Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,34

cocktail, then started walking away.

“Hey,” he called after her. “Where’re you going?”

“My table—join if you’d like.”

And so he did. Tony did too, given Sarah was with a girlfriend. The four of them drank and smoked, played billiards and darts, and danced to the occasional song. At last call Tony and Beetle invited them back to the Sheraton. The friend was game, but Sarah wouldn’t budge on her “I don’t go home on the first night” policy, and Beetle settled for a telephone number and a brief kiss.

In the weeks that followed Garrison life at Hunter Army Airfield went on as usual. Physical training, paperwork, squad and platoon evaluations, parachute jumps. Beetle never called Sarah. The army was his life. He could be deployed anytime. A relationship would be messy. Nevertheless, the next time he was in Savannah on pass he found himself thinking about her, the fun they’d had, and he discovered he still had her number in his wallet. He called her from a payphone. He expected a snub, but she said she was getting ready to go out with friends and, whatever, if he wanted to come to Congress Street, maybe they could meet up. He got the name of the place she would be at and convinced the guys he was with to change venues. They were all keen except for Tony Gebhardt, who didn’t want to see the friend again. But Tony was outnumbered, and they went.

While searching the Congress Street club, Beetle realized he couldn’t remember exactly what Sarah looked like, and when he found her on the patio out back, he was surprised by how beautiful she was. They were both more sober than they had been at the Irish pub, and they spent the rest of the night at a secluded table, talking, touching, making out. This time it was her suggestion to return to the hotel.

After that they saw each other as often as possible, and they fell madly in love the way only the young and naïve could. Beetle proposed on the anniversary of the day they’d met. They married a short time later on a beach on Tybee Island. He moved out of the barracks, and they rented a house off post together on a cul de sac in a quiet Savannah suburb. Sarah chose it because of the mature vegetable garden in the backyard. The idea of being able to step outside and pick basil or tomatoes or chili peppers delighted her to no end. Also, they had been talking about having children, and the house had a spare bedroom, which they could convert into a nursery.

Sarah found employment as a receptionist at a small law office, while Beetle was promoted to Specialist, then Sergeant, given a team leader position, and eventually his own squad.

Their lives had been near perfect.

Then, in October of 1983, President Regan issued orders to overturn a Marxist coup. Beetle kissed Sarah goodbye in the middle of the night, and within hours he was on an Air Force C-130 Hercules four-engine transport, configured to carry paratroopers, heading for the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

Beetle arrived at the motel before he’d realized it. Directly to his left a stand of pines had been cleared to make room for a parking lot, which was currently empty. A sign perched atop a twenty-foot metal pole announced in red and yellow neon: “Hilltop Lodge - Vacancy.” A tacky, flashing arrow pointed to a cement staircase that carved a path through the trees to the top of the hill.

An icy wind blew in from the west, sneaking down the throat of Beetle’s shirt and causing his skin to break out in gooseflesh. Rubbing his arms to generate warmth, he climbed the steps, seventy or eighty in total.

The motel rose two stories behind a grove of twenty-foot fir, which, given their calculated spacing, had been planted some years back. The shiplap siding was rotting in places, though someone had attempted to give it a facelift recently with a rich brown coat of stain. A thick hedge of privet lined the perimeter of the plateau and substituted for a fence to prevent visitors from plunging down the steep slopes. On a clear day those same visitors would have been afforded a sprawling panorama of Boston Mills and the national forest those kids had mentioned, though tonight little was visible behind the drab gray curtains of mist.

Beetle followed a stone path between two towering fir to the reception. A placard in the window