Kenyon pulled a long hard drag and held the fumes inside his lungs before he passed to Patrick. He exhaled slowly, lovingly. “That little mother whirled around at me, you know, pointed his fucking a-one number automatic rifle at my head and he says, ‘Soldier, don’t you turn your back on me!’”
Kenyon hit his long, hard thigh with the palm of his hand and shook his head. “Hey, that’s the kind of man you sure don’t turn your back on. Well, we collected dog tags, you know, and pushed on till we come to this here little clearing with a buncha them little shacks. Weren’t nobody there but little old women and some little bitty babies. Not kids, mind, but babies, little teensy babies in their mamas’ arms, crying and sucking out their breakfasts.
“Them old ladies, you know, weren’t really old, I guess, just look that way, with troubles they known. Men all gone, run off, and here’s this fuck-off yellin’ at them like he thinks they got a hutful of gyrene ears they preparing for a feast or something. He’s yellin’ and the women are cryin’ and the babies are lookin’ all scared and then, just like that”—Kenyon snapped his fingers and locked his lips and jerked his head up, then spread his fingers in a gesture of wonder—“he just opens up on them, just like that, baby, right on, he rips into them and turns and tells all of us, there was nine of us besides him, he says, ‘Open up, kill the Commie slant-eyed Cong bastards.’ Some old crippled stooped-over man comes creeping out of one of them hootches and the guy next to me opens up with an automatic and he starts yelling, ‘V.C., V.C. You was right, Loot, V.C.’”
Kenyon caressed the last small remnant of glowing marijuana with the tip of his finger, then crushed it. “Little brother with me, little soul brother from Philly, not more than eighteen, he got sick to his stomach and then he started crying, real big tears coming from his eyes. That boy started crying and yelling and the lieutenant turns to him and points his automatic and says, ‘You want some too? Then start shootin’.’” Kenyon rubbed his hand over his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “Oh, shit, Irish, that little black boy from Philadelphia, with the tears runnin’ down his face, he turns and starts shootin’ and wastin’ them little mamas and their babies, just like that!”
“What about you, Kenyon?” Patrick asked, knowing but wanting to hear anyway.
Kenyon said slowly and precisely, “No way, man, uh-uh. There was ten of us and five done the shooting. One guy, another soul brother, he run away and I never seen him again. A white kid, kid who was planning on going to medical school, he sat down on the ground and covered his face in his hands and like he was frozen and couldn’t move from that position. Another whitey, he just walks away and leans against a tree like he been kicked in the stomach, all gray in the face. This other black guy from Jersey, him and me, we just look at each other, see. We got our trigger fingers ready, you know, and without sayin’ nothin’ we both know it ain’t the slants we thinkin’ of wastin’, but this guy, he looks around and shakes his head, like he’s sayin’, ‘Not now, Kenyon, not here and now, baby.’ Which was right, because that lieutenant and his guys, they coulda took us easy as we coulda took them.
“Later on, the white guy who stood against the tree, he went to the company commander, see, and he said it was a massacre and he wanted the lieutenant and them men arrested, you know. Well, baby, I coulda told him.” Kenyon laughed at the man’s stupidity. “But the poor dumb bastard didn’t ask me. The commander, why, baby, he never heard of such a thing; he never wanted to hear of such a thing again, you know. And oh, my, that G.I., but didn’t he get his balls blown off during a mine sweep. That whitey, he didn’t know shit about how you get things done.”
Kenyon knew how to get things done. Two of the men who shot the civilians were found dead in a Saigon alley, dead of overdoses of bad heroin. Two men were shot dead: Sniper fire, sir.
And the lieutenant: a couple of hundred pieces of that man’s ass forever embedded in jungle rot, since he had the misfortune to step on a mine.
“You see, baby,” Kenyon said softly, “you gotta get something done, why, do it. Ain’t no fuckin’ difference between here and home, where I come from.” Suddenly, as though it had just occurred to him, Kenyon said sadly, “Oh, shit, baby, how’m I gonna make it back home, you tell me that? Some dude bothers me, gives me some shit I don’t want, why it wouldn’t mean nothin’ to me to waste him. I mean, baby, it wouldn’t mean nothin’. And the Man gonna come and tell me I gotta be locked up the rest of my life like I’m somethin’ in the zoo because I wasted some dude who don’t mean shit. Oh, man, it’s a fucked-up world for sure.”
Through the long spun-out nights, they sat around campfires, tried to get dry and free of the damp earth around them. They tried to blot out the days, which were filled with mangled young bodies which in an instant lost youthfulness and acquired the horror of helpless age. The men in the unit were slightly older than the wounded they dealt with. Kenyon, twenty-four, was the oldest; Patrick, twenty-two, was the average. The age of the wounded averaged out to twenty, with some as young as eighteen, some as old as twenty-three.
Sometimes Kenyon shot heroin; some of them took uppers and downers. They all smoked pot. Kenyon said, “What the hell, baby, if it feels good, do it. Learned me a nursery rhyme when I was a little chile: ‘Don’t matter who you screw or what you screw only that you screw.’”
Patrick went through the nights, floated, drifted on pot, but he could snap into reality if he had to; not like the real heads, they went off too far, out too far. In a way, Patrick stood over them as they dozed and spun away from themselves and each other, a kind of guardian in the night. Some of them were hooked on whatever took them out of themselves. Patrick wasn’t sure about Kenyon; it was hard to tell with him.
“Hey, you know,” Henderson said thickly, “you know what I seen today?” He was a pothead and hardly spoke most of the time, but pot loosened him. “Guy we brought in with the busted right leg, redhead from Virginia, you know? Guy had a string of ears on him, hooked onto his belt. Christ Almighty, can you imagine a guy doing something like that? V.C. ears. He says that everybody in his outfit does it. He says their GO. wanted proof of body count. Ears!”
Kenyon grinned. “Don’t matter shit, you take a dead man’s ears or his pecker off’n his corpse. Don’t matter shit.”
“But hell, Kenyon,” Henderson protested, “that’s pretty rotten stuff. I mean, that isn’t Christian. We’re supposed to be civilized.”
Kenyon laughed out loud and Becker, a small, intense, close-cropped, tense-jawed boy from Iowa, said, “What’s funny, Kenyon? You think that anything is okay, nothing’s wrong? Well, it’s wrong to desecrate bodies; it’s wrong and I hate to see our men do it.”
Wetzel and Hutton, cousins from Tennessee, were flying now, spaced out on pills, eased and floating on pot. They started to laugh uncontrollably and Becker really got sore.
“What the hell, you guys. I mean, if we do the same kind of atrocities that they do, then what’s the difference between us? I mean, that sort of thing makes us just as bad as them.”
For some reason, that struck all the others as funny. They kept laughing, those who were almost too high to keep up with what was being said and those who passed up every second drag as the reefer, a giant concocted by the Tennessee cousins, went around the circle. Patrick wasn’t too high but he felt an edge of hilarity and he began to sing “God Bless America” and they all joined in, really giving it force.
For some reason, that made Becker really fly into a rage and they tried to assure him that they were being patriotic, and to prove it, they started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” but nobody could remember all the words. They laughed and gagged and sucked in the pot and laughed and felt so crazy good they couldn’t figure it all out and it didn’t seem to matter anyway. Only Becker, between drags, grumbled, and after a while, he didn’t know what the hell he was so mad about but he stayed mad because it felt good.
“All I gotta say,” Becker mumbled, “is it’s a terrible, terrible thin
g to mutilate a dead body. Even if it is a V.C.”
“What I gotta say is that it don’t matter shit what you do, one way or the other,” Kenyon said with a sudden strange vehemence that caught everyone’s attention and seemed to cut the mood. It cracked, split, changed, rearranged. Kenyon hunched forward, probed a long black finger into Becker’s chest. “You listen, mother fucker, and you listen good to me. Don’t matter. Dead’s dead. Dead’s nothing. Dead’s shit. Be general or dog, dead’s dead.”
Becker, sober and bitterly aware now, said, “Nothing matters to you. What matters to you, Kenyon? Tell us, because I’ve seen you; nothing matters to you.”
“Not death, baby. Death ain’t nothin’ to matter about.”
Patrick leaned toward him intently, with an urgency he didn’t understand. “But what, Kenyon,” he asked, had to know, “what matters, Kenyon?”
They all turned toward Kenyon, waited for him, as though he, Kenyon, had the answer. There was silence around the fire; the flickering red light around them encompassed them in a reality remote from any other.
Kenyon sighed deeply, reached a rough hand into Patrick’s shaggy blond hair and shook him. “Don’t nothin’ matter but stayin’ alive, baby. And I’m not too sure that matter shit neither.”
Kenyon was married and received letters from his wife, but he never wrote back to her. “She ain’t gonna have no stack of letters to spend her life with if’n she don’t get me back.”
They went on a four-day R and R together and over drinks in an early-evening bar, Patrick talked to Kenyon more than he’d ever talked to anyone in his life. He talked about his father, because his mother had sent him newspaper clippings which quoted his father at the site of a student demonstration protesting the war: “Deputy Chief Inspector Brian O’Malley made a brief appearance at the site and when asked to comment said, “Look, my kid is over there. How do you think I feel about these demonstrators?’”
“See, I’m of some value to him now. I’m over here and now, now I’m valuable to him. Jesus, I don’t know, Kenyon. My old man, well, he’s so fucking goddamn great, like what the hell is the use, you know? I mean, he was a real hero in his war, not a bullshit armchair hero. You know what kind of hero? The kind who never talks about it. My uncle told me about him when I was ten or eleven. I mean, hell, I never knew that my father took over a whole goddamn unit when all the line officers were killed. Hell, he was about my age, maybe a coupla years older, your age. He wiped out four Japanese machine-gun nests. You know, John Wayne kind of stuff, creeping up with a grenade stuck in his mouth, that kind of thing. On Iwo Jima, his unit was being wiped out and my old man ended up winning the whole damn thing, practically by himself.”
Kenyon drank beer and waited with a strange slight smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“You know what he is now? A deputy chief inspector. I mean, there he is, no education or anything and he took those tests and kept passing them. One of the youngest captains in the Department’s history and now he’s one of the real bosses.”
“No shit?” Kenyon said, unimpressed. “Well, somebody gotta be fuzz, I guess.”
“Hey, Kenyon, I’m a cop. Didn’t you know that?”
“For real, Patrick? Hey, for damn real?” Kenyon’s head rocked back and forth. “I don’t believe that, baby.”
“Yeah, really. I had eight months on the job before I enlisted. It’s waiting for me when I get back. What the hell. Everybody’s gotta be something. But, Jesus, my old man: war hero, deputy chief inspector. You know what I mean?”
“Man, you got big trouble,” Kenyon said, amused. “Must be real tough to hafta measure it with your daddy.”
“What the hell kinda thing is that to say, Kenyon? What do you know about it?”
“Not shit, baby. I don’t know shit. Got no daddy of my own to break my chops. Some dude slipped it to my mama one night, and on his way, and here I am.”
Patrick was shocked. Hell, that was his mother he was talking about. “You shouldn’t say something like that, Kenyon. It reflects bad on your mother.”
Kenyon considered for a moment, then said simply, “Hell, my mama got lots a’ bad reflections on her. Never bothered her, why the hell should it bother me?”
Another world. Jesus, them colored live in another world.
He’d heard it when he was too small to know who they were and now Kenyon was telling him exactly what he’d heard and overheard from his father and his uncles, his cousins, his friends, men he worked with. But he and Kenyon were buddies and friends. He was closer to Kenyon than he’d ever been to anyone, and yet he had no understanding of Kenyon or of his world.
Kenyon leaned his elbows on the table, tilted his head back, drank from the bottle, the only way he liked beer. He sighed a long beery breath and grinned. “Hell, baby, I done things by the time I was ten that you only just heard about when you was eighteen.”
Patrick pulled a shocked face, widened his eyes. “Easy now, man. Don’t tell me anything I shouldn’t know. I’m just a pure and innocent young boy.”
The broad black face went serious. Just the slightly mocking smile played at the heavy lips, but Kenyon’s eyes, color of his skin, were still, seemed sad, almost gentle, the way his voice went gentle. “You know, Irish, that’s a for-real fact. You truly are a innocent boy. Goddamn, but I think that’s half the trouble goin’ on, the whole fuck-up business of what’s good, what’s bad. You know what scares the living shit outta most of you whiteys? I mean, man, it’s just basically pure and simple. What the hell I got between my legs. Get down to it, man, that’s what it’s about. See, you been raised to see it one way; I learned another way.”
Kenyon dropped his hand to his lap, caressed his sex, smiled. “It comes alive, baby. I mean, the minute I tell it to, the minute I say to it, hey, I needs some comfort or I needs some fun or I needs to fly or to feel or to prove I’m me. And nothin’, no words or rules or dumb regulations, gonna freeze me down, hold me in. Nothin’ gonna turn me soft or melt me away, because, man, this here is mine, you know?”
As Kenyon spoke, his face relayed his pleasure, his mouth moved in careful sensuality, his eyes revealed the rising sensation, his shoulders moved forward slightly, large, strong shoulders caving forward.
“Whites, see, you got yourselves about nine million reasons why ain’t nobody should get no pleasure, but shit, baby, this is all we got, get right on down to it, and ain’t no way I’m gonna let anybody turn this here off. It don’t matter, see, don’t matter shit how I use what I got.” Kenyon stopped speaking, grinned broadly and shook his head in amusement. “Oh, baby, you have turned a bright, bright red in your face. What’s the matter, Irish? You gettin’ a tingle in your dingle?”
Patrick felt heat sear through him, not just through his face and head, but through his body, down the inside of his thighs, in his groin, across his stomach. As Kenyon’s voice played with words and created intimacy, Patrick felt the beginnings of an erection, caught and held and brought down by the beginnings of the terrible, ancient adolescent fear. He picked up the heavy mug and drained the flat beer.
“Relax, man,” Kenyon said quietly, his eyes intent, “I don’t wanna make it with you.”
Patrick flashed anger without a word; the tightened jaw and the hardened eyes turned to steel. Kenyon had touched a boyhood, open, painful, vulnerable nerve ending: one of the most stringent, fearsome of all prohibitions.
Kenyon laughed, not sensuous sound but loud amusement. “There you are, man. I just gave you a genuine live demonstration. See, you all uptight and caught in a strangle. And for what? The way I see it, a man can do any goddamn fucking thing he wants to. Don’t change nothin’. Don’t make nothin’, don’t break nothin’. Don’t make him a man or unmake him a man. See, if that’s the measure of it, just that handful down there, if that’s what decides what a man is, well, then it’s all really one big bucket of shit, you dig?”
“No,” Patrick said shortly, “no, I don’t dig this at all. I don�
�t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Talkin’ about life, baby. Look, what you believe is, you die and you burn. I mean, that’s what you believe, baby. But me, see, I know, I mean, I know for a number-one fact that dead is dead and this is the one and onliest time around. Man, I want to try everything. I want to have it all before I’m nothin’. I screwed with little girls practically babies and with old whores ready for the garbage can and with women so juicy ripe I’d liked to died just drowning in them with all the lush smells and tastes and feels. I done it with men and boys and everything in between and in ways you couldn’t even register. But just you get this one thing straight at the beginning if you ever wanna learn something about life: it ain’t no measure of a man, how he do it.”
“Then what the hell is a measure of a man? To you, Kenyon?”
Kenyon touched his Afro lightly, felt it spring beneath his fingertips; it was a pleasurable touch and he lingered for a moment, then said, “Why just that he keeps trying to find out things, I guess. That he don’t go shutting no doors he never has even tried to open. Oh, but you got a sad, sweet, dumb face, white boy,” Kenyon said.
He felt sad and he felt dumb. It wasn’t just when Kenyon talked about his life; it was when the rest of them, the black guys, sat around and eased into it: always about the same thing, about sex.
The white guys listened, uneasy, unaccustomed, Jesus Christ, dying with a combination of emotions ranging from lust to fury. Who the fuck did these black bastards think they were anyway. How the hell did they get away with it? Their sexual liberation underscored his, Patrick’s, personal individual bondage to terrors that went back farther than his conscious memory.
Jesus, the misery of his adolescence: the priest-centered, fear-laden, guilt-pounding, stomach-sick terror of his adolescence. The long, lonely, breath-holding dark nights of his desecration made infinitely worse by the too awful to acknowledge knowledge that what heightened his tension and excitement were the sounds he could hear, vaguely but imagined with great intimacy, from his parents’ room. The walls were thick and the occasions few, but he, rigid, sharply awakened, senses at the edge of his skin, screaming at the edges of his being, would listen for the sound of bodies against bedsprings—the goddamn bedsprings, couldn’t they stop the springs from giving them away?—and the moan, the groan which couldn’t have carried down the hall but which carried through the wall or down the hall into him, into his own growing and terrible need.
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