you could put these rebellious high jinks into some kind of proportion.”
“There's too many rules, Father. I can't stand it,” said Charles, a maverick by deepest instinct.
“Living here will eliminate most of the rules,” his father assured him. “If you remember to act like a gentleman and have respect for other people's feelings, I won't expect much more.”
And with responsibility on his own youthful shoulders, Carey, as his mother called him-a family diminutive for Carrville males-developed a grudging maturity. As his parents' son, he was a naturally skilled rider. Under his father's guidance he began taking an active interest in the Fersten stables. A tutor was brought in to finish out the last few months of school, and then Carey entered his first European steeplechase event. It was too much for a young boy. He won and won and won, and at eighteen the adulation overwhelmed him. In December his father brought him home to recuperate; he'd been living on nerves and liquor for the last month.
Although barely eighteen, he'd seen much of the world and indulged his senses past prudence for a long time, more so lately with the hedonistic partying accompanying the race circuit. Women were interested in a winner-and a rich, handsome winner increased the offerings to dizzying proportions. He was worn out, worn down in body and spirit. Pleasure had somehow lost its fine edge.
It can happen at any age, the questioning… What is happiness? What sustains it? How is it measured? Or would satisfaction be a plainer word for a plainer world?
His spirits at low ebb, Carey came back to the States at a time when newscasts were pressing home the need to save a small Asian country struggling toward democracy. The first U.S. war fought on television showed young children dying before the viewer's eyes, depicted old, helpless people displaced from their lifelong homes, pitilessly presented footage of entire villages disappearing under napalm attacks. The politicians were talking then about “the light at the end of the tunnel,” and Carey felt a surge of the spirit that had called his father and his father's father and countless Ferstens from the days of medieval baronies to fight other peoples' wars. Instead of resting, Carey impetuously joined the marines, a spontaneous decision based on a fugitive combination of melancholy, youthful idealism, and remembered stories of Fersten ancestors who had fought through a thousand years of Europe's history.
He may not have taken so drastic a step had his life been less off course. But the decision didn't seem drastic at the time; it seemed as if he'd been handed an opportunity to do something more significant than proving one's skill as an athlete on and off the course. He told himself it was wise to at least make his own choice by enlisting at a time when the draft was hot on the heels of eighteen-year-olds without deferments. But he realized the flaw in that rationalization: Generals' sons weren't fighting this war, nor were senators' sons or rich men's sons. He wouldn't have had to go. But, brooding and moody, with an elusive desire to test himself and somehow help in the tragedy five thousand miles away, Carey Fersten joined up. At the time he thought of himself as another Fersten male going off to war, another generation. There was pride in that.
When he came back from Vietnam two years later, the boyishness was gone and his bright idealism had faded. He stayed in his room for two weeks, not even coming downstairs for meals. His father had been aware of the drugs, but he'd only watched and waited, careful not to intrude upon the painful readjustment.
During his third week home, Carey received a visit from the widow of his best buddy in the corps, a man who'd died in his arms. Dhani MacIntosh had taken the bus from Chicago-a day and a half trip with transfers and layovers-and had walked the last three miles from the highway. She brought the pictures Mac had sent back to her, all the ones in which he and Carey had been standing arm-in-arm or clowning around with the usual rude gestures and uplifted beer bottles. And she wanted to talk about Mac, wanted to know everything that the brief letters hadn't been able to say, wanted to be with someone Mac had loved like a brother.
It was the first time Carey had cried since he'd come back. They both cried, held each other and cried.
“The first time I saw Mac, he was nineteen,” Carey began. “He had just flunked out of college and decided the marines might pay the bills for you and Mac Junior. He walked into our temporary camp after carrying a basketball through five miles of jungle. Best damn sight I'd seen in four long months of hell. He called me ‘Shorty'… it was the first time in years I'd looked up at anyone… and asked me if I played basketball. We set up a makeshift hoop and played horse or twenty-one or one-on-one. Sometimes when we went back to the main camp for a few days, we'd put together a real game. Mac and I, Luger and Ant, along with a pickup guard or sometimes without one. We whipped everyone's ass.”
“He said you were the first cool honkey he'd ever met,” Dhani said with a smile.
“I had fewer hang-ups than a lot of folks out there, and Mac and I liked to party. No women,” Carey quickly interposed. “There weren't any out where we spent most of our time. Mac and I and some of the crew would just party up and talk about what we were going to do when we got out. He wanted to start up a community center in your old neighborhood, he said, and help a few kids out of the ghetto. Mac always felt if he'd paid more attention in school, he wouldn't have flunked out. The basketball scholarship got him to college but couldn't keep him there.”
“He never learned how to read real well,” Dhani said softly.
“I know. He knew. But he wanted to make it better for some other kids. It's the only fast track out of the ghetto, he'd say, sports and school.”
“I'm in a job training program now. I think I might be able to start college next year.”
Carey's eyes filled with tears, and he brushed a quick hand over the wetness. “Do you know how happy Mac would be to know that? Hey, Mac, you hear that?” he said, looking up. “You hear how smart a wife you've got?” He smiled a rueful smile at Dhani. “I talk to him all the time. Christ, people'll call me nuts, I suppose, but I do.”
“Me, too. He was the kind you just know would always listen.”
Carey looked out at the late fall landscape and swore under his breath. Turning back abruptly, he said, “You know what pisses me off something fierce? There's plenty of assholes living… and Mac's dead. It's not fair!”
“Did he suffer?” Dhani asked after they'd talked about the futility and the injustice, after they'd discussed the good memories and the good times. She had avoided the question until the last because she wanted to know, but was afraid of the answer.
“No,” Carey replied. Sitting on the porch railing in the late afternoon sun, he looked down at the even rows of planking below his feet before he looked back at her. “No, he didn't suffer,” he lied.
Dhani exhaled a great breath of relief. “I was afraid… he'd… the end was… awful.”
“It was fast,” Carey said. “Really. How's Mac Junior?” he asked. And while Dhani talked about her son, Carey tried to press back the terrible memories of Mac's death.
They had just been dropped into the clearing they'd already taken twice in the last six months. He was at point and Mac was slack man, five yards behind him when Mac stepped on the mine. The explosion knocked Carey flat. When he turned back to the anguished screams, he saw what was left of Mac thrown on a heavy jungle bush. Mac's arms and legs were gone. If he lived a million years, he'd never forget the sight of Mac crying for him. As he scrambled back, Carey screamed for a corpsman. “It's all right, Mac, I'm here. I'm here.” Very gently he lifted the man who had been six foot six into his arms, carefully eased himself onto the ground, and held him. Staring out of the dense green growth of underbrush that for a suspended moment in time seemed to isolate them as the last two men on earth, Carey roared, “If there's not a corpsman here in two minutes, I'm going to kill somebody!”
Mac's eyes were open wide. “I don't want to die,” he whispered.
“You won't,” Carey said fiercely. “I won't let you. Corpsman!” he screamed. “Dammit, we need a fucking corpsman over here!”
“I can't feel anything, Shorty. Am I going to make it?”
“It's shock, Mac. The feeling will come back. Your body's in shock.” But with each beat of his heart, Mac's arteries were pumping away his life. “We'll have you fixed up in no time,” Carey reassured him.
Just then a VC artillery unit began a dropping pattern along the tree line sheltering the company. No one could move. No medic came. As soon as the mortars started exploding, the Hueys that had dropped them in the clearing lifted like big, lumbering birds and flew away. Carey swore at them as they disappeared over the treetops.
He told Mac the copters would be there in a minute for him, that he'd be taken out to the nearest field hospital, that he'd earned a good, long R and R. He lied and lied and lied while his best friend died in his arms.
When Mac was dead, Carey made a soft bed for him in the undergrowth. Oblivious to the VC mortars systematically sweeping across the tree line while the firebase on the hill got their bearings on target, he raced toward the drop point where he knew the corpsmen would be. He manhandled a protesting corporal through the exploding shells to where Mac lay and said to him in a cold, level voice, “I want his arms and legs sewn back on.”
