May 4, Sunday
Gunner was snoring like a cat freight train; his wet nose jammed in Lieutenant Robin Haas’s ear. He clung to her as though someone would tear her away, leaving him to fend for himself, though he had been spoiled rotten since he was a kitten. Robin reached up to stroke Gunner’s heaving side, knocking the newest issue of Life magazine from her nightstand in the process.
The magazine documented the Fall of Saigon. From April 29 to 30, fifteen North Vietnamese Army divisions had surged through the city to the Presidential Palace. War photographers captured the two-day evacuation as 662 Marine, Navy, and USAF flights airlifted 6,236 passengers to the Seventh Fleet waiting in the South China Sea.
Robin grabbed the magazine from the floor, stuffed her pillows behind her back, and leaned against the bed’s headboard. Gunner climbed onto her lap then to her shoulders as though he knew Navy pilot Lieutenant Harry Stillwater was on the cover. Six and a half years dead, Harry was now back among the living.
Two years ago, Harry’s family had carved an end date on his tombstone and buried relics of him in an otherwise empty grave. One was a scorched copy of Song of the Lark recovered from a crash site outside a ville in Vietnam's Central Highlands. His dad, Art, had cried, Harry’s sisters, Celeste and Martha, had cried. Mary, his mother, had sobbed as she hugged Robin. The next day, Art drove Robin to the Fargo, ND airport and waited while she boarded her flight, waving as the plane took off. Robin sobbed from Fargo to Chicago to San Francisco to Monterey, California, as with each flight, the wheat fields of Harry’s home became her past.
She opened the Life magazine to a page ruffled from handling. A photo of Cessna 0-1 Bird Dog on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea dominated the page. The two-man aircraft was surrounded by men, including Robin’s cousin, Commander Byron Cooper. Some of the men held the struts to keep the airplane from lofting into the air. Some stood by the open right-hand door staring at a dark-haired man on a gurney. A bloody handprint stained the right back window emphasizing the smear on the fuselage beneath the open door.
Robin fingered the black curls of Byron’s brother, Laury Cooper, left untrimmed for his wedding on April 19. Since then, a war had ended, the dead had come to life, and everything Robin thought she knew had transmogrified into the unimaginable.
Robin grabbed a chenille bathrobe from the end post of her bed and threw it on over the last of Harry Stillwater’s T-shirts, still wearable as a nightshirt. Tucking her feet into her slippers, she wandered toward the kitchen.
Robin’s bedroom was to the left of a hall dressing room with two mirrored closets. She padded through the hall into the long living room then around the corner into the dining room with its fieldstone fireplace tucked in one corner. Though folding doors could be closed between the living and dining rooms, Robin left them open so flames dancing in the hearth cheered both spaces. An oversized desk with a typing-well faced the dining room, perpendicular to the front door, defining a small front entry. The apartment’s vaulted, uninsulated ceiling leaked when it rained. A Boston fern hanging by a chain from a rafter gathered the drips. The fern’s fronds hung two feet out and down. A large kitchen with oak cabinets and butcher block patterned Formica counters was off the dining room to the right.
Robin made herself coffee in her new drip coffeemaker set on the open counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room. A swag curtain sewn from a sheet hung from the ceiling on the dining room side of the bar further defined the two spaces. As the coffee dripped, Robin congratulated herself for having the fortitude to relegate Harry’s silver percolator to the storage closet at the front of her designated parking space. The image of the percolator thumping while Harry read the Sunday paper still brought her to tears.
Gunner wove between Robin’s legs as she spooned cat food into his bowl. She set the dish on the tray of his highchair. Gunner jumped first onto one of the dining chairs then climbed into his seat. They sat side-by-side at the round dining table Harry had bought for the house that the three never shared.
A soft glow drifted waves of dawn through the windows fronting Robin’s apartment. Robin pulled her bathrobe tight, hungover from too much booze drunk and too much marijuana smoked the previous night. Pot smoking was a one-way ticket out of the Navy. Robin knew better.
No, she didn’t.
The beer and alcohol flowed at a housewarming thrown by LT Kris Connor and Petty Officer First Class Becky Stevens, given permission by the Commanding Officer to share an apartment due to the high cost of rent in the seaside town of Monterey. Everyone but Robin left the party by 8:00 p.m., shortly after which the marijuana appeared. Hours later, well, maybe not; Stevens stoned out of her gourd, rolled Robin off the couch, and kissed her on the lips. Robin’s eyes had popped like a bad cartoon. Worse, Robin was Stevens’s Division Officer.
Topping off her week, the Leading Chief of Robin’s Division, Scott Rivitz, was due to appear at a career-ending Review Board, May 5. He was a good man, an excellent Leading Chief, and a sobbing wreck.
Rivitz had been handpicked to lead the Communications Division in the vaulted vault. The sailors assigned to it tracked submarines and communications in the Pacific as the cold war raged, requiring NATO Top Secret clearances. The vault officially didn’t exist, but everyone in the Command knew it did.
Rivitz turned down the position in the vault to avoid the required NATO Top Secret clearance, claiming he preferred the Data Banking Division. The subsequent clearance investigation occurred without his consent. Scott’s next-door neighbor, a doddering fool from what Robin could devise, asked one question of Defense Investigative Service agents during the routine investigation. The following day, Rivitz was charged with homosexuality and on his way out of the Navy.
And now, in all fairness, Robin should report Stevens for the same offense. She would have if Stevens and Connor hadn’t pinkie pledged her to secrecy, as in pinkies intertwined. Robin really had been hopelessly stoned.
She should never have smoked the pot, Rivitz should never have been charged, the boy she had been raised with, Laury Cooper, should never have gone back to Vietnam, and Harry Stillwater should still be dead.
Robin held Gunner’s paw against the hurt hurtling her way.
Robin answered her ringing telephone, expecting it to be Rivitz reassuring her that he would attend his Review Board at 1400 the next day. Instead, Kate Van Streain-Cooper spooled out breathlessly, “Have you heard anything, seen anything? The new Life did say the passenger had been airlifted to Guam. I guess that means Laury.”
“Not a word. No one has contacted me. I take it you haven’t heard either.” Robin sat on the floor next to the pine board balanced on three cinder blocks that held her television and telephone.
“No. Laury’s friend, Jack Trawler, knows where I am. Jolie does, too,” Kate said, spitting out her stepdaughter's name like a hairball.
Robin sidestepped Kate’s issues with Laury’s ward, Jolie, his brother Byron’s daughter. “I do know that Byron is still on the aircraft carrier on station in the South China Sea. The carrier is busting at the seams with refugees. Everyone aboard must be scurrying just to keep people fed and safe. I wouldn’t put too much weight on not hearing.”
“From my husband? If he can’t be bothered to contact me, why am I waiting for my honeymoon to start at a ritzy hotel on Waikiki Beach? Why?”
“Laury may not be able to contact you.”
“Not if he’s dead, of course,” Kate demurred.
“Kate, I don’t think you’re a widow.” If Laury were dead, Kate would have been contacted by now. But then, Harry hadn’t gotten word to Robin in over six years, not once, other than telepathically. Or maybe she had just been pathetically incapable of accepting Harry’s death.
“And you?” Kate asked, ice tinkling in a glass. It was 0930 in Hawaii; they must start early at the Moana Hotel.
“I’m hanging in there. Jolie told me Laury made a deal with the Minotier,” Robin said to change the subject. She didn’t want to dish up her own feelings of betrayal to Kate, not right now, not after everything Kate had been through.
“That’s what I hear as well. Chloe Minotier showed up at the farmhouse with a dark-haired, gray-eyed boy of eight. She said the boy and your Harry were payment for the Minotier acquiring the Trang drug franchise. I don’t know Minotier from Trang, opium from heroin, or if they are starting or ending a drug war. Oh, Robin, how can we all be so guilty?”
Robin changed the subject again, “Since you’re on the line, can I ask your legal opinion?”
“Shoot.”
“My Leading Chief has been charged and is due at a Review Board tomorrow. I told you about him while I was at the farm for your wedding. He is the one that was identified as homosexual during an investigation for a NATO Top Secret clearance for a job he refused.”
“I remember.” Kate was slurring her words. This wasn’t her first drink of the morning. Terrific, all Robin’s possibly dead alcoholic cousin needed was an angry, drunk bride. “This may surprise you, but your cousin, the man with enough connections to… Anyway, he couldn’t devise a way to help you or your Chief, which is unheard of since he can connect dots that don’t exist.”
“You sound scared.”
“I am. I thought I knew what I was getting when I married Laury, now this. My whole life is upside down.”
“I know the boy I grew up with well enough to know that though it appears Laury contracted with the devil Minotiers, there is more to it. Can you give him the benefit of the doubt? I know he loves you?”
“Laury loves you, Robin, yet he lied to you about Harry Stillwater for six or seven years. Isn’t that a bit cold?” A slosh and a slurp followed.
“I suspect there was a reason. Laury has been protecting me since I was ten.”
“Who is going to protect me? Laury went back to Vietnam, Robin, like he was going to a park, like it was fun, like no one could touch him, like he thought he was some Greek god of war.”
“Maybe he is?”
“You don’t see it do you?”
“I do. I know Laury would do anything to make your world whole.”
Robin listened to the ice in Kate’s glass. “It’s the anything I’m afraid of, Robin.”
“If you hear from Laury, you’ll let me know?”.
“He better show up soon. The beach boys are starting to look good to me.”
The receiver hit the cradle at Kate’s end. The call was over, and maybe Laury’s seventeen-day-old marriage. Robin added that to her accumulating list of woes.
At Gunner’s growl, Robin trotted in from her bedroom, dressed in a pink oxford shirt and blue jeans. She stroked Gunner thinking he needed comforting from some scary feline dream, for instance, no kibble for a week. Gunner growled again as footsteps echoed on the redwood balcony running the width of Robin’s apartment.
Gunner beat her to the door. Robin rarely pulled the drapes over her floor-to-ceiling windows since her second-floor apartment was hidden from prying eyes by the balcony railing. But she had closed the curtains the night before in a marijuana-induced haze of paranoia. So, on Gunner’s advice, she opened the door. Chief Warrant Officer Dan Cisco kissed her on the neck, then down the cleavage of her pink oxford shirt. Robin fondled the blondish stubble on Dan’s chin.
On her way back from Kate and Laury’s wedding, Robin had played that game, the one where if a man loves you, he turns for one last look as he leaves. Dan Cisco had—twice. As he boarded his flight, he checked to see if she had followed him to his boarding gate. When she hadn’t, he glanced at the restaurant window on the second floor of the Monterey Peninsula Airport. Robin watched from the booth they had shared, tapping the faux walnut tabletop with the gift Dan had produced, a locket she had given Harry Stillwater in 1968. Dan handed her the charm then proposed marriage. As if finding the pendant with Stillwater’s supposed bones in his supposed grave next to his supposedly shot down A-6 Navy attack jet gave Dan rights. Since then, Cisco had gone back to Vietnam to bat clean up as a Naval Investigative Service agent specializing in the drug trade. That is when he wasn’t preoccupied with keeping her out of trouble as he had when they first met three years ago.
“You’re back,” Robin said.
“Where else would I go?” Dan asked, slipping the apartment key Robin had gifted him years ago into his khaki uniform slacks.
“Vietnam? Like you did two weeks ago? Or the newest hot spot. I don’t know.”
“Look, Chiquita, I love you. You know, I do. From almost the first moment I saw you at the Officer’s Club at the Naval Postgraduate School. But I’m Navy, going to be Navy the rest of my life. I don’t want my family raised by two Navy parents. I want them to have a home and a great mother who is always there for them, no matter where I am. I want to come home and see their faces, then get kisses all over mine.” The words tumbled helter-skelter out of Dan’s mouth as though a mounted black wraith would steal them before he could belt them out.
“This is goodbye, then?” Robin asked in wonder.
“No, Chiquita, no, it’s a proposal. I want you. I want to have these wonderful little people with you. I swear I’ll be there; I’ll love them. I swear it.”
“What about the three you already have?” Robin stepped away, smoothing her button-down collar shirt over her jeans.
“No lie, I’d like the boys to be with us, but...”
“I’ve seen the news clips and the photograph in this week’s Life magazine of the Cooper boys and Harry.” She reached for Cisco’s hands. “Why hasn’t Harry called? I keep wondering if he’s ill or hurt.”
“I saw him on the aircraft carrier. He’d been held captive, taken a few beatings, didn’t look like he had eaten in a month or two. Still, he seemed okay. He told me he needed to go home to see his folks, but I suspect he has a bunch of questions to answer first.” Cisco raised Robin’s hands to his lips, proceeding to kiss each knuckle.
“I called Harry’s parents. He hasn’t gone to see them, Dan.”
“Then, I don’t know, babe. Like I said, I suspect Naval Intelligence, CIA, and who knows what other alphabet outfits have lined up to debrief him. He’s a legend. I’d heard of Galon, meaning braid, for years. It’s kind of a mystery he’s alive.”
“Laury?”
“Saw him, too. Byron was hooked up to him via a direct transfusion. They evacuated Laury post-haste to the Navy hospital on Guam. Look, Chiquita, I’ve spent the last four days trying to beat everyone else to your door. I want to marry you. Nothing has changed since I saw you at the airport. Will you marry me?”
“I love you. It’s just....” She gripped Dan’s hands more tightly. If she was wrong, she would for sure end up the crazy maiden aunt to her nieces and nephews.
“If Stillwater walked in the door?” Dan smoothed the pads of his thumbs over the back of Robin’s hands.
“Harry’s a dream now, someone I used to know for a year once,” she lied.
“Still, Laury risked everything to save him.”
“I heard that Laury got his son and Harry in exchange for handing the Minotiers the drug trade in Southeast Asia all for themselves.”
“Laury went back in to get Stillwater, and, as far as I know, that’s it. The Trang were holding Stillwater for ransom. Laury didn’t pay; they did. As for the Minotiers, their rivals are gone. Poof.”
“So, you’re saying Laury jeopardized his family for me.”
Dan gave a deep sigh. “I know. I guess everything’s your fault.”
“Dan, I’m a mess.”
He moved his hands to her hips. Robin put her head on Dan’s shoulder; comfort flooded her. Maybe there was something left in her that could commit to this man the way he deserved. Dan loved her. She knew he did, but Harry…
Robin plopped on her couch, the one she and Harry bought when there had been nothing but future. She ran her hand over the worn upholstery trying not to cry. She wasn’t a pretty crier, everything ran. She dragged a finger under her nose, expecting Dan to leave before she could get either don’t go or sorry out of her mouth. Instead, he sat next to her, holding the hem of her pink oxford shirt as she sobbed.
Gunner growled, blaming Dan for Robin’s tears.
“Do you think that fat blob would recognize his farm boy if Stillwater did show up?” Dan asked.
“Absolutely. They were a pair. Gunner would gun through the house at Mach speed when Harry came home. He’d make himself flat and just tear. That’s how he got his name. He would run so fast he could knock you off your feet.”
“I always thought he was named Gunner because he was Harry’s gunner—sidekick.”
“That, too.”
“So, are you through being relieved? That’s what the tears are about, right? Harry’s alive, babe. Now, what?”
“I don’t know, Dan. They charged my Leading Chief with homosexuality and set his Review Board for tomorrow. Chief Rivitz left in a rage on Friday, and no one has seen him since. The Commanding Officers will hold me responsible if he doesn’t show up. I’m scared for myself.”
Dan pulled Robin into the cusp of his left shoulder. Holding Robin on Harry’s couch, Dan wondered how his life had gotten so entangled in hers. No matter where he looked, he couldn’t see a way out.
“We’re a great team, Robin Haas—you and me,” Dan said brightly. “How about dinner. After that, I’ll check into the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters at the Postgraduate School, leave you some space. But I’m not leaving you. No way. You haven’t responded to my marriage proposal. I plan to haunt you like a starving dog until you do.”
Robin’s tentative smile was the encouragement Dan needed to make dinner reservations, after which he dropped her off at her apartment and continued to the BOQ. When Robin opened the front door, Gunner was waiting on his haunches, ears forward, his front paws together. She reached down and scratched one of his tabby ears and patted his russet looped flanks as he rubbed up against her legs, muttering.
Though Robin had just eaten, she hadn’t. She considered having popcorn and beer, then made herself a BLT with extra B for Gunner. He sat in his highchair next to her at the dining table. Instead of sticking his face in his plate, as he always did, Gunner sat on his haunches. His front paws on the tray, he stared into the fog that curlicued in the lights rimming the swimming pool in the middle of the compound. Robin drew the drapes.
Gunner finished his bacon, jumped to the floor, then onto Robin’s lap. Robin hugged him, as Harry had her, as though she were precious, as though she mattered. At night when Gunner slept, wrapped in her curls, his nose in her ear, she could feel Harry so close that her heartbeats would slow to the lazy pilot pace of his.
And, Dan, poor Dan loved her.
