The Gulf (5 page)

He opened a cupboard and tipped disinfectant into a bucket. The chlorine fumes watered his eyes. He sloshed it onto the floor and it ran in little steaming streams here and there, following invisible channels in the concrete. He scrubbed for a while with a long-handled brush, his lips formed around a whistle that was never born, and then picked up the hose again.

“John.”

He turned, the water spattering across the floor. In an oblong of blue-green brilliance stood a human figure. He looked toward it for a moment, not speaking, as if listening to the golden light, or the random drone of flies. Then, moving deliberately, he twisted the nozzle closed and coiled the grass-green snake back into its wonted place. He passed his hand over his hair, bending forward, hesitating a little. Then the rubber boots went squish, squash across the concrete.

The woman held the yellow envelope against her apron. Her eyes were not so much self-contained or self-assured as past all need for containment or assurance; like the eyes of an oak, if an oak had eyes, or of a waterfall. But to someone who did not know her they might have seemed unexpressive, almost dumb. Faded blue, like her denim skirt. Her heavy, shining hair, the color of clover honey, was braided tightly and pinned up under a figured kerchief.

“What is it, Ola?”

“Telegram.”

Their hands met briefly, her clay-dried fingers to his leather gloves. She looked at him closely, her lips parted. But he was studying the address; had not yet made a move to open it. So she turned, and began making her way back through the yard to a white house, double-porched, toward a clapboard shed in back of it. Its door was all but blocked by a waist-high heap of shattered crockery.

Gordon glanced around absently. His eyes found the straggling, slow-moving line of ruminating beasts. The distant blue-green, like deep water, of the hills over which Ethan Allen had fought. And above it all, the molten glow of the rising sun.

A moment later, the envelope fluttered to the cow-tracked ground.

FROM: COMMANDER, US NAVY RESERVE FORCES

TO: SENIOR CHIEF GUNNERS MATE (DIVER) JOHN W. GORDON, USNR

1.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH PROVISIONS OF US CODE
673
(B), NAVAL RESERVE EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL DETACHMENT
20
HAS BEEN NOMINATED BY THE PRESIDENT FOR EMERGENCY ACTIVE SERVICE. THIS CONSTITUTES TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR NOTIFICATION OF YOUR CALL-UP. CONTACT YOUR RESERVE CENTER IMMEDIATELY TO PICK UP ORDERS AND AIR TICKETS
.

2.
FOLLOWING MINE CLEARANCE REFRESHER TRAINING, YOU WILL DEPLOY TO USS AUDACITY, MSO
-442,
FOR ACTIVE SERVICE IN THE ARABIAN GULF AREA
.

3.
ADVISE IMMEDIATLEY IF FOR ANY REASON YOU ARE UNABLE TO RESPOND TO THIS ACTIVATION ORDER
.

He stood motionless in the growing daylight, looking at the words. When he had them nearly by heart, he folded the paper slowly in two, then creased it with his thumbnail. It hung down by his side, in his long, awkward arm.

He lifted his eyes to the hills.

They rose to four thousand feet, rocky and rounded, dominated by the distant blue of Mount Mansfield. He'd opened his eyes to life to see them brooding above him, as if someday they might slide forward over the small dairying towns on their way to Champlain. Closer to him, the land gentled, and gradually became grazeable. Crevecoeur Farm was three hundred acres of those foothills, rolling meadow, and orchard ten miles out from Stonefield.

Gordon's maternal grandfather had share-farmed on the other side of town. His father, a quarryman, had died young in a fall from a granite terrace. So he'd milked for his grandfather until his country needed him—as wittier people than he had said at the time—to travel to distant countries, meet exotic people, and kill them. He'd spent ten years in the service, then left it for a woman and a farm. But he had had to do something else to make ends meet. So a few years later, he'd gone back, in a way, affiliating with a Reserve unit in Burlington.

At last he moved toward the house. Just before he got there, he changed his direction, for the smaller building.

His wife was standing with her back to him, bent over a brick kiln. Steam hissed up out of it, and a sulfurous stink. As the door creaked, she straightened from a peephole and inserted a plug. She tapped a gauge, then turned. She looked at him for a long time before her eyes followed his arm down to the paper.

“What was it?”

Wordless, he extended it. It hung between them for a moment, then passed, gloved hand to gloved hand. After a moment, her lips went white, sucked against her teeth.

“What is it? A rehearsal?”

“No. It's real.”

“Are you going?”

“I'm thinkin' on it.”

She looked at the kiln, touched it lightly with the tips of her fingers. Then she looked away, out a square of wavy old glass filmed with powdered clay. “There's Mike. Breakfast's ready.”

Gordon bent at the back door to pull off his boots. In damp stocking feet, he padded on into the kitchen. The boy was standing at the stove. He was twelve, tall for his age, with an abstracted, introspective look. His light hair sprang up in a cowlick. He was wearing jeans and boots and a Poison T-shirt under a flannel shirt. When he saw them, he smiled shyly and said, “Hi, Mom, Dad. Y'want some eggs?”

It had taken two years after he married Ola for the boy to call him that. It sounded good to him. “Yeah, thanks, Mike. You sleep good, pal?”

“Uh-huh.”

Gordon sat heavily, then caught his wife's eye and got up again. When he came back, wiping his hands, his plate was steaming with hot eggs and fluffy buttermilk cakes oozing sweet butter and homemade maple syrup.

“How's Wanda doing, Dad?”

“The antibiotic cream's working,” said Gordon. He ate for a while, then added, “Teats don't seem to pain her much as they did yesterday. It's more expensive than that sulfur ointment, though.”

“Mike, what are you doing today?” his mother asked him.

“We're gonna meet down at the church and fly some airplanes. Jimmy said I can fly his P-51.”

Gordon cleared his throat. “Michael.”

“What?”

“I might have to go away for a while. If I do, you think you can help Mom run the farm here?”

The boy had been smiling, and it lingered yet forgotten on his face as the eyes receded, sinking away like flat rocks dropped into a glacial lake. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean, going back to active duty. In the Navy.”

“For a weekend? For how long?”

“I don't know how long.”

“Where are you going?”

“I think maybe a good piece off.”

The boy sat looking at his plate, but he didn't move to eat. He murmured, “You said you wouldn't leave us. That you'd stay here.”

“It wouldn't be because I wanted to,” said Gordon. “You understand that, son? But I gave them my word, y'see. There are things, if a man's promised to do them, he ought to no matter what. I promised to go back if they needed me. They say they do.”

The boy glanced up. His eyes were still distant, but a kind of desperate longing filled them now. “You mean, for a war?”

After a moment, Gordon said, “Not exactly.”

The boy cried out then, something inarticulate and savage, and his voice was twisted and high. Part of it was: “You liar. You fucking liar! And I'm not your
son!
” The plate hit the floor with a pottery crack. They heard his footsteps rapid on the stair and then, just as the door slammed, a sob.

His mother bent to pick up the pieces. She ran her finger cautiously over a fractured edge. They looked at each other across the table. “He's right,” she said. Her eyes were quiet and sad. “You told him you wouldn't leave. Like his father did. The counselor said that was important to him.”

Gordon stared at his stocking feet. Finally he said, “I know.”

“It wouldn't be easy, the two of us, with the haying and all—”

“I know,” he said again. He tried to eat another mouthful of eggs, but he couldn't.

*   *   *

The bedroom was cramped and dim. He bent, tugged a beat-up olive-drab box from under Ola's old bedstead, and snapped open the padlock. In it were uniforms, faded but clean, blue paper banding their starched rectilinearity. He took out a khaki shirt and trousers and laid them out on the star quilting; found a web belt and threaded it thoughtfully through a Marine Corps-style buckle, flipped open a cigar box.

He laid them on the bed and looked at them for a moment. The silver helmet of a first-class diver. The silver-and-gold fouled-anchor-and-star of a senior chief. A parkerized combat-modified nine-millimeter Browning. And the bomb-and-lightning of a master explosive-ordnance-disposal technician.

From upstairs came rock music, played louder than it was allowed to be played.

Gordon sighed, closed the box, put it back in the trunk. Though the world ended, a dairyman had to feed, had to clean, had to milk.

Leaning forward over the quilt, he closed his eyes.

*   *   *

Two sweat-darkened backs ahead of him in a close, hot world of green. No sky overhead, only green, close and silent, as if this doomed country had been bagged and tagged and left to rot.

“There it is,” said the squad leader, stopping. He pointed down with the muzzle of his rifle at the piece of bamboo. Broken at right angles, the apex pointing ahead along the trail. “Good thing you guys come along. Can you check it out for us?”

Gordon nodded. He turned to the man behind him. “Beaner, see that? That's another one of their signs, like the three rocks, or the broken branch hanging down.”

“Right.”

“Better move your troops back, Sarge. Beaner, come on up with me.”

The third class nodded. He was new, just out of EOD school. This was his first time in the field. Gordon went ahead cautiously, looking at the ground for nails or depressions, to the side for launching pits, at the air for the faint glint of monofilament. He needed to shit bad. He'd had the runs for a week.

To someone who didn't know how to look, the device would have been invisible. Hanging in a tree at head level, with still-living branches lashed around it for camouflage. About the size, Gordon thought, of one of the Chinese-supplied pineapple mines. He put out his hand and stopped Beaner. He examined the surface of the ground very closely for perhaps five minutes, then moved off to the right, pulling out his knife. He scored lightly across the surface of the ground, digging a quarter of an inch deeper each time.

“There. See it? The wire?”

“Yeah.”

“Cut it one strand at a time. Use your nonconductive cutters. Don't cut them both at once or you'll complete the circuit.”

Snip, snip, and he straightened. Ripped up the wire, up through leaf mold and dirt, until the homemade split-bamboo detonator and two PX-brand flashlight batteries came into sight.

“Do you want to blow it?” Beaner whispered.

“I'd like to take it back. If it's Chinese, the intel people will want a look at it.”

“Is it safe? Can I take it down now?”

Of course it wasn't, Gordon thought. Nothing was ever really “safe” in explosive disposal. Sometimes you had to accept a risk. But Beaner should know that. He'd had the training. “Should be,” he said. “Go ahead.”

He'd been squatting with his pants down twenty feet away when the flat crack of high explosive sent fragments whipping through the leaves and scything down the bamboo above him. Beaner screamed for a long time before he died.

*   *   *

Ola was still sitting in the kitchen, her plate untouched. The broken halves of the boy's dish lay atop the trash. Her hands were curled around a mug in the shape of a bull's head. She'd made and fired it herself. She made many things that way—things so beautiful he had no words to praise them or her—and sold them at field days in Addison and Franklin counties and all over the state. Now she watched him as he went to the stove and poured another cup of coffee.

“John. I'm not sure I understand. Do you absolutely have to go to this—wherever they want you to go?”

“No. I don't absolutely have to.”

“And you haven't decided yet.”

He didn't answer.

“I don't want you to.”

“I know.” He took a deep breath and looked out the window, toward the sun, now a pale disk, cool and remote.

“And Michael. The school counselor said he was doing better. Starting to trust you, the way he never could trust Louis.”

“I'm sorry,” said Gordon. “I don't want to leave you. Or him. Believe me. But I took the obligation. I took the pay all these years, Ola.”

He waited for a minute, but she didn't say anything else. So he went out.

The muddy, hoof-cratered yard was growing bright now. The sky was red to the east, with only a few high, golden clouds. The wind was losing the chill of early morning, going mild in that brief New England summer mildness, warm yet with a hint of steel, that is like no other weather on earth. The smells of the warming earth, animal smells, breathed up from the ground and mingled with the forest scent of the wind.

He stood in the yard, watching the stock on the near hill. They were due to rotate into the next square Monday. He had to remember to go over the ground one last time, make sure there were no thistles, no buttercups to bitter the milk. Then he remembered: He'd be gone by then.

Well, if he had to leave, now was as good a time as any. Ola and Mike could keep up with milking. The herd was in good condition. Their feet were sound and their teats were holding up. He had second-cut hay coming up, not needing much attention till harvest, and he'd just bought fourteen tons of sixteen-percent grain from Bourdeau Brothers.

If he wasn't gone too long, it would put them money ahead. Active-duty pay, plus diving pay, maybe hazardous-duty pay—that looked pretty good next to a dairy farmer's income.