Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  Chap Eight

  Rust has been studying the map. He and D.J. are map readers (at your service, coordinates) and compass hounds. He even bought D.J. a Keuffel & Esser surveyor’s transit, tripod, and tape for his fourteenth birthday. He knows they now have eleven miles to make before dark and five to six hours to do it in—long twilight still, endless ass of ass-end summer long Alaskan twilight, and he’s not worried a bit at that, he’s free, man, loose, loose as Henry with a goose, shedding those corporation layers, all that paper ass desk shit and glut, dictating larynx ass machines, six-button Tphones, buzzer shit (conference table alcohol—where is your buzz), deadass hour shit, and he’s free of Luke the Fink with his Washington up your ass connections, he’s being bad Rusty and it’s years, man, he wants to holler hallo for a grizzer any size big ass beast.

  They go, putting on the miles, walking ten yards apart, crossing bare ridgelines when they feel they far enough away from Luke to take the chance, then ducking back to timber when they hear whirlybird Cop Turd glomming over the next hill, yeah, Luke has put in a call, round up those strays, shit, no one is going to round them up. And after an hour, a good sweat on each, father and son sweat, a little alike, a little diff, Rusty got just a hint of sweet rot in his smell but when the balls is back in as now he’s okay, many a hero smell worse than old Rust, and they go like two combat wolves, eyes to the left, eyes to the right, slow relaxed sweep, looking, listening to the mood, man, their steps keen off each little start of sound, squirrels on a split ass, working upwind through the timber, skirting all the alder, briers, snag-brush, working their way into the wind as if they going to smell that bear. And when they stop to rest, they are real good, man, tight as combat buddies, they pick a spot under an overhang rock at their back so no bear can come up behind and the touch, just the feather on your ass touch, of danger, cause grizzer could be anywhere near, is ozone bubble in the nose, that oo oo oo of the nose when you going to meet a real hot fuck in an hour and you know she there waiting for you, whoo-ee, whoo-ee, humping a sweet pump by the railroad track beautiful big-ass Texas night. Rusty starts to talk. They looking out off a ledge onto a view of stone ice peaks twenty miles away, could be Colorado, not Alaska in September, and those mountains full of evergreen dropping in long fat sweet ass sweet husband fat-ass type of lines, the rolling stands of evergreen looking like fur on the ass of the grizzer, yeah, those soft humps of mountains are like sleeping bears, big haunches of hibernation, Hiram, and Rusty starts to point out the local flora, the tall saxifrages like the boykinia, the sowdock, fireweed, horsetail, he been pointing them out all along as they were going, just a quiet little voice, “That’s white bell of heather over there, D.J.” or “Hot damn, look at the height of those horsetails,” “White mountain avens, boy, pretty flower that,” “Purple rhododendrons, up in the Circle! Wait till I tell your mother I saw purple rhododendrons in the Arctic Circle.” Oh, there’s cow parsnip and climbing bells, yellow arctic poppies, more of a fine white little flower he calls saxifrage again. “Know what saxifrage means, kid?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Rock buster. That little white flower is a rock buster. Any saxifrage is strong enough to grow and split a rock.” And D.J. reels with that, cause he thinks of the little green shoot (or is it white? underground, just nipple tit out of the seed) getting its white nose into the smallest crack of the rock and pushing and the rock pushing back, and it swelling to crack the rock and the rock not cracking, how can a soft shoot move rock? Yeah, well it sends out the word to the root and the root pulls into the basic ass power of the earth and draws a force, a subterranean thunder, Wanda, and womb, woom woom woom, one little blast of swell, that shoot is harder than rock for one micromillionth of a second, it got a hard on, Herbert, and the rock stone pussy cracks, and up comes boykinia the local saxifrage. Just rock buster. D.J. is humper-ding with sweet pores of thought. Damn.

  “That’s monkshood,” says Rusty.

  About then was when they first sat looking out across a canyon and a long field of tundra turning red and yellow already and a pioneer tree in the middle of it.

  “Man, you like to be a tree by yourself in the middle of a field?” asks Rusty.

  “Now you know I really don’t know,” says D.J. confessing ignorance for the first time since thirteen.

  “My grandmammy, your great-grandmother Eula Spicer Jethroe, used to be a witch, so evehbody claims. She used to tell me when I was a little three-year-old still shit ass in my breeches that I must never sleep under a pioneer tree, cause it is full of sorrow and alone and bats piss on it at midnight, therefore it stands by itself getting messages, all kind of special messages, and if you sleep under it, you witched by it, you get the messages too.”

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know. Old Eula Spicer Jethroe wouldn’t say.” Yeah, they laughed. D.J. said, oh, cautious as they come, “Rusty…sir…how do you know the names of all this grass…herb…all this.”

  “Why I spent a half hour talking to Luke asking the names. That’s the only good half hour I had with him. Cause that used to be my hobby. When I was your age I used to be a walking compendium of Texas wild flowers.”

  “Say, you never let on.”

  “Well, D.J., my daddy had more time, you know. Him and me were close, you know cause it was all that time, depression, East Texas depression years, cold heart times. He had no work so we went hunting for meat. Then two years later he hit a well and the Jethroes was rich again, but those two years I saw sights, learned things. We used to camp out in a lean-to right on the plains. Coyotes. Oh, that’s a cry.”

  “I’ve heard it hunting.”

  “Yeah, but in a lean-to set up so the rain don’t blow in the open end, and starting a fire in the rain, know how to do that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you got to look for a stump that’s protected by overhang, or the underside of a tree branch that’s rotten, you got to find dry punk, that dry perfumy sort of rot stuff in a tree, and that’s your tinder and your paper all in one. If it’s dry, it will get wet twigs to burn. So, that we used to do, daddy and me, used to camp out there four days in a row, trailing across that plain till an animal got in range, not so easy when the plain is bare, you hear, and we had to make the shots count too, I learned a lot from my daddy, he taught me one thing I’m going to teach you now—the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or three seconds when you can’t see.”

  “I know that, daddy,” says D.J.

  “Yeah, but you never made a principle of it. That’s the difference.”

  “Yessir, yessir.”

  “Listen, know the worst thing I ever saw. It was a poor deer being killed by an eagle. Some hunter had wounded the deer—the eagle finished the job or was about to when I couldn’t stand to watch no more and shot the eagle and put the poor deer out of its miz. But that eagle had swooped in, plucked out one eye of the deer, fluttered up a little you know like a Nigger strutting his ass feathers, and then plucked the other eye. It was going to go for the nuts next. Terrible creature the eagle. I’ve heard they even pull the intestine out of a carcass like a sailor pulling rope with his mouth. It got me so upset to recognize that E Pluribus Unum is in the hands of an eagle that I almost wrote an open letter to the Congress of America. Can you imagine your daddy getting that ape shit? But I think it’s a secret crime that America, which is the greatest nation ever lived, better read a lot of history to see how shit-and-sure a proposition that is, is nonetheless represented, indeed even symbolized by an eagle, the most miserable of the scavengers, worse than crow.”

  On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J. can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right. It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a
little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach, and there’s even a speck of caries, one bit of dental rot almost on the agreeable side (for face it, fellow Americans, there are secret freaked-out grope types who dig dental rot if its subtle kind of high clean funky smell, how often, after all, does a nose get near a living nerve?) but with all this detraction, fatigue, booze, Nick the Teen, garlic and cavity, it’s still a good breath, it got muscle and a big happy man with that clean odorless white American flesh (hey assholes out there, is this D.J. addressing you a Texas youth for sure or is he a genius of a crippled Spade up in Harlem making all this shit up, better wonder, work your bronze, this is a problem—whose consciousness you getting, overlap on the frequencies, Percival? shit, D.J. is going to make you fly up your own ass before you get to read him right, it’s love to have the consciousness of D.J., Texas youth, better believe, cause it’s easier for D.J. to imitate a high I.Q. Harlem Nigger time to time, since D.J. knows New York, yeah, he passed through, MacDougal Street you wait and see, than for a Harlem Nigger ever to know all this secret Texas shit. Well, place your bets, worry your head audience of D.J. there is no security in this consciousness, and you are going to die some day and there is no security in that, well, before you buy your casket Mr. Rot Gut wait till you get to know Tex and his own daddy Gottfried Hyde Senior, the undertaker, there’s a piece of woo, and point coming here, point your nose, auditor, is that D.J. riding on currents of love can take all the smell of his daddy’s breath and love him still, cause that’s love—you can go to the end of the other’s breath and still forgive him. If you husbands and wives out there in receiving land cannot do that, well, hump your shrug, all is not hopeless, maybe you still in love if only with limp dick and just one lip of the pussy, or two lips of cunt dry as adhesive tape. Whoo-ee!) D.J. takes his consciousness and by act of will zooms with Superman moves of his brain projectile back to ledge, back to rock, and Rusty pointing across the valley to a caribou upwind from them, a caribou just standing near the pioneer tree, and Rusty lifts his rifle, breathes, waits to feel D.J.’s mood, waits, puts down his rifle. “Shall we let it go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, son. Shit, let’s let old caribou go. He suffering anyway.”

  And that old caribou is standing with his nose in the moss, digging his nose in, and his haunches are hicking and twitching and his stump tail is wiggling like a baby’s running nose. Alaska flies are murdering him, he stands, suffers, then makes a dash for two hundred yards to escape the flies, stands, looks for damp in the tundra, holds it, suffers the flies, then runs again, on up to the ridge where there will be wind maybe, maybe there will be wind, and he can clear his head from thirty fly bite on the minute. And Rusty and D.J. watching have been waiting for fifteen minutes, and there’s fine cool in them now, they’re off the fever of hunting and into the heart of it, the cool, letting that caribou go has got them so ready for bear they could believe in man-bear radar, it’s as if now they know, cause the pitch of secret tune is pure that grizzer is near, something big is by. And as they step out, they have not gone one-half of a mile before they find a track, fresh bear track on the wet earth of a high mountain rivulet, and their hearts hold, cause track is big, Rusty could put the soles of both his big hunting shoes inside that one bear’s foot, and mark of the claws in front is long, two inches long of claws, this is grizzer, grizzer baby, never black bear, not with claws two inches long. Now they feel the size. They’ve been thinking of grizzer as a big big man, about as frightening as a stone-black seven-foot three-hundred-pound Nigger, but grizzer is bigger than that, grizzer is right up there with the hippopotami and the small elephants, and the big elephants, yeah, that’s how it feels, now they feel alone and in the woods with some fast dark boxcar size of beast moving somewhere around in relation to them. Shit! And the Cop Turd comes by overhead shaking the silence, and failing to see them in the woods, and Rusty says in a hoarse little clearing of his throat (just like a little clearing in the forest) “Hey, now, D.J., we’re on bear traveling trail.” And through the brush ahead is a path, looks like it’s been grooved by many a grizzer working down the same route through the brush, and there and here, bark rubbed from trees, familiar intimate family rub of itching hide and itching bear asshole rubbing against that old corncob bark. Yeah, some nappy mountain of grizzly has been lumbering and slinging his legs along here. And D.J. breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his heart like the jaws of a vise cause that grizzer could come erupting out of the brush, could a grizzer travel at speed through that brush? it’s death D.J.’s breathing, it comes like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him, own pig shit smell, terrible fear right out of his lungs and pores, mucous lining of now flappy-ass organs, and back of fear like man riding chariot pulled by eight wild pigs in harness is crazy-ass murder, cause D.J. for first time in his life is hip to the hole of his center which is slippery desire to turn his gun and blast a shot into Rusty’s fat fuck face, thump in his skull, whawng! and whoong! with the dead-ass butt of his Remington 721, D.J. is shivering on the death in this hot-ass vale of breath, cause each near-silent step of his toe on the tail sounds a note, chimes of memory, angel’s harp of ten little toes picking out the blows of Rusty’s belt on his back, he five years old and shrieking off the fuck of his head, cause the face of his father is a madman ass, a power which wishes to beat him to death—for what no longer known—a child’s screaming in the middle of, and so interrupting, a Hallelujah Sir Jet Throne fuck? nobody know now, D.J. just remembers the beating, screaming, pleading, smell of pig shit in his five-year-old pants, and death, coming in like oscillations red and green waves pulsating from oscilloscope, murder came red and green, stop, go, Rusty’s eyes in to kill on D.J.—fat five-year-old spoiled beautiful little fuck in the middle between husband and wife, hola, Olatunji, vale of breath on the vise in his heart and first seed of tumor, figure-toi, could that be?—little pretty seed of backed-up murder passed from valve asshole Rusty’s heart to the seat of D.J.’s brain, for Hallie rushed in then, picked up decanter whiskey, flung it through on a line through window, and glass crackled all scythe and lightnings, and spell broke, murder weather cracked in thunder, and D.J. all pig shit smell and five-year-old ass and back burning like the flesh in the burns of Hell run all screaming into Hallie’s arms, little man saved by cunt, virility grew with a taint in the armature of the phallic catapult, call it tumor if that’s what D.J.’s got in his brain, cause brilliance is next to murder, man, brilliance is green and gold light on the body and wings of horseflies hovering over the rot and gray-gold and red of degenerating meat. Whoo! Death is on him, memory of father near to murdering the son, breath of his own murder still running in the blood of his fingers, his hands, all murder held back, and then on the trail came a presence, no longer the fear of death but concentration, murder between the two men came to rest, for murder was outside them now, same murder which had been beaming in to D.J. while he thinking of murdering his father, the two men turned to contemplate the beast. Which was there? There before! No. Nothing to be seen. All calm now, as if they walking into the flat ass calm of a flat still sea, stepping in deeper on every step, their bodies in different states of immersion every breath, the late sun throwing out orange-lavender, and lead of color near to immersions now infusions of purple in deep of the wood, and each step took them into different domain, for D.J.’s nose was like a king surveying the principalities of the realm, bleed you not, Sigismunde, calm to calm they stepped on in along the trail, each step a rock God laid on water, hot horseshit Hercules, and hum the smells in that wood, Prince of Pals, they took one step through a kingdom of pines, mad genius pine trees, prescribing their aromatic antiseptic prescription for all things, incense saying come to me I am all, I am siren of the North, nerve of the Arctic Circle with affiliates down to the Equator, I’m a brain, man, pine needles my calling card.

  Next step, in they’re plu
nged into some rot, some stump of dwarf birch, bark rubbed ass of raw by tail of bear or moose of caribou antlers eight years ago! like that! and dying over the years, cause a ring of bark had been cut and the skin of such dying tree go to rot beneath the trunk, fell down. Into the open mouth of that remaining stump came the years of snow, sun, little jewels of bird shit, cries of sap from the long dying roots, the monomaniacal electric yodeling of insects, and wood rotting into rotting wood, into gestures of wood, into powder and punk all wet and stinking with fracture between earth and sky, yeah, D.J. could smell the break, gangrene in the wood, electric rot cleaner than meat and sick shit smell and red-hot blood of your flesh in putrefaction, but a confirmed wood gangrene nonetheless, Burbank, a chaos of odor on the banks of the wound, nothing smells worse than half-life, life which has no life but don’t know it—thank you, Mr. Philosopher, just show me the hemorrhoids of the academy, and on that rock!…Next step was into a pool of odor which came from the sweets of the earth, sweet earth smell speaking of endless noncontemplative powers, beds of rest, burgeonings, spring of life, a nectar for the man’s muscles on the odor of that breath, yeah, D.J. was breathing his last, he was in the vale of breath, every small smell counted, it was the most fucking delicious moment of his life up to that point, for there are those who know and those who do not know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity) and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz, and the next step put his nose into an aisle of forest scents, herbs offering each their high priest of here, here is the secret lore and the cold fires of the temple, and leaf mold, wet molderings, some kind of forest good-bye weeded in from the messages of the wind, sending back to the peasant, back to the farm, then moss, new greenings, the odor of forest beginnings like baby ass powder and tiny flowers, the tenderness of the tip where life began, and some sweet wine of old funk in the moss as well, some odor of dwarf’s armpits wiped with velvet, thank you, milady.