Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [66]
The Chinese had 120,000 men; we had 15,000.
A wave of them came at us. We would be overrun. We shot from the hip.
Gertz went down and a second later Fischer’s face exploded.
“Good bye,” said Tommy.
“I love you,” said I.
I took a bayonet in the arm, reached around for my fallen weapon and came up with a camp shovel. I sliced half-way through the neck of the soldier behind the bayonet and drove the shovel into the chest of another. I pushed Tommy away from one thrust, only to throw him into the path of another. Then, all the air I had went out through my chest at the point of the bayonet that went into my back, and that’s the last I knew of it, until this very moment, this moment of flying through the air, heart pounding, to knock Odd away from the shot Nascine took at him.
We lay in the mud, looking at each other, Tommy, Odd, Tommy, Odd….Quinn, Clarence, Quinn, Clarence.
“My God,” he said, “we’ve always been together!”
“You were there, just now?”
“Korea.”
We held each other, now on the wet American soil, pinned down again, this time by Nascine, who stood over us and pumped a fresh shell into the chamber. Honestly, neither one of us cared. He didn’t matter anymore.
The Deputy put the shotgun to his shoulder.
“Why did you suddenly want to buy the truck?” I asked. “Just curious.”
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“I do,” said Odd. “When you killed Jimmy, Jeannie tried to run. You chased her and brought her down with a baton blow, back of her knee. You were going to finish her off right there, right here, in the mud, but the look of fear in her face aroused the real monster in you, the one that has always lived there. You dragged her to the back of the truck, out of the rain, on the mover’s pad Jimmy had spread out back there, and you raped her. You raped her with the boy she loved sitting in the cab, where she could see him, with his head blown off. Then you sat her next to him, and by that time she welcomed the shot that you fired. The only hard evidence, the notebook, you stole, so you had no worries. Until I came along, because I would know, wouldn’t I? And in the years that have passed, DNA would be discovered, and the back of that truck was still loaded with your DNA, your semen, and no way to explain it.”
“Guess what?” he said. “I’m gettin’ a little aroused right now. But, c’mon, you can tell me, how do you know all that?”
“You don’t know?” said Odd, giving his own words back to him.
“That shit about you being Jeannie, reincarnated? No, that don’t fly.”
“Jeannie talked herself into loving you, for about two minutes. It was how she tried to deal with her own shame….and disgust.”
“Disgust?”
“Disgust and confusion. It was her first time. She was young and inexperienced. She didn’t understand why a grown man would cry like a baby, after an orgasm.”
If I could have touched Nascine with a stick at that moment, he would have cracked into a thousand little pieces. But I was still in the mud with Odd, watching the Deputy’s finger on the trigger.
”Good bye,” said Odd.
“I love you,” said I.
Now, from the trees behind us, a sharp crack, and Nascine yanked back as though on a string, right out of one of his clamming boots.
Odd and I disembraced each other.
Chief Shining Pony walked out of the trees behind us, cradling a 30-30 carbine. He didn’t ask after our well-being, and he didn’t check out Nascine. He didn’t have to. Some deaths have a way of leaving no doubt. What he did say, with an economy I appreciated, was, “That’s that.”
“Thought you didn’t want any part of this,” I said.
“Only this part.”
I sat where I was and watched Nascine. He lay motionless, his mouth open to the fog, his body slowly settling into the mud. What now, I wondered. Clarity gone, all linkage broken, attachments let go, fluids drying, skin cooling. Not a life led well;