Riders on the Storm Read online

  To my grandchildren:

  Shannon, Patrick (PJ), Reagan, Kate, Maggie, and Charlotte

  With my profound love and respect

  To some of the good ones along the way:

  Nancy Angenend, M.D.

  Jennifer Berns, PA-C

  Erin E. Brown, ARNP

  Lynne (Russell) Conlin

  Chad Davis, PA-C

  David Dingli, M.D., Ph.D.

  Larry Donner

  Jill Flory, M.D.

  Mark and Barb Johnson

  Uva Mae (McAtee) Klein

  Jean (Murrin) McNally, M.D.

  Tammy O’Brien A MD

  Tina Perry

  Kevin and Deb Randle

  Tracy Ridgeway, RN, BSN, OCN

  Bill Schafer

  Judy (Stevenson) Schneiderman

  I’d like to thank

  Penny Freeman, LISW

  Tracy Knight, Ph.D., LP

  Lt. Colonel Kevin Randle

  for their invaluable help with this novel.

  Once again I need to thank my friend and first editor Linda Siebels for her skill, her patience, and her humor. You’re the best, kiddo.

  Thanks to all the organizations dedicated to keeping those of us with the incurable cancer Multiple Myeloma alive as long as possible.

  “Just as I was getting ready to fly home from Nam my sergeant told me not to wear my uniform, that a lot of us were getting hassled for wearing them. But I figured to hell with it. I fought in the war, didn’t I? I was proud of my uniform. But when I got to O’Hare this kid, this girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen comes running up to me and spits on me and screams that I’m a ‘baby killer.’ Her dad came over and dragged her away but man I could not fucking believe it. Thirteen or fourteen.”

  —Corporal Tom Squires

  MY NAME IS SAM MCCAIN. THERE WAS A TIME EIGHT MONTHS ago when I didn’t believe that. When both a neurosurgeon and a psychologist visited me every day and tried to convince me of it. With no luck for five weeks.

  What happened to me was that I went to Fort Hood with four others from my National Guard unit to work on a special project our Guard captain thought would be good experience for us. You know how the Guard is in this piece-of-shit war we’re having with Vietnam. King’s X. Home Free. Got it made. You get in the Guard and the percentage of you going to Nam is very low. Very.

  So one night we’re all getting drunk (this was told to me) as we did every night we could and I don’t know who brought it up but one of us said Shit, we should enlist. Look how many guys from our hometown of Black River Falls, Iowa, are over there already. And there have already been six deaths from our town since 1964. What kind of pussies are we, hiding out in the Guard?

  We made this pact and somehow we remembered it in the morning and did exactly that. Went to this sergeant we’d met and said sign us up. A week later we got to go into town and do some drinking. I made the mistake of hitching an early ride back with a sergeant who was a lot drunker than I’d first realized. He piled up our Jeep by running into a tree going flat-out. He was killed instantly.

  The neurosurgeon operated on me for almost fourteen hours. When I finally got out of surgery (again these are all things I was told) I had no strength, I had no memory except for these strange Poe-like images (Poe as in the Roger Corman drive-in movies which I loved). And except for the fact that some of these stray images scared me and some made me sad and some made me happy and some made me horny I had no real idea of what they meant. Had I just imagined them, or did they relate to this Sam McCain guy they kept telling me I was?

  And after my memory returned I almost wished it hadn’t. I was informed that my mom had had a stroke and was now living in Chicago with my little sister. And then I read the letter that my fiancée had written me while I was still not Sam McCain. I have to say that for a “Dear John” kind of thing she’d come up with a pretty good reason for ending our engagement. She’d told me that after her first husband died (in Nam in fact) she’d taken to drink and running around and sleeping around. She hadn’t told me that she’d had a child and that rather than abort it (which she was inclined to do) her lover took it and raised it. She hadn’t seen the man or her daughter since a few weeks after the birth. But they came back through town and—There you go.

  The not having a memory thing isn’t as bad as people sometimes think. For quite a while that was one memory I didn’t want to have at all.

  Finally I was released. I went immediately to Oak Park to see my mother who was living in this huge house. My sister’s second husband not only didn’t beat her up, he was nice enough to have money and even have one of the large empty rooms on the second floor turned into a small apartment for Mom. Her own bathroom even.

  Then it was back to Black River Falls.

  It turned out that the odd anxiety I felt as I drove the Interstate was warranted.

  The war was not only destroying people overseas, it was destroying them back in my hometown.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part One

  “We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.”

  —Ronald Reagan

  1

  DESPITE THE PANIC IN HIS VOICE I RISK WHEELING INTO A CONVENIENCE store for coffee. Whatever crisis he is facing this time, I won’t be much help if I’m this groggy. It is twenty-three minutes to two a.m. That dread I’d felt coming home? It is finally realized on this bleak, mysterious night.

  A town like Black River Falls generally goes to sleep between ten and eleven except for the taverns and the three clubs where you can dance. A Quad City businessman, which is often synonymous with Mob, has tried to open both a XXX bookstore and a strip club in the past year. The whisper is that in the next six months or so city council members will give up fighting—the guy loves lawsuits—and allow the bookstore. No doubt night owls of a special species will flock to it.

  Will Cullen lives in the wealthy area of town. His home is a sprawling yellow-brick house that has been here long enough to have creeping vines venerating the exterior walls. A piney windbreak to the east isolates the place from its neighbors. His wife Karen has a wealthy father who paid for the place. He thought that maybe this kind of splendor would help Will recover from his Nam tragedy.

  I top a small hill and gaze down at the moonlit homes stretching out before me. Senators love to bluster about how the rest of the world envies us, and when you see this portrait in shadow and light you have to agree with them. Solid houses, good jobs, bright futures. Too bad we were losing thousands of our troops—not to mention even more thousands of innocents—just so two fine fellows named Johnson and Nixon could play John Wayne.

  The streetlights are sparse and so my headlights and motor hum seem all the more intrusive as I sail down the street to Will’s home.

  I have my window rolled down. The slight chill feels good after the blistering August we’ve been having.

  The
enormous house is dark. Maybe Will hadn’t wanted to wake Karen or their daughter up. Still, the dark house puzzles me and makes me uneasy.

  I glide up the driveway and snap off the engine. The triple-stall garage is closed. His and her cars will be inside.

  The scent of flowers—morning glories and scarlet rockets from what I can see in the deep shadows—lend the breeze a pleasant scent. The only other aroma is of the Lucky I am smoking.

  I walk from my car up the curvy and lengthy flagstone path to the front door. I expect him to step out at any minute. I knock feebly, thinking of Karen and their three-year-old daughter Peggy Ann. No response.

  There is a huge window to the right of the front door so I go over there and peer in. The faint light of the half-moon lends the living room the look of a showroom. There is a joke among all their friends that Karen is such a fastidious housekeeper she’d prefer that when you visit you stay outside. God help the person who sets a drink down without using a coaster. Death would be swift.

  No sign of Will.

  I have terrible thoughts. Every once in a while there are stories in the news about the lives of a seemingly happy family ending when the husband—usually the husband, though wives have done it, too—takes a gun and kills the wife, the kids and finally himself.

  I think of the mental problems Will had developed while serving in Vietnam. Like many sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, he has turned to alcohol to deal with his griefs. Karen has told me that he’s even started drinking at work sometimes. He has been put in mental hospitals for short stays twice.

  I move along the side of the house. More flowers, more scents. Distantly the sounds of eighteen-wheelers on the highway; a lone lonely dog a few blocks over barking out his need for companionship.

  I stop at the side door. People in our town of thirty-five thousand or so still leave their doors unlocked. This is slowly changing with the increase of serious crime across the country.

  I try the door. Apparently Will is still of the belief that you can trust your neighbors. The door is unlocked.

  I have terrible thoughts again.

  If I call the police and there is nothing wrong—maybe Will has just had one of his frightening panic attacks—then I will have embarrassed Will. Karen is from some of the town’s oldest money. She is the reason that Will’s veterinary clinic is doing so well. She is on enough boards of this and boards of that to know people who do not mind expending heavy-duty dollars on their animals.

  I start inside and then stop. A good way to scare the hell out of people; a good way for me to get shot. Both of them know how to shoot. Karen’s father owned a large chain of sporting goods stores. The entire family was taught to shoot, even, and as Karen often joked, the dog.

  I close the door and then stand in the starlight deciding what to do next. My impulse is to just get in my car and head back to my apartment.

  Then I see the beam of a flashlight waving around inside in the kitchen window.

  The light vanishes quickly. Through a window close to the front room I see the beam again still waving around. Searching for something.

  Then the living room light comes on.

  I move cautiously back to the front of the house and there she is in the window. Karen in a flattering pink nightgown, her mussed, bobbed blond hair giving her the look of a just woken child. But that impression is contradicted by the Colt Python in her hand. Pretty as she is, there is a hard side to her. I have no doubt she is tougher than Will.

  When she finally sees me, she sets the gun down on the table and hurries to the front door. As she’s letting me in she says, “Are you all right, Sam? What’re you doing here?”

  “Will called me. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “Will did? Why?”

  “What I’m thinking now is that he must’ve had one of his panic attacks.”

  We have a small circle of friends. We all know of Will’s troubles. His panic attacks, the frightening temper he’s developed, his inability to get a good night’s sleep, his recklessness in both his personal and business lives.

  “He always wakes me up when he has them. Usually I give him more of his meds and sit with him until he calms down. I wonder why he didn’t wake me up tonight.” Will had accidentally shot and killed a little girl in Nam. He’s never gotten over it. And worst of all, sometimes he has to rush out of his own home when he sees his daughter, who is about the same age as the little girl he killed. Mere sight of Peggy Ann triggers all his self-loathing and terror. Drunk one night he told Karen that maybe their daughter is actually the little Vietnamese girl here to haunt him.

  We are standing a few feet apart. She smells of sleep and yesterday’s perfume. “I’m so sorry you had to come over here, Sam. Look at the time. You have to get up and go to work in a few hours.”

  “And Peggy Ann will have you up pretty early yourself.”

  “Is there something I can get you? How about a beer?”

  “I won’t say no.”

  She pats me on the cheek. “You’re such a good friend, Sam. I’ll get you your beer and then round up Will. He may be embarrassed and hiding in the den. He does that sometimes.”

  The living room is so formal I never quite feel comfortable in it. From the grand piano to the white-brick fireplace to the long flocked drapes that cover the tall narrow windows to the bay window that overlooks the swimming pool—I am always careful when I’m here. I like the Cullens very much, it’s just that their modest abode is a little less modest than my own. I sit down on a tan leather ottoman, mindful that I don’t want to brush my Levi’s against her couch or chairs.

  The beer is served in a fancy Pilsner glass. I thank her for it and she rushes off.

  I soon hear a door open quietly. From here I can see into the hall that divides the house. A light comes on and then goes off almost immediately. A child’s voice, frightened. Maybe a bad dream. Or adults up at this time of night. Adults do terrifying things at night. Even three-year-olds know that.

  Karen has a soothing voice and she uses it now with her daughter. I can’t understand the words but the sound Karen makes is almost songlike. There will be hugs and kisses and then Peggy Ann will be tucked back down into the gentle dreams of three-year-olds. She will forget whatever had woken her.

  Karen comes back. Shaking her head and twisting her long hands together. “He’s not in the den or any of the bathrooms or the kitchen. Just a second. I should try the basement.”

  “Let me try that, Karen. Why don’t you just sit down?”

  I am pretty sure she knows as well as I do that he isn’t in the basement. Not unless he’s dead down there. At his own hand.

  I spend several minutes in the basement. It is not only finished but also furnished with expensive family room chairs and a couch. There is even a small bar and a twenty-nine-inch TV console. Even though I am not much of a sports fan—except for the World Series—I’ve spent many long afternoons down here with Will’s group of vets.

  She waits for me at the top of the stairs. She’s changed into dark slacks and an olive-colored cotton blouse. Her feet are in thongs.

  “No luck?”

  “Sorry. No luck.”

  She waits until the basement door is closed again before she says, “Now I’m afraid, Sam.”

  “Before either of us starts to panic, let me check the garage, which I should have done first anyway. I’m just a little foggy, I’m afraid.”

  “You think he went somewhere? It wouldn’t be like him to go anywhere. After he has these attacks he usually goes to sleep and I have a hard time waking him up.”

  “I’ll flip the backyard light on and go have a look.”

  “I’d like to go with you.” Tension has tightened her narrow face.

  I smile. “Since it’s your house I think that can be arranged.”

  The backyard grass is green and rich in the sudden light. A picnic table, a child’s swing set, a barbeque are spread across the sizable stretch of yard. Suburban bliss.

/>   She keeps so close to me she bumps me a few times.

  I’ve known Will since we made our First Communion together. He’d been one of those kids who didn’t take much seriously. B’s were fine with him. His main interest until late in high school was science fiction in all forms. He’d had a few dates but none had ever turned into anything serious. In his sophomore year in college he’d shocked everybody by going out with a true heartbreaker, Cathy Vance. There were a lot of jokes about how he’d managed to get her to fall in love with him, including mind control. Two years they went together and when it ended it was him not her who broke it off. They were engaged until he suddenly met Karen. They got married quickly and had Peggy Ann four months after the rings slid on their fingers. Then he was drafted. Before the war he’d been the dominant one. When he returned, their relationship changed considerably. He’d come home in pieces and shards of his former self.

  Before the war they’d been parents and friends. But given his condition on returning she’d also had to become mother, sister, protector, and defender. Anybody who’d thought she was just a rich girl and a snob had to quickly and forever change their minds. Her love for him was fierce and resolute.

  She carries the garage door opener with her when we walk outside. Now she thumbs it and we wait and listen as the door rumbles. As we start inside I can see that the stall for Will’s Thunderbird is empty.

  2

  YOU DON’T EXPECT TO FIND A SITTING SENATOR AND A COUPLE of reporters at a backyard barbeque. That was my first thought last night when I showed up at Tom Davis’s new native stone and glass home on a perch above the river.

  I might have been happier to see a senator if he hadn’t been one who was hawkish on the war but had two draft-eligible sons who had mysteriously not served. He was a proud friend of the defense industry and, as Time had leaked to no apparent avail, a heavy investor in said industry. Though he was a Republican, he wasn’t friendly with our brave and laudable Republican governor who had denounced the war last year.