Gathering himself, Tyrel pulled himself up straight. “I apologize. Didn’t mean to offend. Let me buy you a drink.”
Victor stared hard at him with those dead eyes. “I don’t drink unless my men drink with me.”
Tyrel looked at all of them. “All right then.” He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. He pushed aside a fleeting concern that he was going to be broke by the end of the night. “I’ll buy for all of y’all.”
A slow smile spread across Victor’s face. “Much obliged, Country,” he said in that drawl that told Tyrel he wasn’t far from small towns and backwoods himself. “You can even drink that beer with us.”
A few minutes later, they were all settled at one of the back tables. Tyrel thought that every man in the cantina was envious of him.
Although Victor didn’t talk much, Fat Mike and other members of his group kept the stories flying. Tyrel hadn’t been around much, but he knew he couldn’t believe everything that was being told. Still, if even half of it was true…
During a lull in the conversation, Dennis Hinton walked into the cantina.
Tyrel was a little surprised. Denny wasn’t one to go and hang out in the bars, and he sure stayed away from the women. Some said it was because of his raising, that his daddy was a preacher out of Alabama. There were others who said Denny preferred reefer to alcohol. Tyrel wasn’t sure who had the right of it, but he did know that Denny hadn’t ever come into the cantina with him.
“Denny,” Tyrel said, pushing up from the table. “Denny. Over here.”
Fat Mike snagged the front of Tyrel’s shirt and yanked him back down into his chair.
“That ain’t cool, man,” Fat Mike said. “If you’re gonna sit at this table, you’re gonna sit here by our rules. And one of them rules is that you don’t act like an idiot.”
“But that’s my friend,” Tyrel protested.
“Maybe you want to go be with your friend,” Fat Mike suggested.
Tyrel was debating on that. He’d bought the first round and two more besides. He really was going to be broke by the end of the night. He honestly didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to afford to sit in that chair.
“No,” Victor said in that quiet voice of his, “let it alone, Fat Mike. Let him invite his friend over if he wants.”
“But that-” At a glance from Victor, Fat Mike shut his mouth and sat there silently.
Victor shifted his attention to Tyrel. “Invite your friend over, Country. I’ll buy the next round.”
Tyrel stood again. “Hey, Denny. Come on over. Victor said he’s buyin’.”
Denny hesitated a moment, then walked over. One of the other men hooked a chair over with his foot. Denny sat, but he didn’t look comfortable.
Proud of himself and his new friends, Tyrel just grinned and ordered another beer when Victor offered.
›› Atwater Apartment Building
›› Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
›› 0911 Hours
“Why did Victor Gant want Dennis Hinton to sit with them?” Maggie asked.
Richard McGovern shook his head. “Lady, I didn’t know everything Victor was doin’ back then. How’m I supposed to know now?”
The man was lying. Maggie knew that with certainty. She couldn’t tell exactly what he was lying about, but she knew the deception was there all the same.
“We all thought it was a joke,” McGovern said. “Most of us knew Hinton didn’t drink. He had him a good dose of religion. That and a good attitude. The way he acted, you’d have thought he could walk on water.”
“Why do you say that?”
McGovern lit up another cigarette from the butt of his previous one. “To understand that, you’d have had to be there. You’d have had to be in that jungle, fighting Charlie. Everybody I knew that was over there was afraid.” He paused. “Except this kid Hinton.”
“He wasn’t afraid?”
“Nope. Not a day he was over there. Probably not the night Country shot him either.”
“Why?”
“The way I figured it, Hinton thought he had a direct connection to God himself. You could tell it too, the way he came over there and sat down in the middle of us. Like nothin’ and nobody could touch him.” McGovern shrugged. “Or maybe he just felt safe because Country was sitting there with us. Anyway, he sat down, looked us all in the eye, and ordered a soda pop. Like he was Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke or something.”
Maggie waited. The hardest part of conducting an interview was knowing when to be quiet and let silence make the person being interviewed talk.
“After we had a round or two,” McGovern said, “Victor suggested we go hunting. And that’s when things started to get real interesting.”
53
›› Intensive Care Unit
›› Las Palmas Medical Center
›› El Paso, Texas
›› 0815 Hours (Central Time Zone)
“Hunting?” Shel asked.
His daddy nodded but didn’t look at him.
“For what?” Shel tried to imagine, couldn’t, and gave up.
“Victor didn’t say,” Tyrel answered. “Just told us there wasn’t nothing like being out in the jungle at night.”
“You’d run night maneuvers before.”
“Yep. But we’d never run night maneuvers with Victor Gant. Everybody talked about him like he was a ghost out in the jungle. I wanted to see him in action. See if he really knew that much more than I did. My daddy taught me how to hunt at night. We used to go coon huntin’ down in the hollers all the time when I was a kid. When I got older, Daddy taught me how to take deer during the daytime and how to track a coyote at night. I was a whisper in the darkness.”
Shel listened to his daddy talk. In all the years that he’d known the man, Tyrel had never talked so much about what he’d done. Others had told Shel stories, but Tyrel wasn’t one to abide bragging. If he’d been talking to his daddy for any other reason, Shel would have been happy to sit and listen.
“So we all went and got our rifles,” Tyrel said. “Then we slipped through security and went out into the jungle.”
“Hinton went with you?”
“Yeah. That’s where I…” Tyrel stopped speaking for a moment. “He didn’t come back that night. He died out there.”
“Why did he go?”
“I don’t know.” Tyrel’s voice was dry and paper-thin.
“Did you ask him?”
“No. I was twenty-one years old. I was scared to be going, but I was excited too. I was going with Victor Gant. A genuine penetration team legend. There was nothing that coulda kept me from going that night.” Tyrel paused. “Except knowin’ how it was all gonna turn out.”
›› Highway 19
›› Qui Nhon, Vietnam
›› 2207 Hours
›› October 15, 1967
An hour after leaving the cantina, Tyrel was still drunker than Cooter Brown. He figured an hour of walking would have put him near to rights, but he was still having trouble seeing straight. And walking straight for that matter.
They were three miles out from Qui Nhon when Victor Gant called a break.
“How are you boys feeling?” Victor asked.
Everybody answered that they were feeling fine except for Denny. He’d been kind of hanging back from the crowd even though he’d agreed to come. Watching Denny now, mad at himself because he couldn’t sober up enough to take care of himself and wasn’t quite drunk enough to forget about being afraid, Tyrel didn’t know why Denny had come.
“That’s good,” Victor said, “because now we’re going to do exercises.”
“Exercises?” Denny asked.
“Yeah,” Victor said. “A few night maneuvers.” He looked at Tyrel. “Country there said he wanted to learn to be a better soldier. Tonight I’m giving lessons.”
“Country needs to be in bed,” Denny said. “He’s three sheets to the wind as it is.”
Fat Mike jabbed Denny in the chest with a big forefinger. “You think him bein’ drunk is any different than bein’ out there in the jungle for four or five days? Dude, you don’t get no sleep out there. You’re too busy tryin’ to grow eyeballs in the back of your head to sleep. You think sleep deprivation is any different than being drunk?”