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“He’s a shitkicker,” the same man said. “You know, what’s-his-name.”
“Have I hired a bunch of morons?” Caspian said.
“We’re on it, Mr. Younger,” another man said.
“The guy has a squirrel cage for a brain,” the first man said. “I can’t remember his name.”
“Then be quiet and go find out who he is.”
Three rockets zipped from an island in the lake and popped overhead in a shower of blue and pink and white foam, lighting the orchard like a pistol flare.
“Behind you, Mr. Younger,” one of Caspian’s men said, pointing at the cherry trees.
That was when they all cut loose.
THEY HAD SEEN Clete but not me. At least six or seven were firing in his direction, the bullets ripping through the trees, cutting branches and raining black cherries on the ground. I was still on one knee. I raised the M-1 to my shoulder and aimed through the peep sight and began shooting. I had never fired an M-1 at a human target. The first man I hit was running for the edge of the shed, trying to position himself so he could choose his shots as his compatriots took the brunt of our fire. I saw red flowers bloom on the back of his shirt while his body jacked forward and struck the shed wall.
Another man had set up behind the fender of the Chrysler and was firing a semi-auto that had a suppressor and an extended magazine, not aiming and probably not counting rounds. Each sho
t sounded like compressed air released from a bottle of carbonated water. Because the suppressor lowered the bullet’s velocity, the rounds that went past my ear made a whirring sound, like a boomerang whipping through the air. My first shot hit the headlight and blew glass into his face. The second whanged off the top of the fender and hit the shed wall. The third went home and knocked him loose from the car and onto the ground, where he remained with his feet pulled up in a fetal position.
The bolt locked open on an empty chamber, and I heard the tinny sound of the clip ejecting. I pushed another into the breech and released the bolt and began firing again, the stock recoiling solidly into my shoulder with each shot. I saw Clete Purcel coming toward me, bent low, holding his hip, as though he had walked into the sharp corner of a tabletop. His face was pale, his eyes bigger than they should have been. He sank down next to me. I gathered up the sling of his rifle and slung it on my shoulder. “How bad are you hurt?” I said.
“I think it went on through. Maybe it clipped a bone,” he said. A bloodstain was spreading through his shirt. “More of them are headed our way.”
“No, there were only eight or nine besides Younger. I got at least two of them.”
“I saw them coming down the slope. I didn’t imagine it.”
I shook my head. “That’s not possible,” I replied. “There’s nobody else up that slope. Keep it simple, Cletus. Younger is an amateur, and so are the guys who work for him. He’s down to a few men.”
“I know what I saw.” He took his .38 from his holster. “Get going. I’ll slow them up.”
“That’s not going to happen, Clete. Get up.”
“I’m too dizzy. That son of a bitch really whacked me.”
I got to my feet and pulled him up with me, working his big arm over my shoulder. “You’re going with me, or we’re going out together. If we can make it to the driveway, we’ll spray the orchard and have Gretchen and Alf on their flanks. We’ll cut them to pieces.”
His eyes closed and opened again, as though he were unsure where he was. “Let’s rock,” he said.
We moved through the trees, the cherries hitting our faces, the tree branches like whips against our skin. Then I heard the report of a rifle from the yard of the stone house and heard a bullet zip through the trees and smack against the shed, followed by a second and a third shot, and I realized Gretchen was putting down covering fire for us with the bolt-action Mauser she carried in her pickup. “See?” I said. “We’re going to make it. Just put one foot after another. It’s easy. Like Rudyard Kipling said about going up Khyber Pass, you do it one bloody foot at a time.”
I could feel Clete’s knees starting to sag. “I need to rest,” he whispered. “Let me go, Dave. I’ll be all right. I’ve just got to sit down and rest for a while. I’ve never felt this tired.”
CLETE SAT IN a grassy depression in the lawn of the stone house, a swale that probably operated as a drain during the spring runoff. He stared back at the orchard and the wind in the tops of the trees. In his mind’s eye, he was back in the valley that led to the hills resembling a woman’s breasts. It was sunset in the valley, and in the gathering dusk, he began the ascent of the first hill in a series he would have to traverse before he could slip off his pack and his rifle and his steel pot and lie down and sleep in a dry hole free of mosquitoes and snakes and dream about a Eurasian girl who lived on a sampan by the shore of the China Sea.
He never saw the stick grenade that arced end over end out of the shadows and bounced off a tree trunk and exploded five feet from him and killed two other marines and blew Clete down the hillside. Nor was he able to reason his way through the events taking place around him—the automatic-weapons fire that looked like flashes from an electric power line dancing in the darkness, somebody yelling for the blooker, the throp of helicopter blades, and the rattle of a Gatling gun that was ripping foliage and geysers of dirt out of the hillside.
Everything taking place around him no longer seemed his concern, because he knew he was about to die. The sensation was not as he had imagined it. He felt as though he were being drawn back through a tunnel, one that was translucent and pink and blue, a place he had been before. It was the birth canal, he was sure of that, and on the other end of it, he thought he could see a warm and lighted presence that should have been his birthright but had been denied him during his time on earth.
Then the face of a navy corpsman was looking into his. “Don’t go dinky-dow on me,” the corpsman said. “Hang on to your ass. We’re going for the ride of your life. Then you’re the fuck out of here, man. We’re talking about the Golden Gate in ’68. Just stay with me.”
The corpsman wiped Clete’s face and pulled loose his flak vest, then rolled him onto a poncho liner and dragged him like a human sled all the way to the bottom of the hill.
Clete lay on his back inside the swale and looked up at the stars. He could hear Gretchen shooting and smell the grass and the fertilizer in a flower bed and the cold that seemed to be blowing down from a snowfield high up in the mountains.
“We never made it back from over there,” he said. “We thought we did, but they body-bagged us and forgot to tell us about it. They stole our lives, Dave.”
