Mile Zero (38 page)

The differences were there from the beginning. Evelyn carried her ideals with her, St. Cloud was on the run from his. A man can’t marry his conscience, but St. Cloud had been fool enough to try. He wasn’t certain if he married Evelyn because he loved her, or because the shared idealism of their youth proved a stronger passion than the urgent sexual desire that originally brought them together. What Evelyn said about him from the first was true, the root of his restlessness could not be torn from him. He was part of the generation conceived under the cloud of Hiroshima and came of age during the
time of Vietnam, one of Uncle Sammy’s marked babies. A strange stain of guilt covered him, an implacable atomic dust gnawed at his essence. Evelyn refused to allow the shadow of the cloud to keep her shivering in the dark crevice of despair, she understood no one could outrun the cloud, it is in the heart, forever. But the heart harbors other things, the balances and weights of truth and survival, the knowingness of when to shed the afterbirth of former selves. Evelyn’s sense of survival was stronger than St. Cloud’s, she knew her strength pulled him head over heels for her, but nothing remains the same, nothing is forever, she taught him that. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe St. Cloud would never learn, continue to fall in love with abstractions to avoid the true lessons of the heart. Evelyn was lost to him as they journeyed from those early college days of commitment, lost because he could not find himself.

The unshakable guilt of Vietnam became St. Cloud’s mistress, swelling to disproportionate balance between himself and Evelyn. Even in long moments of passion, Evelyn knew she shared St. Cloud with something else, that he owed his allegiance to his assumed collapse of bravado. She sensed he harbored his sexual energy, as if it were a sin to spend his essence on anything more intimate than his desperate sense of loss. What had been good between them in the beginning went quickly bad. Evelyn could trace it to that first day on the bookstore roof as the rain of tear gas clouded overhead; it was their collective beginning and St. Cloud’s personal end, for he was powerless to shift the predictable course of the antiwar march below in the streets, let alone derail the roaring train of history called the Vietnam war, destined to derail in a crash of disorienting despair. It was on the bookstore roof where St. Cloud surrendered his youthful ideals. Watching the diminutive protestors in the maze of streets below marching toward inevitable failure, he saw clearly that his way was to become a warrior of the shadows, to trade his life for all-out war on war, declare war against his own country, become a human bomb, an incendiary physical device, an instrument of destructive force equal to the destructive force operative in the steaming jungles eight thousand miles away. To stop the war St. Cloud would have to sacrifice himself, no quarter could be given, no reserve sought, by necessity he must become the ultimate weapon, destroy the infrastructure of his own society. Whenever bombs rained from bays of B-52S eight thousand miles away he would provide equal explosions in his homeland. Power lines, bridges, dams, roads, all would be
blown. The country would tremble beneath a violent finger of disaster pointed by one of its own. The bones of those who spoke broken promises would be broken, no prisoners would be taken. Release was to become a terrorist, a fierce wind of retribution culminating in one’s own fiery reprisal. Release was the extinction of madness by madness.

Evelyn alone understood St. Cloud’s innermost failure; he was incapable of crossing the line, could not pass the point of no return, could not justify what it would take to win. Even if St. Cloud could stomach it, even if to splatter the blood and bone of his own countrymen across a map of justified reprisal was imaginable, it remained in the end beyond his doing. It was not that he was a coward, it was simply he was not a killer. That is why he was against the war from its origination. He could not become a killer, even for a cause he deemed far greater than the mediocrity of his own existence. Evelyn understood the suffering of St. Cloud’s soul. To what reality he finally emerged was not important; what was important was that he escape the Black Cloud, understand at last he was capable of change, accountable only to himself. Evelyn had discovered this truth within herself before she discovered St. Cloud, for it was not St. Cloud who discovered her in the mayhem of that long-ago antiwar march, it was she who was seeking him in her dusty sandals and thin dress, stalking the male wounded, sniffing for the scent of fear she knew so well. Though she was only twenty at the time she had traced in a few short years a lifetime of despair and guilt over the war eight thousand miles away, which was driving an endless stake through the heart of her generation. As she watched the stake being driven ever deeper it became horrifying to her that so many were unaware of its lethal presence, as if the stake had driven out the capacity for remorse, leaving a large part of the generation face down in a brain-dead field of apathy. This fact above all others drove Evelyn to desperate extremes, left her with the unmistaken calling that she alone must assume the agonizing guilt denied others. Antiwar marches and public screams of protestation were no longer enough for Evelyn. She felt compelled to pursue fateful acts. In the eternity of the few years before she met St. Cloud in the crowded streets of a college town, she had danced naked on a bar top in a roadside strip joint near the sprawl of a California airbase constructed in the midst of onion fields unfolding to the horizon. Evelyn’s teen-aged body gyrated nightly to the thunderous roar of Vietnam-bound transport planes overhead, which dwarfed the metallic incantations of guitars from loudspeakers
surrounding her. Smoky air swirled about her sweat-slickened turns on the bar as eighteen-year-old boys followed her every move. The hair of the eighteen-year-olds was cut recruit bristle short, their creased battle fatigues creaking with untried embarrassment as their upturned faces sought a reflection of redemption in the shine of Evelyn’s stiletto-heeled shoes stamping out the wailing guitar beat on the bar top. The muscles of Evelyn’s calves tightened within nylon stockings gartered by a lace noose cinched about her waist. Her fingers traveled an outline of breasts, up to shoulders thrust back as she arched, arms outstretched behind, a curved bridge beneath the overhead spin of a mirrored globe flinging light across faces excited by a stripped-down oiled body begging to be held as affectionately and with such wanton consequence as a recruit fondles his first rifle. After each of Evelyn’s nightly go-go performances she would lead a recruit into the cubicle recess of a motel room next to the strip joint, take a bland sweating face between her two cool hands and gaze into eyes with hope carved from them with her sure purpose, like a fortune-teller melting the marrow of a new believer’s bones. All the while the roar of transport planes shook the already trembling motel bed. Planes landed and departed on runways reaching to the horizon of open California farmland. White flowering fields of onions surrounded the activity of men on the runways, whose machines had no relation to the tilling of the earth. Beyond the runways, past the camouflaged hulks of barracks and galvanized metal warehouses of munitions waiting to be loaded, were grand piles of harvested onions, mountains of vegetables exuding a pungent odor of earth salt to sail the wind, powerful enough to bring tears to men’s eyes as jet engines rent the air, as steel bellies of planes yawned open to offer bodies in green rubber bags inside stacks of shiny aluminum caskets, as long lines of recruits in green uniforms stood ready to march into the yawning bellies. The eye-tearing salt scent of onions traveled for miles, down the highway, past crowded go-go bars and topless-bottomless strip joints, through the whine of the sucking motel air-conditioner into Evelyn’s flared nostrils as her mouth moved on a sweat bland face, her hips rising from the shaking bed to meet the thrusting weight of a shuddering body, at that moment her lips flowered with their true purpose, her heated words released into an unsuspecting ear:
“Don’t go. Just turn your back on it and walk away. Hell no, don’t go.”

Evelyn could not stop a war, but she could start a man’s conscience.
Some of the bland-faced recruits walked away from her bed, away from the airfield, drifted down the highway, distancing themselves from a killer identity before it was too late, abandoning their own names and families, slipping into neutral countries, or disappearing into the cracks of a burgeoning underground. Some marched to a new drummer of inspirational purpose, others were forever condemned to uncertainty, letting their hair grow long and their memories short, starting new lives, forgetting old hurts. In one way or another, those who walked away from Evelyn’s bed with conspiratorial words ringing in their ears severed forever the tenuous thread that connected them to the mighty notion at play on the glistening tarmacs of the airfield of men leaving a country at peace to make war in another country. This severing happened not in a flash of illuminating cowardice or elevated consciousness, but in an unpredictable moment when a young girl surrounded by the air-conditioned wind of sweet onions whispered,
Don’t go
. Some didn’t. Evelyn never knew, Evelyn never counted.

Evelyn carried her message from the onion fields into the big cities with college campuses not yet awakened to the consequences of a stake being driven through the heart of the least suspecting. She looked the predictable type on a college campus. She looked neither for nor against anything, espoused no political cant and outwardly breached no social contract expected of someone her age. She quietly worked the fields of academe. At night, in her bed, her success was her swift surprise, her whispered avowed purpose. Naked college boys were into her before gauging the true depth of her intention. The boys rose speechless from rumpled sheets, tried to pay her or kiss her, but knew from the expression in her eyes there was only one earthly payment expected of them. Evelyn was there for
them
, presenting in passion’s irrational moment the only rational way to pay the bill. She never knew if they did, never knew which way they drifted when the draft notice came in the mail. She didn’t have the heart to look back, there were more colleges, all across the country, she didn’t have much time, and when she felt she was losing the battle, she headed back to the airbase in the onion fields, to the bar top surrounded now by even more bland faces, not hundreds, but thousands: black, brown, white, red. It was in her heart her job to strip bare and mount the bar top, on the off chance a bland face would see reflected his road to redemption in the shine of her stiletto shoes. Long after the music stopped none of the bland faces, not
those choosing to travel the thread from a country at peace to a country at war, nor those who drifted away to an inevitable uneasy peace with themselves, knew what happened to the all-American-looking girl who danced naked on a bar top in a neon-lit strip joint at the edge of onion fields. She became to them as much a dream as their own youth had become. They could not know she grew an independent life in her from those endless sweaty nights. Although the growth deviated from her avowed purpose, Evelyn let the forming human buried deep in her belly be.

Perhaps it was the season of killing Evelyn was in the midst of? Whatever it was, Evelyn could not destroy something in the center of her to keep others alive, to do so would give the lie to the who and why of what she had become. She too drifted off down the highway, but it would have to be a different way now. She chose a large city along the San Francisco Bay, where troop trains passed through. She lay down with others before the trains carrying cheering and jeering recruits leaning from open windows with fists of stiff-fingered Victory signs raised. She did this until she grew too obviously pregnant to be pulled from iron tracks by nervous troopers, led handcuffed to the siren wail of a waiting police van. Necessity dictated a settled existence, but not a still life. The coastal city she retreated to was thick with fog and young men hiding behind long hair and beards, men who one way or another had cut the thread between war and peace, created a limbo of exotic dope, chanted the lyrics of a brash new music making its own circular history, from this they prayed a new life would mushroom, for this new life they needed children not attached to the old thread. Evelyn lay among many of these men, although she had a new life of her own within, she had not sought them out for that purpose, but they quickly understood their hunger for her. The bearded men envied and stroked her as she watched for the one among them most desperate for the gruel of her avowed purpose. Finally she found one who had already been to the war eight thousand miles away, then climbed back from the end of the thread to his place of inevitable uneasy peace. His face was no longer bland, only uneasy. He had skipped being a man, had jumped from boy over man to become a killer, only nineteen. Initially he followed the thread from peace to war because his father had been a soldier in another war and was proud he too had a son to offer. The son knew little about war, only that his father needed his offering, so off he went eight thousand miles to prove the thread remained unbroken. Quick with
his hands and possessed of fierce eyesight, he became a hog driver of a Chinook chopper. He learned in the air quickly, to feint and fake, zig and zag, jockeying that bitch hog through rain of hot onto any piece of smoking defoliated jungle real estate Charley had put a down payment on that day. He lived to be radioed in on top of the heat, he ate the rush of wind coming through open chopper doors, cursed his way through incoming zing, suck and slam of shrap hellbent on opening his hog like a can of worms, he waved and spit at the little yellow gods pumping blue-green tracers up from below trying to bust his metal bubble, bust his ass back down to klick zero. On he soared, to a cool pie-in-the-sky 2,500 feet and higher, straining rotor blades whining a song of freedom above the moans of blood-splattered wounded grunts slumped all around him. When he dropped toward the ground he stuck mean and low over sloggy rice paddies so close he could reach out and stick a phosphorus grenade up a water buffalo’s ass, instant barbecue bovine for Charley and friends. Later, at night, he would bask in air-conditioned splendor, the jungle’s mosquito hum in his ears, ice in his veins, vodka in his glass, opium in his pipe:
Migh migh migh said the spider to the fly
on the radio. Daddy would be proud. Son had proved it, saved the day, the mighty thread remained unbroken. A flyboy’s dreams took flight, after all, he sought no wider war.