Headhunter

by Tim Curran

  He screamed and something huge…something like a man but the size of a giant wrapped in black, leathery blowing rags…snatched Lin, yanking him up into the air with one powerful arm. Trang saw what it was. In the luminous moonlight, he saw a hideous face which was no face, but an eyeless mask of white pulpy flesh set with fingers of green and black fungus. It seemed to be crawling on the bone beneath, but that was because it was bloated with crawling worms.

  He stopped there, breathing hard, shivering, his eyes wet with a dew of tears. He took out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his face. “Yes. What then? You may ask.” He swallowed down hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I remember only vaguely…the thing as it took my brother’s head, slashed it free with claws like the blades of scythes. There was blood and…enough. I cannot discuss it further.” He sighed, staring fixedly into dead space. “They found me wondering in the jungle the next afternoon. I have no memory of it. I was feverish. I slipped into a coma and awoke in the French mission hospital. I told the priest my story and then I told it to my father and the village elders. I remember how they looked, what they said: Ac quy ddi san ddau—The Devil That Hunts Heads. Con quy thau ddau nguoi—The Devil That Collects heads. I remember hearing of it as a boy, a story, no more and no less. But the elders? My father? The French priest? They looked most serious, most sober about this subject.”

  Trang was quiet a time, collecting himself.

  Quinn must’ve been real tight with this guy to get him to tell this story to a complete stranger. And I think if I hadn’t been hunted by the thing and told Trang as much, he would never have dredged all this up. It was hard on him. You could see that. I’d been through my share of the shit in Vietnam, but I was soft and sheltered compared to this guy who’d lived in this country every day of his life. And that’s why I believed him implicitly. He had squeezed-out his soul to tell me this and it was no small matter for a man like Trang to unburden himself, to allow another man—particularly a foreign round-eye—to see his grief, his anguish, his personal demons.

  He lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my direction. “My brother Lin was possibly the finest human being I have ever known. I grieve for him each day. For who he was and what he would have become. And possibly, for myself. You see, since that day, Mister Mac-Kinney…Mac, yes? Mac, my life has not been a happy one. I have lived for vengeance all these years, but I know it is impossible. I will never find the Headhunter’s lair, for I am not meant to. Do you understand this?”

  I shook my head. I admitted I knew nothing and understood less.

  “Yes, perhaps,” he said, a slight grin lifting his lips. “Only those who are marked can find it as it can find them. I believe one is fated to become its victim and once fated, the Headhunter can find you anywhere. You cannot hide. You cannot run for the trail always ends. But as it can find you, so can you find it. But myself? No, it has no business with me, so forever it will be the elusive shadow I chase and never find.”

  I swallowed down the rest of my beer. “For chrissake, Trang, why me? What in the name of Christ have I done? Who have I offended?”

  But he just shook his had. “I do not know. Nor will you ever know.”

  After that, Trang began to talk of other things. His life as a policeman, how he was designed to do this and nothing else. That political systems mattered nothing to him. Today he worked for a democratic republic, but perhaps tomorrow, the communists. It did not matter. He was a real brutal, heartless sonofabitch and I wouldn’t have wanted him on my ass. But I knew, yes, I knew that down deep there was a little boy hiding in him, a little boy that had never stopping suffering or missing his younger brother. Maybe if he’d been American I would have patted his arm, but he was Asian. He would take it as an insult, a sign that I thought he was weak.

  “Trang,” I said hopelessly. “How do I kill this thing?”

  He looked at me and those eyes burned into me like acid. “I have heard of only one way,” he said. “You must cut its head off.”

  13

  The next few weeks, I kept moving around.

  I found if I stayed in the same place more than one or two nights, I would hear it getting closer in the dead of night. And I knew that’s what it was doing, sounding for me, searching, sniffing around every night, trying to pick up my trail. When the sun set, it rose like some black, noxious vapor from sewers and ditches and dark places, slinking around looking for me.

  So I kept moving. I didn’t get out of the country. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t because I had this overwhelming feeling that something needed to be done, that I was tied there and, God help me, I simply couldn’t leave. Then one of my contacts slipped me some info. It seemed MACV—Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—was growing concerned about soldiers being found without heads. My contact told me he didn’t have precise numbers, but it was upwards of a dozen troopers in the last year. MACV had decided it was some hardcore, sadistic VC or NVA group, possibly even mercenaries or bandits. Regardless, they didn’t like it and they were going to do something about it.

  After I heard that the 1st Air Cavalry Division was involved, I knew I had to be a part of it.

  14

  When you saw the black-and-yellow shoulder patch of the Air Cav, you knew shit was going to happen. You knew a major operation was in the making. Those guys were good, maybe the best infantry unit in Vietnam. When they came on the scene, the body count was high and the NVA were going to take a serious ass-kicking. These guys had bailed the Marines out on numerous occasions and when you were with them, you knew you were watching an elite force of real bullet-eaters. Unlike the Marines that wasted men horribly, the Cav had very good, very creative leadership and they usually got the job done without wasting a lot of lives. While the Marines threw themselves at the enemy, trying to drown them in their own bodies, the Cav went right for the throat.

  The guy I was looking for was an Air Cav colonel named Tulliver, Frank Tulliver. He was an old school ballbuster, but filled with the crazy, unconventional type of thinking the Air Cav thrived on. He was a tall, thin man with wiry white hair, a foul mouth, and a face that could have been chipped from flint. When you saw him, you knew he was a soldier.

  He could have been nothing else.

  I found him at an abandoned soccer field in Saigon. The Cav had been on a big operation up north and Tulliver, true to form, had brought hundreds of dead NVA back with him to be photographed and studied. Remember Captain Morales of the 101st Airborne that I introduced you to that gray, wet (and portentous) day at Bai Loc? Well, Morales was into stiffs, but he was an amateur compared to Tulliver. Tulliver had been amassing large body counts since World War II. Only cancer and heart disease took more lives than Frank Tulliver.

  He knew dead.

  He liked dead.

  That’s why his boys called him “Reaper”, but never to his chiseled tombstone face. You called him “sir” or the medics would be busy pulling his boots out of your ass.

  There were Air Cav people clustering outside the stadium and most of them didn’t look too happy. And I couldn’t blame them—you could smell the bodies a block away and here at the field, Jesus, it smelled like a refrigerator full of rancid meat. The Cav soldiers had formed something of a defensive perimeter around the stadium and right away two of them stopped me, asked me who the fuck I was and what the fuck I wanted.

  “I need to see the old man,” I told them and they just looked at each other and shook their heads, as if they thought that was a bloody stupid idea in the first place. They gave me shit, two burly sky soldiers dressed in crisp green fatigues and brandishing M-16 rifles with fixed bayonets. They were arguing, pretty much, as to how far they could legally shove a bayonet up my ass when I showed them my plastic-coated MACV accreditation card that identified me as a member of the Vietnam press corps.

  That changed their attitudes completely, for Tulliver was a media hound. He wouldn’t take a shit without two photographers and an information officer squatting at his side. A body count
was what he considered a prime photo op.

  A black hard-stripe sergeant came up to me and shooed the jar-heads away. His name was Danny Brown and he was from Chicago. I knew him pretty good.

  “Fuck you want here, Mac?” he asked me. “This ain’t your scene, motherfucker. You got more taste than taking pictures of dead slopes. Leave that for the scavengers, they don’t know no better.”

  I lit a cigarette. “I didn’t come to look at the stiffs, I came to see the Reaper.”

  He shook his head and pulled me aside. “No, baby, you don’t want that. Motherfucker has really slipped something this time. Shit, you know how he be with this body count-shit, this war of fucking attrition and all? Well, he got worse. We be up at Cam Lo, wiping our asses all over Ho’s finestthat being an NVA battalion we caught in this valley and knocked the nails down tight on the motherfucker’s coffin and allwell Reaper, he gets a big-ass hard-on because of all them bodies. So that crazy…fucking guy, shit, he has us bag ‘em and chopper ‘em out. Something like six-hundred dead little dinks. The slicks couldn’t carry enough, kept making trips back and forth, so Reaper call the Marines, has ‘em send in the big Chinook. Fucking Shithook drops out of the sky and I thought those Gy-rines was gonna shit when they saw what we was marching up the ramp.”

  It was insane. But just another footnote to an insane war fought by insane people with insane ideas on how to go about it. That awful putrid stink hung in the air like a fog. I could feel it settling over me in a damp, festering rot.

  Danny said, “It’s getting weird, this Viet-nam thing. I’m short, baby. Gimme one month and I’m gone. Back to Chi. Fuck this. I joined Air Cav, not fucking Graves Registration. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bull-motherfucking-shit. That’s what I say.”

  He started telling me how truly fucked-up the whole thing was. How two days ago, when they brought the bodies in, Tulliver had the Cav soldiers unwrap them and arrange them all in neat little rows according to size. The whole time, he’s hopping around and whistling showtunes like “Hello, Dolly” and “Oklahoma!” and snapping that riding crop of his against his leg. Then he changed his mind. Officers had to be separate. NCOs over here, enlisted over there. Stiffs that weren’t exactly there in entirety, put them over there, that’s their place, but you see part of an officer, you re-file his ass, NCOs, too. What you waiting for soldier, goddammit, lets get these cold cuts shuffled, shaped, and sorted!

  “Some of my boys were passing out and throwing up on account of that stink, so Reaper starts handing out gas masks—you know, Mac? Like them World War One trench masks?” Danny shook his head and I could almost hear something rattling in there. “Last night, I decided to relieve a few of my killers on watch. So I’m standing there and it’s dark except for inside the stadium where the bodies are, Reaper’s got that lit up like Merry Fucking Christmas. I start hearing these sounds, right? Pop, pop, pop. I say, what the fuck be that noise? Some Alabama cracker cherry private, he starts laughing, says, that’s the stiffs, sarge, when they fill full of gas, bloat and all, buttons start popping from their uniforms. Be careful, he say, laughing like Bob Motherfucking Hope doing his thing, be careful or you lose an eye, them NVA buttons hard as a rock. That fucking kid gotta be all of nineteen, Mac, and he laughing his white ass off. Now tell me, is that right? We got good soldiers here and fucking Reaper, crazy sonofabitch, he’s turning ‘em into ghouls! Sheeeiit!”

  “It’s fucked-up,” I said and it was. Vietnam was a war that seemed to encourage individuality, something you don’t generally run across in the military. But it flourished in ‘Nam, got carried to great extremes.

  Danny sucked off a flask of whiskey from his belt. “Can’t wait till that white boy gets back to Ala-fucking-bamy, starts telling his ma and pa what he did during the war. Starts laughing about dead bodies.” Danny was wired. He kept eating uppers out of his right pocket to keep his edge and downers from the left to keep him stable. “Ain’t no way to run a war. Think I’m gonna join the fucking Marines or some shit. Goddamn Reaper, he sit in those stands all by himself, stares at those bodies all going to slime out there. Even has his meals brought in. Motherfucker, I ain’t been able to touch food since this carnival started. White Mice have been crawling up our ass about the stink. Lieutenant even went and told Reaper we had to do something, smell was offending people. German businessman are shitting cinderblocks. Reaper starts giggling, LT says, saying that he was there when they liberated Mauthausen, Germans out to feel right at home with that smell.”

  Danny led me past the soldiers mulling around and through the gate into the stadium and right away I heard a strange murmuring sound, like about fifty-thousand hornets on low idle. But Danny told me to get used to it. It was the flies. A million flies buzzing Reaper’s favorite showtune.

  Danny left me at the gate. I went in and the stink—a higher, more pungent stink—hit me in a hot, green wave of putrescence. The bodies were rotting, black and green and blue, going to some fleshy soup. They didn’t look much like people anymore. Some of them were actually moving they were so full of worms. Others had sat straight up from expanding gases. The flies were buzzing so loudly I thought I would lose my mind. I found Tulliver sitting in the stands by himself, drinking ice tea and stroking his chin.

  “I wondered if you’d show, Mac. I sure as hell did,” he said, staring out over those bodies, his personal collection of advanced decomposition. “I’ve had most of the journalists in here already. But they don’t hang around long. Why you think that is?”

  I gave him a hard look. “Why do you think, sir?”

  He stuck a plug of tobacco in his cheek and worked it slowly, spitting brown juice at a fly. “Must be the stink. Funny, Mac, that smell. I’ve had it on me for years. Had it since those camps in Germany. You ever see pictures of those camps? Bodies. So many goddamn bodies. I remember the infirmary at Mauthausen. They had these bunk beds in tiers of five and six. The people on the lower bunks had drowned in pools of waste and puss draining from those above. We had to wade through it.” He spit some more tobacco juice. “But I suppose it’s time to bury this lot. Got all I’m gonna get from ‘em.”

  I didn’t dare ask what that might be because, honestly, I didn’t want to know. This guy had a morbid death obsession and I’d been through so much by that point, I don’t think I could’ve clung to my sanity if he would’ve explained the mechanics of his dementia.

  “Got Graves coming today to clean this up. Ain’t telling the troops, though. Fuck ‘em. Let ‘em get that smell up their nose and under their skin. Let ‘em know what death really is and I guarantee you, they won’t want to go and die on me.”

  At best, his logic was convoluted; at worst, perfectly obscene. I had to bite my tongue not to tell him so.

  Tulliver sighed, looked me in the eye. “But you didn’t come to see this, did you? You came because you heard about my op up in the Highlands, didn’t you? Don’t bother denying it, Mac, word’s got around you’re more than a little interested in our local headhunters. You want to come, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He just shook his head. “You can’t. I’m sure you got good reason for wanting to and by looking in your eyes, I can see it don’t have a pinch of shit to do with those rags you write for, that’s it’s more personal-like.” He spit more juice. “See, Mac, this is a black bag op. Some Agency spook fuckwig must’ve let it out, but it’s still a secret op. We have some good intelligence on where to start hunting and our mission profile is pretty fucking simple: find ‘em, fix ‘em, and fuck ‘em. Kill those bastards so goddamned dead their own mamas would puke at the sight of ‘em. MACV doesn’t want no press along on this one.”

  But I wouldn’t let it rest there.

  I couldn’t let it rest there. Something had been keeping me in Vietnam when I should have been running clear to the other side of the world if I’d had any sense. And this was it. This is what I’d been waiting for and I knew it. So I kept after him and after him until I thought he was going to slap
me or toss me down into the bodies below.

  Finally, he sighed, said, “Mac, you can’t come with us, goddammit.” Then he shrugged. “Least not officially. We’re leaving at 1300 hours tomorrow. When you get to the airfield—and I know you got enough sense to come late—there might be another chopper waiting. It’ll drop you at the LZ, which will be east of Pleiku near the Cambode border. We’ll be there. Real ugly, hard country. You lose you ass—or your head—ain’t nobody’s fault but your own.”

  He left me in the stadium, looking down at the bodies.

  I stayed there for a long time.

  15

  It was afternoon and we were flying over the Central Highlands and I was looking down into that spooky, ghost-haunted run of steep ravines, yawning mist-shrouded valleys, jagged mountain ranges, and congested plains. I could see Montagnard villages clustered in the lower elevations, cooked by daytime heat and humidity, chilled by endless nights of frigid darkness, inundated by monsoon rain. I saw no people in them as we flew over. Ground fog was laying thick as smoke down there and I knew how that fog was, appearing suddenly, choking off vale and obscuring hill, disappearing and reappearing yet again in a seething, swirling mass that turned patrols back around on themselves, confused both us and the enemy. Sometimes drawing entire units into its murky folds, tucking them away into its murky belly where they would never be seen again.

  A lunatic, scary place.

  The door gunner kept looking back at me and grinning. I just didn’t get what was so funny. But he kept doing it. Looking down into those shadowy draws and across triple-canopied bluffs, then back at me, grinning and grinning.

  The pilot took us down, flying just above the treetops, so damn close it seemed you could have reached down and plucked leaves with your fingertips. We passed Marine firebases blasted into hilltops. Some were still occupied and you could see the snouts of 105s rising from the mazes of bunkers and trenches, Marines looking up at us from their sandbagged and barbed-wired confinements. Some bases were abandoned and the Marines had dynamited them to deny Charlie their use. They looked, from above, like a collapsed series of gopher tunnels or anthills, hollowed and caved-in, strewn with flattened huts and tin-roofed buildings fallen into themselves. As we passed over such a graveyard, I saw a man standing down there in the wreckage.