He heard a scream he recognized and saw Tweety fall near one of the burned-out hooches. Rolling for the cover of a crispy tree stump, D fired across the road and took out the VC standing over his corporal. “Tweety! I’m comin’!”
“I got him, Sarge!” yelled Torres, who grabbed their man and dragged him back. With Tweety covered, D took a beat to see the whole fight.
The VC squad looked to have them outnumbered by a factor of two, but already there were six of them down, and only Tweety was down from their side, as far as D could see. They were coming from both sides of the road and up from behind, but fighting only with rifles and knives. No mortar shells or explosives. The bodies on the ground were tattered and emaciated.
This was a remnant gang. What was left of the VC here after the hell the 503rd had rained down in retaliation for the October ambush, and some survivors of the hamlet they’d destroyed. They were hardly more than zombies.
There would be more, there were always more, because the war made more every day—men and women who’d lost everything and had nothing left but rage. It was why the Americans could win just about every goddamn battle and still not get on top of this stupid war. The enemy were fighting for their home, and they had a nearly endless source of people who’d take on that fight.
But for now, D saw what he and his men had to do to win this fight right here, and that was all that mattered.
“Douglas, Washington, Krysto! To me!”
~oOo~
“That was sharp thinking, Sergeant,” Cornish said. He grabbed a camp stool and made himself comfortable in the medic hut. “I’m gonna put you in for a commendation to go with this next Purple Heart.”
D shrugged and grunted as the medic put another stitch in his back. “Thank you, sir. But what I did wasn’t anything special.” To the medic, he said, “You sure there was Novocain in that shot you gave me, Mason?”
Mason smirked. “I’m sure, Sarge.”
He’d taken a ricochet off Krystovich’s helmet, and the bullet had sliced a trench across the back of his shoulder, but he and Tweety, and Krysto’s helmet, were the only casualties. No deaths. They’d wiped out that ragtag VC band.
And the little old lady was dead, too. D didn’t know whose bullet had brought her down, or which side it had come from, and he didn’t much care. Little old lady or not, she’d been the enemy.
When the bullets were flying, that was the only thing that mattered.
“I heard what you did. You put your own life on the line to save your men. You survived an ambush and brought every man home alive, D. That’s something.”
He’d also taken precious time trying to decide if the old woman was dangerous or not, and he’d almost picked wrong. If he’d just shot her on sight, maybe the VC wouldn’t have gotten the drop on them at all. But until he’d been sure she was an enemy, she’d been a little old lady.
What Cornish was talking about was what had come next: D had seen the way the bush was moving, and the shape of the VC attack, and managed to flank them. After that, they fell like paper husks. Then, in the bush, he’d found a ramshackle camp. And destroyed it.
“Yeah, it was my job. I don’t need a commendation for doing my job. But I’m better in the field, sir. The desk shit—”
“You’re good at that, too. I had two years without you to know how good you are. And I’m secure enough to see where my days in command have worn dull spots. I see how troops move. You see how men do. Here, my view is even higher, and I need someone to see the ground. You help me keep us alive.” With a grin, the major nodded at D’s shoulder. “And you’re out of the field for a week or two, at least, now. Right, corporal?
Corporal Mason nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Fuck,” D muttered. He grunted again as Mason jammed the needle in his back again. “How’s Tweteise? Any word?” Tweety had taken a bullet to the gut, but he’d been conscious and cracking wise all the way to the helo.
Something like that, it seemed a hopeful sign, but more than once D had seen a guy holding his intestines in his hands, trying to keep them from unwinding, and cracking jokes or commenting on the situation, or just praying loud and clear, right up to his absolute last breath. Gut wounds took a long time to do you in, but they were good at getting you done.
“He’s in surgery.” Cornish answered, his smile fading. “I haven’t had an update since he went in. But his vitals were strong. He’ll pull through.”
D nodded. “I sure hope so.”
Just then, Private Douglas poked his head in. “You got a letter, Sarge. One of them pretty-smellin’ pink ones. Thought it’d take your mind off—”
The mere thought of a new letter from his girl made him completely forget about his shoulder. His heartbeat zinging, D waved him close. “Give it.”
The paper felt like satin in his hands. It was just paper, but Mo had touched it, so it felt like satin. He could imagine her fingers brushing his skin …
He put the envelope to his nose. Even after a week or more of travel—the postmark on this one was dated ten days ago—the rose scent remained. The very thought of roses got him hard as fuck these days—including right now, so he was glad there was a sheet over his lap while Mason finished his sewing work.
Mo didn’t write him as often as he wrote her. Every day, if he could, he got at least a page to her. He never told her anything of import, he didn’t even talk about the guys here or share the kind of stories it would be safe to put in a letter, but he wanted that connection. He wanted her to feel him reaching across a whole goddamn ocean and half the United States to touch her and tell her he loved her.
The only days he didn’t write were when he was in the field—and even then, in quiet moments, or to keep himself calm when he needed it, he wrote her in his mind.
She wrote him about once a week or so. Plenty to keep him secure that she was still his, still waiting, and she wrote long letters, filled with news from home. Lately she’d been talking a lot about her plans for the baby. With something like four or more months to go, she was already buying clothes and toys and trying out names.
She’d even sent him a photo of her in her first maternity dress. She was gorgeous—though he hadn’t really seen a belly.
He could survive the days in between on the content of each letter. And that blessed rose scent.
Seeing him huff the envelope, Cornish laughed and stood. “I’ll leave you to it and go put you in for that commendation. Once you get the all-clear here, get yourself a meal and a shower.”
“No shower,” Mason said, sticking D again. “Sorry, Sarge. Just a quick wash until the wound closes.”
D grunted and ignored him. He knew the drill, but he was getting the battle sludge off at his earliest opportunity.
He slid his finger under the envelope flap and pulled out Mo’s latest letter.
It wasn’t even half a page. It didn’t include the date or a salutation. It didn’t include her name. Just a few sentences in her pretty, Ireland-kissed handwriting, and D’s heart broke on the first one.
I lost our baby. I don’t know what I did wrong, but our baby is gone. Please forgive me.
It wasn’t the baby that broke his heart. The loss of their child was a hurt, yes, but the pregnancy was a far-off thing for him, something he had no chance to be a part of, so its import was funneled entirely through his love for Mo, and his desire for her happiness. Now, her pain throbbed in every space between those few words, and her loss was a grenade exploding inside his ribcage.
As D grappled with his pain, Mason tried to lift his arm to wrap his wound. D lashed out without thinking. The crash of the instrument tray landing on the rough wood floor pulled him from the vortex of heartbreak, and he saw he’d knocked Mason on his ass.
“Sorry,” he managed to say.
Mason got back to his feet. “I’m okay. Bad news?”
D could only nod.
And read those few aching words again.
~oOo~
For the first time since
he’d sat down to write Mo’s first letter, Brian couldn’t think what to say. Because a letter wasn’t the right way to say it. He needed to be there. She needed more than a few words in his chicken scratch handwriting on shitty lined paper. She needed him.
And fuck, he couldn’t even call her. Until and unless he got R&R in Saigon, he didn’t have a way to make a goddamn phone call.
So there was only this: a crappy ball-point pen, shitty lined paper, inadequate words.
He did what he could for his wife, who needed him and was so far away.
My Irish,
Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I wish I’d been there for you. I wish could be there to hold you now. I don’t know what to say except that. If I could, I would take your hurt away and hold you close as long as you needed. There’s nothing for me to forgive. You didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t have to be there to know that’s true.
I love you, Mo. I love you, I love you, I love you.
There was nothing to say but that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mo swatted her cousin’s sneaky paw away from the cake. “Ach, Robby! If you must, get a spoon and have a nip from the bowl!”
He grinned and went to the silverware drawer to do just that, and Mo went back to forming buttercream strawberries on Maggie’s cake.
On the back windowsill, the radio, turned to face the screen, played Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’ to the party in the back yard.
It was the very first party the Quinns had ever had at home. Maggie’s high school graduation had given them cause enough to open their doors to her many friends.
Uncle Dave was at the grill, Aunt Bridie was playing hostess, trying unsuccessfully to get these newly formed adults to play the party games she’d found in Redbook, and Robby was steering clear of it all, hounding Mo as she finished the cake.
He scooped out a mounded tablespoon full of dark red frosting and shoved it in his gob. With his mouth still full, the little monster went for another, and Mo slapped him again. “Out with you!”
“I can’t help it! It’s good!” he mumbled around the gooey mass on his tongue.
Mo brandished the frosting knife, and he relented. “Tell Ma I’m goin’ to Jason’s house.”
“Be back by dark.”
“Okay.” He dropped his spoon in the sink and headed to the garage door. Mo went back to her work. When she finished the border of strawberries, she filled a new bag with the green frosting she’d mixed and added their leafy tops, and then wrote Congrats Maggie! CCHS 1970 across the cake.
Marvin Gaye was over. While the DJ did his spiel and went to commercial, Mo listened to the sounds of Maggie’s party. She’d been invited to do more than cook and bake, of course, but she hadn’t been interested in a graduation party of her own, and she was less interested in Maggie’s. It didn’t seem such an accomplishment to graduate high school.
Of course, Mo, unlike Maggie, hadn’t been one of her class’s most popular girls. Furthermore, she’d been accepted at OU and had known she wasn’t anywhere near finished with school. Maggie, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in college. She wanted to be a wife and mother. She and Roger, her boyfriend since sophomore year, were already engaged.
Assuming he didn’t get drafted before they could plan a wedding. And assuming the Fates were kinder to Maggie than they’d been to Mo, and she would have all the babies she wanted, when she wanted them.
After she’d lost the baby, until the last of the physical effects of the miscarriage finally ended, she’d had a terrible few weeks. Mo had known grief and anger in her life; she’d experienced agonizing, terrifying loss. But never before had she felt so weak with grief. The doctor told her it was hormones, her body trying to understand that the work it had been focused on was no longer needed. Mo didn’t give a fig why; she knew only that the loss had literally left her bedridden.
That baby had been more than her child. He or she had also been a link to Brian, and now she had none.
A month, she’d spent like that. And then, one morning, when Aunt Bridie made her ritual stop to ask if she’d join the family for breakfast, Mo had felt able to say yes. A couple days later, she’d gotten dressed in real clothes. Day by day, with her family behind her, she’d found her strength.
Once she got her feet on the ground again, Mo had looked around and taken stock of the damage to her life. She’d lost half a semester, possibly more. That was a thing she could focus on, a problem she could work to solve, and once she’d seen it and could turn her energy to it, she’d begun to feel like herself again.
First, she’d gone to her professors of the courses that were still in session, explained her situation, and asked if she could catch up. After five weeks away, she hadn’t been surprised when only one allowed her to do that. But two of the other four agreed to give her incompletes for the term, which meant extra time to finish her missed work. The final two professors allowed her to take an authorized withdrawal, so there was no negative consequence to her GPA.
She’d managed a B in the course that let her catch up. Here at the beginning of June, she’d also already made up all the work of incompletes, and earned As in both. And she was enrolled in summer session to retake the other two.
She had overcome the loss of her spring semester, and, with no reason now to lay out in the fall, she was on track to graduate with her Bachelor’s degree and her teaching certificate next spring. She had her plan back on track.
But she didn’t have her baby. And she didn’t have Brian.
He wrote her almost every day, he did what he could do comfort her, to encourage her, he told her over and over again that he loved her and missed her, but Mo felt a distance growing, and she didn’t know which of them was moving away.
She wasn’t writing, so maybe it was her. But he was changing; she could see it in the words he used, and in the way he’d started to sign his letters with the letter D. He’d forgotten a few times before, and then she’d find a letter signed with both a struck-out D and with his name. Lately, though, he didn’t seem to notice.
That D scared her. D was a man she didn’t know. D, she was sure, was the Mr. Hyde he’d been so afraid she’d find in him. What if D came back and left Brian in Vietnam? That fear was second only to her fear that he wouldn’t come back at all.
The radio was now playing ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ by Jimi Hendrix. Mo focused on that song, one of her favorites, before her mood could get pulled any deeper into the shadows by thoughts of war and loss.
“How’re we doin’, love?” Aunt Bridie asked. Mo had finished with the cake and was rinsing up the dishes. “Well, look at that. It’s lovely, Mo.”
“Thank you. I hope it’s big enough. I didn’t expect so many people.”
“Nor I. But you know Maggie—she didn’t stick to the guest list, naturally. We’ll slice thin, and add extra heaps of strawberries so they can’t tell. You’ve sliced them up, yeah?”
“I did. They’re steeping in their juices now.”
“Well done. Why don’t you go on out and have yourself a wee nip of punch?”
Mo shook her head. “If I want punch, I can get some here in the fridge. I’ll leave Maggie to her friends and her party. Looks like it’s craic, though. I’m going to go lie down and read for a while in the quiet. Unless there’s anything else I can do?”
Hands on her hips, green eyes narrow, Aunt Bridie studied Mo. “No, love. You go on. The mail’s come. It’s on the hall table.”
Mo nodded and headed to the hall. She hadn’t been able to write more than a couple letters since the baby, and Brian’s letters had begun to worry her, but she lived for them just the same.
“Mo,” Aunt Bridie said as Mo reached the entrance to the hallway.
“Aye?”
“You were dancin’.”
“Hmm?”
“When I come in. You were at the sink, dancin’. It was good to see. All will be well in time, love. You’re the strongest of us all, and you’
ll be well.”
~oOo~
25 May 70
My Irish,
I’m not going to hound you to write me anymore. I know I can’t help what you’ve been going through until I’m there again, and I know you resent me for it. I left you alone, you needed me and I wasn’t there, so I’m going to stop asking you to do something you obviously don’t want to do. Or can’t do, I don’t know. But I need to keep writing you. I need to talk to you every day or I think I’ll lose my head. Even if I’m doing all the talking, it helps.
I miss you so goddamn much, Mo. Damn, If you’re not there when I get home I just hope you still love me and will give me a chance to make things up to you when I’m back.
I don’t really have anything else to say but that. Nothing here is as important as you.
I love you, Irish.
D
Mo wadded up the letter and threw it across the room. Sometimes, his letters had made her sad; often, they worried her; occasionally, they’d frustrated her; but never before had she been quite so furious.
Nothing here is as important as you.
Well, why in the seven holy fucks was he there then? The bleeding idiot!
“AGH!” She wadded up the envelope and sent it in the same direction as the letter. Then she stormed to that corner and stomped on the crinkled balls.
Her bedroom door swung open, and Uncle Dave leaned in. “Mo? What’re you about?”
Mo caught her breath—and realized she’d been growling like a bear while she’d stomped. “Sorry, Unca. Just … havin’ a mo.”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No. I’m ragin’ at the idiot I married.”
That brought on a chuckle. “Aye. Good. Sound work. Keep it up, then, love.” He ducked out and closed the door.
Mo’s moment had passed, and she looked at the floor. The wads of paper were flat now and covered in the pebbled prints from her Keds. She picked them up and went to her desk. Working carefully, she spread the letter and the envelope out and smoothed them as flat again as she could make them.
Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 17
