Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  “Not if you do a good job,” he said quietly. “That’s an advantage of grabbing one duck at a time. You can yank it under and break its neck.” I just looked at him. “Didn’t think of that, did you? That’s what Shaw did. He has trouble killing, too. Think there’s some of the healer strain in him. But folks gotta eat.”

  “Not dead things,” I said quickly. “We could eat bread and potatoes and stuff.”

  Papa gave me a long look. “But wheat ears die so we can have bread. All those grains will never have baby wheat ears of their own, because they gave up their goodness for us. Potatoes are the roots of a living plant—a plant we kill by digging up.”

  Sweet lord, I’d never thought of it that way, but what’s seed but thrashed wheat we’ve set back?

  “It’s a cycle, daughter. All things feed on death . . . and in time, we will be food. For the fire, or the worms. Our spirits go beyond, but all flesh returns to the earth.”

  “What about people who die wrong?” I had no idea where that question came from.

  “Wrong . . . before their time?” I thought about his words, and then he added: “Or at the hands of the dark side, like Dolph did?”

  Those tears started rising again.

  “I haven’t studied the mysteries as much as your aunt, Allie, so I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think there’s anything mankind’s come across yet that can kill the spirit . . . except maybe another man.” His face grew thoughtful, and worried, suddenly. He looked quickly at me, and then back to the lake. “But that can happen when you’re still living, daughter. If you kill a man, all you’ve done is change him from living to dead. His spirit is free, and his body returns to earth. You have to be alive to have your spirit eroded.”

  “So you have to eat death to have life,” I murmured. It seemed that everyone, whether they had power or not, brushed up against the mysteries.

  “Yes. The trick is to live well—to treat life and death with respect. Dolph didn’t have much time to learn these things.” There was a pause, and then Papa said slowly: “But I will tell you this, Alfreda—something I haven’t told your momma. Your brother died well. Even with the madness setting in, something human remained. He seemed to know it was time to end the chase. When he was trapped, and couldn’t reach the rabbit he’d been hunting, he just turned and waited. The group came up so fast, they speared him before anyone could blink. After that, the madness set in again, so we had to kill him to save ourselves. But somehow Dolph was able to keep himself from attacking us, those few moments when he might have. I have no doubt that whatever and wherever heaven is, he’s waiting for us.”

  That made me feel a lot better, suddenly. I wasn’t sure why, but it did. “Dolph was a good person,” I announced.

  “True,” Papa agreed.

  “But sometimes he did stupid things,” I went on. “Or . . . even mean things.” I felt greatly daring, voicing that thought. “Like when he threatened to dunk me in the rain barrel if I followed him when he walked out with Becky after church.”

  “Folks can be mean sometimes,” Papa said slowly, “and sisters and brothers can be worse than most. But when you needed each other, you stuck up for each other, didn’t you?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Dolph was smart, and funny, and a good trapper and farmer. He was a kind son and brother, most times, and a good Catholic,” Papa murmured, taking out his pouch and pipe. “He was also stubborn as a mule, and had a cutting tongue when he wished. Men need a few flaws, Allie . . . otherwise they might start thinking themselves perfect. Make sense?”

  Guess I didn’t have to worry about perfection. “Now Josh has gotta carry on for two,” I muttered, repeating something Aunt Dagmar had said to Aunt Sunhild.

  “No,” Papa said sharply, and then seemed to work at relaxing. “Josh has gotta be himself. No one can carry another’s burden. Dolph did his living and earned his rest. We need to let him go. Don’t fall into that thinking, Allie. Bad enough your momma’s setting too many hopes on Joshua. Don’t you do it, too.”

  We sat quietly for a while, the breeze pushing at us. I brushed futilely at the wet sand on my skirt while I did some thinking. Finally I said: “I’ll miss the grass snakes in my bed. He always tried to pick friendly ones.”

  Papa started chuckling. “Good thing. Didn’t you put the last one you discovered under his pillow?”

  It was my turn to grin. “Yup. Wish I could tell him about being tucked behind a turtle’s dream.”

  The flint struck iron, and Papa puffed on his pipe. “Dolph may be the safest person to tell about your lessons, Alfreda. When you say your prayers at night, it doesn’t hurt to ask God to pass on that you’re getting chummy with turtles and snakes. Dolph would be glad you’re carrying on the tradition.”

  Tradition . . . “Josh has been so nice to me lately, I’m not sure I can put a snake in his bed,” I admitted. “If Ben would grow just a little bit more . . .”

  This time Papa laughed aloud. Another puff, and he asked: “You going to save the feathers, like Shaw suggested?”

  “What would I do with them?”

  “I’ll bet Shaw has some ideas.”

  Nodding, I slowly got to my feet. It never hurt to remember the price of something. Best to always count the cost up front. “We’d better get back and pluck those birds, or they won’t hang long enough before roasting.”

  “Rinse off first,” Papa suggested. “Or your momma will have a fit.”

  I contemplated that, and repressed a grin. I could get bloody from a fall, and Momma never batted an eyelash—just patched me up. But tear my dress or muss my hair . . . some things never changed.

  A rising run of notes echoed through the woods, this time sounding like the slide of a violin. I took a deep breath, and realized I was content. It didn’t matter about the bird, really . . . it, too, was a Mystery. And I’d know the answer in time. Everything came in its time, if you were paying attention.

  Shaw walked over about then, and asked: “Do you want us to carry your ducks for you?”

  I shook my head. “Thank you, but I’ll carry them myself.”

  Short Timer

  Dave Smeds

  I worked on a Vietnam-related novel for fifteen years and it was an arduous process of creation. However, in the course of those fifteen years, the subject of the war and the experiences of its soldiers left me with the urge to do something far shorter and from a different approach, and a couple of years after completing the novel, all of a sudden “Short Timer” poured out. By that point, it was a story I was meant to write, and so I did.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  DeWitt dragged his boot out of the sucking, red mud. Half a klick to the LZ. Boone was still alive.

  Boone. Of all the squad, DeWitt would rather have carried out anybody else, but that didn’t matter now. Boone was who was left. So Boone was who he’d try to save.

  Boone moaned, wiggling, trying to walk. Dirty but intact skin showed through the rips in his fatigue pants. The rifleman’s legs were still good, if he could only stay coherent enough to make them work. But the unfriendly fire was closing in again, so DeWitt carried the man, no matter how much it made him stagger through the elephant grass.

  “Perimeter’s just past that line of trees,” DeWitt whispered, spitting the words out between quick, sharp gulps of air.

  The line of trees lay lost somewhere in the vegetation and the dripping wet shadows of the night. DeWitt could not have seen it even if an illumination round had gone off straight overhead. But he knew it was there. He knew Boone needed to hear that it was there.

  One guy, DeWitt thought. Dear Jesus, let me bring back at least one guy.

  “I’m short,” Boone mumbled, his eyes rolling aimlessly in their sockets. “Forty-three days ’til I get my papers. Captain said he might send me back to the rear next week, let me work with the ARVN until my tour’s up.”

  “That’s right,” DeWitt said, keeping Boone talking. “Think of next week, man.
They got refrigerators in the rear, Boone. The beer is cold.”

  Boone laughed, licking his lips as if he were already tasting the brew.

  Small arms fire blistered the jungle about five-zero-zero meters to the right. DeWitt adjusted Boone’s weight across his shoulders and kept moving. Speed was everything now. Boone was losing too much blood. And if the NVA didn’t know exactly where the Americans had run, they’d figure it out soon enough. The two grunts couldn’t stick around.

  DeWitt wheezed. His knees groaned as the path took an upward turn. The incline slowed them, but its presence was a good sign; it proved they had found the hill. The LZ was at the top. Still secure, said that last transmission, before Welles had stepped on a mine and sent himself and the radio to hell. Still able to bring in the medevacs.

  DeWitt had just glimpsed the line of trees in the moonlight when a long, turbulent rattle issued from Boone’s throat. DeWitt lowered his burden to the mud. Boone didn’t move. His eyes, glassy and pallid, looked at the stars as if some type of salvation waited there.

  DeWitt pulled down the rifleman’s eyelids. He would be going on alone.

  Again.

  He fished through the bloody fatigues until he found the laminated photo of Boone’s girlfriend. The night turned her portrait into amorphous blotches of white and grey, only vaguely female. On the back was her address, written in Boone’s fifth-grade penmanship. DeWitt pocketed the photo and left Boone behind.

  With only his own weight to support, DeWitt could have moved quickly. But he merely slogged up the hill. The small arms fire faded to a distant, staccato drumbeat. Mist rose from the ground, hiding the roots and decomposing leaves, muting the edges of the jungle night.

  DeWitt sighed. The humid air took on a life of its own, negating the sounds and sensations of Vietnam. Gradually it brightened, picking up a purplish tinge. DeWitt kept plodding forward.

  “Purple Haze all in my brain . . .”

  The jungle disappeared within the mist. The air clung like a wet rag, ripe with the taint of ozone. DeWitt’s body itched. The veneer of sweat, dirt, and other people’s blood evaporated from his skin, taking his clothes as well. One last step, and the haze itself vanished. DeWitt stood naked in the middle of a bathroom in a suburban tract home. On the wall above the toilet hung a calendar that read August, 1983.

  His reflection confronted him from the mirror. The image was far from the infantryman he’d once been. Gray dusted the temples of his finely kinked, receding hair. His basketball-player physique carried two dozen extra pounds around the waist. The tattoo he’d acquired in Saigon barely showed anymore against his dark skin.

  DeWitt Langdon, Accountant. Age thirty-nine. Vietnam was a million years gone.

  But in his hands, he still held the photograph of Boone’s girlfriend.

  He turned it over, smearing the fingerprints on the back—the blood was that fresh. Reading the address, he wondered how many times the woman had moved in the fourteen years since Boone had written the information down, how many times she’d changed her name.

  Cradling the photo in his palms, he threaded through the house to his garage. He pulled a metal storage bin from under his workbench, opened it, and laid Boone’s memento inside.

  He sighed. With a bone-weary tread, he made his way to the bedroom. Wanda was awake.

  “Trouble sleeping?” she asked.

  He tried to relax as she rubbed his shoulders. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ve been so preoccupied lately,” she said, worry creating a valley between her eyebrows. “Thinking about the wedding?”

  He took her face between his hands and lifted her mouth to his. “Never you worry about that,” he said between kisses. “You’re the woman for me, no doubt about that. Ain’t your fault I can’t sleep.”

  “I thought I’d cured your insomnia,” she said impishly, caressing his balls with her fingernails. His scrotum contracted, skin tightening around each hair follicle.

  “Maybe I need more therapy,” he said. He rolled her onto her back, reached for a breast, and found the nipple already rising to greet him.

  ∞

  “I’m going to Safeway today,” Wanda said. “You think a five pound ham is enough? That teenager of yours will probably eat like a horse.”

  DeWitt tried to update his mental image of his son, but his mind wouldn’t accept the revision. The picture would metamorphose back to the diaper-clad toddler he used to bounce on his knee and take to the park. Rudy had truly been his kid at that age, not the barely-glimpsed figure seen on certain holidays and for a couple of weeks each summer. His ex-wife claimed she never meant to deny DeWitt his chance to be a father, yet taking Rudy to live nine hundred miles away amounted to the same thing.

  But now Etta’s second marriage had gone sour. DeWitt was engaged to Wanda and had a steady job. “He needs a father right now,” Etta had said—her idea, of all things. And though the boy might be hardly more than a stranger, DeWitt had instantly agreed to take him.

  “Better get a ten-pounder,” DeWitt told Wanda, with a twinkle in his eye. “My family knows how to eat.”

  They discussed more details of Rudy’s welcome-home party. Only six days to go—DeWitt could hardly believe it. They talked until it was time for church.

  At the services, it seemed every pew held another friend. Never had the Virgin in the stained glass window smiled down more kindly. Yet DeWitt was restless sitting on the polished wood. He kept turning to the wrong pages in the hymnal.

  A trace of purplish fog slid by the window. DeWitt would see it out of the corner of his eye. When he’d turn, the view would be clear, but he knew what he’d seen. His breathing deepened, and his palms itched, like a hunter who has a four-point buck in his sights, but hasn’t yet pulled the trigger.

  Fourteen years he’d lived with that adrenaline kiss. When he’d been too poor to buy food, the Purple Haze had fed him. When he didn’t have four walls to call his own, he’d always had a place to go. Even the morphine he’d taken for his shrapnel wounds hadn’t possessed such a siren call.

  He didn’t know why the haze was appearing so frequently. Usually many days passed, sometimes weeks or even a month. But lately it had been hiding in the background almost everywhere he went, and right now his gut told him that before the day was over, he’d cross the threshold again.

  When it came, he was ready.

  ∞

  The Purple Haze always led DeWitt to the same spot. When the mists cleared, he was standing on a dirt road on the outskirts of a rice paddy. The noon sun hammered on his helmet, turned his gun barrel to a branding iron and his collar to a washrag. Directly in front of him was jungle. Here, ages ago, the original patrol had set out. Here is where the replays had to start. It was one of the rules.

  He blended into the elephant grass. Five steps in, a frog croaked, right on cue. Ten more steps, and he reached the edge of a punji pit, which he avoided. Another twenty meters and the canopy closed overhead. In the shade of a massive teak, he found his buddies.

  Grease-painted faces beamed at him. Helmets tilted in salute. And Johnnie, as always, stepped forward, wrapped his thumb around DeWitt’s, and said, “Good to see you, brother.”

  The other bloods had always liked him, but now even the white guys—even Boone—looked up to him. Without DeWitt, none of them would be there, healthy and whole, their clips full of fresh ammunition, the enemy nowhere in sight or hearing.

  The first hour was always the most special. It was their gift from the Purple Haze. The rules didn’t require them to head out. They could take a nap, converse, think. The choice was theirs.

  Zuniga wrote his usual notes to his family. Smith and Brodie obsessively tried to armor-pad the places where they’d taken wounds on earlier replays. But most, at some point, sat and listened while DeWitt described the changes out in the world where time did not hold still.

  “Home video,” Johnnie said, sighing wistfully. “I’d never miss another Phillies game.”

  “
Pussy hair in Playboy,” added Morgan.

  “The Rolling Stones still makin’ records? Damn.”

  They asked him of things DeWitt had told them many times. Like the parent of small children, he patiently repeated item, fact, and anecdote. They clutched at the information, drawing it to their hearts, trying to make it stick. It did so haphazardly, giving them, at best, a fragmentary glimpse of a future that had skipped them by.

  DeWitt wanted to think that their inability to remember was merely because they had not directly experienced the events and changes, but he didn’t put much faith in the theory. It was the haze toying with them, with him. The haze made the rules. He could bend them about as well as he could throw a hand grenade with his ear.

  All too soon, they rose to their feet. The smiles evolved into nervous twitches and stiffly held spines. The men all wanted to stay right where they were.

  The Purple Haze wouldn’t allow that, either. They had to go forward, toward the LZ. They had to pass through the ville. They had to reach the fire zone before nightfall. And they had to make contact with the enemy. Other details might take a million different tangents, but those basics were set. If DeWitt or any of the squad ignored them, the Purple Haze would come early, pulling DeWitt out and sending the other men back to limbo.

  DeWitt sent Morgan forward to serve as point man. The rest assumed patrol formation, lifted their heavy packs to their shoulders, and began the hump to the ville.

  The jungle smelled of rot and laterite clay. The humidity drew fluid from the pores of every man in the squad. As they walked, the eyes of DeWitt’s buddies lost the knowing depth. He sighed, sad and happy for them at the same time. Soon recall would not be an issue. They were returning to the selves who had originally set out on patrol, back in 1969. They wouldn’t remember the replays until the beginning of the next one, though for the rest of the day, they would follow his suggestions with an obedience far more profound than when he had been their plain old squad leader.