No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,11

going on with her. “Ain’t like that, Danny-boy.”

“Oh God,” said The Ack. “Don’t let him start singing. I’m not drunk enough for that. Hell, Mick’s not drunk enough for that, and you can bet he’s out-drinking the Devil right now.”

“The girl’s magic,” I said to the beer, and my buddies, the guys I’d known a lifetime, all burst out laughing.

“Last time he said that was about Annie.” Andy went from grinning to solemn and raised his glass of dark ale. “Miss that lady.”

I tapped my glass against his. “Every day. But this girl, Jo, she’s real magic. I had a heart attack last year.”

That shut them up, three old guys sitting around a boozy table in what woulda been a smoky bar, back in the day. Little bastion of quiet, that was us, all silence and worry on a Friday evening in a pub full of kids. Lotta them were in the military, Navy kids who reminded us of ourselves, ‘cept about a million years younger. The Ack still wore his hair in a crew cut, and Andy didn’t have any. Maybe we looked ex-military to the kids, or maybe we just looked old and boring. Either way, they left us alone, but when we got quiet it spread out around the bar for a minute. Then The Ack got himself together enough to say, “You never said. What’s the cardiologist say?”

“That I got the heart of a twenty-five year old.”

Andy, deadpan, said, “Thought you said she was twenty-seven,” and all of us laughed again. The kids in the bar relaxed and the noise level went back up. Nothin’ like a bunch of old farts to bring down the mood, I guess.

Ack waved Andy’s joke off, though. “How’s that possible? Don’t get me wrong, Muldoon, but you were a smoker. That leaves marks.”

“It’s the girl. Joanne. The kid’s got magic.” I looked between my old buddies, then pushed the beer aside and sighed. “Don’t give me those faces. You remember the war.”

I didn’t look at Danny when I said it, but the other two did. His eyebrows beetled at me and I shrugged. “Your culture. Your demons.”

“My goddamned demons are the same one every other American kid has,” Dan muttered. “Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and not meeting Marilyn Monroe.”

“You knew what they were called.” From anybody outside of this circle, Andy’s tone woulda been accusatory. It almost was anyway.

“I didn’t know how the hell to get rid of ‘em, did I.” Danny drained his tea with an emphasis that woulda gone better with a shot of Jack Daniels, but a guy worked with what he had. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

We all grunted. None of us wanted to talk about it. None of us ever had, except obliquely. But there’d been something fucked up in the Korean nights, something different from the war. Not worse, but harder to understand. We understood the war. We hated it, we were scared of it, we didn’t want it, but we got it. Stop ‘em at the 38th parallel, blast them yellow Reds to hell. Billy Joel was a kid while me and these guys were fighting that war, but he got it too. War was easy to understand.

The thing that came pressin’ down on your buddies, stealin’ their breath like cats were supposed to steal babies’, the thing that screamed all night like a Korean banshee, the things you didn’t quite see from the corner of your eye and died tryin’ to chase down, those were harder to understand. Danny’d had names for them, names his Korean-born parents had told him. Stay away from ‘em, he’d said, they’ll steal your soul and eat your bones.

We’d listened. Our whole damned platoon had listened, even when it meant us sittin’ on each other to keep ourselves from goin’ out after the sound of a shriekin’ baby that just wasn’t quite right. We’d listened, ‘cause Danny was our secret weapon and there ain’t no point in havin’ one if you don’t use it for all it’s worth. But other troops hadn’t had him, and a lot of their guys were the kind who went missing in action, no body or explanation to send home to his family, just a flag and an apology.

We lost two guys that way. Reckless Rick, he was always gonna get himself killed one way or another, but we found his body the next day, lookin’ drowned when we all knew there wasn’t any water for miles. And the other Andy,