A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (2 page)

She still loved to watch him move and could still see the raw-boned athlete she had fallen for all those years ago. The image of Lou at thirty-four was a permanently imprinted in her mind like the photograph of the family forebears that hung in the hall: confident gaze, skin an inch thick, his face framed by dark brown hair, and the gold major’s leaf and infantry crossed rifles pinned to the collar of his khaki shirt.

Maggie first saw him on the edge of the Fort Benning pool, blanched and skinny, smelling of cocoa butter, limping from war wounds that left half-dollar-sized pits notched into his thighs. He had “gimped” over to her towel, mumbling something about birds. When she looked into his eyes, which were as blue as the pool, she saw ambition and naïveté and sensed that this was a man who would always need help. Hers.

Of course when things between them grew serious, he had to pass inspection, to meet mother. The pipeline had already sounded the alarm on him—something about disobedience of orders in Vietnam. The last thing her family needed was a rebel. But on that first Sunday afternoon around the table, father and Lou hit it off immediately and all the dark clouds lifted.

And why not
? she mused. Lou was an infantryman to his bones. “A field officer, born to a true passion for mud,” father had said. Let spit-shined shoes go to hell. Lou was clearly a young man secure in his strength and still full of optimism, Nam be damned. Oh yes, he might need a little help from someone up the line to get his career in the Army re-ignited, someone like… well, father wore
three stars
on
his
collar.

The courtship was a short one. Once father got things straightened away with the Army, a new duty station beckoned. With mother’s help, Maggie threw the wedding together in two weeks, reserving the room at the Blue Ball Inn for their wedding night, which, as she recalled, was hot and silly. Lou had placed her on the bed in the wrestler’s starting position—kneeling on all fours—giggling. He knelt beside her and wrapped her arm over his back and around his chest. At the command, “wrestle,” he gripped her wrist and rolled, bringing her over the top of him, and kept rolling until she was beneath him and their noses touched.

Then he got quiet. He could’ve snapped her like a twig, but his hands were gentle on the small of her back. He fixed his eyes on her face and wouldn’t let go, focusing first on her chin, then her eyebrows, just as he did when the children were born—inspecting them, admiring them, absorbing them. His eyes fixed on hers and burrowed into them, out of focus now, and close, as close as it was possible to be.

He still had it. She saw it in him: the combination of strength and vulnerability that had drawn her in, back on the towel at Benning. She wasn’t the only one who saw it. Women still looked—like the little secretary in the office. He’d said that his “indiscretion” hadn’t meant anything, and they’d come through it.

* * *

Lou watched Mag at the front table as she scrutinized a large blue and white plate, holding it away, then close, turning it over and over, caressing the front and back with graceful fingers. Approaching fifty, she was still beautiful. Only her eyelids, and maybe her butt, made any concession to gravity. Actually, the years had made her even more appealing to him. She had a deliberate, easy way with people that spoke to her innate ability to see through to the truth of things. She had reserves to draw on, reserves that steered them both through trouble, no matter what happened. And she never seemed to fuss over herself. In his favorite photograph of her—an errant curl on her forehead, the collar of her blouse just slightly askew—he found her dazzling.

What was it, two years since he’d gone over two hundred pounds, fifteen over his wrestling weight? He’d never forget the day when, for the first time, he glimpsed breasts—his own—in the mirror. Now it was his hands; they’d lost all their strength. He remembered the summer he hadn’t been able to get the Phillips-head screw out of the screen door hinge and finally had to call a carpenter. The guy was forty, fifty years old— a regular blue collar guy with his pants drooping off his butt and under that medicine ball he carried in front—but he’d managed to get the screw out in a second. Of course, he had the right tools: an electric screw driver, and hands—like bagels—hard and brown.

So there was the specter of the breasts, and then, of
his
drooping pants. It was only because they either had to droop or be pulled up under his armpits, and he'd rather have the puddling in the back than showing a burl in front.

From across the room, through a veil of blue smoke, Mag looked like she did thirty years before when he first saw her testing the low dive at the Fort Benning pool; when she stretched out on a thick towel on the hot concrete pool deck and reached for her paperback—
Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to American Birds
. He remembered he’d wasted no time making his move.

“Hot! Hot! Hot! Sorry. I’ll only perch here a second,” he’d said. “What’s that you’re reading about...birds?”

Over the next two months, they, but mostly she, carved a smooth, youthful relationship built on wisecracks, confidence, candor, and quirkiness, as evidenced by her adamant choice of the inn at Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, for their wedding night. Lou recalled a pair of globes, just above the door of the two-story tavern, that swung in the wind as he and Maggie roared into the weedy, gravel parking lot, dust swirling at the bumpers of their white, ’58 Thunderbird convertible. Hand in hand they ran—his Army dress blues, epaulets askew and missing the bow tie, and her frilly, white gown hiked up to her shins—to the reservations counter, past faces peering from the darkness of the beery taproom.

Upstairs, halfway down the hall, he swept his arm behind her knees, lifted her, and twirled into the room. Champagne bottle in hand, his senses swirled with the dusky smell of the dark, floral wallpaper and the ceiling fan turning, slowly, amplifying the heat and wetness growing on their faces and in the crooks of their arms, twirling, on her nose, her neck, down her spine to the small of her back, twirling, between her breasts and on her throat and lower, in her navel, and down.

Blue serge and white silk and lace trailed away from the huge, four-poster bed on which he made ringers with her garter and panties.

“Put your hands behind your head,” he said.

After which she said, “Mama told me to make this fantasy last a lifetime.”

In the beginning, neither of them thought much about anything, giving in, instead, to raging hormones. Two months after he’d pulled her out of the Benning pool, they were joined for life. He was ambitious; she was vigorous. And in two and a half years, they managed to produce two healthy boys and a Danish modern dining room set. Now, after traveling around the world through twenty-five years of Army life, they were back in Glen Rock, struggling with the transition to civilian life.

“I’m not wild about the wingback, Mag. The seat’s too short. It catches me right in the back of my...”

“Just checking,” she interrupted. They’re a lot cheaper here than they would be down at Gorman’s.”

“See anything else?”

“The butter mold’s nice.”

“How about one of those window fans up front? If we can get one for a song...”

“I was thinking about that too.”

Mag watched Gordon Peters, the auctioneer, settle behind his podium. He was tall and beefy, with a reddish tinge to his thinning hair. He went through his preliminary instructions like a volunteer at a blood donor center checking off diseases, warning them not to bid if they hadn’t inspected the item, explaining about sealed bids, blah, blah, blah. He had a gavel and a little block of marble to bang on. But when things got started, he forgot about the gavel and instead clapped his hands when an item sold. He dwelled on the cheap box lots, holding up the cheesy contents—a can opener, a ball-peen hammer—trying to squeeze the last six bits out of each box.
Christie’s
, it was not.

In the four years since they’d driven through the gates of Fort Dix for the last time, Lou still struggled with the transition to civilian life. Having commanded a three-thousand-man infantry brigade, he now found himself sitting in a closet-like room dominated by a desk littered with paper: the office of Sal Marino, branch operations guru, a small man with grayness sneaking in on all sides. Sal deftly handled all the niggling admin problems in the branch, and, when time allowed, dabbled in commodities – pork bellies, wheat, corn, and soybean oil. Sal was important, about as important as the warrant officer who ran Lou’s brigade motor pool years ago. And this little confab was tantamount to Lou dodging grease rags while shooting the bull with his head mechanic, something that would never have happened in the old days. Nevertheless, of all the people he’d met in the civilian business world, Sal’s quiet sureness felt best.

He spoke in a gravelly voice. “Not so easy slipping out from under the eagles, I bet, Lou,” he said. “Not that I ever wore eagles.”

“I thought I had it locked,” Lou said. “Then...”

“What do they call it? A seamless transition?”

“Yeah, infantry bull colonel to financial services executive in one little step. Ha.”

“Hey, you did it.”

“I did?”

“You’re here aren’t you? You’re drawing real checks every month.”

“I wanted to hit the ground at a fast trot in full gear, so to speak. No moping around. No muttering about soldiering circles around all the young studs nipping at my butt for the last four years.”

“It’s not an easy jump, Lou. What did you know about stocks and bonds? What had you ever sold before you made your first cold call?

“I never thought about selling, Sal. I was heading for a big office in a big bank.”

“Sometimes all you get is a consolation prize.”

“‘Hop on that civvie fast track,’ I’d said. ‘Get fired up. Let go of the shelter of the US infantry.’ I had big plans.”

“The market won’t stay in the toilet forever.”

“Sure. Besides, it’s already too late to make a move to something else. I’ve been out there looking. The whole frigging economy is based on downsizing fifty-year-olds.”

“Hang with it, Lou. Swisher loves you.”

“I don’t know, Sal. It’s this image that keeps me up at night: the clean edge of an axe on the back of my neck.”

It was all true. In twenty-one years, he’d rocketed up the ranks of the infantry to full bird, commanded every unit from a rifle platoon to infantry brigade, and written the book on mechanized infantry river crossings. He’d swallowed the carefully nurtured image of the career soldier as the modern-day knight in shining armor—above the shit of normal life, prepared to give his all for the hopelessly undisciplined civilian herd.

He’d seen the axe falling on comrades all around him, yet had kept the delusion that they’d never sever him from the Corps. Never. But it was all over with the stroke of a pen. Finished. Done. A whole career. Like his footprints in the mud and rain at Ban Me Thuot, the only trace left of him after two years of combat duty eroding before his eyes in two minutes flat.

He and Maggie had clung to the world they invented together when Lou gambled with this choice of the securities business as his new career, a decision that haunted him because he knew he forced it on himself out of pride again, and it had come back to bite him. Out of necessity, they’d scaled back on some of the elements of the good life as they knew it. But he wasn’t about to cave. He was still the same man, and their life together was still alive. And just to prove it, he resolved to haul his old swagger out of moth balls. His step would project conviction again—a certainty that some things were due him after all the years. He didn’t have to answer to anybody about them. It was just the way it was going to be. He would travel light and ready. He would never leave the house again without three hundred bucks in his wallet.

For her part, Maggie had seized on the auctions as a way for them to get back to where they’d been long before. And so, when she’d proposed the auction tonight, it would’ve been tantamount to unrequited faith for him to refuse.

And it wasn’t the worst way to spend time. Mostly he sat and let Gordon Peters’ voice trail away. It was a safe place; the two of them together, alone with their thoughts, waist deep in a broth of uncertainty, but at one with the white elephants of other people’s lives.

“How much do you think the butter mold’s worth, hon?” she asked.

“Hmm? The butter mold...If you can’t get it for a...”

“I wouldn’t go any higher than fifteen for it. It’s cracked.”

“You better get in quick then,” he said.