Again to Carthage Read online

  “Ick. Trail’s not gotten a lot of use lately,” said Denton.

  “Guess not,” Cassidy agreed. “You look like you’re in shape, but obviously not from running out here.”

  “Nope. Been sticking close to home working on the ol’ thesis. Getting in some miles though. The heels have been better lately. I’ve been thinking about racing a little.”

  They ran along in silence for a while. Then Denton asked, “Cass, are you really sure you want to be out here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Staying out here at the A-frame, away from everything.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just maybe not such a good time to be alone.”

  Cassidy considered this. Denton had never told Cassidy a single important thing that had not sooner or later turned out to be true.

  “There has been something of a letdown,” Cassidy admitted. “I know you warned me, but I honestly didn’t think it would be this bad. It’s a weird feeling …”

  “I know.”

  “Kind of empty, you know?”

  “Yep. It can get pretty bad.”

  “I’ve had a few bad days, but I’m all right. I’ve survived blue funk before.”

  “Well, I’ve talked to a lot of guys and it’s pretty typical no matter how you did, win lose or draw. The thing itself is so cathartic, so final, that hardly anyone in the Games will have thought much beyond it. I read that somewhere, but I didn’t understand it until I went through it. Come to think of it, it’s one of the reasons that every one of you is there on the starting line in the first place. It’s the single-mindedness that got you there.”

  “We definitely know our way around deferred gratification,” Cassidy said.

  “It’s your life you’ve been deferring, Cass. That comes crashing in on you. Maybe it hasn’t really hit you yet, but it will. You’re maybe still sort of in the slipstream of it all, the hoopla, the interviews, the boondoggle invitations, flying around, your relatives calling to say they saw you on TV …”

  “I think I’m out of the slipstream already,” said Cassidy glumly. “Maybe that’s the hidden blessing of coming second. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back here. I wanted something familiar.”

  “Ah yes. It helps to have something to come back to, that’s for sure,” said Denton. “Well, you’re welcome out here. You know that.”

  Another silent mile went by.

  “Heard anything from Mize?” Denton said.

  “He’s doing flight training in Texas. Helicopters. Says he loves it. I sure hope the whole mess is over before he goes over there and does something stupid.”

  “I don’t know if it’s ever going to be over. What happened to the army track thing?”

  “He decided against it. Thought it would be copping out. He doesn’t think much of the war, but he’s strange about these things. You know what he also considered?”

  “What?”

  “Being a medic.”

  Denton whistled.

  “He’s always been like that. He wasn’t in ROTC to line up a deferment either. In his own weird way, Mize has always been a kind of true believer. In another age he would have been a Quaker or something. But no. No track dodge for him. I’m sure they offered it to him.”

  “And no medic. Helicopters.”

  “Helicopters. Little ones. With guns on them.”

  “Well, to change the subject only slightly, what did you decide about school?”

  “I’m going to go. I can’t think of anything better to do. There’s no deferment, of course, and I don’t have a family like you, so I have no idea what I’m going to do about that, but I haven’t been called up for my physical yet, so I’m going to at least start it.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m thinking of staying here. At first it was just my backup, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Duke and Vandy are better law schools, but right now I can’t imagine picking up and going to some new place. I’m thinking of taking some time off and starting winter quarter. They’re being incredibly nice to me at Tigert Hall for some reason. I’m apparently no longer considered just a pain-in-the-ass loudmouth from a nonrevenue sport.”

  “Public opinion’s shifting. Even Cronkite has turned. McNamara’ll go to his grave saying our so-called police action was the only way to stop global blah blah. He’ll be the only one. But hey!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Want some advice?”

  “No.”

  “Go ahead and start school now. Take some time later if you need to, but start now.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know.”

  “It will make it easier.”

  “Okay.”

  “And remember what Jumbo Elliot used to tell the Villanova guys.”

  “What was that?”

  “Live like a clock.”

  “Live like a clock.”

  “Right.”

  “Live like a clock.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Okay, I give up. I find Jumbo opaque at best. Where did you get this anyway?”

  “Liquori. What Jumbo meant was keep to your schedule. If your morning run was always at eight A.M., you go out and do a token run at eight A.M., even if you’re tapering for a big race or on summer break. You’re not really training, you’re just keeping your body on the same routine. Eat at the same time, sleep at the same time. Live like a clock.”

  “Like Mussolini’s widow.”

  “How’s that?”

  “After the war she’d go work in the fields from sunup to sundown. People would say, Why do you do that? She’d say, It’s good hard work and when you do it all day you can sleep at night.”

  “I guess.”

  “So this is like I’ve just seen my spouse strung up upside down with his mistress by an angry mob after losing a world war? That what you’re saying?”

  “No, I’m saying live like a clock.”

  Cassidy gave him a sideways look.

  “Think about this,” Denton said. “A man with a hundred-dollar bill and a day to live might conceivably—under the right circumstances—have himself a wonderful time.”

  “Okay,” Cassidy said dubiously.

  “But a man with a hundred-dollar bill and a week to live might well be in serious trouble.”

  “Anyone with a week to live is undoubtedly in serious trouble, regardless of his finances,” Cassidy said.

  “Context, Cass,” said Denton. “Context and chronology are everything. Timing, if you will.”

  “I don’t like it when you start ‘if you will’-ing,” Cassidy said glumly.

  “You’ve capitalized yourself mightily to this point,” Denton said. “For years and years now, putting everything in, taking nothing out.” He gestured at the trail in front of them, as if it represented all their trials and all their miles.

  “But it’s perfectly okay to live your life a little now, Quenton,” he continued. “You’ve earned at least that much. No one will blame you, no one will fault you. Everything doesn’t have to hurt, everything doesn’t have to be a battle.”

  Cassidy snorted. “How would you possibly know—”

  “I know!” Denton said, too loudly. They ran in silence for a while, Cassidy thinking to himself, Oh Jesus, what an addlepate I can be.

  “I wish someone had been there to tell me,” Denton said quietly.

  “Mmmm?”

  “To live like a clock.”

  “Okay, Bruce.”

  They ran quietly again. Finally, Cassidy said: “Bruce, I’ve been doing that very thing for years now …”

  “Exactly!”

  “I lived like a clock for nearly four years in college, through quitting school and racing Walton, through the buildup for the trials, and then right to the finals of the goddamn Olympic 1500 meters.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re telling me—”

  “To keep doing it.”

  3

  Hadley v. Baxendale

  CASSIDY RECLINED UNCOMFORTABLY, twiddling his thumbs on top of his paper-bibbed chest, watching Dr. Clark Hodge squinting up at the X-rays. The orthodontist occasionally turned back to Cassidy and, by gently grasping the point of his chin, rotated his head this way and that, murmuring, “Hmmm!”

  Cassidy tried not to glimpse the film, finding it just plain alarming to recognize the faint outlines of his own lips and jaw and the less familiar but denser mortality that was his skeletal self. It was more, really, than he wanted to know.

  But Dr. Hodge could not have been more fascinated.

  “Well, well!” he exclaimed, tossing the X-rays onto the tray that also held Cassidy’s sunglasses and a disturbing plaster model of his upper and lower jaws. “No doubt about it. Definite class-two malocclusion, moderately severe. Unquestionable case for appliances and possible follow-up orthognathic surgery.”

  “And it will keep me out of the draft? This is definite?”

  “Oh, it’s definite, all right all right. Every practitioner in the country just got a Selective Service directive referencing possible prosecution for unwarranted treatment. They sounded serious.”

  “I’ve been sweating this out for months, trying to get into ROTC, the Guard, and it’s nothing doing. The waiting lists are huge. But this sounds too good to be true.”

  “Oh, it’s true, all right. Uncle Sam wants you, but”—he paused for dramatic effect—“he does not want your overbite!” he said happily. Leaving the room with the X-rays, he called back over his shoulder: “You have no idea how good this has been for business!”

  Quenton Cassidy began law school nine days later with a mouth full of gleaming wire and a grateful heart.

  He quickly found his mi
nd surprisingly amenable to little mental gymnastics like the Rule against Perpetuities, joint and several liability, res ipsa loquitur, and constructive breach.

  And on the news every night and in the headlines every morning, the collective national horror show marched on like a wave of zombies no one could stop. My Lai, the Tet Offensive, Fire Base Alpha, Hamburger Hill, the Cambodian Incursion, it just went on and on and when you didn’t think it could get any worse, it got worse. And then it got worse again. It struck Cassidy that the black-and-white photographs and the blurry video were mostly of things burning: villages, helicopters, monks, babies. It went on and on and no one really seemed to know why.

  Cassidy and most of his classmates had been by stages incredulous, angry, frightened, ashamed, stunned, and finally numb. They went to rallies, they signed petitions, they wrote letters to the editor, and they even—in a paroxysm of irrelevancy—occupied the office of university president Steven C. Prigman, who was on a quail-hunting trip in Alabama with the president of the state senate and was thus regrettably able to become enraged only after the fact. Orators from the panhandle railed in Tallahassee about campus radicals and outside agitators and the governor snarled to reporters about long hair and other grooming issues. Legislation was proposed, but stalled in committee.

  Cassidy lived like a clock.

  Or at least he tried to. He ran most days. Five miles, six miles, ten, it didn’t matter. It was so much less than the hundred-plus miles a week he had done for years that it wasn’t hard at all. He even found—surprise!—joy in it again. Psychologically it was much easier to just go out and run than to be constantly bending his body and mind to an ironbound training regimen, where every workout had a purpose and every mile led to some far-off goal. He just ran. He was no longer a fanatic. He found that if he missed a day no comet came to destroy the planet, and if he missed two or three days in a row, it did not indicate a major character flaw, destined to snowball into a lifetime of lethargy and decadence. It was just a missed day or two. It took him a while to get over the old fear and guilt that once defined him, the unthinking discipline he had inculcated in himself over many years. But once he was over it, life seemed gentler somehow, less combative. Though he wouldn’t have described himself as happy, he was mostly content.

  He tended his little garden in the faint receding limelight due an Olympic also-ran, enduring with grace the occasional honorary event or award or recognition someone or other felt necessary to bestow upon some poor slob who, after all, was but a tick of the clock away from actually becoming somebody.

  Quenton Cassidy had once been a runner. Now he was something else.

  4

  Green Skin of Hill

  Getting shot at was not nearly as glamorous as it sounded, but it certainly held your attention.

  And parts of it were a helluva lot more fun than most guys would admit. That was the way Mizner saw it. It had a school’s-out, don’t-sweat-the-small-shit quality that made the rest of life seem almost sleepy, faded, less contrasty.

  At least that was the way it was for aviators, and it seemed more or less the same for the ARPs, the elite aeroriflemen he mother-henned every day. Maybe the true land-bound grunts felt differently, he didn’t know. He had little interaction with them, but he suspected they felt it too.

  Mizner was far from being one of the heroin-laced warrior-poets, but he had come to believe that however fucked up it was in so many ways, war could be amazingly interesting and occasionally quite beautiful.

  You’d soar dreamily over an endless green skin of hill, lovely and serene and remote somehow like an aquarium, mesmerizing to watch rolling below. Sometimes you’d go down to peek beneath the leaves and see things right out of “Kubla Khan”: gorgeous waterfalls, magic temples, a wild tiger ogling you with ancient yellow eyes. They wanted to land, roll up their cuffs, put their feet in the water, have a picnic. It was nuts. Skeeter once got off a quick shot at a dark-haired soldier in a gray uniform sitting in the top of a tree. The “soldier” immediately leaped fifty feet to the top of another tree and disappeared into the canopy. I saw his face, Lieutenant, Skeeter said later, I could describe him to you.

  But most of the time what you got down there was the smell. That familiar repulsive stew of fish-based feces, rotting vegetation, and aviation fuel that would fill you with both revulsion and ennui and would forever be the essence of Vietnam for a lot of people. Then sometimes the jungle would start spitting up little yellow gashes of death at you and you would never be more focused on anything else in your life as you would on what was down there in the leaves trying to kill you.

  And the hardest thing to do was to look directly into the harsh light of kill-you hate coming right at your eyeballs. To look unflinchingly into that light though every instinct in your being told you to look away. Skeeter claimed the light was physically painful to look at.

  “You have to look at it though, sir,” Skeeter told him their first time out. “It’s hard to do but you have to make yourself look right at it.”

  If you couldn’t look at it you couldn’t kill whatever was making it and then you were very likely to get killed yourself.

  He had had the minigun for some time now and he had used it a little but Skeeter was the one who did most of the damage, sitting behind him there in the doorway with the monkey strap his only physical connection to the motherland, an M-60 hanging from a steel cable bouncing in his lap like a big phallic bird, a box of frags nearby and the different-colored smokes ready on the wire while Mizner did what he was supposed to do and had been expensively trained to do and actually liked to do, and that was to fly the thing.

  The thing was the OH-6A Cayuse, the loach, the so-called light observation helicopter that had become the focal point of his entire existence, that had in fact saved his life many times now. If such a thing were possible Mizner had fallen flat in love with the tough little machine.

  Traveling at altitude to and from their assigned kill boxes at a hundred knots, he would slump comfortably in his seat with his right leg cocked up outside the open door to pick up a little breeze, bracing the collective with his left leg and flying with his left hand as the aquarium passed safely far below. But when they really went down into it and the radio was crackling with three and four levels of carefully monotoned battle chatter, he would have his shit tightly wired together, zipped up, tight sphinctered, and serenely focused. He would yank an armpit full of collective and goose the cyclic all over hell and back, working the pedals like a tricycle, making the little bird do whatever circus tricks he had mastered and some that he just made up on the spot, necessity being, he often maintained, the motherfucker of invention.

  Skeeter had also seemingly come to terms with this strange line of work that involved finding a few scattered human beings in a vast jungle and making them dead. But they had been shot down together—once three times in one day—and they had both been wounded and they both had friends who had died sitting in a seat full of their own blood. Neither of them slept worth a damn and Skeeter occasionally hung out with the heroin guys.

  “Will I meet them again?” Skeeter had asked drunkenly one night in the so-called officers’ club in Phu Loi. A door gunner was no officer but like most of the pilots Mizner carried an extra set of silver wings for him when they were loitering off their own base somewhere. “The people I killed,” he said to Mizner’s raised eyebrows. “Do you think I’ll meet them all when I die?”

  Mizner shrugged.

  What will I say to them? he asked the pilot. The guy in the spider trap under the rubber tree who tried to shoot us down at the Michelin plantation, the one with the little kid? The girl in the cart with the hidden AK, who smiled like an angel and then threw down. Put one in the door frame so close I got steel splinters in my cheek? Is death where you get together again? Is death a final rendezvous of killers and killed?

  There there, said Mizner.

  They were working a steep valley, way out of their usual range, where fuel was always on their minds. They were in the usual pink team, supporting some kind of dumb-ass LRRP insertion that had gone terribly wrong. White loach, red Cobra gunships, two blue Hueys with their aeroriflemen—flying grunts, ARPs. And another complete team not far away on scramble alert, which meant playing cards and waiting for an invitation.