The Vietnam Reader (75 page)

Jonesy took a long stretch of black commo wire and whipped a handful of it into the open air. It looped high over the ridgepole and came down, smacking Paco in the leg. Gallagher and Paco held the girl down firmly while Jonesy tied her wrists together behind her back, then hauled on that wire the same as if he were hoisting the morning colors, just as crisp and snappy as the book says—
The Manual of Arms,
James, the twenty-two-dash-five, we called it. The girl had to bend over some or dislocate both arms, so she bent down over this raw wood thing about the size of a kitchen table. The girl was scared shitless, chilly and shuddering, glossy and greasy with sweat, and was all but tempted to ask them as one human being to another not to rape her, not to kill her, but she didn’t speak English.

There was considerable jostling and arm punching, jawing and grab-ass back and forth, and everyone formed a rough line, so just for a moment Paco got to stand there and take a long look. A peasant girl, not more than fourteen, say, or sixteen. And by the look of her back
she had worked,
hard,
every day of her life. She was not beefy, though. None of the Viets were big, but then sharecropping doesn’t tend to turn out strapping-big hale-and-hearty offspring. Ask someone who knows shit from shit and Shinola about farming, James, and he will tell you that sharecropping is a long, hard way to get down to business and get some. The dumbest dumbshit on the face of this earth (who knows just enough about farming to follow a horse around with a coal shovel) knows that sharecropping sucks; knows you can’t spend your life sharing your crop with
yourself,
much less split it between you and the Man. But who knows, maybe Viets enjoyed being gaunt and rickety, rheumy and toothless. Maybe. They got along well enough on forty-and-found—what they grew and what they scrounged—and it was a long row to hoe, James. Viet sharecroppers ate rice and greens and fish heads, and such as that—whatever they caught, whatever they could lay their bare hands on.

Jonesy stepped up behind the girl, took out his pearl-handled straight razor with a magician’s flourish—acting real gaudy and showy the way he could—and slit her flimsy black pants from the cuffs to the waistband, just the same as you’d zip a parka right up to your chin. Then he hauled off and hoisted her up another notch or two for good measure, until her shoulders turned white (clear on the other side of the laager Lieutenant Stennett heard the commo wire squeak against the ridgepole). Then Gallagher stepped up behind her, between her feet, unbuttoned his fly, and eased out his cock. He leaned on her hard, James, rubbing himself up a fine hard-on, and slipped it into her. Then he commenced to fuck her, hard, pressing his big meaty hand into the middle of her back.

Gallagher and Jonesy started to grin and wanted to laugh, and a couple dudes
did
laugh, because no one in the company had had any pussy for a month of Sundays (except for Lieutenant Stennett, who hadn’t been in this man’s army that long).

And when Gallagher finished, Jonesy fucked her, and when Jonesy was done, half the fucking company was standing in line and commenced to fuck her ragged. The girl bit the inside of her cheek to keep back the rancor. The line of dudes crowded the low and narrow doorway, drinking bitterly sour canteen water and the warm beers
they’d been saving, smoking cigars and jays, and watching one another while they ground the girl into the rubble. Her eyes got bigger than a deer’s, and the chunks and slivers of tile got ground into her scalp and face, her breasts and stomach, and Jesus-fucking-Christ, she had her nostrils flared and teeth clenched and eyes squinted, tearing at the sheer humiliating, grinding pain of it. (Paco remembers feeling her whole body pucker down; feels her bowels, right here and now, squeezing as tight as if you were wringing out a rag, James; can see the huge red mark in the middle of her back; hears her involuntarily snorting and spitting; can see the broad smudge of blood on the table as clear as day; hears all those dudes walking on all that rubble.) Dudes still ambled over to the doorway to watch, to call out coaching, taking their turns, hanging around the side of the building after—some getting back in line.

And clean across the clearing—way the hell on the other side of the laager; way the fuck out in left field on the other side of the moon—Lieutenant Stennett squatted on his steel pot with his knees up and his back to the doings in the hooch, making himself a canteen cup of coffee. The dudes at the quiet end of the line heard the feathery hiss of the thumb-sized chunk of C-4 plastic explosive, and the clank of the green bamboo twig he stirred it with, but don’t you know, James, we didn’t pay it so much as a never-you-mind. The lieutenant heard the grinding, raucous laughter behind him; heard the raw-wood table squeak and creak, creeping across the floor, shoved at and shoved at the way you might pound at a kitchen table with the heel of your hand. And if he’d had a mind to, he could have glanced back over his shoulder and seen that line and that bit of commo wire looped over the mahogany ridgepole. He knew what was what in that hooch all right, all right—he might have been a fool, James, but he wasn’t a
stone
fool. He worked his shoulders, trying to ease that damp, raw-boned, sticky-sweaty feeling of sleep out of his back. He kept his back and his head slumped, tending his hissing little C-4 fire, stirring the caked and lumpy thousand-year-old C-ration instant coffee furiously with a knotted bamboo stick until you’d have thought he was going to wear a hole in it, if you didn’t know better; studying it like it might be entrails.

And when everyone had had as many turns as he wanted (Paco fascinated by the huge red welt in the middle of her back), as many turns as he could stand, Gallagher took the girl out behind that bullshit brick-and-stucco hooch, yanking her this way and that by the whole head of her hair (later that afternoon we noticed black hairs on the back of his arm). He had a hold of her the way you’d grab some shrimpy little fucker by the throat—motherfuck-you-up street-mean and businesslike—and he slammed her against the wall and hoisted her up until her gnarled toes barely touched the ground. But the girl didn’t much fucking care, James. There was spit and snot, blood and drool and cum all over her, and she’d pissed herself. Her eyes had that dead, clammy glare to them, and she didn’t seem to know what was happening anymore. Gallagher slipped his .357 Magnum out of its holster and leaned the barrel deftly against her breastbone. “We gonna play us a little game. We gonna play tag,” he said in a clear and resonant voice, “but who’s it?” he said, and jerked the girl once, and her eyes snapped. “Who’s it? Why, you are, Sweet Pea.”

Then he put the muzzle of the pistol to her forehead, between her eyebrows. He held her up stiffly by the hair and worked his finger on it, to get a good grip (a .357 ain’t some chickenshit, metal-shop, hand-crank zip gun, James). The girl glared at the red-and-black tattoo of the dragon, and she was almost near enough to his hand to purse her lips and kiss his knuckles. And then in the middle of us jostling and grab-assing, Gallagher squeezed off a round. Boom.

The pistol bucked and Gallagher’s whole body shimmered with the concussion; we all eyed him quickly. Some of the fucking new guys flinched, and Lieutenant Stennett positively jerked his arm and splashed himself with scalding coffee. Smoke rose from the pistol and Gallagher’s hand in a cloud, in wisps. If you had listened closely, you would have heard the ring of metal on metal, the same as you hear a 105 howitzer ring with that
tang
sound; a sound the same as if you had hauled off and whacked a 30-foot I beam with a 10-pound ball-peen—a sound you feel in every bone of your body from the marrow out.

Her head was so close to the hooch that we heard the shot simultaneously with the clack and clatter of bone chips against the brick and
stucco. The pistol slug and the hard, splintered chips of brick ricocheted and struck her in the meatiest part of her back, between her shoulder blades. Just that quick there was blood all over everything and everyone, and splinters of bone and brick stuck to our clothes and the bare skin of our arms and faces. And the girl was dead in that instant (and we mean
stone
dead, James) and lay in her own abundant blood. Her hands and arms fluttered the same as a dog’s when it dreams.

Paco remembers the spray of blood, the splatter of brick and bone chips on Gallagher and Jonesy and
everyone,
as thick as freckles, and how it sparkled. He remembers that quick, tingling itch of the spray, like a mist of rain blown through a porch screen. He remembers the brown bloodstains down the fronts of our trousers for days afterward; remembers Gallagher turning to the rest of us, still holding her scalp, and how we made a path for him when he walked away, hearing him say out loud (the timbre and resonance of his voice reverberating superbly), as if we were in an auditorium,
“That’s
how you put the cool on gooks.”

Some of us shook out of our reverie and walked away, too, but the rest lingered with resentful and curious fascination, staring down at the bloody, filthy bottoms of her feet, her slumped head and flat, mannish face. The whole expression of her body was drawn to the dry, drooping lips and lolling tongue. We looked at her and ourselves, drawing breath again and again, and knew that this was a moment of evil, that we would never live the same. It even began to dawn on Lieutenant Stennett, the English major from Dartmouth, who’d been sitting pucker-assed on the other side of the night laager with his back as round and smooth as a beach pebble, still stirring his C-ration coffee and minding his Ps and Qs like there was no tomorrow. Good morning to you, Lieutenant. Ain’t you got that coffee fried yet?

Soon enough, we heard the thump-thump-thump, whomp-whomp-whomp of the dust-off chopper come to pick up the KIAs. It circled the laager once, coming around upwind, and landed in the middle of the hooch yard. One by one we backed away from the girl’s corpse and went to help load the body bags, and by that time the girl—whatever her name was—was still. When the chopper was loaded, it
rose and left. Lieutenant Stennett got word from Colonel Hubbel for us to hit the road for Fire Base Carolyne. We finished breakfast, saddled up our rucksacks, turned our back to that hooch, and left that place—we never went back. Perhaps the girl’s body was found later, and buried, but we would never know.

Paco sprawls spread-eagle on his bed in his one-room room, itchy hot and stinking drunk, thinking about Gallagher’s red-and-black tattoo and the girl and the rape, and that look the dust-off medics gave us.

There is nothing to do for the squeeze-you-down heat but lie still—it is too oppressive for anything else. Cathy and Marty-boy are still fucking up a storm an arm’s length away, their bodies slapping together, Cathy sighing contentedly. Paco’s cock is still iron hard and his groin aches—he cannot help his hard-on. And when they finish Cathy says in an exhausted wine-drunk voice, “Oh, Marty-boy, that was just super!” Marty-boy pours the last of their warm Roditys richly into his plastic cold-drink cup, and Paco hears the pat of dry bare feet on the cheap carpet as they share from the cup. Marty-boy stands among the pretzel crumbs and old wine spills, easy and quiet, feeling the bit of cool of the dark drift in the tall front windows, then hustles into his pants, the loose change jangling and keys rattling. He cinches his belt and ties his sneakers, all the while looking at Cathy lazily rolling and curling this way and that—her beautiful body glistening-cuddling herself. Paco hears Marty-boy leave her rooms, step gingerly down the stairway and out the front door of the hotel, easing the screen door back in its jamb (gleaming at his own cleverness). Paco hears him walk down the middle of the street past the Texas Lunch, scuffing the pavement along the dashed white center line as he goes.

Cathy lounges on her bed, murmuring. Paco lies on his bed with his eyes closed, but awake, daydreaming, brushing the fuzzy wallpaper with the back of his hand and waiting for first light, the coolest part of the day.

Love Medicine
L
OUISE
E
RDRICH
1984

A BRIDGE

(1973)

It was the harsh spring that everybody thought would never end. All the way down to Fargo on the Jackrabbit bus Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, passenger breath as though she could encompass the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air with them, by replacing her own scent with theirs. She didn’t close her eyes to nap even once during travel, because this was the first time she’d traveled anywhere alone. She was fifteen years old, and she was running away from home. When the sky deepened, casting bleak purple shadows along the snow ditches, she went even tenser than when she’d first walked up the ridged stairs of the vehicle.

She watched carefully as the dark covered all. The yard lights of farms, like warning beacons upon the sea or wide-flung constellations of stars, blinked on, deceptively close.

The bus came upon the city and the lights grew denser, reflecting up into the cloud cover, a transparent orange-pink that floated over the winking points of signs and low black buildings. The streets looked slick, deep green, from the windows of the bus.

The driver made a small rasping sound into the microphone and announced their arrival at the Fargo terminal.

Stepping into the bus station, the crowd of people in the hitched, plastic seats looked to Albertine like one big knot, a linked and doubled
chain of coats, scarves, black-and-gray Herbst shopping bags, broad pale cheeks and noses. She wasn’t sure what to do next. A chair was open. Beside it a standing ashtray bristled with butts, crushed soft-drink cups, flattened straws. Albertine sat down in the chair and stared at the clock. She frowned as though she were impatient for the next bus, but that was just a precaution. How long would they let her sit? This was as far as she had money to go. The compressed bundle of her jeans and underwear, tied in a thick sweater, felt reassuring as a baby against her stomach, and she clutched it close.