“Give it to him,” Hartman said to the president. “Saddam’s understanding of television is worse than Michael Dukakis’s. He’s from another century. Trust me. The more he uses TV, the more he’ll harm himself. Beagle loves it. He visualizes seeing Saddam strut, with his stormtroopers, through the burning ruins of a conquered country.”
In the California hills Magdalena Lazlo awoke, before dawn, sky just turning light, with an empty space beside her. She reached out, knowing he wasn’t there, and put her hand on the pillow where his head had rested. A sentimental gesture. It felt so good to have a man to miss.
Holding that mood close, arms held so as to literally cradle it to her breasts, she slipped into a robe and went down toward the kitchen. On the way downstairs she heard noises. She felt chilled and the feeling—holding dreams of a protector-lover against her body—left her quick as a ghost in the daylight. But then a beat, a moment, after that, she smelled the aroma of coffee brewing. And other smells. Bacon in the pan, bread in the toaster. Then the sound of a black man speaking softly and laughing.
She moved silently so that she could look and listen without being seen. She didn’t know, at first, what prompted that. Then she realized she wanted to see a father with his son. She wondered about herself and touched her belly. She had used birth control, on and off, since she’d been sexually active. But not always. She did not get pregnant easily. If she did, there would have been more than one accident by now. There hadn’t been. Even with her husband. Was that why it had been so easy for her to say “Yes, come inside,” that she wasn’t really afraid, at least not of pregnancy and its consequences—interrupted career, stretch marks, sagging breasts and belly, widening of the hips, squaring off of the buttocks, and responsibility? And of course that companion that then clings to you for twenty or thirty years. She should have been afraid—she pushed her hair back with her fingers—it was madness not to be afraid, of the other thing. The disease. Was that a matter of sheer denial? Or was it that other streak in her, the one that meant it when she said “Let it be birth or death with us,” liked it that way, because otherwise it didn’t seem worth doing.
She had a name for that part of herself. The way some men have pet names for their penises and for the same reasons, because the part often led the whole and the person took pride in where the piece took them, stupid and dangerous places included. Mary Magdalene was her obvious but secret name for that side of herself, and Maggie liked to let Mary out in front of the camera, the sainted whore, saucy, wicked, vulnerable, dangerous. Dangerous to herself most of all. It was that quality, that sense of working without a net, that gave her performances magic. Not the craft, not the cheekbones, not the tits. Daring to be ugly, rude, pathetic, stupid, scared, domineering, vicious, a bitch, a cunt, an ice maiden, a saint, daring to find the line in the air that could not be sustained and sustaining it.
Martin Joseph Weston, eighteen, looked over toward the door and saw her standing there, her robe pulled tight at the waist, her hair tousled with sleep, just finger combed, and nothing on her feet, and it was all he could do not to whistle and say things that went down just fine in the streets in L.A. but which he knew would just sound all wrong here in this ultrafresh other world. Then she smiled at him. It was a shy smile, like she was intruding on their house and was worried what they would think of her. And he fell in love with her, his heart truly stricken.
His father wanted to laugh out loud just looking at the look on his son’s face. But he knew how dumb and tender a boy’s pride is in puberty, especially in front of his father and a Goddess. So Steve just said, “Morning, Miss Lazlo, how do you like your eggs?”
She said good morning to Steve and to Martin, told them to call her Maggie. She didn’t want the eggs or the bacon, but if there was enough coffee, she’d take some of that and a piece of toast off the unsliced loaf of sourdough rye. Steve poured her the coffee. She took it black, as most women whose shape is their fortune do. He put a slab of bread, beside his, in the toaster oven. Maggie sat down at the table by Martin. He already had soft-scrambled eggs, a thick hunk of Canadian bacon, and toast in front of him. But with her that close he had the unsavory feeling that he didn’t quite know how to eat right and that chewing would make him look like a dog. “So this is what you looked like when you went into the Marines,” Maggie said to Steve.
“Spittin’ image.”
“You were a good-looking boy.”
“You bet. Had all the young girls just chasing me all over Macon. It was different in them days. A girl got pregnant, you was expected to marry her. Made you cautious. A little bit. And they didn’t have this AIDS thing.”
“Come on, Dad.”
Steve slid his eggs out of the pan onto the plate next to the ham. He took the toast, Maggie’s and his own, from the oven, found a plate for hers, and buttered them both. There was a fancy jar of ginger marmalade in the refrigerator that’d caught his eye. He got that, plus the two plates, utensils, and his own cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.
“You were with Joe, in Vietnam.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“What do you want to know?”
“There’s this man, Taylor. He hates Joe. Do you know why?”
“Joe didn’t tell you?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“Well, if he didn’t tell you . . .”
“I just didn’t ask. Steve”—She gave him a look that asked for help in a special kind of way—“I love Joe. Please.”
In the early dawn two men from the Sacramento office of Universal Security sat in a van. One poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. The other climbed out to take a leak off in the brush. Nothing had happened all night long. It’s hard to watch nothing. But it’s easier than digging ditches.
In the early dawn Joe, Dennis, and Hawk watched the house from three different positions. Joe to the east and Dennis to the north were hidden among the rows of grapes. Hawk, to the south, was in the shadow of some apricot trees.
Dylan, who normally woke with the dawn, stood up in his crib and cried for attention. The nanny came and picked him up. From where he was, Joe could see when she turned on the light and then saw her pass, in silhouette, holding the boy, in front of the window.
They were the first ones up. Nanny got Dylan his bottle. Then she let out the dogs.
“Once Joe got to be sergeant, he could run things,” Steve said. “With him running things, everythin’ starts to get better. People stop dying. We stop losing guys to booby traps and all of that. And ambushes. Nobody ambushes Sergeant Joe Broz. It’s like he’s got one of them sixth senses or mystical powers. But he don’t. He used to explain it to me. How he done it. And to Joey. Joey was his bes’ friend, from where he come from. They’s like this, Joe and Joey. He had a whole set of rules for ambushes: terrain, expectations of the enemy and such like. And they worked.
“What you had to do was work hard. Go the long way around, cut your way through brush and stay off’n the trail. Wear your helmet and flak jacket no matter how hot it get. Dig deep when you digs in. Camouflage. Stick some damn leaves in your helmet, and paint your face, especially white guys.109
“You ever seen that movie The Dogs of War? Chris Walken, he’s got this motto: ‘Everyone goes home.’ Well, we wasn’t that good. But we was good. And after a while, Joe Broz, he gets to be like, like a star. Almos’. He was proud. Real proud. Takin’ care of his boys, you know how it is. Make you take care of your feet, gets you clothes, make you do everything you gots to do but write home to your mama.
“We gets this new lieutenant Gelb. Jew boy from Atlanta. I remembers that because I’se from Georgia myself. Anyways, he was alright. He seen that Joe’s got it all in hand and the bes’ thing he can do, for hisself and for all concerned, is to leave well enough alone.
“We’re up in I Corps, tha’s up north, near the DMZ, mountain country a lot of it, you know. These officers, they come. To this day, I don’t know
who these people is or why’s they there. One of them, he’s this Marine captain. Captain Tartabull. And this Army captain. Captain Taylor, he’s there as an observer. The Marines is showing the Army how they get it done. Some bullshit like that. We don’t know who this Tartabull is. Nobody never seen him before. But he’s acting like he’s the captain and is out in the bush commanding us all day and night and backwards and forwards. Captain, he a motherfucker.
“He done get us all fucked up.
“There’s twenty-seven of us, including the three officers. We go into the LZ—the landing zone—in two CH-46s. Alright. Everything’s alright. LZ is cold. We’re out of the choppers. Hit the ground running, like Joe insists his boys do, and into the treeline. Form a perimeter. One, two, three guys out on the flanks.
“The two captains, Tartabull and Taylor, stroll outta the choppers, you know, motherfuckers trying to outcool each other. Like ‘Look at me, I ain’t ’fraid o’ no NVA.’ So then this Tartabull, he say we’re going into this here valley, that’s right in front of us, to the next valley, to find Charlie, ’cause we’re gonna get some bodies today. Yes, sir, we’re gonna get body count, take home some ears.
“You know what’s comin’, right. We all sees it comin’. Joe Broz, sergeant, he says, ‘ ’Scuse me, Captain. That’s ambush country in there. Don’ go that way.’
“Captain says, ‘Tha’s where we going. Those are the orders.’
“ ‘Sir, that’s a mistake, sir. Maybe if we went over on the left . . . left flank—’
“ ‘Sergeant! You afraid to go in there, in the valley there?’
“ ‘Yes, sir. Because that’s what Charlie wants us to do—they waitin’ for someone dumb enough to do that.’
“ ‘Sergeant, you are relieved.’ Then he calls up the lieutenant.
“ ‘Lead your men, Lieutenant.’ LT takes the captain aside, speak to him personal, but everyone can tell he’s trying to say something about Joe and his experience and shit. Tartabull is all tired up and pissed off, because they’s questioning his judgment in front of this Army captain. Just ’cause he’s wrong and he’s gonna get us killed, tha’s not gonna stop him.”
Joe had expected dogs. You always did in the country. He had laid down scents that were supposed to lead the mutts away from the men. A bitch in heat, which was the best thing for males, and fox in case the dogs were females. It was hard for the men, who couldn’t smell the packaged aromas—and if they could have probably wouldn’t have appreciated them the way the dogs did—to have confidence in the product. So they froze when the dogs came out.
The dogs, two beagles named Ford and Nixon, came racing out of the house, clearly enthralled by exciting new scents. They raced in a circle trying to pick out the track to follow. They didn’t seem dangerous, by themselves, but discovery certainly was. The three men were armed and on the property of a very rich celebrity. They could each imagine the arrival of the local and state police, cars, bloodhounds, and helicopters, turn the whole thing into some crazed John Landis film, like The Blues Brothers, cop cars in record-setting numbers roaring across California to converge on the Beagle vanity vineyard. Or turning into First Blood, maddened pigs against demented vets, live at five, tape at eleven.
Suddenly, Ford and Nixon put their twitchy black noses down close to the ground. Heads low, tails high, they ran like little madmen, following an invisible line.
It took them right between Joe and Hawk and far from both of them.
Both scents, fox and bitch, led to a bunch of bones, meat still on them, which would keep the dogs busy once they got tired chasing smells that went nowhere. There was a little bit of sedative in the meat, the sort that they give dogs to make them sleep in their portable kennels during airplane flights.
Joe waited for the rest of the household to wake up.
Taylor checked in with the couple watching Beagle’s house from their vantage point on the road. He asked them if they’d seen anything. They said no.
“Sure it was an ambush. We done lost five guys in the first minute, less’n a minute.
“They’s dug in. We’s pinned down. They in bunkers, with machine guns and mortars, they got the bunkers camouflaged. A B-52 strike ain’t gonna blow them suckers outta their holes. We pinned down good. They done been preparing for this for a long time, and every night they say this prayer, Lord, send us some Marine dumb enough to walk through the Valley of Death.
“The captain—this Tartabull—is trying to call for air support. Anything, choppers, Puff the Magic Dragon, fuckin’ B-52s if he can get ’em. But he cain’t. Nothing available.
“The way we is, is like in a half circle. There’s this steep mountainside on what was our right flank comin’ in, but now tha’s sort of our rear. What was our forwardly direction, that’s now the right flank. We’s got four guys there, Joe with Joey and two others, both brothers. I’m in the center with three other grunts and Taylor. Taylor got balls, pardon me, but no question about it. Man ain’t no coward. And he’s doing the best he can. The LT, he’s on the left, what used to be our rear, the way out, if they is a way out. Tartabull, he’s behind a fallen tree and some rocks, near the steep part. We got fifteen, sixteen guys down already.
“They’s maybe fifty, sixty of them out there. If something don’ happen soon, we gonna be overrun, we be dead meat.
“You never been in combat. I don’t know how to tell what is like. I don’. It’s loud, it’s like being inside a barrel of noise, screaming and explosions and gunfire. Noise, noise, noise.
“Tartabull is screamin’ into the radio and he’s finally got through and they’re gonna give him something. I don’t know how Joe hears what Tartabull is doing. But he knows that the captain is fucking up. Captain giving the fly boys the wrong coordinates. Captain givin’ them—I don’t know this at the time, Joe tells me later—captain givin’ the wrong coordinates. Captain calling in an air strike right on top of us.”
Nanny took Dylan outside. They called for the dogs, but they didn’t come. Dylan was disappointed. Nanny was more concerned with distracting the boy than figuring out where the dogs had gone.
A little while later Beagle and Jackie woke up. They waved from the window at Dylan. He held his little hand up, opening and closing it, which was his way of waving. It was adorable and his parents cooed. Then he saw a really great stone and needed to pick it up and throw it at Nanny.
Hawk had the best view of the front of the house and the road. It was Hawk that spotted the U. Sec. company car coming up the driveway. He whispered the news into the microphone that he wore on his wrist, the other two heard it on earpieces. Though it came from a different manufacturer, it was essentially the same communication system that the Secret Service uses.
“Joe crawls over to the captain. All the way over he’s yelling, ‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong.’ Captain ignoring him. Yelling into the radio, coordinates over and over. Wounded guys are screamin’ what they’re screamin’. Screamin’ for a medic, morphine, their mamas. Screamin’ and firing.
“Joe finally gets to Tartabull. Screamin’ in his face. Wrong coordinates. Give me the radio. Calling him names. All that shit, everything he can think to say. Tartabull screaming back at him. Then Joe takes his M-16, he points it at the captain.
This is weird, ’cause with all the screamin’ and all the shit, suddenly everybody looking at Joe and the captain. Including me and Taylor, who’s right next to me, practically. Joe holds the gun. Captain holds the radio. Clutching it. The LT, he’s over there with them. Captain’s got a .45. He points it at Joe. Somethin’ comin’ in over the radio. The NVA ain’t stopped, they’re still at it. Suddenly, Joey gets hit. Joe looks over there. Looks back, says somethin’ to the captain. Captain says somethin’ back.
“Joe shoots him. Once.”
The man from U. Sec. stayed ten minutes or less. Joe guessed that he told Beagle that he was there to sweep the house for bugs, but that he was really there to pick up the day’s tapes.
The three watcher
s waited patiently. Around nine o’clock Jackie and Beagle went down to the stable. It was clear that Jackie could ride well and also that she thought she looked good doing it. Beagle could barely stay on and just didn’t have the knack of moving with the horse’s movement. Rather, he moved against it even at a walk, ensuring that his buttocks thwacked into the saddle every other step the horse took.
They headed up toward the apricot grove. Hawk willed himself to invisibility. The horses smelled him and whinnied. But their riders assumed that the noises were over horsey business and yanked on the reins and rode on past.
Next to leave was the cook, for the market.
About a half hour after that the nanny put Dylan in a stroller and started walking up the road.
Unless there was someone they didn’t know about, the house was now empty.
“Joe gets on the radio. He’s screamin’ new coordinates. Taylor screamin’ at him. The LT gets hit. Stupid fuck is out from cover.
“Joe lays down smoke grenades, purple, maybe yellow too, I don’t know.
“Not more than two, three minutes later, it seems like, the F-4s come screamin’ out of the sky. And they’re laying down napalm. It’s one, two hundred yards from us. We can feel the heat. There’s this wall of flame. Couple hundred yards we woulda been refried Marines. Barbecued. Turned into crispy critters.
“We use that, that’s our cover, to run our asses out of there.
“Joe is carrying Joey. I catch up to him. Joey’s dead. I tell him that. Then suddenly I’m hit. Joe is crying. I never seen Joe show nothin’. He’s crying. I’m on my knees, somethin’s wrong. It’s all goin’ away. Then Joe, he puts his buddy’s body down and he lifts me up and he carries me on out of there.
“I don’t know, firsthand, too much what happened after. But what I understand happened was this—we got ten men out. Ten of the original twenty-seven. Got the LT out. I think Joe went back for him, that’s what someone tol’ me. They also tol’ me he weren’t never gonna walk no more. Never again. Maybe tha’s true. I don’t know. Taylor got out.”
Wag the Dog Page 38