Again to Carthage Read online

  What it was, and the others overhead had no way of knowing this, was that Skeeter wouldn’t leave his pilot. He hunkered down in the dark and he jabbed himself in the leg with the tip of his K-Bar to stay awake. They almost found him several times.

  At first light the next morning he thought he would cry when he looked up to see the sky filled with lethal bees, looking for their own, looking for him.

  When they found him and saw he still could not move they took turns dropping in overhead and taking out their frustration on the surrounding countryside. Each time they stopped, the enemy would fire back a few times to say, Still here, asshole. They put down smoke markers and had the snakes make rocket and guns runs. Still they fired back. Skeeter chuckled. Tough-assed little bastards, he thought.

  It went all the way up to a colonel circling somewhere overhead in a C&C Huey, who got red-assed all over again. Then he talked to someone back at the base, and then they got good coordinates on where the downed fliers were. Then they rechecked the coordinates again all up and down the chain of command.

  Then they called everyone out of there. Everyone.

  It grew so quiet that Skeeter could hear Vietnamese chatter around him. Then a little FAC OV-10 prop plane flew in and went straight to work marking various places with his rockets. The NVA were shooting everything they had at him because they knew what it meant.

  When the FAC flew away it was quiet for a few minutes before Skeeter could hear them coming from a long way off. The fast movers flashed overhead and several seconds later the whole jungle became an earthly hell of vertical dirt and vegetation that seemed to go on and on. Skeeter was certain he could not survive it himself, but he did.

  A few minutes after that they came back and ran their belts dry, glittering brass cascading incongruently into the tropical tangle below, some of it landing, still hot, on Skeeter, who didn’t panic like the grunts sometimes did, having swept enough of the stuff out of the back of his loach after a busy day.

  Another loach buzzed in to do a battle-damage assessment, poking around a bit until he amazingly took some scattered fire. He fired back for a few minutes, but then he left too.

  Skeeter was stupefied that anything could be living out there, much less still fighting. But then it was quiet for a while and because the enemy seemed preoccupied, he allowed himself to doze off.

  Then Spooky came.

  The grunts sometimes called it Puff the Magic Dragon. An old prop AC-130 transport plane rigged up as a flying gun platform, this one with four 7.62 miniguns, two 20mm Gatlings, and two 40mm Bofors antiaircraft guns. It was capable of pouring such murderous fire from the heavens that anyone who ever witnessed it, enemy or friend, never forgot it. At night the tracers would form a solid red laser line from heaven to earth, a lovely-to-watch arc that would wiggle around against the night sky like a neon garden hose when the gun moved around. And the red tracers were only every tenth round. What the neon hose did at its far end was something closer to civil engineering than to warfare. It remade the landscape. The grunts would look up in the sky and shake their heads at each other and say, Spooky knows.

  This Spooky had already locked in the little sweet spot of friendly jungle in the middle of a huge doughnut of destruction. It then proceeded to kill every living thing for three kilometers around that spot. It circled for less than seven minutes, chopping, dicing, and mincing the earth and all its inhabitants and then straining the results through its exceedingly fine and murderous colander. Then Spooky left, satisfied as usual.

  When the whole area was finally quiet and seemingly freshly harrowed for spring planting, the Hueys at long last put grunts on the ground and they went in and found Skeeter. Within a few hours it was all over the base.

  There were two black-clad enemy soldiers a few feet away in the little clearing, both shot in the head. There were bodies and parts of bodies of twenty-two more at various distances in a circle around them and numerous bloody drag trails leading away into the jungle. All of the gunner’s M60 belts were empty, and the CAR-15 magazines were used up.

  Skeeter, a loaded .45 in his left hand, was sitting next to his pilot, gently touching his arm. The door gunner had been shot in both legs and through the right shoulder. He didn’t look up at the grunts. He was talking quietly to Mizner. As the grunts told it, what he was saying, over and over was:

  “Aw, jeez, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I’m so sorry, sir.”

  5

  Home We Brought You

  EIGHT DAYS LATER the Runner lay in an oak box at the feet of a childhood friend on a hot little hill of faded brown grass in the middle of the coral peninsula the Spaniards named for flowers.

  The faint traffic hum from Interstate 4 in the distance drifted across the parboiled landscape of scrub palmettos and spindly pines, indicating that humidity and rabid insects notwithstanding the Sunshine State was on the move.

  The preacher was waiting.

  Cassidy made a noise just to be sure he could. Then he pulled some cards from his inside jacket pocket and looked up at the small group.

  “Robert Penn Warren wrote about how there is really no one quite like a friend of your youth. Someone who looks at you later on in life and sees you only as you were when you were young. I cannot truly comprehend that we are here today for the reason that we are, and I don’t think I’ll be able to understand it for a very long time. And the one person I would want to help me understand it is the one person who cannot. He was a friend of my youth and that is the way I will always think of him.”

  He took a deep breath and looked at the cards in his hand. From them he read about the time you won your town the race we chaired you through the marketplace and how nice it was to die young while your records were all still standing even if you weren’t. How it was good to leave early while you could still remember how the people cheered for you. He had to stop a few times.

  Then he put the cards back in his pocket and looked at the small gathering of mostly simple, kind American folks, women with clipped grocery coupons in their purses and men with work-roughened hands. And among them a sprinkling of very thin, intense-looking young men too, standing there with mostly dry eyes. Several of them had been to the Olympics and two of them had brought medals back.

  “I want to tell you something about Jerry,” Cassidy said. “I knew him about as well as it’s possible to know anyone. It takes a while to finish a ten-mile run and you get to know someone pretty well when you run a few hundred of them together. One of the things I found out about him was that he was the kindest, most considerate person I ever knew. And the other thing I found out about him was that he was the toughest runner I ever knew.”

  There were some chuckles from the thin young men.

  “We ran together and against each other since back in junior high school and, boy, he beat me and beat me and beat me.” Cassidy shook his head. He looked up at them for a moment.

  “It takes courage to do it, to be a runner. We all found that out a long time ago,” he said. “Because it’s about more than fatigue. It’s about pain, and dealing with it for a long time. And it’s about resolve.”

  He looked up to see the young men looking at him, some smiling a little.

  “You can’t really be much of a runner unless you have courage, and so I don’t want you to worry about him, or what he went through. He wouldn’t want you to, believe me. That’s what I really wanted to tell you. We ran ten thousand miles together and I can tell you that for certain.”

  Cassidy looked out across the hot palmetto wasteland that surrounded the little cemetery.

  “He was braver than all of us,” he said.

  While they were preparing to lower the casket, a soldier walked over from the honor guard and stood in front of Cassidy. He looked different from the rest, who were obviously young enlisted men. This one was older, deeply tanned, with a chest full of ribbons and medals; the only one of which Cassidy recognized was a Purple Heart. There were three of them.

  “Mr. Cassidy?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “The lieutenant wanted me to give this to you. I’m sorry to do it here but I’m leaving right away.” He drew a wrinkled sealed envelope from his tunic, looked at it, and handed it to Cassidy. He stepped back, stiffened to attention, saluted, and turned to walk away. Then he paused and turned back with a little twist of a smile on his brown face.

  “You were really right about him, sir.”

  Cassidy only then noticed the slight limp as the soldier walked to the parking lot to join the others in the olive-drab government sedan.

  Cassidy walked quickly over to the car before they all got in, tapped the soldier on the shoulder.

  “You were with him?” he asked.

  The soldier turned and studied him closely. Cassidy saw that his eyes were glistening.

  “Sir,” the soldier said, “I never lost a pilot before.”

  He got into the backseat and the car pulled away.

  There was more pain in those eyes than Cassidy could imagine in the world. It was three days before he could bring himself to read the letter and he never told anyone what was in it.

  6

  Daybreak in the Subtropics

  IT WAS THAT crazy head-floating scent of frangipani, oleander, Spanish moss, Gulf Stream, and some kind of spicy bayonet plant that always reminded him of the aroma of drawn butter sitting beside a lobster tail.

  It was a salty tropical fruit salad is what it was and it woke him to the first rays of sun over Lake Worth. He lay drowsily under a single mostly symbolic sheet watching the orange glow suffuse the stucco surfaces and arches of his bedroom, stretching deliciously and almost without movement in the rare absence of air-conditioning’s false chill.

  It was a Monday, which meant multiple calendar
calls, frantic pink phone slips from the weekend, and general hit-the-ground-sprinting pandemonium of a litigation-oriented practice. But it was Roland’s turn in the barrel, which meant that Cassidy’s Monday morning belonged for once to Cassidy. That was something they did for each other, the alternating-Monday thing, and they often remarked to each other that it was possibly the only regularly scheduled event in their lives that made any real sense. The guy in the barrel would be addled with his own stuff anyway, so why not have one be addled for both. Might live longer, said Cassidy. Might sleep longer, said Roland.

  The only thing that worried Cassidy was that he had a pretty good rapport with most of the trial judges and he knew very well that Roland would be in there somewhere in the bowels of the Palm Beach County Courthouse, waddling back and forth and occasionally wagging his finger, lecturing a circuit court judge on some incredibly inane point of civil procedure. Before they had begun the alternating-Monday routine, Cassidy had once wandered into such a scene.

  There was Roland, huffing and puffing hugely back and forth in front of the bench, distractedly jingling change in his left pocket, holding a volume of the Southern Reporter with his right, an index finger hooked into the appropriate precedent but arguing from memory:

  “If the court would but glance at Pelczynski v. Town of Lantana, volume 303 of the Southern second, page 326, argued in our state’s highest court so ably by my own esteemed partner, it would find some most convincing obiter dicta to the effect that …” The Caesarean curls on his capacious Greco-Roman head were glistening.

  “Mr. Menduni!” the judge shouted in exasperation. “This is a … calendar call, sir! I’ll grant your motion, whatever it was, if you’ll just tell us whether you’re ready for trial or not!”

  The young opposing attorney, who had never laid eyes on Roland before, watched in astonishment as Roland, mopping his brow, plopped himself down self-importantly in his chair with a look of satisfaction such that he seemed like nothing so much as a very large, very smug child.

  “Yes, indeed, Your Honor,” he said. “Ready and able, sir.”

  Cassidy knew that possibly the only thing that kept Roland from being held in contempt of court the moment he opened his eyes in the morning was that he was very nearly always, absent some extremely rare hurried misinterpretation, close to a hundred percent right. Right as rain, dead-on accurate, smack-down-the-middle right. And in the early days he had convincingly demonstrated that to several judges who, completely undone by his finger-wagging, huffy-puffy, know-it-all personality, had ruled against him out of sheer animus. Roland had dutifully taken the poor magistrates “up” and had each of them resoundingly reversed, all without charging his clients a red cent for the favor, just because Roland was Roland.

  And of course Roland excelled in the calmer, more academic appellate world, where he treated the judges’ panels with a modicum of respect, and where pedantic personalities—when accompanied by solid arguments—were accorded a more thoughtful hearing.

  It was a good strategy, getting those reversals early on. No trial judge liked being spanked in an appellate court, where all the world could read of his disgrace at length and between hard covers. For all time.

  Roland still exasperated some of them, but they now knew to pay the hell attention to the “stupendous fatty,” as one of Cassidy’s friends called him.

  Cassidy strode smoothly across the bridge toward the southern end of Palm Beach as the sun was still clearing the low vegetation of the barrier island. He couldn’t help thinking, It’s almost decent for running.

  Despite growing up not ten miles from here and having run thousands of miles back and forth across this very same so-called lake, he never liked running or competing in the heat. Even the scant few hundred miles up to Southeastern University had blessedly placed him in a kinder clime for his schooling and racing days.

  Up ahead he saw another runner heading in the same direction and Cassidy automatically searched out a traffic gap and crossed over to the other side, but it was no use. In a few seconds he was even with the fellow, whom Cassidy thought he recognized from some local races as a fairly decent age grouper, a thirty-four- or thirty-five-minute 10K guy. So of course when Cassidy glanced ever so slightly over his left shoulder he saw that the fellow had increased his pace to keep up.

  Cassidy dropped into miler gear for the rest of the bridge and then turned alone toward the deserted Everglades Club, where he hopped the fence and thus gained access to God’s own Atlantic Ocean.

  It was a stunning morning on the beach, perfectly clear with a light breeze coming off the Gulf Stream but the sun high enough now to warm any exposed skin. Cassidy scarcely needed it. Though shirtless, he was already glistening as he made his way along the hardened strip of sand at water’s edge. The ocean itself was almost a Bahamian turquoise, the darkened twin reef lines clearly fingering their way down the coast fifty yards out parallel to the waterline.

  Cassidy didn’t think much of the concept of the “runner’s high,” but as he made his way down the crystal-sugar-white-blue-green-autumn-cool-salty-and-faintly-fishy weekday beach he had to admit that he felt pretty darned decent. Yessir, pretty darned decent right at this very moment, right here on the edge of the Atlantic, Planet Earth, Mind of God.

  It didn’t hurt that he was still in okay shape despite being a very former Olympian, that he perhaps overly relished such opportunities to play hooky from the real world, and that he still thought of himself as being in his twenties despite evidence to the contrary. If he had also been in love it would have just been too much.

  He was exactly six foot two and if he was up any at all from his racing weight of 167 it was only by a few pounds, unnoticeable to civilians. The raggedy sun-streaked and teammate-chopped hair that had in school won him the sobriquet “Blond Brillo” was now more professionally trimmed and conditioned, and though he had honestly come by some squint lines around the eyes, the high cheekbones and the general—despite being relatively fair complected—red-brown visage were much the same as when he had been younger. In fact, he had had difficulty at times, particularly when not suited, convincing some new client or other that he was in fact the real attorney and not somebody’s kid playing behind the desk.

  After he had gone an estimated two miles or so, he stopped and toed off his sockless running shoes, pulled a mask and snorkel from the small of his back, and tiptoed into the surprisingly warm water. He loved the push-pull of the little waves washing in and out, brushing prickly coral sand and periwinkle fragments back and forth across his ankles and excavating tickley grooves under his arches and toes.

  When he was deep enough he did a flat eyes-closed racing dive into the salt sea, being careful not to dislodge the mask now riding on his forehead, snorkel dangling every which way. He porpoised underwater a long way out, then surfaced and swam like a human the rest of the way to the inner reef line where he turned over and kicked along, facing the sky while he removed the mask, turned to spit in it, rinsed and then placed it properly over his eyes and nose. He bit on the snorkel mouthpiece, blew hard, upturned, and disappeared into the blue-green.

  A witness would have thought him surely drowned.

  Skin diving and running were surprisingly unalike, but Cassidy had spent much of his childhood underwater and he had long ago taught himself the studied serenity necessary to stay down a very long time.

  When he finally did come up, he surfaced barely long enough to spout a hard bullet of seawater straight up, then kicked leisurely along the reef line trying to keep his backside low in the warm water and out of the chilly air, seeing what there was to see there among the living coral. What there was to see was a swirl of impossibly gorgeous life-forms unsuspected by most land dwellers: beau gregories, queen angels, rock angels, sergeant majors, blue tangs, yellow tangs, top hats, Cuban hog snappers, porkfish, butterflyfish, squirrelfish, lookdowns, bar jacks, grunts and wrasses of various types, and even an occasional dinner-sized grouper or snapper. He knew them all on sight, and loved them all.

  Now he was merely a happy spectator, but on those occasions when he hunted the edible ones, he did so as he imagined a Native American would: solemnly, filled with respect and something not quite sympathy. To his mind the worst outcome of any hunting foray would be to mortally wound an animal and have it slither off heartbreakingly sideways to escape. If it holed up somewhere that he might still get at it, as grouper often did, he would be up and down, up and down until he either retrieved the poor creature or exhausted himself beyond all good sense.