by Peter Straub
By the time I reached the BUBBLE sign, five or six children had attached themselves to me, some of them still begging for dollah, others drilling questions at me in an incomprehensible mixture of English and Vietnamese. Two girls leaned out the windows of BUBBLE and watched me pass beneath the sign.
I turned right and heard the girls taunting me. Now I could smell wood smoke and hot oil. The shock of this unexpected world so close to the camp, and an equal, matching shock of pleasure almost made me forget that I had a purpose.
But I remembered the green door, and saw the name Ly picked out in sharp businesslike black letters above the knocker. The children keened and tugged at my clothes. I knocked softly at the door. The children became frantic. I dug in my pockets and threw a handful of coins into the street. The children rushed away and began fighting for the coins. My entire body was drenched in sweat.
The door cracked open, and a white-haired old woman with a plump, unsmiling face frowned out at me. Certain information was communicated instantly and wordlessly: I was too early. Customers kept her up half the night. She was doing me a favor by opening the door at all. She looked hard at my face, then looked me up and down. I pulled the bills from my pocket, and she quickly opened the door and motioned me inside, protecting me from the children, who had seen the bills and were running toward me, squeaking like bats. She slammed the door behind me. The children did not thump into the door, as I expected, but seemed to evaporate.
The old woman took a step away from me and wrinkled her nose in distaste, as if I were a skunk. “Name.”
“Underhill.”
“Nevah heah. You go way.”
She was still sniffing and frowning, as if to place me by odor.
“I’m supposed to buy something.”
“Nevah heah. Go way.” Li Ly snapped her fingers at the door, as if to open it by magic. She was still inspecting me, frowning, as if her memory had failed her. Then she found what she had been looking for. “Dimstro,” she said, and almost smiled.
“Di Maestro.”
“Da dett man.”
The dead man? The death man?
She lowered her arm and gestured me toward a camp table and a wooden chair with a rush seat. “What you want?”
I told her.
“Sis?” Again the narrow half-smile. Six was more than di Maestro’s usual order: she knew I was being diddled.
She padded into a back room and opened and closed a series of drawers. In the enclosed front room, I began to smell myself. Da dett man, that was me too.
Li Ly came out of the back room carrying a rolled cellophane parcel of handmade cigarettes. Ah, I thought, pot. We were back to the recreations of Berkeley. I gave Li Ly twenty-five dollars. She shook her head. I gave her another dollar. She shook her head again. I gave her another two dollars, and she nodded. She tugged at the front of her loose garment, telling me what to do with the parcel, and watched me place the wrapped cigarettes inside my shirt. Then she opened the door to the sun and the smells and the heat.
The children materialized around me again. I looked again at the smallest, the filthy child of two I had noticed earlier. His eyes were round, and his skin was a smooth shade darker than the dusty gold of the others. His hair was screwed up into tight rabbinical curls. Whenever the other children bothered to notice him, they gave him a blow. I sprinted across the street to another open-fronted shop and bought Jack Daniels from a bowing skeleton. The children followed me almost to the gate, where the soldier on duty scattered them with a wave of his M-16.
In the shed di Maestro unrolled the cellophane package and inspected each tight white tube. “Ly Li loves your little educated ass,” he said.
Scoot had produced a bag of ice cubes from the enlisted man’s club and dropped some of them into plastic glasses. Then he cracked open the first bottle and poured for himself. “Life on the front,” he said. He drank the entire contents of his glass in one swallow. “Outstanding.” He poured himself another glass.
“Take this slow,” di Maestro said to me. “You won’t be used to this stuff. In fact, you might wanna sit down.”
“What do you think we did at Berkeley?” I said, and several of my colleagues called me a sorry-ass shit.
“This is a little different,” di Maestro said. “It ain’t just grass.”
“Give him some and shut him the fuck up,” said Attica.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You’ll like it,” di Maestro said. He placed a cigarette in my mouth and lit it with his Zippo.
I drew in a mouthful of harsh, perfumed smoke, and Scoot sang, “Hoo-ray and hallelujah, you had it comin’ to ya, Goody for her, goody goody for me, I hope you’re satisfied, you rascal you.”
Holding the smoke as di Maestro inhaled and passed the long cigarette to Ratman, I scooped ice cubes into a plastic glass. Di Maestro winked at me, and Ratman took two deep drags before passing the cigarette to Scoot. I poured whiskey over the ice and walked away from the table.
“Hoo-ray and hallelujah,” Scoot rasped, holding the smoke in his lungs.
My knees felt oddly numb, almost rubbery. Something in the center of my body felt warm, probably the Jack Daniels. Picklock lit up the second cigarette, and it came around to me by the time I had taken a couple of sips of my drink.
I sat down with my back against the wall.
“Goody goody for it, goody goody for shit, goody goody for war, goody goody for whores …”
“We oughta have music,” Ratman said.
“We have Scoot,” said di Maestro.
Then the world abruptly went away and I was alone in a black void. A laughing void lay on either side of me, a world without time or space or meaning.
For a moment I was back in the shed, and Scoot was saying, “Damn right.”
Then I was not in the shed with the body squad and the five units, but in a familiar world full of noise and color. I saw the peeling paint on the side of the Idle Hour Tavern. A neon beer sign glowed in the window. The paint had once been white, but the decay of things was as beautiful as their birth. Elm leaves heaped up in the gutter brown and red, and through them cool water sluiced toward the drain. Experience itself was sacred. Details were sacred. I was a new person in a world just being made.
I felt safe and whole—the child within me was also safe and whole. He set down his rage and his misery and looked at the world with eyes refreshed. For the second time that day I knew I wanted more of something: a taste of it was not enough. I knew what I needed.
This was the beginning of my drug addiction, which lasted, off and on, for a little more than a decade. I told myself that I wanted more, more of that bliss, but I think I really wanted to recapture this first experience and have it back entire, for nothing in that decade-and-a-bit ever surpassed it.
During that decade, a Millhaven boy who has much more to do with this story than I do began his odd divided life. He lost his mother at the age of five; he had been taught to hate, love, and fear a punishing deity and a sinful world. The boy’s name was Fielding Bandolier, but he was known as Fee until he was eighteen; after that he had many names, at least one for each town where he lived. Under one of these names, he has already appeared in this story.
I was in Singapore and Bangkok, and Fee Bandolier’s various lives were connected to mine only by the name of a record, Blue Rose, recorded by the tenor saxophonist Glenroy Breakstone in 1955 as a memorial to his pianist, James Treadwell, who had been murdered. Glenroy Breakstone was Millhaven’s only great jazz musician, the only one worthy of being mentioned with Lester Young and Wardell Grey and Ben Webster. Glenroy Breakstone could make you see musical phrases turning over in the air. Passionate radiance illuminated those phrases, and as they revolved they endured in the air, like architecture.
I could remember Blue Rose note for note from my boyhood, as I demonstrated to myself when I found a copy in Bangkok in 1981, and listened to it again after twenty-one years in my room upstairs over the flower market. It was on t
he Prestige label. Tommy Flanagan replaced James Treadwell, the murdered piano player. Side One: “These Foolish Things”; “But Not for Me”; “Someone to Watch Over Me”; “Star Dust.” Side Two: “It’s You or No One”; “Skylark”; “My Ideal”; “ ’Tis Autumn”; “My Romance”; “Blues for James.”
4
WHEN I EMERGED FROM THE TRANCE induced by Li Ly’s cigarettes, I found myself seated on the floor of the shed beside the desk, facing the open loading bay. Di Maestro was standing in the middle of the room, staring with great concentration at nothing at all, like a cat. His right index finger was upraised, as if he were listening to a complicated bit of music. Pirate was seated against the opposite wall, holding another 100 in one hand and a dark brown drink in the other.
“Enjoy the trip?”
“What’s in there besides grass?” My mouth was full of glue.
“Opium.”
“Aha,” I said. “Any left?”
He inhaled and nodded toward the desk. I craned my neck and saw two long cigarettes lying loose between the typewriter and the bottle. I took them from the desk and put them in my shirt pocket.
Pirate made a tsk, tsk sound against his teeth with his tongue.
I squinted into the sunlight on the other side of the bay and saw Picklock lying in the bed of the truck, either asleep or in a daze. He looked like an oversized dog. If you got too close he would bristle and woof. Di Maestro attended to his imperious music. Scoot was ranging back and forth over the body bags, humming to himself as he looked at the tags. Attica was gone. Ratman, at first glance also missing, finally appeared as a pair of boots protruding from beneath the body of the truck. One of the bottles of Jack Daniel’s had disappeared, probably with Attica, and the other was three-fourths empty.
I discovered the glass in my hand. All the ice had melted. I drank some of the warm watery liquid, and it cut through the glue in my mouth.
“Who lives outside the camp?” I asked.
“Where you were? That’s inside the camp.”
“But who are they?”
“We have won their hearts and minds,” Pirate said.
“Where do the kids come from?”
“Benny’s from heaven,” Pirate said, obscurely.
Di Maestro lowered his finger. “I believe I’d accept another cocktail.”
To my surprise, Pirate got to his feet, walked in my direction across the shed, and put his hand around a glass left on the desk. He poured an inch of whiskey into it and gave the glass to di Maestro. Then he went back to his old place.
“When first I came to this fucking paradise,” di Maestro said, still carefully regarding his invisible point in space, “there must have been no more than two-three kids out there. Now there’s almost ten.” He drank about half of what was in his glass. “I think all of ’em kinda look like Red Dog Atwater.” This was the name of our C.O.
Scoot stopped humming. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, sweet Jesus on a pole.”
“Listen to that hillbilly,” di Maestro said.
Scoot was so excited that he was pulling on his ponytail. “They finally got him. He’s here. The goddamn son of a bitch is dead.”
“It’s a friend of Scoot’s,” Pirate said.
Scoot was kneeling beside one of the body bags, running his hands over it and laughing.
“Close friend,” said Pirate.
“He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects,” said Scoot. He unzipped the bag in one quick movement and looked up, challenging di Maestro to stop him. That smell that set us apart came from the bag.
Di Maestro leaned over and peered down into the bag.
“So that’s him.”
Scoot laughed like a happy baby. “This makes my fuckin’ month. And I almost missed him. I knew he’d get wasted some day, so I kept checkin’ the names, but today’s the day he comes in.”
“He’s got that pricky little nose,” di Maestro said. “He’s got those pricky little eyes.”
Picklock stirred in the truck bed, sat up, rubbed his eyes, and grinned. Like Scoot, Picklock was generally cheered by fresh reminders that he was in Vietnam. The door at the far end of the shed opened, and I turned around to see Attica saunter in. He was wearing sunglasses and a clean shirt, and he brought with him a sharp clean smell of soap.
“Chest wound,” di Maestro said.
“He died slow, at least,” said Scoot.
“That Havens?” Attica’s saunter picked up a little speed. He tilted his head and tipped an imaginary hat as he passed me.
“I found Havens,” Scoot said. There was awe in his voice. “He almost got through.”
“Who checked his tag?” Attica asked, and stopped moving for an instant.
Di Maestro slowly turned toward me. “On your feet, Underdog.”
I picked myself up. A fragment of that peace that had altered my life had returned.
“Did you check the tags on Captain Havens?”
It was a long time ago, but I could dimly remember checking a captain’s tags.
Attica’s rich dark laugh sounded like music—like Glenroy Breakstone, in fact. “The professor didn’t know shit about Havens.”
“Uh huh.” Scoot was gloating down into the bag in a way that made me uneasy.
I asked who Havens was.
Scoot tugged his ponytail again. “Why do you think I wear this fuckin’ thing? Havens. This is my protest.” The word struck him. “I’m a protestor, di Maestro.” He stuck up two fingers in the peace symbol.
“Baby,” di Maestro said. “Bomb Hanoi.”
“Fuck that, bomb Saigon.” He leveled an index finger at me. His eyes burned far back in his head, and his cheeks seemed sunken. Scoot was always balanced on an edge between concentration and violence, and all the drugs did was to make this more apparent. “I never told you about Havens? Didn’t I give you the Havens speech?”
“You didn’t get around to it yet,” di Maestro said.
“Fuck the Havens speech,” said Scoot. His sunken, intent look was frightening exactly to the extent that it showed he was thinking. “You know what’s wrong with this shit, Underdog?” He gave the peace symbol again and looked at his own hand as if seeing the gesture for the first time. “All the wrong people do this. People who think there are rules behind the rules. That’s wrong. You fight for your life till death do you part, and then you got it made. Peace is the fight, man. You don’t know that, you’re fucked up.”
“Peace is the fight,” I said.
“Because there ain’t no rules behind the rules.”
That I nearly understood what he was saying scared me—I did not want to know whatever Scoot knew. It cost too much.
Havens must have been the reason Scoot was on the body squad instead of out in the field where he belonged. I had been wondering what someone like Scoot could do that would be bad enough to banish him from his regular unit, and it occurred to me that now I was about to find out.
Scoot stared at di Maestro. “You know what’s gonna happen here.”
“We’ll send him home,” di Maestro said.
“Gimme a drink,” Scoot said. I poured the rest of the Jack Daniels into my glass and walked across the shed to get a look at Captain Havens. I gave Scoot the glass and looked down at a brown-haired American man. His jaw was square, and so was his forehead. He had that pricky little nose and those pricky little eyes. A transparent sheet of adhesive plastic covered the hole in his chest. Scoot tossed the glass back to me and detached his knife from its peculiar thong, which looked more than ever like a body part. Then I saw what it was.
Scoot noticed my quiver of revulsion, and he turned his crazy glance on me again. “You think this is about revenge. You’re wrong. It’s proof.”
Proof that he was right and Captain Havens had been wrong—wrong from the start. No matter what he said, I still thought it was revenge.
Attica took an interested step forward. Picklock sat up straight in the back of the truck.
Scoot leaned
over Captain Havens’s body and began sawing off his left ear. It took more effort than I had imagined it would, and the long cords of muscle stood out in his arm. At length the white-gray bit of flesh stretched and came away, looking smaller than it had on Captain Havens’s head.
“Dry it out, be fine in a week or two,” Scoot said. He placed the ear beside him on the concrete and bent over Captain Havens like a surgeon in midoperation. He was smiling with concentration. Scoot pushed the double-edged point beneath the hair just beside the wound he had made and began running the blade upward along the hairline.
I turned away, and someone handed me the last of the 100 that had been circulating. I took another hit, handed back the roach, and walked past Attica toward the door. “Make a nice wall mount,” Attica said.
As soon as I got outside, the sunlight poured into my eyes and the ground swung up toward me. I staggered for a moment. The sound of distant shelling came to me, and I turned away from the main part of the camp, irrationally afraid that body parts were going to fall out of the sky.
I moved aimlessly along a dirt track that led through a stand of weedy trees—spindly trunks with a scattering of leaves and branches at their tops, like afterthoughts. It came to me that the army had chosen to let these miserable trees stand. Normally they leveled every tree in sight. Therefore, they wanted to hide whatever was behind the trees. I felt like a genius for having worked this out.
An empty village had been erected on the far side of the growth of trees. One-story wooden structures marched up both sides of two intersecting streets. There were no gates and no guards. Before me in the center of the suburb, on a little green at the intersection of the two streets, an unfamiliar military flag hung limply beside the Stars and Stripes.
It looked like a ghost town.
A man in black sunglasses and a neat gray suit walked out of one of the little frame buildings and looked at me. He crossed over the rough grass in front of the next two structures, glancing at me now and then. When he reached the third building he jumped up the steps and disappeared inside. He had looked as out of place as Magritte’s locomotive coming out of a fireplace.