Free The Ax by Donald E. Westlake Page B

EBD, has to put right there, in his resumé, that he was in Vietnam. So what? Is the world supposed to owe him a living, a quarter of a century later? Is this special pleading?
    I was stationed in Germany, in the Army, after I got out of boot camp. We were in a communications platoon in a small base east of Munich, on top of a tall pine-covered hill. A foothill of the Alps, I suppose it must have been. We didn’t have much to do except keep our radio equipment in working order, just in case the Russians ever attacked, which most of us believed wasn’t going to happen. So my eighteen months in the Army in Germany was spent mostly in a beer haze, down in Mootown, which some of us called Munich, I have no idea why.
    Mootown. And while the guys in Vietnam called the kilometer a click—“We’re ten clicks from the border”—we in Germany were still calling them Ks— “We’re ten Ks from that nice gasthaus”—though the Vietnamese influence was getting to us, and Ks were becoming clicks in Europe as well. Nobody wanted to be in Vietnam, but everybody wanted to be thought of as having
been
in Vietnam.
    Like this son of a bitch, EBD. Twenty-five years later, and he’s still playing that violin.
    On a midmorning Thursday in May, there isn’t that much traffic on Route 5, and I’m making pretty good time. Not quite as good as the big trucks I can see from time to time across the river on the thruway, but good enough. The little towns along the way—Fort Johnson, Fonda, Palatine Bridge—slow me some, but not for long. And the scenery is beautiful, the river winding through the hills, gleaming in spring sun. It’s a nice day.
    Mostly it’s just river, there to my left, but some of it is clearly manmade, or man altered, and that would be remnants of the old Erie Canal. New York State is bigger than most people realize, being a good three hundred miles across from Albany to Buffalo, and in the early days of our country this body of water to my left was the main access to the interior of the nation. Back before there was much by way of roads.
    In those days, the big ships from Europe could come into New York Harbor, and steam up the Hudson as far as Albany, and off-load there. Then the riverboats and barges would take over, carrying goods and people on the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal over to Buffalo, where they could enter Lake Erie, and then travel across the Great Lakes all the way to Chicago or Michigan, and even take rivers southward and wind up on the Mississippi.
    Some years ago, I was watching some special on TV, and the announcer described something as being a “transitional technology.” It was the railroads I think he was talking about. Something. And the idea seemed to be, a transitional technology was the cumbersome old way people used to do things before they got to the easy sensible way they do things now. And the further idea was, look how much time and effort and expense was put into something that was just a temporary stopgap; railroad bridges, canals.
    But everything is a transitional technology, that’s what I’m beginning to figure out. Maybe that’s what makes it impossible sometimes. Two hundred years ago, people knew for certain they would die in the same world they were born into, and it had always been that way. But not any more. The world doesn’t just
change
these days, it upheaves, constantly. We’re like fleas living on a Dr. Jekyll who’s always in the middle of becoming Mr. Hyde.
    I can’t change the circumstances of the world I live in. This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can hope to do is play that hand better than anybody else. Whatever it takes.
    At Utica, I take Route 8 north. It goes all the way to Watertown and the Canadian border, but I don’t. I stop at Lichgate.
    A factory town on the Black River. Prosperity, and the factory, left this town a long time ago; more transitional technology. Who knows what used to be