He moved to the window. Thirty floors down, the Strip was still congested and ablaze with frenetic activity at two in the morning. Everyone writing their own novels: lurid romance, frat-boy picaresque, therapeutic hokum, even the odd murder mystery. The liquor tasted like burnt dirt, but he got it down. Toward the bottom of the glass, his reflection in the window mingled with the lights below and became part of one image, as though his essence had somehow left him, spread in the desert wind, superimposed itself over the city. Henceforth art thou the genius of the MGM Grand. He finished the last of his drink and touched his throbbing cheek, and it seemed like his life had begun.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A little before two in the afternoon, Cindy Evergreen Lazar pushed into Conference Room B of the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was a large, semicircular room, perhaps three hundred capacity, and she was surprised to see it full of people waiting to hear her father speak. Some stood in the aisles, and some sat in folding chairs provided by the management for overflow. There were a good number of military types, including two elderly men in those felt-green, sharp-cornered VFW berets that reminded her of the paper hats the cooks wore at In-N-Out. Richard had taken her there, ritually, once a week, until the divorce, one of the few ways he hadn’t ever let her down. They would always split a large french fry—eating it first since the fries got soggy and disgusting after three minutes or so—then they would eat their burgers, wrapped in the greasy wax paper, which she would secretly take tiny, illicit bites from while staring out the window at cars going by on Danforth Avenue. She moved to the rear of the conference room, where she hoped she would be obscured by shadows. This spot had the additional virtue of being located five feet from the exit door, which she anticipated pushing through in only a couple of minutes.
She didn’t know why she had come. Today was her day off, a day that had begun unpromisingly around noon with the heraldic yapping of her neighbor’s dog, an obese beagle she sincerely wanted to murder. Not that she should have minded being woken—her dreams during the night had been a series of vague sketches on the general theme of anxious inadequacy; in one, it was her first day at a new job, but no one had bothered to tell her what her duties were, and so she had wandered around a vast, gray factory floor looking for a supervisor, until she realized no one was there and they had tricked her, whoever they were. She got out of bed and put on her tattered sweatpants with the shot elastic waistband, which augmented her feeling of general worthlessness. She washed down a Wellbutrin with a microwaved cup of day-old coffee, added two Vicodin and a Lortab to the mix, and turned on the TV, landing on some reality show that featured rich women being rude to waitstaff and calling one another names. The pills gradually took effect but only served to offset what she’d taken the night before (after her shift, sitting in front of a roulette wheel at the Nugget, avoiding an unavoidable meeting with goddamned Mikhail), and she found herself in a gray and restless shadowland of low serotonin. She got up and took a shower, which did help, at least in terms of giving her something to do, but eventually the water got cold.
She sat down on the edge of her bed, wrapped in a towel, and began plucking hairs out of the crown of her head. This, despite telling herself after her last session—as she thought of them—that that was it, no more. But then, she told herself that after every session. She couldn’t remember how or when she’d started doing it—the hair pulling had been a small thing for years, a weird though very occasional habit—but it had gotten worse in the last few months as her money and legal troubles had intensified and was now to the point where she found herself, several times a day, in a glazed stupor with her hand hovering over the top of her head.
The bald spot was the size of a casino chip and almost as perfectly circular. She had allowed herself to see it recently, alone in the beveled fluorescence of a Lord & Taylor dressing room, untying her camouflaging topknot and staring up at it, the cheerful pink of her festering soul. She’d wept. But now, her predatory fingers expertly searched its periphery for the perfect hair to yank. Finding one, she wrapped it three times around her index finger and teased herself with a slight tug, the heavenly feeling of upward pressure on the scalp. She relaxed, then tautened, her grip on the hair many times—as she did, she fell into a delicious whiteout trance; the suffocating anxiety washed gently away from her, and she was like a pier at low tide, temporarily released by the churning sea.
With a pop, she pulled it out.
The following six hairs brought diminishing returns of calm, until she found herself just sitting on her bed, yanking out her hair. She collected the hairs from her bedcovers and dropped them in the trash. She got dressed and rearranged her topknot and, desperately needing to escape her apartment, decided to go for a drive. It was early Saturday afternoon, and the traffic of North Las Vegas had a sluggish feel, as though the heart powering everything could barely bring itself to beat. From her apartment she drove east on Tropical, then south on Commerce, the decrepit buildings of downtown hulking on the horizon. The streets were awash with the usual flotsam of partying yahoos, hustlers, and homeless, though it was hard to tell who was who—the taxonomy of Vegas casualties was indistinct and frighteningly fluid. She’d lived here for eight years now and hardly even noticed these people anymore; like the ubiquitous plong and doink of the slot machines, you had to tune them out or go crazy. She passed through downtown, took a left on Sahara, and found herself three blocks away from the Convention Center. When she looked up, she saw the marquee and her own last name suspended twenty feet above the parking garage. She admitted it to herself then: she’d known he was coming and was curious. Well, why shouldn’t she be?
Now, she watched as her father was introduced and emerged on the stage to enthusiastic applause. It was hard to square her memories of him with a figure people would come to see and applaud for, but there he was. He stood frowning at the podium, waiting for the clapping to die down. She hadn’t seen him in several years, and a couple of things were immediately apparent to her.
First, he was fat, much fatter than he’d ever been, and he’d always been fat. Before, the fat had been hard and seemed structural to her, a part of him, like the interior metal girders in the buildings he worked on. Now it seemed extraneous, an add-on. His gut was a soft expanse that, in tandem with his beautiful white coxcomb of hair, created an avuncular bearlike effect that belied what she was sure was still his essentially selfish nature.
Second, surprisingly, he didn’t appear to be drunk. As a girl, she’d learned all the signs. His face would always turn an even richer shade of scarlet than usual—in particular, the area on the sides of the bridge of his nose. She had thought of it as his mask. As he’d bent carefully over her to tuck her in, she would imagine pulling it off his face. Even from the back of the room she could tell that the man up on the podium was only averagely red faced. Also, he’d crossed the stage with an insouciant, absentminded trudge. When he was drunk, he walked with the measured, cautious gait of a man moving through a room filled with precariously balanced crystal stemware; when he was sober, he was unapologetically clumsy.
The applause died, and her father gingerly addressed the mic with a shaky left paw. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m Richard Lazar.” It took him a moment to find his place in the book. He looked up, scanning the crowd, then began to read.
We’d been in camp for almost three months—three months of sitting there with our thumbs up our asses, in some cases literally (a new kid from Idaho named Sanderson was caught in the latrine with three fingers in his bung; he claimed the mess chow had made him so constipated that he was trying to manually extricate a turd, and was nicknamed Brownfinger for the duration of his tour, another two months, as it turned out, at which time he was mortared at Parrot’s Beak and sent home without legs or a nickname)—when we got our marching orders.
Sergeant Martin gave them to us after breakfast. They were: a weeklong push to Nha Trang, north of Cam Ranh; pack light on provisions, heavy on ammo; decamping tomorrow
oh six hundred; expect engagement. In other words, as usual, no one told us what in the green living shit was going on. We marched all day—our safe little base camp disappearing behind us, through alternating paddies and rain forest—with the question of where the fuck we were going and why going back and forth like a sung call-and-response:
Where in the fuck is Nha Trang?
Why in the fuck are we going there?
We camped on the edge of a little hamlet that seemed mostly inhabited by chickens. Occasionally an old lady would peek her head out of a shack and then disappear again. The chickens didn’t seem to mind us. I didn’t honestly mind the march so far. I mean, if you’d given me a choice I would’ve stayed at base camp, and I still didn’t think I could fight—still had that dull certainty in my gut—but at the same time there was a strange relief, almost a physical release, in finally doing the thing we’d been sent there to do. Getting it the hell over with.
Berlinger, however, was pissed. He stopped Lieutenant Endicott, as Endicott walked through camp. “What’s the mission, Leftenant? I’m not going any further if I don’t know.”
“Yes, you will, Berlinger.”
“I will not. I’m telling you. I’ll walk straight back to the brig at base camp, but I ain’t goose chasin’ around the fucking mountains if no one has the good grace to tell me just what I’m doing here. Common courtesy, sir.”
“Your staff sergeant told you. Heading to Nha Trang, another five days or so.”
“Right, why?”
Endicott looked down at all of us as if deciding something, then he seemed to shrug into the darkness. “Search and destroy.”
Search and destroy. The words have a poetic ring. And a Calvinist logic that suggests if you search hard enough, you’ll find something to destroy. Endicott disappeared into his tent and left us where we’d collapsed, our gear sprawled out around us like we’d dropped from the sky through the jungle canopy. Berlinger sat back down and started carving long strips off a palm frond with his knife. He said, “Search and destroy. That means a colonel got tired of us sitting in his pocket, right? Clusterfuck’s getting a little unfucked—everyone’s getting shipped home soon, better send us out here to get our asses shot at while they still got a chance, right?”
“Shut up, Berlinger,” said Davis Martin. He was a surly East Texan, tightly muscled and with all his features bunched up in the central square inch of his face.
“Spread a little napalm around for no reason, something to remember us by, right?”
“I said shut the fuck up.”
“Davis Martin, my daddy told me don’t trust no one with two first names,” barked Berlinger. The guys sitting near us laughed. “Anyway,” Berlinger went on, “I don’t know what you’re getting pissed about. It was in the Reporter, Nixon’s drawing down. These aren’t state secrets I’m giving away here.”
“One more word and you draw point tomorrow, that’s a threat and a promise.”
“Search and destroy, my ass,” Berlinger muttered, but he stopped talking. The thick jungle air hung around us like fine cloth, something you could reach out and grab. I ate my MRE and listened to the night, then dropped into a dead sleep, dreaming of the usual stuff: watching and being watched, pursuit and pursuing, fumbling with a gun in slow motion, a nightmare mist of malarial death.
———
Over the next couple of days, Berlinger went into a livid funk so profound that he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. He hadn’t been himself since Carbone—he’d mostly stopped with the relentless provocation and bullshit, and it was sorely missed, at least by me. He still played cards with us, even still horsed around some, ribbing Kozinski for being a dumb Polack and that kind of thing, but it somehow felt strained and perfunctory to me, as though he was just keeping up appearances. I know he felt guilty about Carbone. I felt bad about Carbone, too, at least for a little while, but in all honesty the feeling faded pretty quick. It seemed like something I had dreamed, or read about in a book. It hadn’t for Berlinger, though. He walked by himself behind everyone, as though he was humping some extra gear, an invisible radio, say, that was pushing him down into the muck. When I waited for him to catch up, he just shook his head at me. I let him be.
We swamp-assed it through a soggy lowland marsh for two days—the inside of my thighs chafed red and swollen as a baboon’s ass from the heat and the damp fabric of my combat fatigues—then the morning of the third we hit higher, drier ground. Pure bliss. We walked in a steaming line up a wide clay ridge on the side of a hill, steadily rising out of the grassland. The sun rose as if it was one of us, up out of its resting place beyond the jungle. Against my will, as so often happened, I was struck by the beauty of the place, and by the fact that, given what we were there to do, I was still able to recognize that beauty. It would have been easier, in a way, if it had been an uglier country. Easier to keep in mind what you were there to do and have done to you.
We were reminded soon enough. At seven hundred hours, Endicott sent word around that aerial recon had reported recent VC activity in this area. A nearby village called Vien Dinh was harboring an encampment. We held our guns at the ready, hunched down, fanned out, and slowed up, looking for movement in the treacherous woods, or the glint of wire strung across our path. We moved this way for two hours, aching under our field packs and fear, the ridge slowly and inexorably rising up over the landscape, until we were nearly level with the tree line. Then five of us—me, Berlinger, Martin, and two other guys whose names are lost to me—crested the ridge and looked down at the village of Vien Dinh.
It sat a hundred yards below us, innocent, or at least unaware. Several thatched huts crowded around a central area that had been cleared of palm trees, with a darkened area that must have been a communal cooking space. An old person, impossible to identify as a man or woman from this distance, sat on a wooden bench, stooped over a plate of food they ate with their fingers. A bare-chested man appeared on the far edge of the scene, carrying wooden buckets, full of rice or maybe water. It was strange watching these people go about their banal chores and duties, the routines they completed daily—gathering water, cleaning and mending clothes, feeding their meager livestock, cooking, and washing up—completely unaware of being watched. It felt indecent.
There was no Vietcong presence that I could see. Davis Martin waved us back off the edge, and we jogged behind him to where Endicott and the rest of the platoon had stopped. Martin and Endicott conferred, and then Endicott motioned for us to follow him back thirty yards or so down the ridge, to a small stone outcropping that provided shade from the rapidly rising sun. We gathered as close as we could, and listened as he spoke in a low tone, although there was no way anyone down there could have heard him talk.
“Listen up. We’re gonna park it here until the VC make an appearance. We’ll take shifts surveilling. When they do show up, we’re going to get back in formation and blast the hell out of them. Martin will give firing orders, we clear?”
“No, sir.” Berlinger stared at Endicott, or past him, as though he was seeing something out in the dense green foliage.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, ‘No, sir.’ ” Some of the guys groaned.
“Berlinger,” Endicott began, but Berlinger had unslung his rifle and handed it to Endicott butt first. The lieutenant took it uncertainly, for a moment balancing it on its barrel and looking like an old man with a walking stick.
Berlinger said, “Lieutenant, I hereby surrender my weapon and myself to this platoon as a noncombatant, or an objector, or deserter, or whatever the fuck the terminology is. I lay down arms.” He pointed to the ridge over the village. “I am not doing this.”
“You don’t have a choice.” Endicott tried to hand him back the gun, but Berlinger wouldn’t take it.
“Respectfully, sir, there’s always a choice.”
“Pick up your weapon, soldier.”
“No.”
Endicott paused, and when he spoke, he spoke slowly. “You understand
you can be court-martialed for this. And you understand that can mean a dishonorable discharge, maybe years in prison.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn.” Endicott sighed. “Goddamn it, fine.” He handed Martin the rifle. Martin went over to Berlinger and confiscated his field pack. Standing there empty-handed, Berlinger looked like a little kid who’d shown up late to a playground full of kids playing soldier. He walked away and sat next to a small rock with his hands between his legs. I wanted to go over there and beat his fuckwad prima-donna head in.
Forty minutes later the guy who’d drawn first watch, a PFC named Tilghman, turned around and gestured wildly. Davis Martin jogged over with his gun in firing position, dropped to his belly, and looked over. He waved at us to follow him, motioning with his palm flat to the ground. We spread out in a predetermined line and moved up the crest of the hill, crab-walking the last ten feet to the edge.
The Vietcong were down there, identifiable by their trademark loose-fitting uniforms, as well as by the rifles slung over their shoulders. They squatted around holding tin cups of something, green tea maybe, carrying on conversations in clusters. We were too far away to hear what they were saying and, of course, we wouldn’t have understood it anyway, but the general atmosphere of the scene struck me as one of convivial relaxation after a hard night’s work. It was, after all, still morning. One of the Vietcong laughed, a hoarse bark. I was reminded of the time before shipping out that I’d stayed up all night with my buddies in Knoxville, cracking a final beer as the sun came up, relishing the delay of sleep another ten minutes, another five. I reminded myself that if the soldiers below us had pulled an all-nighter, they’d done so creeping through the surrounding forest, the same as they had done in my nightmares over the last three months. Setting claymores and bouncing betties, rigging booby traps with sharpened punji sticks, hoping to wound, maim, impale me—hoping to shear the flesh from my legs.
The Grand Tour Page 17