Red Star

By Dennis Ford

Blair Bottoms journeys home after a tour of duty in Vietnam to discover the town he once knew is different. The Jersey Shore that bathed his childhood thoughts now appears corrupt and guilty. He never dreamed that through a tangled set of circumstances he would become an active participant in a web of lies, deceit, and murder.

When he meets the captivating Melissa Noon, Blair instantly falls in love. But his love for her may not be enough to save him from the tragic course he's created. In the end, Blair must choose between protecting the woman he adores and securing his fortune no matter the cost.

Red Star brilliantly shows how moral compromises can add up to a life completely changed and used in terrifying ways. It's about not losing our past-and believing in our future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 21, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595886562

Dennis Ford

Dennis Ford is the author of nineteen books, including the recent novels Tracks That Lead To Joy and World Without End. He lives on the Jersey Shore, where he walks the beaches and thinks about ghosts.

Book preview

RED STAR

Dennis Ford

29654.png

RED STAR

Copyright © 2007, 2010 Dennis Ford.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

844-349-9409

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-0-5954-4326-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-5956-9181-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-5958-8656-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 10/29/2020

CONTENTS

A Better Place

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

All Possible Worlds

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

The Way The World Works

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Homebodies

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

for my father and mother,

for my sisters,

for my nephews and nieces,

for all the good times we had together,

and for the years that led

from the Roseland Raiders to the Wessex Knights

A BETTER PLACE

CHAPTER ONE

29686.png

Home, he kept saying to himself, over-and-over home, never once growing bored, home, home at last.

He stared at his image in the dimly reflective glass and he thought, Blair Bottoms, you made it home, and he felt immense relief that the prayer-wish uttered in the strenuous test of combat and in the tedious stretches of camp came true. Who’d have thought it? he asked with a smile that owed more to the scratches in the dual windows than to the agreeable cracks in his cheeks. And who’d have believed you’d come home a hero?

Some words own a power to make the speaker feel good, whether by the structural arrangements of phonemes or by the semantics of pleasant memories. Love and the names of lovers are such words. Friends and family, mother and father, children and the names of children are among such words. Home is also a nice word, and if his home in Milton wasn’t the best place on earth, it was better by far than the jungle highlands where even professional devils want for names on the map.

Home, he repeated, reassuring himself that the plane was over New Jersey, and nearly over the airport in Newark. I’m looking forward to home.

He recognized Vietnam as a bad word from the first he heard it, back in current events class in Milton High. Vietnam sounded bad, somehow alien in Western speech. It read bad, too, mean and ugly on the page. From its sound and from its look—it caused the eye to gag as it did the mouth—and from the reveries inspired by mixing Hollywood with the history texts, he guessed Vietnam wasn’t a real place. He found out during his tour of duty that he was smarter than his grades indicated. He had guessed right. Vietnam was a place so far out of his experience growing up on the shore he doubted he had been there for the unbelievable length of a year and had performed to the satisfaction of his peers valorous deeds amid the mayhem.

He reminded himself not to think of bad words that stood for bad places, but to think of home. The war was no longer his concern, but that of a new class of enlistees who in the miserable fullness of time would undergo the crazy exuberance and despair of combat. He knew what was on the minds of the recruits as they tripped to Southeast Asia. Some recruits told themselves they wouldn’t succeed in the terrible place they were going. Probably, they were right; probably, they should have rehearsed the rosary than litanies of self-doubt. Some guys washed out. He saw it happen, how soldiers crumpled psychologically, and how other soldiers tore into well-conditioned muscles with bullets or with hypodermic needles. Other recruits wouldn’t be given the chance to succeed or to fail—the enemy would see to that. Most of the recruits honored their country. He saw that happen often enough and, to his surprise, it happened in his own case.

If he learned any lesson in Vietnam, it was that people change. A year ago, he journeyed in much the same flight path. He had a window seat on that flight, too. He thought he’d be able to spot landmarks on the American continent, the Father of Waters perhaps, or the Rockies, or the Grand Canyon, but he saw only darkness on the land below, and darkness in his reflection. On the way to Asia he thought about the good times he enjoyed in Milton, his city on the sea. He thought about the batters he mowed down as the star pitcher for the Marauders and about the touchdowns he scored as the star tailback for the varsity football team. He thought about the good times he had on the beach. He was a born swimmer, no sooner out of diapers then into bathing trunks. He thought about the good times he had with his pals on the Boardwalk and on Athernon Shepley’s amusement pier, and about the better times he had with his girlfriends in the back seat of his white convertible when they parked on the deserted road that led to Barnegat Lighthouse a few miles up the coast from Milton. All the while he thought of the adventures of his youth, he couldn’t get Vietnam out of his mind. He suspected that he and the other enlistees on board were heading for disaster and, as it turned out, he was more right than he cared to remember.

He started on that trip a nervy young man barely into his twenties, and when he returned he was mature enough to put accurate thoughts in the impressionable minds of the luckless soldiers who took his place. He started out as they did, as innocent and naive and as confused and full of conflicting ideas, and he faced the dragon of war that bared its bloodthirsty maws in his generation in a place badly taught in geography class. He did what he was told. He stood his ground and fought his country’s enemies and made a man of himself. He wore war paint and war feathers and he carried a technological alchemy of weapons and he won for his mighty efforts a Bronze Star for valor.

He felt no satisfaction that other men took their turns in the jungle’s chop shop, but grieved for the recruits, as he had grieved for himself when he rode the carnage express to the west. He tried to keep his mind not on dismal thoughts—gloating was out of the question—but on the astonishing fact that his tour was over. You’re home, you’re safe, you’re out of danger, thank, thank—but he didn’t know whether to thank the statistical order in the universe that he finished by chance at the positive end of the cosmic distribution or the personal God who answered the prayers of the devout woman who took a mass daily for her son’s safe return.

The pilot announced the arrival time and the ground temperature at Newark Airport, and he still couldn’t believe that he, Blair Bottoms, the honored son of Matthew and Mary Bottoms, was home from the war in Asia, home from danger, home from disaster, and home to deadening cold. The insufferable phrase, ten degrees caused him to join the lapels of his uniform and pin them closed with his chin.

Cotton provided no warmth, and the empty shot bottles of Martell cognac, balanced on the unfolded snack tray attached to the seat ahead of his, failed to cheer him from the inside. Cloth couldn’t retain heat in moderate temperatures to one acclimatized to the tropics, and he grew immune in Asia to the effects of cognac for shots to be of help. He thought to ask the stewardess for a blanket or for another shot, but she had already settled in the rear of the plane, relaxed with the shoes off.

Ten degrees, and dusk still lingered. He shivered in anticipation of how far the temperature would plunge before night ended.

He leaned and pressed his hand against the window and, for warmth’s sake, his nose against his hand. His gaze encompassed the unobstructed universe from salt to stars, yet he saw none of the landmarks of day and nothing beyond the lowered flaps at the base of the wing.

He couldn’t sort the dusky shadows or distinguish between blue landmasses and blue cloud banks. Both looked the same, at once solid and strangely insubstantial. Nor could he assign a geographical identity to the patternless arrangement of lights stretching out below; to his surprise, the task became more difficult as the plane descended and as the ring of cities grew larger and still larger. Such was the paucity of visual prompts—there were too many by day and not enough by night—he couldn’t tell whether the lights belonged to the ground or to the sky or, for all he knew, by reflection to the plane.

What he saw of earth and sky extended without definitive depth or distance. The atmosphere was dry, the winter air unbearably crisp in itself and in bones one part flesh, another part frozen, but the vista looked thoroughly wet, as if he viewed snow melting on the marge of a swollen river through a frosted windshield in a driving rain. What he saw belonged more to viscid corneas than to the four-cornered earth.

As the plane careened across the twilight shell, banking eastward on its landing run, Blair saw that the sunset, usually grand in February, was a dismal-looking flattened streak of crimson tinsel unable to conduct light, heat, or hope. People don layers of clothing in winter to increase their bodily warmth, and in the Arctic mammals evolved to outlandish size to obtain metabolic protection against the cold. The sun, which of natural objects was best prepared to survive winter, seemed from his airborne perspective to shrivel and to shrink and to solidify at its surface from sol into gel and from hydrogen-fueled fire into vaporous flume. The sun looked like a feather caught between gravities—too heavy to float away, but not heavy enough to descend into oblivion.

Scratches ingrained in the dual windows broke the light into the visible spectrum and then into invisibility. Blair sat back for fear that he would smear the sun merely by the strength of his eyesight.

His experiences in different parts of the globe destroyed his juvenile parochialism that New Jersey in general, and Milton in particular, was the center of the universe and that when the sun ceased to shine on his Atlantic hometown it ceased shining altogether. The sun that set over Milton, New Jersey, rose over Saigon City, South Vietnam. If the sun opened in season to impatient day-trippers waiting on the night, it brought grief the year round to the American tourists who traipsed the camera-clear green of Asia.

The solar carousel spun on its celestial course, and Blair’s thoughts turned to the playroom in the mansion of his being and to a finite, if less fragile, contraption, the merry-go-round heart of Athernon Shepley’s amusement pier. His eyes closed in a half-tensed, half-relaxed squint that bleared both the indistinct lights outside the pressurized cabin and the sensual bulbs of reverie.

On one pass of the lopsided wheel he saw snack stands stocked with cartons of jelly apples and paper cones of cotton candy, one as hard as the lacquered horse he sat on, the other as delicate. The chrome hinge of imagination exposed a wall of skiddleball lanes on a second pass; he heard the continuous banging as balls landed in the numbered pockets and clashed in the pointless gutters. A maze of pinball machines and toy rifle ranges popped into view on a third pass; enough cut-out soldiers met their deaths in such machines to settle world war in a single afternoon. A fourth pass illuminated a grid of fish bowls whose perplexed inhabitants swam with dorsal fins bent by meteoric dimes pitched across the counter.

Blair preferred to stay on the imaginary carousel, surrounded by wood horses alternately rising and dipping and by wood serpents incongruously hauling gaudy chariots, but a sudden bounce of the plane restored him to alertness. He glanced outside, but couldn’t spot the specific reason why the plane lurched. He supposed a shear of wind was responsible or a sudden drop in altitude. The sun, such as it was, had set, and a persistent red streak shone in its stead, a cosmic wire that grew more malevolent as the skyey mesh of lights lost their color. Threaded from disparate sources, the red light singed competitors sightless. Struck from a dark fire, the light burned where other embers flew off to extinction.

The light crossed from the scratch at the western rim of vision to the scratches in the windows and from the sunken star to the blinking red beacon at the end of the runway. The light led from the horizon through the spools of Blair’s reflective red eyes to the carnival stringers hung inside the carousel and then it folded up like a fuse, the quicker to expedite disaster.

Blair closed his eyes tightly, but he found no solace in once friendly reveries. The interior of the carousel had darkened, crinkling like a smudged carbon loosely attached to the master copy. The snack stand had closed, the jelly apples had turned wormy, the cotton candy had corroded. The skiddleball lanes were quiet, the balls stacked over a coupon frill. Cardboard soldiers laid in pieces on their cardboard bombproofs. Goldfish floated upside down in their bowls.

He sat by himself in the first car of the Wild Mouse, a miniature roller coaster at the bitt end of the amusement pier. Three stories high and a few yards wide, the Wild Mouse couldn’t compare with any roller coaster of reputation, but it had inspired an irrational fear in Blair since earliest childhood. The Whip, the Octopus, the Rocket, the Tiltawhirl—they were newer rides than the Wild Mouse, faster, with steeper hills and valleys, and with sharper turns, more dangerous curves, yet he rode them as many times as his friendship with the operators allowed. When it came to the Wild Mouse, he was able to ride only in imagination. The effect was no less frightening for being purely psychological.

The car jerks into slow motion. Hooked, it pulls to the right and climbs. The motoric lassitude, the best the rebuilt engine can manage, teases the rider and then torments him. The slow rise puts an end to fun, to courageous words, to raucous boasts, to ill-timed bragging and boyish bravado. The climb enlarges the vector of his vision from a localized point to a coastline extending from New Jersey to Gehenna. The car lifts away from the shore and replaces the pier lights with a gray mist in which the clay of the sand and the brown of the surf become the same galena hue, grainy and gravel-like. The higher the car rises, the nearer to the water it seems to sink. When it reaches the crest, the car dips and allows him to take in and fully calculate fears roused on the haul up. He looks away, certain that the car must surely separate from the chains and propel itself into the gloomy depths. He braces for reasons of gravity and morality and teaches himself anew swimming lessons and the catechism. His parting statement is the gland’s gasp, the throat’s most primitive utterance. He throws pride away—too quickly, for the car veers at the last moment and plunges backward toward the pier.

Blair expected disaster to drop on him as he dropped into the accommodating sea, but when he awoke from the nightmarish ride he realized only consciousness had been submerged. He sat in mind on the collapsible seat of gravity, three stories above the pier, another three above the ocean, with what he believed was nothing more than a safety chain between him and the hereafter, yet all he risked was the ignominy that the shot bottles, clinking precariously, would bounce over the rim of the tray as the plane braked and wet his trousers in lieu of the waves.

For the veterans of the War to End Wars, there were victory parades from reusable boxcars to Broadway. For the veterans of World War Two, there were muggings in Times Square and kisses for the asking. For the veterans of the war in Korea, there was a loquacious old soldier bitterly fading away. And for a veteran of the continuing war against communism, there was a hesitant ten-year-old leaning against the glass panels of a nearly deserted airport ramp.

It was on account of his nephew that Blair stayed sane while participating in the undisclosed brutalities of an undeclared war. Little Mikey hadn’t prevented the abuses that came with the defense of democracy, and he hadn’t excused them afterward, but he offered Blair an opportunity to suffer guilt for the right reasons.

Blair traced the boy’s development through his letters. He received monthly evidence of Mikey’s growth in his handwriting and in the expression of increasingly complicated ideas. Initially, the boy’s letters were in a printed scrawl composed more of pictures than of prose; their dictated content was obviously beyond a juvenile’s interest as it disclosed the state of in-laws’ health and of his grandfather’s declining bar business. The letters were in script by the end of Blair’s tour and full of material dear to the writer’s heart, and to the reader’s. In summer the letters reported the American League standings; in winter they disclosed Mikey’s plan to commence the long path from the mound in the city park in Milton to the mound in Yankee Stadium.

You’ll do well, Blair wrote back. Baseball’s in our blood. It’s part of our genes.

Baseball ran in the Bottoms’s bloodline, but not the ability to recognize faces. The boy who stood alongside the glass had the same brown hair as Mikey, the same abundance of freckles, the same wholesome roundness of youth combined with a lean athleticism, but he was a good deal taller than Blair remembered.

His sister had been remiss in not including photographs with the penmanship, but she made physical amends and proved by her emotional greeting that the knowing glances exchanged between Blair and the boy were accurate.

Beth, who had stood with her husband toward the rear, couldn’t restrain herself when Blair lingered on the ramp. She rushed forward and hugged her brother and kissed him out of utter joy that he returned home unharmed and a hero. She understood that the war sometimes maimed the souls of soldiers it left intact in the flesh, but she preferred not to think of such a possibility. All she wanted to know was that her baby brother was home safe and without seams.

Let me look at you.

Beth held her brother at arm’s length without releasing her grip. She didn’t know what to expect after so long an interval; she was surprised only at the lack of surprise. Blair wasn’t taller than when he left. He stood slightly over six feet, and he looked no heavier weighed by a bulky winter coat. He was no older in the face, but more tan than she remembered, so tan his full lips, broad cheeks, and straight nose, were almost the same high brown as his eyes, almost the same brown as his hair.

She met his teary eyes through her tears, and the teasing judgments she made returned to memory with the freshness of the sibling squabbles that marred their growing up. You have eyes the color of a tree, she repeated to herself as she often said to his annoyance.

She claimed his eyes were tree-like when they were young and in mixed company because she believed he owned the dull intelligence of wood and, when she wanted a favor, some of its obstinacy. The meaning of the words had changed in the airport, however, quite as if she spoke a different language than English in the mind’s discreet tongue. Trees stay mute in their pain, except for the phrases cut in their bark. Blair wasn’t harmed that way, but she feared to consider the flames that scorched his marrow. To her relief, he didn’t try to express the turmoil she glimpsed beneath the brown tranquility.

You haven’t changed.

You’re just being kind, he answered in a flat voice spoken from deep in the throat, as if he had swallowed a considerable amount of seawater or had spent a day on an arid beach.

Really, you look mighty handsome in that uniform for—for being overseas.

And you look pretty good for staying home.

Blair looked at his sister and saw the reflection of his brown eyes and hair, though dye lightened her tips to blond. He thought of her not as she was, a grown woman twice married and mother to a boy on the verge of adolescence, but as he had when homesickness complicated the continuous tensions of war, as a surrogate mother on roller skates. If she argued with him and bossed and bullied him by parental proxy, she also defended him and reined in his recklessness and prevented some of his more rowdy stunts. Despite their rudeness and their roughness—there were times they treated each other more cruelly than they did strangers—she was his pal and his defender, and she was for him more than she was for her girlfriends or, later, than she was for her boyfriends. The memory of her loyalty moved Blair to hug her and to regret the selfish wish that she hadn’t suited up for combat. He could have used her good judgment on the grown-up playgrounds of Asia.

Memories of their childhood brought back a time when the worst offense he committed was cutting class or a school chum’s lower lip. He imagined himself in tattered shirt and jeans, and in bathing trunks, and in a baseball uniform, and in shoulder pads and helmet, and then in formals when he rented a tuxedo to escort Debbie Katkin to the senior prom, and he wanted to keep rehearsing the good memories, but he became aware that people were looking at him. He realized to his embarrassment they weren’t seeing him in the leisure wear of nostalgia.

When he realized his family stared at his uniform, he recalled how many civilians had dog-eyed him on the flight home, their gazes so severe and disapproving, he thought to visit the men’s room to see if there was something the matter with his appearance. If the looks of civilians could kill, he stood a better chance in combat.

This is Gary, Beth informed her brother, withholding the superfluous, My husband.

Blair remembered Gary Kent as a Milton patrolman whose specialty in fighting crime on the waterfront was chasing home any citizen between six and sixteen years of age caught on the Boardwalk after curfew. He couldn’t remember if he ever saw Gary out-of-uniform—as a teenager he saw him in uniform too often—but the man didn’t appear capable of wielding the billy club in advance of the badge. He looked too small, too slight, and too gray to be a street cop; certainly, he looked older than his forty-five years. Blair extended him the benefit of a doubt, along with his hand in friendship. It wasn’t polite to address the man’s appearance or the strained relationship between prowling lawmen and prowling teenagers. He knew he didn’t look like a soldier without the uniform on.

Sorry I couldn’t make the wedding.

For understandable reasons, Gary responded.

I’ll buy you guys a combination wedding and first anniversary gift once I get settled.

Come on, Mikey, why are you so quiet? Beth tried to grab hold of the suddenly bashful boy without letting go of Blair. We couldn’t get him to stop talking the entire trip to the airport. Heck, we couldn’t get him to stop talking the past month. Between baseball and knowing you were coming home, it’s been ‘Uncle Blair, this’ and ‘Uncle Blair, that’ and ‘Uncle Blair, the other thing.’ Now, when his Uncle Blair’s finally home, he doesn’t say a word.

I have one friend in the world.

All the kid wants to do is play baseball, Gary added in a tone of reproof said with a smile of admiration. Baseball in summer I can understand and almost play. Baseball in winter, though? You can’t throw a hardball when there’s snow on the ground.

Sure, you can, Blair informed him. You paint the ball orange, so you can find it in the snow. You clear off a driveway for a diamond and use a chunk of ice for home plate.

If that’s an invitation to take over Mikey’s training, I gladly accept.

You were the number one guy in the Little Leagues, Mikey, and you’re going to be the number one guy in the City League. This is going to be your year. You have more physical skills than the other players, you practice harder, and you’ve gotten to be a big guy. We have to stop calling you ‘Little’ Mikey.

Isn’t that the truth? Beth marveled at a physical fact that saddened her. Children grow so fast, faster than the Himalayas, she added, ruffling her son’s hair with her glance.

Why can’t you be the best? Gary asked by way of encouragement. Your uncle made it to the State finals in high school.

I remember, Blair. You pitched super that day.

"The Marauders would have won the title if the game was six innings instead of seven."

You were the best high school pitcher in New Jersey for six innings.

I should have practiced more. You may as well win, if you’re going to play.

The politicians ought to hear what you said about sports and apply it to Vietnam, Gary commented, interjecting an unwanted word into the conversation.

Beth’s expression reflected Blair’s distress. More effectively than her brother, who was at a loss for words when reminded that he had been involved in more losing causes than the State finals, she changed the topic and restored cheery thoughts consonant with his personal victory of arriving home after a perilous journey. You must be glad to be back.

If I didn’t look foolish, I’d kneel and kiss the ground.

Don’t do that, Gary advised. People would sooner walk over as around you. When they see the uniform, they’d kick you for spite.

What do you think of my boat?

Blair stood in the parking lot of the airport, in a cement marina where luxury craft traveled on tar rather than on water, and he looked around to try to choose the motoric response to his brother-in-law’s vain question. Nice, he answered as he stared at a foreign import, and Nice, he repeated at the leg-stretching sight of an American-made station wagon. Nice, he said a third time, Very nice, indeed, as Gary opened the broad door of a Cadillac sedan parked between wrong guesses.

Nice, he repeated with more feeling, as he followed Mikey into the back seat. He sank so deep into leather luxury he lost track of the echo of his compliment.

Nice, ha? Beth asked as she settled in the front seat. Gary won’t let me drive, she commented in a tone of voice that disclosed no hint of resentment.

Without waiting for the passengers to catch up with the motor, Gary put the clutch in reverse and backed out of the parking space. The engine was so quiet, and the acceleration of the car was so gentle, the driver appeared a nervous wreck in comparison.

This capsule’s as complicated as the lunar module and far simpler to operate. I control everything at the touch of a button.

Gary chuckled as he played with the instrumentation. The stereo roared in one speaker after another, demonstrating the bass extremes of easy listening. Each of the four windows opened and closed in turn, though not in time with the music. The wipers cleared the windshield of cleaning fluid and the roof light switched on and off, a dim match to the high beams that blinded the oncoming traffic.

Shut the windows, Gary, it’s cold, Beth admonished. And don’t drive so fast. You know how dangerous parking lots are. She leaned against the dashboard and looked upward toward the planes that, disrupting traffic from six hundred feet above ground level, widened the close lanes with wonder.

The Apollo spacecraft requires the Pacific for a landing, but this boat can stop on a dime.

A dime may be small change to pay to prove the brakes work, but go easy. Blair didn’t cross the continent to risk an accident in a parking lot, and Mikey’s in the back seat.

The motion of the car was so fluid, Blair didn’t realize the sedan had slowed till it paused at the tollbooth. Wait, he appealed, fumbling to find his wallet. Let me get the parking.

It’s taken care of. Gary held a roll of money toward the roof light he clicked back on and picked a twenty dollar bill loose. He thumbed one side of the wad as he waited for the attendant to return the change. He folded the money inside out and thumbed the opposite end of the wad in case Blair missed the fact that he carried only tens and twenties.

He meant to impress Blair, and he succeeded. Blair was indeed impressed that a patrolman drove a chief’s car and flashed a chief’s salary, but he remained silent. It wasn’t his place to cast suspicion on the source of Gary’s wealth, a loaf sliced to Beth’s and Mikey’s health. If he thought about Gary’s income, it was only to consider joining the Milton police force.

It’s a good thing we didn’t take the old man along. Gary pointed at the red bull’s eye glowing atop the advertisement on the Budweiser brewery that stood outside the airport. We’d have to make a pit stop in the taphouse, not to mention in every john on the highway between here and the home lavatory.

Pop’s on a tear? Blair asked.

You heard of having ‘half a load on?’ Matthew has two halfs a load on. He’s been on the sauce since Christmas.

This past Christmas, or the Christmas of the year before?

This past Christmas.

That’s not bad, then. It’s only February.

I haven’t been in the family long enough to know how bad bad can get, but if Matthew’s capable of drinking more than he has this past season, then I’m mighty impressed. I’d take my hat off in his honor, only I’d be scared he’d fill it with cheap whiskey.

You shouldn’t talk about Pop this way in front of Mikey, Beth admonished.

Michael knows about his grandfather. As it is, I’m making an exception letting Michael inside the tavern. The Come On Inn is no place for a boy his age, what with the foul talk and with ‘The Drinck’ flowing like there’s no tomorrow.

Give Pop a break. He’s drinking, okay, maybe more than usual, but only because he’s happy Blair’s home.

I forgot. It takes an exceptional occurrence to get Matthew to drinck. Gary looked in the rearview mirror and caught the wandering attention of a passenger more interested in the sights along the highway than in the road show of memory. Blair, your father’s so overjoyed you’re home, he dranck the obligatory load on.

It’s been known to happen.

When it comes to ‘The Drinck’, Matthew has the appetite of a caterpillar crawling on a branch where bottles serve for leaves and yellow beer for petals. Unfortunately, the only rashes erupting are on the sober people who have to endure the hypocrisy he calls ‘love’ and ‘fond feelings’ and ‘family feelings’.

Beth, how’s Mom? Blair asked to forestall an argument more likely to break out than a temper rash.

I can’t tell you how much Mom missed you and how she worried about you. She would have come with us tonight, only she had to stay and keep the in-laws company.

Let’s not forget she also had to stay and keep the old man in some semblance of order.

Blair extended Gary a generosity the man wasn’t willing to extend in kind. He understood the frustration of sobriety matched against a permanent inebriation. He had often grown sufficiently angry to want to exchange fists in place of venom over Matthew’s careless rowdiness. Like Beth, he grieved that things couldn’t be different in their home, different in their maturity as they weren’t in their growing up, but he experienced a tranquility in his fate and an acceptance of his liquored lot in life. Gary ranted about the ancestral weakness of the Bottoms family and fumed about the follies that follow the collapse of ambition. Maybe Gary was nasty because he was new to the family and not used to Matthew’s frequent hellbenders. Maybe Gary was nasty because of the cheap return Matthew offered for all the good things he did for Beth and Mikey. Maybe he was nasty because he never knew anything different than a perfectly sober and successful life. He was a cop, but he mustn’t have seen much of the world. Blair had seen Vietnam, and he found there a world of reasons to accept what Gary had prejudged a bad life.

Blair looked toward the side, toward a thoroughly good thing that had changed for the better, and he saw to his surprise that Mikey wasn’t sleeping. He forgot that Mikey was no longer a child easily rocked to sleep by the motion of a car. He thought to change the subject and tell Mikey some stories of his baseball heroics. He had been the starting pitcher on every team he played for. He had been the ace of the staff from the Little League to the American Legion. Only in Vietnam, where he played intramurally, did he descend from the mound and assume the catcher’s position, a hot place from which he humbly observed the rise of a better pitcher who threw faster, and a meaner curve, and with more finesse than he believed possible outside the major leagues. He thought to tell Mikey about the best pitcher he ever saw, but he didn’t want to spoil the ride home and reveal how the game ended for Jimmy Harley, and he supposed that baseball was the last topic on the boy’s mind. He suspected that Mikey, though a player and a fan from earliest boyhood, preferred at that moment to hear war stories.

He turned from Mikey and observed the highway, how it looked too small and too crowded for the cities and then too large and too empty for the countryside. Cities gave way to towns as Gary demonstrated that his foot was as heavy on the gas pedal as the tires were light on the pavement. Towns gave way to shopping malls, and shopping malls gave way to truck stops, and truck stops gave way to roadside stands, and roadside stands gave way to the illuminated exits of the highway, each more lonely than the former in their monotonous sequence. The illuminated exits gave way to darkness, as if the ramps led off the edge of the planet.

The cold deepened the night and the excesses of winter dimmed the lights and squeezed them from radials to pinpoints, whether at their sources photic or reflective. The sedan raced ten miles and better above the posted speed, and immense billboards of light, vast cities wide, shrank to the size of placards and shrank still further till they became single bulbs shivering in the streaky distance.

It used to be he knew the map of New Jersey, the location of its cities and towns and roads, by the athletic fields he played on—the baseball fields and football fields were side-by-side for the wealthier teams and one-and-the-same for the poorer teams—but he forgot the local geography he knew before he left for war, and the view from the back seat of the Cadillac was no better than the view from the plane. He couldn’t say where he was until he smelled the fishy, sinus-clogging odor of the ocean. Until he smelled the ocean, he was sure he wasn’t home.

He left the driving to Gary Kent and allowed himself to take on the subtle motion of the sedan and ride half-dreaming into the dreamy darkness.

"Here are the soldiers home from battle, here are the conquering heroes returned from war," Blair heard spoken neither from the interior of a warm, leather-insulated sedan nor from the skiddery curbside of a highway cracking in the cold but from the tropical white streets of Saigon. What trophies did you bring home, heroes? What prizes did you win in battle?

He sits on the hard frame of a military jeep. His battery mate sits beside him, an Arkansas farm boy with fair hair the color of baked apples in a pie and with broad dimples creased like the warm crust. His buddy’s widely appealing features betoken fiddles and bales of hay and barefoot girls in blue jeans, not the rifle held on his lap, nor the grenades strapped to his flak jacket, nor the two Vietnamese prisoners crouching in the cramped space between the driver and their boyish captors.

We brung these two gooks, Jimmy Harley shouts at the pedestrians. He reaches and, showing off for the servicemen who tease him while they wait for the light to change, strikes one prisoner on the back of the head. Merely for spite, he strikes the second prisoner a similarly sharp blow.

Just two? Two prisoners? That’s all you brought home? Two prisoners from all the world of war?

These two are alive. You clawns cin go up-country if you warnt and count the gooks we left behind.

Jimmy half stands and half squats in the crowded jeep and grabs his manhood in a gestural, obviously genital, act of defiance. He doesn’t remain balanced for long, but falls back to his seat when the jeep lurches to a start. When he steadies himself, he strikes the prisoners a second time for the slim chance his competitors in-service missed his deed the first time.

Beth, you’re sadly mistaken if you think I bought this boat to obey the speed limit.

Roused from the chance to crash into further bad memories, Blair leaned forward. You can show the badge if the troopers pull us over.

That’s what badges are for.

The badge won’t work with the state troopers, Beth noted. They don’t know where Milton is.

Believe me, Beth, they know where Milton is.

The only good thing about the convertible I used to drive was that it couldn’t go very fast, Blair said, sitting back.

I remember that car. Gary eased up on the gas pedal when he noticed Beth’s growing annoyance at his reckless driving. It was an oversized white convertible. What was it, a ‘59 model?

1959, yes. I wonder if Pop kept it in working order.

I would have caught you and the rest of the rowdies if I drove this boat instead of the wrecks the city owns. They’re prowl cars all right—that’s all they can do is prowl. As soon as they hit fifty miles, the transmissions fall apart.

Fifty was the limit? Too bad I didn’t know that at the time. The convertible could do fifty one.

The change of the traffic light from green to yellow was the usual signal to step heavier on the gas pedal, but Gary chose to obey the rules of the road and, thereby, allowed Blair a full minute to observe the political allegiance of Atlantic College.

Until his grades dropped the last two years in high school, he thought he might attend the college. He thought he might even win an athletic scholarship, but it was his misfortune to live near the single school in New Jersey that didn’t specialize in sports. Regardless of his scholarship, he hung out on campus and ogled the women and, acting older than his age, tried to win dates by the virtues of good looks and a convertible able to keep up with the traffic. He was familiar with the campus, with its ivy paths and secluded parks, places good for making promises, but he hardly recognized the school when he returned in Gary’s car and pressed against the glass for a better view. More had changed in the years he was away than the wintry ribbons tying an earthen package wrapped in ice with bows of heavy breath.

The campus had built up considerably. The picturesque elm patch that once surrounded the campus gave way to monoxide bouquets in place of fallen leaves. A large portion of the sandstone hill that stood across the street from the school had been leveled and replaced by additional parking for faculty and staff; only a few decorative pines remained amid the traces. A modern glass and steel building replaced the old brick library, or so Blair guessed for the rows of stacks of books glimpsed inside. Another modern building, larger than any on campus except for the gymnasium, housed the new student center. An immense torii had been erected between the library and the student center. The irregular heart to an irregular network of buildings constructed in different architectural styles, the torii was almost as tall as the student center.

We got them in Jersey, too, Gary said with a scowl.

A circus-sized tent had been raised in the parking lot, with its back against the side wall of the student center. Fires glowed in metallic bins placed at the entrance to the tent, beneath posters of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. A searchlight illuminated the tent from the inside out. Several troughs stood inside the tent, and on the troughs skinny signs had been nailed. Deposit your student ID card, read one sign, Deposit your draft card, another, Deposit your social security card, still another. Weighed by bricks to keep from being distributed purposelessly, pamphlets leftover from a livelier season laid on decrepit picnic tables. A single protester stood watch for peace inside the tent. Made clumsy by the cold, he marched to-and-fro and avoided stepping too close to either the entrance or to the bins. He wanted to stay warm, but not to immolate himself for the cause.

Go ahead, Gary said in a voice that was one part jest, another part sarcasm. Just don’t deposit your feelings in the back seat.

I thought this kind of thing went on only in the big cities.

We have our own little war on the home front. Gary took his foot off the brake at the sound of the horn of the car stopped behind him and slammed on the gas pedal. Don’t you worry. Their day will come, and then they’ll have everything to protest.

Blair sat back and folded his arms formally on his lap. He listened as Gary and Beth competed to mock the peace movement and as Mikey inadvertently increased their invective by asking well-meaning questions, but he heard another voice, a Southern voice appealing in abject desperation, "Help me, Blair, help me."

He tried to direct his thoughts away from the catastrophe of Vietnam and toward the man who owned the courage of his convictions to stand outdoors on a wickedly cold night. The fact that a protester from their staid county risked frostbite to stand for peace shocked him. The citizens of New Jersey were conservative by nature, thoroughly loyal to the president, and unlikely to get involved with radical causes. Though the tent was on private property, it was in public view and open to the road. That it had not been shut down was proof that the citizens condoned its presence. Taxpayers sent their children to the same school that sponsored the protest. They paid their tuition and ran up their book bills on their charge cards. They purchased the cars parked in the lot where the tent was pegged. They contributed generously to the school’s endowment, that it sheltered their male children from war, their female children from grief, and, in the meanwhile, provided a competitive education. He wondered how much longer the war in Southeast Asia could continue if the good people of Milton endorsed the school that endorsed the protest.

If you ask me, Beth, they ought to be tried for treason.

Mom, what’s treason?

The protesters should deposit their wallets in the troughs, pour kerosene in, then set the troughs on fire and put out the flames with their educated asses.

Mom, what’s treason?

Gary clicked his lips to correct his stepson for interrupting adults in the middle of their vitriol. Beth believed that Mikey deserved an answer, only she couldn’t think of a definition of treason equal to the boy’s understanding of patriotism. Blair noted their reactions to Mikey’s inquiry with the same interest he devoted to the roadside objects that passed from windshield clarity to tail pipe obscurity in the same instant. He didn’t dote on the faces of his in-laws, nor on the unknown face of the protester shivering in his snow boots. Against his will, he dwelled on the dimpled face of his Arkansas buddy and on the tormented phrase Help me, Blair, help me borne on expectorations that carried more blood than breath.

CHAPTER TWO

29686.png

Melissa Noon applied the final strokes of makeup on the death’s head disguise she painted on her boyfriend’s face. She utilized the skills she acquired as a member of the Atlantic College Dramatic Society to create a macabre mask that would properly frighten spectators yet retain the respectable pathos their noble cause elicited. A stickler for details, a stickler for esthetics, she labored for half an hour to contrive the combined effect of terror and tragedy, and she believed she succeeded. When she was done, she couldn’t help but laugh.

What are you laughing at? Douglas Naughton challenged. You’re laughing at me.

Don’t be so serious, Douglas. Melissa stared at the beige rouge that covered his face from the collar upward, and at the eye-black that darkened his brow, and at the canary yellow hair that clashed with the lifeless effect created on the skin below. I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing at your hair.

I’m not dyeing my hair, I’m telling you for the last time. I’m not dyeing it black or red or gray, not even green, like Professor Winder suggested.

Definitely not green. If you dyed your hair green, you’d look like a cross section of soil. Melissa traced the streak that curved from ear-to-ear. The eye-black can serve for an earthworm.

That’s really funny.

As it is, you look like a half-peeled banana, where the eye-black serves for a bruise.

That’s even funnier.

Ar, don’t mess it. Melissa reached and blocked Douglas’s hand before he ruined her work with a wipe.

I don’t know why you took so long to put the makeup on, or why you did such a thorough job. Douglas pointed with his chin toward three men who argued the specifics of their planned peace rally from the public forum of a theater devoid of actors and audience. I’m playing to the professors, not to a full house.

They’re the only critics who count.

Here it is the dead of winter, and I feel like I need to sweat.

You’re nervous because you don’t know what the professors will say. If we act like we know what we’re doing, and if we don’t make any suggestions, they’ll approve.

They won’t approve. They don’t feel like they’re doing their job unless they find something wrong.

Smile for the camera, Mr. Naughton.

Douglas squinted as the flash popped in his eyes and his mouth dropped open in surprise that Tom Corwin, photographer for the school paper, caught him off guard. His mouth closed before his eyes reopened, but he didn’t require words to express his indignation.

Tom stepped from the shadows and, bumping lenses, brought the camera against his glasses, the thick black frames of which extended like fixed locks of his thick black hair.

One more time, smile. Floor unseen, Tom walked the half-lit aisle with a slight stoop, as if he were greatly in earnest or greatly in need of stronger glasses. These pictures are for next week’s edition—and for the ages. We have to show something to gain admission to graduate school in heaven. Here’s hoping God’s on our side. What do you think, Melissa, is God with us or is he a’gin us? Is the Lord a peace protester, or is he not?

If we judge God by what he says, he’s with us. If we judge God by what he does—oh boy, we’re in trouble. Melissa’s grimace, and the roll of her head in a feigned shiver, concluded the unstated thought.

"Things will go badly for