The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  Stepping out of the plane, you got hit with a type of heat that was different from any heat you might experience in America. I had gone through boot camp during the summer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, hellish prairie flats that baked steady in August at around 145 degrees, give or take. But the memory of that was immediately erased by the January jungle heat of Vietnam. It was like sticking your head inside a huge creature’s mouth and sucking in the rank exhalations, like crawling into its burning guts.

  As we trudged across that tarmac to the staging area to await further transport, the heat descended on us with all the weight of reality. Until now, the whole thing had seemed like a far-fetched joke. Even Basic, with its four-thirty reveille trumpet blast, and its forced runs, and its push-ups and obstacle courses and shitty food, seemed as much like the YMCA camp I attended for two weeks as a kid as anything else. It was just a tedious game you had to get through, and on the other side sat another thin stretch of civilian life before deployment. But this was real. The heat, the distant sliver of sea, the less-distant presence of the jungle on the airstrip’s perimeter, not to mention a variety of signage in French and Vietnamese.

  “Welcome to Vietnam, motherfuckers,” some rawboned brush-cut to my left kept muttering. It was annoying but still beat hearing any more about Corporal Singleton’s girlfriends’ pussies. Welcome to Vietnam, over and over—it felt incantatory, an attempt to ward off the evil spirits surely lurking in the jungle we’d just been flying over. It felt like it might work just as well to summon them as ward them off, though.

  Within the space of five minutes, clouds coalesced overhead and the sky dumped rain. As we huddled tight under the overhang of a piece of tin roofing, our company’s CO, Lieutenant Endicott, and two of his staff sergeants took a headcount making sure no one had deserted before even getting to base. He cleared his throat, and as he spoke, the rain behind him intensified to biblical proportions, a solid sheet of water that looked prearranged as a theatrical backdrop to our arrival in-country.

  “Gentlemen,” he said.

  “Hooah,” we said.

  “At ease. Here’s the deal. At some point today, the USAF will see fit to send over the choppers we requisitioned a week ago. They will take us to your new home in Bao Loc. The road to Bao Loc is pretty good, and normally we’d just drive you in, but there’ve been heavy mortar exchanges lately, and command feels ground transport is too risky. So until then, sit tight with your thumb about halfway up your ass, but not all the way, and most certainly not up your neighbor’s. That’s an order.”

  “Hooah.”

  We slumped against the tin siding of terminal number 4, Cam Ranh air base, for minutes, then hours, but the choppers did not materialize. The rain slacked off, and the sky cleared, but no choppers. A big kid sitting next to me pulled a piece of wood out of his pack and began whittling it with a penknife. He shook his head, and said, “No choppers coming, bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because every goddamn thing in this piece-of-shit war—excuse me, military intervention—is ass up and clusterfucked. You’re new, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m a transfer, just spent four months up near Binh Dinh. Four months is long enough to figure a few things out. No choppers, you’ll see.”

  “I’m Richard Lazar.”

  “Mitch Berlinger.” He stuck his hand out without smiling, and we shook. “No choppers,” he said again, with a downward musical lilt, addressing himself back to his woodworking.

  ———

  Berlinger was right. Three hours later, a convoy of olive-drab trucks with camouflage canvas tarps pulled up on the tarmac. The staff sergeant split us up, sixteen men a truck, safeties off and barrels out. I can’t speak for anyone else in that truck, but even before we left the air base, passed the guard towers, and began rumbling down that bumpy road into the jungle, I thought I might pass out from fear. It was all happening too fast: sixteen hours earlier, I’d been at SFO, looking at college girls and eating a churro and watching Hare Krishnas sing “Krishna Krishna Hare Hare” and ping their little finger cymbals together. Now I was being driven down a road into enemy territory, a road our CO had just told us was too dangerous to drive down. I shut my eyes and, despite already being an avowed and often annoyingly vocal atheist, I whispered the Lord’s Prayer to myself. Just to have something to concentrate on, I told myself, though I knew differently. I was praying as hard as the devoutest Muslim on the road to Mecca.

  I guess my prayers were heard and answered, because nothing happened. We drove down a shitty, cratered road for three hours, then hung a left onto an even-shittier, even-more-cratered road for another thirty minutes, until that road petered out into a faint trail of dust, which led us to the front gate of the base. “Gate” is probably a bit grand—the threshold was marked by two large wooden poles on either side of the trail. With the chicken wire and the lazy hills rising up behind the compound, it felt like we’d been shipped in to work on a ranch in California. But this feeling quickly vanished as we drove farther in, past several mortar positions surrounded by sandbags, past an enormous canvas tent with the Stars and Stripes fluttering nervously overhead, and stopped in front of a row of aluminum Quonset huts.

  We got out and stretched our legs—mine were severely cramped from maintaining a squatting position and a full rectal pucker for most of the afternoon. One of the staff sergeants escorted us to our quarters. It was the last hut, butted up against a dense tree line that ran maybe half a football field to the base of a small mountain or very large hill. Looking up at the hill, I felt my shoulders relax a little with the thought that it would be very near impossible to creep up on us from behind and, further, that we were buffered from the surrounding forest by everything else in the base. It was a little like the feeling you get as a kid, all nice and tucked in, with yards of blanket and pillow keeping the monsters at bay.

  “Nowhere to run,” someone said, and I turned to see Berlinger shaking his head at the hut.

  “What?”

  “Any kind of assault on base, we’re pinned in here. Retreat would be impossible.”

  “I was looking at it the other way.”

  “Glass half full, huh? That’ll last about another forty-eight hours here.”

  We both stared silently up at the mountain for a moment or two, then Berlinger slapped my back, and said, “Well, come on, sweet cheeks. Let’s pick our coffins, I mean cots.” I followed him into the hut, same on the inside as you would imagine it would be from the outside. Spartan and hot as ever-loving fuck. Twelve cots were laid out, six a side, and I saw that the ones in the corners had already been claimed. I put my pack down next to a cot under a window, and Berlinger sat on the one adjacent. The sergeant told us to get situated, that chow would be at nineteen-hundred, then disappeared. Propped up against two starchy pillows, I pulled out whatever book I was reading, or trying to read, at the time. Probably Hemingway, predictably enough, and, even more predictably, probably A Farewell to Arms. I wasn’t big on subtlety at nineteen. I’m still not.

  A few other men straggled in and picked a cot, among them the country-faced brush-cut. He looked around at everyone, sitting there in a puddle of their own sweat, and said, “I’m Lester Hawkins.”

  A few guys grunted their names. I might have. Hawkins grinned broadly. “Welcome to Vietnam, fellas.”

  “Hey, Lester Hawkins,” said Berlinger. “Put a fucking sock in it.”

  “Hey man,” said Hawkins. He put his sack down and sat on a cot near the opposite wall, looking deflated. He had been expecting something else, an experience of instant camaraderie that wasn’t transpiring. He pouted like a little kid in time-out. There was something about his face that made me want to punch it, so I tried not looking at him as best I could.

  Some other soldier, a dark-haired kid with the deep-set yet bulging eyes of a deepwater fish, said, “Well, I’m Carbone. Tony Carbone.” Another chorus of grunts. Carbone sat on his helmet and slouched
forward, elbows on knees. “Anybody else from New York?”

  “I’m from Manhattan,” said Berlinger.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, Kansas.”

  Carbone looked confused. “Whatever, man. Anybody here from a real place?”

  “K-State’s in Manhattan, boy. That’s as real as it gets. Wildcat Pride.”

  There were some laughs. Carbone said, “Real country bumpkin, huh?”

  “That’s right. You got a problem with good country folk?” I glanced over at Berlinger. His face was stone-serious, but his eyes twinkled with comic ire. He was enjoying himself.

  “I’ve got a problem with anywhere you can’t get a good slice or an egg cream. That includes this shithole and Manhattan, wherever. Tennessee.”

  I said, “Let’s leave Tennessee out of this.”

  Berlinger said, “It’s Kansas, you ignorant wop.”

  Carbone made like he was going to get up, but Berlinger had eight inches and a hundred pounds on him, and there was no way anything would happen. “Nothing against Italians, of course,” Berlinger added.

  “Hayseed. New York City would chew you up and spit you out. We eat punks like you for breakfast.”

  “You eat your sister’s pussy for breakfast!” bellowed Berlinger. This time Carbone did get up and walk across the hut, but a couple of other guys stopped him. Berlinger was cracking up, rolled back on his cot, his feet pedaling in the air like a dog getting his stomach scratched.

  “Why don’t both of you shut up,” a big black dude in the far corner intoned, and everyone did. The silence filled the hut, seeming to fight for space with the choking humidity. It was worse than the arguing; it allowed in all the thoughts you didn’t want to be thinking. I got up and went back outside, where the barest trace of a breeze cooled the sweat on my arms. I could hear them inside, going at it again, the rise and fall of voices talking over each other. I walked to the side of the hut, then behind, where the tree line began. The base’s chicken-wire fencing, topped with a reassuring whorl of barbed wire, laced around the back of the hut and the adjacent buildings.

  A rustling in the trees set my heart jackhammering. I looked up and out, and it stopped. I waited, and it started up again. I looked at the hut, thought of the men inside, and hated them for not running outside to help. The rustling grew louder and I tried to yell, but nothing came out. My God, I thought, it’s happening already. I half put my hands up in front of me in a posture of uncertain, preemptive surrender.

  The sound resolved itself in the form of a small monkey, elderly looking, with a white mask, that shuffled through a stand of leaves and stopped. It picked insects off a limb, ate, and looked down at me. Its expression was ancient and unknowable, like one of those tormented bearded faces on the side of a Greek urn.

  “What the fuck am I doing here,” I said, but it didn’t respond.

  I stood there looking at the monkey and the jungle behind it, and everything was suddenly completely incredible to me, unreal and unbelievable: the monkey; the bluish razor wire pulled through the foliage like ribbon on a birthday present; the nearby voices of other uprooted boys, everyone from somewhere else and now—for reasons it seemed no one fully understood—here; my own outstretched hands palely glowing in the thin jungle light. For the first time since I’d landed, the fear dissolved and was supplanted by a helpless infantile awe. The monkey seemed embarrassed by me, pretended to look over his shoulder as though seeing something important, and scampered away. I walked to the fence and touched the limb where it had just been. I thought about how strange it is that things can be one way then another, how you could wake up in California and fall asleep in Vietnam. The ludicrous mutability of life. I was, as they say, having a moment.

  Maybe that’s just the ordinary awe of youth, though. Maybe it feels that way for everyone, at war or not. Before everything you do or see is a version of something before it. Before you get older and everything calcifies: your personality and memory and sense of the world. I’m too old now to much remember what it’s like to be young, but I still remember looking down at my hands, how they glowed and glowed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Richard had gotten the call two years earlier. He’d been pissing in the desert, or trying to. The morning breeze blowing across the Sonoran basin was not yet infernally hot, and it wrapped the mangy bathrobe around his legs with a playful caress. Distant cars tooled by on the John Wayne Parkway, which connected Phoenix, to the north, with Maricopa, to the south. The trailer was located in the Interzone, as he thought of it, a moonscape of sand and rocks and distant, spectral mountains. He heard the phone ring inside the trailer, which was strange, since no one ever called him. For a moment, curiosity did battle with the need to piss, but pissing won, handily. He closed his eyes and waited for his prostate to wake up, and as he did, the phone rang again.

  “Coming, goddamn it,” he yelled into the desert air.

  Inside the trailer, he located the antique, chipped plastic phone, half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes, which was unsurprising, since everything in the trailer was half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes.

  “Yeah,” he wheezed.

  “Can I speak to Richard Lazar?”

  “Speaking.”

  “You’re a hard man to track down.” The voice was mild and pleasant, and more terrifying for that fact. Richard’s heart creaked with the tacit assumption that this could only be someone he didn’t want tracking him down. Who would track him down that he’d want to talk to?

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Stan, at Reiner-Goldwell.”

  “What at where?”

  “Stan Rosenburg.”

  “Why does that name sound familiar?” He sat down on the long sofa bench that ran half the length of one side of the trailer, propping his elbows on a small Formica table. In front of him, on the table, sat the broken typewriter on which he’d written all his novels. Victor, his dog—a fat bearded collie who had with age, distressingly, become a dead ringer for his owner—staggered over stiff-legged from sleep and settled again at Richard’s feet.

  “Because I’m your agent?”

  “Oh, right. Jesus, Stan.” The name had been hard to place because he hadn’t heard or seen it in almost two years. Since he’d turned in the last memoir draft, in fact. Weekly phone calls had become monthly and then bimonthly, and so on, as reports trickled back that editors weren’t interested in another Vietnam story, or in war stories, period. In the new millennium, the reading public, it seemed, was all warred out. Did he have anything with serial killers or lawyers, or serial killer lawyers? He did not. Finally, having run through his entire list of editors over the course of eighteen months, Stan had stopped calling, and Richard had assumed he’d never hear from him again.

  “Okay, he remembers. Listen, I have good news.”

  “What?”

  “The book. We got a yes.”

  “What?”

  “Listen, I know I said there wasn’t anything else I could do, but I never stopped believing in it. I still passed it around, now and then. Junior editors and small presses, that kind of thing. Always the same line, ‘No one wants another war story,’ right?”

  “I have a pretty firm handle on that, yeah.”

  “But listen, then three months ago we invade Iraq. And I’m not trying to be crass here, but suddenly I’m getting calls.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  He could almost hear Stan shrug on the other end of the line, see the long, sleek face, seal-like with his shimmering pomade helmet. “We’re at war. People are interested. So last week, Kathleen Talent at Black Swan calls, says she loves it and wants to put an offer together. And I just found out this morning, she got the green light on it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Rich, it’s getting published. I waited to tell you until there was real news, didn’t want to get your hopes up for no reason. I know this has been a hard stretch. We’re still working on the terms of the
contract. You need to call her, I have the number right here, do you have a pen? She wants to get you going on a final draft, email you some notes. Do you even have email?”

  “RMLazar at AOL dot com.”

  “Do I get a thank you? There’s going to be a check coming your way in a month.”

  Richard looked around the trailer, to the extent that it was possible to look around a space so comically small. On one end was the dark chamber of his bed and bedding, a gray space half obscured by curtains and dimmed by towels duct-taped over the adjacent windows. On the other end was the sealed-off bathroom, which hadn’t worked in weeks. Something to do with the sump pump, his landlord had ventured unpromisingly. His landlord lived a mile away, on the opposite side of the property, and came by twice a month or so to see if anything needed fixing, with no intention of ever fixing anything; Richard suspected the real reason for the pop-ins, as he called them, was just checking to see if his tenant had died yet.

  This was where he’d landed, after Eileen, after Carole—after women. And after money. He’d worked construction and roofing until his knees and hips had gotten so shot he could barely climb the ladder to retile some yuppie nitwit’s five-million-dollar Spanish modern; a humane foreman had suggested he move into another line of work and given him a reference at his cousin’s bar. Working three shifts a week at the Tamarack had necessitated, as they say, a lifestyle change. He’d had to give up certain luxuries: his crappy studio apartment in Phoenix, for one, and also things like cable television or ever eating in a restaurant again. He hadn’t made money from his writing in years; he’d never really made a living.

  “Hello?” said Stan. “Are you crying?”

  “No, of course not. I’m just surprised.”

  “Richard, this is a good thing.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll call what’s-her-name.”

  “Kathleen. I’ll email you the details.”

  After Stan said goodbye, Richard really let loose, cried like a little baby. Like his baby, Cindy, when she was little, tears begetting more tears, his face a hot, smeary mess. Like the baby he was. He took some deep breaths and tried to figure out what he was feeling and why, an exercise he hadn’t undertaken in years, since for years he’d always felt roughly the same way—i.e., like shit—and known why, i.e., because everything was horrible.