Keeping Watch (13 page)

Someplace warm; palm trees and sand. Sunburn crinkling the skin on his face, eyeballs burning with the glare off the water, his back leaning against a wall or building, something hard. And a very young child playing with a bright red beach ball, a girl of three or four with a floppy pink hat on top of her glossy blond curls. The ball got away from her and came to rest near his feet. He stretched, an enormous distance, to nudge it back in her direction, when a shrieking harpy flapped out of the day and beat him verbally about the head and shoulders, snatching the child up and scurrying with her to the safety of their umbrella, the child shrieking too as the ball got farther and farther away. Allen thought he had somehow managed to get the red object into his hands and propel it in the general direction of the beach umbrella; he thought he remembered the child's steady gaze, her look of considered appreciation, as if they had for a moment shared some secret acknowledgment of the important things in the universe, but he could never be sure. That uncertainty troubled him, out of all proportion.

Come to think of it, he was probably drunk then as well.

Another fragment, bright and sharp. Wintertime, rain sheeting down on the other side of a partially intact wall, warmed by a small fire that he fed scraps of two-by-fours and broken pallets, talking for a long time to Streak and Mouse about mountains and football and methods of keeping your feet dry. Mouse was dim, his black skin fading into the night, but Streak was as clear and solid as the boots on Allen's feet, the white patch in his hair gleaming in the firelight.

He'd spent some time in the woods—the actual woods—he was sure. One fragment had the smell of mussels cooking in seaweed, so he must have lived on a beach for a while. But in another, he was in the deep woods with the silence and the stars and the green stretching out for a hundred miles, his possessions reduced to the small pack on his back. He'd been hungry for so long, he was probably not far from starvation, but the pains in his belly no longer bothered him. It was almost like being on patrol. Particularly when one evening he caught a faint whiff of strangers, and all his senses went wild. He slipped out of his pack, took his big knife into his hand, and crept in utter silence through the undergrowth, hunting the intruder.

There were four of them, two men and two women, disguised by long hair and hiding their NVA pajamas under jeans and Mexican ponchos, but Allen was not deceived. He squatted motionless outside the firelight as they cooked and ate their meal out of battered pans. One of the men then went over to the Volkswagen van they had driven there, coming back with a small pouch. From it he removed four white objects the size of dice. They each took one and placed it in their partner's mouth, a ceremonial gesture, then lay back on their sleeping bags to study the stars. Nothing happened for a while. Then one of the women began to giggle quietly to herself, and one of the men said over and over, “Far out, man, look at that; far out.” After a while, the familiar sweet musk of high-grade pot filled the forest; at this more familiar marker, Allen stirred, and stepped out from his hiding place, knife in hand.

Only when one of the women screamed, a full-throated sound that could not have come from a VC soldier, did he pause to reconsider. His eyes finally took in the meaning of the ethnic clothing, the long hair and beards, the VW van, the terror in four hippie faces.

“I'm sorry,” he told the screaming woman. “I'm sorry, I'll go now, I'm sorry.”

And he went.

He couldn't be sure, but he believed that he'd stayed out of the real woods after that.

Lying with Lisa, after a good time.

“Were you afraid?” she asks him, her voice low.

“Just now?” he replies, and nuzzles her. But he knows what she is asking.

“No. Over there. In Vietnam.”

How could he say no without sounding insane? How could he possibly begin to explain to her what kind of fear Vietnam was, how the only hope for survival was indifference? How could he say to this good woman that the only human beings he could have spoken to about it were either dead or scattered, that he ached every day for them, that the fact she'd never been there made her forever Outside? Still, he had to give her something; she deserved that. “A little. At first.”

“Not after?”

“No. I was mostly tired. All the time, really, really tired. I fell asleep on a march once,” he told her, knowing the story would amuse and distract her.

But then, looking back, that memory could not have been from the jungle time. It must have broken loose from before, when he was still with her. For some reason, the realization that he didn't even know when this was from seemed sadder than anything else.

Images, as meaningless as a dustpan full of broken mirror. Heating a can of beans over some Sterno, talking about the superiority of C4 for the purpose, passing trains rattling his very bones. Mouse's black hand cradling Chris's pale hair, compassion and gentleness such as Allen had never known outside of his platoon. Snow drifting through a broken window—a shed of some kind—collecting into a pattern on his boots that seemed somehow meaningful. A school yard in a desert, brown children and a white teacher, and a uniform come to move him off. A night under a full moon, the stars paled by the light's intensity, and rabbits moving in the cool illumination, the comfort that came from knowing an enemy could not be creeping up across that dark landscape.

Then, suddenly, a big slab of memory, vivid and coherent. It was, he thought, probably September, and almost certainly 1974, which would mean that he'd been living in the urban jungle for three years, at home with all the other animals that moved through the dark concrete wilderness under the bridges and behind the warehouses. He was in Portland, he was sure of that, spending his days with the usual changing handful of bearded men, many in fatigues, some of whom even belonged in them. They spent their days in the parks and near the river, drinking fortified wine, which he'd found almost as good as vodka at keeping his leg from aching and his eyes from seeing too much of deRosa in the shadows.

“You seen Mac lately?” This from Todd one day. Todd had been a Marine outside Saigon in 1966 and 1967.

“Probably got picked up again,” said Beanfield, a three-tour sergeant who'd left most of his left hand behind.

Mac's real name was McAllister, also a vet, although his war had been Korea. He got picked up regularly, whenever the wine freed the demons instead of keeping them subdued. He'd be out in a few days. Allen nodded, and turned his mind to dinner.

But Mac never showed. A couple days later the civilian squad was at one of their favorite haunts, a coffee shop run by a young woman whose father had fallen in the Hue bloodbath celebrating the Tet offensive. As she was handing them their to-go orders of coffee and soup, she asked, “Did you know that guy who got killed?”

“What guy?” Allen asked her.

“That homeless man that got torched. You didn't see it?” She bent to paw around under the counter, coming up with a newspaper.

It must have been a slow day for news, because the reporter had spent several column inches describing a decorated veteran named McAllister who had ended his days under a bridge, burned to death. The police suspected arson, as they had found no accelerant more volatile than fortified wine in the vicinity of the body.

“Fuck,” exclaimed Todd. “Uh, sorry, Jennifer.”

“Don't worry about it. Was the guy one of you?”

“That was Mac,” Allen said.

“Wonder if they're having a funeral or something,” Todd speculated, reading the article again.

“You could call the police department and ask,” Jennifer suggested.

The men looked at each other. In their collective experience, the police department was something you avoided, not something you phoned. The girl gave them her gentle smile. “You want me to find out?”

“Would you? That'd be really great. Here, how much do we owe you?”

“Nothing today,” she told them. “It's on the house, in memory of your friend.”

Mac, with two years in Korea and a Bronze Star, was granted no memorial services. The local funeral parlor finished the job of cremation and shipped his ashes home to a sister in Idaho, who buried him in the family plot. His vet buddies bought a bottle of expensive California wine, propped up the torn-out article from the newspaper, and toasted it to Mac's memory; and that was that.

Except that a few days later, another homeless man was attacked, lingering in the burn ward for three days before his body gave up. Before he died, he told the police that two teenagers had sprinkled him with lighter fluid and tossed a match on him. They'd been laughing when they did it. He hadn't been one of the squad, but Allen and the others had seen him around, a gentle old man plagued by voices in his head, who slept under bridges because he hated to disrupt other people with his nocturnal conversations.

Then came a third victim, another of theirs. Gibson was a grunt with a steel plate in his head that left him with severe headaches, hearing loss, and an aversion to bright lights. His favorite underpass was noisy, but hidden from passing headlights, and that was where the kids tracked him down. He hadn't died, but he was going to be in the hospital for a long, long time.

“We've got to do something,” Allen told Todd over dinner at the Salvation Army.

“Yeah, like what? You wanna clean off your M16, run a patrol?”

“Something like that. Look, Todd, the cops don't give a damn. Oh, if they spot two kids carrying a can of lighter fluid and some matches, they'll pull over and ask questions, but they're not going to beat the bushes under the freeways looking for anyone.”

“Yeah, well, time to head south, anyway. San Diego, I was thinking.”

“Okay, man, you do that,” Allen told him, and bent over his bowl.

“Interested in coming along?” Todd offered.

“Driven out by a couple of punk kids who seem to think they're just burning the garbage? No thanks.”

“So, what, you gonna lay an ambush?”

“Why not?”

“Great idea, Carmichael, handing M16s to the brain-dead and the drunk. Let me get out of town before the firefight, okay?”

“I didn't say anything about a firefight. The punks aren't shooting us, are they? One real soldier could take them. Of course, two would be better.”

“You're nuts, Carmichael.”

“Sure. But I liked Mac, and old Gibson never hurt a soul. I feel like . . . like there's a sniper working his way through my squad, and it's pissing me off.”

That was language Todd could understand, an image calculated to bring him over. Frankly, Allen didn't want to do a solo patrol. Lurking in the back of his mind, a part of him that he'd never been able to kill off no matter how much he drank, was the hard-ass, competent grunt he used to be, a small, ineradicable seed of a personality that refused to fade away. Still, Allen wasn't so delusional as to imagine that he actually was that man. He might possibly be able to take two kids single-handed, but he'd have to count on luck. And if it came right down to it, he didn't know if he'd have the guts to go it alone. He watched Todd, and saw with relief the moment the other man gave in.

“Shit, this is just nuts. But I can't let you stick your neck out alone.”

“Semper fi, man.”

“Ain't it the truth, the Marines are always saving the Army's butt.”

Todd and he spent the night in Allen's fleabag hotel, staying relatively sober, working out the plan. Keep it simple, they decided; punks wouldn't be expecting their victims to ambush them. Take turns being the bait. One night the Marines would take the point position, pushing a shopping cart piled high with junk around the city, pausing regularly to carry on conversations with the ghosts before openly retreating to the underpasses and bridges as the sun was going down, and all the while the Army would be following at a distance with a length of galvanized pipe tucked inside his overcoat, watching for interested kids and cutting ahead in order to be hiding near the target bridge when Todd arrived. The next night, Army and Marines would reverse the roles.

It only took six days. Allen was point man, limping along in the rain, covered head to toe in plastic bags and tattered rain gear, wrestling the awkward, clattering metal cart over the uneven ground. He'd been stopped twice during the afternoon by police warning him of the dangers that lurked under the bridges, and he'd nodded mutely and continued on his way. The daylight was fading and Allen was about two hundred yards from the bridge where Todd was waiting, thinking more about dinner than about their patrol, when he was hit by a quick chill fizz up his spine, and in an instant all his senses were tingling. He was smelling through the pores of his skin, hearing with the back of his scalp: Someone was out there, watching him. His impulse was to dive for cover, but in another lifetime, Allen had been good at laying ambushes, and now he reminded himself that although he looked like the target here, in fact, he was the hunter. He kept his head down, one more scrap of society's garbage, and continued trudging.

At the ambush site under the bridge he stripped off the plastic bags, surveyed the area closely for intruders, and then said quietly to the other half of his squad, “Todd?”

“Yo” came a reply from the shadows where the roadway met the riverbank.

“Charlie's here, man,” he said. “Stay alert.”

“No shit?” Todd exclaimed. Neither of them, Allen suddenly realized, had expected anything to come of this brief, final spasm of self-respect. Of course, he could be wrong—his instincts might be so screwed up by the years of abuse and retreat that he was imagining the enemy's eyes, and maybe nothing would come of it.

But he continued with the agreed-on plan and stuffed a blanket so that it looked like an occupied sleeping roll, then arranged the rest of the goods so he had a clear line of sight, since the combined noise of rain, traffic, and the sporadic trains behind them made it unlikely he would hear anything short of a full motorcycle gang. If they did come, their approach would be from the riverbank or through the train yard; in either case they would be outlined briefly against the lights. If there was someone out there. Which half an hour later he was beginning to doubt.