Still Mrs. Wilson did not tell her of Raymond’s appearance on her porch that hot summer day, or of what she learned later about his altercation with her foreman, Bob Campo, nor did she offer any real specificity of what she knew of his movements in the county, despite the fact that she had followed those movements with some care. Her only goal at that time had been to keep him away from Helen at all costs, but her daughter was almost twenty then and had been dating a local boy, a white boy, and it was therefore nearly impossible to keep her indoors.

“I’m sorry, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I just assumed he’d gone to find you.”

For a long while the room rang with silence.

“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Takahashi said at last. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

Chapter 7

7

“SO WAIT—WHERE WAS HE, THEN?”

“Who?”

“Jesus, Flip, who do you think? The Jap kid.”

This was but a few days after I had returned from San Jose. The man I sat with I knew wholly by the nickname he had borne in Vietnam. I have no real notion of how it was in other units, but in ours most of us had nicknames of some kind, some colorful, some mere abbreviations of the names our parents might have called us, so that amidst Phil and Skip and Mike there was also Apache Dan and Mark-One and Tenn (short for ­Tennessee) and the great gruff African-American philosopher we all called Mama and the thin reedy stoner poet known to us as Professor Ted. And there was the man who sat across from me in the booth: my friend Chiggers, a man with whom I had lived and died in the mangrove swamps and whom I loved in the way that men who have been in combat together loved each other, many of our number bleeding out into the muck or exploded into pieces unrecognizable as human flesh. Those of us who survived had promised each other that we would stay in touch and that we would visit one another and be there for weddings and christenings and the like, and perhaps in the moment of our parting some of us actually believed such things were possible. But the truth was that I did not really think I would ever see any of them again after leaving the delta, not even Chiggers, who had been my best friend there. Indeed it had come to feel, in the year or so I had been stateside, that the war had been some strange dream from which I had never entirely awakened. It had all happened over there, in that other place, in another world than this. That the war was still ongoing did not seem possible, and yet it was present on a daily basis in the papers and on television and it would not be stilled.