There Will Be Killing (20 page)

He had noticed this new letter was skinny, though. But even skinny letters without drawings or clippings deserved the royal treatment. He was grateful for anything.

So he opened the envelope.

There were many things soldiers all dreaded and Izzy knew what they were: A mine blowing off their legs or, even worse, their balls. Burns from the napalm or white phosphorus. Beyond that though was the “Dear John,” and it was only when he was half way through reading her letter that he realized he was holding a deadly snake in his hands.

First Izzy felt cold and his hands were numb and shaking as if he was going into shock, and maybe he was because he started over from the top because he was sure, he was certain, that he did not understand what he was reading. . .

“We are so far apart and it is not the distance, it is that nothing is the same anymore, because we have grown in different directions.”
What was she saying?
“I was in the Village with a friend and heard Bob Dylan singing ‘Mr. Jones,' and I thought you are like Dr. Jones now. It's something my women's anti-war group has really helped me see.”
What the hell did Bob Dylan and Mr. Jones have to do with him? And just what was she talking about. . . seeing what?
“I have started seeing a man that I feel is like a soulmate to me.” Izzy looked up and out at the sea.
What the fuck is a soulmate?
“I have sent both the ring and your classical guitar back to your mother, Israel. I don't think she was too unhappy with my decision. You know she never thought we were well suited and I've come to realize on that much she was right. I'm sorry you were drafted but maybe it's not entirely a bad thing if it kept us from making a serious mistake. Please know I wish you only the best. . . . ”
Best? BEST?

“Fucking god!” he suddenly screamed. “Wish me the BEST? The BEST
what?
Have the best fucking war over there, have the best fucking time ever by yourself over there?” Izzy leaned over and puked up everything in his stomach. He could not believe how much pain he already was feeling, how betrayed and deserted. . .
what was he going to do?
He needed to get home and right now. He would talk to Colonel Kohn and say—

Say what, that just like half of all the other poor sons of a bitches over here he'd gotten a Dear John and that he was sorry to say that he had to leave immediately, had to get home to straighten all this out and he would promise to come right back as soon as he could? He just had to talk to her, had to—

He made himself finish reading the letter, forced his blurry vision onto the remainder that said: “please do not try to call me, my mind is made up. I have thought long and hard on this Israel. To everything there is a season. Now I need my space and you must accept that the engagement is over. One day you will thank me. With deep affection, Rachel.”

“Affection,” Izzy whispered. Then shouted,
“AFFECTION?”

Izzy crumbled the letter in his fist. He sat in the sand. It got dark. After a time, he realized that someone was sitting next to him. It was K.O. He turned and looked into the brown eyes of the big dog. She licked the hand that still gripped Rachel's betrayal. And he wept.

And then Izzy realized someone else had come to sit on his other side.

“Dear John, huh?” J.D. passed him a joint. “Welcome again to Vietnam.”

Izzy destroyed Rachel's letter with the burning tip of a joint and proceeded to get so stoned and wasted that he didn't remember much of the night or know how he managed to wake up in his own bed sometime the next afternoon. He had never been so irresponsible as to sleep in late and miss a class, much less rounds, but once he pried his aching eyes open from his pounding head, Izzy saw the note taped to his chest:

Take the day off. We've got you covered.

A glass of water was beside the bed. Along with a bottle of aspirin, a bottle of Jack, and a sleeve of saltine crackers.

He eventually managed to make it to the kitchen sometime before dark. There were chocolate chip cookies on the counter. He knew who was responsible for that. And he knew who had him covered at the hospital. Izzy realized then that the one person he thought he could count on at home knew nothing about loyalty or real friendship. He wondered if she had planned this all along, if she had been going out on him while he was in training, before he even got shipped over here. Maybe he was better off without Rachel and maybe he would thank her one day, but now all he felt was stupid and duped and hurt and so extremely hung over that he was grateful to have something to focus on besides the utter bleakness he felt inside because it felt a lot like the day Morrie ended up in the hospital as a quadriplegic.

Izzy looked at his arms. He looked at his legs. All he had on was a pair of boxer shorts so he could see himself pretty good if he didn't count his still blurred vision. Something had happened to the tone of his body and the color of his pale skin since he had been here and he wondered if Rachel would notice, if it would make a difference. And if it did, what would it matter anyway since she wanted her space with a soul mate that didn't remind her of Mr. Jones while she went to her women's anti-war protests and was counting the days to Woodstock?

Days, how many days?

“342 and a wake-up,” muttered Izzy as he bit into a cookie.

When Gregg and Robert David quietly entered the kitchen they simply said, “How're you doing, man?”

Gregg slapped him some skin. “Margie was in for a few hours today. She asked where you were and I told her you'd been called into the ER at the hospital again but I knew you had a little something for her when you got back.”

Gregg slid a nice box of chocolates next to the cookies.

Robert David followed up by depositing some cheap green, purple and gold beaded necklaces with a coveted copy of the latest Playboy magazine and said, “That will have to do until I take you to a proper Mardi Gras.”

And then they gave him his space.

The next morning Izzy woke up early. He wandered down to the beach, the same place where he had read Rachel's Dear John, as if he could eradicate her betrayal by greeting a new day where the sun would soon be rising out of the South China Sea. He knew this would be the only cool whisper of breeze there would be, the only peace to be had, until he went to sleep again and woke up early tomorrow.

He was a lucky man to have such good friends in this strange, foreign place that had begun to feel more familiar than home. Izzy knew that, but he still felt like shit. Though maybe he wouldn't feel quite as shitty if he still had the letter to put up in the enlisted men's hooch on the Wall of Shame with all the rest of the Dear Johns he had been invited to join. Bayer had trekked over to the villa to issue the invitation with a big slice of lemon cream pie hijacked from the enlisted men's mess hall, saying that was Hertz's favorite and he'd want Izzy to have it.

News traveled fast in this fraternity he had never imagined joining, and for once Izzy didn't regret being in the company he was keeping instead of the company he just might be better off without. If Rachel couldn't stand by him in the short term, what kind of long term chance for happiness did they have, really?

Just then, Izzy came upon something he didn't expect. Feeling like a voyeur he softly padded over the sand and closer to the ironwood tree where J.D. moved in some sort of bizarre slow motion dance choreography.

“Take off your shoes and socks and shirt and copy me,” J.D. instructed, his back still turned and a good ten feet away. “Come on, Izzy, it'll do you good.”

“How did you know it's me?”

“I heard you walking and I smelled your aftershave and you are a mouth breather. So close your mouth, breathe through your nose, be quiet and copy me. We'll work on the aftershave later but for now, just shadow my moves and see what happens.”

And he did. Izzy moved and he moved and he moved and for a few seconds he was not here, not anywhere, he was just present in the silent movement.

In the end, J.D. bowed out to the sea. Izzy copied that, too.

“Did you like that?” J.D. asked.

“Actually, I did. It was relaxing. What was it?”

“Something very old, called Tai Chi, something my grandfather taught me.”

“You have a Chinese grandfather?” Interesting. J.D. had a unique look about him but Chinese didn't seem part of his genetic composition.

“Maybe,” J.D. answered, typically cryptic, before pointing to the water. “Let's swim out and we'll work on some breathing lessons.”

“I don't like to swim and besides, it's deep out there.”

“It's all deep everywhere and always will be.”

“Since when did you become a philosopher?”

J.D. grinned. “Since I studied to be a monk?”

“I think your sense of humor is highly underestimated, J.D.”

“Who knows, maybe I'll give stand-up a try if this agent gig doesn't work out. Until then, though. . . ” J.D. motioned in the direction of an in-coming chopper. “I hate to tell you this, but we have a ride coming for you, me and Gregg later this morning. Compliments of Rick again.”

“What?”
Izzy just started shaking his head no, no, no. “Uh-uh, no way. I am not going back to the Highlands, not after that last trip to see Rick and our nice little tour of the morgue.”

“You and Gregg said you would help.” J.D.'s voice was firm. “I took you at your word and I'm asking you to step up to the plate now.”

“I'm not going back on my word J.D., but we seem to have a little difference of opinion as to what ‘help' means. I can understand your need to make sense of why some psychopathic monsters might be carving up our troops. I can even understand why you possibly felt the need to drag us to a firebase in an attack helicopter to look at mutilated dead bodies to help figure that out. But Gregg and I don't need any other visible evidence to assist you in a consulting capacity.”

“A consulting capacity?” J.D. repeated. “Oh, you mean like sitting around the table the other morning and discussing theories and throwing out some ideas about psychological profiles, I believe you called them.”

“Exactly.”

J.D. tapped his chin as if deep in thought. “Hmm. Okay, then if you don't mind humoring me, could you describe how you went about your previous consulting experience?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, back home, maybe you had a nice office to use, a comfortable chair, possibly even an impressive desk?”

“Yes. It was typically a pleasant academic or clinical setting. That's how most assessments are offered, or discussions conducted on whatever psychopathology is being presented by, or to, a psychiatrist.”

“While you enjoy a fine coffee, perhaps.”

Izzy closed his eyes and sighed deeply, imagining himself in the office overlooking Central Park with a beautiful cup of cappuccino on a beautiful modern Eames table, and sighed again, “Yes.”

“Then you need to wake the fuck up, Dr. Moskowitz, because this is
not
a pleasant academic or clinical setting. This is
not
a situation that is conducive to a nice cushy chair with coffee served while you discuss or assess or psycho-whatever in a typical consulting capacity. What this
is,
is a top of the very top hierarchy of needs from the military brass that doesn't give two shits about what you or Dr. Kelly consider ‘helping.' If they wanted assistance in the kind of ‘consulting capacity' you're so generously offering, don't you think they'd hire Einstein if they wanted to?”

“Einstein was a physicist,” Izzy muttered, toeing the sand. “And he died in 1955.”

“That's not the point!” J.D. paused, lowered his voice. “Listen, I don't know what you think I'm doing when I'm not around but I can assure you that it involves getting information potentially pertinent to this case from resources less savory than your own.”

Izzy suddenly felt a little belligerent. “Oh? And here I thought you were sipping
Soixante Quinzes
with Kate during happy hour. I'm sure Gregg will be relieved to know all of your time is being wisely invested elsewhere.”

A muscle ticked in J.D.'s cheek. He took a deep breath and appeared to be exercising an enormous amount of control. “If I'm calling you in it's because I've exhausted all other possibilities and I have no choice but to go with what I've got to work with and right now that means responding to a request Rick made via the right channels that we pay another visit to discuss a plan he has in the works.”

“Fine, he can come here and we will plan to your heart's content.”

“He's training some new troops, so we go to him, not the other way around.”

“Then Rick is calling the shots now, is that it?” Izzy didn't know why he was deliberately pushing J.D.'s buttons except he didn't feel like he had anything left to lose, except maybe another friend he thought he had but was no more a friend than Rachel had turned out to be if he was willing to subject him and Gregg to more trauma.

“This is why guys like me don't get to have friends like you, Moskowitz. Because then you start to think we're equals, that I owe you some kind of explanation. But that's not the way it works, it's not how I get the job done, and as to who is calling the shots, let's get it straight for sure that you and Greggy boy are not calling any.”

J.D. folded his arms across his chest. Izzy knew what that defensive body language signaled. J.D. was closing out the friend he said he couldn't have.

Maybe they had never been friends. Maybe Gregg was right and J.D. was possibly a sociopath since he clearly displayed enough hallmarks for one:

Charming when necessary, even seductive.

Successful, often at the expense of others.

A natural aptitude to manipulate people and situations to his advantage.

A lack of remorse when others paid for his personal gain.

And he could be a stone cold killer as Izzy had witnessed their first day.

Despite the ax Gregg had to grind over Kate, Gregg had not wanted to assign J.D. to that particularly disturbing personality category—
especially
because of J.D.'s involvement with Kate. Izzy thought of how J.D. had been good to him in his own way, and he didn't want to go to that dark place of suspicion either. But neither did he want to delude himself into the possibility of friendship with someone capable of strategically using others to their benefit while emulating expressions and emotions often learned at a young age from normal people because they were usually highly intelligent and became highly accomplished actors in order to fit in when, in reality, they were not capable of real feeling or carrying the burden of a conscience.

Hell, who knew? Maybe J.D. was the Ghost Soldier by night to keep his day job safe and had no qualms about using him and Gregg as the equivalent of imprisoned gladiators to keep the top brass entertained. Izzy had never thought himself the paranoid type, but anyone who didn't have a degree of paranoia in this crazy place would be less than normal. Yay. He was paranoid. That made him normal. Amazing how the mind worked to justify just about anything.

Izzy crossed his own arms. “Did you know about this trip being set up when you found me the other night?”

“It didn't seem the best time to bring it up.”

“So were you being nice to me, just to get me to agree to this?”

J.D. stared at him, hard, his eyes sharp yet dull like flint. Izzy stared straight back, refusing to give up ground. “Well?” he demanded.

“I don't have to be nice to anyone to get them to do what I need them to do,” J.D. said flatly. “I expect to see you and Gregg at the LZ at 1100 hours. I'm not sure how long we'll be gone so pack accordingly.”

“Anything else? Sir?”

“No. That will be all.”

Izzy had gone several steps when he heard J.D. say, “Wait.”

Izzy kept walking. Acknowledging any excuses or apologies from J.D. was not how it worked; not when the fury Izzy nursed had nothing on the fear already rolling like thunder through his guts.

J.D. had been right at the get-go. He needed to wake the fuck up.