Keeping Watch (2 page)

Chapter 3

Allen's dreams were cloaked in green, even after all these years.

The good dreams, dreams like those flickering behind his eyelids that night in the apartment smelling of cat's piss, were woven from the rich and varied greens of the islands where he had grown up: the dark, dull cedar and the sword fern in autumn, the gloss of wet madrone and Oregon grape, the brilliant tips of the springtime firs against the gray-green mounds of the distant mainland, the opal-green tint the sea took on during a clear day after a rain, the blues and greens of the small braided rug that had met his bare feet each and every morning of his childhood, all of them melding in his sleeping mind with the mind-boggling, gorgeous multiplicity of colors that had made up the Vietnam countryside, ranging from near-black to startling chartreuse, from the quiet bottle-green flavor of light under the jungle canopy to the artificially bright patchwork of the rice paddies.

Those were the good dreams.

But then there were the other nocturnal greens. He could not have said what the difference was, why one color was comforting and its close brother brought menace. He only knew that the dreams that had him thudding out of sleep into full, sweat-drenched, tight-muscled battle alert were shaded with dead tones. They might begin with the bright olive of a new guy's fatigues, a clean slate waiting for the messages of battle and blood and the permeating red earth of Vietnam, to be followed by the ominous flatness of one lone shrub on an entire hillside of vegetation, a shrub whose roots had been cut by some tunneling creature. Sooner or later he would dream the startling jade-green of Flores's eyes, and once those eyes had appeared, the shades of green worming their way into his sleeping mind bore the inevitability of decay: the weird tones of chemically murdered foliage and the blatant innocence of the vines that sprang up overnight from soil disturbed by man; the lifeless colors of the hacked-off branches used to camouflage the enemy's trucks and the yellow-green glow of terrain through a nightscope and the nauseous blue-green of suppurating infections in Caucasian bodies that had lain a week in the jungle heat. The greens would writhe and merge like jungle phosphorescence through his sleeping brain until he bolted upright, sweating and breathless at the piercing reality of a green body bag being zipped shut inches from his nose, or of eight-foot-high elephant grass curling down upon him like the maw of some huge carnivorous creature. Sometimes he would be heading back to the NDP in a Huey, the cool breeze fingering his damp hair and his M16 easy between his knees, relaxed and safe and riding high above an undulating sheet of emerald-colored crushed velvet that draped the soft curves of the earth below—only the chopper would shudder and Allen's harness would open and out the open door he would shoot, floating unencumbered over that endless green expanse of unbroken jungle, achingly beautiful and pure except that he was not floating he was falling and the jungle was rising up at great speed and the crushed velvet became individual trees reaching up for him and the ground was getting closer so close it was nearly at his eyelids and he was about to—

Yes, Allen's dreams were green.

Of course, Allen had been pretty green himself when his stiff new jungle boots had stumbled down the metal stairs from the air-conditioned Braniff jet onto the sticky tarmac of Vietnam. Wet behind the ears, clueless jerk, fuckin' new guy, a real cherry, oh yeah. What grunts so expressively called
fresh meat
. Twenty years old and out to save the world in his yearlong cycle in 'Nam, when he hadn't even had enough sense to save himself.

He could have stayed deferred, could have sat out the remainder of his four years behind a nice clean desk in a nice tidy classroom. But romantic fool, halfway through his freshman year at the U of W he'd looked around and thought,
I'm not doing my part.
So he'd enlisted, can you believe it? Turned up his nose at the student deferment and signed his name on the forms. At least his girl Lisa had slept with him when he'd come home from boot camp, so he hadn't shipped off to war a virgin.

Sometimes, in the darkest cycles of his middle-aged sleep, smells would creep in, too. Not so much that first overwhelming stench, which he would come to know all too well as the rich savor of shit barrels doused with fuel and set alight, but rather the country's other, more universal odors—rot and stale urine and clothes stiff with fear-sweat, diesel trucks and jet fuel and kerosene cookstoves, dust and animals, rice paddies and incense and the ubiquitous fish sauce the people ate, an olfactory flood that swept over him on this, his first venture into the tropics. Even now, a couple of lifetimes later, the whiff of a pit toilet or the whoop of monkeys in a zoo had the power to clothe him in the taut and twitching skin of a kid barely out of his teens, and for an instant prickly heat would flare in his crotch and armpits, sweat trickle down the muscular hollow of his young spine beneath the ghostly pack. Even on that first day, bumping in the bus with its wire-covered windows while his mind worked to convince itself that this was the act of a righteous man, a ritual of passage that would make him whole—even then, his body had had enough sense to dread the place.

He'd learned to control himself. It was twenty years or more since he had dived behind a car at a sudden clatter, at least fifteen years since he had slapped his rib cage reaching for a nonexistent rifle. But thunderstorms still made him jumpy, approaching a strange house had him scanning the surroundings for sniper sites and perimeter defenses, and on a dirt path, his eyes never ceased searching for trip wires.

And all his dreams were cloaked in green.

Chapter 4

It was the slaughter of his computer that had done it, the boy told himself afterward. If the punishment had been the usual, the boy would have just taken it as he always did, but the sight of the computer—his lifeline, his one sure competence, his only friend in all the world, scattered across the carpet like so much garbage—that was when the thoughts had started, when the spark of rebellion had begun to smolder in his heart.

Father always liked to present himself as an indulgent dad, the sort of guy who turns up loyally for back-to-school nights and science fairs (if he's not out of town on business), who tries his best to make time for the yearly parent-teacher conferences, where he impresses that year's teachers with his caring words and earnest sympathy for their hard job, who always has a donation for the sports fund and who buys the best for his kid, be it name-brand shoes or cutting-edge computer equipment. And Father was good: Teachers and parents thought he was just a great guy. None of them ever guessed that when Father looked around for someone to defer the cost, it was the boy who ultimately paid for it.

Not in money, of course—and rarely out of his skin, at least not during the school year when teachers might notice. The boy had long since grown resigned to the rituals of payment, chiefly because he had learned how to shield off the essential parts of himself from that doing the paying. But this time, with the computer, Father had got inside his shield and found his weak point, and the price had proved intolerable. The boy knew, beyond a doubt, that the next installment might well cost him everything. And thus the small, hot burn of rebellion.

The punishment started, as most of them did, in all innocence—in this case an assignment in English class. They were to write a short story, setting their scene in a kitchen and using as many descriptive passages as possible to bring life to the smells, sounds, and sensations that the characters were experiencing. The boy labored over this as he did over all writing, since his eyes had difficulty pinning down the unreliable words that lived on a page. He knew this was a problem some kids had—he'd had a classmate who'd been diagnosed with dyslexia—but he sweated to keep it to himself. Father would go berserk if he was reminded by some well-meaning school counselor that his son was not quite perfectly made. The boy got around his problem with slippery letters by memorizing thousands of words, by being scrupulous about spell-checking every little thing he wrote, and by reviewing ahead anything he might be called on to read aloud in class. So far, he'd kept this quirk of his eyes to himself, by dint of hammering his brain into order.

He spent hours on this simple assignment, making sure he had each word spelled correctly, each verb with its proper ending and not with letters that had spilled over from its neighbor. He was so focused, in fact, that he forgot to check what he was actually writing about. So when Ms. Rao took him aside after class, pointed to the part where he'd been describing the slap of a steak being dropped to the floor (he'd been trying to be a little bit funny here) and asked how he happened to know what the crack of a belt against flesh sounded like, he went straight into panic mode and froze, red-faced and terrified.

It just seemed like it would sound that way, he stammered out; he didn't know, he didn't actually know what that noise would sound like, how could he? But he shot her a glance, and his thudding heart sank to his toes. She didn't believe him. So he raised his chin and looked her in the face, cool again. “You wanted us to write descriptions that, uh, provoked a nuance.”

“Evoked a nuance,” the teacher corrected automatically.

“Yeah, that. You know, like you were talking about, uh, unexpected contrast being one of the things that makes a reader sit up and take notice. So I was using the contrast of something that would really be pretty bad to make you see how basically silly these people are.”

And then he shut up. Knowing when to shut up was the key to a successful lie, even more important than getting the details right and looking people in the eye. The teacher's gaze of accusatory empathy wavered, and she looked down to reread the passage he'd written, doubt in every pore of her smooth brown skin. She frowned slightly, trying to look at it from the point of view he had suggested, and he could see when she got it. He relaxed, queasy at the nearness of the danger averted.

But he had relaxed too soon. “James, will your dad be home tonight?” Ms. Rao asked.

God no,
he raged in despair,
don't call him about this, don't do that you stupid shit-faced woman, what the fuck do you know about anything, just give me the damn paper back and let me rewrite it, don't try to talk to Father, don't oh don't . . .

“I . . . I don't know. I think he's coming back tomorrow, or maybe on the weekend.”

“Doesn't he tell you?”

“He doesn't always know how long the projects will go on. But he always calls to talk to me at night.” Which was a lie. Jamie never knew when Father would appear, where he was, never talked to him on the phone except when Father wanted to balance a threat over his head. But Father was at home today, would be home tonight unless something important came up, and he could see by this damned woman's face that he was doomed. He hated her; he wanted to drive his pencil into her neck. Instead, he took the paper and slumped off to his next class.

Jamie spent the rest of that day in the throes of cold and hot waves, so clearly preoccupied that two of his teachers asked him if he was ill. He rode his bike home, went to his doorless bedroom to sit in front of the dark computer screen, and waited for the phone to ring.

Five hours: a lifetime. Five hours before he heard the phone followed by Father's voice downstairs, five hours and ten minutes before he heard Father's footsteps on the stairs.

The Quiet
refused to come.

Father carried a fireplace poker in his right hand, an antique implement of ivory and steel that normally lived in the living room. The boy had never touched it because, as Father had explained, true ivory would scorch if a child carelessly left it within range of a hot fire. Up close it was a fearsome instrument, the end of it split into two metal fingers, one straight for prodding, the other hooked back to pull. The boy went cold at the sight of the weapon, nearly whimpering in terror, but Father intended another use.

“Unplug the machine,” he said softly. The boy's eyes went from the poker, to the man, to the computer screen a foot away. The ghost of his own reflection lay there, which somehow gave him the courage to protest.

“But Father—”

“Unplug it.”

The boy took another look at the poker, then dropped to his knees to crawl under the desk. He wrapped his fingers around the plug of the surge protector and eased its three prongs out of the wall, then reversed out, exquisitely aware of Father standing behind him. As he got up warily to face his father, he noticed that the small green power light beneath the screen had gone dark; he felt as if he'd switched off the life support of a close friend.

Father held out the poker, handle first. “Smash it.”

There was no question but that the boy should take it. The handle was smooth and warm from Father's palm, the whole thing astonishingly heavy—Jamie had to brace both hands just to raise its split tip off the carpet. He swung it wavering through the air, and let it bounce off the top of the monitor. The screen jiggled, but stayed where it was, not a mark on its sturdy plastic casing. It was Jamie who felt shattered. He couldn't do this.

“No!” he cried involuntarily, letting the poker thump to the floor. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to write what I did, I'm sorry! I need it, I can't work without it, you can take it out on me, but not my computer!”

It was a mistake, he knew that even as he heard the words pouring from his throat. You never, ever, disobeyed a direct order, not if you expected to remain standing. But underneath this acknowledged rule was a hidden truth, deeper and ultimately far more devastating: You didn't love something if you wanted to keep it. He saw the stern disapproval arranged on Father's face, but he also saw the flare of satisfaction, saw Father realize that he had succeeded in getting inside his son's shield.

He was not surprised when Father bent to retrieve the loathsome object, nor when Father placed the handle back into his hand. This time Father wrapped his own grip around his son's, crunching the thin fingers between ivory and implacable flesh and bone; this time the boy's arm came up hard, tugging its socket at the height of the swing; this time the monitor cracked through with the harsh thud of a skull breaking, glass spurting like blood across the desk and the boy's chest. The second blow was easier. Jamie's arm went up again, and again, pounded into shreds the monitor, hard drive, keyboard, printer—all the beautiful parts of the machine he loved.

After a while, Jamie became aware that his hands alone were wrapped around the warm ivory, that Father had stood back to watch him smash and pound without assistance on the brittle plastic and the glass, reducing the motherboard to a miniature junkyard of metal and plastic, splintering holes in the wooden desk beneath. Smashing blindly, hearing the sound (a small voice asked sarcastically if he was going to put this, too, into one of his English assignments) of crunch and splinter and spatter, horrible yet horribly satisfying, and behind it a furious, high-pitched scream that he knew was inside his own brain. He pulverized the chunks, beating at the machine until nothing but the mangled shell remained. Only then did Jamie stumble back, trembling and panting, his eyes red but dry, looking down from some far distance at the pieces of worthlessness flung across the room. He wanted to smash something else; anything.

Father's hand came down onto his again; this time it was gentle. Strong fingers pried the ivory grip from his son's tingling fingers, laying the rod on top of the debris-covered desk. He picked up the chair, and Jamie winced, but Father merely flipped it over to free it from glass before restoring it to its place. He sat down on it. The trembling boy felt one hand on his shoulder and another against the back of his knees, and then Father was lifting his son up and settling him onto his lap, so that the boy came to rest surrounded by Father's strong arms.

Jamie sat rigid inside the embrace, bubbling with rage, fighting to remain oblivious to the strength and the warmth:
Not this time,
the boy swore to himself;
I will
not
give in this time.
As if he'd spoken the vow aloud, the man's embrace tightened a fraction, a gesture of both threat and affection, but Jamie held his body taut and aloof and whole, right up to the moment the strong right hand came up to rest gently—oh, so gently—on the boy's sweat-soaked hair, pressing the child's face against his heavily muscled shoulder. “Oh, son,” Father murmured into his ear; Jamie's determination wavered, rallied briefly, then collapsed. He curled into Father's chest and sobbed, in submission and confusion and hatred and love and humiliation and more emotions than a twelve-year-old boy could name, much less hold in.

When Father had left him, tucked into bed with the proud kiss of a tyrant planted on his forehead, the boy lay there, cold with shame, sick with fury, glaring at the debris of his own iniquity.
I did that,
he raged at himself.
I did that, not Father.
But in the morning, even if Father was at the breakfast table, nothing would be said. And during the day, while he was at school, Howard would clean it all up—or maybe Mrs. Mendez, but probably Howard, who was there to clean up Father's messes. Life would go on; this was just another of Father's lessons that I can't tell anyone about.

Eventually, the worst of the trembling stopped, the bitterest self-flagellation died down as the adolescent body was pulled toward sleep by the ebbing tide of a long and dread-filled day.
Don't forget to put on slippers before you walk across the carpet,
he reminded himself, free-falling toward the dark bliss of unconsciousness. His palm tingled with the feel of the ivory as he passed through images jumbled like the shards of the computer: a small brown-and-white dog
(Couldn't be trusted. Not to bite.)
with its lips snarling back from snapping white teeth; the voice of Hal, the
2001
robot, slurring its protest as Dave disconnected its clever brain; a dying elephant, the one whose tusk had rampaged through a delicate machine, flailing its ears in outraged despair as the ivory-hunter's bullet drained the life from it; his own hand grasping the poker—he could feel it, his arm muscles stretching, fingers twitching where they lay on the pillow—then driving down, hard, smashing again and again
(Couldn't be trusted . . .)
upon the astonishingly fragile head of his father where it sat on the desk
(. . . Not to bite.).

The image of his father's shattering head startled him back from the brink of sleep.
No, that's not what I want. It was my fault; I didn't have to keep on and on.

But he wanted me to, and he knew I would. He always knows, and there's something going on, and today was different.

But the bed's warmth tugged at him, and the images and sounds faded, and narrowed, and settled into a brief awareness that something had changed, that the evening's catharsis had broken more than the computer.

His last thought before sleep took him was bleak, yet it had a hot, angry spark at its core:
Everything I love dies. Everything, except Father.

(Couldn't be trusted. Not to bite . . .)