Bill Houston’s Honolulu shore leave commenced with the forenoon watch, too early for a man with money to spend: on top of everything, the navy wished to deny him any nightlife. He took a shuttle bus from the naval station and across the open fields of the air force base and then through town to Waikiki Beach, wandered dejected among the big hotels, sat on the sand in his Levi’s and wild Hawaiian shirt and his very clean shoes—white bucks with red rubber soles—ate grilled pork on a wooden skewer at a kiosk, took a city bus to Richards Street, booked a bed at the Armed Services YMCA, and started drinking in the waterfront bars at one in the afternoon.
He tried an air-conditioned place favored by young officers, where he sat at a table by himself smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking Lucky Lager. It made him feel lucky. When he’d collected enough change he called home on the mainland, chatted with his brother James.
That just made him more depressed. His brother James was stupid. His brother James was going to end up in the military like himself.
He strolled the waterfront with the beer thudding inside his head, a lonely feeling pulling at his heart. By 3:00 p.m. the pavement of Honolulu had baked so hot it sucked at his rubber shoe soles as he walked.
He hid inside the Big Surf Club trading beers with two men slightly older than himself, one of them a man named Kinney who’d recently joined the crew on Houston’s ship—the USNS Bonners Ferry, a T2 tanker manned mostly by civilians, of whom Kinney was one. But he hadn’t just waltzed on board for a tropical cruise. He’d spent time in the navy, lived on ship after ship, and had no real home ashore. Kinney had attached himself to a barefoot beach bum who seemed hopped up on something. The bum bought the table two pitchers in a row and eventually revealed he’d served with the Third Marines in Vietnam before landing back home on an early discharge. “Yeah, baby,” the bum said. “I got the medical.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I’m mentally disabled.”
“You seem all right.”
“You seem all right if you buy us a beer,” Kinney said.
“No problem. I’m on disability. Two forty-two a month. I can drink a serious amount of Hamm’s, man, if I sleep on the beach like a Moke and eat what the Mokes eat.”
“What do the Mokes eat? Who are the Mokes?”
“Around here you got the Mokes and the Howlies. We are the Howlies. The Mokes are the native fuckers. What do they eat? They eat cheap. Then there’s a whole lot of Japs and Chinks, you probably noticed. They’re in the Gook category. You know why Gook food stinks so bad? Because they fry it up with rat turds and roaches and whatever else gets in with the rice. They don’t care. You ask them what the fuck stinks around here and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I’ve seen some things,” the bum went on. “Over there the Gooks wear these funny straw hats, you probably seen those—they’re pointy? Girls riding on a bicycle, you grab their hat when you go by and you just about yank their head off, because they’re tied with a string. Yank her right off the bike, man, and she goes down fucked up in the mud. This one time I saw one where she was all bent like this, man. Her neck was snapped. She was dead.”
Bill Houston was completely confused. “What? Where?”
“Where? In South Vietnam, man, in Bien Hoa. Right in the middle of town, practically.”
“That’s fucked up, man.”
“Yeah? And it’s fucked up when one of them honeys tosses a grenade in your lap because you let her get up beside you on the road, man. They know the rules. They know they should keep their distance. The ones who don’t keep their distance, they probably have a grenade.”
Houston and Kinney kept quiet. They had nothing comparable to talk about. The guy drank his beer. A moment almost like sleep came over them. Still nobody had spoken, but the bum said as if answering something, “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.”
“Let’s see some beer,” Kinney said. “Ain’t it your round?”
The bum didn’t seem to remember who’d bought what. He kept the pitchers coming.
James Houston came home from the last day of his third year in high school. Got off the bus raising his middle finger at the driver and whooping.
His mother had caught a ride out to work and left the truck in the driveway, as he’d asked. His little brother Burris stood in the drive with a finger in one of his ears, peering down the barrel of a cap pistol while he pulled the trigger repeatedly.
“Watch your eyes, Burris. I’ve heard of a kid got a spark in his eye and he had to go to the hospital.”
“What are caps made of?”
“Gunpowder.”
“WHAT? Gunpowder?”
The telephone rang inside.
“I’m not allowed to answer,” Burris said.
“Did they turn the phone back on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s ringing, ain’t it?”
“Shut up.”
“Now it done quit, you fool.”
“I wouldn’t answer anyhow. It sounds like bugs talking in there. Not people.”
“You’re a funny feller,” James said, and went inside, where it was hot and smelled a little like garbage. His mother refused to turn on the evaporative cooler unless the temperature got into the hundreds.
He carried a number of papers from school, homework, report card, year-end bulletins. He shoved them in the trash can under the sink.
The phone rang again: his brother, Bill Junior.
“Is it hot in Phoenix?”
“It’s almost a hundred, yeah.”
“It’s hot here too. It’s sweaty.”
“Where you calling from?”
“Honolulu, Hawaii. Hour ago I was standing on Waikiki Beach.”
“Honolulu?”
“Yep.”
“Do you see any hula girls?”
“I see a bunch of whores is all. But I bet they’ll do the hula.”
“I bet they will too!”
“What do you know about it?”
“Me? I don’t know,” James said. “I was just saying.”
“Goddamn, I wish I was back in good old Arizona.”
“Well, I’m not the one who reenlisted.”
“You can put me on a nice clean desert anytime you want to. It’s honest heat there, ain’t it? It’s dry and burning. This here’s mushy, is what it is. Hey, kid, imagine this, did you ever lift the lid on a kettle full of boiling sewage? That’s what it’s like stepping out on the street in this place.”
“So,” James said, “what-all else is going on?”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“I’ll be seventeen here pretty quick.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“What am I gonna do? I don’t know.”
“Are you done with school?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Did you graduate?”
“I’d have to go one more year to graduate.”
“Ain’t nothing else to do besides graduate, is there?”
“Not where I can see. Or I was thinking about the army, maybe.”
“Why not the navy?”
“Too many sailors in the navy, pard.”
“You’re a wiseass, pard. Better join the army, pard. Because you’d just get your ass kicked daily in my branch of the service.”
James was at a loss. He didn’t actually know this guy. The operator interrupted, and Bill had to deposit more coins. James said, “Are you in a bar, or what?”
“Yeah, a bar. I’m in a bar in Honolulu, Hawaii.”
“Well, I guess that’s …” He didn’t know what it was. “Yeah. I been in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Honolulu—let me see, where else, I don’t know—and the tropics ain’t no tropical paradise, I’m saying. It’s full of rot—bugs, sweat, stink, and I don’t know what-all else. And most of the beautiful tropical fruit you see, it’s rotten. It’s mashed on the street.” James said, “Well … I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Bill said. “Hey, tell Mom I called, okay? And tell her I said hi.”
“Okay.”
“Okay … Tell her I love her.”
“Okay. So long.”
“Hey. Hey. James.”
“Yeah?”
“You still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“Go in the Marines, man.”
“Aah, them are overrated.”
“The Marines get a sword.”
“The Marines are really the navy,” James said, “part of the navy.”
“Yeah … well …”
“Well …”
“Only the officers get a sword, anyway,” Bill Junior said.
“Yeah …”
“Well, I gotta go get laid,” Bill said. “Get some!”
“What do you know about it?” his brother said, laughing as he hung up.
James searched the kitchen drawers and found half a pack of his mother’s Salems. Before he got out the door the phone rang—Bill Junior.
“Is it you again?”
“Last time I looked, yeah.”
“What’s up?”
“Say hi to South Mountain for me.”
“We don’t see South Mountain no more. We see the Papago Buttes.”
“On the east side?”
“We’re on East McDowell.”
“East McDowell?”
“Ain’t that the shits?”
“You’re out in the desert!”
“Mom’s working on a horse ranch.”
“I’ll be goddamned.”
“She knows about horses from when she was a little girl.”
“Watch out the gila monster don’t bite you.”
“There ain’t any shade, but it’s nice. We’re right up near the Pima Reservation.”
“And you’re in school.”
“I been at Palo Verde for a while, since about October, maybe.”
“Palo Verde?”
“Yeah.”
“Palo Verde?”
“Yeah.”
“When we lived over on South Central, our school used to play Palo Verde in basketball or something, or football. What was the name of our school that time?”
“I went to the elementary. Carson Elementary.”
“I’ll be goddamned. I can’t remember the name of my own high school I went to.”
“Ain’t that the shits?”
“Do you ever get to Florence?”
“Nope.”
“Do you ever see Dad?”
“Nope,” James said. “He ain’t my dad, is why.”
“Well, you stay out of trouble. Learn by his example.”
“I don’t follow none of his examples. I don’t even look at his examples.”
“Well,” Bill Junior said, “anyway …”
“Anyway. Yeah. Are you really on Waikiki Beach?”
“Not really. Not right now.”
“We’re right about at Fifty-second and McDowell. They have a zoo over here.”
“A what?”
“Yeah, a little zoo.”
“Hey, tell Mom something—when is she gonna be home?”
“Later. A couple hours.”
“Maybe I’ll call her. I want to tell her about something. There’s two guys on my ship from Oklahoma, so anyway, you know what they both said? Said I sound like Oklahoma. I said, ‘Well, sir, I’ve never been—but my people are.’ Tell Mom that, okay?”
“I’ll do that.”
“Tell her she started me in Oklahoma, and I come out like I’m from there.”
“Okay.”
“Okay!—that’s short for Oklahoma!”
“I’ll be goddamned,” James said.
“Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?”
“Okay.”
They hung up.
Drunk as a lord, James thought. Probably an alkie like his father.
Burris marched in with his cap gun in one hand and a Popsicle in the other, wearing his short-pants and nothing else, looking like a little stick man. “I think I got a spark in my eye.”
James said, “I gotta get going.”
“Does it look like I got a spark in my eye?”
“No. Shut up, you peculiar little feller.”
“Can I ride in the back of the truck?”
“Not unless you want to get bumped out and killed.”
He showered and changed, and just as he was going out, the phone rang. His brother again.
“Hey … James.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey … James.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey. Hey. Hey …”
James hung up and left the house.
James picked up Charlotte, and then Rollo, and then a girl Rollo liked named Stevie—short for Stephanie—Dale, and they drove out toward the McDowell Mountains looking for a party they’d heard about, a wild unchaperoned outdoor affair, supposedly, off the road and out in the desert away from anything; but if such a gathering actually went on, it was lost in a maze of dry washes, and they steered back to the highway and sat in the back of the pickup drinking beer. “Couldn’t you get it no colder?” James asked.
“I stole it from the icebox in the barn,” Rollo said.
“Can’t even find a party on graduation night,” James said.
“This isn’t graduation night,” Charlotte said.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s the last day of school. I’m not graduating. Are you graduating?”
“Warm beer,” James said.
“I’ll never graduate,” Charlotte said. “I don’t care.”
Rollo said, “Yeah, who gives a flying fuck,” and they all laughed at his vulgarity, and he said, “We’re country kids.”
“No, we ain’t,” James said.
“Your mother works on a horse ranch. My dad messes with irrigation. And there’s a great big barn behind my house, pardner.”
“It’s nicer out here,” Stevie Dale said. “No cops.”
“That’s true,” James said, “ain’t nobody to bother you.”
“Just mind the snakes.”
“Mind this snake,” Rollo said, and the girls whooped and laughed.
It was a disappointment to James that when the two girls laughed, Charlotte had to be the one who forced beer out her nose. Stevie was younger, just a freshman, but she seemed simpler and not so nervous. Stevie kept her posture straight, and she smoked in a sexy way. What was he doing with Charlotte? Actually he liked Stevie.
He dropped Rollo off, and then he drove Charlotte home. Stevie kind of ended up still in the truck. He made sure of letting Charlotte off first.
He kissed Charlotte goodbye as they stood out front of her house. She locked her arms behind his neck and clung to him, her lips slack and wet. James held her without much strength, with his left arm only, and let his right arm hang. Charlotte’s older brother, out of work, came and stared from the doorway. “Shut the door or turn off the damn cooler, you fool,” her mother called from within.
In the truck James asked Stevie, “You need to go home?”
“Not exactly,” she said, “not really.”
“You want to drive around?”
“Sure. That might be nice.”
They ended up right back where they’d been with the others an hour before, looking out at the low mountains, listening to the radio.
“What’s your plans for the summer?” Stevie said.
“I’m waiting on a sign.”
“That means you don’t have any,” she said.
“Any plans.”
“I don’t know if I should aim for just a summer job, or find something real and permanent—just not go back to school.”
“You mean drop out?”
“I was thinking I’d get in the service like my dad.”
She made no response to this idea. She placed her fingertip on the dashboard and rubbed it back and forth.
James had run out of conversation. His neck felt so taut he doubted he could even turn his head. Not one word to say occurred to him.
He wished she’d say something about Charlotte. All she said was, “What are you so sulky about?”
“Shit.”
“What.”
“I think I’ve gotta break up with Charlotte. I really have to.”
“Yeah … I’d say she probably feels it coming.”
“Really? She does?”
“You’re just not lit up around her, James, not at all.”
“You can tell, huh?”
“You’ve got a cloud raining down all around you.”
“What about right now this minute?”
“What.”
“Ain’t raining down on me right this minute, is it?”
“No.” She was smiling, she was the sun. “Are you really going into the service?”
“Yep. The army or the Marines. I guess you’re gonna let me kiss you now, ain’t you?”
She laughed. “You’re funny.”
He kissed her a long time and then she said, “That’s what I like about you. You’re funny when you’re happy. And you’re good-looking—that’s one thing too,” and they spent a while kissing, until a commercial came on the radio, and he spent some time with the dial.
“Hmmm,” she said.
“I’m trying to think, does this man kiss like the army, or like the Marines? Hmmmm,” she said while kissing him. She broke away. “Maybe the U.S. Air Force.”
He kissed her and very gently touched her arms, her cheeks, her neck. He knew better than to put his hands where he wanted to. “I’ve got one warm beer left,” he said.
“Go ahead. I’m not thirsty.”
He sat against the driver’s door, and she against hers. He was glad the sun was setting so he didn’t have to worry what he looked like. Sometimes he wasn’t sure the expression on his face made any sense.
Now he had to burp. He just went ahead and did it loudly and said, “Greetings from the interior.”
Stevie said, “Your dad’s in prison, isn’t he?”
“Where’d you get that one?”
“Is he?”
“No, that’s more my stepdad,” James said. “Just some guy, really. He’s my mother’s fault, not mine.”
“And your real dad’s in the service, huh?”
James draped his arms over the wheel and rested his chin on them, staring out … So now she suddenly thought they should tell their worst secrets to each other.
He got out and went behind some scrub and took a leak. The sun had dropped behind Camelback Mountain southwest of them. The sky was still pure blue above and then at the horizon tinted some other color, a rosy yellow that went away when you looked at it.
Beside her again in the truck he said, “Well, I just made up my mind: I’m joining the army infantry.”
“Really? The infantry, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Then what? Specialize in something?”
“I’m going to get over there to Vietnam.”
“And then what?”
“I’m going to fuck up a whole lot of people.”
“God,” she said. “You’re not with the guys here, you know. I’m a female.”
“Sorry about that, chief.”
She put her hand on the back of his neck and touched his hair tenderly with her fingers. To stop her doing it, he sat up straight.
“That’s an awful thing to say, James.”
“What.”
“What you said.”
“It just came out. I didn’t mean it, I don’t think.”
“Then don’t say it.”
“Shit. Do you think I’m that evil?”
“Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.”
They kissed some more.
“Well, anyhow,” he said, “what do you feel like doing at the moment?”
“What … I don’t know. Do we have gas?”
“Yep.” It thrilled him she’d said “we.”
“Let’s drive around and see what’s going on.”
“Let’s take the long way.” That meant he’d make a serious pass at her.
“Okay.” That meant she wouldn’t mind.
James stood out front of the house in the dark as his mother came home from work in Tom Mooney’s convertible Chevy, staring out of the passenger side with her mouth lagging open, her face hidden by a ragged straw hat, a bandanna protecting her neck. Mooney waved to James, and James dropped his cigarette butt to the earth and stomped it out and waved. By then the Chevy had gone.
She went on inside without a word for her son, this silence both unusual and welcome.
It lasted until he followed her into the kitchen. “If you don’t think that ranch has about wore me out, just come feel the muscle a-quivering on this arm. If I heat a can of soup, you better eat it.
Don’t make me fuss and then just sit there dreaming your dreams.” She turned on the kitchen light and stood under it looking small and spent. “I’ve got baloney and I’ve got tomaters. Do you want a sandwich? Sit down, and I’ll make us soup and sandwiches. Where’s Burris?”
“Who?”
“He’ll be around. He’s always hungry. I lost weight while I carried him to term. I started out one-nineteen, and in my ninth month I was down to one-eleven. He fed on me from the inside.” Wiping at her face, she smeared it with dirt from her hand.
“Mom. Wash up before you cook.”
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “I’m just so tired I forget I’m alive. Open the can for me, hon.”
They ate peanut butter and jelly and Campbell’s soup.
“I’ll cut up this tomater.”
“I just ate. I don’t want it.”
“You’ve got to have vegetables.”
“There’s vegetables in the soup. That’s why it’s ‘Vegetable Soup.’”
“Don’t run away. I mean to talk to you. When is your school done for the summer?”
“It finished up today.”
“Come to work at the ranch, then.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“What don’t you know? Do you know a dollar when you don’t see one? Because I don’t see one.”
“I was thinking about the military. Maybe the army.”
“When? Now?”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Seventeen and crazy.”
“Bill Junior was seventeen. You signed for him.”
“It didn’t hurt him, I suppose.”
“He called today.”
“He called? What did he say?”
“Nothing. He’s in Honolulu.”
“I’ve never seen a dime from him. Not that I’d ever ask it.”
“If I get in the army, I’ll send you some.”
“Once or twice he sent some money. Not regular. He hasn’t lately. And I can’t ask him because my pride strangles me.”
“I’ll send some every payday. I swear,” James said.
“You decide that on your own.”
“Does that mean you’d sign for me?”
She didn’t answer.
He picked up a fork and started eating sliced tomato. “You send me the envelope every month, I’ll send you some money back inside it.”
“Did you talk to the recruiters yet?”
“I will.”
“When?”
“I will.”
“Will when?”
“Monday.”
“If you have the papers Monday night, and you can show me some good reasons for the service, I might sign. But if you’re just dreaming, then Tuesday you better wake up and get over to the ranch with me. I’ve got the phone back on, but the rent is waiting on the Lord to move. Where’s Burris?”
“He’ll come when he’s hungry.”
“He’s always hungry,” she said, and began to say all over again the same things she’d just told him, because she was unable not to say them.
His mother was unable to be quiet. She read the Bible all the time. She was too old to be his mother, too worn out and stupid to be his mother.
Bill Houston thoroughly enjoyed beer, but there came a point where it started to stick in his throat. This tavern must face west, because the burning sun poured through the open door.
No air-conditioning, but he was used to that in the places he drank in. It was a dive, all right.
He returned from the toilet, and Kinney was still interrogating the beach bum: “What did you do? Tell me exactly what you did.”
“Nothing. Fuck it.”
Bill Houston sat down and said, “I got nothing against you boys. Got a little brother wants to go in the Marines.”
The ex-marine was drunk. “That ain’t nothing. I’ve seen some things.”
“He’s talking like he did something to some woman over there,” Kinney said.
“Where?” Houston said.
“Vietnam, goddamn it,” Kinney said. “Aren’t you listening?”
“I’ve seen some things,” the boy said. “What it was, they held this woman down and this one guy cut her pussy out. That stuff happens there all the time.”
“Jesus God. No shit?”
“I did some of it too.”
“You did it?”
“I was there.”
Houston said, “You really”—He couldn’t quite repeat it—”you really did that?”
Kinney said, “You cut up some bitch’s cunt?”
“I was right there when it happened. Right nearby, right in the same—almost in the same village.”
“It was your guys? Your outfit? Somebody in your platoon?”
“Not ours. It was some Korean guys, a Korean outfit. Those fuckers are senseless.”
“Now shut the fuck up,” Kinney said, “and tell us what the fuck you did.”
“There’s a lot of bad business that goes on,” the man said.
“You’re bullshit. The U.S. Marines would never put up with that. You’re so bullshit.”
The guy held up both hands like an arrestee. “Hey, wow, man—what’s all the excitement about?”
“Just tell me you cut up a living woman, and I’ll admit you’re not bullshit.”
The bartender shouted, “You! I told you before! You want beef? You want scrap?”—a big fat Hawaiian with no shirt on.
“This is a Moke right here,” their companion said as the bartender threw down his rag and came over.
“I told you to get out of here.”
“That was yesterday.”
“I told you to get out of here with that talk. That means I don’t want to see you yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
“Hey, I got a beer here.”
“Take it with you, I don’t care.”
Kinney stood up. “Let’s get the fuck out of this shit-hole Moke joint.” He put his hand up under his shirt at the level of his belt.
“You pull a gun in here you gonna do time, if I don’t kill you.”
“I get mad easy on a hot day.”
“Get out, you three.”
“You making me mad?”
The young bum laughed insanely and hopped backward toward the door, dangling his arms like a monkey’s.
Houston hurried for the exit too, saying, “Come on, come on, come on!” He was pretty sure he’d actually seen a gun butt in the waist of Kinney’s jeans.
“See—that’s a Moke, right there,” the bum said. “They act all rough and tough. You get an advantage on them, and right away they cry like little babies.”
They each bought a jug of Mad Dog 20/20 from a grocer who demanded they buy three loaves of Wonder Bread along with the wine, but it was still a bargain. They ate a little of the bread and tossed the rest to a couple of dogs. Soon they walked, drunk, surrounded by a pack of hungry strays, toward a glaring white strip of beach and the black sea and blue froth crashing on the sand.
A man stopped his car, a white, official-looking Ford Galaxie, and rolled down his window. He was an admiral in uniform. “Are you fellas enjoying the hell out of yourselves?”
“Yes, sir!” Kinney said, saluting by putting his middle finger to his eyebrow.
“I hope like hell you are,” the admiral said. “Because hard times are coming for assholes like you.” He rolled up his window and drove away.
The rest of the afternoon they spent drinking on the beach. Kinney sat against the trunk of a palm tree. The bum lay flat on his back with his Mad Dog balanced on his chest.
Houston took off his shoes and socks to feel the sand mounding under his arches. He felt his heart expanding. At this moment he understood the phrase “tropical paradise.”
He told his two comrades, “What I’m saying, I mean, about these Mokes. I think they’re related to the Indians that live down around my home. And not just them Indians, but also Indians that are from India, and every other kind of person you can think of who’s like that, who’s got something Oriental going on, and that’s why I think, really, there ain’t that many different kinds of people on this earth. And that’s why I’m against war …” He waved his Mad Dog around. “And that’s why I’m a pacifist.” It was wonderful to stand on the beach before this audience and gesture with a half gallon of wine and talk utter shit.
However, Kinney did disturbing things. With a dreamy look on his face he tipped his bottle above his shiny black dress shoes and watched the wine dribble onto the toes. He tossed several pinches of sand in the bum’s direction, speckling the bum’s chest, his face, his mouth. The bum brushed it away and pretended not to realize where it was coming from.
Kinney suggested taking the party to a friend’s house. “I want you to meet this guy,” he told the bum, “and then we’re gonna fix your bullshit.”
“Fine with me, asshole,” the bum said.
Kinney held up his thumb and forefinger pressed together. “I’d like to get you in a space about that big,” he said.
They headed across the beach to find the house of Kinney’s friend. Houston was in agony, dealing with bare feet on the hot sand, and now on the black asphalt.
“Where are your shoes, you moron?”
Houston carried his white socks in the pockets of his Levi’s, but his shoes were gone.
He stopped to purchase a seventeen-cent pair of zoris at a store. They had a sale on Thunderbird, but Kinney said his friend owed him money and promised to take them on the town later on.
Houston had loved those ivory-white bucks. To keep them white he’d powdered them with talc. And now? Abandoned to the tide.
“Is this a military base?” he asked. They were in some kind of development of cheap little pink and blue dwellings.
“These are bungalows,” the bum said.
“Hey,” Houston said to their companion. “What is your name, man?”
“I’ll never tell,” the bum said.
“He’s totally full of bullshit,” Kinney said.
Maybe these bungalows seemed a bit slummy, but not compared to what Houston had seen in Southeast Asia. A mist of white sand covered the asphalt walkways, and as the three of them strode among the coconut palms he heard the surf thunder in the distance. He’d passed through Honolulu several times, and he liked it a lot. It simmered and stank as much as any other tropical place, but it was part of the United States, and things were in good repair.
Kinney checked the numbers above the doorways. “This is my buddy’s house. Let’s go around back.”
Houston said, “Why don’t we just ring the doorbell?”
“I don’t want to ring the doorbell. Do you want to ring the doorbell?”
“Well, no, man. He ain’t my friend.”
They followed Kinney around the building.
At one of the back windows, where a light shone, Kinney stood on tiptoe and peered inside, then he pressed himself against the trunk of a palm tree beside the wall and said to the beach bum, “Do me a favor, tap on the screen.”
“Why should I?”
“I intend to surprise this guy.”
“What for?”
“Just do it, will you? This guy owes me money, and I want to surprise him about it.”
The bum scratched his fingernails along the window screen. The light went off within. A man’s face hovered in the window frame, barely visible behind the screen. “What’s the story, mister?”
Kinney said, “Greg.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me.”
“Oh, hey, man—Kinney.”
“Yeah, that’s right, it’s me. You got the two-sixty?”
“I didn’t see you there, man.”
“You got my two-sixty?”
“You just back on the island? Where you been?”
“I want my two-sixty.”
“Shit, man. I have a phone. Why didn’t you call?”
“I wrote you we’d be pulling in the first week in June. What do you think this is? It’s the first week in June. And I want my money.”
“Shit, man. I don’t have all of it.”
“How much you got, Greg?”
“Shit, man. I can probably get some of it.”
Kinney said, “You are a lying piece of genuine shit.”
From his waistband he pulled a blue .45 automatic and aimed it at the man, and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared. Right at that time Houston heard an explosion. He tried to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.
“Come on, come on,” Kinney said.
There was a hole through the window screen.
“Houston!”
“We’re done. We’re going.”
“We are?”
Houston couldn’t feel his own feet. He moved along as if on wheels. They passed houses, parked vehicles, buildings. Now traffic surrounded them. They’d come a long way in what seemed like three or four seconds. He was out of breath and sopped with sweat.
The crazy bum said, “That’s pretty nifty, man. I think you won that conversation.”
“I don’t forgive my debtors. I don’t forgive those who have trespassed against me.”
“I gotta go.”
“Yeah, I bet you gotta go, you stupid fuck.”
“Where are we?” Houston said.
The bum was moving at a tangent now, off the sidewalk, into the street.
“Hey. I don’t like your face,” Kinney said as the guy left. “You crazy treacherous coward.”
“What?” the guy said. “Listen, don’t fuck with me.”
“Don’t fuck with you?”
“I think that’s my bus,” the guy said, and sprinted across the street right through squealing traffic and got behind the cover of a bus.
Kinney shouted, “Hey! Marine! Fuck you! Yeah! Semper Fi!”
Houston doubled up and vomited all over a mailbox.
Kinney didn’t look right. A greasy film covered his eyes. He said, “Let’s get a drink. Have you ever had a depth charger? Shot of bourbon in a mug of beer?”
“Yeah.”
“I could use a bellyful of them bastards.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Houston said.
They found a place with air-conditioning, and Kinney got the two of them set up with beers and shots in a booth in the darkness at the back and began preparing depth chargers.
“This’ll put some torque in your pork. Ever had one of these?”
“Sure, you drop a shot in a beer.”
“Well, I just know how you make one,” Houston said.
Without any sense of the intervening hours, Houston awakened sweaty and all bitten up by mosquitoes and sand fleas, a sagging mattress swallowing him alive, a headache pounding against his skull. He could hear the surf pounding also. His first fully conscious thought was that he’d seen one man shoot another man, just like that.
He seemed to be quartered in some kind of open-air bedroom. He made his way to the faucet in the corner, where he drank deeply of the sweet water and peed, first removing from the sink a wet bedsheet with a large black-rimmed hole burned in its middle. He found his watch, wallet, pants, and shirt, but he’d lost his shoes on the beach, he now remembered, and he was pretty sure he’d left his kit bag at the Y. His seventeen-cent zoris seemed to have walked away on their own.
His wallet held a five and two ones. He collected ninety cents in coins scattered on the bamboo floor. He stepped out to get his bearings.
His head swam. The water he’d gorged on was making him drunk all over again.
The sign said king kane hotel, and it said sailors welcome.
He kept an eye out for Kinney, but he didn’t see anyone at all, not a living soul. It was like a desert island. Palms, the bright beach, the dark ocean. He headed away from the beach, toward town.
He didn’t return to the Bonners Ferry. He had no intention of getting anywhere near her berth, or anywhere else he might run into Kinney, the last person he wanted to see. He missed the sailing and spent two weeks ashore without liberty, sleeping on the beach and eating once per day at a Baptist mission on the waterfront, until he was confident Kinney was closer to Hong Kong than to Honolulu; then he turned himself in to the Shore Patrol for a week’s recuperation in the brig.
His rate was rolled back to E-3 and he was a seaman again, which meant he automatically lost his Boilerman rating. This was the second demotion of his career. The first had resulted from “repeated minor infractions” during his tour at Subic Bay Naval Base—after he’d taken to the warrens of vice outside its gates.
Houston spent the following eighteen months assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base in Yokosuka, Japan, mostly with rowdy black men, low-aptitude morons, and worthless bust-outs like himself. More often than he liked, he remembered the admiral in Honolulu who’d lowered the window of his white Ford Galaxie and promised, “Hard times are coming.”
Because he now had a girlfriend who let him go all the way, James forgot about the army for a while. Once or twice a week he put an air mattress and a sleeping bag in the back of his mother’s pickup and snuck Stevie Dale out of her unconscious household and made love to her in the predawn desert chill. Twice, sometimes three times in a night. He kept a tally. Between July 10 and October 20, at least fifty times. But not as many as sixty.
Stevie didn’t seem moved to participate. All she did was lie there. He wanted to ask her, “Don’t you like it?” He wanted to ask, “Couldn’t you move a little bit?” But in the atmosphere of disappointment and doubt that fell down around him after their lovemaking, he was unable to communicate with her at all, other than to pretend to listen while she talked. She talked about school, about subjects, teachers, cheerleaders—of whom she was one, just an alternate, but she expected to join the main squad next year—nonstop in his ear. Her gladness was a fist stuffing him deeper into the toilet.
He had more on his mind than his love life. He worried about his mother. She didn’t make much money at the ranch. She exhausted herself. She’d grown thinner, knobbier. She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law husband. James had never accompanied her on these pilgrimages, and Burris, now almost ten, refused to serve as escort—just ran away into the neighborhood of shacks and trailers and drifting dust when the poor old woman started getting herself ready on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
James didn’t know how he felt about Stevie, but he knew his mother broke his heart. Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her? She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. James suspected she was just faking herself out, flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window. Having just about reached a decision in his mind to quit school and see the army recruiters, he stalled for many weeks, standing at the top of the high dive. Or on the edge of the nest. “Mom,” he said, “every eagle has to fly.” “Go ahead on, then,” she said.
The army turned him down. They wouldn’t take minors. “The Marines will take you when you’re seventeen, but the army won’t,” he told his mother.
“Can’t you wait a half a year?”
“More like three-fourths of a year.”
“That’s a lot of growing and learning you could do in school, for your education. Then you could graduate and be ready for your service, ready all the way through.”
“I got to go.”
“Go in the Marines, then.”
“I don’t want the Marines.”
“Why not?”
“They’re too stuck up.”
“Then why are we talking about the Marines?”
“ ‘Cause the army won’t take me till I’m eighteen.”
“Not even if I sign?”
“Not even if anybody signs. I need a birth certificate.”
“I have your birth certificate. It says ‘1949.’ Couldn’t you just as easy change it to ‘1948’? Just close up the tail on the nine to where it looks like a eight.”
On the last Friday in October, James went back to the army recruiter with a lying birth certificate and came home with instructions to report for muster on Monday.
The first two weeks of his basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina were the longest he’d experienced. Each day seemed a life entire in itself, lived in uncertainty, abasement, confusion, fatigue. These gave way to an overriding state of terror as the notions of killing and being killed began to fill his thoughts. He felt all right in the field, in the ranks, on the course with the others, yelling like monsters, bayoneting straw men. Off alone he could hardly see straight, thanks to this fear. Only exhaustion saved him. Being driven past his physical limits put a glass wall between him and all of this—he couldn’t quite hear, couldn’t quite remember what he’d just been looking at, what he’d just been shown. He waited only for sleep. He dreamed hysterically throughout, but slept for as long as they let him.
They assigned him to Vietnam. He knew it meant he was dead. He hadn’t applied, hadn’t even asked how you apply, they’d just handed him his fate. Four days out of basic, here he carried his lunch toward a table in the enlisted mess, the steamy odor of reconstituted mashed potatoes rising toward his face, and his legs felt like rubber as he stepped toward a future scattered with booby traps and land mines: they’d be on patrol and he’d be too far ahead of the others in a line of guys in the jungle, he’d be in front and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss. There was no sense sitting here, spooning up his lunch off a partitioned tray. He should be saving his life, getting out of this mess hall, disappearing maybe in some big town where they had dirty movies that never close.
Two of the guys came over and started talking about dying in battle.
“Are you trying to get me spooked worse than I am already?” James said, trying to sound humorous.
“The odds are you won’t get killed.”
“Shut up.”
“Really, there’s not that many battles or anything.”
“Did you see that guy over there?” James said, and they had: three tables away sat a very small black man in dress greens, a first sergeant. He didn’t look big enough to join the army, but on his chest he wore many ribbons, including the blue one with five white stars signifying the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Whenever they saw a soldier with decorations, James and the others made a point of passing close to get a look. That was it, wasn’t it?—to be drinking a cup of coffee with this person inside of you hardened and blackened by heroic deeds, and kids walking by with a weak feeling in their stomachs, trying not to stare. But in order to enjoy it, you had to get home alive.
When the others left, James returned to the line for another helping. People complained about the food, and therefore James complained too; but actually he liked it.
The black man with the blue ribbon on his chest beckoned him to his table.
James didn’t know what to do but go on over.
“Come on, sit down,” the sergeant said. “You got that look.”
“Yeah? What look?”
“Just sit down,” the sergeant said. “I ain’t that black.”
James joined him.
“I says you got that look.”
“Yeah?”
“The look says I wanted to drive a tank or work on helicopter engines, but instead they sending me to the jungle and get shot at.”
James said nothing, lest he weep about it.
“Your sarge told me, Conrad, Conroy.”
“Sergeant, yeah,” James said, extremely nervous. “Sergeant Connell.”
“Why didn’t you think of something to volunteer for, to get you out of it?”
Now James feared he’d laugh. “Because I’m stupid.”
“You’re going to the Twenty-fifth, right? Which brigade?”
“The Three.”
“I’m from the Twenty-fifth.”
“Yeah? No shit?”
“Not the Three, though. The Fourth.”
“But the Three—are they, are they—you know—fighting?”
“Some units are. Unfortunately, yes.”
James felt if he could only say, Sarge, I don’t want to fight, he would surely save himself.
“You worried about getting killed?”
“Sort of, you know, I mean—yeah.”
“Nothing to worry about. By the time The Thing eats you, you all emptied up, you ain’t thinking. Nothing but jazz happening.”
James couldn’t quite take comfort from this statement.
“Yep.” The small black man hunched forward, touching the fingertips of each hand together rapidly. “Come here. Listen,” he said. James leaned toward him, half afraid the man might grab him by the ear or something. “In a combat zone, you don’t want to be a pin on a map. Sooner or later the enemy’s going to hammer on that pin with a superior force. You want to have some mobility options, don’t you? You want some decision-sharing, don’t you? That means you want to volunteer for a Recon outfit. That’s a voluntary thing. You volunteer for that. After that, you never, never volunteer for nothing, nothing, nothing, not even to jump in bed with a red-hot female, not even James Bond’s girlfriend. That’s rule number one, is don’t volunteer. And rule number two is that when in the foreign land, you don’t violate the women, you don’t hurt the livestock, and if possible not the property, except for burning the hooches, that goes with the job.”
“That’s a Medal of Honor you got there.”
“Yes, it is. So you listen to what I say.”
“All right. Okay.”
“I might be black as coal, but I’m your brother. You know why?”
“I don’t guess I do.”
“Because you’re going over to the Twenty-fifth as a replacement, ain’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me, I ain’t your sir. You going to the Twenty-fifth, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. And you know what? I came from the Twenty-fifth. Not the Third Brigade, the Fourth. But anyway, I could be the one you’re replacing. So I giving you the dope.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“No, you don’t thank me, I thank you. You know why? It’s me you could be replacing.”
“You’re welcome,” James said.
“Now: what I just said, you take all this under your advisement.”
“Will do.”
James enjoyed the way they talked in the infantry, and he tried to talk that way too. Mobility options. Pin on a map. Superior force. Under advisement. These were the same phrases a recon sergeant had used while delivering a talk to their barracks just two weeks earlier. Now the phrases rang true, they made sense. One fact stood out clear: if you had to be a grunt, you might as well be recon.
After more than a year in the States, in California—two months at the Defense Language Institute in Carmel, and nearly twelve months at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey—Skip Sands returned to Southeast Asia and, somewhere between Honolulu and Wake Island, flying miles above the Pacific on a 707, came into the shadow of the mystery that would devour him.
After the 707 to Tokyo he went by prop plane to Manila, by train to the bottom of the mountain north of there, by car once again to the staff house in San Marcos, ready for a confrontation with Eddie Aguinaldo, and also happy at the prospect of the major’s pointless sweaty jungle night patrols, only to find that the patrols had been discontinued and Eddie Aguinaldo was nowhere around. The Huks had been declared extinct. Anders Pitchfork was long gone. For company Sands had only the household crew and occasional vacationing staff from Manila, usually overworked couriers who slept a lot. He waited nearly a month for one of them to bring word from the colonel.
Word arrived in a courier pouch, on a photo postcard of the Washington Monument. A yellow seal pasted to a corner warned, KEEP OFFICIAL BUSINESS UNDER WRAPS / COUNSEL CORRESPONDENTS TO USE ENVELOPES / THANK YOU / YOUR AMERICAN POST OFFICE.
Merry Christmas somewhat early. Pack your files, the whole show. Head to Manila. See the Section. I’m in Langley bouncing a desk off the walls. Saw Boston last week. Your Aunt and Cousins send warmest wishes. See you in Saigon. Unc FX.
But the files were already packed, or so he assumed. His first day back he’d found, in the closet he’d left them in, three olive army-issue footlockers, the lid of each stenciled with the name BENéT W.F.—the accent applied by hand with a soft-point pen—and each one heavily padlocked.
Having had no word as to the keys to these treasures, he left that matter for another day and did the next indicated thing, which was to travel to the embassy in Manila in a staff car almost entirely filled with his uncle’s project. There he was instructed to keep the car and travel some forty miles beyond the capital to Clark Air Base, where he’d board military transport for South Vietnam.
Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve. His itinerary would have him taking off on New Year’s Day from Clark Field for the airport at Tan Son Nhut, outside Saigon.
At last! Feeling as if he’d already taken to the air, he sat in the staff car on Dewey Boulevard watching the sun quiver on Manila Bay, and by its glorious light, in order to calm himself, he glanced through his mail. An alumni newsletter from Bloomington. Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, both many weeks old. In a large manila envelope he found his final batch of California mail, forwarded from there through his APO address. These letters had chased him for two months. From his Aunt Grace and Uncle Ray—the eldest of his father’s four siblings—came a greeting card envelope with something whacking around inside it, one of the new John F. Kennedy half dollars, it turned out, and a Hallmark card, to which the coin had evidently been taped before coming loose on its ten-thousand-mile journey. Skip had turned thirty on October 28, and in commemoration of this milestone here came fifty cents, double the usual, no more quarters for such a big boy.
Also, quite a rare thing: a letter from the widow Beatrice Sands, Skip’s mother. It felt thick. He didn’t open it.
And here was a letter from Kathy Jones. He’d received several in the last year, each one crazier than the last, had saved them all, had ceased answering.
Are you finally here in Vietnam? Maybe in the next village? I welcome you to the Bible in Panavision and Technicolor. But here it’s good not to be from your United States of America. Too many resentments. They don’t mind the French so much, though. They beat the French.
Do you remember Damulog?
From the next paragraph the word “affair” leapt up at him, and he stopped reading.
Nothing further from the colonel.
He hadn’t seen his uncle in over fourteen months, had concluded that one or both of them had been sidelined owing to the questionable business on Mindanao. Something, anyway, had kept them both from the action. He’d taken his course in Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute, and what started by looking like the sensible prelude to a Saigon posting turned into eleven baffling months spent with a crew of three other translators, not one Vietnamese national among them, working on a project of doubtful utility, that is, pursuing a patent folly—to extract an encyclopedia of mythological references from over seven hundred volumes of Vietnamese literature, an endeavor waged mostly in three basement-level offices of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and consisting mainly of the listing, categorization, and cataloging of fairy-tale figures.
This he understood to be his uncle’s contribution to the Psychological Operations Group of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, for which the colonel now served, Skip further understood, as chief CIA liaison. In fact, all but officially the colonel ran Psy Ops for MAC-V, according to an Agency officer from Langley named Showalter, who checked in with Skip’s translation team on a more or less monthly basis; and before long Skip would help the colonel run it. “When does he want me there?” “January or so.” “Outstanding,” Skip said, completely infuriated by the delay. This conversation took place in June.
The fanciful project ended with sudden postings to other places for all the participants, who boxed and shipped to Langley the useless material.
He opened the letter from his mother.
“Dear Son Skipper”—her hand rounded, slanting, large, covering several pages of six-by-eight-inch stationery bond:
I’m sure not much for writing, so first thing, nothing’s wrong. Wouldn’t want you to think it’s only bad news would get me to sit down and send a greeting to you. It’s really the opposite, a really fine day of Indian summer. The bluest sky, not a dab of a cloud anywhere up there. The trains go by with a different sound due to leaves turning on the trees, it’s a happy greeting now, pretty soon we’ll hear that lonely sound of a whistle in bare winter. This afternoon it’s warm enough you want a breeze through the house. Open the windows and hear the redwing blackbirds calling. And the grass is still coming on, you can see where it needs one more cutting before the fall is really official. When I saw how pretty the day was I thought, “I think I’ll write a letter!”
Thank you for the money. I bought a new drier to go with the washer. Got it full of clothes right now and going round and round. But in fine weather like this I like to put the big things like the sheets and bedding out on the line and dry them in the world, and that’s just what I’ve done. Got the sheets on the line like in the old days. Yes, I ordered a drier, I didn’t get a TV. You said get one, but I didn’t. When I feel like I need entertainment I go to the shelves and take down The Old Curiosity Shop or Emma or Silas Marner and read just any old part and nine out of ten times I have to go back to the beginning and read it all. I just have to. Those are good old friends.
I told you about old Rev. Pierce retiring. There’s a new man at the church, Pastor Paul. Pretty young. His last name is Conniff, but he goes by Pastor Paul. He puts his new slant on things. He kept me interested, I went every Sunday all last winter, then the weather relents, the sun shines, things get busy, and I haven’t been since early April probably. No TV, but I try to keep up with the news. Isn’t it terrible news? I don’t know what to think. Sometimes I wish I could talk to somebody about what I think, then I think I better not. I know you joined the government to be of service to the world, but our leaders are sending good boys to wreck another country and maybe lose their lives without any sound explanation.
Well, a half hour’s gone by since that last sentence. That new drier ding-donged and got me running to do the folding while it was still hot. Excuse me for the things I say. Maybe I’ll just say what I want and go back and write this letter over, cross out the bad parts and just send the nice parts. No, I better not. War means something different to me than it does to generals and soldiers. As of next December 7 twenty-six years will be gone since we lost your father, and every day I still miss how it was. After a while I had boyfriends after your father, and really spent some time with Kenneth Brooke before he took a job with Northwest Airlines, but it was a little too soon for us before we’d gotten it all sorted out what we’d do, Ken and I, so when he moved to Minneapolis, that was that. Otherwise I think we would have gotten engaged, which means you would have had a stepdad. But that’s off the subject. What was the subject? Goodness, I better not send this letter! I don’t know if you even knew it was a little serious between me and Ken Brooke. Do you even remember Ken at all? Every other Christmas he and his family come back home to visit his folks and his sister. The other Christmases they go back to his wife’s home town, I don’t know where that is. Boy, am I having one of those days.
I’d better get out that old push-mower and do the yard one last time for this year. I’ll have to oil it up. Had it done by the kids all summer, one or other of the Strauss kids, Thomas or Daniel, but they’re in school now. They took turns with their Dad’s big noisy gas-powered monster. Made two dollars each time. That old push-mower is an old friend of mine. Remember how I used to do the yard—”And stay away from those blades with your fingers!”—that’s what I hollered, like those blades would jump up and bite your fingers off, even with nobody pushing. Then one day I hear those blades whirring and look out the window and here comes Skipper in his teeshirt with his skinny arms, pushing past the window like The Little Engine That Could. Did the whole yard on your first try. I hope you remember, because I remember so clearly. I hope you remember how good you felt, and I will too.
I appreciate the little notes you send. People ask about you, and it’s good to have news to relate. Attending the Language Institute, attending the Naval Post-Grad, attached to U.S. Embassy, pretty impressive, makes me feel like a star.
We’ve had a beautiful day all day, but here about three PM it’s gusting up a little, gets the sheets waving and slapping at the wind. That’s the whitest they can get, when they’re dried in the sun and the breeze. And we’re lucky about that breeze, because the tracks aren’t far, but the breeze is always the other way, no grit coming down. Makes me glad we live on the “other side” of the tracks! I remember when I saw you go by that window. I saw your strength of character in a flash. I thought when I saw you, He’s a goer like his Dad, he’ll get himself through college on jobs and scholarships, nothing’s stopping that little lad. And now more study, more grad school. Army, Navy, Embassy, seems like everybody needs you.
Here, six lines from the finish, he had to stop reading and curse himself. He’d spent fourteen months in the States, could have arranged a visit home before he’d left again. But he’d ducked her. Sure: war, intrigue, the fates—certainly, he’d face them. Just, please, not Mom. Not her laundry flapping in the sorrows of autumn. Not Clements, Kansas, with its historical license to be tiny, low, and square. Here, in Manila, at approximately fourteen degrees latitude north and fifty-seven longitude east, he couldn’t get much farther away. But it wasn’t far enough. It hurt him to think of her all alone. Particularly after his time at the Language Institute. True to the colonel’s word (“I’ll send you to the school, we’ll work that out”), he’d been posted, just before that Thanksgiving of 1965, to the institute on a high bluff overlooking Carmel. The view was that of low fog hunched over the coast, or higher fog wrapped around the grounds, or, on the clear days, the pure Pacific heartrendingly removed from him while he underwent his total immersion course in Vietnamese, which meant four weeks’ confinement to the facility followed by four weeks with weekend passes only. On his first leave he took Communion a few miles down the coast at the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a nunnery open to the public for Mass on Sunday mornings. The laity faced the altar, and the sisters, cut off by their vows from the world, sat or stood, no telling which, behind a wall, hidden even from their families, some of whom sat in the pews to glimpse the upturned palms of the cloistered acolytes reaching through a small window to receive the Body of Christ. Watching them that morning, thinking of them now, eased his bonds. Had he taken a vow of separation? No. Whatever his circumstances, he was free, and fighting for the freedom of all. But his mother: Some sort of vow undertaken there. Some sort of walling-in acceded to.
Skip, I pray for you and for the whole country. I’m going to start up with the church attendance again.
I’m sorry I hardly ever write, I do appreciate your notes, but it takes a certain kind of day to make me get out the pen and paper.
Well, there you have it, another letter or something!
Thinking of you,
Mom
Having proved himself with this one, he felt he might face the letter from Kathy Jones. But it had grown too dark to read.
He’d spent some considerable time with these communications, and his taxi hadn’t moved half a block. “Is there a problem?” he asked the driver. “What’s wrong?” “Something is delaying,” the driver said. Far around the curve of the boulevard as it followed the contours of the bay, he saw the lights of traffic moving freely. But here they were stuck. “I’ll be back,” he said. He got out and walked toward the trouble, skirting the stalled cars, wending among the rancid puddles. A large city bus held up the flow, stopped by a single man who stood lurching in the middle of the street, drunk, his face covered with blood, T-shirt ripped down the front, weeping as he confronted this vehicle, the biggest thing he could challenge, apparently, after somebody had beaten him in a fight. Horns, voices, gunned engines. Keeping to the shadows, Skip stood and watched: the bloody face, deformed by passion, shining in the bus’s headlights; the head back, the arms limp, as if the man hung by hooks in his armpits. This reeking desperate city. It filled him with joy.
At the beginning of James’s furlough his mother took three days off from the McCormick Ranch, and they spent the time watching television together in the small house at the edge of the desert. The day he got back she unpacked his Class A greens and straightened the creases carefully with her steam iron. “Now you’re doing something for your country,” she said. “We have to stand up against the Communists. They’re Godless.” It might have meant something, if she didn’t say the same about the Jews and Catholics and Mormons.
After the old woman went back to work, James saw a great deal of Stevie Dale. The afternoon of Christmas Eve the two of them drove in his mother’s pickup out to the edge of the hills on the Carefree Highway, to the site of a one-car accident in which the driver had been killed.
“See there?” Stevie said. “He hit a saguaro, then a paloverde, then that big rock.”
The blackened wreck had been pried away from a boulder by emergency crews some days earlier, but hadn’t yet been removed. The car had turned turtle and burned.
“He must’ve been flying.”
“Only one in the car. Only car on the road.”
They popped a couple of beers each, and quickly Stevie got tipsy. They sat looking at the wreck like a charred, upturned hand.
“The driver burned to death inside,” she said.
“I hope he was knocked out,” James said. “For his sake.”
The car had been red, but the flames had melted its paint. Now it showed several patches of bare, bright metal. It might have been a Chevrolet, there was really no telling.
“Every single thing in the world is slowly burning up,” she said.
“Yeah? Is it? I don’t get you.”
“Everything’s oxidizing. Everything in the world.”
He gathered she’d come by this news in her chemistry class.
During basic he’d thought of her continually, but it was nothing personal. He’d thought just as often about at least seven other girls from their high school. Being with her here, even surrounded by these unbounded spaces, he felt trapped in a vise.
He said, “Can I ask you something? The first time we did it, were you—you know—a virgin, or something? Was that your first time?”
“Are you serious?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Yeah. I mean no.”
“What exactly do you think I am?”
“I was just asking.”
“Yes, I was a virgin. This isn’t something you do every day, or I don’t anyway. What do you think I am,” she said, “some motorcycle mama?”
That made James laugh, which in turn made Stevie cry.
“Stevie, Stevie, Stevie,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He was glad it was Christmas Eve. She’d spend tomorrow with her family, and he wouldn’t have to see her.
But it was only the beer working on her, and in two minutes she’d accepted his apology. “The sunset’s always beautiful when there’s clouds,” she said.
In the dusk it would cool off quickly now. He felt a breeze starting, the day’s last warm breath as it ended. Stevie kissed him many times.
In South Carolina they’d treated him like a beast, and he’d survived. He’d grown bigger, stronger, older, better. But having returned to the world he’d grown up in, he had no idea how to sit in a room with his mother, or what to say to this sixteen-year-old girl, no idea how to get through a few days in his life until he shipped to Louisiana for Advanced Infantry Training, until he got back where people would tell him what to do.
Stevie said, “I guess we’ll open presents and all that stuff pretty early,” and placed her loving fingertips on the back of his neck. “What time do you want to come over?”
As he considered this simple question, it seemed to widen until it split his very thoughts open.
He wrenched at his door’s handle and got out into the air and walked past the exploded wreck and stood bent over with his hands on his knees, barely keeping upright, his gaze lifted toward the winter horizon. He wanted somebody to come out of the faint pink and blue distances and save him. Far away he saw the ripples of a mirage—either a horrible burning death in Vietnam, like that of the man pried from this charred Chevrolet, or a parade of years filled with Stevie’s questions and her fingers touching his neck.
Sands stayed overnight in a private room with a bath at Clark Field’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, most of which was devoted to dorm-style living in a collegiate atmosphere, with doors opening and closing and half-dressed young men shouting up and down the halls and the sounds of showers and Nancy Sinatra tunes warring with Stan Getz bossa nova instrumentals, and the stink of Right Guard spray deodorant. He arrived around eight at night. He and the driver got his footlockers into his room. He spoke to no one, turned in early, got up late the next day—New Year’s Eve—and boarded the base shuttle bus and asked the Filipino driver to let him off wherever he could find some breakfast.
Thus Sands found himself at 9:00 a.m. on December 31, 1966, at the snack bar in a bowling alley filled, even at that hour, with airmen pursuing improved averages in a clattering atmosphere. He ate bacon and eggs off a plastic plate at a table alongside rows and rows of bowling balls and watched. Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands determined he’d give it a try as soon as his breakfast settled. Meanwhile, he drank black coffee and read his letter from Kathy Jones. She wrote in a neat hand, apparently with a fountain pen, in blue ink, on flimsy, grayish, probably Vietnamese-made onionskin. Her first few letters to him had been direct, chatty, lonely, affectionate. She’d wondered if they might meet in Saigon, and Sands had looked forward to that. Now these recent letters, these confused ruminations—
I’ve dealt with jokers all my life. Just jokers. No aces, no kings. Timothy was the first ace and he introduced me to the King—Jesus Christ. Before that I went to Minneapolis for college. But I lost my drive so I quit and worked as a secretary and went out for cocktails every night with young guys who worked downtown, young jokers.
—they might have been torn from a journal, addressed to no one. He could hardly stand them. He’d stopped looking forward to seeing her again.
These people here in these lands we’re visiting—look at these people. They’re as trapped by circumstance as criminals are trapped by prison. Born and live and die according to the dictates of how things go—never say, I want to live in that place rather than this place, I want to be a cowboy rather than a farmer. Can’t even be farmers, really—they’re just planters. Tillers. Gardeners.
In the beginning her communiqués hadn’t been long, generally two sides of a page, and had ended, “Well, my hand’s getting tired! I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy” or “Well, I see I’m down to the bottom, I’d better sign off. Yours, Kathy.” In the beginning he’d replied, always very briefly. Not, he hoped, curtly. But he hadn’t known what to say. The nature of their connection, clear enough in the heat of it, had become mysterious.
When it comes to the contrast between having a choice and no freedom to choose whatsoever—here’s where it gets as stark as it can get. You, America, your forces are here making war by choice. Your enemy doesn’t have a choice. They were born into a land at war.
Or maybe it’s not that simple—U.S. vs. North Vietnam—no, it’s the young men who get this war forced upon them versus the ones who choose this war, the dying soldiers vs. the theorists and the dogmatists and the generals.
Here was clumsy thinking, and Sands had long ago lost patience with it. Would she like to see a bust of Lenin by the door of every public school? See the Statue of Liberty toppled in an obscene ceremony? Of course she would. And that wrongheadedness appealed to him. Always the sucker for sardonic, myopic, intellectual women. Women quick-witted and congenitally sad. In her face a combination of aggression and apology. Kind brown eyes.
Remember asking me about a place in the Bible claiming there are different administrations on the earth and I said I didn’t think so? You were right—First Corinthians 12:5-6 etc. “And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.”
That must appeal to a G-man like you! (I still don’t believe you work for Del Monte.) If you want to believe that different angelic departments sort of run different parts of the show down here on earth, I don’t blame you. Just going from the Manila airport to Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon I’d be almost ready to call it diversities of deities, diverse universes, all on the same planet.
Come to think of it, in North America various Spanish priests (the Catholic Church itself?) must have believed that some areas are under control of the Devil—or of Christ—thus places called “Mt. Diablo,” “Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” and so on.
He slipped the letter under his coffee mug. No concentrating on it now. Travel excited him. This world ending, the next emerging, the bowlers surrounding him with motion and noise, flinging out black planets, smashing the constellations of wooden pins. Back in his room, other things to set moving: the monster of the colonel’s files, and a duffel bag packed with two pairs of walking shoes and four changes of machine-washable clothing—no suit, no dress apparel—also a small crate woven of cane, a basket, really, but quite sturdy, packed with dictionaries in several languages. Skip had been trained to remember that he came as a civilian and must dress like one, avoid khaki or olive garb, wear brown shoes rather than black, brown belts as well. He’d left behind his custom-tooled carbine and traveled with a secret agent’s kind of weapon, a .25-caliber Beretta automatic concealable in a pants pocket. His mind raced over all of it, a result of too much coffee. He gave up the idea of bowling, left the lanes, and went striding through the tropic noon until his brow thudded and his wet shirt clung to him.
The base library looked open. The air conditioner roared on its roof. He approached the door and saw people within beneath fluorescent lights, but the door wouldn’t budge, and he had a moment of panic in which he felt himself locked out and gazing helplessly on the land of books. A man coming out opened it with some effort—just stuck in its frame, swollen with damp—and Sands gained entrance. Jangling from the coffee he flitted from stack to stack and looked into a number of books, never taking a seat. In a copy of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson he read all the chapter epigraphs, looking for one he thought he remembered—something to do with the treasure of a life spent in obscurity—but it wasn’t there. In the children’s section he found some volumes of Filipino folk tales. Nothing from Vietnam.
He was delighted to chance, next, on a book about Knute Rockne. He sat down and turned its leaves until he found on page 87 a photo of Rockne on the fields of Notre Dame in 1930 with the last team he’d coached; and among them, in the middle of the third row, with more abundant hair and his wrinkles erased and the familiar, eager sincerity on his face: Uncle Francis. A second-string freshman, but nevertheless one of Rockne’s blunt, confident young men—chests out, chins up, peering ahead no further than two or three minutes into the life to come. Francis’s older brother Michael, Skip’s father, had graduated from Notre Dame the year before and moved to his bride’s hometown of Clements, Kansas. Francis would join the army air force and leave it in 1939 to fly with the pseudo-civilian Flying Tigers in Burma. Michael would grow restless selling farm equipment and join the navy in 1941 and go down six months later with the Arizona in the first few seconds of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Death had too often visited prematurely among his father’s people—wars and accidents. The colonel had a daughter, Anne; a son, Francis Junior, had drowned one Fourth of July while sailing in Boston Harbor. A brother and a son, both claimed by harbors. There had been brothers and sisters and plenty of cousins, and many children from those sources, and everybody had somebody missing. It was a loud, sad family.
Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children. They stared back at him. An old ache sang its song. Only child of a widowed mother. Somehow he’d entered their world without becoming a man.
He shut the book and instead opened the fragile pages of the letter from Kathy Jones:
They were born into a land at war. Born into a time of trial that never ends.
What I don’t think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there. If God told them they were in Hell, then the torment of uncertainty would be relieved from them, and their torment wouldn’t be complete without that nagging question—”Is this suffering I see all around me my eternal damnation and the eternal damnation of all these souls, or is it just a temporary journey?” A temporary journey in the fallen world.
And I might as well tell you, my faith has gone dark, because I started reading Calvin, wrestling with Calvin, and I lost the fight and got dragged down into Calvin’s despair. Calvin doesn’t call it despair but it’s despair all right. I know that this is Hell, right here, planet Earth, and I know that you, me, and all of us were made by God only to be damned.
And then suddenly I scream, “But God wouldn’t do that!”
—See? The torment of uncertainty.
Or I guess as a Catholic, you might ask yourself if this is a journey through Purgatory. You’ll sure ask yourself that when you come to Vietnam. Five or ten times a day you’ll stop and ask yourself, When did I die? And why is God’s punishment so cruel?
He spent the afternoon in the cool of the library and rode the shuttle bus back to the BOQ.
He’d hardly been back in his room a minute when somebody knocked at the door, a man about his own age, wearing civvies, holding in each hand a bottle of San Miguel beer.
“These are the last in the bucket, my man.”
The quality of the man’s smile was disconcerting.
“The Skipper needs a beer.”
Skip said—”Hey!”
“Quantico!”
He accepted a bottle and they shook hands, Skip flushing with a warmth of recognition, although the name escaped him. They’d done a twenty-one-day ciphers program together at Quantico just after his training at the Farm—never buddies, but certainly, now, well met. They sat around chatting about nothing, and after a few minutes Skip felt the moment for getting his friend’s name had slipped past. “Where’s your home station now?” he asked the man. “Still Langley?”
“They’ve got me stashed in the District. At the State Department, the big building, Pennsylvania Avenue. But I make the rounds—Saigon, Manila, DC. What about you?”
“I’m being transferred. Saigon.”
“You get a good deal in Saigon—share a house, servants, that order of existence. Run of the place whenever you can get away. Hell—every weekend. Most weekends.”
“I hear it’s a beautiful country.”
“Surprisingly beautiful. You step out of a hooch to take a leak, shake off the last drop, and look up—God, you can’t believe it, where’d it come from?”
“Just like here, in other words.”
“Considerably more dangerous. You do earn your hazard pay.”
“You’re in Operations, am I right?”
“Right,” Skip said. “Officially. But I seem to work for Plans.”
“Well, I’m in Plans, but I seem to work for State.”
“What brings you to the base?”
“A free ride back to the war at twenty hundred hours. The clock’s running out for me, son. Last chance for a San Miguel. Wish I could take a keg with me.”
“Do they sell San Miguel by the keg?”
“Come to think of it, I’m not sure. But they sell it by the bottle at the Officers’ Club. Let’s go.”
“I’m all grimy. Should I meet you?”
“Should I wait?—Or what about going into town?”
“Well,” Skip said, “if you’re leaving at twenty hundred—”
“Or we could swing by the Teen Club, find out what the officers’ kids are up to.” Skip said, “What?”
“Say, that reminds me—I mean, speaking of officers’ kids. Aren’t you related to the colonel himself?”
“Which colonel, now?”
“Aren’t you close to the colonel? The colonel Francis Xavier?”
“I’m one of his favorite people, if we’re talking about the same guy.”
“There ain’t but one Colonel.”
“I guess not.”
“I took that Psy Ops course of his. He’s a man with a message.”
“He’s got vision, all right.”
“You took it too? He titled it wrong. ‘Reminiscing and Theorizing’ would be more like it.”
“That’s the colonel.”
“He’s put some of his thoughts in an article for the journal. Have you read it?”
“In the journal? You mean in Studies?”
“Yowza.”
They referred to the Agency’s in-house organ, Studies in Intelligence. The colonel’s thoughts in the journal? What to say to this? Nothing.
He gulped his beer and wiped it from his mustache. He’d gone through the bushy Kennedy phase. Now they were all back to crew cuts again, flattops—proving they weren’t the Beatles. But Skip had kept his mustache. It was luxuriant.
“Do you read the journal much, Skip?”
“I catch up in Manila. We didn’t have it in the boonies. I was up in San Marcos.”
“Oh, yeah—the Del Monte place.”
“Ever been there?”
“No. You haven’t read his piece?”
“I can’t believe he’d get anything into shape for actual publication.”
“It hasn’t been published. It’s just a draft.”
“How did you happen to see it?”
“I wondered if you’d seen it in a rough form.”
“Man, I didn’t know he ever put a pen to the page. How’d you get hold of it? Are you with the journal?”
“So you haven’t seen it.”
Skip now felt his heart coming to a halt. “No,” he said, “like I said.”
“Well, I’ll be open with you. The piece is a little puzzling. One explanation is it’s meant to be satire. But if he’s submitting satire to the house organ, that’s puzzling in itself. That’s troubling too; that in itself is puzzling.”
“I see,” Skip said. “Look, obviously I remember you, but I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Voss.”
“Rick, right?”
“C’est moi.”
“The face was familiar, but—”
“I’m getting porky.”
“If you say so.”
“I got married. We had a kid. I got fat.”
“A little girl. Celeste.”
“Nice name.”
“She’s eighteen months.”
“That makes it hard, huh? Traveling and all.”
“I’m glad I travel. I’m like the moon, I come and go. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I could take it day after day. Women and children frighten me. I don’t understand them. I’d rather be somewhere else.” He’d been sitting on the bed; he got up and sat on one of the footlockers. “And whose gear is this here?”
“I’m just delivering it.”
“Who’s W. F. Benét?”
“The recipient, I guess.”
“Or maybe the sender,” said Voss.
“I’m actually not familiar with the name.”
“What’s the W for? William?”
“Beats me,” Skip said.
“And what about the F? What’s his full name?”
“Rick … I’m just a blind courier on this one.”
Voss said, “Wanna arm-wrestle?”
“Uh, no,” said Skip.
“If we arm-wrestled, do you know who’d win?”
Skip shrugged.
“Do you care?”
“No, I don’t,” said Skip.
“Neither do I,” said Voss. “We don’t need muscles. We’ve got a private army now. These Green Berets are like human tanks. They’re death machines. One of them could tear the two of us to shreds, huh? And they work for the Agency. Well, the point is, from here on out we’re gonna keep the tough guys in uniform. They don’t graduate from the field, they don’t get behind a desk and start running things. This ain’t the OSS. That war is history.”
Skip clinked his bottle against Voss’s. Both bottles were empty. “If we were halfway through a case of this stuff,” he said, “I’d just figure we were having a bull session. If it was four a.m. and we were half sloshed.”
“But we’re not.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“When are we gonna get those beers?” Skip said.
“Well, how about right now?”
They both stood up.
Skip said, “Oh, drat. Wait a minute.”
“What.”
Skip said, “My watch is stopped. What time is it?”
“Fifteen-twenty.”
“Darn, I’ve got a little briefing in forty minutes. I’d better get my gear in order.”
“Then what? Right to Saigon?”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ll probably see you there.”
“All right,” said Skip, “and then we can have those beers. What do they drink in Saigon?”
“Tiger Beer. Then they puke.”
“Good enough,” Skip said.
Voss stared at the floor and concentrated before raising his gaze, preparing to speak.
“You’ll be heading off, then,” Skip reminded him.
Voss stood up. “Rain check,” he said, and as he departed Skip sent him half a salute.
The colonel had always said: When you hit the wall, take a shower and change your clothes.
Skip did both, and then he took the day’s apparel downstairs to the laundry room with the intention of traveling to his new post completely clean. For over an hour he sat on a plastic chair among the thudding machines—hiding, essentially, evading scrutiny—in a rising tide of confusion and dread. He climbed out of it momentarily to fold his clothes and was dragged back down. He sat upright in his chair, back straight, hands in his lap. He remembered that his life was nothing. He focused on that point on the horizon, the solid, the fixed, the prominent goal: the defeat of Communism. The panic subsided.
Soon he stood out front of the BOQ under a dark but rainless sky. Shuttles came four per hour. He boarded the next one and traveled at the base limit of “15 MPH/24 KPH“ through this town of green buildings with identical corrugated roofs, out to the last stop just inside the gate, and then in a taxi into the town of Angeles, a main street of asphalt, tangled dirt lanes, bars and brothels and shanties. “Would you like to meet some ladies?” the cabbie asked. “No, thanks.” “Then will you go to the carnival?” Yes, why not, he’d go to the carnival, what had he come to town for anyway? Two acres of dirt was all this carnival needed for its mildewed brown tents with shuddering frayed hemp ropes, its half dozen rides, its loudspeakers playing the local radio station, its grand, faded murals raised up in front of the sideshows. As he paid his driver, pleading children boxed him in, and angry vendors chased them away. He bought peanuts wrapped in a page from a magazine. Liked the look of the Mermaid of Sulu on a mural and went in to see. He was the only patron. She had long black hair tied back with plastic flowers. Her small breasts were cupped, clasped, by a bikini top. Of what material the tail? He couldn’t see, some kind of cloth. It didn’t swing like a fish’s. With her arms she shoved herself back and forth in a glass tank about four feet high and eight feet long, set on a platform three feet above the earth. She came up for air, went down, back and forth, back and forth. Broke the surface again and reached for a white towel hung on the tank’s rim, dried her hands and face, took cigarettes and lighter from their perch beside the towel, lit a Marlboro skillfully with damp fingers, smoked a minute, waved her hand at him to leave, to go away, and turned her back. He left and made for another tent—the Five Dwarfs of Bohol. Where was Bohol? Somewhere in these islands, he assumed, he’d look at a map sometime. For now he’d only meet some of its citizens, the small, jolly, bearded men depicted on a huge banner stretched above the entrance, two of them working their gold mine with their glinty-pointed picks, the other three hauling a barrow heaped with winking nuggets—Franco, Carlo, Paulo, Santo, Marco, odd names, magical men. But inside were not these men. In five large bassinets the dwarfs lay in dirty diapers, blind, spastic, comatose, with their names, ages, and weights displayed on cards. Between seventeen and twenty-four years old. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-three pounds … Not beards, but long filaments of peach fuzz never trimmed. Their limbs jerked, their milky eyes shivered in their heads … Flies landing on them … Sands limped outside and boarded the roller coaster, nothing too impressive, the kind of thing disassembled and trucked from town to town, and yet what it lacked in height and depth it made up for in speed and torque, and as the cars swooped down an incline or rammed into a bend, as the whole structure lurched and swayed, death stopped his throat, for who oversaw the assembly, who looked after this ride, who vouched for its safety?—No one. Expect a tragedy. Good and dizzy, he descended from this amusement and stood once more in front of the tent of the mermaid, the wet prisoner. Sunset now. New Year’s Eve. Throughout the afternoon, fireworks had sounded sporadically, now more and more. Not whistles and bangs. A peripheral crepitation, pops and bursts from off somewhere. On the tall poster the mermaid smiled and didn’t seem the type to smoke Marlboros. He had an impulse to go in again and further oppress himself.
An air force jeep pulled up quite near, driven by an airman. Voss was the passenger. He disembarked and they stood together before the gigantic discolored illustration. “Was this your appointment?”
“Yes.”
“Your briefing?”
“Right.” Feeling frightened, hilarious. “Do you want to go in?”
“Actually, I was here a couple of days ago. You go ahead.”
“I’ve already been,” Skip said sadly.
“Sure.”
The two Americans sat at a vendor’s linoleum table, each with a bottle of San Miguel. Looking most out of place. Voss wore a pin-striped shirt, brown slacks, brown wing-tip shoes. He looked like a Bible salesman. So did Skip.
Skip said, “So this isn’t a coincidence.”
“Surely you understand I have a purpose here.”
“Yeah. I just said so.”
“I’m here to shake you up.”
“You haven’t succeeded.”
“Good enough,” Voss said. “I just hope I’ve been heard.”
“All I’ve heard is a lot of ungrateful nonsense.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, I agree there’s such a thing as evolution. Things are changing, we’re a new generation, but—what have you got against the old guard?”
“Nothing at all. They’re running the show. But not the colonel, right? The colonel’s a show unto himself.”
“Do you know him at all? Aside from the course of his you took?”
“I know him. I worked for him.”
“Really?”
“All last summer and fall. Old F.X. He kidnapped me. Had me doing research.”
“Research on what?”
“Anything and everything. He called me his clerk. I think his idea was if he had to be a prisoner in Langley, he’d better take a prisoner of his own, you know? But I owe the guy. I’ve gone up two grades since then.”
“Wow.”
“Since June.”
“That’s fast.”
“Like lightning.”
“Skip, no. It wasn’t the colonel who got me promoted. But after I’d been with him, folks took an interest.”
“Good. That’s great.”
“No, no, no. You’re not picking this up fast enough.”
“What. Tell me.”
“Folks took an interest in me because folks have taken an interest in the colonel.”
Here was a moment for staying still, betraying nothing. “… An interest?”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“I mean, when you say he was ‘a prisoner’ in Langley …”
“Now he gets it.”
The next question would have to be whether the colonel had landed in real trouble, fate-provoking, career-wrecking difficulty. But the question to follow that one was whether the colonel still had trouble, and then, after that: Who else has trouble? Am I, for instance, in trouble?
Therefore he swallowed all questions.
And Voss was spitting them out now.
“What happened in Mindanao fourteen months ago?”
“I guess you must have seen the report.”
“I read it. I did the decode. I was sitting right by the telex when it came in ‘Eyes Only.’”
“Well, if it came in Eyes Only, why did you decode it?”
“Eyes Only is not a legal classification, I’m sure you know. It’s out of James Bond.”
“Well, still—as a courtesy.”
“As a courtesy to whom?”
“As a courtesy to me, and to the recipient.”
“We look at everything directed to the colonel. Or from the colonel.”
“Then you know how things went down there.”
“Yeah. The colonel botched it.”
“That’s not what my report says, Rick. Read it again.”
“Can you tell me why he’s wasting valuable time and resources trying to run down newsreel footage of a ball game?”
“No, I can’t. Baseball?”
“Football. A football game. He tried to commission a transpacific flight for some cans of film. Does he think he’s the president?”
“The colonel has his reasons for whatever he does.” His blood roared. He was ready to hit Voss with a bottle. “What football game?”
“Notre Dame versus Michigan State. The one last month.”
“I have no idea.”
“The colonel’s collecting more intelligence on the Notre Dame-Michigan State game than he is on the enemy.” Voss looked at his watch, signaled the airman.
“Are you carrying his football film to him?”
“Skip. Skip. Nobody’s giving him any football film.” He stood up and held out his hand. As firmly as he could, Skip accepted it. “Look,” Voss said, and as he searched for words his eyes broadcast human sympathy. “See you in the war.” His jeep was running. He turned away.
Sands drank two more beers, and when darkness had fallen he wandered away from the fun and ate fish and rice in a café. Through the doorway he watched a minor spectacle in the street, a drunken young man with one burned and bandaged arm in a sling, who nevertheless was able to light a succession of firecrackers and toss them at the feet of leaping, squealing passersby. By 9:00 p.m. the town rattled all over with celebratory explosions. Independence Day in San Marcos had impressed him, but this was wilder and decidedly more dangerous, full of actual gunfire and large booming cadences, as if the entire night were under attack. He thought he’d probably find it more peaceful in South Vietnam. He strolled into the red-light district—Angeles consisted of little else—the slop, the lurid stink, the thirsty, flatly human, open-mouthed stares of the women as he passed dank shacks beating with rock ‘n’ roll music, as hot and rich with corruption as vampire mausoleums. The wanton mystery of the Southeast Asian night: he loved it as passionately as he loved America, but secretly, with dark lust; and he admitted to himself without evasion that he didn’t care if he never went home.
Beginning two days after Christmas, James ceased calling his friends, stopped taking Stevie’s calls. He spent the days watching cartoons on television with his ten-year-old brother, Burris, sharing as best he could in the serenity of a mindless childhood.
On New Year’s Eve he went to a party. Stevie was there. She was angry, and she left him alone. She stayed out back in the dark with Donna and her other friends, the alternate cheerleaders and future runner-up prom queens, huddled under a cloud of resentment. Good. The one he’d really always wanted was Anne Vandergress, who’d come to Palo Verde High School the same year as James and who stood now in the doorway of the kitchen looking beautiful, talking to a couple of guys he’d never seen before.
He drank rum. He’d never before tasted it. “We call this a three-oh-two,” somebody said.
If he was going somewhere to be blown up by a mortar or something, then he wished he’d never started going around with Stevie Dale.
“Well, hell. That three-oh-two goes down easier’n beer does,” he agreed.
“Now put you some in a Coke.”
It was Anne Vandergress talking. She was a honey-blonde who always wore nice makeup, and he’d never approached her because to him she’d seemed too young and pure and elevated, then his last full year in school he’d heard she was dating a football player, a senior, Dan Cordroy, then another one, Cordroy’s buddy Will Webb, then half the goddamn team, all seniors, and he’d heard she was putting out for every last one. “You’re so fucking beautiful, you know that?” he said. “I never told you that,” he said, “did I ever tell you that?”—though it seemed to James she was a little less beautiful than he remembered, a little heavier, thicker in the face. More grown-up, but not in a good way; instead in a way that reminded him of middle age.
One particular swallow of rum stalled in his throat and nearly gagged him, but then it went down all right, and after that his throat felt numb, and he could have swallowed nails or glass or hot coals.
He rushed through an hour like a physical thing, a hallway. His lips turned to rubber and he drooled while saying, “I’ve never been this drunk in my life.”
People seemed to be circling him, laughing, but he wasn’t sure. The room tilted sideways and the very wall knocked him on his ass. Hands and arms grappling him upright like the tentacles of a monster …
He arrived in his body from some dark place, and he was standing outdoors holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.
Donna loomed like a wreck coming at you. Mad as fire. “Why would you say that? Why would anybody talk that way?” Stevie in the background with her head bowed, weeping, girls around her patting her hair and smoothing away the grief.
Rollo held him upright in the yard. Donna dive-bombing him, you couldn’t shake her. “Donna, Donna—” Rollo was laughing, snorting, barking—”He can’t hear you, Donna. Stop the lecture.”
“Stevie was almost pregnant. Don’t you realize she was just about pregnant? How can you act like this?”
“Almost pregnant?” Rollo said. “A/most?” James was on his knees with his arms around Rollo’s legs.
“She thought she was pregnant, okay, Rollo? Okay? He can’t just spit her out the last night he’s in town and just go to Vietnam. Okay, Rollo?”
“Okay!”
“Tell him that!”
“Okay! I’ll tell him! James,” Rollo said, “James. You got to talk to Stevie. You sure hurt her feelings, James. Stand up, stand up.”
His legs rolled him over to Stevie standing by a stone barbecue pit with a fire in it. He said something, and Stevie kissed him—her soggy teenybopper breath. “And you’re smoking a cigarette,” she said, “and you don’t even smoke.”
“I smoke. I always did smoke. You just didn’t know about it, is what.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I smoke.”
Something else happened and Stevie disappeared and was replaced by, or turned into, her friend Donna. “You’ve hurt her for the last time, James.”
“I smoke,” he tried to say. He could neither shut his jaws nor raise his chin from his chest.
He was back inside the kitchen, where Anne Vandergress seemed no longer beautiful. She seemed old and worn-out. Her hair was frizzy. Her face was flat and red and sweaty and her smile looked dead. She laughed along with everybody else while he announced she was a whore. “It took me a while—but you’re a whore. You’re a whore, all right,” he said very loudly. “I just want you to figure that out like everybody else already did,” he said, “that you’re a complete, slutty whore.” Anne laughed grotesquely. She looked like she’d been pulling a train all night. His mind was stuck in a warp and he kept saying, “What a whore—what a whore—what a whore—”
They threw him on the ground and hosed him down. The dirt turned to slime around him and he crouched in it, flailing, trying to stand upright.
This was not vastly different from certain moments of his basic training. His feet splayed and he flopped on his face and ate mud, thinking: All right, men: here we go.