Sympathy for the Devil
Page 38
“I don’t know,” he said to the bodies. “It wasn’t as much fun as we thought it would be. Too easy. Seems like all my life I’ve made myself do things that seemed difficult so I could say, ‘Hey, look what I did.’ And then when I’ve done it, it doesn’t seem like it was difficult at all. It was easy.”
He walked in silence for what seemed like a long time, feeling the weight of the bodies, the flex of the bamboo on his shoulders.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “You guys are dead. All those dumb fuckers back there are dead. It was easy. What are we gonna do now?”
By first light they had reached a tree-covered bend in the stream, out of the defoliated zone, and Hanson called for an extraction chopper. He cleaned his friends’ wounds with water from the stream, wiping the black blood away from the ugly entrance wounds, purple punctures like bruises, then began to work on the ragged exit wounds, the compound fractures.
“I wish I could have brought Troc and Krang,” he said to Mr. Minh, “but I couldn’t take everybody. They’ll understand, won’t they?”
He cupped Mr. Minh’s katha in his hand, then slipped it over the little Montagnard’s head and put it around his own neck.
It was still cool, bands of pink clouds on the horizon, when he first heard the choppers, like faraway thunder, a troop carrier and two gunships.
The air was full of angry radio traffic. The American unit had been calling in medivacs and resupply choppers during the night, and now they were trying to explain what they had been doing on the hilltop, why they had not cleared the operation with Hanson’s launch site and the other units in the AO.
When Hanson spotted the extraction choppers, low on the horizon, he directed them over his position and popped a Day-Glo signal panel, the panel snapping like a flag in the wind. The choppers wheeled and came back, hovering at treetop level. Over the radio Hanson told them to drop the Stabo gear. The ships shuddered above him, huge machines suspended in the air. The glowing orange cone of their exhaust and their blinking strobe lights were bright against the early morning sky.
“There’s a clearing. Just to the south. We can set down there,” the crew chief said, his voice metallic through the small radio speaker. “No need for the gear,” he said, his voice quavering with the pounding rotor blades.
Hanson looked up at him, leaning out the side of the chopper, his face covered by the round black visor, reflecting Hanson and the bodies.
“Negative,” Hanson said, jabbing his weapon at the chopper, then at the ground. “I want the Stabo gear.”
The lines and harness of the Stabo gear came out the door and uncoiled as they fell, snap links and buckles tumbling through the pearly morning light. Hanson hooked up Mr. Minh and Quinn, talking to them beneath the roar of the chopper. He hooked himself in, then gave the crew chief the thumbs-up. The slack was taken up and then the chopper pulled pitch and they were in the air heading east. Hanson looked up into Quinn’s dead face, the prop blast stinging him with flurries of oily blood.
He saw smoke and debris on the hilltop three klicks away, and he smelled burning mo-gas, but as the chopper climbed, the air was cooler and sweeter and the horizon expanded and spread out before him—the green of the jungle, the lighter green of bamboo, raw red bomb craters, the silver winking of rice paddies below where, for a moment, he watched the reflection and the shadow of the chopper and the three bodies chasing behind, the reflection bending and jumping crazily across the paddies, the shadow racing alongside, black and relentless. He saw round graves, trails webbing a riverbank, a powder-blue pagoda, dark mountains, and the morning sun. The taut cable angled up from his shoulders to the black thorax of the helicopter.
Anyone watching from below could have seen that only one man in the rig was alive. The other two hung almost horizontally, spread-eagled and limp, rolling and kicking in the wind.
Hanson gripped the submachine gun across his chest and looked east, past the sun, to where he knew the ocean would be if he could only see farther. And he knew, he’d always known, he thought, that no matter what he did, and no matter how many others died, he was doomed to survive the war.
The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: “As Time Goes By” copyright © 1931 by Warner Bros., Inc. (Renewed) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. “California Dreamin’,” words and music by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips. Copyright © 1965, 1970 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc., New York, NY 10022. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. “John Wesley Harding,” words and music by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. “Magical Mystery Tour,” words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1967 by Northern Songs, Limited. All Rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico Controlled and Administered by April Music Inc. Under License from ATV Music (Comet). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission. “American Woman” by R. Bachman, B. Cummings, M. Kaye, G. Peterson. Copyright © 1970 by Dunbar Music Inc. and Six Continents Music. All Rights Administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. “Cuchulain’s Fight With the Sea” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thank you to John and Linda Quinn. Without their support and loyalty, and John’s clear-eyed reading and advice, I don’t think I could have done it.
To Elliott Anderson, who first gave life to Hanson in TriQuarterly.
To Jim Crumley, for his friendship and for showing me how to survive in this business.
To Bill Kittredge, who taught me to weigh every word, and told me, “You can abandon your work, but it will never abandon you.”
To Fred Chappell, my first teacher, who taught me that beauty can be found in anything.
To Nat Sobel, who kept trying when I had given up.
To the National Endowment for the Arts, for giving me some time out of uniform and off the street.
And to all the good men of the 5th Special Forces Group, Vietnam.
Want even more KENT ANDERSON? You don't have to wait.
Tap here to find your new favorite book.
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.
About the Author
Kent Anderson is a U.S. Special Forces veteran who served in Vietnam and a former police officer in Portland, Oregon, and Oakland, California. He was an assistant professor in the English Department at Boise State University, and, as a protégé of John Milius, he wrote screenplays for New Line Cinema for five years. His novels include Sympathy for the Devil, the New York Times Notable Book Night Dogs, and his newest title, Green Sun. He may be the only person in U.S. history to have been awarded two NEA grants as well as two Combat Bronze Stars. He lives in New Mexico.
Books by Kent Anderson
Green Sun
Night Dogs
Sympathy for the Devil