The Charm School

hour later he heard the sound of a Chaika’s engine on the lane, followed by the clanking of a tracked vehicle, probably a troop carrier.
    He waited for the crunch of boots in the frozen garden, the smashing of the front door, then the footsteps across the wood floor.
    He waited, but the engines droned off, and quiet returned. Hollis wondered if they were looking for him and Lisa, or for Jack Dodson, or all three. There were precious few citizens in this country whose whereabouts weren’t accounted for, and three foreigners on the loose was a major malfunction in the system, an intolerable situation.
    Hollis closed his eyes and let himself drift. He vaguely heard Lisa mumbling in her sleep, then heard her say distinctly, “The car is stuck,” followed by, “I’m duty officer,” then, “He’s your friend too, Seth.”
    Hollis always thought it bad manners to listen to the sleep talk of people he slept with, but this was the first woman he’d slept with who dreamed in Russian.
    Hollis fell into a light, troubled sleep and had dreams of his own.

 
12
    Lisa was awakened by a sound in the back garden. She shook Hollis. “There’s someone outside.”
    Hollis opened his eyes and heard the creak of a door. “The bathroom is outside.”
    “Oh.”
    There were noises coming from the kitchen, and a rooster’s crowing cut through the dawn. Lisa said, “I can see my breath.” She exhaled. “See?”
    “Very nice.” Through the window, Hollis saw Zina, Pavel and Ida’s daughter, coming from the outhouse. She passed by the curtainless window but kept her head and eyes straight ahead.
    Lisa said, “It’s Sunday morning, Sam, and the church bells are silent all over Russia.”
    Hollis nodded. “I’d like to hear a church bell again.”
    They sat in silence awhile, listening to the morning birds, then Lisa said softly, “Do you like it in the morning?”
    “What? Oh… .”
    “I’d hate to think I was a one-night stand, so let’s do it again.”
    “All right.”
    They made love again, then lay back under the quilts, watching their breath as the dawn lit up the window. Lisa said, “This is called smoking in bed.”
    She put her arm around him and rubbed her toes over his foot. After a while she said, “Turn over.”
    Hollis lay on his stomach, and she pulled the quilts down. In the weak light she saw the white and purple scars that started at his neck and continued down to his buttocks. “I guess you
did
get banged up. Does that hurt?”
    “No.”
    “Were you burned?”
    “Hot shrapnel.”
    “The plane exploded?”
    “Well, not by itself. A surface-to-air missile went up its ass.”
    “Go on.”
    Hollis rolled onto his back. “Okay. December twenty-nine, 1972. Ironically it turned out to be the last American mission over North Vietnam. The Christmas bombings. Remember that?”
    “No.”
    “Anyway, I was over Haiphong, released the bombs, and turned back toward South Vietnam. Then my radar officer, Ernie Simms, in the backseat says coolly, ‘Missile coming up.’ And he gives me some evasive-action instructions. But the SAM was onto us, and I couldn’t shake it. The last thing Ernie said was ‘Oh, no.’ The next thing I knew, there was an explosion, the instrument panel went black, and the aircraft was out of control. There was blood spurting all over the place, and the canopy was covered with it. I thought it was mine, but it was Ernie Simms’. The F-4 was in a tight roll, wing over wing and streaking straight into the South China Sea. I jettisoned the canopy, and Simms and I blew out of the cockpit. Our parachutes opened, and we came down into the water. I floated around awhile watching enemy gunboats converging on me and contemplating life in a POW camp.”
    Hollis sat up and stared out the window. He said, “I saw Simms in his flotation seat, about a hundred meters away. He’d gotten a compress bandage on his neck and seemed alert. I called to him and he answered. One of the gunboats was bearing down on him. He yelled out to me, ‘Sam, they’ve got me.’ I swam toward him, but he waved me away. There wasn’t much I could do anyway. I saw the Viets pull him aboard. Then they came for me. But by that time the Marine air-sea rescue choppers had come in with guns and rockets blazing away at the gunboats. A chopper plucked me up. I saw the boat that Simms was on, cutting a course back toward the North Viet shore batteries, and our choppers broke off the pursuit… . They flew me to