Never Too Late

by Patricia Watters

  "Absolutely not!" Barbara said. "Carter, it's bad enough you're determined to do this thing, but you must forbid Andrea from going along."

  Carter crooked a finger under his wife's chin and lifted so she was forced to look directly at him, and said, "If I thought I could forbid Andrea I would, but she's got too damn much of me in her to listen. But she'll be fine. Bud Howell's a competent man. He won't let anything happen to her. In the meantime, you'll be flying home. There's no reason for you to stay here."

  Barbara held his gaze, then gave a sigh of resolve, and said, "I know better than to try and stop you from doing this, but I won't be flying anywhere until I know you and Andrea and Jerry are back safely." She set her jaw and glared at her husband, who kissed her lightly on her tightly-pressed lips, smiled into her eyes, and said, "I didn't think you would."

  It was an odd exchange between her parents, and Andrea wondered how much confrontation mixed with love play might have taken place behind the scenes while she was growing up. It seemed out of character for both of her parents—her mother challenging her father, her father yielding in a loving way to her mother's concern. She'd have to think on that.

  ***

  They set out just before daybreak the following morning, all wearing batik outfits that matched as closely as possible the colors of the thick underbrush of the forest, and each carrying a long machete for hacking brush, or defending themselves if need be. The night before, they'd studied a topographical map of the region they'd be accessing, noting the location of several blue holes in the vicinity where the trail would be making its way through the forest.

  It was decided that Carter and Jerry would go first to locate and clear out any booby traps, and following a few hundred feet behind would be the inspector, Andrea, and Bud Howell the body guard. If any of them heard someone approaching, they'd hide in the brush until the person passed. Inspector Schribe mentioned that few ventured into the interior, and those who did were connected with Cavallaro's operation.

  Inspector Schribe had someone take them by boat to the southern part of the island and drop them off within walking distance of where they'd be entering the forest. It was barely light when Schribe led them up the beach and along a deserted road to the trailhead. There, he pushed aside a twist of vines, revealing a trail cutting through the woods, which was skillfully disguised by almost impenetrable brush. They each slipped through the narrow opening and Schribe carefully closed the brush behind them. The forest was so dense, little light came through the tangle of trees overhead, but it was enough to reveal a narrow trail edged on one side by a mangrove swamp, and on the other by a mixed forest of Madeira, pine and crepe myrtle.

  After they'd gone a few hundred feet, Carter, who'd been leading the procession, turned and said, "Porter and I will go on ahead from here and spring any traps. The rest of you wait a half hour before following." As Carter started up the trail, he glanced over his shoulder and said to Jerry, "Stay a good ten feet behind me, Porter. I don't want you breathing down my back."

  Jerry said nothing, but as he followed the tall, white-haired man who was gripping a long machete, and who seemed not only fully capable of carrying out this mission, but eager to do so, he wondered what would happen if either of them had to put their faith in the other. The idea of laying down his life for Carter Ellison didn't sit too well at the moment.

  They were well into the forest, and had been walking for over a half hour, when Carter crouched to examine something on the trail. When Jerry caught up to see what it was, Carter said, while pointing, "Four tufts of grass tied in knots, each placed at the corner of what will be a pit below. Whoever did it knows what he's doing." He lifted an interlaced network of sinuous vines, revealing a shallow pit. "Just what I thought. A punjit trap."

  Jerry looked into a pit, about knee deep, and saw spikes coming up at sharp angles. Carter prodded one of the spikes with his machete and the spike shot upward with force. "They're mounted on sapling triggers and are deployed when someone steps in the pit," he explained. "The spikes can go through a boot and tear a leg apart."

  Jerry stared at the brutal-looking trap, and said, "I have to hand it to you, Ellison. I never would have spotted that thing."

  "That's the idea," Carter replied, springing another spike. "Just keep in mind that booby traps are like snakes. Where there's one, there are others." After he'd sprung the remaining spikes, Carter continued to stare into the pit. When the silence became profound, Jerry glanced at him and saw a troubled, yet faraway look in his eyes, the look of a man recalling something he didn't want to remember, but couldn't forget. Carter confirmed it when he said, "I doubt if we'll find tiger pits in a small operation like this but I'll still watch. They're six feet deep with two-foot-long spikes primed with sapling triggers, ready to impale a victim. A hell of a way to die."

  "You saw firsthand, didn't you," Jerry said, even though he suspected Carter had never talked about it before.

  Carter nodded. "A boy about twelve. It hadn't been a quick death."

  In one of the most profound moments in his life, Jerry reached down and squeezed Carter's shoulder. "Some memories don't go away," he said, knowing only too well, feeling a bizarre closeness with a man he'd hated for twenty-five years.

  Carter looked up at Jerry from his crouched position, and his mouth twitched in a half smile of understanding. It was an odd moment, Jerry thought, connecting with Andrea's father the way he'd once connected with Andrea. But there was one difference between them. He'd never share with Carter his own haunting memory, but he carried a photo of it in his wallet as a reminder.

  Carter stood. "The most feared trap was the Bouncing Betty," he said, as if wanting to talk about something he'd held inside for most of his adult life. "They weren't intended to kill, just blow off the family jewels. That's what the men feared most, which had a devastating psychological effect on them."

  Jerry thought about that, and its ramifications. If he'd been stripped of that part of him twenty-five years ago, would Andrea have stayed with him? There was no question she'd enjoyed sex as much as he had back then. It had been very much a part of their everyday life, to unwind from the worries of the day and wrap themselves up in each other's bodies before going to sleep each night...

  As they made their way up the trail, Jerry said, "Would you sign up for Special Forces again, knowing what you know now?"

  "Sure," Carter said, without hesitation. "I'd rather die fighting a pointless war for my country than while boozing it up with a bunch of rich kids who didn't know their asses from a hole in the ground. I suppose that's why I'm here, to prove to myself that I'm not just another rich boy who never did shit for anything or anyone. Capturing a drug king pin helps take the edge off that."

  Jerry stared at the broad back of a man he was beginning to have a newfound respect for, while contemplating Andrea's surprise on learning that her father had been in Special Forces. It seemed odd that Carter had never said anything to her, if only to make her proud. "Why didn't you tell Andrea you'd been in Special Forces?" he asked.

  Carter shrugged. "Girls don't need to be exposed to that. If I'd had a son, I might have told him, but not a daughter."

  Jerry understood. He'd treated Scott different from the girls, his own little silver-spoon-fed princesses. But talking about those differences wasn't something he wanted to share with Carter at the moment. Maybe someday he would, but not now.

  As they continued on, while hacking through brush that encroached on the footpath, Carter said, "At least we don’t have to contend with bamboo grass. That stuff sliced through skin like razor blades. It was hell over there." He raised his machete to slash at more brush, then caught himself and walked cautiously to where there were three tiny sticks, tied together to form an almost invisible tripod, and which were placed in the center of the trail. He removed the tripod with the tip of his machete and lifted another webbing of vines to reveal another spike pit.

  "It's the same as the other, just a different kind of marker,"
Carter said. "At least they're consistent." After he sprang the spikes, he scanned the surroundings, his eyes sharpening as they caught something off the trail. "Over there... crushed brush, like a footpath." He made his way toward what appeared to be a crude path. A short ways into it, he pointed to two sticks straddling the path, and said, "Parallel sticks mean this path is clear. Let's see what's hidden back there."

  Jerry followed Carter to where the path ended in a tangle of crepe myrtle trees interwoven with vines. Carter parted the brush. "I'll be damned," he said. "A blue hole."

  Jerry stepped to Carter's side and looked into a natural grotto. Down a slope, about twelve feet from where they stood, was a hole about eight feet in diameter. Jerry moved around Carter, then made his way down the embankment and peered in the hole. "The water's not blue," he mused.

  "It is from the air," Carter said. "The reflection of the sky makes them look blue. Meanwhile, we'd better get back to the trail. I don't want the others thinking we're ahead of them and winding up in a trap."

  They returned to the main trail and continued in the direction they'd been going. After springing another pit, Carter said, "We'll let the others catch up so they can see what to look for if we get separated." He covered over the pit and set the marker in place—a stick shoved in the ground at a forty-five degree angle, with the stick pointing to a trap—then lowered himself to sit on the trunk of a fallen tree.

  Jerry sat beside him, and as they waited, he looked askance at Carter, and asked him a question that had been nagging him from the start. "Why did you join up in the first place?"

  "You mean, why did a rich kid like me join up when I could have gotten out by going to college or with the help of big daddy Ellison's connections?"

  "Well, since you put it that way... Yes."

  Carter rested his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers together, and said, "I enlisted at a time when I was trying to figure out what in hell to do with the rest of my life. I was away at prep school when Vietnam was building up. None of us knew where it was or why we were fighting there. But it all came home to me when the son of our butler was killed in action. A Marine. He and I grew up together so it hit me hard. Then the issue of the draft came up. My family pushed me to go to college to get out of being called up, which seemed like dodging the draft. So while I was trying to figure out what to do, I graduated from the elite New England academy my father sent me to, and partied, and chased girls, and wrecked my car. Then one day I was just plain fed up with the direction of my life and I signed up." He glanced at Jerry then, and said in a voice that carried with it a touch of humor, "This may come as a surprise to you, Porter, but life can seem pretty pointless when you don't need to work because you have all the money you need to live comfortably without doing a damn thing."

  Jerry laughed. "Well, I can tell you this much. When you haven't got two plug nickels to rub together you're ready to claw your way to the top if that's what it takes." He glanced at Carter, whose lips held a slight smile, and took a chance by asking, "So, how was a rich boy fresh from an elite New England academy received among the troops?"

  Carter let out a muffled guffaw. "Like a rich boy from an elite New England academy. Not very well. But I was also working with men who'd been in the military for years, and I was green. Another reason they didn't want me around. I'd be a risk in the jungle because I didn't know shit what I was doing."

  "Yeah, I know the feeling," Jerry said, "maybe in reverse. I was the punk kid from nowhere. No class, no education to speak of, and before long, I was cleaning up messes for men who'd been in business twice as long as I was old. But they needed my services, so they begrudgingly gave me their business." He let out a little chuckle. "So it seems, we were both fish out of water."

  One corner of Carter's mouth tipped up as he looked at Jerry, and said, "Maybe that's what it takes to build character in a man."

  And Jerry knew Carter had not been talking about himself. It was a curious feeling to get backdoor praise from a man who'd held nothing but disdain for him for twenty-five years. Carter cut the discomfited moment of letting down their guards by adding, "It seems strange sitting here surrounded by booby traps, talking about something I haven't wanted to talk about since leaving Nam. It also feels kind of... therapeutic."

  "Go ahead then," Jerry said. "Be my guest."

  For a few moments Carter said nothing, his eyes looking off as if into the past, then he took a long steadying breath, and started talking...

  "Before leaving home we saw movies of what was going on over there and it seemed more like war games than the real thing. But my first day in Nam I knew it was no game. A truck with recruits pulled into the compound and the guys piled out in their new jungle fatigues and stood in formation waiting for orders. A few minutes later, choppers started coming in and the men were told to unload them. But what they were unloading were the bodies of the men they'd be replacing, most of them blown to shit by who knows what. By the time those recruits finished unloading bodies, their new fatigues were stained with blood, and the men would never be the same. And that was only the beginning. The stress wears you down. You have an engagement, get into a firefight, have close calls with traps or bombs, all in a single day. With that kind of stress soldiers turn to alcohol or drugs. It builds, and by the time you get out, you have stress disorder."

  Jerry looked at Carter. "Are you telling me you have stress disorder?" he asked.

  "Hell, I don't know what I have," Carter replied. "Lapse of memory maybe because I don't talk about it. At least not until now."

  "Yeah, some things are best left buried," Jerry said, understanding all too well the need to stay silent about things that are too painful to face, like seeing the burnt out frame of a car and the charred remains of a kid dead at sixteen...

  Carter started in again. "In the jungle you shed the rules of society to learn the rules of survival and be more animalistic. You don't wash, you smell like dirt and BO. And when you finally go home, you have to toss out everything you learned about survival and learn and rules of society again. It's not easy going from jungle base camps with hand-dug latrines to a twenty-two-room mansion with marble bathrooms and a staff of servants." He let out a short laugh. "Man do I sound pathetic. You probably grew up living like I did in the bush."

  "Close, but not quite," Jerry said, offering a little smile of understanding.

  "You have siblings?" Carter asked, turning to look at Jerry.

  "Yeah, two half-brothers somewhere," Jerry replied. "We took different paths and that's fine with me."

  "And your mother?"

  "Who knows? After beating the crap out of me a few times, I didn't really care what happened to her. It's fine though. I've got my girls and—" he stopped short of saying, my girls and Andrea, adding instead, "I've got my girls and my grandkids."

  Carter eyed him for a few moments, and said, "Most of the regular soldiers came from backgrounds like yours and were a hell of a lot better qualified for Special Forces than I was. But instead of getting one of them, Special Forces got a privileged shithead like me who grew up needing a battalion of nannies to wipe his butt."

  Jerry looked at Carter and smiled. "I'm not sure, Ellison, but I think you just paid me a compliment."

  Carter shrugged. "I did... long overdue."

  "Well, if it turns out we're about to become friends, it's twenty-five years too late," Jerry said. "Andrea and I are about to become history."

  "Is that what you want?" Carter asked, looking at Jerry.

  "Hell, Carter, I don't know what I want with that woman any more. She drives me crazy. I spent twenty-five years trying to one-up you by giving her everything I thought I'd taken away from her when she married me. And just for the record, I never asked Andrea to drop out of college and marry me. We'd planned on marrying after she graduated, but when I got the chance to start my own business in Myrtle Beach and told her I was moving, she quit school and came with me. She thought I'd find someone else if I went without her, and I was su
re she'd find someone else if I left her behind, so when she insisted on going with me I didn't try to stop her. But we had some good years before... Yeah. There were some good years."

  "Don't write her off too quickly," Carter said. "Andrea's stubborn, but she's not stupid."

  "Is that another compliment?" Jerry asked, looking at Carter.

  He smiled. "Could be."

  For a few minutes they sat together saying nothing, but during the silence, Jerry could feel a rapport he would never have expected an hour before. It made him sad to think it took twenty-five years to get to know the man.

  Carter was the first to speak. Glancing back at the trail where they'd been, then ahead where they were going, he said, "Something's not right. I can feel it."

  "Feel what?" Jerry asked.

  "The silence. When the birds are quiet there's something wrong. Don't ask me why because I don't know. It's just how it is... like the forest is waiting for something to happen. The same gut feeling I got in the jungles in Nam when I knew we were being watched."

  Jerry felt it too, an eerie, unnatural silence. The question now was whether to go forward and confront whatever was out there, or go back and warn the others...

  CHAPTER 9

  Andrea glanced back and was relieved to see Bud Howell behind her again. He'd left the trail for a few minutes to relieve himself, and during that time she began to have the feeling they were being followed. She assumed it was nerves brought on by having seen the spike pit Jerry and her father had uncovered. The idea that a human set such a brutal thing to maim another human was inconceivable, especially since the man in charge of the whole operation was a man she'd not only trusted, but had been alone with in his stateroom on several occasions.