The Return: A Novel (8 page)

In the next moment it occurred to her that a single phone call might resolve both the dad problem and the tension, which she now identified as at least partly sexual in nature. Like many women of her generation and cast of mind, Statch had an engineering relationship to her own body and its requirements. She knew what she liked, she knew how to get it, and the only problem was getting it without entanglements—that is, with a minimum expenditure of emotional energy. Someday she would reset the program so as to enable marriage and children, but not just yet. It puzzled her when she heard women say there were no good men left, because she’d found plenty. She thought that what women of the educated classes meant when they said this was that there were no good upper-middle-class men making six figures who were not metrosexual wimps or work-obsessed assholes or gay persons. Possibly true, but Statch did not require her lovers to hold a degree from a good college, or even one from high school, or to work at high-status, big-bucks jobs. She demanded only a sense of humor, a nice body, a certain edge, a competence in the physical world, and that they liked her. Recent guys had included a chef, a stock-car racer, the stock-car racer’s chief mechanic, a Boston police detective, and a boatbuilder.

She told her machine, “Call Mick.” This was the cop.

*   *   *

Marder decided to stop in Baton Rouge, believing that the Louisiana city might host craftsmen skilled at repairing bullet holes in vehicles, and so it proved. At Bob’s Body, out on Airline Highway, he waved thick wads of cash in the greasy little office, until the eponymous Bob got the idea: no insurance, no records, no taxes, double pay for a one-day job starting this minute.

When that was settled, he dodged across the highway to a McDonald’s. The day was warm and would get warmer, the dense, white-skied sticky heat of the gulf south, a climate Marder particularly disliked. He didn’t mind heat as long as it was dry; he liked to bake, but boiling annoyed him. He felt he’d boiled enough in his life, in both Vietnam and New York summers.

He paused outside the restaurant and looked through the glass. Skelly always sat strategically in public places, and here had chosen a booth in a corner, with a good view of the street, back to the wall, close to the rear exit. Marder hung for a moment, slightly outside Skelly’s angle of view, and watched—silly, really, but being with Skelly tended to make one conspiratorial.

Skelly was drinking iced tea and writing with a cheap ballpoint in a small notebook. Despite the heat, he was wearing a tan cotton jacket over his T-shirt, and he had his old Red Sox cap pulled down over his eyes, which were obscured by Vuarnet sunglasses. Holding the notebook with one hand, Skelly reached into an inside jacket pocket and, to Marder’s surprise, pulled out a telephone, a thick black thing with a pencil antenna. Marder walked in. Until he started this trip, he had not been in a fast-food joint since his kids were grown, and now, in the chill of the A/C, smelling the familiar slightly sickening odor of cheap food, he resolved not to do so again. He slid into the seat before Skelly could slip the phone back into his pocket.

“I thought you didn’t own a cell phone, Skelly.”

“I don’t.”

“Then what was that thing you just stuck in your pocket, a bagel? Your personal vibrator?”

“That’s a sat phone.”

“Really. Who were you talking to on it?”

“A guy. What’s with Bubba across the way? He going to fix your truck? Not that I thought it needed fixing. I thought the bullet holes took some of the respectable old-fart asshole shine off the thing, added a little street cred.”

“We don’t need street cred where we’re going. We want to be invisible.”

“Yeah, I sort of got that part. You mind telling me why?”

“Asks the most invisible man in America. It’s simple. I don’t want to be bothered. I want time for peaceful contemplation in my Mexican hideaway. Why is that hard for you to understand?”

“Because it’s complete bullshit. You’re armed to the teeth, you’re paying cash, you got your cell switched off. This tells me you’re on the run from something. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help.”

“I appreciate that, Patrick, and let me assure you, in all sincerity, that there is nothing I am fleeing from or hiding from. Like you, I’m an aging man entitled to a few eccentricities, of which this trip is one. I didn’t invite you along, but now that you’re here I’d like you to respect my wish for a certain anonymity. Tell me one thing—are you packing heat this fine morning?”

“What, you mean guns? Hell, no!” Slight pause. “Just the Sig is all.”

“Oh, wonderful. I’m really looking forward to spending my … my vacation in some southern jail.” Marder had almost said “last days” but checked himself in time.

“Right, so this is why you haven’t said twelve fucking words to me since those guys jumped us in that roadhouse in Buttfuck, Georgia? Because you’re scared I’ll disturb your contemplation?”

“Jumped us?
Jumped
us? You walked into a biker bar and provoked a violent confrontation, from which I had to rescue you with a firearm, after which you destroyed maybe a quarter-million bucks’ worth of—”

“First of all, who’re you talking to? Your grandmother? ‘Rescue’ was not the operative word, my friend. Interference I’ll give you; escalation, yes. If you’d kept that cannon in your jeans, in three minutes every one of those Confederate assholes would’ve been shit out of action. You’ve seen me do it.”

“I have. When you were twenty-three, when you were thirty—”

“What’re you saying? I’m past it? I’m fucked?”

Skelly’s voice had risen to the combat decibel range, suitable for good communications over small-arms fire, and the usual mix of Mickey D patrons was staring at them, some with avid interest, some with fear. A chubby youth in a white shirt with a plastic name tag on it had eased his cell phone out.

Marder stood up abruptly. “Yes, you’re a superannuated bag of gas. To prove it, we’re going to call a cab, find a pool hall, and I’ll whip your ass in nine ball while we wait for Bob to fix my proletarian vehicle.”

“In your dreams,” said Skelly.

*   *   *

Marder was actually a somewhat better pool player than Skelly was, but Skelly had won the majority of the games they’d played over the years, simply because he wanted to win more than Marder did. They played a match of eleven games, win by two, and Marder dragged the thing out to twenty-three games, enjoying Skelly’s increasing discomfort, before easing off and throwing the last game, enjoying also the boyish triumph on his friend’s face. Not a competitive guy, Marder, although he wondered sometimes whether his remaining life might present him with some combat worth giving his all for. It’d be interesting if that happened.

There was a seafood joint a little ways down the highway, so they walked over and had a meal, Cajun-style seafoods, rich and spicy. When they’d finished, Marder said, “Why don’t you call Bob and see if the truck’s done. He said five-thirty.”

Skelly obligingly took out his costly brick and made the call, then called a cab. Bob turned out to be an artist with Bondo and paint. The holes were all neatly patched and the glass had been either plugged or replaced. Bob didn’t ask questions about whatever had caused the bullet holes, nor did he comment when he observed Skelly attaching Louisiana license plates to the Ford.

Marder did, however.

“May I ask what the fuck?”

“Yeah, well, a little insurance. As you pointed out, we may have damaged some fascist motor vehicles back there and started a fire and so forth. I thought maybe the word might’ve filtered through to the police.”

“Where did you get the plates?”

“Some guy I know.”

“Some guy? What guy?”

“A guy who sells phony plates. It’s a need-to-know thing, Marder. Leave it lie. The papers’re all in the glove, your name and everything. So, are we rolling or what?”

*   *   *

After that, interminable Texas. Marder drove through the night, sometimes straying off the interstate to find a place to eat that wasn’t a chain and finding some good little places: once a Chinese restaurant that, incredibly, made delicious egg rolls from scratch, another with biscuits from heaven. The food gradually became more Mexican-ish as they headed west from San Antonio but never became really Mexican. Marder found that he had a hunger for the food that his wife used to make, the food of her native soil, the place where he was going.

The country had changed since the last time he’d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings:
GO COUGARS
!
GO HAWKS
!
GO REBELS
! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.

Marder thought of himself as a patriot, but, like many men his age, he was a patriot of a nation that seemed no longer to exist. Modernity had failed, obviously, and now he was going into a country that modernity had failed even more spectacularly; all the bright ideas of the imported religion, of the imported economics, of the imported revolution, of industrialization, of education, of freedom even, had all failed or had been attempted in such a warped fashion that they could not work, could not change the immemorial nature of that land and its people. What remained was the strange country, inexplicable, that he did not understand but that he loved, as he had not understood but had loved his wife.

The land rose. Marder had left the interstate and was now climbing into the Davis Mountains on a state road. He had forgotten that Texas had mountains, but here they were, damp, cool, verdant, with trickling rocky streams, smelling of pine and sage. They passed through a state park and Marder pulled off the road at an overlook.

“Nice country,” said Skelly, who was sitting in the passenger seat, unusually, for he typically spent the daylight hours back in the camper, sleeping and doing various bits of business that required the use of his special laptop and his special phone. He also claimed it embarrassed him to watch Marder drive.

“Wasted on Texas, of course,” he added. He lit another cigarette and held it out the window between drags, which was the acme of consideration for him. The cigarettes came out of a Marlboro pack, but they were unfiltered, hand-rolled, and laced with hash oil.

“You don’t like Texas?”

“No. But I don’t like any of the states. To be honest, I’ve never been in North Dakota, so it could be an exception and not full of stupid, fat, arrogant, ignorant, money-grubbing, whining, hypocritical American assholes.”

“Come on, Skelly, we’re not that bad.”

“Yes, we are: fat, doped up, and dangerous. Did you see that parody poster? Picture of some nice country like this here and the caption goes, ‘America! It’s more than bombs and fat people.’ Actually, not.”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“Yes, we have, and you always lose. I’m going for a run. You want to come along, fat boy?”

“I am height and weight proportional for my age.”

“You’re soft as cream cheese. And don’t think you’re going to ditch me, ’cause I got the keys.”

Marder watched the man trot down the road with his usual effortless lope.

*   *   *

He recalled now the first time he’d seen it and how much he had hated Skelly then. The three of them—Marder, Hayden, and Lascaglia—set off just after dawn one morning in 1969, in the dry season, in a helicopter with the gear and hopes of Iron Tuna aboard, one of a dozen such little teams of volunteer air force technicans. They’d trained on the equipment for three weeks, and now they were off to the Special Forces base camp for jungle training. Not one of them had ever been in a helicopter before or in a jungle. They were headed toward a Special Forces base called Bronco One.

They were set down in a clearing, Marder recalled, and humped the heavy containers that held the repeaters and the voodoo devices, plus their personal gear and weapons; then the chopper lifted off, leaving them alone somewhere in Vietnam or maybe the Kingdom of Laos. Marder didn’t recall the details, only the feeling of absolute vulnerability and the waving saw grass and the threatening dark tree line. Again, he could not bring to his mental screen the faces of the other two men. Lascaglia was jumpy, a nervous dark kid from Providence or Boston, and Hayden was an Appalachian person with more than the usual reserve such people had, a silent, almost passive presence.

A group of small dark men in mixed uniforms, some wearing brimmed jungle hats, others with cloth headbands, emerged from the tree line. Lascaglia grabbed his M16 and started to curse, but Marder said, “Relax, man, those are montagnards. They’re the good guys.”

Or something to that effect. At any rate, the Yards helped them carry their gear, each man lifting a heavy olive-drab case up on his tiny shoulders as if it were a feather pillow. They walked down a jungle trail for what seemed like miles but was probably only a klick or two. Marder had got hold of a Hmong phrase book in Nakhon and said “Nyob zoo” to anyone who passed him, but he was ignored. But he’d read enough to know that Hmong was impossible to learn from a book, since a syllable could mean wildly different things depending on which of the seven tones you spoke it in, so he wasn’t worried. He had a good ear—the nuns had told him that in Spanish and Latin class—so he figured he’d learn it with the daily exposure. The boyish adventure novels he’d grown up on all stressed that imperial troopers in foreign lands did well to learn the native tongues. He recalled being happy walking down that trail, not afraid at all; it was Kipling brought to life.