Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [135]
Something else was bothering him. Historians wrote of battles as epic events involving thousands of soldiers acting in concert, all of them directed by a brilliant strategist such as Alexander or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson. But for the grunts on the line, the reality was otherwise. They took home a limited perspective, a few shards of memory, flashes of light, a name being called out, the whirring sound of a projectile flying past one’s ear. In the larger context of the battle, the individual’s perspective was little more than a sketch on the back of one’s thumbnail. The invasion at Inchon saved United Nations troops from being pushed into the sea. But Hackberry remembered only one detail from it. A group of marines under the command of a young naval lieutenant had captured a lighthouse. They were aided by Korean civilians. Had they not held the lighthouse, the peninsula would have been lost. In retaliation, the North Koreans began executing civilians. Some of the civilians armed themselves with captured weapons and fought back at a railway station, where they filled suitcases from the baggage room with dirt and barricaded themselves inside. They should have survived, but they didn’t. A shell from either a railroad gun or an offshore battery hit the depot and killed everyone inside. The shell must have contained phosphorus, because the bodies of the dead were burned uniformly black, as though they had been roasted on a slow fire, the skin swelling until it burst.
Hackberry had never forgotten the image of the dead Koreans and their frozen posture inside the ruins of the building. Nor would he ever forget the image of Ethan Riser dying in a spray of .45-caliber bullets fired into his face by Jack Collins. People said time healed. If it did, Hackberry thought, the pocket watch he had inherited from his father must have been defective.
“Pam?” he said through the open door without getting up.
“Yes, sir?” she answered.
“See if Anton Ling is home. If she is, tell her we’re on our way out.”
“What’s up?” Pam said, standing in the doorway.
“It’s time for Miss Anton to get honest about her past.”
“You talking about that Air America bullshit?”
“No, arms to northern Nicaragua, courtesy of Josef Sholokoff. Would you stop using that language?”
Pam looked out the window at a woman coming up the sidewalk. “She must be psychic,” Pam said.
HACKBERRY WASN’T SURE whether there was a thread of resentment or jealousy in Pam’s voice. He had given up dealing with the mysteries of eros and was sure that at some linguistic juncture in ancient times, the words “error” and “erotic” had sprung from the same root. The truth was, he could not define his own feelings about either Anton Ling or Pam Tibbs. One reminded him of his dead wife, Rie, who would always remain the love of his life. The other woman, Pam Tibbs, was as brave as Rie had been and equally protective of him, even to the point of causing him public embarrassment, and the look in her eyes always told him that she saw the young man inside him and not the man who was almost eighty. Also, she gave no quarter in either love or war, and her level of loyalty was ferocious. No man could have a better companion as a lover or friend. He could have worse problems, he thought. But damn it to hell, an old fool was still an old fool.
Anton Ling walked past Maydeen and R.C. and Felix and a bail bondsman and Pam Tibbs and a drunk cuffed to a D-ring as though they were not there. “I just heard about Ethan Riser on the radio,