by Tom Molloy
The drainpipe chilled, then burned my bare hands as I slid to the frozen earth, scanning the nearby storefront windows for the flash of blue lights. Pulled from a warm doughnut shop for trouble at a church, the cops would be ready to murder.
I sprinted across the hard lawn of the church, leaping the low black metal fence that surrounded it. Running in a burst along three blocks, I ducked into a doorway as two cruisers rushed past, bouncing blue strobes off each other’s polished metal.
Calculating the time it would take the police to gather their information and express their outrage, I gambled on running straight home under the elevated subway.
It worked, and the chill that squeezed my body made the warm welcoming house and the grasp of the sleeping bag a delight. Even though I slept less than two hours, I met the day refreshed.
10
The morning the Banzai Bunny destroyed the Second Squad dawned with the warm, rich, flowing fragrance of early summer in the DMZ. The awful night when they seized the ship had become distant memory. We had rearranged the events in our collective consciousness so that they suited our needs.
In our retelling of the tale, especially to the new wide-eyed replacements, we had held the line with élan and wit. The paper shufflers and the brass had screwed up, but we, the unsung heroes, the grimy grunts, had saved the day. If the damn-fool navy could not hold on to its own damn ship, that was their problem. The infantry had hung tough.
On this particular morning we were doing what we were always doing. We were looking for infiltrators. The North Koreans dug tunnels under the DMZ, some of them large enough for men to run through three abreast. The infiltrators came through these, or they crawled like ghosts through our barbed wire and claymore mines, or they landed on the shores behind us in rubber rafts.
As we patrolled, we were actually within the DMZ. This was illegal, and against all the rules, but we were out to show we meant business.
I walked point for the patrol through the low shrubs, tiny flowers and sudden swift flowing streams of the Cease Fire Zone. Two hundred meters to my left, and slightly behind me, the Second Squad, made up of four men, moved in uneven spurts over the rough terrain.
The best description of patrolling I ever heard was from Sgt. “Diamond” Jim Dalton who sagely observed, “It’s like playing guns when you were a kid, except it’s real.” How real it could be was indelibly impressed on my mind exactly nine days before the attack of The Banzai Bunny.
On that day at 3:00 a.m., or oh-three-hundred in military parlance, I was roused from a sound sleep by Sgt. Dalton and told to report to the company command bunker. There, I was joined by seven other young men, all as sleepy and confused as myself. We were all from different squads so we knew something very unusual was going on.
In a few minutes our company commander came in with another soldier who wore no insignia, but who from his demeanor was obviously an officer. This soldier informed us that the eight of us had volunteered for a special mission. We stiffened with pride for we knew at once that Diamond Jim had picked us from the 147 men of the company.
“Gentlemen,” said the soldier without insignia, “today we are going to send a message to our friends in Pyongyang and to their puppet-masters in Moscow.”
He told us we were going across the DMZ into North Korea itself, and that once there we would “meet a friend.” He said that at the present time there was no need for us to know more than that. We gathered our weapons and filed into the darkness behind Diamond Jim and the soldier without insignia.
Weapons taped for silence, faces blackened, we moved out swiftly. At first we went in quick march, then to double time. We stopped for barely one minute and the anonymous soldier told us we were at the edge of “The Z,” and that a “corridor” had been cut through the barbed wire and mines for our convenience. We were to go through this corridor on a dead run.
We did just that and forty-five minutes later crouched on a small plateau. There among the scrub brush we lay in a wide circle all facing outward, waiting for our “friend.”
And then, like a wisp of ground fog, he rose from a clump of bushes. In his 20’s, of medium height, lean but muscular, he had blue eyes and blonde hair cut almost to his scalp. He wore blue jeans, combat boots, and a UCLA sweatshirt. We stared at his garb, too surprised to speak, nodding dumbly at his greeting,
“Mornin’ all.”
He was carrying a camouflaged case with straps of leather sewn lovingly along its top.
“Buffalo Bill,” whispered Denny Duffy, who had nine days to live.
We followed Buffalo Bill, who followed the soldier without insignia, and we went north. Both Buffalo Bill and this soldier were relaxed and cheerful as we moved north in a long thin row.
When the sun rose, yellow and remote, we were a quarter mile inside North Korea. Buffalo Bill was beside me, and he unzipped the case with slow affection.
He lifted a beautiful walnut stocked rifle with a telescopic sight almost as long as the weapon’s barrel. Humming softly, he attached a metal tripod to the weapon and handed me a pair of binoculars.
“Show time,” was what he said.
From our position, the enemy nation unrolled below looking exactly like the land of our ally. I moved the binoculars slowly from left to right. It was like watching a smoky, silent movie. Beside me, Buffalo Bill was humming a Beatles tune as he prepared himself. Then he relaxed, and I peered through the glass as he spoke.
“Our North Korean buddies shot up a fishin’ boat the other day. Now back home we call that downright rude.”
He took a series of deep breaths.
“See them fellas workin’ on that there wall?”
In the glass I could clearly see a group of workmen off in the distance adding cement to some sort of retaining wall. They seemed about a mile away, I said I could see them.
“See that fella leanin’ on his shovel?”
The worker was the closest one to us; in fact, he was staring in our direction. I said I could see him.
The rifle cracked and the echo boomed once, then twice, but the workers were beyond the sound as I watched and the seconds passed.
The man leaning on the shovel was there and then there was a soft explosion of pink that went out from his head and over the other workers. I could see the tiny black dots of their open mouths, the almost comical panicked gestures, but I could not hear the screams as they dropped their tools to run in every direction.
The second shot seemed louder than the first as the workers scrambled up the steep incline, instinctively running for home. The one in the lead suddenly embraced the hillside and the others ran around him, disappearing from view and leaving the two dead men alone with the wall and the hill and the probing sunlight. Far off, so faint it seemed unrelated to us, a siren began to wail, and we turned south on the run.
By the time the rest of the Company was having breakfast, we had showered, shaved, been issued clean fatigues, and told to forget where we’d been and what we’d seen.
I was on a pile of sandbags lacing my boots when I sensed something behind me. It was Buffalo Bill. Yards behind him, hands clasped behind his back, gazing northward, was the soldier without insignia.
Buffalo Bill smiled and said, “We done good today.”
The North Koreans did not respond, and soon things fell back to their usual pace.
On the ninth day after that incident, we were on patrol. We had two M-60 machine guns, one M-79 grenade launcher, M-16’s, claymore mines, fragmentation grenades, smoke grenades, radios, helmets, and flak jackets.
At 9:30 on a sunny warm morning, a rabbit, a huge soft fluffy white rabbit, the biggest rabbit any of us had ever seen, exploded from the underbrush, and with a flying leap bounded off the arms and face of Paulo Cruz, knocking him down and jarring loose the pin of an M-36 fragmentation grenade.
Falling and screaming, Paulo slammed his rifle, which should have been on safety, but was on full automatic, onto a rock. The impact caused a burst of full automati
c fire that tore through Denny Duffy, killing him instantly.
Amid the screams and groans of a dozen men, Cruz grabbed the live grenade from between his prone legs and flipped it blindly over his head. It landed between J. J. “James” Taylor, who hated music, and Marvin “Mad Dog” Minihane, who never said an angry word to anyone in his short life.
The grenade killed them both with a horrid muffled boom, causing Bubba “Mugga” Epps to shoot Paulo dead, because as he put it, “No man get fucked by a rabbit gonna stay onna same planet as me.”
As the armored personnel carriers fired bursts of fifty caliber bullets into the high grass seeking to kill the infiltrators we said had ambushed us, and the medevacs circled, and above them the jets screamed, and the mortars pounded the earth in frustration, Diamond Jim sauntered over to where I sat, watching a file of ants, and he asked me,
“What did you see?”
“Nothing.”
“That, my man, is the correct answer.”
That night by the only paved road in the village, on the side of a shack that served as our whorehouse, I carved:
DID YOU DO GOOD TODAY?
11
The red light atop the green metal bridge reached upward and sent its message into the fog, an achingly slow cadence of warning. The cars moved in silence across the bridge, and their procession made the time uncertain. This feeling of timelessness caused my throat to become tight, and tears filled my eyes while I watched the light and the way the red kissed the white mist.
But soon, I knew, someone would come into this men’s room, so I quickly pulled out my instruments and in a neat scrawl wrote,
PEER WITHIN
Replacing the instruments, I went to the window and leaned against the cold unyielding sill as I breathed the frigid waterfront air of Chelsea. Below I could see a wet ancient cobblestoned street that led past warehouses straight to the water. Funny Chelsea. Curled against Boston like a baby to its mother. A tiny little place, where people were packed in like refugees on a tramp steamer. Boston was fifteen minutes and a world away across the Mystic Bridge.
Straightening my sweater to smooth the little bulge the instruments made, I strode back out to the high-ceilinged bar with its slowly spinning wooden fans, its rows of gesticulating men, and its waitresses, one of whom wore bright orange sneakers. It was she who gestured to me and whispered in my ear, “David wants to see you downstairs.”
During our first meeting there had been a sense of inadequate time. He seemed to have much to say to me, and perhaps I to him. There had been such urgency, such energy crackling from him. His image had stayed with me, touching something within. Tall, muscular, intense, needing always to crowd one’s personal space so that he filled his listener’s view, David was imposing, almost charismatic, and I sensed too, almost insane. As I went down the stairs, I heard a steady crunching sound, a thumping of wood, and quick breathing.
The bar cellar was like the open basement of a house except that the ceilings were higher. David sat on a stool beneath a single bare light bulb. Two piles of money were before him on a small worn table. On his right, a pile of bills was heaped in a random mound; on his left was a stack of bills neatly arrayed. Near the counted bills were three straight lines of cocaine.
He gestured at a stool near the little table. Rolling a ten dollar bill tightly, he passed it to me and said, “Partake, that we may speak.”
I breathed in the line of white powder. I had never done it before. I felt a crispness of thought, a perceptible drop in body temperature. David raised his hand.
“Shhh.”
I froze. He stared at the ceiling, as the floorboards creaked unceasingly with each movement of the customers.
“Know what that is?”
I waited as his gaze and his hands descended.
“To quote that great American and that simply marvelous anti-Semite, H. L. Mencken, ‘The greatest collection of goose-steppers and poltroons ever assembled under one flag in Christendom. Boobus Americanus.’”
Grasping the edges of the table, he leaned closer, his hands clenching the wood, this throaty whisper adding urgency to his words.
“They’d kill us if they could get away with it. They’d love to cut our balls off, the cocksuckers.”
He leaned back and began counting money again.
“Look at all this shit. A gift from the great unwashed.”
He put the bills down, then rapidly wiped his hands on his pants.
“Christ.”
Striding to a sink, he held up his hands.
“Look at this shit, just look at it. That’s what Freud said it represented, you know. Shit. Money’s shit. It’s filthy. I gotta wash my hands every five fucken minutes, or I’d smell like a sewer. Did you ever know you got so dirty counting money?”
I shrugged. “I never had enough to get dirty counting it.”
He came back under the light bulb rubbing his hands. “Of course you didn’t. Because you’re a good Christian. You were too busy jerkin’ off to make any. Here.”
He flipped a fifty to me. I pushed it into my shirt pocket.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Like a child with leaves, he ran his hands through the loose bills.
“Shit, says Freud. That cocksucking coke-head. Blew enough snow to kill a horse. Did you know he was fucking his sister-in-law for 20 years?”
“No.”
He leaned still closer.
“Of course you didn’t. The little hymie prick. His whole philosophy was a coke-rap.”
Now David’s voice rose so that he was almost shouting.
“A fucking coke-rap, and all the Christian assholes swallowed it, the fucken way cunts swallow cum. Except the Catholic Church, except the Holy Fucken Roman Catholic Church. They jumped around like a bunch of old ladies who see a mouse. Holding up their skirts, screaming in terror. ‘Sex! Sex! Sex! Oh kill it! Somebody kill it, please kill it!’ The faggots, the Jesuit fucking fagots, sucking little altar boys’ pricks, ’cause they’re not man enough to rip a cunt’s clothes off!” He squinted in the light, the sweat more visible on him now, his voice again falling low.
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Sure? I’ll have one of the girls bring something.”
“No thanks.”
Again his hands passed through the money. He rolled another ten into a straw and passed it to me. I inhaled long and deep, a sense of wellbeing, of safety, coming over me as David spoke.
“I don’t fuck with my girls. Lotsa pussy around, a man don’t hafta fuck the help.”
He worked the money flat, the way an old baker kneads dough. His voice rose again, and because he was so close I leaned back on the stool.
“Know what half the pussy want? They want to suck other pussy. That’s what all these made-in-the-shade-ultra-cool-yuppie-cunts want. They all want to lick pussy.”
Suddenly, he was almost screaming.
“And don’t you forget that my friend, or you are lost.
L-O-S-T, lost. And to quote another all-American Jew-baiting member of the literati, motherfucker, ‘O lost and by the wind grieved, ghost come back.’ Thomas Wolfe, my friend, out of Asheville, North Carolina, by way of Harvard, a path guaranteed to produce a rare and fine blend of Christian gentleman, and say hey, speaking of Harvard,”
Again his voice rose almost to a scream.
“Ain’t ya gonna tell me the Harvard Jews, Kissinger, Ellsberg, and Rostow, started the fucken Viet Nam War, ain’t ya gonna pin that on us too?”
He jumped to his feet, scattering the money.
“Ain’t ya gonna tell me the Jews started the war, but we wouldn’t fight it, ’cause we’re too busy defending Israel?”
He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes widening, and screamed.
“Don’t you think I know what you’re all saying?”
The sweat near his right eye caught the light as the liquid coalesced and a single drop fled down his cheek. He saw
the feet descending the stairs before I did and frowned at the orange sneakers. Stopping halfway, the waitress bent over, both hands on her knees.
“Everything OK?”
With a wave he sought to dismiss her.
“Things here are going swimmingly. Tend to your flock, woman, tend to your flock.”
She hesitated, took half a step away, then stopped.
“I heard shouting, I didn’t know if …”
He cut her short, his neck muscles bulging as he yelled.
“You heard shouting, you stupid bitch, because I was shouting. Shouting is shouting. Remember the song, ‘Shout shout, knock yourself out’? or am I dating myself? ‘Shout’ yelleth the Lord, ‘and all things shall come unto thee. Amen.”
She fled, taking the stairs two at a time. As David bent to pick up a dollar bill that had fallen on the floor, he noticed some cocaine ground into the heel of his hand. He held his hand at eye level beneath the light bulb. “How plebeian of me. How dreadfully common.”
Licking the cocaine off, he sat down on the stool. Pulling a small paper packet from his shirt, he poured a gram of cocaine in a straight line, tapping the last few bits of the powder in silence. His lips pressed tight around a light blue razor blade, then released it to his hand, and he leaned close to chip rapidly at the hard white drug.
I could hear his breathing, could hear the groan that worked its way from deep in his chest and passed his throat. The sweat gathered, caressing both his cheeks. Chipping slower now, he said, “Jesus sweated blood at Gethsemane.”
“Yes, so I’m told.”
His gaze was locked on the white powder when he spoke. “My grandfather was a great man. A very great man. He fucked three different women every week, till he was over 80. He used to organize orgies between young boys and ladies of the evening and watch through a one-way mirror and beat off.”
With the blade David continued to chop the powder, forming it into a circle, then a large single line, then four smaller ones. He swept and chopped, swept and chopped.
“My grandfather, my father’s father, from whose loins I sprang, owned half of this city.”