The Throat (5 page)

In the shed di Maestro unrolled the cellophane package and inspected
each tight white tube. "Ly Li loves your little educated ass," he said.

Scoot had produced a bag of ice cubes from the enlisted man's club
and dropped some of them into plastic glasses. Then he cracked open the
first bottle and poured for himself. "Life on the front," he said. He
drank the entire contents of his glass in one swallow. "Outstanding."
He poured himself another glass.

"Take this slow," di Maestro said to me. "You won't be used to this
stuff. In fact, you might wanna sit down."

"What do you think we did at Berkeley?" I said, and several of my
colleagues called me a sorry-ass shit.

"This is a little different," di Maestro said. "It ain't just grass."

"Give him some and shut him the fuck up," said Attica.

"What is it?" I asked.

"You'll like it," di Maestro said. He placed a cigarette in my mouth
and lit it with his Zippo.

I drew in a mouthful of harsh, perfumed smoke, and Scoot sang,
"Hoo-ray and hallelujah, you had it comin'
to ya, Goody for her, goody goody for me, I hope you 're satisfied, you
rascal you."

Holding the smoke as di Maestro inhaled and passed the long
cigarette to Ratman, I scooped ice cubes into a plastic glass. Di
Maestro winked at me, and Ratman took two deep drags before passing the
cigarette to Scoot. I poured whiskey over the ice and walked away from
the table.

"Hoo-ray and hallelujah,"
Scoot rasped, holding the smoke in his lungs.

My knees felt oddly numb, almost rubbery. Something in the center of
my body felt warm, probably the Jack Daniels. Picklock lit up the
second cigarette, and it came around to me by the time I had taken a
couple of sips of my drink.

I sat down with my back against the wall.

"Goody goody for it, goody goody for
shit, goody goody for war,
goody goody for whores…"

"We oughta have music," Ratman said.

"We have Scoot," said di Maestro.

Then the world abruptly went away and I was alone in a black void. A
laughing void lay on either side of me, a world without time or space
or meaning.

For a moment I was back in the shed, and Scoot was saying, "Damn
right."

Then I was not in the shed with the body squad and the five units,
but in a familiar world full of noise and color. I saw the peeling
paint on the side of the Idle Hour Tavern. A neon beer sign glowed in
the window. The paint had once been white, but the decay of things was
as beautiful as their birth. Elm leaves heaped up in the gutter brown
and red, and through them cool water sluiced toward the drain.
Experience itself was sacred. Details were sacred. I was a new person
in a world just being made.

I felt safe and whole—the child within me was also safe and whole.
He set down his rage and his misery and looked at the world with eyes
refreshed. For the second time that day I knew I wanted more of
something: a taste of it was not enough. I knew what I needed.

This was the beginning of my drug addiction, which lasted, off and
on, for a little more than a decade. I told myself that I wanted more,
more of that bliss, but I think I really wanted to recapture this first
experience and have it back entire, for nothing in that
decade-and-a-bit ever surpassed it.

During that decade, a Millhaven boy who has much more to do with
this story than I do began his odd divided life. He lost his mother at
the age of five; he had been taught to hate, love, and fear a punishing
deity and a sinful world. The boy's name was Fielding Bandolier, but he
was known as Fee until he was eighteen; after that he had many names,
at least one for each town where he lived. Under one of these names, he
has already appeared in this story.

I was in Singapore and Bangkok, and Fee Bandolier's various lives
were connected to mine only by the name of a record, Blue Rose,
recorded by the tenor saxophonist Glenroy Breakstone in 1955 as a
memorial to his pianist, James Treadwell, who had been murdered.
Glenroy Breakstone was Millhaven's only great jazz musician, the only
one worthy of being mentioned with Lester Young and Wardell Grey and
Ben Webster. Glenroy Breakstone could make you see musical phrases
turning over in the air. Passionate radiance illuminated those phrases,
and as they revolved they endured in.the air, like architecture.

I could remember
Blue Rose
note for note from my boyhood, as I demonstrated to myself when I found
a copy in Bangkok in 1981, and listened to it again after twenty-one
years in my room upstairs over the flower market. It was on the
Prestige label. Tommy Flanagan replaced James Treadwell, the murdered
piano player. Side One: "These Foolish Things"; "But Not for Me";
"Someone to Watch Over Me"; "Star Dust." Side Two: "It's You or No
One"; "Skylark"; "My Ideal"; '"Tis Autumn"; "My Romance"; "Blues for
James."

When I emerged from the trance induced by Li Ly's cigarettes, I
found myself seated on the floor of the shed beside the desk, facing
the open loading bay. Di Maestro was standing in the middle of the
room, staring with great concentration at nothing at all, like a cat.
His right index finger was upraised, as if he were listening to a
complicated bit of music. Pirate was seated against the opposite wall,
holding another 100 in one hand and a dark brown drink in the other.

"Enjoy the trip?"

"What's in there besides grass?" My mouth was full of glue.

"Opium."

"Aha," I said. "Any left?"

He inhaled and nodded toward the desk. I craned my neck and saw two
long cigarettes lying loose between the typewriter and the bottle. I
took them from the desk and put them in my shirt pocket.

Pirate made a tsk, tsk sound against his teeth with his tongue.

I squinted into the sunlight on the other side of the bay and saw
Picklock lying in the bed of the truck, either asleep or in a daze. He
looked like an oversized dog. If you got too close he would bristle and
woof. Di Maestro attended to his imperious music. Scoot was ranging
back and forth over the body bags, humming to himself as he looked at
the tags. Attica was gone. Ratman, at first glance also missing,
finally appeared as a pair of boots protruding from beneath the body of
the truck. One of the bottles of Jack Daniel's had disappeared,
probably with Attica, and the other was three-fourths empty.

I discovered the glass in my hand. All the ice had melted. I drank
some of the warm watery liquid, and it cut through the glue in my mouth.

"Who lives outside the camp?" I asked.

"Where you were? That's
inside
the camp."

"But who are they?"

"We have won their hearts and minds," Pirate said.

"Where do the kids come from?"

"Benny's from heaven," Pirate said, obscurely.

Di Maestro lowered his finger. "I believe I'd accept another
cocktail."

To my surprise, Pirate got to his feet, walked in my direction
across the shed, and put his hand around a glass left on the desk. He
poured an inch of whiskey into it and gave the glass to di Maestro.
Then he went back to his old place.

"When first I came to this fucking paradise," di Maestro said, still
carefully regarding his invisible point in space, "there must have been
no more than two-three kids out there. Now there's almost ten." He
drank about half of what was in his glass. "I think all of 'em kinda
look like Red Dog Atwater." This was the name of our CO.

Scoot stopped humming. "Oh, shit," he said. "Oh, sweet Jesus on a
pole."

"Listen to that hillbilly," di Maestro said.

Scoot was so excited that he was pulling on his ponytail. "They
finally got him. He's here. The goddamn son of a bitch is dead."

"It's a friend of Scoot's," Pirate said.

Scoot was kneeling beside one of the body bags, running his hands
over it and laughing.

"Close friend," said Pirate.

"He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects," said
Scoot. He unzipped the bag in one quick movement and looked up,
challenging di Maestro to stop him. That smell that set us apart came
from the bag.

Di Maestro leaned over and peered down into the bag.

"So that's him."

Scoot laughed like a happy baby. "This makes my fuckin'
month
. And I
almost missed him. I knew he'd get wasted some day, so I kept checkin'
the names, but today's the day he comes in."

"He's got that pricky little nose," di Maestro said. "He's got those
pricky little eyes."

Picklock stirred in the truck bed, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and
grinned. Like Scoot, Picklock was generally cheered by fresh reminders
that he was in Vietnam. The door at the far end of the shed opened, and
I turned around to see Attica saunter in. He was wearing sunglasses and
a clean shirt, and he brought with him a sharp clean smell of soap.

"Chest wound," di Maestro said.

"He died slow, at least," said Scoot.

"That Havens?" Attica's saunter picked up a little speed. He tilted
his head and tipped an imaginary hat as he passed me.

"I found Havens," Scoot said. There was awe in his voice. "He almost
got through."

"Who checked his tag?" Attica asked, and stopped moving for an
instant.

Di Maestro slowly turned toward me. "On your feet, Underdog."

I picked myself up. A fragment of that peace that had altered my
life had returned.

"Did you check the tags on Captain Havens?"

It was a long time ago, but I could dimly remember checking a
captain's tags.

Attica's rich dark laugh sounded like music—like Glenroy Breakstone,
in fact. "The professor didn't know shit about Havens."

"Uh huh." Scoot was gloating down into the bag in a way that made me
uneasy.

I asked who Havens was.

Scoot tugged his ponytail again. "Why do you think I wear this
fuckin' thing? Havens. This is my
protest
."
The word struck him. "I'm a
protestor, di Maestro." He stuck up two fingers in the peace symbol.

"Baby," di Maestro said. "Bomb Hanoi."

"Fuck that, bomb Saigon." He leveled an index finger at me. His eyes
burned far back in his head, and his cheeks seemed sunken. Scoot was
always balanced on an edge between concentration and violence, and all
the drugs did was to make this more apparent. "I never told you about
Havens? Didn't I give you the Havens speech?"

"You didn't get around to it yet," di Maestro said.

"Fuck the Havens speech," said Scoot. His sunken, intent look was
frightening exactly to the extent that it showed he was thinking. "You
know what's wrong with this shit, Underdog?" He gave the peace symbol
again and looked at his own hand as if seeing the gesture for the first
time. "All the wrong people do this. People who think there are rules
behind the rules. That's
wrong
.
You fight for your life till death do
you part, and then you got it made. Peace is the fight, man. You don't
know that, you're fucked
up.
"

"Peace is the fight," I said.

"Because there ain't no rules behind the rules."

That I nearly understood what he was saying scared me—I did not want
to know whatever Scoot knew. It cost too much.

Havens must have been the reason Scoot was on the body squad instead
of out in the field where he belonged. I had been wondering what
someone like Scoot could do that would be bad enough to banish him from
his regular unit, and it occurred to me that now I was about to find
out.

Scoot stared at di Maestro. "You know what's gonna happen here."

"We'll send him home," di Maestro said.

"Gimme a drink," Scoot said. I poured the rest of the Jack Daniels
into my glass and walked across the shed to get a look at Captain
Havens. I gave Scoot the glass and looked down at a brown-haired
American man. His jaw was square, and so was his forehead. He had that
pricky little nose and those pricky little eyes. A transparent sheet of
adhesive plastic covered the hole in his chest. Scoot tossed the glass
back to me and detached his knife from its peculiar thong, which looked
more than ever like a body part. Then I saw what it was.

Scoot noticed my quiver of revulsion, and he turned his crazy glance
on me again. "You think this is about revenge. You're wrong. It's
proof."

Proof that he was right and Captain Havens had been wrong—wrong from
the start. No matter what he said, I still thought it was revenge.

Attica took an interested step forward. Picklock sat up straight in
the back of the truck.

Scoot leaned over Captain Havens's body and began sawing off his
left ear. It took more effort than I had imagined it would, and the
long cords of muscle stood out in his arm. At length the white-gray bit
of flesh stretched and came away, looking smaller than it had on
Captain Havens's head.

"Dry it out, be fine in a week or two," Scoot said. He placed the
ear beside him on the concrete and bent over Captain Havens like a
surgeon in midoperation. He was smiling with concentration. Scoot
pushed the double-edged point beneath the hair just beside the wound he
had made and began running the blade upward along the hairline.

I turned away, and someone handed me the last of the 100 that had
been circulating. I took another hit, handed back the roach, and walked
past Attica toward the door. "Make a nice wall mount," Attica said.

As soon as I got outside, the sunlight poured into my eyes and the
ground swung up toward me. I staggered for a moment. The sound of
distant shelling came to me, and I turned away from the main part of
the camp, irrationally afraid that body parts were going to fall out of
the sky.

I moved aimlessly along a dirt track that led through a stand of
weedy trees—spindly trunks with a scattering of leaves and branches at
their tops, like afterthoughts. It came to me that the army had chosen
to let these miserable trees stand. Normally they leveled every tree in
sight. Therefore, they wanted to hide whatever was behind the trees. I
felt like a genius for having worked this out.