I nodded. “There are places I could go, maybe. Hibernate for a while. Wait for things to quiet down.”
Sarah dropped the hair dryer.
“Fucking hibernate! Animals hibernate, people act. That’s why we’re here—to stop the goddamn killing!” She slapped her hip. “No lie, you amaze me. William the victim. Fuck conscience, fuck everything. Vietnam, you think it was cooked up just to ruin your day. That’s how you think. All the big shots, all the world leaders, they got together at this huge summit conference, and LBJ jumps up and says, ‘Hey, there’s this sissy-ass creep I want to fuck over,’ and Ho Chi Minh says, ‘I got it! Start a war—we’ll nail the son of a bitch!’ A persecution complex. Almost funny, except it’s so contemptible.”
“My error,” I said.
“Terrific. That’s your only comment?”
“Not quite. I get the feeling we’re growing apart.”
We stood facing each other.
The shower curtain was bright red. There was some steam in the room.
Sarah turned away. “This conversation,” she said slowly, “has outlived its utility.”
If you’re sane, you see madness. If you see madness, you freak. If you freak, you’re mad.
What does one do?
I froze. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move my bowels. At night I’d roam the villa’s hallways, thinking this: If you’re sane, you’re not completely sane.
By daylight, too, the bombs were real. Nethro explained the physics. He showed us how to make big bangs out of small household appliances. How to bait a booby trap and adjust the tension on a pressure-release firing device. All around us, for three days, there was the smell of cordite and gasoline.
Down on the beach, taking turns, we pitched grenades at mock enemy bunkers. We learned how to set up a Claymore mine—the angles of aim, a geometry lesson. If you’re sane, I decided, you can calculate the effects of petrochemicals on bone and tissue. If you’re sane, but only then, you understand the profundity of firepower.
“Blammo!” Ollie yelled.
Nethro folded his big arms. “Shit, man,” he said softly. “You don’ know shit.”
But Ollie did know shit.
And Sarah, too, and Ned and Tina. They knew the whys and wherefores of deadly force.
So I froze.
It happened first on the weapons range, where I locked and loaded, taking aim, pressing my cheek to the rifle’s plastic stock. I closed my eyes and drew a breath and squeezed the trigger. Then I froze. Full automatic—twenty rounds.
The rifle seemed to pick me up and shake me.
I heard myself squeal. I heard Sarah say, “Christ.” Behind me there was laughter.
I tried to release the rifle—drop it, throw it—but I couldn’t, because then the freeze came, and the panic, and I turned and watched the bright red tracers kick up sand all around me.
The black rifle kept jerking in my hands, I was part of the weaponry.
Then silence.
A soft, watery sound. The blue Caribbean, wind and waves, Sarah looking down and saying, “Christ.”
I was smiling. I dropped the rifle and squatted in the sand.
“Audie fuckin’ Murphy,” Ebenezer said.
Ollie giggled.
Ned Rafferty put his hand on my head, just holding it there, and there was still that silence.
Strange, but I didn’t feel shame. Emptiness and relief, but not shame. Later, when the jokes started, I thought: If you’re sane, you don’t feel shame. You feel helpless. You feel a stickiness at the seat of your pants. But not shame.
Rafferty helped me up.
“This development,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “gives scared shitless a whole new meaning.”
“Ain’ roses,” said Nethro.
“Let him be,” Ned Rafferty said.
“Yeah, but that smell.”
Rafferty held my arm and said, “Let him be.”
And again that same night.
A final exam, Ebenezer called it. He was grading on the pass-fail system.
At midnight we formed up in the courtyard. We smeared our faces with charcoal. We wore black sweat pants and black cotton jerseys. On our backs and belts, we carried C-4 explosives, wire cutters, Claymores, blasting caps, fuses, electric firing devices, rifles, and rucksacks.
“Tonight,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “we baptize the Christians. You people will get shot at. You will not commit messies in your shorties.”
He looked directly at me.
“Shitpots,” he said, smiling. “Regulation panty-poopers.”
Nethro briefed us on the details.
A simulated commando raid. The object, he said, was to make our way across a two-hundred-meter stretch of open beach. To move with haste and silence. To attack and destroy a twenty-foot wooden tower that had been erected that afternoon. Along the way, he told us, we would encounter certain obstacles. Barbed wire and booby-traps and tear gas. Then he grinned and snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, an’ two machine guns. M-60s—live ammo.” Nethro opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance. “No sweat, we aim high. Four feet, more or less. Just don’ take no leaks standing up.”
Then we moved out.
We crossed the tennis courts and followed Nethro down to the dunes.
The darkness was something solid. There was fog, too, which carried the scent of brine and seaweed, and the night seemed to slide beneath itself. Ahead, I could see the green phosphorescent glow of a wristwatch. I reached out and put a hand on Rafferty’s rucksack and moved by touch. If you’re sane, I thought. Then I laughed and thought: Ghosts.
“Hush,” Rafferty said. “Cerebral slack, man, just spin it out.”
The starting line was a shallow trench in the sand. Quietly, we knelt down to wait. There were spooks in the dark but I imagined I was elsewhere. Mars, maybe. A deep cave. I breathed from the bottom of my lungs. Forty minutes, a full hour, then the fog lifted and I could see moonlight on barbed wire, the outline of a rickety tower two hundred meters up the beach. No panic, I thought. Just this once, I would perform with dignity. I would not wail or freeze or befoul myself.
There was movement in the dark.
“On your bellies!” Nethro called. “Stay flat, kiddies!”
At the far end of the beach there was a sharp splatting noise. A green flare exploded high over the tower.
Rafferty tapped my arm.
“Stick close,” he said. “I’ll run the interference.”
Behind us, Nethro fired up a flare and yelled, “Hit it!” and we were moving. Sarah went first, then Ollie and Tina and Rafferty. Nethro kicked me and said, “Anytime, darlin’.”
The first twenty meters were easy. Up and over, out of the trench, snaking motions, part wiggle, part crawl, rifle cradled across the elbows. I was a commando now. Anything was possible. Push-glide, no thinking. Off to my right I could make out the peaceful wash of waves where the sea touched land. Dignity, I thought, then I said it aloud, “Dignity.”
When we hit the first wire, Rafferty used his cutters and motioned for me to slip through.
We bellied forward.
“Easy,” Rafferty said, but it wasn’t easy. There was confusion, and my rucksack caught, and I felt a cool slicing sensation on my forehead. Concertina wire—looped and tangled—and when I twisted sideways I was cut again at the neck and cheek.
A white flare rocketed up over the beach.
There was a soft whooshing sound and then the guns opened up. Red tracer rounds made edges in the night. “Move,” Rafferty said, “just move.” But the wire had me. High up, almost directly above us, another flare puffed open, and the two machine guns kept up a steady fire. A game, I reminded myself, but then I flopped over and watched the red tracers unwind through the dark. That much was real. The guns were real, and the flares and muzzle flashes. No terror, just the absence of motor control. I felt Rafferty’s big arms around me, and then came a clicking sound, and we rolled through the wire.