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carry a jammed or broken rifle with you when you’re trying to put distance between yourself and the battle scene?
    La Légion est toujours avec toi
. Always with me. When I was their property, maybe. But when I became a soldier for money, their fine words left me as I’d left them. Forever.
    W hen I finally got back to the house that day, it was full of kids, like it always is on afternoons during a school week. Teenagers. Dolly’s just a magnet for them. Mostly girls, but anytime you’ve got that many girls, there’s going to be some boys, too.
    She knows how to have fun, my Dolly. And she can tell some stories, believe me. But what she’s best at is listening; I know this for a fact.
    There’s a lot of stuff I never told Dolly, not out loud. Not because I wanted to keep it a secret. Dolly’s got this … I don’t know the word for it, exactly, but she feels things inside her that other people are feeling. I would never want Dolly to have some of the feelings I still have inside me.
    Maybe that’s why those kids are always talking to her. Not the phony way they’d talk to some school guidance counselor; more as if she was the kind of aunt you could trust, the kind who’d never rat you out to your folks, no matter what you told her. If you needed an abortion, she’d know where to go, and take you there herself. That last part, I knew for a fact, too.
    She’s always teaching those kids something, like how to stitch up those crazy costumes they’re wearing out in public today. And they’re always teaching her stuff, too. Like how to work her cell phone with her thumbs to send messages. She showed me one of those messages one time—it was like it was in a different language. When she tried to explain it to me, I told her I didn’t care about stuff like that, stuff I’d never have a use for.
    What I didn’t tell her was that using any kind of code was for business only. I was out of business, and I didn’t want any reminders of what I used to be.
    I don’t … I don’t dislike kids, exactly, but I’ve really got nothing to say to them. I’m not interested in anything they’ve got to say, either. What could they know at their age? Well, maybe it isn’ttheir age. When I was younger than any of them, I was already doing things that these kids only see in movies. Not things I’m proud of.
    After a while, they got used to my staying in my workshop in the basement, and they never bother me when I’m down there. Dolly doesn’t have a lot of rules in her house, but the ones she has you better follow, or you’re eighty-sixed. Like bringing drugs or booze into her house. Try it once, it’s two weeks. If there’s a next time, it’s your last.
    No one can ever open that basement door, anyway. Even if they get past everything else, only Dolly knows the keypad code.
    I’ve actually got two places of my own. The basement workshop, and what Dolly calls my den. She fixed it up real fine. It’s got a big dark-red leather easy chair, and a flat-screen TV with earphones, so I can watch the BBC without the racket from all those kids bothering me. I like to read, too. I never read that “I was there” stuff. I tried it for a while, but it wasn’t any different from what the library racked in the Fiction section.
    One wall is nothing but bookshelves. The others hold my terrain maps. They’re from different places I’ve been, but I never explain that to anyone.
    There’s this big porthole window, so I can see right out into the yard. Some days, I’d be sitting there and Alfred Hitchcock would pace right past that window, like he was making sure everything was okay.
    E very once in a while, a couple of the boys wander back to the den. If the door’s closed, they never knock. But if it’s open, they know they can just walk right in. Sometimes girls come in there, too.
    The boys always want to talk about Vietnam. I don’t know where they got the idea that I’d been there. I guess they figure anyonemy age