Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  Someone pops a canister of billowing white smoke to shroud the LZ from the jungle bunnies, and tired men stand idly as the birds go up. One boy, shot twice in the gut and bandaged, wet red splotches throughout, looks to his upright comrade; his hand, crimson slick, shaking as he smiles, almost cheerful, saying, “It doesn’t feel as bad as it looks. I feel fine; I’m going home now,” and, “This’ll get me a ticket home, right?”

  The lieutenant waits until the last man is exfiltrated, and he climbs aboard his own helo, finally headed back to the airbase—a short flight, short enough to emphasize how close these gooks are to camp. As summer nears its end, this war seems more a country-sized siege, with the interventionists perpetually on the defensive. In January they came from the urban underground; in May they came from the valley marshlands; and in August, now, they come from the mountains of the west.

  Candyman’s platoon has been dispatched downriver from Kon Tum Province, navigating through the karst mountains and jungle defilades, to report and repress the movements of the Vietcong along the Ho Chi Minh trail. It’s presumed that a Communist offensive is mounting across the Cambodian border.

  Twenty klicks east of that partition, an affluent town is commandeered by the American military. The main thoroughfare is converted into a checkpoint—an asphalt boulevard, lined with cement barricades and quilted barbed wire. On the roadside, a burned-out rusty bicycle discarded behind a boarded-up beverage vendor cart; its plywood and metal facade shot-through by two-dozen rounds, fresh from a firefight. Old and older women hustle down the street, hauling homegoods in plastic bags and wrapped blankets; toddlers shouldered and kids led by hand.

  One child, walking bare-chested with his mother, breaks from her grasp; his face contorting with shock and anguish, and he sprints away from her, toward one of three bodies lying in the road: a man in white collared shirt and black pleated pants, with no shoes; a man in pale green fatigue jacket, lifted to reveal his abdomen—shredded and pockmarked by a shotgun blast—and a satchel, spilling unspent Kalashnikov ammo; a man in dark pantaloons, with a pistol in his holster and an RPG round—the languishing warhead—leaning against his chest, and his face turned to the boy, and boy running, shouting, “Cha! Cha!”

  An American grunt with rifle lowered points ahead, to the line of gooks walking toe-to-heel; stepping inside the boy’s path and ordering him to stay in-line. The boy evades and falls to his father’s side, sobbing and shaking his ragdoll body. The soldier trudges to the boy with his arm extended, hooking the boy's bare collarbone with hard fingers, and yanking him off the corpse, onto his ass. The boy, shaken from his grief, looks to the soldier with eyes smoldering of contempt. The mother retrieves her son and—repressing her own tears—shuffles him back into the line. The boy holds his infernal gaze, allowing only the crest of the hill to break it.

  Two Americans cross the street, cutting through the marching line; stepping over the low cinderblock wall. The leading man, black—a LAW in one hand, an M16 in the other; bandolier around his chest—and the man trailing him, tan—square-headed and outfitted just the same, but with his LAW slung over his shoulder, freeing his hand for a primitive sledgehammer: a wood log drilled once-through for a thick stick handle, and heated tight, wrapped with twine. “Delta Force,” their badges say. Through quasi-suburban backyards of rubber trees and palms, they walk, arriving upon a fenced-in patio where a dozen other Americans hold kangaroo court for a trio of suspected dissidents.

  Three young gooks on their knees—two, bare-chested, in their early twenties; the third, a preteen in tattered, sweat-soaked linen clothes. He’s crying. Three other gooks—stripped to their underwear; their hands tied behind their backs—are walked outside, from the house’s backdoor, and brought to their knees on the patio: an older gentleman with rotted teeth, and laceration on his cheek; a twentysomething, well-fed, with a pudgy-face made evermore swollen by bruises and bludgeons; and an old man, scrawny, with big hands and balding head.

  One Delta Force soldier, dark-skinned and somber, rests his hand on the crying boy’s shoulder. Two other soldiers, standing nearby, smile and share whispers, referencing the boy. The shorter of the two soldiers—his helmet marked with a painted white heart—taps his dark-skinned comrade on the shoulder and has him step aside. White-heart then pulls a small tin can from his buddy’s rucksack and sets it atop the boy’s head, only to startle him—and so the can falls off. Frustrated, white-heart scoops the can back in hand and unsheathes his bayonet, pressing it to the boy’s throat, ordering him to stay still. The boy obliges, shivering whilst stiff as stone; on his knees; whimpering; petrified and tense—and the can is once again set atop his head.

  White-heart takes a few metered steps back, and he faces the boy, holding the bayonet by its blade tip with thumb and fore-knuckle, poised and balanced; readied to throw like an injun tomahawk. The boy sobs; quivers, quakes, and shuts his eyes; and the balding man barks—shouting fierce foreign vile—until white-heart relaxes, grinning; turning to the old man and flipping the bayonet in hand to catch. With another step towards the old man the boy shouts, “Cha!” and white-heart knows…

  “The old man’s your father, eh?” he smiles at the boy, bringing the bayonet to the old man’s chin; gliding it along his jaw as the boy cries louder. White-heart asks the old man for names and information, and the bayonet creases the flesh of his jowls. The old man fumes, and seethes—exhaling hard and fast through nostrils and bared teeth; his eyes transfixed on the accoutered, silvery hand of his tormentor.

  Nothing is said, and white-heart relents, turning instead to the boy: with a step forward, bayonet in hand, he makes to plunge his blade through the boy, who recoils—eyes wide, mouth open, arms straining desperately to break their binds—and the old man shouts again, prompting white-heart to halt his pump-fake blade. The old man speaks now in repetition—pleading, capitulating, surrendering, and sobbing.

  White-heart orders the balding man be taken back inside with the ARVN translator. The gentleman with rotting teeth barks his inflective tongue at the balding man as two gruff Americans drag him away. The elder’s tone means to suggest an inevitable death, rendering all snitchery optional. White-heart nods to this brothers and the gentleman with rotting teeth is brought to the center of the patio. A boot to the back of his head knocks him face-first into the dirt, and he’s promptly hoisted-up by his bound arms. He screams as his shoulders strain, bending in their sockets, as he’s made to stand.

  White-heart unpockets a pair of oversized gloves and stoops low, scooping a handful of red dirt to pour into an open glove. He shoves his wriggling fingers inside, spreading the dirt evenly; encasing his hand in earth so that it appears swollen—and, with this homemade weighted glove, he cold-clocks the elder across the face.

  The elder falls to the ground, unconscious, landing doubly, tossing-up dust and lost teeth. The dark-skinned soldier winces on the hit. The square-headed Mexican calms the cooing crowd with easing hands, and he produces his primitive sledgehammer, prompting only greater excitement. He widens his stance and holds the sledge downrange like a nine-iron, taking two slow practice swings as the dazed elder tries to orient himself, struggling to get his weight off the ground. The Mexican then heaves back and swings the sledge full-force into the elder’s cheekbone—his head twisting sharp, jolting aside; shattering his lovely bones. The Mexican turns his face skyward, cupping his hand above his eyes as a visor, as if tracking a long-shot ball. There is laughter.

  The soldiers turn to the remaining four gooks, all of whom recoil at the thought of being next. A meatier soldier, with a crosshair-shaped scar across his cheek, snatches the ear of the pudge-faced gook and drags him to the center of the patio. He then lords over the toppled gook, barking in his held ear, asking if he wants to fight. The pudge-faced gook whimpers and shakes his head, repeating in the negative; cowering against the earth; pressing his slobbering face into the dirt and burying his clawed fingers. The crosshair-scarred soldier looks to white-heart, who pouts his l
ower lip and sneers, with half-lidded eyes and pompous gaze. The crowd chants, “Pollice verso! Pollice verso!” and white-heart tilts his head like royalty, extends his fist, and—after a succulent pause—twists it to thumb-down.

  The crosshair-scarred soldier shrugs—squinting, grim deniroface—then stoops low and heaves his bare fists into the pudge, beating on his ribs and the sides of his head. The pummeling goes on for a minute, uninterrupted, until he’s pulled off; pulled aside so his comrade can dump a bucket of cold water onto the gook—a shock that causes him to jolt nearly upright, despite his fatigue—and with his upward arc he primes himself for the swing of the Mexican’s sledge, clocked upon the lower face—the jaw, the teeth, the nose—all smashed flat. He crumples, gurgling and writhing with muddled moans. The show endures the crowd until a gunshot drops the curtain on the pudge.

  The two young gooks and the crying boy are brought to their feet. The soldiers encircle them, like wolves closing-in around docile prey. The youths look to one another, weary and wet-eyed. Then, a shrill shout sounds from beyond the fenceline, and a woman bounds through the gate from the neighbor’s backyard. She jogs—limp-wristed, in floral blouse and black pantaloons—shouting for the boy, and the soldiers raise their rifles, ordering her to stop. She slows, pleading: That’s her son, she says, stepping further forward. The soldiers are wary but lenient in the way of her tread, now gentle and demure; familiar; less a hostile gook and more a sympathetic mother. She steps evermore forward, parting their throng; looking to each of their faces.

  Their rifles lower as tensions ease. The mother extends her arms, open for embrace, as she walks slowly toward her son, speaking to him in native tongue, garbled by the whimpering in her voice. The boy’s brow crinkles, almost confused, and he talks in turn, sobbing his replies. He extends his arms, too, but white-heart intercepts with his fist against her sternum. “No contact,” he says. “No contact,” but the mother presses on. White-heart resists and the mother cries louder, leaning into his arm with all her weight. The other soldiers close-in around them, nervous. White-heart extends his other arm to her waist, and she walks into his hand—contact.

  His eyes, curious, look to his hand, where a belt of orbs bulge beneath her blouse, and his brow twitches as reality clicks, and he looks to the mother—her face now absent of tears and sadness; instead cold and resolute; eyes of steel and fiery fury—and white-heart's sudden scowl and angered warning are drowned immediately in thunder as a dozen detonations erupt between them, vaporizing white-heart and the woman alike in an explosive burst of cloth, meat, splash, and shrapnel; inflicting the lesser same upon the nearest three soldiers—a devastation of red flesh that sends them incapacitated into the dirt.

  Upon the explosion, a woman crests the house adjacent—a demure native, of pristine face, jet-black hair, and light-colored robes—emerging over the roof peak, with a commandeered LAW straddled on her shoulder. She aims down, discharging her rocket—a suctive thoomp—and a whistling trail of steam, on to impact the legs of the Mexican, and the earth erupts as he hurtles backward—now but a mere torso, of flailing arms and rocking head—from whereupon he stood, and the shrapnel tears through his buddies around him—mud splatter, blood splatter. Aim is taken on the female rocketeer and in three bursts she keels, rolling off the edge of the roof.

  Four women, equipped with black pajamas and AK-47s, rout the house and charge the backyard. In the ensuing gunfight, both parties quickly lose two to their maker, and the entanglement only ends when the other two women are incapacitated by wounds. The torturing party within the house emerges to find the backyard decorated for a horrid neighborhood barbecue—the theme, “carnage carnival.” They take inventory of their fallen, finding the crosshair-scar soldier among the alive and the genteel black soldier among the dead.

  The two twentysomething gook dissidents reproach themselves for cowering, but they find relief in their survival. The boy—rather, the boy’s pelt—is found: the skin of his back, shed from the spine, without legs; with arms loose, still boned and bound together; skull fragments rattling within his shattered dome. He resembles now a wriggling skin rag, of a texture and haggard rigidity equivalent to a lion’s kill after the pride’s been into it. And as a wounded soldier lifts this pelt from the ground, holding it by some portion and curiously inspecting, the last vestige of the boy folds, flops, and drapes around himself.

  The two surviving gook women struggle to stand. The Americans—wounded and otherwise—are quick to surround, harangue, and wrangle them; binding their limbs with the plaid scarves pulled from their gaunt necks and braided hair; prodding and pounding upon their open wounds with gun barrels and stomping feet. Pistols are shoved in their faces during a round of questioning, and soon the Americans must restrain one of their own from butchering the two women in a berserker’s rage.

  The crosshair-scar soldier runs his hand over his face, feeling where shreds of shrapnel have added new pockmarks, bleeding out slashed cheeks, nose, and lips, with one distinct metal barb piercing the crosshair below his eye. He limps, otherwise, and he orders the women’s hands be tied behind their backs before they're marched into town…

  Through the house—where the balding man lies, horribly deceased—and into the street, where the highway overpass spans the neighborhood; the suburb that leads to a market row, where a gaggle of ARVN soldiers mills among the clay brickwork. The ARVN accept the two young women as prisoners and bring them to the center of the square.

  The crosshair-scar soldier announces to the native crowd that any and all VC collaborators, even women and children, will be shot in the street like dogs. Fear swells the two girls’ faces, with crinkling brows, wide wet eyes, and spread mouths panting. The first woman hyperventilates before she is executed—shot in the back of the head by a dirty pistol—and the second stands erect, staring proud and resolute into the crowd before being shot in the head herself; a spray of red mist that erases the dignity from her face.

  The marketplace shivers, silent; anxious, scared, stupefied, and sickened—the worried whimpering of women and children fills the air. An American soldier shushes them to no avail. Delta Force orders the crowd to return to their daily business. ARVN troops produce two black tarps and wrap the female bodies, bound at the ankles, thighs, and arms with fisherman’s rope commandeered from a shop table.

  Word travels fast and far, to the villages outside the city, and when the men of Candyman’s platoon advance into the jungle, they stumble upon a road littered with ratty hand-me-down combat boots, sandals made from discarded tires, olive-green fatigues, camo bucket hats, and shreds of black robes and plaid scarves—a whole salvation army’s worth of discarded ARVN wardrobe. This village—according to the most recent of maps, still friendly and occupied—seems curiously to have been abandoned by its guards: ARVN who must have changed attire; changed sides.

  “Whatever it was that happened in the city,” muses 1st Lt. Greene, “seems to have inspired a lot of gooks into treason.”

  “Who’d have thought,” Pvt. Miller snorts, “killing their own countrymen isn’t how you win their favor.”

  “No, no,” interjects Sgt. Zagorac, “it’s a sign of good work, cos you gotta even-out the teams—like in kickball. If there’re more shirts than skins then you gotta donate some players, or the game can’t go on.”

  “Right,” Miller laughs, “I forgot about that rule entirely.”

  Greene checks his wristwatch. “Come to think of it, we’re into the eighth inning now.” He stands, stretching; groaning; announcing, “Okay, guys—grab your gitch. Our team's gotta take the field.”

  The stocky Pvt. Hudson smears shoe polish across his face, conjuring camo from the canopy; masking himself in shadow. He slings an RPD LMG—commandeered from the Soviets; fed underneath by a large ammo drum—over his shoulder and finishes his ensemble with a strip of red cloth tied around his forehead, akin to a kamikaze pilot’s hachimaki headband. He tightens the harness on his radio-pack transceiver and turns about, to fa
ce a barrier of soggy cardboard boxes, stacked along the roadside. He kicks the damp papyrus wall.

  Pvt. Page groans, shifting beneath his rain-slick poncho; seated in the mud and slouching against the cardboard boxes; clutching his abdomen and gritting his teeth. His stomach cramps and churns. Hudson kicks the cardboard once again, causing it to topple; sending Michael backward into the mud. He groans louder.

  “Get up,” Hudson says. “We’re leaving.”

  Michael lies in a heap of wrinkled plastic and thick mud. From somewhere within his muck, he raises a thumbs-up. Then, like a mummy, he rises—first, sitting upright; then, standing. He waddles to his rucksack, set upon the ground and packed full: canteen strapped-in and bedroll underneath; shovel strapped to an ammo case there, and two bandoliers draped over the top. An M16 rifle leaning against the pack, and a helmet teetering atop the barrel, the way an acrobatic Chinaman spins a dinner plate.

  The platoon mobilizes, pausing only on the order to produce their Zippo lighters. The soldiers fan out, across the village, and each flicks their flint wheel with the colorless indifference of a timeworn habit. In the footsteps of his comrades, Pvt. Page approaches the nearest thatched hut and carefully raises his hand to the straw eaves—tickling the dry reeds with hungry flame, and tending each kindling long enough for a burn to self-sustain. The fire soon consumes the straw of the roofs, then the stick beams below, and the log supports, inevitably caving-in the hut to fuel the fire beyond bonfire heights and heats.

  Mountains of flame devour the village, swallowing structures whole, and digesting them with such gluttonous fury that the firelight can be seen for miles. One soldier endures the infernal heat so as to snatch a wooden stick: one that’s fallen from the conflagrating lot, still burning on its own. He dips his cigarette to it—lighting it—and then puts it to his lips, taking a drag; looking coolly off at the fires of his wake.