Free Courier by Terry Irving

apparently, it’s genetic. Plus, the stress of poverty and… hopelessness eats our people up inside, and drinking is a cure or at least it dulls the pain for a little while. A lot of the guys coming back from the war seem to be drinking to forget."
    "Yeah, well, there are some things that happened in Vietnam that I would drink Drano to forget, but short of that, alcohol just doesn’t work. I end up hung over and still remember everything. The worst of both worlds."
    She looked at him seriously. "So, what do you do to forget?"
    "When I manage to forget a single second of my time over there, I’ll be sure to let you know."
    "But you can’t go on like that," she said. "At home they’d say you were sick, poisoned. The elders know how to fight an illness like that, but you have to be willing to fight along with them."
    "Smoke and feathers?"
    "My dad’s the only licensed psychiatrist on the Montana reservation." There was a flash of anger in her eyes. "Sometimes he uses smoke and feathers, and sometimes he uses psychotherapy. Occasionally, he just knocks the patient upside the head once or twice."
    Rick grinned. "Sounds like my kind of guy."
    They might have continued to talk about each other, but Dina was fighting for a position on the Senate Special Committee that was about to start hearings on the Watergate scandal and she was bursting with the latest chapter of the story that had been delighting – or infuriating – political Washington since the "third-rate burglary" had happened six months ago.
    More cash had been discovered. Dina said that the wife of one of the arrested burglars had been in a plane crash and turned out to be carrying thousands of dollars in cash.
    Rick said, "Everything about this Watergate thing seems to have something to do with cash."
    "This is the tip of the iceberg," Dina responded. "Everyone knew that Nixon was calling in all his chips for this election. The money was just flooding in. Corporations, industry associations, old friends. You name it."
    Eve looked curious. "But don’t they know the names of everyone who gives money to a campaign? I thought they just passed a law on that."
    "They did, but it didn’t go into effect until last April and under the old law – and I love this name, The Corrupt Practices Act – you didn’t have to identify any contributions to a candidate before he was nominated."
    Rick had watched the convention coverage like a soap opera, since there wasn’t much else going on when all the politicians were out of town. "And Nixon didn’t officially get nominated until August."
    Dina smiled. "Bingo. My Republican friends say his money people started beating the bushes the day after the election in 1968. There must be millions of dollars sloshing around. Hell, he certainly didn’t have to spend much to beat McGovern."
    Eve smiled. "I could have beaten George McGovern."
    The women went on with their conversation. Rick said enough to not to be called on the carpet for inattention by Dina, but he was actually just enjoying watching the dark-haired woman talk. He felt that sitting next to her was like sitting under a warm sun and dropping off to sleep. When he was a kid, his favorite time at the beach had been late afternoon, when most of the people had left and the surf and sun merged into a golden haze, and he would doze off and wake up to find that he was alone in the twilight.
    "Rick, Rick, Earth to Rick. Come in."
    He brought his attention back to Dina. "Hmm?"
    "We were talking about the war, the peace talks breaking down, and now the carpet-bombing of Hanoi."
    "And you almost let me miss that?" Rick snorted. "Thanks a lot. They’ve been having peace talks since they started this war, and I don’t know which particular idiots are planning those air raids, but a lot of those B-52s are going down. More downed planes means more POWs – just what we need."
    Eve looked at him. "But I thought this war was