Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  Hanson looked at the photo on the card. It had been taken three years before, in basic training. It looked like a mug shot of a criminal. The person in the photo had a shaved head and was staring dully somewhere beyond the camera.

  The bartender set a drink in front of Hanson and said, “One fifty.” Hanson laid some bills on the bar. The bartender took two and walked away as Hanson sipped his drink and thought about what had happened in the past three years. He was thinking about the skull when the young soldier walked in.

  “Okay if I sit down, Sarge?”

  He was infantry, eleven-bravo, grunt, sixteen weeks of training. The kind of kid who gets killed in the first two months, before he learns what to be afraid of, what to look out for, before he understands that there are people out there who are really trying to kill him. It would probably happen in the first or second operation. In the regular infantry units they don’t worry about new guys. The troops who have survived a few months look out for themselves and their buddies.

  “Sure,” Hanson said.

  “I don’t want to bother you…”

  “Sit on down.”

  The kid set a thick manila folder on the bar. His 201 file, a record of his life for the past sixteen weeks, medical history, uniforms and insignia issued, inoculations, pay vouchers, unit clearance forms, next-of-kin insurance forms, rifle qualification, Geneva Convention training certificate, and, right on top, his travel orders for Military Assistance Command Vietnam—MACV. He was going to the 3rd Mech.

  Hanson looked at him in the dim light, and he saw the basic Army-issue dead eighteen-year-old. When Hanson looked at him, he saw him as he would look when he was dead. They all looked alike when they were dead.

  “Look,” Hanson said, “I’ve got to catch a plane, but let me give you some quick, free advice.”

  “Sure, Sarge,” he said, trusting Hanson because of the green beret and the ribbons on his uniform.

  “Okay. When you get to your unit you look around for someone who’s been there six or eight months. Do what he does. The reason he’s still alive is because he knows what he’s doing. Try and stay in the middle of the column on operations. The middle is good. And don’t be afraid of being scared. People start shooting, you get down on the ground, okay? Give yourself a chance to figure things out. You make the first two months alive, and you’ve got it made.”

  Hanson stood up and said, “Don’t sweat it, you’ll be okay. I can tell.” He pushed the bills lying on the bar over in front of the kid. “Buy you a drink. When you get back a year from now you can buy somebody else one. Take care now.”

  As he walked out of the bar, the kid said, “Thanks a lot, Sarge.”

  “Thanks a lot, Sarge,” Hanson muttered to himself as he walked quickly away. “Thanks a lot for lying to me, for not telling me that I’ll be dead in six weeks. Thanks for the drink, Sarge.”

  As he walked toward his boarding gate, he passed a huge bank of TV screens set into the wall. They were all turned to different channels, mostly game shows and soap operas. The sound was off, and the whole wall flickered and blinked like a monstrous computer screen as the camera angles jumped and cut from scene to scene. On the game shows people were laughing and jumping up and down, hugging TV sets and ovens, people dressed like clowns and vegetables.

  A little boy walked up to Hanson, watching him hard. “Were you in the war?” he demanded.

  “Yes, sir, young man.”

  “How many people did you kill, then?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes you shoot at them and they shoot at you, and you can’t tell if you killed anyone or not.”

  The boy was disappointed. He looked at Hanson for a moment, then said, “Well, was it a lot?”

  “Yeah, I guess it was.”

  The little boy grinned savagely. “I knew it was a lot,” he said.

  “Matthew,” a thin, angry woman called from down the concourse, “come here right now.”

  The little boy ran to her, and she took his hand, glaring at Hanson. She walked on down the passageway, and the little boy twisted away from her like a demon and grinned back at Hanson.

  One screen on the bank of TVs stood out like a blind eye. It was black and white, and it kept showing the time, temperature, humidity, and wind speed, one fact indifferently replacing the next.

  It was raining when Hanson’s plane began to taxi down the runway. The tiny raindrops pulled themselves across the round window, lurching sideways toward the tail. The domes and spires of the refinery gleamed under thousands of floodlights. They floated in the boiling white smoke and bursts of yellow flame. It looked like a city in the act of destroying itself. Hanson couldn’t hear any explosions. He wondered what it would be like if he were deaf. But you can feel the explosions that come close enough to hurt you.

  The brakes squealed as the plane stopped. It sat back and shuddered as the engines began to rev. Hanson touched the window lightly with the back of his hand and felt the pitch of the engines.

  They began to move. A black and white sign flashed past that said K-4 RUD CLOSED. Then the blue runway lights were snapping past like bursts of memory or fore-knowledge of events you can’t prevent, and the plane was in the clouds.

  It was black outside the window, and Hanson watched the raindrops drag themselves across the glass. He wondered if it was the jet exhaust or the wind speed that made them act that way.

  The pilot announced that it was seventy-two degrees below zero outside the plane.

  In the seat behind him a child began to cry. A woman’s voice said, “Jason, if you don’t stop that I’m really going to give it to you when we get home.”

  He kept crying.

  Hanson couldn’t remember ever seeing any children cry in Vietnam, not even the ones who were wounded, who had flies crawling on their wounds and faces. He tried to think of at least one, but he couldn’t.

  As he thought back, recalling face after face, he met the same listless stare each time. Not that they seemed to blame him for whatever had happened to them, but they expected him to do something. Most of the time all he could do was wait for the medivac and watch them die.

  THE BLUFFS

  Hanson was running the bluffs. Sixty feet below him the surf bore in on the cliffside, booming into the gray rock. Past the breakers and beyond the kelp beds, the sea folded into the horizon. The land rose slowly on his right. Tall blond grass covered the hill, curling away from the sea, up into the shadows of gnarled evergreen windbreaks. He ran the winding lip of the bluffs at a steady pace, relaxed, head slightly back. He ran toward the pain. It came dully at first, in his calves and chest, swelling until it pumped through his blood, until it filled him. He smiled, his eyes the color of the ocean, and began chanting softly:

  Here we go

  all the way

  Airborne.

  All the way

  Airborne, hunh!

  I can run…Airborne

  I can jump…Airborne

  I can kill…Airborne.

  Hunh! I can kill,

  Airborne.

  “I can kill…Airborne, Airborne, Airborne,” until the pain began to fail and fall away. It came at him like ragged gusts at the edge of a powerful wind, and then he was through pain into the pure violence that breaks just beyond. It was raw oxygen and adrenaline and he could run forever. The wind was at his back now. The wind cupped around him, took him in.

  “Airborne Ranger, Green Beret…Make my money blowin’ gooks away, hunh, here we go, all the way…” When the whole team ran together they slowly increased their speed, almost sprinting the last lap around the perimeter of the launch site. Montagnard team members watched them, laughing at the Americans for running in the heat.

  “Come on, ladies,” Quinn roared. “Pick up the step. Charles is gonna have your ass for sure, you that slow. That fish-breath little rice burner gonna be runnin’ behind you with his hand in your panties.”

  Dawson, out of breath and laughing at Quinn’s accent, shouted,
“Quinn, quit playing nigger drill sergeant and slide your paddy ass back in formation. You fuckin’ up my timing. Don’t nobody talk that way. Maybe they talk that way in some weird place, in Australia or some shit.”

  No one got out of step, and the pace kept getting faster, the left jump boot slamming down harder than the right to keep time, pounding out the rhythm of the team in tight formation.

  “I’ll double-time down Tu Do Street…Kill more Cong than I can eat…Ha! Here we go, all the way…” Running with the team was being one of the bricks in a flying wall that could crush anything that opposed it, miles of slamming that left jump boot down, running beyond endurance: not through thinking, but through the assurance—held so long and confirmed with each thud and push of that high-topped, spit-shined paratrooper boot that it was never even put into words, certainly never questioned—that none of them would ever die.

  Silver yelled back over his shoulder, out of breath, his wire-rim glasses flashing in the sun. “Quinn. Probably some people talk that way. In California. Whole neighborhoods, probably. They got everything in California. They got everything there that you don’t want.”

  Hanson eased his pace, watching one of the small hawks that hover against the offshore winds of Mendocino, California. The hawk’s wings and splayed tail feathers quivered as it held like a kite on a string, searching for movement in the sea grass. As Hanson slowed to a walk, the wedge-shaped bird tipped one wing, tucked its talons, took the wind, and was gone.

  Hanson walked halfway up the hill and lay down in the waist-high grass. He tore a piece from one of the broad blades and put it in his mouth. It tasted of sea salt. He bit into it and the saltiness gave way to bitter juice. Hanson thought of the two tastes as a fragile sandy brown suddenly masked by a thick wipe of dark green.

  He cut his eyes sideways. Something was moving toward him through the grass, not a field mouse or thrush, something much bigger than that. The grass dipped and popped back up.

  A badger pulled himself out of the grass, his head weaving strangely from side to side, and started across the little clearing that Hanson had beaten down. He staggered into Hanson’s foot, then lurched on out of the clearing.

  Hanson rose slowly. Something was wrong with this animal—thirty pounds of muscle, teeth, and claws that even bears go out of their way to avoid. He had read about a species of badger that was the only animal, except man, known to kill for no apparent reason. Not for food, nor defense, but out of some sort of anger or simple, ruthless joy. “He is a puzzle to scientists,” the article had said. Hanson smiled, recalling the phrase, and followed behind the badger as it floundered on through the grass. Clusters of swollen ticks hung like dusty grapes from the badger’s jaw and throat.

  Weak from loss of blood and the toxin that ticks produce to keep the blood flowing, the badger looked up at Hanson and hissed. All his teeth were fangs. An animal with teeth like that, Hanson thought, has no fear, no mercy, and no regret.

  Hanson took off his shirt and wrapped it around his left hand. He held the groggy badger down with that hand and began pulling the ticks off with his right, carefully working them loose so as not to leave the heads in the badger. One by one he pulled them out of the coarse brown fur, their tiny black heads and pincers flailing blindly, and squeezed them between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, until they popped. When he’d removed them all, his hand was sticky with black blood, pale shards of burst bodies, and, scattered across the back of his hand like seeds from crushed berries, the black flesh-boring heads of ticks, still alive though ruined, groping for purchase on the freckled skin.

  The cabin was chilly and damp. She was in the bedroom reading. Though it was getting dark, she still wore the gray-tinted wire-rim glasses. She had a handsome, wide-featured face and was wearing a long cotton dress and a hand-knit shawl. Everything about her—the tasteful, expensive clothes, her calm brown eyes shaded by the gray glasses, her slow, calm voice and easy logic, reflected a life in which there had always been enough money, and time, and room to move away from anything unpleasant. She had spent the previous summer in Taos, New Mexico, where an aura balancer had read her tarot. “You will always have young lovers,” the woman had told her. She had picked Hanson up in a bar the month before, and he’d been living with her since then.

  The money he’d saved in ’Nam was gone. He’d drunk it up, given it away, spent it on airplane tickets and rental cars. The cabin had been good at first. He’d been glad to be away from the cities where there was too much noise, too many people who didn’t pay attention, who talked too much and got in his way. In the cities he’d provoked fights with strangers whose faces he couldn’t recall, for reasons he didn’t remember, and found himself sobering up on a bus or plane, trying to remember what he’d done. He would finger the cuts on his cheek, or suck his skinned knuckles, and try to remember, sore and hung over. When it did come back to him, he’d try to forget again, glad to be clear and not in jail. Two assault charges, one in Denver and the other in Palo Alto, were gathering dust in the inactive files of the two police departments, the “Suspect Information” boxes empty except for the words “Male Cauc, 5′10″, 150#, med brn hair, dk jacket, blu jeans.” Another box on the forms asked, Weapon/force used, and was filled in, “Hands/to hit. Feet/to kick.”

  It had been better since the cabin. He’d begun to watch himself, watch for the signs, and avoid people when he felt it coming on. But the winter rains were beginning; things seemed to be closing in. The omens were unfavorable.

  Hanson scooped the ashes out of the Franklin stove and swept it clean of soot. He stuffed newspapers under the grate, then carefully laid Xs of small kindling, crossed and interlocked sticks of larger kindling over that, balanced two wedges of dry fir on top, and touched it off.

  The paper flared, burning away a full-page ad for power mowers; the kindling caught, and in a minute the big chunks of fir were flaming. The logical progression of fire always pleased him. A slow, controlled explosion.

  Then she was in the room talking about her weekend—another encounter group “mini-marathon”: two days without sleep in a geodesic dome back up in the redwoods, with twenty other people and “Jonathan,” the group leader. That summer in Taos, when she found the aura balancer, she had stopped taking LSD.

  “God,” she said, “it was fantastic. Really. Something very real happened this time. Spaces opened. You could feel the spaces open.”

  She laughed, took a drag on her cigarette, and flung her arms wide, her shawl swirling gracefully.

  “I was surrounded by people attacking me because they cared about me—as me. Then that space opened and it was full of support, sharing with them, getting in touch with ourselves and our feelings. Like…even if I don’t like someone, that’s fine because it opens things up for honesty.”

  She was smoking furiously.

  “There I was the first afternoon with everyone watching, and Jonathan asks me, ‘What do you feel?’

  “And I thought, and said, ‘Nothing. I feel nothing…I don’t trust what I feel.’ And Jonathan just smiled—he has a wonderful smile—and he said, ‘We hear what you’re saying, and that’s how we begin to really feel, by admitting that we feel nothing.’ ”

  As he turned to go into the kitchen, Hanson said, “Jonathan wants to feel something in your panties.”

  He walked through the kitchen door, and a cluster of roaches broke like a lacquered sunburst, fanning out as they ran for safety behind the sink.

  “Nice maneuver, roaches,” Hanson said, speaking to the dark space between the sink and the wall. “Precise and coordinated. I’ll give you that.”

  He didn’t like the roaches, but he felt that since they had been there before he’d moved into the cabin, they had as much right to stay as he did. He went out of his way not to step on them, and refused to let her put out poison for them. “Can you imagine what it must feel like,” he had told her, “to swallow that shit, and then have to crawl off and wait for it to eat your guts out? How could you slee
p knowing they’re in agony all over the house, dying all around you in the dark. Listening to them die.”

  Hanson did like the snails that had invaded the cabin when the winter rains began. He kept track of their slow, sure movements across the windows and redwood walls. When they found their spot, they would seal off the edges of their shells. Scattered about the walls, they looked like little knots of muscle pulling the house tight. Even in the heaviest rain the cottage no longer leaked as it had before they came. Their shells were all slightly different—striated earth colors, creams and browns—and very delicate. She had wanted to put them back outside, but even if she was careful, trying to slide them loose gently, once they had sealed off, the shells cracked and they died. Hanson had told her to leave them alone. Things had been better for him since the cabin, and the snails held the cabin together.

  Hanson glanced in to see how the fire was doing, and smiled.

  “Really real, really real, oh really really really really ree-al,” he sang, shuffling from foot to foot, flopping his head like a puppet. He turned and, looking through the empty doorway into the kitchen, smiled more broadly, nodded his head, and said in a hearty voice, “Hi, I’m Hanson. Is your encounter card filled? No? You know, there’s these feelings I have, that I’ve been, well, keeping bottled up. You see, I did these things.…Could I, you know, share them with you? Really? That’s very supportive of you.”

  He looked in the cupboard where he kept his wineglass, but it wasn’t there. His wine-drinking glass was a tall, thin jelly jar with fluted sides and a flaw running from lip to base like a transparent scar. He looked in the sink and through the other cupboards.

  “Where’s my glass?”

  Reaching farther back in the cupboard, he knocked a dime-store coffee mug off its hook with his elbow. The heavy white mug dropped harmlessly to the shelf.