“Well, they’re both adults. They can take off without telling anyone.”
“Yeah, I know that, Kavanagh! I feel like a jerk for worrying, plus, according to my father, Skelly is exactly the kind of person you want with you if anything dangerous is going on. But I am worried. Isn’t there anything you can do that’s not illegal?”
“Call him now.”
“I told you, I’ve been calling him every couple of hours for days.”
“Humor me. Just call him again.”
Statch slid away from him and walked over to the chair upon which she’d dropped her bag, pulled out her iPhone, and pressed the buttons. Kavanagh did not really expect the results of the call to be different from the dozens of earlier ones, but this way he got to see his girlfriend walk across the room naked, which he thought was something special.
“Hello?” said Statch, and then began a short conversation that Kavanagh didn’t understand because it was in Spanish, but he understood what was implied by her yelling into what was obviously a dead line at its end.
When she turned to look at him, her face was bleak. “It was a kid,” she said. “He said he found the phone in a trash can in Ojinaga. He didn’t see who put it there.”
“Where the hell’s Ojinaga?”
“I’m looking it up now,” she said, punching away at the tiny device. “It’s on the border, in Chihuahua. Oh, Christ, he’s going to Mexico!”
“Come here,” Kavanagh said. After a little coaxing, she was lying against him once more, with his arm protectively around her.
“What’s the story with Mexico?”
“I’m not entirely sure. That’s the romance part. My mother was a dish, educated and much sought after; the son of a big political boss wanted her, and her father had to go ahead and agree to the marriage, or else. It was apparently that way in the part of Mexico they were in, and still is, I guess. Anyway, along came my father and stole my mom from this big shot, and they eloped. My grandfather was real bitter about it and never answered any of my mom’s letters, and my grandmother had to sneak out of the house to get phone calls. We never went to Mexico, my mother never saw her family again, and I got the feeling that if my dad ever went back there, he could get in serious trouble. Why would he go there? I don’t get it!”
Kavanagh studied the ceiling for a while and stroked the area of warm girl flesh that was at hand. Then he said, “Okay, look, there’s a guy I know, owes me some favors. He works for a telecom that will remain nameless, and sometimes he looks over the logs for me. I could ask him to check out your dad and this Skelly character. But, really, Statch—not a word to anyone, ever. And if anyone ever asks me, I’ll deny it; I’ll say it was a lie I told you to get laid.”
“But you’re not lying.”
“I would never do that.”
“No, and I’m not just trading sex for help, am I?”
“I don’t believe you are, no.”
She shifted on the bed, threw a thigh across him, and sat up in the saddle. “In that case,” she said, “would you please fuck me into oblivion? I don’t want to think about this shit for as long a time as we can manage.”
* * *
Skelly came back from his run, barely sweaty but powdered with dust. Marder asked him if he always ran armed. Skelly pulled his T-shirt over his head and grinned.
“You’ve been poking through my shit, Marder. I assume you poked far enough to know you can’t poke anymore.”
He took off the nylon fanny pack he’d been wearing and placed it on the counter, where it made a pistol-ish clunk.
“Or what?” asked Marder. “You’d have to kill me?”
“No, but others might. The security business is highly competitive. In some parts of it, when they say they want to eliminate the competition, it’s not just a business metaphor. I don’t want to have to keep rescuing you.”
“No, I wouldn’t want you to go through the trouble,” said Marder after a moment, but Skelly had already stripped and entered the camper’s tiny shower. Marder didn’t want to bring up the subject of rescues, since he and Skelly had difficulties in coordinating their memories on that subject, and Marder found it best to avoid it, even when Skelly was sober.
When Skelly got out of the shower, Marder said, “Speaking of pistols, I was just thinking about the Moon River Invitational Shoot-Out.”
“Really? Why was that?”
“Like I said, traveling with you is loosening the mystic chords of memory.”
“Also because it’s the one pathetic time you beat me at anything. I would have caught up with you by the fourth deck, if Handlebar hadn’t stopped it.”
Marder thought this was probably not true but said nothing.
* * *
He did recall the actual event fairly well. Handlebar was the lieutenant commanding the detachment of Special Forces and their montagnard allies and was so called because of his remarkable mustache, grown, Marder assumed, so that he would not be carded in bars. Not a bad officer, for an officer, was the scuttlebutt, and a man always up for morale-boosting activities. When the contest was explained to him, he arranged to have two sets of bamboo posts erected in the cleared ground that surrounded the village, between which some lines were nailed, and upon these were hung with wire hooks two complete decks of playing cards. At a range of ten meters, Marder and Skelly were to shoot all the pips out of the cards with their .45s and finish by shooting out the heads of the face cards. This made 244 targets per deck. The rules were that a shooter couldn’t go on to the next card until he’d shot out all the pips (or heads) of the previous card, and the man who finished first won, except that Skelly insisted that the winner had to be at least four cards ahead to win. Marder stayed two or three cards ahead through four whole packs of cards.
Everyone in the village—soldiers and tribespeople—was out watching this, the soldiers drinking “33” beer and the Hmong drinking their horrible rnoom rice brew through straws. It got dark, in the usual lights-out fashion of the tropics, and Lieutenant Handlebar called the match, declaring Marder the winner, with Skelly insisting they shoot by the light of flares and the lieutenant explaining in an intoxicated way that this was a good way to silhouette the entire population for the VC, who would in any case have been drawn to the area in droves by the shooting. Some of the other sergeants, laughing like maniacs, had to physically pick Skelly up and haul him away. The VC were in fact drawn, the base got rocketed for a brief time, and there was a nice little firefight, but that was a normal evening in Moon River.
Marder had thought that he was in deep shit, that Skelly would come down hard on him, but such was not the case. Skelly became if anything almost friendly, no more yelling or nasty remarks, or fewer than before. In any event, training, such as it had been, was over. The air force team had to earn their hazard pay now, by mounting helicopters, flying to various predetermined parts of Laos and Vietnam, and burying the repeaters so as to cover the whole broad delta of supply routes that made up the trail. The long repeater aerials, disguised as vines with fabric sheaths the men called “sweaters,” had to be hung just so from the nearest trees. Then they planted a few voodoos on the trail proper, to see if the system worked.
After that, back at the village, the airmen made sure the machines were alive and transmitting and that they could pick up the voodoo signals. Which they could: the voodoos talked to the repeaters; the repeaters talked to the planes overhead. All they had left to do was to actually bury the little spheres in a dense belt across the entirety of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or at least that portion that fell within their area of operations. This was the hard part, which no one on the team had really thought about during this preparation period but now had to. During this phase, Marder had been impressed by the skills of Skelly and his SOG team, by the helicopter crews from the 21st Special Operations Squadron that ferried them to and fro, and by the enormous effort being made to ensure the success of their operation. The air force staged diversionary raids; the Spectre gunships hovered
overhead; each mission was accompanied by flame and explosions and the racket of miniguns establishing a zone of death around their working areas.
Several times they had experienced ground fire, or so Marder recollected. He had a mental image of glowing green balls rising from dark woods and floating by and the sound of metal banging against the aluminum of the helicopters. He did not recall being afraid, but perhaps that was the salve of forgetting.
What he did recall, with startling clarity, was a conversation he’d had with Skelly the evening before they left for their first run to plant voodoos. The sergeant had come by the Hmong longhouse where the airmen lived. Marder couldn’t remember where Hayden and Lascaglia were that evening, but he had the sense that the sergeant and he were alone. Skelly dropped a duffel bag on the floor.
“Your uniform of the day,” he said. “I figured you’re a large.”
Marder dumped the bag out on his cot: a light-green shirt and pants in nylon, a soft, brimmed hat of the same color, a pair of tire-rubber sandals, plus a set of web gear of unfamiliar design.
“What is this?” asked Marder, holding up the shirt.
“It’s a garbage man’s uniform from South Korea.”
“Are we allowed to wear this?”
“Well, the rules say we can’t wear civilian clothes and we can’t wear enemy uniforms, and this is neither. It’s cool to wear and it blends in pretty good, especially with a little mud on it. The footwear is Vietnamese, as worn by Charlie, in case anyone is inclined to follow tracks. We’ve had guys walk right by NVA patrols in that gear, and even if they think it’s fishy, it gives us a couple of seconds, which is all you need sometimes.”
Marder waited for Skelly to leave, but Skelly did not.
Instead, he plopped himself down on Lascaglia’s cot and lit a cigarette. A strange sight: since arriving at Moon River, Marder had never, as far as he could recall, seen Skelly other than upright, usually moving to some purpose.
“So, Marder, where did you learn to shoot a pistol like that? Not in the fucking air force.”
“No. I’ve been shooting pistols since I was seven or eight. My dad had a Colt Woodsman .22, and he brought a .45 back from the Pacific. We used to shoot the .22 at a range in the basement of the VFW hall near our house. It was probably illegal as hell, but nobody minded in those days. Also, my dad knew a guy down in Coney Island who had a kind of rinky-dink arena for fights and bike races, and he had a real range set up behind his place; we’d go down there, take the subway a couple of times a week, and blast away with the .45. The guy had, like, a ton of condemned army ball ammo and he’d let us shoot it off, and in return my dad would print up posters and shit for him—I mean for his arena. He died about five years ago, so we stopped going.”
“Your dad died?”
“Oh, no, the guy. With the arena. O’Farrell was his name. So after that I just shot with the Woodsman.” There was a pause. Skelly watched his cigarette smoke in silence.
“Where did you learn to shoot?” Marder asked, to keep the conversation going. “Did you shoot with your dad?”
“No, the only thing my father ever taught me was how to lie. He must have envisioned this war. And if I had access to a gun in his presence, I would’ve probably shot him.”
“Didn’t get along, huh?”
“You could say that. What does your dad do for a living?”
Marder told him, speaking easily and happily about his father, and then, by easy stages, prompted by what seemed like genuine interest from Skelly, he talked about his mother and his family and his neighborhood. Only later did he understand that Skelly’s interest was not merely polite. It was very nearly anthropological. The kind of normal urban American family life Marder had enjoyed was as alien to Skelly as the customs of the Hmong in whose midst they lived—or even more so, since Skelly, it turned out, knew a great deal about the Hmong.
After a period of this exposition, Marder began to feel a little uneasy, as if he were in the classic small room with a skilled interrogator and the humble data of his life a matter of substantial import. So he asked Skelly about his own background, and Skelly answered with the question: “Did you ever read a book called The Catcher in the Rye?”
“Yeah, I did, as a matter of fact. I got it on Fourth Avenue. It was something my mom and I used to do. There’re all these used bookstores on lower Fourth, and we used to take the subway up from Brooklyn. Starting when I was about six and up ’til, I don’t know, ’til I was too old to go out shopping with my mother, I guess. I picked it up, the paperback, because of the red cover and the title.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out what the guy’s problem was. I mean, he went to prep school, so he must’ve been loaded, or his folks were, so what did he have to complain about? But the whole book is one long bitch about how phony everything is, how everything isn’t just right for wonderful what’s-his-name, Canfield—”
“Caulfield. Holden Caulfield.”
“Right. Why did you ask?”
“Because I’m what Holden Caulfield turned into.” He laughed then and shook his head. “You know, Marder, we’re probably the only two people in northern Laos capable of discussing The Catcher in the Rye. I might have to keep you alive after all.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. So you got kicked out of prep school?”
“Yep. I thought they were all phonies. You never thought your parents were fucked up?”
“No, I thought they were decent, honest people. I told you, my father’s a union guy, a printer. He’s proud of what he does; he thinks he’s preserving the printed word, the backbone of civilization, and then he always said the printers were the aristocrats of the labor movement, the vanguard. And my mom—I’d come home from school and there’d be this stranger, some old bum off the street, and she’d be feeding him soup. Ladies would come up to me at the grocery store, or wherever, and say, ‘Oh, your mother’s a saint.’ I didn’t think anything of it. And she was a reader too; she read to me for as long as I can remember, and she made sure the nuns didn’t mess with me. In our neighborhood, I’d walk down the street with the two of them, I’d be smiling, I was so glad they were my folks. So, no. The army is fucked up, the world may be fucked up, but not the Marders. Why did they kick you out?”
“I got liquored up and took a big crap on the school seal. They had it inlaid in marble in Byron Hall, the main building there at Vaughan Preparatory Academy. Then my father sent me to the Christian Brothers, where he’d gone to school, to see if they could, as he put it, beat some sense into me.” Skelly lit another cigarette and gazed upward at the smoke rising through the thatch, weaving like a serpent around the thin shafts of light that descended from above.
“And did they?”
“Well, they sure beat me, I’ll give them that. I didn’t think they were phony. They were extremely sincere about whipping boys. I thought they were nuts, all that God bullshit, and I wouldn’t do it—I mean pray or pretend to believe in it—and I got beat, and I still wouldn’t, and basically I lasted about a month and I just took off. I broke into the school office and stole all the cash that the students had on deposit for pocket money and like that, a couple of hundred bucks, I guess, and then I hitched south. I got to Florida, got a job in a restaurant in Orlando, slept in a crash pad with a bunch of other runaways. It was a nice time, really, and then I got picked up and the cops sent me back to Dad.”
“He must’ve been pissed.”
“Not really. He’d sort of written me off. He delegated his executive secretary to deal with me, Mrs. Tatum. Actually, she was the only person I can recall who took me seriously when I was a kid, I mean as someone who had a mind of his own.”
“What about your mom?”
“Oh, the lovely Clarissa? After I ruined her figure, the lovely Clarissa took off and married an Argentinian polo player. I get a check and a card from her on Christmas and birthdays. Anyway, Mrs. Tatum handled it perfectly—asked me where I wa
nted to go to school, if anywhere, and I said I wanted to go to a regular public high school, and she sent me to Hancock High and I loved it. Girls, for example: I’d never had daily access to girls before, and to guys who were just regular assholes and not rich assholes, which is a completely different level of assholery and much harder for me to take, my father being the classic rich asshole. And it was the whole fucked-up urban high school thing you see in the movies. No one’s interested in anything but who’s cool and who’s not, and it’s all about getting sex and having laughs and getting high, with the actual studying as something you did as little of as possible. And nobody beat me or told me I was a disgrace to the school, because in a school like that, if you weren’t arrested for murder you were considered an honor student.
“In my senior year, Mrs. Tatum asked me if I wanted to go to college and I realized that I didn’t, that sitting at a desk or going to the library or writing bullshit was not what I wanted to do, and one day I was downtown with a bunch of my pals and I passed a recruiting office and I walked in, just curious, and there was this master sergeant there, a big black guy with rows of ribbons, and, what can I say? He saw me, he knew who I was, what I was supposed to do. I realize that he was only doing his job, that he wanted me to fill a quota, but the wanting part was real. And no one had wanted me before, I was a pain in the ass to everyone, and even if the army just wanted me to get killed, that was cool with me. I was only seventeen, so I had to get my father to sign off on the form, and Mrs. T. didn’t even bother him with it. She ran it through the autopen and there I was, in a place where I could either die or kill somebody, which were the only two options that interested me at the time.”
* * *
Marder recalled that last line very well, although the rest of it might not have all come through that first evening. There were a lot of such evenings. Looking back, sitting in this camper with the sun rising over the peaks, warming the day, Marder thought about how astonishingly young they’d been, himself scarcely more than eighteen, Skelly two or three years older. Skelly was the first contemporary Marder had found with whom he could discuss the ideas found in books, who thought as he did that the things in books could form your life. It had been intense, frightening almost, almost as memorable as the slender, skillful girls of Thailand.
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