The Return: A Novel (20 page)

*   *   *

They had argued, there in the command hooch at Moon River, about the scam with the fake Russians and the porters. Yes, they’d played it in different areas, but the NVA weren’t stupid; they communicated. They’d be saying, “Who’re those white guys driving those stupid Hmong? Who’s the liaison with our command?” and they wouldn’t find a liaison, they’d know it was a scam, and the next time they went out it’d be a massacre. Meanwhile, Colonel Honey was on the horn every day: When are you people going to finish my system? What is wrong with you, Marder, don’t you realize this is the key to the whole war? And Lieutenant Handlebar was getting the same from his people up his chain of command. So, a lot of tension, with Skelly arguing that they had to be blown, that they should go out on the last mission at night and do the usual sneak play and emplace the last fifty or so voodoos that way. And he had prevailed.

Skelly volunteered to lead it, and Marder couldn’t back out; not that he wanted to back out. The whole unit was psyched up by the prospect of finishing the mission and seeing how the new system worked. To Marder’s surprise, Pinto Hayden also volunteered. Hayden said that he’d like to go because if they had another technician working they could get through it that much faster. There was a little silence and then Sweathog also said, “Yeah, what the fuck,” and the lieutenant said, “Shit, we’ll all go, we’ll get another bird in.”

The birds came, three Jolly Green Giants, and they almost scratched the mission because of the low ceiling, but it lifted later the next morning and they flew out to an old half-overgrown LZ on the east side of a mountain near A Yen, on the other side of which was a place where two main branches of the trail converged and it was therefore vital to sensorize. They flew in without incident, ascended the mountain, and Remained Over Night on the steep slopes, digging niches in the mud to park their exhausted bodies.

A chill mist covered the mountain as they descended the next morning. They were in three teams, each with eight montagnard soldiers, a Special Forces sergeant in command, a lone airman, and one LLDB along in case they needed to interrogate someone or confuse the enemy. Marder was in Skelly’s team, walking just within visual range of Baang, Skelly’s radioman, watching the sway of the big basket that contained their PRC-25 radio with the antennae rolled up and concealed. When they started out, they could barely see more than five meters and they kept bunching up for fear of becoming separated, and Skelly was trotting up and down the line calling out in a harsh stage whisper to keep their distance. Every so often the leading team, with Hayden and Pogo, would stop and they’d wait in silence, listening to the drip of water from foliage and the gurgle of the rushing stream whose gorge they were following. It was dangerous to walk down stream valleys—always a good place to get ambushed; it was safer to chop your way through thorn and bamboo—but for this mission they were taking the risk; they needed silence and speed.

As the morning wore on, the mist lifted a little, and Marder could see the line of men, maybe four or five in either direction, and he could see also that they had entered a zone of disturbed forest. Trees had been knocked over by blast and the area had been defoliated, which was how they knew they were close to the trail. The sergeants posted security teams and the airmen got to work, opening the little globes of the voodoos, turning them on, pinging the relays to ensure that they could communicate with the net, burying each in a shallow pit, and artfully stringing the antennae, rootlike, vinelike, around any conveniently upright vegetation.

That wasn’t the memory. He really didn’t recall the meeting in the command hooch, or Hayden or the others, or the flight in, or the overnight stay on the steepest slopes, or burying the sensors at the edges of the trail. He had reconstructed all of this tale out of supposition and from what Skelly had said over the years, usually when he was drunk; in other words, he had created a plausible fiction he could relate to himself and others, a literal war story.

What he actually remembered was:

The explosion. The disorienting sound, the soft whump of the shock wave a fraction of a second later.

Green tracer blossoming out of the gloom, the snap of rounds passing overhead. Screams, people running, shouting, and somehow more distantly the percussive pop of weapons firing.

Skelly grabbing at his rucksack, screaming in his ear to move, move, return fire. The cut-down grenade launcher being placed in his hand.

The acrid smell of propellant. A man maddened with pain, screaming God’s name and obscene curses …

The sense of everything slowing down, of his body recovering from the paralysis of fear and perfoming simple operations—pointing the launcher, pulling the trigger, breaking open the smoking breech, inserting another fat sausage-like round; and again.

Taking cover behind an immense fallen tree, firing shotgun rounds at groups of men in green uniforms and pith helmets running by, seeing them fall, knowing he’d killed them, seeing one PAVN soldier raise his rifle and fire directly at him, and knowing, absolutely, irrationally, that he was invulnerable, that no bullet could kill him, the man shooting and the bullets flying overhead, and him struggling to get another round in the M79 and firing almost point-blank into the man, seeing his middle dissolve into a red jam. The man’s rifle flying upward.

And the feeling. They talk about adrenaline, but Marder knew it was much more than adrenaline; it was a mystical cocktail that comes only from this one act, from killing men at the risk of yourself dying, a Pleistocene inheritance, disgusting and marvelous at the same time. Sports, even violent sports, were just a pale shadow of this. Why they’d never abolish war.

*   *   *

“Hey, buddy.”

Marder felt a hand on his arm, shaking gently. Skelly’s face was there, but strangely it was not covered in sweat and red dust. It did not have the unique expression melding terror, rage, and control that was Skelly’s face in combat.

“You back with us?”

Marder shook his head violently and shuddered. “Jesus! I was somewhere else.”

“Yeah, you were muttering and waving your arms around. You were scaring the girls.”

Marder looked around. Amparo, Lourdes, and Pepa were standing frozen on the terrace, staring at him, looking like the decorative extras in an Antonioni movie tableau. He wondered vaguely where his daughter was.

“You ought to put away the pistol too, chief.”

Marder stared at the gun in his hand—his father’s .45—and dropped it on the table.

“How’re you feeling, chief?” Skelly asked. “The margos going down pretty good?”

“I was back in the war,” Marder said. “It was shooting those guys today. It was that firefight we got into in the blasted forest. When Hayden and Lascaglia got it. And we hauled Pogo out. I remember—I mean
really
remember it, but in flashes. I mean, I know what happened, but just now I … it was like I was there.”

“What happened?” This was Pepa, coming over, offering to sit, getting the nod, sitting down, and pouring herself a drink from the seriously depleted pitcher of margaritas. “Marder here was having a flashback,” said Skelly. “We were in Vietnam together.”

“Really,” she said. “A particularly stupid war, even among American wars.”

“Yeah, but the part we were in wasn’t stupid at all. We were protecting an indigenous people from a nasty regime that wanted to exterminate them, but somehow that cut no ice with the fine liberal sensibilities of the people who wanted us to leave. In the particular instance Marder is referring to, what happened, since you asked, is that a small party of Special Forces and montagnards ran into a reinforced company of PAVNs—North Vietnamese regular soldiers—who just happened to be in the area looking for just such operations as the one we were on. One of our people touched off a trip-wire mine, and we had a running firefight up a mountain.”

“It was foggy,” said Marder, “so we couldn’t call for air support and we were out of artillery range. I thought we were dead.”

“War stories bore me,” said Pepa, “especially ones from lost wars.”

Skelly ignored her. “Yeah, we were dead. A lot of us were actually dead by then. And then the wind picked up, the fog blew away, and a Spectre gunship that had been loitering in the area came zooming in and blew them up. There was no foliage and—”

Skelly stopped and looked off into the distance, as if had just remembered an appointment.

“—and I have to agree with the señora here. War stories
are
boring. I was going to take Statch around the island to look at some of the things we got going, she being a real live professional engineer. You want to come?”

“I would if I could walk,” said Marder.

“Then I’ll see you later,” said Skelly. He nodded to the reporter. “Señora. I’ll try to think up something more entertaining for next time.”

*   *   *

“What a strange little man,” said Espinoza, after a drink. “This is a good margarita. I’m surprised. What does he do, your friend?”

“He runs a security firm.”

“That could mean anything. It’s like import–export.”

“True. But Skelly is unusually close about his business dealings. He spends a good deal of time in Asia.”

“And you—you’ve retired from book editing, you said, and you’re here to enjoy the sun and fun, taking the precaution of bringing an armory with you. Obviously you’re under no obligation to tell me what you’re really here for, but I would appreciate not being treated as a fool.”

“I had no intention, Señora Espinoza—”

“In fact, if you’re going to survive much longer in this lovely resort, you will require some information about the various players. Perhaps we could arrange a trade.”

“Fine, but I’m sure my information is not nearly as rich and valuable as your information. It would hardly be a fair trade.”

“We’ll see. And call me Pepa, like everyone else does. Señora Espinoza is my mother.”

“I see. And how
is
your mother, Pepa?”

“She’s fine. She has a job in the Ministry of Culture and gives her old clothes to her maid. A model of socially responsible bourgeois womanhood.”

“And your father. Is he also a model?”

“Yes. He’s Cesar Teodor Espinoza.”

“The architect?”

“That one. He travels a good deal and is generous to his wife and his several mistresses. No one could ask for a better father.”

“I sense a tone of disaffected sarcasm.”

“You sense correctly. I was raised in surroundings insulating me from the reality of my country. When I grew up, I decided to change that, to actually live in Mexico and not in the international icing that frosts its upper layers, and, if I could, as a journalist, to rub the faces of my class in the realities of their unfortunate nation.”

“And how is the rubbing going?”

“Indifferently. It was scandalous when I became a telenovela actress, and, if possible, the scandal was doubled when I became a reporter on the narco beat. My mother’s friends don’t mention me to her anymore, as if I were a whore in the Red Zone. My father thinks it’s amusing that I am playing at journalism and is always asking me when I’m going to forget all this nonsense and get married.”

She finished her margarita, lifted the pitcher as if to pour another, then set it down with a metallic clang on the tin table, leaving her glass empty.

“I believe that is sufficient information about me. Oh, one other thing: I despise America. I despise your policies on drugs and immigration, the unconscionable hypocrisy, and I find that most Americans are exactly what one would expect from citizens of such a disgusting and destructive nation. Now, tell me why you are here in Playa Diamante. And no quotes from
Casablanca,
if you please.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I was going to open a saloon and call it Rick’s. But you can call me that, since we seem to be on an informal basis now. Why am I here? The short answer is, my late wife was from here. I brought her ashes back here to be interred in the family crypt in La Huacana. Aside from that, I felt I needed a break. And, unlike you, I love my neighbor. I love Mexico, the top parts and the bottom parts. I love it as only an exile can love his country, even though it’s not my country. I stole my wife from here, an act of selfishness I’ve always regretted, and so when I decided to retire, I chose to come here.”

“You chose to come equipped like a small army, with an apparently deadly henchman in the ‘security’ business? And a cannon? I think you’ll have to do better than that.”

Marder laughed. “What can I say? Skelly attached himself to me without my invitation. You should ask
him
what he’s doing here and why he brought his cannon along.”

“Perhaps I will. Why did you buy this particular house?”

“It was on offer, and the price was right. A bargain, in fact.”

She looked at him closely. “Interesting. You’re lying about why you came but not about your reasons for buying this property. Let me ask you something: Have you been threatened at all since you came here? I mean aside from the events of today, which I suppose were directed at me.”

“Yes. Early this afternoon some men came and told us to get out.”

“Did you get their names?”

“Yes. Gasco and Crusellas. They said they worked for Servando Gomez.”

“Well, in that case, you’re in trouble with the Templos as well as La Familia. I wouldn’t like to be your life-insurance company.”

“And the Templos are…?”

“An offshoot of La Familia. You know who
they
are, don’t you?”

“The drug gang.”

“More than a drug gang. A drug gang with religious pretensions, which is just what Mexico needs, another murderous cult justifying their crimes as ordered by God.”

“Are they actually religious?”

“No one in Mexico is religious. Oh, there are some elderly ladies, I suppose, but besides that the Church has always been a racket to keep the people distracted while they’re raped every day by their rulers. It’s the same here.”

“I’m religious,” said Marder mildly.

She didn’t seem to register this statement. “As far as La Familia is concerned, one of the early
jefes
got hold of some American evangelical’s book of nonsense about how to be a heroic Christian man, and now they all read it and quote from it while they do their murders, which naturally are all defined as God’s justice.”