Spurlow waited until the cameraman had moved around to get an angle on him that would incorporate the murals.
‘But I’m not!’ he shrieked, scuttling toward them a few steps, then darting away.
From the crest of a high hill, they could see the body of the war. A green serpentine valley stretched from the base of the hill, cut by trails so intricately interwoven that they looked to be the strands of an ocher web, and scattered among them, like the husks of the spider’s victims, were charred tanks and fragments of jeeps and the shells of downed helicopters. Dark smoke veiled the crests of the distant hills, leaked up in black threads from fresh craters, and directly below, an armored personnel carrier had been blown onto its side and was gushing smoke and flame from a ragged hole in its roof. Several dead men in combat suits lay around the carrier, and a group of men in olive-drab T-shirts and fatigue pants were loading body bags, while two others were spraying foam from white plastic backpacks onto the flames. All the smoke threw a haze over the sun, reducing it to an ugly yellow-white glare, the color of spoiled buttermilk. Choppers were swarming everywhere—close by, in the middle distance, and thick as flies at the extreme curve of the valley. Hundreds of them. Their whispering beats seemed to convey an agitated rhythm to the movements of the firefighters and body baggers. Now and then a far-off explosion, a crump, a new billow of smoke, and the choppers would flurry around it, fire lancing from their rocket pods. Despite all the activity, despite the urgency of the men below, the sounds of battle, Mingolla sensed a lassitude to the scene, a kind of unhurried precision that accrued to the responses of both choppers and men, and he was not surprised to learn that the battle for the valley had been many months in progress.
‘Can’t nobody figure why, neither,’ said the sergeant who escorted the four of them on an elevator down through the middle of the hill. ‘Seem like we coulda overrun the beaners anytime, but we keep holdin’ back. Guess ya gotta have faith somebody knows what the fuck they doin’.’
The sergeant was a short, balding army lifer in his late forties, pale, thick-armed, and potbellied, and was obviously a man to whom faith was not a casual affair. He wore two silver crosses around his neck, he pretended to be knocking on wood whenever he said something optimistic, and on his right biceps were tattooed the words ALLEGED FAST LUCK,surrounded by representations of cornucopias, dollar signs, arrow-pierced hearts, and the number 13 surrounded by wavy radiating lines to indicate its sparkling magical qualities. He was a bit slow on the uptake, scratching his head at their every question, and when not talking, he vagued out, staring dully at the elevator door. Mingolla recognized the signs.
The corridor into which they emerged from the elevator was covered with white foam like the tunnels of the Ant Farm, and was thronged with harried-looking junior-grade officers. The sergeant conducted them through a door at the end of the corridor, and told the corporal at the desk that the I-Ops were here to see Major Cabell. The corporal punched a buzzer, an inner door swung open to a round white room with a desk and chairs, charts on the walls, and a cot in one corner.
Major Cabell was in her thirties, a tanned reedy woman whose lusterless brown hair and strained expression had hardened her good looks into a spinsterly primness redolent—Mingolla thought—of a frontier schoolmarm who had been forsaken by her lover and left to age in the prairie winds. She threw on a dressing gown over her T-shirt and fatigue pants, and invited them in. She agreed to send them across the valley with a recon patrol the next morning; but when he suggested a chopper she told him that they’d be safer with a patroclass="underline" they lost a lot of choppers on missions to the far side of the valley. She checked her watch, offered them the use of bunks and shower facilities, but asked Mingolla if he would mind staying behind and talking. Official business, she said. Once the others had gone off with her aide, she unwound, seeming to drop four or five years along with her brittle air; she broke out a bottle of gin and pulled up a chair beside Mingolla, who was becoming unsettled by her attitude toward him.
‘I hope you don’t mind talking,’ she said, filling Mingolla’s glass. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk with a man.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘This place… the intrigues are unbelievable. It’s medieval! Lieutenants scheming against captains, captains against each other, against me. It’s because there’s no resolution to the battle. People get bored, and for lack of anything else to do they start planning career moves.’
‘You serious?’
‘Oh, yes! If they’d let me win the battle—and I could, in a matter of days—everything would be all right. But command insists upon a holding action. God knows why!’ She began to rub the ball of her right thumb across the knuckles of her left hand. ‘It’s really unbelievable. People trying to make fools of one another… that gets a lot of them killed. They write reports on each other’s eccentricities, and sometimes things get back to the injured party. I’ve caught some of the reports they’ve written about me. If I did half what they say…’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘And so I’m cut off from any possible… relationships. Stuck in this room. I have this recurring nightmare about it. I’m on a beach… White sand, heat. I live in a house in the dunes. I’m always exhausted from walking on the beach, because it’s so boring. There’s nothing to look at… even the colors are all bleached and ugly. I’m not helping anyone by being there. It’s not an escape or a retreat. I’m just supposed to be there. It’s like my profession. No one needs me, no one speaks to me. In fact, I don’t even know how to speak. I’ve always been there.’ She gave a nervy little laugh. ‘It’s not far from the truth. So’—she affected casualness—‘you’re from New York. God, it’s been years since I’ve been in New York.’
‘Been a while for me, too,’ he said, glancing around the room. There was a stack of confession magazines on a night table beside the cot, and set beneath it was a small TV, a VCR, and a number of videotapes, the word Love prominent in many of the titles. There was a dominant pattern in the major’s thoughts, one that had obviously been trifled with, and from the contents of the room it was clear what particular delusion the pattern reflected.
To fend her off—she had begun trailing her fingers across his arm and knee—he asked about her background. He didn’t want to reject her outright, to hurt her. Despite her delusion, there was something impressive about the major, a core dignity and strength that forced you to disregard her flaws, to relate to her without pity. It had been a long time since he had met anyone whom he didn’t pity.
‘I enlisted because my mother died,’ she said. ‘People do the damnedest things under pressure. God knows what I was thinking. It seems now that I wanted structure. Structure!’ She laughed. ‘The army’s got all the structure in the world, but it’s all topsy-turvy.’
She described her mother’s illness, how she’d coped. ‘I did labor,’ she said. ‘I built a masonry wall around the house. I worked in the garden. Cutting away rotten roots… tough as clenched knuckles.’ She swirled the gin in her glass, stared into it as if hoping the liquid would reveal some oracle. ‘People are so simple, really. When I came home to take care of her, she put my clothes away in a drawer she’d cleared. No big deal. Just this simple inclusion in her life. Sometimes she’d ball all her pain up into a simple order, get rid of it that way. I remember once she said, “See the seeds of that lily… balanced on the leaves. Get the big ones. Don’t let them dry out too much. Plant them on the far side of the garden.” And after I’d done it, she felt better.’ The major freshened Mingolla’s drink. ‘My sister came to help out. I hadn’t seen her for years. She’d acquired a southern accent and had taken to wearing a gold map of Texas on a necklace. She said she loved me, and I hardly recognized her. She’d married this Texas boy who wrote horror novels. I read some of them. They were okay, but I didn’t care for it. At best it was this sort of sensual pessimism. Maybe I just couldn’t identify with the self-loathing of vampires.’