THO AN (EXCERPT)

Tho An 

     The door gunner nodded at what he'd heard through his earphones, leaned back from peering over his weapon at the jungle below, and looked around at us. Helmeted heads turned to him. He made a quick down/up motion with his right hand. We jacked the bolts of our weapons  -most of us carried M14 rifles; Lt. O’Neill carried a .45 caliber “grease gun”(

) - to chamber a round. We checked our safeties. Engine and rotor noise made it too loud to talk, but talk was unnecessary. Glances ricocheted from face to face with the spark of here we go. The men from "F" Company looked longer at Lieutenant O'Neill, Chituras and me than at one another. They already knew who they were, had been in enough combat together to know who'd do what when the shit hit the fan. The three  of us were Marines from the air wing who'd come along as Tactical Air Control Party. Unknowns. I met their searching eyes with as much steadiness as I could muster. 

     The chopper dropped; waist high grass welled up under us and was flattened by rotor wash. The door gunner became a demon bent on clearing his aircraft so it could get back in the air: "Out!out!OUT!" We jumped out the door, bent low, ran to the edge of the clearing. No firing yet.                                         

     "F" Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, had orders to approach the village of Tho An, about seven and a half miles southwest of Chu Lai, and, if fired upon from the direction of the village, to level it. Any villagers who wanted to leave could do so. They would be rounded up and taken by helicopter, with what possessions they could carry, to a refugee camp.      

     We fanned out, got on line with the grunt platoons leading and our headquarters group a few yards behind them, and advanced on Tho An, still walking in waist-high grass. Bayonets sniked onto bayonet lugs along the line. Lieutenant O'Neill nodded toward Chituras and me; my bayonet was already out of the scabbard and I was working its ring over the flash suppressor of my M14 when I heard Captain Love (no shit, that was his name), the "F" Company commander who was a few steps in front of me, say "That's it, that's what I like to see, gimme some steel on the end of it."

     Someone did fire on "F" Company from the village, and we began the work of leveling it. First, the firing from the village was answered by the sharp cracks of the company's rifles; machine guns were set up and added their staccato voices. Then we pulled back and sat and felt the earth tremble under the artillery barrage, and heard those peculiarly sharp explosions made by the splintering steel casings of artillery rounds. 

     Next came the F4 Phantoms, sharks of the air, the sinister, howling jets with their grotesquely turned-down black snouts (grotesque, yet beautiful to every infantryman on our side), their wide, low-slung, swept-back wings and high triangular tails: the 250-pound bombs were dropped with a straight approach and a quick, turning pull-out, the bombs falling like a handful of pickles and going off in quick succession. The napalm runs were long, graceful arcs. As each jet began to climb away from the bottom of its arc, it would loose one long silver obelisk to tumble end-over-end, flashing in the sun, until it hit behind the trees and sent a cloud of red-orange flames laced with black smoke into the feathered border between green palm-fronds and blue sky.

     Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the Phantoms finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.               

     Attached to “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee. 

     They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A Sergeant cursed the engineers for using too much explosive, not because it was terrifying the Vietnamese, but because they might injure some of us. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.

     I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. 

     One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.

     But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face.

     Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. It fell between me and everything I could see in the village. It moved top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of "F" Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can't explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.

ICICLES (POEM)

ICICLES (POEM)

1/4/02 Chief Joseph Mountain

For three days, snow has fallen

onto the cabin roof, thawed, slid,

frozen, slid again, curved, re-

frozen until a foot-thick whitecap

of corrugated ice

hangs above my door, a row

of two-foot icicles

along its lower edge. As

the ice became a half-circle

the icicles turned and pointed at the wall:

the very claws of winter.

It thawed again, and the icicles thinned

at one point only, near their tops, and

they drooped, then bent

until they pointed long slender

lumpy-knuckled fingers
at the ground.

Comes the light. Blue moon glows through

gauzy clouds; white stars blink

between.

I step off the porch,

look up, watch

as light enters ice.

Blue light enters ice, turns,

pings around inside

until icicles begin

to vibrate, then hum.

Light becomes music, and

the row of crazy icicles

are skinny silver temple bells tolling

the hymn of winter.                                   

                                                               © Dean Metcalf 2002, 2012

MOMENT (POEM: 1964)

                                    Moment

                                                         for Stan Wellman 2012

1964: South China Sea

It is hours

into the night.

We are in the bowels

of the attack transport

USS Pickaway.

We are marines: young

warriors, powerful, and

think we are stronger yet.

Vietnam is a word

we barely know. Soon, and

forever, Vietnam will be

the only word we know. A gale

slaps the ship about

like a volleyball.

Our bunks are

tubular steel and canvas,

side by side,

six high. There are

two hundred of us

in a compartment the size

of your living room

if you are moderately

well off. The walls are

half inch steel plate

painted battleship gray. The light

is from single bulbs, each

inside a heavy glass globe

inside a steel cage.

This is to protect the light bulb

from the kind of men we are, and from

heavy things which fly across the compartment

when the ship is at sea

on a night like tonight.

The battleship gray walls

and the glass globes in their steel cages

drip beads of sweat

from saltwater showers. The smells are

sweat, saltwater and puke.

We can’t sleep

for being slammed into

one another. The ship

is hammered

by a heavy sea,

shudders,

nose-dives

into the next.

“Je-sus Christ!”  is uttered loudly

by one of the grunts

from Delta Company.

From another bunk comes,

shouted, “Jesus Christ

blows elephants

for a nickel a herd!”

The laughter is chopped

by a silence, as we wonder

whether the power

that’s just been insulted

is the same as that

which threatens the ship.

Then, from a third bunk:

“Hey. Knock that shit off.”

Now another silence, as

each of us signs

a secret document saying

he is afraid of the wind.                                                      ©Dean Metcalf

                                                                                              11/26/2002

DRESS BLUES 1

My mom married five times, still never got it right. My favorite stepdad was a Wisconsin farm boy as a kid who taught me to hunt and fish in the mountains and streams of eastern Oregon. His name was Bill Gano. This is for him...

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30-30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30-30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30-06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere. 

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me. 

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by - of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town - an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals - some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth - on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers. 

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform. 

     The man in the uniform was watching me, seemingly   with approval, handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world. 

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in. 

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that." 

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained. 

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval. 

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are. 

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

ICICLES (POEM)

1/4/02 Chief Joseph Mountain

For three days, snow has fallen

onto the cabin roof, thawed, slid,

frozen, slid again, curved, re-

frozen until a foot-thick whitecap

of corrugated ice

hangs above my door, a row

of two-foot icicles

along its lower edge. As

the ice became a half-circle

the icicles turned and pointed at the wall:

the very claws of winter.

It thawed again, and the icicles thinned

at one point only, near their tops, and

they drooped, then bent

until they pointed long slender

lumpy-knuckled fingers
at the ground.

Comes the light. Blue moon glows through

gauzy clouds; white stars blink

between.

I step off the porch,

look up, watch

as light enters ice.

Blue light enters ice, turns,

pings around inside

until icicles begin

to vibrate, then hum.

Light becomes music, and

the row of crazy icicles

are skinny silver temple bells tolling

the hymn of winter.                                   

                                                               © Dean Metcalf 2002, 2012

DREAM: RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL

The rattlesnake dream     

     Sometime in 1991, I was walking down a back street in a Guatemalan town – either Guatemala Antigua, the old Spanish capital; or Panajachel, on the shore of Lago de Atitlán. I was with my friend Roger Bunch, who’d spent years in Guatemala, and a friend of his who was interested in dream interpretation. That friend asked me to tell some of mine. So while walking down that back street in Guatemala, I told him about “Dance of the Arrows” and “Rattlesnake and Pistol.”

     Roger’s friend was agog, and asked me to write them down so he could interpret them for me. In good Marine Corps fashion, I told him to go piss up a rope: “Forget it, buddy. Those are my dreams, and I already know what they mean.”

     I decided then and there to write this book, and what its title would be.

Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol

People come running up to me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid. They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help: "Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I ever held, the one my stepdad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no-nonsense machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws, all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake. You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing, which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold, unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer, moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am, after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony. They're aware of the eye-to-eye conversation between me and the snake, and want me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right. 

EXCERPT: MERCENARY 2

Mercenary 2

     I got my film from the Rus Rus trip developed - nearly thirty rolls of 35mm - and invited Mickey up to the house to look at the pictures. When he came into the cottage Annie and I shared, he took off the rain jacket he was wearing. He immediately noticed that I'd noticed how he handled the jacket, and how it looked: he'd shucked his arm out of the left sleeve first, then slid the right sleeve off more carefully. The bottom right coat pocket hung heavily toward the floor; that was what had caught my eye. Mickey smiled, almost appreciatively. He said something like "Yes, there is something heavy in there," meaning, of course, his pistol.

     He was visibly surprised by my photos: the Miskito and Sumo fighters with their M16s and AK47s and G3s and assorted uniforms; the incongruous, sweaty Texans; the visible tension in the bodies of the youthful warriors as they clambered out of the dugout canoe ahead of me on the Nicaraguan bank of the Río Coco; the carefully arranged skulls at Tulin Bila.

     I saved the clear photo of Flaco for last. "Recognize this guy?" I asked. Mickey smiled: "What's he calling himself these days?"  

     "Colonel Flaco. So you know him?"

     "Oh, yeah. Flaco and I go way back."

   ”What's his real name?" Mickey just smiled again and shook his head. Then: "Dean, you'd have made a hell of a soldier." 

     Mickey and I continued talking every few weeks for another year or so. A story unfolded about the junior-high school son of the woman Mickey was living with. I never met the boy, but I heard about him repeatedly from what became two sides of a struggle for his soul. He'd grown up mostly without a father, and suddenly there appeared in his life this cocksure figure, Mickey, who was wildly fluent in the manly arts: he could take anything apart, explain its workings, fix it, build it, destroy it, blow it up, kick the shit out of it, or shoot it. 

     Especially shoot it. The boy, of course, went for that immediately. So Mickey, liking the idea of being a hero to the kid, soon had him out in the woods with pistols and rifles, burning up ammunition. But, Mickey told me, there was little of the breathe-in, breathe-out, hold 'em and squeeze 'em accuracy that I'd been taught by my stepfather and uncle and Marine marksmanship instructors. No: what Mickey taught the boy was combat shooting, two hands on the pistol, crouch, aim quickly with the entire body at the center of mass of your target, shoot rapid-fire until the man was down, then quick! on to the next target.

     A simultaneous attempt was being made to make an opposing claim on the boy's future. Mary Duffield, a peace activist who lived near Santa Cruz, owned a seaworthy sailboat and was a serious ham radio operator. She would organize local and longer-distance sailing trips for youngsters, as well as providing instruction in ham radio operations and equipment. Sometimes she would combine the two. The ax she had to grind was international peace. She felt, and taught, that getting children from different countries to talk with, and to meet, one another was one way to reduce the level of violence in the world. Mickey snorted at that idea, but the boy happened to be infatuated with ham radio as a hobby, and his mother apparently encouraged him to spend at least some of his free time with Mary. Besides being an experienced open-ocean sailor, she was also a qualified operator of international short wave radio equipment.

    Many months later, in 1986 or '87, I would get a worried call from Mary. Mickey, the woman and the boy had disappeared suddenly and without leaving a hint of where they had gone. She was worried about the boy, and asked if I'd see if I could locate them. I tried, but had no luck. Dropping out of sight was one of Mickey's professional skills. All we heard was a rumor that the three of them had been witnesses to "something really awful," and had to disappear. After still more months had passed since Mary's call, she got a cryptic note from the boy, with no return address, saying that he wouldn't be in touch anymore but wanted her to know that he was all right. None of us ever heard from them again.

     Before that last episode, I asked Mickey for a favor. I'd done him a few smaller ones, like getting him a free appointment with my wife, a dermatologist, to treat a fungus he'd brought home from one of his adventures in Central America.

     It was late 1985. News reports were coming out about contra raids in southern Nicaragua. Apparently a "second front" was being opened, to force the Sandinistas to divide their resources and relieve some of the pressure on the main contra units operating out of Honduras in northern Nicaragua. This meant to me that contra groups must be operating out of Costa Rica, raiding into southern Nicaragua, then jumping back across the border for sanctuary. Yet Costa Rica's policy of neutrality forbade the use of its territory for any such activities. There seemed to be an opportunity to break significant news here, but major news organizations had done next to nothing about it. 

     What I asked Mickey for was information about contra base camps in northern Costa Rica, and crossing points the raiders used to get into Nicaragua.

   Now, this is an interesting thing to try to describe. Mickey and I were just flat on opposite sides. Mickey was a mercenary, an admitted CIA operative - contract, not career - a "professional soldier," as he called himself. I was a veteran with a chip on my shoulder, a small-time crusader against the very type of operations by which he made his living. Yet we had, after a fashion, become friends. This was, in part, because we had a soldierly respect for one another in matters of nerve and heart and experience, which at times matter more deeply among men than does what separated us: that is, conscience.

     There was something else to it. I was never able to put my finger on it until a couple of years later, when Doyle McManus (of the Los Angeles Times' Washington, DC, bureau) and I were in Miami doing interviews to follow up the story of the Rangers allegedly having parachuted into Nicaragua. Doyle and I were driving in a rented car on our way to an interview, and talking about the quirks involved in chasing down stories about covert military operations. We had both found sources, a couple of them very good, within the covert operations community who had been willing to talk, on a limited basis, about what they knew. And the reason they'd talk was because we already knew things which we weren't supposed to know. We agreed that there was a certain gamesmanship involved here, which made how much you knew more important than which side you were on. It amounted to a form of cooperation among enemies, perhaps even in the interest of richening the experience of the fight itself.

     I asked Mickey for the help over a beer in one of those places that was so crowded and noisy a dozen people could meet and plot a terrorist bombing and nobody'd be the wiser. He got quiet, and looked at me for a long time with the soberest expression I ever saw on him. It was clear that he was looking into me, trying now to see past all our war stories and repartee, trying to see my very bones, who I was down deep. 

     Then he leaned over the table, onto his elbows, halving the distance between our faces. "What are you prepared to do?" he asked.

     "Huh?

     "Costa Rica es un fogón," he said, Costa Rica was a bonfire of covert operations activity.

     "It's gotta be," I said. There was no other way they could do those raids, repeatedly, on the Sandinistas' own ground, without getting caught.

        "So. Can you help me?"

    Mickey shrugged, then sighed, having come to his decision. He said he would call Langley (Virginia: CIA Headquarters), give his account number, and ask that a courier be sent with information about camps and border crossings. It wouldn't be all of them, he said, only a few, maybe only one or two.

     "But it won't mean shit unless you follow through," he said.

     "What does that mean?"

     Mickey looked at me in a way that told me, as no form of documentary evidence could have, that he was who he said he was: a serious player in a deadly game. 

     He told a story. He'd been on an operation in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines ashore there. He and a partner had been flown inland in a C47, and told to hang loose for a few days, near the airplane, until they were contacted. That evening, they got bored, decided What the hell, we're Latinos, we can find our way around, let's walk down to that little town. They passed three peasants on the road. All nodded, said “Buenas noches,” walked on. As they passed, Mickey and his partner looked at each other and simultaneously concluded that their operation was compromised. Without a word, both turned, pulled their pistols, and killed the three men. "Pah, pah, pah," Mickey said, imitating the shots, and shrugged. "They're only peasants."

     He asked the question again, this time parsing out his words and sliding each one along the conduit between our eyes: "What...are...you...prepared...to do?"

     His words, borne upon that look, made me shudder. "What do I have to do?"

     "I will give you the name of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You will go there and wait in the room. When the man comes, you stand behind the door, knock him in the head, take what he brought you, and split."

     I thought for a long moment. I did believe in what I was doing, believed that many human beings would live or die depending on the quality and quantity of information to reach the mainstream press about covert operations in Central America, believed that the work was not being thoroughly done, that I could contribute. I also believed that, if I so much as nodded at this moment, Mickey would do what he said he'd do, or at least try. And I believed that the chance of a breakthrough story about illegal covert operations, involving agents of the U.S. Government or private U.S. citizens, compromising the neutrality of Costa Rica, was worth some serious risk. It might even be worth fighting for.

     I spread the thing out in my mind. Most of my friends, I knew, saw me as someone who'd lived an eventful life, done difficult and dangerous things, was capable of doing more such things, if perhaps a little nuts for having done so many. I treasured, in myself, that part of me that had pulled the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was still a teenager, while everyone else looked on; the same part which had run across the clearing by the well in Tho An with my automatic rifle because the First Sergeant had called for such a rifle, and I was the only man present who had one; the same part that had caused me to be instrumental in hauling the anchor in Shelter Cove.

     But Mickey was from a different world. In his world, the man coming through the door was an impediment, to be removed. But what if he were very alert, very strong? I didn't have the skill to be sure of knocking him out, without killing him. But wasn't he an enemy, a bagman for people who ruined families and nations for fun and profit? Wasn't I on the right side? But what if I had a moment of moral hesitation? I could be killed, then and there. The man coming through the door would be more like Mickey than like me.

     He had asked the right question. I wasn't prepared to do that.

     He'd told me his real name. At least, to my knowledge it was his real name. He’d even showed me his driver's license. At first I wondered why he had done so. But by the time our association ended, I understood that part of his communication to me had been unspoken, had been contained between the lines of his stories, in the expression on his face when he said certain things, in the fact that he was always armed and that using his weapon was the core of his way of being in the world. Put into words, that part of his communication would have been something like this: You know what world I live in. You understand its basic rules, and the penalties for breaking them.

     I do. That's why his real name is not used here.