by Rex Miller
They see me and the sampan heads for shore. Noise of their unmistakable gunfire as I force myself to run.
Right behind me. Small and wiry men, hardly more than boys but men, shouting profanities and firing assault rifles, small and determined, profane men running through the double-thick foliage as I blunder weakly ahead across her great body. Footsteps on decaying, dead leaves and twigs and rotten pathway. Massive picture-book ferns and wait-a-minutes as I dodge AK-47 rounds crashing through undergrowth.
Into tall, screaming, razor-edged saw-grass. Nightmare green of slicing terror and noise, green of river willows, emeralds on velvet, gators and crocs, fire-breathing salamanders. Tricking the eye like a patchwork quilt of multihued earth tones — green and rust. She takes me and decides she will not kill me this time.
I thought I was in green hell, but not yet. And I cannot write about that part of it. Some hells are too private to recount, much less to share. Nor will I write about the canvas snakes. Only that the other day I watched a harmless two-foot blacksnake climbing high up in an ash. (For what? There were no bird’s nests there.) Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet above the ground. I watched him coiling around the symmetrical perfection of the ash and turn himself slightly, almost disappearing in an awesome trick of camouflage.
The blacksnake’s gray-black belly so closely matched the coloration of the ash’s bark that he disappeared, ninja-like, before my eves, yet without more than a suggestion of movement. Then he suddenly reappeared and dropped about two feet down into a mass of leaves, wrapping himself around a fragile limb that sagged with his weight, and for just that second or two when I thought the limb wasn’t going to hold and the snake was going to drop out of the tree on me, I flashed on the little bamboo vipers dropping. It was like a vehicle backfire after thirteen months of mortars and arty and you yell “Incoming!” and hit the deck in the middle of the shopping mall with all the people looking at you and snickering.
Nor will I detail my eventual parting from Chi. Except to say that ultimately I crossed the river into Saigon’s Chinese section, where I lived in hiding for a long time. Most of that time was spent with Chi, and the conditions were far from conducive to providing a foundation for a solid, lasting relationship. It neither ended badly nor well; it simply ended after a time, in a tiresome series of arguments over nothing, made more distasteful by the unpleasantness of the circumstances.
I had a lot of time on my hands to design an escape avenue, and plot my own revenges. I recall one of my first plans involved putting a lot of this shit down on paper and arranging it so that the three major networks and the anti-war papers would have photocopies if I wasn’t back in the world, contract payout in hand, healthy and wealthy, by X date. I had figured certain precautions so that torturing me for contacts and so on would be mutually destructive. I thought I’d fabricated a plan that would put Ellsberg’s shit back on the op-ed pages. Can you imagine what some politicians would have done with knowledge of the U.S. military coopting a mission involving convicted murderers? That was one of the first plans that came off the drawing board and went sailing straight into the big round file. We’d already seen that movie.
When I got out, toward the end of it all, I came out like a blurred simulacrum of a ghost, a shadow of an eidolon, all insubstantial form and phantasmic image, the illusion of a figment of a dream. Incorporeal. A trompe l’oeil collage. An apparition. Now you see me, now you don’t. Abracadabra.
And then I dreamed that I had dreamed myself out. And this was the worst nightmare of all, coming only at night, stalking the shadows of bedrooms and motel rooms all made palatable by the decorating firm of I.W. Harper, lighting up the dark corners of my subconscious with scenes of frightening clarity and minute attention to detail. I would wake up just on the edge of the nightmare each time, seconds from putting my painstakingly contrived escape plans into motion, choking on the smell of Southeast Asian jungle and canvas snakes, drenched in fear-soaked sheets of sweat, paying for remembered sins for the five hundredth time, dreaming that I was awake and not knowing yet that my mind’s eye was still imprisoned within the bamboo cages of my captors, still caught inside my cruel dream.
Once, I recall vividly, the damn thing was so real and so powerfully strong that I could see myself swinging my legs off the side of the bed in some Ramada or Best Western and coming down not on the floor but in a sea of tall, undulating elephant grass, walking away from the bed with that funny, twisting, grass-mashing walk we used in the tall grass to beat a pathway for the men behind. And just as I dreamed I awoke in the microsecond of startling insight, something opened that showed me what it was all about. I wish I could explain it for you too.
Let it suffice that I caught a glimpse of the parallel stage of waking as it slid by the sleep stage in a receding blur, and a secret revealed itself to me as I got a quick peek up the skirts of lady truth. I learned that Heaven and Hell do exist. Everlasting punishment or life eternal — it’s all there. The infinite lives we will relive again and again down through the endless tunnel of perpetual timelessness.
But on the other hand, perhaps I did too many drugs in the sixties, and this is payback. Whatever the case, I found another born-again dreamer in 1974, in Canada. Just another of those strange quirks of fate that like to elbow me in the ribs once in a while to see if they can get my attention.
I’d been in Providence. I forget why. And I was driving up the Atlantic seaboard, more or less aimlessly, the way I did everything, following the blue feature that wound and wound, heading more or less north, meandering without maps, going with the flow of the blue, moving only at night, totally giving myself to it — sound familiar? — freezing in the chill salt spray of the nearby ocean breezes, going with the curves and twists of the coastline that will eventually take you up through Maine and into Canada if you don’t give a shit how many days it takes. It’s funny what stays in your mind. I remember crying alone in the darkness at the sweet smell of the ocean night — someplace called Rye Beach.
I had become a victim of my own expertise. Like a confused chameleon, I had so mastered the art of the delusive appearance that somewhere along the line I had lost my own identity. I suppose I was either running from myself, from my own reality, or running to find it. Whichever. Gasoline was no more costly than psychoanalysis. Finally, after days of aimlessness I managed to hit customs.
I had stopped for gas in a pretty little village just across the line called Sault Saint Marie, and was driving in the daylight for a change when the beauty of a view got me. Always the American tourist, I pulled out a Polaroid to preserve the scene. It stayed in my mind because of maybe three thousand photographs I’ve taken over the years, using twenty-eight different cameras, each more expensive and worthless than the last, it was the only picture that was perfect. I shot the clouds and a church spire reflected in the blues and whites of the local riverway, and the beauty of the mirrored scene just blew me away.
So I’m at this little gas station, listening to French-Canadian radio and trying to get my head together when some kids come running up to the car next to mine, pointing at a beautiful German shepherd in the back seat. Big mother, just gorgeous. A fabulous animal with a white-masked face that gave it the look of part coyote or part wolf. The kids were excited when they saw the dog and had run across the street for a closer look at it, jabbering, “Ooh la la! Poochee! Ooh la la! Poochee!”
The dog was a knockout. I got out of the car to get a better look at the animal myself, and a familiar voice said in a thin whisper, “Man, this better be a fuckin’ coincidence.” The man sitting in the front seat was Shooter Price, cocaine eyes asparkle.
“Shit me not, man. I thought you were dead.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t know anybody else walked away from that mess.”
“No problem. Listen, what I need you to do, just be real cool, man, like when these kids move on, what I want is you to walk up ahead about
twenty feet. I’m going to pull up to where you are real slow, just keep your hands where I can see them, OK?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure.” I walked. The kids were moving off. The dog barked once.
“Fine. Real good. Just stay there now.” The car started and Shooter moved up out of the service area. When he was even with me, he motioned me over and opened the door on his side.
“Real easy now, just lean in here like we are talking, please,” he said, putting a hand along my back as I leaned in and beginning an expert pat-down, “so — uh, how you been and like that.” The dog growled slightly. “No, Prince,” he said.
“Prince, huh?”
“Good boy.” I don’t know if he meant me or the dog. He was busy running his left hand up my leg, and I don’t think he was measuring my inseam or that glad to see me.
“I’m not carrying, babe.”
“Sure, I can be OK with that.” He kept his right hand inside a paper sack on his lap. My back was getting a nice cramp.
“Walk around and get in the front seat, please.” I walked. I got in the car. Prince was about three inches behind my head. I didn’t turn around.
“He gonna bite?”
“Naw. He’s cool. Just relax.” Shooter reached over and did a frisk job on my ankles, one more time around the fly (I was starting to like it), and a few more professional pats and squeezes. He tossed the sack in the backseat next to Prince and tucked a leg up under him.
“What did you have in the sack?”
“Can of Alpo.”
“So.”
“Yeah. Sorry, mano, but I hadda check, you know how it is.”
“Oh, not really. No. How is it?”
“Well. You could have found me up here, right.”
“Why would I want to do that — old time’s sake?”
“Somebody blew our shit away that day, my man. That was fuckin’ friendly fire; that goddamn arty was comin’ from in back of us.”
“Yeah, pard, but remember me? I was on that bird right there witcha, remember?”
“That don’t mean shit and you know it. How the fuck I know what you been up to since the mid-sixties, man. I don’t know who you work for, now or then, and don’t rightly give a fuck.”
“How come you let me in the car, then? I mean you coulda blowed my ass away right then and there, man. How do you know I don’t have a curare dart in my belt buckle or some of that Ian Fleming jive shit? I could have a bomb in my asshole for all you know.”
“You gonna take me and Prince, man? No fuckin’ way.”
“Right. Hey, well, good to see ya, man, hello, and I must be leaving.”
“No hard feelings, pal.”
“No. Course not. Like I say, I was just here, been driving up from New England. I didn’t even know you were alive. I didn’t see anybody else walk away from that bird. Did anybody else make it?”
“No. I saw you get out and I saw it blow. If they weren’t already dead when we crashed, they died then. You and I are it. And Harold.”
“Harold?”
“So I heard, man. I was around for a while, figurin’ how to get my ass out of there. I knew a dude was close to some Nung up in the hills. Said there were stories about some ugly dude was hiding for a while and walked into King about the time our team got lit up. Real skinny, ugly fucker. That sounds like it had to be our friend Harold.”
“Jesus.”
“What happened when you went back?”
“What do you mean?”
“How come they didn’t find some way to take you off? Whoever was determined to abort that mission coulda done a job on you real easy. But you’re still here. That’s what looks a little strange, no offense.”
I went back to the beginning and laid the whole thing on him. I guess he bought it because I’m still here.
“Well, whatever works,” he said.
“There it is.” Long-ass pause. Prince is breathing down my neck. “Uh . . . you still in the same — er, line of work?”
“No way. Too many amateurs in that shit now. I’m out of it.”
“That’s cool. Well, listen, man, good to see you and that crap. I’m gonna leave if you have no objections.”
“OK. Take care.”
“Yeah, man. You too.” I start to open the door real easy like. You never fucking know about Shooter. I ease out the door waiting to feel some real sharp fangs sink into my hippie haircut when Price says, “Hey, mano. C’mere a minute.” Oh, fuck.
“What.”
“You know what has more bones than a fish?”
“Uhhh. . . . No, what?”
“A graveyard, baby.” Shooter laughs.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Rex Miller
ISBN 978-1-4976-3157-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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