The tree line across from us was covered with black birds, I didn’t know what kind. Were there crows in Vietnam? They perched in their own clusters, occasionally flapping from one frond to another. It looked like the birds were spying on the VC, the same way we were. There was something comic about the situation, a horrible dramatic irony, and a kind of giddiness overtook me—it reminded me of playing hide-and-seek with my cousins all over their big farmhouse. Looking at their legs through the slats in a closet door. I had to bite on the stiff sleeve of my jacket to keep from giggling out loud.
My attention at that moment landed on someone carrying a sun-faded pink umbrella. From our downward angle, I couldn’t see who they were or what they were doing, just a pair of feet now and then. They moved in a circle around the fire pit, now close to the Vietcong. One of the VC looked up and said something, and, seemingly rebuffed, the umbrella floated away. The umbrella and its bright color were fantastic in the middle of all the black and brown and olive green.
The soldier next to me made a fist with his right hand, and I did the same as I looked up the line to my right. At the top, Sergeant Martin held his hand clenched in the air, and if I’d forgotten my field signal training by that point, his meaning when he pointed his M-14 down at the encampment was unambiguous. All the guns pointed down into the little valley, safeties off. One VC got up and wandered behind a lean-to, where he pissed with his hand against a tree. Martin raised his hand again. I sighted my target, a VC wiping out what looked like a large pan with a white rag. Like a party balloon popping in the thick air, a lonely shot sounded, a trigger accidentally pulled by a nervous eighteen-year-old finger from Nebraska or Vermont or Mississippi. The VC stopped talking and looked around. The pink umbrella paused near the tree line.
Then Martin’s hand dropped and we were all firing. I shot my VC several times in quick succession, and the last shot pinged off the pan he was holding. The bodies of the men below us flailed as though participating in a lively, impromptu dance. More merriment. The guy taking a piss fell over holding his dick. The people in the lean-tos appeared to sleep through the whole thing. I cannot express to you the pleasure I felt firing my gun, killing those fuckers. After almost an entire year of doubt, of imagining myself running away, or covering my head and pissing myself, there I was, squeezing the trigger over and over, sighting targets and blasting them with casual accuracy the way we’d been shown in Basic. Someone in black ran toward the western tree line and I took the back of his head off with one shot. Then I shot him again to make sure.
With the visible clusters of VC dead or dying on the ground, the field of fire expanded like a hungry blob looking for more things to eat. Someone—probably this guy Harriman who’d played backup QB on his Oklahoma high school football team—pitched an arching grenade the entire distance, an absurdly long throw that blew one of the houses off its supports. The explosion initiated a wave of gunning and fragging that was aimed at the huts and lean-tos. A wounded man limped out carrying something and was shot three times before he hit the dirt. The old person I’d noticed before had fallen next to their bowl of food, carelessly spilled beside them. A snatch of fabric from the pink umbrella, caught in the trees, fluttered as if in surrender.
One thing I remember thinking was how strangely similar it was to scenes in movies when people get shot. If you had asked me before, I might have guessed that there would be some telling difference, however small. It would have to be a small detail, in fact, a key visual detail that Sam Peckinpah or Walter Hill might have imagined wrong, and something that would falsify the corpus of movie mayhem in experienced eyes. But what I saw, two hundred yards away, looked just like something from a film: the noise, the smoke, the dust, bodies jerking and falling, some blood, though not an unrealistic amount. Then eventually silence.
What had happened had taken maybe twenty seconds, probably less. The smoke took another thirty seconds or so to clear, then Sergeant Martin stood and we all followed suit. We walked down the ridge behind him like a line of ducklings following their mother. As we walked slowly among the corpses in the field, everyone had approximately the same look of childish astonishment on his face, disbelief that he could be partly responsible for such a thing. Most of the VC had fallen face-first, but two near me had fallen next to each other on their backs, with their heads nearly touching, as though they were a fond couple sky-gazing, or perhaps two kids making snow angels.
I wonder if the following realization is universal to everyone who’s just killed someone: that you are now, and always will be, a killer. It is a very clear line, and once you’ve crossed it, there’s no going back. You can’t unkill someone, no matter how much you’d like to, and you can’t unkiller yourself. For the rest of your life, you have the honor of being in the select group of human beings who have ended another human being’s life. It is no small thing. I looked at my fellow soldiers and thought how all of us—Endicott and Martin, and dumbfuck Lester Hawkins walking around trying not to smile, and even that zit-faced kid from Illinois or Indiana who’d cried over a picture of his sister’s high school prom, and even me, even me—were killers now.
But Berlinger wasn’t. I turned and looked, and there he was, escorted by Endicott. Just visible over the crest of the ridge, shielding his eyes from the harsh sunlight with his bladed hand, surveying our work.
———
Richard thanked the audience and began taking questions. Cindy pushed through the exit and walked through the entrance hall, past enormous arching windows providing a grand view of the parking deck across the street. She was on the verge of crying, a fact that upset her far more than the chapter she had just heard. Her father hadn’t made her cry since she was fifteen, when she found out he was getting remarried, to that awful woman whose name Cindy couldn’t remember right at this moment. Carole, with an e, a spelling that had always infuriated her. She’d cried after he’d told her on the phone, locked herself in her room, and ignored her mother’s murmured entreaties from the hall. But later she felt a powerful wave of relief, secure in the knowledge that this would be the last time he would wield this power over her.
Which had been true until just now. The reading had been an unwelcome reminder that he was an actual person, not merely the collection of timeworn seriocomic flaws—the drunk, penniless bungler from whom she coldly tolerated a biannual phone call—to which she’d successfully reduced him over the years. She barged into the bathroom and cupped water onto her face until the wave of childish self-pity subsided. She dried off with paper towels and flashed a false, gruesome smile in the mirror. But she hadn’t cried.
She entered the corner stall and sat for a minute, gathering herself. The laminated metal of the door and walls was a pleasing color of dull mustard yellow, and she wouldn’t have minded staying in there forever; something about the close space and neutral color made her mind go blank. For a moment she was no longer worried about her life: the money Mikhail was demanding, her job, her debt, her spiraling prescription drug usage, her miserable love life, the impact of the dry desert air on her skin, the funny clunking noise her car was making, her shitty father and his fucking book.
Just one hair, two, and, with a contented sigh, she rose.
She walked out of the bathroom as Richard walked out of the auditorium. He was surrounded by a coterie of older men in a tableau that resembled some ghastly parody of teen idolatry. He saw her and raised his hand, and she involuntarily raised hers. She started to the exit doors, then stopped and sat in one of the iron stairwells that led to the upper rooms, waiting until the crowd dispersed. He walked slowly over, with the strenuous nonchalance of someone trying not to frighten away a small animal.
“Hi, Cin,” he said.
“Hey.”
A young guy walked up from behind, another fan, Cindy thought, except he didn’t say anything to Richard and stood about four feet to the side. A stalker, then, she thought, perversely imagining the guy pulling out a gun and blowing her father’s head off. The thought
, surprisingly, didn’t make her entirely happy.
“This is Vance, my driver,” said Richard, pointing backward with his thumb.
“Your driver.”
“And valet. Vance, stop being weird and meet my daughter, Cindy.”
Vance came forward and stuck out his hand, as though he were presenting her with a piece of questionable fruit for her perusal. She took it. It was large and limp, and as she shook it, she realized she had never fully understood the precise sense-meaning of the word “clammy” until this very moment.
“Nice to meet you,” said Vance.
“Uh-huh,” she said, taking a better look at the kid. He was younger than she’d originally thought, maybe still a teenager. His high, intelligent forehead was rendered idiotic by the makeshift Prince Valiant perched on top of it. Large hazel eyes swam distorted and fearful and goonishly large inside the twin aquarium tanks of his glasses. His Adam’s apple and mouth protruded in tandem, but his lips were curled inward, which gave him a reticent aspect. One cheek was bruised and swollen, and an unluxurious beard pushed through the dusting of acne on his cheeks like industrious weeds in a raspberry patch. He was a fucking mess.
“The thing already happened,” said Richard.
“I saw it,” Cindy said.
“Oh.”
“It was good.”
“Thanks. I know you wouldn’t say so if you didn’t mean it.”
She stood. “And it was good to see you. Good luck with the rest of the tour.”
“Don’t you want to get lunch or something at least?”
“No.”
“Come on. Why not?”
“I told you to call, Dad. You said you would call.” Her voice sounded childish and repellent in her ears.
“I did call.”
“Oh bullshit.”
“I called last night. Check your phone. It went straight to voicemail.”
Not feeling like explaining that she’d allowed her service to lapse, and not believing him anyway, and furthermore not wanting anything besides to get away, maybe take a Halcion and sleep until it was cool and dark outside, she turned to leave and noticed the parking agent outside ticketing her car. Richard was saying something to her back, but she was already pushing through the hot metal doors, advancing on the small man. His shorts ended indecently high on his bunched thighs, between which he clenched his bicycle while he punched her license-plate number into a handheld ticket machine.
She said, “What are you doing?” closer to a yell than she’d intended. The agent looked back at her, surprised.
“Loading zone, lady.”
“Come on. I’m leaving. Please? Please.”
He shook his head and continued punching information into the machine. It fed out a little loop of paper, which he tore off, stuck in an envelope he pulled from a fanny pack, and handed to her. She pulled the ticket back out and looked at it. “Two hundred and fifty dollars? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
He got back on his bike and started to pedal away. “Don’t ignore me,” she yelled—actual yelling now. “Don’t ignore me, you motherfucker.”
He stopped. “What did you say?”
“Oh, I’ve got your attention now? Nice job you have.”
“You want me to call the cops in on this? Don’t park in a loading zone, okay? It’s not complicated.”
“You know what else isn’t complicated? Fuck. You.” She kicked the rear tire of the bike, not very hard, but it caused his center of gravity to shift behind him, and he sat on the ground to avoid falling. Before he could get back up, Richard was between them. His bulk was sizable enough that he managed to completely obscure one from the other. He helped up the parking agent and said, “Sorry, sorry. I’ll pay the ticket, thanks, sorry about this.”
“I could sue that bitch for assault!” the man yelled.
“That bitch is my daughter,” said Richard, in a soft tone. “She’s having a rough day. Cut her a break, okay?”
The agent felt his back tire, shook his head, and rode away. Cindy stalked to the driver’s side, got in, and turned the key. Nothing happened. She turned it again, then a third time, but nothing, not even that shitty clicking noise that usually tells you that you’re fucked. She screamed and beat her hands once, hard, against the steering wheel. The horn still worked, at least. At least one thing worked—she did it again and kept doing it. The wheel juddered and the horn honked in dying bleats, and she felt she might have gone on beating it, beating the wheel and the dash and the door, until she was sitting in a pile of rubble, or until her arms were broken and flopping around uselessly, but then her father was holding her still. She tried to pull away, but he held her tighter and tighter, and then—fucking goddamnit shit—she was crying.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The first thing Vance noticed when they entered Cindy’s apartment was the overpowering smell. He was used to bad-smelling places—besides his own, there was the domicile of his aunt, who lived even farther than Vance and his mother out in the Spillman sticks and who was a crazy cat person that took in strays at the rate of a new one about every three months; the few times he and his mother had visited, the smell of cat piss and shit was so strong that it was like a physical threshold they were crossing—but this was different. It was composed of many different elements—beauty products, cooked food in the dirty kitchen, old marijuana and cigarette smoke, accumulated body odor and sweat, a light and not entirely unpleasant fecal tang—united in a sort of ur-female smell. The odor was magnified by the smallness of the space and the closed windows that looked to have been painted over and never opened. This was a dwelling overwhelmed, overoccupied by its occupant, and the air itself was redolent of an unhappy woman.
There was clutter on every visible surface, and it was difficult to move through the room without stepping on a magazine, a CD, an article of clothing. He and Richard tiptoed across spots of green carpet that appeared sporadically, like rocks in a rushing stream. Cindy collapsed on the sofa and stared at the dead TV, worrying her hands. Her eyes were still red rimmed, but at least she wasn’t sobbing anymore. AAA had successfully jumped her car, which Vance had driven over, hoping the mood would magically improve once they got her home, but it hadn’t. She seemed to be waiting for something to happen, for one of them to do something.
Richard said, “Glass of water?”
She gestured with her thumb in the direction of the kitchen, the airspace of which was guarded by a pair of fat, territorial flies. Richard returned with three glasses; Vance’s was stained with purple lipstick. Cindy continued staring at the TV as though there were a tiny play being staged inside of it for her benefit alone. She opened a little handpainted Oriental box on the coffee table, plucked out a few pills, and washed them all down in one swallow. As he had since being introduced to her, Vance tried to get a handle on what she looked like.
It was difficult. For one thing, she was a blur of nervous fidgets—continually cracking her knuckles and smoothing her overtreated blonde hair back in a lank, high ponytail. For another thing, she was one of those people who looked very different from different angles. From the front, she was striking—gorgeous even—with unusually wide-set eyes that communicated a shimmering intelligence, even though all Vance had seen her do so far was yell at a parking attendant and have a nervous breakdown. But looked at from the side, she had a smushed aspect that reminded him of a dog his father had brought home to appease his mother—an idiot Chow that accidentally strangled itself on its own leash while tied up in the backyard. Vance had come home from school to find it lying on its back, grinning up at the sky, black tongue lolling. He couldn’t square the two angles of her face—they didn’t seem to belong to the same person.
She said, “You can go now.”
Richard sighed and said, “Cindy, I know I’m the last person on earth you want to take any help or advice from, but tell me what’s going on.”
She opened her mouth to speak, and as she did there was a pounding at the door. She s
hut her mouth and the pounding stopped, which created the unnerving impression that the sound had come from her mouth. The door opened and a man walked a few steps inside, then stopped. He wore the kind of long, outdated leather jacket that expendable muscle wears in mob movies. But he wasn’t muscular, instead was tall and rangy, about Vance’s height, and stooped at the neck like a reading lamp. He was either the world’s oldest thirty-five-year-old or the world’s youngest sixty-year-old; however old he was, the look of unhappy irritation on his face was timeless. Without acknowledging Richard and Vance, he said, “Who are they?”
“My father and his valet.”
“Valet?” He pronounced the word slowly with an incredulous rising tone that, paired with the expression on his face as he looked at Richard and Vance, suggested he thought a “valet” might be akin to a catamite or a sexual slave, then he returned to Cindy. “Where were you last night?”
“Something came up.”
“Doesn’t it always. Look, you can’t keep avoiding me, we need to talk.”
“I know.”
At this, the man sighed and ran his hand through a mortified forelock retreating as quickly as possible from the dour face below. “When then?”
“I get paid tomorrow, I’ll come by the Monaco.”
He sighed again, and his shoulders drooped. His very person conveyed a world-weariness so profound that it made Vance tired just watching him. He seemed like a man whom life had disappointed beyond all reason and expectation—“long suffering” didn’t even come close to capturing the mythic ennui on display. He said, “Can you borrow it from your dad here?”
“I’m sorry, who are you again?” said Richard.
“Mikhail.”
“Oh, of course. Mikhail. I think my daughter would like you to leave.”
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