GRob nudges him and Wilson glances up to see that she’s pointing at Baxter, who has taken a seat among the flowers some twenty yards away. “Baxman?” he says.
“Don’t come near me,” Baxter says. “Come near me, I’ll mess you up.”
GRob puts a hand on Wilson’s arm and says, “Leave him,” but he shakes her off and screams, “Baxter, this is total bullshit!”
“Walk away,” Baxter says.
“That all you got for me? Walk away? After the shit we seen together? That’s it?”
Silence.
“You better talk to me, Baxter!”
“Devil’s loose in the world, man. Where we goin’ go? The devils, they got it all now.”
Fuming, Wilson can’t fit his feelings inside of words.
“War’s over, man,” says Baxter. “I’m shuttin’ it down.”
“Baxter! Goddamn it!”
“I’m with you, man. I hear what you sayin’. But you need to walk away. Right now.”
His words are badly slurred, almost unintelligible, and Wilson understands from this it’s too late for argument, that his own words, if he could find them, would form merely an annoying backdrop to whatever sweet ride of thought Baxter has chosen to rush away on. Tears are coming and he’s furious at Baxter. Were their good times and shared fear simply prelude to this muscle-spasm of an exit? Did people just invent each other, just imagine they were tight with one another?…
“Charlie.” GRob touches his hand and Wilson jerks it back from her angrily, saying, “Don’t call me that! I hate that fucking name!”
“I know,” she says. “Hate’s good.”
As they move off smartly across the field, Wilson glances back to see the cute yellow canary and the skuzzy black-and-white cat cavorting on Basknight’s faceplate, growing ever smaller, ever more indistinct. He doesn’t know what’s on Baxter’s privacy screen and he doesn’t want to know. Baxter’s always changing it. From an old Pong game to a photograph of a Russian meteor crater to an African mask. All stupidly announcing some sloganlike truth about the soon-to-be skull behind them. Wilson decides he’s sticking with shots of the Rockies for his screen. They don’t say diddly about him, which is better than saying one dumbass thing, and it’ll never seem as monstrously puerile as Basknight’s Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon.
The figures of Baxter and Basknight dwindle to anonymous lumps, and Wilson summons them onto his helmet display, taking an angle low to the ground and looking up, holding them both in frame so they resemble ancient statues, relics of a vanished civilization, weathered soldier-shaped monuments commemorating something, though he’s forgotten what.
1830 hours
Wilson no longer feels like scrap iron, like a wild dog, like a movie star with mad fucking weapons. He feels like Charles Newfield Wilson. Charlie. Walking through the valley of the shadow, waiting for the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch, and whatever else hell has in store. Scared shitless, even though he’s got a pretty, deadly blond at his side. He knows he should run some battle juice, but does more IQ instead. Dangerous levels. His mind’s eye wheels, encompassing fragmented images of childhood, phosphorescent flares like the explosive firings of neurons, an assortment of sense memories accumulated during the past few hours, a kaleidoscopic succession of what look to be magazine photographs, most relating to a museum display of Egyptian artifacts; these and other categories of things remembered all jumbled together, as if overloaded files are spilling their contents and causing short circuits. The insides of his eyes itch, he can’t swallow, his heart slams, and his vision has gone faintly orange. But soon the flurry and discomfort settle, and it’s as if he’s been fine-tuned, as if a bullet-smooth burnished cylinder has been slotted into place inside his twitchy self, a stabilizing presence, and he begins, for the first time, to have a grasp on the situation, to not merely react to its hopelessness, to accept it, and, by accepting it, by announcing it calmly to himself, stating its parameters, he comes to believe that all is not lost. They are in hell, maybe with a patch or two of heaven mixed in, and they cannot contact command. As with any battlefield, the situation is fluid, and, as has been the case with other battlefields, they can’t trust their instrumentation. He’s been here before. Not in so daunting a circumstance, perhaps, not on a field that—as this one seems to—was fluid to the point that it actually changed shape. But essentially they’re in the same position they were in during other covert actions, conflicts that never made the news back home. Recognizing this gives him hope. If your situation is fluid, you have to become fluid. You have to understand the unique laws of the place and moment and let them dictate the course of your survival. He switches off his instruments. He no longer wants to see things as digital cartoons or confuse the issue with readings that can’t be trusted. They’re on the right path, he thinks. Going forward. GRob nailed it. Going forward is who they are.
As they walk through the flowers, GRob asks him about Colorado, where he went to school, did he have a girlfriend, and all like that. By this, he realizes how scared she is. She’s never been much of a talker, just a mad fucking soldier like Perdue… and maybe, he thinks, that’s at the heart of her fear. GRob and Perdue were tighter than he and Baxter. They went on leave together, and there’s no doubt they were lovers, though Wilson knows GRob had an eye for guys. Plenty of times he caught her checking him out. But GRob and Perdue were a unit, they neutralized each other’s fear and now Perdue’s gone, GRob’s unsure of herself. In context of this, he wonders why he’s not more unsure of himself now that Baxter’s gone. He doesn’t believe it’s just that IQ is insulating him from fear, and he’s coming to accept that he and Baxter didn’t have anywhere near as strong a bond as GRob and Perdue. What purpose they served for one another is unclear. Yet even as he thinks this, he suspects that he does understand their relationship, that they weren’t really tight, they were flimsily aligned, doing big brother-little brother schtick to pass the time.
“I got this thing about flowers,” GRob says, and takes a swipe with her rifle as she tramples down the yellow blooms. “My uncle ran a funeral home in Tucson. I used to hafta come over after school because my mama was working, and my uncle would babysit me. It was like flowers all over the place. Guys would give me flowers, I’d hate it ’cause they made me think about dying.”
“They’re just flowers,” Wilson says. “Not a metaphor… right?”
She gives a salty laugh. “Yeah, I forgot.” They walk on a few paces, then she says, “Hard to believe it, though,” and this sparks something in Wilson, a flicker of comprehension, something that seems hopeful, helpful, but he doesn’t pursue it, he’s too concerned with keeping her straight.
“I’m not re-upping after this tour,” he says. “This does it for me.”
After a pause she says, “You said that after Angola.”
“Captain Wilts got me drunk and preached me a sermon. What can I say? I was a jerk.”
“I’m short. I got six weeks left. I could take it all in leave and catch a plane somewhere.”