"I think you should have gone in the ambulance. A concussion can fool you sometimes."
"It doesn't have anything to do with a concussion."
I looked at her colorless, depleted face.
"Listen, let me go to my boat and change clothes, then I'll take you to an Italian restaurant on the lake where they serve lasagna that'll break your heart," I said.
"I don't think I can go anywhere now."
"All right, I'll go up to that Chinese place on St. Charles and bring us something back. I'll be gone only a few minutes."
She stared quietly into space for a moment.
"Do you mind not going for a while?" she asked.
"All right, but I tell you what—no booze. Instead, I'm going to fix some hot milk for you, and an omelette."
I took the tumbler of whiskey from her fingertips. Then her eyes looked desperately into mine, her mouth trembled, and the tears ran down her cheeks.
"He put his hands all over me," she said. "He put them everywhere. While the other one watched."
She started to cry hard now, her chin on her chest, her shoulders shaking.
"Listen, Annie, you're a brave person," I said. "You don't know it, but you saved my life. How many people could do what you did? Most people just roll over when violence comes into their lives. A guy like that can't harm a person like you."
She had her arms folded tightly across her stomach, and she kept her face turned down toward the table.
"You come in the living room and sit on the couch with me," I said. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to the divan. I sat down next to her and picked up her hands in mine. "What happens outside of us doesn't count. That's something we don't have control over. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important. You don't get mad at yourself or feel ashamed because you catch a virus, do you? Listen, I'll be straight-up with you. You've got a lot more guts than I have. I've been in a situation where something very bad happened to me, but I didn't have your courage."
She swallowed, widened her eyes, and touched at her wet cheeks with the back of her wrist. Her face jerked slightly each time she breathed, but she was listening to me now.
"I was in Vietnam in the early days of the war," I said, "a hotshot lieutenant with a degree in English who really thought he could handle the action. Why not? It had never been very rough while I was there. The Vietcong used to pop at us with some old Japanese and French junk that had been heated up and bent around trees. Half the time it blew up in their faces. Then one day we were going through a rubber plantation and we ran into a new cast of characters—North Vietnamese regulars armed with AK-47s. They sucked us into a mined area, then blew us apart. If a guy tried to turn around and crawl out, he'd either set off a Claymore right under his face or get chopped up in their crossfire. We lost ten guys in fifteen minutes, then the captain surrendered. They marched us through the rubber trees down to a coulee where ARVN artillery had killed a bunch of civilians from a VC village. There were dead children and women and old people in the water and all along the banks of the coulee. I figured they were going to line us up and blow us into the water with the rest of them. Instead, they stripped off our web gear and tied our hands around trees with piano wire they tore out of a smashed-up piano in the plantation house. Then they ate our rations and smoked our cigarettes and took turns urinating on us. We sat on the ground like kicked dogs while they did it to us. I blamed the captain for surrendering. I even felt pleasure when they urinated on him. But something else happened that really put some boards in my head later on.
"A gunship spotted us, and about ten minutes later a bunch of rangers and pathfinders came through that same mined area to bail us out. We were the bait in the rat trap. I could hear the AKs and the Claymores going off, hear our guys screaming, even see blood and parts of people explode on the tree trunks, and I was glad that I was out of it, drenched in piss and safe from all that terror out there where those guys were dying, trying to save us.
"I used to pretend to myself that I didn't have the thoughts that I did, that what went through my head didn't have anything to do with the outcome anyway, or other times I just wanted to kill every VC or North Vietnamese I could, but the real truth of that whole scene, before a couple of Hueys turned the place into a firestorm, was that I was glad somebody else was getting shredded into dog-food instead of me.
"That's what I mean about rolling over. You're not that kind of girl. You've got a special kind of courage, and it can't be compro
mised by some peckerwood dimwit who's going to end up as Vienna sausage if I have anything to do with it."
"Your feelings were just human. You couldn't help it," she said.
"That's right, but you were a better soldier tonight than I was in Vietnam, except you don't want to give yourself any credit." Then I brushed back her blond curls from her forehead. "You're a prettier soldier, too."
Her eyes looked back at me without blinking.
"Pretty and brave. That's a tough combo," I said.
The blueness of her eyes, the childlike quality in them, made something sink inside me.
"Do you think you'd like to eat now?" I said.
"Yes."
"My daddy was a wonderful cook. He taught me and my half-brother all his recipes."
"I think he taught you some other things, too. I think you're a very good man."