“Nice apartment,” said Bennett. Frye watched him wipe his eyes with a fist. “Really nice little place to be. Cost me a fortune, but Pop sent money by the pound. You should have seen her, Chuck. Sitting on the bench at the plantation with a fucking guitar. She was just a girl. It was her innocence, how simply she accepted things. Innocence isn’t right — more like faith. Yeah, faith, that was what she had.”
Bennett drew carefully on the bottle. His eyes never left the screen. When he started talking again, it was to the picture. “Yeah, you should have seen her. She was everything I thought we were fighting for. She was young and beautiful as a girl could be. She’d sing all the fuckin’ time and that voice was like heroin inside my veins. It made me feel warm and good inside. She had one of those faces that seem to have a light on behind it. Even when there wasn’t any sun and it rained a week straight, she had a glow. It was unreal, but the things I felt coming alive in me when I talked to her, they were brand-new. It was like she was a perfect animal. A perfect human female animal, right there in front of me. Everything I thought that animal should be. We connected. She picked up English fast.”
Bennett dropped the carousel controller and hooked his thumbs together, flapping his hands like wings. “She’d do like that when she saw me. Frye always came out ‘Flye,’ like a bird. I told her we could fly away from that war together someday. We did. We tried to.”
“I see what you loved in her, Benny.”
“No,” Bennett said quietly. “You don’t. She was Vietnam. Her parents came south in ‘fifty-four because they were strong Catholics. Mom died of fever; they killed her father because he wouldn’t shelter the Cong. You know what she wanted? She wanted to study music.” Bennett examined his gin, tilted back the bottle and drank. “So there she was, like the rest of the goddamned country, trying to be left alone while the Viet Cong terrified them at night and we ran the place during the day. She’s why I’m here, I thought. These are the people we came here for. We’re here to give them half a chance at running their own lives someday.
Frye watched his brother lean back and stare for a long while at the ceiling.
“You tried.”
Bennett reached clumsily under the couch cushion and brought out a .45. He almost tipped over, then righted himself and studied the barrel of the gun. “See this? I’m not afraid of this.”
“Put it down. You’re drunk.”
Bennett clicked off the safety and looked down the barrel again.
“I got soaked in Agent Orange, Chuck, and I don’t have cancer. I saw worse shit than you can dream up and I’ve never had a flashback I couldn’t handle. I had enough pain for a whole city, but I don’t shoot, pop, or snort. I drink because I always drank. I don’t even collect the disability I got coming. You know why? Because I’m one tough stand-up motherfucker, and they can keep their dollars and send ’em to someone who needs it.”
“Come on, Benny. Put it down.”
Bennett gazed through Frye. “I got my legs blown off, that’s all. But Chuck, I gotta tell you right now, if they kill her, I’m gonna blow my brains out too. That’s no complaint, that’s just what is. Without her, I’m a bunch of pieces left all over the globe. With her, I can still see why it happened and why it was worth it.”
Bennett clicked back the hammer, hooked his thumb against the trigger and rested the gun in his lap, barrel pointing at his chin. “What more can I do, Chuck? What more? I keep looking, and she doesn’t come home.”
Frye reached out his hand. “Come on, brother,” he said softly. “We’re gonna get her. She’s okay. It’s going to come out all right, Benny. I promise. Then it’ll be just like old times. We’ll eat on the island on Thursdays and argue with Pop, and Mom’ll be happy and Li can write some more songs on the Martin. Maybe you can meet this new girl — Cristobel — she’s really good, Benny. The four of us could do something. Maybe we could get the family like it was in the old days. We’ll be tight again. Come on, Benny. Debbie’s gone. Don’t you go too. That wouldn’t be fair.”
Frye reached out and touched his brother’s hand. Slowly, he eased Bennett’s thumb from the trigger guard, then brought the gun away. Bennett tipped over, burped, tried to sit back up and tipped over again. “What am I supposed to do?”
Frye and Donnell worked his clothes off and got him to the shower. Bennett slumped in the corner and stared out, a defeated soldier, while the warm water ran down him.
Chapter 20
Back home, Frye got into a pair of Mega-Trunks and waxed his board. He made the ten-minute walk to Rockpile while the first light of morning coalesced in the east.
The hurricane surf had hit. He stood on the sand and watched the horizon, the plate-glass water, the gray waves marching in, precise as infantry. Each crashing mountain sent a tremor up his ankles and into his legs. Eight feet at least, he thought, and all muscle. Hard, vascular tubes, well shaped. The air filled with spray, and the sand vibrated. Frye watched two surfers carefully picking their waves. One took off and got launched from the lip — nothing but the long fall down for this man — his orange board trailing after him like a flame. The other thought better and backed off. More like ten feet, Frye saw now, and getting bigger. The beach trembled. The wide white noose of a riptide wavered out when the set ended.
He could still smell the death in his nostrils, on his skin, in the air around him, everywhere.
What am I supposed to do?
I don’t know, Benny. If I did, I’d do it for you. But it’s clear to me that you’re over your head and so am I, and that things are going to get worse before they get better.
Frye sat on the damp beach, took a handful of sand, and let it run between his fingers. He wondered if he’d simply been there more, closer to Bennett, more involved with the family, more present, somehow this all wouldn’t have happened. Ridiculous, he thought. But little things can make the difference. The road is paved by degrees, the thousand paths taken, or not. We steer by the second. Take your eyes off the road, you hit a cement mixer or cream a nun in a crosswalk. Take your pick. It’s the small stuff that adds up, or doesn’t. Something here prevents something there — a word, a gesture, an action.
And Frye knew that the last ten years of his life had been a slow retreat from his family, his wife, his own future. When you ignore enough problems, he thought, they become one problem. And the more you ignore it the faster it grows until you end up sitting on a cold beach, wondering if the one thing in your life you do well is going to kill you. More than anything, you hate yourself for being afraid.
I want back in. I can try.
He paddled out. Past the shorebreak, he looked south to Cristobel’s faded blue apartments, which from this angle seemed to be spilling into the water. Brooks Street will be pumping, he thought, so will Salt Creek and Trestles. You have to admit it: Rockpile on a hurricane swell is one ugly break. A surfer waved; Frye waved back.
Sitting outside on his board now, he blew into his hands, tried to get the blood going. All he could feel was the damp chill of the tunnel, and the putrid cavern where Loc’s brother lay. He shivered. The morning sky was gray and so was the water, and somewhere far to the west they met without a seam. The next set lined up against it. He lowered himself to the board and paddled hard, rising with the first wave. He was surprised how big it was. The next wave came close behind, bigger still. He scrambled up its face and pitched over on the far side, ready for another. Third time’s charm, he thought, sliding for the sweet spot on the incoming mountain, finding it, pivoting his board and with three hard strokes of his arms, felt the wave’s mass catch hold of him, take him up, then hesitate and offer him that one last opportunity to get out.