Germaine nodded, conceding the existential point, and swayed slightly. They stood irresolutely for a moment, looking at each other. Liz realized that the priest was a little drunk. Or even a lot drunk. She wondered what the hell he was doing here. He didn’t really seem to know himself.
“Would you—like to come in?” she offered.
Germaine considered this as if such a notion would never have occurred to him, then said tentatively, with an air of willingness to try a radical idea, “If that would be all right.”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘all right,’” Liz said, mock ponderous, and the priest laughed delightedly. He really was the oddest man.
LEADING GERMAINE into the house, Liz hesitated at the entrance to the living room, but the formality of that seemed unbearable. She couldn’t really picture the two of them sitting stiffly on the unused furniture, making priest-parishioner small talk. The dining room table was still submerged in unprocessed life debris, and the TV room was knee-deep in toy soldiers, block forts, half-clad Barbies, and stuffed animals. In the end, she sat Germaine on one of the kids’ stools at the kitchen counter. Liz moved to the counter’s far side, feeling a little like the bartender at the last stop on the priest’s pub crawl.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked, and, pointedly, “Coffee, maybe?”
Germaine looked dubious. Liz went on, “Apple juice, Kool-Aid, Tang, water, milk, beer, bourbon…”
“What kind of Kool-Aid?” Germaine asked.
“Grape, I think.”
“What kind of bourbon?”
“Jack Daniel’s. He’s got a bottle of Jameson’s in there too, I think.”
“Faith and begorra,” Germaine said approvingly, which Liz took as a yes to the Irish whiskey.
She slipped into the living room and opened the bar cabinet that Mike had brought back from Taiwan. A gift from a Chinese general, it was an elegant thing shellacked in black, with colorful dragons entwined on the front panels. The bar was well stocked with the liquors necessary to the alcohol-reliant dinner parties she was compelled to put on as an officer’s wife, including the ingredients of Mike’s infamous Artillery Punch, a sledgehammer concoction that regularly reduced full colonels to babbling idiots after three cups. But Mike’s domestic drink of routine was a double shot of Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, a beer chaser, and a bowl of peanuts. He was a moderate drinker, a quiet sipper, easing sometimes into hilarious deadpan eloquence as the bourbon level diminished. Liz loved the nights when her husband really settled in. She would read the signs early and get a casserole in the oven, then make herself a strong whiskey sour and join him in the family room. The kids knew to leave them alone at such times; the islands of their parents’ cocktail hours were taboo, slightly awesome and mysterious. Grown-up stuff. She and Mike did some of their best talking then.
A quart of twelve-year-old Jameson’s, Mike’s special-occasion whiskey, stood behind the Jack Daniel’s, untouched, like all the liquor, since July. Liz grabbed the bottle and a Third Marine Division shot glass and went back into the kitchen. Germaine was still at the counter, leafing through a pile of the kids’ artwork. Deb-Deb’s infinite variations on otters, Angus’s airplane battles, Kathie’s hearts and flowers.
Liz got a glass set up and twisted the top off the Jameson’s. “How do you drink this?”
Germaine shrugged. “Out of a brown paper bag in the 7-Eleven parking lot, usually. But since it’s the good stuff, you could drop an ice cube in it.”
Liz fixed him the drink, slipping a second ice cube in for dilution’s sake, then went back to the refrigerator to try to find something for herself. There were three Schlitzes in the back, left over from Mike’s last six-pack. She hadn’t had the heart to throw them out. She opened one now and came back to the counter.
Germaine had held off on his drink until she returned. Liz lifted her beer and said, wryly, “Semper Fi.”
He raised his glass. “Sangre Christi.”
“Yikes,” Liz said, but she tapped her drink against his. “Amen, I guess.”
Germaine tossed the shot off in a single gulp and spit the ice cubes back into the glass. Liz hesitated, wary of contributing further to the delinquency of a priest. But there was no mistaking the way he set the empty glass down, and she poured him another. He still had the pile of the kids’ art spread in front of him. Liz noted that he’d paused over one of Danny’s recent drawings, a Marine carrying a wounded buddy across a stream.
“I feel like I should apologize for my children’s lurid war pictures,” she said. “I’m afraid the boys are a little obsessed right now.”
“It’s natural enough,” Germaine said. “Actually, though, I think this is St. Christopher.”
“Really?” Liz said, gratified.
“It looks like the new stained-glass window at the church, to me.”
“Who knew?” She hesitated, then said, “He wants to be a priest, you know.”
She’d thought he would be pleased, but Germaine looked pained. “No, I didn’t know.”
“A chaplain. ‘Like Father Zeke,’ he told me.”
“Shit,” Germaine said. He considered his drink, then said, “He’ll grow out of it, God willing.”
“You are a very strange man,” Liz said.
Germaine shrugged, as if to say he’d heard it before. They sat for a moment without speaking. Liz was surprised by how comfortable the silence was. She went over the relationship in her mind, trying to remember how they had gotten to a point of such ease.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” Germaine said at last.
“I assumed they threw you out of the last bar for getting theological or something while celebrating the Marines Corps birthday.”
“Actually, I’m a very well behaved drunk, even on major holidays. I just get quiet and brood.”
“And how is that different from you sober?”
He smiled ruefully. “Touché.”
“I’m an obnoxious drunk,” Liz said. “I get loud and satirical, especially when I hit overload on the duty, honor, country stuff. Mike always has to keep an eye on me at Marine Corps functions.”
“What do you do, when you get loud and satirical?”
“I tend to start quoting Shakespeare. ‘Seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.’ ‘Who hath honor? He that died o’Wednesday.’ That sort of thing.”
“‘I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath…’”
Liz gave him an appreciative look. “Exactly. Mike used to love that about me, actually. But it turns out that having a loose cannon for a wife is bad for a military officer’s career.”
“It’s the same for priests,” Germaine said, so deadpan that it took Liz a moment to get it and laugh.
“Do priests even have careers?” she asked.
“Most do,” Germaine said. “I never did.”
His glass was empty. Liz picked up the bottle to refill it, and their eyes met. It was a little unnerving. She felt invisible most of the time in her life, submerged into this role or that—mother, wife, daughter, supportive friend, or friend in need of support. But Germaine seemed to see her without the mask of a particular function. She felt like herself with Germaine, and that felt both exhilarating and dangerous in some vague way.
“What are you doing here?” she marveled.
“Damned if I know,” Germaine said frankly, and this time they both laughed.
CHAPTER 15
NOVEMBER 1967
from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly
H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF
c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602
Mon 20 Nov 1967
Khe Sanh, RVN
My Dearest Lizzie,
If Jeanne Dixon says 1200 people are going to die at Khe Sanh, it must be true, as she certainly knows more than the people actually running the war do. She must mean bad guys, though, as there are not 1200 Marines here. Maybe she means 1200 elephants. We’ve been hell on thos
e pink elephants lately. The Vietnamese SPCA is furious with us.
This place is actually a backwater of sorts. If the North Vietnamese ever do decide to attack, we’ll be a truck stop on the Ho Chi Minh Trail long before 1200 people have time to die, as our “defenses” at present consist of a single strand of triple concertina wire, some unmowed elephant grass, and a couple of No Trespassing signs. Fortunately, the bad guys seem to care even less about this place than we do. III MAF has consequently pulled out everybody but the cooks and bottle washers to fight where there’s actual fighting, and at this point we’re basically just a bunch of guys camping out beside the airstrip, which they’ve finally gotten around to improving recently through the addition of a billion tons of crushed rock and a layer of flattened beer cans. Hotel Company has done its part in emptying the beer cans, but otherwise we have not seen much action and don’t expect to.
Don’t worry about me, my darling Lizzie. Really. The war is elsewhere these days. Khe Sanh isn’t on anybody’s map.
your loving,
Mike
DEB-DEB’S SIXTH birthday fell three days before Thanksgiving. Liz worried that Deb-Deb hadn’t made any new friends yet in kindergarten; her youngest daughter was not so much antisocial as socially oblivious, in her benign way, impervious to the usual dance of forming relationships. Most often she moved happily enough in a world of her own. But Deb-Deb had come up with a substantial guest list of half a dozen names, and Liz had duly sent her daughter off to school with a pile of pink invitations to an after-school tea party to be held at the O’Reilly house. On the afternoon of Deb-Deb’s birthday, however, no other children arrived. Instead, the dining room table, cleared for the occasion, had seven exquisite place settings of tiny teaware, and at each place but one, a stuffed animal sat with an invitation propped neatly on its lap. The empty place was for Linkalink, Deb-Deb’s very special friend, who was invisible.
Deb-Deb, apparently content with the gathering, took her place at the head of the table, just to Linkalink’s left, and poured chocolate milk from the teapot for all the guests. Liz stood in the doorway, trying to decide how freaked out she should be. She’d long understood that her youngest child was a special case, but she’d hoped that the stringencies of kindergarten would have a moderating influence. It would have been nice to have at least one other actual human child present.
The party proceeded happily. Deb-Deb swam otter-style into the kitchen to refill the chocolate milk, blew out the candles after making God-knew-what sort of wish, and served the cake graciously to everyone present. She opened her presents, several from Liz, one from each set of grandparents, and one from Maria Petroski, her godmother. Danny had given her a sketchbook and a set of colored pencils; Kathie had cut out a huge pink heart and written “I love You” in the center of it, and Angus had given Deb-Deb a pine cone, for reasons of his own. There had been nothing from Mike, not even a card, which was understandable enough, Liz thought, given that her husband had a war to fight, but still upsetting. She’d bought a card and signed it with Mike’s name, but Deb-Deb had recognized her handwriting. For a child hopelessly lost in a fantasy world of her own, she was remarkably acute.
THAT NIGHT, tucking Deb-Deb into bed, Liz took another shot at invoking Mike’s presence.
“You know your daddy loves you,” she told Deb-Deb.
“I know,” her daughter said serenely. “He’s just never home for my birthday.”
Liz opened her mouth to protest, then, upon review, held her tongue. Mike must have been present for at least one of Deb-Deb’s birthdays, but she couldn’t remember any. For a long time, Liz had shown Deb-Deb pictures of Mike and told her daughter that was “Dada,” but that hadn’t worked any better than forging signatures on birthday cards: For years, Deb-Deb had thought a framed photograph was called a dada.
The previous year Mike had been in Puerto Rico on some kind of amphibious exercise; the year before that he’d been on a ship in the Mediterranean. It really was possible he hadn’t celebrated a single one of his younger daughter’s birthdays at home. He’d even been in Okinawa when Deb-Deb was born. Liz vividly remembered the loneliness and borderline despair of that last birth. Deb-Deb, like the other three O’Reilly children, had been conceived on the rhythm method, a good Catholic accident. Every pregnancy had thus started out feeling like a sort of defeat, but Deb-Deb in particular had strained Liz’s sense of the balance between motherhood and simply having a life. She had just recovered from Angus’s arrival, and had managed through sheer force of will to lose the usual forty pounds in record time and land a role in that summer’s Quantico little theater production of Joan of Arc. The director had been okay with her bottle-feeding at rehearsals, but a pregnant Joan of Arc was too much, and the role had eventually gone to her understudy, a lithe, virginal second lieutenant’s wife who was probably on the Pill. The night Deb-Deb was born, Liz’s first thought was relief that she actually felt love for the poor kid, that the sight of her daughter’s angelic little face and bright blue eyes did, thank God, make it all seem worth it; and her second thought was that if the pope thought birth control was wrong, the pope could jolly well have her next baby himself. She’d given Mike a box of condoms the day he got back from the Med, and they’d worked fine, as mortal sins went, until now. Apparently even the thought of getting back into theater was enough to make her pregnant.
She was just settling in to read Deb-Deb’s bedtime story, Harold and the Purple Crayon, when Danny hollered from downstairs, “Mom! Telephone!”
“Take a message and tell them I’ll call them back,” Liz hollered back.
“It’s Dad!”
Liz bolted to her feet, thinking, Ohmygod, he’s hurt. He was calling to tell her he didn’t have a left leg anymore, or something.
Deb-Deb’s eyes were wide; no doubt her daughter’s expression was mirroring her own. Liz willed her face into composure and found a smile. Just your run-of-the-mill weeknight phone call from a husband in a war zone. At least he was alive.
“I’ll bet he’s calling for your birthday,” she said. “Do you want to talk to Daddy?”
Deb-Deb, relieved, beamed and nodded, and they hurried downstairs together. Danny was at the kitchen counter with the receiver pressed to his ear, fighting off Angus and Kathie, who were pressing for a turn.
“Here’s Mom,” he said, as Liz approached. “Over.” And then, “I love you too. Over.”
“‘Over’?” Liz said as she took the receiver.
“He’s on a radio.”
“Mike?” Liz said into the crackle of static. There was an unnerving pause, an emptiness, and she could feel the thousands of miles, the continents and the ocean between them. At last she added, uncertainly, “Uh, over?”
There was a click of sorts and Mike said, “It’s a radio-satellite hookup, sweetheart. You have to use radio procedure. Over.”
“I love you. I love you. I miss you. I miss you terribly. Uh, over.”
“Copy that,” he said dryly. She thought he was being humorous, a typical Mike tweaking of the absurdity of it all, though it was hard to tell through the attenuated tonal quality of the transmission. “I love you too. I miss you like crazy. Over.”
“Are you all right?” Again, the unforgiving static. “Over?”
“Just peachy,” Mike said. “I’ve only got three minutes here. Over.”
“I love you,” she said. It seemed silly to waste their precious three minutes saying anything else. “I love you. I love you. It’s Deb-Deb’s birthday. Over.”
“Roger that. You want to put her on? Over.”
A disembodied voice came on the line just then and said, “One minute left, Captain.”
“Copy that,” Mike said, as Liz handed the phone to her younger daughter.
“You have to say ‘over’ when you’re done talking,” Liz told Deb-Deb. “Like a game, see? You say blah-blah, over, then he says, blah-blah, over. Back and forth.”
Deb-Deb nodded solemnly and took possession of the re
ceiver. “Daddy?”
“Over,” Liz prompted.
“Over?” Deb-Deb listened for a moment, and her face lit up. Birthday greetings with a Deb-Deb twist, probably; Mike was actually very good with his younger daughter. Deb-Deb was nodding happily in response.
“He can’t hear you nodding, sweetie,” Liz said, and Deb-Deb said hurriedly, “Blah-blah, over.” And then, “I love you too, Daddy. Here’s Mommie. Blah-blah over.”
“—fifteen seconds, over,” Mike was saying, as Liz got back on the line.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you. I love you, my beautiful man. Over.”
“I love you too, darling,” Mike said. “Over and out.”
IT SHOULD HAVE been routine. The Hotel Company patrol had slogged out to the limit of the artillery cover from the 105mm howitzer batteries at the Khe Sanh base, about ten klicks, three days of hard travel out and three days back, working up and down the steep, slick slopes through triple-canopy jungle, bamboo, and vine thickets, picking off leeches and keeping an eye out for bamboo vipers, water buffalo, and even tigers. The jungle was beautiful, surprisingly cool and green and so quiet you could hear the crystalline burble of the streams snaking down toward the Rao Quang and the sound of twice-filtered raindrops hitting the big fronds of the ferns at ground level. But the silence and the beauty fooled no one; the next turn in the trail could hide an ambush, the next tree a sniper. The monkeys in the area had a distinctive cry that sounded eerily like “Fuh kyoo,” and they liked to throw rocks. One of the Third Platoon’s point men had crapped in his pants one day when a fuck-you monkey threw a rock at him, though he had retained the presence of mind to blow the monkey away. No one begrudged him the overreaction. Everyone’s nerves were pitched high.
Mike kept the men moving through the bush as much as possible, but in the end the only realistic way to cover any ground was to walk single file along the trails or streambeds. The company was about two klicks from the base, stretched out over half a mile of trail like a snake in a bent rain gutter, when the firing erupted at the head of the column. Two single shots, tiny, almost offhand cracks, delicate as ice shifting, followed by the roar of dozens of M-16s responding.
Lizzie's War Page 17