by Peter Colt
I paced around the apartment. I was not a good loser. I smoked or tried to. I didn’t have patience for the pipe, and the cigarettes got crushed out quickly. I kept running through it in my head. Had I screwed up Danny’s big shot at respectability? I took responsibility for stuff in my life. Blame Vietnam . . . what the fuck was that? Who the fuck was he to say that? I didn’t use Vietnam as an excuse for anything.
I went around and around with it for a long time. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Why should he be mad? I took the case he asked me to take. What the fuck did Vietnam have to do with anything? I stomped around the apartment, but that didn’t help. I thought about what a dick Danny was being. That didn’t help. Danny was under a lot of pressure to succeed, albeit self-imposed. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to find the father for his client. I had tried; I had done the legwork. I had been pushed off the bluff, my car got beat up, and someone shot at me. I had tried, tried to fit in and get a job. Be like Danny and everyone else. Didn’t he realize, it just hadn’t worked?
Chapter 21
I spent two days brooding in the apartment. Two long days beating myself up and thinking I was a flake and a failure. Two days wondering if I had screwed up Danny that badly, and if what he said was true.
In the end, I decided to call Shelly. I was feeling low, and the last time I remembered feeling good about myself, it was with her. Her voice on the telephone seemed a lot better than going over Danny’s accusations in my head. I went to the desk and began to rummage around for the gallery pamphlet with her number. Her number was on the back of the pamphlet where she had left it. I picked up the phone and held the handset between my ear and shoulder as I dialed. Listening to the clicks of the rotary wheel with each number and then waiting for the ring, I started to turn the pages of the pamphlet.
Shelly answered, and I didn’t say anything. Not one word. I had wanted to talk to her. I needed to hear her voice—young, alive, teasing, and warm. Instead I couldn’t talk. I wasn’t even sure I could breathe. She started to say something about crank calls when I carefully placed the handset back in the cradle. I stared at the pamphlet and whistled. In the center of the trifold was a picture of Ed Harriet handing a large, vagina-like painting to a lady, apparently from the gallery. Ed Harriet, the nice burnt-out hippie. Ed Harriet, Charles Edgar Hammond, back from the dead. The caption read, “Ruth Silvia’s nephew, Ed, loaning the Lightship Gallery some of her early paintings.” There was more, more text about the show and more about the gallery. It didn’t matter. It turns out that Charlie Hammond got comfortable. Got careless. Whatever he had been running away from, he let his guard down. He had his picture taken. He was the late Ruth Silvia’s nephew. He had been there in 1968. Had he been there the other day shooting at us?
“Fuck me.” It came out of my mouth slowly, and for a second, I thought someone else was in the room. “Fuuuu-uck me.” I had been right. I had figured it out. I had to prove it. Not to make it up to Danny or Deborah Swift . . . I had felt like I had lost. Lost faith in myself, and now I needed to prove it beyond any doubt.
I called Danny’s service. I knew that he would be fighting traffic on his way home. I told them that they were to call him with a priority message. He would call them back and Danny would hear, “Mr. Roark said to rip up the bill and the final report. He has proof that the subject on Nantucket is the one the client is looking for. He will send definitive proof and final report in forty-eight hours.”
I double-checked the ferry schedule. If I hurried, I could make the last ferry. I changed out of loafers and into jeans, work boots, and a shirt and sweater. I put on the Colt in its shoulder holster and grabbed my Bean’s parka. A spare magazine made it into my pants pocket. I made my way to the Ghia and stopped only for gas. Traffic was thinning out, and I was able to make it out of the city in good time. The ride to the Cape was uneventful, but my heart was pounding the whole way. The sky had gone from the early blue, inky hues to full dark. The Ghia was a dented Cyclops after Shelly’s ex had put the boots to it, but it still got me there.
When I made it to the ferry, they told me there was no chance of taking my car over. There was no point in trying for standby. It was hunting season, and Nantucket was a prime spot for deer. Every year, hunters came from as far away as South Carolina to bag a Nantucket deer. The ferry lot was full. I was told where to find a private lot, which turned out to be someone’s yard, where they were making a lot of cash by letting people park. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I found an envelope in the Ghia, put a twenty-dollar bill in it—four days’ worth of parking—and wrote a note, which I slipped through the mail slot. I made it onto the ferry with minutes, a few precious minutes, to spare.
I had no book and nothing to do except eat chili and drink bad coffee in the lounge on the top deck. The curtains had to stay closed, so when I wasn’t eating or thinking about things, I would step out into the darkness and light a cigarette. I would smoke and listen to the throb of the engines and the hiss of the water parting under the bow of the ferry. I was crossing the water after my quarry. My hands shook slightly. I was angry for doubting myself and angry for giving Danny reason to doubt me.
I was on the deck with the wind whipping by and the salt spraying, and I realized I was looking forward to the meeting with Charlie Hammond/Ed Harriet. I was feeling the way I used to feel at the launch site in CCN, walking to the birds to infill. The gear had been checked and rechecked. Every man on the team knew their job and the other guys’ jobs. Each man knew where we all kept the important gear. Everyone knew what they had to do and had complete faith in each other. The Americans and the Yards had complete faith in each other. You had to. The job was so fucking dangerous.
I had checked and rechecked my gear. The stuff I carried on my person at all times, the Silva compass around my neck. The Browning Hi-Power on my hip, hanging low like some jungle cowboy gunslinger. Pen flares in my cargo pocket near my laminated maps and a grease pencil. My web gear festooned with fragmentation grenades and spare magazines for my silenced K gun. The big white phosphorous grenade taped to my web gear on the opposite side from my upside-down knife.
There had been great comfort in the pre-combat inspections, the checking and rechecking of gear. It had all the familiar comfort of Catholic Mass. Then when you could check no more, you walked out of the briefing room, lifted your ruck, and fell in with the team. Yards and Americans, sun-browned and fit, moved to the birds. There were no white guys, no black guys, no Asians, just a team of men flying off to certain danger. Because the stakes were so high, there was a simplicity to it. You did your best. You trained hard. You tried to eliminate any potential mistakes. Mistakes, even the smallest of them, meant you were dead. You refined your game. Or an equally determined enemy killed you.
It was life distilled. Because it was so dangerous and certain, that made it simple. When I got home, life was chaos. Boston was chaos. The army, Nam, recon work all had rules. Boston was just a series of loud, narrow streets filled with more chaos and fewer rules. When I got home, I was shocked by the streetlights, stop lights, and short skirts. Cars moved impossibly fast by me and beeped loud, angry noises at each other. I remember getting back to my father’s apartment before he died and just sitting there flushing the toilet. I was mesmerized. Except for R&R that I was too drunk to remember, I was in a real bathroom for the first time in almost two years. With a real flush toilet.
The shape of the island came into view, dark and low against the night sky. There were no stars or moon to be seen, but the red lights of the TV reception towers twinkled in the distance. Then the lights from an occasionally lit house. The jetties reached out like two welcoming arms made of rocks. Then Brant Point Light and the lights of the harbor. The ferry, named after that same island, slid into her berth, and I made my way down to the car deck. I recognized a trucker from the snack bar. He offered me a ride, and he took me halfway to where I was going. I told him I was going to the pizza place nearby. That got me halfway to the cra
nberry bog, where Ed Harriet lived and Charlie Hammond was waiting.
I walked toward the pizza place until he was out of sight and then started to put one foot in front of the other toward the rotary by the island paper. Then I headed down Milestone Road. By army standards, I didn’t have far to go—four miles on the main road and another one down soft sand. For November, the night was warm, and the rain didn’t start until I was half a mile in.
I remember night marches in North Carolina, in a place we called Pineland. Pineland was near Fort Bragg but a world away, meant to resemble Europe or Nam or the next place, the next war. Pineland was where you had your Green Beret final exam. You parachuted out of a C-130 into a piece of North Carolina that was best known for golf courses and national forests. You jumped into Pineland to help lead the resistance against some fictional Soviet-backed puppet. You were chased by members of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were not hard to outsmart; they were just persistent, and there were more of them. They were paratroopers, meant to take the fight to the enemy, not chase guys through hot, humid woods. They were there because they were ordered to be there.
It was always hot and humid, like Vietnam—they wanted you to acclimate. After you linked up with the people playing the resistance and conducted your missions, the play war was over. You had to march out. It was always a lot farther than you were led to believe. No one told you how far or how much time you had. You just had to march, one foot in front of the other, and navigate without getting caught by some bored paratrooper. Then, if you weren’t a fuckup, you graduated and went off to Vietnam.
Walking down Milestone Road in a rainstorm, I was back in Pineland. Headlights in the distance, and I would step off of the road into the bushes. Invisible to the people in cars driving on the only part of the island where you could drive forty-five mph. In Pineland, you had to carry a full rucksack, fifty-five pounds, straps cutting into your neck and shoulders. You carried a rifle, a heavy M14 with no sling. There were no slung rifles in Pineland. Your face and hands were blacked out just like in the old war movies. On Milestone Road, no one was actually looking for me, my face wasn’t blacked out—I was just acting out of habit. The same habit that had kept me alive in the jungle. I didn’t know why it was important to be invisible, I was just acting on some old instinct.
When I crossed Milestone Road and started down the soft sand road to the house in the cranberry bog, it was only raining harder. I was glad of the Bean’s jacket and the work boots. I made my way down the road to his house, sweating under my sweater and jacket, without ever seeing a car.
The detached garage was still there, and the house was still there. I could smell wood smoke, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to have to knock on the door and say something. What do you say to a man who is trying, for whatever reason, to drop out from the world?
I trudged across the sodden yard, and as I got closer to the door that I wasn’t sure how to knock on, it swung open. Framed in the light, holding a shotgun that looked very different from the double barrel he pointed at me last time, was Ed Harriet. This time he held an Ithaca 37, which was missing six inches of barrel and six inches of stock. A vicious weapon that you could empty faster than most by holding the trigger down and working the pump. I had seen Claymore mines that could do less damage. He looked at me, his eyes lit by the wild light of the lightning. I thought two things: one, he was going to kill me with the Ithaca. Two, I was staring at Charlie Hammond.
“The dog heard you or smelled you.” He looked me up and down, a drowned rat and a mess of a man. “You’d better come in and have a drink.” He turned away and turned back again, and said resignedly, “I knew you would come back. Just fucking knew it.” He said it with just a trace of bitterness.
Chapter 22
I stepped in from the rain and stood opposite him. He held the Ithaca in one hand, pointing it at my stomach. He couldn’t miss at that range. Actually, at this range, it would cut me in half. He bladed his body, still pointing the shotgun at me, and held out his left hand, palm to the ceiling. I eased the Colt out of its holster and watched him slide it into a back pocket. He turned and went down the hall to the kitchen.
He pointed with the shotgun to the same chair I sat in last time. He put two glasses on the table and a bottle of Old Crow next to them. He looked at me, sizing me up, and then put the shotgun in the corner next to him, leaning against the wall barrel up. “I trust I don’t need that with you?”
“Nope, I am just here to talk.” I was just glad not to have a sawed-off howitzer pointed at me.
He sat down and poured us each a slug of Old Crow into the kind of thick shot glasses you only see in bars. He lifted his and I lifted mine, and it burned all the way down to my stomach. I shivered, suddenly feeling the damp chill from my walk. He set us up again and said, “What brings you to my little house on a night like this?”
I looked at him. Now there were no traces of the aging hippie. “A long time ago, a little girl’s father went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. She paid me to find him. She paid me to find you, Charlie Hammond.”
He leaned back in his seat and said, “Ahhhh.” He poured another Old Crow for each of us. “I haven’t heard that name in a long, long time. You’re a private eye?”
“Yes.”
“And all of this is because I split a long time ago?”
“Yes.”
He leaned back and his face seemed to soften, and he was Ed Harriet again. “Ha, aw shit. The dog freaked out with the storm, and then you showed up. No one comes around after nine on this island, much less walking up, sticking to the shadows. I didn’t know what to think.”
“What’s with the sawed-off Ithaca? Are you expecting a whole lot of trouble?” Like a small army?
“Yes, I have been expecting trouble for ten years. Since you first showed up, I knew it was coming in one form or another.”
“Look, your daughter is married. He is rich and about to go into politics. She hired me to find you to make sure that there were no scandals, or if there were, they could figure out ahead of time how to deal with them.”
“And you? Do you work for one of those big companies?” He was looking at me across the tabletop.
“No, I am independent. Not even a secretary, just a dusty office in Boston.” I didn’t add that no one would miss me until the rent was late.
“Why should I help you?” He punctuated this by pouring us another belt of Old Crow, which by now was beginning to taste good.
“You wouldn’t be helping me. You would be helping your daughter. I am just a messenger of sorts.”
He sat back and contemplated this. “What do you need from me?”
“Can you fill in the blank spaces from when you left?”
“Sure, but it isn’t easy. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
“No, I have some nice Thai stick. We could get stoned. It would be easier for me to talk about it.” He was all hippie again.
“Sure, it is your house. Who am I to stop you?”
He got up, taking the Ithaca with him, and was back in a few minutes. He put the Ithaca back in its corner and put a pipe on the table. Unlike my briar, his was made of glass, like a giant, distorted marble. He packed it and lit it, inhaling deeply. He let out a breath of smoke and did it again. Then he held the pipe out to me. I hadn’t smoked much since I got back from Nam. It had never suited me. I always felt paranoid, which is a bad thing.
“Hey, man, you want me to talk. You want my trust . . . smoke with me. Like the Indians, man, a peace pipe.” Hippie Ed held it out. Who knows, maybe he had spent the last almost thirty years following the Dead on tour.
I took the pipe and inhaled deeply, and then again. I couldn’t tell if it was good shit or not. At first, I couldn’t tell if anything had happened. He poured me another whiskey, and I took it.
“Hey, man, you were in the service, right? I can tell—the gun is spotless and well-oiled, it is like a baby version of the
GI 45.”
“I was in the army.”
“Yeah, I figured. If you were a Devil Dog I would have sensed it. Were you in Nam?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you in the shit?” His tone was more than a little wry. “Did you kill people?” His voice had a funhouse quality as he said it. Or it was the Thai stick.
“Yeah.” So deep in the shit that . . . he interrupted my train of thought, which was moving a little slower.
“I was in Korea. You probably know that. I was at the Chosin Reservoir, the Frozen Chosin, the Chosin Few. Yep.” I nodded. He hadn’t been in the shit, he’d been in the whole fucking sewer. He had been in one of the worst battles of the twentieth century, if not the worst.
“It was so fucking cold. We were hungry and cold, and I was fucking scared every fucking minute. The chinks would blow their fucking bugles, and you wondered if this was the last charge, if this would be the one that would get you. Each charge was like a giant wave, a human wave, a wave of chinks.” He dragged on the pipe and passed it back to me. I was feeling, as they say, mellow.
“We kept shooting them and shooting them, and then they would stop. Then start up again. We were low on everything—bullets, food, grenades—everything except dead chinks. The only fucking thing you could smell was blood and shit. Not even that fucking kimchi, just blood and shit. It was too cold for the bodies to rot. That was a small fucking mercy.” He paused to drink and smoke and set me up with both.
“I remember we threw away our carbines. They were fucking useless. They’d blow their fucking bugles, and it would start again. We’d mow them down with our BARs, Brownings, and our Garands, and we’d just fucking annihilate them, and we’d lose a few of ours, but we couldn’t afford it, and they could. We ended up stacking up their chink bodies, because we didn’t have anything else. Do you have any idea what it feels like to lean against a pile of dead, frozen chinks, hunched over your rifle, trying to make more?” The question was purely rhetorical.