Gone South (2 page)

Dan had to stop for a red light. The pickup’s brakes squealed a little, in need of new pads. A job replacing rotten lumber on a patio deck last week had made him enough to pay the month’s rent and utilities, and he’d had a few dollars left over for groceries. Still, some things had to slide. He’d missed two payments on the pickup, and he needed to go in and see Mr. Jarrett to work something out. Mr. Jarrett, the loan manager at the First Commercial Bank, understood that Dan had fallen on hard times, and cut him some slack.

The pain was back behind his eyes. It lived there, like a hermit crab. Dan reached beside himself on the seat, picked up the white bottle of Excedrin, and popped it open. He shook two tablets onto his tongue and chewed them. The light turned green and he drove on, toward Death Valley.

Dan wore a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans with patches on the knees. Under a faded blue baseball cap, his thinning brown hair was combed back from his forehead and spilled over his shoulders; haircuts were not high on his list of priorities. He had light brown eyes and a close-cropped beard that was almost all gray. On his left wrist was a Timex and on his feet was a sturdy pair of brown, much-scuffed workboots. On his right forearm was the bluish-green ghost of a snake tattoo, a reminder of a burly kid who’d had one too many cheap and potent zombies with his buddies on a night of leave in Saigon. That kid was long gone, and Dan was left with the tattoo. The Snake Handlers, that’s what they’d been. Not afraid to stick their hands in the jungle’s holes and pull out whatever horror might be coiled up and waiting in there. They had not known, then, that the entire world was a snake hole, and that the snakes just kept getting bigger and meaner. They had not known, in their raucous rush toward the future, that the snakes were lying in wait not only in the holes but in the mowed green grass of the American Dream. They got your legs first, wound around your ankles, and slowed you down. They slithered into your guts and made you sick and afraid, and then you were easy to kill.

In the years since that Day-Glo memory of a night in Saigon, Dan Lambert had shrunken. At his chest-thumping, Charlie-whomping best he’d stood six-two and carried two hundred and twelve pounds of Parris Island – trained muscle. Back then, he’d felt as if he could swallow bullets and shit iron. He weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds now, and he didn’t think he was much over six feet. There was a gauntness in his face that made him think of some of the old Vietnamese people who’d huddled in their hootches with eyes as terrified as those of mongrel dogs expecting a boot. His cheekbones jutted, his chin was as sharp as a can opener under the beard. It was the fact that he rarely ate three meals a day, and of course a lot of his shrinkage was due to the sickness, too.

Gravity and time were the giant killers, he thought as he drove along the sun-washed highway with the back of his sweat-wet shirt stuck to the seat. Gravity shrank you and time pulled you into the grave, and not even the Snake Handlers could beat such fearsome enemies as those.

He drove through pale smoke that had drifted from the chimney of Hungry Bob’s Barbecue Shack, the cook getting all that meat good and black for the lunch crowd. A tire hit a pothole, and in the truck’s bed his box of tools jangled. They were the hammers, nails, levels, and saws of a carpenter.

At the next intersection he turned right and drove south into an area of warehouses. It was a world of chain-link fences, loading docks, and brick walls. Between the buildings the heat lay trapped and vengeful. Up ahead a half-dozen pickup trucks and a few cars were parked in an empty lot. Dan could see some of the men standing around talking. Another man was sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper, his CAT hat throwing a slice of shade across his face. Standing near one of the cars was a man who had a sign hanging around his neck, and on that sign was hand-lettered
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
.

This was Death Valley.

Dan pulled his truck into the lot and cut the engine. He un-peeled his damp shirt from the backrest, slipped the bottle of aspirin into his pocket, and got out. “There’s Dan the man!” Steve Lynam called from where he stood talking with Darryl Glennon and Curtis Nowell, and Dan raised a hand in greeting.

“Mornin’, Dan,” Joe Yates said, laying his newspaper in his lap. “How’s it hangin’?”

“It’s still there,” Dan answered. “I think.”

“Got iced tea.” A plastic jug and a bag of Dixie cups sat on the ground next to Joe’s folding chair. “Come on over.”

Dan joined him. He drew iced tea into a cup and eased himself down beside Joe’s shadow “Terry got a ticket,” Joe said as he offered Dan some of the newspaper. “Fella came by ’bout ten minutes ago, lookin’ for a man to set some Sheetrock. Picked Terry and off they went.”

“That’s good.” Terry Palmeter had a wife and two kids to feed. “Fella say he might be needin’ some more help later on?”

“Just the one Sheetrock man.” Joe squinted up toward the sun. He was a lean, hard-faced man with a nose that had been broken and flattened by a vicious fist somewhere down the line. He’d been coming here to Death Valley for over a year, about as long as Dan had been. On most days Joe was an amiable gent, but on others he sat brooding and dark-spirited and was not to be approached. Like the other men who came to Death Valley, Joe had never revealed much about himself, though Dan had learned the man had been married and divorced the same as he had. Most of the men were from towns other than Shreveport. They were wanderers, following the promise of work, and for them the roads on the map led not so much from city to city as from hot-tarred roofs to mortared walls to the raw frameworks of new houses with pinewood so fresh the timbers wept yellow tears. “God, it’s gonna be a cooker today,” Joe said, and he lowered his head and returned to his reading and waiting.

Dan drank the iced tea and felt sweat prickling the back of his neck. He didn’t want to stare, but his eyes kept returning to the man who wore the desperate hand-lettered sign. The man had sandy-blond hair, was probably in his late twenties, and wore a checked shirt and stained overalls. His face was still boyish, though it was starting to take on the tautness of true hunger. It reminded Dan of someone he’d known a long time ago. A name came to him:
Farrow.
He let it go, and the memory drifted away like the acrid barbecue smoke.

“Looky here, Dan.” Joe thumped an article in the paper. “President’s economics honcho says the recession’s over and everybody ought to be in fine shape by Christmas. Says new construction’s already up thirty percent.”

“Do tell,” Dan said.

“Got all sorts of graphs in here to show how happy we oughta be.” He showed them to Dan, who glanced at the meaningless bars and arrows and then watched the man with the sign again. “Yeah, things are sure gettin’ better all over, ain’t they?” Joe nodded, answering his own cynical question. “Yessir. Too bad they forgot to tell the workman.”

“Joe, who’s that fella over there?” Dan asked. “The guy with the sign.”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t lift his gaze from the paper. “He was there when I got here. Young fella, looks to be. Hell, every man jack of us would work for food if it came to that, but we don’t wear signs advertisin’ it, do we?”

“Maybe we’re not hungry enough yet.”

“Maybe not,” Joe agreed, and then he said nothing else.

More men were arriving in their pickups and cars, some with wives who let them out and drove off. Dan recognized others he knew, like Andy Slane and Jim Neilds. They were a community of sorts, scholars in the college of hard knocks. Fourteen months ago Dan had been working on the payroll of the A&A Construction Company. Their motto had been We Build the Best for Less. Even so, the company hadn’t been strong enough to survive the bottom falling out of the building business. Dan had lost his job of five years and quickly found that nobody was hiring carpenters full-time. The first thing to go had been his house, in favor of a cheaper apartment. His savings had dwindled amazingly — and frighteningly — fast. Since his divorce in 1984 he’d been paying child support to Susan, so his bank account had never been well padded. But he’d never been a man who needed or expected luxuries, anyway. The nicest thing in his possession was his Chevy pickup — “metallic mist” was the correct name of its color, according to the salesman — which he’d bought three months prior to the crash of A&A Construction. Being behind the two payments bothered him; Mr. Jarrett was a fair man, and Dan was not one to take advantage of fairness. He was going to have to find a way to scrape some cash together.

He didn’t like looking at the man who wore the hand-lettered sign, but he couldn’t help it. He knew what trying to find a steady job was like. With all the layoffs and businesses going under, the help-wanted ads had dried up to nothing. Skilled laborers like Dan and the others who came to Death Valley were the first to feel the hurt. He didn’t like looking at the man with the desperate sign because he feared he might be seeing his own future.

Death Valley was where men who wanted to work came to wait for a “ticket.” Getting a ticket meant being picked for a job by anyone who needed labor. The contractors who were still in business knew about Death Valley, and would go there to find help when a regular crewman was sick or they needed extra hands for a day or two. Regular homeowners sometimes drove by as well, to hire somebody to do such jobs as patching a roof or building a fence. The citizens of Death Valley worked cheap.

And the hell of it, Dan had learned by talking to the others, was that places like Death Valley existed in every city. It had become clear to him that thousands of men and women lived clinging to the edge of poverty through no fault of their own but because of the times and the luck of the draw. The recession had been a beast with a cold eye, and it had wrenched families young and old from their homes and shattered their lives with equal dispassion.

“Hey, Dan! How many’d ya kill?”

Two shadows had fallen across him. He looked up and made out Steve Lynam and Curtis Nowell standing beside him with the sun at their backs. “What?” he asked.

“How many’d ya kill?” Curtis had posed the question. He was in his early thirties, had curly dark brown hair, and wore a yellow T-shirt with
NUKE THE WHALES
stenciled on it. “How many chinks? More than twenty or less than twenty?”

“Chinks?” Dan repeated, not quite grasping the point.

“Yeah.” Curtis dug a pack of Winstons and a lighter from his jeans pocket. “Charlies. Gooks. Whatever you dudes called ’em back then. You kill more than twenty of ’em?”

Joe pushed the brim of his cap up. “You fellas don’t have anythin’ better to do than invade a man’s privacy?”

“No,” Curtis said as he lit up. “We ain’t hurtin’ anythin’ by askin’, are we, Dan? I mean, you’re proud to be a vet, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I am.” Dan sipped his tea again. Most of the Death Valley regulars knew about his tour of duty, not because he particularly cared to crow about it but because Curtis had asked him where he’d gotten the tattoo. Curtis had a big mouth and he was on the dumb side: a bad combination. “I’m proud I served my country,” Dan said.

“Yeah, you didn’t run to Canada like them draft-dodgin’ fuckers did, huh?” Steve asked. He was a few years older than Curtis, had keen blue eyes and a chest as big as a beer keg.

“No,” Dan answered, “I did what I was told.”

“So how many?” Curtis urged. “More than twenty?”

Dan released a long, weary breath. The sun was beating down on his skull, even through the baseball cap. “Does it really matter?”

“We want to know,” Curtis said, the cigarette clenched between his teeth and his mouth leaking smoke. “You kept a body count, didn’t you?”

Dan stared straight ahead. He was looking at a chain-link fence. Beyond it was a wall of brown bricks. Sun and shadow lay worlds apart on that wall. In the air Dan could smell the burning.

“Talked to this vet once in Mobile,” Curtis plowed on. “Fella was one-legged. He said he kept a body count. Said he knew how many chinks he’d killed right to the man.”

“Jesus Christ!” Joe said. “Why don’t you two go on and pester the shit outta somebody else? Can’t you see Dan don’t want to talk about it?”

“He’s got a voice,” Steve replied. “He can say if he wants to talk about it or not.”

Dan could sense Joe was about to stand up from his chair. When Joe stood up, it was either to go after a ticket or knock the ugly out of somebody. “I didn’t keep a body count,” Dan said before Joe could leave the folding chair. “I just did my job.”

“But you can kinda figure out how many, right?” Curtis wasn’t about to give up until he’d gnawed all the meat off this particular bone. “Like more or less than twenty?”

A slow pinwheel of memories had begun to turn in Dan’s mind. These memories were never far from him, even on the best of days. In that slow pinwheel were fragments of scenes and events: mortar shells blasting dirt showers in a jungle where the sunlight was cut to a murky gloom; rice paddies shimmering in the noonday heat; helicopters circling overhead while soldiers screamed for help over their radios and sniper bullets ripped the air; the false neon joy of Saigon’s streets and bars; dark shapes unseen yet felt, and human excrement lying within the perimeter wire to mark the contempt the Cong had for Uncle Sam’s young men; rockets scrawling white and red across the twilight sky; Ann-Margret in thigh-high boots and pink hot pants, dancing the frug at a USO show; the body of a Cong soldier, a boy maybe fifteen years old, who had stepped on a mine and been blown apart and flies forming a black mask on his bloody face; a firefight in a muddy clearing, and a terrified voice yelling
motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker
like a strange mantra; the silver rain, drenching the trees and vines and grass, the hair and skin and eyes and not one drop of it clean; and the village.

Oh, yes. The village.

Dan’s mouth was very dry. He took another swallow of tea. The ice was almost gone. He could feel the men waiting for him to speak, and he knew they wouldn’t leave him alone until he did. “More than twenty.”

“Hot damn, I knew it!” Grinning, Curtis elbowed Steve in the ribs and held out his palm. “Cough it up, friend!”