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 breaststroke.
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 vines, 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.
Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be working late that night. They found Trig's body, smashed and ruptured by the explosive.
It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines:
HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST, CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS
SELF IN BOMB BLAST, TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN
PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE.
It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That's what Trig was telling him that last night, now he understood.
He had to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?
Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with exhaustion.
'Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit,' said Bob.
From the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the mountain. It wasn't a great mountain. Donny had seen greater mountains in his time in the desert, he'd even climbed some. Swagger said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious backwoods the sniper hailed from.
The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to observation from hundreds of meters out.
Pick your poison.
'Oh, Christ,' said Donny, looking at the steep slope.
Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.
'I want to get halfway up in the next two hours,' Bob said.
'I don't think I can,' gulped Donny.
'I don't think I can either,' said Bob.
'And, what's worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area heading on that base camp, they're sure to have security out, just the thing to keep boys like us out of their hair.'
'I can't do it,' Donny said.
'I cain't do it neither,' said Swagger.
'But it's gotta be done and I don't see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two others, believe me, I'd send them, yessirree.'
