“Hello, Bar Stool,” he said, “how’s the Mescalero?”
“If it was flyin’, I wouldn’t have come in the eight-pack.” He gestured at the dust-coated vehicle, which had four doors, and bench seats. Bar Stool, Lee thought, looked sixty or so, his hair white, his face seamed. But he seemed strong and agile. He fit Lee’s concept of a cowboy.
Lor Lu turned to his wards. “Bar Stool,” he said gesturing, “meet Ben and Lee and Becca and Raquel.”
“Glad to know you,” said Bar Stool.
They shook hands with him, the girls included. Bar Stool’s was large and callused.
“Do you, ah, have another name besides Bar Stool?” Lee asked.
“Yep.” Bar Stool opened one of the back doors. “If you folks will climb aboard, we’ll get to the Ranch in time, you can shower down and settle in before supper.”
They boarded, dust flying as they slammed the doors. Then Bar Stool took off with as much of a jackrabbit start as the eight-pack provided, the truck bouncing along the rough road, trailing a plume of tawny dust. He drove too fast for the conditions, it seemed to Lee, fifty miles an hour on ill-graded gravel, slowing and speeding according to the bends, curves, and holes. “How far is it?” she asked—loudly; the ride was noisy.
“Twelve miles.”
She’d already given up on the girls attending a private school. There wasn’t even a public school in Henrys Hat.
“Mr. Bar Stool,” Becca asked, “how did you get your name?”
Bar Stool looked at her via the rearview mirror. “Ask Muong Soui Louie here.” He thumbed toward Lor Lu beside him. “He tells it better than me.” Lor Lu glanced back, grinning. “It was at the Raven hootch at Long Tieng,” he said. “The Ravens were a secret U.S. operation. Not secret from the Pathet Lao or the North Vietnamese. Secret from America. And the hootch was the house we lived in, with a cage outside, and two Himalayan black bears we fed beer to. We had a little club nearby, where we drank, and the club had bar stools. Bar Stool got his name because he got so attached to one of the stools, sometimes when he left he’d take it with him.”
Becca looked uncertainly at Lor Lu, getting no notion at all of what he’d been describing. Neither did her mother—no clear notion. It was Lee who spoke. Cautiously. “Where was that?”
“Laos. Long Tieng was the center of Hmong resistance to the Pathet Lao. The Hmong were a mountain people, and the Pathet Lao were communists.”
“Then this must have been . . .”
“Bar Stool was there from ’69 to ’72.”
Lee stared at the small Asian. The truck hit an exposed culvert and jounced, hard, her seat harness holding her in place. “Was that—in the Vietnam War?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking. Peripherally.”
She stared. He’d said “we” as if he’d been there. And the Vietnam War had ended—what? Forty years ago? Yet Lor Lu couldn’t be much over thirty, if that.
The strangeness killed the conversation while stimulating Lee’s fears. She sat, unable to think coherently, as if some small but dangerous beast crouched in ambush, watching for weakness. Grassy hills flowed past, with occasional small groups of grazing cattle. The grass wasn’t even green; it was dead. Dun-colored. To the west the foothills rose higher, patches of dark pine marking them, coalescing into distant forest. After twenty minutes or so she saw a large camp ahead, with tents of different kinds. Hippies! Tents enough for a hundred people or more, even now at the beginning of October, with cold weather coming. Here and there were structures she assumed were sanitation facilities—latrines perhaps, and bathhouses. On a nearby knoll stood a large water tank.
And a barbed wire fence, with a sign reading children at play, speed limit 15. Bar Stool had slowed way down. A uniformed entry guard waved them through a gate without stopping them. Why barbed wire? Lee wondered. And the guard wore a pistol! Good God!
The truck tires had thrummed momentarily as they passed through, a sound they’d heard several times since leaving Henrys Hat.
“Mr. Bar Stool, what was that sound?” Raquel asked.