A young television newsman, his camera whirring, suddenly took his face away from his viewer and gagged.
“Excuse me,” he said, embarrassed, his hand pinched over his mouth. Then he turned aside and vomited.
The divers laid the body front-down on a black plastic sheet. The backs of the thighs were pulsating with leeches. One of the divers walked away, took a cigarette from a uniformed deputy’s mouth, and smoked it, his back turned toward us.
The pathologist was a tall white-haired man who wore a bow tie, suspenders, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a thin black ribbon around the crown.
“I wonder why they didn’t eviscerate him while they were at it,” he said.
The body was nude. The fingers and thumbs of both hands had been snipped off cleanly at the joints, perhaps with bolt cutters. The head had been sawed off an inch above the collarbones.
Helen bit a hangnail off her thumb. “What do you think?” she said.
“Look at the size. How many guys that big end up as floaters?” I said.
Even in death and the gray stages of decomposition that take place under water in the tropics, the network of muscles in the shoulders and back and hips was that of a powerful, sinewy man, someone whose frame was wired together by years of calisthenics, humping ninety-pound packs in the bush, jolting against a parachute harness while the steel pot razors down on the nose.
I stretched a pair of white surgical gloves over my hands and knelt by the body. I tried to hold my breath, but the odor seemed to cling to my skin like damp wool, an all-enveloping hybrid stench that’s like a salty tangle of seaweed and fish eggs drying on hot sand and pork gone green with putrefaction.
“You don’t have to do that, Dave,” the pathologist said. “I’ll have him apart by five o’clock.”
“I’m just checking for a bullet wound, Doc,” I said.
I fitted both hands under the torso and flipped the body on its back
“Oh shit,” a newsman said.
“Maybe the guy was having a female implant put in,” a uniformed deputy said.
“Shut up, asshole,” Helen said.
There was a single wound above the groin area. It had been cored out by a fish eel, whose head was embedded deep in the flesh while the tail flipped in the air like a silver whip.
“You might look for a nine-millimeter, Doc,” I said.
“You know this guy?” he asked.
“My guess is his name was Jack,” I said.
Helen brushed at his thigh with a piece of folded cardboard. “Here’s a tattoo his friends missed,” she said.
It was a faded green, red, and gold Marine Corps globe and anchor imposed upon a cone-shaped open parachute.
“The poor dumb fuck didn’t even know who he was on a skivvy run,” Helen said.
Helen’s therapist had asked her one of those questions for which an honest answer is seemingly disingenuous or so self-revealing that you don’t wish to inhabit your own skin for a while.
My dreams seemed continuous, beginning with the first moments of sleep and ending at dawn, but the props and central characters always remained the same.
I stand at a brass-railed mahogany bar on a pink evening in the Philippines, the palm fronds in the courtyard waving slightly in the breeze. I knock back a shot glass of Beam and chase it with San Miguel on the side, rest my forearms on the coolness of the wood and wait for the rush, which, like an old friend, never disappoints, which always lasers straight to the nerve endings at the base of the brain and fills the glands and loins and the sealed corridors of memory with light and finally gives ease to the constricted and fearful heart.
For a while.
The bartender’s face is pale yellow, the skin tight against the skull, the skin stretched into cat’s whiskers, the mouth a stitched slit. The evening air is filled with the rustle of bead curtains and the silky whisper of the Oriental women who move through them; redolent with the thick, sweet smell of opium, like honey and brown sugar burned in a spoon, and the smoky scent of whiskey aged in charcoal barrels, the black cherries and sliced oranges and limes that you squeeze between your back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure, as though somehow they connect you with tropical gardens rather than places under the earth.
The dream always ends in the same way, but I never know if the scene is emblematic or an accurate recall of events that took place during a blackout. I see myself lifted from a floor by men with no faces who pitch me through a door into a stone-paved alley that reverberates with a clatter of metal cans and crones who scavenge through garbage. A pimp and a whore rifle my pockets while I stare up at them, as helpless as if my spine were severed; my hands are cuffed behind me in a chair in a. Third World police station while I shake with delirium tremens and sweat as big as flattened marbles slides down my face.
When I wake from the dream my breath shudders in my throat, the air in the room seems poisoned with exhaled and rebreathed alcohol, and I sit on the edge o f my bed and begin to rework the first three steps of the AA recovery program. But there are other images in my mind now, more disturbing than the ones from my sleep. It’s like a red bubble rising out of a heated place just beyond the limits of vision; then it bursts in the back of the brain and I can see tracers lacing the night like strips of barroom neon and taste the bitterness of cordite on my tongue. The rush is just like the whiskey that cauterizes memory and transforms electrified tigers into figures trapped harmlessly inside oil and canvas.
My shield and my 1911-model army-issue .45 automatic sit on top of my dresser in the moonlight. I think it’s not an accident they found their way into my life.
An hour after I got home that evening the phone rang in the kitchen.
“We dug out two rounds,” the medical examiner said. “One of them’s in good shape. But I’d say both are either nine-millimeter or .38 caliber.”
“Two?” I said.
“There was a second entry wound below the right armpit. It did the most damage. It flattened against something and toppled before it entered the chest cavity. Anyway, it pierced both his lungs. You still think this was the guy out at your house?”
“Yeah, the guy was carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge under his right arm. One of the rounds probably deflected off it.”
“I suspect he was wrapped awful tight, then.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“He jacked a lot of adrenaline into his heart before he got hit. Otherwise, I don’t know how he made it out of there. Anyway, tomorrow we’ll see if we can match his blood to the specimens you gave me from Cade and the bushes in front of your house.”
“Thanks for your help, Doc.”
“Keep me posted on this one, will you?”
“Sure.”
“I wasn’t passing on an idle thought about the adrenaline in this man’s heart. I’ve read medical papers about the deaths of royalty who were executed during the French Revolution. Sometimes they were told if the headsman’s blow was off the mark and they were able to get up and run, their lives would be spared. Some of them actually rose headless from the block and ran several yards before they collapsed.”
“Pretty grim stuff.”
“You’re missing my point. I believe the man I took apart today was absolutely terrified. What could put that level of fear in a soldier of fortune?”
Not bad, podna, I thought.
After supper I sat on the gallery and watched Alafair currying her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out in the railed lot by the shed we had built for him. Tripod was off his chain and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch, his tail hanging down the side of the wire like a ringed banner. My neighbor had moved out of his house and put it up for sale, but each evening he returned to turn on his soak hoses and water sprinklers, filling the air with an iridescent mist that drifted across his hydrangeas onto our lawn. The sun had descended into a flattened red orb on the western horizon, and in the scarlet wash of the afterglow the flooded tree trunks in the swamp seemed suffused with firelight, and you could see an empty rowboat tied up in the black stillness of the bayou’s far bank, the wood as dry and white as bone.