The Neon Rain (14 page)

“Look, Murphy, I went after the booze, which you owe me twelve dollars for, and I got rainwater running out my crotch while you guys are in the dry, licking your greasy fingers. Don’t provoke me.”

Murphy chewed on his food and looked at nothing.

Starkweather wiped his face and arms slick, lighted a Lucky Strike from his Zippo, snapped the lighter shut and stuck it in his watch pocket with a thick thumb, and inhaled the smoke without removing the cigarette from his mouth while he took a fifth of Seagram’s whiskey, a six-pack of Jax, a capped vial of pills, and a brown medicine bottle from the sack and put them on the table. Then he rummaged around on the workbench until he found a rubber funnel and a glass jar filled with rusty nails. He dumped the nails out on the workbench and walked back to the table with the jar and the funnel. His shaved head was shaped like a question mark.

“You should have been here earlier,” he said. “We got some real high notes out of your friend. You remember what they used to say in ‘Nam. Call up Charlie on the telephone and he always answers.”

He filled the glass jar with beer and whiskey and the liquid from the brown bottle, then poured in the pills and screwed on the cap and shook it all together as though he were making a martini. His saliva was wet on the tip of his cigarette, and he breathed with a mean energy.

“It must be terrible to know you’re a lush that can’t hold his liquor,” he said.

“I’ve spilled more in a week than you’ve drunk in your lifetime, asshole,” I said.

“I’ll bet. My first wife was a juicer,” he said. “She’d do anything for it. She screwed a cabdriver once for a quart of beer. I found out about it, cut me a switch as thick as my finger, and whipped the dress off her back. I took her money and clothes away and locked her in the bedroom and she’d drink hair tonic. Finally they come and took her off to a crazyhouse in Montgomery.”

“No matter what happens here tonight, I’ve got some friends who are going to cool out your action, Starkweather,” I said.

“Maybe so, maybe so. But in the meantime I’ve got a drunkard’s dream for you. When those ‘ludes hit you, I can pull your teeth with pliers and you won’t twitch. The castor oil is just to round out your evening, bring back those old three-day benders when you used to shit your pants. If you’re a good boy, we’ll let you sit up and drink it by yourself.”

“Get on with it,” Murphy said.

“Stop giving orders for a while, Murphy,” Starkweather said. “A lot of this mess is yours. We should have taken these guys out the first time they got in our face. Instead, you had to make an intelligence operation out of it to impress Abshire.”

“Why is it in any given situation you never disappoint us?” Murphy said.

“You got a way of letting other people clean the pot after you get off it. Maybe you ought to do some grunt work yourself. You ought to be there when them Indians close off a village and start pulling them out of the huts. The amusement park really lights up. I don’t think you’d have the guts for it.”

“It’s not a matter of guts, my friend,” Murphy said. There were small breadcrumbs in the whiskers on his chin. “Some people are adverbs, others are nouns.”

“It’d be fun watching you hump it.”

“You might not believe this, but I had a role of some minor historical importance at the Bay of Pigs and Dien Bien Phu. The latter was about the time you were trying to figure out the difference between your mother’s ovaries and a bowl of grits.”

“You got a great record, Murph. If you’d been at Omaha Beach, we’d be speaking German today.”

Erik, the little Israeli, snickered, and the Nicaraguan looked back and forth hot-eyed at the joke he didn’t understand.

“You idiots, he’s burning his wrists with the handcuffs,” Murphy said.

“Always the intelligence man,” Starkweather said.

“You do your job and shut your mouth, Starkweather. The lieutenant could operate on one brain cell and outwit you. If you screw something up here tonight, or open your face one more time—”

He stopped and breathed hard through his nose.

“I’m going to bring his car in now. You wrap this package up,” he said. “We’re going to talk later.”

“You heard the bossman,” Starkweather said to me. “Time to go to work, earn our pay, fetch that barge and tote that bale. Good-bye, fart-breath.”

They forced the spout of the rubber funnel past my teeth and into the back of my mouth. I gagged and coughed, my eyes filled with water, and I felt my chest convulse under their hands. Then they held my nose and poured the mixture of beer, castor oil, whiskey, and Quaaludes down my throat. The sudden raw taste of alcohol after four years of abstinence was like a black peal of thunder in my system. My stomach was empty and it licked through me like canned heat, settled heavily into my testicles and phallus, roared darkly into my brain, filled my heart with the rancid, primordial juices of a Viking reveling in his own mortal wound.

The light went out of my mind, and in a few moments’ time I was caught again in my drunken world of all-night bars, taxi drivers guiding me through my front door in the false dawn, the delirium tremens that covered me with sweat and filled the inside of my houseboat with spiders and dead Vietnamese. I heard beer-bottle glass break in my head, saw myself pushed out the back door of a wino bar, saw the contempt in a bouncer’s face when he stuffed me in my automobile and threw my hat in after me, felt myself heaving my insides into a public toilet, felt the hands of a pimp and a whore turning my trouser pockets inside out.

Then a strange thing happened. Most of my dreams about Vietnam were nightmares that at one time made me fear sleep. Even before I became a full-blown drunk, I used to drink three beers before bed so I would sleep through to the morning. But now somebody was carrying me in the warm rain and I knew that I was once again in the loving care of the soldiers from my platoon. I had heard the
klitch
under my foot in the dark on the jungle trail; then, as though I were a spectator rather than a participant, I saw myself covered with cobalt light, my body crawl with electricity, my soul light the trees like an enormous candle.

When I awoke, the smoke was still rising from the rent holes in my fatigues and they were carrying me between them on a poncho while the rain ticked on the trees and the shells from an offshore battery ripped through the sky overhead. In the humid darkness I could hear the labored breathing of the four men carrying me. They were running in a half-trot, the tree branches and vines slapping against their faces and steel pots, their expressions stonelike and heedless of the other Claymores that must have been set on the trail. One of the four was a hillbilly boy from north-era Georgia. He had a large American flag tattooed on his flexed, sun-browned arm, and he was so strong and he pulled so hard on his corner of the poncho that he almost tipped me out on the trail. But when a couple of AK-47s went off and they had to set me down suddenly, he crouched close to my face and whispered in his mountain accent, “Don’t you worry none, Lieutenant. If they ain’t at the LZ, we’ll tote you plumb to Saigon if we have to.”

They carried me the rest of the night. Their faces were exhausted and beaded with pinpoints of sweat and dirt, their fatigues stiff with their own salt. I should have been afraid but I was not. They never faltered, even though their arms and backs ached miserably and their hands were rubbed raw and blistered. The moon broke through the clouds overhead, the mist hung like strips of wet cotton along the jungle trail, and I fell into a deep morphine dream, a prenatal quietness in which the only sound was my own breathing and the labored breath of the four men carrying me, which finally became a collective hum like blood coursing through an umbilical cord. I heard them stop once and set me down gingerly while they changed my serum albumin bottle, but I didn’t wake until morning, when I heard the blades of the medevac roaring over the LZ and I looked up out of my black cocoon and saw the boy from northern Georgia lean down out of the light and touch my face with hands that were as tender as a woman’s.

But the hands that lifted me out of the trunk of my own automobile on the third level of a parking garage above the river didn’t belong to the men of my platoon. In the darkness and the swirling rain I saw the faces of the little Israeli, the Nicaraguan, Philip Murphy, and Bobby Joe Starkweather staring down at me as though I were a loathsome object whose smell made their nostrils dilate and whiten with shock. They lifted me to my feet, then wedged me behind the steering wheel of my car and slammed the door closed. My head felt as though it had been stunned with Novocain, my mouth hung open uncontrollably, my chin and neck were slick with vomit, the sickening sweet stench of excrement rose from my trousers. Through the windshield I could see the green and red running lights of barges out on the Mississippi and clouds of vapor rising from the rain-dented water like a scene out of purgatory.

They propped Sam Fitzpatrick next to me and splashed whiskey and beer on his clothes. I tried to hold my head up straight, to reach out and touch him, but my chin kept falling on my chest and my words became thick bubbles on my lips. His eyes were rolled upward, and when he breathed, fresh blood drained from his nose onto his shirt-front. My face was numb, dead to the touch, stretched tight across the skull the way skin is over a death’s head, and I felt my lips splitting apart in a wicked grin, as though I wanted to share an obscene joke with the world about our execution. Then an awful taste rose out of my stomach, my head pitched forward, and I felt something like wet newspaper rip loose inside my chest and then I heard a splattering through the steering wheel onto the floorboards.

Someone had started the car engine now, and a bare arm ridged with muscle like rolls of nickels reached across me and dropped the transmission into gear. The rain was blowing hard on the river.

The car rolled toward the guardrail, gaining speed, as I slapped limply at the door handle and tried to pull the lock free with fingers that felt sewed together with needle and thread. At first I could see the river levee, a lighted street down below with cars on it, the black tops of one-story warehouses; then as my car neared the guardrail and the end of the concrete shelf I could see only the sky and the rain twisting out of it and a distant airplane with its wing lights flashing against the blackness.

I heard the rail fold under my bumper, then snap loose altogether from its fastenings just as the front wheels dropped over the edge of the concrete and my car tilted forward and slid out into space like it was beginning the first downward rush of a rollercoaster ride. The back end started to roll over, and I was pressed flat against the steering wheel, watching the street below roar up at me through the windshield, my mouth open wide with a sound that would be caught forever in my throat.

The car hit the corner of another building or concrete abutment of some kind, because I heard metal shear, as though the underside of the car had been surgically gutted, smelled a drench of gasoline briefly, then we crashed upside down in the middle of a sidewalk in a thunderous roar of glass, crumpling metal, and doors exploding off the hinges.

I was outside on the pavement, my clothes covered with oil and glass shards. We had beat it, I thought. The bad guys had done their worst and hadn’t been able to pull it off. We were painted with magic, Fitzpatrick and I, and after we had recuperated it would be our turn to kick butt and take names.

But only drunkards and fools believe in that kind of poetic simplicity. The fuel tank was gashed open and the car was soaking in gasoline. I saw wisps of smoke rise from the crushed hood like pieces of dirty string, then there was a
poof
and a burst of light from the engine, and a strip of flame raced along the pavement to the gas tank and the whole car went up in an orange and black ball that snapped against the sky.

I hope he didn’t suffer. The inside of the car was a firestorm. I couldn’t see anything except flames swirling inside the gutted windows. But in my mind’s eye I saw a papier-mache figure, with freckles painted on its face, lying quietly between the roaring yellow walls of a furnace, ridging and popping apart in the heat.

The next morning the sun was bright through the windows of my hospital room, and I could see the green tops of the oak trees against the red brick of the nineteenth-century homes across the street. I was only half a block off St. Charles, and when the nurse cranked up my bed I could see the big dull-green streetcar passing along the esplanade.

I had a concussion and the doctor took seventeen stitches in my scalp, and small pieces of oily glass were embedded in my shoulder and all down one arm, so that the skin felt like alligator hide. But my real problem was with the whiskey and Quaaludes that were still in my system, and the series of people who came through my door.

The first one was Sam Fitzpatrick’s supervisor from the Treasury Department. He wasn’t a bad guy, I guess, but he didn’t like me and I believed he felt it was Fitzpatrick’s involvement with me, rather than with Philip Murphy and Central American guns, that had led to his death.

“You keep talking about an elephant walk. There’s nothing like that in Fitzpatrick’s notes and he never talked about it, either,” he said. He was forty, wore a business suit and a deep tan, and his gray hair was cut short like an athlete’s. His brown, green-flecked eyes were steady and intent.

“He didn’t have a chance to,” I said.

“You tell a strange story, Lieutenant.”

“Psychopaths and government fuckheads out of control do strange things.”

“Philip Murphy isn’t government.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Take my word,” he said.

“Then why don’t you take mine?”

“Because you have a peculiar history. Because you keep meddling in things that aren’t your business. Because you killed a potential major government witness and because one of our best agents burned to death in your automobile.”

My eyes broke and I had to look away from his face. The trees were green in the sunlight outside and I thought I heard the streetcar clatter on the esplanade.