The water rose through the towel and clamped itself upon his face. He tried to hold his face tight to fight it, keep it from tunneling into his systems, but that defense lasted only a second. It unleashed fear. Swagger was not a fearful man and had learned over long, hard years how to separate himself from the rat teeth of what little fear he felt, how to objectify the agony and examine it as if it were the product of some other mind, a scientific phenomenon to be studied. That worked for a bit, and then that defense too was overwhelmed.
He felt his body jack and spasm as the Irishmen leaned into it and all his strength went against all theirs and since there were more of them, they prevailed, leaving him alone, finally, with the water.
Water, water, everywhere. Funny little rhyme from somewhere lost, it was nevertheless the hard truth of this moment, as his mind now spasmed, just as his body did and lost control against the totality of death and wet that clamped upon his face, until he blew hard against the towel, expelling some small portion of what had come in, and then he reflexively inhaled and there was no air, only a rushing wall of water, coded with cold and death, and here it was at last, he’d dealt enough of it to men the world over, turning Panther Battalion’s legions to anonymous grave markers in a foreign land, blowing Payne’s arm off and Shreck’s lungs out, outsniping the general in the bitter woods of Arkansas, taking down the Cubans on the high road in the mountains, oh so many, sending the fat Jap’s head spinning through space as he was about to dispatch Susan, then upstroking Kondo, the man stunned that his own blow had bounced off a steel hip, him driving the sword so hard to spine, God, the blood, a man had so much blood inside him, and those four Grumley fucks, in store and parking lot, each thinking himself such a gunman and finding out no, I’m not much of a gunman next to Swagger, and finally those two gangbangers in the car fight, so many of them, and now he’d join them, they’d saved him a place in hell right among them—
The air rushed in. He breathed it hard as the towel was torn off, sucking it in, pure elixir of ambrosia, cold and life-sustaining, his lungs inflating greedily.
“Did I not tell you, boys, did I not? A strong fellow, sure, so he is. Almost a minute in the universe of the drowning and not a word for it.”
“And no shit at all,” said Jimmy. “His buttocks got a cork a’tween ’em.”
“He is tough,” said Ginger. “Give the poor beggar that. Impressive start. A right bucko, as you said, Anto. Maybe ’twill be a long night’s work.”
“On the other hand,” said Jimmy, “maybe that was it for the fella. Now he’s spent. He gave it a good go, but he isn’t holding it today, not now that he knows what it’s like and how far beyond deciding it is.”
Anto took the opportunity to continue the lecture.
“Finally,” he said, “there’s my kind of torturer. I am what is called the duty torturer. I ask no understanding, and if caught out by the Clara Bartons of the news, then I go to me fate with dignity, sure in the conviction that what I done was in the right, no matter how them lady-fellows spun it round and made it seem evil. Because of Anto Grogan and his three leprechauns, there’s a hundred-odd British squaddies back in Blighty, drinking Mr. Guinness’s black velvet and enjoying their fine plowman’s lunch. We won’t comment on the fact that the fookin’ Brits always make their pet Irish their torturers, because they know we have the strength, which they themselves do not, and at the same time will take our ultimate fate, our dismissal and disgrace, with dignity befitting our proud race. So when the four of us are found out and called beasts and driven from the service we have given our lives to, then that’s fine by us, it is. We seen the duty, we done the duty. We take the crap that comes afterwards, the shit the Clara Bartons bring to us. You may ask the boys, perhaps they differ, but because of what we done in the night in the cellar of the jail with the buckets and buckets of lovely snotgreen water—because of that we knew in the day where the camel jiggers would be, and we put them down. Lord God, Sniper Swagger, you alone of men would know how godly that was, how Christian civilization was what we defended with our manly trigger fingers. Remember that wolfish Yank in the movie and his speech about standing on the wall? That was us, boyo, on the wall, doing the duty that had to be done. Or do you read Orwell? You’ve heard the one I loves so, about the comfort and warmth of many fine people in England, which I extend to Christian civilization, because rough men do dark deeds by night. We here in this room, all of us, are mates, having done the dark deeds, having been the rough men. Sniper, are you ready for more?”
Who could outspeak a poet? Not Swagger.
“Fuck you, Mr. Potatohead.”
Anto sighed, as if disappointed in the lame zinger that Swagger had improvised, and more disappointed that his hero was no Oscar Wilde, answering in honed epigrams.
“A comment bespeaking futility. No better than the sod carrier’s curse. Are yis not finished yet?” he wondered and stared into Swagger’s twisted, drenched face, and answered his own question. “You are not. Still, I think you’ll be before I have my breakfast eaten. Second bucket, buckos.”
“You talk too much.”
“I do, I do. The Irishman’s curse.”
The second bucket was a creature. It hunted him through the towel and he squirmed and struggled, trying to fight for a last wisp of oxygen trapped in the fibers of the towel, but then it had him. He thought of some kind of wet squid, something monstrous from the dark, dark well of human fear, some glistening, tentacled, boneless crusher from the deep that wrapped its wet strong arms about him and buried his face in the nexus where all those legs formed some kind of hideous, pink, cold, horror-movie sucking mask. Wet and cold and slimy, oceanic and ancient, it fought to snatch his soul from him, and he felt his body bucking against its grip, his bound knees trying to rip free, his hands trying to claw away from their plastic wires, and he had an image of ripping the thing off his face and throwing it to the floor and stomping it, smashing it with his boots, feeling it squirm in endless pain as it died spewing green greasy guts across the floor and then it all went black—
“You said he’d be a fighter, and a fighter he is,” Ginger said, as Bob came back to consciousness through a sense of dislocation. Air, there was air.
“Almost nobody lasts long enough to actually pass out,” said Jimmy, with just a hint of awe showing in his voice. “I don’t recall any man ever passing out. They panic and beg for release, but no one can consciously hold their breath long enough to simply make themselves faint like that.”
“Agh,” said Anto, “he does have the fight in him, for such a string bean of a fellow. You’d have thought a bruiser might have a bigger lung capacity and do well under the towel, but this fella’s nothing but skin and bones, yet he’s got a lot of battle in them scrawny pants of his. And again, Ginger, not a shitter, is he? I should have bet you, Ginger, on that. Give it to me. I knew he wasn’t a shitter.”
Anto leaned into Bob’s face, peering intently, seeking answers.
“Sniper, you’re a lot of trouble.”
“Begging your pardon, Anto,” said a new voice—it had to be the one called Raymond, who hardly ever spoke—“but maybe it’s best if yis don’t be calling him ‘Sniper.’ It reminds him of who he is, and in that perhaps he’s finding his bloody strength.”
“Hmm,” said Anto, “good point, Raymond. Should I try the reverse then?”
“I should,” said Raymond. “Don’t build him up, tear the fellow down. Make him see how little he is, how he cannot win, how we hold all the cards, we are the power. This man here is a man being tortured in a cellar, the lowest form of life there is, at the whim and mercy of them that has him.”
“Did you hear that, you bloody bastard?” Anto asked Bob. “Raymond thinks I’m all wrong, I’m building you up when it’s tearing you down that should be my pathway. All right then, I’ll try it. Nobody can say I don’t listen to suggestions. Hero! What tripe! What rotten spew! What yellow runny shit! You’d be nothing. Do you hear? You’re a man who’s kill
ed boys and women in your time, as have we all. You ain’t no hero, you’re a bloody killer, with your fancy rifle, lyin’ up in the grass, waiting for the poor sods to come out and then taking all from them with but the three ounces you put into the trigger, and it’s nothing to you, but somewhere there’s a widow cryin’, a baby or two starvin’, a mate grievin’, a father disconsolate, a mother ruined. But that’s nothing to the bastard in them bushes calmly and without a scratch on him looking for his next voyager and hoping to get back while the scoff’s still hot. Aye, looking at him makes me sick, boys. Douse him again. Get this bastard done so I don’t have to truck with the gobshite.”
The next bucket was pain. That’s all. Through all Swagger, the pain was general. It had nothing to do with concepts such as “water” or “torture” or with who he was and what he knew and who he was responsible to; it had no meaning whatsoever. It was just pure, harsh, absolute pain, radiating outward from his lungs as his discipline gave and he took water deep inside all his channels, and yet through it all, he noticed that a little pain in his backward-bent wrist, where the flex-cuff’s sharp plastic edge cut him enough to penetrate the general blanket of agony, and in need of something to control his mind, some servomechanism on panic, he twisted that wrist harder, feeling the goddamned plastic edge bite deeper and deeper, and he tried to imagine how it sawed through the muscle fibers, rawly separating them, and how of their own volition they peeled upward, away from each other, emitting a thin penmanship of blood from the subcutaneous network of capillaries in his skin, not a gush of blood, just a scrawl of it, but he concentrated on the pain, the sharp, biting pain of that tiny wound against the larger insult to body and mind and—
“Goddamn the fellow, will he not give!” screamed Anto. “The bastard is getting on me nerves. We’re all knackered hard, sure we is. What, how many buckets now, Jimmy?”
Three, thought Bob, I’ve lasted three buckets on these motherfuckers.
“That would be seven now, Anto,” said Ginger.
Seven! He’d lost track, his mind was falling in and out of gear. Seven. He must have been there for hours. He had no idea.
Someone slapped him hard in the face. His eyes opened, revealing nothing but blur and sparkle behind which figures moved, and then someone wiped them clear of water, and he saw now the four had stripped off their shirts and were down to undershirts, the bulky ones, tattooed muscles glistening with either sweat or splash from their labor, and scrawny Raymond like a wet rat. They were breathing hard, and all had hair pasted down flat and damp.
Seven buckets on you motherfuckers, he thought, even though it was hard to remember who, exactly, he was, and why he was here or what this was all about. That had vanished somewhere along with the untracked buckets.
“Jaysus Janey Mac, he’s hard of head,” said Anto. “All right, goddamn your black heart, Swagger, now I’m giving it to you straight. You listen hard. I’m bloody tired of you acting the maggot. This time, we kill you. If you’d any to tell, you’d have told, I’m sure. Your silence makes its point: you’ve told no one of your findings, because if you had, you’d give them up. You’d put them between you and the horror of the water. Remember Winston in Room 101, when finally he gave up Julia out of fear of the rats lunching on his nose. If you had a Julia to give us, you’d have given us she long before. So there is no Julia—”
What was this asshole ranting about?
“—there is no Bureau, there is no report protocol nor coded words, there is no waiting SWAT team. You’re on your own, Sniper, and I should have known because us snipers is lonely bastards, out beyond, doing the dark thing solitarylike and crawling back then where all the boys pretend they don’t see you because you’re naked death, whilst they’s battle-killin’, a whole different kettle of shad, unless of course Johnny Muhammad has snipers, and then it’s your ass sure they be lovin’. But you’re alone in this one, and that means that in the way things are, you’re no better at all than I. You’re not a holy warrior fighting for some holy cause like the goddamned rug weavers, you’re a bloody mercenary. You take your wages and you’ll soon be dead, and heaven ain’t suspended and earth’s foundations ain’t fled. You’re just dead. Okay boys, this is it, I’m done fooling with this one. Swagger, ’tis a shame to end up drownded dead in a bucket like a Titanic rat after all ye’ve been and done, but there it lies.”
Again the towel was clamped and the hard muscled limbs pressed against his bound body to hold against the spasms of the drowning man, and again he felt the dread infiltration of the water, its first mild licks, its rising chill, its fingers somehow clawing to rip at his mouth and nose and tear them wide open to fill them and kill him dead drowning.
This bucket was blue. That is to say, as the water rushed through the towel and clamped its intensity across his face, he was taken back in memory close on fifty years, and he remembered a day at the public pool in Little Rock, sometime in the fifties, a bright, hot summer, he and a thousand other kids flapping and jostling and splashing in that vast blue wetness, and he was trying to swim on his own and somehow his thin boy’s arms propelled him a certain blind distance in a certain blind direction and for just a second he actually was flat in the water propelling himself along on the rhythm of his muscles and then he ran out of strength and settled to the bottom, and that was when he realized he had swum too far in the wrong direction and was now in over his head. This is how children drown; caught in the grip of panic, he opened his mouth to scream but it didn’t happen and instead the cold, chlorinated brew of the pool raced in torrents into lungs and gut, and the lack of oxygen tripped off a flare of fear and he flappity-flap-flapped and he sank yet further and he had a moment when he knew he was dead and he saw blue blue blue shot with bubbles arising as if he were dying in Alka-Seltzer or some terrible thing, and suddenly someone strong had him, and the sun burst above him as if it were some kind of skyrocket, and the air rushed him, sucked with all the hunger of the young, and he was propelled this way in the strong hands of his savior, who of course was no one less than his father.
“Whoa, Bobby, you almost went to Davy Jones on your old dad, would have upset Mommy for days!” his father sang as he brought the boy to safety. “Yes sir, she’d never give me a moment’s peace!”
The man laughed, and Bob saw his father’s face clearly for just a second, a great man, a good man, a brave man, the best who ever lived for this among a million other reasons, all much better than this one, and it occurred to him that if he died, who on earth would remember his father? No one. He was the last who’d shared time on earth with Earl Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, the son of Sheriff Charles Swagger, Earl who’d gone off to war with the Marines and won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima and come home for ten good years as a state trooper in the Arkansas Highway Patrol before he was taken from the world for nothing, really, nothing that counted. And Bob felt some kind of sudden strength: if you kill me, if I die in this water, it is of little interest to the world, but it means Earl Swagger’s memory dies too, and I cannot let that happen.
Time passed.
His father aged.
It was a few years later. Daddy left in the late afternoon, knowing without looking that his son watched him go, and he raised a hand. So long, little boy. See you soon, little fellow. Daddy’ll be back and we’ll play some catch or walk in the woods or something, yes sir.
But his father didn’t come back again, ever. Instead, late at night, the colonel showed up, and then Sam and then some newspaper people and then some neighbors, and then some Negroes from the other side of town. They were all silent, except for his mother’s sobbing, and in time, the colonel came up and told him that his father was dead. Compared to that pain, that long, hard trek through wasteland and jungle, this shit was nothing.
“Goddamn him,” screamed Anto, in lost and wild fury, as the towels came off in what seemed like only three hours. “Look at the bastard. He just looks at us, him growing stronger, with them mad sniper eyes. Does he like it, do you th
ink? Has he grown gills to live in water? Has he evolved himself backwards to some fishy lurker? The bastard, the bastard,” and he let fly, smashing Bob hard in the face with a muscle-clotted palm, driving him to the floor with a clatter.
There was silence in the room, except for the heavy breathing of the torturers. Finally Anto spoke.
“Get him cleaned up. Rinse him down. Get him some food. Let him piss and finally shit. I’ve got to try something else. The bloody fooker. He must be Irish to have a head or heart that much of steel.”
40
Nick had, for the first time in his life, taken to sleeping in. And why not? He had nowhere to go or be; he was just home, besieged by press, waiting for various accusations and investigations to reach some kind of clarity or resolution.
But that morning, Sally nudged him awake at 7 a.m.
“Umm. Ummphh. Yeah, what?”
“Sweetie, sweetie, wake up. Something’s happened.”
He blinked, rubbed shellac out of his eyes so that they finally cracked open to admit the dawn, and sat up.
“Whattya mean?” he mumbled, his tongue still stuck to the roof of his dry mouth.
She stood by the window, trim in her blue business suit, her horn-rim glasses glinting.
“The vultures,” she said, hooking a thumb to indicate the alien gathering on the lawn, “they’ve tripled. Maybe quadrupled.”
“Kill some of ’em when you back out, will you?” he said.
“I just want to break the foot of that prissy little bitch Jamie whatever. She’s out there, the wan, pale little zombie. She nailed me on the Mason thing with an ambush on the courthouse steps. I still owe her.”
“Really,” Nick said, “it’s much cheaper to kill them. If you just maim them, you have to support them for years. If you kill them, their buddies lose interest in a couple of weeks.”
“Okay, sweetie, have to run. Summary’s at ten thirty. Have a good day.”
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 91