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The Price of Blood pb-1

Page 23

by Chuck Logan


  There was an auditorium, meeting rooms, and a health spa, with two saunas, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, a hot tub, and a workout room. The units were Cape Cod, cookie-cutter clapboard, smartly painted Prussian Blue and cream and as monotonous as a rank of Continental soldiers. Just right for fussy city people who didn’t want to get too near the woods.

  The young lady at the registration desk showed them a map of the grounds and explained that the gravel Lakewalk along the shore led to a mini-mall where they could find an espresso and pastry shop and a boutique.

  “Good,” said Nina. “I can go shopping.”

  Broker wasn’t listening. He watched traffic on the highway. Since they’d turned into the resort no other car had entered the parking lot. Maybe she had lost them in Lansing.

  Nina discovered that there was a hair salon in the resort proper, next to the video arcade. She fingered her head of copper straw and issued an appeal that brought a sympathetic response from the receptionist. Broker grinned. Colt.45 in her bag and she was girl-talking. The receptionist quickly dialed a number and cajoled somebody into staying late for an appointment.

  Then Nina splurged and took the third most expensive room in the joint, with a king-sized bed, full bath, and a Jacuzzi overlooking Lake Superior. “Spectacular view,” said the brochure.

  They signed in and got the key and carried their bags up to their room. The king-sized bed looked good. But Nina insisted on going shopping. It was nearly five-thirty, her appointment was at six.

  They practically ran the Lakewalk. In the boutique, Broker blundered into a jangling deja vu ambush when Nina stepped out of a dressing room wearing a snug, dark purple dress with price tags hanging off it. She said, “Do you think this is too tight?”

  Little alarms flashed in the back of his mind. Many mornings when he was a married man, Kimberly would come down the stairs and say exactly those words.

  “It’s fine,” said Broker, backpedaling.

  “What about the way it fits here?” She ran her fingers along the taut material over her left hip-where the Iraqis shot her-and she continued, word for word what his ex-wife used to say: “Give me an honest opinion.”

  “I think you should get it,” said Broker.

  “Just tell me how it looks when I walk away, from behind.”

  “Well, it does kind of show off your…” Oh shit.

  “So it is too tight or…”

  Broker spun on his heel and went outside before he got pulled into the vortex of the F-word. Not the one that stood for “unlawful carnal knowledge,” the one that ended in at.

  He smoked a cigarette and watched the highway, the resort parking lot, and the Lakewalk. Finally Nina came out of the shop with an armful of bags and immediately set off across the road. He jogged to catch up. She headed for a strip of stores: a grocery, a liquor store, and a sporting goods-bait shop. She headed for the door with the prominent neon sign that blared GUNS.

  With the same easy aplomb she’d shown among the dresses and the shoes, she bought two pistol cleaning kits, one for a 9mm and one for the Colt, and a box of Federal.45 caliber, 230 grain ball rounds.

  As they left the store and hurried across the highway, Broker asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You had hollow points in the Colt,” she explained in a professional voice that sounded like, you dumb shit.

  “Aw, God,” groaned Broker.

  Then she convinced him that Bevode Fret and company were nowhere in sight and that they certainly weren’t going to snatch her from the beauty shop. So Broker carried all the shopping bags up to the room. He stripped and stayed under the shower for twenty minutes and emerged from the bathroom clean and shaven. He changed the bandage on his thumb. The swelling had gone down. He experimented with making a fist.

  He put on his only change of clothes, the light sport jacket he’d worn to New Orleans, cotton slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and worn loafers. All slightly wrinkled.

  He took a Heineken from the small refrigerator and sat out on the balcony to revive himself with the “spectacular view” of a dead flat Lake Superior. A loon motored by, some gulls dived, three ducks landed. He tapped his index finger at the circle Nina had drawn around Loki, Wisconsin, on the map. Then he stared at a castle of clouds and thought about Nguyen Van Trin.

  Right after he first arrived in Vietnam. Before the Big Offensive. Before he’d learned to wear his sweat. The older, red-haired major on the team, whom the others called “Mama Pryce,” sat him down.

  “You notice there’s graves all over the place? The Vietnamese have this thing about graves,” Pryce said. “And they have these lunar holidays when they go fix up their graves. Well, we are in the middle of one of those lunar holidays and I want you to take the Jeep and drive Colonel Trin, the commander of the regiment, over to the old Dong Ha combat base. There’s still some American units stationed there and some of our guys live in the house where he was born. You know, sorta go in and smooth it and help him dress up the family cemetery.”

  In a more optimistic time the combat base had looked like primitive Rome. A legion of U.S. Marines had built it on seven hills that overlooked a muddy river. Now it had reverted to the South Vietnamese and resembled a military slum transplanted from Mars. Nothing but rusty barbed wire, collapsed barracks, and clouds of gritty red dust blowing over the gummy red hills.

  Broker found Colonel Trin to be the most foreign presence he had ever known. With his flat face, his cold, brown wraparound Asian eyes and scars lumped on his high, wide cheeks, he could have been a bronze Sphinx. Broker also noted that he smelled strongly of onions and garlic. And the Sphinx did not speak. And Broker had no Vietnamese language skills. Considering the late hour, the army had canceled the course. So he just drove the Jeep. Trin sat stiffly in the passenger seat and pointed. Two shovels, a mattock, a hoe, and a rake clattered in the back.

  Trin directed Broker down a maze of dusty roads until they came to a very old and roomy country home of masonry and tile that was misplaced in the military debris. Garden terraces were choked with weeds and blurred out in the adobe-colored dirt. An outbuilding had taken a direct artillery hit. A dusty Jeep and a three-quarter-ton truck were parked haphazardly on the patio.

  Trin jerked his hand toward the house. Broker picked his way up the path, past boles of orange, rust-fused barbed wire, soggy heaps of C-ration cardboard and an ornate, stone-carved griffin that was toppled on its side. As he neared the door he had to detour around an upright, ornamental stone slab that barred direct entrance.

  Broker stepped around the screen and yelled, “Anybody home?” No answer. He went in. The damp walls dripped with marijuana fatigue and, in the central room, he found three U.S. army enlisted men sprawled on cots. Their gear lay heaped in mildewed piles, their rifles were dirty. Pin-ups from Playboy and Cavalier made a solid tit-heavy collage of the walls. A can of C-Ration ham and mother fuckers-lima beans-heated on a small kerosene stove. The smell of bubbling beans mingled with the albumin stench of urine. Somebody was taking a piss in the next room.

  It was 1972. Nobody saluted second lieutenants. “What?” said one of the Gls. Two others ignored Broker. A fourth came through the door buttoning his fatigue trousers.

  Base rats. Attached to some signal outfit.

  Broker had been taught in officer candidate school never to lay a hand on an enlisted man. So he turned to the one who had spoken and booted him to the floor, overturning his cot.

  “Outside,” said Broker.

  They formed a huddle. “What’s going on?” demanded the black one. Broker squinted at them. They thought it was a democracy. They were like the kids back home, sucking down dope, going to concerts, and thinking life was supposed to be fair. Broker, young and dumb, still thought it was the army at war.

  But in deference to the times, which were bad, he didn’t push it. They measured him and saw that he was made out of piano wire and ax handles and that he wore the flap to his holstered.45 unsnapped. And that was enough.
They whispered among themselves. One of them offered a sloppy salute.

  Broker ignored the salute and explained. “A Vietnamese colonel, whose house you’re pissing in, wants to look after some things. So take your asses down the road for a few hours.”

  As they filed out, one of them said, “Fuckin’ gooks.”

  When they were gone, Colonel Trin walked stiffly into the building carrying a small green canvas satchel. His face remained a graven image as he visited each room. Then he went out the back door and through the brush toward a gentle, overgrown hillock that the Gls used for their garbage dump. Broker went back to the Jeep and grabbed the tools.

  When he returned, Colonel Trin had stripped off his tunic and had stooped to work, graceful with muscle and scar tissue. He kicked at rusty cans and cardboard and worse, he yanked handfuls of tall weeds. A pendant swinging from a chain around his neck caught a flash of sun. It got in the way and Trin snatched it off and put it in his pocket. He looked up and saw that Broker was staring at the thick raised scars on his back and chest. Broker lowered his eyes and pulled off his fatigue shirt and stood, barechested, hefting the mattock, looking for a way into the job.

  Trin narrowed his hooded eyes for a brief second and then took Broker by the arm and put him to work clearing brush away from a low, round cement wall that surrounded a weed-choked earthen mound. The round wall did not go full circle. There was an entrance and it was ceremonially blocked by an upright cement slab that was smaller than but similar to the one in front of the main house’s front door. Another dozen mounds were spread through the brush.

  Broker swung the mattock. He hoped to make up for his goof-off countrymen tossing their garbage on other people’s graves.

  They worked side by side through the siesta hour as the red earth fought them like a bed of coals. Broker was getting a sense of the Vietnamese colonel: He was a worker. And he hardly sweated drop one. Broker put out fluids like a hunk of fatback pork in a skillet, but he was determined to keep up. Soon he became dizzy in the heat and had to go to the Jeep for the water can. He brought the container back with him and offered a canteen cup to the short, indefatigable Asian.

  Trin straightened up, took one sip, and returned the cup. When their shadows were longer than they were tall, they’d cleared the hill of brush and weeds. Broker had raked the garbage into a pile closer to the house. As Trin expertly used a shovel and a hoe to shape the grave mounds, Broker smoothed the ground between them.

  Then the warlike colonel kneeled and took a fistful of incense from his small satchel. He lit the joss sticks and jammed them in the soft dirt of the nearest grave mound.

  Buddha stuff. Broker looked around the barbed-wire skirted hills. He saw piles of tin and plywood, the collapsed housing of departed Americans. And then he began picking out the subtle, neglected earthen mounds. Ancestor worship. They were everywhere and some of them were probably there and looking old when Jesus Christ was just learning to swing a hammer.

  And Broker, who had an N, for “none,” stamped on his dog tags in the space reserved for a religious affiliation, was stumped at what to do next. So he gathered up the tools and walked back to the Jeep.

  Colonel Trin returned with his tunic buttoned and his stern eyes shaded by the brim of his military cap. He pointed the way back to Dong Ha. Except he had Broker turn off short of the compound and down a side street dense with twittering, smiling people. Trin pointed one last time. A restaurant.

  When they were seated, Trin removed his cap and ran his hand through his thick black hair. His smile came sudden and disarming and warm, like his previous face had been a mask that had dropped off. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to Broker.

  Broker declined. He didn’t smoke-yet. He was two weeks away from laying on the ground all night next to dead bodies that had swelled all day in the sun.

  Trin tapped the pack. “Bastos,” he said. “Algerian. The French paratroopers used to smoke them.” He spoke impeccable English in a deep voice.

  And he talked like a storybook. “Now we will have a real Vietnamese meal and I’ll explain why foreign garbage has an affinity for Vietnamese graves. I will tell you the history of my country. You will learn about sorrow.”

  They talked all night.

  He jerked alert and checked his watch. She’d been gone for almost an hour. He was starting to worry when there was a knock on the door.

  The face of Mama Pryce’s daughter was distorted in the fish-eye security peephole. He opened the door and she came in and…Hmmm. She’d had her hair fixed-no longer a wash-and-wear mop, now it was swept around in a subtle way that showcased the sparse lines of her neck and chin and cheeks. Her eyes were bigger, grayer. And she wore earrings. Long silver jobs with dangling jade half moons.

  “Give me an hour,” she said. “Now beat it. I’ll meet you in the bar by the restaurant.”

  44

  He was nursing the dregs of a beer when Nina came through the bar room door like a panther crashing a poodle show.

  High heels realigned her posture and catapulted her from the girl next door. And the hair and the simple, elegant black dress. Especially the dress that, through some sorcery of design, spring-loaded the tilt of her hips and made them very emphatic. The crisp black skull-and-crossbones tattoo popped on her bare left shoulder as cautionary in its own right as a Harley logo stamped on a muscular forearm.

  The silver-and-jade earrings played to a touch of carotene eyeshadow. Lipstick made rose petals of her lips. And the perfume-Lola LaPorte’s perfume had smelled like danger and loneliness. Nina’s was an alchemy of mother’s milk and happy sex and Broker, with his Achilles’ groin, smelled the danger of the kitchen. Of fixing screen doors. A dumb, happy danger.

  “Well?” she asked casually.

  “Impressive,” said Broker, blindsided.

  “You didn’t really think I was a lifer dike, did you?”

  “I said I was impressed.”

  She fingered the cheap rumpled material of his summer jacket. “You look like a mechanic.”

  “A squeaky clean mechanic,” said Broker. He stood up and gallantly walked her into the restaurant feeling like a rough-trade date whom a model had rented for the night.

  Why not? They had a rendez-vous in Loki, Wisconsin, where uncomfortable truths might wait. Tomorrow could be bullet time. And she looked great.

  Nina ordered a vodka martini and specified three olives. Broker, trying hard to relax with the Beretta jamming his kidneys and scanning the restaurant doorway, decided to go nonalcoholic and ordered a Sharp’s.

  The drinks arrived and she fished an olive out with a toothpick and held it between her teeth for a moment before chewing it. Broker sipped his weak beer. Their eyes met and they both asked questions at the same time. Hers: “Why didn’t you remarry?” His: “Why in the hell did you join the army?” His came out a little bit first.

  She speared the second olive and shrugged and asked another question. “Why did you?”

  “I didn’t join. I had a high lottery number.”

  “But you went Airborne and Ranger and OCS.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Nina went after the third olive. “We’re old-fashioned cannon fodder, you and I. Squares. I’ll bet when you hear the national anthem you put your hand over your heart.”

  The waiter returned and Nina ordered a New York strip, medium rare, a baked potato, no sour cream, and a salad with vinaigrette dressing. Broker went for the lake trout. He was watching her almost exclusively now and hardly cased the doorway.

  “What you’re really asking is did I go into the army because of my father.”

  “Okay. Did you?”

  “Partly. The other reason is a corny vow that a certain group of young women can never admit that they’ve taken. But one of us is going to really command soldiers someday. It’s the last hurdle.”

  “You did.”

  “I only did what I was trained to do. Make decisions in a crisis.”
>
  “Modest.”

  She lowered her eyes. “We have to be. Sojer men don’t like them pushy broads.” She smiled wryly. “You don’t like pushy broads.”

  He stared hard at her.

  “Okay,” she shrugged. “I’d like to be the first, but I don’t have any illusions. Basically I’m just the little Dutch girl’s thumb. I’ll probably end up jumping in to plug a gap somewhere. That’s the life I opted for.”

  He continued to stare at her. “What I don’t like is the way you jump to conclusions about Ray being all good and LaPorte being all bad.”

  Their food arrived and when she cut into her steak, for the first time, he noticed her fingers. And he remembered Lola and her lacquered nails. Nina kept her fingernails trimmed almost fanatically close to the cuticle. He reached over, took her right hand, and turned it over. Then her left. Scallops of scar tissue patterned the pads of her palms.

  She shrugged. “That night in the desert. Coming down from the fight, I wouldn’t leave until all the wounded were out. I sat with some of the dying. Figured it came with the territory. Everyone was watching my face. I guess I clawed hunks out of my hands. Didn’t even know it. My nails were too long.” She picked up her knife and resumed cutting her steak. “Won’t happen next time.”

  Broker thoughtfully chewed a mouthful of trout and almonds in silence. Then he asked, “What about the other part of joining the army, about your father?”

  Nina looked up with a practical expression. “That’s where the people who know Dad and LaPorte were. Some of them are generals now. Most of them refused to talk to me. But some did and they all said the same thing.” She pointed her fork across the table. “Dad had a reason for being there at the end in Vietnam. He was deeply committed to evacuating people who’d worked for our side. But they all said that LaPorte stayed one tour too long. Not smart for a guy who’d been fast tracking for a first star, hanging on to a lost cause that way. They even used the same words to describe it. Like he was literally trying to find something.” She paused. “I didn’t get here by myself, Broker. A couple of those foxy old warriors pointed me in a direction.”

 

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