“You peek through my windows, you come to my house uninvited, you beat up my boyfriend with a blackjack, and now you trail your BO into the concert I’m attending. Do you see a pattern here?”
People were turning to stare now. His face was burning, his armpits sweating inside his coat. He tried to find words to speak but couldn’t. He shoved his way through the crowd back toward the grass embankment where Greta waited for him. Behind him he thought he heard people laughing.
Greta pulled the snow cones out of his hands. “You look terrible. Sit down. What happened over there?” she said.
“Senator Finley’s daughter holds a grudge. It’s no big deal,” he said.
“Who cares? She’s a brat who should have had her butt pounded a long time ago,” Greta said. She got up from the grass and threw the snow cones in a trash barrel. “Come on, big fellow. Show me where you live.”
She walked a few steps toward the parking lot, then turned and waited for him to follow.
THEY DROVE ACROSS the bridge and turned into a shady side street that bordered the river. But he couldn’t concentrate. He had started out the evening convinced he was investigating both ecoterrorists and a rogue intelligence operation. Now he’d been made a public fool and he was in the company of a woman whose complexities and motivations he couldn’t begin to guess at. He felt like a man being pushed into a fistfight after his arms had been torn off.
His apartment was located in a century-old refurbished brick building with a grand view of the river and the city. He walked out on the balcony and looked back toward the bridge and the park on the opposite side of the river where the dance was still in progress. Why care what those people thought? he asked himself. The civilian world was a joke, a giant self-delusion that had little connection to the realities of nations in conflict.
He remembered a moment of revelation in El Salvador back in the 1980s. A photographer had taken pictures of U.S. advisers carrying weapons in the field and several congressmen had threatened an investigation. The irony was that the El Salvadoran helicopters raking leftist villages with Gatling guns were receiving their coordinates from U.S. AWACS planes high overhead and no media knew anything about it.
Darrel wondered if Amber and her liberal friends at the dance had any idea what was done for them and in their name on the ragged green edges of the American Empire.
But moments of reverie like these were not entirely comforting to Darrel. He also remembered seeing a helicopter gunship coming in low over a rain forest, a molten sun behind it, the downdraft whipping the canopy into a frenzy, then the Gatling guns blowing a series of huts into a pinkish-brown cloud laced with dried thatch. There had been children as well as adult civilians in those huts, and sometimes in the middle of the night he heard the sounds they made before they died
.
Greta was making a pitcher of sangria at his bar, although he had not asked her to.
“Still thinking about that spoiled twat?” she said.
“You never told me what you were doing over at Senator Finley’s place.”
“Mine to know,” she said, stirring the ice and red wine with a celery stalk. “But if you insist, I have friends who contribute to his campaign. I suspect you voted for Finley, didn’t you?”
“I don’t vote. I think politics is a sideshow.”
She filled two goblets with sangria, fitted orange slices on the rims, and handed him one. “Here’s to all the jerks who take sideshows seriously,” she said, and clinked his goblet.
“I don’t figure you.”
“What’s to figure?” she said. She drank from her goblet, then set it down and slipped her arms around his waist. He felt her stomach touch his loins like an electric current.
Later, after they had made love in his roll-away bed, she put on her panties and walked without her top to the bar and came back to the bed with their drinks. She had few wrinkles in her skin, no stretch marks, and her muscle tone was extraordinary for her age. She drank from her glass, then leaned over him and kissed him wetly on the mouth. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.
“About what?”
“How you liked it.”
“Good. I liked it real good. You’re quite a woman.”
She tapped him on the lips with a finger and winked. “You’re not bad yourself. Next time, though, give a girl a little compliment. Mind if I use your bathroom?” she said.
A moment later he heard the toilet flush and the faucet running. The band was still playing across the river, the sound of the music floating thinly above the roar of the current. He put on his boxer shorts and walked to the balcony. Somewhere in the crowd on the clipped lawn Amber Finley was still dancing with Johnny American Horse, the moon rising above the mountains into a turquoise sky, the two of them blessed with youth, the admiration of their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.
He had never felt so miserable in his life.
AFTER SUNSET and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.
The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.
Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.