“Golden Boy?” he asked, in a mocking, though playful tone.
Richards grinned self-effacingly. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll give you that one. In fact, now that I think about it, I like ‘wolf eye’ better. Gonna put in for that one next time around, see if it’s available.”
Dugan smiled, noticing then that the slate gray murk of the nighttime was starting to break. Clouds had been building throughout the evening, blocking the starlight and perhaps giving him an extra minute of life. Nonetheless, he began to experience that sense of bone-tired weariness and muddled thought that signaled his oncoming death. It was nearing dawn.
“Gonna have to stop soon,” he said, and it wasn’t a request.
Richards scrunched his face guiltily and winced before letting out a sigh. Dugan knew then there was something that Richards hadn’t told him.
“Can’t do it,” he said finally. “But I think we can get you all fixed up.”
Springing to his feet, he shouted to the wheelhouse: “Arturo, por favor, grab me one of them tarps from the front of the boat.”
With a high-pitched, “Si, senor,” the boy was off and running.
Turning to Dugan, Richards went on. “Now remember, there were four boats to choose from, and you and I both know I didn’t pick this one for its seaworthiness.”
Walking toward the boxlike construction amidship, he reached for the hatch and lifted. From inside drifted the scent memory of tens of thousands of dead fish that had once occupied the space. Peering inside, Dugan saw Rorschach patterns of ancient blood and guts decorated the interior. In addition to a half inch or so of fetid water, the bottom had bits of loose bone and petrified skin and congealed fish parts.
Arturo took that moment to bring over a stained and ripped segment of black canvas that had also been used in its past for God knows what.
Dugan eyed the box with uncertainty, carefully inspecting the areas where lid met edge, where the hinges were fitted to ensure they were flush and made a tight seal. In this instance, the decades of fish blood and other liquids that had over time splattered the interior had also oozed into the grooves and pits and small bore holes, becoming a solid glue that might have made the structure airtight as well.
Satisfied, Dugan turned to Richards. “I’ve had worse,” he said honestly.
Perhaps not expecting that reaction, it took some time for Richards to issue what for him was a sincere and perhaps admiring smile.
“I’ll bet you have, kid,” he said. “I’ll just bet you have.”
Somehow understanding what was going on, the boy held out the tarp to Dugan, who took it from his hands and thanked him. Bending low, Dugan picked up his bag and tossed it into the chest. Climbing in after it left him about waist high, so he had to sink to his knees before making the floor his watery bed. Flipping open the tarp that would serve as yet another, backup shield from the sun’s deadly rays, he lifted it over his body and prepared to lie down for the day. Reaching for the lid, he started pulling it closed, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on Arturo. Before shutting it entirely, he sent a wink the boy’s way and then was gone.
For himself, the boy seemed to puff up a moment, realizing suddenly that the most important job he had on this voyage, perhaps the most important job he would ever have, was to make sure that this hatch remained closed until the sun went down this evening.
The last thing Dugan heard before he died for yet another day, after lying down in the putrid water and covering himself tightly with the tarp, was the minor thump produced by a sixty or so pound boy plopping himself down on top of the box. And Dugan was certain he would still be there when he woke up in the evening.
Chapter Six
1
Bob Hope was up on stage telling stupid jokes that nobody thought were funny, but they all laughed anyway because it was a little piece of home brought right here to the jungle. Well, maybe some of them jokes was funny. He always brought pretty girls along too, and that never hurt. Pruitt was hoping he’d get to see Ann Margaret, who he liked a lot. He saw her in a movie with Elvis once. He also could have gone for Nancy Sinatra, whose “Boots Were Made For Walking” had become something of an anthem in their outfit. But they got Joey Heatherton instead, and she did all right.
He could draw a little bit as a kid. His father caught him at it one day and told him it was pansy stuff, then broke all his crayons and colored pencils and threw them in the trash before dragging him out back and showing him how to fight. That’s all a man needed to know in this world, his father told him. Hell, a strong back and sharp knuckles was all his father ever had, all his father ever needed, so therefore it was all Pruitt would ever need too. Though he occasionally wondered what his no account, shiftless drunk of a father would know about any of it, he took to his backyard lessons like a man, instruction that was often accompanied by the sting of a leather belt, and sometimes extended to the kitchen, to his bedroom, to the basement he was always too afraid to go down, anywhere he came near enough for his father to get his hands on him.
He knocked up his girlfriend in high school, which was dumb but probably just as well, because he wasn’t going to graduate anyway. Too many fights, too many missed classes, and too much time spent in detention and in the moonshine fog of late night East Texas hellraising with Jimmy Pratchett and Richie Coughlin in Jimmy’s father’s Ford pickup. The baby was six months old by the time he signed up for the military. It seemed at the time his only option, and anyway, he was young and strong and courtesy of his father, one tough bastard. Patriotic as all get out too. Got a tattoo of the Stars and Stripes on his right shoulder one drunken night just to prove it. It would be the first of many.
Then came boot camp in the swelter of a South Carolina summer, and one mean S.O.B. of a drill sergeant who claimed to love all his men, but seemed to take a special delight in making Pruitt’s life a living hell, though Pruitt did sometimes wonder if every man in his outfit didn’t feel the same. Either way, the D.I. did his job, and by the time he got through with him, Pruitt was a Grade A, USDA Prime, All American Killing Machine. Funny to think about now, but he had never even heard of Vietnam until after he’d put on a uniform. Sometime afterward, he found himself on a flight there.
Once in country, it was unending rains and whizzing artillery and the hornet’s nest buzz of helicopters swarming incessantly across the skies. Dick Phelps, who everyone called Brooklyn on account of he was from Brooklyn, was the first from their platoon to buy it, managing to get himself blown up on a land mine. After that, it was Booby Charles from Louisiana, who got cut in half in an ambush. Next came Ronnie Tipton, a quiet type that never said where he was from, who fell in one of them pits lined with sharp stakes. Rico Jones from Meridian, Mississippi, the gentlest boy Pruitt ever knew, decided one day he had seen enough and shot himself in the eye with his own M1.
They all started running together after that.
At some point came a three day patrol that left them all dog tired and without sleep. On a morning that might have been a Tuesday, they stumbled into a small village they didn’t even know was there. It didn’t appear on any map. Hardly qualified as a village, really. It was more like a collection of thatched hovels and smoky fires. But their intel said the area was crawling with enemy, and if not enemy, then folks who sympathized with them. They weren’t there more than two minutes before they came upon the old lady, and I’m telling you, that old lady just would not shut up. She began ranting at the platoon as soon as they marched in, yelling and shouting and probably cursing them all in that guttural harshness they called a language. Hearing it always gave Pruitt a headache. He didn’t understand a word.
Maybe she was only asking what the hell you were doing there? Maybe she was asking why you were raining fire from the sky on people just trying to get along, people caught up in political bullshit they didn’t understand and you don’t understand? In fact, maybe she was asking the very same questions you’d only recently started asking yourself, Pruitt.
So this la
dy was going on and on, and at one point an old man came out who mighta been her husband, and even he tried to calm her down in that singsong crap language of theirs. Before you knew it, another half-dozen or so villagers had circled around, mothers with suckling babies and young kids mostly, who were there maybe only to see what all the commotion was about. The patrol sergeant, Alabama we called him, he put up with her nattering for about as long as any human could possibly be expected to, and everyone in that patrol was thinking that the ladies screams and yells could probably be heard more than a few clicks away, and who’s to say that wasn’t why she was doing it, to alert the VC who might be watching them even now from the treeline, and Pruitt watched Alabama very slowly lift his M16 and point it toward the old lady and then he let go with a short burst.
Course, it got real quiet once that happened. But after the shock wore away, and the old timer behind her who mighta been her husband and was only there to try and calm her down, he discovered he was now covered in the shouting ladies blood and gore, and he started singing that same song she had just been singing, shouting and yelling and going on and on, was when Billy Lester, a nineteen-year-old pissant from Oklahoma who looked up to the sergeant like a father, he got in on the action by raising his own rifle and with a smile on his face blew away the old man. Like turning on a faucet, that’s when the hardcore shit started going down.
Seemed like everyone in the platoon took out somebody that morning and into the afternoon. All except Pruitt, that is, who did his utmost to just stay invisible. He wanted no part of that shit. But don’t think for a second that while standing there watching, he blamed any one of them for what they were doing, because he would have died for every last man, even that pissant Okie Billy Lester, and the old lady’s screams really had become annoying, and maybe even dangerous. Then, before too much more time passed, that asshole Billy Lester noticed Pruitt hadn’t yet joined in on the fun, and he dragged two young kids not much older than five or six by the scruffs of their necks into the center of the village while some of the platoon started taking a few of the young girls out to the woods for a little R&R, and others started dragging bodies to rice paddies and burning the thatch roofed dwellings and doing whatever else needed to be done. Billy whined to Alabama that Pruitt hadn’t gotten any action, and the flat-eyed stare Alabama sent his way let Pruitt know that he needed to graduate this day, to consecrate in blood the solemn bond that would tie all these men together for the rest of their lives. All Pruitt could remember after that was staring into the wide open eyes of the two scared kids, a boy and a girl, and
Did I kill children? he asked himself again with a choking, internal sob.
And just as it had been ever since he first crossed the pale boy’s path, his voice was there to comfort him.
“You’re not ready yet, Pruitt,” he said in a soothing, almost hypnotic tone. “You’re not strong enough. You’re getting close. But you’re not strong enough. Be patient. We’ll get there together, you and me, and I’ll be with you every step of the way. For right now, just put your mind at ease. Everything will be all right. I promise. Everything is going to be all right.”
Pruitt awoke with a sharp intake of breath. It took more than a few seconds, but soon he felt the dampness of his clothes and understood he had been having a nightmare. But whatever it had been, it was lost to him now.
2
Dugan ascended from the dusky twilight of death with the rank, putrescent smell of dead fish in his nostrils, so it took no time at all for him to remember where he was. Snaking his head from underneath the tarp, he brushed his eyes around the hold and saw his cursory inspection of the previous evening had it about right. Barely a wisp of moonlight made its way into the dark chamber.
Sitting up, he tapped the top of the chest, and seconds later heard the light thump of a pair of small feet hitting the wooden deck. Next he heard the squeak of the rusty latch being raised, followed by the creak of the hatch being lifted, though just a smidgen. Two brown eyes peeked through the crack. They went wide to see Ojos de Lobo staring back, though this time, the boy smiled to see them and lifted the hatch all the way. Grabbing his bag, Dugan rose up from his watery grave and tousled the boy’s hair before stepping out into the night.
The air was steamy with the ripe dew of a recent rainfall. The river was alive with the shrill symphonies of insects, the dissonant croaking of bullfrogs, and the haunting cries of night birds. Beneath his feet, the engines thrummed on with the same churning, monotonous beat:
Dum dum. Dum dum. Dum dum. Dum dum.
In the wheelhouse, the indefatigable Miguel was still at the helm. Dugan wondered if he had been there all day, before supposing the boy might have spelled him for a bit. At the stern, Richards was in what had become his default position, slumped against the tackle box with his khaki-clad legs stretched out in front of him. His arms were crossed as he stared vacantly somewhere off in the middle distance. An apparently fresh, though half consumed bottle of wine was open next to him. His bag was by his side.
Dugan went over there to join him, noting that sometime during the day, the CIA man had donned a filthy straw hat. Something approaching mud appeared streaked along his cheeks. A colorful blanket now hung rakishly across his shoulders in the manner of a serape.
Though he nodded in friendly greeting, when Dugan sat down beside him, Richards grimaced and turned up his nose.
“You stink,” he said only half facetiously.
Dugan smiled. “I’ve smelled worse.”
Richards chuckled. “I’ll bet you have, kid. I’ll just bet you have.”
Dugan let a few seconds tick by before asking, “So what’d I miss?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Richards answered in a bored monotone that belied his words. “Just a biblical deluge of rain there was no fucking escape from on this tub. A couple of plug ugly sharks bigger than the boat followed us for a while. And a Nicaraguan gunboat on the lookout for smugglers flagged us to a stop.”
Dugan took that in, waiting for the rest. Remembering the coldness with which Richards dispatched the pilot, he knew such a situation would have been fraught with danger. He imagined the man had his weapon at the ready the entire encounter. The only question now was whether he had used it.
“But, it turns out,” Richards went on, “that one of the guys on board was from Miguel’s village, so we just waved to each other and had a good laugh and both went on our merry ways.”
Relieved to hear there had been no gunplay, Dugan said, “I guess that explains the getup, huh?”
“Hey, when in Rome, kid,” Richards said mock defensively. “When in Rome. And don’t forget, I am a trained master of disguise.”
Dugan let out a snicker before slouching back to watch the landscape pass by. Along the shore, the impenetrable forest that had bounded them on both sides for the duration of last night’s voyage had been supplanted by wide agricultural plains and blue-green hills. In forested outcrops dotting the shoreline, fireflies filled the trees. Off in the far distance, beyond the grassy plains and lush hills, loomed the outlines of imposing mountains.
Nearer to shore, primeval reptilian eyes viewed them suspiciously from just above the surface of the swollen river, crocodiles ever watchful for unsuspecting prey. Simple huts dotted the soft mud banks.
The night breeze made quick work of drying his clothes. With the fish stink starting to dissipate, Dugan recognized the air was infused with other aromas: the musky stench of crocodile; the stickly sweet smell of pine; the raw sewage funk of at least one nearby village emptying its waste into the water; the acrid fumes of burning garbage from that same village.
But by far, the most dominant fragrance in these precincts was the rich, bracing smell of coffee. It seeped into his nostrils and provided an almost physical jolt by washing into his pours. Though his strict diet precluded it, for a nostalgic moment, his mind went back to early mornings in his hometown, after he had delivered his daily allotment of newspapers, sitting at the kitchen table wi
th his mother, drinking coffee and sharing the news of the day.
There were more boats along this stretch of river, small fishing vessels like the one they were in, or one-man skiffs sitting ghost-like on the water, casting their nets for one last strike. From his perch in the wheelhouse, while passing them by, Miguel sent them each a friendly wave. Marveling at the man’s dogged willpower and boatmanship, Dugan had to admit they’d got lucky with Manuel. He admitted too they might even have gotten lucky with this bucket of a boat. He smirked to remember he should have known that from its name: El Golpe de Suerte.
The Lucky Strike.
Luck or no, there was more than a little skill involved. Miguel was expert at navigating the river, skirting close to the banks when obstacles were in their way, or to avoid other unseen dangers only an intimate knowledge of the waterway would provide. He slowed when the river narrowed such that you could reach out and touch overhanging limbs, cleanly maneuvered around the hundreds of small islets that studded the length of the river, and seemed to propel the boat forward through sheer force of will when the draft was so low they could hear the hull skimming the bottom.
During a lull in their conversation last evening, while watching Miguel pilot the boat, Dugan had asked Richards how much their journey had cost.
Richards let out a chuckle.
“Let’s just say that I, well, more properly, the United States of America, is now the proud owner of this vessel. It’s the newest ship in the navy. In fact, I vote we rechristen it. We’ll call her ‘Ojos de Lobo’.”
Dugan smiled as Richards went on.
“Of course, much as I’d like to, I probably can’t keep it. Think I’ll just give it back when we’re done with it. I presume they need it more than we do. I expect it’s all Arturo can ever hope to inherit from his father.”
Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between Page 11