A Song to Die For (4 page)

The night dragged on, and Creed began to think he might actually be able to deal with his fear. It was intense, but there
was
a limit to it. A man could get just so scared, he thought. He stayed low and prayed from time to time, listening to the ordnance and small-arms fire being traded around the perimeter of the base. He thought about that kid screaming, about the sergeant having saved his life by preventing him from trying to retrieve the kid. He decided that getting drunk in a war zone was a very bad idea.

Finally, U.S. artillery zeroed in on the VC mortar camp and drove the enemy out of range by dawn. Fire Base Bronco lost three killed and seven wounded.

This was Verse One in Creed's personal ballad of death cheated. He would hear that kid screaming for a long, long time.

*   *   *

One morning, Creed jumped into a jeep to help the camp gunners set the M60 machine guns in place around the base. He got out of the jeep at the first placement and was walking behind one of the gunners toward the sandbagged site when another soldier called him back to help lug a crate full of 50-caliber rounds. Only seconds later, he found himself looking at his own blood in the dirt, just inches from his face. Stunned, he realized he had been knocked down by an explosion from behind and had busted his lip in the fall. The gunner carrying the M60 had stepped on a land mine placed the night before by VC encroachers. The gunner was dead. Had Creed turned back a second or two later, he probably would have been dead as well.

Verse two.

The days dragged on. There was a calendar in the hooch. He grew to hate that calendar. The pages did not turn fast enough to suit him.

Mounding a land mine one day, he misgauged the placement of the target. His blade hit the mine and exploded it. Shrapnel tore all thorough and around the bulldozer, instantly ricocheting around him like a swarm of bumble bees stirred from hell. The percussion stunned him.

He lifted his hands first, to make sure they were still there. He felt his face, finding it intact. He couldn't find a scratch anywhere on his body, but he was almost totally deafened by the ringing in his ears for three days.

Verse three. Would he run out of luck?

Ten months into his tour, Creed became one of those short-timers who had met him with empty stares upon his own arrival.

“Forty-five days and a wakeup!” he said to some newbie one morning at chow, bragging about the approaching end of this tour, knowing the recruit was staring at twelve months of war. That day, while working the road near the village of Duc Pho, Creed noticed some GIs gathered around the dirt-road entrance to the village. He realized they were taking pictures of something. He approached on his road grader and looked closer.

Heads. Severed human heads. Viet Cong fighters killed and decapitated by South Vietnamese loyalists, their heads then impaled on bamboo spikes. This was the most grisly thing he had ever cast his tortured eyes upon. The heads did not resemble any ghoulish props he had ever seen in a Hollywood movie. They were ghastlier—not cleanly sliced free, but sloppily chopped and hacked away, with flesh, veins, and windpipes dangling, bloodbathed, underneath.

“Oh, my God,” he said to himself. “Those idiots are taking pictures. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to get that picture out of my head.”

That night, somehow, VC combatants slipped past the guards and through the wire and attacked the base from within in a well-timed assault. It began with a fire grenade being dropped inside Creed's hooch through an open window. Flames leapt through the hooch and all hell broke loose. A couple of soldiers, engulfed in flames, ran screaming through the door only to be shot down by waiting enemy attackers. A couple of the other men seemed to get through the gunfire, but Creed wasn't sure.

What he was sure of was that he was the only one left alive in the burning hooch and he couldn't stay much longer. He had won a forty-five, Colt, semiautomatic, Model 1911 pistol from a master sergeant in a card game. He wore it most of the time, and had it strapped on now. He drew it from its holster and took a step toward the door. Bullets shattered the wooden doorframe and sprayed him with splinters, driving him back.

He smelled human flesh burning, heard staccato machine-gun fire outside. A face appeared in the window, followed by a rifle muzzle. In the light of the flames, Creed could clearly see that the face was Vietnamese. He locked eyes with the enemy, over the sights of his Colt. One shot made the face go away.

The hooch became so hot that he felt his skin was about to boil. It was as if he heard his own echo before he even screamed. Someone was yelling, and it was him. He tore out of the hooch with flames on his heels. The relative cool charged him with adrenaline that he felt roaring up his spine in an icy tingle. Muzzle blasts in the dark. He returned fire at full sprint, his eyes searching for some sort of cover under the flare-lit sky.

He ran and ran, finding no safe haven, yet somehow avoiding a spray of lead. The trench. He could only hope his own men held it. He got a glimpse of the man that shot him. The VC missed with the first couple shots, and Creed twisted to the right as he ran, firing his Colt at the enemy attacker. The bullet went into his lower back on the right side, tore through his guts, and still managed to strike his left forearm as well.

He toppled into the trench, breathless, crazed, afraid of death.

A soldier in the trench took one look at him and yelled, “Medic!”

Now Creed got strangely angry and pulled himself to his knees though his guts were roaring in pain. He peeked over the top of the trench, fired his .45 until it clicked, then felt himself slipping into shock.

“Medic!”

Verse four. Done.

*   *   *

The surgeons removed several feet of his intestines and sent him to Japan to begin a long recovery. The mangled and burned men he met there made him feel lucky and guilty all at once.

An army doctor, a major, showed him an X-ray of his shattered arm and jokingly said, “I hope you weren't a guitar player or something.”

“Something,” Creed replied.

The doctor leaned closer so no one else would hear. “Be thankful you got to keep that arm. On a busy day we would have taken it off. We had time to save it, but I can't promise you'll have the dexterity you once had.”

Creed swallowed hard. “Thanks for not cuttin' it off, Doc,” he managed to say.

“I'm sending you to Beach Army Hospital to recover from your gut wound. And they'll probably put some pins in your arm and set you up with some therapy for it.”

Creed envisioned some swank facility by the ocean. “Where's Beach Army Hospital?”

“Mineral Wells. The garden spot of Texas.”

Ah, Texas … Creed had never heard a word so sweet.

*   *   *

It turned out that Beach Army Hospital was nowhere near a beach. Mineral Wells, Texas, was just eighty miles south of the Oklahoma border, in fact. Six months after he landed there, Creed was up and around. He had eased back into his boot camp calisthenics and could do a hundred sit-ups, easy. He did his push-ups on his knuckles because he couldn't flatten his left palm out on the floor. The surgery on his left arm had somewhat improved his range of motion and dexterity, but he still couldn't bend his wrist enough to wrap it around a guitar neck.

Instead, he had purchased a Dobro in a Mineral Wells pawnshop. With the instrument on his thighs, strings up, his left hand could easily manipulate the steel bar on the strings over the neck. Still, he missed the control he had had with a fine electric guitar.

One day his surgeon, a Major Mark Fray, saw him playing the lap steel in the day room of the hospital. He walked near to listen.

“That's pretty good, Mason. Do you play a regular guitar, too?”

“I used to,” Creed said. “I can't reach around the neck anymore. My wrist won't bend enough.”

The doctor wrote something on a clipboard. “Do you play golf?”

Creed wondered about the leap in the conversation. “No, sir.”

“My kid wants to play guitar. I'll teach you how to golf if you'll teach him how to play his six-string.”

Creed couldn't find anything particularly wrong with the deal. “All right.”

The next day he found himself on the driving range with a seven iron in his hands. Major Fray showed him how to grip the club and gave him a couple pointers on his swing. Within an hour, he found that he could actually hit a ball pretty straight. It felt good, even though the strain of the golf swing shot pains through his wounded left forearm.

“You're a natural, Mason. Even with that stiff wrist. I'll loan you that seven iron. I want you out here every day. Make it hurt a little. Work on your range of motion.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My kid will stop by the dayroom after school on Monday for his first lesson.”

“Fair enough, Major. Thanks.”

One day on the driving range, Creed reared back to hit the golf ball and felt a pop in his left arm in mid-swing, followed by a searing pain up his arm and down into his fingers. He dropped the club and looked at his hand, turning it this way and that. When the pain subsided, he compared his wounded wrist with his good, right one. He found that he could now bend the left one almost as far as the normal wrist.

There was a nip of autumn in the air, and it felt great after the long, hot, Texas summer. He was going to play guitar again. He had survived his tour in hell. Life wasn't over.

One day he heard a song by Dixie Houston on the radio. Judging by the production alone, he could tell that the label had invested a fortune in her. He wrote to her care of the label. No reply. He put in calls to his former producer. He left messages. No one returned them.

Creed Mason was honorably discharged from the army two months later with a purple heart, a pretty good golf swing, and a seething desire to play guitar on a stage again. He thought about Nashville, but didn't have the bus fare. Anyway, he knew he was not ready, as a picker, to return to Guitar Town just yet. He had heard about the live music scene down in Austin, three or four hours south. Might be a good place to get his chops back. He said good-bye to Major Fray, stepped out of Beach Army Hospital, hiked off the post, and stuck his thumb out in the air alongside the highway.

 

4

CHAPTER

1:22
A.M.

Highway 71 stretched out like a runway in front of her, and whoever that was behind her was taking advantage of the straightaway to gain some serious speed.

The Shelby GT passed inches from her door, cut in front of her, and blinded her with red brake lights. Rosa swerved and gunned the Chevy engine like a race car driver to regain her lead, but Franco's favorite car shot passed her again before she could get ahead. Out of nowhere she saw a reflector marking a blacktop turn to the left, so she skidded and fishtailed into the turn as Franco shot past it.

She made the left turn, then lined the Corvette into a screaming acceleration down the strange stretch of blacktop, her heart beating furiously in her chest. She startled a small herd of deer on the side of the road, and they bolted across the pavement behind her, causing Franco to slam on his brakes. That was lucky, she thought. This part of Texas was thickly populated by deer, and whitetail/auto collisions were common.

She sped on, and heard the engine rev as the pavement dipped away below her into a shallow creek bed. Bottoming out on shocks and springs, she kept her foot on the accelerator and rocketed up the other side of the creek on the narrow stretch of asphalt. She saw Franco's headlights behind her again, but now she was keeping her distance.

There was a chance to turn toward a town called Kingsland, but it came and went in a blink and Rosa found herself barreling past a sign that announced Sunset Shores, a lakeside development. She had to brake as the long, straight country blacktop gave way to curving residential streets, and Franco closed in from behind. Rosa switched her headlights off, downshifting when needed so her brake lights would not give her away. She had to rely on the moon, and the occasional porch light to guide her as there were no streetlights in this sleepy excuse for a town. From her college years, Rosa knew about the chain of lakes above Austin, impounded by several dams on the Colorado River. She sensed she had stumbled upon a road that would dead-end at one of those lakes.

Just as she saw Franco shoot by her last right turn in the rearview, a deer darted in front of her car and she had no choice but to brake to keep from hitting it. Before rounding a hairpin turn, she saw the Shelby's backup lights, and knew Franco would soon be back on her tail.

“Shit!” she blurted. This street followed the crooked lakeshore, she realized. Nothing to do but keep running and hoping, shifting and winding. She came to a fork, and bore to the right, sensing the lake on the left. She saw the “Dead End” sign too late, and found herself on a peninsula, heading for a parking lot adjacent to a marina and a boat ramp. Franco's headlights swept the terrain behind her, a quarter mile back.

Rosa pulled into a vacant parking spot near the boat ramp, using her emergency brake to stop, avoiding the red flash of taillights. She shut the engine off, grabbed the strap of her purse, and jumped out, cursing the dome light as she opened the door. Slamming the door, she ran, hearing the Shelby accelerate behind her. Looping the purse strap over her head and under one arm, she sprinted around a row of condominiums to find a beach and a lakeside bar. The neon “Open” sign switched off the moment she looked at it. She heard a boat motor start down the dock.

Running faster than she had ever run in her life, she came upon a man casting off lines as his boat idled. It was a classic wooden boat, about a twenty-footer, with the motor housing situated in the middle of the passenger area. “I need a ride across the lake!” she blurted, startling the man.

He stood straight and fell back in the seat behind the steering wheel as the boat rocked. His long hair blew across his face and he looked up at Rosa as if she were the answer to a prayer.