The Fair Exchange - Part 5

We drank one more pitcher of beer, the two of them getting a little soppy before the night finally came to its awkward end. Ed gave me a bear hug and asked for my forgiveness with tears running from his eyes. I forgave them both.

At any rate I said the words.

But after I checked into a nearby hotel, I felt a surge of unexpected jealousy. As I left the bar, I noticed a photo collage dedicated to Joey, my jaw tightening when I recognized Rita in several pictures. I was surprised at how much discovering she loved Joey instead of me hurt.

Tears of regret stung my eyes as I remembered wakening in the graveyard with Rita’s arms wrapped tightly around my chest, both of us still naked and shivering in the predawn cold. Although relieved that I had survived my night in Hell, when Rita kissed the back of my neck I reflexively pulled away.

“You said you would do anything,” she whispered huskily.

“What the hell did you do to me?” I growled. “I thought I was going to die.” Pulling myself from her embrace I sulkily began to pick up my clothes. But even without looking directly at her I was overcome by a desire so strong that when she gently placed her hand on my shoulder, I slipped into her arms as if Gretchen had ceased to exist altogether.

In the days that followed I often recalled with longing the warmth of her grownup kisses. Rita’s features gave her a gaunt and haunting beauty – piercing green eyes spaced a little too widely above a small, sharp nose, her honey brown complexion framed by a face that was wide at the temples and narrowed to a small, pointed chin.

After making love on the dew drenched cemetery grass, I shared with her what I had experienced that night, something I never did again with anyone else. Once I finished, Rita answered softly, “I fear for you, Jamie Faust. The Lord of the Dead will exact a price and you will not be the only one to pay it.”

It would be untrue to say that my desire for Gretchen completely died that morning or was scared into submission by the visions I witnessed that night. After all, who was I kidding? Gretchen was Joey’s girl. My fear of Joey proved even greater than the specter of the dead.

Although my thoughts often returned to Rita in the following weeks, something unspoken prevented me from pursuing her. Maybe she was simply too dangerous. Or maybe I was still afraid of what my friends would think. In the final analysis, none of it really mattered. A few months after that night, I found myself at the Marine recruiting station on my 18th birthday as if I had no other option. I had run away from them both.

After my arrival in Vietnam our battalion deployed to the old imperial city of Hue. Before that our unit had seen scattered fighting in rural villages and the jungle, but nothing like what we would experience once we deployed to Hue. Every inch of street was triangulated by enemy snipers, every building cleared of the enemy paid with Marine blood. We fought for seventeen straight days, even the mundane activities of eating, sleeping and relieving ourselves fraught with unrelieved terror.

When I boarded the plane to LA a year later my midnight experience in the cemetery was no more than distant memory. But rounding the corner into the baggage claim I saw Gretchen standing there as if waiting for me. We embraced as naturally as if we had known each other for years.

I never asked why she was there – fearful that Vodou magic rather than free will was responsible. But when we kissed for the first time I felt like the luckiest fellow alive, my desire for her as vibrant in the moment as the terrible night when I said that I would do anything to win her.

Unfortunately, between that night in the cemetery and the one where Gretchen first embraced me my life had taken an unexpected turn. Invisible wounds followed me home from Viet Nam, eventually replacing Gretchen’s love of who she believed me to be with the fear of who I had become. God knows I wanted to love her the way she loved me, but my capacity for loving never truly returned. You can only go through the motions of love for so long before the pain it causes your beloved drives her to an emotional distance too great to bridge.

Ed wishes he had served in ‘Nam, but when he closes his eyes to sleep he does not see brother Marines lying still beneath bloody ponchos or a baby as it wails next to a prostrate woman who will never nurse or comfort him again. He does not see the faces of familiar and unfamiliar dead; he does not see the bodies rotting on the street corners or in the mass graves that we uncovered when the fighting in Hue finally ended. He does not endlessly fight a war in his dreams that I will never stop fighting.

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The Fair Exchange - Finale