by Peter Straub
The lighter flared again. I could see Poole’s extended arm, the jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole’s head. He moved away from the opening.
“What is it? Are there any”—the lieutenant’s voice made a creaky sound—“any bodies?”
“Come down here, Tim,” Poole called up.
I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.
Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was sickeningly strong.
“What do you see?” the lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.
I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.
“Hot,” Poole said, and closed the lighter.
“Come on, damn it,” came the lieutenant’s voice. “Get out of there.”
“Yes, sir,” Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room. The topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.
“Well, well,” Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.
“I want you guys out of there, and I mean now,” whined the lieutenant.
Poole snapped the lighter shut, and we moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand, but of course he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We stiff-armed ourselves up out of the hole. The lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and a thick, fleshy nose, and his adam’s apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. “Well, how many?”
“How many what?” I asked.
“How many are there?” He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.
“There weren’t exactly any bodies, Lieutenant,” said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.
“Well, what’s that good for?” He meant, How is that going to help me?
“Interrogations, probably,” Poole said. “If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods.”
“Field Interrogation Post,” said the lieutenant, trying out the phrase. “Torture, Use Of, highly indicated.” He nodded again. “Right?”
“Highly,” Poole said.
“Shows you what kind of enemy we’re dealing with in this conflict.”
I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with the lieutenant, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use Of, highly indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry—I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.
For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: “The Walk to the Paradise Gardens,” from A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of times.
If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I stopped moving. A boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there—I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that’s what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that “The Walk to the Paradise Gardens” was about two children who were about to die and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. I took in his fair hair and round dark eyes, the worn plaid shirt and dungarees that made him look like someone I might have known in my childhood in Pigtown. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud.
I said something to the other two men and went through the door into the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the lieutenant asking Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain. Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill’s cigarette, and Tina Pumo exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me with absolute conviction that this was the Paradise Gardens. The men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green background of the paddy.
My soul had come back to life.
Then I became aware of something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. A wonderful soldier named M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.
Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light, Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his mysterious letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.
“Let’s saddle up,” the lieutenant said. “We aren’t doing jack shit around here.”
“Tim?” Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.
“Well, what was it?” asked Tina Pumo. “Was it juicy?”
Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.
“Aren’t we gonna torch this place?” asked Spitalny.
The lieutenant ignored him. “Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post.”
“No shit,” said Pumo.
“These people are into torture, Pumo. It’s just another indication.”
“Gotcha.” Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.
“I was just remembering something,” I said. “Something from the world.”
“You better forget about the world while you’re over here, Underhill,” the lieutenant told me. “I’m trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn’t noticed, but you have to cooperate with me.” His adam’s apple jumped like a begging puppy.
The next night we had showers, real food, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut.
I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was si
tting in the brothers’ tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisical: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and which he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names—“Cherokee” and “KoKo,” “Indiana” and “Donna Lee”—or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words—“I Thought About You” (Art Tatum), “You and the Night and the Music” (Sonny Rollins), “I Love You” (Bill Evans), “If I Could Be with You” (Ike Quebec), “You Leave Me Breathless” (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, “Thou Swell,” by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.
On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.
After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, “Enough.” The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.
“I’m gonna have a smoke and a drink,” Cotton announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly’s shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.
Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.
Dengler looked at me and smiled. “What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?” He did not wait for me to answer. “I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.”
“Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,” Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.
Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, he never looked as though he belonged in uniform. “Here’s what I mean, kind of,” he said. “When we were listening to that trumpet player—”
“Brownie, Clifford Brown,” Spanky whispered.
“—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.”
“Sweetie-pie,” Spanky said softly. “You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.”
“When we were back in that village,” Dengler said. “Tell me about that.”
I said that he had been there too.
“But something happened to you. Something special.”
I shook my head.
“All right,” Dengler said. “But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.”
I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this, and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to write.
2
ILEFT THE TENT with a vague notion of getting outside into the slight coolness that followed the rain. The sun, visible again, was a deep orange ball far to the west. A packet of white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.
The shack where an enterprising weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor was all the way on the other side of camp. The enlisted men’s club was rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese “33” beer in American bottles.
One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted man’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.
A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor.
The building stood in a grove of trees in the curve of the road, and as I walked downhill toward it in the sunset, a muddy camouflaged jeep gradually emerged from invisibility on the right side of the bar, floating out of the trees like an optical illusion.
Low male voices stopped when I stepped onto the rotting porch. I looked for insignia on the jeep, but mud caked the door panels. Some white object gleamed dully from the backseat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.
The door opened before I could reach the handle. A boy called Mike stood before me in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt too large for him. Then he saw who I was. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in.” He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me an uncomfortable smile.
“It’s okay?” I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t.
“Yesss.” He stepped back to let me in.
The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. Pungent cordite hung in the air. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.
“Oh, hell,” someone said from off to my left. “We have to put up with this?”
I turned my head and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even murkier.
“Is okay, is okay,” said Mike. “Old customer. Old friend.”
“I bet he is,” the voice said. “Just don’t let any women in here.”
“No women,” Mike said. “No problem.”
I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.
“You want whiskey, Tim?” Mike asked.
“Tim?” the man said. “Tim?”
“Beer,” I said, and sat down.
A nearly empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them
. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnny Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s well-guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife.
“I just want to make sure about this,” he said. “You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?”
“Anything you say,” I said.
He put his hand on the gun.
“Got it,” I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer.
“Tim. Funny name. Sounds like a little guy—like him.” He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. “Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.”
“Don’t you like women?” I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse.
I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.
“This rear-echelon dipshit is personally interfering with my state of mind,” the drunk said to the burly man on his right. “Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue.”
“Leave him alone,” the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.
The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.