‘Forget it.’ Conor stood up.
‘So you were over there too?’ Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.
‘Yeah.’
‘Clerk-typist?’
In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.
‘What outfit were you in?’
‘Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.’
Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over a loose grave. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.
He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.
For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.
Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.
He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.
Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘I got nowhere else to go,’ Conor said.
Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.
For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underbill’s picture.
The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M. O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.
He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.
There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.
The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.
‘Dengler!’ Conor says in his dream. ‘Dengler, look at the lieutenant!’ That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!’
Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.
Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.
Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters – they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.
‘Okay this morning, Red?’ Roehm asked.
‘Right as the dew, man.’
Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.
Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.
Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?’
Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. ‘You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.’
The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? ‘Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,’ he said.
‘A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.
‘Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures – you asshole.’
‘I knew Cotton,’ Conor said. ‘I was with him when he bought it.’
‘I don’t care who took the pictures – I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.’ Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. ‘You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.’
‘We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all –’
Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.
‘PUSSY!’ he screamed.
‘I thought you liked pussy,’ Conor said.
‘I’m a good taper!’ Woyzak shouted.
Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs Daisy hovered behind the contractor.
Woyzak smiled weakly at her.
‘That’s enough,’ Roehm said.
‘I can’t work with this asshole,’ Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.
‘This guy was edging me on,’ Conor protested.
‘Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,’ Mrs Daisy said nervously. ‘He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.’
‘Who’s the taper, anyhow?’ Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. ‘I only want to do my job.’
‘But look how he’s doing it, man!’
Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.
He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs Daisy, who giggled.
In