Red rain 2.0 (13 page)

Annie just grins. "He does okay. Not sure he's officer material."

"Thank god for that! No disrespect intended, LT, but as everyone knows, any outfit's nothin' but a clusterfuck without good NCOs," Gunny says. "The brass, they'd rather sip fine whiskey and smoke big cee-gars than go out and kick butt. Speaking of which, I think I will now have myself a fine cee-gar."

He drops from near roar to near whisper. "Offer you one, LT? Prime. Real Cuban, straight from Habana. Still got friends in Guantanamo."

Annie nods. Gunny's off to his office, back in a moment with two big Monte Cristos or some such. I never had the taste for cigars. He carefully trims the ends of both, uses bis Zippo to light Annie up with the delicate wavey sweeps of the flame connoisseurs favor, gets his own going. I'm mopping up egg yolk with a scrap of toast while Annie draws on her cigar, nods appreciatively at Gunny, and says, "I do believe you've obtained some outstanding contraband here."

Gunny puffs and chortles. He gives me an affectionate slap on the back, but so unexpected and so powerful the yolk-soaked bit of toast pops out of my mouth. Momma's still looking, still smiling, still teary.

"Luther, you home now. You finally home," she says.

I'm sure Annie thinks it's more an asylum for the criminally insane.

93

We're on the creaky little dock built out from Gunny's narrow water frontage. There's a fiberglass Boston Whaler moored at the end, rubbing against bald old tires he uses for bumpers. The man's been busy early. Coiled in a proficient military manner at the base of each piling is a length of cord with a chicken neck tied to one end. Gunny weaves from piling to piling, tossing the baited strings into the murky creek waters. Annie's watching, bemused. She's from Ohio, she's eaten crabs before like everyone else around Baltimore, but she doesn't know squat about the water, about oystering and crabbing. Gunny shows her the drill. The cords are slack, but when one tightens up, you ever so slowly begin pulling it up. Those blue channel crabs, the big jimmys, don't like to let go of their meal. But if they spot you, they'll bolt. The trick is getting them near enough to the surface so someone beside you with a long-handled net can get it beneath and scoop 'em up.

It's about a 50-50 deal, usually. Annie misses the first half-dozen, then nets four in a row. She tries to grab her first catch from the front instead of from behind and gets a nasty claw nip on one of her fingers.

"Aw fuck," Annie snaps.

"Improvise, adapt, overcome. Surrender is not in our creed," Gunny says.

"You know, Gunny, you talk like you watched that Clint Eastwood movie—what was it,
Heartbreak Ridge?
—two or three too many times." Annie grins.

"Huh!" Gunny grunts. "I
taught
those Hollywood pussies Corps talk. That's why Eastwood sounds
authentic."

Mom fetches a Band-Aid. Annie isn't fazed. The baits go back in, we watch the lines, we pull when one goes tight, we dip the net. Annie grabs a netted crab from behind, sneaks up on Gunny while he's pulling a line, and waves those snapping claws a half inch from his nose. "Goddamn!" he bellows.

Before lunch, we've got three dozen in a Styrofoam chest full of ice and creek water.

94

We eat Smithfield ham sandwiches and drink cold beer from the bottle, sitting in Gibson Island chairs under a big old oak. I drift off into a doze, Annie and Momma and Pop talking. Late afternoon, we rebait and cast the lines. We net another dozen before it gets too dark. Mom steams them with Old Bay, and we eat on the little screened-in porch— crabs, cole slaw, sliced tomatos, potato salad with lots of mayo, choice of beer or iced tea with lots of sugar and lemon. I have the tea.

It doesn't quite feel real. My head gets jagged, but an easy jagged, not a scary one. Still, I slip a tab under my tongue when no one's watching, then wash it down with tea. We all watch a nice moonrise.

Late that night in Gunny's office, Annie and Momma gone to bed, Gunny sipping whiskey and me a single beer, Gunny turns serious. "That silver bullet out there, that come from blood money, Luther?"

"Negative."

"Don't bullshit me, Lubejob!"

"I didn't do it for the money. I tried to tell you that when I was leaving, but you wouldn't hear."

"I wouldn't then. Damn straight. I'm hearing now, though, if you got anything but shit to say."

"Won't insult your intelligence by claiming I did it entirely for a fucking cause. It was partly wanting to be on the right side, but it was also partly wanting very badly to practice my profession."

"Which you lost in Kuwait. Which I understood. You weren't the first and won't be the last soldier who refused to accept the enemy's surrender. I refused, mostly always, in Nam."

"But I got caught, you didn't. I lost it all. When the Sarajevo offer came along, money was never part of the equation."

I pull out a plain buff envelope with a return address of "Postfach 480, 0101 Vaduz" printed discreedy in the upper-left-hand corner, with a Lichtenstein postmark on the upper

95

right. It's been in my jeans pocket all day. I take out the bank statement it contains and hand it to Gunny.

"That's all? What've you been spending on, besides that fancy car?"

"You sure you're hearing? I already told you no about the car. What you're seeing is my
entire
salary and my wound bonus. The whole damn thing. I haven't touched a dime. I get a statement once a year. This is this year's. The money's been sitting there since '95. Probably sit there forever," I say.

"Christ, this is chickenshit!" Gunny's looking at the numbers. "This isn't much more than a sergeant's yearly salary with combat pay, if there was any combat around anymore."

"Yeah, well, there was free room and board, you know. PX privileges too, if there'd been a PX, which there wasn't."

Gunny's laughter rolls through the room. "Oh Lordy, Lordy, I do hate to admit it, but I had you wrong. I figured you were going for big-time bucks. Never imagined meres worked so cheap. Goddammit, I still say we should've sent in the First Marines and cleaned the Serb clocks! Greased every swinging dick they could muster in Bosnia, then gone on into Serbia proper and taken Belgrade and executed that goddamn Slobo what's-his-name and all the other war criminals."

"Ah, you're just jealous because your thirty years were up in '90 and you missed Desert Storm. And because we pissed away that win by stopping too soon."

"Fuckin' right!" Gunny was still laughing. Then serious again. "Are you gonna forgive your old man? He'd be most pleased if you could do that. He feels like dogshit for the way he treated you."

"Ah you know." I'm not truly trusting this, but I go with it. "Burned-out old jarheads, they can't think straight. They're all too concussed. Hard to blame the pathetic fucks when they're out of line. They know not what they do."

Poppa smiles at me in a way he hadn't since I finished my Special Forces training. He doesn't say any more for a

96

while. Then he raises his glass and shouts, "Here's to us and them like us. Most of the poor motherfucks are dead."

If Annie'd been there, she'd have said he was stealing movie lines again.

We leave Sunday after lunch because the traffic's going to be hellish on Labor Day Monday. Mom gets a bit teary again. Gunny shakes Annie's hand very solemnly. "Do me a favor, LT," he says just before I start the TT down the oys-tershell driveway. "Make sure my boy gets bis butt back down here. Soon, and often. Semper Fi?"

"No problem, Gunny," she says.

I feel a little like I'm being sweated on a felony charge as we head north. Details—who, when, what, why? Annie wants details, more details. Annie says my folks are great, says I'm wrong about Gunny, says the problem's mine, not his, if I still think I'm unwanted down there. "He's genuine, Luther," she tells me. "Not acting to please your mother. My read on all this is pretty simple. He regrets a lot of wasted years. He wants to do what he can to make up for that. He wants to see his son just as bad as your mother does. He just can't express that any way but rough and jokey. Don't blow it off, Luther."

"I'm not. I'm just doubtful."

"Your standard condition. Part of your anotnie."

"That again?"

"It comes with certain professions. Cops, soldiers. We're asked to protect society, but to do that properly we sometimes have to break the society's rules. We feel our leaders are unreliable, society's basically unpredictable and without order. Natural conflict, don't you see? Leads to anger and total frustration."

"I get that, but what about the rest?"

"Easy. We're not hardwired to believe killing is wrong. That's software. In some people it never gets loaded properly, and you get drive-by shooters, mob bit men, coldblooded murderers."

97

"Yeah? I didn't get the right software, is that it? Shit."

"Maybe you got it, but it was taken away. What good's a soldier who'd crumple up and weep every time he shot an enemy? For that matter, what good's a cop who couldn't pull the trigger when a perp was about to shoot his partner?"

"So then why'd Gunny hate me for going to Sarajevo?"

"Because when they erase the killing inhibition, they try to substitute certain protocols to control the killing. Your father has a very rigid set of principles. No doubt he's been developing them and dressing them up with notions like honor and ideas that war should be conducted according to certain rules. Total contradiction right there. The soldier is ordered to destroy the enemy. No way around it. You do lots of psychological gymnastics so you can live with it.

"Shit, I'm running off at the mouth," Annie says. "Short answer, Luther, is that mercenary work violates your father's artificial construction. He hates that, because he knows down deep his own rules are pretty flimsy. Now he's sorry. End of story."

End of conversation, too, for a while. More than enough to mull. Then, as we head north through Maryland, her cell rings just moments before mine. We're each listening hard to our separate callers, talking fast. I push down a bit on the TT's accelerator pedal. We click off almost simultaneously.

"You go first, Luther," Annie says, a little hitch in her voice that worries me.

"Just Ice Box. He's got a live one for tomorrow night. Buy-and-bust. Medium-good, he says. Nothing major. You?"

Annie's staring way down the highway, her right knee bobbing up and down. She won't look at me.

"Major," she says at last.

"C'mon, give," I say.

"Old lady, living alone near Madonna. About sixty-seven years old. Son of a bitch breaks in, rapes her."

"Aw shit."

"But then he feels obliged to rearrange her face with his

98

fists. She's in the hospital now, major reconstructive surgery." Annie sighs.

"Oh man, that's bad."

"On a lighter note," she manages, "get this. Those asshole parents of the reservoir girl? They've shipped her off to some boarding school way up in New England somewhere."

Annie's just closed the TT's door and is loping off toward her house when my cell chirps again.

"What?"

"It's not eleven yet, little brother. Still office hours, yes?"

"I'm not exactly busy at the moment, Vassily."

"Why not come see me then? I'm down here. We talk a little, I show you something funny. Like old times."

That I do not like the sound of, but the address he gives me is on Charles Street, not ten minutes from where I am and on my way home anyway. Turns out to be a row house on a good block just south of Johns Hopkins University. A wirey guy with black hair slicked back greets me at the door. "Shooter you must be," he says, grinning. Russian. "Vassily, he tells me all about you. Me, I am Nick. You come with me."

We go along some corridors. The place is nicely furnished, but there's no sense of a home to it. It's like a room at a Marriott. Near the back of the house Nick leads me down the stairs into the basement, then through a steel door. Through a time warp too.

One bright light on the ceiling, circling a naked black kid tied to a steel chair. He's got a gang tattoo on one corded bicep, and a face from a nightmare! Somebody's been massaging it, most likely with lead-lined gloves. His eyes are so swollen they're just slits, his mouth looks like ground beef.

"Hey Shooter!" Vassily calls from the shadows outside the circle of light, then steps into it and puts a hand on the kid's shoulder. The kid flinches. "Remind you of old times, except here we got no fucking Serb pig. Here we got a thief.

99

This blackie and his friends, they been robbing our pharmaceutical retail operation. Right, Nick?"

"Da, Vassily. For sure."

"But he won't admit it," Vassily goes into Russian. "Pretty tough, this blackie. You want to give it a try, Shooter?"

"Fuck no! I'm finished with that shit," I say, feeling a shakiness and a nausea I know I can't show. "He didn't steal from me."

"Ah little brother, America's made you soft," Vassily laughs. "Okay, Nick. Next step."