A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  What could the ex- German tank commander say? No? He had played the battle of Stalingrad in his mind a hundred times; sometimes he made it into the city, sometimes his tank was blown up on the outskirts. The chance of going back one more time was irresistible. Kleist turned and, sloshing his feet on the wet mud, he climbed back onto the bank.

  “Yes, we go to Stalingrad,” he said.

  Purcell maintained a separate room filled with computer terminals, a mainframe along one wall, a huge TV screen. On one side was a cubicle built on a platform and inside was the compartment of a tank. As they walked to the house from the pond there was the distant crackle of gunfire. The killing hadn’t stopped; the city remained under siege. It was the kind of starry night, and tracer-filled sky that made re-enacting the Battle of Stalingrad a giddy enterprise. The special effects on the cathode-ray screen—hooked invisibly to the computers, high grade software programs, and sound-tapes from actual battles—guaranteed that anyone inside would feel and experience every element of tank battle. Inside the room, Purcell flicked on the lights. He went over to the cubicle, opened the hatch door, and showed Kleist the way in, with a small bow of his head. Kleist looked at the helmet and gloves Purcell had handed him and then at the cubicle which looked like a gas-chamber.

  “It’s safe,” said Purcell. “I’ve fought battles in the Gulf, the Battle of the Bulge, France, North Africa, and Vietnam. We have hundreds of battle programs. You can select your battle, your tank and that of your enemy. What do you say, Kleist? Have another go at Stalingrad?”

  He watched as Kleist pulled the helmet over his bald head and slowly slipped on the gloves. He waddled over and climbed into the cubicle, sitting in what looked like a bamboo electric chair with straps and wires looping at odd angles, connecting to a bank of computers and terminals. Kleist eased himself in with a long sigh. A moment later, Purcell slammed the door shut, hit the main switch, hurling Kleist back through time to Russia; he was back in his command tank about fifteen kilometers from Stalingrad, where through the gun turret he saw the chunky gray skyline in the distance. Thunderous explosions rocked Kleist back in his chair. He held the joy-stick and commenced firing. Purcell watched the battle on the TV screen. He saw Kleist’s flanking movement, cutting through a Russian perimeter and knocking out two tanks, one artillery placement. Two platoons of infantry turned on their heels and ran in the face of the devastating concentrated fire power from a dozen attack tanks.

  An hour thirty minutes into the battle, Kleist suffered a direct hit and his tank was killed. He had made it within five hundred meters of Stalingrad. Smoke filled the screen of the interior of the tank. Kleist pulled off the helmet, coughing and hacking, his face red and his tongue, a large and bloated organ, jutting from his throat. He hated getting blown up. It was fucking depressing.

  “I’m getting too old for this, Purcell,” said Kleist. “And you kept changing the weapon placement and the kinds of weapons.”

  This was true. Purcell loved tinkering with history, injecting weapon systems which hadn’t been invented until forty years after the battle. Purcell loved the battlefield frozen in a single image of death and destruction. His computer scanned the weapons, and a laser printer spewed out descriptions of weapons, shells, ammunition expended, damage assessments, casualty lists. Purcell held up the sheets of paper as they were ejected from the printer, reading the results.

  “Make Mr. Kleist feel loved,” said Purcell, as the girls who had been whispering in the corner, watching the TV screen and thinking it was a war film, ran forward and began kissing Kleist’s bald head. They had dried themselves off with sweet smelling, fluffy towels, and sprinkled themselves with perfume supplied by Harry Purcell during the battle of Stalingrad. Purcell opened a window to the room, and a breeze fluttered the curtains. The Presence Purcell had felt in HQ drove a blade of Arctic night though his thighs, and made the HQ girls giggle, sing, and shiver—not so much from the cold of the Presence—the kind of cold that makes your guts churn ice cubes—as from their anticipation of the sexual encounter which was bound to happen next.

  “Anything different, you know, out of the ordinary?” asked Purcell. The figures from the computer didn’t add up; Kleist and the German Army should have taken Stalingrad hands down. They had been armed with the latest, high-tech weaponry. Yet the Russians had stopped them in their tracks.

  Two of the HQ girls fondled, embraced and touched Kleist.

  “Kleist, why didn’t you take the city?”

  Kleist’s head bobbed up from between the breasts of one of the girls. He had a crooked smiled and lipstick marks all over his bald head. “Indians. Out of nowhere. I was attacked by Indians. I had green smoke coming out of cracks in my turret.”

  Purcell looked at the old man and the young girls wrapped in towels. Their eyes reflected the yellow flame like green cats’ eyes. The stab of cold pierced his neck and Harry felt he would never swallow again. He staggered over to the window. The green vapor had cracked the Leopard-1, the top-of-the-line German tank; one that had outperformed the American Commando Stingray counterpart in almost every simulation and on every terrain. Kleist’s experience was a mystery.

  An M-16 rifle on automatic sounded at the other end of the soi. Purcell slammed the window shut. One girl leaned forward taking Kleist’s soft member in her mouth, sucking with her eyes half-closed, and moaning quietly. The old man made one of those hospital, death-bed moans. The sound of pain rather than low-tone screech of pleasure. One of the girls tried to kiss Harry on the lips, but he pushed her away. He grabbed the computer printout and sat at the terminal, running the numbers through one of his weapon assessment programs. Nothing, but nothing came out the way it was supposed to; the numbers made the program hang up.

  “The spoils of war,” moaned the old war criminal, his eyes rolling inside his head. The other girls sat huddled, watching the blow-job, watching the battle screen frozen in time, and Purcell screaming at his computer.

  “What’s wrong? Something happened, Harry? ” asked Kleist, reaching for the helmet.

  “What are you doing?” asked Purcell.

  “I want inside my tank. I want to find that fucking Indian,” said the old man.

  “How do you know he was an Indian?” asked Purcell.

  “He had a spear,” said Kleist. “A German tank knocked out by some asshole with a spear. And he wore a T-shirt with the word ‘Montezuma’s Revenge’ on the front. On the back it said, ‘If it floats, flies, or fucks—rent it.’ I have to go back and get that fucker.”

  Purcell sighed. “Okay, one more chance. Knock out Montezuma and the other three girls are yours.”

  8

  CORTEZ’S TEMPLE

  by

  Harry Purcell

  THE PROBLEM IS to estimate the amount of trauma caused by all of those who died—30 million Russians alone, perished in one war. The Second World War. The Russians, like the Germans, and the Americans would settle for nothing less than precise numbers. They counted dead bodies. Counting the dead in that war led to the Cold War. The Russians recoiled into a long phase of paranoia, despair, mourning, and lived where they had counted the bodies—inside a vast landscape where bodies littered every corner. Russia was a land of ghosts who would not go away; ghosts who would not rest so long as those who had counted their bodies lived. Post-1945 Russia was filled with Presences which moved at will among the living.

  Think of the trauma the Americans felt with their minor losses in Vietnam—less than 60,000 killed. Multiply that number by a factor of eighteen and you get the casualties on the Russian side in one battle—the battle of Stalingrad. Multiply it by a factor of five hundred and you have an image of Russian dead by 1945. One death is a moral outrage. In Vietnam the obsession with body counts forced soldiers in the field to count the dead. Their own and those of the enemy. How does an entire city’s population deal with a horizon littered with dead people blown into pieces, heads, arms, legs, torsos shredded, a twisted wreckage of flesh? Some say they bes
t dealt with it by not seeing it. They wore the special glasses of survival which allowed them to see only the earth, the soil, and the ground. Every body part was submerged as part of the earth, a garden of flesh and bone flowers.

  There was one rule never to violate: never command soldiers to count the dead. Second, never order civilians to count bodies. Once the soldiers and civilians are enlisted in the counting enterprise, the country is doomed. To start the process of recording and seeing what is recorded signals that a corner of no return has been turned and no one can turn back to a state of innocence. No one can witness that much death and not have some sensor which holds the human mind in an integrated whole short-circuited. People can not see death of such magnitude and survive without massive trauma disrupting them for life. The Russians looked, they saw, they walked among their dead. They should have been trained to see roses. They counted until their fingers and tongues went numb. They should have seen daisy chains. The body counting gave the Russians fifty years of collective nightmare. Two and a half generations of Russians had to come and go, roil in their collective nightmare before a new start could be made. When the counters had been forgotten, the country woke up and everyone said the Cold War was over.

  Cortez had counted the skulls; he had counted the dead. Did it take the Spanish two and a half generations to shake off his nightmare? Or was the Cortez off-shore body count like the American count in Vietnam—a nightmare spanning a single generation?

  9

  SNOW HAD BEEN stopped at two roadblocks. A soldier had pointed an M-16 at a spot between his eyes, smiling all the time. He decided to take the soldier’s advice and not enter the zone on the other side of the roadblock where smoke and flames were visible and rifle fire cracked above the fires. He returned to HQ, a little sheepish, thinking if he really wanted to cover the uprising, he should have tried to get into the zone at some other point. Instead he returned to HQ to find a teenager who was tightly wrapped inside a sleek, black dress with a thigh-high hemline; this was the same HQer who had once bathed in a solution of Listerine. She looked gift wrapped, seeking a Christmas tree to sit under. He knew her from around the old jukebox; she had made the transition to the new jukebox without forgetting the number of a single song. Snow was impressed. Her name was Noi. Hair over the shoulders, small upturned nose, oval-shaped face and killer dimples. Snow was glad that some soldier had pointed a rifle in his face and this act had changed the course of his life, forcing him back to HQ to discover that no one had taken Noi.

  Noi snuggled against Snow in the booth, sipping a watery coke, her eyes half-glazed as if she were far away. It was after three in the morning and HQ was packed; customers and girls stood, squeezed together, and the waiters, trays chest level, tried to clear a small path to deliver drinks and food. From the crowd no one would have guessed a revolution was going on in the streets. Snow whispered in Noi’s ear, brushing aside her hair and earring which looked like a gold smoke ring. He had one hand on her bare leg under the table, and she giggled as he blew into her ear and massaged her thigh. Snow saw the word Listerine form and disappear like a soap bubble from Crosby’s lips. She rummaged through her handbag, rattling through her assortment of knife, brass knuckles, lipstick, compact, keys to several hotel rooms, and a small bottle of Listerine. Finally she pulled out a plastic bag of chicken balls. The chicken balls were about double the size of her fake pearls, and she offered both Snow and Crosby one. They locked eyes and declined.

  “They’re always in a feeding frenzy,” said Snow.

  “As long as they stick to chicken balls, it’s tolerable,” said Crosby.

  “What other kind of food did you have in mind?”

  Crosby lit a cigarette. “Once about four years ago, a friend of mine, whose name shall remain unspoken, took a girl from the African Queen in Patpong. She had a kind of Chinese look. Very nice legs, ass and tits. I mean she was a fine product. Someone a collector would no doubt take off the market fast. Indeed, as we speak she is in France.”

  “Food, Crosby. The subject is food. We don’t give a ratshit if she’s in France or the grave. Food was the point.”

  The plastic bag of chicken balls was offered around and declined for a second time.

  “My Thai friend took this girl—number 29—to a short-time hotel. She took her shower first. And unlike young Noi here, did not wash down in Listerine, so she was out in ten, fifteen minutes, coming out with a towel wrapped around her waist. Next, my friend went into the bathroom…”

  “And found durian smeared over the walls,” said Snow.

  “No, he simply took a hot shower. Again, another ten, fifteen minutes passed, and when he emerged…”

  “A Pizza Hut delivery boy banged on the wrong door…”

  “Even better, he stood in the open door with a massive erection and stared into the bedroom. This Patpong goddess sat naked in the center of the bed, her ass to the side, legs curled, with mirrors on every wall and the ceiling reflecting her perfect waistline and hair tumbling down below her shoulders. She had a silky down skin without a single blemish. Her back was slightly arched, you know how the spine goes in that small curve and her breasts standing out like inflatable…”

  “Lilo tits…” interrupted Snow, rubbing Noi’s other thigh under the table.

  “He took two or three steps toward the bed and noticed this goddess was eating. This girl was from Isan and had grown up on a diet of fried grasshoppers. So it would come as no surprise that she had bought a bag of fried grasshoppers from a street vendor in Patpong and stuck them in her handbag. She waited until her john was showering, opened her bag, took out the hoppers, and even though it was a short-time hotel, for a moment it was just like home. When he came out of the shower, he walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. She was watching TV. There was something odd. A crunching sound. It wasn’t from the TV. A greasy food smell hung in the room. He stared at her mouth. Her beautiful jaw rotated ever so slightly, in a grinding action, like the action you would associate with milling flour, and what he watched—with some horror—his erection immediately went from north to south—was a grasshopper leg curved over the right corner of her mouth, the foot of the grasshopper extending down below the lip. As she chewed, the skinny grasshopper leg appeared to be kicking against the side of her lip, as if it was trying to climb out—‘Let me outta here. You’re next.’ She stopped chewing and smiled at him with the leg wedged in the corner of her mouth. With a well-polished nail she delicately pushed the grasshopper leg into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. Nothing she could do after that could jump-start his member. He was more than limp, he had not just gone south, his penis had retracted inside his body. He swears this. He paid the girl and sent her off without getting laid.”

  “That’s disgusting, man,” said Snow.

  “I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “What would you have done, Crosby?”

  “I probably would have lit a cigarette and had a think about it. But my Thai friend, he simply fled the scene. It was too much. You want your sex without grasshopper legs in the girl’s mouth.”

  “Have a chicken ball, Crosby. It might take your mind off the past.”

  10

  VERSION TWO OF HOW SNOW CAME TO COVER THE BANGKOK MASSACRE

  A Short Story

  by

  Robert Tuttle

  JENNIFER, THE HIGH-MILER who had a serious emotional attachment to Snow, decided to hole up in their Winnebago that first week in the new town. Her intention was to apply for a job—sooner or later. It wasn’t much of a town. But they had exhausted their money and needed to work and save some money before setting off. She had some prior experience as a secretary—a real estate office in New Jersey—though her typing skills were not the best. The pressure was off when Snow had landed a job. Soon the cash flow would start again. After Snow’s return from Bangkok, this had been his first job—in the middle of the great unannounced American depression—Snow, asking, “Hey, man, why didn’t anyone tell me there was no
work in America?” Jennifer replied, “You probably never asked.” And Snow had to admit this was true. He had simply taken it for granted that there were always jobs, and all you had to do was apply, go to work, and collect loads of money.

  They had travelled together in the Winnebago across the country, looking for work until Snow had spent his nest egg and part of the nest before finding work in Montana. It wasn’t a career choice. But as a source of revenue until something better came along, minding turkeys was better than being flat broke or holding up 7-11s.

  On Snow’s first day working at the turkey farm a middle-aged worker named Roger came over and stood beside him. Roger had his hands in his pockets and a wad of chewing tobacco stuffed between his upper lip and gum. He looked like a Little League baseball coach. He spit a brown thick spittle on the ground every couple of minutes. Roger had been at the job in the turkey business more than nine years. He had the wild eyes and nervous, shuffling feet of a serial killer.

  “Can you hear the turkeys call your name?” Roger asked.

  Snow looked at him as if Roger might be armed and dangerous. When he smiled he had a brown saliva smile. He was definitely the kind of guy who hung out at HQ and believed the girls he picked went with him because they loved him. He had seen guys like Roger before, plenty of them lived hand-to-mouth in Bangkok, sleeping with young bar girls. Snow pegged Roger as someone who suffered from massive delusion. Snow played along with Roger, thinking that while he sounded psycho, he was reasonably certain that Roger was unarmed. This turkey calling your name nonsense bothered him. He mentioned it to Jennifer.

  “This wando named Roger who chews brown shit from a tin said he hears the birds calling his name,” Snow explained to her over dinner.