Message from Nam (33 page)

“He was crazy nuts in love with her.”

“Yes, he was,” Ralph agreed in deference to both of them, “but that was his business, and I don’t think he’d let that interfere with anything. I just don’t believe that. And if you’ve got an attitude about it, Campobello, I suggest you bury it right now. If you cared about him at all, why don’t you just shut up your fucking opinions and keep them to yourself. That girl is going to be devastated over this and she doesn’t need you mouthing off at her if your paths should happen to cross sometime, which I sure as hell hope they don’t.”

“So do I.”

“For his sake, do me a favor, if you do run across her, be a gentleman, keep your mouth shut.”

“Go fuck yourself, mister,” Tony Campobello spat into the phone, tears welling up in his eyes again. “That bitch killed my captain.” He was like a child standing beside his dead mother, wanting to kill everyone who came near her. And when he slammed the phone down a few minutes later, Ralph sat for a long moment, staring unhappily out the window. What the hell was he going to tell her?

France had been listening to him all the while, and when he stood up to get dressed, she came and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about your friend.” She had a wonderful French accent, and a gentle touch, and a wise heart, and he turned around and held her. “I’m sorry for both of them.”

“So am I. I tried to warn them a long time ago.”

“Why?” she asked softly.

“Because I thought they were wrong. The price is too high if you lose over here. I tried to tell them that. But they didn’t listen.”

“Perhaps they couldn’t.” She was wiser than he was in the end. And she watched while he dressed. And an hour later he was at the Caravelle, knocking on the door of Paxton’s room with a grim look in his eyes. But when she opened the door, she was dressed in jeans, a shirt of Bill’s, and her combat boots, and she looked painfully pretty.

“Did they tell you anything?” she asked nervously, and stepped back so he could come in. She had made the bed herself and after not eating dinner the night before, she hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning.

“Yeah,” he said noncommittally as he stepped in and looked around. He wanted desperately to avoid this moment.

“Well?” she asked, and he sat down heavily in a chair. The same chair Bill had so often sat in. “What the hell did they tell you?”

What did you say? How did you tell her? He had done this a thousand times before, and suddenly he couldn’t do it one more time, he just couldn’t do it anymore, or he thought it might kill him. He was thirty-nine years old and he had seen and heard and smelled and written about more death than he ever wanted to see in a hundred lifetimes. He dropped his face into his hands and then looked at her. There was nothing left to do but tell her. “He was killed yesterday, Pax.” His voice was a drumbeat in the room and for a minute she thought she was going to faint. And all she could see was Ed Wilson’s face when he came to tell her about Peter, and the sound of her heart crashing to the floor and breaking. She sank slowly onto the bed this time and stared at him, refusing to believe it.

“He wasn’t.”

“He was.” Ralph nodded. “He went down into one of the tunnels, and Charlie got him. It was quick. He didn’t suffer. The rest doesn’t make any difference.” And he didn’t know if it was true or not, but he felt he owed her that much. He reached out a hand to her from where he sat, but she just sat there staring at him and didn’t take it.

“Can I see him?”

He hesitated while he thought about what Tony had said about Bill having his head blown off by Charlie. “I don’t think you should. They’re sending him home tomorrow.”

“Two weeks early,” she said, almost without thinking. She was sitting there, staring into space, deathly pale, in his shirt, feeling as though there was nothing left in the world for her. She was nearly twenty-three years old and she had lost the only two men she’d ever loved to this miserable war, and now she felt as though her own life was over.

“I told you this could happen, Pax. You knew it yourself. It’s the chance we all take just being here. It could be me this afternoon, or you … it was him. It could have been anyone.”

“But it wasn’t.” And then slowly, the tears began to run down her cheeks, and Ralph moved over to the bed and sat next to her and held her in his arms while she cried for what seemed like hours, grief that rolled on relentlessly like thunder.

“I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …” But she was beyond words, beyond thinking, beyond consolation. She had nothing left. She had nothing. She had lost him. Gone. Like a memory. And all she had left from him was the bracelet he’d given her for Christmas. She looked down at it emptily, and then suddenly she realized that the army would send all his personal effects to Debbie in San Francisco. The books she’d given him, inscribed by her, the trinkets, the photographs they’d taken of each other in Vung Tau, the letters.

“Oh my God … they can’t do that …” Ralph thought she was still grieving for him, but then she explained what she was thinking. “We have to stop them.”

“It’s happened before, Pax, to other guys. She’ll just have to understand that he was in a war zone. He’d been here for a long time. People change.”

“But that’s not fair. Why should she have to live with that now?” She thought of her mother, when her father had died with the other woman. “And the kids. Can’t we stop them?”

“I don’t know.” He thought about it for a while, and he admired her for thinking like that, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. The army was pretty circumspect about sending home a man’s effects. They sent home everything right down to his underwear and his postcards, which proved she had good reason to worry.

“Who can we talk to?”

They both thought of the same man at once, and Ralph almost groaned at the thought of him, but Paxton said his name first. “Campobello.”

“Jesus. I’m not sure he’d do fuck all for me, Pax.”

“Then I’ll call … no … I’ll go see him. He must be pretty broken up too.” It was a mild understatement, and Ralph didn’t want to tell her now that the guy hated her guts and held her responsible for Bill’s death.

“Look, why don’t you let me take care of it?”

She blew her nose and her voice quavered again when she answered. “I owe it to Bill to do it myself. I’m going to drive out there.”

“Shit. I’ll come with you.” She had no idea what she was walking into, but all his efforts to dissuade her were useless. And the mission of saving Debbie from the knowledge of their affair seemed to have given her new life and slightly better control over her grief, as he drove her to Cu Chi. But when they got there he hadn’t been prepared for the shock of running into Campobello almost as soon as they arrived and having him almost attack Paxton physically, while Ralph finally grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

“For God’s sake, man, stop! Can’t you see the state she’s already in!”

“She fucking well should be,” he shouted, tears streaming down his face, as she stood trembling near the car, trembling uncontrollably at what he’d just told her. It was more of what he’d said to Ralph earlier on the phone, but delivered with even greater venom. “Would you like to see the condition he’s in?”

“Please …” She sank to her knees as she sobbed and began to retch as Campobello grew pale and watched her. “Please stop … I loved him …” And then suddenly, in the place where they stood, with recruits standing in the distance, watching them, only guessing at what it was about, there was silence. Campobello stood trembling and pale in Ralph’s hands, and Paxton stood staring up at him with open hatred. “I loved him. Don’t you understand that?” she said quietly, and now he was sobbing too.

“So did I. I would have died for him. He saved my life in one of those fucking holes … and this time I couldn’t help him.”

“No one could, man,” Ralph said to him, letting go of him then, “no one can help anyone here. It happens or it doesn’t. Look at all the guys you know who’re so fucking careful they squeak, and they buy it the day before they go home, and the others who’re sloppy and drunk all the time and they don’t get a scratch. It’s destiny. Fate. God. Call it whatever you want. But hating anyone over it isn’t going to change it.” Campobello knew it too, but that was what was driving him crazy. He wanted someone to blame, someone to take it out on. Too many of his men had died, and now the captain he loved, the man who had saved his life, been his friend, laughed with him, drank with him, been his pal, was gone, and it had to be someone’s fault. And he wanted desperately to blame Paxton.

Ralph explained to him quietly what they had come there for, and Campobello looked startled. “Can you help us, man? She’s right. That stuff shouldn’t go home to his wife.” The sergeant looked at her angrily then, the venom coming back to him, but she was back on her feet then, looking shaken but determined.

“You afraid of getting caught? Is that it?” he asked her.

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid of hurting her, and their girls. He loved her, too, and them. There’s no reason to hurt them. We were talking about getting married. There’s no reason now for anyone to know that.” And then, although she didn’t owe him anything, she told him about her father. “He died with another woman in his plane, and my mother has had to live with that for the rest of her life, and one day my brother told me, and I always wondered why. We all did. In my parents’ case, I kind of knew, but it still wasn’t right. We didn’t need that. Neither do they. It’s enough to deal with the fact that he died … I’d like my things back.”

“Like what?” He looked suspicious of her, and it was clear that he still wanted to hate her.

“Three books of poetry, that I wrote some things in, and a bunch of photographs and letters. The rest won’t make any difference.” She looked embarrassed then. “I bought him some funny underwear for Christmas, and he had a lock of my hair somewhere. I think those are the only things that would matter.”

“Why are you really doing this?” he asked her, walking closer to her now, unable to believe that she had no ulterior motive.

“I told you why. What happened is painful enough for all of us. She doesn’t need to know about us.” And for an instant, just an instant, he believed she was a good person, and that hurt him even more. It hurt him even more to think that Bill Quinn had really loved her, that maybe he had died for her, or if he hadn’t, he might have. They were all tired and confused and overwrought, and they had all been there too long, Quinn and Campobello, and Ralph, and even Paxton.

“Are you going home after this?” he asked her, almost forgetting that Ralph was there, and tears filled her eyes again as she answered.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged emptily. “I guess so.”

He nodded. “I’ll go through his stuff. Wait here.”

He did, and was gone for half an hour while she cried and Ralph smoked Ruby Queens, and finally the sergeant came back with a small package.

“I’ve got the books and the photographs and letters and the underwear. I couldn’t find the hair, but it’s not there anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” She wondered if he’d been carrying it when he died, but she didn’t say it for fear of enraging Campobello further.

“Thank you,” she said softly, trying to control herself, and taking the small package from him. It looked so pathetic now. There was so little left of the enormous love she’d had for him. So little left of their hopes and dreams. Like the towns the army had to burn to smoke out the VC, they left nothing behind them but rubble and ashes.

He stood watching her as they walked back to Ralph’s jeep, and then he turned and called out to her. “Hey …” He didn’t want to say her name and she stopped, looking at him, the man who had hated her so much, who thought she had killed Bill.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with his lips trembling. She wasn’t sure if he was sorry he had been so hard on her, or sorry Bill was gone, but either way, so was she.

“Me too,” she said as she got in the car, and he was still watching them as they left the base and drove back to Saigon.

C
HAPTER
17

“Y
ou gotta go home, kid.” Ralph was standing in her room at the Caravelle, and she was sitting on her bed again, with a belligerent look on her face this time and her arms crossed. Nixon had been sworn in the week before, and Bill had been dead for a month, and she was a month late going home now. “There’s nothing left for you here. Your six months are up. Your paper wants you home. Bill’s not coming back. And the Teletypes in my office are gonna drive me fucking crazy. They want you back, Pax. You’ve been here for seven months. You’ve got to go now.”

“Why? You’ve been here for years.”

“That’s different. I’m assigned here, and I have no one to go home to. No one who gives a damn. My parents are dead, I haven’t seen my sister in ten years, and I live here with the woman I love who’s having my baby. I have reasons to stay, you don’t. And you’re starting to go nuts here. You’re like those guys who’ve been down in the tunnels too long. Go home, get some air, get some R and R and if you love it here so fucking much, let them send you back or find someone else who will. But if you don’t get the hell out now, you’re going to do something stupid.” She had already gone on two missions with Nigel and Jean-Pierre, and Ralph could tell from the stuff she was writing that she was too overwrought to do herself or anyone else any good. “Get out, before I call them to come and get you.” He also knew that she’d stopped watching what she ate and she had dysentery so bad, she’d been running a low-grade fever. And she’d looked awful since Bill died. She was grieving, but she was trying not to let it show. It was like being dead on her feet and not willing to admit it.