by Ron Hansen
“Yeah,” the Corporal says. “That's what I want. How much is it?”
The little man squints his eyes at the Corporal. “I give it to you, soldier.”
The Corporal drinks a green beer and swivels on a high bar stool to tell a girl in net stockings stories about how he split a private's lip clean past his nose with only one punch, how he rolled grenades into a sergeant's tent, how he shot a machine gun overhead and then walked inside the anarchy of slugs pelting down like rain.
She listens, openmouthed, and then sips from his glass. “You not so tough,” she says. “I hear plenty worse than that.”
The Corporal says, “I was just getting started.”
His third woman passes her hand over the sharp creases of his khaki pants and shirt, catches her image in his polished black shoes, peeks through his expensive camera, and photographs him crossing his eyes, twisting up his lips, putting on the red coat. He shows her his back and for a moment she is speechless.
“You know what it says?”
“Sure,” she says. “I read English good.”
“Okay. What's it say?”
She pauses. “Say you want me to stay with you tonight.”
All that day she tells him exaggerated stories of an American giant who kills great cats with his teeth and cooks weeping men on a spit.
“Hasn't met me yet,” the Corporal says.
She speaks of voodoo, curses, magic things. She moves over him, works on him, looks between her thighs. “You sick?”
The Corporal is ashamed.
“No worry,” she says. “I get you someone. You be cured plenty quick.”
A hot whisper of an afternoon breeze pushes at the drapes. He is openmouthed, open-eyed, seeing only his important red coat.
The Corporal winces at the stink but allows her to pull him around a corner. She drops his right hand as she ducks into a shop. He stoops at a window and looks in at her short legs and the high slit of her purple dress. Above him are rows of plucked birds strung by the neck, spinning slowly in the wind, and skinned, pop-eyed rabbits hung in a sprint; nearby are iron tanks of green eels, tripe, water snakes, gutted fish. There is an aquarium where squid throw out their bundle of arms and glide down to a darker corner. Here the men dress in baggy shorts, squat openly in the streets, scurry as though they have boys on their backs. Gray smoke twists up from pot stoves placed outside the doorways.
The prostitute comes out, showing her gapped teeth as she smiles, a wet, paper-wrapped package in her hands. “You cure,” she says.
The Corporal expects her to give him the package, but instead the prostitute hands it to a heap of rags that is abruptly next to him, rocking from foot to foot. Her hair is like wax, her upper lip is darkly mustached, her long nails corkscrew from her fingers.
“Witch,” the prostitute says.
The witch rips off the papers, chews into a squirming carp, finds the pulsing heart with her fingers, pops it in her mouth. Her fingers mull around in the entrails. She wipes her bumped face with the juice, and then raises up an eye patch to peer at the Corporal with a gray pupil. She seems surprised. “You the island man.”
The Corporal turns for an explanation, but the prostitute has disappeared. When he turns back to the witch, only the carp is there, lying on paper on the street, its eye staring up with loathing.
The Corporal runs down the hotel corridor and hits his door hard. The door swings inward, banging the wall. His gold watch, his camera, his important red coat are gone.
***
Then the Corporal sees the American giant she'd been talking about. It is a bright Sunday morning, his last day of rest and relaxation. As he packs, he looks down to the street and sees the prostitute strolling with a sun-pinked man who is probably six feet eight inches tall. He is wearing a Panama hat and a yellow suit; he jauntily leans on a cane. The prostitute speaks and the American smiles, raising overjoyed eyes to the window. The American yells, “You!” and the Corporal steps away from the open window.
The Corporal jerks and jounces and pushes into the snapping canvas on highway curves. Across from him are two other replacements, a private and a helicopter pilot. The private is named Skeeter; the pilot Kenya. Skeeter operates a radio and appears to want to go deaf—he takes a toothpick out of his pocket and begins jabbing it into his ear.
The pilot will not speak. He merely stares with rowdy eyes when the Corporal talks to him. The big truck guns up a hill, changes gears, squeals as it stops. Road dust rolls in through the open back, and Kenya gets up, brushing his pants. He says, “You in a crazy company, boy. Your captain's the boogeyman.”
Him. He is standing there with his pink head shaved, his great mustache waxed. Yes: six feet eight, maybe two hundred eighty pounds, and the boy's gold watch on his wrist. He peers at a clipboard and looks up after he reads their names. He recognizes the Corporal with a “Har!” He opens his powerful arms to the troops and smiles with deep pleasure at what he is preparing to say: “I'm Captain Saint Jones!”
Kenya whispers, “The boogeyman.”
Captain St. Jones inspects the replacements and approves of all but the Corporal. “Look at you,” he says, and touches the Corporal's name patch. It is hanging by only a stitch. And his pants come uncreased at the Captain's notice, his polished boots look sandpapered, his zipper, of course, is undone.
Captain St. Jones scowls down. “You're not a soldier,” he says. “You're a ragman.”
Ragman. The Corporal feels hexed. He weakens. His underwear suddenly tatters, his collars fray, seams abruptly rip open, leaving spider legs of thread. He discovers yellow slugs in his boots, peels and rinds in his overnight pack, green mildew and sticky webs over everything. He pushes a cleaning rod down his M16 and pulls out steel that is striped with crawling ants.
And then the ragman gets an idea. At night he creeps into the Captain's tent and puts a finger on all the things in it, making them crack, cleave, spot with rust.
St. Jones throws up the flap of his tent in fury and peers at his company. The rising sun is big behind Captain St. Jones, and his men grow hunched at the sight of him. He wears a musketeer's plumed hat, high black boots are pulled up to his thighs, a great sword hangs at his side, and his spurs ring when he moves. “Okay, men. Have it your way.” He dips his fingers in a jar and twists wax into his mustache. And then he grins. “Patrol!”
The Corporal is ordered to pack for the Captain. The rips in his blankets have been neatly patched, pants seams sewn, cracks in plastic cemented together, spots of rust polished out. When the tent is down, the great cot folded, the air mattress stamped flat, the Corporal discovers an old wooden trunk in the jungle close by. He wrenches open the catch and heaves up the lid. Inside are his expensive camera, his impor- tant red coat, the carp the witch had chewed open. The Corporal presses the coat to his cheek and passes his fingers lovingly over the green dragon.
The Corporal sits in the helicopter, his legs swinging in the wind, watching high grass spray away as they wobblingly lift off. Jungles sway under them, green and yellow birds dart and soar away. The open fields are gold and steamy and roll in the air blasts like cooking broth. They aren't gone twenty minutes before Kenya dips the helicopter to the right so St. Jones can point to weeds parting for stooped runners. He yells words that the Corporal cannot hear and then hangs by one arm from a strut, clenching his silver sword in his teeth. He jumps down and sprints into the jungle. High palms swoop away from him, great trees shake. The chopper cuts and sways and hammers the air over little people who are cowering helplessly in the weeds. One of them stands and picks his weapon up, but words are apparently spoken, for he stops and cocks his head to the left and is pulled down into the grass. Another stands and runs to the jungle, then is tripped and swallowed up. A painted man appears in a rain cape of weeds and angles a bazooka up at the chopper's guns when he is surprised by a big hand on his rope belt and disappears. Again and again it happens like that, and then Captain St. Jones gets up, waving his big arms overhead,
wincing at the chopper's wake as it lowers to him. He jumps up into the helicopter and wipes the sword with his palm. He is panting a little but happy. The Captain grins at Kenya and Skeeter and the Corporal. “Here is greatness,” says Captain St. Jones.
A journalist in green fatigues patrols with the company for a day, bellying through the yellow savannah, whispering into a tape recorder, snapping pictures of the geography, the plunder, the piled-up bodies. He takes a group portrait with Captain St. Jones eating grapes in a hammock, his patrol sitting cross-legged below him. And there will be a dark photograph, too, of a villager hung by his ankles from a high tree as Skeeter interrogates him.
“Getting anything from him?” the journalist asks.
“Nope,” Skeeter says.
The Captain appears in his high boots and plumed hat and tells Skeeter to step aside. Gripping the sword with both hands, the Captain swipes it upward through the man's body. The skin bursts open with an explosion of green bats and straw. His blowing hair is grass. The journalist attempts a picture but the iris on his camera won't open. Skeeter looks sheepish. The Captain pats him on the cheek and says, “You were asking the wrong questions.”
The Corporal spies a black shape in the woods.
On patrol, a soldier drops to his knees and slumps over. There are no apparent wounds in him, but his eyes roll up with death when he is lifted. Another soldier on patrol leaps into swamp water, pitching onto his sides and back as he slaps at the phantom fire that is creeping up to his ears. A private keeps on sleeping as his squad makes preparations. A buddy walks over to wake him up and finds a screwdriver hole in the private's throat. Green leeches suck all the blood from an overweight sergeant in one night. A private drowns on his canteen water even as he's drinking it. Cigarette packs are poisoned.
And they walk into a village of grass huts. A cooking fire of gray embers is in the center, with young boys around it, playing a game with their fingers. A pretty girl is stripped and appraised. Mothers are lined up with babies at their hips. Skeeter interrogates them in their language and they give him poor inventions. Away in a steamy clearing, an old woman is singing in high pitch, “Yo ti ya yam i no bi tamba co o no.” As she approaches, the villagers get down on elbows and knees, praying, pitching away their coins, slapping themselves with open palms.
The Corporal is pulled to her. He can't explain it. And then he sees that she is rocking from foot to foot in gunnysacks and signaling that he ought to come nearer. Her hair is like wax, her upper lip darkly mustached. Only the eye patch is missing. She leers at the Corporal and her teeth are gray pebbles. She inchingly raises up her skirt.
The Corporal wakes up in moonlight with her body cold beneath him. He can't recall all that happened. One of his eyes has been poked out and the pain is enormous. He pushes himself up from the witch but somehow she holds him even in sleep. And then a smile comes to her lips and she simpers at the Corporal. “You mine now,” she whispers and permits his escape from her. The Corporal is naked in a green swamp and his Army company has disappeared. His skin is painted with blood. He looks down to the witch in puzzlement and she opens a path to the west.
And now he is the boogeyman. The Corporal follows his company at a great distance. He can hear cassette players, helicopters, warning shots that rap the trees and provoke the monkeys into wild jabber. And he can pause and hear slippered footsteps behind him or pick out the stink of skunks killed on a highway, of forty fish belly-up in a pond. Spiders are in the grass she walks, a gray sickness powders the leaves, yellow slugs grow huge as legs and are overslow in eating the dogs they catch.
***
Horrible things happen to the Army company as they sleep. A man can wake up cloaked in white moths or with a mitten of red ants on his right hand. A pool they sip from on one night can become, by dawn, a dry cup in the earth heaped with poisonous frogs. Young men die of their nightmares or sleep-walk into the jungle. Skeeter, for example, is missing. And the moon is always green.
Even Captain St. Jones is ill with high fevers, headaches, muscle cramps that purple his legs. His ankles swell until his bootlaces pop, and stomach pains make him walk in a stoop. At last he sicks up a pale, gutted fish, its green gills pulsing, its eyes plucked out.
Her work.
The pygmies are in a circle, eating raw meat and rice from wooden bowls. Crossbows lie at their feet. They speak poetry in whispers, oil themselves, pat their skin with leaves. One of them presses another's wrist and points.
The Corporal stands in steep rock shadow, as still as he can.
The pygmies get to their feet, pick up their bows, and slowly creep back into the jungle. The Corporal sits in their places, collecting their body heat, their spoken words, their unspoken memories. Skeeter's bones are in a pit on gray coals. The Corporal strips off pieces of Skeeter's meat and eats them as the pygmies sing their word for boogeyman.
A deer yanks a leaf from a limb and swings her head to the south, staring into the jungle as she chews. Her ears perk up and she leaps away, but Captain St. Jones intercepts the doe on the path, wrapping his great arms around her neck and riding her down into a sprawl. The doe chops at the peat with her hooves and nearly wrenches away, but the Captain rips his bayonet up through the hide and pulls out the deer's insides. High up in the cavity, he pushes the Corporal's watch, his camera, and especially his important red coat.
How can he explain his hunger, his great yearning? The Corporal crashes wildly through the forest, crying with a voice not his own. He cuts his biceps and calves with a sharpened stick and paints the trees with his blood. At night, in anguish, he yowls for her and, as a sign of his misery, chips out his teeth with rocks.
He makes traps for the soldiers—straw pits, rope nooses, bamboo spears. He pushes spotted leopards into their camps. When the company is out on patrol, he rips apart packs and boxes and tents, looking for his possessions. The Corporal despairs of ever getting them back, of the witch ever letting him go.
Captain St. Jones and his company are caught, up to their mouths in swamp water, their weapons high overhead in the moonlight. A picket fence of water-spray spurts up from machine-gun fire as the soldiers drop to the swamp bottom or plunge over into high reeds and cattails. Cartridges jam, gun actions go rigid, hand grenades fly wildly awry. Her work. Captain St. Jones pulls himself up from the swamp, cautiously rolls onto a path, and limpingly sprints away.
He is jogging through jungle many hours later when one leg gets caught in a vine and Kenya spins crazily over the cow path, a rope looped around his right arm and neck. The skin has been peeled from his face.
Here there is peace. Here, in the swamp, there are no signs of the Captain or his patrol. The Corporal sleeps on green moss that is dappled with sunlight. He opens his mouth for rainwater. Canaries sing, deer forage daintily, monkeys screech and trapeze in the treetops, a parrot nibbles at a peanut the Corporal pinches between his fingertips.
St. Jones stops to read his compass and then slaps reeds aside to push to the east. And then, yes, the putrid smell. He presses more rapidly toward it and drops to his knees by the evil body of the deer. He swipes away horseflies and jams his hand into a soup of maggots. Withers collapse at his pressure, a snake pours itself out of the open mouth. And then Captain St. Jones owns them again: the gold watch, the expensive camera, and the important red coat. He wraps his great arms around them and rolls happily on the ground.
Around the swamp, the native people make a pole corral and, with spades and dams and nightwork, a deep moat that all hope will keep the boogeyman in. Ceremonies are performed on the banks opposite his camping place. In them the one-eyed boogeyman emerges from the jungle, painted in blood, in a rain cape of weeds, and a witch doctor's hand is placed on the heads of pretty maidens until the boogeyman agrees on one. And then the girl is weighted with stones and guided into the creek water as mothers pray that the green army and the boogeyman will stay away from their village.
A helicopter passes overhead, and the Captain rushes out
into the burning open, swooping his arms up, crying for help, pitching rocks at its underbelly as it yaws and speeds away. He goes back to the elephant and eats with the jackals until his belly aches, and then he scoops up his possessions, wiping his mouth on the lettering of the silk coat. The Captain perceives a greater darkness and looks up at the sun. Only a slice of it is apparent as the moon nears eclipse.
His sign. The Captain looks for a parrot and sees one in a treetop to the west. He wrenches his way through weeds and high grass until he comes upon green water and a pole corral. He splashes deeply into the creek and then dips underwater to pass his hands over the shapes of pretty girls lolling among the carp and eels, crab traps of stones at their hips. The green water irons out over him, and then he bursts up from the bottom, blowing air, and raises up his sword. “Yes!” shouts Captain St. Jones.
Hush. There the giant is, sleeping, his huge back rounded, the great sword at his side, glinting silver light. The Corporal spies his worshiped coat, the powerful lettering, the green dragon and the golden torch of its breath. He slides into the creek from his island and swims across underwater, coming up with a gasp when he strokes into a holy girl and her leg oozes away.
And yet the Captain sleeps. The Corporal creeps up onto the hot sand and attempts to pick up the coat. He can't budge it—the weight is like an iron car, or as though the earth's gravity has been changed just for it. The Corporal slinks closer and clasps the great sword, then jumps up in the increasing darkness and hacks at the Captain's head, splitting it from crown to ear.
One roar of pain and the Corporal knows he has killed a giant bear. St. Jones is laughing at the Corporal's ignorance as he swaggers out of the jungle, the gold watch on his wrist, the expensive camera strapped around his neck. “Caught me sleeping, did you, boy? Only wish I got a snapshot of you to send it to your witch.” The Captain easily picks up the coat and painstakingly brushes away the sand. “And now you can give me the sword.”