“The Reverend wants us to be practical,” she said. “Words and protests are a starting point, but what we really need to do—”
“We need to make it harder for the government to do this to its people.” The Reverend spoke as slowly as Lee had talked fast. “We need to save our brothers, one by one, from this war.”
Mrs. Moon stood and left the room. The sleeping girl lay still on the couch. Jeannie clutched Charlie, fished up her purse, and stood to leave. She looked up to see everybody else—Lee, Crystal, June, Silver, the other girls and boys, the Reverend, the bearded man—staring at her.
Jeannie’s tongue was dry in her mouth. “I have to go,” she said.
Lee stood and gripped her by the wrist; she was surprisingly strong. “You’re not leaving,” she said.
Kip / May 1968
You ever made out with a fat chick and she won’t get off you, you know what the heat’s like in Vietnam. It lies all over you, sweats on your skin, squeezes the air out of you. You can’t shake it. In the bare-naked hour of dawn you wake and it’s writhing on you, rubbing its flesh-folds on your body and dry-tonguing your mouth. It’s that Devil’s work. He’s here, no mistaking it. Nighttime, he comes squirming in the dirt, shitting bugs and lice, hanging dead animals on the perimeter wire for us to look at over our morning cup of coffee. And come dawn he’s snuck back down into the forest, farting rounds and rockets, waiting for dusk so he can crawl up the garbage chute with the rats and roll grenades from the bushes.
This morning, there was a dead girl on the wire.
Skid got the detail to peel her off. Captain Vance caught him beating off to some tit-shot last night, told him this way he could get some girl action for real.
“Only chance I get to relax is when you assholes are sleeping,” Skid told us.
Problem is, Vance doesn’t sleep—doesn’t even blink, with those hard-boiled peepers of his—just wanders the firebase all night, eyeballing and sniffing for booze and dope. Skid should’ve known this, but Skid’s so dumb, he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
So here I am, cleaning my rifle while Skid curses, the dust licking my weapon dirty just as soon as I’ve rubbed it clean. You have to breathe real shallow here, keep your lips shut, no Minnesotan heavy mouth-breathing or the dust just walks straight in, and not even a canteen of water will flush it out.
“You missed some,” calls Hutch, splashing his razor in his helmet. Skid’s got the body down, but there’s hair in the wire.
“Fuck you, Hutch,” yells Skid.
Hutch is ducking his head to check his face in the mirror of the jeep that’s idling by the lookout bunker. He’s the vainest motherfucker I ever met. “Looking real pretty,” I say, but the words barely step out of me when my eyes bounce in their sockets and the ground jerks and there’s an old-woman scream, and the dust is puffing and the scream’s still running like the record’s jammed, and there’s Skid, wriggling like a squashed bug in the dirt with one leg where there used to be two.
“Holy shit.” Hutch is frozen by the jeep, blood striping his face. I grip my rifle, but it’s broken up for cleaning; and now Lieutenant Roper has bellied down by the perimeter trench and is pitching bullets toward the scrub beyond the wire. He empties his magazine and curses. “Fucking booby trap.” The scream has stopped and Skid is just plain yelling, the same word, over and over.
“Corpsman,” Roper hollers, and people are hell-for-leathering past me, and I guess that’s what Skid is shouting for. And the place is getting real quiet and real methodical, the way it does right after the shit’s flown—even Skid is hushing down—and I guess my dad was right when he told me folks never hear you when you yell, because Skid only has a whisper in him by now, and even through the noise of the Dustoff and the radio and the stay-calm yammering, I can hear him asking for his mom.
The Dustoff sets down, blowing red grit, and a couple grunts help load Skid inside. Hutch struggles through the heat, cheek sliced from where his razor slipped. He’s holding something that looks like roadkill raccoon, all chewed-up, black-pink meat—but the light blinks and I see it’s laced and booted, and there’s no telling my stomach it’s time to clench up and take it, it just wheels over and washes puke all the way up my throat. I swallow it down.
Hutch yells something, a word or a scream or who-the-hell-knows, and heaves the leg into the chopper after Skid, who’s given up asking for his mom and is lying still as a rock, the corpsman leaning over him and trying to talk him out of going over the Big Ridge. The chopper winches itself into the sky, its gut sagging over the mountains as it drags away, and the firebase gets quiet. Hutch stares at us too long, like he’s gathering for something, and I see his hand shake. He opens his mouth like there’s something stuck in his throat—like Buck-Buck the stammerer in high school—until finally it comes: “Son of a bitch’ll have to sit for his sucky-sucky for a while.” And I swallow, swallow, till my stomach stills and I can shout out a laugh, and when I do, Hutch looks relieved. But I can’t help thinking he’s wrong—that Skid has had his last blow job, if the poor bastard ever got one at all.
Roper clocks my face as we walk away. “Don’t think about it, Jackson,” he says. “You’ll still be dragging your ass in this shithole while he’s drinking scotch and watching Bonanza back home.” But there’s water in his eyes and his face is drab and I feel the weakness in his hand when he claps my shoulder.
“Always had him for a screamer,” says Hutch; and he’s shivering, even though it’s ninety degrees out.
“Uh-huh,” I say, spitting the vomit that’s washing around my mouth. Hutch grips my arm with his Skid-bloodied fingers and walks away. I sit down to finish cleaning my weapon, my fingers dancing like I caught those damn trembles from Hutch; and all I can think about is that fresh piece of Skid on me, and how someday soon, sweet old Momma Skid is going to get the rest of him sewn up and boxed and spangled, mailed with kind regards and solemn regret, courtesy of the United States Marine Corps.
That makes one leg, one foot, and a hand so far, plus one body bag—two if you count Skid, which I’m minded to. Charlie’s getting closer. We got probed last week—a half-dozen dead VC inside the perimeter, Roper told us most likely a dozen more dragged back down the hill. One played dead, but old peeled-eye Vance saw his nostrils flare and yanked him to his feet, and I swear that slack-legged, piss-soaked little guy was the same water-buffalo-whipping kid I threw a stick of gum to on our MEDCAP last week. Our first real live prisoner, but just as the higher-ups were figuring out what to do with him, Lieutenant Dinh started yelling all dinky dau and shoved the kid to his knees and shot the back of his head off, blasted all the brains and red fever right out of him; and before his pajamas had a chance to dry in the sun, he was lined up to be buried with his buddies.
All this is enough to wear you down, and eleven hours after Skid went skyward—eleven hours of hole-digging, sandbag-filling, bunker-building, home-dreaming, ammo-humping, field-stripping, bore-cleaning, Skid-wondering, barrel-brushing, wire-mending, fuse-fixing, shit-burning, ration-chowing—I’m ready for a release. Esposito is the man with the plan around here, buys smoke from the raisin-eyed mamasan that does our laundry. Esposito’s a Jersey kid all the way to the soles of his feet, greasy even with a crew cut, with ugly eating habits and a sawed-off temper. He’s built like a meatball and knows everything about fighting, learned it from the movies. We’re squatting in his hooch and he’s got his fat tongue out, sealing up the joint and tendering down the edges; he’s putting his lighter to burn it when Roper appears.
“Briefing with the captain,” he says, his chest rising like he’s been running laps.
“What’s the matter, Lieutenant?” says Esposito, pocketing his lighter and swallowing the joint in his fist. “You’re breathless as a cheerleader riding a quarterback.”
I throw Esposito a broad smile and squash it before Roper sees it. Smoke dribbles from Esposito’s fingers and the smell of dope spikes the hooch. Roper says nothing, just star
es at Esposito; and Esposito watches him straight back with his South Jersey, neck-clenching grin, just daring the lieutenant to order him to open his hand. Roper’s strict and straight as a bayonet—he doesn’t take shit from anybody, not even from the brothers—but he’s standing there and I can see his eyes boring into Esposito’s knuckles. I’m betting he’s going to call Esposito on it; but he steps back out of the hooch, fading a trail of words—“FDC at eighteen hundred hours.”
Esposito curses and shakes the joint from his fist. “Looks like Vance rode Miss Butterbar a little too hard today,” he says, sucking down a mouthful of smoke.
“Something’s about to go down,” I say.
When Captain Vance gets us all together, it’s most often the appetizer for a red-letter-day shit-feast. Last time we had a party like this, the next thing I knew I was on a search patrol on the wrong side of the perimeter. Didn’t search out a goddamn thing—but on the way back to the firebase, Buchanan’s boot found a toe-popper that blew his left foot clean off.
Esposito has sucked the joint all the way down to the roach. “Want some?”
“Sure.” I take the roach and put it to my mouth, but I don’t inhale—just pinch my lips around it, then blow and squash the butt under my boot. If the captain’s looking for more volunteers, I’ve got to be clearheaded, ready to make sure he doesn’t choose me.
Captain Vance is one long, tall motherfucker, with a deep-cut frown like he’s been thinking too hard. Everybody’s crouching in the dirt, facing forward. Vance is nodding at Roper; and when we hump down at the back of the group, Roper turns to us with black eyes and smiles.
“All right, let’s go,” he calls.
Vance starts to pace, his face shining cherry red. He keeps telling us this is his second tour in country, but that milquetoast skin of his won’t agree, just fries right up as soon as he steps out of a C-130.
“Listen up,” he says, and I can hear the tennis lessons and the smooth-skinned girls and the college education in his voice. We all hear it—you can feel it in the clench and shift of the group.
“You’re on Firebase Deadwood.” Vance pauses like this is news. “This is my firebase, and each and every one of you belongs to me.” He slow-pans us, head dipping up and down like he’s counting the number of bodies he has at his disposal. A snackle of laughter comes from the far side of the group, and it’s one of the brothers, the too-tough, hand-jiving power brother who slugged Pederson at chowtime last week and called him a fucking rabbit. A murmur rolls, and men move. Vance raises his voice. “It is my responsibility to keep you alive. We lost a man today; I don’t want to lose any more.”
So, Skid bought it.
This settles everybody down; even the brothers stop laughing. The puke I gulped back this morning wriggles in my stomach, and I hold steady and stare straight ahead, counting one-two-three as I wrestle it still.
Vance surveys his men, his feet wide, his hand on his holster, ready for a speech. And I’m wondering what he’s going to say about Skid, how he’s going to hero-dress a kid we all know was ugly and dumb as they come. “Here it is,” he says. “When PFC Cobb’s hooch was cleared out, a quantity of what I’m told”—Vance slides a heavy look at Roper, who folds his face in a frown—“is marijuana was found.” Vance leaves a long, This-Is-What-Happens-When-You-Smoke-Drugs pause. “Now listen up,” he says. “There will be no drugs on this firebase. No pot, no grass, no dope. Whatever you call it, I won’t have it on my hill. You want to survive this war, you got to stay sharp.”
Skid’s still warm in his bag and this asshole can’t even say a good word about him, just uses his corpse as a pulpit to preach from, as though the real evil here isn’t the crotchrot or the booby traps or the RPGs snouting through the bushes, it’s the fucking dope, the ten-minute toke at the end of a day of skin-searing, brain-murdering, run-for-your-life boredom.
Vance paces, then stops to stare into our faces, rocking his crotch back and forth, like he’s trying to air-fuck us. “So,” he says. “You tell me now if you have anything to hand over. I’ll give you five minutes. After that, if I find anything, I’ll court-martial you, and you’ll spend the rest of the war staring at the walls of the Portsmouth brig.” Esposito elbows me and makes an oh-so-scared expression; but there’s something held-back in his face and I can tell—two weeks short of flying home, he doesn’t want any trouble.
“Five minutes. Give it all up, and we’ll move on. Lieutenant”—Vance turns to Roper, who’s crouching like a toad in the dust—“set your watch.”
The silence gets thick; I can almost hear the tick-tick of Roper’s wristwatch, and Skid and all his squirming and shouting sneak back into my brain, so I train my mind on the last time this kind of thing happened, way back in elementary school. Me and Bobby had poured red paint over Mrs. Mahoney’s chair while she was out of the room talking with Principal Studebaker; the old lady was pissed, made us all stay through lunch until somebody fessed up to ruining her pantsuit. After five minutes, Kenny Cox cracked and told—fatass just couldn’t wait to strap on his feed bag in the cafeteria. (Later in the schoolyard, Bobby busted his mouth so bad the kid had teeth for dessert.) But, man, at nine years old, those five minutes were the longest of my life. In country, you learn how to handle it when time lays itself on you. The trick is to stare down each minute, right till you see the back of it, and don’t think about all those others lining up behind it, or you’ll go crazy. And I must be getting good, because already Roper is standing and gripping his wristwatch.
“Time, Lieutenant?” says Vance.
“Two minutes, sir.”
Vance looks around the group. “Nobody, huh?” He turns to Roper. “Lieutenant, you reported an incident just before eighteen hundred hours, is that correct?”
A nasty smirk burns across Roper’s face.
“Private First Class Esposito and Private First Class Jackson, sir.”
“Shit,” says Esposito. All heads turn to us.
“Esposito and Jackson, up here.”
Son of a bitch. We stand, and Hutch wolf whistles.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
I pick my way forward, but I’ve not gone three steps when Esposito slams against my back, grabbing my ass to steady himself.
“What the—”
“Fucking New Guy,” says Esposito to the fat kid with the clean cammies that’s sitting at his feet, confusion slapped all over his face. “Get out of the fucking way.”
“But I didn’t—” says the kid, cheeks wobbling.
“Shut it, blimp,” says Esposito. He gives the kid a kick before continuing on his way.
“Move it,” says Roper.
We push to the front and stand like a pair of clowns.
“Gentlemen. Anything you need to give me?” says Vance.
“No, sir,” we say.
“Turn out your pockets,” he says, and I’m hoping Esposito left his stash in his hooch.
Even the lizards are listening as we unbutton the flaps on our jackets and turn out Zippos, dong, photographs, cigarettes, and rubbers into Roper’s cracked hands.
“All right,” says Vance to Esposito, who’s already taking his shit back from Roper while I’m working the buttons on my trousers. “As you were.”
So, Esposito was smart. Roper’s going to be pissed.
“And your back pockets, Jackson,” says Vance.
I scoop one pocket out, handing over a pack of Chiclets and a book of matches, and then the other, and I’m closing my fingers around some piece of cloth or I-don’t-know-what, and I pull it out and it opens up in my hand, and there it is, the most beautiful dope I’ve ever seen, lime green and lush and springy. This is confusing to me, and there’s a moment before my brain pieces it together and I realize that I’ve been screwed, and I know who did the screwing.
“It’s not mine, sir,” I say, and I hear Hutch and Pederson snickering. I turn to look at Esposito, but he’s got his eyes to the ground, innocent as a fucking egg.
Vance lean
s in close. “I don’t want to goddamn hear it,” he says, and I see it in his naked face, that bone-cold, live-and-let-die ferocity that makes a man sign up straight out of college for a lifetime of shooting and killing. He watches me for a moment, and I see it all moving through his eyes—disgust, pity, spite, disappointment—like slides in a Kodak Carousel, and I’ve seen this show before—my dad has it down pat. Vance turns to Roper.
“Where are we at, Lieutenant?”
“Five minutes, eleven seconds, sir,” says Roper, his eyes all over Esposito.
Vance smiles, and I swear to God I can’t remember the last time somebody smiling meant anything good was going to happen. He turns to the men sitting in front of us.
“Private First Class Kipling Jackson’s father”—I listen for the snuck of laughter at my first name, and see the shoulders of the brothers shaking—“was a decorated hero who fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Proudest battle in Marine Corps history.” Vance glances at me, smug with his information, and I’m guessing Roper’s been telling tales. “I wonder what he’d think if he saw his son now.” My brain goes to my dad, sitting in his jammies, ever-so-frowning over a long letter before reaching the end of it and spitting out his bourbon. Even here, on Deadman Mountain, up to my pucker in deep serious, my dad’s disapproval still finds me, a tracer hightailing through the dark. I catch Hutch’s eye. He looks uneasy. Vance steps toward me, and I get the real size of the man, the steak-and-milk-fed heft of him, all big head and broad shoulders, the kind of boy who tears up his mother pushing himself out into the world.
“PFC Jackson,” says Vance. “Under Article Fifteen of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I’m imposing nonjudicial punishment for possession of marijuana.” Esposito stands hunched next to me, trying to disappear. He’s watching me from the corner of his eye.
“Sir—” I say.
The Outside Lands Page 9
