Wild Midnight (29 page)

Startled, she raised up on her elbow to look at him. “No, no! I ... I cut it myself. I did it yesterday morning.”
 

She felt his body relax again imperceptibly. “I want you to try to forget this,” he said wearily. “And get out of here. The best thing you can do is go back to Philadelphia.”
 

She was silent for a long moment. The night was still around them, cloaking them in its softness, and she didn’t want to let go of this time in his arms. “No, I can’t,” she murmured.
 

She felt him sigh. “Look, I can’t tell you anything. Rachel, because it’s a waste of time. Believe me, I’ve learned that the hard way. Why don’t you just stay happy and innocent?”
 

“I’m not innocent now,” she reminded him. “Somebody just tried to kill me.”
 

He stirred restlessly, almost irritably. He moved his hand along the side of her face, but didn’t look at her. That hard, perfect profile was as still as carved marble as he stared straight ahead.
 

“I’m a lost cause, a ‘jungle vet,’ Rachel. I’m still not all the way back in this world after all these years, and I don’t know that I want to be.” The weariness in his voice was apparent. “I want you to go away and leave me alone. I think I have enough money to give you bus fare back to Philadelphia—is that what you want?”
 

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she murmured. Her fingers traced his nose with its slightly flared nostrils, the sensuous curve of the side of his mouth, and his hard, angular jaw. “I don’t understand.”
 

“God.” He took a long, reluctant breath. “Why in the hell anybody would want—” He turned his face to her abruptly. “Look, I was a soldier, a grunt, a butcher, a babykiller—all those names you people threw at us. I worked behind enemy lines in the jungle. Half the time nobody knew exactly where I was. The other half I didn’t know exactly where I was. Too much jungle, too much being lost, too much everything. End of story. Occasional nightmares. End of epilogue.”
 

“Tell me about the nightmares.” When he turned his head to stare at her she said, “I’ve just had my own nightmare. I didn’t ask for it either.”
 

“Believe me, you don’t want to hear it.” When her gaze didn’t falter, his lips tightened. “You want me to, don’t you? You just can’t wait to hear, can you?” He turned his head away to stare at the ceiling. “If I tell you, I want you to go back where you came from. Then we’re even, Rachel.”
 

There was a silence for a long moment. “The nightmare—what I didn’t understand at the time because I didn’t want to listen—was that if you ran into anybody out there, you had to kill them. Otherwise eventually the ‘Cong would find out that there was a Lurp—our long range reconnaissance—living in the jungle, reporting their movements. So one day I stepped onto a path in the jungle and there was an old man in the villagers’ black pajamas with two little kids. He had one by the hand and he was carrying the baby. We just stared at each other. The nightmare is that we go through that one minute of time over and over again.” He paused and turned back to stare at the ceiling. “I’m looking at the old man and he’s looking at me, and he knows that I’m going to do what I have to do. I have the M-16 in my hand, safety off, my finger on the trigger.”
 

The quiet words soaked into Rachel’s consciousness, and she couldn’t breathe. She was in his nightmare and it was horrifying.
 

He went on in a soft, even voice, “But I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. The old man probably reported me to the local political revision team. And the ‘Cong started setting traps for me.”
 

He stopped. Then with deadly softness he said, “Do you want to know the rest of it? Is that what all this has been leading up to?”
 

Rachel supposed she had always known in the back of her mind that it was there, the dark secrets that tormented him. She was suddenly afraid. “No.” She could barely get the word out because it was a terrible lie.
 

He picked up her hand. He held it in his for a second before he brought it to his mouth and absently kissed her fingers. “Pull the covers back,” he told her.
 

Rachel was frozen with guilt. He thought she’d planned this. She wanted to take back everything that had been said, roll back time to before her questions began, but that was impossible.
 

“Go ahead,” he urged her softly. “We’ll match nightmares if that’s what you want. I’m responsible for what Roy and Lonnie tried to do to you, so I owe you.”
 

“I don’t want to.”
 

“Sure you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have started this.
 

Half of DeRenne County wants to know what happened to me in ‘Nam, the other half thinks I spent five months in a stateside army hospital because I was crazy, a mental case. I don’t know which is worse—that, or what really happened.” It was his hand that moved back the sheet, and his hand that grasped her upper arm to pull her into a sitting position. She could see the lean length of his body uncovered, one hand resting lightly on his chest. His hand on her upper arm pulled her downward to make her bend over him.
 

“The charge was set to tear off the genitals. The grunts were scared spitless of it, worse than any other kind of booby trap. It’s called the Castrator. It comes up under your feet, takes everything away, and if it gets enough of you, they fit you with little plastic bags for body excretions. That is, if you still want to live. Damned few do.”
 

Rachel couldn’t move. She stared down with wide, alarmed eyes at his beautiful golden body, fully illuminated for the first time in the glow of the bedside lamp. And she felt the breath in her throat expanding as though it were a giant bubble about to burst.
 

Chapter Sixteen

The force of the blast could be seen clearly on his left side.
 

On the outer thigh beginning at the kneecap there was a large glistening white plain of destroyed skin down to the muscle. It rose to his hip bone and then seemingly crept around the back to encompass his left buttock; in the front the massive scar extended across the upper thigh into his groin. Against the golden, healthy flesh the devastated area on the lower front of his body was a white, malevolent blight of past pain, past suffering.
 

“What you’re seeing, Rachel, are skin grafts. Everything was more or less there, it was mainly a patch job. They told me I still had just about everything right away in the hospital, to keep me from going crazy.”
 

She had to touch him. She had been inexperienced enough, unconfident enough not to have explored his body before in their passionate lovemaking. But now her fingers traced his wounded flesh hesitantly. She could see, bending close, that the dark mat of pubic hair was broken by the same pitted, thick keloid scars, the tufts of dark russet curls interspersed with deadened white skin like a ravaged landscape after a forest fire. But the big, soft, intact shape of his sex, marred only by a few faint lines of old surgical repair, seemed undamaged.
 

“I was lucky,” he went on in the same harsh tone. “I must have stumbled over a log, or the trip wire was at an angle to my body, or maybe they just hadn’t rigged it right. I took only the peripheral blast.” His fingers closed on her hand in a hurting grip. “It’s ugly, isn’t it? Tell me what you see isn’t ugly as hell.” His voice was raw with pain and anger. “Tell me that you—any woman—would want to put your hand around me and stroke me and make love to me there.”
 

Shock had followed too many shocks that night, and Rachel was only dimly aware of what he was saying. In her mind’s eye she saw him lying on some jungle path bloody and in agony, not knowing how badly he was hurt. And that if he survived it was possible life would not be worth living. It didn’t matter that the blast had mostly missed him or that the surgeons’ work had been skillful. The suffering and the horror were still there.
 

He lifted his arm to hold it over his eyes, his hand clenched. Deep grooves in his flesh from nose to mouth were the only thing that showed his emotion. “The first day I thought I was going to die, there was a real danger I’d bleed to death. I had to work on myself with the first aid kit and it wasn’t any damned good except for the morphine. When I could get on top of the pain I broke radio silence and called for the LOACH choppers to come get me out. On the second day they got a fix on me as I tried to move around to stay ahead of the ‘Cong. The first chopper crashed coming in low over the trees to avoid enemy fire. I didn’t know it then, but my best friend, Poke Screven, was on board. He heard I was in big trouble out in the jungle and the damned fool swapped with one of the regular crew. The second chopper brought me in. They thought I was going to die too. I didn’t, but I wanted to when I found out about Poke. I went off my rocker—they had to tie me down in the stretcher flying me out to the base hospital in the Philippines for more surgery, to keep me from jumping out of the plane.”
 

She leaned over him, unable to move. In all this time no one in Draytonville had known what had happened to him. Except, perhaps, the lawyer, his best friend’s father. And Darla Jean? She couldn’t help wondering.
 

They were thinking the same thoughts. He said, “I couldn’t go near a woman when I came back from ‘Nam. The skin grafts still hurt, and I created a stampede when I used the urinal in the men’s john in the airport, which was not exactly great for my male ego. They told me in the hospital I was all right, but that was not the same thing as being in bed with a woman, seeing if everything still worked. And it sure looked like hell.”
 

She stared down at his rigid face, slightly glistening now with beads of perspiration from the effort this was costing him. His mouth curved in a grim line of gallows humor.
 

“To appreciate this at all, you have to know what I was before I went to ‘Nam—all-time champion DeRenne County stud. I had my first woman at thirteen. I was nearly six feet tall and still growing, hung like a horse a year after my hormones started working. Word must have gotten around, because I found a whole army of women who suddenly couldn’t keep their hands off me. I was practically raped by a good looking county deputy’s wife who met me outside of junior high with a six-pack of beer and took me off in her car. I was dazzled out of my mind. After that I had so many rides in cars, pickup trucks, even taxis after school, that the next year I had to drop off the ninth-grade varsity football team. I had found out that with my wonderful talent, and the way I looked, I could have nearly any female I wanted if I just tried hard enough, and God, I wallowed in it. At nineteen all I knew was making out and raising hell.
 

“One Thanksgiving weekend I got caught in bed with a married woman in Hardeeville and her husband chased me halfway to Savannah, trying to blow out the tires on my car with a shotgun. Three months later I was up for accessory to an armed robbery I didn’t even know was going on because I was dead drunk in the back of the car at the time. My mother and old Screven persuaded the judge I was too much of a Beaumont to throw in the state slammer for five to ten years, so I was quietly shunted into the service.”
 

He lifted his arm a fraction to rub his forehead, eyes tightly closed. “When I came back from ‘Nam I wasn’t too damned happy to find out I was right back where I started, here in the scene of all my past glories, except that a bunch of Asians had nearly succeeded in gelding me.”
 

“Don’t,” Rachel moaned, not sure she was able to bear this.
 

“Don’t, hell, Rachel. You want to know everything, right? It took me three years to get up enough nerve to find out for sure if the doctors were right. I was a real jungle vet—I took to the swamps with a vengeance, patrolling the area, half looking for the ‘Cong, living out of my mind. By daylight I worked hell out of my body, trying to forget what was under my clothes that the rest of the world couldn’t see but that I knew damned well was there. By night I boozed it up until I was back in the jungle again.
 

“One night was drunk in a bar outside Hazel Gardens and Darla Jean climbed all over me. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put her in the jeep and took her down to Old Beaumont Docks in the damned darkest woods I could find, and had her. Several times. I couldn’t stop. She was happy as hell. So was I. I found out I could make it with a woman after all. Providing it was dark enough.
 

“Rachel.” His husky voice was resigned. “I never should have touched you, you know.” He took down his arm from his face and smiled his grim, enchanting smile, tawny eyes glinting in the soft light. “I grabbed you that first night when you threw soup on me, and I couldn’t let you go. I wanted to punish the hell out of you and I wanted to have you at the same time. You were so damned soft and desirable ... and not for me. And I knew it. But you were everything I should have had in my misbegotten life, and didn’t. And I couldn’t resist you.” He was silent for a long moment and then said, “I miss all that long red angel’s hair. Is that why you cut it? To get rid of me?”
 

She only shook her head dumbly.
 

“Stop crying, Rachel, I don’t need your pity,” he murmured. “Save some of it for yourself. After all, I nearly got you killed.”