Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

miracle struck and he didn't have to go to Vietnam. But the only alternative was Canada, and that frightened him. To be an outcast from his country, maybe forever, was a concept that he had never before confronted head-on. It would mean separation from everything and everyone he knew and loved. And he could never come back .
    If he did go to 'Nam, though, if he did, it would be two years of the Army, no more than a year in 'Nam, probably. He could stay alive for a year—he wouldn't be in combat all the time—he'd just be careful . That was Rorrie's problem.
    He was fast, casual, quick to do crazy things, take stupid dares. He'd probably walked into that mine on purpose , for God's sake.
    Brad shook his head and stood up. He wished he could buy booze at nineteen, and then he considered crashing someone's pad and drinking their booze. But instead, he went back to his dorm. His roommate, whose number was 287, was studying when he came in. "You okay?" he asked Brad.
    "Yeah."
    "What you gonna do?"
    "Shit . . . man, it's all such shit."
    In a few weeks Brad got the notice to report for his physical, which he passed. He went home, said goodbye to his parents and to Bonnie, who told him she'd be faithful and cautioned him to be careful. When he replied that he'd stay out of the way of bullets, she clarified her admonition by having it include a sexual warning as well. He decided bitterly that he would fuck the first gook whore who made him an offer.
    He didn't get the chance for quite a while. Basic training was a two-month nightmare of close bodies, filthy talk, and a series of near-fights that gave him constant bouts of diarrhea, which the Army doctors treated with large doses of Kaopectate . He went to Vietnam in March 1970 and came back thirteen months later not only alive, but untouched. He had not suffered so much as a scratch from the time of his arrival in the country to the time of his departure. He came back to the United States and to Merridale with an athlete's body—lean, rock-hard, cable-muscled, over which was stretched a tanned surface of smooth, unblemished skin. But if his mind could have shown a human form, it would have been shriveled, diseased, filled with the decay of a month-old corpse.
    It was April when he returned. Buds were slightly greening the trees, and his mother's daffodils were just starting to open, laying a slash of yellow across the base of their house. He entered his room as if it were a stranger's. He had forgotten the boy who had lived there, could not remember his reasons for putting up the posters of rock stars, the wrinkled map of Middle-earth. Only the poster of Doc Savage touched a note of response: the torn shirt, bunched muscles, face wrinkled with something more than age. This he did not touch, but the others he took down, rolled up, and put into the closet, tossing into the waste can the nearly dry balls of Plasti-Tak that had held them to the walls.
    His mother was finishing the supper dishes, so he went onto the back porch, where his father was sitting reading the paper. He put it down when Brad came out the door, and they smiled at each other, sitting side by side on the glider and listening to the clatter of Melmac , the soft liquid sound of rinsing, the metallic rattle of silverware hitting the drying rack. Brad laughed low in his throat. "Jesus, what a pretty sound."
    His father nodded. "Don't let Mom hear you say that," he said with a grin.
    "Yeah, sure." He dug out a pack of Winstons from his pocket and lit one.
    "When did you start that?" his father asked.
    "Smoking? In 'Nam." He exhaled slowly, watching the smoke turn a small space of evening air gray, souring for a moment the scent of honeysuckle drifting up from the back fence.
    "Not too good for you, is it?" His father had never smoked.
    Brad shrugged. "I never thought about that. It didn't matter much. Maybe I'll quit."
    The father looked at his son's profile in the dying light. The face had changed, he thought. There