Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around, his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the ball in the air. Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much, the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you went airborne.
That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head took over your body and off you went.
He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop out, he had caught it for a first down, and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient enemy for the first time in living memory.
Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.
The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of energy. Maybe he would make it.
But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog. It was Swagger, of course.
“Come on,” Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain. “We’re almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of hills, a river and a goddamn mountain. Damn, ain’t this fun?”
ater. According to the map, the river was called Ia Trang. It bore no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen brown and wide, overspilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine gun fire.
“Guess what?” said Swagger. “You just got a new job.”
“Huh?”
“You just got a new job. You’re now the lifeguard.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I cain’t swim a lick,” he said, with a broad smile.
“Great,” said Donny. “I can’t either.”
“Oh, this one’s going to be a pisser. Damn, why’d you insist on this trip?”
“I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important.”
“That kind of thinkin’ll git you killed every damn time. Now, let’s see if we can find some wood or something.”
They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had worked it over pretty well; nothing could have survived the hell of that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain. There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.
“I hope they were bad guys,” said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.
“If we run this fucking war right,” Swagger said, “we’d have known they was bad, because we’d have people on the ground, up close. Not this shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should have to die because he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and some squid pilot’s got some ordnance left and don’t want to land on no carrier with it.”
Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who it killed, why it happened. His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal survivaclass="underline" how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.
“Well, nobody’ll ever know, that’s for goddamn sure,” said Bob. “Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell ’em. You got that, Pork? That’s your new MOS: witness. You got that?”
Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different instrument?
“I’ll tell ‘em.”
“ ’Cause I’m too dumb to tell ’em. They’ll never listen to a hillbilly like me. They’ll listen to you, boy, ’cause you looked the goddamn elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Now let’s scare up some wood and build us Noah’s ark.”
They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny’s rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the pistols to it.
“Okay, you really can’t swim?”
“I can sort of.”
“Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and you kick hard. I’ll be on the other side. Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what. And don’t let go. The current’ll take you and you’ll be one dead puppy dog and nobody’ll remember your name till they inscribe it on some monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain’t that a pretty thought?”
“Very pretty.”
“So let’s do it, Pork. You just became a submariner.”
The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus. In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the rickety raft over and only Bob’s strength on the other side kept them afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.
It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as it fell from the gray sky at a brutal velocity.
“Kick, goddammit!” he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a kind of strangely rhythmic breast-stroke. The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.
But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn’t imagine its ending. The water lured him downward to its black numbness; he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit, peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead kids in ditches, flaming villes, friendly-fire casualties, the whole fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history itself.
“Fight it, goddammit,” came Swagger’s call from the other side, and then he knew who Bob was.
Bob was Trig’s brother.
Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow. Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn’t, to be heroes in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special, they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force. The war would kill them. That’s why both had commanded him to be the witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in the war.