“I still wish you’d have come along.”
“I think the past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Does that tell you anything?”
“I guess it does,” Michael said. There was a moment of silence that went on too long. She would not speak until he did. “Okay,” Michael finally said. “I’ll probably see Beevers and Tina Pumo and Conor tonight, and there are some ceremonies I’d like to take part in tomorrow. I’ll get home Sunday about five or six, I suppose.”
“Your patients are extremely understanding.”
“Diaper rash is rarely fatal,” Michael said, and Judy uttered a smoky exhalation that might have been laughter.
“Should I call you tomorrow?”
“Don’t bother. It’s nice, but don’t bother, really.”
“Really,” Michael said, and hung up.
2
Michael moved slowly through the Sheraton’s lobby looking at the men lined up at the registration desk, among them the big cowboy in tiger-stripe fatigues and his three buddies, and the groups of people sitting on padded dark green chairs and banquettes. The Sheraton was one of those hotels with no true bar. Women in clinging, filmy dresses brought drinks to the twenty or thirty tables in the sunken lobby. The waitresses all seemed to have descended from the same tall, languid, handsome family. Where these princesses might normally have served gin-and-tonics and Perriers-and-lime to men with dark suits and power haircuts—to men like Michael Poole’s neighbors in Westchester County—now they set down shots of tequila and bottles of beer before wildmen in battle jackets and bush hats, in funky fatigues and funkier khaki ballcaps.
The sulphurous conversation with his wife made Michael want to sit down among the wildmen and order a drink. But if he sat down, he would be drawn into things. Someone would begin to talk to him. He would buy a drink for a man who had been in some of the same places he had been, or had been near the places he had been, or who had a friend who had been near those places. Then the man would buy him a drink. This would lead to stories, memories, theories, introductions, vows of brotherhood. Eventually he would join the parade as part of a gang of strangers and see the Memorial through the thick insulating comfort of alcohol. Michael kept moving.
“Cavalry all the way!” shouted a whiskey voice behind his back.
Michael went through a side door out into the parking lot. It was just a little too cold for his tweed jacket and sweater, but he decided not to go back upstairs for his coat. The heavy billowing sky threatened rain, but Michael decided that he didn’t much care if it rained.
Cars streamed up the ramp from the street. Florida license plates, Texas plates, Iowa and Kansas and Alabama, every kind and make of vehicle, from hardcore GM pickups to tinny Japanese imports. The van cowboy and his friends had driven to Washington from New Jersey, the Garden State. Tucked beneath the Camaro’s windshield wiper was the note: You were in my way so FUCK YA!!!
Down on the street, Michael flagged a cab and asked the driver to take him to Constitution Avenue.
“You gonna walk in the parade?” the driver immediately asked.
“That’s right.”
“You’re a vet, you were over there?”
“That’s right.” Michael looked up. From the back, the cabdriver could have been one of the earnest, desperate, slightly crazed students doomed to flunk out of medical schooclass="underline" colorless plastic glasses, dishwater hair, pale youthful skin. His ID plate said that his name was Thomas Strack. Blood from an enormous pimple had dried on the collar of his shirt.
“You ever in combat? Like in a firefight or something?”
“Now and then.”
“There’s somethin’ I always wanted to ask—I hope you don’t take no offense or nothing.”
Michael knew what the cabdriver was going to ask. “If you don’t want me to take offense, don’t ask an offensive question.”
“Okay.” The driver turned his head to glance at Michael, then looked straight ahead again. “Okay, no need to get heavy.”
“I can’t tell you how it feels to kill someone,” Michael said.
“You mean you never did it.”
“No, I mean I can’t tell you.”
The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.
I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred buddies in here, please. They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.
“This okay?” the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and left the cab.
Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street. Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing in the reality of this parade.
It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue—the Iranian hostages had been given that one—but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears instantly filled his eyes.
The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.
He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.
In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill—not brooding or thinking about him, considering him—since Harry Beevers had called him up at the end of October to tell him about the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.
In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.
Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.