As she moved through her forms, the blocks and punches and startling high kicks, she did not lack an audience. She was an attractive female alone in a camp full of lonely men. The gawkers kept a wet, respectful distance, though, and went easy on the catcalls. They’d all seen how she handled Rhino – or heard, which pumped the act up to more than it was.
Eric Bell stood by himself to the side, near the bunker Mark shared with Croyd, the rain matting his dark-blond hair to his misshapen skull. He was silent, his hands and body at rest.
When she felt the end of her hour nearing, Moonchild finished her practice and turned to enter the bunker. Eric stepped forward. “May I talk to you?” he asked. His voice was low and deep beyond his years.
She tipped her head and regarded him coolly. “You are disappointed that there was no fight tonight, yes?”
The boy shook his head. “Relieved. I don’t have much taste for violence.”
“Really? Why, then, are you here, in the middle of a military camp?”
To her surprise he laughed. “I might ask you the same question. The answer is, I believe in love. But love isn’t all you need, no matter what the Beatles sang. The nats have been grinding our faces in that fact since long before I was born – or you either, I suspect. We must have strength, the strength to protect ourselves. Then our love can begin its work – not in a spirit of confrontation, but confidently and unafraid.”
She dropped her gaze to the mud. “That is very beautiful.”
He laughed again. “I was a street poet in Brooklyn before I came here to be a peaceful guerrilla warrior. I picked up a few oratorical tricks back then. It’s all sleight-of-tongue.”
Her mind filled with an urban street-corner image, young Eric barefoot in torn jeans, addressing an afternoon-rush pedestrian throng. First one man in hardhat and coveralls stopped and turned to listen to him, then a woman in a smart gray executive suit, a delivery boy on a mountain bike, one after another, until the homeward surge stood still to hear the boy poet’s words.
He finished his poem, the words of which Moonchild could not quite hear, though they tantalized with the promise of infinite meaning. The crowd barraged him with dead cats and garbage. She laughed. “That never happened, surely!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in amused delight.
His distorted features slipped into a highly charming grin. “Not exactly,” he said. “You can call that a sleight-of-mind. Another one of my gifts.”
She smiled and started to turn away, suddenly shy. “The way you handled Rhino…” he said.
She froze, every muscle tensed, as if expecting his next words to strike like a blow.
“It was beautiful,” he said. “You could have hurt him badly, yet you did not. You could have shamed him, too. I guess a lot of the guys think you did. But I know better. I saw the way you gave him a chance to strike you when you helped him up, gave him the pride of choosing to do the right thing. That was the most magnificent thing of all.
“You have an ace’s powers, but none of an ace’s arrogance. You have enormous strengths, but you use them with restraint – yes, and with love. That’s what this place” – he gestured around at the dark, rain-swept camp. – “what Fort Venceremos is all about. You show us the way that, yes, we shall overcome.”
She licked her lips and swallowed. She could find no words.
“I’d like to talk to you more,” he said. “I want to know you. May I see you sometime?”
She nodded, almost frantically, agitated by some emotion she could not identify and the coming transformation. “Ask Mark,” she said quickly. “He is a good man.”
She vanished into the bunker, leaving Eric in the rain.
“Check,” Croyd said, moving his bishop. It tipped over his knight en route. “Excuse it. These digits aren’t really designed for manipulation,”
“Uh-uh,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Can’t do that, man.”
For a being virtually bereft of mimetic muscles, Croyd could muster a hell of an outraged look. “Why the hell not?”
“Revealed check from my queen. Can’t put your own king in jeopardy, man.”
“Shit.” Croyd retracted the move, knocking the white knight down again. “And here I thought I had your back to the wall.” Mark gave him a thin smile. Once upon a time he had been a middling-hot chess player; he’d held a master’s rating in high school and college, playing tournaments, memorizing games by the book-load. Time and extensive experimentation with psychoactive chemicals had left certain gaps in his knowledge, and he hadn’t had much occasion to keep his skills honed since. He still fancied himself a dangerous player.
Unfortunately Croyd played with the banzai intensity of an amateur. All those classical openings painstakingly committed to memory, all Mark’s fianchettos and his Nimzo-Indian Defenses, all his careful strategic analysis, blew right out the door in the face of a player who didn’t know enough to know what he wasn’t supposed to do. Despite the misfire of Croyd’s current attack, Mark saw yet another draw looming a few moves ahead like the face of a glacier.
Somebody rapped on the bunker’s doorpost with something hard. “Hello? Anybody in here?”
“Lizards and old hippies, if that counts,” Croyd called. “Come right on in.”
Brew and Luce entered, Brew folding an umbrella, Luce’s face streaming with rain and his T-shirt soaked transparent and clinging to his rather flabby middle. Umbrellas were bogus, apparently.
Gilbert immediately started batting at the air, which was a near-solid blue haze from about the level of Mark’s breastbone up, with several of his arms. “You’re smoking that damned cigar in here. I don’t know why the Colonel permits tobacco onbase. Smoking is a bourgeois habituation, fostered by capitalist consumer fascism.”
“That must be why every Viet over the age of three years old smokes,” Croyd said affably.
“It can’t really be helping you,” Evan Brewer offered in his sweet-reason voice.
Croyd laughed. “Get real, man. Maybe I’m damaging my tissues and my precious bodily essence. But every two, three months I go night-night and the wild card deals me a whole new set. Where’s the damage?”
“Side-stream smoke adversely affects the health of those around you,” Luce said primly, folding his lower sets of arms while his upper continued to fan.
“What? Meadows? He’s got enough bad habits of his own. A little cigar smoke won’t make him much difference.” He drew on the cigar and released an aromatic jet toward the log beams of the ceiling.
“So, you gentlemen have something in mind, or is this a social call? Us old guys need our sleep. But I guess you know that.”
Luce scowled. He liked to think of himself as a youth in rebellion, although he was old enough to have fathered most of the second-generation Brigaders. “Colonel wants to see you. Now.”
“Are we in trouble?” Mark asked.
Luce glowered, still feeling the sting of Croyd’s “old guys” crack. Brew shrugged. “He didn’t tell us to point guns at you, for what that’s worth,” he said easily.
“Can’t beat old-fashioned courtesy,” Croyd said, standing and sweeping his stubby tail left and right a couple of times as if to shake the kinks out. He swayed briefly, as if drunk, then collected himself. “Let’s not keep the man waiting.
The Colonel’s office was paneled in some dark-stained hardwood. Mark guessed teak, but he wasn’t sure if that came from Vietnam. It was also small, cozy to the point of near claustrophobia for three individuals, their chairs, and a lordly wooden desk.
The room was additionally crowded with two-dimensional occupants, stuck up on the walls and sharing frames with Charles Sobel. There was a young Captain Sobel, painfully earnest, Doug MacArthur chin proudly ajut as General Westmoreland pinned a medal on his chest. There were pictures of Major Sobel, a little older, a little more creased around the eyes, posing with members of the joker Brigade company he had commanded in the early seventies. There were a lot of photos of Sobel in civilian clothes, shaking hands with Jimmy Carter, shaking hands with Andrew Young, shaking hands with Robert Redford, shaking hands with the Hero Twins in Guatemala, shaking hands with Gregg Hartmann, back in uniform to shake hands with joker Brigade survivors in front of the Vietnam Wall, whitewater rafting with Soviet veterans of Afghanistan. He probably shook their hands, too, but for some reason had neglected to memorialize it. “Care for a drink, gentlemen?” Colonel Sobel asked, leaning back in his padded leather chair. Soft New Age music played from a small generator-run CD system. “I have a modest but, if I may say so, fairly high-quality collection of hard liquor.”