The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

“I’m talking. I’m reducing your rank to private, and you’ll forfeit seven days of base pay.” This hits me like a punch—all force and stun and I know it’s going to hurt like hell later. A slick-sleeve again, and twenty-five bucks the poorer. It’s one thing to be sitting up here dust-chewing and cornhole-clenching night and day, but you have to be a damn idiot to do it for free. Somebody in the crowd whistles, and a smile tickles Vance’s face. I didn’t smoke a puff of that fucking joint and now I’m getting hauled up for it. Roper slides me a look I can’t read, and Vance continues. “I’m also restricting you for fourteen days: no MEDCAPs, no R&R, nothing.” That smile has run all the way into a grin. “You have the right to refuse this punishment,” he says. “But then I’ll have to court-martial you. Which I’m guessing isn’t too appealing.”

  I hear them, these words he’s speaking—they roll to me one by one, like balls sliding over a pinball table, dropping into my brain with the clunk-clunk of straight losses.

  “But, sir—”

  “We’re done here,” says Vance. “Come back at zero six hundred hours tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll have a formal hearing.”

  “Somebody planted it on me, sir,” I say. Esposito’s rocking on his boots.

  “I don’t care.” Vance turns to the crowd and lifts his voice. “I find that stuff on anybody, I won’t tolerate it.” The show’s over. Vance mutters, “All right, that’s it,” and walks, waving Roper along with him. Roper stops to grip my shoulder as he goes.

  “Goddamn, Jackson,” says Esposito, all strut and swagger now that the higher-ups have fuckered-off.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” I say, and my fingers fly for him, squeezing into a fist just as they reach his face; I feel the smack of his cheekbone, the smudge of his skin. He staggers back, holding his jaw.

  “Shit, Jackson.”

  Hutch catches my arm, dragging me so that my feet stumble. “What the hell, man?”

  “It’s none of your fucking business, Hutch.”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” says Esposito, checking his palm for blood—there’s barely a trickle, the candy-ass motherfucker. I feel the eyes crawling on me and I need to shake them off; the light’s dying and the temperature’s sunk and I want to get away, and for once I’m glad I’m on first watch.

  I grab my stuff and head to the observation tower, high above the dust and the bullshit. In the valley below, a stream worms, and to the east—every time a near-surprise, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks—is the South China Sea, hiding beyond the mountains. I crouch down and light a cigarette, watching the sunset rage on the ocean; and I think of the sun blazing orange on the water at the Fleishhacker Pool, diving off the tower with Jeannie and trying to outstare her underwater; coming home, starved and burn-eyed, to Oreos and Tang. Something sour and rotten bloats inside me, and it comes, the puke that’s been struggling in my stomach ever since Skid got fried this morning. Old Redneck Corncracker Skid, with his brown teeth and his cold sores and his dreams of pickups and banana pudding. He had the smell of the South all over him—whiskey, hay, dung—was so damn rotten with life, I never marked him to get wasted. And the fog heaves in from the ocean and it’s like I’m floating in a cloud; and I know it’s only the fog moving, but it feels like the cloud’s taking me, lifting me from the watchtower, off Deadman Mountain and over the South China Sea.

  Here’s the thing: Skid didn’t die. Skid rode that fat green bird all the way to Danang, morphine rushing through his veins to sluice the pain, the corpsman leaning close, jabbering about how the bleeding had stopped, how Skid was going home to Georgia, how he was never coming back to this dump. Right now, Skid is in the hospital, tucked into cool sheets, watching a foxy nurse wide-eyeing over his wound, drinking orange juice and spooning Jell-O from a glass cup. Soon enough, he’ll be back with the peach trees and the Jesus freaks, living his muck-poor, hillbilly life, smearing up the air with his bad smell and disappointing everybody with his slap-jaw, gee-shucks, mother-fucking dumbness, and I’ll still be here with Vance and all the other assholes, bored and scared, rotting from the feet up.

  At zero six hundred hours I report to the fire direction center, frozen with dew and something else, some dark-faced fury that slunk inside me in the night and didn’t leave when dawn came. Vance is bent over a table, fingering maps. Above him a washing line hangs, pinched at three-hundred-millimeter intervals by binder clips that carry charts of coordinates scheduled to be bombed to bejesus. The bunker is dim and smells of farts, and it could be day or night, in any fucking war; except dawn punches through the hatch, and the gasoline reek of napalm rising from the valley reminds me that this is a brave new day of my very own 396-day, catch-me-if-you-can, howitzers-and-ham-and-motherfuckers war.

  Everything here is covered in plastic; and as Vance turns, I imagine it being spattered with blood, imagine how it would feel to put my fist in his Ivy League face. He rises up to his full QB height and stares like I’m a stranger.

  “Private First Class Jackson, sir,” I tell him.

  “Private Jackson,” he corrects me. “You bring a representative?”

  “No, sir.”

  We stand, and he stares hard at me. He’s waiting; there’s a question in his face.

  “Sir,” I say.

  “Jackson.”

  “Sir.”

  “Well?”

  “Sir?”

  “You made a decision?”

  “It wasn’t me, sir.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “It’s not right—” My voice gets loud; Vance holds up his palm for me to stop.

  “I said, have you made a decision? Do you want me to send you back to your father, or do you want to put on your big-girl panties and make something of yourself here?”

  He’s standing too close; I can see the pores where his skin breathes.

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Okay what?” Vance slaps at a stinkbug that’s crawled onto his shoulder and is gazing at his neck. He’s going to make me say it.

  “I’ll stay. I’ll take the punishment, sir.” My tongue is all glue and suck and the last word comes out small and swallowed, like I’m some limp-dick punk, like I’m actually afraid of him. Vance thins his eyes, and they gleam with satisfaction, and I know my word mashing confirms everything he thought about me; and all the shit and guts inside me turn hot.

  The radio belches static and Vance cocks his head.

  “Ghost Actual, this is Yankee 21, adjust fire, over.”

  “Dismissed,” says Vance. He waves his hand and turns back to his table.

  Skin burning, I step back into the noise of dawn—trucks snorting, men bitching—and head for my hooch.

  Esposito is sitting on my rack, legs look-at-my-big-balls wide; Dopfer and Carter are hunkering on the ground. Esposito stands.

  “What happened?”

  “Told him to stick his punishment, told him I’d take the court-martial.”

  “No shit.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Told me he wouldn’t do it. Said he needed me up here, with all these VC around.”

  “Bullshit,” says Carter.

  “Shut up, Carter,” says Esposito, cuffing his shoulder. “C’mon—it’s too cramped in here.” He muscles me out of the bunker; Dopfer and Carter follow. Dopfer is all meat and no brain—I’ve never heard him talk except to ask the boom-boom girls in the village how much. Carter’s a flesh-lipped, pockmarked kid from Seattle. All that rain must have soaked right through to his soul, because he’s one hostile motherfucker; and Somebody Up There seems to know it because Carter’s always getting screwed on his Charlie rats—all peanut butter and halved apricots—and he’s such a mean son of a bitch, nobody will trade with him.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday, man. You got burned,” says Esposito, squatting on a sandbag and waving the rest of us to crouch.

  “Fuck you, man,” I say, standing over him. “It’s you that fucking burned me.”

  Carter smirks, and
Dopfer rises to stand, but Esposito holds him down.

  “I’m sorry, Jackson, I really am. You’re a real man, to take it the way you did. You know I can’t mess up my record—it’s going to be tough enough for me to get a gig as it is.”

  Esposito’s got a rap sheet as long as the Delaware River, or at least that’s what he tells us—it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gone all the way through his law-breaking life pinning his shit on the nearest fucking idiot.

  “Come on,” he says. “Sit down.” I spy Roper watching us from his hooch, Vance approaching him from the FDC.

  “All right,” I say, crouching down, keeping my eye on Vance, who’s talking to Roper and turning his head in our direction.

  Esposito hands each of us a cigarette, opens his Zippo, lights mine and Carter’s, shuts the Zippo lid, reopens it, and sparks the flame for himself and Dopfer.

  Carter shakes his head. “Pussy,” he says, cigarette wagging.

  “Your funeral, cocksucker,” says Esposito.

  Esposito likes to punish Carter, keeps him around like a dog he can kick; Carter seems not to mind, but this one landed.

  “Superstitious bullshit,” he says, spitting a snotball to the ground. It gleams in the sunshine, an inch from Esposito’s boot.

  Esposito knocks my knee with his fist. “You still getting demoted?”

  I nod. Carter’s watching me sideways; Dopfer is squatting straight-backed, like he’s waiting for orders.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “I feel bad,” says Esposito. A smile spreads over Carter’s face. “You lost dollars on this. No pay for a week, lower pay grade.” I stare at Esposito, and it comes to me that maybe he means it—he comes from a long line of wops where the worst thing you can do is steal a man’s bribe money.

  “I’ll pay it back,” he says. I shake my head. “When I get back to the World,” he says. “I’ll pay your losses.”

  Carter tips his chin to study me, his eyes moving across my face like he’s reading words there.

  “Bullshit,” I say.

  “I mean it, man,” says Esposito, and he’s getting all Italian on me, his brown eyes shining and soulful like Sophia fucking Loren’s.

  “It’s not about the money, man,” I say.

  Esposito has his head low; he’s thinking over something heavy. I wait—we all wait—and Dopfer’s breath gets thick.

  Carter cracks. “Jesus, Dopfer, you kid-simple asshole. Close your damn mouth.”

  Esposito jerks up his head like whatever’s been weighing down his brain has been lifted, and reaches into his back pocket. “Take this,” he says, pulling out a photograph. I don’t need to look at it—I’ve seen it before, recognize it from its finger-wearied corners—but Esposito pushes it at my face. A girl, tan and gap-toothed, grinning at the camera, tomato sauce on her cheek. The face is scarred by a fold down the center of the photograph from when he kept it in his wallet back home, and no matter how many empty hours Esposito spends smoothing it with his finger, the damn crease won’t heal. Sitting next to the girl, dressed in a vest and a bow tie, is a teddy bear, almost her size. Esposito’s baby daughter, died just before he shipped out, choked on an all-American, Land-of-the-Free hot dog.

  “Take it,” says Esposito. Carter’s right, he is a fucking pussy. “As security,” he says. “I send you the money, you send me the photograph.”

  “You men got nowhere to be?” It’s Vance, standing behind me, throwing shadow on us. “Jackson, haven’t you eaten enough shit for one week?” I turn to squint at him; his boots are flush against my ass. “Esposito, get the hell up. I know all about you.”

  Esposito scrambles to his feet.

  “And the rest of you.” Vance bumps me with his boot.

  We stand.

  “Seeing as you’re not busy,” says Vance, “I’m sending the four of you out on a listening post tonight. Ground surveillance radar found VC stacked up in the tree line; we think they’re planning another probe. Report to Lieutenant Roper at seventeen hundred hours for your orders.”

  We watch as he strides back toward Roper’s hooch.

  “Pig lifer,” says Carter.

  “I hate that motherfucker,” says Esposito.

  “Yeah,” I say, taking the photograph from Esposito and putting it in my pocket.

  “Son of a bitch is always marching in our shit,” says Esposito.

  I think of the way Vance brushed me off in the FDC, like I was another stinkbug, and I feel that fury again, sneaking up through my boots.

  “You heard about Delta Company? Did their CO a job,” says Carter.

  “Bullshit,” says Esposito.

  “It’s true. Son of a bitch was a real hard-charger, kept ordering his men out on suicide patrols and sending Chinooks full of grunts in body bags back to Dong Ha. They sent him a warning—left a Claymore under his bunk with a note saying ‘You’re shorter than you think.’”

  Esposito snuffles a laugh. “That’s a good one.”

  Carter continues. “Next day, the CO told them they were going to take a hill. The ARVN were supposed to take it, but they got chewed up by a .51-caliber and got the hell out of there. That was it—that night someone rigged up a Claymore and a trip wire outside the CO’s bunker; and this time it was him riding the chopper in a body bag.”

  “Shit,” I say. “I’m surprised they found anything to put in the bag.”

  “It’s rational. The law of the jungle,” says Carter. “Kill them before they kill you, right?”

  “Captain Vance could use a frag up his ass,” says Esposito.

  “Too bad he’d enjoy it,” I say, and Esposito laughs, and so does Carter; and Esposito gets to laughing so hard it sounds all hee-hee-hee, just like they write it in the funny pages, and this sets me off too, and that gut-swilling Skid-sickness that I’ve been humping around eases, and I get an all-of-a-sudden, clear-as-day feeling of certainty—like waking from a dream, or falling into one—that we are brothers-in-arms, and that somehow everything is going to be all right.

  At sunset, we get ready to leave for the listening post. I watch Esposito check the rounds in his magazine for the third time, his shoulders hunched, a frown running cracks in his war paint. I wonder if he’s got it too, that homesick feeling massing in his stomach: fear, dismay, and lonesomeness, all mixed and stewed together. Lance Corporal Shea is chipper as a Boy Scout, humming the Beatles loud and off-key as he tapes a flare to his flak jacket. The five of us—Shea, Carter, Dopfer, Esposito and me—are readying to go out eight hundred meters beyond the perimeter, in the dark, with no radio.

  “Can’t run a wire that far,” Roper told us hours ago, but we knew the truth, knew that even with a radio, you bleed static for a moment, and those gooks will find you before your mouth has touched the receiver.

  “Questions?” says Sergeant Fugate.

  “Can you go over our mission again, Sergeant?” I say.

  “Your assignment is to listen for the enemy.”

  “And if we hear them?”

  “Track their movements. Watch for a probe.”

  “And if they’re approaching the perimeter?”

  “Send up the red flare.”

  “And engage the enemy—”

  “Do not engage the enemy unless necessary.” Fugate takes a swig from his canteen. His fingers shake over the lid, and I wonder if he’s boozehounding his way through his second tour. “You’re a small squad, with no backup. You draw fire, you’re dead.”

  “We send up the flare, we don’t have a fucking choice,” says Carter.

  Fugate rolls his cheeks and spits. “If you need to return before dawn, send up the green flare. So we know you’re friendly.”

  Carter shakes his head, his bottom lip drooping, like my nephew when he’s told no ice cream. “There it is,” he says.

  “Shut up, Carter.” Esposito turns away, and I guess he’s getting superstitious again, guess he’s got that short-timer dread that it will be on that Last-Day-Nearly-Home mission that
death will finally track him down.

  Carter bitches as he pulls on his asspack. Fugate ignores him. “Lance Corporal Shea, you got the flares?” he says.

  “Sergeant.”

  “All right. Move out.”

  We patrol down the hill, the sun snitching our eyes, the scrub writhing with beetles and hoppers. The sun is almost gone as we weave into the forest. We walk, boots cracking the undergrowth, rifles aimed at leaves, into the thickness of the bush, until the trees close out the sky. Shea hesitates, then waves his fingers at us.

  “Here we fucking go,” murmurs Carter. Esposito turns and smacks him in the shoulder; Shea snaps his finger to his lips. We squat together, and wait.

  Night falls piece by piece through the trees, the here-and-there scraps of sunset darkening, one by one. There’s one lick of light left, running warm down the length of a tree trunk and over the forest floor. In the middle of the puddle of light, a locust squats on a stick, stroking its legs together, catching the last rays. It springs away, into the shadow; the light dies.

  The death of the light sets off a commotion: the birds thump and the rats scurry and something—a monkey or a chicken or a lizard—starts cackling. Those dink animals are downright stoked that night’s here. But for me, now that the last smear of light has gone, I can feel it, feel its soft, wet fingers on me: Fear—slobbering, bucktoothed, loon-bird Fear. Esposito is crouched down next to me; I hear his throat make a loud click and wonder if he feels it too. The bush gets shush-don’t-make-a-sound quiet, like all the creatures have reached their positions for a game of hide-and-seek. Sunset has yanked the temperature down low, and I’m cold, the coldest I’ve been in country, my muscles quivering, my teeth dancing in my mouth. I clench my jaw shut, feel the ridges of my teeth grind and tremble. We wait; and I try to hold still, watching the gloom, the blank shapes of the trees, watching to see if any of them move.

  It turns out this jungle-dark’s got a playbook, got a whole set of moves laid out to keep a man wired-up scared; and that first sundown dark isn’t really dark at all—it’s just the murdering of the light; and now that the light’s dead, the darkness can start to happen. It shades out the silhouettes of the fat trees that mark the edges of the woods; then it thickens, blotting out the scraggy trees that were four, three, two meters in front of me. As the blackness sets, the distances between me and Esposito and Shea shrink. I hear Shea’s breath, Esposito’s dry swallow, the tick of Shea’s knee as he shifts his weight. Now we are elbow-to-elbow, foot-to-foot, leatherneck paper-chain men. Waiting.