Swan Dive

approaching in silence despite his legs churning at insect speed. He held a snub-nosed revolver, and rapped the butt just to the rear of Terdell’s right ear. The big man let out a breath, but no noise, sinking to his knees as he reflexively held onto the wood. The little man sapped him again, and Terdell fell flat forward, breaking his nose on the edge of the two-by-four that preceded him to the ground.
    The little man whispered, ”Can you walk?” His Spanish accent was so thick it came out, ”Khan jew wok?”
    I said, ”With some help.”
    He got me up, tugged my arm around his shoulder, as if I had a leg wound, and hustled and dragged me into the concrete pipe. He shifted and adjusted my weight, and we hopped and scraped through the pipe, then took a junction to the right and one to the left, after which I stopped noticing or caring.

Dios mío, man, you a fucken mess.”
    The numbness from Terdell’s stick work was melding into that throbbing pain that says it’s bruised, but not broken. I rolled my head slowly and watched my savior drive. The lights we passed by and under flickered strobe-like over his face, which belonged on an olive-skinned twelve-year-old. He had short, kinky hair and delicate features, smudged here and there with grime and sweat. On his right hand near the knuckles were two homemade tattoos, faded blue crosses with the initials ”H.R.”
    After we had wound through the maze of pipes, he had led me back out into the night, across a deserted road to his car. He’d helped me into the conservative white Oldsmobile 98, and I was dripping mostly mud and a little blood onto the white leather upholstery.
    ”I’m gonna be three days with the Armor-all, you know it?”
    ”Sorry. And thanks for getting me out of there.”
    ”Oh, man, you with turdball Terdell for like an hour, was the only human thing to do.”
    ”Mind me asking how you came to be in that pipe?”
    ”Long story, man. I call you office, but you not around, and I couldn’t leave no number for you ‘cause I was covering my territory, and I don’t believe in no phone in the car like some fucken bloods think they exec-u-tives fooling the people watch them go by, you know? So, I stake out you house, wait for you, and I see J.J. and the Godzilla setting something up. I figure, lay chilly, see what happen. When they put the grab on you, I just follow along.”
    ”I had a message from a Hector Rodriguez.”
    ”That’s me.” He extended his hand. ”But you ever got to find me on the street, you ask for Niño, huh?” We shook. ”You pimped for the dead girl.”
    He returned his hand to the wheel, frequently checking side and rearview mirrors. ”Oh, harsh word, man. More like a broker. You gotta win the ladies’ respect but let them keep some of it. No rough stuff, no dom-i-na-tion shit from me.”
    ”You seemed to dominate Terdell pretty well back there.”
    ”That was different. Coming out the pipes, it was like being back in the Nam .” He looked at me, judging something. ”You over there?”
    We were winding down some of the same streets Terdell had used on the way in. ”For a while.”
    ”Thought so. You got the look. Who you with?”
    ” MPs. Mostly street patrol.”
    ”Combat?”
    ”Some.”
    ”You there for Tet?”
    ”Yeah.”
    ”Bad shit.”
    ”It was.”
    ”I was before that. Iron Triangle with the Hundred Seventy-third Airborne. You a Cubano grunt and come in at five-five and maybe one twenty-five with ammo, they call you Niño and make you a tunnel rat. You ever go in one?”
    ”Not till tonight.”
    ”Oh, walk in the park compared to the dinks’ underground. They dig miles of tunnels, man, they fucken lived in the tunnels. It was like that movie, you know it? Science fiction thing with the foxy Yvette chick?”
    ”The Time Machine?”
    ”Yeah, yeah, it was like that. We was the beautiful people, the boo-coo beautiful American soldiers, man. But we was living on top of all these ugly dinks, digging their way to Saigon .”
    ”Last I heard, they made it.”
    ”Not while I was there, man.” Niño warmed to it. ”One of the bro’s, he’d hear digging, see? It’d happen like that, you be taking five, next thing you know, it’s like the fiicken earth itching itself inside. The bro’ would call me over, we wait it out, then punch through into the tunnel. We short on time, we just frag it. Took us months to see that didn’t do no good. Fucken tunnels stronger than iron, man, after that