The Unwilling(49)

“Very expensive whiskey.” He sat across from me, a big man in jeans and loafers. “So…”

He let the word hang, and I found myself strangely uncertain. I’d come for answers about my brother, to guilt Ken if I had to. Instead, I was swept up in visions of my family as it had once been. Against the backdrop of now, it was too much, so I went elsewhere. “I think I have a girlfriend.”

“Is that really what you came to talk about?”

I shook my head, staring into the whiskey. “Dad thinks he did it.”

“Maybe he did.”

I looked up. He was serious. “What is it with you cops?”

“What is with you kids? Your brother put two bullets in a biker’s leg. You saw him do it. He’s trafficking illegal weapons. Is murder such a stretch?”

“The murder of an innocent woman.”

“This is a discussion for your father.”

“He won’t talk about it.”

“Then be patient.”

“How, exactly? Jason’s my brother.”

Ken frowned more deeply, then stood and crossed to a collection of framed photographs. I was in some of them. So was my father. He stood for a long, reflective moment, and then lifted a frame from the shelf. “Did you know that I fought in Korea?”

“I did. I do.” So had my father.

“Eighth Army, Second Infantry Division, Ninth Infantry Regiment. That’s me on the end.” He handed me the frame. In the picture, a double row of young men faced the camera. Ken was grinning. They all were. “That was taken the day before we deployed. I was twenty-four years old, a newlywed, a recon sergeant. Most of the others were about your age.”

In the photo, Ken was wide and rawboned and lean, his face clean-shaven, the grin brash and self-assured.

He spoke as if reading my mind. “I wasn’t afraid of much.”

He took the picture back, and studied it with a distant expression. “By July of that year, we were on the Naktong River, not far from the city of Pusan. Ever heard of it?” I shook my head, and he shrugged. “Different war, different time. For us, though, it was about as real as real gets. North Koreans had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and pushed us into a defensive line along the river. Fighting was constant, weeks of it, day and night, as bad as you can imagine. By August, we’d taken heavy casualties, and were short on everything: troops, supplies, even ammunition. I was a forward observer, tasked to monitor NKA movements. That put me way out front, usually on a hilltop, usually exposed. The terrain was rough on our side of the river, our lines too thin to deal with the incursions, the coordinated attacks. Some days, every foxhole had someone in it that was dead or dying. Rifle fire. Mortar rounds. Even hand to hand, at times. I got cut off more times than I can remember, me and my crew alone on one hilltop or another. Sometimes I’d see North Koreans coming over the river, thousands of them, this wave of humanity determined to kill every last one of us.

“You wonder if there’s a point. Here it is. Our battalion had nine forward observers, people like me. By the time October rolled around, I was the only one left alive. We learned later that those were the bloodiest weeks of the entire war, that nothing else even came close. Five thousand Americans killed, twelve hundred wounded, another thousand MIA. Hell, the South Koreans lost forty thousand.

“I saw more heroism in those days than most men see in a lifetime, and I saw the bad stuff, too, the way men turned coward or turned cruel. Of the thirty-six in that initial platoon, only four of us came back alive. One killed himself a year later, Charlie Green, a corporal, a Kentucky boy. James Rapp robbed a bank, pulled eight years of hard time, then got out, stole a car the same day, and drove into a phone pole. Some said it was intentional, another suicide. No one really knows. The third survivor was from California, Alex Chopin, a good kid, a little flaky but solid in a fight. After the war, he lived rough for a while in LA, then disappeared into some kind of commune up the ass end of Humboldt County. As for me, number four…” Ken sat, his eyes dark and distant. “I lost my wife. I struggled.”

“You said there was a point.”

“People change. That’s the point. They change in wartime most of all.”

“Do you really think he killed her?”

“I think it’s possible.”

I put down the glass, and rose to my feet, dry-mouthed.

“Sit down, Gibby.”

“I think you’ve said enough.”

“You don’t have the facts, son, not about this case or your brother or what war can do to a man.”

“So give them to me.”

“I told you, kid. It’s not my place.”

“He couldn’t have changed that much.”

“War and prison and drugs.” Ken reached for my untouched glass, poured the whiskey into his, and leaned back. “You do the math.”



* * *



At home much later, I stayed awake for hours, afraid that if I slept, I would dream of a river and mud, and small men come for killing. I pictured Ken on a windswept hill—this friend of my father who’d fought young, and lost some piece of himself. He’d known war, as had my brothers; and without meaning to, he’d put some of that war inside me.

The Jason I’d known.

Jason as he might now be.