The whining voice of some heart-struck singer began to drift out of Susan’s room just as Truax finished cleating the bandage. He stood, examining himself in the dressing mirror beside the roller desk. He looked ridiculous in the clothes she’d chosen for him. Red-and-white-checked sports coat, a white polo neck and red trousers. Gleaming white loafers. But Irma said it was what men wore to parties these days. He stole a glance at his wife’s reflected face, frozen in a cosmetic grimace. Her hand seemed steady enough as she swabbed the viscid gunk around her eyes. But it wasn’t the hand that worried him. It was the tongue.
He headed downstairs, turning on the TV in the den to kill the minutes before it was time to go. Saturday evening, which meant his two favorite shows—Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Hee Haw. He settled into the sofa, forgoing the beer he usually drank as Marlin Perkins ushered him into a world of savagery, violence and cunning. He would have to keep his wits about him at the party. Especially since Irma seemed so intent on losing hers. Still, he couldn’t be too hard on her. She was the one who got them invited. Over the last few months she’d managed to become close to Sally Swope, using her card-playing skill to claw her way to the top of the Newton bridge circle’s round-robin, where evidently winning was everything. She and Sally were partners now, queens of the hill. His wife had earned the priceless invitation after they’d consolidated their domination in a long session that left Irma so wired on caffeine and nicotine that she’d been up until nearly 5 A.M., rereading The Carpetbaggers from cover to cover.
The upshot of which was that Truax was going to Swope’s house. Maybe there the lawyer would realize that he could be part of the team just as surely as any of those college kids. He double-checked the bandages. The last thing he wanted was for his hand to act up tonight. He wished there was some way he could get through the party without the dressing and the glove. Three months ago he could have swung it. The infection seemed to be in remission then, its only symptoms a slight swelling and a few patches of mottled skin. He was able to get by with nothing more than a Band-Aid. For a few weeks it began to look like the worst was over. But then the rot returned, starting with a long night of malarial sweats, followed by the swelling and the stink and the festering blisters.
It had been his only wound. That was what made it so hard. Three tours, and this was all that happened to him. Nothing in the delta in the bad days just after Tet, when it was patrolling and ambushing night after night in nipa palms so thick with booby traps that they seemed to be the very fruit of the land. Nothing during the thirteen months spent as a lane grader at brigade main base outside Saigon, using his delta know-how to teach boots the fundamentals of keeping their asses from getting blown off. Mortar and sniper fire were frequent there—of the ten master sergeants in his original instruction detail, four were wounded, one fatally, over the course of the year. And nothing, almost, during the ten sleepless months he spent in a highlands area of operations as hot as they came. He’d seen other men blown into so many pieces that they had to be shoveled into body bags. He’d seen soldiers die from spilled guts or sucking chests and he’d seen men killed by wounds so discreet that it took medics several full-body searches to find the hole. A corporal named Dalgetty had been shipped home a quadriplegic after a crunching tackle in a rugby game against some Australians, and a black nurse whose name he didn’t know had been crushed by a shard of stratospheric ice that fell off a B-52. He’d seen countless booby-trap wounds—pierced heels and scrambled gonads and dangling limbs. But this was all that happened to him. So small. And yet it persisted. While men he didn’t think would live another hour were now healthy and whole.
It happened just outside My Song, the strategic hamlet in the middle of bullshit where he was posted during his final tour. By the time Truax got there in 1971, all pretense of pacification had been abandoned. The villagers knew the score—anyone who approached the wire would be greased. Grandmas, pregnant women, monks. Kids. It didn’t matter. The platoon’s sporadic patrols had nothing to do with protecting the locals or defeating the enemy. They were simply intended to make sure the NVA couldn’t establish mortar or sniping positions within range of the camp. The war was over. The men at My Song were simply watching their asses until the last dust-off came.
It happened in April, just before monsoon. A staff sergeant had been shot in the elbow by a sniper and so Truax had to take his squad out on morning patrol. The heat was intense, so he decided to limit the circuit to two kilometers, through a small, steep valley the men usually avoided for fear of ambush. But Truax knew better than to leave a sector unpatrolled for long. The men grumbled but fell into line. The veteran sergeant was too well respected to suffer the petty insubordinations that plagued younger noncoms. Besides, he’d developed a reputation for luck among the superstitious grunts. When he was on patrol or watching the wire, they vied to be near him. So even when he announced they were going cross-compartment, avoiding the trails to hack their way through the prehistoric growth, the men simply tied down what was loose and waited for him to point the way.
The going was slow but relatively safe. The enemy was far less likely to plant booby traps here than on the well-beaten pathways. Truax had taken point—he didn’t want some cherry leading them into a swamp. For two hours they cut through the jungle, encountering nothing more ferocious than leeches and jabbering monkeys. He was just about to join the trail back to My Song when he saw what looked like the entrance to a cave. He raised a hand, the squad halted. Caves were breeding grounds for the enemy. They had to be checked out and neutralized whenever encountered. Truax made everyone aware of what he’d seen, then crept forward, pushing aside the hanging fronds with his rifle barrel. As he drew close he could see the grin-shaped slit in a wall of mossy rock. It was about three feet tall at its center. Big enough to check out for himself. He handed back the rifle and took his .45 from its holster, then squatted perfectly still at the grinning mouth, waiting for movement. Everything seemed quiet. He considered shaking and baking the place with Fu Gas or maybe some C-4 but decided the resulting noise wouldn’t be worth the trouble. So he switched on his shoulder lamp and went to look.
The cave’s first ten yards were covered by a looming slab of rock suspended three feet off the ground. Truax duck-walked beneath it, his .45 leveled in front of him. The revolver had always been his weapon of choice. He paused at the end of the passage, hand-holding the lamp to illuminate the rest of the cave. It was a single rectangular chamber, no bigger than a two-car garage, its roof a good ten feet high. It was empty. There was no enemy here. Truax holstered his weapon and stepped up into the chamber. The air was damp and thick with mossy odors. In the lamp’s pale glow he began to detect something on the walls. Whiteness. Motion. At first he thought it was simply a trick of his eyes, though he quickly realized that it was something living. He went to the nearest wall to check it out, scraping on his Zippo to supplement the lamp. It wasn’t until he was inches away that he could see them. Big, colorless centipedes, clinging to the rocks. Thousands of them. So white they seemed to have never seen light. Some dangled from the cave’s small abutments like high-wire artists. They were a couple inches long and as thick as pistol barrels. In the weak glow they looked like so many wriggling fingers. Truax held the Zippo close to one—it writhed maniacally, as if the light caused it untold agony.
“Sarge?” an SP4 named Diaz called from the cave’s mouth.
He’d forgotten his men out there.
“Secure,” he answered.
He let the Zippo flare out. A few seconds later the flashlight went dead. Just like that, pitching him into absolute darkness. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Truax felt something he rarely experienced. Panic. The chamber’s liquid black and the after-image of those thousands of writhing fingers caused him to lose it for a moment. His heart began to pound; a fresh wave of sweat poured into his grubby undershirt. There was no air. This was what is was like to be buried alive. Everything he’d told himself not to feel these past three years sudden
ly poured into him and then threatened to burst out. He had to get out of here. He tried to scrape on the lighter but his hand was shaking so badly that he dropped it into the void. Enough was enough. It was time to go. He scrambled back toward the mouth of the cave in utter darkness, his equipment rattling against his body. He stumbled just as he reached that shelf of rock and blindly put out a hand to keep himself from slamming against the puddled floor. He felt something gelatinous as his right hand touched the wall, followed by a slight prick. He crouched and scrambled back out of the cave. The men stared blankly at him as he made it into the light. The idea that Sergeant Truax had lost it was so far from their minds that none of them noticed the telltale signs of panic. He quickly regained his composure.
“Anything?” Diaz asked.
Truax shook his head. As the squad formed up he took a quick look at his hand. There was a small emergent dome of blood just beneath the pinkie. He sucked at it for a moment. One of those centipedes had got him, most likely. He wondered if it was a bite or a sting. If maybe he should tell somebody about it. But then his men were ready to move out. The enemy was out there. By the time they hit the trail back to My Song, the panic he’d felt in the cave was completely gone.
The pain started an hour after he got back to camp. A sharp, insistent ache near the puncture. It reminded him of the time he’d splashed battery acid on his wrist while working on a jeep back in Frankfurt. During watch that night the pain seemed to increase with every beat of his heart. By dawn he could barely move his fingers. The skin on his palm was bright pink, swollen so tight he could count the pores.
The fever set in over the course of that day, worse than a spell of malaria. It spiked for the next forty-eight hours. Nothing seemed to help. Aspirin, salt tabs. At one moment he’d feel calm, the next delirious. He quickly dehydrated. They called in a medic from battalion but he was useless. The young platoon leader, usually in awe of his aging master sergeant, eventually countermanded his refusal to be transported. Seventy-one days before his time, Truax was dusted off.
He spent the next month in a Saigon hospital, running fevers and watching his hand grow gradually worse. The doctors tried a dozen different courses of antibiotics, none of which did any good. Truax tried describing the insect to them but nobody had heard of such a creature. One thing was clear—with a hand like that, Truax’s war was over. He was eventually manifested on a Braniff back to San Francisco. He spent a month at the VA before returning to his family at Meade. When Irma saw his hand she didn’t say a word. Truax’s chances of making officer were over.
Soon after, the army hooked him up with a woman from Earth-Works, who told him about a job in the new city they were building. The company had a policy of recruiting NCO’s who’d seen active service, especially those with manageable disabilities. They could offer him job training and a subsidized mortgage. Truax, it seemed, was just the sort of man they needed.
“Hi, Daddy.”
It was Darryl. Her lumpy fourteen-year-old frame was encased in painter’s pants and a sweatshirt emblazoned with a vertical JOY, each letter beginning a different word. Jesus. Others. Yourself. She dropped heavily onto the sofa next to him, her mouth puffy with eight hundred dollars of metal, her headgear pulling her lips into a mirthless grin. If Susan had inherited Irma’s Teutonic beauty, then poor Darryl was heir to Truax’s lumpen Saxon stock, right down to her short limbs and limp, bark-colored hair.
“So what are your plans this evening, young lady?” he asked gently.
“Young Life. It’s the whole county at the Interfaith Center. Some of the guys from Up With People are going to be there.”
“Sounds great.”
“They do these cheers?”
“I saw them on the Super Bowl.”
“Weren’t they great?”
“Yes, they were.”
“So you and Mom got a party?”
“At the Swopes’.”
“And I guess Mom’s going to get drunk,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Don’t say that, Darryl.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
Her voice was eerily matter-of-fact. As if she were talking about some wayward pet.
“Sometimes I guess it’s not a great idea to say things even if they are true,” he offered.
“That’s not what David says,” she claimed, referring to Truax’s turtlenecked nemesis, the Reverend Abernathy. “He says you should speak the truth loudly and whenever you can.”
Well, he’s not married to a drunk, Truax thought. He didn’t spend ten months sitting in shit outside My Song. And there’s no extremity rotting on him.
“There are different kinds of truth, I guess.”
Darryl flashed him an incredulous smile.
“There’s just one truth, Dad. Jesus.”
Truax turned back to the TV. Jackals were feasting on a slaughtered gazelle.
“Well,” Darryl said brightly. “Gotta bee-bop-de-boo.”
And then she was gone, thudding out of the room and through the front door. Truax didn’t bother to tell her to be home on time or be careful. He didn’t have to.
Susan was next, appearing silently in the den’s archway. Unlike her sister, she moved around the house noiselessly, hardly disturbing its regulated air. She had changed into her usual costume—hip-hugging jeans and a navy-blue halter top. No shoes. Her hair combed out, long and fine. She slid onto the sofa before the Naugahyde cushion had time to resume its original shape. She put her head on his shoulder, just like she used to when she was a little girl. She smelled of strawberries and Ivory.
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“Mutual of Omaha.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Yuk.”
Truax wanted to stroke her hair—it looked so soft. But his good, left hand was pinned between them and he would not touch her with the glove.
“So you’re planning to stay in tonight?” he asked gently.
“I guess.”
“And you understand what your mother said about no visitors.”
“Of course I understood. I’m not dense.”
“Susan …”
She pulled her head from his shoulder and looked at him, her expression more troubled than angry.
“I wish you two wouldn’t fight so much,” Truax said with gentle exasperation.
“She starts it.”
“She’s just worried about you.”
Susan shrugged.
“Nobody has to worry about me.”
“We just want you to be happy, Susan.”
The words set her off.
“But that’s the thing, Daddy. I am happy. Right now. I wasn’t happy when I was a little girl because we moved around so much. I wasn’t happy after that because you were off in that dumb war. And her royal highness didn’t seem to give a damn that I wasn’t. But now that I am happy, it drives her nuts.”
She stood up.
“Susan …”
“You want me to be happy? Just tell her to leave me alone.”
Before he could think of a response, she was heading back upstairs to listen to those singers of hers, women whose voices were far too sad for whatever paltry pain they might have suffered. At the doorway she passed Irma, now wearing the voluminous chiffon dress she’d bought for the party. Susan ignored her mother, who cast a quick, quizzical glance after her before turning her attention to Truax. Her sway was so slight that it was visible only to a husband’s eyes.
“Ready,” she announced.
8
Wooten had counted on a leisurely Saturday before going to Swope’s party. The plan was to sleep late, then call Sally to make sure the bakery had delivered the cake. Once that was set, he’d take the girls for lunch at Swensen’s, where he would bribe them with banana splits to keep quiet about the meat loaf he’d consume away from Ardelia’s systolic glare. Then, a couple hours watching his beloved Cards take on the despised Pirates, followed by a three-beer nap. After that would come a long, muscl
e-forgiving shower and, finally, the twilight stroll to Swope’s. The one thing his day off would definitely not include was a visit to unit 27. There would be no trumped-up work to get him out of the house, no phantom runs to the hardware store. He was through with that. For good.
But his plans were shot to hell almost right away. The phone rang just as he was walking out the door. He froze, wondering why it never rang as he embarked on unpleasant tasks. They could be carting him off to his execution and the damn thing would stay tomb silent. But just let him try to grab a few minutes of family time and it would yowl like a trapped cat. Ardelia had shouted from the laundry room for him just to leave it. But he couldn’t. It had been twenty years since he just left it.
It was Vince D’Armi, the weekend duty engineer at Newton Plaza.
The news was bad—there had been another gaslight explosion. This one in Juniper Bend. Worse still, the homeowner had already called 911. Wooten cursed. Savage wanted the problem dealt with internally. There would be hell to pay if this made the papers. After a quick explanation to Ardelia, he jumped in the Ranchero and headed over to the site, hoping like hell he’d beat the Cannon County VFD.
The explosions had started two months earlier. Before that, there had been no hint of trouble from the gaslights, planted in every yard in the city, five-foot-high cast-iron stems housing a constant natural-gas flame. They were cheaper to run than conventional streetlights and, what’s more, Barnaby liked them. They reminded him of simpler days, he’d once explained, when he was a boy growing up in small-town Kansas or a young architecture student in Chicago and the nights seemed to be suffused with warm, quavering gaslight. When the first one erupted everybody thought it was a fluke. Without warning, jets of flame burst through the four glass panels, making the lamp look like a rocket that had nosedived into the earth. The local fire department compounded the trouble by turning a hose on the damned thing. It wasn’t until Wooten arrived that the situation was brought under control. Using nothing more than a screwdriver, he simply opened the panel at the lamp’s base and worked the stopcock. The flame vanished immediately, leaving no more damage than a few bits of blackened glass.
The New City Page 11
