; the other part of her mind told her that it was because he was still angry at her—that he might die in a state of anger. On television every day she saw American boys wounded, dying, dead in their body bags. Danny's fate and the fate of the child she had wanted to have—but whose existence, whose chance of life, she feared as much as she feared the possibility of Danny's death—joined in her mind, got mixed up in her dreams.

She waited, checking for menstrual blood ten times a day, trying not to think about consequences.

She had never been so alone in her life.

Cindy loaded her car with clothes, books, her electric typewriter, the unwashed bedding that still smelled of Danny, and drove to Columbus. She moved into her new little house—almost a doll's cottage—and started her new life as a law student.

Most of her professors and nearly all of her fellow law students were opposed to the war. In one of her classes the professor humiliated a student who had fought in Vietnam, asking him questions on legal ethics and turning his answers into an argument about the morality of a modern technological society using its machines to slaughter the population of a defenseless primitive society. On the faces of her classmates Cindy saw a certain look of triumph when the veteran, who limped from his wounds, was stricken dumb by the eloquence and ardor of the professor.

By the first of October, Danny still had not written or called. Cindy watched the evening news on CBS at seven o'clock and ABC at eleven, then woke up early to watch the news segments on the
Today
show on NBC. By covering all three networks, Cindy hoped to catch a glimpse of Danny, but she was afraid that this would actually happen and the Danny she would see would be the tormented, dying Danny she had seen in her dream. She could not sleep. At night she studied until she could no longer comprehend what she was reading, and then wrote Danny long, half-coherent letters.

The letters never caught up to Danny, but Cindy had had her telephone in Columbus connected before he left, so he knew the number. On October tenth, a week after her second period had been due, he called her collect from Saigon. She covered the mouthpiece and sobbed when she heard his voice.

Danny told her how bad the chow was, what lousy movies he had seen. Half the army in Vietnam was smoking dope, the other half was drunk. It was a lot like going to Kent State except that everybody had a short haircut and a gun. The officers were like coaches, full of shit about discipline and game plans and team spirit, and living off other people's sweat and reputation.

Cindy said, “Are you in the fighting?”

“Not especially. What we do is go for long walks with guns and grenades hanging off us and try to make friends with the natives. Scares the crap out of them, but you know me—just old John Wayne who wouldn't hurt a fly.”

“Where in Vietnam are you, exactly?”

“Military secret. But watch out for me on TV. I wrote you a let—”

The line crackled; he was gone. They had been cut off by a timer. Into the dead connection Cindy said, “I love you,” forming the words, not speaking them aloud.

A week later she received Danny's letter. After class that same day she caught up with the limping veteran and showed him the return address: I & R Plt., 1st Bn., 26th Inf., 1st Inf. Div.

He read it. “So?”

“It's my boyfriend's address. What does it mean?”

“It means he's got his ass in the grass.”

“This is a combat outfit?”

He snorted. “You could say that.”

Cindy said, “Look, I just show up for class with that jerk, just like you. Give me a break.”

The man shrugged. “What Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoons do is, they go out on patrol all by themselves and try to locate the enemy. Draw fire. Then they radio back to the battalion and wait for everybody else to move up.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

He was still unsure of her motives. After a pause he said, “It is. The First Division operates in War Zone C, which runs from Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border. That's where all the best gook outfits hide out—just across the border in Cambodia. The First Division goes in after them. Your boyfriend is probably walking point.”

Cindy knew from television what that term meant. It meant that Danny was the first American soldier the enemy would see as they lay in ambush in the jungle.

She said, “I see. Thanks.”

Her voice trembled. For the first time, the vet showed some human feeling. He said, “What's your name?”

“Cindy.”

“Hang in there, Cindy,” he said. “He's got a good reason to be careful.”

6
As soon as the conversation ended, Cindy drove to a clinic off campus and took a pregnancy test. A woman called with the results a couple of days later, early in the morning.

She was pregnant.

Cindy had been studying all night in her nightgown and robe, and after hanging up the phone she stripped these off and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was absolutely beautiful.

Better than anyone, she knew how perfect her own body was. She had always loved it. Now she thought of what might be growing inside it, and for the first time since she and Jack Adams had done what they had done and spoiled the pleasure she had always taken in looking at herself, she met her own eyes in the mirror. If the child was Danny's, Danny would never die, and she and Danny would never be separated. The child would carry Danny's genes and her genes into the future, and it was possible that the right combination of egg and sperm might someday, maybe centuries from now, come together and result in another Danny—black hair, blue eyes, mirthful smile, amazing grace. And memories he did not even know he had.

But if this fetus belonged to Jack Adams, it too would perpetuate something—the shameful memory of the betrayal she had visited on Danny in her weakness and folly. Like a shudder, dark and unbidden, guilt and shame and hatred ran through her flesh one after the other, like the orgasms that Jack had given her.

She brushed her teeth, showered, dressed, and went directly to the abortion clinic.

In the recovery room, Cindy was awakened by a nurse—the same one who had helped with what they called the procedure.

“Which was it?” she asked.

The nurse said, “It was an embryo, Cindy.”

Cindy sat up on the gurney. “
What was it?
”

“We're not permitted to say.”

“I want to know.”

“It really is better not to assign human characteristics to it.”

After a moment of silence, eyes locked on the nurse's, Cindy said, “I insist.”

“Okay.” The nurse looked at a chart. “First trimester male embryo,” she said.

“Hair color?”

“We don't make a note of that. How are you feeling?”

Cindy didn't answer.

“A little woozy?” the nurse said. “That's normal.”

She took Cindy's blood pressure, then her pulse, and, after she was through, held on to her wrist for a moment. She looked down with a practiced, smilingly sincere expression of—what?

“Cindy, listen to me,” the nurse said. “Nothing happened here that you need to feel anything but good about.”

“You may be half right about that,” Cindy replied.

Two

1
Off a clown-white Haitian beach, while suspended from an inflated plastic ring in surf that was the exact temperature of saliva, Peter revealed the outline of his plan for Jack Adams.

First, he was going to bind Jack to us for the rest of his life. Then he was going to manage his future in minute detail. And then Jack was going to be elected president of the United States.

“Legitimately, in an honest election,” Peter said. He named the year. “It is perfectly possible.”

I said, “You're going to turn the president of the United States into an agent of influence?”

“No, Dmitri,” he replied, “you and I are going to turn Jack Adams into an agent of influence, and then with our help and advice and moral support, Jack is going to transform himself into the president of the United States.”