Part 29 (1/2)
”My problem is you.”
Tanner stood up unsteadily. Men approached to restrain him, but he shook them off. ”I'm done here.” He wiped his bloodied mouth and looked at his hand. ”Quang Ngai.
I'm supposed to interfere with a bunch of wackedout Marines? They were VC in the tunnels. What if they killed one of our guys?”
Darrow leaned against the wall, rubbing his hand. ”Gunning down women and children.”
”We're not the morality police out there. Especially you, huh? As long as you have the wife and kiddie back home, the piece of a.s.s over here, it's all okay, huh?”
Darrow lunged. It took Robert and three other men to drag him outside. Although Darrow and Helen had been together openly for more than a year now, the spoken words unleashed something. She felt looks from some of the men, stares from wives and girlfriends.
”Forget Tanner,” Robert said. ”He's a s.h.i.+t. You've given him wet dreams even taking him seriously.”
”I'm sorry,” Darrow said. ”I shouldn't have come.”
”Come back in. It's still early,” Robert said.
”Not for me.”
Helen searched for Annick to say good-bye. At the end of the bar she spotted quivering red sparkles. When she got closer, Annick was crying.
”What's wrong?” Helen said.
Annick shrugged. ”It's all coming apart.” ”What is?” ”Everything. The war is ending.” ”Where's... your guy?”
Annick tossed her head, annoyed. ”He's nothing.”
”I thought he was the one.”
”Only the war is the one.”
Darrow and Helen drove back home in silence. Helen hung up her borrowed back home in silence. Helen hung up her borrowed dress, turned on the red-shaded lamp. They went to bed, lay side by side, not touching or talking, then rolled away from each other in sleep.
In the middle of the night, Helen awakened to the rumble of thunder, the sound of rain on the roof. From long habit, she hurriedly got up to put bowls under the regular leaks in the ceiling. Back in bed, she listened to the drops of water plink first against metal, then against water. Darrow rose and stood at the window, smoking.
”I guess you don't care we might drown in a puddle in our sleep,” she said.
”d.a.m.ned thing is he's right.”
She stared at the water stain on the ceiling. ”Who?”
”That SOB Tanner.”
”About?”
”What p.i.s.ses me off is seeing myself in him.”
Helen sat up, knees folded beneath her chin. ”You're nothing like him.”
Darrow came to the bed and sat down. ”I've been here too long. I hear something going down in Can Tho or Pleiku, I have to be the first one there.”
”That's your job.”
”I've been leading you along, too.” He took hold of her arm, stroking the skin at her wrist. ”I don't mean to.”
”Don't leave because of me,” she said.
Darrow shook his head. ”Let's take our trip to Cambodia. I want to see the apsara s again. I had dreams there....” s again. I had dreams there....”
Lying in his arms, she realized Darrow spoke with other people's words. Words she wanted to hear but that were not necessarily the same as the truth. He created himself like a collage, bits and pieces that she would never come to the bottom of.
”I'm ready to leave with you,” he said.
She had dreamed the words so long that she barely made sense of them, but she tried to convince herself that the long siege was over. He loved her after all, and now they could go home.
When he left early that morning, she was still sleeping.
It was this way in Vietnam during the war--sometimes Darrow felt all powerful, in Vietnam during the war--sometimes Darrow felt all powerful, felt he could ride fate like a flying carpet, like a helicopter, will it to do his bidding. Other times fate reminded him that he was only a toy, blown this way and that, swept away or destroyed on a whim.
The difficult decision made, Darrow felt lighter than he had in years. Helen equaled life to him, and he would let all this go and follow her, follow life out of this place. As scheduled, he joined the crew of a guns.h.i.+p, spent the morning flying in Tay Ninh province along the Cambodian border, photographing a cross-border black-market operation. It was a good morning, a good helicopter. He felt in his element. The pilot flew contour, almost touching the tops of trees, what they called ”map of the earth” flying.
Hostile forces could hear the plane but didn't have time to draw a bead on it in the dense canopy jungle.
The pilot, Captain Anderson, was in his midtwenties, a big puppyish kid with a constant grin, unable to hide his plea sure in flying. Sunlight glinted off his blond, buzzcut hair. Darrow smiled, and the sobering thought occurred to him that he was almost old enough to have a son that age. Where had the time gone?
After doing an aerial recon, Anderson got orders to drop in on a couple of forward firebases in the Parrot's Beak. Isolated, the area was considered bandit country, riddled with VC and NVA positions. The night before, bases were attacked, and now enemy bodies, strung up in the perimeter wire, bloated in the hot sun as trophies.
Darrow and the pilot sat on the ground, their backs against sandbags, and ate Crations, ignoring the fetid smell blowing in from the wire.
”I'm shy to say this, but you were the photographer when my dad served in Korea.
You took his picture.”
”No kidding?”
”I swear it. Recognized the name right away.”
”That's amazing. So he came home. And had you.”
”And five others. Wait till I tell him you were here.”
”That'll be good. Very good.”