“Cancer, boys. They are cancer. That’s the best I can put it, although as you know, I’m no talker. Owen, do you copy?”

“Copy, boss.” Flat. Flat and calm, damn him. Well, let him be cool. Let him be cool while he still could. Owen Underhill was all finished. Kurtz raised the paper hat and looked at it admiringly. Owen Underhill was over.

“What is it down there, Owen? What is it shuffling around that ship? What is it forgot to put on their pants and their shoes before they left the house this morning?”

“Cancer, boss.”

“That’s right. Now you give the order and in we go. Sing it out, Owen.” And, with great deliberation, knowing that the men in the gunships would be watching him (never had he given such a sermon, never, and not a word of it preplanned, unless in his dreams), he turned his own hat around backward.

Owen watched Tony Edwards turn his Mets cap around so that the bill pointed down the nape of his neck, heard Bryson and Bertinelli racking the.50s, and understood this was really happening. They were going hot. He could get in the car and ride or stand in the road and get run down. Those were the only choices Kurtz had left him.

And there was something more, something bad he remembered from long ago, when he had been-what? Eight? Seven? Maybe even younger. He had been out on the lawn of his house, the one in Paducah, his father still at work, his mother off somewhere, probably at the Grace Baptist, getting ready for one of her endless bake sales (unlike Kurtz, when Randi Underhill said praise Jesus, she meant it), and an ambulance had pulled up next door, at the Rapeloews”. No siren, but lots of flashing lights. Two men in jumpsuits very much like the coverall Owen now wore had gone running up the Rapeloews” walk, unfolding a gleaming stretcher. Never even breaking stride. It was like a magic trick.

Less than ten minutes later they were back out with Mrs Rapeloew on the stretcher. Her eyes had been closed. Mr Rapeloew came along behind her, not even bothering to close the door. Mr Rapeloew, who was Owen’s Daddy’s age, looked suddenly as old as a grampy. It was another magic trick. Mr Rapeloew glanced to his right as the men loaded his wife into the ambulance and saw Owen kneeling on his lawn in his short pants and playing with his ball. They say it was a stroke! Mr Rapeloew called. St Mary’s Memorial! Tell your mother, Owen! And then he climbed into the back of the ambulance and the ambulance drove away. For the next five minutes or so Owen continued to play with his hall, throwing it up and catching it, but in between throws and catches he kept looking at the door Mr Rapeloew had left open and thinking he ought to close it. That closing it would be what his mother called a Christian Act of Charity.

Finally he got up and crossed to the Rapeloews” lawn. The Rapeloews had been good to him. Nothing really special (“Nothing to get up in the night and write home about,” his mother would have said), but Mrs Rapeloew made lots of cookies and always remembered to save him some; many were the bowls of frosting and cookie-dough he had scraped clean in chubby, cheery Mrs Rapeloew’s kitchen. And Mr Rapeloew had shown him how to make paper airplanes that really flew. Three different kinds. So the Rapeloews deserved charity, Christian charity, but when he stepped through the open door of the Rapeloews” house, he had known perfectly well that Christian charity wasn’t the reason he was there. Doing Christian charity did not make your dingus hard.

For five minutes-or maybe it was fifteen minutes or half an hour, the time passed like time in a dream-Owen had just walked around in the Rapeloews” house, doing nothing, but all the time his dingus had been just as hard as a rock, so hard it throbbed like a second heartbeat, and you would think something like that would hurt, but it hadn’t, it had felt good, and all these years later he recognized that silent wandering for what it had been: foreplay, The fact that he had nothing against the Rapeloews, that he in fact liked the Rapeloews, somehow made it even better. If he was caught (he never was), he could say I dunno if asked why he did it, and be telling the God’s honest.

Not that he did so much. In the downstairs bathroom he found a toothbrush with Dick printed on it. Dick was Mr Rapeloew’s name. Owen tried to piss on the bristles of Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush, that was what he wanted to do, but his dingus was too hard and no piss would come out, not a single drop. So he spat on the bristles instead, then rubbed the,pit in and put the brush back in the toothbrush holder. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water over the electric stove-burners. Then he took a large china serving platter from the sideboard. “They said it was the stork,” Owen said, holding the platter over his head. “It must be a baby, because he said it was a stork.” And then he heaved the platter into the comer, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Once that was done he had fled from the house. Whatever had been inside him, the thing that had made his dingus hard and his eyeballs feel too big for their sockets, the shattering sound of the plate had broken it, popped it like a pimple, and if his parents hadn’t been so worried about Mrs Rapeloew, they almost certainly would have seen something wrong with him. As it was, they probably just assumed that he was worried about Mrs R… too. For the next week he had slept little, and what sleep he did get had been haunted by bad dreams. In one of these, Mrs Rapeloew came home from the hospital with the baby the stork had brought her, only the baby was black and dead. Owen had been all but consumed with guilt and shame (never to the point of confessing, however; what in God’s name would he have said when his Baptist mother asked him what had possessed him), and yet he never forgot the blind pleasure of standing in the bathroom with his shorts down around his knees, trying to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush, or the thrill that had gusted through him when the serving platter shattered. If he had been older, he would have come in his pants, he supposed. The purity was in the senselessness; the joy was in the sound of the shatter; the afterglow was the slow and pleasurable wallow in remorse for having done it and the fear of being caught. Mr Rapeloew had said it was a stork, but when Owen’s father came in that night, he told him it was a stroke. That a blood-vessel in Mrs Rapeloew’s brain had sprung a leak and that was a stroke.

And now here it was again, all of that.

Maybe this time I will come, he thought. It’ll certainly be a lot goddam grander than trying to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush. And then, as he turned his own hat around: Same basic concept, though.

“Owen?” Kurtz’s voice. “Are you there, son? If you don’t roger me right now, I’m going to assume you either can’t or won’t-”

“Boss, I’m here.” Voice steady. In his mind’s eye he saw a sweaty little boy holding a china serving platter over his head. “Boys, are you ready to kick a little interstellar ass?”

A roar of affirmation that included one goddam right and one let’s tear em up.

“What do you want first, boys?”

Squad Anthem and Anthem and Fucking Stones, right now!

“Anyone want out, sing out.”

Radio silence. On some other frequency where Owen would never go again, the grayboys were pleading in famous voices. Starboard and below was the little Kiowa OH-58. Owen didn’t need binoculars to see Kurtz with his own hat now turned around, Kurtz watching him. The newspaper was still on his lap, now for some reason folded into a triangle. For six years Owen Underhill had needed no second chances, which was good because Kurtz didn’t give them-in his heart Owen supposed he had always known that. He would think about that later, however. If he had to. One final coherent thought flared in his mind-You’re the cancer, Kurtz, you-and then died. Here was a fine and perfect darkness in its place.