Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  “Get your goddamn hands off me, you—”

  “Little pitchers have big ears,” he cautioned her.

  “Rotten, no-good”—heedless of the fact that some of the children were still in the room, she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could with her free hand—“son of a bitch!”

  “And you, Mrs. Brown, have a filthy mouth.” Face stinging and features contorted, Cain dragged her into the hall.

  “Liar!” Cat screamed at him. “Cheater!”

  “I’m going to pretend you’ve been talking about Johnny all this time.” He yanked open the front door, all but ripping it off its hinges, and stalked across the terrace. “Because if I thought you were talking about me, I’d cram a bar of soap so far down your throat, you’d be burping bubbles for the next month.”

  Cain wanted to get her as far away from the house as he could. The children had seen enough, heard enough. As had the nuns. So with only that big old tropical moon to guide him, and with Cat spitting and snarling behind him, he headed back down the grassy hill they’d climbed only a little while ago.

  “Let go of me!”

  “Gladly.”

  Cat didn’t just fall on her bottom when he released her. She fell apart. “Damn you, Johnny!” She cried out his name. Cried it out with anger and with anguish. She looked up blindly and cried to the heavens, “Damn you to hell and back, Johnny Brown!” Then she covered her face with her hands and gave in to the grief and bitterness and pain of his betrayal.

  Watching her weep, hearing her harsh breaths, Cain burned for her. Yearned for her. He stood clear of her, though, trying to give her a modicum of privacy. Only when her heartbroken sobs had diminished into the hiccuping tremors of catharsis did he drop down beside her.

  He didn’t touch her. She wasn’t ready for that. He sat with one knee raised, an elbow crooked upon it, and the other leg fully extended. Idly, he plucked the longest blade of grass he could find and twirled it in his fingers as he stared out into the jungle just a few yards ahead.

  “Tell me.” Her voice sounded rusty from so many tears, and moonlight kissed the tormented face she finally turned to him. “No more surprises. No more cover-ups. Just tell me the whole story.”

  Before, Cain had admired her courage. Now her strength of character, her willingness to confront the worst head-on, awakened a new emotion in him. An emotion that he could not, would not name.

  “I only met Johnny twice—once at the end of his first tour, and once at the beginning of his second—so I really don’t know the whole story.”

  “I knew him my entire life, so I can probably fill in the blanks.”

  He frowned in concern. “You’re sure you want to hear this?”

  “I need to know.” A healthy anger began nibbling at the edges of her hurt. “I’m entitled to know.”

  Diverting his gaze, he delivered the blow in a quiet voice. “Johnny had a Vietnamese ‘wife’ named Lily.”

  “‘Wife’?” she repeated with forced calm.

  “He wasn’t alone in that. I mean, it’s not the norm or anything, but a lot of guys over here—officers and noncoms alike—have them. They’re away from home, they’re lonesome, they’re afraid.”

  “They’re horny,” Cat added bluntly.

  Cain bit back a smile. “They’re horny.”

  She studied the stars dusting the sky out beyond the humidity. “Did Lily know that Johnny already had a wife?”

  “It was a marriage of convenience, as most of these arrangements are. Lily was a refugee from the mountains with no real job skills, and Johnny was a soldier who needed—”

  “Sex,” she supplied tartly. “Johnny needed sex.”

  “It wasn’t just sex,” he refuted. “Though that was obviously part of it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “He needed someone who was there for him day after day, night after night. Someone to hold him when he was sweating with fear and shame and guilt. Someone to tell him that he was doing the right thing even when he was bombing the hell out of their country.”

  The vehemence in Cain’s voice brought Cat’s head around. He sounded as if he were speaking from personal experience. Which was preposterous. He was a man on the run. A fugitive from justice. And if Colonel Howard ever got his hands on him, he was a goner.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “Lily got pregnant just a couple of months before Johnny was slated to go home. She didn’t have a family she could go back to because they’d died in a Zippo Raid, so—”

  “Zippo Raid?”

  “A search-and-destroy mission.” He reached in his pocket, pulled out his lighter and flicked it. The flame burned like a blue-and-yellow tongue in the night. “Touch it to a thatched roof, and that’s all she wrote.”

  She flinched at the thought. “That’s what Loc meant when he said there were atrocities on both sides of this war.”

  “War isn’t a John Wayne movie, where the good guys always wear white hats and the bad guys black.” He snapped the lighter closed and put it away. “It’s down and it’s dirty and it’s mean. On both sides.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear—”

  He ignored her. “They maim or kill your best buddy, you burn them out. You blow them out of the water, they take your new best buddy prisoner. Then they cut off your point man’s head and stick it on a pike, so you line up every man, woman and child in the next village you come to and mow ’em all down.”

  Her shudder was quick and uncontrollable. “That’s insane!”

  “That’s war,” he said coldly.

  She hugged her knees and, as difficult as it was, tried to put herself in the other woman’s place. “And there was Lily, pregnant by a man who was just using her and probably terrified at the thought of being alone again in the—”

  “And making noises about going to Johnny’s commanding officer—”

  “Which could have resulted in a demotion or a court martial.”

  “So that’s when I first met Johnny.” Wishing he hadn’t left his cigarillos back at the house, Cain began chewing on the blade of grass he’d been playing with. “He’d heard about me from another guy in his squadron—”

  “Who’d gotten another girl pregnant?”

  “A bar-girl, who didn’t want the baby because it would interfere with business.”

  “So you sent the guy to see Soeur Simone—”

  “Who agreed to take the baby—”

  “And Johnny asked you to make the same arrangement for him.”

  Cain’s laugh was etched in acid. “Asked is hardly the word I’d use.”

  Cat looked at him over her shoulder. “He threatened you?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He pulled the just-between-us-hellions routine on me first. When that didn’t work, he let me know he had ‘connections’ in case I ever needed any spare airplane parts. Then, when I told him where he could stick his spare parts, he tried to put the squeeze on me. Said he’d go all the way to the top to see that the orphanage was shut down for overcrowding—as if he weren’t trying to add to the problem—and that Soeur Simone was reassigned to someplace like India.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Johnny.”

  “Desperate men do desperate things.”

  Cat stared out into that black jungle she’d followed Cain through only hours before. It seemed like days. Years. And now here he was, leading her through an even darker and denser garden of lies.

  “I had the feeling you didn’t like him, but I couldn’t figure out why.”

  Cain swatted a mosquito that was making a meal of his arm. “Now you know.”

  “It explains why he was such a basket case when he was home on leave. And why he volunteered for a second tour.”

  “Lily knew where he lived.”

  She choked out a weak laugh. “He gave her our address?”

  “Guys can do stupid things when they’re thinking with their glands instead of their brains.”

  She shot him a baleful glance. “That so
unds like someone who’s qualified for the dunce cap himself.”

  His smile shone wide and white in the moonlight. “Let’s just say guilty as charged and leave it at that.”

  Absently, she scratched her ankle. “So Lily was essentially blackmailing Johnny?”

  “Desperate women also do desperate things.”

  Crickets and geckos filled the silence as Cat mulled over everything that Cain had told her. It was all so unbelievable. She’d known Johnny as long as memory served. And yet it seemed that she hadn’t known him at all.

  Now she scratched her neck. “And the second time you saw him?”

  “He was a gun-shy mannequin who should have been grounded.”

  “My brother Drew said he told him that he hated the war.”

  “To turn a phrase—badly—there’re no hawks in cockpits or foxholes, either one.”

  “But he came back because of Lily.” And Cat’s throat ached at the thought of it.

  This time, Cain’s laugh was dry as dust. “He came back to cover his own ass.”

  “When was the baby born?”

  “April 2.”

  “So Johnny died not knowing he’d fathered a son.”

  “And Lily hemorrhaged to death about an hour after giving birth.”

  Her eyes slid closed at the horror of it. “Did she ever get to hold her baby?”

  “I wasn’t there, of course,” he said in a subdued tone. “But from what I’ve heard, I doubt it.”

  The wind was still and, except for the occasional night bird, the world around them was silent. If they tried, they could pretend there was no war or human tragedy playing out somewhere beyond the trees. No men dying, no women crying and no unwanted babies being born.

  But in the here and now, there was a woman struggling to deal with the details of her late husband’s betrayal. There was a man who regretted with all his heart that he’d had to reveal them. And there was a baby back at the house who needed a home.

  “I trusted him,” Cat said quietly. “I always trusted him.”

  She was ready, Cain thought, cupping a hand under her chin and turning her face to his. “He trusted you, too.”

  Bitterness rose like bile in her throat. “To stay home and play Betty Crocker while he was screwing around over here?”

  “To remember him as a basically decent guy who made a dumb mistake.” He dropped his hand. “A mistake he paid for with his life.”

  Staggered, she stared at him. “Are you defending him now?”

  “No. Hell, no.” He was just winging it as best he could. “But Johnny and Lily are gone. And you’re going back to the world. So who does that leave? Who’s the innocent party in all this?”

  Cat understood only too well what Cain was trying to say but she refused to acknowledge it. Rankled, she scratched her other ankle until she drew blood. “I don’t know about you, but the mosquitoes are eating me alive.”

  “Speaking of eating . . .” He’d planted the seed, he told himself as he got to his feet. All he could do now was hope it took root. He reached down to give her a hand up. “I’m starving.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you never got your shrimp and rice.”

  “I got my fill of sharp tongue and cold shoulder, though.”

  “Shut up, James,” she said, but totally without venom. No other man had gotten her angry with such regularity . . . and no other man could so readily charm her out of her anger.

  He wagged a finger under her nose. “There’s only one woman who can call me that with impunity.”

  “Did you say immunity?” she countered archly.

  While he groaned at her comeback, their silliness was a refreshing antidote to the serious nature of their earlier conversation.

  Her hand still caught in his, they started back to the house. “God, I dread facing Soeur Simone.”

  “Why?”

  “You have to ask, after the ass I made of myself?”

  That elicited a companionable chuckle. “She’s probably already said a rosary on your behalf.”

  She gave him a gentle elbow in the ribs. “That must make you a candidate for a novena, huh?”

  As they crested the hill, laughing, a shrill cry pierced the night. At first, Cat thought it was just a jungle bird. Then a light came on at an upstairs window, throwing its soft glow over the dark lawn, and she could see Sister Simone’s silhouette bending over a baby’s crib.

  “You know the terrible irony in all of this?” She paused in the square of light and peered up at the nursery window with painful intensity. “Johnny grew up without a father. And now his son will grow up without a father or a mother.”

  “Unless someone adopts him.” Cain stopped beside her and slid his hands, palms out, into his back pockets.

  “Maybe some nice Vietnamese couple will—”

  “Dream on.”

  The baby was crying in earnest now, his distress reaching deep within Cat to tug at her heart. It was Johnny’s baby. She knew it without knowing why. And she could tell by his strenuous protests that something was wrong.

  Trying to separate herself from the child and his misery, she cleared her throat and spoke too loudly, “What makes you say that?”

  “Take a close look at those kids tomorrow.”

  But Cat was looking at Cain as though seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time.

  “Look at their rounded eyes.” His own good one wasn’t quite round but it wasn’t quite almond-shaped, either. “The shape of their faces. Their complexions.” His features were chiseled, his nose aquiline. And his teak-colored skin stretched taut over slashing cheekbones that might have belonged on a warlord. “Hell,” he said, stepping away from her so that he was almost one with the night, “some of them even have curly hair.”

  And as he stood there in the dark speaking so passionately and so fiercely, she began to see the light.

  “They’re bui doi—the ‘dust of life’,” he bit out over the baby’s shrieks. “Who in a country of starving children, a country where the infant mortality rate is almost sixty percent, will take a by-blow of war? No self-respecting Vietnamese couple that I know of.” He turned back to her and saw by her dazed expression that she’d made the connection, but he was determined to have his say. “The American people don’t know they exist. Might not care even if they did know. So when we lose this war—as we eventually will—and the Communists take over, those kids will either be enslaved or killed.”

  “You’re—” She fumbled for the correct word.

  His mouth hooked in a humorless smile. “Amerasian is the term I believe they’re using these days.”

  “James! Catherine!”

  As one, they looked up and saw Sister Simone standing at the window holding a small, wriggling body to her shoulder.

  “Come quick!” she pleaded over those heart-wrenching cries “The baby is sick!”

  * * * *

  “He was fretting at his ear earlier today.” Not wanting to wake the other babies who were sleeping in the nursery, Sister Simone had met them at the bottom of the stairs when they came running into the house.

  Cain lifted the baby from the nun’s arms and carried him into the dining room. Then he pressed his lips to that tiny, furrowed brow. “Well, he’s burning up with fever now.”

  “Take off his clothes,” she ordered as she started back upstairs. “I need to take his temperature.”

  Almost frantic with fear, Cat hovered over Cain as he sat down on one of the chairs and laid the baby on his thighs. She wanted to help but there was nothing for her to do. Already he was stripping the infant, his long, lean fingers making short work of the lightweight sacque and bulky cloth diaper. He was careful to support the delicate neck in his large palm as he undressed the infant.

  Cain turned him onto his tummy when Sister Simone returned with a rectal thermometer. The baby howled at this new indignity. Cat would have had to be a pillar of salt not to be moved at the sight of that dark, manly hand smoothing up and down the infant�
�s back to comfort him.

  “One hundred and five,” the nun said solemnly.

  Cat’s arms suddenly ached to pick up the baby and comfort him, but Cain beat her to it. He cradled that squirming little body to his broad chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth. She clasped her hands together and asked anxiously, “Is there a doctor we can call? Or a hospital we can take him to?”

  “This isn’t America, with emergency rooms on every other corner,” Cain reminded her pointedly. “This is a country at war. The hospitals are full of the wounded, and the few doctors that are left are all busy treating them. Fortunately, Soeur Simone is trained as a nurse.”

  Cat’s respect for the religious woman went up another notch.

  “We’ll bathe him in lukewarm water to bring his temperature down.” The nun turned on her sensible rubber sole and motioned for Cain to follow her.

  Half-crazed with panic, Cat trailed them down the hall and into the same bathroom where she’d taken her shower. The baby’s skin was mottled under the bright light and his frail arms were flailing like broken wings. His frenzied cries had diminished to pitiable mews.

  He’s dying, she thought, licking a tear from the corner of her mouth. My baby is dying . . .

  After Sister Simone filled the sink, Cain submerged the baby. Cat watched with growing dread as he cupped that beautifully rounded head in a gentle hand and began scooping water over the feverish little body. A spasm seized her heart when those trembling rose-petal lips turned blue.

  Please, God, she prayed with a mother’s heartfelt fervency, make my baby well, let my baby live . . .

  “Do you still have any of that penicillin I brought you last month?” Cain asked over his shoulder.

  “No.” Sister Simone switched places with him and nodded approvingly when she saw the baby going flaccid. “Three of the children have been sick since then, and—”

  “I’ve got more, but it’s on the boat.”

  “I’ll go get it,” Cat said around the lump in her throat.

  Cain wheeled away from sink and met her eyes directly. The grim expression on his face reminded her of how he’d looked just before he’d led her into the jungle. At the time she’d been afraid of dying from snakebite or plain old heart failure. But now that tangled wilderness seemed tame by comparison. Now she knew the real meaning of fear. Because now she knew that there was nothing more terrifying than seeing one’s child in life-threatening danger.