Girl by the Road at Night
Page 19
It’s pouring as Whitaker leaves the mailroom and trudges down the road toward the gate, which he can barely see. The sky is a wall of gray blotting out the sun, the stars, the moon, whatever might be up there. Rain pounds on his poncho, rattling loudly; it clatters on his helmet. He carries his rifle slung so the muzzle points to the ground. His canteen and ammo pouch bounce off his hips as he shuffles along, thinking, Hut two three four. Hut two three four.
A truck, pelted and sopping, sits at the gate on its way into the compound. One of the guards stands with his head tipped steeply back so he can talk to the driver. Whitaker strides to the passenger side. The window is open and the man seated a few inches back from the frame is mostly in the shadows, but Whitaker thinks he knows him. “Hey,” he says, “we were in basic together. Fort Leonard Wood, right?” The guy leans forward and he is gaunt and stricken, with strange big eyes. He seems to be going blind for the few seconds he stares at Whitaker.
The truck splashes off, uncovering the other guard. “I’m here for Collins,” Whitaker tells him.
“Okay.”
“I thought I knew that one.”
“Did you?”
“I guess not. What’d they want?”
“They’re going to visit their buddy. They’re from a transportation company and their convoy got hit and he got his legs blown off.”
They go into the bunker and stand staring out. Two other guards are flopped on cots in the back. One sits up and says, “I can’t fucking sleep.”
“It’s early.”
“Hey, new guy. If you sleep, keep your boots on because there’s rats back in that corner.”
“I think it was the same one twice.”
“I think it was two different ones. Two different rats.”
“You didn’t take notice of any distinguishing markings, did you?”
“No.”
“So maybe it was just one.”
“Maybe.”
“And we saw him twice. That could be.”
“Sure. I guess.”
Whitaker starts thinking about Lan and maybe getting a pass to go to Vung Tau. He leans on the sandbags, peering through a firing slot into the flood and fog. There are units stationed at Vung Tau, but guys go there for a kind of mini R & R sometimes. It’s on the beach. After a while one of the guards heads down to the evac hospital’s mess hall. He brings back egg salad sandwiches for everybody and a big thermos of coffee. Whitaker fills his canteen cup with hot black coffee. He pulls the hood of his poncho up over his head and he puts his helmet on top of the hood. He walks out of the bunker. The front and back of the poncho fall around him like the sides of a tent shuddering, but keeping him safe, under the pelting rain. He sips his coffee and feels he’s missing out. He feels it deeply, powerfully, unexpectedly, senselessly. He’s missing out on something, though he has no idea what it is. He’s just missing out. He peers into the deluge and sips his coffee and then he feels something else. The torrent is steady. It falls in sheets, all but erasing the road. It streams off his helmet, past his eyes. Alone in his poncho, sheltered in his poncho, with coffee in the still-hot canteen cup in his hands, he has the strangest sensation that at this very moment he stands at the high point of his life. The pounding splatter on the road, on the rubber of his poncho, on his helmet sounds more like crashing waves than countless drops of water, no matter how many he tries to imagine. It’s like it’s falling inside his head. Pop pop. Lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli, lolli, lolli. Now he is getting mad. At what? At motherfucking what? Tonight you’re mine, completely… . More fucking song lyrics. But by the morning, by the sun … when the night …
“Hey,” one of the guards yells to him. “What are you doing out there?”
“C’mon in before you drown.”
“What?”
“C’mon in before you drown.”
“Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?”
“It doesn’t look like it, does it?” Whitaker yells.
“No.”
“We saved you a sandwich.”
“Okay. I’m comin’.”
“Hurry up.”
“Okay.”
“Come on.”
“Okay.”
Acknowledgments
“Can one appeal to Heaven, so far away?” That is how the Vietnamese characters on the cover translate. They are line 596 from Truyen Kiêu, The Story of Kieu, the great classical poem of Vietnam written in ideographic Nôm, the ancient script of Vietnam, by Nguyên Du (1765–1820). I owe their presence and authenticity to John Balaban and Lê Vaăn Cuòng of The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, http://nomfoundation.org. My thanks to Dick Hughes for putting me in touch with John.
At one point in the text I have paraphrased and then quoted from Kim Van Kieu, the prose translation of The Story of Kieu, rendered by Le Xuan Thuy.
Thanks to the early readers of this manuscript: Deborah Schneider and Sarah Hochman, Marsha Rabe, George Nicklesburg, Jill Rabe, Ricky Trabucco, Dennis Reardon, and Pat Toomay.
About the Author
David Rabe has been hailed as one of America’s greatest living playwrights. He is the author of many widely performed plays, including The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, In the Boom Boom Room, Streamers, Hurlyburly, and The Dog Problem. Four of his plays have been nominated for the Tony Award, including one win for best play. He is the recipient of an Obie Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, among others.
Rabe is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Dinosaurs on the Roof and Recital of the Dog, and a collection of short stories, A Primitive Heart. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, Rabe lives with his family in northwest Connecticut.