by David Rabe
Le Xuan Thuc is packing up his tools. He moves slowly, wearily, as she approaches. She is close to her door when he says, “You should not bring the soldiers here. Why do you do it?”
“I did not bring them. It was Pham Van Doan.”
The old man considers something that weighs heavily upon him and only gradually can other thoughts push it away. “Like the eel you burrow in the mud, Lan, and yet you give money to your family, so in that you are a good daughter.”
Within her house, she shuts the door tightly, then fixes the hook. She folds the towel. She settles the bucket in the corner. She watches through the window as Thuc hobbles from sight. At the chest, she unlocks the lid and withdraws The Tale of Kieu with its faded cover. She lights one candle and sits on the side of the bed. She finds easily the chapter she wants. The candlelight flows over the pages:
My daughter, retorted the old Panderess, all men are alike. Do you think they would come here for nothing? In this profession there still exist many other amusing things: games of hide and seek by night, intimacy or gay company by day. Listen to this, my daughter, and keep this in mind: there are seven interior attitudes and eight intimate techniques to amuse people until they are sated with the willow-flower, until you can turn them upside down like stones, and until they completely lose consciousness.
She can’t help it. She begins to imagine Madame Lieu attempting such instructions at the car wash. After some seconds she grows amused, giggling finally. She reads a while more, then closes the book, ready for sleep.
12
While he stands in line, Whitaker counts the heads of the soldiers preceding him to the phone booth. They wait under a streetlamp at the edge of the company street. Weary, his face sore from windburn, a curious sadness draws his mind inward. On the rifle range throughout much of the day, he fired at white targets that sprang from the concealment of bushes, logs, and dirt. He popped away with confidence, taking a good weld, the weight of the weapon firmly controlled by his hand snug on the stock. The targets appeared and vanished under each bullet’s impact. From a standing position, even the slightest waver made the distant white specks appear to flutter like bits of paper in the wind. Yet he and the magic fuckin’ rifle dropped them all, firing with unorthodox precision as the sights fell across the target and held an accurate line for the smallest instant. Moving forward when the instructor indicated, he worked his sector of terrain, blowing pretend people away until he was startled by one springing up maybe twenty yards in front of him. Because the sights were set for distance, he aimed low and dirt splashed in a little cloud. He overcompensated, and the target didn’t respond, nor did the dirt or air. He rushed and got a splash low right. Panicked now, he squeezed hurriedly with no visible effect. The next shot hit low left, then way to the right. “Move on,” the instructor told him. “Forget it.” But he cannot. He carries it with him through dinner and to the street where the line has grown long behind him by the time his turn comes.
His father will be in bed, he is sure. As he dials the phone, his father’s bed is huge in his mind. Its posts are coated with brass. It stands on worn, broken linoleum at the center of the biggest of the upstairs bedrooms in the rickety old house. Whitaker, having spoken to the operator, is depositing the requested change. His father will be there now, lying motionless with his stained old hands at his sides, palms pressed down, shoulders even, eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling as he waits for sleep. Only his brain will be busy, secretly searching for those hidden thoughts that might help him determine the nature of passing time, the nature of waiting. All other drifting specks of ideas will be seen as distractions that must be ignored. With many quilts and blankets piled one on the other upon him, he will be totally still but for the flitting of his eyes. He holds this frozen pose because he believes he is a hunted creature, and if he can keep his pathetic, desperate presence from being discovered, he will never die. Into this old man’s thinking tonight will come the ringing of the phone, Whitaker knows, and the old man, already rigid, will tense with self-absorption while the jangling sound of Whitaker’s calling floats from the downstairs hallway through all the corridors of that house.
“Hello?” says Roger, his brother.
“Rog? This is Joe.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I just thought I’d check on the ole man; this may be the last chance for me to call.”
“Nothin’ new, Joe. Everything’s the same.”
“What’s he doing? Is he in bed?”
“It’s all just the same, I tell you, Joe.”
“He’s incredible.”
“Man, do I know.”
“Could I talk to him, you suppose?”
“He won’t come to the phone, Joe.”
“Ask him.”
“There’s no point, Joe. Honest, once he’s in bed, he don’t budge for nothin’.”
“Yeah.”
“Once he gets all bundled up, that’s it.”
“I know.”
“He’s afraid of the transitions, that’s what it comes down to. I been doin’ a lot of thinkin’ about it. Cold to warm. Warm to cold. Ever since the doctor explained to him all that stuff about his heart and blood and how it works.”
“He’s scared. That’s what I think.”
“Takes him half a year to move. I wish you’d called before he got into bed.”
“I couldn’t, Rog. How could I? You should see the line a guys waitin’ behind me now. This is the first chance I had to get to the phone. I had to wait I don’t know how long, and all these other guys are still behind me.”
“I know it’s tough on you, too, Joe. That’s all I’m sayin’. Listen, you wanna say hi to Bonnie?”
“Bonnie? You on a date?”
“Yeah. You wanna say hi?”
“Listen, Rog, I didn’t interrupt anything, did I?”
“No, no.”
“Just tell her hi for me, okay?”
“Mom called the other night.”
“No kidding.”
“Drunk as a skunk.”
“Lucky you.”
“You can say that again.”
“What’d she have to say for herself?”
“I kid you not. I couldn’t understand a word. She said, ‘Mmmmgumph,’ and you know, gobbledygook.”
“I wonder what she wanted.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Listen, Rog,” he says, “we ought to get an extension phone put into the ole man’s room. See how much it’d cost. Check it out and let me know. I’ll send you the money.”
“You wanna?”
“Yeh.”
“Okay.”
“Look into it.”
“Okay.”
“And tell him I called; tell him I’ll write soon as we get over there. I’m not gonna call anymore.”
“Okay.”
“See you in a year.”
“Bonnie says bye.”
“Bye, Bonnie.”
“Right, Joe. Take care.”
“You, too.”
He steps from the booth and goes past the murmuring line of men under a pale cloud of cigarette smoke. The air has a slight chill. While thinking of his father, his mind is entered by a sky of snowflakes turning, descending, for it is winter and there would be snow in the Midwest. The snowflakes fall as he walks for a time, covering the land, until it occurs to him how much they are like the targets he shot at in that darkening afternoon. He thinks for a while of the one he missed. He cannot penetrate to the cloudy center of his inability to bring hand, rifle, and eye into harmony sufficient to knock that target flat. It nags his mind, and slowly, one very large, targetlike snowflake transforms itself into a man with a yellow face and hands aiming a rifle. “Shit,” says Whitaker. “Oh,” and he grabs at his stomach. “Oh, oh, he’d a shot me to shit.” He gasps and groans, weaves left before right, falling to his knees only to rise in teeth-clenching melodrama and then collapse sid
eways into the damp grass where he lies grinning and looking at the stars. I know you don’t know what I’m goin’ through. But I can tell you that it makes me feel bad. It hurts and I’m so sad. He rolls onto his stomach. More fucking song lyrics. He chuckles and pushes against the ground to get up. Poor Roger. He can just hear his mom drunk out of her gourd talking gobbledygook. And his poor brother has to pick up the phone.
In the dayroom, where he goes, a few of the members of his unit, some of them brand-new arrivals, people he’s never seen before, listlessly watch TV. He sits for a time among them, smoking a cigarette.
13
With men he scarcely knows, Whitaker bunks on the ground floor of a two-story barracks, and as the sun rises on the morning of their departure, he is awake to watch it stain the tree and sky that fill the window across from him. The struts and beams are rough, unsanded, like parts of a barn. At first the dark lines and bulges of the tree are vague against the ink black spaces beyond, in which light seems frail and impossible, appearing, disappearing, fragments and streaks, flashes and ultimately waves that arrive to touch and hold the limbs and show their bark in detail. He does not know how long he has been awake.
“If it’s the day I think it is,” says a voice, “I am feelin’ I got to go on sick call. Got some kind of sickness in me. Bad, too, like TB or typhoid.” It’s Rowe speaking, a huge, older black Spec Five who was in Korea with the artillery. “Malaria. Can’t go nowhere. Too sick.”
“Me, too,” says a southern voice. “Ah broke my damn leg in my sleep. Never had such a fall.”
“Who’s gonna believe that?” says Whitaker. He just wants to say something.
“Not nobody,” says Rowe.
“None a you,” Whitaker tells them, not really knowing what he’s saying.
A whistle screams and screams, getting closer with each blast. It sticks, they know, from the bulbous lips of First Sergeant O’Conner, ordering them to the first formation of the day.
The air is clean and icy cold. They stand in the rectangular, four-lined shape of a platoon, though they are no real platoon, but only a haphazard, hurriedly gathered assortment of strangers. First Sergeant O’Conner paces as they arrange themselves. Some wear gloves. The wind flaps in huge swaths that sweep across them like chilling blows, making their eyes water. First Sergeant O’Conner faces them to announce the schedule. There is much to be done. He spells out their day hour by hour. They will be traveling by commercial jet. Before 2300 hours they will be in San Francisco boarding the troopship USNS Woodrow Wilson, moored out there at the edge of the sea.
A school bus goes by, loaded with children.
Breakfast is eggs, bacon or ham, orange or tomato juice, fried potatoes, rolls and butter, milk or coffee or tea. They eat from tan plastic trays that, like the trays of infants, are sectioned into various shapes. Whitaker is surprised by the enormity of his appetite, for he had anticipated a stomach slack and sickened with worry. Like A.J. or Parnelli on the morning of a big race.
After breakfast their duffel bags must be loaded onto a deuce-and-a-half truck, which will then be driven to the Baltimore airport. One of the unit’s NCOs suggests that the bags be transported from the barracks to the truck through a human chain, but after some discussion between Captain Bell and First Sergeant O’Conner, it is decided that each man will carry his own gear. In this way responsibility will remain individual. Whitaker is among the last to sling the burden of that bag up into the canvas-hooded truck where sixty or so others are already stacked like the corpses of so many dwarfs together in a cave. Three men follow Whitaker, dragging and hefting their bags before the driver checks the stability of the load and slams the tailgate up into place. Thin as a rake handle, this gray-haired, lifer-loser Pfc whistles as he inserts the hooks that make the gate secure, and circling the truck, he kicks all ten of the massive tires. Finally, held in an expression of deep thought, he stands inert for an instant, scanning again the length and breadth of his task. Clearing his throat, shaking his head, he spins to salute Captain Bell who, though surprised by the move, manages nevertheless to return the gesture with some poise.
“I’ll take her in now, sir,” the man says.
“You do that, Barlow.”
“Yes, sir.”
They lie on their bunks in the still air of the overheated barracks for the remainder of the morning. There is the music of many portable radios tuned to various stations and set at low volume, for nearly every soldier owns one. At eleven o’clock, they have police call, because Captain Bell wants every bit of trash cleaned from the area his people occupied. He tells them he wants their area left immaculate. They form a line, arms extended to create the proper spacing in daylight heated now by the higher, fuller sun. Paper, tin, gum wrappers, cigar and cigarette butts, everything but the grass itself is to be picked up. That is their order. Rasputin, a coffee-colored black from Watts, carries his huge plastic transistor radio; the dials are white; a blue grill covers the speaker. He strolls to the music and refuses to pick up anything from the ground. “What they gonna do to me? I don’t pick up this shit,” he says. “What they gonna do, send me to Vietnam?” He shakes his head; he strolls and laughs.
Whitaker agrees, but keeps on bending, obeying. Sprinkled all through the grass, he sees innumerable cinders whose presence he cannot explain.
The noon meal is meat loaf with lumps of tomato, a sauce and chips of onion, carrots, peas, baked potatoes, apple pie or ice cream, coffee, milk or tea. The evening meal, they are told, will be aboard the plane.
At four fifteen they are called into formation wearing fatigues and field jackets, pistol belts, baseball caps, and black gloves. They carry AWOL bags containing toothbrushes, toothpaste, shaving gear, all other personal items. Slung on their shoulders are their M14 rifles, and they stand in the wintry dusk for nearly an hour while the barracks doors are locked, checked, double checked, the guards and CQ relieved of duty. By bus they go out of Fort Meade onto the highway and along the highway until they come to the Baltimore airport, where they drive past the terminal to a waiting civilian in a tie and sports coat who climbs aboard to guide them through a gate marked NO ADMITTANCE and onto the immense emptiness, the desolation, of the tarmac. One hour later, they are marched across the concrete in a column of twos. The plane before them appears tarnished and dull, the color of a spoon. No stewardess attends them and they are seated in the rear section.
At Kansas City where there is a layover, they are allowed to stroll around outside the plane for thirty minutes of their two-hour delay, but they are forbidden to enter the terminal. After takeoff, the pressure that builds up in the ears of one of the men does not release. He pounds his head and groans and starts to cry.
On the ground in San Francisco, they are marched through the mammoth terminal with their weapons on their shoulders, a phenomenon that people notice and smile at. A child imitates their marching. Then a waiting army captain shows the way to the luggage point where they pick up their duffel bags. A bus, glowing at the curb, opens its doors and they are driven down some highways, through some countryside, past residential and factory areas and into the sudden spectacle of acres of concrete and a gathering mass of other buses.
The ship is an immense black wall the length of a city block at the base of which they are deposited and formed into a single-file line. MPs in white helmets and gloves will check them aboard. Someone near Whitaker whispers that San Francisco is across the bay. Empty trucks, coils of wire, surround them. From his place near the tail of the line, Whitaker peers forward to the milky white helmets of the MPs who stand at the gangplank upon which he will step and walk to the hole of the hatchway. He puts down the burden of his duffle bag. The butt of his rifle, moving as he moves, bumps against his thigh. He has been passed from hand to hand—picked up, shifted, abandoned, set down, delivered by a hundred thousand cooperating hands. He imagines giants, and himself as tiny as a toy in enormous palms and fingers. The ship before him seems no vessel of adventure but rather a wall t
hrough which he cannot see San Francisco. Hello, he thinks, hello. City of a thousand faces, city of the Golden Gate, where little cable cars go … here and … there …
He stops suddenly, blinking, as if the final hand, huge and icy pale, has dropped him, so he stands there.
14
Now he can no longer even glimpse the land that a moment ago lay like a shadow cast down upon the flat and comprehensive sea. They left Cam Ranh Bay in the late afternoon, having arrived in the night, hovering midchannel for fifteen hours, like exiles, while cargo and other units were transferred to shore. Jungle was visible beyond the sandy beaches, the wood and tin of the Quonset huts and other buildings. When first sighted, the land had seemed a great black rock, crusted and rigid amid ceaseless waves. Jungle was all they’d heard about. That Vietnam should seem a scorched black rock was a surprise.
Now Whitaker is alone, remembering, wondering. At departure there was a dim scarlet above the shore of stone and green vegetation. The falling sun coated the jungle in a wet-seeming lushness, and a man from another unit began to talk to Whitaker about how he wished he’d brought packets of seeds. He’d like to have a garden. Especially tomatoes. But then he worried that he’d probably have to guard his garden. Pull guard on his garden. “No more flying fish,” he observed. He was right. The schools of flying fish that had accompanied them like pets in the open sea, leaping and staying above the chopped-up blue, were nowhere to be seen. “They must be scared, too,” the man said. They passed scattered ships and silver seaplanes, moored and bobbing. They sailed from the harbor and curved south toward Saigon and into evening.