THIRTY-ONE.

THE SOUND OF HIS PARENTS' voices penetrated the light stage of morning sleep. Sound rather than words washed over him and aroused no particular emotion but slowly memory touched along the edges of his consciousness. There had been other mornings, hundreds of other mornings, and the voices then had been neither soft nor careful. They were according him the status of a guest and he felt strange, as though he were in fact a guest in this house.

There had been mornings of his childhood when the angry words penetrated the walls of his room and forced him to partake of their unknowable mysteries. Force-fed on their secrets, he would emerge blank-faced, sit at the breakfast table with them and with their terrible silences. His sister's pale face, his mother's trembling hands, his father's angry and abrupt movements, filled him with a tension he could scarcely contain.

Under the weight of pretended ignorance, he and his sister were subjected to sudden, unanticipated questions from their father. How did you do on that Latin quiz? You get the math straightened out yet? Tell me again about that dance you want to go to on Friday night. Who did you say was going to chaperon? How the hell did your bike get broken this time?

Each question was a veiled accusation, a probe, an attempt to turn his father's anger to something which could be dealt with openly. He knew that, yet knowing, he always provided the substance.

"Don't, Patrick," Maureen had told him over and over again. Four years older than he, four years of greater endurance or wisdom or whatever it was that kept her eyes carefully down and her mouth tightly closed. While he, Patrick, provided the tight-lipped, grudging response to his father's interrogation. For God knew what reason, he would fix his steel-gray eyes on his father's wrath, feel himself freeze into breakable ice, sliver thin, melting in the growing danger, yet unable to stop himself.

Whatever was unfinished between his mother and father always left his father filled with a consuming anger. To restore himself, to purge himself, the force of that emotion would always turn toward his son.

Maureen told Patrick that it was his own fault. Why did he always put himself in the middle by tone of voice, glare of eyes? It was a senseless defiance that could only end badly for him.

He didn't know why. Helplessness. Because of a feeling of abject helplessness. The knowledge that he was totally powerless to heal the rift between them, yet forced to witness and by witnessing, participate, filled him with an anger of his own.

At some distant time in his life there had been the small, twisted, loud-voiced, evil-smelling old man for whom he had been named: Patrick Crowley, his grandfather. Recollection of his grandfather was not of an actual man but of a presence, powerful, terrible, a knowing presence which had somehow, mysteriously, incomprehensibly, controlled their lives, and at some point in that distant time, his grandfather died and Patrick wondered sometimes if he actually remembered the old man or merely remembered stories told him about the old man.

Although his grandmother lived with them until he was nearly twelve, she was no more part of his knowledge than had she been an apparition. When she died, no void was left. It was as though she had never been.

He could conjure nothing of her, no expression, sound, fragrance, essence, quality. There was nothing left of her beyond a few photographs to establish that she had indeed led an existence in close proximity to his own, within the same walls as part of the same family.

Patrick stretched his arms straight into the air, yawned, studied his wristwatch in surprise. He must have fallen asleep or had been so totally involved in fleeting memory that an hour had gone by. They'd probably gone to ten o'clock Mass, which was late for his mother but standard for his father. His mother hadn't asked him about Mass and he felt a slight uneasy sense of shame. Not about missing Mass, but about her unwillingness to face him with it.

That was his mother: Don't mention it and it won't be.

She had aged. Her fine skin, tight over delicate facial structure, had eased somewhat and cracked at the corners of her eyes into a series of hairline wrinkles. He had been surprised; she had always seemed flawless, as flawless as a child actress who is never really young and never really grows old. He felt guilty at having seen, noticed, the signs of her age, as though he had betrayed her somehow. She was still a beautiful woman: forty-seven years old, slim as a girl, favoring blue clothes for her eyes, her hair tinted a discreet silver-soft blond.

He'd seen Henderson cast an appraising eye. Henderson's mother was one of those big women, arms larded and neck thick. Henderson's father looked like her twin.

God, he'd been proud of them, that they were his parents. In the hustle and commotion at Kennedy, that was his first feeling when he caught sight of them. Christ, they looked great.

His father had that finished look, the dark, certain pride of a man who knew who the hell he was: Deputy Chief Inspector in Charge of Public Affairs of the Police Department of the City of New York.

The security guard tried to make a big commotion about it but his father, with just a gesture, just a few quick whispered words, got things under control, managed to slip through the V.I.P. gate without anyone noticing. His father handled things smoothly, was definitely a man accustomed to handling things smoothly.

They looked great, his mother so fair and slight, his father, thick, dark hair gone just a little gray at the temples, lean in a good, well-tailored dark suit.

He wanted to just stand and watch them, unseen, to try and get them into some perspective but his mother was in his arms and his father pounded his back, took his duffel bag. He introduced them to Henderson and then Henderson introduced his parents and everybody shook hands and spoke at once and he and Henderson swore they'd be in touch when both knew they wouldn't. They hadn't liked each other in Nam and there was no reason why they'd like each other back home.

They all talked at once on the drive home or all fell silent at the same time and then each of them spoke again, as though silence mustn't be allowed to happen. The house looked exactly as he remembered it; it had been large in memory and reality did not diminish it.

He'd been gone for twenty-two months out of his twenty-four years. He caught his father's quick appraising look, which for once ended in a nod of approval.

"Scotch, Patrick?" his father asked, then made two highballs, which they drank slowly, self-consciously, in the study. "How was the trip? You must be tired. Probably won't really hit you for a day or so."

"I'm fine. This feels good, just sitting here, in this room." Carefully, quickly, he added, "With you, Pop."

His father patted his shoulder awkwardly, fleetingly. They were not used to touching. It seemed almost an intimacy between strangers, false and forced. His father took a deep swallow, moved away from him, settled into his deep leather chair. In the whiskey-warm calmness of the room, Patrick felt a rush of emotion. His head was filled with words he wanted to say but couldn't: Hug me, Pop; embrace me; cry; talk; say what you feel; let me say what I feel. It'll be all right, nothing will fall apart, nothing will shatter.

Christ. Oh, Christ, the honesty he'd learned with his dead buddy didn't apply where it counted most.

"Gee, you look good, kid," his father said. There was depth to his voice and warmth and pride. "Tell me, Pat, how's it been?"

He tasted the drink again, put the glass of whiskey on the table beside the couch, ran the tip of his index finger around the lip of the glass.

"It's not exactly over for me yet. I'm going to Kenyon's wake tomorrow. I told you about Kenyon?"

"Jesus, Pat, I feel like I knew him. It's a lousy thing, a close buddy like that."

"It's a funny thing about Kenyon. He knew he was going to get it. Almost like it had to happen because he was so sure of it. I never thought it would happen to me. And here I am."

"A lot of guys are like that, fatalists. I remember-"

Patrick raised his face, moved his head to one side and his gray eyes pierced the space between them. "We gonna compare wars, Dad?"

It was the first sign, the first warning that there were things between them, beneath the safe surface of conversation. There was a momentary silence, sharp and electric, as they regarded each other and found familiarity.

His father's mouth pulled into a smile and he spoke easily. "I was going to say that I remember you wrote us a few months ago about Kenyon, how he wasn't afraid of anything because he felt it was going to happen to him and there was nothing he could do about it."

That wasn't what his father had started to say and they both knew it. Patrick admired the ease with which his father could size up a situation and respond to it in the best way possible, maintaining the advantage at all times.

"There was nothing anybody could do about anything over there," Patrick said shortly. He stood up with a surge of restless energy. He turned, scanned the large room with the unusually high ceiling, the dark stained-glass window set into the paneled wall. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his fatigues and stared at the window. "I never could figure who that was supposed to be," he said. "When I was a little kid, I used to think it was Grandpa, then I used to think it was the devil. I remember once Grandma Crowley told me it was Saint John of the Cross."

His father's laugh filled the room with a harsh staccato. "I think the first two would hit the mark. I wouldn't put it past the old bastard to have himself mounted in glass. He was a corker all right. Christ, Patrick," his father said, "I think the old man would have given the last ten years of his life for the sight of you right now."

When Patrick turned and faced his father, he was unprepared for the open expression of relaxed and genuine pleasure with which his father regarded him.

"I'm glad you're home, kid. I'm really glad you're home." Then, unable to go any further, his father stood up, winked, held his drink toward the window and said in a sharp, tough voice, "I'll drink his welcome home for you, Pat, my lad."

His mother stood in the doorway, small hands on her apron, and said softly, "Well, if you've finished with your drink, the roast is just about ready."

Neither Patrick O'Malley nor any of his friends had ever had any real commitment toward the war. Patrick went because it was his war and his turn to be part of it. His father had had a war; his older cousins had Korea; Viet Nam was his turn.

His friends decided, over beer or a shot of whiskey, that this one was there for them. None of them knew too much about what was involved politically or militaristically or morally or immorally. They knew they were for it and felt superior to those opposed.

They knew, had been taught, believed, that a carefully drawn world-wide pattern existed; their teachers at St. Thomas Aquinas had taught them what to look for; even at St. John's it was pointed out to them. Communism was slipping its strangle hold on the free world. It was up to them.

They sat one night, a bunch of them, spoke vaguely. Except for Tommy Noonan. Over a fourth shot of whiskey, Noonan said bluntly, "My father. My fuck-up war-hero sonuvabitching father. Isn't that what the hell it's all about, Patrick? I mean, ultimately, when we analyze it and get to the ultimate stinking bottom of it, isn't that why we're enlisting, you and me and Sullivan and Flynn and some of the others? Aren't we trying to prove we're as good as the old man? But I think, actually, you know, it's a pretty shitty war they've given us. I mean, hell, their war was all big deal and gung ho and all that 'we're in it together' stuff." Tommy Noonan swallowed the shot and said thickly, "I think, my friend Patrick, that you and me and the rest of us are getting a bit of a royal screwing in our particular war, just to prove to our fathers that we got balls too. But what the hell, initiation rites, as the primitives would say, right, O'Malley?"

Tommy Noonan had both of his legs shot off by a gunner in an American helicopter in one of the unfortunate accidents of war which had caused the serious wounding of seven other Americans besides Noonan. He and Tommy Noonan had gone through grade school, high school and a year and a half of college together. They enlisted in the Army together, along with a somewhat reluctant Tom Sullivan, who thought the Marines had better-looking uniforms.

Sullivan ended up in ordnance and spent most of his time in Thailand. Tommy Noonan was assigned to the Corps of Engineers, spent his time building, destroying and rebuilding landing strips for supply planes.

Patrick O'Malley, through no fault, desire or understanding of his own, ended up as a medic. He did not see Tommy Noonan after he was shot up. He was in the field with Pfc. Dudley Kenyon, picking over what was left of a detachment of men who had been sent in to capture a small rise of land known on their maps as Hill 202.

He and Kenyon eyed each other warily. Kenyon, truly dark enough to be called black, rested his hand lightly on his huge Afro, patted at it, pursed his heavy lips, nodded at the tall blond kid with the pale face. He could see the kid hadn't been at it very long but he could also see he wasn't ass-brand-new. There were a few facial muscles set in place so he knew the kid wouldn't come apart at the first piece of meat they stumbled over, but the kid looked soft enough so that Kenyon hoped they wouldn't find any bits and pieces of his friends or buddies out there.

Patrick O'Malley let Kenyon take the lead with a grave respect which Kenyon noticed and liked. It wasn't deference or any of the phony shit some of the whiteys displayed to let you know they considered you their equal, which was shit in and of itself. It was a smart move on the kid's part and showed a healthy regard for his own skin, to let the more experienced man know, right at the start, that he was the boss.

Kenyon stood over an inert, groaning figure, leaned forward just slightly to listen for a particular sound. He nodded once briskly and motioned Patrick away.

"That man is two breaths away from dead," Dudley Kenyon said, "and we ain't got nothin' to waste on a dead man."

Patrick glanced back once as they walked away, heard a harsh, sibilant sigh, saw the body arch and hold rigid for an instant, then go limp.

Kenyon knelt beside a bleeding man whose face was hidden against his buddy, who cradled him.

"He got it in the stomach," the soldier said. His voice was hollow, empty; he hugged the wounded man's head as though it were a pillow.

"Lemme have a look at his face, man, you like to smother him," Kenyon said. He put his hand under the wounded man's chin, jerked his face abruptly. "Hey, man, you with us or you out yonder or what?"

Kenyon gestured impatiently at Patrick for a needle. "Hey, what color your eyes, soldier? Your face sure one helluva gray color. You got eyes to match or what? Come on, open up and show me."

The lids fluttered; the eyes were glazed and unfocused.

"Where's your buddy from, soldier?" Kenyon asked.

"He's from Tennessee."

Kenyon gave a deep growl from his chest. "You from Tennessee, white boy? Well, now ain't that something interesting. My old papa, he was from Tennessee. Buncha them old sheet-wearing night riders, they come and they took my old pap away one night and we never seen him since." Kenyon leaned close to the wounded man's face and whispered menacingly, "What part of Tennessee you say you was from, whitey?"

The wounded man gasped; his eyes flew open; he stared in terror at the black face which bore down on him. "I didn't do nothin' to your pa. I ain't got nothin' against any you Nigras, you could askt anybody, I got lotsa Nigra friends."

Kenyon squatted back on his heels, cleaned a spot for an injection and grabbed the man's arm. He grinned and said, "Well, you just gave yourself a nice good jolt of adrenalin, boy. You gonna be just fine, once I get this nice mama needle into you. You gonna feel so good that hole in your gut not gonna hurt you one bit."

Kenyon ripped torn clothing away, dug into his kit, cleaned the wound, applied a dressing. He signaled for two stretcher-bearers, and as they carried the wounded man down the hill, Kenyon said to Patrick, "Sometimes you gotta jolt 'em a bit to see if they got anything left. What you do is, you ask some bleeding black man, 'Ain't you the nigger fucked my sister back home in Detroit city?' I guarantee you'll see an almost dead man come back to life, he got anything left in him at all."

Before he joined the Army, the only black person Patrick O'Malley had ever had contact with was the overweight son of a wealthy physician. He was a beige color, with thick pale lips, tightly kinked hair neatly cropped to his skull, and strange light-gray eyes. He had the unfortunate name of Jeremiah J. O'Hara III. He was in all of Patrick's classes at St. Thomas Aquinas, from freshman year through graduation.

The novelty of a black classmate with the unlikely Irish name of O'Hara was good for laughs when things were dull, but Jeremiah O'Hara didn't make a good scapegoat. He had a naturally easy manner, a long-suffering attitude of one who was tired of waiting for an original joke at his expense. He was also richer than practically anyone else at school, got higher grades and had every intention of attending, first, Harvard, then Harvard Law.

Dudley Kenyon was black in a way that Jeremiah O'Hara could never be. He surrounded himself with a conscious racial tension for it had been just such racial tension which had directed his entire life.

But in his work, which was the saving of life, Kenyon displayed a complete lack of awareness of color.

It was condition that spoke to him and he taught Patrick to disregard everything but the possibility of survival when selecting who to attend first.

The dead would wait forever and the dying would die.

It was the living you tried to save.

It became almost a contest, a point of pride at selecting those who could make it and leaving the others for later.

Patrick felt a tough satisfaction when Kenyon would turn to him and say, "Yeah, okay, he looks good," meaning some writhing bloody form who Patrick had decided stood a chance. "Only the winners, man, we pick only the winners."

When they were away from it for a week, moved back from the lines for a few days of rest, it hit Patrick: what they had been doing.

It hit him with the force of doom and instinctively he sought relief as he had been taught from childhood: he found a priest.

He was a Navy priest, young, smooth-cheeked, with longish sideburns. He apologized for not being an Army priest, laughed to put Patrick at ease, assured him he was a genuine chaplain; despite his apparent youth, he'd been in Nam on and off for nearly five years.

It was hard to put it into words, the sense of what he had been doing. It was as though he'd been playing God. The selection of who would live and who would die overwhelmed him. Faces were beginning to haunt him, to accuse him. Young boys covered with their own blood and excrement, lying in a tangle of torn flesh, with nothing human left but a strangulated cry for help, confronted him.

"I might have helped some of them. God, at least I might have eased some of their agony a little."

The priest-Patrick never caught his name; it was something long and Polish or Ukrainian, though he spoke with an irritating Midwestern drawl-wrapped his long hands around his bent knee, dug his heel into the rung of his chair for greater comfort. His face was serious and pensive and he frowned, almost as though to impress Patrick that he was giving a great deal of thought and consideration to the matter.

After a long silence, the priest coughed slightly, blinked, released his knee and told Patrick about how things are in wartime: choices have to he made sometimes. He was sure that Patrick was doing the best he could under very terrible circumstances and he would pray for Patrick and for all of the poor boys he had had, of necessity, to pass by.

He told Patrick that he should make the most of his short leave, try to refresh his spirit, forget for the moment the honor he had so shortly left behind and so shortly would again encounter.

Patrick O'Malley stood up slowly and smiled his blazing boyish smile so earnestly that the priest felt the warm glow of his own comforting powers. He stood up to take the offered hand with hearty fellowship.

"Gee, Father, thanks. Thanks very much. Boy, you sure made me feel better. I mean, I felt pretty bad when I came in here to talk to you, but just listening to you made me feel a hundred per cent better."

"Well," the priest said, flushed with pleasure, "that's what we're here for, that's what we're here for."

"Yeah, Father," Patrick said, "you made me feel so goddamn fucking good that I'm going out to the boondocks and screw at least six little slant-eyed whores."

For just one instant, the priest's hand held in his, continued pumping, until the sense of what Patrick said caused the priest to yank his hand away.

"What...what?"

"And I'll think of you at the very minute I shove it in, Father."

Patrick left the chaplain's office and headed for the bar run by an old Japanese man and his two sons. It was where Dudley Kenyon hung out.

The day that Patrick saved Kenyon's life was the day that Kenyon told him about the five men he'd stalked and murdered.

They were loading the wounded, tied securely to their stretchers, flattened by the protective tarpaulin so that they all looked like cardboard corpses. The heavy blade whirred above their heads, the force of artificial wind prickled along Patrick's scalp, seemed to draw him upward, wanted to suck him into the heart of the machine. The proximity of the invisibly whirling blades was something he could never get used to. The rhythm ran through him as he raised and balanced and handed off the wounded: ma-chete; ma-chete; machete.

The last boy lay patiently waiting, lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Patrick squatted beside him, sniffed and grinned.

"Man, where'd you get that stuff from? From my buddy over there?"

The soldier inhaled, moved his head slightly to indicate that Patrick should take a drag. The sweet familiar odor came slowly in lazy billows from the soldier's mouth. Patrick grinned and inhaled elaborately, then replaced the reefer in the soldier's mouth.

"Sure makes the trip a little easier to take."

Kenyon came over, helped himself to a drag, gave the wounded soldier the last. "This here mother got it made, O'Malley. He got himself a few little toes knocked off his goddamn foot and home again, home again."

"I don't know, man, I don't know." The soldier's voice was thin and far away. "That's what you tell me, brother. But how come I don't like feel nothin'? Don't feel fucking nothin' nowhere, like I don't exist no more."

Patrick caught some quick signal from Kenyon and he realized that this was the kid with the severed spinal cord. He said quietly, "That's 'cause my man here gave you some real a-one special-stock pot like no other shit you ever had."