'Oh, fuck.'
He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he's doing.
'Brophy?' I say.
'I don't know. They got a lot of officers, they hit the command bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys. Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say there'll be a big investigation.
Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You're lucky you got out, Gunny.'
Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings. We went, we lost, we died, we came home to--to what?
I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don't want to live. I want to die and be with my people.
'Corpsman?' I grab his arm.
'Yeah?'
'Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got. Please.'
'Can't do it, Gunny. You're a goddamned hero.
You've got everything to live for. You're going to get the Navy Cross. You'll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps.'
'I hurt so bad.'
'Okay, Gunny. I'm done. Let me give you some Mike.
Only a little, though, to make the pain go away.'
He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I'm in full traction in San Diego, where I'll spend a year alone, which will be followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.
But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.
The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally Memphis walked in.
'Thought I'd find you here.'
'Oh, Christ, what time is it?'
'Mister, it's eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk.'
Bob's head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not pleasant. He was still in yesterday's clothes and the room had the stench of unwashed man to it.
Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared, the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky, pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn't.
'She was operated on at seven a.m. for her collarbone.
You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?'
Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob's few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau's New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney's office that fall, but she'd come here out of her and her husband's love of Bob.
'I had a bad night.'
'I'll say.'
'It ain't what it appears,' he said feebly.
'You fell off the wagon but good, that's what it appears.'
'I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go.'
'You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?'
'I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don't happen to be wrong on this one. Here, loo key here.'
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
'There,' he said.
'No drunk could do that. It's gone, it's finished, it won't never touch these lips again.'
'So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone.'
'Nope. Sorry, don't remember that.'
'Why the booze?'
'I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again.'
