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the bride of Frankenstein what happened when Sal and his hired gum balls were flying friendly skies.”
    The plane had crashed and exploded in a fireball on a mountainside in western Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said someone had poured sand in the gas tanks. Clete finished his beer and blew out his breath. He pushed his hand down in the ice for another bottle. “You okay, partner?” I said. “I've never dealt real well with that bullshit I got involved with in Central America. Sometimes it comes back in the middle of the night, I mean worse than when I got back from Vietnam. It's like somebody striking a match on my stomach lining.”
    There were white lines at the corners of his eyes. He watched his red-and-white bobber move across the water in the shade of an oil platform, dip below the surface and rise quivering again; but he didn't pick up his rod.
    “Maybe it's time for the short version of the Serenity Prayer.
    Sometimes you just have to say fuck it,” I said. “What's the worst day you had in ”Nam, I mean besides getting nailed by that Bouncing Betty?“
    , ”A village chieftain called in the 1055 on his own people.“
    ”Sonny Boy and I hooked up with the same bunch of gun runners It was like an outdoor mental asylum down there. Half the time I ' didn't know if we were selling to the rebels or the government. I was so strung out on rum and dope and my own troubles I didn't care, either. Then one night we got to see what the government did when they wanted to put the fear of God in the Indians.“ He pinched his mouth with his hand. His calluses made a dry sound like sandpaper against his whiskers. He took a breath and widened his eyes. I ”They went into this one ville and killed everything in sight. Maybe four hundred people. There was an orphanage there, run by some Mennonites. They didn't spare anybody …
    all those kids .. . man.“ He watched my face. ;, ”You saw this?“ I asked. ”I heard it, from maybe a half mile away. I'll never forget the sound of those people screaming. Then this captain walked us through the ville. The sonofabitch didn't give it a second thought.“
    He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and tried to light it with a Zippo cupped in his hands. The flint scratched dryly and he took the cigarette back out of his mouth and closed his big hand on it. ”Let the past go, Cletus. Haven't you paid enough dues?“ I said. ”You wanted to hear about Sonny Boy? Three weeks later we were with a different bunch of guys, I was so wiped out I still don't know who they were, Cubans maybe and some Belgians working both sides of the street. Anyway, we were on a trail and we walked right into an L-shaped ambush, M-6o's, blookers, serious shit, they must have shredded twelve guys in the first ten seconds. “Sonny was on point … I saw this … I wasn't hallucinating … Two guys next to me saw it, too .. .”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “He got nailed with an M-6o. I saw dust jumping all over his clothes.
    I didn't imagine it. When he went down his shirt was soaked with blood. Three weeks later he shows up in a bar in Guatemala City. The rebels starting calling him the red angel. They said he couldn't die.”
    He took a long drink off the beer. The sunlight looked like a yellow flame inside the bottle.
    “Okay, mon, maybe I fried my head down there,” he said. “But I stay away from Sonny. I don't know how to describe it, it's like he's got death painted on his skin.”
    “It sounds like another one of Sonny's cons.”
    “There's nothing like somebody else telling you what you saw. You remember what an M-6o bouncing on a bungee cord could do to an entire ville? How about a guy who gets it from ten yards away? No, don't answer that, Dave. I don't think I can handle it.”
    In the silence I could hear the whir of automobile tires on the elevated highway that spanned the swamp. The setting sun looked like lakes of fire in the clouds, then a shower began to march