Spencerville

makes me
remember, and I get teary. Sorry.”
    He’d replied immediately, and without any pretense at
being cool, wrote, “No, I don’t have those familiar places
and things around to remind me of you, but whenever I’m
very lonely or frightened, I think of you.”
    After that, their correspondence increased, but more to
the point, it had taken on a more intimate tone. They were
not kids anymore, but were approaching middle age, with
all that implied. She wrote to him,
“
I
can’t imagine not
seeing you one more time.”
    He’d replied, “I promise you, God willing, we’ll meet
again.”
    Apparently, God was willing.
    Yet the last six years or so had passed without that
promised meeting, and perhaps he was waiting for some
thing to happen, something like a divorce, or her falling
ill. But nothing of the sort happened. His parents moved
from Spencerville, and he had no reason to return.
    The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and he was there to see it,
then he was posted again to Moscow and witnessed the
attempted coup of August 1991. He was at the very top of
his career and was helping to make policy in Washington.
His name was mentioned in the newspapers now and
then, and he felt somewhat fulfilled professionally; but
personally, he knew very well there was something miss
ing.
    The euphoria of the late 1980s became the letdown of
the early ’90s. There was a Churchill paraphrase that
had been making the rounds among his colleagues—Th
e
war of the giants is over, the wars of the pygmies have
begun. Needing fewer people for the wars of the pygmies,
his colleagues were being told to go home, and finally he,
too, was asked to leave, and here he was.
    Keith opened his eyes and stood. “Here I am.”
    He looked around at the burial mound and, for the first time, made the connection between this mound and the similar burial mounds he’d seen in Vietnam. The burial mounds being the only high terrain in otherwise flat wet rice paddies, his platoon would often dig into them for night defensive positions. This was desecration, of course, but good tactics. Once, an old Buddhist monk had come up to him while his platoon was digging and said to him, “May you live in interesting times.” Young Lieutenant Landry had taken it as a blessing of some sort, and only afterward learned that it was an ancient curse. And much afterward, he came to understand it.
    The sun had set, but the moon illuminated the fields as far as he could see. It was quiet here, and the air smelled of good earth and crops. It was one of those beautiful evenings that would stick in your mind for years afterward .
    He came down from the mound and walked between the rows of corn. He remembered the first time his father had planted forty acres of corn as a test crop, and, as the corn started to get higher, Keith had been fascinated with it. It formed an incredible maze, acres of high green walls, an enchanted world for him and his friends. They played hide-and-seek, they made up new games, they spent hours getting lost and pretending that there was some danger lurking in the maze. The fields were deliciously scary at night, and they often slept out under the stars, between the rows, armed with BB guns, posting guards through the night, getting themselves worked up into a state of pure terror.
    We were all little infantrymen in training,
he thought. He didn’t know if that was biological or perhaps a cultural memory from the days when this place had been the western frontier.
Lacking any real danger, we had to cre
ate one, we resurrected long-dead Indians, transported
wild beasts to the cornfields, and imagined bogeymen.
Then, when the real thing came along—the war—most of
us were ready
. That was what had really happened to him and Annie in 1968. He knew he could have gone to graduate school with her, they could have married and had kids and roughed it together like so many of their college friends. But he was already programmed for something else, and she understood that. She let him go because she knew he needed to go slay dragons for a while. What happened afterward was a series of missed opportunities, male ego, female reserve, failures to communicate, and just plain bad luck and bad timing.
Truly, we were star-
crossed lovers.

CHAPTER NINE
    I t rained all day, and it was not one of those summer storms from the west or southwest that came and went. It was a cold, steady rain from over Lake Erie, a taste of autumn. The rain was welcome because the