The Intruders Read online

He looked disgustedly at the ring, then put it back into his pocket.

  The evening sun shone through the branches of the old oak. The window was open, a breeze wafted through the screen. That limb—he could take out the screen, toss down the bags, get onto that limb and climb down to the ground. He could be in a taxi on the way to the airport before they even knew he was gone.

  He was still sitting there staring glumly out the window when Callie came for him thirty minutes later.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, rising from the bed and stretching. “Dinner ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something is wrong, isn’t it?”

  There was no way to avoid it. “You didn’t tell me your Dad was Mr. Liberal.”

  “Liberal? He’s about a mile left of Lenin.”

  “He looked really thrilled when I told him I was an attack pilot.”

  “Dad is Dad. I thought it was me you were interested in?”

  Jake Grafton cocked his head. “Well, you are better looking than he is. Probably a better kisser, too.” He took her arm and led her toward the stairs. “Wait till you meet my older brother,” he told her. “He can’t wait for the next revolution. He says the next time we won’t screw it up like Bobby Lee and Jeff Davis did.”

  “How would you rate me as a kisser?” she asked softly.

  They paused on the top stair and she wrapped her arms around him. “This is for score,” he whispered. “Pucker up.”

  That night when they were in bed Professor McKenzie told his wife, “That boy’s a killer.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Wallace.”

  “He kills people. He kills them from the air. He’s an executioner.”

  “That’s war, dear. They try to kill him, he tries to kill them.”

  “It’s murder.”

  Mary McKenzie had heard it all before. “Callie is in love with him, Wallace. I suggest you keep your opinions and your loaded labels to yourself. She must make her own decision.”

  “Decision? What decision?”

  “Whether or not to marry him.”

  “Marriage?”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know what was going on?” his wife said crossly. “I swear, you’re blind as a bat! Didn’t you see her at dinner tonight? She loves him.”

  “She won’t marry him,” Professor McKenzie stated positively. “I know Callie!”

  “Yes, dear,” Mrs. McKenzie muttered, just to pacify the man. What her husband knew about young women in love wouldn’t fill a thimble. She herself was appalled by Callie’s choice, believing the girl could do a whale of a lot better if she just looked around a little.

  Callie was inexperienced. She didn’t date until college and then couldn’t seem to find any young men who interested her. Mrs. McKenzie had hoped she would find a proper man while working for the State Department—apparently a futile hope. This Grafton boy was physically a good specimen, yet he was wrong for Callie. He was so…blue-collar. The girl needed a man who was at least in the same room with her intellectually.

  But she wasn’t going to say that to Callie—not a chance. Pointed comments would probably be resented, perhaps even resisted. In this new age of liberated womanhood, covert pressure was the proper way, the only way. One had to pretend strict neutrality—“This is your decision, dear”—while radiating bad vibes. She owed her daughter maternal guidance—choosing a mate is much too important to be left to young women with raging hormones.

  Secure in the knowledge that she was up to the task that duty had set before her, Mrs. McKenzie went peacefully to sleep while her husband stewed.

  At breakfast Professor McKenzie held forth on the Vietnam War. The night before at dinner he had said little, preferring to let the ladies steer the conversation. This morning he told Jake Grafton in no uncertain terms what he thought of the politicians who started the war and the politicians who kept the nation in it.

  If he was expecting an argument, he didn’t get it. In fact, several times Jake nodded in agreement with the professor’s points, and twice Callie distinctly heard him say, “You’re right.”

  After the senior McKenzies left the house for the university, Jake and Callie headed for the kitchen to finish cleaning up.

  “You sure handled Dad,” Callie told her boyfriend.

  “Huh?”

  “You took the wind right out of Dad’s sails. He thought you were going to give him a bang-up fight.”

  She was looking straight into his gray eyes when he said, “The war’s over. It’s history. What is there to fight about?”

  “Well…,” Callie said dubiously.

  Jake just shrugged. His knee was fairly well healed and the dead were buried. That chapter of his life was over.

  He gathered her into his arms and smiled. “What are we going to do today?”

  He had good eyes, Callie thought. You could almost look in and see the inner man, and that inner man was simple and good. He wasn’t complicated or self-absorbed like her father, nor was he warped with secret doubts and phobias like so many of the young men she knew. Amazingly, after Vietnam his scars were merely physical, like that slash on his temple where a bullet gouged him.

  Acutely aware of the warmth and pressure of his body against hers, she gave him a fierce hug and whispered, “What would you like to do?”

  The feel and smell and warmth of her seemed more than Jake could take in. “Anything you want, Miss McKenzie,” he said hoarsely, mildly surprised at his reaction to her presence, “as long as we do it together.” That didn’t come out quite the way he intended, and he felt slightly flustered. You can’t just invite a woman to bed at eight-thirty in the morning!

  His hand massaged the small of her back and she felt her knees get weak. She took a deep breath to steady herself, then said, “I’d like to take you to meet my brother, Theron. He lives in Milwaukee. But first let’s clean up these dishes. Then, since you so coyly suggested it, let’s slip upstairs in a Freudian way and get seriously naked.”

  When Jake’s cheeks reddened, Callie laughed, a deep, throaty woman’s laugh. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking about that!”

  Jake dearly enjoyed seeing her laugh. She had a way of throwing her head back and unashamedly displaying a mouthful of beautiful teeth that he found captivating. When she did it her hair swayed and her eyes crinkled. The effect was mesmerizing. You wanted her to do it again, and again, and again.

  “The thought did flit across my little mind,” he admitted, grinning, watching her eyes.

  “Ooh, I want you, Jake Grafton,” she said and kissed him.

  A shaft of sunlight streamed through the open window and fell squarely across them in the bed. After all those months of living aboard ship, in a steel cubicle in the bowels of the beast where the sun never reached, Jake thought the sunlight magical. He gently turned her so their heads were in the sun. The zephyr from the window played with strands of her brown hair and the sun flecked them with gold. She was woman, all warm taut sleek smoothness and supple, sensuous wetness.

  Somehow she ended up on top and set the rhythm of their lovemaking. As her hair caressed his cheeks and her hands kneaded his body, the urgency became overwhelming. He guided her onto him.

  When she lay spent across him, her lashes stroking his cheek, her breath hot on his shoulder, he whispered, “I love you.”

  “I know,” she replied.

  Theron McKenzie had been drafted into the Army in 1967. On October 7, 1968, he stepped on a land mine. He lost one leg below the knee and one above. Today he walked on artificial legs. Jake thought he was pretty good at it, although he had to sway his body from side to side to keep his balance when he threw the legs forward.

  “It was in II Corps,” he told Jake Grafton, “at the base camp. And the worst of it was that the mine was one of ours. I just forgot for a moment and walked the wrong way.” He shrugged and grinned.

  He had a good grin. Jake liked him immediately. Yet he was slightly tak
en aback when Theron asked, “So are you going to marry her?” This while his sister walked between them holding onto Jake’s arm.

  Grafton recovered swiftly. “Aaah, I dunno. She’s so pushy, mighty smart, might be more than a country boy like me could handle. If you were me, knowing what you know about her, what would you do?”

  Both men stared at Callie’s composed features. She didn’t let a muscle twitch. Theron sighed, then spoke: “If I were you and a woman loved me as much as this one loves you, I’d drag her barefoot to the altar. If I were you.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “And what about you, Sis? You gonna marry him?”

  “Theron, how would you like to have your throat cut?”

  They ate lunch at a sports bar around the corner from the office where Theron worked as a tax accountant. After a half hour of small talk, Theron asked Jake, “So are you going to stay in or try life on the outside?”

  “Haven’t decided. All I’ve got is a history degree. I’d have to go back to school.”

  “Maybe you could get a flying job.”

  “Maybe.”

  Theron changed the subject. Before Callie could get an oar in, Theron was asking questions about carrier aviation—how the catapults worked, the arresting gear, how the pilots knew if they were on the glide slope. Jake drew diagrams on napkins and Theron asked more questions while Callie sat and watched.

  “God, that must be terrific,” Theron said to Jake, “landing and taking off from an aircraft carrier. That’s something I’d love to do someday.” He slapped his artificial legs. “Of course, I can’t now, but I can just imagine!”

  Callie glowed with a feeling approaching euphoria. She had known that these two would get along well: it was almost as if they were brothers. Having a brother like Theron was hard on a girl—he was all man. When you have a real man only a year and a half older than you are to compare the boys against, finding one that measures up isn’t easy.

  Jake Grafton did. Her cup was full to overflowing.

  “Is he going to stay in the Navy?” Mrs. McKenzie asked her daughter. They were in the kitchen cutting the cherry pie.

  “He hasn’t made up his mind.”

  Grafton’s indecision didn’t set well with Mrs. McKenzie. “He probably will,” she said.

  “He might,” Callie admitted.

  “The military is a nice comfortable place for some people. The government feeds and clothes and houses them, provides medical care, a living wage. All they have to do is follow orders. Some people like that. They don’t have to take any responsibility. The military is safe.”

  Callie concentrated on getting the pie wedges from the pan to the plates without making a mess.

  “Would he continue to fly?” Mrs. McKenzie asked. “If he stayed in?”

  “I suspect so,” her daughter allowed.

  Mrs. McKenzie let the silence build until it shrieked.

  When Callie could stand it no longer, she said, “He hasn’t asked me to marry him, Mom.”

  “Oh, he will, he will. That’s a man working himself up to a proposal if ever I saw one.”

  Callie told her mother the truth. “If he asks, I haven’t decided what the answer will be.”

  Which was, Callie McKenzie suspected, precisely why he hadn’t asked. Jake Grafton was nobody’s fool. Yet why she hadn’t yet made up her mind, she didn’t know.

  I love him, why am I uncertain?

  Mrs. McKenzie didn’t know much about Jake Grafton, but she knew a man in love when she saw one. “He’s an idiot if he throws his life away by staying in the Navy,” she said perfunctorily.

  “He’s a pilot, Mom. That’s what he does. He’s good at it.”

  “The airlines hire pilots.”

  “He’s probably considering that,” Callie said distractedly, still trying to pin down her emotional doubt. Had she been looking for a man like Theron all this time? Was that wise? Was she seeking a substitute for her brother?

  Her mother was saying something. After a moment Callie began to pay attention. “… so he’ll stay in the Navy, and some night they’ll come tell you he’s crashed and you’re a widow. What then?”

  “Mother, you just announced that some people stay in the military because it’s safe, yet now you argue it’s too dangerous. You can’t have it both ways. Do you want whipped cream on your pie?”

  “Callie, I’m thinking of you. You well know something can be physically dangerous yet on another level appeal to people without ambition.”

  Callie opened the refrigerator and stared in. Then she closed it. “We’re out of whipped cream. Will you bring the other two plates, please?” She picked up two of the plates and headed for the dining room.

  She put one plate in front of Jake and one in front of her father. Then she seated herself. Jake winked at her. She tried to smile at him.

  Lord, if her mother only knew how close to the edge Jake lived she wouldn’t be appalled—she would be horrified. Jake had made light of the dangers of flying onto and off of carriers this afternoon, but Callie knew the truth. Staying alive was the challenge.

  She examined his face again. He didn’t look like Theron, but he had the same self-assurance, the same intelligence and good sense, the same intellectual curiosity, the same easy way with everyone. She had seen that in him the first time they met. And like Theron, Jake Grafton had nothing to prove to anyone. Perhaps naval aviation had given Jake that quality—or combat had—but wherever he acquired it, he now had it in spades. He owned the space he occupied.

  He was like Theron! She was going to have to come to grips with that fact.

  “The most serious problem our society faces,” Professor McKenzie intoned, “is the complete absence of moral fiber in so many of our young people.”

  They had finished the pie and were sipping coffee. Jake Grafton let that pronouncement go by without bothering to glance at his host. He was observing Callie, trying to read her mood.

  “If they had any sense of right and wrong,” the professor continued, “young men would have never fought in that war. Until people understand that they have the right, nay, the duty, the obligation, to resist the illegal demands of a morally bankrupt government, we will continue to have war. Murder, slaughter, rapine, grotesque human suffering, for what? Just to line the pockets of greedy men.”

  After the prologue, the professor got down to cases. Jake had a sick feeling this was coming. “What about you, Jake? Were you drafted?”

  Jake eyed the professor without turning his head. “No.”

  Something in his voice drew Callie’s gaze. She glanced at him, but his attention was directed at her father.

  “Wallace,” said Mrs. McKenzie, “perhaps we should—”

  “You volunteered?”

  “Yes.”

  “You volunteered to kill people?” the professor asked with naked sarcasm.

  “I volunteered to fight for my country.”

  The professor was on firm ground here. He lunged with his rapier. “Your country wasn’t under attack by the Vietnamese. You can’t wrap the holy flag around yourself now, Mister, or use it to cover up what you people did over there.”

  Now the professor slashed. “You and your airborne colleagues murdered defenseless men, women and children. Burned them alive with napalm. Bombed them in the most contemptible, cowardly manner that—”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Gentlemen, let’s change the subject.” Mrs. McKenzie’s tone was flinty.

  “No, Mary,” the professor said, leaning forward with his eyes on Jake. “This young man—I’m being charitable here—is courting our daughter. I think I have a right to know what kind of man he is.”

  “The war’s over, Mr. McKenzie,” Jake said.

  “The shooting has stopped, no thanks to you. But you can’t turn your back on all those murdered people and just walk away. I won’t allow it! The American people won’t—”

  But he was orating t
o Jake Grafton’s back. The pilot walked through the doorway into the hall and his feet sounded on the stairs.

  Mrs. McKenzie got up abruptly and went to the kitchen, leaving Callie alone with her father.

  “You didn’t have to do that, Dad.”

  “He’s not the man for you, Callie. You couldn’t live with what he did, he and those other criminal swine in uniform.”

  Callie McKenzie tapped nervously on the table with a spoon. Finally she put it down and scooted her chair back.

  “I want to say this just right, Father. I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time, but I’ve never known just how. On this occasion I want to try. You think in black and white although we live in a gray world. It’s been my experience that people who think the dividing line between right and wrong is a brick wall are crackpots.”

  She rose and left the room with her father sitting open-mouthed behind her.

  In the guest room upstairs Jake was rolling up his clothes and stuffing them into his folding bag. The nylon bag, Callie noticed listlessly, was heavily stained. That was the bag he had with him in Olongapo last autumn.

  “I’ve called a cab,” he told her.

  She sagged into a chair. “My father…I’m sorry…why do you have to go?”

  Grafton finished stuffing the bag, looked around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then zipped the bag closed. He lifted it from the bed and tossed it toward the door. Only then did he turn to face her.

  “The people I knew in the service were some of the finest men I ever met. Some of those men are dead. Some are crippled for life, like your brother. I’m proud that I served with them. We made mistakes, but we did the best we could. I won’t listen to vicious slander.”

  “Dad and his opinions.”

  “Opinions are like assholes—everybody has one. At his age your father should know that not everyone wants to see his butt or hear his opinion.”

  “Jake, you and I… what we have might grow into something wonderful if we give it a chance. Shouldn’t we take time to talk about this?”

  “Talk about what? The Vietnam War? It’s over. All those dead men! For what? For fucking nothing at all, that’s for what!” His voice was rising but he didn’t notice. “Oh, I killed my share of Vietnamese—your father got that right. They are dead for nothing. Now I’ve got to live with it…every day of my life. Don’t you understand?”