Night Train

by Thom Jones

  Pink was ahead of me running alongside a pair of unarmed NVA who had just dropped a container of rice. Both of the men wore thick tortoiseshell spectacles and were clearly noncombatants. I watched the three run in unison for a second, then, in spite of my heavy gear, broke past them like a man hell-bent on the finish line. A few seconds later both of the dinks passed me with a look of terror on their faces. Motherfuckers looked like dinks with Down syndrome. As they increased their lead, Pink raised his carbine and placed two rounds into the base of each man’s skull. It was the best kind of one-handed “John Wayne” shooting I had ever seen.

  Then Ondine was up running alongside me, laughing his ass off. “Man, what kind of stupid-ass shit was that?”

  “They were unarmed,” I said, panting for breath. “It didn’t seem right.”

  “Tell me the last time Charles cut you a line of slack,” Ondine said.

  “Tell me the last time Captain Barnes cut us any,” I said. “Everybody in this for-shit country is out to fuck us, Ondine. I mean fucking everyone.”

  “Tell me about it,” Ondine said.

  In moments the team gathered at the streambed that led back to our primary LZ. Everyone was accounted for except for Felix. The sound of small arms fire from behind began to pick up. Suddenly Felix T., with his long stride, came galloping down the rocky creekbed. In addition to his rifle and gear, he was packing a PRC-25 radio and two bandoliers of .60 ammo. As he passed by, Ondine began to laugh hysterically again. I said, “Christ, Ondine, what’s so goddamn funny?”

  Ondine was hysterical, which wasn’t like him. I wondered if Ondine was going to maintain or not. He was pointing at Felix. “Yeah,” I said, “the retard Olympics. It’s a regular side-splitter.”

  Up ahead Felix slipped on a mossy rock and went sliding down the wet rocky bed. He looked like a man trying to make a hook slide into home plate. Suddenly there was a flat, muffled explosion and Felix T. gave out a sharp piercing scream. A white phosphorus grenade attached to his web gear had become unpinned as he fell. By the time Ondine and I reached him, he was holding on to his chest. Blood was spurting from his uniform. Ondine pulled his shirt back. “Lung,” he said.

  “I’m fuckin’ burnin’ up,” Felix said through gritted teeth. The white phosphorus continued to burn within his flesh. Ondine looked him over, not knowing where to start. Felix was covered with holes. He cried, “Burnin’ up, do something! Get me a fuckin’ medic, Jesus!”

  I pressed my field dressing against Felix’s chest but all that did was send a gusher of blood from his nose and mouth. Felix’s teeth began to chatter and in another moment he was dead. He was truly lucky. It was over in less than three minutes.

  Ondine wasn’t laughing anymore. He stripped the radio off Felix and handed it to me. “This is yours,” he said as he hoisted Felix over his shoulders.

  ‘You aren’t going to try to carry him all by yourself?” I said.

  Ondine said, “Greenie power,” and his black eyes flashed amphetamine. He took a few steps down the creek before he stopped and dropped the body and frantically began brushing burning pieces of phosphorus from his shoulders. Singh and Gerber caught up and without saying a word helped carry Felix’s large lanky body forward. Overhead we could hear the sound of Cobra gunships and in the clearing ahead I spotted smoke grenades in the LZ. Pink and L. D. Pfieffer came back to help with the body. We got into the slicks in a hurry, remembering how Charles had locked in on Second Recon’s pickup zone with mortars. Everyone braced to receive enemy fire but in moments the slicks were airborne and headed back to Camp Clarke. Singh turned to Pink and in a necessarily loud voice said, “Did you make the shot?”

  Pink, the diminutive speaker, raised his voice in a shout to be heard over the helicopter noise. “It was a perfect shot. One of the best I ever made.”

  “All right!” Singh said. Relief was written all over his face. His expression spoke volumes for the adrenaline euphoria of war. Once the perils of a situation have been escaped, the good times roll. It’s a lot like hitting yourself over the head with a hammer. It really feels good when you stop, and beyond that there’s no point or moral lesson to be learned whatever. Singh was Mr. Happyface. I suppose I was, too.

  “Sorry about your man, Tall Paul. What happened?” Pink said.

  “Felix liked to keep the pins on his grenades straight,” Ondine said. “Like fuckin’ John Wayne. Well, take heed. The cat rolled a willy peter.”

  “Jesus,” Pink said.

  “Uh huh!” Pfieffer said. “You remember that bird he torched back at Pendleton? That fucking roadrunner?”

  “I do. That was some sick shit,” Gerber said. “A low deed.”

  “Well, that’s all I’m saying, man,” Pfieffer said. “What goes around, comes around!”

  “Man!” I said. “Don’t start with that! One doesn’t lead to another, like that. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  Pfieffer looked back at me with a wide grin on his face. “I can’t fucking hear you, man. What did you say?”

  I didn’t want L.D. inadvertently inflicting “boonie voodoo” upon the team by establishing prophecies, or a train of thought that made such prophecies seem logical. But I didn’t have the strength to shout over all of the helicopter noise. I looked down at my hands, which were sticky with Felix’s blood. My rough palms were blackened like charcoal from white phosphorus burns. They were little black bore holes, the very opposite of white. Beyond those I had to thank God that I made it through another mission without suffering great physical harm. I cared not at all for Felix, never had—and who could the stupid fuck blame except himself? Had it been anyone else, it would have bothered me. I watched smoke coming from the little bore holes in my hands. Adrenaline aside, they really did hurt, but it was the sort of hurt that almost felt good. Christ! I was alive. Soon I would be guzzling beer and smoking reefer. Maybe Barnes would give us five days of out-of-country R&R. Bora Bora was supposed to be very good. I could feel the smile muscles begin to activate but couldn’t help but wonder if Pfieffer wasn’t right with his boonie voodoo theory. Maybe Felix T. had hexed us when he torched that fucking bird back at Pendleton. For all the smiles, something felt wrong, and we all knew it and felt guilty for not stopping him when he set the goddamn thing on fire. I pulled a small jar of Vaseline from the medical ruck and used it to cut off the oxygen supply to the white phosphorus burns on my hands. As soon as the rest of the team saw the Vaseline, they begged for me to pass the jar around. I wasn’t the only one suffering from internal combustion. Wisps of rancid smoke were steaming from little pinpoint vent holes off of just about everybody.

  40, Still at Home

  THE GREEN ROOM​ would never make the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. The carpet was old pea-green shag. Originally, it matched the green velvet cover of the springworn Slumber King, but somewhere during the Jimmy Carter administration the velvet dyes had broken down. Now, the bedcover, canopy, and the two sets of heavy green velvet drapes had lightened to a garish shade of lime. The room’s textures and color schemes were a fright, like the marriage of Transylvania and Graceland. Margo Billis could no longer bear looking at it. The plan had been to renovate this atrocity as she had done with the rest of the house, but that had been B.C., before the cancer. The future seemed worthwhile. No longer was this so.

  Yet it was Matthew, her son, who seemed to be the one dying. One Sunday evening after he had logged in twelve-plus hours of continuous sleep, anger forced her across the threshold into his hovel of a room. Matthew twisted his pale round face away from the blue light of the television, arched an eyebrow, and like a demented Charlie Brown, he said, “What are you doing?”

  Margo jerked back. Her son’s movement’s, in the ghostly light of the TV, looked sickeningly macabre—the combination of a cartoon and a ventriloquist’s dummy act; the Rod Serling version of “Peanuts.”

  She regained her composure and said, “What does it look like? What do I ever do, except pick up after you?” Her voice was hoars
e and she had to sag to one knee as she hacked off a series of painful dry coughs. To Matthew’s tender sensibilities it seemed that a crew of Northwest lumberjacks were ripping through California redwoods with seven-horsepower Husqvarna chain saws. He knew that if she didn’t leave soon, he would awaken fully, long before his body rhythm was prepared for anything so hideous as consciousness. His mother continued to cough with one hand poised on her very tender lower back. The last thing she needed to do was throw out her back.

  Finally Matthew effected a sit-up and turned on her, “Goddamn it! Do you always, without fail, have to come crashing in here like some deranged fiend when I’m trying to sleep?”

  A back spasm stabbed Mrs. Billis and she was seized by a cramp in her foot. She had to hobble upright so she could put weight on the foot. The doctor told her the cramps had to do with a potassium imbalance or something. And the back pain! She thought that with all the morphine she was taking it was unfair that she would suffer back pain or any pain at all! The foot cramp eased but she took a few tentative steps to be sure. “All you do is sleep,” she said.

  Sensing weakness, Matthew boomed, “Baloney! I’ve been sending out résumés and you know it.” His round cartoon mouth twisted into an “O” of hatred as he spit out these last words. Leonardo couldn’t have drawn a more perfect circle than those formed by Matthew’s pale lips.

  Margo made three attempts to clear her throat before she said, “If you think sending out résumés is going to get you anywhere, buster—you’re crazy. Nobody reads them. When are you going to get a job, dammit? I’ve totally had it with you.” She brought her fist to her mouth and coughed.

  Matthew’s moon face sank back on the pillow as he raised an arm and clawed at the air helplessly. “Oh, God! Stop with that coughing, will you, please? Use your inhaler or something.” His anger quickly dissolved into a vapid puddle of self-pity and he spoke in a gasping whisper, “Just quit torturing me. I’ve got endogenous depression. If I don’t sleep, I’ll be dead by Friday.”

  Matthew’s room was cold, and Mrs. Billis huddled in her red terry-cloth robe, drawing it closed tightly against her neck. “Everybody’s got depression,” she said. “It’s part and parcel of the human condition.”

  These words aroused Matthew’s general sense of contempt for the world. He said, “No, they don’t. Not like mine. People get a mild case of the blues and brag about taking Prozac or St. John’s wort, but they’re lightweights. They go to work, they do things. My case is worse than anything to precede it in the annals of recorded medicine.” Prematurely awake, and racked with exhaustion from head to heel, Matthew let his arm flop along the side of the Slumber King, producing a visible little puff of dust before the raybeam coming from his television. Matthew’s speech had given his vocal cords too much of a workout and now his throat was raw. If he was in for another bout of strep, he decided he would just kill himself now and be done with it. He was utterly without codeine and couldn’t face a sore throat without narcotics. A strep sore throat was akin to having your tonsils out by the Inquisition’s ace torturing squad—red-hot irons and pincers and a holy relish for their gruesome duties.

  Mrs. Billis said, “You talk depression, but it’s just a game with you. People who are really depressed kill themselves. Suicide has never even crossed your mind; all you want is the life of Riley!”

  Matthew rolled his head in his pillow and said, “I’m too depressed to kill myself. Jesus! Everybody knows that you can get too low to commit the deed! When I get better, I’m going to for sure,” he said. “Mark my words! I’m getting off Zoloft and getting back on Nardil just to that end. I have to go two weeks cold turkey because you can’t mix conventional antidepressants with MOA inhibitors. When I make some therapeutic progress, then I’ll really be dangerous. In the meantime, if you have the least shred of feeling or compassion, leave me alone to lie here and wallow in my misery and self-loathing…please, oh God, make her go. If I’m getting strep again, just shoot me. Fuck!”

  “Knock it off with that crap,” Mrs. Billis said. “Get your ass out of bed, get a job, and go out and find yourself some cute girl! You are your own worst enemy, and mine, too! Lying in bed isn’t going to solve anything. Look at me, I’ve got cancer and I’m not crying the blues. I’m seventy-three and I still get up and work like a dog!”

  Matthew felt he might weep. Surely he was having a nervous breakdown. He said, “Why do you always have to come busting in here with tough guy tactics when I’m ready for shock treatments? Do you time my cycles and plan on coming at the worst possible moment? You don’t know what hell looking for work can be. Capitalism is the worst evil ever devised by man. Hustle, hustle, hustle until you can’t go on. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t hack it out there in middle-management hell. If you only knew how heartless those bastards are now. In your day people were still human. I’m telling you, it’s criminal and no one will stop them!”

  Margo Billis barked off several shallow coughs. Her relationship with her son had come down to little more than late-night arguments. Mornings, daylight hours weren’t so bad, but the nights were killers. When she could no longer control the anxiety over her impending fate, she would burst into his room on any pretext. “Be glad you aren’t living in a car,” she said. “Be glad you aren’t trying to cut it in North Korea with beriberi and a tablespoon of rice per day.”

  Matthew’s throat was aflame. He pitched his voice higher to work an unused portion of his larynx and Margo recoiled. He sounded perversely like Mickey Mouse. Helium-voiced, this cartoon son tossed out his hand and said, “Depression is worse than any painful disease—cancer, starvation—whatever you got—anything. I’ve seen more than a hundred shrinks. I’ve taken every antidepressant under the sun. Engineering is all wrong for me. I need another venue to express my peculiar point of view. I mean if I have a contribution to make to the world, I need to go another road.” Matthew was proud of his vocabulary choice but when he saw that it failed to impress his mother, his thin neck finally gave out and his heavy round head fell back on the Slumber King. His voice was piercing. “I can’t take any further interrogation. What you are doing to me is against Geneva Convention rules.” He folded a king-size pillow around his head and then stretched into the full layout position and executed a body roll-and-a-half toward the east wall. In one adroit, well-polished move he not only escaped the sharp light from the hallway, he also muffled the harsh gravel rasp of his mother’s incessant nagging.

  By now, Mrs. Billis had worked herself into a state of furious indignation. This unleashed a full convolution of organic trauma, but her anger was greater than fear. She swung Matthew’s door shut with her lambskin slipper and stalked into the kitchen with his breakfast tray. “Lazy-ass son of a bitch! He’s worthless! Forty years old and useless! I’ve had it. I’ll kill him!”

  She stabbed at the fried-egg mess on her china plate with a soap sponge. The eggs were harder than rocks. She wondered why she cared. Soon she would be six feet under. Then what would he do? Then what “road” would he find? She whirled around and in another moment she was back wresting the blankets away from him. Matthew had already dropped off to sleep again and clung to the blankets desperately. She backed away and turned to his closet. “I’m going to take all of this shit, throw it out on the lawn, and have the locks changed! I can’t take anymore. I’m the one who’s sick! You can just get the hell out!” She screamed as she began ripping Matthew’s clothing out of the closet. Matthew leaped from the Slumber King and forced her out into the hallway. During the struggle he snagged his baby toenail on the dresser, half ripping it off. “Goddamm it,” he screamed. “You’re totally nuts! Just leave me the fuck alone. You’re a maniac!”

  Mrs. Billis pushed at the door but Matthew had the full weight of his body pressed against it. “If you aren’t out of here in one hour, I’m calling the police!” she screamed. “I am sick of waiting on you, picking up after you, and paying your bills. I want you out!” She sounded like Linda Blair in The Exorci
st.

  Although his mother weighed scarcely a hundred pounds and was dying of cancer, Matthew had to use every ounce of his strength to hold her off. It felt like Lucifer bucking the other side of the door. As soon as the pushing stopped, he clicked the lock shut and returned to bed. His pulse was racing and he felt short of breath.

  Out in the kitchen she began to cough again. Little poppers. Kaff kaff kaff! He heard the hiss of her medicinal inhaler and seconds later the coughing stopped entirely. Why didn’t she pick it up at the first tickle? Why? Because she was a fiend and coughed simply to torment him with guilt! And Jesus Christ, did his toe ever hurt! Matthew reached for the flashlight and sat on the edge of the bed examining his bloody nail. He needed to rip the thing off but lacked the courage to do so. Instead, he resumed the full layout position and began to practice hatha yoga breath control. He wasn’t doing it right, just operating on the basis of some half-remembered instructions from a meditation book one of his many counselors had laid on him.

  His toenail throbbed. He flipped on the flashlight again, gritted his teeth, and pulled the snagged edge of it loose and then flopped back in the position. Such a small few micrometers of tissue and such a great pain. A perfect metaphor for life! Fuck it, going to sleep now would be impossible!