“Huh,” Mark said, and allowed himself to be led off to the bunker.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Night, and a kata in the rain. This time Moonchild — and the semi-submerged Mark persona — were feeling guilty about being so well rested. The rain had returned in mid-afternoon. Moonchild carried on her martial dance uncaring, serene and lovely, her heavy black hair hanging around her shoulders like seaweed.
The sun had been high up in the sky and the bunker filling with heat like a Cadillac with cement when Mark opened his eyes. He had slept through reveille, which was a much-abused record played over the camp P.A. system. It was a weird note, after even Mark “The Last Hippie” Meadows, Cap’n Trips, had broken down and bought a CD player for his long-lost head shop, the Cosmic Pumpkin, to wake up every morning to the firefight sounds of old-fashioned vinyl getting scratched by a needle. Maybe they figured the cracks in the record would roust out the somnolent better than the recorded bugle solo.
It hadn’t awakened Mark. The miracle was, nobody had come along to kick him awake when he didn’t fall in for P. T. Nor was he in the deep shit he assumed he was, when he turned up at H.Q. at ten o’clock in the morning with his shirt buttoned one hole off to report, heart-in-throat, that he’d overslept. He had been told not to sweat it and was given minor make-work jobs to while the day away inside the perimeter. They hadn’t even made him fill sandbags.
Mark was feeling almost human by evening chow. Afterward the nightly political meetings were held in several big tents, lit by kerosene lamps and smelling of wet canvas, like a militaristic camp revival. Brew taught the one Mark and Croyd wound up at, explaining the history of the Vietnamese war of liberation from a socialist point of view. The young bloods kept getting bored and making noise or dozing off. They were pounced on by Revolutionary Vigilance monitors — other young recruits whose interest in the proceedings had been engaged by giving them red armbands and Authority — written up and told to attend the dreaded daily self-criticism sessions that followed the regular political meetings.
Every once in a while an original joker Brigader would lose his cool at some quietly dry remark Brew made concerning the American involvement in Vietnam and start yelling. Brew never flinched. He just got this sardonic half smile on his heavy, handsome face, listened to what the retread had to say, and then demolished him without ever raising his voice. His refutations didn’t always seem logically watertight to the ever-scientific Mark, but the recipients seldom found an answer to them. Brew fought with words the way his buddy Luce did, toward the same end — total Clausewitzian devastation of the enemy — but his skills were subtler. “Jack the Ripper compared to the Skid Row Slasher,” Croyd said, sotto voce, when Mark mentioned it to him.
When Brew finished with him, the objecting veteran got handed a yellow slip requiring his presence at the ensuing kiem thao session. The veterans accepted them meekly, seeming almost to welcome additional contrition. The young bloods generally had to be threatened with worse, like a good beating by the monitors, or some downtime in the Box. The Box was a recent innovation right out of every direct-to-video prison flick ever made: a tiny tin-roof shed at the foot of the parade ground. Malefactors were locked into it and allowed twenty-four hours or so to enjoy the stunning heat of day and the surprising nighttime chill.
When the indoctrination session ended, the sun was long gone. It was safe for Moonchild to come out and play.
As she moved through her forms, the blocks and punches and startling high kicks, she did not lack an audience. She was an attractive female alone in a camp full of lonely men. The gawkers kept a wet, respectful distance, though, and went easy on the catcalls. They’d all seen how she handled Rhino — or heard, which pumped the act up to more than it was.
Eric Bell stood by himself to the side, near the bunker Mark shared with Croyd, the rain matting his dark-blond hair to his misshapen skull. He was silent, his hands and body at rest.
When she felt the end of her hour nearing, Moonchild finished her practice and turned to enter the bunker. Eric stepped forward. “May I talk to you?” he asked. His voice was low and deep beyond his years.
She tipped her head and regarded him coolly. “You are disappointed that there was no fight tonight, yes?”
The boy shook his head. “Relieved. I don’t have much taste for violence.”
“Really? Why, then, are you here, in the middle of a military camp?”
To her surprise he laughed. “I might ask you the same question. The answer is, I believe in love. But love isn’t all you need, no matter what the Beatles sang. The nats have been grinding our faces in that fact since long before I was born — or you either, I suspect. We must have strength, the strength to protect ourselves. Then our love can begin its work — not in a spirit of confrontation, but confidently and unafraid.”
She dropped her gaze to the mud. “That is very beautiful.”
He laughed again. “I was a street poet in Brooklyn before I came here to be a peaceful guerrilla warrior. I picked up a few oratorical tricks back then. It’s all sleight-of-tongue.”
Her mind filled with an urban street-corner image, young Eric barefoot in torn jeans, addressing an afternoon-rush pedestrian throng. First one man in hardhat and coveralls stopped and turned to listen to him, then a woman in a smart gray executive suit, a delivery boy on a mountain bike, one after another, until the homeward surge stood still to hear the boy poet’s words.
He finished his poem, the words of which Moonchild could not quite hear, though they tantalized with the promise of infinite meaning. The crowd barraged him with dead cats and garbage. She laughed. “That never happened, surely!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in amused delight.
His distorted features slipped into a highly charming grin. “Not exactly,” he said. “You can call that a sleight-of-mind. Another one of my gifts.”
She smiled and started to turn away, suddenly shy. “The way you handled Rhino…” he said.
She froze, every muscle tensed, as if expecting his next words to strike like a blow.
“It was beautiful,” he said. “You could have hurt him badly, yet you did not. You could have shamed him, too. I guess a lot of the guys think you did. But I know better. I saw the way you gave him a chance to strike you when you helped him up, gave him the pride of choosing to do the right thing. That was the most magnificent thing of all.
“You have an ace’s powers, but none of an ace’s arrogance. You have enormous strengths, but you use them with restraint — yes, and with love. That’s what this place” — he gestured around at the dark, rain-swept camp. — “what Fort Venceremos is all about. You show us the way that, yes, we shall overcome.”
She licked her lips and swallowed. She could find no words.
“I’d like to talk to you more,” he said. “I want to know you. May I see you sometime?”
She nodded, almost frantically, agitated by some emotion she could not identify and the coming transformation. “Ask Mark,” she said quickly. “He is a good man.”
She vanished into the bunker, leaving Eric in the rain.
“Check,” Croyd said, moving his bishop. It tipped over his knight en route. “Excuse it. These digits aren’t really designed for manipulation,”
“Uh-uh,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Can’t do that, man.”
For a being virtually bereft of mimetic muscles, Croyd could muster a hell of an outraged look. “Why the hell not?”
“Revealed check from my queen. Can’t put your own king in jeopardy, man.”