Swarms of mosquitos buzzed around them, settling on their faces. Every few seconds they had to blow tickling mosquitos out of their noses. Poole could remember being so tired that if Rowley had offered to prop up his arms for him, he would have collapsed into sleep right there. He could remember feeling the leeches attach themselves to his thighs.
“Oh God,” Poole said, realizing that he was trembling. He wiped his eyes and looked at the others. Conor was weeping too, and emotion suffused Pumo’s handsome, normally impassive face.
Harry Beevers was watching Poole. He looked about as emotional as a weight-guesser at the state fair. “It got you, hmm?”
“Sure,” Poole said. Profound irritation at Beevers’ smugness flashed through him. “Are you immune?”
Beevers shook his head. “Hardly, Michael. I just keep my feelings inside. That’s the way I was raised. But I was thinking that a bunch of names ought to be added to this thing. McKenna. The Martinsons. Danton and Guibert. Remember?”
Poole had no desire to try to explain what he had just experienced. He too could think of at least one name that could be added to those on the wall.
Beevers virtually twinkled at Michael. “You know that we’re going to get rich out of this, don’t you?” And for some Beeversish reason utterly opaque to Michael Poole, he tapped him twice on the chest with an extended index finger. The finger appeared to have been manicured. Then Beevers turned to Pumo and Linklater, evidently saying something about the Memorial. Michael could still feel Harry’s index finger playfully jabbing at his sternum.…
A hundred dying mosquitos packed Poole’s nostrils; dying leeches clamped onto his weary, dying legs. It was decided, Poole knew: as if in imitation of their ignorant, terrified, and variously foolhardy nineteen-year-old selves, they really were going to take off for the Far East all over again.
PART
TWO
PREPARATIONS
FOR
TAKEOFF
1
“Maggie never comes in here, Maggie had enough,” said Jimmy Lah, answering Harry’s question as he poured a silvery ribbon of vermouth over the ice and liquid already in the glass. He squeezed a paring of lemon rind around the rim of the glass, then slipped it down into the ice cubes.
“Enough of life, or enough of Tina?” Beevers asked.
Jimmy Lah placed on the bar a fresh paper napkin with the word Saigon printed in slanting red letters over the silhouette of a man pulling a rickshaw. He set Harry Beevers’ drink on the napkin and with a sideways sweep of his hand gathered up the damp, torn napkin beside it. “Tina’s too normal for Maggie.”
The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.
It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.
Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.
Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.
Then Harry saw who had opened the door.
Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving cautiously but swiftly into the restaurant. She had nearly reached the counter when Vinh managed to grab her shoulder. The child’s mouth became an astonished 0, and Vinh hauled her back into the kitchen. The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.
In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before—on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised.
An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.
He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.
Jimmy stepped nearer. “That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie—they’re old buddies.”
“Tina must have a lot on his mind,” Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.
“You see the
Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.
The first message read:
“See what I mean?” Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.
“Your sister placed both these ads?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Whole family’s crazy.”
