Summer Cool

30

In the dessert, in the hour before dawn when the autumn constellations had not yet given way to the sun, Bobby Petty told Jack Paine what it was like.

"It's like nothing I've ever felt before, Jack. One moment my life was on a flat road, and I was traveling on a straight course. Then, with one bit of information, the road disappeared and there was nothing but hole in front of me. I remember looking into the TV room where Terry and the kids were watching something together, and when I saw her I felt dirty. I went into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror, and it wasn't me anymore. It was someone else. A monster. I didn't even look at the girls. I was afraid they would be unclean if I even looked at them. So I went into the bedroom, and packed some things in a duffle, and said I'd go out for ice cream and took the duffle and left. I went to a bar up in Scarsdale, a non-cop place, and I stayed in a motel room, and by the next morning I knew what to do.

"I went to the bank when it opened and took all the money out, and got on a plane for Texas. If I'd left the money Terry wouldn't have believed I was gone. I only had one thing in my head, Jack. To kill Kwan, and keep him from killing my men. The rest of it didn't seem important. My life was over anyway_; the further I got from my life the better it would be. The only thing I wanted to do before the whole thing came out, before they lumped me in there with Calley and the rest of them, was to kill Tiny Man."

Paine had one question, but didn't want to interrupt. In the purpling dawn light, he felt Bob Petty bursting next to him, wanting to spit all the poison out of him.

"So I followed him from Texas, back to New York." Petty laughed grimly. "I called that stupid bastard Coleman and told him Kwan was coming, and he panicked. I couldn't save any of them."

Petty stared at the horizon, looking for the sun that refused yet to rise. "In a way I think they were lucky, getting it over with."

This time, the silence was longer_; the sun would not burst forth from the horizon, but Petty was looking beyond it, anyway.

"It was horrible in Cambodia, Jack," he said, his voice barely audible. "It was war, and I lived with it because of that, but face to face like that. ." The whisper trailed off, returned, stronger. "It was something we thought we had to do, and we did it. For years I wished I had been in the air force because they got to do it from up in the clouds by pushing a button. It's no different, but they didn't have to look into the faces. There was one face I dreamed about for years. He couldn't have been more than nineteen. He looked into my eyes when I shot him. His eyes were the same as mine. Whatever happened, he thought he was doing the right thing. He was willing to die for it. That was my face. I knew that if that conviction wasn't in me, that if I wasn't absolutely sure that what I was doing was right, was saving the lives of my own people, then what I had done that day when that face had looked into mine and refused to look aside, was look in a mirror and that I had killed myself. .

He was weeping, trembling beside Paine in the cool predawn desert. All of it came out of him, and suddenly Paine felt as if he were holding not a friend, not even a brother, but his own son. The bond was that close.

Petty wailed, "Oh, God!" and tried to bury himself, his memory, his very self, into Paine's chest, and Paine held him for a long time, and rocked him, and let the hurt flood out of him into the desert ground.

"Jesus, Jack," Bobby said, sitting up, pulling away from Paine. "Jesus."

And they watched, and still the sun would not rise. "I have one question, Bobby," Paine said.

They looked for the unrising sun, and Petty said, "What is it?"

"Who told you that what you had done was wrong, and that Kwan was trying to kill off your unit?"

Bob Petty looked at him in the purpling light.

"I thought you would have known that. Didn't you talk to him? It was Chief Bryers."

Paine rose, and told Petty to follow. And, as they turned their backs on the cool desert, the sun, an orange beacon, thrust its lip up over the horizon, triumphant, promising light at last.