A Song to Die For (3 page)

“Hey, Franco! Take some rib eyes out of the freezer, will you?”

Franco waved. “Sure, Pop.”

Shakily, Rosa grabbed the binoculars, backed away, and returned to the Jeep. She waited to hear the diesel tractor start back up before she cranked her motor.

*   *   *

Back in the city, Rosa retrieved her Corvette from her father's house, and went home to her own place. Then paranoia overwhelmed her, so she checked herself into a hotel downtown, using a fake name. She showered and wept, trembled and paced the floor. Finally, she slept. When she woke on Friday morning, she was no longer a Martini. She remembered that her father had gone to the ranch to plant trees in the past. When this was over, she was going to find her real mother and live happily ever after. Right now, she had no one.

Rosa had once dated a cop. Nice guy, good-looking, very athletic, but boring. She called him. “Jake? This is Rosa. Rosa …
Martini
.” She had to spit the surname out, for it felt dirty in her mouth, like dust from the desert. “I need to talk to you at the police station.”

Lieutenant Jake Harbaugh came to work early to meet Rosa in his office at 7:30 a.m. He smiled and hugged her. She broke from his embrace, and refused to make small talk with him. “I'm here to report a crime. I witnessed a murder.” To her own amazement, she told the story methodically, coherently, and unemotionally. It was like listening to a TV documentary narrated by her own voice. When she was finished, she focused on Jake's face. He looked pale.

“Who else have you told?” he asked.

“No one.”

“Good.” Jake let out a great sigh and got up from his desk. “I've got to find my supervisor. Wait here, Rosa.” He walked out of the office.

She sat there, feeling somewhat purged of the guilt and filth she knew she didn't deserve to suffer in the first place. She wondered about the witness protection program. She wondered why her real mother had given her up for adoption. She felt utterly alone and devoid of identity. After waiting a few minutes, Rosa stood and paced around Jake's office, which was adorned with all sorts of manly trophies: A mounted bighorn sheep head with glass eyes staring at nothing. A rainbow trout in perpetual rigor mortis on a pine board. Then there were the bronzed sports trophies for golf, basketball, baseball …

A team photo caught her eye. She was drawn to it as if it were a window out of her own little hell. Stepping closer, she saw about twenty guys in rugby uniforms. Jake was on the back row with the bigger men. A face leapt out at her from the front row of players. It was Franco. He was looking right at her, and smiling. He was holding the corner of a banner. One of Papa Martini's casinos was the team sponsor.

That was seventeen hours ago, and she had been running ever since. She could not shake the feeling that she had been followed from the police station, though no one vehicle had stayed in sight behind her. As she sped ever onward toward Austin, she had stopped only to gas up, visit the ladies room, grab some junk food, and to use a phone booth outside a Jack in the Box in Albuquerque.

She had remembered a sorority sister named Celinda Morales. They had partied together at the sorority house, but otherwise were not close friends. That was good. There was no link for Franco to follow. Rosa recalled that Celinda had grown up in a tough neighborhood in San Antonio, and had lost a little brother to gang violence. Her undergraduate degree was in criminology, and she had stayed at UT to attend law school. Celinda's ultimate goal was to go home and prosecute gangsters—she talked about it all the time.

From the phone booth outside the fast-food joint, Rosa had called information for Celinda's number, and had jotted it down in ink on the Jack in the Box receipt, which was stapled to the top of the burger bag. She stuffed a few French fries in her mouth and called Celinda.

“I need your help,” she said after the obligatory niceties. “I don't have time to tell you why on the phone.”

Celinda had given Rosa directions to her apartment building on Riverside Drive, just off Congress Avenue in Austin.

*   *   *

Now Rosa was an hour away from Celinda's place, tired, and worried about the headlights in the rearview mirror. It couldn't be Franco. It just couldn't … She had come so far. She choked the fear down in her throat and waited, hopefully, for some cowboy to barrel past her on this lonely stretch of blacktop outside of nowhere.

 

3

CHAPTER

1:20
A.M.

Carrying his Strat, Creed made his way to the backstage door at Armadillo World Headquarters, a couple of the players patting him on the back along the way. Stepping outside, he heard Shine's voice behind him again:

“Hey, where you goin', Creed?”

He spoke over his shoulder, without making eye contact with her. “Nowhere.”

The broad-reaching honesty of his reply hit him hard as he walked away.
Nowhere
. Maybe there was a song in the idea. “Nowhereville,” or something like that. He felt he had been residing there for quite some time.

Shine persisted. “Can I go?”

He continued walking. “You don't want to go where I'm goin', Shine.”

She let him get three steps farther away. “Hey, how many babies
did
you kill in Vietnam?”

Creed knew her scorn was driven by drugs, booze, and his rejection of her advances, but the words cut deep. “None,” he answered. “Just one grown man.”

As he trudged toward his van in the band parking area, his memories whirled back to a time before he knew what war was like. That had all been changed by a simple draft notice.
Change
was an understatement.
Turned upside down
was more like it.

Reporting for duty in 1967, Creed had found himself faced with an unexpected decision. He could choose to go into the U.S. Army as a draftee, and serve only two years, trusting the army to pick his military occupation, which would probably be that of a frontline grunt with an M16. Or he could enlist for three years, and choose his own Military Occupational Specialty.

Creed was proud to serve his country, but he didn't have a death wish and he wasn't mad at any little men in the Southeast Asian jungles. He couldn't shake the idea that the music business had something special waiting for him in his future, and he didn't care to miss it, six feet deep in a military graveyard.

He decided to enlist for three years. He looked over the M.O.S. choices and found heavy-equipment operator listed. This was an honorable way off the front lines, he thought. And if it turned out he was wrong about a glorious music career awaiting him, he could always find work back home operating heavy machinery. He liked big diesel machines already. His grandfather had big tractors on the farm. He had learned the basics of diesel mechanics at his uncle's shop, and at the garage where he worked for a time in Nashville. If he had to do something as crazy as go to war, this at least seemed like a logical way to do it.

After boot camp, he spent months training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, learning how to push things around with big diesel cats and road graders. In army slang, he became a “heavy junk” operator.

He landed at Cam Rahn Bay on a commercial TWA flight. His airline trip to war struck him as odd for a boy raised with images of D-Day beach landings and paratrooper jumps in World War II flicks. With his first whiff of Southeast Asian air, he knew he was nowhere near Kansas anymore. The place smelled dank, damp, mildewed, and rotten. It took days to get accustomed to the strange odors.

Corporal William Mason's next set of orders sent him to a place called Chu Lai, for a booby trap and mine sweeping course. It was here that he discovered he would be using his bulldozer, as often as not, to explode enemy land mines.
Great
. The army bestowed upon him the lofty title of “combat engineer” and issued Creed orders for Fire Base Bronco south of Chu Lai.

When he arrived at Fire Base Bronco, also known as Duc Pho for the village located nearby, Creed could tell he was finally in the middle of the war. The soldiers stared weirdly here and the mood was somber. Morale consisted of the short-timers taunting him about the certainty of his impending death. They would sing a bastardized version of “Camp Town Races” to him and the other new recruits:

Oh, you'll go home in a body bag, doo-dah, doo-dah …

Bastards couldn't sing anyway.

His job at Fire Base Bronco would be to keep the roads clear to Chu Lai, which sometimes would mean driving a road grader through sniper-infested jungles. But when land mines were detected, which was often, he would be called in with a bulldozer. His sergeant explained:

“What you do is, you push just the right amount of dirt on top of the land mine, then you dig deep and push the whole pile hard enough to make the mine blow up inside the mound. I'll show you tomorrow. Sweet dreams, Mason.”

After watching the sergeant blow up a couple of dirt piles, Creed was ordered to try his hand on the next enemy land mine located by sweepers.

He piled and pushed as the sergeant watched from a safe distance, feeling as if he had enemy sniper crosshairs on him all the while. Finally, he got the land mine to blow up. Though muffled deep inside the mound of dirt, the force of the blast rocked the dozer back and the explosion made his ears ring. The whole ordeal strained his nerves to the brink.

“Not bad for your first time,” the sergeant said, having trotted close enough to shout over the diesel engine. “But you're too careful. I can do one in a third of the time it took you.”

“I'm not in that big of a hurry to blow myself sky high, Sarge,” Creed replied.

“You better get a hell of a lot more efficient, Mason, or you'll find yourself on point with some infantry outfit. The army gave you your M.O.S., and they can take it away.”

After that, Creed got serious about the science of detonating land mines in record time, with just enough dank Asian earth piled on top of them to save himself from annihilation. Pushing the lethal ordnance around underground while keeping his M16 constantly within reach, Creed couldn't help but think: “Man, if the boys in the band could just see me now. They wouldn't believe this shit.”

He and the other combat engineers built their own hooches and bunkers at Fire Base Bronco. His hooch didn't amount to much more than a shack slapped together with lumber, tin, and canvas with bunks inside. The bunker they constructed nearby was dug into the ground and surrounded with sand bags.

“You think we'll ever have to use this thing?” one of his bunk mates asked the sergeant while putting the last row of sand bags in place.

“Let me explain something to you morons,” Sarge said. “Out here, we control the war by day. The Viet Cong control it by night. You better know your way into this bunker in the dark or you're dead meat. You'll see your first firefight soon enough.”

Waiting for that first attack on his home base rubbed Creed's nerves raw, night after night. He thought maybe the sergeant had exaggerated the threat. After all, Fire Base Bronco was surrounded by barbed wire and trenches and protected by machine-gun placements. Would the VC really rush this place in the dark?

Creed wrote letters to Dixie for a while, but she never answered one. He had put in a collect phone call from Fort Leonard Wood, but Dixie had apparently changed her number.

In 'Nam, he didn't let on to any of his new military friends that he was Creed Mason from the country band Dixie Creed. There wasn't a guitar in camp that he knew of anyway. He was just plain ol' Bill Mason, from Texas, and that's the way he liked it. He didn't want any preferential treatment, and sensed that he might even be given the more dangerous jobs were he to flaunt his brush with stardom in front of his superiors. The army had a way of breaking everyone down to a common denominator.

One thing he did get good at was poker. There was plenty of roadwork to do on most days, and regular mechanical issues to deal with on the diesel machines, but long periods of boredom also dragged by, and poker was one way to pass the time. Creed had played with his dad and brothers back home, and now became a serious student of the game. Every hand of cards was like a song to Creed, and took his mind off the threats of impending death.

He was, in fact, sitting at a poker game in his hooch when his first firefight finally came. As they played cards, Creed and his friends were chuckling over the new kid, who had arrived today, dead drunk. The kid was now passed out on a bunk. As the laughter died down, Creed cocked his head at an odd whir he heard in the air.

An instant later, an enemy mortar exploded just outside the hooch, tossing Creed off the crate he had been using for a chair. He found a bunk on top of him.

“Take cover!” the sergeant screamed.

“Get in the bunker!” one of the short-timers yelled.

Creed scrambled out from under the bunk, grabbing a rifle from an overturned rack as he scurried to the bunker. Tracers, flares, and rockets lit up the sky like a rock-and-roll concert, but the music was all lethal gunfire and screaming death. As he piled into the bunker, he turned, as if ready to fight with the M16 he had grabbed.

“Give me that rifle!” the sergeant ordered.

Creed handed it over.

“The barrel's bent in the blast, Mason. This thing's useless. Just keep your head down.” The sergeant threw the damaged weapon out of the bunker.

Creed's heart was pounding and his guts churned with a fear he had never known nor imagined. Then he heard the kid screaming back in the hooch. That drunken kid who had arrived today and passed out on a bunk had now awakened to a hellish firestorm and wouldn't know up from down in this strange place.

“I'll get him,” Creed said. He took one step, but the sergeant grabbed him in a headlock and muscled him down. Looking back on it later, he would realize that he had failed to hear the whir of the next mortar round—the one that hit the hooch dead on and killed that kid on his first day at Fire Base Bronco.