Andy had his hand pressed against his chest, same way as I’d had gettin’ off the plane. We all looked like we couldn’t breathe, and I sure felt like the breath had been knocked outta me. The older we got the less like a crime it felt when one of us died, ‘cause there was nothing so bad as a kid losin’ out on all those years ahead of him, but that didn’t make it easier. One of us muttered, “Son of a bitch,” and we all nodded.
“The limo’s waiting,” The Ack-Man finally said. “Let’s go have a drink. It’s after five in Korea.”
“She’s a kid,” I said into my beer. Green beer, an Alaskan Amber with food coloring. I’d had enough to drink that I’d stopped tellin’ the bozos behind the bar not to color my booze, and we’d all had enough to drink that we’d stopped talking about Mick and were on to our own lives. “She’s a mess. Nah. She was a mess. She’s growing out of it.”
“Lemme get this straight.” Dan leaned forward over a cup of tea. Not even in the worst of it in Korea had I ever seen him drink anything stronger than tea. “You’ve got a twenty-seven year old girlfriend and you think she’s a mess?”
I couldn’t help laughin’. Alla Joanne’s friends thought she had somethin’ going on with me, but I hadn’t figured on my friends thinking I had somethin’ going on with her. “Ain’t like that, Danny-boy.”
“Oh God,” said The Ack. “Don’t let him start singing. I’m not drunk enough for that. Hell, Mick’s not drunk enough for that, and you can bet he’s out-drinking the Devil right now.”
“The girl’s magic,” I said to the beer, and my buddies, the guys I’d known a lifetime, all burst out laughing.
“Last time he said that was about Annie.” Andy went from grinning to solemn and raised his glass of dark ale. “Miss that lady.”
I tapped my glass against his. “Every day. But this girl, Jo, she’s real magic. I had a heart attack last year.”
That shut them up, three old guys sitting around a boozy table in what woulda been a smoky bar, back in the day. Little bastion of quiet, that was us, all silence and worry on a Friday evening in a pub full of kids. Lotta them were in the military, Navy kids who reminded us of ourselves, ‘cept about a million years younger. The Ack still wore his hair in a crew cut, and Andy didn’t have any. Maybe we looked ex-military to the kids, or maybe we just looked old and boring. Either way, they left us alone, but when we got quiet it spread out around the bar for a minute. Then The Ack got himself together enough to say, “You never said. What’s the cardiologist say?”
“That I got the heart of a twenty-five year old.”
Andy, deadpan, said, “Thought you said she was twenty-seven,” and all of us laughed again. The kids in the bar relaxed and the noise level went back up. Nothin’ like a bunch of old farts to bring down the mood, I guess.
Ack waved Andy’s joke off, though. “How’s that possible? Don’t get me wrong, Muldoon, but you were a smoker. That leaves marks.”
“It’s the girl. Joanne. The kid’s got magic.” I looked between my old buddies, then pushed the beer aside and sighed. “Don’t give me those faces. You remember the war.”
I didn’t look at Danny when I said it, but the other two did. His eyebrows beetled at me and I shrugged. “Your culture. Your demons.”
“My goddamned demons are the same one every other American kid has,” Dan muttered. “Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and not meeting Marilyn Monroe.”
“You knew what they were called.” From anybody outside of this circle, Andy’s tone woulda been accusatory. It almost was anyway.
“I didn’t know how the hell to get rid of ‘em, did I.” Danny drained his tea with an emphasis that woulda gone better with a shot of Jack Daniels, but a guy worked with what he had. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
We all grunted. None of us wanted to talk about it. None of us ever had, except obliquely. But there’d been something fucked up in the Korean nights, something different from the war. Not worse, but harder to understand. We understood the war. We hated it, we were scared of it, we didn’t want it, but we got it. Stop ‘em at the 38th parallel, blast them yellow Reds to hell. Billy Joel was a kid while me and these guys were fighting that war, but he got it too. War was easy to understand.
The thing that came pressin’ down on your buddies, stealin’ their breath like cats were supposed to steal babies’, the thing that screamed all night like a Korean banshee, the things you didn’t quite see from the corner of your eye and died tryin’ to chase down, those were harder to understand. Danny’d had names for them, names his Korean-born parents had told him. Stay away from ‘em, he’d said, they’ll steal your soul and eat your bones.
We’d listened. Our whole damned platoon had listened, even when it meant us sittin’ on each other to keep ourselves from goin’ out after the sound of a shriekin’ baby that just wasn’t quite right. We’d listened, ‘cause Danny was our secret weapon and there ain’t no point in havin’ one if you don’t use it for all it’s worth. But other troops hadn’t had him, and a lot of their guys were the kind who went missing in action, no body or explanation to send home to his family, just a flag and an apology.
We lost two guys that way. Reckless Rick, he was always gonna get himself killed one way or another, but we found his body the next day, lookin’ drowned when we all knew there wasn’t any water for miles. And the other Andy, Dandy Andy, who the prettiest guy in our unit. Couldn’t keep his hands off the girls, or their hands off him. He’d gone off with the most beautiful local girl any of us had seen, and he’d come back in the morning white-faced and shaking. Never said a word, just died by noon, and when the doctors stripped his body to put him in dress greens, he looked like a hundred vampire leeches had gotten to him.
After that everybody listened to Danny, and listened good. He never knew how to stop ‘em, just to stay the hell away, so that’s what we did. And now, fifty years later, we all sat there starin’ into our beers, still tryin’ ta stay the hell away.
‘cept I’d spent the past fifteen months hangin’ out with a girl who wouldn’ta done that, even if it’d been the smart thing to do. Especially if it’d been the smart thing. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t believe me. What mattered was trying to make them believe there were people out there who could fight the monsters.
And maybe, just a little, it mattered to me that they learned I was one of ‘em. “I do wanna talk about it,” I said abruptly. “Because didja know every one of us who came back from the war, every single one of us has died of a heart attack?”
They didn’t. I could see it in their eyes. Andy rubbed his chest again, makin’ me pull a deep breath too, just to make sure I could. “Every one of us, even when we were young. Died of a heart attack in our sleep. That’s thirteen heart attacks.”
“Lots of people die of heart attacks. You just said you almost did too.”
“Yeah, but—” All of a sudden I felt sorry for Jo. You couldn’t just say, “Yeah, but I was witched into it,” even if it was true. The poor girl had spent the last year trying to offer up sensible explanations where none existed, and now that I was trying to, it was harder than it looked. “But I had Joanne,” I finished.
They laughed at me again. I couldn’t blame ‘em. “Arright, arright, yeah, I got myself a sweet young thing and she healed my heart. Gotta use that big fat military retirement check for somethin’, right?”
Ack-Man snorted. “You can use it to buy me another drink. Mick would’ve had us all under the table by now. Let’s show him he’s not forgotten.”
There was nothin’ to say to that but buy another round, an’ hope mentionin’ all the heart attacks might get one of ‘em curious enough to ask me about it later, when we were all too drunk to see straight. In the meantime we took turns talkin’, telling tales about the past year, remembering old friends, and thankin’ God we were happy drunks instead of miserable ones. Danny kept us that way by stayin’ sober and dragging us out of self-pity when we went that way.