In Grand Rapids, before going into the house, he had pulled over to the curb, letting the car murmur and hum, the long hood shuddering, waxed, a glistening tongue touching the trees in reflection.
You want to know what my credo is? he said. And without waiting for her to answer he continued:
My credo’s: never kill for a good reason. If you’re going to be a failed enfold, then do it wholeheartedly and with all the gusto you can muster. When you kill, do it quickly so that you pluck the proper method from the situation itself. But never ever, ever be efficient. I mean don’t go for the easy kill. At the same time don’t stretch it out too much. If there’s a scream I want it to be the brutal, loud, quick kind that it goes in one ear and out the other. You can blame that on Nam or you can blame it on the way my mind works. The one thing I hated over there was hearing a fellow grunt crying, stuck out in the fire zone while we gave the Marine credo a workout (never leave the dead buddy behind and all that). He looked at her and examined her eyes and then reached up to touch her face. For a second there was a softening in his features. He had a lean, sharp chin and a gaunt jawbone that led up to an unusual fat brow. Then he gave her a swat on the top of the head and said, Shit, man. We’ve got to go in, take care of this Shaky character, and leave a calling card for the police, who will give it to the authorities, and then eventually it’ll go up the chain to some poor Psych Corps agent. Their job is to find some semblance of order in all this madness, and mine, as I see it, is to give them something to think about …
You’re oblivious to the facts, Meg, he said. His fingers moved along her thigh. She stayed silent and looked out at the streets passing, Grand Rapids in the early morning light, nothing but television aerials, the stars, dew on roofs, lights on in a few windows as folks got up to face a day of work. She tried not to listen, let him keep going, as they moved through the cloverleaf.
Let me explain. When I heard your name a lightbulb went off and the word bingo came to mind. Bingo, I said. I’ve got to get her out of there and take her on the road. She’s the one for me. She has a story that somehow ties to mine.
Anyway, he said, pulling the car to the curb and cutting the engine. I have a picture in my head of the man who caused your trauma from everything you’ve told me.
I haven’t told you anything.
You’ve told me plenty. In so many words.
So tell me what you know, she said.
I know he died in your typical big-time snafu, all sparkle and glimmer and flash.
You’re sure about that.
I’m certain of it.
Then how come I don’t think so. How come I can’t even speculate.
I’m not the one to ask, he said. Then he got out, opened the rear door, and began loading his weapons in the backseat, snapping them open and shut, filling the car with the smell of oil while she gazed out at the house and examined the beach towels someone had carefully hung over the railing, lining them up neatly: one with the Detroit Tigers emblem: the roaring tiger and the baseball bat. Another had a map of the state of Michigan adorned with symbols: cherries and automobiles and rolls of papers. Next to it was a towel with a peace symbol. She read them from right to left and then from left to right and thought: the Tigers were playing the night of the first Detroit riot, and then the state burned, and then the peace movement — then the peace movement fell apart. A fourth towel was missing, she thought. The statement wasn’t complete. There has to be a fourth towel in the house somewhere, still wet and smelling of lake water and suntan lotion, and on that towel there has to be some symbol of hell.
Rake’s face appeared in her window. Get out of the car, he said, and she did.
She could remember the nurse’s big, lovely brown hands and the way he had soothed and assured, but she couldn’t remember his name or his face. She could remember the med center and the start-off point, a room with long countertops and forms to fill out and secretaries with slightly bemused expressions, tired from processing in-patients who came in a great never-ending cycle, and then the rest — the Tripizoid injections, the hippy encampment with a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome and campfires — became a blur.
Let me quote myself, Rake was saying in the car. This was later, moving along a road through the darkness, the engine rumbling under her feet, in her legs.
You’re driving on some forsaken road like this one, and then some bloke, yeah, that’s the word, some bloke appears with his thumb out, and he wonders if you’re going to pick him up or not, and he has that desperation in his eyes because he’s hoping for some blind luck, some kind of happenstance out of the blue, and you slow down to get a look at him, and fucking bingo, he’s some long-lost comrade-in-arms, a guy you knew back in the fray. So you stop and wave him over to get a better look and see that, yeah, he’s a buddy you were sure was KIAed. You were sure of it but there he is, looking loopy, his eyes weary and lost, and he leans forward a little bit and says, Hey, can I get a lift? And you say, Where you heading? And he says, Anywhere. And you tell him to get in, wanting to probe a bit, thinking maybe he’s not the guy. And he gets in and sits beside you and you drive a few miles without saying much, just idle chitchat, and then you say, Hey, man, you ever see action in Nam? And he says, Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did, and you say, Hey, me too, and he gives you that kind of reaction you’ve heard a million times, flat and noncommittal, full of avoidance — because you get either that or the other thing, the full-on meeting-of-two-souls-in-the-desert vibe, as if to say, and this is usually in just a word or two, How could it be possible that two souls bump into each other? Two souls who were over there and are now over here? As if it were some fantastic impossibility, for Christ’s sake, when in truth it’s as likely as anything else in this state. And because he’s noncommittal you wait it out, saying, Fuck, man, and you wait, maybe putting the radio on, figuring the music might lure more out of him but not caring too much because to want his history isn’t healthy.
Outside the city there was nothing much along the roadside except dead fields with purple skunk cabbage, old billboards advertising truck stops, restaurants long shut down, houses in shambles. In the center of one field a man stood, staring mutely as they passed, resting his weight against an implement. The Indiana border exerted its own unique pull down and down into the great heart of the country, past demarcation signs; past the dullard state of Ohio. They’d get to the border and head west toward Chicago and feel her pull but not venture too far because that would go against what some vets liked to call the Covenant of the Mitten. You got to keep it in the Mitten, you’ve got to rage against one thing or you’ll never get it done, and it does no good to go wildly out into an entire continent, Rake explained. Fucking state’s enough to take care of. There’s enough drugs in the state to keep a man busy for a lifetime, not to mention Detroit, not to mention the Grid itself, not to mention the riot zones.