The Ends of the Earth
Page 25
“You always been scared,” said Buddha. “You bein’ scared’s what got them two men dead out there. Time for that to stop. You know you got the power. So go on!”
“I can’t!”
“You ain’t got no choice.” Buddha pulled Taboo’s head down gently and kissed him openmouthed, breathing into him a calming breath. “Do it,” he said. “Do it now.”
Hesitantly Taboo came to his feet. “Don’t you go nowhere now. You wait for me.”
“You know I will.”
“Awright.” Taboo took a few steps toward the bathroom, then stopped. “Buddha, I don’t…”
“Go on!”
Taboo lowered his head, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Buddha heard the tub filling, heard the splashing as Taboo climbed into it. Then heard him begin to mutter his charms. He needed to sleep, to fix, but he kept awake as long as he could, trying to help Taboo with the effort of his will. He could feel the vibrations of the magic working through the bathroom door. Finally he gave in to the pressures of exhaustion and the throbbing in his back and drifted off to sleep; the pain followed him into the blackness of sleep, glowing like the core of his being. He woke sometime later to hear Taboo calling his name and spotted him in the darkest corner of the room—a shadow outlined by painted stars.
“Taboo?”
“It don’t feel right, Buddha.” Taboo’s voice had acquired a husky timbre.
“C’mere, man.”
Taboo came a step closer, and though Buddha was still unable to see him, he could smell the heat and bitterness of the herbs.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Buddha asked. “It musta worked.”
“I think…But I feel so peculiar.”
“You just ain’t used to it is all…Now c’mere!”
Taboo moved still closer, and Buddha made out a naked young woman standing a few feet away. Slim and sexy, with shoulder-length black hair and high, small breasts and a pubic triangle that showed no sign of ever having been male.
The air around Taboo was still and dark. No ripples, no heat haze. The magic had all been used.
“I told ya,” said Buddha. “You beautiful.”
“I ain’t…I just ordinary.” But Taboo sounded pleased.
“Ordinary as angels,” Buddha said. “That’s how ordinary you are.”
Taboo smiled. It was faltering at first, that smile, but it grew wider when Buddha repeated the compliment: the smile of a woman gradually becoming confident of her feminine powers. She lay down beside Buddha and fingered his belt buckle. “I love you, Buddha,” she said. “Make me feel right.”
Love was a steady flow from her, as tangible as a perfume, and Buddha felt it seeping into him, coloring his calm emptiness. On instinct he started to reject the emotion, but then he realized he had one more duty to fulfill, the most taxing and compromising duty of all. He reached down and touched the place between Taboo’s legs. Taboo stiffened and pushed her hips against his finger.
“Make me feel right,” she said again.
Buddha tried to turn onto his side, but the pain in his back flared. He winced and lay motionless. “Don’t know if I can. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.”
“I’ll help you,” she said, her fingers working at his buckle, his zipper. “You won’t have to do nothin’, Buddha. You just let it happen now.”
But Buddha knew he couldn’t just let it happen, knew he had to return Taboo’s love in order to persuade her of her rightness, her desirability. As she mounted him, a shadow woman lifting and writhing against the false night of the ceiling stars, strangely weightless, he pinned his dead wife’s features to her darkened face, remembered her ways, her secrets. All the love and lust he had fought so long to deny came boiling up from nowhere, annihilating his calm. He dug his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips, wedging himself deep; he plunged and grunted, ignoring the pain in his back, immersed again in the suety richness of desire, in the animal turbulence of this most alluring of human involvements. And when she cried out, a mournful note that planed away to a whisper, like the sound a spirit makes falling through eternity, he felt the profound satisfaction of a musician who by his dominance and skill has brought forth a perfect tone from chaos. But afterward as she snuggled close to him, telling him of her pleasure, her excitement, he felt only despair, fearing that the empty product of his years of ascetic employment had been wasted in a single night.
“Come with me, Buddha,” she said. “Come with me to Miami. We can get us a house on the beach and…”
“Lemme be,” he said, his despair increasing because he wanted to go with her, to live high in Miami and share her self-discovery, her elation. Only the pain in his back—intensifying with every passing minute—dissuaded him, and it took all his willpower to convince her of his resolve, to insist that she leave without him, for Taboo and his dead wife had fused into a single entity in his mind, and the thought of losing her again was a pain equal to the one inflicted by Johnny Wardell.
At last, suitcase in hand, she stood in the doorway, the temptation of the world in a white silk dress, and said, “Buddha, please won’tcha…”
“Damn it!” he said. “You got what you want. Now get on outta here!”
“Don’t be so harsh wit’ me, Buddha. You know I love you.”
Buddha let his labored breathing be the answer.
“I’ll come see ya after a while,” she said. “I’ll bring you a piece of Miami.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Buddha?”
“Yeah.”
“In the bathtub, Buddha…I just couldn’t touch it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
She half-turned, glanced back. “I’ll always love you, Buddha.” The door swung shut behind her, but the radiance of her love kept beaming through the wood, strong and contaminating.
“Go on,” he murmured. “Get you a big white car.”
He waited until he heard the front door close, then struggled up from the bed, clamping his hand over his liver to muffle the pain. He swayed, on the verge of passing out; but after a moment he felt steadier, although he remained disoriented by unaccustomed emotion. However, the sight of the pitiful human fragment lying in the herb-steeped water of the bathtub served to diminish even that. He scooped it up in a drinking glass and flushed it down the toilet. Then he lay back on the bed again. Closed his eyes for a minute…at least he thought it was just a minute. But he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been asleep for a long, long time.
Buddha had to stop and rest half a dozen times on the way back to the shooting gallery, overcome by pain, by emotions…mostly by emotions. They were all around him as well as inside.
The shadows of the ruined houses were the ghosts of his loves and hates; the rustlings in the weeds were long-dead memories with red eyes and claws just waiting for a chance to leap out and snatch him; the moon—lopsided and orange and bloated—was the emblem of his forsaken ambitions shining on him anew. By loving Taboo he had wasted fifteen years of effort and opened himself to all the indulgent errors of his past, and he wished to God now he’d never done it. Then, remembering how dreamlike everything had seemed, he had the thought that maybe it hadn’t happened, that it had been a hallucination brought on by the liver punch. But recalling how it had felt to make love, the womanly fervor of Taboo’s moves, he decided it had to have been real. And real or not, he had lived it, he was suffering for it.
When he reached the shooting gallery he sat cross-legged on his mattress, heavy with despair. His back ached something fierce. Pete was angry with him for being late, but on seeing his discomfort he limped upstairs and brought down a needle and helped him fix. “What happened to ya?” he asked, and Buddha said it wasn’t nothin’, just a muscle spasm.
“Don’t gimme that shit,” said Pete. “You get hit by a goddamn car, and you be tellin’ me it ain’t ’bout nothin’.” He shook his head ruefully. “Well, to hell wit’ ya! I’m sick of worryin’ ’bout ya!”
Pete turned to go back up the stairs, and Buddha said, “Hey, Pete!”
“Yeah, what?”
“I love you, man,” said Buddha, and sent his love in a focused beam of such strength that he shivered as it went out of him.
Pete looked at him, perplexed. His expression changed to one of pleasure, then to annoyance. “You love me? Huh? Man, you been hangin’ out with that faggot too much, that’s what you been doin’!” He clumped a couple of steps higher and stopped. “Don’t bother comin’ upstairs for your goodnighter,” he said in gentler tones. “I’ll send it down wit’ somebody.”
“’Preciate it,” said Buddha.
He watched Pete round the corner of the stairwell, then lay down on the mattress. He was so free of desire and human connections that the instant he closed his eyes, golden pinpricks bloomed behind his lids, opened into Africa, and he was flying across the grasslands faster than ever, flying on the wings of the pain that beat like a sick heart in his back. The antelope did not run away but stared at him with wet, dark eyes, and the stick figures of those who guarded the village saluted him with their spears. The shadows of the masked women danced with the abandon of black flames, and in one of the huts a bearded old man was relating the story of a beautiful young woman who had driven a white car south to Miami and had lived wild for a time, had inspired a thousand men to greater wildness, had married and…Buddha flew onward, not wanting to hear the end of the story, knowing that the quality of the beginning was what counted, because all stories ended the same. He was satisfied that Taboo’s beginning had been worthwhile. He soared low above the green mountains, low enough to hear the peaceful chants of the gorillas booming through the hidden valleys, and soon was speeding above the lake wherein the solitary fish swam a slow and celebratory circle, arrowing toward the mists on its far side, toward those hallucinatory borders that he previously had neither the necessary courage nor clarity to cross.
From behind him sounded a distant pounding that he recognized to be someone knocking on the door of the shooting gallery, summoning him to his duty. For an instant he had an urge to turn back, to reinhabit the world of the senses, of bluesy-souled hookers and wired white kids and punks who came around looking to trade a night’s muscle work for a fix. And that urge intensified when he heard Pete shouting, “Hey, Buddha! Ain’t you gon’ answer the goddamn door?” But before he could act upon his impulse, he penetrated the mists and felt himself irresistibly drawn by their mysterious central whiteness, and he knew that when old Pete came downstairs, still shouting his angry question, the only answer he would receive would be an almost impalpable pulse in the air like the vibration of a gong whose clangor had just faded beneath the threshold of hearing, the pure signal struck from oblivion, the fanfare announcing Buddha’s dominion over the final country of the mind.
This little gook cadre with a pitted complexion drove me through the heart of Saigon—I couldn’t relate to it as Ho Chi Minh City—and checked me into the Hotel Heroes of Tet, a place that must have been quietly elegant and very French back in the days when philosophy was discussed over Cointreau rather than practiced in the streets, but now was filled with cheap production-line furniture and tinted photographs of Uncle Ho. Glaring at me, the cadre suggested I would be advised to keep to my room until I left for Cam Le; to annoy him I strolled into the bar, where a couple of Americans—reporters, their table laden with notebooks and tape cassettes—were drinking shots from a bottle of George Dickel. “How’s it goin’?” I said, ambling over. “Name’s Tom Puleo. I’m doin’ a piece on Stoner for Esquire.”
The bigger of them—chubby, red-faced guy about my age, maybe thirty-five, thirty-six—returned a fishy stare; but the younger one, who was thin and tanned and weaselly handsome, perked up and said, “Hey, you’re the guy was in Stoner’s outfit, right?” I admitted it, and the chubby guy changed his attitude. He put on a welcome-to-the-lodge smile, stuck out a hand, and introduced himself as Ed Fierman, Chicago Sun-Times. His pal, he said, was Ken Witcover, CNN.
They tried to draw me out about Stoner, but I told them maybe later, that I wanted to unwind from the airplane ride, and we proceeded to do damage to the whiskey. By the time we’d sucked down three drinks, Fierman and I were into some heavy reminiscence. Turned out he had covered the war during my tour and knew my old top. Witcover was cherry in Vietnam, so he just tried to look wise and to laugh in the right spots. It got pretty drunk at that table. A security cadre—fortyish, cadaverous gook in yellow fatigues—sat nearby, cocking an ear toward us, and we pretended to be engaged in subversive activity, whispering and drawing maps on napkins. But it was Stoner who was really on all our minds, and Fierman—the drunkest of us—finally broached the subject, saying, “A machine that traps ghosts! It’s just like the gooks to come up with something that goddamn worthless!”
Witcover shushed him, glancing nervously at the security cadre, but Fierman was beyond caution. “They coulda done humanity a service,” he said, chuckling. “Turned alla Russians into women or something. But, nah! The gooks get behind worthlessness. They may claim to be Marxists, but at heart they still wanna be inscrutable.”
“So,” said Witcover to me, ignoring Fierman, “when you gonna fill us in on Stoner?”
I didn’t care much for Witcover. It wasn’t anything personal; I simply wasn’t fond of his breed: compulsively neat (pencils lined up, name inscribed on every possession), edgy, on the make. I disliked him the way some people dislike yappy little dogs. But I couldn’t argue with his desire to change the subject. “He was a good soldier,” I said.
Fierman let out a mulish guffaw. “Now that,” he said, “that’s what I call in-depth analysis.”
Witcover snickered.
“Tell you the truth”—I scowled at him, freighting my words with malice—“I hated the son of a bitch. He had this young-professor air, this way of lookin’ at you as if you were an interestin’ specimen. And he came across pure phony. Y’know, the kind who’s always talkin’ like a black dude, sayin’ ‘right on’ and shit, and sayin’ it all wrong.”
“Doesn’t seem much reason for hating him,” said Witcover, and by his injured tone, I judged I had touched a nerve. Most likely he had once entertained soul-brother pretensions.
“Maybe not. Maybe if I’d met him back home, I’d have passed him off as a creep and gone about my business. But in combat situations, you don’t have the energy to maintain that sort of neutrality. It’s easier to hate. And anyway, Stoner could be a genuine pain in the ass.”
“How’s that?” Fierman asked, getting interested.
“It was never anything unforgivable; he just never let up with it. Like one time a bunch of us were in this guy Gurney’s hooch, and he was tellin’ ’bout this badass he’d known in Detroit. The cops had been chasin’ this guy across the rooftops, and he’d missed a jump. Fell seven floors and emptied his gun at the cops on the way down. Reaction was typical. Guys sayin’ ‘Wow’ and tryin’ to think of a story to top it. But Stoner he nods sagely and says, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of that goin’ around.’ As if this was a syndrome to which he’s devoted years of study. But you knew he didn’t have a clue, that he was too upscale to have met anybody like Gurney’s badass.” I had a slug of whiskey. “‘There’s a lot of that goin’ around’ was a totally inept comment. All it did was to bring everyone down from a nice buzz and make us aware of the shithole where we lived.”
Witcover looked puzzled, but Fierman made a noise that seemed to imply comprehension. “How’d he die?” he asked. “The handout says he was KIA, but it doesn’t say what kind of action.”
“The fuckup kind,” I said. I didn’t want to tell them. The
closer I came to seeing Stoner, the leerier I got about the topic. Until this business had begun, I thought I’d buried all the death-tripping weirdness of Vietnam; now Stoner had unearthed it and I was having dreams again and I hated him for that worse than I ever had in life. What was I supposed to do? Feel sorry for him? Maybe ghosts didn’t have bad dreams. Maybe it was terrific being a ghost, like with Casper…Anyway, I did tell them. How we had entered Cam Le, what was left of the patrol. How we had lined up the villagers, interrogated them, hit them, and God knows we might have killed them—we were freaked, bone-weary, an atrocity waiting to happen—if Stoner hadn’t distracted us. He’d been wandering around, poking at stuff with his rifle, and then, with this ferocious expression on his face, he’d fired into one of the huts. The hut had been empty, but there must have been explosives hidden inside, because after a few rounds the whole damn thing had blown and taken Stoner with it.
Talking about him soured me on company, and shortly afterward I broke it off with Fierman and Witcover, and walked out into the city. The security cadre tagged along, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. I had a real load on and barely noticed my surroundings. The only salient points of difference between Saigon today and fifteen years before were the ubiquitous representations of Uncle Ho that covered the facades of many of the buildings, and the absence of motor scooters: the traffic consisted mainly of bicycles. I went a dozen blocks or so and stopped at a sidewalk café beneath sun-browned tamarinds, where I paid two dong for food tickets, my first experience with what the Communists called “goods exchange”—a system they hoped would undermine the concept of monetary trade; I handed the tickets to the waitress, and she gave me a bottle of beer and a dish of fried peanuts. The security cadre, who had taken a table opposite mine, seemed no more impressed with the system than was I; he chided the waitress for her slowness and acted perturbed by the complexity accruing to his order of tea and cakes.