The Vietnam Reader (74 page)

We can take a pause now, and lean over Paco’s thighs and knees and calves, James, even in the little light of his room; there
is
a slice of moon, a 40-watt back-porch light, and the glow of a yellow hall light reflected into the room under the door—this faint and burdensomely warm and oppressive light that gives his room a welcome and intimate air nonetheless, as still and smothering a place as we are likely to come across these warm and stuffy nights, unrelieved by comfort. If we lean down, we can see the many razor-thin surgical scars, the bone-fragment scars (going every which way) the size of pine-stump splinters, the puckered burn scars (from cooked-off ammunition) looking as though he’s been sprayed with a shovelful of glowing cinders, the deadened, discolored ring of skin at the meatiest part of his thigh, where the Bravo Company medic wound the twisted tourniquet, using Paco’s own bandanna, though the time for a tourniquet had long passed. The sallow, thin-faced medic slapped the crook of Paco’s elbow to get a vein, and Paco and half the company could hear his grumble: “Come on, you dumbshit grunt motherfucker, give me a
goddamn
vein,” and Paco’s arm stung like a son-of-a-bitch—the medic’s dog tags jangling in Paco’s face. And if we look closely at Paco’s arm, we can see the scar of the gouge at the inside of his forearm, the size of a pencil stub, where the catheter ripped loose when those shit-for-brains Bravo Company litter bearers dropped Paco down a rain-slick footpath, litter and all. (“You goddamned bullshit fucking Bravo Company Jesus Christ, I hope you motherfuckers all die shit!” Paco whispered, and cried.)

We could lean down and take a good hard look, and see all that, James, even in this little light. We could back away, now that we
know what we’re looking at, and those scars will seem to wiggle and curl, snapping languidly this way and that, the same as grubs and night crawlers when you prick them with the barb of a bait hook. But it is only an illusion, James, a sly trick of the eye—the way many a frightful thing in this world comes alive in the dimmest, whitest moonlight, the cleanest lamplight.

Paco lies on his bed, trying to nod off, trying to get as comfortable as the muggy air and sweaty-filthy sheets and teasing, tickling ache will allow, but out the window—kitty-corner to his—Paco hears Cathy honey-fucking the everlasting daylights out of some guy
(Marty-boy,
she calls him). There’s no mistaking that sloppy, glucking sound, the bed squeaking effortlessly and meekly, the lovely sounds of their fucking filling the room (the way a cat’s purring will fill a room, James). Marty-boy eases in and out of her, his buttocks working, his ankles crossed and the dry bottoms of his feet reaching over the foot of her bed. He bends his head down and licks her pearly breasts; Cathy arching up, holding him to her with her hands and heels, really enjoying all that.

Fucking the girl is something Paco has dreamed about over and over, sprawled spread-eagle on his creaking bed, with his flaccid cock (slashed with scars) flopped to one side of his thighs—oh, how his back would ache on those nights—his pubic hair fluffy and prickly, almost crackling in the heat, like dry grass.

Paco is furiously jealous—Marty-boy’s clean haircut and the undulating smoothness of his back (not a mark on the son-of-a-bitch, James); Cathy’s vigorous huffing and puffing, with her face squinched up, and her thrashing that fluffy hair from side to side, whipping it across Marty-boy’s face; and him squinting severely, his whole body shuddering with the effort. Paco doesn’t have to strain any to hear—can practically slide his hand and arm out his windowsill, over the nicotine burns and coffee-cup rings, lean out a little and fingertip-touch the top of her hair. Cathy sighs slowly and calmly and soothingly—content, Paco thinks to himself (his cock getting solid, jerking stiffly in the air)—brimful of peace and pleasure.

Now Cathy heard Paco fiddle with his key in the lock; heard him
fumbling around in his dingy little room; smelled the very beer on his breath. And so now with each slippery thrust she stretches her thin little neck and exhales audibly toward the window. She pulls on Marty-boy’s pale, shuddering hips—clawlike, with sedately manicured nails—and sways from side to side with her heels spiked into the mattress. Then she’s swinging her legs in the air—the hairs glittering—now staccato, now languidly, in a fresh surfeit of pleasure; now pummeling the small of his back in a frenzy with the callused points of her heels (with her thin, pinkish tongue between her teeth and a slaphappy grin on her face, as though to say, I got a nice little kick from teasing that gimp, but the fucking is nice and I love it, too).

Paco wishes Marty-boy (some primary-education major from the Wyandotte Teachers College, the same as Cathy) to hell and gone. Paco sweats up a storm trying to wish himself sober, trying to wish himself up from his bed and out of his room (sidestepping down the hallway in purposeful slow motion—toe-heel-toe—his hands skimming flat against the wall for guidance, balance). Paco has the incredible, shivering urge to sneak into Cathy’s room and stalk up behind Marty-boy as bold as brass, grab him by the hips and yank him off, shake him out and set him aside, as if he were a mannequin. (Marty-boy would stand there astonished, wiggling like a big old bass snagged at the side of the head with a treble hook and dragged ashore—flabbergasted.) Cathy would be pulling at her own hair by then; grinding her hips into the air, straining her legs and belly, her pussy luminescent with lubrication. Paco imagines that he climbs onto the bed between her legs, stretching out above her. He imagines, too, that he slides into her as easily as a warm, clean hand slips into a greased glove; that she whimpers grotesquely, encircling him at once with her arms and legs, holding him to her like warm covers.

By this time Paco’s cock is iron hard and feels as big as a Coke bottle. And he’s just a man like the rest of us, James, who wants to fuck away all that pain and redeem his body. By fucking he wants to ameliorate the stinging ache of those dozens and dozens of swirled-up and curled-round, purple scars, looking like so many sleeping snakes and piles of ruined coins. He wants to discover a livable peace—as if he’s come up a path in a vast evergreen woods, come upon a comfortable
cabin as solid as a castle keep, and approached, calling,
“Hello the house”
been welcomed in, given a hot and filling dinner, then shown a bed in the attic (a pallet of sweet dry grass and slim cedar shavings) and fallen asleep.

Paco lies on his back, smelling the starched linen on her bed, Cathy’s eau de cologne and pink talc, the pungent tin-and-tar porch roof—the powerfully rank sweetness of their sweat. Paco stares up at the darkened ceiling and the curled chips of paint that hang down as thick as a shedding winter shag. Then abruptly, he remembers Gallagher’s Bangkok R&R tattoo, the red-and-black dragon that covered his forearm from his wrist to his elbow (that tattoo a goddamned work of art, everyone said, a regular fucking masterpiece). He sees the tattoo, then suddenly remembers the rape of the VC girl, and the dreams he has had of the rape.

He winces and squirms; his whole body jerks, but he cannot choose but remember.

Gallagher had this girl by the hair. She wasn’t just anybody, you understand, James—not some dirt farmer’s wife or one of those godawful ugly camp-following whores; not some poor son-of-a-bitch’s tagalong sister pestering everyone with her whining; not some rear-rank slick-sleeve private (who doesn’t know dismounted, close-order drill from shit and Shinola), who pushed a pencil or wrapped bandages, and smiled big and pretty when the Swedish journalists shot through on the grand tour. No, James, she was as hard a hardcore VC as they come (by the look of the miles on her face). She had ambushed the 1st platoon’s night listening post just shy of first light and shot two of them dead (the third guy had tackled her when she ran, and beat the shit out of her bringing her in), and now the company was hunkered down, wet and sullen, plenty pissed off, waiting for the dust-off and a couple of body bags. Gallagher was nibbling on a bar of Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate (the color of dogshit) and sipping heavily chlorinated canteen water, watching her squatting on her haunches, wolfing down a C-ration can of ham and eggs some fucking new guy had given her—wolfing it down with a plastic spoon and her thumb—and finally Gallagher had had enough. The next thing you know, James, he had her by the hair and was swearing up a storm,
hauling her this way and that (the spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth slurring his words) through the company to this brick-and-stucco hooch off to one side of the clearing that’s roofless and fucked over with mortar and artillery hits up one side and down the other.

Paco sees wiseacre (“Fuck-you-up-boy”) Gallagher haul that girl through the night laager; sees this dude and that peel off from their night positions and follow across the hard, bare clay, smacking their lips to a fare-thee-well—there’s a bunch of guys in that company want a piece of
that
gook. Gallagher waltzes her into the room at the side, no doubt a bedroom. And the whole time the girl looked at that red-and-black tattoo out of the corners of her eyes like a fretted, hysterical dog. She could see only the slick-sweated tail, curled and twisted and twined around itself, and the stumpy, lizardlike legs; the long, reddish tongue curled around the snout and head and the long, curving neck and forelegs, but she could not see that much because of the way Gallagher had her by the hair.

(Take your hand, James, and reach around the top of your head, grab as much hair as you can grab in one hand and
yank,
then press that arm tight against the side of your head and look over, hard, at your arm out of the corners of your eyes. That’s as much of Gallagher’s arm as the girl saw.)

The hooch was claustrophobic, with thick walls and small rooms, and smelled like an old wet dog. Gallagher and the rest of us reeked sourly of issue mosquito repellent and camouflage stick and marijuana, sopping-wet clothes and bloody jungle rot (around the crotch and under our arms). The girl smelled of jungle junk and cordite—gunpowder, James—and piss.

(If the zip had been a man, we would not have bothered with the motherfucker, you understand that, don’t you? Gallagher, or whoever, would have grabbed that son-of-a-bitch by his whole head of hair—that zip staring at the twined and twisted and curlicued red-and-black tail of that Bangkok R&R tattoo, knowing jolly well it was going to be the last thing he’d be likely to get a good clean look at in
this
life. Gallagher would have dragged him over to the hooch, jerking him clean off his feet every other step, snatching his head this way and that for good measure, grumbling through his teeth about the one and
only way to put the chill on gooks. We would have taken him around to the side, held him straight-backed against the beat-to-hell brick-and-stucco hooch wall—the zip’s eyes that big and his poor little asshole squeezed tighter than a four-inch wad of double sawbucks. That cocksucker would have been pounded on till his face was beat to shit; till our arms were tired—“Anybody else want a poke at him? Going once. Twice. Three fuckin’ times.” Then someone would have held him while Jonesy pulled out his pearl-handled straight razor just as slow and catlike and quiet as a barber commencing to trim around your ears. Jonesy would have flicked that sucker open with a flashy snap, showing that puffy-eyed, bloody-faced zip four inches of the goddamnedest Swedish steel he’s likely to come across, and then just as slow and calm and cool as you’d have a melon, James, Jonesy would have slit that zip’s throat from nine to three. And he wouldn’t have cut him the way he snipped ears; wouldn’t have cut him the way he whittled booby-trap tripwire stakes for Paco; no, he’d cut him with a slow sweep of the hand and arm, the same as reapers sweep those long-handled scythes—that long, bare-armed motion that makes their sweat pop and the yellow wheat lie back in thick shocks. Beautiful and terrible.

The razor cut would have bled horrible abundance, the zip’s life gushing from his neck in terrific spurts, with him watching it, hardly believing—his face wax-white. It would have been as though he’d been garroted, good and proper hard; only, the razor cut would have hissed and bubbled and gurgled the way strangling with a wire simply cannot.

You’ve got to understand, James, that if the zip had been a man we would have punched on him, then killed him right then and there and left him for dead.)

So Gallagher hauled the woman off by the hair, and she looked as hard as hard can be at that red-and-black tattoo. And she was naked from the waist up, but nothing much to look at, so no one was much looking at her, and she was flailing her arms, trying to gouge Gallagher’s eyes out, and swinging her legs, trying to kick him in the balls, but Gallagher was doing a pretty good job of blocking her punches and holding her back (was a wrestler, Gallagher was). She
screamed in Viet that no one understood, but could figure out pretty well,
“Pig.
You
pig.
GI beaucoup number ten goddamned shit-eating fucking pig. I
spit
on you!” Gallagher dodged and bobbed and weaved, and chuckled, saying, “Sure, Sweet Pea, sure!” He pulled her—arms flailing, legs kicking, screaming that hysterical gibberish at the top of her lungs. And everybody in the whole ballpark knew they weren’t going in that hooch to argue who can throw the blandest brush-back pitch—Lyle Walsh or Dub Patterson. Even Lieutenant John Ridley Stennett (Dartmouth, 1967) knew, for a refreshing fucking change. Good morning to you, Lieutenant!

We took her into the side room, and there wasn’t much of the roof left, but there were chunks of tiles and scraps of air-burst howitzer shrapnel, and the ass end of some bullshit furniture littered around. You walked on the stone parquet floor and the crumbs of terra-cotta roofing tile, and it crunched—like glass would grind and snap and squeak underfoot. That hooch was a ruin, James, a regular stone riot of ruin. Gallagher and the girl, Jonesy and Paco and the rest of us, stood in the brightening overcast (more like intense, hazy glare) that made us squint involuntarily, as though we were reading a fine-print contract.