The Return: A Novel (10 page)

So it proved. “It’s my dad,” she said. “He, well, he seems to be missing. God, that sounds more dramatic than I meant. It’s just he’s been a little weird since my mom died.”

Kavanagh understood, having watched what became of his own father after the death of his wife of forty-two years. “Yeah, it’s always rough, that kind of thing. Weird how?”

“Oh, nothing you could put your finger on. Bascially, he blames himself for her death. Not to get into details, but he did a bad thing and she, well, not exactly killed herself but like that. Not a good scene at all. So he called me up the other day and said he was taking a trip, no destination mentioned, and since then I haven’t been able to get hold of him. Everything goes to voice mail; he doesn’t answer texts. The last time his phone got turned on it was in Mississippi, and let me add that that’s not a location my dad would be likely to settle down in. So I thought it would be good if I knew who he’d called in the days before he left, maybe get some information on his plans.”

“How would you do that?” asked Kavanagh, well knowing.

“You could pull his phone logs.”

“Uh-huh, I could, if your father were a master criminal and I had a court order.”

“What if he was in danger? Like kidnapped.”

“Do you have any evidence of that? Does your father normally consort with criminal types? Is he fabulously wealthy?”

“No, none of the above. But I just
know
something’s wrong. He’s always been
extremely
careful about keeping in touch. And he never goes off like this. He’s a planner, even fussy about arrangements. And he does know at least one criminal type, or shady character, I should say.”

“Really? Who would that be?”

“A guy named Patrick Francis Skelly. He was in the Special Forces in Vietnam, and my dad served with him there. Since the war he’s been doing weird stuff—‘security,’ like in quotation marks? He’s a little nuts, and it wouldn’t knock me flat if I found out he was a drug lord or an arms dealer or whatever. I’m thinking he might’ve got my dad involved in something. That’s the only thing I can think of. And
he’s
not home either and doesn’t return calls.”

“Well, they’re both adults. They can take off without telling anyone.”

“Yeah, I
know
that, Kavanagh! I feel like a jerk for worrying, plus, according to my father, Skelly is exactly the kind of person you want with you if anything dangerous is going on. But I am worried. Isn’t there anything you can do that’s not illegal?”

“Call him now.”

“I told you, I’ve been calling him every couple of hours for days.”

“Humor me. Just call him again.”

Statch slid away from him and walked over to the chair upon which she’d dropped her bag, pulled out her iPhone, and pressed the buttons. Kavanagh did not really expect the results of the call to be different from the dozens of earlier ones, but this way he got to see his girlfriend walk across the room naked, which he thought was something special.

“Hello?” said Statch, and then began a short conversation that Kavanagh didn’t understand because it was in Spanish, but he understood what was implied by her yelling into what was obviously a dead line at its end.

When she turned to look at him, her face was bleak. “It was a kid,” she said. “He said he found the phone in a trash can in Ojinaga. He didn’t see who put it there.”

“Where the hell’s Ojinaga?”

“I’m looking it up now,” she said, punching away at the tiny device. “It’s on the border, in Chihuahua. Oh, Christ, he’s going to Mexico!”

“Come here,” Kavanagh said. After a little coaxing, she was lying against him once more, with his arm protectively around her.

“What’s the story with Mexico?”

“I’m not entirely sure. That’s the romance part. My mother was a dish, educated and much sought after; the son of a big political boss wanted her, and her father had to go ahead and agree to the marriage, or else. It was apparently that way in the part of Mexico they were in, and still is, I guess. Anyway, along came my father and stole my mom from this big shot, and they eloped. My grandfather was real bitter about it and never answered any of my mom’s letters, and my grandmother had to sneak out of the house to get phone calls. We never went to Mexico, my mother never saw her family again, and I got the feeling that if my dad ever went back there, he could get in serious trouble. Why would he go there? I don’t get it!”

Kavanagh studied the ceiling for a while and stroked the area of warm girl flesh that was at hand. Then he said, “Okay, look, there’s a guy I know, owes me some favors. He works for a telecom that will remain nameless, and sometimes he looks over the logs for me. I could ask him to check out your dad and this Skelly character. But, really, Statch—not a word to anyone, ever. And if anyone ever asks me, I’ll deny it; I’ll say it was a lie I told you to get laid.”

“But you’re not lying.”

“I would never do that.”

“No, and I’m not just trading sex for help, am I?”

“I don’t believe you are, no.”

She shifted on the bed, threw a thigh across him, and sat up in the saddle. “In that case,” she said, “would you please fuck me into oblivion? I don’t want to think about this shit for as long a time as we can manage.”

*   *   *

Skelly came back from his run, barely sweaty but powdered with dust. Marder asked him if he always ran armed. Skelly pulled his T-shirt over his head and grinned.

“You’ve been poking through my shit, Marder. I assume you poked far enough to know you can’t poke anymore.”

He took off the nylon fanny pack he’d been wearing and placed it on the counter, where it made a pistol-ish clunk.

“Or what?” asked Marder. “You’d have to kill me?”

“No, but others might. The security business is highly competitive. In some parts of it, when they say they want to eliminate the competition, it’s not just a business metaphor. I don’t want to have to keep rescuing you.”

“No, I wouldn’t want you to go through the trouble,” said Marder after a moment, but Skelly had already stripped and entered the camper’s tiny shower. Marder didn’t want to bring up the subject of rescues, since he and Skelly had difficulties in coordinating their memories on that subject, and Marder found it best to avoid it, even when Skelly was sober.

When Skelly got out of the shower, Marder said, “Speaking of pistols, I was just thinking about the Moon River Invitational Shoot-Out.”

“Really? Why was that?”

“Like I said, traveling with you is loosening the mystic chords of memory.”

“Also because it’s the one pathetic time you beat me at anything. I would have caught up with you by the fourth deck, if Handlebar hadn’t stopped it.”

Marder thought this was probably not true but said nothing.

*   *   *

He did recall the actual event fairly well. Handlebar was the lieutenant commanding the detachment of Special Forces and their montagnard allies and was so called because of his remarkable mustache, grown, Marder assumed, so that he would not be carded in bars. Not a bad officer, for an officer, was the scuttlebutt, and a man always up for morale-boosting activities. When the contest was explained to him, he arranged to have two sets of bamboo posts erected in the cleared ground that surrounded the village, between which some lines were nailed, and upon these were hung with wire hooks two complete decks of playing cards. At a range of ten meters, Marder and Skelly were to shoot all the pips out of the cards with their .45s and finish by shooting out the heads of the face cards. This made 244 targets per deck. The rules were that a shooter couldn’t go on to the next card until he’d shot out all the pips (or heads) of the previous card, and the man who finished first won, except that Skelly insisted that the winner had to be at least four cards ahead to win. Marder stayed two or three cards ahead through four whole packs of cards.

Everyone in the village—soldiers and tribespeople—was out watching this, the soldiers drinking “33” beer and the Hmong drinking their horrible
rnoom
rice brew through straws. It got dark, in the usual lights-out fashion of the tropics, and Lieutenant Handlebar called the match, declaring Marder the winner, with Skelly insisting they shoot by the light of flares and the lieutenant explaining in an intoxicated way that this was a good way to silhouette the entire population for the VC, who would in any case have been drawn to the area in droves by the shooting. Some of the other sergeants, laughing like maniacs, had to physically pick Skelly up and haul him away. The VC were in fact drawn, the base got rocketed for a brief time, and there was a nice little firefight, but that was a normal evening in Moon River.

Marder had thought that he was in deep shit, that Skelly would come down hard on him, but such was not the case. Skelly became if anything almost friendly, no more yelling or nasty remarks, or fewer than before. In any event, training, such as it had been, was over. The air force team had to earn their hazard pay now, by mounting helicopters, flying to various predetermined parts of Laos and Vietnam, and burying the repeaters so as to cover the whole broad delta of supply routes that made up the trail. The long repeater aerials, disguised as vines with fabric sheaths the men called “sweaters,” had to be hung just so from the nearest trees. Then they planted a few voodoos on the trail proper, to see if the system worked.

After that, back at the village, the airmen made sure the machines were alive and transmitting and that they could pick up the voodoo signals. Which they could: the voodoos talked to the repeaters; the repeaters talked to the planes overhead. All they had left to do was to actually bury the little spheres in a dense belt across the entirety of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or at least that portion that fell within their area of operations. This was the hard part, which no one on the team had really thought about during this preparation period but now had to. During this phase, Marder had been impressed by the skills of Skelly and his SOG team, by the helicopter crews from the 21st Special Operations Squadron that ferried them to and fro, and by the enormous effort being made to ensure the success of their operation. The air force staged diversionary raids; the Spectre gunships hovered overhead; each mission was accompanied by flame and explosions and the racket of miniguns establishing a zone of death around their working areas.

Several times they had experienced ground fire, or so Marder recollected. He had a mental image of glowing green balls rising from dark woods and floating by and the sound of metal banging against the aluminum of the helicopters. He did not recall being afraid, but perhaps that was the salve of forgetting.

What he did recall, with startling clarity, was a conversation he’d had with Skelly the evening before they left for their first run to plant voodoos. The sergeant had come by the Hmong longhouse where the airmen lived. Marder couldn’t remember where Hayden and Lascaglia were that evening, but he had the sense that the sergeant and he were alone. Skelly dropped a duffel bag on the floor.

“Your uniform of the day,” he said. “I figured you’re a large.”

Marder dumped the bag out on his cot: a light-green shirt and pants in nylon, a soft, brimmed hat of the same color, a pair of tire-rubber sandals, plus a set of web gear of unfamiliar design.

“What is this?” asked Marder, holding up the shirt.

“It’s a garbage man’s uniform from South Korea.”

“Are we allowed to wear this?”

“Well, the rules say we can’t wear civilian clothes and we can’t wear enemy uniforms, and this is neither. It’s cool to wear and it blends in pretty good, especially with a little mud on it. The footwear is Vietnamese, as worn by Charlie, in case anyone is inclined to follow tracks. We’ve had guys walk right by NVA patrols in that gear, and even if they think it’s fishy, it gives us a couple of seconds, which is all you need sometimes.”

Marder waited for Skelly to leave, but Skelly did not.

Instead, he plopped himself down on Lascaglia’s cot and lit a cigarette. A strange sight: since arriving at Moon River, Marder had never, as far as he could recall, seen Skelly other than upright, usually moving to some purpose.

“So, Marder, where did you learn to shoot a pistol like that? Not in the fucking air force.”

“No. I’ve been shooting pistols since I was seven or eight. My dad had a Colt Woodsman .22, and he brought a .45 back from the Pacific. We used to shoot the .22 at a range in the basement of the VFW hall near our house. It was probably illegal as hell, but nobody minded in those days. Also, my dad knew a guy down in Coney Island who had a kind of rinky-dink arena for fights and bike races, and he had a real range set up behind his place; we’d go down there, take the subway a couple of times a week, and blast away with the .45. The guy had, like, a ton of condemned army ball ammo and he’d let us shoot it off, and in return my dad would print up posters and shit for him—I mean for his arena. He died about five years ago, so we stopped going.”

“Your dad died?”

“Oh, no, the guy. With the arena. O’Farrell was his name. So after that I just shot with the Woodsman.” There was a pause. Skelly watched his cigarette smoke in silence.

“Where did you learn to shoot?” Marder asked, to keep the conversation going. “Did you shoot with your dad?”

“No, the only thing my father ever taught me was how to lie. He must have envisioned this war. And if I had access to a gun in his presence, I would’ve probably shot him.”

“Didn’t get along, huh?”

“You could say that. What does your dad do for a living?”

Marder told him, speaking easily and happily about his father, and then, by easy stages, prompted by what seemed like genuine interest from Skelly, he talked about his mother and his family and his neighborhood. Only later did he understand that Skelly’s interest was not merely polite. It was very nearly anthropological. The kind of normal urban American family life Marder had enjoyed was as alien to Skelly as the customs of the Hmong in whose midst they lived—or even more so, since Skelly, it turned out, knew a great deal about the Hmong.

After a period of this exposition, Marder began to feel a little uneasy, as if he were in the classic small room with a skilled interrogator and the humble data of his life a matter of substantial import. So he asked Skelly about his own background, and Skelly answered with the question: “Did you ever read a book called
The Catcher in the Rye
?”