W. Griffin - The shooters

"You sound as if you didn't like him," she said.

"Actually, I liked him very much. He was kind to me. What I think now is that he wasn't all that unhappy that an American, a Mexican-American with a name like Jorge Castillo, had not come back to further pollute the von und zu Gossinger bloodline."

He met her eyes again, quickly averted them again, and reached for the other full martini glass. She snatched it away before his hand touched it.

"You've had enough," she said.

"That decision is mine, don't you think?" Castillo asked, not very pleasantly.

She glowered at him. Then she put the glass to her mouth and drained it.

"Not anymore, it's not," she said.

"You're out of your mind. You'll pass out."

"Finish the story," she said.

"How the hell am I going to get you home?"

"Finish the story," she repeated.

"That's it."

"How did you wind up in San Antonio?"

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh."

He shrugged. "Well, my grandfather and my uncle Willi went off a bridge on the autobahn, and that left my mother and me alone in the castle."

"Why didn't your mother try to get in contact with your father?"

"When he didn't write or come back as he promised, I guess she decided he didn't want to. And I suspect that my grandfather managed to suggest two or three thousand times that it was probably better that he hadn't. I just don't know."

"How did you get to San Antonio?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, you've heard that good luck comes in threes?"

"Of course."

"A year or so after my grandfather and uncle Willi went off the bridge, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer."

"Oh, God!"

"At that point, my mother apparently decided that wetback Mexican relatives in Texas would be better than no family at all for the soon-to-be orphan son. So she went to the Army, which had been running patrols along the East/West German border fence on our land. She knew a couple of officers, one of them a major named Allan Naylor."

"General Naylor?" she asked.

When Castillo nodded, she added, "He's a friend of my father's."

"I am not surprised," Castillo said. "Anyway, Naylor was shortly able to tell her the reason that my father had not come back as promised was because he was interred in the National Cemetery in San Antonio." He paused, then-his voice breaking-added: "So at least she had that. It wasn't much, but she had that."

Beth saw tears forming. Her own watered.

He turned his face from hers and coughed to get his voice under control.

He then asked, "If I take a beer from the cooler, are you going to snatch it away from me and gulp it down?"

"No," she said softly, almost in a whisper.

He took a bottle of Schlitz from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. As he went to take a swig, raising it to his mouth, he lost enough of his balance so that he had to quickly back up against the counter.

Without missing a beat, he went on, "So…so one day Major Allan Naylor shows up in San Antonio, nobly determined to protect as well as he can the considerable assets the German kid is about to inherit from the natural avarice of the wetback family into which the German bastard is about to be dumped."

"Oh, Charley!"

"My grandfather was in New York on business, so Naylor had to deliver the news to Dona Alicia that WOJG Jorge Castillo had left a love child behind in Germany."

"What happened?"

"She called my grandfather in New York, told him, and his reaction to the news was that she was to do nothing until he could get back to Texas. He didn't want to be cruel, but, on the other hand, he didn't want to open the family safe to some German woman just because she claimed her bastard was his son's."

"Oh, Charley!"

"You keep saying that," Castillo said. He took another swig and went on: "Couldn't blame him. I'd have done the same thing. Asked for proof."

"So how long did that take? Proving who you were?"

"Not long. Thirty minutes after she hung up on Grandpa, the Lear went wheels-up out of San Antonio with Abuela and Naylor on it. They caught the five-fifteen Pan American flight out of New York to Frankfurt that afternoon. Abuela was at the Haus im Wald at eleven o'clock the next morning."

"Haus in Wald? What's that?"

"Means house in the woods. It's not really a castle. Really ugly building."

"Oh. And she went there?"

"And I didn't want to let her in," Castillo said, now speaking very carefully. "My mother was pretty heavily into the sauce. What she had was very painful. I was twelve, had never seen this woman before, and I was Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. I was not about to display my drunken mother to some Mexican from America.

"So Abuela grabbed my arm and marched me into the house, and into mother's bedroom, and my mother, somewhat belligerently, said, 'Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my bedroom?' Abuela said she didn't speak German, so my mother switched to English and asked exactly the same question. And Abuela said"-Castillo's voice broke, and he started to sob-"and Abuela said, 'I'm Jorge's mother, my dear, and I'm here to take care of you and the boy.'"

He turned his back to Beth and she saw him shaking with sobs.

And she saw him raise the bottle of Schlitz.

And she ran to him to take it away from him.

And he didn't want to give it up.

They wrestled for it, then he fell backward onto the floor, pulling the bottle and Beth on top of him as he went down.

Neither remembered much of what happened after that, or the exact sequence in which it happened.

Just that it had.

The next thing they both knew was Beth asking, "Charley, are you awake?"

"I'm afraid so. I was hoping it was a dream."

"It's half past ten," she said.

"Time marches on."

"My God!" she said. "What happened?"

"You don't remember?"

"You sonofabitch!" she said, and swung at him.

He caught her wrist, and she fell on him.

"I told you not to call me that," he said.

And then it happened again.

[-VIII-]

The Daleville Inn

Daleville, Alabama 2005 9 February 1992 The rain was coming down in buckets, and First Lieutenant C. G. Castillo, who had gotten drenched going from the Apache to Base Ops and then drenched again going from Base Ops to his car, got drenched a third time going from where he had parked his car to the motel building.

The Daleville Inn was full of parents and wives who had come to see their offspring and mates get their wings pinned on them, and one of these had inconsiderately parked in the slot reserved for Room 202.

As he walked past the car and started up the stairs to the second floor, the car in his slot flashed its lights at him and then blew its horn.

He was tempted to go to the car and deliver a lecture on motel parking lot courtesy, but decided that was likely to get out of hand and satisfied himself with giving the driver the finger as he continued up the stairs.

He was standing at his door, patting the many pockets of his soaking-wet flight suit in search of his key, when he heard someone bonging their way up the steel stairs. Then he sensed someone standing behind him.

"I was just about to give up," Beth Wilson said. "I've been sitting out there since six."

"I was afraid of this," he said.

"Afraid that I'd be here?"

"Or that you wouldn't," he said.

"We have to talk, Charley."

"Oh, yeah."

"Just talk. Nothing else."

"Would you believe I expected you to say something like that?"

He found the key. He opened the door, waved her through it, followed her in, closed the door, and only then turned the lights on.

"You could have turned them on before you pushed me in here," Beth said. "I almost fell over your wastebasket."

"But no one saw the general's daughter and the affianced of Righteous Randolph in Castillo's room, did they? As they would have had I turned the lights on first."