The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information did it convey? What message did it carry?
"Donny!" I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he's so gone there's no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don't know, but I somehow squirm to him and hold him close.
"Donny!" I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and nose. It's also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever gets how much blood there is: there's lots of it, and it comes out like water, thin and sloppy and soaking.
His eyelids flutter but he's not seeing anything. There's a little sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I'm screaming, "Corpsman! Corpsman!"
I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60 and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.
Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he's on both of us, and there are three or four more grunts, pressing against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with morphine, then hits me again.
"Donny!" I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.
Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He couldn't remember Donny anymore.
Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to recall Donny but his mind wouldn't let him.
Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine gun fire. The taste of dust and sand.
Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and spreading, easing numbness. I won't let go of Donny. I must hold him still. They're trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness of the morphine taking me out.
I sleep.
I sleep.
Days pass, I'm lost in morphine.
I'm finally awakened by a corpsman. He's shaving me.
That is, my pubic region.
"Huh?" I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy with grease, bound by weight.
"Surgery, Gunny," he says.
"You're going to be operated on now."
"Where am I?" I ask.
"The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward. They'll fix you up good. You been out for a week."
"Am I going to die?"
"Hell, no. You'll be back in the Major Leagues next season."
He shaves me. The light is gray. I can't remember much, but somewhere underneath it there's pain. Donny?
Donny's gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all by itself.
"Dodge?"
"Dodge?" he asks.
"You ain't heard?"
"No," I say, "I been out."
"Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit. Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five more."
"Oh, fuck."
He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he's doing.
"Brophy?" I say.
"I don't know. They got a lot of officers, they hit the command bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys. Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say there'll be a big investigation.
Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You're lucky you got out, Gunny."
Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings. We went, we lost, we died, we came home to--to what?
I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don't want to live. I want to die and be with my people.
"Corpsman?" I grab his arm.
"Yeah?"
"Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got. Please."
"Can't do it, Gunny. You're a goddamned hero.
You've got everything to live for. You're going to get the Navy Cross. You'll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps."
"I hurt so bad."
"Okay, Gunny. I'm done. Let me give you some Mike.
Only a little, though, to make the pain go away."
He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I'm in full traction in San Diego, where I'll spend a year alone, which will be followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.
But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.
The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally Memphis walked in.
"Thought I'd find you here."
"Oh, Christ, what time is it?"
"Mister, it's eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk."
Bob's head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not pleasant. He was still in yesterday's clothes and the room had the stench of unwashed man to it.
Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared, the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky, pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn't.
"She was operated on at seven a.m. for her collarbone.
You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?"
Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob's few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau's New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney's office that fall, but she'd come here out of her and her husband's love of Bob.
"I had a bad night."
"I'll say."
"It ain't what it appears," he said feebly.
"You fell off the wagon but good, that's what it appears."
"I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go."
"You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?"
"I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don't happen to be wrong on this one. Here, loo key here."
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
"There," he said.
"No drunk could do that. It's gone, it's finished, it won't never touch these lips again."
"So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone."
"Nope. Sorry, don't remember that."
"Why the booze?"
"I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again."
"So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?"
"I didn't learn nothing yet."
"But you will," she said.
"I know where to look for an answer," he finally said.
"And where would that be?"
"There's only one place."
She paused.
"Oh, I'll bet this one is rich," she said.
"It just gets better and better."
"Yep," he said.
"I don't never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really rich."
"Where is it?"
"Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But it's there, and by God, I'll dig it out."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It's still there. I'm going to have it cut out."
CHAPTER thirty-three.
It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he'd had to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine, he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.
"Mr. Swagger," said Amy.
"I'd heard you'd left these parts."
"I did," he said.
"But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez."
"Amy, honey, I'll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to Rufus's oats every morning. I bet that'll help him."
"Thank you. Dr. Lopez."
"It's all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr. Swagger wants a private chat."
"
"Bye, Mr. Swagger."
"Good-bye, sweetie," said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.
"Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good," the doctor said.
"Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me."
"Where'd you go to cover?"
"A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise.
Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over."
"I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a hero."
"My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that's all."
"Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you'd come back into the area, Bob. There's no first-class outfit this side of Tucson."
"Maybe I will."
"But you didn't come all this way to talk about horses," said Dr. Lopez.
"No, Doc, I didn't. In fact, I flew down this afternoon.
Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here I am."
Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.
"I can't just do that. Give me a reason."
"I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an airplane without a scene."
"That's not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are not an animal."
"Well," said Bob, "actually I am. I am a Homo sapien.
But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on many animals, and most of 'em are still with us today. I remember you nursed Billy Hancock's paint through two knee operations, and that old boy's still roaming the range."
"That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal."
"You never even charged him."
"I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century."
"Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that's why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now. Tonight."
"Tonight!"
"I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up."
"Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won't be whole again for a long time."
"Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It's a matter of time. I can't tell you why, but I'm under the gun on time. I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of evidence. I need your help."
"Oh, Lord."
"I know you did a tour over there. It's a thing guys like us have in common. We ought to help each other when we can."
"No one else will, that's for sure," said Dr. Lopez.
"You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and worked on more than any ten MDs.
You know what you're doing."
"I saw enough of it over there."
"It's a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man," said Bob.
"I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA don't recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever."
"That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it."
"I copy you there. I wouldn't be here if I didn't have no other choice. I need that bullet."
"You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern hospital medicine."
"You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don't do it, I'll have to do it myself and that won't be pretty."
"I believe you would. Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a bitch. You better be, because you're going to need every bit of tough to get through the next few days."
Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The ugliness of the entrance wound was visible, he hated to look at it. The bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle, then shattered the plate like flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else-- a channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward, surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.
"No false hip?" said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it carefully.
"No, sir," said Bob.
"They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you."
"Did it break a leg, too?"
"No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg."
The doctor probed Bob's inner thigh, where a long dead patch described the careening bullet's terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up, away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor's operating theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems.
Except for the two of them, it was deserted.
"Well, you're lucky," Dr. Lopez said.
"I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn't take it out without permanently crippling you."
"I am lucky," said Bob.
"Yeah," the doctor said, "I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down close to the knee. I know what happened.
They had to screw your hip together with transplants, the deep, muscular wound of the bullet didn't matter to them.
They didn't even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory, not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors."
"You can get it?"
"Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You will bleed like a dog on the roadway.
I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest.
This isn't a small thing. It isn't a huge thing, but you ought to spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet."
"You cut it out tonight. I'll sleep here and be gone in the morning. You give me a good pain shot and that will be that."
"You are a hard case," said the doctor.
"My wife says the same."
"Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All ri
ght, you sit back. I'm going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I'll go scrub, and we'll give you a painkiller and we'll do what's gotta be done."
Bob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation.
The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut down on blood loss. Then he'd wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if an artery had been snipped, but it hadn't, and as the initial jet was soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the ugly gash.
He'd seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny's blood. Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten into his throat fast and he'd gagged it out. There was so much, it overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: it came from his nose and mouth, as if he'd been punched in the face. Donny's face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.
The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a coin purse, then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound and began to press and feel.
"Is it there?"
"I don't have it--yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I'd guess that's standard for an old bullet."
He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new scalpel, he cut more deeply, more blood flowed.
"I'm going to have to irrigate," he said through his mask.
"I can't see much, all that damn blood."
"They will do that on you, won't they?" said Bob.
Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that it bubbled.
It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not unpleasant, even a little ticklish, he could feel the probe, could almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn't just pop out as a new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation.
He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor's gloved fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his surgeon's gown and smock.
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