His flaming red hair mimicked the fire burning in his mind. The one he tried to put it out with Old Grand Dad, but it just kept on raging—alcohol fueling the flames. Life had dealt him one card away from an inside straight hand after hand. Beginning with his father’s death. The first of many betrayals.
His beautiful father, broad and bold took five years to succumb to the brutality of ALS. His mother re-married months later to a man who wore checked sport coats and red pants. A cliché of a character prowling used car lots feeding on the uninformed and overwhelmed. He referred to himself as The Shark in the 3rd person and to Tom as “Irish” which further alienated them.
Just shy of his 19th birthday, Tom’s mother died of ovarian cancer leaving him an orphan with very few cards left to play. And small-town Guthrie, Oklahoma seemed, to Tom, more prison than playground. The Navy offered an escape and Tom took it. And arrived at NAS Alameda in California, his cynicism already honed to a fine edge only to receive his “Dear John” letter two weeks after arrival.
One more lousy shuffle by a cardsharp universe dealing from the bottom of the deck. That night became the first of many sabotaged with too much drink and steeped in cigarette smoke from unfiltered Camels. Unfiltered. It’s how Tom lived. How he spoke. How he viewed life.
When he returned from Vietnam, he no longer saw in Kodachrome. Even grey had become a nuance that no longer registered. The moral ambiguity. The pitiless carnage. The imminence of death in that embattled country had served to exacerbate the depths of his disillusionments.
The glass was neither half-empty nor half-full—there wasn’t even a glass. Anymore. And all the cards were wild.
Despite too much bourbon, his mind remained keen and unrelenting as a butcher’s blade. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and hired on at Raytheon creating more efficient weapons to kill more expendable people. Made from the elements of Earth the means to destroy it.
He appreciated irony. It suited his sensibilities. While his past shaped him, he seldom acknowledged it with others. “Where are you from” produced “Oklahoma.” Got any family, earned the curious a cryptic, “One sister.” And no further details. His demeanor squelched any follow-up inquiries.
He kept his backstory close and his array of medals in a metal box and the box in the upper far corner of his bedroom closet. Photos of Cam Li hid there as well. Cam Li. Cam Li in Saigon, the last time he saw her. One final heartbreak too many. “I can love you or I can love my country, but I can’t love both. Not at the same time. Not in these circumstances,” she wrote him before disappearing into the jungle.
Weeks later, he wept bitterly—hot, angry tears when informed she had been part of a cadre that planted the explosive decimating his squad. Shredded his best friend. Desolate, he hunted her, village to village—ransacking homes, probing tunnels, threatening lives for scant information.
He loved Cam Li that much. The question of what he would do if he found her remained unresolved. Until 33 years later at a convention in Las Vegas. Of course, he recognized her. Lustrous ebony hair in a thick rope braid. Her stately posture. That slightly flared nose and luminescent cheeks. Provocative mouth imbued with the sardonic. A woman whose carriage spoke of surety. Who projected a sense of knowing what ordinary mortals could not.
A cascade of unbidden memories swept through Tom as he observed her engaged in lively conversation with several other men. Age had not dimmed her aphrodisia. Tom considered an immediate departure. A retreat to take time and assess his reaction. But as one who feels being watched, Cam Li turned to see him. Nothing registered at first. She offered a quick nod of acknowledgement and re-engaged her companions, but Tom could tell something had shifted in her. Something clicked and her back stiffened. She stopped talking. Listening. She had recognized him as well.
Tom slipped from the hall and out onto the balcony overlooking The Strip. The night hot and oppressive around him. Breathing intentionally, he wrestled with the gamut of emotions unable to pin any down. What could he say, if it came to it? What would he say? Should he say? Who was she now? How much of the past should dictate the present? His free-wheeling mind made him unsteady.
He gripped the waist-high railing against the eddy of such tumultuous thoughts. Against images of Vietnam, 1971, when he heard from behind him, “Hey,” Cam Li said; “It’s been a long time.”
It jolted Tom to the immediate. To uncertain terrain. He would have to tread carefully, “Years,” he answered keeping his back to her.
“Too many of them?” she asked; “Or too few?”
“Both.”
“Ah. Well. Then—I should leave,” she said framing the statement as a question. Allowing him his lead.
“Like you did before,” he responded inviting a rejoinder.
“Different circumstances.”
“Different context.”
“Yes.” She stepped toward him. The faint smell of her engulfed Tom. He breathed her in before saying, “War makes strange bedfellows.”
“That war is over.”
“Not for me, Cam Li. Not for me.” The sound of her name caught in his throat, circumventing anymore speech. He focused on the mad array of pulsating neon signs garish against a pitch-black sky. The duality of his feelings for her returned full-flower. His passions poisoned by her betrayal. She’s the one who finally bankrupted him from staying in the game anymore—from engaging with humanity beyond professional courtesies. Stepping away into himself.
Yet, they needed closure. He knew that. He wanted that. And something more, perhaps. “I hurt you,” she said.
“Me. My men.”
“Politics,” Cam Li said as if it explained everything.
“Bullshit.” Tom spun about and faced her. Restraining himself from approaching.
“We can’t help whom we love, Thomas.”
“Speaking of me or for yourself?”
“Speaking universally.”
“But we can make decisions about whom we murder.” The accusation impelled by years of pent-up speculations took them right to the heart of their matter. Took him right back to that summer in Saigon and the thick rain and the chaos that roiled their passions.
Cam Li took it in stride. “Nobody’s hands are clean, Tommy,” she said using the familiar address.
“And that absolves you.”
“Absolution is ecclesiastical. Forgiveness made of baser stuff. And we all need forgiveness.”
“How could you, Cam Li?” Tom demanded, circumventing anymore preliminaries; “Tell me that! How the hell could you?”
“We were under assault, Thomas. Had been under assault. This punching bag. This—pawn. Did I know it was you? Your men? No. Would it have mattered? Yes. But if not me, then someone else. We were caught in this monstrous, yes, political firefight. Chess pieces on a multi-dimensional board. Our sovereignty exploited over and over. Puppets being manipulated by governments being manipulated by god only knows who governed for themselves. We weren’t supposed to happen, you and I, but we did and it was beautiful, Thomas. That part was beautiful.”
This affirmation checked Tom. The rapture of her undeniable. Their shared ardency yet resonate. They had been all fiery and bright. All consuming. For Tom had never done anything halfway. “That’s quite a speech,” he said striving to remain noncommittal.
“I’ve been saving it up.”
The yelp of sirens from the street below punctuated the night. Appropriate background music for their balcony drama. They considered one another, intimate strangers, and for the first time in his adult life, Tom had no play. Was stymied by indecision.
“I’m not sure where to go from here,” he admitted.
“That’s new,” Cam Li said.
“Yes.”
“How does that feel?”
“Unsettling.” Cam Li crossed to the railing taking in the neon bazaar that is Las Vegas. They were quiet together letting whatever this was going to be find its footing. “Are you married?” she asked.
“Never.”
“That’s sad.”
“So I’ve been told. And you?”
“Twice. Three children.”
“And today?”
“A widow.”
“Life,” Tom said saying it all.
“Yes. Life,” Cam Li echoed and looking out over the city asked, “Did you hate me?”
“Just as much as I loved you.”
“Still? Either way?”
Tom joined her at the railing. Her departure. His friend’s death. The mad cacophony that was Vietnam kaleidoscoped through his mind. Some things won’t be forgotten. “The ghost of you haunted me till right this moment,” he confessed and felt exposed saying it. And relieved. Some weight lifted away from his essence.
She put a hand on his arm. He resisted the reflex to pull away, “I am sorry for any pain I caused you. Truly.”
Tom saw the truth of her contrition in her eyes. It further eroded his resistance. “The pain, it drove me,” he said; “Kept me on point. I had room for nothing else.”
“Even today? Even tonight?”
It shouldn’t be this easy, Tom thought. There being so much to account for. The dead wanted their voices. There should be some rite, some ritual, some pound of flesh extracted. “That’s an awful lot to ask,” he said.
“I still have lots to give,” Cam Li answered and allowed herself a smile. It yet intoxicated. “My room number’s 828,” she told him; “Come see me.” And she walked away—yet slim-hipped and unambiguous.
Tom raked his fingers through his now tempered red mane of hair. The litany of disappointments that littered his life, the catalogue of devastations upon which he had framed his day-to-day existence couldn’t be ignored. Brokered by bitterness, Cam Li, the coup de grace—he faced, once again, the question that dogged him since childhood: how do you reconcile with the unreconcilable?
Thus far, his answer had been, you don’t, you can’t. It’s impossible. And it got him to this place—a fierce and solitary man angry at the world. Nowhere.
And now Cam Li—both lover and assassin—challenged his fortifications. Offered a way
out of his malaise. But it would take a hell-of-a-lot of intervention to overcome decades of a carefully cultivated narrative. Probing scar tissue inflammatory. What would be the result? Life had taught him there were no happy endings. Bridges give way and we all take our falls. Exhilaration has its corresponding despondency.
Yet, in Room 828 waited his opportunity to circumvent all the fetid disappointments that populated his biography. There reigned his Queen of Hearts. Everything past served as history and we don’t live there. Shouldn’t live there if we’re to live at all.
Tom surveyed the starless night sky. He closed his eyes. Breathed deeply. “All right, then,” he told the universe and turned about and headed toward the elevators.
Time to go all in—again.
Kayner’s plays, prose and poetry have numerous awards and appeared in a variety of publications.
