by Tim O'Brien
"Sorry again. Divorced, right?"
"Light me another one, David."
"No can do. What about those unborn babies?"
"Pity," Marla said, "but they'll have to live with it. Come on, fire me up."
David tapped out a cigarette, slipped it between her lips, struck a match, and watched her lean in toward the flame. Lovely woman, he thought. Steel eyes. Silver-blond hair, cut short. Trim. No hips. No sign of any extra eight pounds. They'd remained friends over the years, sharing lunches, sometimes sharing a bed, and David found it impossible to believe that they would not somehow end up living together and getting old together and finally occupying the same patch of earth. Anything else seemed mad. Worse than mad. Plain evil.
Marla blew smoke into the July night.
"Much better," she said.
"Not for our babies."
"David, please, just lay off the baby bit. I'm low on the estrogen. Empty tanks. I'm old."
"You're not old."
"Oh, I am. Always was." She looked away, looked back at him, went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. "It's this reunion crap, David. Makes people mushy."
"Mushy, mushy me," said David.
"Absolutely. Mushy you."
"I need to ask something."
"Is it mushy?"
"It is," he said.
"No," she said. "Don't ask."
Marla folded her arms and stepped back.
She was fond of David, and wished things could be otherwise, but what he wanted from her had never been a possibility. Ordinary love—what most people thought of as love—meant little to her. All she'd ever wanted was to be alone.
"Let's dance," she said. "I'm not good at this."
"At what?"
"This. Talking."
"Fair enough. But if you don't talk, I don't dance."
"The leg?"
"Not the leg," he said. "I was just hoping ... Forget it."
"You could watch, couldn't you?"
"Sure," he said.
He followed Marla inside and stood watching as she danced with Dorothy Stier and Spook Spinelli. It was true, he thought, that she'd put on some wear and tear. The sockets of her eyes had yellowed, and her skin had a brittle, crumbly texture that took him by surprise. She looked her age, which was fifty-three. But even so. A stunning fifty-three. In point of fact, he decided, a sublime and heartbreaking and drop-dead magnificent fifty-three. For all the years, there was still the essential Marla glow, a magnetic field, whatever it was that made Marla into Marla, and that made his own life worth the pain of living it.
After a time Marv Bertel cut in and took Spook off into a corner, and a moment later Dorothy Stier went off to make peace with Billy McMann, and then Marla danced alone.
Well, David thought.
Dream girl.
He turned away.
The evening had been hard on him, because he wanted Marla so badly, and because she'd lived inside him for so many years, through a whole war, then through a nine-year marriage, and then for the decades afterward. To her great credit, he realized, Marla had never feigned passion, never promised anything. David believed her when she said she cared for him. But he'd come to despise the word "care." He did not care for it. Nor did he care for the terrible truth that Marla only cared for him.
After two drinks David left the gym. He made his way across campus to Flarety Hall, took the elevator up to his room, removed his trousers and prosthesis, popped a Demerol, popped a half sheet of acid, lay down on the tile floor, and allowed the narcotics to carry him away to a shallow, fast-moving river called the Song Tra Ky.
Ellie Abbott left not long afterward with her husband Mark and with the sound of waterfowl in her head. Harmon would not quit drowning on her. She had dared two affairs in her life, and the second had gone very, very badly, and for almost a year now Harmon Osterberg had been drowning in her dreams. It was something she could never talk about. Not with Mark, not with anyone. The affair had developed by accident, a mild flirtation, never serious, but the consequences were enough to make her believe in Satan. For the rest of her life Ellie would be living with the terror of a ringing telephone, a midnight knock at the door. Secrecy was squeezing the future out of her.
In the cab, as they returned to their hotel, her husband said, "Was it fun?"
"Fun?" she said.
"The reunion. Old friends. What else?"
There was a vacuum, as if a hole had opened up between them, and for a few seconds Ellie wondered if she might find the courage to fill it with the truth.
Instead, she said, "Oh, fun."
Almost everyone else partied well past midnight. There were door prizes, and later a limbo contest, and later still a talent show designed for laughs. Marv Bertel was among those who stayed. Bad heart and all, he danced several times with Spook Spinelli, who was already married, doubly, and who divided her time between two adoring husbands and a now-and-then lover on the side. By one in the morning Spook's head was on Marv's shoulder. "I'm a lardass," he told her, "but I'd make a fantastic third husband. Hide me under your bed. Beds, I mean. Plural."
Spook said, "Nice dream, isn't it?"
"Just say maybe."
"Maybe," she said.
Dorothy Stier stayed late too. She stood outside with Billy McMann, trying to explain away her mistake, or what Billy called a mistake. She blamed it on religion and politics and the vast differences between them in 1969. "I was Catholic," she reminded him. "I was a Nixon chick. What else could I do?"
"They have churches in Winnipeg," Billy said. "They have tea services."
"At least dance with me."
"No, thanks," he said.
"Please?"
"Can't. Won't. Very sorry." He would not look at her. "So where's Ron this evening?"
"Stop it."
"Let me guess," said Billy. "Home with the kids?"
"Correct."
"You bet correct. Home. Kids. Correct's the fucking word."
Inside, Marla Dempsey still danced alone, down inside herself.
Sixty seconds away, David Todd lay shot through both feet, dumb as dirt, sky high, listening to the sound of everness cut through the tall, bloody grass along a shallow river west of Chu Lai.
Harmon Osterberg was drowned.
Karen Burns was murdered.
In a downtown hotel room, Ellie Abbott lay under the sheets with her husband Mark. At one point Ellie began to reach out to him. She almost said something.
Just after 1:30 in the morning the band stopped playing. The lights came up, people began drifting toward the door, but then someone found a radio and turned up the volume and the party went on.
At the rear of the gym, six former football players ran passing plays.
The twin slide projectors pinned history to the wall. RFK bled from a hole in his head. Ellie Abbott swam laps with Harmon Osterberg in the Darton Hall pool, and Amy Robinson hoisted a candle for Martin Luther King, and a helicopter rose from a steaming rice paddy west of Chu Lai, and David Todd bent down to field a sharp grounder, and Spook Spinelli grinned her sexy young grin, and Billy McMann dropped a fiery draft card from the third-floor balcony of the student union, and the Chicago police hammered in the head of a young man in whiskers, and Paulette Haslo led a pray-in for peace, and Apollo II lifted off for the moon, and the President of the United States told heroic lies in the glaring light of day. Out on the dance floor, Minnesota's lieutenant governor and his ex-fiancée, now a Lutheran missionary, swayed slowly to fast music. A chemist explored the expansive hips of a retired librarian. A prominent physician and one of the full-time mothers, formerly a star point guard, made their way toward the women's locker room. Unofficially, this was a thirtieth reunion—officially a thirty-first—and for many members of the class of '69, maybe for all of them, the world had whittled itself down to now or never.
Billy McMann and Dorothy Stier had gotten nowhere. They stood near the bar, apportioning blame.
Paulette Haslo was on her hands and knees, drunk, peering up at t
he cardboard stars. "All I ever wanted," she was telling no one, "was to be a good minister. That's all. Nothing else."
The chemist kissed the weathered throat of his retired librarian.
Minnesota's lieutenant governor had vanished. So, too, had his ex-fiancée, now a Lutheran missionary.
Spook Spinelli sat in Marv Bertel's lap. Marv was certain his time had come. Spook was certain about nothing, least of all her own heart. After a while she excused herself, got up, and went off to call her two husbands and a now-and-then lover named Baldy Devlin.
At a back table, over the last of their vodka, Amy Robinson was confiding in Jan Huebner about her disastrous honeymoon, explaining how packets of hundred-dollar bills had ended up in her purse. Good luck, Amy said, always came in streaks, and she was afraid she'd used up every last bit of hers on the honeymoon. "It sounds superstitious," she said, "but I wonder if I've got any left. Luck, I mean. For the real world."
"Divorce sucks," Jan said.
"Big-time," said Amy.
Jan looked around the gym. "Maybe we'll strike gold. This whole place, take a look around. Nobody left except a bunch of wretched old drunks like us. People who need people."
"I hate that song," said Amy.
"The universe hates it," said Jan. "Except for my ex-husband."
"Screw the guy," said Amy.
"All the guys," said Jan.
"Cheers," Amy said.
"Cheers," said Jan.
Amy finished off her drink, closed her eyes, blinked out a smile. "Crazy, crazy thing, isn't it?"
"Crazy what?"
"Oh, I don't know, just getting old," said Amy. "You and me, our whole dreamy generation. Used to be, we'd talk about the Geneva Accords, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Now it's down to liposuction and ex-husbands. Can't trust anybody over sixty." Amy shook her head. For a few seconds she tapped her empty glass against the table. "And you know the worst part? Here's the absolute worst part. Our old-fogy parents—yours and mine, everybody's—they didn't know jack about jack. Couldn't spell Hanoi if you spotted them the vowels. But one thing they did know, they knew damn well where we'd end up. They knew where all the roads go."
"Which is where?" Jan said.
"Here."
"Sorry?"
"Right here."
Jan sighed. "True enough," she said. "But look at it this way. Things could be worse. We're not Karen Burns."
2. JULY '69
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, July 16, 1969. In four days, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon. But now, a world away, in the mountains west of Chu Lai, Second Lieutenant David Todd lay in the grass along a shallow, fast-moving river called the Song Tra Ky, badly wounded, thinking Dear God, listening to people die all around him. Hector Ortiz had been shot in the face. The boy was dead, or seemed to be, but his transistor radio still crackled with the evening news out of Da Nan. Apollo II had lifted off that morning. There were prayer services in Sioux City, progress reports in Times Square, and all across the republic, in small towns and big towns, under bright summer skies, crowds gathered in front of appliance stores to witness updates from Mission Control. Vince Mustin was crying. He had been shot in the stomach. Up ahead, on the far side of the river, Staff Sergeant Bus Dexter yelled something and crawled toward a clump of boulders. He almost made it. David watched the big man push to his feet and begin to run, three or four clumsy steps, then something exploded behind him and lifted him up and jerked him sideways and dropped him dead on the riverbank. Buddy Bond and Kaz Maples had died in the first burst of gunfire. Happy James had been shot in the neck. Doc Paladino had vanished entirely. Minutes ago, during the platoon's rest break, Doc had been kneeling in the grass a few meters behind David, listening to Ortiz's radio, grinning and shaking his head—"Fuckin' moon," he'd said—and then came a crashing sound, followed by a glare, and Doc Paladino had been sucked away into the powdery grass.
Others were still dying. David could hear them making animal noises along the riverbank and in the brush behind him. He had no idea what to do. He had been shot through both feet. He rolled sideways through the grass, toward the; river, then covered his head. It was his nineteenth day in-country. He was partly terrified, partly amazed. It had not seemed possible that he could be shot, or shot so quickly, or shot through both feet. The noise amazed him, too, and the way Doc Paladino had been sucked away dead, and how his feet hurt, and how Ortiz's little transistor radio kept playing while people died. Apollo's touchdown was scheduled for 8:27 P.M., Greenwich Mean Time, July 20, at a spot in the universe called the Sea of Tranquillity.
David was too afraid to move.
It occurred to him that he was an officer, and that he should do something, except there was nothing to do, nothing to shoot back at, just the dry, brittle grass all around him.
Ten or fifteen meters away, Ortiz's transistor radio played a transmission from Apollo II.
Somebody near the river was laughing.
There were Vietnamese voices, chattering sounds.
For a few seconds the gunfire seemed to ease off, the way a rain ends, but then it started up again, louder and much closer, and David told himself to move. He took a breath, crawled forward a few feet, stopped, listened, and then crawled again. It seemed absurd to him that he could be shot the way he was. The pain was terrible, but not nearly as bad as his fear, so he pinched his eyes shut and talked inside himself and kept moving until he reached a pair of saplings at the center of the clearing. Oddly, even with the gunfire, he could still hear Ortiz's radio. Vince Mustin was no longer sobbing, and along the river, where most of the platoon had been trapped, the return fire had ceased. The Vietnamese were yipping, sometimes laughing. Now and then a single gunshot rang out. Mopping up, David thought. And it then became evident to him, for the first time, that he would almost certainly die here, and that he would die alone, no buddies, no Marla Dempsey, shot through both feet.
Panic made him move again. He dragged himself through the grass, mostly on his belly, and after what seemed an impossibly long time he reached a thicket of reeds along the Song Tra Ky. The rest of the platoon had to be somewhere downstream. An hour ago he had allowed half his men to march off for a swim; back then the universe had still been a universe.
David wiggled into the muck, hugged himself, briefly pictured his own corpse. He also pictured Marla Dempsey. No doubt she would show up at his funeral. She would drape a flag over his coffin and blink hard and feel guilty. She would do her best to cry.
The pictures made him want to live.
Fifty meters away, barely audible now, Ortiz's transistor radio kept droning on about mankind's destiny, how Apollo II had brought the world together. None of it seemed real: not the newscast, not the moon. "Come on, partner, hang tight," a voice said, smooth and Southern, a Texas drawl. Crazy, David thought. The voice seemed to be coming from Ortiz's radio. He pressed himself down into the reeds, trying to think clear thoughts, but all he could manage was the hope that he would not leak to death through his feet, that he would not be finished off like the others.
At one point he heard Vietnamese voices close by. He smelled something fishy and sweet, maybe hair tonic. He imagined a rifle muzzle against his temple. "Hey, don't!" he said, then felt himself slipping away.
Later, he heard himself mumbling about baseball.
Later still, he watched his feet being eaten by ants, a whole colony.
***
The ants awakened him just before dark. He lay still for a few seconds, and then the pain in his feet hit him hard. He sat up, brushed the ants away, pulled a canteen from his belt, drank it empty, rubbed his eyes, stared up at a purple sky. There were insect sounds, a few frogs, nothing else. The temptation was to sleep again, to float away, and he was surprised, almost frightened, to hear a polished Texas voice say, "Let's go, my man. Move out. Time's tickin', ants lickin'."
David scanned the tropical twilight.
"I'm serious, Davy. Move."
Dark had set in by the time he dragged himself ba
ck into the grassy clearing. Already the place had the feel of memory. He followed the sound of Hector Ortiz's transistor radio, which now filled the night with Sly and the Family Stone. Ortiz's corpse lay nearby. Closer to the river, in a rough semicircle, were the bodies of Kaz Maples and Buddy Bond and Vince Mustin and a young PFC whose name David could not remember. They were all dead, pale and plastic, as if they had never lived, but to be sure David examined each of them for a pulse. Afterward, he sat and listened. He was twenty-two years old. He was a baseball player, not a soldier. Part of him wanted to weep, or go crazy, but he was too afraid and too bewildered, even for craziness, and Sly was spooking him.
He switched off the radio, put it in his pocket.
Two notions struck him at once. He knew for a fact that he would die here. He knew for another fact that it was mostly his own fault.
The night passed in fog. Sometimes he prayed, sometimes he surrendered to the pain in his feet. Periodically, when he thought he could tolerate it, David tightened up the laces of his boots, hoping this might stop the bleeding. His thoughts came at him like fireworks: a flash from childhood, then darkness, then another flash opening up into some half-forgotten face from college. He saw Marla Dempsey dancing in the Darton Hall gymnasium. He saw his mother hanging up clothes in the back yard, his father planting a lilac bush, his brother Mickey tossing a baseball at the garage.
Like getting shot, David noted.
None of it cohered.
Late in the night he switched on Ortiz's transistor radio. He kept the volume low, the Sony tight to his ear, and listened to a tired-sounding master sergeant in Da Nang chat about the Apollo moon shot. "No potholes, no bumps in the road," the announcer said, "and we got ourselves a nice wrinkle-free trip to the rock. So all you troopers out there, all you wee-hour trippers and dippers and war-wiggies and scaredy-cats, you can take heart in that." The man chuckled. "The technology works, guys."
