No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,10
It just looked better on some of us than others. We grunted each other’s names into each other’s shoulders, no sentimentality here, no sir, then stood back and all three of us looked each other up and down, seeing what the past year had done to us.
We were so busy doing that, that Daniel snuck up on us before I got his sign out. He said, “I see how it is,” out of nowhere. “You make a fuss for all you white guys, but you don’t give a damn about the Korean.”
“Man, I am not white!” Andy and Danny had gone around on that one for fifty years and would keep doing it til they were both dead. I scrambled for Dan’s sign, held it up, checked it, and flipped it right-side up, putting as big an innocent grin on my face as I could manage.
“You’re still a goddamned sneak, Danny.” Danny had been our secret weapon, the American-born Korean who walked in and out of enemy territory without ever raising an eyebrow. He was the only one of us without any body scars from Korea. Fifty years later I still didn’t know just how deep the other ones cut, the ones on his heart. “Thought your plane didn’t get in for another twenty minutes.”
“And you’re still goddamned blind.” Another round of hugs and hand-shakes went around, Dan saying, “Tailwind, we got in early,” between greetings. If I looked good, he looked like an anti-aging commercial. He had that luck of the draw a lot of Asians seemed to get, the tight smooth skin over bone structure most women would kill for, and his hair was still black as pitch. He coulda been anywhere from his late fifties to a couple weeks older than God, and I knew for a fact he was the oldest of us, turnin’ eighty-three in another week. He stepped free of Ack’s hug, then, with a sigh, took his sign from his duffel.
It said WHERE THE HELL’S THE LIMO, ACK?
We all stared at it, hardly understanding. Then the breath wheezed out of me, my chest feelin’ as heavy as it had on the plane. “Wait, what the hell, where’s Mick?”
“His wife called me this morning. You guys had all left already.” Dan was up in San Francisco, the shortest flight any of us had to get to San Diego. My shoulders fell. There wasn’t much else Dan had to say, though he went ahead and said it: “He’d been having a hard time breathing the past few days, she said. He went to the doctor, they said he was fine, so he was planning to come up just like always. He went to bed early last night, and when she came to bed…”
“Dammit. Dammit.” Seventeen of us had come back together from Korea. Time and trouble had taken most of us away, but these five—me, Andy, Dan, Mick and Dave—we’d stuck through. The last three years it had been us five, and just last night it had looked like it would be all five of us again.
Andy had his hand pressed against his chest, same way as I’d had gettin’ off the plane. We all looked like we couldn’t breathe, and I sure felt like the breath had been knocked outta me. The older we got the less like a crime it felt when one of us died, ‘cause there was nothing so bad as a kid losin’ out on all those years ahead of him, but that didn’t make it easier. One of us muttered, “Son of a bitch,” and we all nodded.
“The limo’s waiting,” The Ack-Man finally said. “Let’s go have a drink. It’s after five in Korea.”
“She’s a kid,” I said into my beer. Green beer, an Alaskan Amber with food coloring. I’d had enough to drink that I’d stopped tellin’ the bozos behind the bar not to color my booze, and we’d all had enough to drink that we’d stopped talking about Mick and were on to our own lives. “She’s a mess. Nah. She was a mess. She’s growing out of it.”
“Lemme get this straight.” Dan leaned forward over a cup of tea. Not even in the worst of it in Korea had I ever seen him drink anything stronger than tea. “You’ve got a twenty-seven year old girlfriend and you think she’s a mess?”
I couldn’t help laughin’. Alla Joanne’s friends thought she had somethin’ going on with me, but I hadn’t figured on my friends thinking I had somethin’