Keeping Watch (12 page)

Chapter 13

The war let Allen Carmichael free from its clutches on the twelfth of September, 1968, leaving him with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, some medical and monetary offerings, and a pair of government-issue crutches. He came back to a country where gentle, long-haired proponents of free love spit on men in uniform and called them baby killers, and police beat up protesters at national conventions, home to the green islands of the Pacific Northwest, to a peaceful sea that was home to the intelligent black-and-white orca and the fragrant cedar tree.

Home to a place where the people were afraid of him.

He'd told his family not to come visit him in the Honolulu military hospital, not wanting to see anyone he cared about in that setting, not wanting them to see him. But Lisa came anyway, a week after he'd gotten there, showed up tentatively at the door to the ward the day after his second surgery with a bunch of flowers that looked as if she'd carried them all the way from the islands. The nurse was late with his pain meds, so he was sweating and panting with his teeth clenched against the fire burning up his leg, staring at the open door as if he could summon her there by sheer will, when abruptly his eyes reported that the sweet-faced, long-haired girl in the miniskirt was someone he knew.

He'd far rather have seen the nurse there, although the other guys in the ward were more than happy to make up for his lack of enthusiasm. At the whistles and calls, Lisa nearly turned to flee, but at that moment she spotted him, or thought she might have, and she raised her chin and stepped into the ward. Halfway there, her steps faltered again as she began to doubt her eyes, but she came on, ass-length blond hair shimmering under the fluorescent lights, legs like something from a pinup, made-up eyes, white lipstick, looking so innocent and untouched that Allen felt like weeping.

Then she was by his bedside, her fear pushed down and her uncertainty betrayed only by a slight waver in her voice when she said his name. “Allen?”

“You shouldn't have come,” he told her, but it was like swatting a kitten, and he relented. “But I've got to say, you're the most gorgeous thing I've seen in about two hundred years.”

Lisa blossomed into a smile, and leaned forward to kiss him, but he was afraid that if he let his jaws relax into it, he'd start to moan—and not from pleasure. So he accepted her kiss closemouthed, and she drew away, the questions back in her face.

“My leg's kind of sore,” he admitted. “They operated again yesterday.”

The operation at any rate gave them something to talk about, and after a while the nurse came and gave him his drugs, and things got better, if a bit fuzzy. Later he remembered Lisa offering to stay until he went home. He also remembered the look of relief, poorly concealed, when he told her he didn't want her to.

He saw her next at the airport in Seattle. He was the last off the plane, thanks to the crutches, but when he came into the hall, she was not there. The terminal was bright and noisy and whirling with strangers dressed in peculiar clothing, and in the hospital he'd heard stories about hippies spitting on soldiers. Sweat broke out under his uniform as his eyes began a recon for potential ambushes, and he found himself backing into a corner where he could see everything coming at him. The stewardesses came off the plane, and the flight crew, and he was just starting to wonder how the hell a man on crutches was supposed to hump his duffel bag all the way to the islands when Lisa came flying down the terminal, all legs and hair, to rescue him.

She didn't understand his silent mood, and became hurt at his refusal to laugh away her car problems. He dozed, or pretended to doze, on the drive north, and on the ferry used his crutches as an excuse to stay in the car. Lisa went up to the passenger deck, coming back before they docked with a paper cup of coffee for him. She was ridiculously grateful when he not only accepted it, but leaned forward to kiss her on the lips.

There was, inevitably, a party to celebrate the hero's return, all the cousins and aunts and childhood friends gathered together as if to exorcise the horrors from his past year. And Allen stood apart, watching their mouths move as they consumed food and emitted words, knowing beyond a doubt that he had nothing whatsoever in common with these people. His real family was either in Vietnam or dead; these were loud strangers who twitched and shied away whenever he made a sudden move. After an hour, when the noise was building into a crescendo of desperation, he saw his brother eyeing him, wondering and uncertain. Allen put down his drink and struggled his way to bed.

It took him a week to work up his courage to sleep with Lisa. He told himself he didn't know how his leg would take it, that she was too innocent to feel comfortable in being on top, but deep down, he knew he was terrified of hurting her.

When they did manage it, and she did not bruise with the desperation of his embrace or melt from the acid emanations of his accumulated guilt, he felt that he had taken the first step to leaving Vietnam behind. As soon as he was off the crutches, he limped away from the dark identity of “Crazy” Carmichael as well. One night in October, his body spooned to the length of her back, his left hand cupped around the heaviness of her breast, he asked her to marry him.

She wriggled around to face him, and said yes.

They wed quietly in the town hall, witnessed by Lisa's parents and kid sister Nikki, two of Allen's aunts, and his brother Jerry. The following week, Allen filled out the paperwork requesting a mid-year university reentry. Life resumed.

He didn't sleep worth shit, of course; that was to be expected. And food had no taste to it and sex tended to be either frantic or nonexistent, both of which left Lisa unsatisfied. But he told himself that it took time to crawl out of the sewer. That it was normal to be washing your hands in the sink and suddenly imagine you were standing in a river washing dried blood from your arms. That anyone in his position would feel like a cracked sheet of glass rattling loose in its frame, waiting for a minor knock to shatter it to bits.

Classes started in January. The campus stank of rotting corpses—not always, just occasionally. One morning in February he glanced up in the lecture hall and knew, with no doubt in his mind, that the instant before he raised his eyes every person there including the professor had been dressed in black NVA pajamas.

In March Allen gave up driving when he spotted a booby trap in the center of the freeway, jerked the wheel violently, and missed causing a massive pile-up by inches. The bus system proved no less troublesome, because deRosa liked to ride in the back during rush hour, affording Allen glimpses of flayed skin in between the shoulders of bored commuters. In April, Allen took to carrying a screw-top bottle of vodka, which he was pleased to find kept both deRosa and the smell of corpses at bay.

The summer of 1969 found more hippies converging on San Francisco and Allen carrying a heavy load of summer classes, leaving him with only August to fill. The month of free time, which Lisa seemed to expect was going to be some kind of a relaxing honeymoon, was a dark hole in Allen's memory. All he remembered were two episodes, both involving Lisa. At the first, he was walking next to her on the street in Victoria, a dignified city across the water from the islands. She was chattering about nothing in particular and swinging their joined hands, dressed in something new and brief and bright; Allen meanwhile was—as he always was doing on any street—checking out the rooftops, windows, and alleyways for potential ambushes. Without warning, the
thucka-thucka
of a helicopter echoed down the street from the waterfront, and Allen's muscles reacted instantaneously. His right arm shot out to scoop Lisa down by her shoulders, shoving her to the ground where he crouched over her, hand slapping his side for a nonexistent gun. Her arm was badly scraped, her wrist sprained, her dress ruined, and her embarrassment so profound, she forgot to be frightened. Lisa was furious, then and when the emergency room was finished with their X rays and strapping tape. He finally had to tell her that he'd thought he'd been protecting her from a gunship. That was when she began to look at him oddly.

But it wasn't until two days before classes began that the previous September's apprehension returned to her eyes. The weather had turned cool, and they had spent the afternoon at the movies, so that Allen could be inside before darkness fell. Lisa was feeling hopeful, and flirtatious, and she did a sort of self-conscious striptease in the bedroom, tossing her clothes around to stir her husband's passion. It succeeded beyond anything she could have imagined: When Allen came out of the bathroom and spotted her red tights lying in a skinned heap on the floor, he went berserk, shouting and breaking furniture. The evening ended with her in tears and him drinking himself into a stupor. At four the next morning, he woke to her choking noises and struggles, and the realization that his hands were around her throat.

From then on, the fear was never very far down in her eyes. And Allen slept on the sofa, waking several times each night to check the doors and survey the street below. He couldn't make her happy, but at least he could keep her safe. From himself, if no other.

He managed the remainder of his university career by sweating the books and taking on a massive class load (hell, he wasn't sleeping anyway). He played on the sensibilities of two profs who weren't peaceniks to gain credits for class work he hadn't actually done. At the end of it, his college years seemed to have been spent with a scream of rage clenched between his teeth—a huge animal fury that would rise up at nothing more than the suicidal innocence of the other students as they thoughtlessly settled down without so much as a glance at the rooftops, or at the professors who thought their classes had any kind of relevance to a world in which VC skinned living men. But he clamped his feelings under iron control, and in the end, he managed to cram four years into two and a half, graduating in June of 1970 along with the class he had originally entered with, the year before he'd enlisted.

Almost as if he hadn't gone away at all.

A job followed. And another job, when that one fell through. And a third close on its heels. A weeklong fight with Lisa about having a baby (a dream, about deRosa coming to pick Lisa's newborn up with his bloody hands) ending with her moving out for a while, then returning with tears and pleas that she didn't understand why he was acting this way, what he wanted her to do, what had happened to them. . . . And another job, more fights, while the cracks in the glass façade spread, the hold on its frame weakened.

Christmas 1971: dinner and family and a tree, and the event that sent the pieces of Allen's life raining down with terrifying rapidity. Afterward, he could never understand why one snide remark from one of his smart-mouthed hippie cousins should have sent it all to hell. Allen had been eating remarks like that for three years, what was one more? Maybe because he was in his own home, surrounded by family, his and Lisa's, and that self-righteous sneer from a boy too young to face the draft was the final straw. Maybe the remark itself had nothing to do with it, but only chanced to coincide with the countdown of seconds from the timer that had been pulled long ago and in another country. Allen couldn't even remember exactly what the jerk had said, only that he'd said it, leaning back in his chair and looking at his girlfriend for approval. Whatever the trigger was, the result was the same: Allen came out of his chair with the intention of taking the guy apart.

It took most of the men there to pull him off the terrified long-hair, a whirlwind of blood and shouting and the sweet and glorious release of pounding the bastard's bearded face to a pulp. Panting and huge and feeling whole for the first time since the VC bullet had dumped him into the stinking paddy, Allen slowly became aware of the rest of the crowded room, the appalled women and charged-up men, the huge eyes of Lisa's gorgeous little red-haired kid sister Nikki, the bloody nose of seventeen-year-old Jerry, who'd somehow gotten in the way of his brother's fist. His father, disappointed yet again.

A moment of stillness, all the faces turned to him; a moment eerily akin in his mind to that of Brennan looking out from the cave. A shrill sound began to sing through his brain, jangling like malaria pills, dangerous like the whine of a starlight scope when it is first toggled on. Only this grew, quickly, becoming clearly audible but directionless—why did none of the others hear it? The sound was piercing now, flooding his head, a shrieking cacophony like a whistle or a woman's voice or—or a man being tortured to death out in the green. It climbed higher and louder until all the fractures of his glass façade seemed to quiver in their frame. Then Nikki broke into gulping hysterics and a roar of emotion filled the room, and Allen felt his life shatter and rain down around him.

He turned and ran.

Back into the jungle, where a creature like him belonged.

Allen left his home, left the islands, left the state for a while, moving ever deeper into the green, burrowing deep among the splintered remains of his life, doing his best to hide from the noise and what it had to tell him. For months, years, the piercing wail of a man in agony rode his brain like a constant auditory migraine. Afterward, when the scream began at last to fade, pieces of his time in the wilderness came back to him, but never in its entirety, only as hunks and slivers that he would push around, uncertain just where each memory belonged, or how many were missing entirely.

A clean-edged shard, unconnected to anything else: Allen was drunk, so profoundly intoxicated, he had come out the other side into a moment of startling sobriety. He could remember every detail of the faces around him, the wrinkles on the cop's uniform, the spicy smell of the guy's deodorant and the chewed nail on the thumb that grasped the nightstick. Allen's throat ached with the roar he was letting out, his shoulders bunched, remembering the sensation of throwing himself into battle with nothing held back, his feet recalled the intimate crunch of the grit beneath his shoes as he crouched to launch himself at the other man. Then out of the corner of his eye the thumb going tight on the nightstick, and clean bright nothingness.