"Hey, Tony, you forgot your pants," he said, then saw the expression on Tony's face and said, "So it's a good day to get some sun."
I followed Tony across the lawn, through the trees, and past the goldfish ponds and birdbaths and tennis court to the back wall of his property. A hooded air vent protruded from the ground close to the base of the wall.
"Find it," he said.
"What?"
"The trapdoor."
"I don't see one."
He bent over and pulled on an iron ring set next to a sprinkler head, and a door covered with grass sod raised up out of the lawn and exposed a short, subterranean stairwell.
"It's an atom bomb shelter," he said. "But I heard the guy who built it used to pump the maid down here."
We went down inside, and he clicked on a light and pulled the door shut with a hanging rope. The walls and floor were concrete, the roof steel plate. There were two bunk beds inside the room, a pile of moldy K rations in one corner, and a stack of paperback novels and a disassembled AR-15 rifle on top of a bridge table.
"I come down here when things are bugging me," he said. "Sometimes I make up a picnic basket and Paul and me spend the night down here, like we're camping. It's got a chemical toilet, I can hook up a portable TV, nobody knows where I am unless I want them to know."
He sat down on the bunk bed and leaned back against the concrete wall. A dark line of hair grew up the center of his stomach from the elastic band of his underwear. He stirred the ice in his drink with his finger. Then he was quiet for what seemed a long time.
"After I got hit they didn't send me back to my old platoon," he said. "Instead I got reassigned to a bunch of losers. Or maybe they'd just been out too long. One guy had a scalp lock from a woman on his rifle, another guy gave a little boy a heat tab and told him it was candy. Anyway, I didn't like any of them. Which was all right, because they didn't like me, either, and they kept treating me like a newbie.
"So one night the lieutenant tells us to set up an ambush about four klicks up this trail, so we pass a real small ville by a stream after one klick and we go on another klick, and finally everybody says, 'Fuck it, we sandbag it, let the loot set his own ambush.'
"But while we're sitting out there in the dark it's like everybody's got something else on his mind. It's hot and quiet, and water's dripping out of the trees and we're slapping mosquitoes and smelling ourselves and looking at our watches and thinking we got six more hours out here. Then the guy with the scalp lock on his rifle-his name was Elvis Doolittle, that's right, I'm not making it up-Elvis rubs his whiskers with his hand and keeps looking back down the trail and finally he puts a cigarette in his mouth. The doc says, 'What the fuck you doing, Elvis?'
"He says, 'I'm going back to the ville.'
"Then nobody says anything. But everybody had seen these two teenage sisters with their mama-san in front of the hooch. And they know what Elvis is thinking. Then he says, 'We'll leave Mouse and the new guy. Nobody'll know. That ville's got something coming anyway. That booby trap that got Brown. They set it.'
"'You don't know that,' Mouse says.
"'If they didn't set it, they know who did,' Elvis says.
"Then they all talked it over and my heart started beating. Not because of what they were going to do, either, but because I was afraid to be left on the trail with just one guy.
"Elvis turns to me and says, 'You ever say anything about this, you ain't getting back home, man.' Then they were gone. The trees were so thick all those guys just melted away into the blackness. You could hear monkeys clattering around in the canopy and night birds and sounds like sticks breaking out there in the jungle. Sweat was running out of my pot and my breath started catching in my throat. Then we hear something clank.
"Mouse whispers, 'It's up the trail. It's up the fucking trail.'
"I tell him to be quiet and listen, and he says, 'It's NVA, man.'
"I tell him to shut up again, but he says, 'They dideed out on us, man. It ain't right. I ain't staying.'
"His eyes look big as half-dollars under his pot, and I'm trying to act cool, like I got it under control, but the sweat keeps burning my eyes and my hands are shaking so bad it's like I got malaria. Then I hear something up the trail again.
"'That's it,' Mouse says. 'Let's get out of here.'
"I put my hand on his arm. 'All right, man, we go back to the ville,' I say. 'But what are you gonna do with what you see back there?'
"'I ain't gonna see nothing,' he says. 'It ain't my business. I got eighteen more days, then it's back to the world. I ain't gonna get pulled into no court-martial, either. You do what you want to, Cardo.'
"He takes off, and a minute later I follow him, tagging along like a punk to something I don't even want to know about, all because I'm scared.
"When we get back to the ville, Elvis has put all the zips in their hooches and has sent the doc with a flashlight into the hooch that's got the two teenage sisters. The doc comes out and says, 'They're clean,' and then Elvis and this big black dude go in. About ten minutes later Elvis comes out fixing his fly and sees me and Mouse squatting by the trail.
"'You dumb shits,' he says. 'You get the fuck back up that trail.'
"'I ain't gonna do it, Elvis,' Mouse says.
"He grabs Mouse by the back of his shirt and pulls him up out of the dirt, just like you pick up a dirty clothes bag.
"'Fuck you, man. We're not going back up there by ourselves,' I say. 'We heard something clank up there. You dideed out on us. They get through, your ass is in a sling.'
"He's frozen there, with Mouse hanging from his fist. He says, 'What d'you mean, something clanked?'
"Before I can answer an old man runs across the clearing out of nowhere and tries to get in the hooch, where a couple of other guys are taking their turn inside. He's yelling in gook, and the big black dude is holding him by the wrists, and everybody's laughing. Then one of the sisters starts screaming inside, and more zips are coming out of their hooches, and it's all starting to deteriorate in a hurry. Elvis lets loose of Mouse and walks fast across the clearing just as the two guys come back out of the hooch.
"One of them is the guy who gave the kid a heat tab. He and Elvis look at each other, then the guy says, 'The shit's already in the fire, man.'
"The old man goes in the hooch, and there's more yelling inside, and Elvis says, 'What'd you do to her?'
"The guy, the heat-tab guy, says, 'Nothing you didn't.'
"But the guy who was in there with him says, 'He told her he'd kill her baby if she didn't blow him.'
"By that time I just wanted to get out of there, so I don't know who threw the grenade. I was already headed down the trail when I heard it go off. But somebody threw it right in the door of the hooch, with the two sisters and the old man and maybe a baby inside. Then I started running. When I looked back I could see the sparks above the trees from the burning hooch. I don't know if they killed anybody else there or not. I never asked, and I never told anybody about it. The next day I volunteered to work in the mortuary at Chu Lai. "
"The mortuary?" I said.
"That's right, man. I peeled them out of the body bags, cleaned the jelly out of their mouths and ears, washed them down, embalmed them, and boxed them. Because I'd had it with the war. And I'd lost my guts, too. I just wasn't going out again. I didn't care if I was a public coward or not."
He drank from the bourbon, then leaned forward on his thighs. He rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck and looked at his hand.
"Maybe it took courage to do that, Tony," I said.
"No, I was afraid. There's no way around that fact." His voice was tired.
"You could have gotten out of the bush in other ways. You could have given yourself a minor wound. A second Heart would have put you in a safe area. You think maybe it's possible you volunteered for the mortuary to punish yourself?"