‘Did you find Cotton’s name yesterday?’ Pumo asked, breaking into his thoughts in a way that seemed to extend them.
Poole shook his head. ‘Let’s find him today.’
‘Hell, let’s find everybody,’ Conor said. ‘What else are we here for?’
4
Pumo listed all the names and their panel locations on the back of an American Express slip. Dengler, 14 West, line 52 – Poole remembered that one. Cotton, 13 West, line 73…Trotman, 13 West, line 18. Peters, 14 West, line 38. And Huebsch, Hannapin, Recht. And Burrage, Washington, Tiano. And Rowley, Thomas Chambers, the only man in their company killed at Ia Thuc. And the victims of Elvis, the swivel-hipped sniper: Lowry, Montegna, Blevins. And more after that. Pumo’s tiny, neat handwriting covered the back of the green American Express slip.
They stood on the stone slabs of the path, looking up together at the names etched into polished black granite. Conor wept before Dengler’s name, and both Conor and Pumo had tears on their faces as they looked at the medic’s name: PETERS, NORMAN CHARLES.
‘Goddamn,’ Conor said. ‘Right now, Peters ought to be on top of a tractor, worried that he ain’t going to get enough rain.’ Peters’ family had worked the same Kansas farmland for four generations, and the medic had let everyone know that while he temporarily enjoyed being their medical corpsman, sometimes in the night he could smell his fields in Kansas. (‘You be smelling Spitalny, not Kansas,’ SP4 Cotton said.) Now his brothers worked Peters’ fields, and whatever was left of Peters, Norman Charles, after the helicopter on which he’d been giving plasma to Recht, Herbert Wilson, had crashed and burned was beneath the doubtless fertile soil of a country cemetery.
‘He’d just be bitching about how the government is giving a royal screwing to him and all the other farmers,’ Beevers said.
Michael Poole saw a huge golden-fringed flag ruffling in the breeze off to his right, and remembered glimpsing the same flag yesterday. A tall wild-haired man held the flag anchored to his wide belt – beside him, nearly obscured by a glistening wreath, stood a round white sign lettered in red: NO GREATER LOVE. Poole thought he’d read that the wild-haired ex-Marine had been standing in the same place for two days straight.
‘You see the story about that guy in the paper this morning?’ Pumo said. ‘He’s holding the flag in honor of POWs and MIAs.’
‘It won’t bring them back any quicker,’ Beevers said.
‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ Pumo told him.
In that instant, the long black length of the Memorial announced itself – to Poole it was as if it had just spoken and taken a step toward him. Michael remembered this from his first visit. He moved very slightly away from the others. The world was a blur. Once Poole had stood for hours up to his waist in water swarming with leeches, holding his M-16 and his Claymores out of the water until his arms ached, turned to lead, died…Rowley, Thomas Chambers was standing beside him, also holding his arsenal out of the stinking water. Swarms of mosquitos buzzed around them, settling on their faces. Every few seconds they had to blow tickling mosquitos out of their noses. Poole could remember being so tired that if Rowley had offered to prop up his arms for him, he would have collapsed into sleep right there. He could remember feeling the leeches attach themselves to his thighs.
‘Oh God,’ Poole said, realizing that he was trembling. He wiped his eyes and looked at the others. Conor was weeping too, and emotion suffused Pumo’s handsome, normally impassive face.
Harry Beevers was watching Poole. He looked about as emotional as a weight-guesser at the state fair. ‘It got you, hmm?’
‘Sure,’ Poole said. Profound irritation at Beevers’ smugness flashed through him. ‘Are you immune?’
Beevers shook his head. ‘Hardly, Michael. I just keep my feelings inside. That’s the way I was raised. But I was thinking that a bunch of names ought to be added to this thing. McKenna. The Martinsons. Danton and Guibert. Remember?’
Poole had no desire to try to explain what he had just experienced. He too could think of at least one name that could be added to those on the wall.
Beevers virtually twinkled at Michael. ‘You know that we’re going to get rich out of this, don’t you?’ And for some Beeversish reason utterly opaque to Michael Poole, he tapped him twice on the chest with an extended index ringer. The finger appeared to have been manicured. Then Beevers turned to Pumo and Linklater, evidently saying something about the Memorial. Michael could still feel Harry’s index finger playfully jabbing at his sternum…Only problem is that it doesn’t have enough names on it, he heard Beevers saying.
A hundred dying mosquitos packed Poole’s nostrils; dying leeches clamped onto his weary, dying legs. It was decided, Poole knew: as if in imitation of their ignorant, terrified, and variously foolhardy nineteen-year-old selves, they really were going to take off for the Far East all over again.
1
‘Maggie never comes in here, Maggie had enough,’ said Jimmy Lah, answering Harry’s question as he poured a silvery ribbon of vermouth over the ice and liquid already in the glass. He squeezed a paring of lemon rind around the rim of the glass, then slipped it down into the ice cubes.
‘Enough of life, or enough of Tina?’ Beevers asked.
Jimmy Lah placed on the bar a fresh paper napkin with the word Saigon printed in slanting red letters over the silhouette of a man pulling a rickshaw. He set Harry Beevers’ drink on the napkin and with a sideways sweep of his hand gathered up the damp, torn napkin beside it. ‘Tina’s too normal for Maggie.’
The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.
It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.
Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.
Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.
Then Harry saw who had opened the door.
Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving