Thai Horse

by William Diehl

  Eddie Riker, who would very humbly tell you that he was the best slick pilot in the whole damn Vietnam war, was the next man at the table.

  They sent a light colonel in from Saigon to interrogate Riker. The first thing Riker noticed was that the colonel didn’t sweat. A hundred degrees in the shade with the humidity running about 98 and his shirt was still starched. Dry as the Sahara. Riker was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt and was soaking wet. The colonel came to the barracks where Riker was under house arrest. An arrogant little man impressed with his own importance, carrying an alligator briefcase and a little stack of files. He spoke in a monotone and never looked Riker in the eye. He stared down at the report the whole time, tapping his pencil slowly on the table while Riker told him the story. Riker knew the type, just another scummy lawyer sitting out the war in Saigon.

  ‘You are charged with criminal assault on an officer,’ the colonel said.

  ‘I know it,’ Riker said.

  ‘I’d like to hear your version of this,’ the colonel said, leafing through the report in front of him. The pencil went tap, tap, tap. Riker knew whatever he said would go right past the colonel. To people like this, combat was running out of toilet paper in the middle of the night.

  ‘Okay,’ Riker said. ‘First of all, you got to understand I’m the hottest damn slick pilot in the outfit. We been evacuating wounded along the DMZ in Song Ngan for five months now.

  It’s about thirty minutes by air from here. A real shit situation. A lot of action and heavy casualties. I been doin’ six, seven runs a day, which puts a lot on the Huey. I tell you this so you understand, with that kind of schedule, maintenance is critical.

  ‘Anyway we inherit this lousy little fig-leaf major — a real fugazi, man — in charge of maintenance. Short-sticker, y’know, had about two months to go, sat around carving notches in this piece of wood keepin’ track of his time. All he cared about, gettin’ out of here. And we’re losin’ choppers left and right, maintenance was so shit-ass bad. The other mornin’ I’m dropping down to pick up a bunch of wounded kids and all of a sudden I don’t have any power. I’m at maybe ninety, a hundred feet, all of a sudden my slick drops like a fucking body bag. I hit, the Huey rolls over, the blades shower off A dozen kids are chopped liver. Ever seen a human being after a chopper blade works ‘em over?’

  The colonel sighed but didn’t look up. He turned away, staring out the window.

  ‘Just stick to the facts, Lieutenant,’ he said.

  ‘These are the facts, Colonel. A dozen kids down there waiting for salvation and I fell in and butchered them.’

  Riker paused long enough to light a cigarette.

  ‘Me? I end up with a bruise on my neck and a headache. They fly me back here to base and all the way back I’m thinkin’, That son of a bitch, all he’s gotta do is keep the slicks up to snuff and he can’t do anything but carve notches in his Goddamn stick. That’s his whole fuckin’ job. It really ate me. When I got back, I went straight to that little short-sticker and I took his stick and I rammed it where the sun don’t shine and then I broke it off and I whipped the shit out of him with the rest of it. I whipped that sorry bastard till he looked like a bowl of ravioli. I was gonna shoot his ass off, but I didn’t. I just whacked him. Then I called the provost marshal and they put me under house arrest and that’s the whole story.’

  ‘That’s all you have to say?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘What else is there?’ Riker answered_

  ‘You have no remorse?’ the colonel said with surprise.

  ‘Remorse?’ Riker said after a moment’s thought. ‘Yeah, I got remorse. I think now I should have killed that worthless shit. God knows how many body bags he filled.’

  The colonel looked up at him for the first time. He looked angry. ‘I’m recommending that you be arraigned for criminal assault,’ he said. ‘You’ll be assigned an attorney. You’ll also be returned to Saigon for incarceration.’

  ‘So what else is new,’ Riker said with a shrug.

  The colonel flipped the file folder shut and meticulously arranged things in his case and stood up and brushed some lint off his sharply creased trousers.

  ‘You have a bad attitude problem,’ the colonel snapped.

  ‘No, Colonel, what I got is a bad maintenance officer.’

  The colonel stalked out of the barracks.

  Riker watched him priss across the yard and get in his jeep and drive off. He stood there and he thought, What the hell, this is a waste. The hottest slick pilot in Nam and I’m playing solitaire in a fuckin’ Quonset hut and kids are out there dyin’. So he walked out and grabbed a chopper that was warming up and went back to work.

  Gallagher sat next, the man who walked with this funny hitch like limping with both legs, as if his feet hurt all the time. That was because they did. A land mine had driven the floor of his jeep up to his armpits. And beside him was Johnny Prophett, who had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but he stayed in Nam too long. Burned out at twenty-five, he had turned to heroin to ease the pain of losing his golden touch.

  Prophett was sitting beside the road, scratching out some notes on a legal pad he kept stuffed in his canvas shoulder bag. His back hurt and his throat was choked with dust. It hadn’t rained for days, and the roads were brick-hard and beginning to crack into jagged seams. He had lost the war two days before, twenty or so miles away, awakening in the morning after a night of white-powder hallucinations to find the outfit he had tied up with gone. Nothing left behind but the usual:

  empty cans and shell casings; asked remnants of fires; tattered socks and tank tops too worn out to bother with. It was always the same when they moved out, like a gypsy carnival that had packed up in the night and moved to another town.

  He had run out of horse and was already beginning to feel the agonies of withdrawal. The stomach pains, the itching, the headache, the dry mouth. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly write. Besides, it all sounded the same. He hardly heard the jeep until it was almost on top of him, and he jumped, startled, and then scrambled to his feel and stuck out his thumb. It reminded him of the day he had hitchhiked to Woodstock, or tried to. By the time he got there the music was a memory.

  The dust-coated jeep whizzed by, then skidded to a stop, throwing out pounds of dirt and dust.

  ‘You oughta be careful,’ Gallagher said, a Cincinnati-flat accent, ‘I almost creamed ya.’

  Prophet limped over to the shotgun seat. ‘How about a ride?’

  ‘Sure, hop in,’ said Gallagher, grinding the gears into low. ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘I lost track of the war,’ said Prophett, rubbing his arms.

  ‘Shit, you’re goin’ in the wrong direction. Action’s back there,’ Gallagher said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘Thought I’d jog cross-country to Camranh,’ Gallagher said.

  ‘What’s your gig?’ asked Prophett.

  ‘Run a coupla service clubs down in S—town.’

  ‘Sounds real tough.’

  ‘It’s a living. You a reporter?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I know a few TV guys down country. Keep them happy, know what I mean?’

  ‘Right,’ said Prophett, huddling down in the seat, hoping the shakes wouldn’t get too bad. At least he could score there, maybe catch a Huey ride back up to the line. He draped a foot over the side of the jeep. ‘Camranh sounds fine t’me.’

  ‘I’d watch that,’ said Gallagher. ‘This road’s fulla cracks.

  Hate to lose control with you hanging that leg over the side like —,

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when they hit the land mine. Gallagher didn’t even hear the explosion; all he felt was the ungodly pain in the bottom of his feet, as if he had been hit with a baseball bat by Hank Aaron, and he was tossing head over heels in the air, trying to grab on to something, anything, only there was nothing to grab on to. He landed in a soggy ditch twenty feet away with a thunk th
at sounded like someone smacking a pumpkin with a board. The air hissed out of him. He rolled over on his back, out of the gooey mess, and stared up at the sky and thought, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, be kind to me. Don’t let me die here.

  On the other side of the road the shattered jeep lay upside down, its wheels still spinning around, its undercarriage blown away. Prophett lay on his side, staring dumbly at his leg, which was trapped under the wreckage. He had forgotten withdrawal, the pain in his leg was so great. He slid up to a sitting position and pushed halfheartedly on the side of the vehicle, as if he thought it might just topple back upright. Then he passed out.

  Then there was Wonderboy, rock star turned marine. He had left most of his face in the Mekong Delta.

  Harswain was a short, lean stick of a man with a bushy mustache and hair like a porcupine’s and he still carried his swagger stick from the days when he was a DI at Parris Island. He sat on a log and drew little nothing doodles in the dirt with it.

  ‘You’ll know when it’s coming, pretty boy,’ he said to Wonderboy. ‘That round with your name etched into it. You’ll know it. It’ll come sighin’ ‘cross the field and it’ll spit in yer eye a second afore it eats up yer brain.’

  He laughed.

  Wonderboy felt a cold chill on the back of his neck. Fear nested in his chest and squeezed his lungs and he was out of breath. It was time for some relief. On the line for seventy-seven days. No break. Out of the first sixty that had gone up, there were fourteen left. He listened to Harswain and he thought about that bullet.

  That was when Charlie hit. There was chaos — everybody running around, scrambling to get behind something, grabbing for weapons. Mail coming in. Harswain yelling at them as usual.

  ‘Get below his horizon,’ he was yelling and Wonderboy was snaking across the ground on his belly, crowding a downed tree and suddenly it was being chewed up a foot away and he cowered down behind it and got his piece ready and then he did a John Wayne, twisting, rising, throwing his rifle across the log, popping half a dozen caps at the jungle.

  That was when he saw the bullet, or thought he saw it, that lead slug auguring through the air toward him as if in slow motion, spinning white-hot like an angry wasp, an ugly stub of lead whistling through the air.

  He fell on his back with his eyes squeezed tight shut and waited, listening to more lead ripping the tree over his head, and then he dropped his gun and scrambled on his hands and knees away, toward the jungle, sobbing with fear, listening to Harswain’s scream, ‘Come back here, you lily-livered little freak, you. Damn you,’ heard him fire a burst toward his back and saw it chew the ground up around his feet but he didn’t stop. He stood up and kept running until he couldn’t run anymore. He fell on his hands and knees and threw up.

  He heard the flamethrower nearby, felt the backlash of heat from it and peered through the jungle grass. The kid was twenty feet away, burning everything in front of him.

  Perfect cover, thought Wonderboy, scrambling in behind him. Then somebody yelled, ‘Incoming!’ and he heard the sigh of the mortar falling down from the sky, and he pulled into a tight little curl like a slug in a garden. It was a direct hit on the tank, and the flamethrower and the kid erupted in a giant splash of fire that swept over him and a moment before he passed out he felt the skin on his face begin to melt. .

  Finally there was Corkscrew and Potter. Now, there was a pair. Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, had once run most of the class hookers in MoTown from the backseat of a gold-tinted stretch Lincoln, .while Potter had scratched out a living on an Arkansas farm where the earth was so poor ‘the ants climbed trees to fuck,’ as he delicately put it. They had come out of the war closer than twins.

  They had been holding the hill in Dang Pang for two days against a bunch of VC that seemed w be everywhere.

  On the morning of the third day Potter crawled around the top of the hill and checked pulses. The rest of his men were dead. Mortars had taken down most of the trees and rain had filled the shell holes with stagnant water. Baby mosquitoes popped from their eggs and skimmed along the surface of the smelly ditches. Now there were three of them. Potter, the poor Arkansas dirt farmer, and Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, a couple of fast-living Detroit pimps who got caught in the draft. Dogface infantry soldiers all, with about as much in common as a banana and a glass of gin.

  Potter crawled back to the small bunker he had fashioned from fallen trees and dirt.

  ‘We’re outa everything,’ Corkscrew told Potter and Hammer. ‘Outa ammo, outa food, outa water,’ he said.

  ‘Outa luck,’ Potter groaned, clutching his stomach. ‘I gotta have a drink, Corkscrew.’

  Corkscrew said, ‘You got a stomach full of shrapnel, man, if you drink, you’ll die.’

  ‘I’m dead anyway,’ Potter answered.

  ‘Bullshit,’ snapped Corkscrew. Hammer had said nothing. Corkscrew reached over and shook his brother to wake him up, and Hammer rolled over and toppled face down in the muck at the bottom of a ditch.

  ‘Ham!’ Potter yelled. He jumped down and lifted Hammer up and dragged him back to the top of the ditch. But Hammer’s body was cold and his eyes were sightless.

  ‘Oh God damn, God damn you all,’ Corkscrew screamed angrily. ‘You motherfuckers, come on up here. You want something, you fuckin’ apes, come and get it. .

  When the relief column came up the hill, Corkscrew was standing over the wounded Potter and his dead brother holding his empty M-16 by the barrel, waiting for the VC.

  Yeah, thought Earp, they’d all do in a pinch, but tonight Riker will do. He nodded to the man in the safari hat.

  ‘Checking out,’ Riker said. He took off his hat with ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidered across the crown in gold and swept his chips into it. He was wearing khaki cotton tennis shorts and a red tank top, his chest hair curling over its neckline, and while his thick black hair was turning gray and he sometimes wore gold-rimmed reading glasses, his deeply tanned arms and shoulders had the smooth muscles of a man who kept himself in top physical shape. He walked across the room and cashed in his chips to the portly man they all called the Honorable.

  A thin, hollow-eyed Johnny Prophett got up from the poker table and urged Earp into a dark corner of the alcove. ‘Let me go on this one, Wyatt, please?’

  ‘C’mon, look at you. Your hands are shaking so bad you could mix a martini without moving your arm.’

  ‘A cup of coffee, a quickie . .

  ‘Johnny, some other time, okay? I’m being straight up with you. If I take you on this, you could get us all killed. Maybe next time, okay. .

  ‘I pull my own,’ Prophett mumbled, looking down at his feet.

  ‘Sure, you do,’ Earp said and slapped him on the shoulder.

  Earp, Riker and Early left the alcove, passing behind the bar and entering Wilkie’s private office. He ignored them. The office looked like an indoor junkyard. Old newspapers, bills, file folders, and magazines were piled on the desk, chairs, on the floor, and were stuffed in an old-fashioned file cabinet shoved in one corner.

  ‘Sweets has every piece of paper he ever got in his life,’ said Early, shaking his head sadly as he surveyed the oppressively cluttered office.

  ‘That he has,’ Earp answered. He opened a drawer in the desk, put his .357 in it and took out a 9 mm. pistol with a silencer attached. He popped the clip and checked it. Full.

  The phone rang, a muffled announcement from under a stack somewhere. Riker found it and handed the receiver to Earp.

  ‘Earp. Yeah . . . excellent, excellent! Okay, we’re on. Be real careful. Good luck.’

  He hung up the phone and rubbed his hands together very slowly.

  ‘We’re in luck. She got there ahead of him. He checked in ten minutes ago and she managed to get the connecting room.’

  ‘So it’s a go, then,’ said Early.

  ‘Yep,’ said Earp.

  ‘Sounds like a stroll down the lane to me,’ said Riker.

  ‘Could be,’ Earp said with raised ey
ebrows. ‘Let’s go, we got ten minutes.’

  Prophett, too, left the alcove and walked across the bar to the men’s room. He sat down in a stall and took a small plastic box from his pocket. It contained a hypodermic needle, a candle, a spoon and a packet of heroin. With shaking hands he lit the candle and set it on the toilet-paper holder, then tapped some of the powder in the spoon and cooked it over the flame until it was a clear bubbling fluid, dipped the tip of the spike in the fluid, his fingers squeezing the bulb on the end of it, forcing out the air, sucking in the fluid. He flexed his fist. The needle flirted with a vein, nicked it, then slipped deeply into it. Prophett flinched slightly, took a deep breath and shuddered. A look of contentment crossed his face, he closed his eyes and smiled.

  The Dusit Thani was a short walk away, but they took Riker’s pickup truck and parked t the rear. Riker got out but stayed close by. Early and Earp went to room 429. She was waiting.

  ‘We’ll give you about five minutes so you can find out the size of the load,’ Earp said. ‘Nervous?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Good girl. Let’s do it, then.’

  She left the room, took the stairs to the third floor and took the elevator back up, just in case he was watching or listening for it. She knocked on the door of 427 and it was opened almost immediately by a large Chinese with a livid scar down one side of his face.

  ‘Mrs Giu?’

  She nodded, and he stepped back as she entered the room, then quickly checked the hail before closing the door. He was surprised. The woman was beautiful — tiny, erect, almost regal in her bearing. She was wearing an emerald-green silk evening dress and white gloves. Her pearl earrings looked expensive. She certainly did not fit the profile of a drug courier.

  ‘I am Mr. Sen,’ he said. ‘Passport?’

  She took the small leather-bound booklet from her purse and gave it to him. He checked it closely, looking for signs of a forgery, but couldn’t detect any. If it got past him, it would get past customs.