Wild Orchids

by Karen Robards

  “Sí, señor!” There was a slight rattle of crockery, and then the faint sound of retreating footsteps.

  Max looked down at Lora. “Now, where were we?” His lips were curled in a half smile.

  She moved beneath him suggestively, employing her own version of the slithering technique that had been driving her out of her mind.

  “Somewhere about there, I think,” she said politely as her hands slid over his buttocks and pulled him deep inside her. The smile deepened, warmed just before he bent his head to catch her lips.

  “I thought it was more like here,” he murmured against her mouth, withdrawing himself until he was just barely inside her.

  “Ummmm, wherever.” Lora’s fingers clenched on his buttocks, her nails sinking deep into his flesh, and he came into her again with a laugh and a groan.

  “Animal,” he accused against her mouth, and then he was kissing her and loving her and there was no more talking at all.

  Later, much later, after a quick shared shower in which Lora finally got to wash her hair, Max wheeled the dinner cart inside and they sat down to eat clad in nothing but thick towels. As Lora lifted the cover from her meal of steak and potato, she closed her eyes in rapt appreciation of the savory smell. Then she opened them again to see Max sniffing with equal enjoyment across the table. She smiled at the picture he presented with his black hair damp and tousled and his torso bare. He looked good enough to eat. . . . Her eyes slid over his naked chest with much the same rapt appreciation she had felt for her steak. If ever anyone had told her that she would be dining with a man dressed only in a towel slung low on his hips, his hairy flesh prominently on view across a very small table, she would have been disgusted. Only beer guzzling, belly scratching morons came to the table without a shirt, and Lora had always thought that if she were unlucky enough to encounter one, she would know how to deal with him. But Max was dazzling half-naked. Besides, with her hair in a beige towel and her shoulders and the tops of her breasts bare above a large brown one, she wasn’t in any better shape than Max. And from the warm smile he was giving her, he didn’t mind at all. Lora smiled back at him as she picked up her knife and fork. It was cozy eating dinner this way, she decided. She felt as if they had been married for years.

  The steak was cold, of course, and so was the potato, and the salad was correspondingly warm, but that didn’t detract a whit from the first decent meal either of them had had in two weeks. They wolfed their food with gusto, gobbling up every last bite of bread and butter and salad dressing. The wine served with the meal was a very good burgundy, and after the food was gone they sat talking about nothing, laughing as they polished off the bottle. Lora told him little snippets from her childhood, about Janice and her mother and father and her house and her job. He listened in attentive silence, leaning back in his chair as he swirled and sipped at the wine, as she described her ambivalent feelings about her mother and the guilty relief she had felt at her death. Lora thought she must have been a little tipsy from the wine, because she told him feelings that she had never expected to confide to another soul. By the time she had finished, the wine was gone and they were lying naked in the double bed, the room dark around them and his arm warm and comforting around her shoulders. Lora lay back, replete with food and drink and this sharing of her deepest secrets with the man she loved, and waited for him to do his part by confiding the details of his life. But he didn’t.

  “Tell me about you,” she prompted finally in a drowsy murmur.

  His arm tightened around her shoulders, and he turned her so that she was lying half on his chest, her head pillowed on the resilient muscle beneath his collarbone and her hand spread out across his chest.

  “Nothing to tell,” he answered, his fingers lightly stroking her upper arm. Like Lora, he sounded half asleep.

  “Of course there’s something to tell,” she replied in exasperation. “Do you realize that I don’t even know how old you are?”

  “Thirty-seven. There, does that make you feel any better?”

  “No.” There was so much she wanted to know, but she was so tired . . . too tired to play the role of inquisitor. Obviously, he had no intention of talking about his past unless she pried every single fact out of him. And she wasn’t sure if he would even tell her everything then. If it hadn’t been for Tunafish, she wouldn’t have known anything at all about him except his name, the fact that he kidnapped women and was wanted by the Mexican police, and now his age. It was as if he was determined to hold her at arms length on every plane but the physical. She realized what he was telling her without words, but what he didn’t know was that she was equally determined to sneak under his guard, to make him need her as she had come to need him: as fundamentally as food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe. But tonight was not a good time to start prying his secrets from him, she decided. She was just too tired. There was always tomorrow. Thank God for tomorrow, she thought with a sleepy smile.

  “I was born on October twenty-seventh. I believe that makes me a Scorpio. Satisfied now?”

  “No.” But she had to smile again at the ridiculousness of it, and he must have felt the movement of her mouth against him because he smiled too.

  “Neither am I.”

  “What?” She was so sleepy that the question was the merest breath of sound.

  “Satisfied.”

  “What?” It took her a few seconds to make sense of this. It might have taken her longer, but his mouth was on her breast and he was turning her onto her back and coming with her. The exquisite suckling sensation made her curl her toes, even half asleep as she was. Then his hand moved down between her legs, seeking and caressing. . . .

  “You’re not sleepy, are you?” The question was murmured as he switched his attentions form one aching nipple to the other. Lora quivered, and her legs parted instinctively to encourage his wandering hand to explore further.

  “N—no.” It wasn’t true, of course, she was so sleepy she could scarcely keep her eyes open, but what he meant was, was she too sleepy to make love with him again and she was never too sleepy for that, never, never, never, never. . . .

  “Sure?” His fingers found the part of her that most cried out for his possession, and slid inside. Lora moaned.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He moved on top of her, replacing his fingers with himself as his mouth continued to nibble at first one and then the other quivering breast.

  Lora moaned again, writhing beneath him despite the waves of exhaustion that his caresses were just barely holding at bay. She could barely keep her eyes open, but she wanted him, wanted him. . . .

  She arched and moaned and clung, and their union was all the sweeter because of the lethargy that threatened to claim her. When at last the exquisite explosion of feeling made her cry out, clasping him tightly to her, he was right behind her, crying out himself, gasping her name. They fell back to earth together, clinging, and were still joined as they were both engulfed by waves of sleep.

  It was later, much later, when Lora awoke. She wasn’t sure what woke her as she lay blinking into the darkness. There was only a sense that something was not quite right. Something . . . Max moved beside her, turning violently from his stomach to his back, muttering. Lora turned on her side facing him, frowning. He was not usually a restless sleeper—but then, she didn’t have much experience sleeping with him. Maybe he was a restless sleeper, and she just didn’t know it. . . .

  His head twisted from side to side, and the restless muttering increased. Lora sat up, staring down at him, wondering if she should wake him. Wondering if it was the nightmare again. . . .

  “Oh, God, what have I done, what have I done? Those people—those people!” He sobbed, clutching at his head, his fingers tearing at his hair.

  Lora bent over him, catching the rigid forearms and shaking them gently, trying to awaken him.

  “Max! Max, wake up! Max!”

  “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . .”

  “Max!”

 
; She caught him by the shoulders, shaking him roughly because his pain frightened her. He was hurting, and she couldn’t bear to see him suffer like that. When he still continued to moan and writhe, she shook him as hard as she could, calling out his name. He sat up then with a great cry, his arms flinging wide. The right one struck her and sent her sprawling backwards.

  “Max!” She regained her balance and crawled toward him, half frightened of him in this state. But her love was stronger by far than her fear. She caught the arm that was bent at the elbow now as his hands covered his face, shaking it, calling his name, praying her voice would penetrate through the clouds of nightmare. . . .

  “Max!”

  Her hands were still on his arm and slowly, so slowly at first she thought she might be imagining it, she felt the tension seep out of it. The agonized sound of his breathing slowed, steadied. Finally, his arms dropped to his sides, and his head turned. His eyes were wide and fathomless in the darkness as they focused on her.

  “Lora.”

  “Oh, Max, are you all right?” She crawled close to him, and would have taken him in her arms, but he held her off, his hands on her shoulders.

  “Did I hurt you? Scare you?” His voice was rough, but beneath the roughness was indescribable weariness.

  “No, Max, no, darling. You didn’t hurt me or scare me. You just had a nightmare, and I woke you.”

  “You mean I just turned into a raving maniac in my sleep.” His voice was bitter. “My ex-wife used to run screaming into the bathroom and lock the door when it happened. I didn’t blame her. Who knows, I might have hurt her one day. I might have hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me, and your ex-wife sounds like an idiot,” Lora said hotly, the pain in his voice making her long for a few seconds alone with the woman who had hurt him so. She had a totally uncharacteristic longing to rake her nails down the lady’s selfish face.

  “She was a very nice girl. Believe me. Kind of like you that way. I seem to have this fatal attraction to nice girls. . . .”

  “There’s nothing fatal about it. Here, darling, why don’t we lie down? You’re cold.” She had managed to put her arms around him, and she could feel him shivering. She wasn’t sure if it was cold or the aftermath of his nightmare, but she thought that either way he would be better off under the covers. In her arms. . . .

  Max let her push him down onto his pillow and cover him with the disordered blankets. Then she lay down as close beside him as she could get, her head on his chest, her arms around him. After the briefest of hesitations, his arms came around her, enfolding her tightly. He was still shivering. . . .

  “Max, can you tell me about it? About what happened at Mei Veng? That’s what your nightmare is about, isn’t it?”

  He laughed, the sound a bitter breath on the artificially cool air. “Tunafish told you about it, didn’t he? About Mei Veng. I’m surprised you don’t think I’m a monster.”

  “I don’t think you’re anything of the sort. You’re a man, that’s all. A man who was caught up in a hellish situation and may have made a mistake. A man who has enough of a conscience to have tortured himself about it ever since. In my book, that doesn’t make you a monster. Far from it.”

  “Oh, Lora, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, do you know that? I had forgotten that girls as kind and decent as you exist.”

  “Tell me about the nightmare, Max. Please.”

  She felt him quiver, and then he sighed. The sigh sounded very, very tired, as if he had been carrying his burden for a long time. Then he began to speak, his words halting and barely audible at times, his voice hoarse with emotion.

  XXVI

  “My father was a minister, you know. The Reverend John Thomas Maxwell. He was a good man, I suppose, but stern and strict with my older brother and me. When I was a little kid and knelt beside my bed at night to say my prayers, his was the face that would appear in my mind. I thought God must be like that—thin and bony-faced with a wide forehead and cold, blue eyes. And so good. He was always so good—a virtuous man. I always knew that I could never measure up to what God expected of me—and I could never measure up to what my father expected of me. They were pretty much the same to me then, I guess.

  “He was a very patriotic man, and when Paul—that was my brother—graduated from high school he raised no objections to him joining the army instead of going to college. My father said there was plenty of time for college after Paul had served his country. I remember my mother cried when Paul left for boot camp. But she never tried to stop him. My mother never gainsaid my father in any way.

  “After boot camp, Paul was immediately shipped off to ’Nam. I was a senior in high school myself, but unlike Paul—and my father—I was against the war. Actually, I knew very little about it, and my feelings weren’t based on any kind of politics. Looking back now, I can see that proclaiming myself anti-war was a way of rebelling against my father. And it worked very well. I drove him crazy in those few months before I went off to college.

  “Texas A & M had a very vocal anti-war group, and I joined them as soon as I walked on campus. I let my hair grow and carried anti-war signs and protested and had a fine old time driving my father around the bend. He got so he would scarcely talk to me, by the end of my sophomore year. All he could talk about was Paul. Paul had been decorated for bravery, Paul had been wounded and been awarded a purple heart, Paul was promoted to sergeant, Paul was coming home. Only Paul never made it home.”

  Max stopped talking, and Lora felt him take a deep, shuddering breath. She lay quietly, not moving, hoping to comfort him just by being a warm, sympathetic presence. And after a moment he started talking again.

  “Paul was killed in October 1968. After that, everything changed. My father seemed to shrink. He became very quiet, no longer ranting endlessly about religion and patriotism and all those things. You know, I almost missed his shouting all the time. It was like he died with Paul. Or I did. My father never seemed to see me after that.

  “My mother died a year later, almost to the day. October 17, 1969. I was twenty-one ten days later. The following May, I graduated from A & M with an engineering degree. The next day, I joined the army. Three months after that, I was shipped off to ’Nam.

  “Vietnam was a nightmare from start to finish. They say war is hell—they’ve never seen combat in ’Nam. From what I’ve heard of hell—and believe me, I heard a lot about it, growing up—it doesn’t even come close. We were recon, I was the lieutenant and I didn’t know shit about what I was supposed to be doing. Some of my men died because I didn’t know what I was doing. I learned on the job, a hard way to learn when men’s lives are at stake. But I learned. . . . We were always scared. Scared to death. So scared we couldn’t sleep even when we had the chance. We’d seen too many corpses who’d had their throats slit while they slept. All we wanted to do was stay alive and get the hell out of that damned country.

  “Mei Veng was a tiny little village near the border of Laos. We’d had reports that they’d been harboring gooks. We went to check it out. God, I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful country. If it hadn’t been for all the killing that was constantly going on, ’Nam could have been a model for the Garden of Eden. It was gorgeous, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the air was sweet—and out of one of those little huts came this baby in a diaper.”

  His voice cracked, and Lora longed to shush him. His pain made her ache. But he needed to talk, needed to share this nightmare that he had held inside him so long. Her arms tightened around him as she listened and wished she was not.

  “They had planted a grenade in his diaper. He got right up to us—none of us was going to shoot a baby who could barely toddle—and the damned thing went off. The baby was blown to hell. Two of my men—Hardy and MacLaren, good guys both—were blown to hell with him. I was hit in the knee—funny, there was all this blood and I hardly even felt it, I’ve cut myself shaving and felt more pain. Another gu
y—Philip Winslow, he had just turned nineteen the day before—had his leg blown off. He lay there screaming that his leg hurt—and it lay off by itself about six feet away. He was clutching that damned stump and it was gushing blood and he was screaming. We were all screaming. Then a woman came running toward us out of the same hut the baby had come from. I don’t know, maybe she was the kid’s mother or maybe she was a Vietcong sympathizer—or both. I don’t know. Harvey, one of the men, shot her. Tunafish was trying to help Winslow, and the rest of us were moving in on that hut. Another woman was in there, crying and trying to hide. Somebody shot her. Then—you know, I don’t remember this very clearly—we were herding all these people out of the huts, old men and teenage boys and women and children and they were screaming and crying and calling out to us in their damn language and then one of the boys—he must have been about twelve—pulled a gun. We shot him. We shot them all. Every last one.

  “You know what I hear in my nightmare? The sound of babies crying. I hear babies crying and I see all those people lying dead in the sunlight and I smell blood.”

  His voice was shaking, and Lora could feel the tremors that racked his body. She didn’t know what to say to ease his pain, so she said nothing. She just held him tightly, closing her mind to the horror that he had described so graphically. Whatever had happened to him in Vietnam, whatever he had done or was done to him was a part of him now. It could never be changed or, she thought, forgotten. But he could learn to live with it. She would help him. Her love would help him.

  “My dad died two months after I was sent home from ’Nam. I was in a VA hospital all that time, and I had only seen him once. I—never told him I loved him. And he never said he loved me. I did it all for him—and we were strangers. That hurts most of all.”

  This tortured confession was whispered. Lora reached up to stroke his cheek, not surprised at the dampness she encountered there. He was crying—Max, super-cool, super-confident, super-macho Max. Her heart ached for him.