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humiliation and more emotions than a twelve-year-old boy could name, much less hold in.
    When Father had left him, tucked into bed with the proud kiss of a tyrant planted on his forehead, the boy lay there, cold with shame, sick with fury, glaring at the debris of his own iniquity.
I did that,
he raged at himself.
I did that, not Father.
But in the morning, even if Father was at the breakfast table, nothing would be said. And during the day, while he was at school, Howard would clean it all up—or maybe Mrs. Mendez, but probably Howard, who was there to clean up Father’s messes. Life would go on; this was just another of Father’s lessons that I can’t tell anyone about.
    Eventually, the worst of the trembling stopped, the bitterest self-flagellation died down as the adolescent body was pulled toward sleep by the ebbing tide of a long and dread-filled day.
Don’t forget to put on slippers before you walk across the carpet,
he reminded himself, free-falling toward the dark bliss of unconsciousness. His palm tingled with the feel of the ivory as he passed through images jumbled like the shards of the computer: a small brown-and-white dog
(Couldn’t be trusted. Not to bite.)
with its lips snarling back from snapping white teeth; the voice of Hal, the
2001
robot, slurring its protest as Dave disconnected its clever brain; a dying elephant, the one whose tusk had rampaged through a delicate machine, flailing its ears in outraged despair as the ivory-hunter’s bullet drained the life from it; his own hand grasping the poker—he could feel it, his arm muscles stretching, fingers twitching where they lay on the pillow—then driving down, hard, smashing again and again
(Couldn’t be trusted . . .)
upon the astonishingly fragile head of his father where it sat on the desk
(. . . Not to bite.).
    The image of his father’s shattering head startled him back from the brink of sleep.
No, that’s not what I want. It was my fault; I didn’t have to keep on and on.
    But he wanted me to, and he knew I would. He always knows, and there’s something going on, and today was different.
    But the bed’s warmth tugged at him, and the images and sounds faded, and narrowed, and settled into a brief awareness that something had changed, that the evening’s catharsis had broken more than the computer.
    His last thought before sleep took him was bleak, yet it had a hot, angry spark at its core:
Everything I love dies. Everything, except Father.
    (Couldn’t be trusted. Not to bite . . .)

BOOK ONE
    Into the Green: Allen
    Chapter 5
    Allen liked Vietnam at first sight—no, be honest: He loved it. October 1967, and here he was, a middle-class white kid who’d never been out of the USA, in uniform, a man among men, rocking to the new Byrds album, sitting in an air-conditioned jet with a lot of other hungover new recruits, dropping from the cloud cover to reveal a great sweep of green such as even his childhood had not prepared him for, going back and back until the blue-green of the most distant reaches was indistinguishable from the sky.
Lush
was the word, he decided. As lush as a woman’s body, and every bit as welcoming, and secretive. A man looked at that green spreading out into the distance, and he craved to enter it, at the same time knowing—and he’d be sure of this with one glance, even if he’d been shut in a cave his whole life and had never heard of the war—that some of the life-forms in that gorgeous lush greenness would kill a man soon as look at him.
    Like some women.
    Not that twenty-year-old Allen Carmichael had a whole lot of familiarity with the ways of women. Most of what he knew about the lush and mysterious side of the other half of the human race was theory gleaned from novels and locker-room talk, and from precisely five nights with Lisa before he shipped out. But it seemed right, and would last him until he had more real-life experience to