Fatal Light Read Free Page B

radio with psychedelic rock and Detroit soul, a running backdrop. Cultured BBC voices lectured over the shout of gunfire on satellite links from Saigon or Phnom Pen as I drifted the neighborhood lanes and, closer to the city, passed the dark shops and stores in front of their vacant parking lots. I turned the radio off as I moved onto an empty boulevard, and snow began to fall.

7
    The night before I left for recruit training I sat in my parents’ dining room. My sisters made faces at each other and my father told stories about his years in the service, in the navy during the Second World War and again in Korea.
    â€œThere were tough times, sure,” he said, sitting back at the end of the meal. “But all in all it was OK. A kid’ll pick up things. See things you’d never see anywhere else.”
    I nodded. My mother looked at her plate and her cheeks were flushed. My younger sister loudly asked to be excused; both girls left the table.
    â€œI’ll tell you, though,” my father went on. “There was something more—I don’t know, organized about World War Two. You went because you wanted to, it was the right thing to do, you were proud to wear the uniform.”
    â€œI guess the lines were a little bit more clearly drawn,” I said. “Back then.”
    My father shrugged. “That’s all I meant,” he said. “We weren’t thrashing around the jungle like a bunch of idiots.”
    â€œJoe Powers told a different story,” my mother said to my father. Then, to me, “Joe was in the Pacific war, on those islands... .”

    â€œCorregidor, Iwo Jima,” my father said. “But hell, Joe was always a little melodramatic anyway.”
    A silence passed; we looked at our plates. My father swirled what was left of his iced tea. The ice cubes rang in the glass.
    â€œMaybe somebody knows what’s going on over there.” My father sighed. “You wouldn’t know it from reading the papers, though, I’ll tell you.”
    My mother stacked the dinner plates and asked if we wanted coffee.
    â€œSounds good,” I told her.
    My father nodded, watched as my mother moved away, into the kitchen. When she was gone he leaned toward me saying, “One thing about the service. You have your fun.” He looked at me, in possession of secrets.
    â€œYou know what I mean,” he said, smiling. “One time I even shared a rubber. You believe that? No shit. Me and this kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma—Ronnie Bills, I even remember his name—me and Bills and this Mexican girl in the backseat of a rented car. We were on a weekend pass in San Diego, must’ve been the summer of ‘forty-three. Bills went first, gets out and takes off the rubber, empties it out, and gives it to me. Christ.” My father was laughing. “What the hell. I mean there we were, one rubber between us and the señorita hot to trot.”
    My mother turned into the dining room with coffeepot and cups on a tray. My father’s laughter subsided and I smiled with the story and he sighed.
    â€œWell,” he said, “I guess we did some crazy things back then.”
    My mother glanced at him as she filled the cups and handed them to us.
    â€œYou know, though? What I really loved about those days?” My father stirred sugar into his coffee. “This’ll sound strange, maybe, but what I really loved was the music. Really. Benny Goodman, Harry James, Artie Shaw. Glenn Miller. I saw ‘em all.”

    My mother smiled, holding the coffee cup close to her lips. “Your father was quite the dancer,” she said.
    My father said, “Your mother and I won some dance contests. Jitterbugging. Fox-trots.”
    â€œSpotlight dances,” my mother said. “I loved those.”
    â€œYou did those at kind of half speed,” my father told me. “You had to be good, couldn’t snow the judges with a lot of flailing around and