and then an instant later with a different kind of shame, How will I ever tell Al Craik?
June
Norfolk.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea. He had never learned much of the rest of it. Something about the hunter—“and the hunter home from the hill.” But he wasn’t a hunter. Dukas was the hunter. He was the sailor. And O’Neill? Had he been looking for O’Neill—?
Alan woke. He was home. Relief and gratitude flooded through him. What had he been dreaming—sailor, hunter? He smelled his house, his bed, his wife. His left hand slid across the wrinkled sheet and found her. She made a pleased sound without waking. His hand went up her hip. Squeezed. The dog raised his head. The dog slept on the floor of the bedroom and would have got on the bed in a moment if he’d been encouraged. When Alan wasn’t there, he slept on the floor next to Rose, and he would wake when she did, just like this, raise his head, look at her eyes as he now looked at Alan’s.
“Walk?” Alan whispered.
The dog’s tail thumped on the floor. Alan slipped from the sheets and padded to the bathroom, then to Mikey’s room, the dog following, springing, ready to bark so hard the effort would carry him right off his front feet if Alan so much as murmured walk again. Alan hushed him with a hand on the huge head, caressing the ears, the side of the jaw. He got a big lick on his bare wrist in return.
His son lay on his back, seemingly asleep, but his eyes opened when Alan leaned over him. The light from the hall glinted on the eyes, and the child smiled. Alan’s heart turned over, broke, put itself back together. So this is what it’s like. He had been home for ten days. One night on the ship, drinking coffee on an all-nighter, a shipmate had told him about coming home from a sea tour, always finding his children changed, new. Kids who might one day, unless you were careful, remember mainly that their father was “always away.” He touched his son’s face.
He put on the coffee-maker and got the dog’s leash, and the dog began to prance. The dog wanted to bark; cautioned to stay quiet, he sneezed. His head went up and down so enthusiastically that Alan could hardly get the leash on him. Then they were out the door and into the dawn; he had a momentary flash of dawns on the carrier, one morning when there were no air ops and the great deck had stretched like a field, and the eastern edge of the sky was a bright line like a hot wire. Did some part of him miss it already?
The dog pissed on every vertical object between their house and the end of the block and then got more discriminating as his supply ran low. Beyond the second street was a wood with a kind of stream in it. He let the dog run. Walking along the dark path, listening for the scuffle of the dog in the old leaves, he thought about the dawn when they’d gone to the Serb house in Pustarla. He thought about it a lot, couldn’t get it to settle down into the understory of his mind. The smell of old blood. The tub full of bloody water. The victims. Shooting that guy.
He clipped the dog’s leash to the ring on the collar and started for home. The dog’s pissing had now become purely symbolic—lifting a leg to show what he would do if he could.
“You remind me of some guys I know,” Alan said. The dog grinned. “You ready to eat?” Alan said. The dog surged forward. “Let’s go!” They ran.
Rose was up. When she saw him, her face opened into a lovely smile, a smile you could dream about at sea. He wondered if he did that for her. Rose did her time at sea, too—exec of a helo squadron, a lieutenant-commander who ranked her husband. They kissed. It went on a while; he wondered if they had time to—They did not; she had a meeting at 0830.
“Maybe come home early?”
“We’ve got company, remember?”
He groaned.
“Feed the dog; it’ll take your mind off your troubles. Your idea, having old friends over for a last get-together with O’Neill—remember? I have to shop; it’s Mike and Harry and the Peretzes, that means no red meat, jeez, I dearly love Bea Peretz, but what the hell does she have to go vegetarian for? Can you eat chicken?”
“How about soy burgers?”
“Fuck you and stop that, there isn’t time. Boy, do I come back from sea duty like this? Mike’s bringing somebody. I don’t think it’s serious.”
Something he had been dreaming about. Mike, the hunter— Mike was in love with Rose; everybody knew it, and everybody knew it was hopeless. “Mike’s serious about you,” Alan said. He put down the dog’s water bowl, and the dog made sounds in it as if a duck was trying to take off.
“He’s doing Greek salad and hors d’oeuvres and I’m doing the main stuff, and yes, I think he’s in love with me and I guess that after you he’s the next one I’d want to be that way. That okay?”
Alan grinned. “So long as I’m first.”
“You’re always first.” She cocked her head, listened. “Mikey’s awake.” She started out, turned back to him. “If it’s any comfort to you, just having you in the house makes me so horny I want to scream.” She started out again, swung back. “Correction—moan, not scream. ‘Bye.”
In the Serbian zone, Bosnia.
Zulu nodded, and Radic swung his fist and it hit the bound man with a sound like a ball hitting a glove. Zulu remembered that sound, the old catcher’s mitt heavy on his hand, his father’s throw making it ache even through the thick, old leather.
Radic looked at him. Zulu nodded again. Radic swung; the bound man screamed as the same sound struck. And again. And again. And again.
And now the Americans were here. The first ones had come in March to replace the UN. Zulu hadn’t fought them yet, perhaps never would, but he wished to. He remembered that American voice shouting in the house at Pustarla, then the running through the snow, naked, that voice and the gun booming behind him. Humiliating.
The bound man looked like raw meat. He was stripped to the waist. So was Radic, from whose sleek muscles steam rose in little wisps, like ground mist. It was still cold up here.
“Is he still alive?” Zulu said.
Radic lifted the man’s drooping head and felt in the bloody mess of his throat. He nodded.
“Cut him down.”
The men from the little pigsty of a village watched Radic. Zulu could smell somebody’s shit. They were terrified. That was the idea.
The bound man lay on the ground. Blood soaked into the dirty snow. Zulu handed Radic a sledgehammer. He nodded.
Radic swung the sledge and blood and brains spattered, and the village men began to wail.
Zulu decided that Radic was all right. He would add him to the Special Unit for Africa.
That evening. Norfolk.
As it turned out, Mike Dukas’s date had canceled and he came alone, a little sheepish that he had been stood up but probably glad,
