Good Day to Die (34 page)

“Use it for what? I’m not dead, Lorraine. Not yet.” My first thought was that she wanted to kill herself before Kennedy got the chance to do it for her.

“Daddy’s not going to come, Roland. He’s going to send Becky. If you’re unable to deal with her, I have to. We’re not going to die here.”

I took the “we’re” as a sign of progress. A couple of hours ago it would have been “I’m.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Look,” she was angry again, “I wasn’t born blind, and I’ve shot a gun before, a revolver, not an automatic. When Becky comes, she won’t charge through these bushes. If I can find her with my finger, I can find her with the barrel of a gun. Just show me where the safety is and leave the gun on the ground where I can find it.”

A shudder ran through my body, from my toes straight up to my scalp, and for the first time, I began to think that I wouldn’t make it. Not through the hours until dark, not through the darkness itself. What I wanted to do—what I was driven to do—was close my eyes and rest.

“Give me your hand,” I said. She complied without a question, and I put her fingertips on the barrel of the .45. “This gun is heavy, Lorraine, but it’s been customized so it won’t kick back very hard when you pull the trigger. The problem is that it’s got a grip safety. Do you know what that is?”

“No. Is it hard to use?”

I guided the tip of her index finger down the lever on the back of the handle.

“You feel that?”

“Yes.”

“Push it in.” I waited for her to compress the safety. “You have to hold down that lever with the heel of your hand when you pull the trigger. If you don’t, the gun won’t fire. Remember, if you carry it anywhere, don’t grip the butt and the trigger at the same time. If you do, you’re liable to lose a leg.”

That was the last piece of advice I had for her. Within minutes, my mind was drifting back and forth between that island of reeds and … I’m tempted to describe what I saw as dreamlike, but my visions didn’t even have the coherence of a dream. Bits and pieces swirled into my vision, refusing to stay long enough to be weighed and counted. Big Mike was there, and dear old mom, of course. But there were teachers, too, and schoolmates, and a whorehouse in Saigon inhabited by sad, tiny women.

I don’t know how long it went on. You might as well ask Dorothy how many hours she spent in the cyclone before she got to Oz. I do know that after a time, I passed into actual sleep, but I only know it because Lorraine shook me out of it.

“She’s coming.”

I tried to reach for the .45, but I could barely move. Not that it mattered, because Lorraine already had it in her hands. “Lorraine? Baby? It’s me, Becky. Please don’t shoot me. I just want to talk to you.”

The wind had died away, and I could hear the steady crunch of Rebecca Kennedy’s feet as she fought her way through the reeds. Once again, I tried to reach for the .45, but Lorraine sensed the movement and pushed my outstretched hand away. For the first time, her face seemed composed, almost serene. A smile played on her lips, but the strangest part was that her face was turned toward me, her blind glass eyes fixed on my own while the gun pointed toward the oncoming sound.

“Lorraine? Please tell me where you are. These weeds are just cutting me all to pieces. I swear I don’t know how you got in here. You must be a mess.”

Kennedy’s voice was actually cheerful. She might have been playing hide-and-seek with a naughty child. If she had any sense of her potential reception, she didn’t show it. Even gripped by fever, I knew that Lorraine had been right. Rebecca Kennedy was insane.

Perhaps motivated by that sudden bit of knowledge, I felt strong enough to reach out for the rifle. I managed to pull it into my chest, but I couldn’t get my fingers to stop shaking long enough to work the safety. Nor could I raise it to my shoulder.

“Now, Lorraine, Daddy is so mad at me. He says it is all my fault, and if you don’t come back to live with us he will do just what he said he would do and put me in the chipper. And it will be all your fault. Will you be able to live with that on your conscience? Believe me, Lorraine, I have done some terrible things in my life and they are mighty hard to live with. I don’t want you to have to go through that.”

Kennedy’s voice was directly in front of us now. She’d stopped moving (or, at least, I couldn’t hear her steps; she might have been crawling). A thought crossed my mind, a thought I had to communicate. Once I had it fixed, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before this. I touched Lorraine’s shoulder and she leaned down to me.

“Don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to. Kennedy could be right behind her.” I took a deep breath. Lorraine’s ear seemed to be twisting and turning, as if she was a dog trying to locate a sound. I watched it grow into a teacup, then turned away. At that moment, I believed I was going to die.

Rebecca Kennedy began to move again, her footsteps sometimes crunching on the new growth, sometimes splashing into the mud. She was coming at a slight angle that would take her fifteen feet past our position. I could see her body now, a vague shape, almost ghostly except for the bright red scarf tied over her hair.

My eyes were drawn to the scarf. At times it seemed disembodied, floating amid the brown stalks like a Disney animation imposed on a sepia-toned kinescope. The scarf told me everything I needed to know about Kennedy’s intentions. Rebecca had been sent to locate us, not to kill us, and Robert Kennedy was following the progress of that red scarf from somewhere up on the mountain. I needed to tell Lorraine. Tell her to pull that trigger while Rebecca Kennedy was still far away, but I didn’t do it.

I didn’t do anything more than lay there and watch as the red scarf, ephemeral as a butterfly, changed course and came straight for us. I watched the body solidify, then the pinched features, the swollen eyes and lips, the stringy, blond hair. Lorraine kept the barrel of the gun pinned to the sound of Rebecca’s progress; she had to know how close Rebecca was.

“Don’t shoot.” It was my voice, though I couldn’t recall deciding to say anything.

“Lorraine, Baby, is that you?”

“Please don’t shoot.”

“Oh, I am so happy to see you, honey. I just have to celebrate.” Her eyes were riveted to the gun in Lorraine’s hands as she slowly undid the knot at her throat, as she raised the red scarf high and waved it back and forth. “Yaaaaaay. Yaaaaaay.”

R
OBERT KENNEDY’S FIRST SHOT
tore through the back of his wife’s skull. Exiting, it opened a jagged circle from the outside corner of her right eye, down across the bottom of her mouth, then up along the outside of her nose to her eyebrow. I saw it in slow-motion—or, at least, I
remember
it in slow-motion—red and white chunks of a three-dimensional kaleidoscope mushrooming outward, plastering themselves to the brown cattails and tan stalks, dripping red rubies onto the black mud.

I found it beautiful. As beautiful as napalm exploding on a distant hillside. I’d seen that many, many times. My platoon substituted napalm for television, gathering after dark, bottles of rum in most hands (joints and even dope in many others) to wait for the fighter jockeys to get to work. I knew there were human beings under that jellied gasoline, but they were enemy human beings, and I was obliged to hate them, not to pity them. Being a man of principle, I didn’t shirk my obligations.

Robert Kennedy wasn’t using his shotgun. Somewhere along the line he’d traded it for an AK47. I recognized its deep bark through all the fever, would have had to be dead not to know it. He was pulling the trigger as fast he could, trying to drown the area surrounding his wife in supersonic lead.

Lorraine put down the .45 and pressed up against me. There was nothing we could do, but wait and listen. Listen to the distant reports and the smack of bullets impacting wet mud. Wait for Kennedy to empty a fifty-round clip, change it, then empty another.

I lost my grip on the present long before it was over, was transported all the way back to the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam. My platoon had been raked by a single sniper. Somebody (a close friend, perhaps, or a hated second lieutenant, or a trusted sergeant) was down and dead. It wasn’t the first time the platoon had been through it, and what we did—did without any command being given—was dive into the reeking muck of a rice paddy fertilized with human excrement and sprinkled with booby traps.

Further retreat being a physical impossibility, we then responded in the approved fashion—with overwhelming firepower. Two M60 machine guns and twenty M16’s were the first on line, coming in as quickly as twenty-two desperate, shit-scared soldiers could swing them into action. Then the M79’s opened up, launching grenade after grenade at the tree line.

Thwoop-BOOM! Thwoop-BOOM! Thwoop-BOOM! Thwoop-BOOM!

The sound was unimaginable, individual rounds expended so fast they became a continuous, unrelenting wall of sound. Locked within it, I couldn’t hear the commands of the lieutenant or the sergeants, couldn’t hear return fire, either. I jammed the trigger down, emptied a clip, reloaded, emptied another—all into a distant tree where I hoped the sniper was hiding.

What I wanted to do was keep firing, to hide behind that wall of sound forever, but after a time (long or short was a concept to be measured later, over a joint and a cold beer) the wall began to crumble. Just small gaps at first, then huge tears in the fabric as more and more soldiers let go of their triggers. Now, I could hear the shouts of our frustrated platoon commander and his buddies: “Cease fire. Cease fire,” and knew I’d have to face the worst part of it.

Because somebody, once we were locked into the silence the way we’d been locked into the firefight, somebody would have to be first to raise his head, to clamber to his knees, to rise to his feet. And for all the ten thousand rounds we’d fired off, nobody was guaranteeing the sniper was dead. Maybe he’d sat it out behind the trunk of a tree. Or maybe we’d simply fired in the wrong direction. Or too high, or too low.

One thing for sure, we’d been firing in so many different directions there was no way to know if any of us had pinned the sniper’s location. He might be waiting for us to show ourselves before blowing off a clip or two. He might be about to fire right now—fire, then retreat to safety again. He might be planning to do this all afternoon because Charlie would slaughter his whole family if he didn’t.

Slowly very slowly, we began to rise. I was propped up on my elbows, when I saw movement in the trees, the flash of sunlight on metal as the sniper swung his AK47 into position. I threw myself on the ground, yanked the M16 up to my shoulder, flipped the lever to semiautomatic and yelled, “Down, down, down, down.”

“Quiet, Roland. Don’t speak. It’s almost time, now.”

I opened my eyes to find Lorraine’s fingers stroking my face. She was sitting with her back to the brush, holding my head in her lap. It was near dark, the sun little more than a violet haze draping the western mountains.

“Get down,” I whispered, obeying her despite my fear. “For God’s sake. The sniper’s still active.”

She smiled, offering me the water bottle. “Drink, Roland. You have to be strong. It’s almost time.”

I drained the bottle, stared at it for a few seconds, held it up guiltily.

“I drank it all, but you can fill it in the stream.”

Then I looked around, remembering Kennedy, the beaver pond, the cattails. The air was dead calm, the water of the pond a flat sheet of smoked glass. Fifteen feet away, the dark shadow of Rebecca Kennedy’s body lay on a bed of flattened reeds. I could barely see her, but I could hear the steady drone of the flies as they went about their business.

Lorraine was right; it was almost time.

“Sit up, Roland.”

She guided me into a sitting position, held me there while I fought the dizziness. After a few minutes, I felt stronger; I wasn’t sweating anymore and I wasn’t disoriented, but I was weak and tired.

“You’re infected inside,” Lorraine whispered. “The bullets may have hit your bowel.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me.” I’d made a joke, which, feeble as it may have been, cheered me considerably. “Besides,” I added, “they weren’t bullets. If they were bullets, I’d be dead.”

She smiled, digging the bag of trail mix out of the daypack. “You already told me that. Do you want to eat? Before you go after him?”

The sun was completely down, now, and the moon wouldn’t rise for another hour. The sky was clear, the rain and wind having driven out every bit of haze. I knew I wouldn’t get a better chance, that whatever was happening inside my body wasn’t about to heal itself. My choices, as I saw them at the time, were very simple—go now or die.

And if I died, Lorraine would die as well. That was also very simple and very clear.

The Anschutz’s clip held five rounds, and I had two spare clips. I was using Remington High Velocity ammo, but that didn’t make my .22 a match for Kennedy’s assault rifle. No, a shoot-out at twenty paces would only result in chunks of my flesh turning up in Nebraska. My advantage was that I could see in the dark. And that I’d spent my life seeking prey that could fight back. I hadn’t scoured the countryside in search of defenseless women. I hadn’t used my wife to lure men onto their knees while I fired into the backs of their heads.

“I’m not exactly hungry, Lorraine. I suppose I could look on it as a last meal. That might get my appetite up.”

Another joke; the future was looking positively rosy.

“There’s something you have to do for me, Lorraine,” I continued. “See, the thing about it is that I don’t know where Kennedy’s hiding, and I’m not strong enough to spend the next three hours trying to find him. I want you to give me enough time to get back up to the road, then fire several shots into the mud. Hopefully, he’ll return fire and I’ll be able to spot him by the muzzle flash.”

“What’s that? Muzzle flash?”

“That’s the flame that comes out of the barrel of the gun. You can’t see it in the daytime, but at night it’s like sending up a flare.”

She thought about it for a minute, nodding her head as she ticked off the possibilities.