“Hey, punk, when I want your opinion I’ll stomp it out of you, okay?”
The other two laughed.
“You got that,” Frank said.
“Yeah. Okay. Didn’t mean anything.”
“Then don’t say anything. That’s your problem. When you say something, you better mean it. That’s something you gotta learn.”
Hanson was drunk. The pool table looked like a smooth green parallelogram, and that made the rebound of the balls, the physics of the game all the more interesting. While he watched the players, he idly rolled a cue ball along the top of his leg. He tapped his foot to the music downstairs and sang softly to himself, “. . . I got my rainbow and a sunny day.” He smiled broadly, like a person who is about to buy something that he has waited and saved a long time for.
The one in the T-shirt was bent over the table, lining up a shot. Hanson walked over, as if to watch, and sidearmed the cue ball just below his ear. He fell sideways, sweeping a mug of beer off the table, his stick clattering across the floor. The cue ball seemed to stick to his jaw for a moment, then fell to the floor and rolled under the table. Where the cue ball had struck the jaw, there was now a shallow depression slowly turning from white to red. Hanson didn’t see it. He’d felt the jaw give way when he palmed the ball into it, and he knew that the one in the T-shirt was through for the night. He was already turning toward the plaid shirt who stood facing him, holding his cue stick, feet braced wide. Hanson kicked him between the legs and took the stick from him as he fell.
The one in the biker outfit swung his cue stick, but Hanson saw it coming and it only glanced off his arm. Hanson snatched a striped ball from the table and threw it at him. The ball hit him high in the chest, and when he flinched, Hanson snapped his pool cue into the wide watch band. The man dropped his stick and stumbled back, holding his wrist.
“Why—” he began.
“Why,” Hanson said to him. “You want to know why?” then drove the stick into the V of his ribs and watched him fall and hit the floor, where he began making little whoops and throwing up.
“Because things are too fragile out there,” Hanson said, pointing toward the dark window, “and I don’t know what to do about it. Because,” he said, “I wake up scared every morning.”
The kid, the Gypsy Cowboy, hadn’t moved. He stood staring at Hanson, half a glass of beer in his hand.
Hanson smiled at him, laid the cue stick down, and thumped the heel of his hand on the rubber bumper of the pool table. “Good,” he said to the kid. “Just don’t move. Be cool, and you’ll be okay. Finish your beer. Drink up, podner.”
The kid drank down the beer, watching Hanson over the rim of the glass.
“Set it down,” Hanson told him, and the kid set the empty glass down on the pool table.
“Now. You too may wonder why I did what I just did.”
“Oh no, I, no—” the kid began.
“Whoops,” Hanson said to the kid. “Don’t move now.”
The one he’d kicked was groaning and pulling himself around on the floor in a circle.
Hanson waited until he pulled himself a little farther around, studying him like a piece of defective machinery. He cocked his leg back slightly, then snapped it straight, sending his heel into the man’s jaw. “Boogie-woogie, motherfucker.”
“Now, let’s see. The reason,” he said, sweat dripping down his cheek. He looked quickly around the room. “I wake up scared,” he said, lowering his voice and walking closer to the kid, “and then I get pissed off because I’m scared, and I want to kick somebody’s ass. I don’t know the difference anymore between being scared and being pissed off. It’s all connected. Like the tidal pools. You change one thing around and that makes it so that everything else has to change, and pretty soon it’s all fucked up.
“I don’t usually trust myself to get drunk in public places anymore. Hell, you see what happens,” he said, wiping his hand across his face.
“Goddamn it,” he shouted, swinging the pool cue and shattering the beer glass off the pool table, then bringing the stick down, splintering it on the table.
The one who had asked him why groaned and rolled over.
“Shut up,” Hanson snapped, kicking him. Kicking him again, then spinning around and grabbing the pool table, trying to lift it, growling and crying down in his chest.
The kid started moving slowly toward the door.
“Hold it. I’m not through yet. See, I get around other people, and they’re talking and making noise, and I start getting mad. Because they don’t pay attention. They got to be quieter and more careful.”
“Anyway,” he said, breathing hard, but calmer, trying to smile, “don’t move now, or make any noise, and I won’t hurt you.”
The kid nodded.
“Do you believe me?” Hanson asked him.
The kid looked at him and nodded.
“Good.”
The kid heard a quick metallic snap, and Hanson had the knife an inch from his throat. “See, you just never know where things will come from. That’s why you got to pay attention.
“Now listen up. If you cut a man’s throat below the larynx, the vocal cords, don’t you see, he can’t make any noise. You take the carotid artery—it’s strange, the guy keeps breathing through the hole you cut in his neck, blowing like a fucking bellows—and in a second he faints and dies. But you got to have a sharp knife.”
Hanson cut the buttons off the kid’s shirt, popping them off one by one, from top to bottom, as the kid stood perfectly still.
“The throat, see, it’s pretty tough meat. Friend of mine always called it the ee-so-fay-gus. He’s dead now, though.
“But that’s pretty useless information, isn’t it. Interesting, I think, huh, but useless.”
Hanson smiled. “Getting cut doesn’t even hurt if the knife is sharp enough,” he said, and laid open a three-inch gash on the back of his own forearm, snapped the knife closed, and slipped it into his pocket. Blood seeped down the arm and in between the webbing of his fingers. He looked at the blood collecting on his fingertips and dripping onto the floor.
“Did you ever think about the devil—because I have—about what a hard job he’s got? He does all the work and God just sits around and takes all the credit for everything. The devil’s got to jump around and hiss and sneer,” Hanson said, then jumped up, rubbing his hands together, jumping, holding his bloody hands like claws, sticking his tongue out, jerking his head from side to side, “like some fuckin’ asshole, ’cause that’s the job he got stuck with. Go out there every fucking day and deliver the pain. Deliver the pain for that slimy asshole God. And everybody hates him for it. Well fuck that, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice almost normal. “Fuck that.” He exhaled slowly. “Boy, I’m tired. I gotta go. I’m really tired.”
“Look, you better stay up here for a few minutes till I’m gone. People are gonna be mad about this. I know it. So you stay right here, okay? If you don’t, what with all this stuff I’ve taught you and everything tonight, I’m gonna be pissed off, and I’ll come back and get you. Do you believe me?”
The kid nodded.
“Good. Take care, now,” he said, snapping the fingers of his left hand at the kid, speckling him with blood.
It was a cool night, and the fog collected on Hanson’s face like sweat as he walked the dark road. He picked up his step, a staggering double-time. “Gotta go,” he chanted, dropping one shoulder. “Gotta be,” then the other, loosening up like a boxer. “Airborne. Infantry.
“Gotta go. Gotta be. Airborne. Infantry.
“Gotta go, gotta be, Airborne Infantry…”
The lighthouse on the point didn’t blink. Through the fog he could see the edge of the light, anticipate it as it began to swing around. It would glow brightly for a moment, dispersed and indistinct, as if it were behind frosted glass, then fade out and swing away.
Hanson stopped and watched the light.
Out beyond the surf a blowhole boomed
and sighed with each wave, like a man who has stopped running for a moment to catch his breath and decide which direction he should go next.
DA NANG
Three weeks later Quinn was standing at the NCO club bar in Da Nang staring at a point somewhere deep inside the big green mirror. He was remembering an early morning in February, his senior year in high school, when he’d had to walk seven miles back to Mason City, hiding from the police. He could feel the numbness in his toes thinking about the frostbite. Using grain silos to plot his course home, he’d crossed the miles of frozen cornfields that rustled in the wind. He lost the feeling in his feet, and blowing snow stuck to his eyelashes and hair as he stumbled through the ice crust and bamboolike corn stalks, scaring up little gray sparrows and field mice. But it had been worth it. Worth the late-night drive to the Clear Lake High School homecoming dance—their chief rivals—where he and some other football players crashed the party with sawed-off pool cues. It was his fondest memory of high school.
Quinn was in a good mood.
The door swung open behind him, and he watched Hanson through the mirror as he walked to the bar and stood next to him, seeming, as Quinn watched, to walk through a small door in the mirror and grow to normal size.
Hanson ordered a beer, poured it into a glass, and took a long swallow.
“There’s something about a bar, first thing in the morning,” Hanson said, looking at Quinn in the mirror. “No cigarette smoke—the light’s different—there’s the smell of stale beer and Lysol. A new world every morning.”
“I got your new world hangin’,” Quinn said, slapping a copy of the orders assigning Hanson back to CCN down on the bar.
Behind them, a bitter warbling laugh rose and fell hysterically. Silver, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, jeans, and a red bandana, stood behind them, holding his mechanical laugh box. He smiled and tipped his hand, and the laughter began again, sobbing, out of control.
“Some fun, huh?” Silver said. “We got a laugh riot here.”
“Tell us about your trip, sport,” Quinn said. “We’ve got a chopper laid on to take us back to the site tomorrow. We even stashed away your gear so you won’t have to break in a new set.”
“So tell us,” Silver said. “How was it, man? How was it back with all those people?”
Hanson laughed. “Not too good…
“But then,” he went on, “I remembered that phone number Sergeant Major gave me before I left…”
The dark mountains, their tops still hidden by fog, rose behind Hanson as he took the sandy path to the beach and the transient barracks. The parchment-brown dune grass brushed his hands and hips as he walked. He had forgotten about the lowland heat, the way it rode the air, as tangible as the wind and rain of the monsoons.
He stopped at one of the crumbling French gun emplacements and looked through the firing port. The sea was calm, the same pale blue as the simmering midmorning sky. A few small boats were out tending the fishnets on the far side of the bay.
The wide white beach was dotted with jellyfish that had been stranded by the tide. Weakly pulsing, they looked like transparent blue brains, or thoughts, random bits of memory caught on the sand. Sea gulls coursed woodenly above him in the thermal currents. Gold flecks of mica moved over the sand with the surf, flickering in the sun. Sea grass and bright blue flowers blanketed the sandy hills toward shore, and a bank of clouds was pushing into the mountains to the north.
Each step he took on the damp sand compressed it so that it flashed beneath his feet like bomb bursts seen from the air.
Hanson sang softly to himself against the sound of the surf, and it occurred to him that Mr. Minh had probably never seen the ocean.
The transient barracks were pleasant bungalows on the beach. Hanson went inside the one he’d been assigned, dropped his duffel bag in the corner, and lay down on the bunk. The surf hissed as he looked up at the ceiling.
Lizards on the walls moved in sudden flurries of speed, then stopped dead still, and it was difficult to actually see them move. As soon as Hanson detected movement, the lizard had frozen again, its shiny eyes focused somewhere beyond him. It was like trying to watch your eyes move in a mirror. The lizards lived on the walls, eating flies and mosquitoes.
Bars of sunlight fell through the shutters onto the concrete floor. They moved slowly, imperceptibly, relentlessly with the angle of the sun.
Hanson lay on the bunk and inhaled the odor of Vietnam. Why was it so different from the smell of his home back in the States? Was it the plants, the earth itself, or was it the breath of the people and animals who lived there? Was he inhaling the same breath that had warmed their lungs and fed their blood?
Outside, two of the maids were talking in the high wail and whine of Vietnamese.
He drifted off to sleep in the cool hootch dreaming of the South Pole, blue-white and motionless.
Later, when the sun had touched the horizon, there was no breeze at all. Outside the NCO club, on the patio, beneath the big green cargo-chute canopy, the Hustlers had set up. The Hustlers were a Vietnamese rock band that had learned their songs by listening to record albums that were diverted from the Army PX and sold on the streets in black market stalls along with Kool cigarettes, Ivory soap, and combat boots. They were young Vietnamese who had spent their adolescence immersed in the war and in American rock&roll culture. They spoke little English, learning to sing the rock lyrics phonetically, with heavy accents. Squeezed through another culture to entertain soldiers, the songs were strangely disturbing, showing at times the dark side of their energy. They were all six months out of date.
Their costumes were taken from record album covers—shoulder-length black hair, bandanas, aviator sunglasses, unzipped leather jackets, tight tailored jeans and boots, cigarettes and surly expressions. Asians in the midst of a bloody civil war parodying the rebellion of middle-class American adolescents.
The two dancers had beautiful waist-length hair and wore fringed bikinis and heavy eye makeup. They were sultry, sexy in a cheap way, an Asian version of the Playboy bunnies that the soldiers had grown up masturbating to. The band was like a disturbing dream in a language that almost makes sense—should make sense—but does not.
When it was dark, Hanson looked up at the stars, the same stars he always looked at when he was on ambush. A sky full of stars, not the ones he used to look at back home, a place he used to call home.
And he was getting drunk, sitting at a table with Quinn and Silver, sharing two pitchers of beer, glowering at the band. The acrid smoke of Vietnamese cigarettes, like smelling salts popped under his nose, kept waking him to the fact that he was back in-country.
“All right, all right, is everybody feeling good?” the bandleader shouted, pacing across the stage, grinning.
“We are happy abou’ being in Da Nang tonight. We have two be-u-tee-ful girls for you…”
The drummer popped the snare drum, both girls did a bump and grind, and the band leader did a double-take at both of them. “Awright,” he yelled, clapping his hands. “What about that?”
The audience broke into cheers and whistles. Most of them were headquarters personnel—clerks, typists, quartermasters—though Hanson spotted a few people from the other teams.
“Awright!” When the band leader shouted the word, it sounded like “our eye.”
One of the dancers did another bump&grind, the snare drum popped, and the bandleader shouted, “What you think abou’ that? I don’ know abou’ her,” he said, rolling his eyes.
The audience whistled and cheered.
“This is what you call your easy-to-please crowd,” Silver said.
“A bunch of dumb fucks,” Quinn said. “And somebody ought to shoot that slimy little fucker up there on the stage,” he said as the bandleader introduced the song “Hang On, Sloopy.”
“Our eye! Now we like to do one favorite songs, ‘Hay Naw Soopey!”
“Hay naw Soopey, Soopey hay naw, yeah, hay naw…”
The dancers began doin
g a double-time version of “the swim,” jerking and grinding through the song, shaking their hair, bending backward, throwing their arms and hips toward the audience. When the spotlight hit the dancers at the right angle, beads of sweat glistened on their chests and down the curve of their bellies.
Like everyone else there, Hanson wanted to go up and grab one of the dancers and throw her down, rip her clothes off and fuck her right there on the floor, looking into those black eyes. It would be more like assault and battery than making love, more like murder. He was breathing tight, shallow little breaths, everything in him focusing on the dancers, nothing but the sight of the dancers filling his head and the ache in his chest.
It didn’t matter that the band was bad. It was loud, and the dancers were humping and sweating. The smell of cigarette smoke, and sweat, beer, and a taste of marijuana hung in the air. Hanson began to look at the laughing and shouting faces of the other soldiers. The roar in his head drowned out their noise. He watched their jaws moving up and down, streaming smoke. Their lower jaws and noses began to look like angry little Punch-and-Judy dolls, whining, barking little faces that he wanted to smash. The hot, rank air pulsed with lust, rage, and loud music.
Soldiers crouched in the aisles, snapping flash photos with Polaroids and Instamatics, jockeying for position. Scuffles broke out when people stood up, or bumped against each other, straining to get a better view of the sweating, panting dancers.
“Our eye,” the bandleader shouted at the end of the song. “Hay naw, Soopey…”
“Hanoi Soopey,” Silver said. “The Commie version of the American favorite. That drummer’s so fuckin’ bad.…I know, he must be drumming in Vietnamese. Some kind of language barrier.”
“. . . How you like to hay now to one of our be-yu-tee-ful gulls, huh? Our eye. Now, one mow song we know you aw know…”
The drummer popped his drums. The dancers began to grind and hump sideways as the band launched into the song that every Vietnamese band played at every performance. The guaranteed hit, “We Gotta Get Outta This Place.”
Sympathy for the Devil Page 9
