James Burke - Light of the World

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.”

Then he rolled on his side and vomited in the grass.

I wiped his mouth with my handkerchief and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “You can’t leave me, Clete,” I said.

“Who said I am?”

“You were talking out of your head,” I said. “Vietnam is yesterday’s box score. Forget Vietnam and everything that happened over there.”

“I was talking about ’Nam? I don’t think I was. I was having a dream, that’s all.”

“We have to go, partner. Can you make it?”

“Go where?”

“To hook up with Gretchen and Alf. We need to nail these guys as they come out of the orchard. We still have Surrette to deal with.”

He widened his eyes as though trying to bring the world back into focus. “Dave, I know I dropped at least three of those assholes. This is what you’re not hearing. There are a lot more of them than you think. I saw them coming through the grass.”

“There’s no grass out there, Clete. You’re losing it. Come on, get up!”

He pulled the AR-15 off my shoulder and tried to stand, then fell sideways, like a drunk. “I think I’m a couple of quarts down.”

“That’s okay. You’re doing fine,” I said. I got his arm over my shoulders again and hooked one hand under the back of his belt and pulled him up. “We’ve been in a lot worse shape than this.”

“When?”

I couldn’t think of the instance. We headed across the lawn into the shadow of the stone house. I could see Gretchen and Alafair coming toward us. In the background, the lake was green-black, the rocks in the shallows illuminated with a strange light that had no source, the wind blowing whitecaps onto the shore, each as defined as a brushstroke in an oil painting.

“Things are happening here that aren’t real, Dave,” Clete said. “It scares the hell out of me.”

“We don’t have anything to be afraid of,” I said.

I think he tried to laugh. I held him tighter, pulling up on his belt, my knees starting to fail.

Gretchen was holding the Mauser bolt-action with one hand across her shoulder. She grabbed Clete’s other arm. “Let’s get him into your truck,” she said.

“Screw that,” Clete said.

“Do what I tell you, big boy,” she said.

“We’re cut off, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’ve got a couple of vehicles parked across the drive.”

“Is there anybody in those sailboats?” I said.

“I couldn’t raise anyone. I went down there twice,” she said. “Somebody cut the phone line to the bar.”

“Surrette?” I said.

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” she said.

“Did y’all see an orange pickup on the road, one with a camper in the bed?” I said.

“We saw some headlights stop on the road,” Gretchen said. “You think that’s Wyatt Dixon’s truck?”

“I guess he doesn’t own the only orange pickup in West Montana,” I said.

“We have too many hurt people here. We’ve got to get off the dime,” she said.

“We’re in a box,” I said. “That’s the long and short of it. Our advantage is that they have to come to us. We’ve also put a dent in their numbers.”

“How many of them are there?” Alafair asked.

“No more than a handful,” I said.

Clete was sitting on the bumper of Gretchen’s truck, bent forward, his head down. “Wrong,” he said without looking up.

“Clete saw more men than I did,” I said.

“Dave, look!” Alafair said, pointing up the slope.

I don’t know where they came from. I could see flashlights moving down the slope on either side of the property. I had no idea who they were or how they got there, if they worked for Caspian Younger or not. I was no longer sure that anything I saw was there.

“Give me the AR-15,” Clete said, his head on his chest. “I dropped my piece on the lawn.”

Gretchen squeezed my arm tightly, her face close to mine. “Time to bust some caps, Dave. We’ll figure all this out later,” she said. She picked up the AR-15 and left Clete the Mauser.

She was right. We were outnumbered, cut off from the highway, and flanked, with the lake at our back.

“Come on, Dave, call it,” Gretchen said.

I could see Molly and Albert and the two girls on the back steps of the house, and I could see Felicity Louviere sleeping in the front seat of Gretchen’s pickup. Clete could hardly move. Blood had run from his side all the way to the knee of his trousers. I felt at a total loss.

“Take it to them,” I said.

“Do what?” Alafair said.

“We go right down the middle,” I said. “If Caspian Younger wants a fight, let’s give it to him.”

By anyone’s reckoning, it was a foolish idea, perhaps one that had its origins in medieval romance or Henry V’s address to his troops before the siege at Agincourt. But there are times when the probability of death in your life is so great that you step across a line and no longer fear it. I believe that was what happened to us as we stood close by a glacial lake where dinosaurs and mastodons once fed and played among the buttercups and ice lilies.