Surge

by Frank McGuinness

  Billy’s father was one of the few that had survived Omaha Beach. A reserved man, Larsen only spoke about his war after one too many bourbons on the porch. Billy would sit listening at his feet, enthralled as the fields of swaying corn were replaced by the Normandy cliff-tops. The Larsens were the only people not surprised when he enlisted in ’63 – just one week after watching a president die in Texas. On the day Billy left for boot camp, his father shook his hand and wished him luck, before turning away, muttering about fixing the barn door. His mother sobbed silently into a tea towel in the kitchen.

  Three months later, as the transport Chinooks thrummed above the rainforests towards the field base, Billy was redefining his understanding of the colour green. In comparison to the amber-gold hues of the Midwest breadbasket, Vietnam presented a luxuriant palette of limes, olives, jades and emeralds. The riot of growth was unlike anything he had ever seen, alien and fascinating in comparison to the tidy, geometric shapes of nature that he knew. In the jungle, the other marines cursed and sweated, swatting futilely at the creatures that crawled and bit and stung. Billy adjusted quicker than most, and, with his small build and dark colouring, rumours began to circulate that he had ‘gook blood’ in him. He laughed it off, yelling across the mess table that he was ‘just as American as any other shitbird in the fucking platoon’. But at night, rolled up in his poncho, he wondered why a place the other grunts had christened Hell on Earth felt like where he belonged. For him, the breath of the jungle was like the smell of the cornstacks back home – dark and fertile – and with the churring of the insects, it lulled him to sleep while the other men tossed and turned.

  Several months into Billy’s tour, on what was supposed to be a routine patrol, heavy Viet Cong fire separated him from the rest of his platoon. Mortar rounds echoed off the surrounding hills, making it almost impossible for him to locate a point of origin. Briefings that week had indicated the discovery of tunnels in the area, and he kept a close eye on the ground. Just the day before, Billy had watched two medics stretcher a bellowing marine into the field hospital, his foot swathed in saturated bandages. The marine had stepped on a hidden trigger, and a trap had fired a bullet straight out of the ground, taking three of his toes with it. ‘Toe-poppers’ were swiftly added to grunt lexicon.

  As he searched for a vantage point on higher ground, the jungle started to thin out around him, the vine-webbed mangrove and banana trees giving way to soaring giants. Abruptly, a clearing surrounded by silvery tualang trees opened out in front of him. In the centre of the clearing, a woman was suspended from a high branch, a rope tied around one ankle and her hands bound behind her back. Her long, black hair hung loose, brushing the leaf-covered ground. A shaft of sunlight had broken through the forest ceiling to illuminate scatterings of pink and white orchids on the barks of the trees behind her. Billy stopped, transfixed by the unexpected beauty of the scene. The cloying perfume of the flowers swirled around him, and he had to lean against one of the low branches, more to ensure he was still awake than to steady himself.

  As if she had felt the touch upon her skin, the woman instantly moved to swing around towards him, craning her neck over her shoulder. Relief flickered across her face as soon as she saw him. She started whispering urgently in Vietnamese, gesturing repeatedly with her head towards the north. He caught just one phrase that he recognised – nguoi linh. Soldiers. It could have been the local VC that had trussed her up like this, he thought; he had heard of women being dragged off by guerrilla units as they threaded through the jungles. However, there were also stories of servicemen who found even the opium-clouded brothels in Saigon too public for more vicious appetites. He didn’t like either alternative.

  The rapid stream of foreign words halted, and, gathering her breath, the woman forced out just one, over and over. Billy realised she was trying to say, ‘Please.’ The simple plea decided him. He unstrapped his knife and reached up to saw through the rope at her ankle. When it split under her weight, she fell heavily to the ground, and he cursed himself for not having freed her hands first. She rolled onto her side and tried to push herself to her feet, but her right leg buckled beneath her. A whimper of pain escaped before she bit down hard on her lip.

  ‘Wait, wait. Just stay still for a minute – I want to help,’ he said, trying the same steady tone he had used with skittish animals back home.

  She paused and watched him intently as he pointed with his knife, first towards her hands and then towards her ankle. Slowly, she nodded and lay still as he leaned down to cut through the knotted ligature around her leg. Then she mutely held out her bound hands. Billy had to force them apart so that he could ease the knife between them, and, as he did so, he saw that the rope had left deep red weals in the pale skin of her inner wrists.

  Straightening up, he took her arm and hauled her to her feet. She took a few hesitant steps, favouring her right leg but managing to stay upright this time. He watched as she made a careful circumference of the clearing. Dead tree orchids were tangled in her hair from the fall, and, as she passed, he had to stop himself from reaching out to pluck them free.

  Suddenly she froze, her head cocked towards the south. Billy realised that the pounding of the mortar rounds had moved closer. The woman turned to Billy and bowed solemnly to him before moving towards the tall elephant grass at the edge of the clearing. He started to follow her, but she stopped and held up the palm of her hand, the gesture warning him away. Reluctantly, he stayed, watching the tops of the grass stalks shiver as she passed until he could no longer tell whether the grass moved because of her or the breeze.

  He resumed his own path up the hills and had to work hard to force a way through the dense grasses. Sharp edges lashed at his face, and his vision blurred as a mixture of blood and sweat trickled into his eyes. Too late, he noticed that the patch of ground in front of him was oddly bare. The earth gave way, and his right foot plunged downwards. He screamed as something razor-sharp sliced up along both sides of his leg. Desperately, he tried to brace himself as his weight dragged him further into the hole, and he pitched forward, almost bending his knee backwards and sending another burst of agony rocketing up his spine. Training had kept his rifle in his hands, and he grasped it, pushing against the butt to leverage himself off the ground. He balanced as much of his weight as possible onto his left knee and then, after taking a few shaky breaths, leaned over to look into the hole. Inside, he saw two sharpened lengths of bamboo wedged horizontally to point towards the centre. When his foot had broken through the cover, the bamboo spikes had torn into his calf muscle and slashed two deep lines up to where they had hooked on the knee joint. Blood was pouring from the open wounds, and he almost fainted when he saw a white glimpse of bone through the lacerated tissue.

  Each time he tried to pull his leg free from the spikes, pain ripped through him, and he came close to passing out. The prospect of lying unconscious and bleeding out into the hole terrified him, and he had to work hard not to spiral into panic. With difficulty, he forced himself to focus on just one small task at a time. He unbuckled his belt and fastened it above his knee, cinching the leather tight in a makeshift tourniquet. The flow of blood started to slow. He shrugged off his heavy pack and set it on the ground next to him. Next, he broke out the magazine in his rifle. Fifteen rounds – and he had another two twenty-round clips in the bandolier. It would have to be enough. He reinserted the magazine, clicked the rifle to automatic and leaned it against the pack, within easy reach. Then, for the first time since he turned eighteen and his mother gave up dragging him to the First Trinity Lutheran church, he prayed.

  Gunfire lower down in the valley gradually became more intermittent, and then stopped altogether. The tropical dusk was falling rapidly. He watched the sky striate with pink and mauve, then grey, the interlaced tualang branches high above him etched in black against it. It reminded him of charcoal drawings he had seen hanging from a rickety stall outside Da Nang, shortly after he had first arrived. The monochrome starkness of the dr
awings had arrested him, and he had considered haggling with the aged stall-owner for one. But it had been close to curfew that evening, and he had hurried on. When he went back the next day, the stall had disappeared.

  He drained the last of the water from his canteen and leaned over to check his leg again before the light faded. It had gone partially numb. The skin below the belt was white, but he dared not loosen the tourniquet – he wasn’t sure he could handle the torture of circulation returning to his mangled limb. Nauseous and cold, he knew that shock was setting in. If he didn’t get out of the hole soon, he would die there like a stuck pig. He grabbed a nearby stick and set it between his teeth, then gripped his rifle and lowered it into the hole. Biting down hard on the stick, he began to hammer the rifle butt against one of the spikes, trying to force the point downwards, out of his leg. But he had forgotten that the spikes would be slippery, coated with layers of his blood, and on the next downward thrust, the rifle slipped and rammed into the open wound. The stick in his mouth shattered.

  He threw the rifle to the ground and curled himself over his folded left knee, his right leg still embedded in the trap. He tried not to think about eating a bullet, but his brain kept circling back to it, and he knew that the more time passed, the less likely it was that he would even be capable of making that choice.

  The grass rustled nearby, but Billy was too spent to even raise his head. It was the VC, he thought, finally come to see what all the shouting was about, and he just didn’t care any more. Anything was better than dying in the hole. Two small feet walked into his line of vision and stopped in front of him. He looked up and saw the young woman from the clearing leaning over him, her hair falling in a black curtain through which he could see slivers of the rising moon. She knelt down next to him and laid her hand briefly on his head – a silent benediction.

  After a furtive glance at the surroundings, the woman began to dig around the sides of the trap with her hands. She had almost reached the level of the spikes when Billy heard a faint, metallic click nearby. She heard it too and dug faster, sweat creating runnels in the dirt on her face and arms. After a few more seconds, she paused, her eyes meeting Billy’s. Understanding what she was about to do, he nodded. She reached down and swiftly wrenched one of the spikes from his leg. In vain, he attempted not to scream, but the pain tore his mouth open. A shot rang out, and the woman lurched forward, Billy instinctively catching her in his arms as she fell. Her hair fanned out across her face, and, when he brushed it away, he saw the bloody crater where the bullet had smashed through her cheekbone. One remaining brown eye stared serenely up at him, perfect except for a tiny, red spray of burst capillaries radiating from the inner corner.

  ‘No, no, no!’ he shouted, over and over until he was punched, hard, on the jaw.

  ‘Holy fuck, Private, will you quit the goddamn hollerin’,’ came a southern drawl almost right next to his ear. A heavily camouflaged marine emerged from the grasses near Billy. ‘You want every VC unit in the area down on top of us? Last time, I swear on the Almighty, this is the last time I’m comin’ out here, savin’ the ass of some shit-for-brains grunt who goes and gets himself fuckin’ lost in the middle of a goddamn shoot-out.’

  The Texan dragged the woman off Billy and dumped her body over to one side. Taking a deep breath, he hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it at her. ‘Torturin’ little fuck.’

  Billy didn’t even hear the marine, he was so intent on trying to heave himself out of the hole towards the woman. She had tried to repay her debt to him. And now she lay splayed on the ground, with spit drying onto her back and her blood trickling into the hole, mingling with his. Billy gritted his teeth, pulling harder and harder against the spike that still tethered him to the trap.

  ‘You’re gonna ruin what’s left of that leg,’ said the Texan calmly, watching Billy struggle to crawl free. ‘Son, you’re just gonna have to remember later that I did this for your own good.’ With one deft movement, he rotated the muzzle away from him and hit Billy just below the temple with his rifle. Billy collapsed, almost welcoming the darkness.

  Sitting alone on the bare floor, the American surveys his handiwork and eats the last of the banh chung. As he chews, the taste of lemongrass floods his tongue. Sometimes he misses the food from back home – burgers and fries, malts and cherry pies – but not often.

  Here, he is known simply as ‘the American’, treated as an eccentric by the villagers now that the war is over. The name Billy Larsen belongs to the life he gave up in Minnesota, a life he abandoned when he realised that he would find no peace until he returned, however many blonde, blue-eyed girls he married. A blood pact had been soaked into the earth of the jungle, and it reached out across the seas to hold him to it.

  One of the local women lives with him, quietly devoted to the strange foreigner. She is damaged in her own way, unable to bear children since Agent Orange wrapped poisonous fingers around her womb. She brings food to his hideaway in the nearby forest but never asks him what he does there; she is content enough that he provides her with money to run their house in the village and that he offers an odd, distant type of affection. He has never told her that the reason he shares her bed is because she resembles a dead woman. The villagers gossip, saying he is haunted by a Vietnamese girl he fell in love with during the war. He smiles, as they are only half right. He is tormented by the image of a single perfect eye – he sees it every time he closes his own.

  He threw away most of the furniture in the hut and ripped out the cupboards and shelves. With everything removed, there was more wall space than he had expected, and it took him several days to coat the walls with those first layers of whitewash.

  He brushes the crumbs from his fingers and kneels down again beside the wall. The stick of charcoal is where he left it on the floor. He picks it up and begins to draw again, scratching line after black line into the whitewash. Three of the walls are already completely covered with images of a beautiful woman, her dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders. There is always something wrong about the left side of her face – an imbalance, an uncertainty in the lines that makes her appear unfinished. He knows this, and it drives him on, for he will not stop until he has recreated her exact likeness.

  The walls have been whitewashed many times into fresh canvases. But, no matter how hard he tries, he will never complete his task – because Billy has forgotten what the woman looked like before the bullet.

  Country Feedback

  Mike McCormack

  It must have looked like a crack in the earth. From the air that is, looking down on it: a great white crack in the earth.

  It was early afternoon, just coming up to the lunch time, and I had nearly the whole pool scooped, two hours going through it with a landing net. It’s an easy job, and, to tell the truth, there’s something soothing about wading through four or five feet of water, something good about having to slow down and make sure you’ve got your footing solid under your feet.

  And it was a nice day working outside. Low, grey skies but no breeze or sign of rain. The rooks in the trees along the bank were raising a ruckus, the sky black with them coming and going. On a quiet day, you wouldn’t believe the noise those fuckers can make. Anyway, I was wired up to my iPod so I did not hear much of anything.

  It was lucky I saw it coming. If that swell took you by surprise there’s only one way you’re going to go and that’s head first into the water. And it’s dangerous falling over in a river with full waders on you. Current suction can drag you down and hold you there.

  And I didn’t hear a sound either even though the crash must have been loud on such a still day. A lorry that big tipping off the road; it would have made some bang.

  I was facing upstream when I saw it coming towards me along that smooth stretch of water above the pool – this wave, about three feet high. I knew I wouldn’t have time to make it to the bank so I just turned my back to it and planted the landing net as hard as I could into the gravel and leaned onto it so that w
hen the wave hit me I would be well braced.

  Even so, it was as much as I could do to hold my footing. The water surged under me and lifted me forward, both feet leaving the ground for an instant before the wave pushed past and began to level out towards the wider shores of the pond. It took me a couple of moments to steady myself and turn around into the current – was there another wave coming towards me? But no, there were no more waves; that was the only one. It took me a moment to steady myself, and I was just about to make my way to the shore when the water around me began to change colour – the whole river turning white up as far as the bend.

  And as I stood there with the water whitening around me I knew we were fucked.

  If it mixes with water, milk is more dangerous than oil.

  You have some chance with oil – it’s lighter than water so it floats and pools. But milk is a bastard. It spreads through the water, down through all the levels, and it chokes off all the oxygen, and if enough of it gets into a river system and that same river system runs through a hatchery, then you’re looking at a serious fish kill.

  I didn’t make it to the lock gate in time.

  The water flooded through for about two minutes, and that was more than enough time to kill a whole lot of fry in the holding tanks. When I got there, they were lying belly-up in the milky water, and by the time I got them flushed out, which took twenty minutes, over eighty per cent of the stock was gone.

  They were lying on their backs with their gills already whitening.

  Three years’ work gone in five minutes.

  Out in the river, milk was still pouring into the pool from upstream. I stood there for ten minutes looking at it – the colour deepening out towards the bank.