Susan Johnson - Hot Streak

They had just been dropped into the clearing they'd already taken twice in the last six months. He was at point and Mac was slack man, five yards behind him when Mac stepped on the mine. The explosion knocked Carey flat. When he turned back to the anguished screams, he saw what was left of Mac thrown on a heavy jungle bush. Mac's arms and legs were gone. If he lived a million years, he'd never forget the sight of Mac crying for him. As he scrambled back, Carey screamed for a corpsman. “It's all right, Mac, I'm here. I'm here.” Very gently he lifted the man who had been six foot six into his arms, carefully eased himself onto the ground, and held him. Staring out of the dense green growth of underbrush that for a suspended moment in time seemed to isolate them as the last two men on earth, Carey roared, “If there's not a corpsman here in two minutes, I'm going to kill somebody!”

Mac's eyes were open wide. “I don't want to die,” he whispered.

“You won't,” Carey said fiercely. “I won't let you. Corpsman!” he screamed. “Dammit, we need a fucking corpsman over here!”

“I can't feel anything, Shorty. Am I going to make it?”

“It's shock, Mac. The feeling will come back. Your body's in shock.” But with each beat of his heart, Mac's arteries were pumping away his life. “We'll have you fixed up in no time,” Carey reassured him.

Just then a VC artillery unit began a dropping pattern along the tree line sheltering the company. No one could move. No medic came. As soon as the mortars started exploding, the Hueys that had dropped them in the clearing lifted like big, lumbering birds and flew away. Carey swore at them as they disappeared over the treetops.

He told Mac the copters would be there in a minute for him, that he'd be taken out to the nearest field hospital, that he'd earned a good, long R and R. He lied and lied and lied while his best friend died in his arms.

When Mac was dead, Carey made a soft bed for him in the undergrowth. Oblivious to the VC mortars systematically sweeping across the tree line while the firebase on the hill got their bearings on target, he raced toward the drop point where he knew the corpsmen would be. He manhandled a protesting corporal through the exploding shells to where Mac lay and said to him in a cold, level voice, “I want his arms and legs sewn back on.”

The horrified man stared at him. When the medic opened his mouth to object, Carey lifted his M-16, pointed it directly at the man's head, and said, “Mac was my best friend.”

The gruesome task, performed hastily but done, was accomplished only moments after the VC bombardment stopped as suddenly as it had started. And now we'll take this clearing for the third time, Carey thought cynically. Mac was dead. For what? The Cong would own this piece of land again an hour after they left.

“Thanks,” Carey said softly into the eerie silence after a steady hour of ear-shattering explosions. He lowered his weapon. “Thanks. He needs them to play basketball.” The corpsman nervously eased himself away from the tall blond man whose glazed eyes stared at the gruesome body on the ground. “Is that better now, Mac?” he heard him say before he turned and ran out of range of the crazy soldier's M-16.

Carey stayed with Mac until his body was lifted aboard a chopper. And then he cried.

Dhani stayed overnight, and that evening at dinner Bernadotte saw a glimpse of the Carey of former days as his son entertained Dhani with humorous anecdotes of Vietnam. It was the first visible break in the brittle, self-contained man who'd come back from Vietnam, the man who'd stayed in his room watching TV, not sleeping, hardly eating, trying to deal with some inner nightmare that wouldn't loosen its hold.

They sat afterward over Drambuie and made plans for the center Carey wanted to fund as a memorial to Mac. For the first time in weeks, he was animated, making suggestions as fast as Dhani could write them down, giving orders as he'd always had the tendency to do, then apologizing to her with a quick, flashing smile. Bernadotte had to excuse himself briefly when he saw that first smile. It brought back images of a chubby two-year-old toddler riding his first pony, and a young boy coaxing his father to let him have a motorcycle years too early. It was the smile Carey warmed rooms of cold-eyed cynics with. His son had returned to him, and Bernadotte needed a moment alone for his tears to subside.

The following day, after Bernadotte's chauffeur had driven Dhani away, Carey turned to his father and said, “I think I'll go for a ride.”

Controlling the impulse to dance a jig for the first time in his life, Bernadotte calmly replied, “It's a pleasant afternoon for a ride. I'll have Leon saddle Tarrytown.”

The riding helped Carey's recuperation; day by day the familiarity of the stark countryside so different from Vietnam slowly blurred his most horrifying memories. In a month the taut edginess had diminished, and in another month Carey came home one day with a movie camera, and announced he'd signed up for a film course at the nearby college.

What started as something to allay the recurring nightmares, a diversion to fill in time until the next steeplechase season began, became an obsession. He had found his mйtier in an artistic discipline that struck a rudimentary chord in every nerve and pulsing beat of his restless soul. He had the eye and the rhythm and the inherent genius to cut right to the core of human feeling, and he made the supremely difficult art of moviemaking look effortless.

It was as if a door had opened into the promised land. All the wealth in his life had never given him the joy and excitement that film-making did. With an artistic, creative mentor who recognized his talent, Carey spent the next two years learning his craft. And then after a summer spent fluctuating between high highs and low lows, when he kept a picture on his dresser of himself and a lovely blond girl sitting on a dock, he decided to finish school at USC. “It's the place to go for film,” he said, “and there're lots of blonds in California.” Grown men didn't die of love. Grown men said, “Get a grip on yourself. Life goes on.” But he'd never before been without something he wanted. And he was badly out of sorts.

So once he was settled at USC, he proceeded with a demolishing vengeance to test the theory that “blonds have more fun.” His master's thesis won a Cannes Film Award, and he was launched. Phrases like astonishing, phenomenal, a unique talent, an inner eye like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Van Gogh combined, potent sensitivity that stirs the soul-flamboyant praise in the hot glare of the world's most prestigious gathering of talent described the newest wunderkind of the celluloid world. He was a sensation.

His mother was pleased he'd found some direction in his life, though she never understood his films and still found horses less demanding. His father watched his progress as a film-maker with keen interest and regarded his son's personal life with a lenient indulgence.

I n Nice, Rutledge greeted Carey at the open door. The surveillance cameras had followed the car from the front gate. “Good evening, Monsieur le Count.” Rutledge was always punctilious in his address, though Carey preferred less formality.

“Evening Rutledge. Good to see you. Is Sylvie here?”

“Yes, sir, in the library.”

Carey's brows rose questioningly. Sylvie was not known for her bookish habits.

“She's having a Cognac, sir,” Rutledge said in answer to the silent question. “This way, please.”

Carey followed him down a corridor of trompe l'oeil landscapes and open-door vistas he'd always considered the villa's best feature. They were very early nineteenth-century work, the villa having been built as a country retreat before the Edwardian influx of aristocracy crowded every square inch of precious sea view with an ornate pile of derivative architecture. Sylvie's villa was pure palladian, its airy rooms open to the Mediterranean sun.

Carey patiently stood back while Rutledge opened the door to the library after one knock and announced in his deep basso, “Count Charles Fersten.”

Sylvie jumped up and ran toward Carey, her silver hair shining in the lamp-lit room, the fuschia silk jumpsuit she wore an incongruous color amid the muted brown tones of old leather-bound books and cherrywood paneling. With dainty sandaled feet flying over the kilim carpet, she crossed the broad expanse of floor, her arms held wide. Carey braced himself for one of her impetuous hugs.

Rutledge discreetly shut the door at her first purring words. “I missed you, dear husband.”

“Ex-husband, Sylvie,” Carey murmured, gently extricating himself from her scented embrace, suspiciously wondering if he'd been lured here on false pretenses. “Where's Egon?”

“You look wonderful, darling,” Sylvie breathed in dulcet tones, her beautifully made-up eyes taking in the full impact of one of the handsomest men on six continents. “I like your new haircut.”

“It's not new.”

“It looks new,” she replied with a wifely intonation.

“Cut it out, Sylvie. I've been hacking my own hair for years and you know it.” Carey's streaked blond hair was spiky and unkempt, as usual.

“Well, I haven't seen you for so long,” she cooed, exuding seduction with practiced skill. “It looks different. Do you like my new Messilina outfit?” she went on, stepping back and holding out her arms so the svelte beauty of her silk-sheathed body was fully visible. “He did it exclusively for me.”

“Sylvie,” Carey said with more patience than he was feeling after an eight-hour flight, “I didn't fly all day to come here and exchange pleasantries. The Messilina's wonderful; he's got a helluva touch. You look marvelous, as always, but Egon better be here, or I'm going to want your throat. Right on the spot.” His hands were jammed into his jacket pockets, and his look bordered on glowering.

“What a suspicious man.” A small, studied moue accompanied the delicate affront.

“Living with you for two years develops the faculty, or one doesn't survive.”

“Not nice, love, but then you always were hard to handle with your evil temper,” she reproached with the tiniest smile.

“Hard to handle… because I won't take your orders twenty-four hours a day? True, Sylvie, I'm harder than hell to handle.”

“Pooh… you're no fun anymore. Can't you take a little teasing?” She looked up at him from under tinted lashes and softly said, “If I remember, you adored teasing in Yugoslavia and in Florence the first six months we were married.”

Carey looked back at her with a dark glance. “If you recall, Yugoslavia and Florence were only blurs; neither of us had a single straight day until we woke up in Rome at Easter. So if I seem serious in contrast to that, it's called living in the real world. Which I'd like to try and help Egon do, if you'd kindly show me which room he's strung out in.”

“No memories, Carey?” Her voice was soft, her violet eyes ardent. Although he was all business, she had other plans for his five-day stay.

He gazed at her and thought, as he had a thousand times over the past three years, how much Sylvie reminded him of Molly. Molly, the woman who loved him, but not enough. Molly, who married her fiancй because she was too frightened to tell her parents two weeks before the wedding-planned down to the last crabmeat canapй for over a year-that she was in love with someone else. It was probably the only reason he'd married Sylvie-that resemblance. Not exactly the memories she had in mind. “We had some good times, Sylvie,” Carey said kindly. “Now what you should do,” he went on with a pleasant smile, “is marry one of those young men hanging around on your yacht. You'd make some banker papa ecstatic.”

“They're boring, love. Everyone's boring, except you.”

“I'm boring now, too. Just work and ride, ride and work. Boring as hell.”

“Boring?” She ran a practiced glance over his body. Her hand, provocatively slow, touched him lightly on the fine wool of his jacket sleeve. “That will be the day.”