Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Jackson
Thunder. Dry and metallic.
The city pulverized, seeming to explode all at once. Mortars. Small arms. Anti-aircraft batteries.
Crazily, off in the distance, a radio is playing the Voice of America. “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” threads its way through the bomb blasts, the melody insipid and cloying. People scream, walls crumble.
Over to the east, a helicopter gunship explodes, then falls like slow-motion fireworks onto the disaster that is Saigon.
We’ve been ordered to evacuate. The men of the 18th ARVN, myself included, crouch in doorways and then run like hell for the next cover, trying to make sense of the utter chaos around us.
Vietnamese, those who are still standing, clutch at us, begging us to take them with us, waving wax-sealed documents and letters from the American officials they worked for.
Letters that, they say, guarantee their right of passage out of this hell.
As I run through the streets, a young girl who can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen grabs my arm.
On her back is an infant, a boy about a year old.
The girl is screaming and crying, her eyes wide with terror.
There’s blood on her face, on her arm, but I don’t think she’s hurt that bad, maybe cut from broken glass.
Without thinking, I take her hand and pull her behind me, thinking that if I can get her inside the airport fence she might have a chance at being one of the lucky ones to get out before the whole place goes up in flames.
Off in the distance, a Chinook helicopter trying to land gives me a point to run for, still pulling the girl behind me.
Then, a deafening boom sends me hurtling to the ground.
Clumps of earth and shards of glass and metal fly past me as I cover my head and wait for it to pass.
When, finally, the noise and rain of objects subsides, I look up and over to see the girl, lying face forward on the ground, motionless.
The baby on her back is now a sickening tangle of red.
I lurch forward in horror, watching my hand as it moves toward their bodies as though it isn’t even my own. I open my mouth and scream, and scream, but I can hear nothing over the sounds of the bombs and gunfire…
With a loud shout, I started awake in the pitch-black room. In the aftermath of the nightmare, the silence around me was almost as deafening as the bombs had been.
I was soaked in sweat, my heart hammering in my chest, as I always was when I woke up from that dream. Three years since the fall of Saigon, and I was still reliving the last day I was there.
My body was tense, on alert and taking in every small sound in the dark hotel room. My soldier instincts were still with me, and probably always would be. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no sounds or movements that weren’t just the occasional creaks and pops of an old, settling structure.
I glanced at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand: 4:13 a.m. I sighed, realizing it wasn’t likely sleep would find me again this morning.
Hauling myself out of bed, I padded to the bathroom in the dark and took a long, cold shower to drive away the demons.
Then, with the first light of dawn just beginning to peek over the horizon, I packed up the small bag that held everything I owned, left the room key on the small round table by the window, and walked out into the crisp early morning air.
With this unexpectedly early start, I’d be at my destination by the end of the day for sure.
Lupine, Colorado.
A place I had once called home.
* * *
An hour later, I was sitting in a nameless 24-hour diner somewhere in the middle of ironing-board-flat Kansas.
As I ate my overdone eggs and bacon and poured myself another cup from a pot of weak coffee, I contemplated the journey that remained in front of me.
I’d been riding for the better part of four days, winding my way across the country from my starting point of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Lupine, Colorado, where I’d end up sometime late this afternoon, was the town I’d grown up in.
The town where I’d graduated high school.
It was the town I’d left six long years ago, when I’d been drafted to serve in Vietnam.
Apart from a couple of short visits after I’d gotten back stateside following the fall of Saigon, I’d been avoiding it ever since.
I was only going home now to take care of some loose ends after the sudden, unexpected death of my father, Frank Stone.
It wasn’t that I disliked Lupine. Not at all.
In many ways, Lupine was the source of the only decent dreams or memories I ever had.
And that was precisely the problem. After all the death and carnage I’d seen in Nam, Lupine seemed almost like some sort of Hollywood set of a quaint, happy little small town by comparison.
My memories felt like some sort of fucking fantasy land I’d created in my dreams. None of it seemed real to me anymore.
Not that I’d felt that way at the time. Throughout most of my adolescence, I couldn’t wait to get out of the small town I’d grown up in.
I had wanted to see the world. I wanted to be someone.
In my adolescent, testosterone-filled fantasies, I’d be rich and famous by thirty, somehow effortlessly taking the world by storm.
Then Vietnam happened. I saw the world, all right. At least the worst, hellish parts of it. The things I saw, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
And then in 1975, when I finally got back to the States, I found the country I came back to was completely different from the one I’d left.
Everything felt different — even though on the surface things looked the same.
It all felt fake. Phony. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t really the country that had changed so much. It was me.
I tried for a while to go back to punching a clock.
To resuming a life that was more or less normal, more or less what was expected of me.
But after everything I’d seen — after the horrors and atrocities I’d faced on a near-daily basis during my time in Nam — I soon realized I wasn’t cut out for a “normal” life.
I got restless too easily. I couldn’t follow orders from pasty-faced pencil-necks who didn’t know their ass from their elbow.
I knew I wasn’t alone in this. My old Nam buddies, fellow vets who faced down the same shit I had, told me similar stories about how tough it was to try to fit back into polite society again.
More than a few of us tried to submerge the memories of battle in booze, or drugs.
Somehow, I managed to avoid drowning in a sea of artificial forgetting.
Instead, I went seeking for something that would get my blood pumping the same way combat had, but in a way that wouldn’t kill me or put me in the nut house.
I found it in motorcycles.
One of my first purchases with what remained of my military pay when I was back stateside was an aging Harley in surprisingly good condition.
I was in East Texas at that point. I’d ended up there at the urging of some of my brothers in arms who were living there, too.
They ended up starting a motorcycle club, an MC that operated just on the bleeding edge of the law at first, and then sort of slid over to the other side.
MCs have an organizational structure that’s similar to the military in some ways, with a strict rules and an inviolable chain of command.
In a lot of ways, it’s a natural fit for a combat vet.
I stopped short of getting patched into my buddies’ Texas club.
Maybe because I wasn’t ready to trade one set of rules and hierarchy for another quite yet.
Instead, after a year or so of hanging around with them, I said goodbye and took to the open road.
For the next couple years, I drifted. I rode the highways and back roads of the country, going wherever the hell I pleased.
I encountered other war buddies along the way.
But I never could quite agree to settle down and stay awhile.
I started to wonder whether if it was just my fate to be rootless.
Of course, there wasn’t anything stopping me from going back to Lupine in all that time. Nothing physical, anyway. I was sure my dad would have been happy as hell to have me back. My ma had died while I was in Nam, and he’d been rattling around the house where I grew up by himself ever since.
But I didn’t go home. It didn’t seem right to.
It almost felt like it would have been a goddamn lie to go back there and settle down like nothing had happened.
Like I was the same Jackson Stone that had left at barely nineteen years old.
Like the country itself, Lupine hadn’t changed all that much, but I sure as hell had.
And every second I spent there was a constant reminder of the naive fucking boy I had been once upon a time. The boy who didn’t exist anymore.
Now, though — against my better judgment and more or less against my will —I was going back.
My dad’s buddy and fellow mechanic Harry Thurmond had managed to get word to me through a friend that Dad had had a stroke the week before.
By the time they’d found him, he was too far gone, and he’d died the next day at the local hospital.
So now, it seemed, I was an orphan. Which meant, among other things, that there was no one but me to take care of the details of Dad’s life and death.
There would be medical bills to pay — bills that his insurance wasn’t likely to cover completely.
It also meant that the small garage he owned needed a new master mechanic, not to mention someone to run the damn place.
At least for a little while, until everything got sorted out.
All of this was going through my head as I threw some cash on the counter to pay for breakfast, went to take a leak, and hopped on my bike for the last leg of my journey.
As hard as I had tried to avoid Lupine and any semblance of a normal civilian life, it was about to pull me back in. Temporarily, I hoped.
My dad and I had never been all that close. But I would do my best to do right by him. In death, at least.
And I was going to do my best to make sure that my stay in Lupine passed as quickly as possible. So I could get back on the road again.