The Protocol: A Prescription to Die (25 page)

“It’s amazing you’re not as red as a boiled lobster, sir,” came a voice from behind.

McAllister’s eyes fluttered. The voice belonged to Franklin, his medic. He forced his eyes to open into slits expecting to shelter them from the sun he last remembered somewhere else in the sky.

It wasn’t where he left it.

Instead, it was beginning its journey to the western horizon. He’d been asleep for several hours.

“Don’t burn. I tan,” he mumbled.

Franklin noisily unfolded the lounge chair he was carrying and sat down.

“Hey there, Dinner,” he said as he scratched the dog’s notched, floppy left ear. “He sure does seem to like you. Follows you everywhere.”

“Yup,” mumbled McAllister as he tried to fall back to sleep and ignore the intrusion.

Too late.

The thoughts began to flow as soon as McAllister’s consciousness was awakened. Even though Franklin was just one man, it didn’t matter. One man acted like a giant antenna and the thoughts from those at the base, although garbled, came flowing across the span of grass, through Franklin, and into his brain. If he told Franklin to lift up his left arm, stand on one leg and turn sideways, the reception would likely improve. He’d have to lower the volume himself, after all.

Spooncake sighed as he concentrated on volume control the way his grandfather had taught him. “Lock it away” he always said. “Lock it away and never let it out.”

“Base is quiet.”

“Yup. S’pose so.”

“Not as quiet as you think,” thought Spooncake.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just trying to concentrate.”

“Ah. What about?”

“Theory of Relativity and such. Just give me a sec.”

In less than a minute, Spooncake stretched his neck and turned his attention to Franklin. He knew the kid wasn’t about to leave and something was on the kid’s mind.

Spooncake knew what it was but had to carry on the conversation as if he was clueless.

“What’s up?”

“They brought in about a dozen wounded a few hours ago. Two didn’t even make it past triage.”

Spooncake knew that. He’d seen the lights. He laid back down on the lounge chair.

“That’s why I came down here. Need a break.”

“What do you think Hammond is doing in Saigon?”

McAllister kept his eyes closed but held up his hand and extended three fingers.

“I will drink them dry. I will punch someone. I will find new and exciting ways to get VD,” said McAllister as he counted down each of Hammond’s goals with a finger. “His words. Not mine.”

“That sounds like him, alright.”

McAllister heard Franklin take off his shirt and stretch out on the lounger he’d brought. If McAllister knew which lounger it was, it was in worse shape than his, and he wondered how the kid was balancing himself on its torn straps and not falling through. Specialist Andrew Franklin was still technically a green bean, just six months into his first tour. He was the fourth medic he’d had on his team. The other three he’d trained and had to watch die. He hoped Franklin would not be just another name on someone’s report.

Yes, Franklin was new.

Yes, Franklin was afraid of his own shadow.

Yes, Franklin was barely nineteen.

And yes, Franklin was thin as a rail and had acne that made McAllister wince at times. When it was bad, Hammond couldn’t resist a running commentary.

“Damn, kid. You gonna pop those things or what?”

Hammond loved to taunt the kid but the kid never said a word and that pissed Hammond off to no end.

The kid was good.

Franklin was one of the best medics that McAllister had ever worked with, and he was glad to have him on his crew. Many men were alive because of the skills the kid had out in the field. He could stop a bleeder with his left hand and simultaneously inject morphine into another soldier with his right.

The kid had become a surrogate little brother.

The problem for McAllister was that he didn’t want a little brother right now.

He wanted solitude.

He wanted quiet without having to manage the volume.

“Give me some of that,” Franklin said as he reached for the bottle of gin still clasped between McAllister’s knees.

McAllister heard Franklin take a long gulp, wheeze, and try to catch his breath. The kid had probably only tasted gin once before in his long life.

“Go easy on that shit. It’ll kill you if you’re not careful, or worse yet, your dick’ll fall off.”

Franklin coughed and nodded.

“Have you…”

“For as long as I can recall. And please don’t think of me as lucky. You don’t want what I got.”

When Spooncake was tired and not in the most communicative of moods, he rarely let anyone finish sentences. Conversation went much faster when he could move things along.

Like now.

Franklin pushed the bottle back between McAllister’s knees.

“It’s just that…”

“I know what they say. Don’t fucking care, really. Just ignore them and focus on your job.”

Spooncake never advertised his intuitive abilities. But he couldn’t avoid the fact that Hammond, the pampered high school football jock he was, had a mouth the size of a large mouth bass that he used quite often, spectacularly often when he was drunk, and Spooncake’s abilities were often the topic of conversation during Hammond’s drunken monologues.

“Goddamn. Motherfucking McAllister. He took us right to those gooks. He can see them you know. He can see those short little motherfuckers in his head. Then I just point and shoot.”

That was Hammond. Even when it had the two-inch nub of a spit-soaked cigar in it, his mouth was generally open when it shouldn’t be. More brawn than brain.

Spooncake had acquired the genetic trait from his father. He called it a curse that was passed down to the men in the McAllister family tree. Everything in life was good until his father decided to blow his head off by pressing a 12-guage into his left eye socket and pulling the trigger. Spooncake heard thoughts as clearly as a radio disc jockey queuing up the next set of tunes. It seemed to be evolving, though, and had changed since he arrived in Vietnam. His ability to perceive feelings instead of just thoughts was growing stronger; a trait his grandfather never described. The curse seemed to be gaining strength.

Everyone was accompanied with color. Good news brought yellow. Exciting news was sun-bright yellow. Sadness was dark blue. Crimson was anger. Pink generally displayed itself when a soldier had accepted the inevitability of his death and was replaced by a black so dark that no other light could penetrate it as death approached. Ultimately, as death overcame life, the black faded and dissolved to emptiness. It didn’t matter which side of the war you were on, either. The colors were the same, regardless of the shape of anyone’s eyes, or whether the corpse-to-be had tits or a dick.

The colors helped him know where the enemy was even through the dense jungle canopy. Angry red flashes of lightning seared up through the jungle wherever the VC were hiding. When he was in the air, the enemy was almost always blood red. There was never the ecstatic happiness of yellow in combat with the other side thinking, “Yeah! McAllister’s coming to shoot us!”

“Over there,” he’d say as he’d see spears of crimson rise through the jungle canopy. He’d point and rotate the Huey so Hammond could check his straps, position himself on the strut, pivot his gun, and start his barrage.

“I don’t know how you fucking do it,” Hammond would say as he pulled the trigger and poured a couple hundred rounds into the jungle. “But I sure like it. I like it when my mail comes special delivery and unannounced.”

Hammond loved his job.

He considered himself a mailman and was performing a service to mankind and delivering their mail.

McAllister never considered Hammond the perfect human being.

As each of Hammond’s bullets found its target, the red shards turned instantly black without the pink interlude, until they eventually disappeared. Typically, when gunfire was involved, there wasn’t time for the acceptance of pink to appear. The lights went from crimson, to black, to dead.

Then gone.

“I think we got ‘em,” Spooncake would say as he turned the chopper back on course.

Spooncake preferred white.

White implied normality, calmness, serenity.

People didn’t die when things were white and Spooncake was tiring of red of any shade.

Bright green was sometimes as bad as red. Bright green was jealousy. It didn’t take McAllister long to learn that men with bright green spikes of light above their heads and carrying assault rifles were not generally a good combination.

He felt Franklin grab the bottle again. This time he took a smaller pull that didn’t steal his breath.

“Why do…”

“It’s a dessert. That’s all.”

The kid had wanted to ask about his odd nick name since the moment he arrived at the base and had been introduced as a member of his crew. Most at the base called him Spooncake—very few knew why. Franklin still insisted on calling him “Sir,” probably because he was too afraid to call him Spoon or Spooncake as everyone else did. Hammond had the uncanny ability to never refer to him as anything but his name.

He was named “Spooncake” during basic training, and the name had followed him across the globe to the hellhole he now found himself stranded in. During flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, his mother would send him a care package that always contained a new four-pack of
Fruit of the Loom
underwear, three pairs of socks, and a tinfoil tray filled with squares of strawberry spooncake—his favorite dessert.

To everyone’s delight, he always shared his mother’s baked goods and in time, when his trunk couldn’t hold anymore underwear and socks, he gave that away too. Within a short time, everyone asked when the next delivery was set to arrive. Soon he was no longer Tim, but Spooncake. Leave it to a group of drunk grunts in flight school to turn Spooncake the dessert into Spooncake the man.

To them it was a natural progression.

“Hey, Spooncake, pull back on the goddamn fucking stick! You’re gonna auger the motherfucker!”

“Not so quick, Spooncake! This bird isn’t a forty-year old Saigon whore you’re screwing. Think of flying this thing like you are fucking a virgin. Slow. Easy. Little moves. She’ll do what you want.”

“Hey Spooncake, wanna go to the officer’s club tonight?”

Pretty simple.

Regardless of where he went, there was always someone who knew him as Spooncake, and it only took someone saying it once to make everyone else follow suit.

Some didn’t even know his real name. Tim.

Spooncake considered himself lucky, though.

They could have called him “Fruit of the Loom,” as over time, he gave away just as much underwear as dessert. His mother always thought he should wear briefs instead of boxers and wanted to make sure he was properly covered and supported where it counted most.

“If they find you hurt and some nurse has to see you without clothes, I hope you are in clean underwear and not wearing those ugly boxers! I didn’t raise you like that, Timothy.”

His mother called him Timothy.

He hated that.

His grandfather called him Tim, Kid, or Kiddo.

Those were acceptable.

Franklin coughed as he took another swig of gin. Spooncake saw him eye the remainder of the sandwich.

“Yes. You can have it.”

“Thanks. I’m starving. They sure make great food, don’t they?”

Even without having taken a mouthful of gin, it was Spooncake’s turn to choke, the kid was a walking food vacuum despite being so skinny he could hide behind a fence post without an inch of overhang.

He could tell the kid was nervous and had good news he desperately wanted to share.

“Spill it, kid.”

“Spill what?”

“You came to tell me something. Didn’t you?”

The kid laughed through his nose.

“Can’t hide anything from you, sir.”

Franklin was surrounded by light as bright and yellow as the morning sun, and Spooncake would be sure to feign surprise when Franklin broke the news about his newborn daughter.

No. You couldn’t hide anything from Spooncake.

Most of the time.

You had to be really good at lying.

*

“Received a letter from home today,” said Franklin.

McAllister sat up, pulled his legs to the side of the lounger, felt a lone strap slide up his ass, adjusted his balance, and looked at Franklin.

“Everything ok?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

Franklin’s light became a solar flare.

“What’s up?”

Franklin handed him four black and white pictures.

“I’m a daddy! My wife had the baby. Kristy Rae Franklin,” Franklin said. “But you probably already knew that didn’t you.”