Swan Dive

gook gunk bake in the fucken sun.”
    He seemed to want to talk about it. ”What if you had more time?”
    ”Oh, if we long on time and heavy on equipment, we blow some smoke into it, see what happens. We long on time, but short on equipment, I go in.”
    ”With a forty-five?”
    ”Shit, no, man. Too much noise, fuck up you ears. I had a thirty-eight, some guys even go down to a twenty-two, but that was too fucken small for me.”
    ”You wear a flak jacket or what?”
    ”Neg-a-tive. Too hot. You take off anything that clinks, leave you in the tee shirt, fatigue pants, and boots. Then you take the thirty-eight, a flashlight, and a stick. You tie the light to the stick with some commo wire or det cord, let you hold it out from you, trick the dink into shooting first where you ain’t. Then you take the knife so you can feel around in front of you, find the booby traps before they find you.”
    I said without inflection, ”Sounds great.”
    ”Man, it was... it was like going back inside you mama, you know it? You move real slow, hands and knees, ‘cause the dinks, they wasn’t building no indoor tracks. The tunnels maybe a yard by a yard and a half, max, unless you got into one of the chambers.”
    ”Chambers?”
    ”Yeah, you wouldn’t believe it, you didn’t see it. Some of the tunnels go down into dormitories, hospitals. I even heard some guys in the Big Red One found some kinda stage thing, like a theater, down one of their holes.”
    ”How the hell did you keep track of where you were?”
    ”You fucken counted, man, counted and mem-o-rized like the teachers in second grade want you to, ‘cause you forget how you come in, you ain’t coming out next to your squad. You maybe coming out into some other outfit, who sees this little guy covered with dirt and sweat and shit. They see what looks like a dink coming out of a hole they didn’t see a GI go into, they fucken open up on you, don’t give you no chance to show ‘em you speak the English with a nice Cubano edge on it.”
    ”You actually see many enemy in the tunnels?”
    ”You don’t see that much, man. Mostly you hear and you smell. Madrón, you think Terdell not nice to be near, you try some of the holes the dinks live in for months. I hit a tunnel had some rotten rice once, thought I was gonna die. Mostly you listen, though. You hear something, you stop everything, moving, sweating, breathing. Usually be some fucken animal, like a snake. Shit, you got so you could hear centipedes and spiders, it was so quiet and they was so big.”
    ”And if it wasn’t an animal?”
    ”Turns out to be a dink, man, you try to take him with the knife first, so maybe you get another one without the other one getting you. Sometimes it’s a cold hole, no dinks, but you hit the jackpot, on weapons, medicals, all that good shit. Man, you think you a king, the king of the fucken tunnel rats. Other times you crawl three fucken miles and don’t find nothing.”
    Niño stopped and took a breath. ”Ain’t talked about those days in a long fucken time.”
    ”Some of them are hard to forget.”
    He looked over at me, confidingly, hands lying easy and capable on the wheel of the Olds. ”You always be what you was then, you know it? You had the cojones, the balls, then, you got ‘em now. You chickenshit then, you the same now.”
    ”What did you want to talk with me about?”
    ”Huh?”
    ”When you called me. What did you want?”
    ”Oh, yeah, right. The Angel, she was a good worker, man. She free-lance a lot, but that’s the way I run my ladies. Nobody got a slave collar on her.”
    ”You the one introduced her to Marsh?”
    ”No. The ladies, they pick up the free-lance dudes on their own. She make me good money, though, and I looking for a little re-im-burse-ment.”
    ”I didn’t kill her. Or Marsh.”
    ”Man, I believe it. I check you out. You so straight, the nuns take you back right now, no questions asked.”
    ”So what’s your angle?”
    ”Marsh have some of J.J.’s shit on him when he cooled. I could do some things with that stuff, move it somewhere it don’t wreck no school kids while I make my profit.”
    ”If I didn’t kill Marsh, I don’t know what happened to the cocaine.”
    ”Yeah, but you per-sis-tent, man. Word is you a fucken bulldog.”
    ”Meaning?”
    ”Meaning, I think you gonna find the stuff, but it might take a while, and I can’t follow you ‘round every day.”
    ”So you get me away from Terdell and J.J., hoping