The Throat (6 page)

An empty village had been erected on the far side of the growth of
trees. One-story wooden structures marched up both sides of two
intersecting streets. There were no gates and no guards. Before me in
the center of the suburb, on a little green at the intersection of the
two streets, an unfamiliar military flag hung limply beside the Stars
and Stripes.

It looked like a ghost town.

A man in black sunglasses and a neat gray suit walked out of one of
the little frame buildings and looked at me. He crossed over the rough
grass in front of the next two structures, glancing at me now and then.
When he reached the third building he jumped up the steps and
disappeared inside. He had looked as out of place as Magritte's
locomotive coming out of a fireplace.

The instant the door closed behind Magritte, another opened and a
tall soldier in green fatigues emerged. It was like a farce: a
clockwork village where one door opened as soon as another closed. The
tall soldier glanced at me, seemed to hesitate, and began moving toward
me.

Fuck you, I thought, I have a right to be here, I do the dirty work
for you assholes.

He kicked up dust as he walked. He was carrying a .45 in a black
leather holster hung from his web belt, and two ballpoint pens jutted
out of the slanted, blousy pocket of his shirt. There were two crossed
rifles on his collar, and a captain's star on his epaulets. He carried
something soft in one hand, and a wristwatch with a steel band hung
upside down from a slot in his collar.

Too late, I remembered to salute. When my hand was still at my
forehead, I saw that the man coming toward me had the face I had just
seen in a body bag. It was Captain Havens. My eyes dropped to the name
tag stitched to his shirt. The steel watch covered the first two or
three letters, and all I could read was SOM.

Good trick, I thought. First I see him being scalped, then I see him
coming at me.

I thought of wet elm leaves in a gutter.

The ghost of Captain Havens smiled at me. The ghost called me by
name and asked, "How'd you find out I was here?" When he came closer I
saw that the ghost was John Ransom.

"Just a guess," I said, and when his smile turned quizzical, "I was
just following the road to see where it went."

"That's pretty much how I got here, too," Ransom said. He was close
enough to shake my hand, and as he reached out he must have caught the
stench of the shed, and maybe the smells of whiskey and the 100s too.
His eyebrows moved together. "What have you been doing?"

"I'm on the body squad. Over there." I nodded toward the road. "What
do you do? What is this place?"

He had grasped my hand, but instead of shaking it, he spun me around
and marched me away from the empty-looking camp and into the spindly
trees. "You better stay out of sight until you straighten up," he said.

"You should see what the rest of them are doing," I said, but sat
down at the base of one of the trees and leaned against the slick,
spongy bark. The man in the gray suit and sunglasses came out of the
building he had entered earlier and strode back across the grass to the
building he had left. He jumped up onto the stoop and touched his
breast pocket before he went in. "Johnny got his gun," I said.

"That's Francis Pinkel, Senator Burrman's aide. Pinkel thinks he's
James Bond. That's a Walther PPK in his shoulder holster. We're giving
the senator a briefing, and then we'll take him up in a helicopter and
show him one of our projects."

"You in some kind of private army?" He showed me the soft green cap
in his hand. "You're one of those guys in Harry Truman shirts who carry
briefcases and live out in Darlac Province, messing around with the
Rhades." I laughed.

"Sometimes we're asked to fly in wearing civvies," he said. He
placed the beret on his head. It was a dark forest green with a leather
roll around its bottom seam, and it had a patch with two arrows
crossing a sword above the words
De
Oppresso Liber
. It looked good on
him. "How'd a lousy grunt like you learn so much?"

"You learn a lot, working on the body squad. What is this place,
here?"

"Special Operations Group. We ride piggyback on White Star when
we're not in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhade."

"You really do that?"

John Ransom explained that the CIDG program in Darlac Province had
been going since the early sixties, but that he had been assigned to
border surveillance in the highlands near the Laotian border, in Khan
Due. Last year, they had parachuted in a bulldozer and carved a landing
strip out of a jungle ridge line. While they looked for the Khatu
tribesmen he was supposed to be working with, his actual troops were
press-ganged teenagers from Danang and Hue. The teenagers were a little
hairy, Ransom said. They weren't much like the Rhade Montagnards. He
sounded frustrated when he told me about his troops, and angry with
himself for letting me see his frustration—the teenagers played
transistors on patrol, he said. "But they kill everything that moves.
Including monkeys."

"How long have you been here?"

"Five months, but I've been in the service three years. Did the
Special Forces training at Bragg, got here just in time to help set up
Khan Due. It's not like the regular army." He had begun to sound oddly
defensive to me. "We actually get out and do things. We get into parts
of the country the army never sees, and our A teams do a lot of damage
to the VC."

"I wondered who was doing all that damage," I said.

"These days people don't believe in an elite, even the army has
problems with that, but that's what we are. You ever hear of Sully
Fontaine? Ever hear of Franklin Bachelor?"

I shook my head. "We're a pretty elite group in the body squad, too.
Ever hear of di Maestro? Picklock? Scoot?"

He nearly shuddered. "I'm talking about heroes. We have guys who
fought the Russians with
Germany
—we
have guys who fought the Russians in Czechoslovakia."

"I didn't know we were fighting the Russkies yet," I said.

"We're fighting communism," he said simply. "That's what it's all
about. Stopping the spread of communism."

He had maintained his faith even during five months of shepherding
teenage hoodlums through the highlands, and I thought I could see how
he had done it. He was staring forward to see something like pure
experience.

I wished that he could meet Scoot and Ratman. I thought Senator
Burrman should meet them, too. They could have an exchange of views.

"How did you get on the body squad?" Ransom asked me.

Francis Pinkel popped out of a building and scouted the ghost town
for marauding VC. A burly gray-haired man who must have been the
senator came out after him, followed by a Special Forces colonel. The
colonel was short and solid and walked as if he were trying to drive
his feet into the ground by the sheer force of his personality.

"Captain McCue thought I'd enjoy the work."

I saw Ransom memorizing the name. He asked me where I was supposed
to join my unit, and I told him.

He flipped up the watch hanging from his collar. "About time for my
dog and pony show. Can't you get a shower and drink a lot of coffee or
something?"

"You don't understand the body squad," I said. "We work better this
way."

"I'm going to take care of you," he said, and began to trot out of
the woods toward the senator's building. Then he turned around and
waved. "Maybe we'll run into each other at Camp Crandall." It was clear
he thought that we never would.

I met John Ransom twice at Camp Crandall. Everything about him had
changed by the first time we met again, and by the second time he had
changed even more. He'd had a narrow scrape at a fortified Montagnard
village called Lang Vei. Most of his Bru tribesmen had been killed, and
so had most of the Green Berets there. After a week, Ransom escaped
from an underground bunker filled with the bodies of his friends. When
the surviving Bru finally made it to Khe Sanh, the marines took away
their rifles and ordered them back into the jungle. By this time a
prominent marine officer had publicly ridiculed what he called the
Green Berets' "anthropological" warfare.

I have used the phrase "the bottom of the world" twice, and that is
two times too often. Neither I, nor John Ransom, nor any other person
who returned ever saw the real bottom of the world. Those who did can
never speak. Elie Wiesel uses the expression "children of the night" to
describe Holocaust survivors: some children came out of that night and
others did not, but the ones who did were changed forever. Against a
background of night and darkness stands a child. The child, whose hand
is extended toward you, who is smiling enigmatically, has come straight
out of that dark background. The child can speak or must be silent
forever, as the case may be.

My sister April's death—her murder—happened like this. She was nine,
I was seven. She had gone out after school to play with her friend
Margaret Rasmussen. Dad was where he always was around six o'clock in
the evening, at the end of South Sixth Street, our street, in the Idle
Hour. Mom was taking a nap. Margaret Rasmussen's house was five blocks
away, on the other side of Livermore Avenue. It was only two blocks
away if you crossed Livermore and went straight through the arched
tunnel like a viaduct that connected the St. Alwyn Hotel to its annex.
Bums and winos, of which our neighborhood had a share, sometimes
gathered in this tunnel. My sister, April, knew she was supposed to go
the three blocks around the front of the St. Alwyn and then back down
Pulaski Street, but she was always impatient to get to Margaret
Rasmussen's house, and I knew that she usually went straight through
the tunnel.

This was a secret. It was one of our secrets.

I was listening to the radio alone in our living room. I want to
remember, I sometimes think I really do remember, a sense of dread
directly related to the St. Alwyn's tunnel. If this memory is correct,
I knew that April was going to have crossed Livermore Street in no more
than a minute, that she was going to ignore the safety of the detour
and walk into that tunnel, and that something bad waited for her in
there.

I was listening to "The Shadow," the only radio program that
actually scared me.
Who knows what
evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.
After this
came a sinister, even a frightening, laugh. Not long before, Dad had
shown me a
Ledger
article
claiming that the real Shadow, the one the
radio series was on, was an old man who lived in Millhaven. His name
was Lamont von Heilitz, and a long time ago he called himself "an
amateur of crime."

I turned off the radio and then, sneakily, switched it back on again
in case Mom woke up and wondered what I was doing. I walked out of the
front door and jogged down the path to the sidewalk, where I began to
run toward Livermore Street. April was not waiting on the corner for
the light to change, which meant that she had already crossed Livermore
and would be in the tunnel. All I wanted was to get past the Idle Hour
unnoticed and to see April's slight blond figure emerging into the
sunlight on the far side of the tunnel. Then I could turn around and go
home.

I don't believe in premonitions, not personally. I believe that
other people have them, not me.

A stalled truck kept me from seeing across Livermore Avenue. The
truck was long and shiny, with some big name painted on its side,
ALLERTON
maybe, or
ALLINGHAM
. Elms still
lined Millhaven's streets, and
their leaves were strewn thickly in the gutter, where clear water from
a broken hydrant gurgled over and through them and carried a few, like
toast-colored rafts, to the drain down the street. A folded newspaper
lay half in, half out of the water; I remember a photograph of one
boxer hitting another in a spray of sweat and saliva.

At last the truck began to move forward,
ALLERTON
or
ALLINGHAM
with
it.

The truck moved past the front of the arched little bridge to the
St. Alwyn annex, and I leaned forward to see through the traffic. Cars
slid by and interrupted my view. April's pale blue dress was moving
safely through the tunnel. She was about half of the way down its
length, and had perhaps four feet to go before coming out into the
disappearing daylight. The flow of cars cut her off from me again, then
allowed me another flash of blue.

An adult-sized shadow moved away from the darkness of the wall and
moved toward April. The traffic blocked my view again.

It was just someone coming home through the tunnel— someone on his
way to the Idle Hour. But the big shadow had been moving
toward
April, not past her. I
imagined that I had seen something in the big shadow's hand.

Through the sound of horns and engines, I thought I heard a voice
rising to a scream, but another blast of horns cut it off. Or something
else cut it off. The horns stopped blaring when the traffic
moved—homeward traffic at six-fifteen on an autumn night, moving
beneath the elms that arched over Livermore and South Sixth Street. I
peered through the cars, nearly hopping with anxiety, and saw April's
oddly limp back. Her hair fell back past her shoulders, and the whole
streak of blond and pale blue that was her back went
up
. The man's arm moved. Dread
froze me to the sidewalk.

For a moment it seemed that everything on the street, maybe
everything in Millhaven, had stopped, including me. The thought of what
was happening across the street pushed me forward over the leaves
packed into the gutter and down into the roadbed. There was no traffic
anymore, only an opening between cars through which I saw April's dress
floating in midair. I moved into the opening, and only then became
aware that cars were flowing past on both sides of me and that most of
them were blowing their horns. For a moment, nearly my last moment, I
knew that all movement had ceased in the tunnel. The man stopped
moving. He turned toward the noise in the street, and I saw the shape
of his head, the set of his shoulders.