by Milk;Honey
Abel was looking out the window, his hands resting on the sill, his shoulders hunched. His feet cleared the floor by six inches. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of gray shorts and a black-and-white checkered sweatband. His beard had been neatly trimmed, his hair washed and braided, the plait grazing the middle of his back.
“Ever think of hanging up a picture?” Decker said.
“There’s beauty in simplicity,” Abel answered.
Decker walked over to him, pushed him down until his feet touched the carpet. Abel turned to face him.
“Okay, buddy,” Decker said. “Spit it out.”
Abel didn’t answer.
“Say it.” Decker gave him a shove. “Say it! Say it, goddammit, say it!”
Decker pushed him backward. Abel stumbled but regained his balance by grabbing a kitchen chair. He said nothing.
Decker grabbed his shoulders, pulled him forward, and said, “She was Cong, you jerk! VC! Charlie! The enemy! The one who tried to blow your balls off, but had to settle for your leg!”
“I knew she was VC,” Abel whispered.
“You knew she was VC?”
“She told me.”
Decker felt his heart pounding. “You knew she was VC, and you went with her anyway?”
“She was being duped by her husband….”
“You knew she was married?” Decker yelled. He let go of Abel with a shove and began to pace. “You took up with a married woman who you knew was enemy. I don’t believe…You play with Charlie, you know what I say to you, buddy? You got everything you deserved!”
“You want to rant, or you want to listen?” Abel said.
Again, Decker grabbed his shoulders, but this time he shook him. “What I want to do is break your fucking neck for what you did to Rina! You got a beef with me, you don’t go taking it out on her!”
“You’re right….”
“Friggin’ maniac!” He pushed Abel away.
“I snapped, all right!” Abel said. “Man, I just…snapped. I saw Rina and she reminded me of Song—”
“Don’t you ever mention Rina and that piece of shit in the same sentence!” Decker said.
Abel’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you ever call Song a piece of shit!” He took a deep breath. “I knew she was Charlie, I knew she had a Charlie husband. I also knew that she was being beaten by the bastard, being pimped by him in Hanoi, then he took her down south as pussybait for us GI Joes—”
“And you never said a word of this to me or anyone.”
“I loved her, Decker! And she loved me! You think she confessed to me for the hell of it? She trusted me! They would have killed her if they knew, because her husband was Cong.”
“She was Cong!”
“She was sixteen years old, for chrissakes! Orphaned! Didn’t know what the hell was going down, just did what she was told to do. Man, she never killed anyone. And she wasn’t trying to waste me. It was a setup by her old man. He’d found out about us—”
“Bullshit!” Decker interrupted. “You jerk, if li’l Song was so innocent, why wasn’t she in the Jeep with you when it blew up? Ever have the courage to ask yourself that?”
“She went back to get a necklace I gave her.”
“You just don’t see it, do you?” Decker said. “That’s what they do, Atwater. They say, ‘Let’s go out for a ride, honey, and boom-boom in the jungle.’ Then, as you get in the car, she says, ‘Oops, forgot something. I’ll be right back.’ Second later, you’re hamburger.”
“No, you don’t see it,” Abel answered. “When Stiller dragged her out, she was wearing my necklace, Decker. You mean to say she went back into the hut, put on my necklace, and came back outside to watch me blow up?” There were tears in his eyes. His voice cracked. “Didn’t you see the look of horror on her face!”
“That was fear, man!”
“You had a gun to her head!” Abel screamed. “How else should she feel!”
“What?” Decker said. “You want me to apologize for wasting her? Fuck you! I’d do the same thing all over, because if I didn’t, she’d just go on and find another dumb sucker to off. And man, we were losing enough of us as it was. I saw it more than you, ’cause I was the jerk they’d call in to repair the damage.”
There was a moment of stillness, the screams reverberating in the silence. Abel started to speak, but stopped himself. He limped over to the couch and sank into a lumpy cushion, running his hands over his face.
Finally, he said, “You never gave her—or me—a chance to explain.” He wiped his wet eyes with the back of his hands. “I begged you not to, Pete. Through the morphine, the shock, through it all, I saw what was gonna go down, and I fucking begged you not to do it.”
Decker didn’t answer.
“Know what it’s like…to see someone you love…explode?” Abel said.
Softly, Decker said, “All I saw was you exploding.” He shook his head and tried to ward off demons. Felt a headache coming on. One that aspirin couldn’t handle. “I lied a moment ago. If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it.”
He exhaled forcibly, then sat beside Abel.
“But back then I…I don’t know…I didn’t have the presence of mind…the experience…I was just a stupid kid, Abe.”
Abel threw up his hands. “We were all stupid…God were we stupid…I just wish…” He let his voice trail off.
Decker said, “You put a gun to Rina’s head because…because you wanted to know what it felt like. You could have asked me directly, Atwater.” His voice cracked. “Want me to tell you what it felt like? It felt like your worst friggin’ nightmare. Think I don’t remember her brains splattering my clothes, her blood spraying in my eyes—”
“Oh God!” Abel held back a dry heave.
“Everything…” Decker shook his head. “It just happened so goddam quickly. My first concern was you. It…I…” He tried to find his words. “I screamed to you about the booby trap—”
“I heard you,” Abel said. “At least, I heard you screaming.”
“Yeah,” Decker said. “You looked up, came halfway out of the Jeep…Then it all came down. Boom! Chaos! I jumped out of the Jeep…Stiller, the Bagman, and DeMarcos had come with me…Stiller was driving…I rushed over to you…”
Decker stopped a moment, stared at his lap, and shook his head.
“God, it was a friggin’ mess! So much smoke…my eyes were tearing like crazy, my nose was clogged from the stench of burning…rubber.”
“Flesh,” Abel said.
“Man, that, too…Your stump…gushing buckets…and you’d been diced by flying pieces of metal. Just…bleeding all over the place.
“I treated you while the others…Fuck, I don’t know what the others were doing…I remember DeMarcos wanting to level the village. Man, I was tending to you and trying to prevent DeMarcos from making another My Lai. The village was supposed to be one full of friendlies…who the fuck knew…then Stiller came out of the blue, dragging out Song…talking about raping her—”
“I didn’t hear that,” Abel said.
“Man, you were so doped up, you didn’t know what was flying. I must have shot you with…God, must have been three ampules of morph. A wonder you didn’t OD on the spot…I was so friggin’ scared. Your face, Abe…gone. Gray and cold. That look when you know they’re one step away from the other side. I managed to control the bleeding, but shock had set in….”
Decker pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag. He felt sweat running down his neck and back; his body was hot and sticky.
“Stiller began yanking off Song’s clothes. I told him don’t…or stop. He started screaming at me, calling me…I don’t know…a nip lover or something like that…saying I was as bad as you…just mouthing off garbage. Meanwhile, DeMarcos must have shoved a magazine into his sixteen. He started busting some caps…peeling off shots at the huts. Then Stiller…he must have dragged Song over to you and me. He put a Magnum to her head.
“God’s honest tru
th, next thing I know the Magnum’s in my hand…I remember feeling cold steel…I looked down…” Decker stared at his right hand as if he’d never seen it before. “I’m holding the fucking gun! Must have been the Bagman…must have been. He must have taken it out of Stiller’s hand and put it in mine, ’cause as God is my witness, I didn’t grab it or take it or anything like that. Then the Bagman…he says, ‘You do it. Abe was your best buddy, man.’ Past tense. They’re talking about you like you’re dead.”
Decker stuffed the cigarette into his mouth and sucked on it so hard, the smoke singed his throat.
“By then I’m pumped up, completely wired. She’s crying…pleading with me in Pidgin English, in Vietnamese. You’re moaning like the wind. Abe, you may have thought you were screaming at me to save her. But I swear to God, you were just moaning—”
“You saying you didn’t hear me begging?”
“I’m saying I saw a dying boy spitting up blood…babbling something I couldn’t understand or didn’t want to understand.” Decker swallowed dryly. “Man, I looked Song squarely in the eye, and at that moment, I just saw…enemy. So, I plugged her. I…plugged her.”
Decker covered his mouth with his fist. He felt winded, as if sucker-punched. Twenty years of repression surfacing as hideously as a bloated body. The heat of the room had become oppressive. He went over to the window, threw it open, and stuck his head outside. Street sounds filled his ears, obliterating the repulsive cries of memory.
But not totally. Decker had shocked himself. The clarity of the images, the details. A camera rolling at high speed but still capturing every moment. His brain wanting to forget, begging to forget an amoebic splotch of exploding flesh. But his memory was unforgiving. He gazed out the window for redemption, but all he saw was his guilt.
Five minutes later, he heard Abel hobble up behind him.
“Wanna beer?” Abel asked.
“Yeah.”
Abel popped open two cans of Bud and placed them on his kitchen table. Decker sat down and emptied the can in four gulps. Abel gave him another, then joined him, sipping suds off the surface of the can.
“You didn’t like her, did you?” he said.
“Wasn’t her personally,” Decker said. “I mean, she was nice enough. And she was beautiful. But she was a gook. Atwater, they were all gooks to me—the friendlies as well as the Cong. I couldn’t get past the slanted eyes, not because I was prejudiced, but because out there I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad.”
“I always thought you were jealous.”
“Jealous of her, not you.” Decker gained enough courage to look Abel in the eyes. “We were tight, then you met her and went all moony-eyed. That was bad enough—me being crapped out in paddyland and you walking on cloud nine. Then you stopped doing stuff for the kids. Well, who am I to talk, I never did a damn thing for any of them. So I kept my opinions to myself. What really got me and everyone else pissed as hell was your sudden conscientious-objector attitude. I remember once Tony the Wolf talking about gooks, saying something nasty, I don’t recall his exact words. Then you piped in, ‘You know the Vietnamese are people, too,’ and stalked out of the hooch. Man, Tony was ready to waste you on the spot. I remember physically holding him back, and that was no easy task, ’cause Tony was built.
“I mean, we didn’t have enough trouble from King Cong Janie telling us to put down our weapons, from people back home calling us baby-killers, from reporters asking us if we ever considered the moral consequences of our actions. Now, you’re telling us that the enemy is human. Talk about demoralizing the troops. She was getting to you, Abel.”
“We never talked politics.”
“Bullshit!” Decker said. “You knew she was orphaned, you knew her husband pimped her. She told you something about her personal life. Something to evoke pity in you. To see the other side as ‘people, too.’ And they are people. But you can’t think about that when you’re shooting at them. Otherwise, you can’t live with yourself.”
Silence. Finally, Abel said, “Could be.”
He finished his beer and squashed the can, thinking about Decker’s words, about all the times he and Song had made love. Her arms and legs wrapped around him, her hair streaming in his face, in his eyes and mouth. Had her smooth limbs, her velvet tresses, been snares? Their loving had seemed so pure, felt so holy. But back then, Abel now knew, his soul had been starved, willing to accept any morsel. Her love. Had it been nothing more than poisonous bait? He knew Decker was right about one thing. VC had been indistinguishable from the friendlies.
He bit his lip, then said, “We’ll never really know about Song, will we?”
“Not in this lifetime.”
“Well, maybe that’s good. Finding out the truth means one of us loses big.”
“This way, we both just lose,” Decker said.
“But not quite as big,” Abel said. “We can both rationalize.” He turned to Decker. “How’d you find out about her?”
“We captured her husband that morning. He had her picture in his pocket.” Decker lit up another cigarette. “Same picture she gave you. My eyes almost dropped to the floor. Guy had no qualms about giving his wife away. Guess he figured if he gave her to us, we’d be lenient with him. Bad strategy—it left him dead. God, what an absolute friggin’ mess!”
“And all this time, I thought it never bothered you.”
“What did you think?” Decker said. “I was made out of stone?”
“I just remember the look on your face when you fired,” Abel said. “You looked so happy.”
“Dope,” Decker said, “made everything look happy. No, I wasn’t happy, Atwater. I was terrified!” He finished a second can of beer and dropped his half-smoked cigarette in the empty can. “Like I said, if I was given a second chance, I might have handled it differently.” He stared at Abel. “But you still had no call to do what you did to Rina. She’s forgiven me, even forgiven you. But man, she was shaken. Poor girl has really been through the wringer. Then you pull a stunt like this.”
“It was low,” Abel said.
“She could have shot you. I’ve got to tell you, I’m surprised she didn’t.”
“I’m not,” Abel said. “I knew she couldn’t do it.”
“She should have.”
“Yeah, I won’t argue that.”
“Jesus, what happened to you that you’d pull a suicide act like that?”
“Like I said, I guess I just went nuts. I was coming off a really bad time. Really bad one this time, Pete. Tons of blackouts, waking up in strange places, getting arrested for vagrancy, drunk and disorderlies.”
“They’re not on your rap sheet.”
“They were in small towns—east and north of L.A. God only knows how I got there. You know, I can tell when I’m gonna have a low period. The memories start in my sleep. Then I start seeing things during the day, hearing gunshots every time a car backfires. My mind goes on strike until the memories start fading. Then I come out of it. And I was coming out of this one, too. But then this rape thing…”
Abel didn’t continue his thought, and Decker didn’t say anything. He’d almost made the case, but almost wasn’t good enough. He waited for Abel to speak.
“You bailing me out.” Abel spun the beer can on the tabletop. “Then, looking at me like I was a criminal…I thought to myself, Who are you to judge me? Then I saw Rina looking at me in the same way. Why’d you tell her?”
“I had to,” Decker said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Hey, I did what I thought was right.”
“Even if it meant making me look like a jerk.”
“Buddy, you did that to yourself.”
“I didn’t rape that whore.”
“I’m not saying you did,” Decker said. “But you fucked her. You want to stay out of trouble, you don’t fuck whores.”
“Thank you, Reverend Decker…uh, excuse me—Rabbi Decker.”
“Abe, this is pointless.”
“Truc
e,” Abel said waving the gooseneck lamp. “Look, I know I shouldn’t ask you to do this, but I wrote something to Rina. Can you give it to her for me?”
“She left for New York last night,” Decker said. “Glad to get out of here.”
“Did I mess things up between you?”
“We’re okay. No thanks to you though.”
“Can you mail the letter for me? I don’t even want to know her address.”
“What’d you write?”
“You can read it,” Abel said. “No cheap excuses. Just a note of pure apology.” He paused, then said, “You tell her what the deal was?”
Decker didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “No…no, I just couldn’t. I fudged. I told her we had a big blowout over a girl.” Decker laughed hollowly. “Talk about a bad choice of words.”
Abel said, “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“I don’t know.” Decker cleared his throat. “It’s too hard to talk about it. Like you said, Song was only sixteen, and I still think about that a lot. Of course, I was only nineteen—a war of teenagers. We were all so young and stupid. The scene repeats on me every once in a while.”
“Our little secret,” Abel said. “It’s what we have between us.” With his fingertips, he traced part of an imaginary barrier separating him and Decker. He said, “And it’s what we have between us.”
The door to the rabbi’s study was open, inviting. The room was done in warm dark woods. Two walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with tomes of Jewish law and commentary, volumes of Jewish history, sets of American jurisprudence, and secular works on philosophy. A third wall was covered with display cases of antique Jewish artifacts and religious objects, including an old set of phylacteries made in Czarist Russia. They had been owned by Decker’s biological father—a religious man who had never seen fit to marry, rather remarry. Decker had met him only once. He’d looked up his adoption records and, after introducing himself to the old man by phone, took a quick trip out to New York to meet him in person. They had nothing in common except physical appearance, yet some kind of bond must have formed in the old man’s mind. All his religious articles had been willed to Decker.
