The Dog Said Bow-Wow (34 page)

Out on the deck, several of the men were smoking cigarettes and holding forth on greens fees and the economy. “Freezing prices!” one of them said. “It doesn’t do any good — it’s just political grandstanding. You’ll notice that the price of a membership at the club has just doubled and yet, oddly enough, nobody’s been arrested for it.”

“This isn’t Russia,” the host agreed. “That’s for sure.”

“I just don’t know what’s happening to this country,” Lionel Wallace said. “Riots and draft-dodgers and bra-burners and I-don’t-know-what.”

The host stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing glass ashtray perched precariously atop the railing. “I blame Nixon.”

His wife materialized at his side and scooped up the ashtray. “We won’t mention that name tonight,” she said firmly. “Let me empty this for you.”

Lionel batted irritably at a hornet, and gazed out over the yard. The Japanese maples were beginning to turn. “You’re going to have to drain your pool soon,” he commented.

“Don’t I know it.”

It was Joe Martinez who bought it first. He’d been walking point, and he’d tripped the mine, and then he was dead, and Red Walker was lying on the ground beside him clutching his stomach and howling, and then Howie Simms was shot right in the head.

It happened as fast as that.

They’d returned fire, of course, even though they were in deep bush and couldn’t even figure out where the enemy
was
. They’d just blasted the hell out of everything, and called for air support, and then air support came and blasted the hell out of everything too.

When the jungle was quiet again, the dead were coptered out in body bags. Red was among them. Also Jimmy O’Brien, their medic, who’d tried to crawl over to Red and drag him back to cover, even though that was exactly what the snipers waited for you to do.

Then, because they had a mission to fulfill and it didn’t matter to anyone back at
HQ
whether it made any sense or not, the platoon proceeded on its way.

The Falkners arrived, and a tension, light and bracing as the first touch of autumn, raced through the women. The Falkners’ marriage was like a loose tooth, hanging by a thread, that might go at any instant. Genevieve had responded with peroxide and tennis lessons. She and Daniel fled each other the moment they entered the room. It pained the hostess to see how little care they took to hide their antipathy.

“Seat?” Andy Wexler said, popping out of a leather armchair. Genevieve smiled widely, graciously accepted, and sat down carefully. She
had
to sit down carefully, in a dress as short as that.

Cindy Wexler turned her back and marched out onto the deck. “This is so bad of me,” she said brightly. “But I would
kill
for a cigarette.”

Lionel gave her one of his, then lit it for her. When he bowed his head over the match, the sun caught on his fine, thinning hair and on the pink scalp underneath.

It was a nightmare. It was like being run down a gauntlet. They couldn’t run the one way because the river was there, and the land got boggy. To the other side, the land rose and there weren’t any trails. There was mortar fire behind them. Were those fuckers sadists, or just incompetent? The Lieutenant couldn’t tell. But so long as they kept moving ahead, changing position, the vc couldn’t seem to get any kind of accurate fire on them. So they ran, straight down the trail.

The Lieutenant flashed back to the gauntlet he’d had to run down, blindfolded and in his briefs, when he pledged a fraternity in college. That was before he’d flunked out. He’d been shoved through a doorway, blind, and forced to run between two howling lines of fists and sticks.

He wished they’d try that on him now.

Suddenly, the vc had their range, and the mortar fire swept over the rear of the line, like a rainstorm.

Then, mysteriously, it stopped.

They burst into a village. Right through some fields and into a village. It was so unexpected that for a second they could only stand and gawk. It was like suddenly finding yourself in Disneyland. Then the Lieutenant fired his rifle into the air, and they were all running again and shouting at the top of their lungs. Villagers came boiling out of the huts, and scattered like pigeons. He figured it would distract Charlie. Maybe they’d be lost in the confusion.

When the barrage started again, it fell upon the soldiers and the villagers with terrifying impartiality.

“I’ll have you know, my dear, that we saw Woody Allen in New York, back when he was a stand-up…” The hostess heard Dorothea Dunletz make a high-pitched kind of an
eep
noise. “Excuse me.”

She hurried over to see what was wrong. To her horror, she discovered that Dorothea had stepped on one of the soldiers.

“Don’t give it a thought, dear,” she said soothingly. “These things happen. I’ll take care of it. No, really, you wouldn’t know where anything is.”

She got the sports section of yesterday’s
Times-Dispatch
and some paper towels. Then, crouching and averting her eyes, she managed to brush the little body onto the newspaper with a few anxious jabs of the bunched-up towels. Hurrying into the kitchen, she hastily dumped the body into the trash can in the cabinet under the sink.

Then she returned with seltzer and more towels, to scrub the stain out of the carpet.

At last, with relief and a certain sense of accomplishment, she was able to rejoin the party.

The Lieutenant wasn’t sure when he’d started seeing the hallucinations. But there they were: People eighty, a hundred, a thousand feet high, with legs like sequoia trees, dwindling away from you, and faces so distant you couldn’t make out their expressions when they thought you weren’t looking and glanced downward. It must’ve been the bennies he was popping to keep going. Sometimes he was in the bush and other times in a room so vast it seemed they would never cross it. At its end was the wall that, for no reason he could understand, they were supposed, at any cost, to reach.

Not that he believed they were any of them going to make it that far. There were only Sammy and Larry and Crazy Bill and himself left out of all who had started the mission. It seemed impossible that so many had died. It seemed impossible that so few could survive.

The roast was ready.

The hostess stuck a fork in it to make sure, then called her husband into the kitchen and told him it was time to start bringing the men inside. “And stop talking about McNamara!” she whispered fiercely. “We’re not mentioning
that
name either.”

“You’re the boss, dear.” Her husband patted her on the fanny, smiling that tolerant smile she found so infuriating, and turned away.

In the living room, Andy was still hanging over Genevieve’s chair, and Genevieve in her turn was laughing far too loudly at his jokes. The only saving grace that the hostess could see was that it was keeping Andy away from the daiquiris. Twice he’d asked her to bring him another, and twice she’d gotten conveniently waylaid by other obligations.

“Everybody — everybody, it’s time to sit down. Everyone? Dinner is served. Sweetheart, would you carve? You’re so good at it.”

As the guests came drifting into the dining room in twos and threes, she guided them to their chairs. She was careful to place the Falkners and the Wexlers as far apart as possible.

Sammy died.

Larry died.

Crazy Bill lasted a little longer than the others, but he died too.

The Lieutenant felt like he’d somehow outlived the end of the world. Everyone he cared about — everyone he
loved
was dead. He had family back home, and he supposed that in a sense he loved them too. But it wasn’t that kind of intense feeling you had here for the guys you relied on to keep you alive. It didn’t grab you in the gut and make you ready to lay down your life for somebody.

The guilt he felt was a living thing. These men had relied on him to keep them alive, and he’d failed them, failed them utterly.

It almost made him grateful that he’d been shot as well.

The host rapped a water glass with a fork to get everybody’s attention. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to propose a toast.” He raised his wine glass and said, “To good friends —” There was a rumble of approval. “ — both present and far away. And, if I might add a personal note, to family as well. Some of whom are close at hand, and others of whom are far away. Some of whom are —”

His wife caught his eye, and he coughed again. “All of whom are missed.”

He sat down.

The Lieutenant hurt like a sonofabitch. He’d dropped his pack and his rifle, and was just running now, stumbling really, through the bush. Leaves and branches whipped against him. They hurt pretty bad, but not as bad as this fucking wound in his side. It hurt like fuck. He was afraid even to look at it.

He smashed full-tilt into something hard.

Dazed, he staggered back a step or two. Then he pulled himself together. The jungle was entirely gone now. There was nothing in front of him but featureless, colorless nothingness.

He reached out a wondering hand. It touched plaster, smooth and cool.

Somehow, he’d reached the wall.

For a second, he couldn’t find his pencil. He slapped at his clothing in a panic, and on the third attempt found it, right where it should be, in his shirt pocket. It was a little stub of a thing, but functional.

Carefully, ignoring the pain, he wrote the names of all the men in his platoon on the wall. Joseph Martinez. Johnny Walker. Howard Simms. James O’Brien. Paul S. Holloway III. Pedro Swenson. Francis Parks. Ulysses S. Brown. Garry Liones. Robert Starbuck. Kent Johnstone. Barry Moyer. Kenneth Fletcher. Samuel Brown. Larry E. Lee. William Daugherty. Last of all, he wrote his own name.

“We were here, damn it,” he muttered. “
We were here!
”

But then all the strength left him, and he slid to the carpet. Away in the distance, he could hear the doorbell chime. It had nothing to do with him anymore. He was busy at the business of dying.

Death was a smooth and featureless black wall. It stretched to infinity in all directions. He felt himself moving toward it. It was so close now, he could almost touch it. On this side were warmth and light, trees and grass and bumblebees, filing cabinets, the Miss America pageant, rebuilt carburetors, Saturday morning cartoons…everything he had ever known or thought or experienced. And on the other? He had no way of knowing. He was going to find out.

In the dinner party far above, the doorbell rang, and somebody got up and went to the door. A courier stood there, envelope in hand. He said the hostess’s name, with a little rise in his voice at the end, like a question mark. The soldier looked up, vaguely curious. Then the wall was upon him. For an instant it filled the universe. He took a last gasping breath. Then he passed through.

He didn’t hear his mother scream when she read the telegram.

THAT WINTER
, Will le Fey held down a job working for a haint politician named Salem Toussaint. Chiefly, his function was to run errands while looking conspicuously solid. He fetched tax forms for the alderman’s constituents, delivered stacks of documents to trollish functionaries, fixed L
&I
violations, presented boxes of candied John-the-Conqueror root to retiring secretaries, absent-mindedly dropped slim envelopes containing twenty-dollar bills on desks. When somebody important died, he brought a white goat to the back door of the Fane of Darkness to be sacrificed to the Nameless One. When somebody else’s son was drafted or went to prison, he hammered a nail in the nkisi nkonde that Toussaint kept in the office to ensure his safe return. He canvassed voters in haint neighborhoods like Ginny Gall, Beluthahatchie, and Diddy-Wah-Diddy, where the bars were smoky, the music was good, and it was dangerous to smile at the whores. He negotiated the labyrinthine bureaucracies of City Hall. Not everything he did was strictly legal, but none of it was actually criminal. Salem Toussaint didn’t trust him enough for that.

One evening, Will was stuffing envelopes with Ghostface while Jimi Begood went over a list of ward-heelers with the alderman, checking those who could be trusted to turn out the troops in the upcoming election and crossing out those who had a history of pocketing the walking-around money and standing idle on election day or, worse, steering the vote the wrong way because they were double-dipping from the opposition. The door between Toussaint’s office and the anteroom was open a crack and Will could eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Grandfather Domovoy was turned to stone last August,” Jimi Begood said, “so we’re going to have to find somebody new to bring out the Slovaks. There’s a vila named —”

Ghostface snapped a rubber band around a bundle of envelopes and lofted them into the mail cart on the far side of the room. “Three points!” he said. Then, “You want to know what burns my ass?”

“No,” Will said.

“What burns my ass is how you and me are doing the exact same job, but you’re headed straight for the top while I’m going to be stuck here licking envelopes forever. And you know why? Because you’re solid.”

“That’s just racist bullshit,” Will said. “Toussaint is never going to promote me any higher than I am now. Haints like seeing a fey truckle to the Big Guy, but they’d never accept me as one of his advisors. You know that as well as I do.”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to be here forever, are you? In a couple of years, you’ll be holding down an office in the Mayoralty. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if you made it all the way to the Palace of Leaves.”

“Either you’re just busting my chops, or else you’re a fool. Because if you meant it, you’d be a fool to be ragging on me about it. If Toussaint were in your position, he’d make sure I was his friend, and wherever I wound up he’d have an ally. You could learn from his example.”

Ghostface lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “Toussaint is old school. I’ve got nothing to learn from a glad-handing, pompous, shucking-and-jiving —”

The office door slammed open. They both looked up.

Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, “One of my constituents is in trouble.”