Going After Cacciato

by Tim O'Brien

  “Clowns,” they said.

  “Louder.”

  “Clowns!” they shouted.

  Thirty-four

  Lake Country

  Blow ’em,” Oscar Johnson repeated. “Forget going down—just blow the fuckers an’ let’s move on.”

  Lieutenant Sidney Martin shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong,” he said. “It’s SOP to search the tunnels, then blow them. That’s the procedure and that’s how it will be done.”

  Oscar smiled. He had a way of smiling.

  “You remember Frenchie Tucker, sir?”

  “I remember,” said the lieutenant.

  “And Bernie?”

  “Both of them. I remember both of them, but that doesn’t change the SOPs.” Sidney Martin folded his arms. He was not afraid. “This time,” he said evenly, “we’re going down.”

  Oscar smiled and glanced at Harold Murphy, who looked away.

  “Sir,” Oscar said. “I don’t aim to be disagreeable. It’s not my nature. But, honest, there’s not a man here, not a single soul, who is gonna put hisself down in that hole.”

  Lieutenant Sidney Martin took a notebook from his pocket. “Go down,” he said.

  “No.” Oscar smiled. “I don’t believe I will.”

  Nodding, Sidney Martin carefully wrote Oscar Johnson’s name in his notebook. Then he ordered each man down into the tunnel, and one by one, each refused.

  Sidney Martin wrote in his notebook nine times.

  “Cacciato?”

  “Still out fishing, sir,” Vaught said.

  “Berlin?”

  “No, sir,” said Paul Berlin.

  The lieutenant shrugged, wrote down Paul Berlin’s name, then took off his boots and socks and flak jacket. He did not speak. He got out his flashlight and forty-five, and he crawled into the hole.

  The men grouped around to wait.

  “Maybe it’ll just happen,” Vaught said after a time.

  Oscar spat into the dirt at the mouth of the tunnel.

  “I’m only wishing,” Vaught said.

  The men were quiet, listening to Sidney Martin’s movements in the tunnel. There was a sliding sound, then a hard thump, then what seemed to be the sound of breathing.

  Private First Class Paul Berlin moved away. He sat on his rucksack and looked out on the mountains. Things were wet and still. No birds: That was one of the odd things—no birds and no trees. Once there had been plenty of them, a green forest, but now the trees were stumps burned to the color of coal. No underbrush, no hedges, no grass. Everywhere the earth was scorched and mangled, bombed out into bowl-shaped craters full from a week of rain. The water was gray like the sky. Down the mountainside, beyond the squad’s makeshift camp, Paul Berlin could make out the dim figure of a fisherman beside one of the craters. Cacciato, he thought. A dumb kid out fishing in Lake Country. This made Paul Berlin smile. He leaned back and pretended it wasn’t a war. It was Lake Country.

  “Gospel truth,” Oscar was saying. “The man’s got us wrote down. Every name.”

  Stink and Harold Murphy murmured.

  “Every name, an’ next time the man’s gonna make us do it.” Oscar gazed into the tunnel. He sighed and smiled. “Sidney don’ ever learn. The man just don’ grasp facts.”

  “There it is, the whole truth.”

  “Sidney Martin seeks trouble, an’ I believe he finally found it.”

  “You think so, Oscar?”

  “I do. I think so.”

  Oscar lifted the grenade from his belt. It was the new kind, shaped like a baseball, seamless, easy to handle and easy to throw.

  He held it as if judging its weight.

  “See my point? It’s preservation. That’s all it is—it’s self-fuckin-preservation.”

  Jim Pederson rubbed his nose, looked at a spot just beyond the tunnel. “We could wait, couldn’t we? Talk to him. Explain the basic facts.”

  “I tol’ you, the man don’ grasp facts. All he grasps is SOPs.”

  “True, but we could … I mean, we could lay it on the line. Couldn’t we? Tell him exactly how things stand?”

  “Then what?” Oscar said. “Same shit that happened to Frenchie Tucker?”

  Pederson nodded. He was a quiet kid, a former missionary to Kenya, but he nodded and looked away.

  “Preservation,” Oscar said. “Survival of the species, which is us.”

  Alone, sitting away from the tunnel, Private First Class Paul Berlin watched the fisherman out in Lake Country. He remembered how the bombers had come to bomb the mountains, making craters, and how the rains had come to fill the craters. Doc Peret was the one who had named it: World’s Greatest Lake Country, Doc had said, and soon it had caught on. Everyone was saying it. “Casualties in Lake Country,” they had said when Bernie Lynn and Frenchie Tucker died in the tunnels—tunnels that led to tunnels, a whole complex through mountain rock—and in each case Lieutenant Sidney Martin had insisted that the tunnels be searched.

  “Touch it,” Oscar said.

  He held the grenade out. He pulled the pin and clamped the spoon with his thumb.

  “Everyone,” he said. “I want it unanimous.”

  Stink touched it first. Then Eddie, then Harold Murphy, then Vaught and Pederson and Ben Nystrom, then Doc Peret.

  “Berlin.”

  Paul Berlin was pretending it was the Wisconsin woods. Indian Guides. Deep green forests, true wilderness.

  He got up and moved to the tunnel and touched the grenade.

  “That everybody?”

  The men looked at one another, each counting. Someone whispered Cacciato’s name.

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Fishing,” Vaught said. “Last I seen, he was out fishing.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Fetch him,” Oscar Johnson said. “Hustle it up.”

  “No time for that.” Stink leaned into the hole, listened, then shook his head. “No way—the man’ll be out any second.”

  “Fishing!”

  “Do it,” Stink said. His face was red. He was excited. “Drop the bugger. Right now, just drop it.”

  But Oscar Johnson backed away. He slipped in the pin, bent it hard to hold the spoon, then handed the grenade to Paul Berlin.

  “Go talk to Cacciato,” he said.

  “Talk?”

  “Explain the situation. Take the frag with you. Get him involved in some group rapport.”

  Then Lieutenant Sidney Martin’s hands showed. He pulled himself out, put on his socks and boots and stood straight. He was not afraid. “That’s how it’ll be done from here on,” he said. He patted his breast pocket, where the names were written. “First we search them, then we blow them. In that order.”

  “Blow it now, sir?” Vaught said.

  “Yes,” Sidney Martin said. “Now you can blow it.”

  It took four grenades to close the hole.

  Afterward, Lieutenant Sidney Martin again touched his breast pocket. “And that’s exactly how it’ll be done from here on,” he said. “We follow the SOPs. I hope it’s understood.”

  Oscar smiled and said he understood perfectly.

  Thirty-five

  World’s Greatest Lake Country

  There’s no fish,” Paul Berlin said, but Cacciato went fishing in Lake Country. He tied a paperclip to a length of string, baited it up with bits of ham, then attached a bobber fashioned out of an empty aerosol can labeled SECRET. Cacciato moved down to the lip of the crater. He paused as if searching for proper waters, then flipped out the line. The bobber made a light splashing sound.

  “There’s no fish,” Paul Berlin said. “Hopeless. Not a single fish.”

  Cacciato held a finger to his lips. Squatting down, he gave the line a tug and watched as the bobber fluttered in the mercury-colored waters. The rain made Lake Country bubble.

  “Don’t you see?” Paul Berlin said. “It’s a joke. Lake Country, it’s Doc’s way of joking. Get it? Bomb craters filling up with rain, it’s just comedy. No lakes, no fish.”

/>   But Cacciato only smiled and held his finger to his lips.

  It was getting dark. Partly it was the rain, which gave the feeling of endless twilight, but partly it was the true coming of night. The sky was silver like the water. All day Cacciato had been fishing with the patience of a fisherman, changing baits, plumbing new depths and currents, using his thumb as a guide to keep the line from tangling. He was soaked through with the rain.

  “You’ll catch cold,” Paul Berlin said.

  “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  “Maybe so, but you won’t be fine with a cold. A cold is all you’ll catch out here.”

  Cacciato gazed at the bobber. His fingers were raw. They were short, fat little fingers with chewed-down nails and deep red lines where the string had cut in. His face was pulpy. It was a face like wax, or like wet paper. Parts of the face, it seemed, could be scraped off and pressed to other parts.

  When the bobber had drifted in close to the bank, Cacciato pulled out the paperclip and checked the bait and then cast it back into the water. The rain made pocked little holes that opened and closed like mouths.

  “Give it up,” Paul Berlin said gently. “It’s for your own good.”

  Cacciato smiled. He moved his shoulders as if working out a knot, then he settled back and watched the bobbing SECRET.

  “Give it up.”

  “I had some nibbles.”

  “No.”

  “Little nibbles, but the real thing. You can always tell.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Patience,” Cacciato said. “That’s what my dad told me. Have patience, he says. You can’t catch fish without patience.”

  “You can’t catch fish without fish. Did he tell you that?”

  “Patience.”

  “It won’t help. It won’t change anything.”

  Paul Berlin laid his helmet down and sat on it. He felt the rain run down his collar. Thunder came from the mountains, making the crater water slosh like soup in a bowl. Beyond the crater were four smaller craters, all full of water, and beyond the last crater was the stump of a large tree. Everything in Lake Country was dead.

  “So it’s for your own good,” Paul Berlin said. “All they want is for you to join in. They want it unanimous.”

  Cacciato worked the line with his fingers, fishing with the exactness of a fly fisherman. He did not seem to mind the rain or cold. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then began winding in the line, jerking it to simulate the motions of a fly. The rain was steady.

  “They’re worried about you,” Paul Berlin said. “Eddie and Oscar, Doc, too. Doc says you’ll catch the flu if you don’t quit.”

  “You’re all such good buddies.”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s a thing that has to be done. That’s all it is. It’ll be done anyway.”

  Cacciato smiled again. He pulled out the paperclip, rebaited it, then tossed it far out into the crater.

  “I had me some nibbles,” Cacciato said. “You can tell them that. Just tell ’em I had some nibbles.”

  “And then what? What do I say then?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “You think that’ll stop them?”

  Cacciato shrugged. “He’s not all that bad. Once he let me carry the radio. Remember that? Along the river. Martin let me carry the radio. He’s not all that bad.”

  “Maybe not.” Paul Berlin watched the bobber shiver in the water. “But you think that’ll stop it? Nothing will stop it. It’ll happen anyway.”

  The water looked cold. It was dead, clear, sterile water.

  Paul Berlin took out Oscar’s grenade.

  “They want you to touch it,” he said.

  Cacciato was silent. His head turned, and he looked for a moment at the grenade, then he looked away.

  “They say you better touch it. It’s hopeless—it’ll be done no matter what. And it’s for your own good.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m a messenger.”

  Paul Berlin did not look at Cacciato. He looked out over the crater. The cold made his throat ache. It made his eyes sore.

  “Touch it,” he said.

  “I got me a nibble.”

  “Touch it now.”

  Paul Berlin pried Cacciato’s left hand from the line.

  “A bite,” Cacciato whispered. “I got one!”

  Bringing up the grenade, Paul Berlin pressed it firmly into the boy’s hand. The grenade was slippery and cold.

  “I do! A real strong bite!”

  “That’s swell.”

  “Real strong!”

  Cacciato’s eyes never left the bobber in Lake Country. Releasing the boy’s hand, Paul Berlin put the grenade away and watched as Cacciato played with the line as though feeling for life at the other end. He was smiling. His attention was entirely on the bobbing SECRET in Lake Country.

  For a long time Paul Berlin sat by as Cacciato fished the big crater. The mountains were full of thunder and soon the rain deepened and dark came. The water seemed to blend with the land.

  It was the same as Wisconsin. Paul Berlin closed his eyes. It was the same. Pines, campfire smoke, walleyes frying, his father’s aftershave lotion. Big Bear and Little Bear, pals forever.

  He opened his eyes and saw Cacciato working with the paperclip.

  “Any luck?”

  “Sucker took my bait.” Cacciato winked. “Next time though, I’ll nail him. Now that I got the right technique.”

  “Be patient,” Paul Berlin said.

  He walked up the slope toward Oscar’s lean-to. In the morning, he thought, he would have to eat a good breakfast. That would help. The woods were always good for the appetite.

  Eddie and Oscar and Doc Peret sat around a can of Sterno, taking turns warming their hands.

  “You talk to him?”

  Paul Berlin put the grenade on the ground in front of them.

  “You know how it is with a fisherman,” said Paul Berlin. “Mind’s a million miles away.”

  They were quiet until the flame died. Then Oscar picked up the grenade and hooked it to his belt. “So,” he said. “That’s everyone.”

  Thirty-six

  Flights of Imagination

  At midnight their necks were shaved for the final time. They were led at gunpoint into a concrete shower stall. Afterward they were photographed, given a supper of turkey broth and bread, then locked in a large common cell. Stink Harris wept openly. Doc and Oscar wrote letters. The lieutenant slept. Eddie Lazzutti lay face-up on a cot, hands linked behind his head, singing nursery ballads in a voice smooth like night. The long vigil began. A miracle, Paul Berlin kept thinking. It was all he wanted—a genuine miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences. He thought of his father for a time, and of his mother, and then he slept, dreaming of miracles.

  In his tower by the sea Paul Berlin considered the possibilities. A miracle, he thought. An act of high imagination—daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

  And so deep in the night, as the moon rose, Cacciato’s round face appeared at the window. The face seemed to float. Sarkin Aung Wan gasped and shook Paul Berlin awake. A miracle, he kept dreaming. But he blinked and reached out to grab the M16 that came sliding through the bars. “Go,” Cacciato whispered.

  And then it started—an explosion, the great iron door shattering like a shot melon, smoke, sirens, and there was time only to snatch for their clothes and boots, and then they were running. Running hard through a maze of bars and steel and floodlit hallways. Gunfire chased them, but they ran hard. There were bright yellow searchlights. Doors broke open; concrete walls seemed to blow themselves away. “Go!” Cacciato was shouting now, leading them through the breaking maze and over the walls and away. Away, scampering through twists of street and alley, over walls, through moonlit courtyards and nighttime bazaars where donkeys brayed and flares opened high over blue-tile domes,
flares and starbursts, guns rattling behind them, chased, and they caught a glimpse of Cacciato running flatfooted through the cobbled streets, and they took off after him. Paul Berlin ran wildly. He squeezed Cacciato’s rifle and Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand, and he ran. Fast, a head-down sprint. It was the soldier’s greatest dream—fierce, hard, desperate full-out running. No honor. No thoughts of duty or glory or mission. Just running for the sake of running, nothing else. Like that time in the mountains, twitching, not wanting to die, twitching and cowering and imagining how far and how fast he would run if he were only able.

  So now he ran. A miracle, he thought, and he closed his eyes and made it happen.

  And then a getaway car—why not? It was a night of miracles, and he was a miracle man. So why not? Yes, a car. Cacciato pointed at it, shouted something, then disappeared.

  Oscar drove. It was an Impala, 1964. Racing stripes sparkled on the body, sponge dice dangled from the rearview mirror. Fender skirts, mudflaps, chopped and channeled, leopard-skin upholstery. They piled in, and Oscar drove.

  In the backseat, eyes closed, Paul Berlin could only think of miracles. Flee, fly, fled, he thought as Oscar drove fast through wee-hour Tehran. The tenses ran together, places blended; they passed the Shah’s golden palace, through the arched gate of the old city, and then into slums and filth and streets with no direction.

  It was cold. Paul Berlin huddled against Sarkin Aung Wan, still clutching Cacciato’s rifle.

  They were on back streets now. Not even streets—gravel ruts. Dark buildings loomed up like jungle. A cartoon, Paul Berlin thought—garish colors and searchlights swaying through the night and a city full of sirens—just a cartoon—but he made himself believe.

  Navigating, Doc directed them north through Ribiscu and Ebis, and Oscar wheeled the big car through vicious hairpin turns. No muffler, and the old Impala screamed in the night. Yellow headlights plucked out statues and frozen animals and sheets of winter ice. The sky kept opening with illumination. They were hunted now—planes and helicopters, sirens, search parties with guns and lanterns, floodlights swishing through the dark and soldiers silhouetted behind high barricades. Oscar drove fast.