The Last Bridge

Chapter Forty-nine 1800 Hours

After dark they found a lonely fisherman poling a sampan down the river toward the sea. J. D. Hooker threw the fisherman overboard, and McKuen placed Colonel Tyreen gently in the bow and watched the angry fisherman swim to shore. He climbed over the gunwales and watched Hooker take the pole. McKuen was tired and hungry and scratched-up, bruised and banged-around. Hooker’s face was sour, and he had nothing to say until McKuen said, “Seems a bleedin’ shame to bust down such a pretty bridge, now I think of it.”

“Christ,” Hooker replied.

Tyreen heard their talk vaguely. He twisted his head. Water lapped the bow. His ears rang, and he felt afloat on a feather cushion. He said drowsily, “McKuen.”

“Sir.”

“Map in my pocket pouch. Rendezvous with the submarine at coordinates HL385748. Midnight.”

“Holy Mother of God. How d’you remember that after all we’ve suffered?”

“It’s my job, Lieutenant.”

“Colonel,” said McKuen, “you are a bastard and a son of a bitch and a fine figure of a man.”

There was no more talk for a while. Hooker’s long pole squelched in and out of the mud bottom. The sampan swayed, and Tyreen lay half awake, buoyed up on a cushion of morphine. He heard McKuen say, “It took a bloody long time to build that bridge, and a couple of stinking seconds to wipe it all out.”

Just like Theodore, Tyreen thought. Just like any of them. He thought vaguely about McKuen. McKuen had been battered and shocked; he had seen it all, he had ridden the tiger; but McKuen was innocent. What he had lived through seemed to have failed to touch his soul. Dig down, Tyreen thought, and underneath McKuen’s Irish skin you would find a solid armor of innocence.

It was the same with Hooker. Hooker said, “My time’s up in a few days. Ain’t gonna see me for grease. I only learned one thing in this Army. If you can move it, pick it up. If you can’t move it, paint it. And if it moves by itself, salute it.”

McKuen laughed. “I never heard you make a joke before, Sergeant.”

“You think that’s a Goddamn joke, Lieutenant? Listen, I get back and you know what they’ll do to me? Court-martial me and throw the book at me. That’s what I lived through this for. You tell me why it was that Captain Saville bought one, and I didn’t. You tell me that, Lieutenant.”

McKuen answered, “There is no rest for the wicked, Sergeant.”

Tyreen thought about Eddie Kreizler. He was still thinking about what Kreizler had said when they reached the delta and Hooker poled silently into the ocean tide. McKuen watched his compass and gave quiet directions. It began to rain lightly. Tyreen lay in the bottom of the sampan and listened to water splash around in the hull. His feet were puffy and splitting. His lips pushed rhythmically out and down; his fevered eyes burned. He thought about a desk job in the States. He thought about his ex-wife and all the dead men who littered his backtrail. McKuen sat softly talking, making jokes; in time he ran out of things to say and sat brooding out onto the sea. Small waves rocked the sampan. A piece of a smile shaped Tyreen’s mouth, and his body loosened; strain ran out of him as though he had pulled a drainplug.

Hooker said, “It’s past midnight, Lieutenant.” And Hooker started cursing.

Tyreen looked around. “Shut up, Hooker.”

“Colonel, all the past two days you been doing nothing but telling me to shut up. If you’re court-martialing me anyway, I figure to hell with you.”

“Hooker, there wouldn’t be any point at all in court-martialing you.”

“Huh?”

“Go home, Hooker,” Tyreen said.

“Well, I—” Hooker shook his head. “I’d do that, sir, if that Goddamn puking submarine would show up. Trust the fat-ass Navy not to be here. Bastard sailor boys.”

McKuen was chuckling, and Hooker said, “Okay. Goddamn it, I’ll shut up. I’ll shut up, Colonel.”

Tyreen scratched his unshaven chin. In the plum-colored night, rain was a gentle whisper of droplets. Tyreen thought, Mission accomplished.

The General could put that in the record books.

The inflated Navy raft came out of the rain and picked them up at 0012 hours.