Ash Wednesday (7 page)

The second date rattled out, and, amazingly, no one reacted. Free again.

At the reading of the third date, a neatly bearded boy near the front twisted his head as though he'd received a blow and gave a deep throaty grunt. He stood up, his face red, shrugging off the hands, unused to touching, that sought to comfort him, and stalked out of the lounge. First blood had been drawn.

Strangely enough, everyone suddenly seemed more at ease. Their birth dates might be called, but at least they would not be the first, and Brad thought it was like death in a way, and whispered to his roommate, "It's like we're all gonna die sooner or later, but who wants to go first,
y'know
?"

His roommate chuckled, then held a finger to his lips. The next date was already being read. Brad heard only the tail end: ". . .
ary
14."

"What?" he said in alarm.

"February 14, now shut up," came a voice, and murmurs of agreement followed.

After the fifth date was called, his roommate looked at him with a question in his eyes. Brad nodded. "Number four," he whispered. "Got me." He sat there silently as the rest of the 366 dates were drawn. Then the room emptied of students, all of them talking, some in a fast-paced tone of relief, others in a quiet monotone. Still others instructed friends how to fail the physical: "Drink some ink"; "Put sugar in the piss jar"; "Say you're a
fag
." One boy was crying silently. No one made fun of him. The last words Brad heard before he walked out alone into the night were, "Shit, they even got
Jesus
."

Sitting on a bench in the grove just like the bench he and Rorrie Weidman used to sit on, he thought about Rorrie long and hard. Desert, he'd told Rorrie, get the hell out if you can't take it. He wondered if he could give himself the same advice. He knew in his heart he couldn't make it, even if a miracle struck and he didn't have to go to Vietnam. But the only alternative was Canada, and that frightened him. To be an outcast from his country, maybe forever, was a concept that he had never before confronted head-on. It would mean separation from everything and everyone he knew and loved.
And he could never come back
.

If he
did
go to 'Nam, though, if he did, it would be two years of the Army, no more than a year in 'Nam, probably. He could stay alive for a year—he wouldn't be in combat all the time—he'd just be
careful
. That was
Rorrie's
problem.

He was fast, casual, quick to do crazy things, take stupid dares. He'd probably walked into that mine on
purpose
, for God's sake.

Brad shook his head and stood up. He wished he could buy booze at nineteen, and then he considered crashing someone's pad and drinking
their
booze. But instead, he went back to his dorm. His roommate, whose number was 287, was studying when he came in. "You okay?" he asked Brad.

"Yeah."

"What you gonna do?"

"Shit . . . man, it's all such shit."

In a few weeks Brad got the notice to report for his physical, which he passed. He went home, said goodbye to his parents and to Bonnie, who told him she'd be faithful and cautioned him to be careful. When he replied that he'd stay out of the way of bullets, she clarified her admonition by having it include a sexual warning as well. He decided bitterly that he would fuck the first gook whore who made him an offer.

He didn't get the chance for quite a while. Basic training was a two-month nightmare of close bodies, filthy talk, and a series of near-fights that gave him constant bouts of diarrhea, which the Army doctors treated with large doses of
Kaopectate
. He went to Vietnam in March 1970 and came back thirteen months later not only alive, but untouched. He had not suffered so much as a scratch from the time of his arrival in the country to the time of his departure. He came back to the United States and to Merridale with an athlete's body—lean, rock-hard, cable-muscled, over which was stretched a tanned surface of smooth, unblemished skin. But if his mind could have shown a human form, it would have been shriveled, diseased, filled with the decay of a month-old corpse.

It was April when he returned. Buds were slightly greening the trees, and his mother's daffodils were just starting to open, laying a slash of yellow across the base of their house. He entered his room as if it were a stranger's. He had forgotten the boy who had lived there, could not remember his reasons for putting up the posters of rock stars, the wrinkled map of Middle-earth. Only the poster of Doc Savage touched a note of response: the torn shirt, bunched muscles, face wrinkled with something more than age. This he did not touch, but the others he took down, rolled up, and put into the closet, tossing into the waste can the nearly dry balls of
Plasti-Tak
that had held them to the walls.

His mother was finishing the supper dishes, so he went onto the back porch, where his father was sitting reading the paper. He put it down when Brad came out the door, and they smiled at each other, sitting side by side on the glider and listening to the clatter of
Melmac
, the soft liquid sound of rinsing, the metallic rattle of silverware hitting the drying rack. Brad laughed low in his throat. "Jesus, what a pretty sound."

His father nodded. "Don't let Mom hear you say that," he said with a grin.

"Yeah, sure." He dug out a pack of
Winstons
from his pocket and lit one.

"When did you start that?" his father asked.

"Smoking? In 'Nam." He exhaled slowly, watching the smoke turn a small space of evening air gray, souring for a moment the scent of honeysuckle drifting up from the back fence.

"Not too good for you, is it?" His father had never smoked.

Brad shrugged. "I never thought about that. It didn't matter much. Maybe I'll quit."

The father looked at his son's profile in the dying light. The face had changed, he thought. There was a depth in the eyes that had not been there before, the sense of having looked over the edge of a great abyss and having teetered on its edge, and the knowledge that one could balance there for a very long time without falling. The mouth was different too. It seemed larger, the lips thick and full, almost sensuous if the line of the mouth had not been so straight and firm, as though a knife edged in coal dust had scored across the petals of a rose.

"Was it . . ." His father paused. "Was it very bad? Over there?"

The full mouth twisted up on the side away from the older man so that all he saw was a crooked frown. Then Brad chuckled, and there was true humor in the sound, but he said nothing.

"I . . . uh . . . I remember the World War. In Italy," his father went on. "There were a lot of things then I wished I'd never seen. I was about your age too. War's a . . . a terrible thing."

Brad, silent, kept smoking, smiling.

"You see much action?" his father asked. Brad made a

nearly imperceptible move that might have been a nod. "Well, I know . . . I know what you must have gone through. I—”

“Uh-unh." The sound floated out on gray smoke. "What?"

"You don't know." It was said without rancor, merely as a statement of fact, to set the record straight.

"Well, uh"—his father laughed uncomfortably—"I think I do. I mean, I was in combat—"

"No." Brad looked at his father and smiled strangely, so that just his two top front teeth showed, like a rabbit's. "You really don't know, Dad. And no horror stories could make me think you do." The smile faded. "There was a master sergeant. Fifty years old. And he
fragged
himself. Just took a grenade, and pulled the pin, and held it up to his head like he was talking on the telephone. He did it because of something he saw. Something I . . . saw too. And twenty-five years before he'd been one of the first inside when they liberated Dachau." He smiled again. "So don't tell me you know. You don't know."

The storm door opened and Brad's mother came out onto the porch. She bent over Brad and kissed his hair. "It's so good to have you back, honey. What are you boys talking about?" She sat between them on the glider.

"I was just noticing your tulips, Mom. They really came out early this year."

"I'm just glad we had some flowers for your homecoming." She folded her hands in her lap. "Do they have many flowers in Vietnam?"

Brad laughed. "Oh, yeah, Mom, big ones. Bright orange. And white." He put an arm around her and hugged her closely. "So big you'd swear they fill the whole sky. But they don't last long," he said, looking upward to where the stars were just beginning to appear, like far-off flares of some impossibly foreign war. "They die real fast." His voice was barely a whisper.

No one said anything for a long time, and Brad seemed not to notice his mother's shoulders stiffen as she wondered in a dim, dull, unimaginative way if her son had really come home.

~*~

The next day was a Saturday, and he picked up Bonnie in his father's car just before noon. She was out the door of her parents' home even before he'd pulled the emergency brake, and threw herself into his arms as he left the car. "Hey"—he laughed—“take it easy, okay?"

"Oh, Brad, thank God you're home, you don't know how much I've missed you, I prayed every night that you'd . . .” And so it went until he stilled her mouth with a kiss. He felt relief at the sudden quiet rather than any passion she might have aroused in him. They went into the house then, and he said hello in a remote and disinterested way to her parents. Afterward they drove out to the park and shared the picnic lunch Bonnie had packed. It was warm for April, and Brad was in shirtsleeves, and Bonnie, in a loose open blouse with a halter underneath. Throughout the lunch she seemed in a state of perpetual excitement, and after they'd eaten, she nearly dragged him the half mile back to the small clearing in the woods, where she pulled him to her and asked him to make love to her.

"I'm on the pill now," she said. "I knew you were coming home and I wanted it to be so good for you, so I went on the pill."

"That was nice of you," he said, giving a small laugh that startled her.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Why? Something seem wrong?"

"You just seem . . . funny."

"Funny," he repeated. He looked down at her for a moment before he asked, "Do you still love me?"

"Oh, yes," she said, making her eyes as soulful as she knew how.

"And you want me to, make love to you?"

"Yes."

"And you want us to get married?"

"Yes. I do. I want that . . . so much."

"Okay, then." He sat down next to her, but he didn't touch her. "I'm going to tell you some things. And if after I tell you
you
still want what you want now, then I'll want it too. All right?"

Terror ran through her. She fully expected to hear of every sexual escapade Brad had had in Vietnam, of teenaged whores and older mama sans, or whatever they called them, trained in how to please men in a hundred different sick ways, ways that she could never hope to compete with. She made herself smile and nod just the same, and sat up and listened as he spoke.

But his words were not of sex and whores and strange diseases. Rather, to her surprise, he spoke of jungles and narrow caves, of grim things done in the middle of the night, couched in words and concepts she did not understand. Yet he painted scenes for her that parts of her mind could dimly comprehend—scenes of blood and fire, agony and death, glimpses of Brad, khaki-clad, tinted with red, eyes gleaming in orgasmic fear, doing
things
that she could not dream of anyone doing, not in
real
life, not in life as it was and had always been lived in Merridale. These were other dreams, the dark dreams, the dreams that would sometimes come to her unbidden in night's black heart, the same kind of things of which Brad spoke now, trying to gnaw their way into her sleep; but she would not let them, for they were
filthy
, worse than the worst things the whores of Saigon could ever bring themselves to do. And those dreams would turn from her and fade back to where they came from, and she would awaken from her effort and lie there sweating, thanking God that she had escaped from that confrontation with shadow.