by Chuck Logan
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 th
ere 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.”
“Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.
“I think we will find out tomorrow,” she said.
They finished their meal in silence. Beyond the windows, Lake Superior dimmed down to an empty ebony ballroom and a soft-shoe of moonlight. They paid the check and walked into the lobby.
“C’mon, Broker,” she said. “Spin me down the beach.”
45
THE SUPERIOR SURF COULD NEVER REALLY MURMUR. It was for rolling rocks. Broker smiled at the insight and wondered if he’d just described himself.
Leaving the restaurant, because of the eyeshadow, he noticed that her iris had flecks of green and that her eyelashes were golden; because of the lipstick, he noticed the curve of her upper lip. As they walked the gravel path along the shore he was very aware of the temperature of her leg when it swept against his. And the rustle of her dress, the click of her heels, and the swing of her hips.
She turned and cuddled against his chest and smoothed a hand down his lapel. The languid motion stopped abruptly. “What’s this?”
He tapped the folded files in his inside jacket pocket. “The banking records. Just a precaution.”
Her eyes soaked up the moonlight. “You have any idea what this dress cost? Do me a favor. Stop working for the rest of tonight.” She stepped out, holding his hand high, and twirled back under it into him.
She grinned. “See how easy it is?” She had wrapped his arm around her shoulders and looked up. “Do me another favor,” she said.
“Sure.”
“For one night stop thinking of me as a nine-year-old in braces.”
Actually, Broker was thinking she was more like ice cream in a black dress. “How come you never got married?” he asked, stealing her question to him.
A lake breeze moved across the material of her dress and he felt the motion, warm, inside the skin of his hands. “I don’t need a husband. I need a fucking wife,” she observed frankly.
He took her hand and his fingers grazed the ridges of scars in her palm. “Okay. You’re all grown up.”
“This could be our last night ashore. Know what I mean?”
He nodded. “It could get rough.”
They stopped walking and stood close. A couple in shorts, with wires distorting the silhouettes of their heads, speed-walked by wearing Walkmans in the dark. Like blinders. Another time, Broker might have pushed them into the lake.
“So…maybe there will never be another night quite like this. Why don’t we just appreciate it,” she said. Slowly she raised her arms and put them, no longer hard but soft and willowy, around his neck. As her energy circled him, her hipbones pressed, definite and hard, and it was very warm down there between them.
His capillaries stood up like happy red wires and he lived through a perfect kiss.
“Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll turn back into a tomboy with a dead frog in my pocket,” she whispered and punctuated it with a hot lick to his earlobe.
“No you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. That’s the problem.”
First they did it with their eyes in the moonlight.
Eloquent with the eyes. The body can only try to take the shape. The body is awkward, it sweats, and fumbles and that is why, even in the dark, you look into each other’s eyes when you make love, to pretend you are not just an animal, to pray that there really is a soul.
Then, like all the best moments of his life, the details were lost in the absence of the ordinary and, like always when he rediscovered this place, he wondered why he couldn’t live here all the time.
For a while they continued to float in each other’s arms soaking up the last tremblers. Then it was eyes again. And breathing returning to normal and the tickle of drying sweat.
Very slowly they found their way back into their own skins and, after an interval, she rolled to the side, removed one of his cigarettes from the pack on the night-stand, lit it, and passed it to him. Now they’d have to talk. Talk ruined the world. What the world needed was a government of eyes.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Broker exhaled a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I never thought this would ever happen again.”
“What?”
“Lay in bed with a woman and look at the ceiling and share a cigarette. It’s not allowed in Minnesota.”
They both laughed and Broker knew that when this was over, he would be old. He just knew. Days like this would never never come his way again.
He watched her roll off the bed and go to the refrigerator and open a mineral water. Then she crossed the deep pile carpet in a glide against the triangles of Scandinavian maple that framed the windows. Broker sighed with happy fatalism. The arena was full of pirates. Now he had opened the last two remaining doors and admitted the lady and the tiger.
But for now the night air came tactile through the screens, still special to the moment and they nudged it with their eyes, back and forth across the room, against each other’s skin.
She sat on the window ledge tipped in quicksilver against the night and stars. The cool, beaded bottle rested on her thigh. She drew one knee up and stretched her left arm over it.
He tried to picture her with long hair. A few more pounds.
He tried to picture her…cooking.
Making love with her had been an outrageous clean, free place. And now a long moment of calm.
But nothing was free, was it?
And they had made love in the eye of the storm.
Broker saw the problem. The castle walls in her eyes had been kicked down in the rumpus on the bed. She had been generous. She could play at surrender and back and forth. Now she had to rebuild her fort and stamp out the seeds of romantic entanglement that could sprout like weeds from every drop of her sweat.
With a mischievous salty grin she ambled to the bed. “The trouble with guys,” she said, “is once they find a great piece of ass,” she took a swig of water, “they don’t know what to do with it.”
“Some guys,” said Broker, pushing up on his elbows. So much for the warrior-virgin theory. “I guess we’re used to it being quieter…after.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I know, I should be spacey and postcoital gooey. Was Kimberly, the space alien, like that in the dark?” Tough talk, but her eyes were still big and grave. “All the guys I’ve been with said the same thing: ‘Let’s get married after you quit the army.”
“Well, you quit the army.”
“I didn’t jump. I was pushed. And not because of the Gulf stink. It was later. Because of a little scrap of tin that costs a dollar in the PX.” She laughed and extended her finger. “You got one and I don’t.” She pointed at his penis, but she was talking about the Combat Infantry Badge. She started stacking up the rocks in her eyes.
“Never happen,” said Broker. “They give it to you, they have to open the combat arms to women.”
“I did the work. I should get paid like everybody else.” She pointed to the two scars in her hip. “What’d I do here, knick myself baking cookies?”
“You’re right,” sighed Broker. “Definitely not post-coital gooey.”
Nina put on a freckled roughneck grin. “I have to mind my stereotypes if I’m going to gatecrash their party and nail LaPorte’s scalp to the clubhouse wall.”
“You really think that’ll work?”
“So I’ve been led to believe.” She set the bottle down on the night table. “The same senior officers who put the bug in my ear about LaPorte think it’s inevitable. A woman is going to cross the line in the next five years—the army just needs a
push. The kind of push that comes from a big splash. If LaPorte drops from a great height, I’ll get my splash.”
“Ambitious,” said Broker. More comfortable now that it was out in the open.
She jerked her lips in a bawdy grin. “Somebody has to be the first swinging vagina to command a rifle company.” She climbed on the bed and straddled his hips. “You secure enough to handle that kind of ambition?”
“Sounds fine to me.” He reached up for her.
“Uh-uh. This time I get to be on top.”
“Okay.”
“Can you handle that?”
“Like I said, some men—”
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“Too much talk.”
“One last thought before the next round of killing starts. Could you handle being a general’s wife?”
“What?”
Nina looked down with a warm smile and said, “See.” Broker threw the pillow at her. She threw it back.
More serious now, she lay down beside him. A prolonged silence buried the banter and she said, “Tell me about my dad, Broker.”
Broker adjusted a pillow under his head. “His left foot was a cornerstone. Guys like him hold institutions together.”
Nina flicked a curl of lint from a tidy breast and knit her brows. “Had he lived and stayed in the army he’d never have made it past colonel. You know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh. He lived by the book but he wasn’t an ass kisser. He told me once he’d grown up in the shadow of giants. He was talking about men like Ridgway, Bradley, Patton. He had a little of that aura.”
“All gone now.”
“Yeah.”
Nina tossed her head and aimed a puff of breath at her mussed hair. “Oh I don’t know, I just got rolled around by a little of that aura.” She grinned.
Broker slowly clipped her chin with affectionate knuckles. Nina took his cigarette and rolled over and dragged experimentally, holding the smoke between her thumb and index finger.
“In a funny way it’s guys like my dad who held me up in the army. The dinosaurs,” she said, handing back the smoke. “Just a bunch of old white men bitching about upper-body strength.”
