Paul Levine - Night vision

WERE THE VILLAGERS ARMED, AND IF SO, DID THEY THREATEN YOUR PLATOON?

"Phuong gets upset. Starts chattering in Vietnamese and the women start running. They didn't get twenty yards."

WERE ANY VILLAGERS WOUNDED OR KILLED BY YOUR MEN?

"Who shot them?"

"Who cares who? A farm kid from Indiana who a year before played high-school basketball, a street kid from the Bronx who enlisted for the GI benefits. Red-blooded American boys with M-16s who were tired and scared and a little crazy and would have shot Westy and LBJ and me, too, if they had the chance. So instead they shot three old women."

"So your log is false. There was no firefight in the village. There was no enemy in Dak Sut."

He sat down on the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees. Somewhere in Coconut Grove, a police siren wailed, then grew softer. Inside the house, the only sound was the gentle whir of the paddle fan. "No enemy? Who was the enemy? The old women hated us, maybe fed breakfast to the poor son of a bitch who spent all day in the mud waiting for us."

"And your translator wasn't kidnapped?"

"Not by the enemy," Nick said softly.

I waited. He was staring at the wall. He lit another cigarette. "Haven't smoked since I was discharged." He inhaled, sucking it in, holding it, then emptied his lungs. "Phuong knew. The second she saw the women shot, she knew. She turned to me. Her eyes were pleading. A corporal who had twelve days left in-country called to the others, 'Let's get the gook cunt.'"

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR TRANSLATOR?

"Phuong started running. He chased her, tackled her, dragged her off. Four or five others followed him. When they were done with her, they each shot her. They'd made a pact. Then a few others started a Zippo raid, burning down every hooch. A few other women scrambled out, girls really. My men, Evan's men, went after them. Got them."

"You were in command. You could have stopped them."

He laughed. There was no pleasure in the sound. Outside, a neighborhood wren sang its early-morning song in a Poinciana tree. "You think it's like a football team, Jake. The coach blows the whistle, everybody listens up, slaps each other's ass."

He turned and looked straight at me. "They would have killed me. My own men. Evan's men. I saw it in their eyes. A sergeant comes up to me and says, 'Stay out of this, sir.' He didn't do any of the killing, but he knew when to turn his head."

"And Evan?"

"He was outraged. You'd have to know him. Eagle Scout, Sunday School Evan. Straight as an arrow, tough as nails. I admired him. Hell, I loved him, and if you'd have been in combat instead of playing ball, you'd know what that means. It's the purest, deepest kinship, something you can't have with a woman."

THE LAST TIME YOU SAW LIEUTENANT FERGUSON ALIVE, WAS HE

"Was he trying to stop the raping and the burning and the killing?"

"He ordered his men to drop their weapons. They laughed at him. One of my grunts raised his rifle. Evan drew his sidearm. He tried to arrest them. He looked to me for help."

Nick Fox was silent again.

"But you turned away," I said. "You let them kill your best friend."

He dropped his head between his knees.

"Nick?"

His broad shoulders quaked and he stared at the floor.

"Nick? What happened to Evan Ferguson?"

When he finally lifted his head, the eyes were blank and his voice was choked. "I pulled my. 45, and I told Evan to forget it, to look the other way, that we could file reports that would dovetail and no one would ever know. 'I'll know,' he said. I argued with him, begged him. We stood there in the dark with the rain coming down, and I was shivering and scared and crying, because I knew what I had to do."

He stopped, but now I knew, too. I knew the secret he carried for so long. I knew the darkest part of Nick Fox's soul, the shining life built on a lie. Behind the medals, the hero was worse than a coward. He had committed the most unpardonable sin.

"You pulled the trigger," I said. "You joined the pact. Because you were afraid they'd frag you and say you stepped on a mine or got it in a firefight. You didn't even try to stop them."

"They were going to kill Evan, and they wouldn't trust me to keep quiet. I had to do it. It was the only way to get out of there. Evan was a dead man either way."

"Keep telling yourself that and maybe you can live with it."

"I shot him in the chest. It knocked him down. I stood over him, and he looked at me, just looked at me, this incredible hurt in his eyes. I shot him twice more, and there isn't a day that's gone by since that I haven't seen that face, that look. It's there when I sleep and when I wake. It's always there."

Lt. E. Ferguson. Rest in peace. May the Lord have mercy.

Now it all made sense. May the Lord have mercy, Nick Fox prayed, on his own godforsaken soul.

An orange glow from the east summoned a new day. During the night the wind had shifted. In the summer our weather comes from the southeast, light breezes carrying the heat and moisture from the Caribbean. But sometime during the night the wind clocked around- southwest, northwest, north, finally northeast-at a steady fifteen knots. An unusual front for this time of year, a breath of air nearly cool.

My kitchen window was open to the breeze. I wore canvas shorts and an old jersey, number fifty-eight. Nick Fox wore his navy-blue suit. You never know when the TV boys will show up. I poured coffee, then sat at the table, my leg supported by a chair.

"I want something from you," I said.

"Yeah, what?" Suspicion knotted his forehead. Nick's mood had changed with the morning light. Blustery again.

"Your blood. Rodriguez's too."

"Go fuck yourself," Nick Fox said.

"Sperm samples, if you want some fun."

"Up your ass, Lassiter."

"No, in a little glass bottle. If you want, you can jerk each other off."

He lit a cigarette, changed his mind, crushed it into a priceless saucer with an illustration of Larry Csonka's face. If I hadn't broken the Jim Kiick dish, I could've auctioned the set at Sotheby's for six figures.

"What's this bullshit about Rodriguez?" he asked.

I told him that Biggus Dickus was trying to diddle every woman in town with a working modem.

"I asked him to do it," Fox said.

That didn't make any sense to me, and my blank look must have said so.

"I asked Rodriguez to join the damn club, to talk with Marsha and Prissy, scope them out."

"And his dating Priscilla…?"

"Same thing, I asked him to."

"Why?"

He looked at me, took a sip of the coffee, and said, "You really don't know, do you? That's the problem with you. You see a slice of the moon and think you've got night vision. But you've got to spend time in the jungle, Jakie, before you can see in the dark."

He turned away and looked like he was deciding how much more to say. "Once you had the log, I knew you'd jump to the wrong conclusion."

I wanted to laugh but didn't. "No wrong conclusion could be worse than the truth."

"No? What about your deciding I had Rodriguez kill Marsha and Priscilla?"

Suddenly the room was stifling despite the breeze. "I figure you'll have an excuse for those, too. It was them or you, right?"

"Damn you! I knew you'd fuck it up. I've got an excuse, all right. I had nothing to do with it. I don't know who killed them, but I know where you've been and what you're trying to prove. I know you were at Compu-Mate and copied a bunch of records that Rodriguez already had. I know you played some scam in the property room, and I know your English girlfriend signed up at the horny women's club. I know you got busted up by some cowboy who drives a Jeep, and I know who sneaked out of here about an hour before I showed up. Jakie, I know when you piss and when you shit, and when you step in it."