IN THE LIGHT
He drove the bus through the sharp edge of night into day. Below, in fierce, bright light, Florida stretched, its white sand a chalk line between the cobalt blue of the sea and the enameled green of the hind. Justin saw home, and his hands clenched on the wheel so hard, they trembled.
On a small side street of a quiet subdivision in Boca Raton, Justin brought the bus down and parked before a pink cinderblock house.
“Don’t you want to go in?” the exec asked.
Justin stared out the bus window. The house was just as he’d remembered: the mango tree, thick-trunked and wide-leaved, dominating the front yard; the bed of jasmine and bird-of-paradise blooming just beyond. An ocean of emerald grass lapped at the pavement.
“You’ve come all this way,” the bus driver said. “Don’t you want to see your mother?”
The bus doors opened, and Justin stepped out. Above his head, he noticed, the palms made a clattering sound in the breeze. He bent to pick up a fallen coconut and held it to his chest, running his hands along its smooth, green surface.
Florida smelled the same: lush and moist and verdant, as though the air itself were about to bloom. Above the roofs of the houses, toward the sea, blue-gray clouds massed, the sight of them at once languid and anticipatory.
“Do you like it?” the exec asked. “Is it what you were looking for?”
Without answering, Justin skirted the house and headed for the backyard. There was the screened porch he remembered; here the budding lemon tree. And there stood his mother, hanging laundry on the line.
“Mom,” he said.
She turned and gave him a smile. The features didn’t stay put long enough for recognition. Her nose grew short, and then long. Her mouth rearranged itself several times indecisively. Her hair went chameleon-like from brown to salt-and-pepper to white.
“I see you’ve brought friends,” she said. Her voice was undecided, too, changing from alto to soprano and back again. The timbre of it was all wrong. “Let’s go in and have some milk and cake.”
He trailed after her, a chick inescapably captured in the gravity of a mother hen. The screen door, which always needed oiling, squeaked just as he remembered. The kitchen was the same, too: all sunshine yellow and white.
“I’ve missed you,” Justin said as he took a seat at the at the kitchen table. To his left sat the bus driver, chair faced the wrong way, arms resting on the metal bar of the back. To Justin’s right Harding sat, fingers laced on the Formica
There was the sugar bowl he remembered from childhood, the ceramic one with the flowers on the side. The coconut in his lap, Justin watched his mother take down four plates and carry them to the table.
“Do you hear it?” he asked his mother.
She glanced up at him curiously, her eyes shifting from blue to hazel to black. “What?”
‘That sound of the palm trees tapping. Do you hear it?”
“It’s just the wind,” his mother told him.
“Yes,” he said. “Just the wind.”
She poured milk in four glasses and set the chocolate cake on the table.
“Justin was just going to tell us about war,” Harding told Justin’s mother.
“Were you, dear?” his mother said.
The palm trees in the front yard rattled like icy castanets.
Justin looked up into his mother’s face and saw that her eyes had changed to green.
“How is war?” she asked.
They were all staring at him now, the bus driver and Harding and his mother. The clatter of the palm trees was so huge a sound, he could scarcely think.
“I’m scared all the time,” he whispered.
The air in the kitchen was cool and thick. “Tell me,” his mother said.
He remembered planes erupting into fire, coming down over the desert in graceful orange arcs, like falling stars he might have once wished on. The worst, he remembered, were night landings, the carrier below in the darkness, a lit postage stamp in the immensity of the sea. The carrier was such a tiny thing, he was constantly amazed to find it. Sometimes, when the seas were high, he pictured the hook not catching and his plane tumbling and crashing on the deck.
Wrapping his body around the solidity of the coconut, he said, “I wish I could go home.”
He flinched when he felt Harding’s mushy hand touch him. “You are home,” the exec said.
But Justin had remembered the thing he most wanted to forget: Boca Raton as it truly was. At high tide, he knew, fish swam in empty houses, crabs’ scuttled through backyards, and walls and fences stood like reefs against the pummeling of the long breakers.
“I wish I could go home,” he whispered, and neither Harding’s touch nor the cool sound of his mother’s voice was any comfort.
IN THE PYRENEES BELOW BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON
Pelham hadn’t ordered him out of the chair, so Gordon went on, making slow and cautious time up the ravine, Rover bobbing behind his unit, keeping out of sight.
Gordon’s tubes were erect, his missiles armed. He drove with his thumb on the firing stud.
Lucky, that, he thought, when he rounded a bend in the stream and found an Arab detachment waiting.
There was the guy with the mortar calmly settling the CRAV in his sights; there were the rest, not thirty yards away, hidden in the boulders as best they were able. And here was Gordon, tubes upraised, ready for the showdown.
It was Dodge City allover again.
Before Gordon had a chance to react, a few AK rounds pinged off his hide. Surprise brought his thumb down on the stud.
Missile One launched with an ear-splitting hiss, rocking the CRAV on its springs. The blast of the propellant blinded Gordon; an instant later he was deafened by the missile’s explosion. Even before the CRAV was fully steadied, even before he could see where he was going, he spun right, hoping to avoid the returning fire.
There wasn’t any. Looking down into the clear stream, he saw the water was threaded with syrupy crimson. Funny how blood mixed with water, he thought. Funny how beautiful it was. It made delicate, curlicue feathers, deft as a painter’s strokes.
When the smoke cleared, he saw the small Rattlesnake missile had hit the rocks to the rear of the squad. The burst of shrapnel and stone had been intensified by the contained space. Men and pieces of men were tangled like flood debris.
The knot of shredded corpses stirred. Slowly, gradually, a man crawled out from under, dragging pink streamers of his own intestines. Rover drifted past Gordon and settled, gentle as milkweed fluff, on the soldier. When the blue light lifted a moment later, the man was no longer moving.
“Get back here!” Gordon shouted, embarrassed and sickened at the same time, as though he had caught his dog worrying a neighbor’s pet rabbit.
Rover floated toward Gordon and stopped a few feet away. In the back of his mind Gordon could hear a chill, questioning rattle.
“You don’t do things like that, damn it!” he shouted.
“Shit, that’s ... Jesus, that’s ...”
The dead soldier was a funny almond color now, and there was an expression of stunned relief on his face.
NEAR LERIDA, SPAIN
Rita clambered out of the Sikorsky and trudged cumbersomely across the tarmac. The duffel bag was weighing her down and somehow the M-16 and she kept colliding butts.
Beyond a Chinook, an absurdly petite soldier stood near a machine-gun-mounted Humvee. Helen Dix, Rita decided; and she found herself wondering if the lieutenant had a problem finding size-three BDUs.
“Capt’n Beaudreaux?” the lieutenant asked as Rita got within earshot.
It was a moment before Rita remembered to return the junior officer’s salute.
“I’m Lieutenant Dix. Glad to have you aboard,” the woman said in a Geor
gia-cracker drawl.
Rita’s heart sank. Lauterbach was a man of contradictions. A man who had the sense to put her in a woman’s platoon and the stupidity to forget that the officer was a redneck.
“Thanks, lieutenant. I appreciate that,” she replied, steeling herself for some good old-fashioned prejudice. “I’ll try and stay out of your way.”
Although dainty, Dix had wiry forearms that would have looked more natural on a boy. Her denim blue eyes had that long-distance stare common to front-line soldiers.
Dix blinked at Rita. Her gaze seemed to narrow its focus.
“Where you all from?” she asked.
“Louisiana originally—”
Suddenly Dix smiled. “Lordy, Lordy,” she said. “A Southerner. Thank God. Come on, Capt’n. We got us some driving to do.”
Surprised by the genuine welcome in the lieutenant’s voice, Rita climbed into the Humvee. Dix had gone shopping for her platoon, she saw. The passenger floorboard and the backseat were filled with string bags of fruit.
‘That there’s Specialist Jimmy Hoover,” Dix said, gesturing with her head in the direction of the machine gun. The young, angular Hoover was sitting with the gun between his legs.
Dix keyed the ignition, gunned the engine, and peeled rubber on her way out of the base.
“You all take your stop-up pills, ma’am?” Dix asked, taking her eyes off the road.
Rita kept hers straight ahead, figuring that at the speed they were going someone in the Humvee should be watching. “Please don’t call me ma’am,” she said in a strained voice. They took a corner too fast, the fenders brushing a yucca and a close-packed fence of blooming cactus.
“Begging the Capt’n’s pardon, but what do you want me to call you?”
“Call me Rita. Just Rita.” They were zipping down a straightaway now. A white goat barely escaped being a road kill.
“Well, Rita. You take your stop-up pills, or what? I mean, if it ain’t the worst thing that can happen getting your period in the field, it comes close.”
“No, I haven’t taken ... I mean, nobody gave me ...”
“Shit. Ain’t men all alike?” Dix asked rhetorically, reaching into her BDU blouse and bringing out a plastic bottle. ‘They just plain overlook the essentials. My old boyfriend? He used to climb my ass about spending too much money on Tampax, like crotch wicks were jewelry or something. Here. You just take one of these, sugar. There’s a canteen down there on the floorboard someplace.”
Rita took the pill bottle. She was prying the canteen loose from a bag of yellow Spanish cherries when the Humvee slowed.
Startled. Rita lifted her head. Dix was driving grim-faced now, careful not to hit the refugees massed on the side of the road.
There were hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. Old men with canes. Begrimed children holding tight to their mothers’ hands. They were walking west, all with the same blankness in their faces, all wearing the same shroud of dust. A line of migrating ghosts. The mass of people moved with the communal, dull purpose of herded cattle.
Rita stared hard at a man in a three-piece suit, a basket of clothes in his arms. Had he not looked so exhausted, so desperate she might have thought he was on his way to the laundry after a long day at work. When the Humvee passed, his eyes tracked it, hot and urgent.
“Where do they come from?” Rita asked. There were so many, it seemed all Spain was emptying.
“Little towns around here. Hey,” the lieutenant said in a bright voice. “I hear you know General Lauterbach. He as much of a hard-ass as everybody says?”
Hard-ass? Rita wondered. Funny. She had never thought of the general that way. “Not that I’ve noticed,” Rita said.
“Huh. Maybe he’s just nicer to you than he is to his staff.”
“I’ve been told I have the general’s every confidence, whatever that means,” Rita said distantly, wondering when the march of homeless Spaniards would end.
“No, honey,” Dix laughed. “I hear he likes you. That he’s what the girls at Robert E. Lee High used to call ’namored on you and all.”
As she swallowed the Mens-Ex and clamped the top back on the canteen, Rita’s mind returned to the helicopter, to the touch of Lauterbach’s hand on hers. “I doubt that.”
“Well, I got it straight from Major Tubbs who got the word from Lt. Colonel Martin who heard it right from the great man himself, that we were to treat you like Steuben crystal. Ain’t that just the most romantic thing you ever heard? Steuben crystal. And here I was expecting you to be some Junior Leaguer, not some tough broad with a grenade launcher on her weapon.”
Rita frowned. “I’m simply important to the general as a researcher. That’s all that means,”
Taking her eyes from the road, the lieutenant gave Rita a sly look. “Ain’t what Lt. Colonel Martin says. Fact is, Lt. Colonel Martin understood that General Lauterbach had a particular interest in you and that your safety and well-being was paramount to the general. Paramount, he says, like if anything happened to you, the army would chew ass past my tailbone. Sugar, that may not be love, but that’s heavy like.”
Rita remembered the first time she met the general. She’d been in an aircraft hangar sorting out the bones of five men who had burned to death in an APC. Two of the bodies were drawn up in the typical burn victim’s pugilist stance. The other three were in charred-bone pieces.
She remembered she had spread out the dental charts and medical records and had just identified one body by an old spiral fracture of the tibia when someone walked into the hangar.
Hearing footsteps, she had looked up but saw nothing important about the visitor in the shadows. She returned to her task.
“You’re taking a long time with this,” the man said. “Why don’t you just approximate the way most of the other doctors do?”
She spun around. “You’ll get your IDs when I say you get your IDs. Families will be burying these bodies and they won’t want to cry over some stranger.”
He took a step forward into the floodlights and she saw two things at once: the disarming smile on his face and the four stars on his collar. “What’s your name, Captain?” the general asked pleasantly.
“Doctor,” she shot back. “Doctor Beaudreaux,”
The smile faltered. “Well. Carry on,” he said with a vague nod. Then he left the room.
It was only afterward that she realized she hadn’t saluted and that he hadn’t chastised her for that.
It’s obvious he loves me for my tact, Rita thought. Or my nappy hair. Or my training-bra-sized breasts.
On the way to the staging area, Rita told Lieutenant Dix of the new orders and tried to picture herself in bed with the general: him on top; her on top. None of the positions seemed to work. And ringed around the bed, the displaced civilians of Spain were looking on with their huge, empty eyes.
CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL
Even after the CRAV was safe abed, Gordon sat in the black silence of the goggles, letting his nerves settle like fizz off a Coke. When he felt his legs and arms were steady, he pried off the headgear.
Ishimoto was sitting next to him.
They looked at each other. In the close quarters of the command center their knees were almost touching. Someone had installed a secondary screen on the table near the CRAV computer.
Ishimoto sat unmoving, even his breathing kept to a minimum. As spare and abstract as a haiku.
“It bothers you,” he finally said.
Gordon didn’t need an explanation. “Yeah,” he agreed.
“It bothers me.” They’d snuck into his room, rearranged his furniture, and then sat there and watched him work. He hadn’t known a thing.
“We leave impressions on all we touch,” the rep said. “I have used all five CRAVs in this place. The mark you leave on your unit is
strong. That is why I think the Woofer follows you. It senses you in it. It senses your equanimity.”
Ishimoto sat back, as though to allow Gordon to digest what he had said.
Equanimity? Gordon thought. What the hell does equanimity mean?
“What?” he asked.
“Detachment. Tranquility,” was the reply. “One must detach oneself from the world in order to be at peace with it. You have this quality, but it is an indifference I do not understand. I follow the Eightfold Path because it has been taught to me. You follow it unknowing. It is possible that you may be a true master.”
Gordon scratched his cheek. “Huh?”
“I am Zen Buddhist,” the rep replied, his voice and his face passive. Jesus. And Ishimoto thought Gordon was tranquil. If the Japanese had been any more tranquil, he would have been asleep.
“No kidding?” said Gordon, Intrigued, “And I could be a Zen master?”
Ishimoto’s lips split into a broad smile. “No kidding.” Gordon sat back in the command chair and grinned at the boxy computer.
The Japanese stood. “You will be hungry.”
In the empty cave of Gordon’s belly an appetite awakened, a bear rousing from hibernation. “Right. Let’s go to the mess hall or something. You eaten?”
Ishimoto shook his head. “I have waited for you.”
As they left the room, Gordon glanced at Ishimoto again. “Hey. Are you all right now?”
Ishimoto raised a placid eyebrow.
“I mean, after what happened between you and the Woofer. You okay?”
It was as though a wall had come down between them, a soft wall, but it was there nevertheless.
“Yes,” he said simply.
Gordon hesitated before asking the next question. “How did it feel? What did you see?”
Ishimoto took a long, deep breath. His onyx eyes settled on Gordon. “I saw a great emptiness,” he said.
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