There was a white adhesive label on the cover of the file that read Virgil White Buffalo.
Virgil.
I thought about the author of The Aeneid and Dante’s supposed guide through hell. I studied the folder and hoped his travels had been more pleasant. They hadn’t.
It had taken the full fifteen minutes to get through the file, and since I’d left Quincy’s office on my way over, my mind repeated only one word.
God.
It was a cloudless day, if hot, and I took a deep breath and smelled the pungent fragrance of cut grass. I thought about what I’d read as I walked across the trimmed sidewalks leading to ward 5. I stopped at the double-paned Plexiglas doors and watched as the officer came over. I mentioned Quincy’s name, and he told me to go down the hall to the second right and to just keep going.
They were sitting at a small round table on which were three thick-handled coffee mugs and a white plastic carafe. I sat and listened as they continued their conversation, which was mostly about Michael’s impending visit and Cady’s plans to return to Philadelphia after Labor Day.
I sat and gazed out at the mountains and thought some more about what I had read back in the doctor’s office.
God.
Cady slid me a mug of coffee. “Quincy says you saved his life.”
I turned my head and looked at her. “Yep? Well, he’s delusional and that’s why they keep him in a place like this.”
Figuring that she wasn’t likely to get the story out of me, she turned to Quincy, who told her a tale that made me sound like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. He said that I’d talked so much about Wyoming that when a job came up in the Veteran’s Administration in Sheridan for a post-traumatic stress disorder coordinator, he and his wife, Tamblyn, had made the jump and never looked back.
“We had only three black people in Wyoming at the time, and I was in charge of trying to achieve a racial balance.”
Quincy shook his head, patted Cady’s arm, and pointed to another set of double Plexiglas doors leading outside to a grass field so green it looked chartreuse. “There’s a walkway through there that leads to another walkway that surrounds the parade ground and then to a big mansion that used to be the fort commander’s residence. There’s a ballroom upstairs with a hardwood floor and bay windows that look out on the mountains. ” He waited a moment. “You should see it.”
Cady, used to being dismissed from my more indelicate law enforcement conversations, nodded and squeezed my shoulder as she passed, looking back at Quincy. “If you decide to keep him, you can’t; we need him too much.”
The Doc smiled. “He’s too smart; the smart ones are always trouble.” We watched as an attendant pushed the door open, and she slipped off her sandals to walk across the parade ground barefoot. “My God, Walter. What an amazing young woman. . . .”
I watched her pick her way across the field, periodically skimming a foot across the blades of soft grass, before walking on. “She’s a punk.”
He turned to me, and his concern was palpable. “She told me about the problems in Philadelphia.” I nodded but didn’t say anything, wondering exactly how much she’d told. “It appears as if she’s progressing magnificently.”
“I hope so.”
He studied me. “What’s worrying you?”
I groaned. “That she’s pushing too hard, that she’s not pushing hard enough, that we’re doing too much physical and not enough intellectual, that we’re doing too much intellectual and not enough physical. . . .”
He laughed. “You haven’t changed, Walter.”
I took a deep breath and tried to wash my anxiety through my lungs. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Doc.”
“It is.” He sipped his coffee. “You read the file.”
“I did.”
“And? ”
I looked into my cup and a past that made my coffee appear transparent.
“And if I ever labor under the supposition that I’ve had a hard life, I’m going to think of Virgil White Buffalo.”
He set his mug down and pulled in his chair. He listened to the story of Ho Thi Paquet and nodded gently at the smooth surface of the table without interrupting—a ritual I’d remembered. When I finished, he looked up at me. “Do you think he did it?”
I took another breath. “I didn’t until I read that damn file.”
We sat there in the comfortable silence we’d cultivated from long ago before he spoke again. “I just went back there.”
“Where?”
“Vietnam.”
"Why? ”
He laughed. “It sounds like you’ve still got some issues.”
“Issues, hell; I’ve got volumes.”
I poured him some more coffee as he continued to laugh. “I took Tamblyn and we went back just last year, stayed at the Morin Hotel in Hue. We’re sitting there having breakfast and drinking Buon me Thuot-style coffee and watching the nuts fall off the bang trees like incoming...” He took a sip.
I nodded. “What was it like, other than nuts? ”
He smiled. “Everybody’s trying to sell you something.” He glanced back up at me. “We took Route 1 through Da Nang to this old fishing town, Hoi An—motor scooters all over the place and not a single water buffalo. Shops everywhere with paintings, jewelry, and T-shirts. The nightclubs in Hue have names like Apocalypse New and M16. I showed Tamblyn Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where we dropped off the first American ground troops.” It was a long pause, and it was only then that I figured he was talking to himself. “All in all . . . it was pretty strange.”
I sipped my coffee and looked off to the few narrow and melting snowfields on the mountains. “Maybe we won after all.”
Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968
The same air force major as before was still the security officer, and DeDe Lind, the Playboy playmate, was still on the wall of the Quonset hut and insisting it was August. “I find it strange that you were posted here by the provost marshal to investigate the overdose of a soldier but ended up in Khe Sanh in an exploding helicopter.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked back at the folder on his desk, which contained the hospital discharge papers. It’d been almost a week, and they’d tried to send me back to Chu Lai and battalion HQ, but I told them that I wanted to return to Tan Son Nhut. “It says here that the swabos have you up for a Navy Cross and a Silver Star.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’d you do up there in Khe Sanh, sink a submarine?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked up through the thick glasses. “What was that?”
“No, sir.”
He studied me a good long time with the dead eyes. “Your official investigation was to be four weeks in length, but I’m going to see about getting that rescinded to three and get you out of here early.”
“Sir, but my orders from HQ...”
“You mean those orders about an investigation that you ignored because you were out joyriding in Khe Sanh?” I didn’t say anything, so he stood up and walked around his desk. He looked at my arm, still in the sling, and the sutured split on my eyebrow where I’d run into Henry. “How’s that investigation going, Lieutenant?” I started to speak, but he cut me off. “The job you were sent here to do? How’s that going?”
My head hurt, and I figured informing him that drugs were rampant in every part of the country and that I’d been warned off by his own personnel wasn’t going to make my situation any better. “Not so good, sir.”
He folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. “In the remaining time period in which we are to be blessed with your presence, you will confine yourself to this investigation and to this air base.” He shook his head at my incompetence. “Do you read me?”