23

U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

And sixty miles distant over the night sea, the sea over which so many fleets and armies had sailed to battle, the two hundred men of Bravo Company crouched and lay and sat in the hull of a rolling ship.

They waited. The ceaseless murmur of their steel mother surrounded them: the rush of sea as they pounded steadily eastward, the creaking groan of the metal fabric that alone sustained them, the hum and whisper of ventilation, the distant throb of a pump, as intimate and yet mysterious as the heart of a woman who sleeps beside you, no matter what the vow never yours inalienably, but only for a moment of inestimable duration.

It’s so quiet, Will Givens thought, cradling his guitar. So filled with familiar sound, and yet, somehow, so silent.

His fingers touched the strings so lightly that through the fresh callus he could barely feel them. Still, in the odd quietness of Spiegel Grove’s troop compartment that evening, he could hear the chord hum to him. As if all the music still to come from the old guitar was waiting, ready for him to release it, yet willing too to bide. Yielding itself to the future and to his will.

Above him Liebo shifted his weight, and Givens looked up at the underside of his mattress. It shifted again, creaking.

“What you doing up there, Dippy?” he asked the ticking.

“I ain’t doing nothing, goddamn it. Let me alone.”

“Don’t get uptight about it. I just wondered.”

“Well, wonder to yourself, Oreo.”

His fingers tightened on the frets. He sat up on one elbow, staring up at the close cotton striping, the dingy yellow fabric of Liebo’s fartsack.

“What did you call me, man?” he said to the mattress.

Silence, and then he heard: “Sorry, Will. I’m kind of on edge, I guess. I didn’t mean to call you that.”

He waited, considered, and then lowered himself back into the embrace of his bunk, still feeling the pulse-hammer of arousal, but relieved that he didn’t have to face the private down. But there was disappointment, too. He wanted to say something angry, strike out, hurt someone. Yeah, on edge. We’re all on edge, he thought. That was why there was no sound in the compartment except the whine of the blowers, the distant throb of engines running at full speed, the omnipresent creak as the bunk frames warped under the weight of bodies and the steady batter of the storm. No mutter and sudden laughter of bull sessions, joking, cassette players, no grab-assing, none of the continual ritual murmur of card games.

He glanced down at the table, below where he lay. The cards were out, but no one was playing. Harner was sitting with his boots planted square on the deck, head down, whittling slowly with his Ka-bar on a swab handle. Wash-man had his feet up on the bottom bunk, staring blankly at a full-page crotch shot in an Italian girlie magazine. He watched them for several minutes. Harner whittled on. Washman stared at the same page. Not even his eyes moved; only his thin chest, ratitic and sharp-edged beneath the thin cotton of his skivvy shirt, rose and fell, rose and fell.

He tried another chord, but it seemed too loud. Liebo shifted nervously above him. He laid the guitar aside and pulled out the book, tried to read a page. The equations made no sense. They described somewhere else, some perfect universe of concepts and logic that had never existed, and never would. He laid it aside too after a few minutes and stared at the underside of the bunk frame for a while. At last he climbed down, taking the guitar with him. Harner and Washman looked up, jerked from their reveries by the scrape of his chair.

“Good magazine?” he asked Washout.

“Uh, yeah.” The private closed it, looking guilty.

“Get that in Palermo?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated, then held it out. “Want to check it out?”

He didn’t. He had resolved not to look at such things again. He had prayed over what he had done, prayed over it and been, he felt, forgiven. He was clean now. But the glossy flash of white thigh as the page turned, a curve of brown into pink, had made the water start in his mouth.

There is none righteous, no, not one …

He took it, and flipped the stained pages. It was in Italian, but the pictures were self-explanatory.

“Oreo,” said a familiar voice behind him, “what are you doing with that trash?”

“Just looking at it, I—”

Cutford’s arm came over his shoulder, so close he could smell him, and seized the magazine. He snatched for it, but he was too late, and the corporal too fast. Bits of paper fluttered down over his head. Washman started up, his eyes wide. “Hey! That’s my magazine, asshole! What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Why you pushing it on this brother, then? He don’t want no cheap white cunt, nor no pictures of any, either.” The tearing came faster, and Washman flinched back as a wad of pages flew at his face.

“Come off it, Cutford—”

“Shut up.” The corporal finished his shredding and tossed the naked spine to the deck. He swung on Givens, his eyes whited. “Why you poison your mind with this toubab shit? It’s a trap for the true man, nigger. Don’t you know that?”

Harner, silent, scooted his chair back. He put the chewed broomhandle behind him, holding the knife in his lap.

“Goddamn it—” began Washman, getting up. His face had gone pale, the blotches standing out in red relief.

“I’ll pay you for it, Washout,” said Givens, standing up, too. “Never mind.”

“Fuck you will,” said Cutford, swaying dangerously ponderous as the ship heaved to a heavy sea. Under the thin dark fabric his chest bulged as he lifted his fists. “He give it to you. I tore it up. Anyone want to settle anything, he settle it with me.”

Givens sighed. The corporal was hungry for a fight. There was no way around it. All he could do was show Washout and the others that he was on their side, not Cutford’s. The anger he had lit with Liebo, and then tamped down, licked up again. Anger was sin, but there was righteous anger, too. The long-built rage of being black yet not accepted as black, the truthlessness of stereotypes and the way men of hate like Cutford forced you into them despite yourself. And suddenly he was eager for it, too. Rage sang through his veins, tightened his calves and the long muscles of his arms. The weak points: groin, eyes, throat. The voice of the instructor at boot camp. “Like they say, troopers, you can build muscle, but not over eyes or knees.” But Cutford had been through boot camp, too. And a lot more. He stepped forward warily, knowing that his enemy was both bigger and more vicious. David had won in the Book, but only with the help of the Lord.

The Lord seemed far away from Troop Berthing tonight.

“You crazy—” he was beginning, when a cry from the next bay of bunks pivoted them all around. It was Hernandez, his voice high with surprise and insult.

“What you doing in my locker, jerkoff?”

“You owe me ten bucks, man. I’m takin’ it out in trade.”

“Like shit you are, you goddamn thief.”

“Fight! Fight!”

Givens stumbled forward, catching an edge of the table. The guitar jangled a discord on the steel deck, but he didn’t stop. He rounded the bunks in time to bounce a red-haired man, one of the riflemen, head-on. There were four of them, all from the same squad. Hernandez, his back to his locker, was wrestling with the biggest. There was time only to see that before the redhead stiff-armed his head against the bunk frame. A dazzling pain shot forward between his eyes. All through the compartment, men leaped down from their racks, taking sides with instantaneous readiness. Unfortunately, that meant the mortar-men were outnumbered four to one.

The white dazzle cleared, and he came away from the frame fighting mad. He grabbed the redhead in a half-nelson, tripped him down in the same motion, and made for Hernandez. Two riflemen took him halfway, hammering him to the deck with punches in the ribs and back. They rolled in a melee around the feet of the bunk frames, he punching out at whomever he could reach, as above him the original fight dissolved in a free-for-all. Hernandez stubbornly defended his locker; Harner had his long arms around a lance corporal from the second platoon; Washout screamed shrilly as a black grunt twisted his wrist behind his back. Liebo was still going round atop that first biggest rifleman.

Then he saw Cutford. The big corporal battered his way through three men in as many seconds, snarling, leaving them sitting on the deck holding bloody faces and moaning. His assault left the mortar team in possession of the narrow space for a minute or two, then the grunts got smart and scrambled across through the racks between them. Surrounded, the squad went down under a mass of shouting men. There were too many of them, and as if realizing it, the riflemen began to fight among themselves, without pretext, and the atmosphere suddenly changed with that, as if they all realized simultaneously that it was over. The skirmish eased off into slaps and pushes. Givens found himself in a corner with Hernandez. “What the fuck, hombre!” the little man said, grinning, a trickle of blood coming from his nose.

“Too many of them, man.”

“Ah, they want to fight, we fight, right?”

“They think they can push mortarmen around, they going to end up with their asses in a sling,” panted Liebo.

“The brass!” somebody shouted from the far end of the compartment. There was no officer, or else he wisely decided not to come in, but they broke apart. The riflemen drifted back toward their racks, leaving behind threats and lifted fingers. The mortarmen jeered after them, but not too loudly. Givens reached up to feel the back of his head. It hurt, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding. Probably leave me with a lump, he thought. It hurt when he breathed, too. Some bastards always had to go for the kidneys. But still he found himself grinning, the adrenaline happiness of a fight welling up, and he bent to help Hernandez pick up the clothes the riflemen had knocked from his locker.

Back at the card table they scraped chairs together. There were not enough and Washman and Hernandez sat side by side on the lower bunk. Liebo displayed a torn shirt sleeve, Harner grinned slowly around a bruised lip, and Givens rubbed the back of his head with a shade more wince than it really called for. They panted together for a minute or two, and then Cutford rubbed abruptly at his skinned knuckles. “I’d ’ve liked to take out a couple more of the fuckahs,” he whispered. “Young bastards. None of them old enough to show hair yet.”

The others looked up, uncertain as to whom he meant. Them? There was something strange in the way the older man sat, chafing his palms as if for warmth. Givens saw that he was bleeding, the drops thick and black as road tar against his skin.

“How old are you, Cutford?” he said softly.

“Old enough I shouldn’t be wastin’ my time in shitpot little troop-compartment scuffles,” said the corporal sharply, yet still without looking at any of them.

“Uh … you fought real good,” said Washout.

Cutford looked at him then, close, and his broad flat nose widened. He gathered his feet beneath him as if to get up, and a jangling musical sound came from under the chair.

“My guitar,” said Givens, remembering suddenly. “Gimme it.”

“Get it yourself, Oreo. Crawl under there and fetch.”

Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought hopelessly, groping under the table, among the butts and scrap paper. What is it with this dude? Is there no way to pacify this anger, this apartness? Looking up at Cutford’s heavy legs, the tops of the athletic socks he always wore showing above the scuffed black of boots, he felt a sudden need to answer what the corporal was continually asking of him, of all of them.

Only what was the question?

When he came up with the guitar, leaning it carefully against the smudged bulkhead where the mortar tube had leaned every morning since the far beginning of the float, Cutford was talking about Vietnam. He never had before.

“Shitpot little scuffles like this … we done this all before, in d’Nam,” he was saying, not remotely, but to Hernandez, who was nodding, eyes intent. “Scuffle around, fart around, grab-ass in the bunkers … it was the heat. It got to you real quick, when you come in country. Heat, man, Alabama was nothin’ to it.”

Givens eased himself back into Washman’s bunk, away from the level of the corporal’s eyes. The other men grew silent too, waiting with him for whatever Cutford had to say.

“Heat,” prompted Hernandez. “Yeah, like in the Delta, hah?”

Cutford looked to him, almost gratefully. He sighed. “Yeah. Hot like that.”

“Where were you?” whispered Hernandez. “In the jungle? The swamp? The mountains?”

“Shit, the bush, man, the bush. It was jungle, man. Fucken scorpions all over, find them in the Claymore pouches, you could feel them crawling on you at night, on ambush, couldn’t move…”

They hung breathless and alone with him, hunters at a campfire, young warriors by the bard; silent in the once-again silent compartment filled with expectant men. The ship banged and creaked. Cutford rubbed his hands.

“How long was you there, man?”

“Two tours, man.”

“Two, Cutford? How come you went around again?”

The corporal hesitated, just for a moment, looking round at them; then reached into his back pocket.

The picture was ironed from years in the wallet, an old Polaroid, the green of jungle yellow, faces yellow, sky yellow. Over his shoulder Givens’ eyes found the eyes of other marines. Hand-twisted cigarettes dangled from smiling mouths. One of them was a short man, thin, something gold gleaming yellow against his dark throat. Next to him, his arm over his shoulders, stood a gangly, grinning, friendly-looking boy Will recognized with a shock as Cutford.

“They needed me,” said Cutford. “Them simple bastards I was with. Off the streets of Watts and Durham and Selma. They needed my black ass. They was going down like … like … we was going down bad. It was sixty-nine, man. They was no more grunts to come. I was a rifleman then. We just went patrol; they just kept sending you patrol, you know, no slack, no break, maybe a day back at battalion if you took heavies, but then, man, right back in the bush. After Tet the Man was scared. He knew what was coming down. It was use the grunt or lose him, and they used us, man. Used us up. I tried to learn them, them simple bastards…”

“The squad?” said Hernandez.

“The whole fucken squad,” said Cutford, leaning forward. The little golden charm, twisting on its chain, swung out from his chest and dangled gleaming in the stark fluorescence from the overhead. “The whole fucken squad one night. Overrun by a batt of en-vee regulars. Just me. They only left me.

“That’s how it was, fuckheads. The Man sends you out there, the ghost officers. They fuck up, the Man don’t pay. We pay, baby, you pay, dickheads like you. I stuck the rest of that tour, and they wanted me to be a warrant. I said, no, fuck you, I’m gettin’ out. And I did.”

“You got out?” said Liebo, gentle-like.

“Two years.”

“Why’d you come back?”

Cutford looked at him long and hard, then seemed to see the rest of them. His face changed, and he shook his head angrily. He was starting to get up when the 1MC came on. The silence in the compartment went suddenly, electrically a dozen times more silent, the men looking naked-eyed up at where the gray speakers sat screwed to the bulkheads. The boatswain’s pipe shrilled, cutting through the whoosh of ventilators, and someone cleared his throat.

“THIS IS THE CAPTAIN SPEAKING.

“AS YOU KNOW, WE HAVE BEEN STEAMING INDEPENDENTLY OF THE OTHER SHIPS OF THE MARG, HEADED EAST WHILE AWAITING ORDERS.

“A FEW MINUTES AGO, WE RECEIVED DIRECTION FROM CTF 61 FOR RENDEZVOUS AND RECONSTITUTION OF THE TASK FORCE. THE RENDEZVOUS POINT IS SOME FORTY MILES AHEAD OF US, NOT FAR OFF THE COAST OF LEBANON. FOR THE INFORMATION OF OUR EMBARKED MARINES, NOT FAR FROM A TOWN YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD OF BEFORE—A PLACE CALLED TRIPOLI.

“WE HAVEN’T GOTTEN OFFICIAL WORD YET, BUT THIS WILL PROBABLY BE OUR LAST NIGHT OF WAITING. WE’LL BE LESS THAN TWO HOURS OFF THE BEACH AT THE RENDEZVOUS POINT. ACCORDINGLY, ALL HANDS WILL TURN TO IMMEDIATELY FOR INSTANT RESPONSE IN THE MORNING.

“I WANT ALL PERSONNEL TO CHECK AND DOUBLE-CHECK YOUR GEAR. THIS GOES FOR EVERYONE, BUT ESPECIALLY FOR THE DECK DEPARTMENT AND THE MIKE-BOAT CREWS. CHECK THE ENGINES AND RADIOS, THE WINCHES, AND THE GATES. MAKE SURE FUEL TANKS ARE TOPPED OFF AND LIFEJACKETS ARE ABOARD—THE SURF AT THE BEACH IS REPORTED HIGH, AND MAY INCREASE TONIGHT IF THIS WIND PICKS UP.

“OFFICERS OF THE MARINE DETACHMENT WILL MAKE THEIR OWN PREPARATIONS FOR DEBARKATION AS EARLY AS 0400 TOMORROW. THIS INCLUDES WEAPON AND AMMO ISSUE.

“I WILL CONTINUE TO KEEP YOU INFORMED.”

The loudspeakers hissed briefly, empty as the eyes of the listening men, and then went silent.

“Ohhh, shit,” whispered Washman. “Is this … is this the way these things start?”

Cutford got up. He was still looking at the loudspeakers, and his hands hung loose and open, palms out, fingers slightly up. A drop of blood trembled for a moment, then fell to the floor. It made a dark pool on the tile.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, this is how they start.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Lemme see Silky about that gear issue.” The corporal turned, took a step, and stumbled over the varnished hollow curve of the guitar. It fell again, chording against ship-steel. He looked down at it for a long moment, and then bent. He held it to his face, looking closely at the pearled fretboard.

“Hey, Cutford—”

But he had already gripped it by the neck, like a bat, and aimed and then swung it, fast, the air rushing through the strings and past the sound hole, singing. When it hit the stanchion it shattered suddenly in midair into separate things, uncoiling strips of wood, strings snapping back on themselves, the pearl cracking like plastic. It was as if the music crammed inside, so tightly, years and years of it still unheard, exploded the stops and nickeled keys across the compartment, snapping and ringing against the bunk frames and deck and even the plastic covers of the light fixtures. The neck was left in his hands, strings dangling, and he swung it again, and again, against the unscarring steel of the stanchion until nothing was left.

“I told you it was too fucken big to fit in here,” he said. “Oreo? Din’t I tell you before?”

“Yeah,” said Givens. “Yeah, Cutford. You told me.”

The corporal had half-turned toward the hatch, tossing away the remnant. Givens’ savage right must have been unexpected. It caught him low in the gut, unready, and he buckled over for a moment and his eyes widened. Then, too fast for Givens to see or follow, he found himself lying on the deck with his windpipe being crushed by Cutford’s knee. It dug deeper, and he clawed instinctively for the man’s eyes. The corporal avoided his hands easily, grinning, and pinned him tighter. Givens began to see stars. “Nice try, boy,” he heard the deadly hiss above him. “A lil late, a lil slow, but at least you tried. We may make a marine of you yet instead of a Jesus-dreamin’ ofay-lover.”

His lips moved without voice. “Fuck you, Cutford.”

“Oh, man, you just said the magic word,” said the corporal. He stood up, grinning, and at his sweaty throat gold swung and glittered like a searching knifepoint. “Okay, dickheads, suit up. They’s sendin’ us to war.”