I was staring into the water? It was green that day—and you couldn’t see the bottom. I was thinking how bad it would be if Echo’s and my dad’s planes crashed into each other as they were flying back from the war. I think things like that. I think a horrible, stupid thought, so it won’t happen. I think it once, and then, usually, it goes away for good.
I looked at Echo as he just stared into the green pond. His eyes got bigger by slow clicks while he was staring. His brows were lifting, see? He was thinking about getting shot, or having his eyes dusted with shrapnel from a Bouncing Betty. He was thinking about swinging a buddy over his shoulder and sprinting him to the LZ to be medevacked to Saigon or Cam Ranh Bay or the Philippines. About the Huey bucking like a Brahman bull and shuddering and hitting the jungle with a loud pop. He was for sure thinking about his dad. He was just thinking, see.
Pretty soon he was over there himself, covered in oily sweat and oily blood, digging through the wreckage. He was blind with sand and light and boom! next thing you know, everything’s on fire and everybody’s crying and everybody’s shooting and saving lives and barking commands and praying to Buddha-Jesus, and without anyone even planning it or even thinking out any particular thing ahead, one side has made prisoners of the other.
I tossed a dirt clod into the water, but Echo didn’t hear the splash or see the rings. He missed the snapping turtle that plopped from a rock and disappeared into the green. It was a big one, an old one, like the one that clamped onto Tommy Powers’s arm ‘cause he’d been messing with it. That ol’ boy clamped onto Tommy, and Tommy barked and howled and shook his arm and the turtle ka-plunked back into the pond with his snack in his beak, and ol’ Tommy bolted up the bank and back over the fence that divided the farmer’s land from ours and the Powerses’ backyards. Blood streamed down from the wound to his hand and threaded his fingers, and I almost felt bad for that blond ape. Served him right, though.
So anyway, the sky was orangey on the horizon. You could still smell the grass fire, only it was soured by water and flame retardant and a cooling day. I was looking around and thinking what Echo was thinking. I said to him, “You know, Tommy Powers may be in high school and everything, but he’s not all that smart.”
“Well—”
“He’s flunking everything. Even 4-H.”
“Ya can’t flunk 4-H.”
“Exactly.”
Echo laughed. “No, it ain’t that.”
“You mean what he said about the fire.”
Echo looked at me like I’d insulted him. I could feel him heat up from where I was sitting, which wasn’t especially close, or especially far away. “No no no no no. The other thing. The stuff about POWs . . . Obviously. Nitwit.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know what you mean, I mean.”
“What do you think I mean, then?”
“Skip it. He was saying a lot of stuff, Echo. I wasn’t really listening. You were the one sitting next to him, not me. He’s shooting bullfrogs, and it was my turn to be his goddamn retriever, like twenty yards from you guys, just where he told me to be. Like a good boy.” I dusted nothing from my palms, and said, “We’re his hounds, you know. He kills frogs and we fetch, and he gives us nothing.”
“We’re hound dogs. Wuff wuff!”
“We ain’ nothin but his hound dogs.”
“Cryin’ all the time.”
Echo snorted, and I chucked a fistful of dirt and pebbles into the water, and said, “His dad’s not even in the war.”
“Aw, come on.”
“It’s true!”
“Sheee-it. If he ain’t in Viet Nam, where is he?”
“Echo, he’s in Thailand.”
“Really?”