Sergeant Dickinson

by Jerome Gold

  After forty-five minutes we started the truck engines and opened the valves to the hoses. I picked up my spray gun and began spraying. I had fallen asleep during the lunch break. My legs had twitched and jerked and once they had jerked strongly enough to raise me off the ground. More than the starting of the truck engines, my legs had waked me up. It was a crisp blue-sky day.

  The girl I lived with smelled bad before and after coupling. She did not know this. She thought it was the smell both of us left after love-making. I did not tell her.

  She was inhaling gasoline fumes. It was a very quick high. She passed the bottle to someone, then demanded it back. Then she got sick, she had a headache, she said, and sbe went to sleep on the floor. After awhile she drank some wine with everybody else.

  On the way home she was very sick. She had thrown up and vomit streaked the side of the car. Some of it was on her cheek.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Please don’t leave me. I won’t get sick again.”

  “I won’t. Be quiet now.”

  “You’re going to leave me. I can tell.”

  “No. You’re wrong. Here. You have something on your cheek.”

  In the morning the blinds were not drawn so that alternating slats of sunlight and shadow striped the bedroom. Elaine was getting dressed.

  “How can I know what to say when you don’t even tell me what you’re thinking?” she said.

  “Don’t say anything.”

  “They’re going to ask me, though.”

  “Then say whatever comes to mind.”

  “Oh, hell. They’re my parents, honey.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “All right. I’ll tell them something. I’ll tell them that you’re going back to school next semester. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Is that what you’ll do then?”

  “What?”

  “Go back to school. Isn’t that what we were just talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I might.”

  “Oh, Ray.”

  The first time I was shot I fell down and thought, this can’t be happening to me, although I had always known that I would not live through the year. Then I had to crawl fifteen feet and it took a long time because it was such a long distance. “I’m going into shock,” I told the medic. “No, you’re not. You’re doing fine. Where are you from, Sarge?” the medic said. Then the medic gave me morphine and helped me to the rear. On the way, we came upon a huge hole that was two feet deep. “How am I ever going to get around it?” I asked. “We’ll just walk around it,” the medic said. Then I fell into the hole. When they lifted me into the helicopter I was in great pain and the medic on board gave me morphine. In Saigon they gave me morphine again. It was a wonder to me that I did not die of good care, but I kept my mouth shut and waited for them to administer each shot.

  My legs jerked and I woke up. It was afternoon now. The sun did not slant through the blinds. I got dressed and went out for a walk. After a while I came home. Elaine was back.

  “Connie wants me to marry him. He was at my parents’.”

  “Who is Connie?”

  “Conrad. You remember him.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to hear what you would say.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Certainly it matters. It matters very much to me.”

  “I see. Yes. I suppose it does.”

  I could see the bones of my hand. Then I blinked and I could no longer see the bones for the blood. “I’m going into shock.” “No, you’re not. Where are you from, Sarge?”

  When you are dead, it is just like sleeping.

  I hate weekends.

  It would be Wednesday before we finished the grove. Three hundred and fifty acres of it would be gone next year. Housing. We watched the children at recess.

  “I wish I was a kid again,” Perez said. “Let my parents support me.”

  “Shit. I wouldn’t want to have to do anything over again,” Bob Miles said.

  When we got home the kitten was dead. It had found the ball of string and got one end of the string wrapped around its neck. The string was pulled taut between table legs and chair legs and the couch and led out the glass door to the terrace. Tbe kitten was hanging off of it.

  “Oh, Ray,” Elaine said. “Look what you’ve done. You’ve killed yourself, like in your dream.” She was still drunk.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Jeff.”

  “Hey, Dixie. I wondered if I’d see you again.”

  “I just came back to get discharged. From the hospital, I mean.”

  “You going to stay in the Army?”

  “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  “Going back to ‘Nam?”

  “Try to. Hey, where is everybody?”

  “Lowell’s around somewhere, playing with himself. Everybody else has either been transferred or discharged. The cancer sergeant is still here, of course.”

  “Yeah, I saw him. What do you mean, transferred?”

  “They’re turning the place into a cancer ward. They started moving us out right after you left. Me and Lowell are the last ones. They’re going to start moving the last-leggers in tomorrow, I think.”

  “The last-leggers?”

  “That’s what Tanner calls them. They’re all terminal cases.”

  “That’s lovely.”

  “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Hey, you’re looking good, Dixie. Been out in the sun.”

  “Yeah. Plenty of sun. What about you? Did they ever cut?”

  “Yeah, would you believe it? I thought they’d kill me first. But they’ve got me doing physical therapy in the pool now three times a week.”

  “Well, that’s great, isn’t it? That’s real good, Jeff.”

  “Yeah, another six months or a year and I’ll be out of here.”

  “It won’t be that long. You’ll see.”

  I had nothing more to say. Jeff watched me expectantly. I blurted:

  “They’re trying to kill us, Jeff. On the outside. They want us dead. The worst part is that I feel like I’m already dead. I think all the time about the guys who are dead and I feel like I should be dead too. I can see them mouldering in their graves, isn’t that how it goes, ‘John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in his grave’? I killed a cat. I drove it insane and it killed itself. I have these dreams, sometimes I can’t tell whether I’m dreaming or not, I’m somebody else killing myself. Does that make sense? I don’t think it was an accident when I blew myself up. I don’t think it was. The world is in pieces, I can’t pull them together. I want to destroy it, all of it, just blow it to hell up, put it out of its misery. They’re trying to kill us and I can’t keep myself from helping them to do it.”

  “Jesus Christ loves you, Dixie.”

  “What?”

  “He can help you if you let Him.”

  “They kill the dead, Jeff. They put them away where we can’t find them. They change them so we can’t recognize them. They make a lie out of everything.”

  “I’m not talking about a bunch of old men who think they know the truth, Dixie. I’m talking about Jesus Christ, your Savior.”

  “Listen, Jeff. If you want to substitute one set of lies for another, that’s your business. But leave me the hell out of it. Fuck you, Jeff. just fuck yourself.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 14

  The mess hall at Pleiku. Nothing has changed: There are the stainless-steel coffee pot, the cheesy can of condensed milk, the brown pressed-paper cups in disordered stacks, the aluminum bowl of stale popcorn, the spilled popcorn on the floor. At a table to the right of center toward the rear, four men in mixed uniform and mufti are playing poker. It is im
possible to tell from their manner which are the winners and which the losers, as all play with equal enthusiasm, laughing, slapping their cards on the table, gibing each other. At one of the tables in the Officers Section to the right rear a man is seated writing a letter. Occasionally he looks toward the card players, then returns to his writing. The fluorescent lighting flattens the scene against the depth of blackness seen through the windows where the curtains are not completely drawn.

  Roy and I are seated at the table nearest the coffee pot. Roy has aged: much of his hair has fallen out, so that what is left lies flat against the scalp, barely covering it. Under his eyes the skin sags in lined gray pouches. His face and arms where they are bare below his rolled sleeves have a yellow cast.

  First card player: “I got me some white meat when I was in Saigon.”

  Second player: “Bullshit, you say.”

  First player: “No, I really did. A secretary from the embassy.”

  Second player: “A male secretary, probably.”

  First player: “No. She had red hair.”

  Third player: “Christ, the last whore I had, I paid her twenty dollars and then she whined all the way through it that I was hurting her. I paid twenty bucks for her and her whining and felt like shit afterward. I finally threw her back on the bed and walked out and a half a block later I found a good lay for three dollars and got my choice of three girls.”

  Fourth player: “Is that the place where the Chinese watch you screw?”

  Third player: “What? What place is that?”

  Fourth player: “There’s a place in Cholon that rents peepholes to the Chinese so they can watch Americans screw. The Americans don’t know they’re being watched, of course, at least not usually. I’ve been there twice.”

  Laughter from the card players.

  Second player: “Did you really get some white stuff?”

  First player: “No.”

  Second player: “I didn’t think you did. What’s that rustling noise I hear?”

  Third player: “That lieutenant writing. Or rats in the kitchen.”

  Second player: “Rats, probably.”

  Roy says, “The last time I was in Saigon a pedicab driver took me to his sister to get laid. Her front teeth were missing. Remember that girl in Col6n who had gold teeth and someone told her that Americans didn’t like gold teeth and she had them pulled, she gave a great blow job? Anyway, this girl in Saigon had her front teeth missing and it turned me off, I just didn’t want to boom-boom her. But there was this other girl, to tell the truth she reminded me of a girl I knew in high school. So I said I didn’t want the older one and I asked the little one how much she charged. She gave me this funny look and said, ‘I too young. I not ready yet.’ So I asked her how old she was and she said, ’Nine.’ Man, I boom-boomed the shit out of her sister, she didn’t know what hit her. Afterward they followed me to the door, I didn’t even take a shower, and tried to get me to say what a good time I’d had and that I’d come back soon. Mama-san was there too, I hadn’t even noticed her when I came in, she was sitting at the table eating rice. The nine-year-old said that if I gave them not too much money every week her sister would boom-boom only me, not anyone else. Even the pedicab driver asked me if I’d had a good time. I lied my ass off and told him what a great lay his sister was and that I’d come back just as soon as I could, that I just couldn’t resist a fuck that good. Man, I just wanted to get away from there. Do you remember that half-caste we had in Vientiane? I had sloppy seconds?”

  “I remember. The last time you mentioned her you said I had sloppy seconds.”

  Roy laughs. “Did I? I don’t remember. Laos was a long time ago, wasn’t it? What, almost six years? More. She might be dead by now. Half nigger, half Lao. Back home she wouldn’t have made a good Georgia washerwoman. I was almost in love with her. Ah, that’s bullshit too.”

  “When are you going back?”

  “Where?”

  “Aren’t you going back to Da Nang?”

  “I’m catching a flight to Nha Trang in the morning. They’ll probably send me back to the States from there.”

  “To the States? Why?”

  “Ah, Doc Fischer says I have high blood pressure.”

  “They don’t usually send you back to the States for high blood pressure.”

  “Fischer thinks I may have tuberculosis, too. In Nha Trang they’ll probably dream up a few more things for me to have. I guess they figure it’s healthier to die in the States than in a foreign country. If you’d arrived a day later we never would have met again. Hell, the only reason I came back to Pleiku was because I was hoping Fischer would tell me something different from what they told me in Da Nang. Well. What’s it like in the States? Is it as bad as everyone says?”

  “It’s pretty bad.”

  “Shit.”

  “People are starving. We threw C-rations to them off the back of a deuce-and-a-half. It was horrible.”

  Roy laughs. “Seriously, is it really bad?”

  “Yeah. It’s bad.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll get used to it. Or I won’t. I guess there’s always a way out.”

  “Yes.”

  “At A Shau we had to shoot the Yards in order to get out. They were hanging on the helicopters when we took off. One fell off into the jungle, about a three-hundred-foot drop. Desperate. They were desperate, they knew what the NVA would do to them. We knew, too.”

  “It was in the Stateside newspapers.”

  “How the NVA treated them?”

  “No. About the evacuation of the camp.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Do you remember Galen? I think you mentioned him to me once. He was involved in the FULRO revolts a couple of years ago.”

  “Sure, I remember him.”

  “He was here, I mean at A Shau, just before we were overrun. He was recruiting for a ‘back-to-Laos movement,’ he called it. He said it was an Agency operation. Excuse me, it’s a ‘Company’ operation. They use the word Company instead of Agency this year.”

  “Was he recruiting Yards or Americans?”

  “Americans. The Yards will be from Laos.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said that there was some American colonel setting himself up as a great white god or something. He has Company backing, they’re supplying money and weapons. This colonel is putting together his own army. All Montagnard. No Vietnamese, no Laotians. And he’s looking for Americans who are willing to burn their draft cards. That’s what he said: ‘willing to burn their draft cards.’”

  “Desert?”

  “I think so. Galen said the Company would handle it, that it’s just a matter of paperwork, but I don’t know. It sounds pretty flaky to me, even if it is a Company operation.”

  “Were you thinking of doing it?”

  “I still am. If the Army tries to send me home I might do it. I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it some more.”

  “Especially if it’s desertion. How do you know it’s an Agency operation? Remember when we were at Bragg, there was a Cuban who was recruiting for another invasion of Cuba? He made it sound like the Americans had approved the whole thing. But they hadn’t, and there were people who went to jail. And the people who went to jail were Americans, not Cubans.”

  “I remember. Well, I’ll see what the doctors want to do with me.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this Laos thing?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Thanks.”

  The fourth card player stands up, stretches. “Deal me out for a few hands.”

  Third player: “You’re quitting?”

  Fourth player: “No. I’m just going to take a break, move around a little.”

  Third player: “I hate to see a guy quit when he’s ahead.”

  Fourth player: “Hey, asshole, I said I was just taking a break.”

  Third player: “You be cool, son. I’m gonna be hell on wheels in about five minutes if you do
n’t sit down.”

  The fourth player sits down. He is dealt into the game. The officer looks over at the card players, returns to his letter writing.

  Roy asks, “Did you hear about Saint James killing a couple of Americans a few weeks ago?”

  “No.”

  “He was getting his hair cut in a Vietnamese barbershop in Saigon and these two GIs come in and start shoving the barber around, telling him they’re going to cut him up, and they take out their knives. Saint James tells ‘em to knock it off. He’s wearing that Walther he always carries in a shoulder holster but it’s under the barber smock, and they tell him to shut up or they’ll cut him too. Then they start after the barber and Saint James shoots ‘em, two shots, one each in the head. He was up here a few days ago, just before they sent him back to the States. God knows what’ll happen to him there. The Army wanted to prosecute him here, but the Vietnamese intervened. But there are no Vietnamese at Bragg who can help him.”

  “A hell of a story.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder what ever happened to Spencer and that maid he raped.”

  “I heard he’s in Okinawa now. I don’t know what happened to her. Well. Did you see Elaine when you were home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine. She’s talking about getting married.”

  “To that guy she was with?”

  “No. Somebody else. I met him. He seems like a nice enough guy.”

  “I always liked Elaine.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m going to go back to my room, Dixie. Maybe if I can get some sleep I can pass that physical.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “No.”

  “Well, take care, Roy.”

  “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER 15

  You can tell the guys for whom this is their second or third or fourth tour when they arrive. The facial skin is tight against the skull in a shiny gloss, the pupils are contracted to pinpoints, the bony parts of the nose press out in white bumps against the skin as though to break through, the teeth are elongated inside bloodless lips. All of this is in anticipation, of course, and in memory of previous tours. The others, those beginning their first tour, are young, unblooded, they retain their color. But the war will outlive us all.