Nick Lawrence, Grand Mare  1995

         “It was a good battle,” Klaas said.  “In the end, that is.  We won.”
            His blue gaze became dreamy. 
            “Any casualties?”
            “Not us.  The Grand Mare army counted sixty bodies but we took no losses.  One of our guys lost an eye.” 
            “Jesus.”
            “Yeah.  A South African guy.  Jerry.”
            Klaas put his own hand over his eye.  His fingers were short and stubby and the hand was tanned so dark it surprised me.  It looked as if he’d been working the soil and forgotten to wash.
            “He came up to me. He said, ‘There’s something stuck in my eye.’  I pulled his hand off.  There was nothing left, a great bloody gash.  So I told him, ‘Wait a minute, then.  I think I’m just going to put a bandage on it.’”
            He took his own hand from his eye.  Klaas’s own eyes were small and close to the surface, just nicks in his skull, really, as if his bone structure were shallow and masklike.  The eyes were translucently blue.  They seemed both depthless and to go on forever.  He was not lacking in compassion.  At the same time, Klaas was a field man.   A tactician.
            “So you bandaged it.”
            “I slapped a bandage on. We stayed there for about three or four hours, during which time the vehicles were repaired.”
            He had slipped into military report-speak, a sign that Jerry’s eye had bothered him.  The lights in the bar flashed off, then on again, and then off.  Power problems.
            “Well, look at that,” Klaas says.  “Night falls on the city.”