The Return: A Novel (5 page)

When Marder first arrived in Naked Fanny, he was amazed by the scale of the operation. The building in which the center lived was the largest structure in southeast Asia; there were hundreds of airmen involved and scores of aircraft flying and billions of dollars being spent. During the briefings that accompanied his arrival, he learned that Igloo White depended on large numbers of electronic sensors capable of picking up the sounds or vibrations of trucks or sniffing out human effluvia. The sensors sent their messages to circling aircraft, which in turn sent data to the analysts at Task Force Alpha, of whom Marder was one.

He spent his shifts in a darkened room with dozens of other airmen, staring at video screens hooked up to the IBM 360 computers that stored the data flowing from the circling aircraft. These men, known as pinball wizards, looked for activity in a particular string of sensors, seeking the patterns of sensor response that signaled the passage of trucks or personnel. Most of the time there was nothing, but when something did light up, Marder would seize on it and pass the information up the line. High above his own pay grade, intel officers would collate the information, make a decision, inform the airborne battlefield command-and-control center, and before too long the forward air controller would lead a strike to just that spot, more or less, and the jungle would erupt in flame. Marder was good at this work, careful and alert, although bored out of his skull.

*   *   *

With a start, Marder snapped himself back to the present. He realized he had been driving for an uncertain period of time with his mind in long-ago Thailand, watching green digits on a screen and not the lights on the darkened interstate. Marder shook himself, felt chill sweat on his palms and forehead. This was strange. He never thought about the war; he could not really recall more than a few incidents of his time in-country. He never dreamed about it, although sometimes it seemed as if it all had
been
a dream; sometimes a face in the street or a sound or a certain situation would pluck a chord, give him a funny feeling—
this
was something that happened back
then
—but he could never quite pin down the source memory. Skelly, in contrast, was a walking encyclopedia of Indochinese events;
his
problem was that he recalled everything.

Marder had been driving for over five hours since his last stop. It now occurred to him that being hungry and tired was what was forcing up this buried stuff, that or the hypnotic effect of the moving lights on the highway, the glow from the instrument panel, the man sleeping in the seat next to him, all setting up a psychological predicate for a trip down memory lane. He didn’t like it. Marder preferred always to focus on the present, on the instant: why he’d been excellent as a pinball wizard at Task Force Alpha, why he was a good shot.

An exit sign glowed greenly in the near distance, a town he’d never heard of, and Marder took it, braking on the ramp, throwing off the near-hypnosis of the open highway, recalibrating his sense of speed. Going thirty felt like being parked. The ramp debouched on a state two-lane with the usual gas plaza and fast-food mills, the road stretching past these into piney rural darkness.

Skelly was up and alert in his usual spooky way the instant the wheels hit the exit ramp.

“Where are we?”

“Somewhere south of South Carolina. I need a piss and the truck needs gas. I could eat too.”

Marder pulled into a gas station, used the can, and came out to find Skelly filling the tank.

“There’s a Hardee’s over there,” said Marder, pointing.

“Yes, but the last I heard, Hardee’s didn’t provide a full bar. I’d like a drink before dining, as they do in civilized lands. Give me the keys.”

Marder experienced a moment of unaccountable panic. Things were getting away from him, his careful plans.

“Come on, Marder. I’ll find us a place, we’ll have a meal and a couple of scoops, and then we’ll get back on the road.”

“I thought we could find an RV park and start in the morning.”

“What’s the point of that? Yes, you look whipped, but I’m fresh as a fucking daisy. You’re forgetting we have
two
drivers and a
camper
. One of us can rack out in the back while the other drives. We can be in Mexico the day after tomorrow.”

Marder didn’t have the energy to argue. Skelly got in the driver’s seat and roared off down the road, away from the highway and the lights. This was
like
something, thought Marder as he slumped exhausted in his seat: being driven down a black road toward an unknown destination.

*   *   *

It was Thailand again. He was in a three-quarter-ton truck with two other guys from his unit. He could not recall either their names or their faces; they were just a trio of young fellow pinball wizards on a pass, tired from staring at the screens, looking for action.

By agreement they’d driven away from the neighborhood of soldier bars and whorehouses clustered like crab lice upon the sweaty carcass of Naked Fanny, driven south into the tropical night. They were looking for the real Thailand, though even the fake Thailand had been thrilling enough for young Marder. Having been raised in a Catholic parish in Brooklyn in the late fifties and early sixties, his sexual experience had amounted to teenaged fumblings with the bad girls of the block, these fumblings dulled by the terror of pregnancy and the anaphrodisiac strictures of the old Church. And here he was translated overnight to a society in which sexual prudence was a risible and scarcely believed rumor. The quasi-Americanized precincts of the great air base had been electrifying enough—the thin brown girls and their elastic, willing bodies! What could the deeper and presumably more genuine country have in store? They drove, the tropical night fell all at once, they drove on, getting lost, driving through streams on increasingly poor roads, youthful bravado pushing them on into the warm, velvety dark, and then they’d seen lights ahead.

*   *   *

There were lights ahead. Skelly was slowing down to take a look. A roadhouse, a mean concrete block, pillbox windows lit by two beer signs, hairy guys and their blunt-faced smoking women hanging out in the dirt yard in front, and a row of chopped Harleys too, their chrome reflecting the colors of the beer signs. Skelly passed it, braked; Marder said, “Maybe not here, Skelly.”

But of course he backed neatly into the lot, as far from the motorcycles as he could. Marder didn’t even bother to start an argument. Instead, he went into the camper and came out wearing a flannel shirt with the tails out.

Skelly said, “You know, I don’t think there’s a dress code here.”

Marder said, “I was chilly,” and then Skelly took off, striding through the parking lot with his cocky small-guy walk, waving, calling out, “Good evening, fine evening, gentlemen,” to the bemused bikers standing around, and the same inside, a low-ceilinged joint, thick with the stink of cigarette smoke and stale beer. In the rear a pool table, a jukebox pumping out a Merle Haggard song; behind the bar a manly tattooed woman with dyed blond hair, and behind her a large Confederate flag.

*   *   *

Walking into a strange bar in a strange country, feeling ill at ease. Again, unbidden, a memory bloomed, the recollection of when he’d first met Skelly. It was in a bar they’d found in a town forty klicks distant from the air-base fence, a large open shack raised on poles above the earth, with a rusting tin roof and a split bamboo floor, the sweet stink of rice wine in the air, and the culinary odor you smelled throughout that part of Asia: charcoal, rice water, grilled meat, oily spices. The darkness of the place was barely relieved by colored lanterns; everyone looked up when the three of them walked in, and not in a friendly way. The furnishings comprised a bar made of teak planks stretched across oil drums, two round tables made from wooden wire spools, and a scatter of miscellaneous rattan stools. Four men were sitting around one table, three of them small and thin and brown with close-cropped hair. They were wearing tattered plaid shirts and shorts cut down from jungle fatigues.

Montagnards, thought Marder. He’d never seen one before, but he’d heard of them, the highland tribesmen who fought for the CIA and the Special Forces. They wore the telltale brass bracelets on their wrists. You could buy crude copies of them in the Saigon markets, and a lot of American soldiers wore them, but he could see that these were the real thing, thin and intricately incised. The fourth man was an American, a smallish pug-faced guy with major muscles, his hair worn longer than was usual for the military but obviously a soldier. He was wearing some kind of light-green uniform shirt of a type that Marder hadn’t seen before, with the sleeves cut down and unraveling. He had a bracelet like the others.

This man stared briefly at the three young airmen and into the silence spoke a phrase in some nasal twittering language, and the place broke up in laughter. The two bar girls laughed, the toothless woman behind the bar laughed out of the dark hole of her mouth, the montagnards and the other men in the bar all thought it was hilarious. Marder wanted to know what the joke was but was too embarrassed to inquire. One of the men with him caught the vibe, pulled at his arm. Maybe we shouldn’t …

But Marder walked in boldly, went to the bar, held up three fingers, said “Bir khap,” and the woman, covering her mouth against the giggles, brought forth three bottles of Singha. As Marder drank his beer, his gaze kept turning back to the American. Without being loud or boisterous, the man was the center of the room’s attention. The bar girls vied for a word; the three montagnards clearly regarded him as the sun around which they orbited. Marder had never seen anyone like that close up before, but he’d read about such men, born leaders, natural warriors, not at all like his own officers, who were more like petty bureaucrats. He’d been fascinated by Lawrence of Arabia in the movie: here was another in real life.

After a period of sneaking looks, Marder found the American looking back. Blue eyes, but with the flat, uninformative gaze of the tribesmen who were his companions; uninterested, hostile, but only mildly, as if to say Marder was not significant enough for serious hostility. Marder felt his face flush, and he turned back to the quiet nervous chatter of his companions and his beer. Finishing it quickly, he had little trouble convincing the other airmen to seek out a more welcoming venue.

*   *   *

In the biker bar, the only food seemed to be packaged bacon rinds, bar nuts, and the contents of large glass vats filled with murky liquid, in which floated pickled eggs and pigs’ feet. Skelly, meanwhile, was taking in all his calories via Jax beers and shots of Jim Beam. Marder sucked at the lip of a longneck and waited for the inevitable. Half a dozen of the bikers were in the back, playing pool, and ten or so were at the bar or at tables. They were ignoring the newcomers but also watching them, looking for an opportunity. On the neighboring stool, a big man in a studded denim vest kept jostling Marder every couple of minutes. He imagined a similar thing was going on on the other side of Skelly, delivered by a bushy-haired big-belly who had an SS skull tattoed on the back of his neck. It was not going to be hard to initiate proceedings.

“Madam, what is that flag there? What does it signify?”

This was Skelly, pointing at the Confederate banner, speaking loud and in the cultured tones of an eastern preppy, which, remarkably, he had actually once been.

“It’s a rebel flag,” said the woman after a scrutinizing pause. The place quieted down, waiting. The click of pool balls stopped; people started to drift in from the back, so there was a substantial audience for Skelly’s peroration.

Marder took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and stuck it, folded, under his beer bottle and eased himself away from the bar.

Skelly evinced curiosity as to why a respectable saloon would display the symbol of an atrocious treason, a symbol, moreover, of the right of rich guys to fuck helpless slave women, many of whom were whiter than the people in this bar, and to sell the daughters thus produced to whorehouses, but perhaps only after first encouraging their sons to fuck their half sisters. Yes, long may it wave, the glorious symbol of the right of sister-fucking by rich men and the fact that poor assholes could be deluded into fighting for that right, and in his opinion Bobbie Lee and every fucking treasonous rebel officer over the rank of major should’ve been hanged from the highest—

Mr. SS Skull swung the first punch. Marder had seen Skelly in operation many times and was always amazed at how fast the man still was, still a perfect machine of harm. Skelly time ran just a little faster than the time of everyone else and, up to a certain point, alcohol didn’t seem to slow him at all.

The punch landed on air, because Skelly had crouched down under the blow and had buried his fist up to the wristbone in the fellow’s crotch. The man screamed and fell on his side, retching heroically. Mr. Studded Vest attempted to throw a choke around Skelly’s neck but instead, mysteriously, found himself flying through the air into a table and chairs. At that point the bartender pulled a cut-down ball bat from under the bar and swung it at Skelly’s head. He deflected it with his left hand, which turned into a grip, pulling the woman forward. Her face smashed down on the bar with an awful crunching thump, a splash of blood, little droplets falling on Marder’s hundred, and now Skelly had the bat.

He was just wading into the crowd with it, clearly to his doom, since there were at least a dozen people armed with cues, chairs, bottles, one with a thick bike chain, when Marder pulled his fancy pistol out from the small of his back and fired a shot into the ceiling.

Everyone paused, and for an instant the place was as quiet as an art museum. Skelly turned and looked at Marder inquiringly, frowning a little, like a child called from the sandbox. Marder jumped toward him, embraced him in a bear hug with his free arm, shouted out, “You’ll have to excuse my friend, he’s still crazy from Nam, crazy from
Nam
! There’s money on the bar, drinks are on us. Sorry for the inconvenience.”