"John Dalmas - The Second Coming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

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 motherтАФno 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 thatтАФin 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 endedтАФ
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