Another Man's Moccasins
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Letter number three would go to the Airwing of ARVN to be delivered to Hoang’s parents in Saigon. I attempted to put a brave and honorable face on why their son had bled to death in the back of a jeep on the way to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.
Letter number four was the one I hadn’t written yet. I set the shot glass down and stared at the chipped keys of the piano. There was no other music in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, because I had ripped the electric cord from the bar’s jukebox and thrown it into the bamboo outside. I extended an index finger and hit an F, listening to the tone of it resonating through my life.
In Mai Kim’s memory, I launched into a one-handed version of Fats Waller’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I’d made the bridge and A N
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was into the chorus in a dirgelike manner when I noticed that a short soldier was standing by the piano and was singing along.
“A good man is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Just when you think he’s your pal, you find him foolin’ ’round some other gal. Then you rave, you even crave to see him laying in his grave . . .”
I looked up at the squat but fl ashy-looking woman with the oversized lips; she couldn’t sing very well, but she was loud. “Marine, you don’t look like 285 pounds of jam, jive, and everything.” She had an enormous smile. “I haven’t heard Fats Waller in quite a while.”
I looked down at my hand and noticed that I’d stopped playing.
I swiped my utility hat off and saluted the two Special Forces men who accompanied her. She wore the beret and the uniform but no insignia for rank. She didn’t salute me, so I figured she was the brass and started to stand, but she put out a hand and seated me back on the piano bench. We were just about eye to eye. “Are you Lieutenant Walt Longmire?”
“Ma’am?”
She shook her head and smiled again as she read my nametag.
“You are Marine Inspector Walter Longmire from Durant, Wyoming?”
“Ma’am.”
“I’m from Butte, Montana, myself.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. She pulled a piece of paper from her substan-tial breast pocket and tried to hand it to me. I sat there looking at her and it, so she picked up the untouched shot glass and rested the note on the piano. “It’s from a friend of yours up north. He knew I was coming through Tan Son Nhut and I promised that I’d hand deliver it.”
She studied me for a moment more. “You are Walt Longmire?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, slugged my shot down, and daintily placed the now empty glass on top of the note. “You take care of yourself, Lieutenant.” She placed a kiss on the top of my head, and I watched as she made for the open doorway.
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An airman came up and looked at me as I picked up the shot glass and plucked the paper that was stuck to its bottom. It was typed in black letters and was obviously written by a two-fi ngered typist since the pressure was even on all the letters. It was from a mountainous site ten miles inside Laos; a station that wasn’t supposed to even exist. Recon Team Wyoming was assuring me that he was fine and was inquiring as to how I’d made out in the war’s most recent developments in his own special way. I read “Seen your ghost lately?”
The shot glass stayed steady in my hand as I remembered a pro-fessor of Shakespeare at USC who read to an uninterested class,
“I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’ the dead men walk again.”
The airman leaned forward and looked in my face. “How do you know her?”
I poured myself another shot. “Who?”
“Colonel Maggie.”
“Who?”
“Martha Raye, Lieutenant. She was on the Steve Allen Show, she was a movie star . . .”
I slugged the shot down and set it back on the Bear’s note, picked up the pen, and started on the letter to Mai Kim’s family with a renewed vigor. I had to get out of Vietnam, it was getting as strange as Wyoming.
I dropped Henry at his T-Bird and Dog with Ruby and was late getting to the gym but changed my clothes and quickly climbed the steps to the second floor and the Universal machines. I made the corner at the landing and started the last leg when I heard a smattering of laughter that caused me to slow.
I stopped on the stairs. I could see Cady, who was seated at the leg press, and Vic’s brother, who was standing in front of her with his back to me. Michael’s T-shirt stretched across his A N OT H ER
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broad young shoulders and read PHILADELPHIA HOMICIDE UNIT, OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. They laughed again, and I listened as he attempted to motivate my daughter into finishing her workout. “Two more . . .”
I waited to see how the conflict would resolve itself and then fought against the wave of exhaustion that cemented my feet to the concrete steps and forced me to think about the scene that had unfolded only an hour ago. I caught my breath, more than a couple of emotions tearing at me like the mockingbirds had torn into Virgil’s untouched groceries.
The bag I’d left at the beginning of the week had still been hanging off the Lone Bear Road guardrail.
I had sat with Dog at my side, placed the new grocery bags at my feet, and watched as the sporadic traffi c dutifully slowed and swept into the opposite lane. Wyoming was an emergency-lane-change state, after all. I thought about this morning. I thought about Ngo Loi Kim, and how she wouldn’t get out of my truck.
A three-way conversation had lasted for almost an hour with Henry as the translator, but it still seemed that there had been so much more to say and not enough time to say it. I tried to tell her about Mai Kim and about the war.
She had given me a letter. The words had been written in an unsteady hand and poorly. The word choices were simple and sentimental, and the guy who had written it had needed a lot more practice giving condolences. He’d gotten it.
I wondered what I’d have told that baby-faced Marine; and the things I wouldn’t have. I wondered what he would have had to say to me. Would he approve of how we had turned out? Would he think I had done everything I could? Would he think I was a good man?
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I hoped so and, as I’d read the tattered letter, fuzzy at the edges where it had been folded and refolded, I remembered how I had written Mai Kim’s family that I had told her about a place on the other side of the world—about an unremarkable pass in a remarkable red rock wall where a number of unsa-vory characters had found a place through which they could herd stolen livestock, about the fat trout flipping their powerful tails through clear freezing water—about my home, a place where the snow-capped peaks stood guard.
“You did not really expect him to be here, did you?”
I looked up at Henry Standing Bear and then down at the plastic bag from the IGA that had twisted in the wind and cinched itself down to a braided strip. I could still see the outline of the untouched groceries—there were a few apples that the mockingbirds had broken through the plastic and gotten, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, and a tin of smoked oysters.
The afternoon sun warmed us and a cooling breeze feathered down from the mountains as I looked at the entrance of the tunnel but could see no tracks in the shallow mud of Murphy Creek. “I guess it’s like a wild birds’ nest, once you touch it, they move on.”
The Bear sat beside me on the guardrail and looked off toward the Bighorns. There were two clouds that hung over Cloud Peak like smoke signals. “Maybe so.”
Virgil had sustained two gunshot wounds, but they hadn’t done much damage—one had grazed his ribs and another had lodged in the meat of his calf. Henry ha
d stayed with the giant until he’d been repaired and then through the following two days and nights. On the third day, the Cheyenne Nation said that he’d gone to take a shower as Virgil slept, but that when he returned, the big man was gone.
That was his story and, so far, he was sticking to it.
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I pulled out the crackers from the old bag, then keyed open the oysters, drained the cottonseed oil, and spooned a few onto a Chicken in a Biskit. Under Dog’s close observation, I handed it to the Bear. “Where do you think he went?”
He looked rather dubiously at my blue-collar hors d’oeuvres and then popped it in his mouth to keep from having to say anything.
I waited a little, fed Dog a cracker, then made one for myself and joined Henry in viewing the few snowfi elds left on the mountains. I could feel the sunshine on my face and squinted my eyes in the pleasure of warmth, just happy to be there. “You wouldn’t tell me if you knew, would you?”
“Two more.”
Michael’s voice interrupted my daydreaming, and I was drawn back to the drama unfolding in the gym at the top of the stairwell. Cady looked up at him and smiled; so beautiful.
“One more.”
His voice, in turn, was kind but insistent. “No, two more.”
I smiled at the jealousy I felt and the surge of unsettled anxiety at being replaced, then eased back down the steps. Michael only had another afternoon with her, and I had another month before she would return to Philadelphia. Anyway, he was probably motivating her better than I ever could. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
“One more . . .”
I stood there and listened to their laughter. The Bear had laughed at me for leaving the groceries, for wanting to solve all mysteries, but he had done so gently. Virgil White Buffalo, Crooked Staff, Crazy Dog Society was out there somewhere, and maybe Henry was right in not telling me exactly where.
He knew that our tracks were not that dissimilar. We’d both 2 9 0 CR A I G J O H N S O N
run as far as we could from the war to the fringes of our separate societies, but Vietnam had overtaken us again: circumstance, two desperate girls, a very bad man, a battered photograph, and a faded letter had seen to that.
Maybe it was not so much that we were haunted, but how and when we chose to deal with these reverberations in our lives that would be the sign of our individuality. Perhaps the battle that I had chosen to fight in Vietnam had marked me. It was a legacy that had tied me to the dead more than the living.
It was, as Ruby had said, my failing.
Their voices continued to echo down from above. “No, two more . . .”
Document Outline
Cover Page
Also by Craig Johnson
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Acknowledgments
Epigraph Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue