Night Trap

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Seconds passed. The A-6 got a lineup and came on.

The probe was out. Alan’s whole will tried to force the probe into the basket. The A-6 seemed to be flying through jelly, barely responsive, lazy. Slowly, slowly, the probe drifted closer.

Suddenly the probe was there there THERE and the basket sailed dead in front of it and it came on the last few feet and it was in.

“He’s in!” Alan shouted, and he heard Craw call something at the same time. He tried to relax his grip on the seat. It’s okay, he thought. It’s okay. Then, as the fuel hit the wounded bird, triumph faded.

Christine gave a shudder. They were four hundred feet off the water and the A-6 had pulled the basket right off the hose. Fuel was raining down to the dark water, falling like blood from an artery, like lost opportunities, lost hopes.

He thought the A-6 started to fall away then, and that would always be the image that he had of it—getting smaller, dropping slowly—but he would wonder later if that was only an image in his mind, the horror of a dream where the inevitable, the terrifying, takes form.

What Alan saw for sure, and knew he saw, knew that this really happened then, was his father raise his head and lift one hand in a gesture, half wave, half salute. Does he know it’s me? Does he know I’m here? Then the head went down and the A-6 dropped like a stone.

An ejection seat fired, and a second later the plane hit the water.

“He’s gone,” he heard himself say. “He’s gone.”

He flipped back to the datalink.

Christine was silent. Then Narc began to report the downed bird.

6 (#ulink_f110af69-f560-5ed8-8003-4dbb2ca31346)

24 July 1990. 2123 Zulu. Florida.

Kim Hoyt had been doing small hits of coke since lunch and she wanted a party. It was pretty much a party already—her brother and two of his friends, her father, two business guys of his who had brought the coke as a sweetener for some deal they were making—but she wanted glitter and splash with it. She wanted to dress up and she wanted to strip naked; she wanted to be admired and she wanted to flirt; she wanted to be coveted and she wanted to be competed for. She wanted to be the center of something exciting, and that said to her a party.

Her father made deals. Mostly, his deals were in construction, condos and hotels, packaging and subcontracting, heavy in the part of the Cuban community where the money was. She admired her father. He was her model for a man: he could twist other men around each other, and he could make big money. Physically, he wasn’t much—paunchy and soft-looking, smooth, barbered—but she had already learned what a lot of young men didn’t know yet, that a middle-aged man like her father was more attractive than they were with their sunbleached hair and their muscles, because he gave off signs of power. If all you wanted was to get fucked, they were okay. “Put a sock in their mouth, they’re fine,” as she said to her friends. But she knew there was more to life than that. She knew that unless you wanted to be some overweight slob with cellulite and three kids and a mortgage, you wanted power and you wanted money.

So Kim loved her father. Almost beyond what was allowed, but they never crossed that line.

She lay by the pool, loving the coke, loving herself, the smooth honey of her skin, the reflection of herself in all the others’ eyes. Three other women were around the pool, too, but they weren’t competition; they were playmates for the businessmen. She felt distanced from them by her promise to Alan. She was his. She’d be all his, only his. She loved her celibacy, all the more because she was the most desirable woman there. She loved their desire, even the other women’s, their desire expressed as envy but desire all the same.

“Telephone, mees.”

Consuela was a black silhouette against the sky, bending toward her like an angel.

“Bring it out here.”

She believed that she and Consuela were buddies. Consuela loved her, she believed.

“I teenk ees heem, mees. Maybe you want private?”

Him. Alan. Consuela knew all about him. (So did her father, for that matter, but in a different way, not the sex—at least not the intensity of it—which Consuela cleaned up after.) “Oh, my God—” The coke gave her tremendous focus, mostly on herself, her feelings (lust, loneliness) and she ran across the tiles, feeling her breasts move, feeling all the others’ eyes on her. “In my bedroom, Consuela—”

She threw herself across the pink bed, grabbed the phone. “Yes?” Her heart was thumping.

“It’s Alan.”

“It is you! Oh, my God, I miss you so! You got my vibes, you felt me missing you, didn’t you! I thought I’d come in my—”

“Kim!” It was a new tone from him; maybe it was the telephone. He sounded uptight. As if he wasn’t listening to her at all. “Kim, I’m coming home for a few days.”

“You’re not!” She shrieked the words. She rolled on her back. She crossed an ankle over a knee. “Oh, lover, when you—”

“Kim, my father’s dead.”

She felt herself go through three distinct stages in a fraction of a second; the coke let her see them clearly. First, annoyance that he would mention such a thing just then; next, fear that something was expected of her; then, heavy, conventional sadness of the kind she saw on television. She began to weep. “Oh—my darling—oh, poor you, I’m so sorry, oh God—”

“I have to settle his affairs. I’ve got compassionate leave. I’m flying commercial; can you meet my plane?”

She wanted to say that she’d be waiting with her legs spread, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear (she felt annoyance again, then something stronger than that), and she assured him she’d be there. She wrote the details on her pad, her writing too large, later hard to read. She was still weeping. The tears felt good, a letting-go. It was nice to cry for somebody’s dead dad, she found.

“I’ve got to go.”

“But you poor thing. Oh, your heart must be broken! The depth—I mean, this is just so sad. I wish I could tell you how I feel it. So—so—” She wept and wept. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, loved herself weeping.

But the more she tried to tell him how sad it was, the less he seemed to respond. She wanted him there with her, seeing her weep, making love, weeping and making love at the same time, and she tried to tell him this, tried to get him to see, but he said less and less and less.

Then she was holding a dead telephone.

It made her weep even more. She couldn’t stop. Everything was just so sad.

Her brother’s friend came into the room and shut the door. He was dumb as a stump but gorgeous, hardly eighteen. She told him how sad it was. He told her she had really deep feelings and began to unfasten her bikini top. That felt right to her.

26 July 1990. 1322 Zulu. Florida.

Alan Craik hadn’t slept the three nights since he had watched his father’s plane fall away. He was wound up tight with fatigue, his eyes too bright; he made quick movements that didn’t quite do what they were supposed to do, stumbled sometimes. Yet he was alert, and when he lay down and closed his eyes, he remained awake, replaying the horror of it.

As the 747 dropped toward Orlando, he stared out the window, as if seeing Florida rise up to meet him was important. He was not seeing Florida at all, however; he was seeing meetings with his father, a last one when he had said goodbye in Bahrain. Death hadn’t given them any premonition that it would be the last time. They had been casual, too quick; he had still been nursing resentment at his father’s remarks about Kim, and his father had been anxious to deal with squadron business.

Alan Craik was confused. He had not known his father well, he decided; was that his own fault? His father had let his mother and stepfather raise him; what did he owe his father’s memory, then? Had his father been a good man? A hero? A model? Where was Alan’s responsibility to his memory? And where was Alan’s part in his death?

“It wasn’t your fault!” Rafehausen had shouted at him. Alan had stood on the flight deck, the warm air of the Gulf washing over him, babbling, “It was my fault. I killed him. They should have had a real aircrewman up there. I killed my father—” Until Rafehausen had grabbed him and bellowed at him, “It wasn’t your fault! It wasn’t your goddam fault! You did everything you could!”

He replayed the last moments of his father’s life as the 747 put down. He saw the final gesture, that raised hand before the plane plunged to the water—had that been corny, or was it gallant? And what was he, Alan, in those moments? And where was grief, which, he thought, should have had him weeping, when actually he was alert and efficient and, after those moments of guilt, hard as a stone? Then he began to replay it all as a way of moving to the edge of his consciousness a question that wanted to intrude: With him dead, why am I staying in the Navy?

He was wearing civilian clothes and had only a knapsack. He came out into the arrival lounge, dodging other travelers who planted themselves wherever their welcomers waited, and Kim was standing at the far side, her back against a pillar, and he smiled automatically, as he did most things automatically just then. She was wearing a black dress and sunglasses and looked tragic and sexy, and it took him an instant to realize that he resented the way she looked, which seemed to require that he be Alan, Kim’s Lover, and not Alan, Mick’s Son. Or simply Alan.

“My poor love,” she whispered in his ear. “I am so sorry.” She held him just the right length of time and then let go. “Are you terribly hurt?” she murmured.

“I’m fine.”

They walked all the way to her car before she spoke again. She held his hand very tight; he knew he was supposed to feel support, love, comfort flowing from her fingers. In fact, he felt nothing. He knew he should not tell her so.

“We’re putting you in one of the cabanas,” she said across the roof of her Mercedes. “We’ll have to find someplace else for us.”

“I’ll be at my Dad’s house a lot. All his stuff—”

She accepted it. Still, driving out of the airport, she said, “I am going to see you, aren’t I?”

“Jesus, of course.”

“I’ve missed you so.”

“I’ve missed you, too.”

He tried to blot the pictures from his mind and to think of something to say to her, and he said, “Thanks for the letters. They really kept me going.” She had sometimes sent him two a day, always short, not very literate, the envelopes stuffed with mementoes—a scrap of black nylon, something cut from a newspaper, a joke. He had been charmed by them, often aroused, then grew a little weary of their relentless, one-note sexual cheerfulness. They were like directives ordering the world to be happy and start fucking.

He let one hand rest on her thigh as she drove. The black dress was very short; under it was a black slip, then her bare, golden thigh.

“Want to go somewhere?” she said.

“Where?” He had slipped into thinking of his father’s death again.

“Don’t you want me?”

“I want whatever you want.”

She bit her lower lip. The sunglasses were as big as beer-can lids and hid half her face. After a long time, her voice level, she said, “I have something to tell you, when you’re ready to talk. It’s something wonderful, but you’re not ready yet and I don’t want to spoil it. Okay?”

“Okay.” He had been thinking about Rafehausen’s shouting at him.

She pulled into a motel, got them a room, and led him inside. Desire surprised him, its intensity like something that had been lying in wait. His lovemaking was humorless and driven, separate from his mind so that he was a kind of onlooker; yet there was physical relief, and the sense of pleasing her.

“You’ve changed,” she said. She cradled his head. “My poor lover. Want to share it with me?”

“What?”

Tears filled her eyes. “Don’t I mean anything to you?” She wept. “I can’t get through to you!” He saw that he was supposed to comfort her, tried, turned it to sex, and became again humorless and driven.

1600 Zulu. Tehran.

Franci will not remember that he is awake sometimes. He will remember things after the sixth day; this is only the fourth day. Yet, he already knows that he has lost one leg. He does not know how he knows it. In fact, a doctor stood by his bed and told another doctor; he has forgotten the event, but his mind has seized the fact. Already, his brain is working on being a different person—no longer young, no longer whole, no longer full of life and promise. He is deadened with drugs and he seems unconscious, but his brain is working on the proposition that a few seconds at the radar post, the flipping of a switch, somebody else’s callousness, have stolen his future. He has not yet been told that he is a eunuch.

1600 Zulu. Florida.

His father owned a house near Five Points in Jacksonville. Alan remembered it from visits after the divorce. His mother had waited a year and then married a nice guy from Iowa, and Alan had visited his father during two humid Florida summers. Then his father had had other duty stations, but he liked Florida and kept the house.

Part of it was rented to a j.g. from another squadron. When Alan’s father was there, they shared the house; when either was away, he locked his bedroom and that was that. A succession of such housemates had trooped through, leaving the house anonymous and male.