Lay Down My Sword and Shield (3 page)

We made love on the bed for an hour, stopping only for me to pour another glass. My head was swimming with whiskey, my heart was beating, and my skin felt hot to my own touch. The floor was unlevel when I walked to the bottle on the dresser, and my breathing became heavier and more hoarse in my throat. We went through all the positions that she knew and all the experiments I could think of, re-creating the fantasies of adolescent masturbation. She affected passion without being deliberately obvious, and she tensed her body and widened her legs at the right moment. After the third time when I didn’t think I could go again she bent over my stomach and kissed me and used her hands until I was ready to enter her. She was soft inside, and she hadn’t been at her trade enough years yet to enlarge too much. She raised herself on her elbows so that her breasts hung close to my face, and constricted the muscles in her stomach and twisted one thigh sideways each time we moved until I began to feel it swell inside me, then build in force like a large stone rolling downhill over the lip of a canyon, and burst away outside of me with the empty tranquility of an opium dream.

Then I fell into an exhausted whiskey stupor. The dust in the air looked like weevil worms turning in the shaft of sunlight that struck against the Jack Daniel’s bottle. The girl got up off the bed and began dressing, and a few moments later I heard the door click shut after her. I was sweating heavily, even in the air-conditioning, and I leaned my head over the edge of the bed to make the room stop spinning. There were flashes of color behind my closed eyes, and obscene echoes of the things I had said to the girl when the stone began to roll downhill. My throat and mouth were dry from the whiskey and heavy breathing, the veins in my head started to dilate with hangover, and I wanted to get into the shower and sit on the floor under the cold water until I washed all the heat out of my body; but instead I fell deeper into a delirium and then the dream began.

I had many dreams left over from Korea. Sometimes I would dig a grave in frozen ground while Sergeant Tien Kwong stood over me with his burp gun, occasionally jabbing the short barrel into my neck, his eyes flat with hatred. At other times the sergeant and I would return to the colonel’s interrogation room, where I sat in a straight-backed chair and looked at nothing and said nothing until the sergeant brought my head down on his knee and broke my nose. Or sometimes I was alone, naked in the center of the compound, where we were allowed to wash under the water spigot and scrub the lice out of the seams of our clothing once a week. And each time I went there and turned the rusted iron valve I saw the words embossed on the surface—
Manufactured in Akron, Ohio.

But this afternoon I was back in “the Shooting Gallery,” a very special place for me, because it was there that my six days on the firing line ended. That afternoon had been quiet, and we had moved into a dry irrigation ditch that bordered a two-mile plain of rice farms with bare, artillery-scarred foothills on the far side. In the twilight I could see the shattered trees and torn craters from our 105’s, and one hill that had been burned black with napalm strikes. We had heard that the First Marine Division had made contact with some Chinese at the Chosin, but our area was thought to be secure. They had two miles of open space to cross before they could reach us, and we had strung wire and mines outside our perimeter, although it was considered unnecessary because the North Koreans didn’t have enough troops in the hills to pull a straight-on offensive. At seven-thirty the searchlights went on and illuminated the rice fields and devastated slopes; then the nightly bugles and megaphone lectures against American capitalism started. The reverberating cacophony and the unnatural white light on the hills and corrugated rice fields seemed like an experiment in insanity held on the moon’s surface. Sometimes the North Koreans would fail to pick up the phonograph needle and the record would scratch out static for several minutes, echoing down off the hills like someone raking his fingernails across a blackboard. Then the searchlights would change angle and sweep across the sky, reflecting momentarily on the clouds, and settle on another distant hilltop pocked with brown holes.

I sat with my back against the ditch and tried to sleep. My blanket was draped around me like iron in the cold, and my feet ached inside my boots. I had gotten wet that afternoon crossing a rice paddy, and grains of ice had started to form inside my clothes. Even with my stocking cap pulled low under my helmet, my ears felt as though they had been beaten with boards. In the distance I heard one of our tanks clanking down a road; then a .30-caliber machine gun began firing far off on our right flank. “What’s that fucking asshole doing?” a corporal next to me said. He was a tall hillbilly boy from north Alabama. His blanket was pulled up over his helmet, and he had cut away his glove around the first finger of his right hand. I had a small bottle of codeine in my pack, and I started to take it out for a drink. It didn’t taste as good as whiskey, but it warmed you inside like canned heat. The machine gun fell silent a moment, then began firing again with longer bursts, followed by a B.A.R. and the irregular popping of small-arms fire. “What the hell is going on?” the corporal said. He raised up on his knees with his M-1 in his hands. Suddenly, flares began bursting in the sky, burning in white halos above the corrugated fields. The corporal’s face was as pale as candle wax in the light, his lips tight and bloodless.

The first mortar rounds struck outside our wire and exploded the mines we had strung earlier. Yellow and orange flames erupted out of the earth and flicked around the strands of concertina wire. I could feel the suck of hot air from the vacuum, my ears roared with the thunder of freight trains crashing into one another, and the wall of the ditch slammed into my head like a sledge. The rim of my helmet had cut a neat slit across my nose, and I could taste the blood draining in a wet streak over my mouth. Somewhere down the line, among the shower of rocks and frozen earth, the tremors reverberating through the ground, the locomotive engines blowing apart, I heard a Marine shout, a prolonged voice rising out of a furnace, “DOOOOOOOOOOOC!” I started to crawl along the floor of the ditch on my hands and knees, then the Chinese corrected their angle of fire and marched the barrage right down the center of our line.

Somehow I had believed that if I ever bought one it would come as a result of some choice I had made; that I would be killed after some positive act of my own—no matter how unconscious or reckless—but there would still be a type of control in my death. However, now I knew that I was going to die in the middle of a firestorm. I had no more chance of resisting my death than if God crashed His fist down on top of me. The shells burst in jagged intervals along the ditch, blowing men and weapons in every direction. The corporal was suddenly frozen in an explosion of light and dirt behind him. His mouth and eyes were wide, his helmet pitted and torn with shrapnel. He seemed to pirouette in slow motion, the weight of his tall body resting inside one boot, then he fell backward across me. The blood ran from his stocking cap like pieces of string over his face. He opened and closed his mouth with a wet, sucking sound, the saliva thick on his tongue. He coughed once, quietly and deep in his throat; then his eyes fixed on a phosphorescent flare burning above us.

Moments later the firestorm ended, almost too quickly, because it seemed that nothing that intense and murderous could ever end, that it would perpetuate itself indefinitely with its own cataclysmic force. I pushed the corporal off me, my ears ringing in the silence (or what seemed like silence, since automatic weapons had begun firing again on both sides of us). The corporal’s helmet rolled off his head, and I saw a long incision, like a scalpel cut, across the crown of his skull. The dead were strewn in unnatural positions along the ditch, some of them half-buried in mounds of dirt from the caved-in walls, their bodies twisted and broken as though they had been dropped from airplanes. The faces of the wounded were white with shock and concussion. Down the line a man was screaming.

“Are you hit, Doc?” It was the first lieutenant. He carried his carbine in one hand. His left arm hung limply by his side.

“I’m all right.” Our voices sounded far away from me.

“Get ready to move the wounded out of here. The right flank is getting their ass knocked off. We’re supposed to get artillery in five minutes and pull.”

“You’re bleeding pretty heavy, Lieutenant.”

“Get every man moving you can. We’re going to have gooks coming up our ass.”

However, the artillery cover never came, and we were overrun fifteen minutes later. Our automatic weapons men killed Chinese by the hundreds as they advanced across the rice fields. We packed snow on the barrels of the .30-caliber machine guns to keep them from melting, and the bottom of the ditch was littered with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. The dead lay in quilted rows as far as I could see. They moved forward and died, then another wave took their place. The bugles began blowing again, potato mashers exploded in our wire, and every time a weapon locked empty or a Marine was hit they moved closer to the ditch. Our only tank was burning behind us, the lieutenant was shot through the mouth, and all of our N.C.O.’s were dead. We fired our last rounds, fixed bayonets in a silly Alamo gesture, and then the Chinese swarmed over us.

They ran along the edge of the ditch, firing point-blank into us with their burp guns. They shot the dead and the living alike, in the hysterical relief that comes with the victory of living through an attack. Their weapons weren’t designed for accuracy, but they could dump almost a full pan into a man who was closer than twenty feet. For the first time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the handles of a stretcher with a wounded Marine on it and ran across the bodies, the ammunition boxes, the bent bazookas, the knocked-out machine guns, the lieutenant spitting blood and parts of teeth on his coat, and suddenly I saw a young Chinese boy, not over seventeen, his thin, yellow face pinched with cold, standing above me in tennis shoes and quilted clothes. I guess (as I remember it) that I threw my arms out in front of me to prevent that spray of flame and bullets from entering my face and chest, but the gesture was unnecessary because he was a poor marksman and he never got above my knees. I felt a pain like a shaft of ice through both legs, and I toppled over as though a bad comic had just kicked me deftly across the shins.

My Korean recall, born out of Jack Daniel’s and sexual exhaustion, ended here. I awoke at six-thirty, sweating, my head thick with afternoon whiskey. For a half hour I sat on the shower tile under the cold water, chewing an unlit cigar. The white indentions in my calves felt like rubber under my thumb.

CHAPTER 2

T
HE SHAMROCK HILTON
Hotel in Houston was crowded that night with Democrats from all over Texas. They came in party loyalty almost seven hundred strong—the daughters of forgotten wars, the state committee from Austin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. fat boys, the oil-depletion wheelers, manicured newspaper publishers, slick public relations men, millionaire women dressed in Neiman Marcus clothes with Piney Woods accents, young lawyers on their way up in state politics (each of them with a clear eye, hard grip, and a square, cologned jaw like Fearless Fosdick), the ten-percenters, the new rich who bought their children’s way into Randolph-Macon, the ranchers with a bright eye on the agriculture subsidy, a few semi-acceptable Mafia characters from Galveston, several ex-hacks, doormen, flunkies, and baggage carriers from Lyndon’s entourage, three Hollywood movie stars who had been born in Texas, an astronaut, one crippled commander of the Veterans of the Spanish-American War who sat in a wheelchair, an alcoholic baseball player who used to pitch for the Houston Buffaloes before he went up to the Cardinals, some highly paid prostitutes, an Air Force general who has probably won a footnote in military history for his dedication in the firebombing of Dresden, and United States Senator Allen B. Dowling.

I had driven from San Antonio in two and a half hours, highballing wide-open like a blue shot through small towns and farm communities, while drunken cowboys drinking beer in front of saloons stared at me in disbelief. I pulled into the white circular drive of the Shamrock and waited in the line of cars for the band of uniformed Negro porters to take over my luggage, my Cadillac, and even my attempt to open a door by myself. They moved about with the quick, electric motion of rubber bands snapping, their teeth white, their faces black and cordial, obsequious and yet confidently efficient. I imagined that they could have cut all our throats with pleasure. They reminded me of Negro troops in Korea when they were dealing with Mr. Skins, a white officer. They could go about a job in a way that deserved group citations, and at the same time insult an officer and laugh in his face without doing anything for which they could be reprimanded unless the officer wanted to appear a public fool.

I idled the car up to the glass doors at the entrance; one Negro pulled open the car door for me, another got behind the wheel, and a third took my suitcase from the trunk. I handed out one-dollar tips to each of them (with the stupid feeling of an artificial situation that you have when you pay a shoeshine boy), and followed the third porter into the hotel. And I wondered, looking at his gray, uniformed back, the muscles stiff and flat under the cloth, Would you really like to tick a razor across my jugular, you uprooted descendant of Ham, divested of your heritage, dropped clumsily and illiterate into a south Texas cotton patch, where you could labor and exhaust yourself and kind through the next several generations on tenant shares? Yes, I guess you could, with a neat, sharp corner of the blade that you would draw gingerly along the vein.

But I still had a fair edge on from the Jack Daniel’s, the Mexican girl, and the dream, and I imagine that is why I suddenly had such strange insights into that black mind walking before me.

I gave my name at the desk and was told that my wife had taken a suite of rooms on the tenth floor. She and my brother Bailey had come to Houston yesterday when the convention had started, and I was supposed to join them today at noon for lunch on the terrace with several of the oil-depletion boys who had all types of money to sink into a young congressman’s career. However, I didn’t have to speak before the convention until ten that night, and I didn’t think that I could take a full day of laughing conversation, racial jokes, polite gin by the swimming pool, and powdered, middle-aged oil wives who whispered banal remarks like slivers of glass in my ear. I had met all of them before in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso, and they were always true to themselves, regardless of the place or occasion. The men wore their same Oshman western suits and low-topped boots, the diamond rings from Zale’s that looked out of place on their fat hands, the string ties or open-neck sports shirts that directed attention away from the swift eyes and the broken veins in the cheeks. They spoke of huge finance with indifference, but I knew that their groins tingled with pleasure at the same time. Their women liked me because I was young and good-looking, successful as a lawyer, tanned from playing in fashionable tennis courts, and with an inner steeled effort I could clink the ice in my glass and look pleasant and easy while they told about all the trivial problems in their insipid lives (in this respect I was very self-disciplined, because I always knew when to excuse myself and walk away before the inner rigidity broke apart).