The Odd Angry Shot

by William Nagle

  ‘Yeah, how much,’ I ask, my face buried in the female breast in front of me. My eyes devouring, my nose smelling a woman, any woman.

  If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. Or so the song goes…Whatever.

  ‘You like have fun with me later?’ she asks, biting my ear.

  ‘How about now?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You buy me drink first, you show you love me.’

  ‘I love you already,’ I say pushing her back and waving the roll of notes under her nose.

  A few words with the bartender.

  ‘OK. We go now,’ she says, coming back and taking my hand.

  ‘Meet you back here in an hour,’ says Harry.

  We walk towards the door.

  ‘We get cab, we go to my house and have fun. I make you happy.’

  We ride down the main street, past the flags, past the market. How simple, I think, no pretence here. No please where are you taking me tonight or what sort of car do you drive or where did you go to school. Just sex—alien sex without the trappings.

  We sit on the edge of her bed. I feel ungainly. My boots, worn down at the heels, stare at me from the floor. The black shoulder holster illegally worn under my shirt, sweat stains in white salty patches on the leather.

  ‘I like you,’ she says, ‘one thousand pee short time, you pay now?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing but time,’ I reply and peel off two thousand five hundred.

  HARRY sits on the sandbags, taking five-round clips from the cotton bandolier.

  ‘Three months to go.’

  ‘Three months to go where?’ I ask stupidly. My face is buried in the pillow.

  ‘Three months and our time’s up. All you have to do is stay alive for the next three months, and home you go.’

  ‘Anyone want some mail?’ asks Rogers, coming in and sitting on my stretcher.

  ‘Any for me?’ I ask hopefully.

  ‘Yeah, one. One for you too, Harry.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Tear envelope as per instructions:

  My Darling

  Just a short note to let you know…

  I recognise the handwriting. Thanks a million.

  ‘Not a bad average is it, eh?’

  ‘What,’ says Harry, ‘don’t tell me she’s finally written?’

  ‘You wouldn’t credit it, would you. After nine months, one letter,’ I answer.

  I don’t even bother to read any further.

  ‘Anyone going near the orderly room?’ I ask.

  ‘In about five minutes. Why?’ says Harry.

  ‘Do me a favour and pin this on the notice board, will you?’

  ‘Ain’t love grand?’ laughs Rogers from behind his letter.

  THE dry season has arrived. Nothing rots now. In place of the green mould there is a layer of fine red dust, churned up by the never ceasing traffic. Trucks, APCs, choppers, land rovers and feet. It mixes into a fine paste as it settles on the sweat-stained, faded clothes that we all wear. Red dust is fast becoming the colour of the Task Force coat of arms. Tinea and body odour on a field of red dust rising.

  Most of us have ringworm or ringtinea as it’s more correctly termed. You wash it ten times a day if you can, then you start to sweat and it starts to itch again, so you wash it again and so on and on.

  ‘Watcha doing?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m making a present,’ says Rogers.

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘The padre.’

  The padre appears now and again, come to spread the good word and save all our souls. Your ticket to Valhalla is a padre, oh Viking warrior.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, leaning over his shoulder.

  Rogers turns and faces me. ‘Well, the last time he came around, he asked Harry and me why we never came to church, and super-mouth Harry, instead of coming out and saying we thought it was all bullshit…’

  ‘Where was I?’ I interrupt.

  ‘You disappeared somewhere. You know you’d do anything to avoid the padre and his bloody free jubes. Why does he always give out jubes? If he really had our welfare at heart, he’d arrive with a case of scotch and a harlot under each arm.’

  ‘Right,’ I laugh.

  ‘Too bloody right,’ says Rogers, ‘it’d go a bloody damn sight further than bless you and jubes, I can tell you now.’

  ‘Anyway, go on.’

  ‘Well, like I said, instead of coming out and telling him that we don’t give two stuffs for his church, Harry says that we’ve been spending time making something for his chapel.’

  ‘He’s got a chapel?’ I ask in amazement. ‘Here?’

  ‘Too right,’ answers Rogers, ‘the engineers built it for him.’

  ‘I’ll be stuffed. So anyway, what are you making?’

  ‘Well, this, as you know, is a shoe box. What I’ve done is cut a hole in one end, and in the other I’ve put this little handle that I’ve made from a coat hanger. Now, attached to the handle is a bunch of feathers…’

  ‘Feathers?’

  ‘Yeah, feathers,’ replies Rogers, smiling.

  ‘Now what you do with it is, you wait until you get an erection and then you insert it into the hole…’

  ‘Go on,’ I reply, moving closer.

  ‘Then you start to turn the handle, the feathers do the rest, and there you have it; one fully operational wanking machine, padres, for the use of.’

  ‘So what are we going to do with it?’ I ask.

  ‘We’re going to present it to him, next time he comes to visit us.’

  ‘This I’ve got to see,’ I say as I walk back into the tent. I sit on my bed and am just about to lie down when I hear Rogers’ voice.

  ‘Hey, Bung me old mate, have we still got any of that blue paint?’

  ‘A blue wanking machine for the padre?’ I start to laugh, and almost make myself sick as I imagine the padre, bent double in a back corner of his chapel with his baggy shorts around his ankles and a blue-painted shoe box impaled on his erect member.

  Bless me father for I have sinned—turn the handle—Hail Mary—gasp, gasp. I’m sure we’re all starting to go mad. Remember.

  THE APC jolts along the dirt road, stopping now and again like a large metal frog caught between jumps, with the snail’s eye of its machine gun sniffing the air. I sit on the steel floor with my back against the loading ramp, the muzzle of my rifle resting against my cheek, studying Harry’s boots. I feel too hot to even try brushing away the fly that crawls along my lower lip. The one-hundred-degree outside temperature is intensified all the more by the steel enclosure of the tracked vehicle that seems determined to do everything in its power to dislodge us from its belly.

  Rogers wipes a droplet of perspiration from the tip of his nose and the red dust on the back of his hand mingles with the sweat, forming a muddy moustache on his top lip. The glamour has gone; no more professional gung-ho here. We have become interested only in trying to stay professionally alive.

  I spread my hand over my forehead and drag it slowly down my face as if trying to squeeze every drop of perspiration from my head. My hand stops momentarily and my fingers bunch together, like the feathers in the padre’s wanking machine. I gingerly feel around the grit and sweat created pustules in and around the creases at the sides of my nose. One breaks. I examine the white discharge that rests on my fingers, then wipe it on the leg of my sweat drenched trousers.

  The now chipped and scarred butt of Harry’s rifle is resting in the crease behind the toe of his almost wornout boot. I notice a small rust patch on the metalwork. Rogers is trying to scratch the tinea that has crept from his foot to his ankle by inserting his knife down the inside of his boot.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, his face screwing up with pain.

  ‘What now?’ asks Harry disinterestedly.

  ‘I stabbed myself.’

  ‘Stupid bastard,’ says Harry from beneath closed eyelids.

  The APC jerks to a halt. My head is snapped
forward and then quickly back, and my eyes open as my skull smashes into the steel ramp. A sickening pain creeps down from the back of my head and my nose gushes blood.

  Harry lies in an upended tangle of ammunition cases and weapons at the front of the vehicle. Rogers lies beneath him, his face buried in a pile of spent Browning .50 calibre cases.

  ‘Where’d you learn to drive, you stupid prick?’ screams Harry at the black-clad crew commander.

  ‘Everyone out. QUICK,’ screams the black-clad figure, as the Browning starts to thud away over our heads, raining red-hot brass cases into the compartment. The ramp behind me gives way and I roll, half-crawl, slide down into the dust and run for the ditch at the roadside.

  Further up the road one of the APCs is burning. I hold my green sweat rag over the end of my nose, then take it away. Still bleeding, I think, as I look down at the crimson patch on the dusty green cloth.

  ‘Ambush?’ questions Rogers.

  ‘Think it’s a mine,’ comes a voice from further up the road.

  ‘If it’s a mine, what are the tankies shooting at?’ yells Rogers.

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ yells someone in reply.

  The shooting stops as quickly as it began. A crew member from one of the vehicles at the rear of the column, his overalls more red than black, comes and lies in the ditch beside us.

  ‘Hit a mine,’ he says blowing his nose on a dirty green rag and then stuffing it back under his pistol belt.

  ‘Any casualties?’ asks Harry, offering the crew member one of my cigarettes.

  ‘Two dead, one wounded. A whole fucking crew gone,’ hisses the crew member in reply, ‘and we’re short to buggery of crews.’

  ‘What was all the shooting about?’ asks Rogers.

  ‘A couple of woodcutters started to run when the mine went up,’ replies the crew member. ‘We thought they were Charlies.’

  ‘Probably were,’ says Harry, inspecting the mark on his cigarette where the sweat had dripped from his nose onto the paper, ‘stupid buggers.’

  ‘Who knows?’ says the crew member. ‘Anyway, they’re in about two hundred bits now.’

  We move past the now stationary line of armoured vehicles. Harry’s water bottles slap into the small of his back as he walks. The smoke from the burning vehicle drifts thinly into the air. We can smell the raw flesh of the casualties as we draw closer to the ruined metal mass lying across the road.

  Two bodies lie in the red dust of the road surrounded by spreading patches of crimson. Someone throws a camouflage-pattern shelter over one and an oil-stained canvas over the other.

  The wounded crew member lies in the dust about twenty feet from them. Two medics are bending over him, working frantically. I notice a crimson trail leading from the burning vehicle to where he lies in the dirt.

  ‘Shit, he must have dragged himself over there when it went up,’ says Rogers.

  ‘Give us a hand will you, mate?’ yells one of the medics, turning his head and nodding at the group of us standing at the roadside. About six of us run forward.

  ‘How is he?’ asks an Armoured Corps captain pushing between Harry and myself.

  ‘Lost his left leg and hip,’ answers the medic closest to me.

  ‘And his balls,’ says the other medic not taking his eyes off the huge burn dressings he is using to try and stem the blood flow.

  ‘Will he make it?’ asks the captain. I notice that two watery lines are drawn on his dusty face.

  ‘Not if Jesus came down and held the saline bottle himself,’ mumbles the other medic from behind clenched teeth.

  The dying face; tears pouring, nose running, blood spitting. Remember when you thought, what if he does make it, what if they give him a nice new tin leg and get him on his feet again, how do you tell some randy typist that you’re sorry you can’t screw her because you lost your manhood on a dirty road in a place called grid reference one-eighty-three-one-nine-six? She’ll look sorry in her sweet suburban way and she’ll be busy the next time he asks her out:

  ‘Sorry, I have to wash my hair,’ or ‘I’m having dinner with my girlfriends’…Excuses, excuses.

  Half a man. And so much more of a man than any one of the smug bastards safe at home who stand in the streets and scream to stop the war. Ask him if he’d like to stop the war, smug bastards. At least he came. No fair weather protests for him. And you knew that every dust-covered, sweaty one of you on that road that day felt the same way…

  ‘We’ve lost him,’ says one of the medics, standing up and wiping the blood from his hands in a piece of burn dressing. Remember, you almost felt glad for him. In fact you did.

  ‘TIGER beer, all the way from good old Singapore,’ grunts Harry as he places the two brown cartons with the black and yellow lettering on the sandbags.

  ‘You’ll shit for a week after a night of that stuff,’ comments Rogers, bending over the green packet of dehydrated chicken and rice and drooling in anticipation.

  ‘Who cares? It’s booze isn’t it?’ says Harry, laboriously opening one of the cartons with his bayonet. ‘You don’t have to have any if you don’t want to. I’m sure the two of us can put a bloody big dent in it without your help.’

  ‘Let’s not be too hasty about this, now,’ smiles Rogers, forgetting about the chicken and rice and moving towards the newly opened carton.

  ‘Piss-pot,’ Harry gulps, throwing a can to Rogers.

  ‘May I?’ I ask, with a look of mock supplication.

  ‘Another piss-pot.’ Harry flings the cold steel can onto my bare stomach.

  ‘You blokes like a game?’

  Bung Holey has appeared in the doorway carrying in one hand an ammunition box, the top of which has several puncture holes, and a dirty, dog-eared pack of cards in the other.

  ‘What’s in the box?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Me pet spider,’ answers Bung.

  ‘Your pet what?’ I ask in amazement.

  ‘Me pet spider. I picked him up in Baria on the laundry run.’

  ‘Give us a look,’ says Rogers following Bung to the centre of the tent.

  ‘Who’s yer tailor Bung?’ asks Harry grinning.

  Bung wore the most remarkable clothing that I ever saw on a soldier. His ‘Anzac Gentleman’s Lounge Outfit’, as he was wont to call it, consisted of a pair of red felt slippers, a pair of grey-white socks, a pair of black and green spotted camouflage trousers cut down to shorts, a grey sweatshirt with ‘Welcome to Bangkok’ printed on the back and a white handkerchief knotted at the corners on his head.

  ‘Stand back. He’s not what you’d call friendly,’ says Bung opening the box lid gently. ‘There you are.’

  ‘My sweet Jesus!’ says Harry.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ says Rogers, drawing away.

  Seated at the bottom of the box is the most repulsive insect I have ever seen: about six inches across, with two half-inch white fangs and two red, beady eyes set like match heads in the squat body.

  ‘What does he eat?’ I ask.

  ‘Meat.’

  ‘Spiders don’t eat meat,’ says Harry, opening another black and yellow can.

  ‘This one does,’ says Bung, closing the lid.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Rogers asks.

  ‘Gladys Moncrieff,’ answers Bung. ‘Aha, I see you’ve got a few cans of ye olde Tiger.’

  ‘You can smell a can of piss six miles away, can’t you?’ says Harry, throwing a can to Bung and looking disgusted.

  ‘Just one of my many talents,’ grins Bung, fingering the cards.

  The card table and seating arrangements consist of two stretchers pulled together and four ammunition cases covered by a half shelter.

  ‘Dollar limit, OK?’ asks Bung, shuffling the cards.

  ‘Yeah. Twenty cents minimum bet, eh?’ says Harry, looking at Bung and putting a can to his mouth.

  Bung slides the cards from the pack and onto the slippery green waterproof cloth.

  ‘Buy one,’ says Harry.

  ‘One more, one more. Ratsh
it twenty-five.’

  ‘Buy one,’ calculating numbers in my head.

  ‘Sit,’ place the military scrip notes on the cards.

  ‘Buy one, and another, sit,’ says Rogers.

  Bung turns his cards over. Six, sixteen. Draws a card from the greasy pack. Six.

  ‘Twenty two,’ yells Harry triumphantly. ‘Bank loses.’

  The game continues throughout most of the afternoon, and the mound of empty black and yellow cans on the dirt floor grows in size.

  ‘I’ll have to open another carton,’ Harry gets up and sways towards the sandbags.

  ‘Anyone in?’ comes from outside. I turn and see two figures peering around the side of the tent. One is wearing a green sweatshirt with the letters USMC stencilled across the chest. The other is bare-chested and is wearing a shoulder holster next to his skin.

  ‘Yeah, come in,’ says Bung, nodding towards the two figures.

  ‘Bring your gunbearer with you and mind not to scratch the piano,’ grins Harry.

  ‘Engineers,’ says the one with the shoulder holster.

  We introduce ourselves.

  ‘Sit down. Like a can? Only twenty cents,’ says Harry, his eyes lighting up like twin neon cash registers.

  ‘Too right we would,’ says the other one, licking his lips. He takes a small roll from his boot and peels off two grubby twenty-cent notes. The cans and money change hands.

  ‘What can we do for you?’ asks Harry. ‘Or have you just come to see what life’s like at the sewer end of the Task Force?’

  ‘No way,’ says shoulder holster.

  ‘We hear you’ve got, or one of you blokes has got, a pet spider.’

  ‘Me,’ says Bung proudly, patting himself on the head. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a pet scorpion over at our place and we reckon that our scorpion can beat the shit out of your pet spider,’ says shoulder holster smugly.

  ‘So?’ says Bung, screwing his forehead up questioningly.

  ‘So we want to arrange a match. Your spider against our scorpion, fifty bucks on the outcome. How about it?’

  ‘How about side bets?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Jointly controlled?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty on all unclaimed bets. That OK with you blokes?’ says shoulder holster, looking at each of us in turn.