Send Down the Rain(65)

“I had taken a team in. The team had done their job, but things had gone badly. The team had been split. In the confusion they’d rendezvoused at Bravo and left me at Alpha. I’d been cut, shot. Half blown up. Lost some blood. Things were not looking too good. I patched myself up, crawled into a hole, and kept quiet. The bad guys were monitoring the radio.

“After two days I ran out of water, so I drank out of a stream. Upstream was a dead buffalo that I wouldn’t find until the next day. By then the dysentery had already set in. I became dehydrated. I’d try to walk and my whole body cramped up. I’d been alone a week when I called it in.

“They said they were glad to hear from me; they needed me fifteen miles south. I told them I needed some antibiotics and what they could do with their fifteen miles. They reiterated their order to hump it south. I reiterated my previous statements and told them if I made it out, I’d hunt every one of them down. I’d kill them, their wives, their children, their dog. Even their dreams.

“A minute later, the pilot’s voice echoed on the line. He said two words: ‘I’m coming.’ Two hours later he landed, dragged me into the chopper, started an IV of antibiotics, and we lifted off. We thought we were in the clear, but an hour and a half from Camp California a rocket cut our rudder. Sent us spinning in a circle. Somehow he landed. I climbed out of the wreckage, pulled him out, and the two of us disappeared into nowhere with a whole bunch of bad somebodies chasing us. By the end of the third day, I was carrying him on my back.

“The first bullet caught me in the stomach. The second passed through him and was headed into me when this stopped it.” I set a book in her hand. “When I told you the story of the man’s body I’d carried for eight days . . . that was your dad.”

Tears were pouring off her chin. I set his watch and dog tag in her hands, and turned the brass Zippo in my hand.

“Against a direct order, and in a stolen helicopter, your father came to get me when no one else would. He was the best of them. The best of them all. He gave me what I didn’t deserve and took what I did.”

We sat in the quiet several minutes. Her eyes were closed as she let her fingers trace the leather cover and letters of his dog tag.

“It’s a gift I can never . . .” I trailed off. Moments passed. “For a long time, I couldn’t understand what would make a man do that. To drop into hell and give himself for another.” I was crying now. “Lying there in that mud, his warm red life trickling out beneath my fingers and the light in his eyes fading, he started laughing. He said, ‘Joseph?’

“I was trying to keep pressure on the hole. Keep him talking. ‘Yeah?’

“He smiled. ‘I want to let you in on a secret. It’s time you knew.’

“I was too busy to look at him. I said, ‘Yeah, what’s that?’

“He tapped my chest. ‘Evil won’t kill evil.’ He tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t. ‘Not ever.’

“I couldn’t stop it. His life was seeping out between my fingers.

“He pulled my forehead to his and whispered, ‘Only one thing does that.’

“I was crying. Crying hard.

“He smiled and placed his hand flat across my heart. He closed his eyes and spoke through a whisper. ‘And it’s the only thing we really need.’ Then he was gone.”

When I could muster the words, I said, “Suzy, I’ve wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for your whole life.”

We sat for an hour. Neither of us talking.


THE MOON ROSE OUTSIDE the window. She blew her nose. “So . . . everything you said in your interviews with me was true?”

“Yes.”

She choked back a sob. “Joseph, I am so—”

I placed a finger across her lips. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Forgive me?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Please.”

“I’ll tell you the same thing your father told me when I asked him that same ridiculous question.”

“Which was?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

Suzy sat up and hugged me for a long, long time. Tears fell. Tears that had been stuffed inside me an even longer time. I don’t know where they all came from, but I cried a lot. I didn’t know my heart could hold that much.

She studied me. “There’s more to your story, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t tell me, can you?”

I turned the index card in my hand. A picture of her tearstained face—of a soul coming clean. “No.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t.”

She looked at Allie. “Does she know?”

“No.”

“Will you ever tell us?”

I gently laid the index card in her hand and shook my head.


WE SPENT THE AFTERNOON laughing. I told her a hundred stories about her dad, his sense of humor. I described his laughter, his affinity for cigars and good Scotch, and his love of all things related to her mom. How he talked about her. How he wanted to move to the mountains of Carolina and build a cabin and sit by the fire and hold her hand. Teach her to ski. Walk her down the aisle.

By evening Suzy’s producer had ordered pizza, pulled up a chair, and sent the security guards home. Suzy was sitting up, eating. She’d turned the corner. The voice that made us all believe, believed again.