He tried to evoke the feel of the factories, the freeways, the bitter wind off the river. But it was gone, that jump where the muscle hits the steel.
Linda smiled sadly and put on her coat. He crossed to her, holding out his hands in an invitation to dance. She raised her voice to carry over the music. “Get a life, Harry. They use that music on TV now.
To sell fruit.”
As he watched her walk out he compared her to Jesse Deucette.
Linda was the opposite of danger; she was forever, a keeper, the good serious girl who went with the decent job and his straight new smile. He’d almost got it right with her.
Harry danced alone with the same old problem. Life presented choices. There was this princess and this dragon. Before he met Linda he’d always chosen to kill the princess and fuck the dragon.
But…
She lived in a house on Lake Como. In the summer she trained for marathons on the park trails, in the winter she HUNTER’S MOON / 131
skied cross country. Kept the stuff in her cupboards lined up. A woman who made lists.
He’d read the list in her mind when she looked at him a certain way and decided it was full of children’s names.
The old panic had set in. The first cold fumble that untied the blood knot of sexual performance. He ran from the scourge of im-potence and masked his retreat in pyschobabble about sobriety.
The phone rang. Arnie, his voice tired and irritable. Murphy would be reprimanded. They’d kill the background stuff. Harry could have his two weeks off. The editor wanted a sit-down discussion of ethical guidelines in situations where staffers get involved inadvertently in stories.
Harry said he’d drop in the office Monday morning.
“What’s that noise?” asked Arnie.
“Music,” said Harry.
“Sounds like that raisin commercial,” said Arnie.
He sat in bed chain-smoking to blunt the lousy taste in his mouth as he watched traffic crawl along the interstate. Lights going east and west. The moon swung a sickle at the curve of the 35 interchange where the road curled north to dragon country.
Go back. Yes. For the woman and the truth.
The night waited like a stretch of tricky open ground he had to cross and his body knew and he clamped his elbows tight to his sides, crossed his forearms rigidly across his chest, and drew up his knees.
Sleep swung open beneath him like bomb bay doors.
21
The jack-in-the-box had slanted eyes and onion breath and carried Karl Marx in his pack and the bastard popped out of the inky rain on springs of fire and steel.
132 / CHUCK LOGAN
And they were all scared, all the young lives that clawed at the melting ladder of a last breath in the muscle-scented night and Harry wet his pants, but it was blood.
And all the ones he’d killed were there and people he’d seen die and every goddamned corpse he’d ever touched.
And the explosion embraced him in white line as strict as a winter bush and two South Vietnamese militiamen took the full force of the booby trap that sprung the ambush and he was clubbed into the slime of a paddy dike with their tangled corpses.
Death was a happy whore on a busy night who put the French kiss to him. He bit off the steaming tongue and spit it back and gagged on a mouthful of digested rice as a dead Vietnamese farm boy’s supper leaked out from the uncoiling yarn of his guts and a slick fishbone sensation tingled along the blood-drenched canvas ankle of his jungle boot and that was vertebrae at the bottom of a chest cavity.
With the oblong eye of perfect fear he saw the implacable shadows swarm up from the paddies and he saw the thigh muscles bang like slats beneath their muddy shorts and he saw the magazines of the Kalishnakovs in their determined hands curve wickedly and drip with the rain and the VC ghosts wore flesh tonight when they came to finish the job.
Don’t move, play dead, and hide in the guts and eat the rice. Wash it down with hot sticky blood and the primal ooze of paddy water and stay alive.
He’d always thought that the angel who drifted across the pond of death and quieted his terror was his mother because she was there, mixed in with the rest. The water where he lay glowed from the still-burning lamps of a ’51 Packard that lurched nose down between the smashed rice stalks with the doors popped open and the dome light still on and a hole in the windshield, passenger side, where he’d catapulted free. And the dome light flickered in the gory ruffled halo of cracked glass that she wore around her face.
And now he saw in the sputtering magnesium light of a HUNTER’S MOON / 133
parachute flare that it was not his mother who came with outstretched arms.
The North Vietnamese soldiers who tried to shoot Randall and Dorothy were there talking to Chris, comparing their wounds. And one of them leaned against the fender of the Packard and Chris put his finger in the hole in the Vietnamese’s chest with fascination on his face at how tidy it was compared to the wreckage of his heart and lungs and the Vietnamese turned to display his dangling scapula.
Not an angel who lifted him from the killing ground and carried him into the grove of pines. Who pulled him down beside her and threw aside her shining robes. Jesse Deucette had the ram’s head configuration of her ovaries and uterus drawn on her belly with blood.
Harry lay motionless and patiently let the brew of dread and mosquito repellent dry in his sweat. He stared at the quiet winter moon that hung over I-94 and massaged the starfish-shaped scars that quilted the muscle of his left shoulder.
And the dream was just another scar that reared up
