by David Rabe
“I got an overnight pass,” Whitaker lies, and from the skepticism puckering the mouth of one and the envy in the gaze of the other, he takes a warning. They resent him. In their bitterness, might they notify his unit of his absence?
“You don’t have no overnight pass to stay here. Not here, man.”
“Nobody asks me where I stayed when I get back. They ain’t gonna come here lookin’ for me, are they?”
“Whatsamatter,” says the shorter one, his brow furrowing. “You sound pissed. We’re just talkin’.”
Whitaker nods. These two don’t even know what unit he’s with. “Sure,” he says.
While they go through a ritual of departure that consists of squeezing the big girls’ tits and promising loudly to return early tomorrow, Whitaker wanders outdoors to piss in the bushes along the pathway beside the house. A truck rumbles past, burying briefly the sounds of insects and occasional crying geckos. His urine spatters on leaves. The pathway before him leads to the rear of the house. He thinks of walking carefully upon the worn dirt sprinkled with stones to maybe get a glimpse of Lan bathing. He finds her naked in moonlight that cuts across her narrow hips, putting her legs in darkness. Beside her the dented silver basin contains foggy water, a white bit of shimmering soap. Beyond her is the jungle gloom diminished here and there by dampened leaves or branches catching light.
When he returns to the road, the two GIs are in the jeep. The girls stand beside it, smiling. Whitaker ambles to the shanty entrance. Standing in the doorway as the jeep starts up with everyone waving and chatting away, he feels as if he is saying good night to guests who have paid a visit to his home. It’s been a little party and now the guests are leaving in their car. “Bye-bye,” says Whitaker. “Nice you could come by.”
Before the jeep has traveled far enough to vanish in the dark, the girls have turned away to seize their baskets, purses, and suitcases. In a moment, they’re gone, too, hurrying down the road in the opposite direction. Whitaker, with Lan, who has come to stand beside him wearing white cotton pajamas, her long thick hair hanging loose, feels his prick stir and lust mixes with a funny fear and loneliness he does not understand. The silence, comprehensive as sleep, is strange, as if he has never heard a rural night before. She tugs his hand to draw him inside. She touches his prick and makes a kind of clucking, maternal sound, as if in pity of his funny body. Will the VC kill him in the night? Is the source of his gloom the feeling that the departure of that jeep was the departure of all jeeps, all trucks and bikes and scooters, and now he will not ever leave? He looks at Lan but learns nothing except how she is truly not so lovely as he thought, but merely young. Why is he in this place alone with only gooks around?
“You pay mamasan,” she says.
“Okay.”
“One thousand five hundred.”
“Yes.”
Their presence everywhere around him is the loneliness he feels, surrounded by their strangeness. Each face is a variation on all the others, their language a silence he does not understand. Like alien trees in an alien forest endlessly duplicating one another, they show him nothing of himself. Lan calls out a sentence in her language; his fear increases.
“Lan,” he says, as Mamasan appears, a squint-eyed old woman twisted by some fault in her spine. She grins at Whitaker, says “Hello. One thousand five hundred Ps you sleep Lan all night.”
He pays. Two boys shadowed by a wraithlike old man arrive from an adjacent shanty to stand in the dimness. Mamasan mutters at them. They all go out the back door. There are other shanties, Whitaker now sees, peering after them, a number that’s hard to determine, wood and straw out near the point where the paddies turn the land soft. Moonlight skitters through the trees. It touches and loses the four silent figures disappearing down that trail.
“What’s going on?” says Whitaker.
Lan tells him, “No sweat. Sit down. Have a beer.”
To assert himself, he remains standing and leans against the wall, thinking of how he has come to settle here on this grubby floor in a falling-down shanty beside a road between jungle and more jungle in a war—and is this what smart men did, men of daring, Parnelli Jones, A. J. Foyt? Is this smart, Whitaker? Or is it dumb?
The small boy with no shirt returns carrying the headboard of a bed. An instant later, the second boy enters dragging a wooden object like a miniature football goalpost. In the moonlight, the old man staggers on the trail. He balances a slatted rectangle of wood on top of his head. Whitaker stares in amazement; children and old men are walking up and down that trail like goddamn elves, like goddamn fucking elves to get him a bed so he can screw a whore. It’s like a demented Disney movie, and he’s in it.
Aided by one of the boys, the old man manages to fit his burden through the door. The boys scamper about, assembling the bed. The old man stands, panting a moment. Lan climbs upon the bed to attach a mosquito net to several hooks and nails in the wall. She stretches the bottom toward the end of the bed but it doesn’t reach and she gives up. The net hangs, a darker swirl, not quite color, in the little light. Mamasan limps as she leaves, blowing out candles, and the old man and children follow.
The mat Lan unrolls to cover the wooden slats of the bed is a tan weave without design.
While Whitaker undresses, Lan lies upon the bed holding on her belly the candle that is the only light they have. Whitaker sits to untie his boots and her hand comes around his hip to stroke his cock.
“Maybe VC come fini me,” he says. “I am sleeping.”
“No sweat.”
“I am sleeping.”
“No. VC numba ten.”
“For sure.”
In his underwear he walks to a chair where he neatly organizes his clothes before hauling the chair nearer the bed. Knife in hand, he pries the blade open until there’s a loud click as it locks; Lan sits up with widened eyes, a yelp of alarm.
“No, no,” she says, and she is afraid of him. The terror transforms her small body.
“VC,” he says.
“No VC. Me numba one,” she says. “Numba one.”
He means to dramatize the pointlessness of her fear by waving the knife down through the air until it enters the dirt and sticks there as if in a sheath. Should it be needed, it will be ready, he thinks, while other smarter channels in his brain show him VC shooting his head off as he sleeps. Or stepping in to blast him as he humps away. When he faces her, she extinguishes the candle with a quick puff of breath before squirming out of her pajama bottoms and taking his prick in her fingers. While he looks at her to find some sign of her real mood, she strokes his balls, and lies back. He reaches up under the cotton blouse to find a tit. He decides to arouse her a little with his finger. There is no hair, all smoothness and bone under cool skin until the opening that is wet and deep and hot—he thrusts a little, rubs, aching in his stomach, in his throat, all the while watching her expression for an indication of his effect. And then his brain receives a message: some power in the heat of her has raced secretly, deeply into him he is coming. His seed is on the move. Too late he tries retreat. It spills and spits into the mat while he, straining against this loss, is filled with such tension and denial he feels nothing. The muscles are all in contradiction. He flops upon his back and lays there staring at a gecko spread-eagled on the ceiling while a mosquito buzzes at his nose. The net is poor. So little does his stupid, sorry-assed mistake show on him that a moment later, while he is immobile and depressed, she nudges his hand with her crotch. She wants to do her job. “You do fuck-fuck, GI,” she whispers. “Okay? We sleep. Do fuck-fuck me. I sleep.”
“No sweat,” he says, disappointed beyond anger. “You sleep now.”
“Sleep now?”
“Yeah.”
“No do fuck-fuck. I sleep?”
“Okay.”
“Numba one.”
When he awakens, she has thrashed across the bed to the other side near the wall. He doesn’t even look at his watch. Sleep has left his head full of dirt and sand, a blow
ing dust, and he feels like crying, he’s such a fuckup. He carefully parts her legs, then kneels above her before she stirs. Her eyes open and she says, “Oh, GI.” He tells her he has no prophylactic, no rubber. His calmer mind now thinks of such things, but he’s ready to risk VD. She shrugs and, touching his erect prick says, “Troi oi,” and reaches out and produces a rubber from somewhere. She concentrates, unwrapping it and carefully fitting it on him. He decides to kiss her and does as she helps him enter with ease. Kneeling, he cups her buttocks in his palms. This will be better, he thinks and twirls his finger in her ear; she makes a funny face. He kisses her, wondering about all the cocks in her day and what she’s done with them. From the inner tissue of her mouth comes a strange taste, the odors of her stomach all rising like smoke off the alien food she eats. But he’s feeling a lot, and it’s strong and it’s turning into more. He rides it through and comes hard and beautiful enough this time to gasp and strain his head away from her, his arching back a sign of his agony to go into her further and deeper, stay longer—what does he want?
When he looks at her, she is waiting alertly to see if he is finished. He slumps off of her. She pats his cheek, turns on her side. “Sleep now. Okay.”
“Okay.”
However, he is unable to and lying there he smokes half a dozen cigarettes and feels very sad. After a while, he wakes her to ask her to get him a beer. She shuffles off and returns, bottle in hand, hot as the very air. The beer brings no pleasure; it makes him thirstier, but he doesn’t complain. Lifting it toward the ceiling, he tries to focus on the moon out the window through the brown of the glass. I am Joe Whitaker, he thinks. Whitaker. Joseph. And I come from … somewhere … anywhere … with a banjo on my knee. The sun’s so hot …
When his watch shows 4:00 AM, he rises and dresses in eerie half-light while she sleeps, unmoving, and he wonders what she thinks of being a whore. From the limits of his skull he tries to pierce the bone of hers. She sleeps with simple, animal ease. His stomach growls. He feels a changing of pressure in his bowels that is shifting gas. Quietly, he farts.
He bends to look out the square hole cut into the wall to serve as a window. He’s getting anxious to leave. Soon laborers will wander the roads, and with this start of the day’s routines, Lambrettas will appear. One will stop for him and haul him through the leaden silver of the morning. He will arrive in ghost-gray light to pass the bunkers, guards, and checkpoints of the gate. Crossing fields and passing the tents of other units, traversing the motor pool, he will shower, shave, and go to work.
Lan wakes, blinking.
“You go now?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“You come back.”
He smiles, and her response startles him. Scampering to where he stands, she unbuttons his fly and fiddles with his prick, but he is finished now. Not even time for a blow job. “No, no,” he says. His single interest has become returning to camp. Nothing in him is any longer drunk or high. Though his rejection hurts her, he guesses, probably seeming an insult, the worry is spreading in him that he will not make it back safely. Now he moves out the door. Pausing ten or so yards into the still-dark street, he finds he has no matches for his cigarette. He looks about. She is in the doorway watching him stand there patting his pockets.
“Hey,” she says, “you want a light?” A lantern flickers above her, attached to the wall of the shanty, and it moves as she reaches to take it and amble, grinning at him, onto the road.
“I give you light.”
He leans into the candle, aware of her smiling face at the edge of his eye. They are husband and wife in the echoes of this moment; he is off to work. She will cook the dinner, care for the kids. “Okay,” he says. “Thank you.”
“No sweat. You go Lambretta?”
“Yeah.”
When it comes, a gladness springs awake within him. He does not know how she woke in the night to eat an orange and stare at him and think of the legendary Old Man of the Moon who sits in moonlight reading his book in which are recorded the connections that will come between people in the world. Quick and silent as a spider, he puts a web of invisible, rosy threads throughout the world until all people everywhere who are destined to be pairs are linked in a secret, lovely manner. Down through their lives the threads draw the lovers, down the trails and rivers, from city to forest, until they finally meet and love. Holding in her palm a wedge of orange she didn’t eat, Lan felt her threads running to the air. The wind had them. No old man anywhere knew of her. Whitaker leaps aboard the Lambretta. He is debris, he knows, a leaf that arrived here on a wind and now, thank god, the gusts that brought him have known enough to return. In the comforting free rhythm of their wings, he rides away.
18
In the dusk, they build the bunker. Their sweat dark with grime, they labor into evening. Whitaker ties off two sandbags packed full. He flops them onto his shoulders, feeling the trickle of sweat on his belly, the dust powdering him. He strides over the ruts left by the treads of the Caterpillars that flattened these fields. The First Infantry Division cleared out the Vietcong and then engineers eliminated the foliage. On a square of slightly higher ground above their tents, the bunker is being constructed. The muscles that ache are high in his shoulders. Pausing at the Lyster bag, he drinks a cup of warm, flat water. It gives no refreshment, but taken in large quantities diminishes the caking dust in his mouth.
The earthen debris being used to fill the bags was delivered by a rumbling old dump truck in the middle of the afternoon. The mound sprawls near the generator that powers feeble lights hung on tent poles about the area where they work. Four men dig with shovels to fill the bags, a stench of waste and age escaping when lumps are broken open. In the distance, the clank and grind of machinery can be heard. Whitaker is returning for another load. One soldier shovels while another sits holding open the mouth of the bag being filled. Bonefezi, a short, squat soldier, thrusts with his spade and says, “You guys know if this was World War Two, we’d have to do all this in the dark, man.”
“It is the dark,” says Whitaker.
“No, no.”
“Whatta you think it is, the middle a the goddamn afternoon, you jerkoff?” says Griffin, Bonefezi’s partner, as the bag in his hands shudders and changes shape with the dirt Bonefezi dumps into it. “Look around, man. It ain’t exactly the middle a the afternoon, jerkoff.”
“I mean, no lights, asshole. No lights.”
“Will you watch where you’re pourin’ that shit, Bonefezi? You’re pourin’ that shitty smellin’ dirt all over me. Will you watch where you’re pourin’ it? Can you do that?”
“What’s it matter, dirty as you are?”
“Okay, so I’m dirty. Does that mean I want to be filthy? No, it don’t mean I wanna be filthy. You’re stupid, Bonefezi, do you know that? Just because I’m dirty already, you think I want you to stand there pourin’ dirt all over me.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think you want it on you.”
“Why,” Whitaker says, “would we have to do this in the dark if it was World War Two, Bonefezi?” He is slinging another forty- or fifty-pound bag onto his shoulder; he will carry the second one dangling at arm’s length.
“Because of the airplanes if it was World War Two,” Bonefezi says. “We couldn’t have no lights like this or we’d probably get an air raid.”
“What about if it was Korea?” says Byrn, Whitaker’s partner.
“Don’t tell me about Korea,” Rowe calls to them from where he stands constructing the bunker wall. “I loved it in Korea. Those whores gave blow jobs—they could take you round the whole damn world. All the way and back.”
“But what if we was workin’ there like we are here now. Could we have lights?” Whitaker asks.
“VC only people in the world crazy enough to fight a war they don’t have airplanes,” Bonefezi tells them.
“Listen,” Whitaker says, “I’ll stop by again. We’ll chat again.”
“That’s a good idea.”
&nbs
p; “See you later.”
He watches the funny pattern of his feet in the dirt as he trudges toward Rowe and the bunker, the walls of which are halfway completed. Releasing the bag from his hand, he bows to allow the second to skitter, tugging at his skin, from off his shoulder. A small cloud of dust marks its landing. Before him, the bunker seems a crooked, unstable structure, piercing him with a moment’s vision of himself and eight or ten others cowering inside the shuddering walls, the roof leaking a rain of dust from the banging concussion of incoming shells. On his way back he passes Griffin, who balances one bag on his shoulder and drags the other. Mortar or rocket attack is their only threat here. The VC are unlikely to try a full-scale assault on such a place. They might hit a nearby village or prowl the ammo dump stretching across the hillsides on the far side of the highway, in the groove of the valley below them running westward toward Vung Tau. Often, flares sparked in the dark above the crates of ammunition stacked over the terrain of those hills like boxes on a wharf.
Heaving up the burden of another hundred pounds, Whitaker sets off, limping a little; his right knee is stiffening where he tore the skin raw when he slipped on gravel while playing tag football. Ahead of him, Rowe works within the bunker walls, where he instructs Doland, who watches closely. Rowe inspects the fit and placement of each bag, attempting to lock them together through their flexibility. Barrels filled with crusted earth, with rock and broken tree limbs form the corners. Rowe sweats heavily and works with the intense and serious concern of a craftsman. He pats and brushes and cleans the bags with the edge of his hand; he slams them furiously with a flat piece of wood to prepare them for the layers that follow.
“Rowe, you eat that shit up, don’t you,” says Whitaker.
“Love it, Mr. Whitaker. Love to do this work. Anything got to do with hidin’ when there gonna maybe be some people shootin’, that my kinda work. Mr. Charles comin’ up one road, man, I am goin’ down the other. I fought my war; I bet you never been shot at, Mr. Whitaker, so you don’t have no real appreciation for this bunker. I been shot at, Mr. Whitaker. You and me gonna be huggin’ and kissin’ them dirty ole walls.” The nearest lightbulb wobbles as Rowe bumps a tent pole, and the light wavers on the brown of his flesh, the bumpy stubble of his beard. His thick, open lips pout as he nods to affirm his wisdom. Doland hurries to stabilize their makeshift lamp.