William Boyd - Stars and bars

“Didn’t you get any compensation? Some sort of pension?” Henderson asked politely.

“For what? I told you, I didn’t have a scratch. I didn’t even get a fuckin’ purple heart. They sent me right back in.”

“Good God,” Henderson said, “that’s barbaric.”

“But at least you weren’t dead,” Bryant said. “Like the other guys.”

“Yeah. That’s something, I suppose.”

They arrived at the house. Alma-May was sweeping the porch.

“Evening,” Henderson said. “Mr Gage back?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.”

“But he’s gone away again. He was looking for you. For to show you the paintings, he said.”

“Bloody hell… Excuse me.” Henderson looked around him exasperatedly. “Did he leave any message about the paintings?”

“No.” Alma-May swept dust over his shoes. He moved aside.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No.”

♦

That evening, Henderson and Bryant watched TV after being served something called ‘turnip cakes’ and a watery ratatouille. Beckman disappeared into his room. From upstairs came the remorseless bass thump of Duane’s rock music. Henderson got a bad headache at about half past nine. He went out into the warm night, stood on the porch and stared at the yellow windows of Freeborn’s mobile home. He found no answer there and so went up to bed.

“Yeah, we was on patrol near Loc Tri. No, no, it was Dhat Pho. Man, we was pissed. A real jerk-off patrol. Then we sees this like buffalo thing — kinda like a big cow? You know? — in a paddy field. That’s where the gooks grow their rice.”

“In a paddy field? I see.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess it was about, oh, a hundred and fifty yards away. No, let’s see, maybe a hundred and thirty.” Beckman Gage, elementary particle physicist, frowned as he tried to recall the exact distance. “Let’s say one-forty. Anyway, so the sergeant says, “The first guy to off that buffalo gets a six-pack on me.” Yeah. Well, I was like carrying the machine gun. The other guys start firing…”

Henderson felt himself nodding off. He’d had a good forty-five minutes of campaign anecdotes since lunch-time.

“…and I laid ten rounds of tracer up its ass. It just sorta disintegrated. Like pink foam!” Beckman gave a dry chuckle and shook his head over the folly of his youthful days.

Henderson looked at his watch. He hadn’t left the house all day in case he missed Gage, but the man hadn’t returned. Bryant had gone shopping with Shanda in Hamburg, which turned out to be five or six miles away. He had been crunching his way through one of Alma-May’s special salads — hard boiled eggs, raw potatoes, squash and some tough purple leaf — when Beckman had arrived from his lab.

“It was kinda like the time we was doing hearts and minds in Tro Nang. No Doc Tri—”

Freeborn came in. Henderson never thought he’d be even a tiny bit glad to see him, but he was. All the same he gripped the edge of the kitchen table defensively. However, Freeborn seemed to have forgotten about his deadline and ignored him.

“Beckman, can I have a word? Outside.” He looked darkly at Henderson. He and Beckman went out into the hall.

Henderson heard Freeborn bellow, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at Duane. Then about two minutes later he returned alone.

“Listen, you English dick, the only reason I ain’t breaking your balls is that I love my father.”

Henderson couldn’t follow the logic of this argument.

“I give you one final warning,” he went on. “If you so much as mention the name Sereno to my father you’re a dead man.”

“Look, I just want to do my job and get out of this…out of here,” Henderson insisted. “You and your father can sort out your own problems. I’ve got no axe to grind.”

Freeborn hitched his tight jeans up, and pointed at him.

“I’m going away for two days. If you’re still here when I get back then you get your ass waxed. Got it?”

“Don’t worry. I shall be long gone.” Perhaps it was the anaesthetic quality of Beckman’s battlefield yarns but Freeborn’s threats didn’t seem to perturb him that much today.

They looked at each other for a while. Why does this man dislike me so much? he wondered. What little scheme of his has my arrival foiled?

Alma-May interrupted their stare.

“Get out of my kitchen,” she ordered grumpily. “I got to make you all dinner, your Daddy says.”

“What dinner?” Freeborn asked.

“He’s having a big dinner for Mr Dose here. He’s invited the preacher and his wife.”

“T.J. Cardew? Shit . And Mrs Cardew? Aw no .”

“That’s the only preacher we got. And y’all got to be there, your Daddy says.”

♦

Dinner was to be served at seven thirty. Guests were to foregather in the sitting room downstairs from seven onwards. Henderson bathed and put on his last clean shirt. He had only brought three, not anticipating his stay to be so protracted. He knotted his tie and combed his hair. As an afterthought he ran his comb through his densening eyebrows. He’d have to get them cut back soon, like a hedge. It had been one of the most boring days of his life, waiting vainly for Gage to show up. Bryant and Shanda had returned from Hamburg at 4.00. When Henderson asked her how she got along with Shanda she had said it had been ‘fun’.

He walked down the passage and knocked at her door.

“You ready?” he called in a loud voice.

“I’m drying my hair!” she shouted. “Five minutes!”

They had to shout because Duane was playing his rock music at exceptionally high volume this evening.

Henderson wondered if Duane would be honouring them with his presence that evening. He was curious to see what the youth looked like.

Gage himself was due to arrive — so Henderson had learnt — with his two guests later, T.J. and Mrs Cardew. Cardew was the minister in Luxora Beach. Henderson recalled that someone named Cardew had been responsible for the sermonette he’d listened to the other night. He assumed they were one and the same. Were T.J. simply his initials or was it some obscure Baptist rank, he asked himself as he walked down the stairs. He heard the clatter of plates from the kitchen and the distant clamour of a raging argument from Freeborn’s mobile home. Good, he thought. With a smile on his face he sauntered into the sitting room.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello again.”

Cora Gage had been brought down and had been placed squarely in the middle of the largest sofa. She was wearing a plain black dress and some sort of effort had been made to get her hair in order. She even possessed — Henderson took the liberty of staring — a smear of pale orange lipstick on her lips. She wore her dark glasses (like pennies on the eyes of a corpse, he suddenly thought) and, inevitably, she was smoking, her pack of cigarettes and lighter nestling in the sag of her lap.

“Help yourself to a jolly old drink,” she said, looking straight in front of her.

“Thank you.”

Set out on a table at one side were various types of whisky and bourbon, some bottles of beer and what looked like a five-gallon flagon of wine — Californian, he read. With considerable effort he managed to up end this and splash some into a glass and reasonable amounts onto the table. He tried to mop this up with a paper napkin but only succeeded in making it fall apart and also getting his hands wet. With a little thrill of pleasure he wiped his hands dry on the cushions of a nearby armchair.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Oh jolly old cheers.”

She really was an objectionable young woman, he thought. He stared at her thin body. The black dress was tight enough to reveal slightly out-of-proportion breasts — out-of-proportion in that someone her size, he felt, really should be flat-chested. He sat down opposite her.