by Ninie Hammon
Piper’s mouth literally dropped open. She felt it, and some part of her spinning mind registered how comical she must look, standing there with her mouth agape. Marian’s hand flew to her throat, and she stood motionless, too, staring in disbelief.
The little girl didn’t freeze though. In fact, she thawed. All the tension seemed to drain out of her. She sank to her knees on the floor before Sadie.
“Well, hello, little pretty,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Sabie!” She held up two fingers. “Sabie dis many.”
Then Sadie launched herself at the little girl and threw her arms around the older child’s neck with such wild abandon, she almost knocked the little girl backward.
“Sabie house,” she said, as language took over from babble. She let go of her stranglehold long enough to gesture at the room. “My house. I hab Rasmus, too. He my teddy bear.” She held her chubby hands about two feet apart. “Dis big. He in my room, Sabie room. But Rasmus nose gone. Lost it.” Then she threw her arms around the little girl’s neck again, clinging in delight every bit as tightly as she had clung to Piper in terror only a few minutes earlier.
The little girl hugged Sadie just as fiercely. She closed her eyes and held the toddler tight to her chest.
“Such an angel you are,” she said. “What a pretty, sweet, sweet angel.”
Piper looked a question at Marian. The blank expression on the older woman’s face likely mirrored her own.
Marian found her voice first.
“Go on then,” she said to Piper. “Get a glass of water for…” she stopped. “Why, I’m forgettin’ my m-m-manners. I’m Marian Addington, and this here’s my daughter-in-law, Piper.” She smiled. “’Pears you done met Sadie. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
A distant look came into the child’s eyes, as if she were struggling to remember her name. Or perhaps to think up a fake one.
“Margaret.” Clearly there was more, but she stopped and offered nothing beyond that.
“Margaret’s a right pretty name, but I b-b-bet you answer to somethin’ shorter, doncha,” Marian said.
The child nodded.
“Maggie?”
The little girl looked confused, then shrugged.
“Aye, Maggie’s short for Margaret,” she said.
Chapter 4
Grayson stared unblinking at Nguyen, then he resolutely closed his eyes and kept them shut, certain that when he opened them again, she would be gone. Now he couldn’t see the world, but he could still smell it—sweat, smoke, dead pig. You couldn’t deny a reality that stank, though this one didn’t smell nearly as bad as what he’d awakened to the day Haystack found him in Yan Ling.
The hand over his mouth is gone, but not the stink. Where had he been? And where is he now? He doesn’t open his eyes, just tries to assess his situation and position without moving.
He has bobbed up to the surface of awareness several times but isn’t sure if he has been unconscious or merely asleep. He is lying on his back on a straw mat, can feel it between him and the hard-packed ground. He can smell the eye-watering stink of the Vietnamese dish made from rotted cabbage, a smell mingled with the feces stink.
He is also aware of a headache that throbs in heartbeat bursts of torture. The pain forces a tiny groan out between his lips.
“You awake, GI?”
He opens his eyes and struggles to focus until he can make out the outline of a very small person, a child, a young girl, sitting on the ground beside him in a dimly lit hut.
“You thirsty?”
He is! So thirsty his tongue and the roof of his mouth come apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro. He nods and the little girl produces a tin cup. She lifts his head up so he won’t choke when she puts it to his lips, and he drinks greedily, long and deep. Now he can talk.
“Where am I?”
“I find you in dead bodies.” After a battle, kids often swarmed over the bodies and stripped them bare. “But you still breathing. Cong coming so I roll you like log over into”—she uses a Vietnamese word he doesn’t know, but her tone and the way she wrinkles her nose and the stench that wafts up from his clothing translates it for him—“to hide.”
She points to the cross on his helmet beside the mat.
“You from Jesus. Don’t kill.”
Grayson thinks of the men who’d fallen as the commandeered M16 recoiled against his shoulder. He’d had the presence of mind even then to be surprised at how much it was like hunting back home. Deer, though, not squirrels. You stalked squirrels; you waited for deer to come to you. And when you caught one in your sights, you shot it and watched it fall.
Twenty-one. His kill number. Of course, some were only shadows. At the time, he thought shadows counted, but now he isn’t so sure. In the crazy light, with screams and dying all around, he had come to believe that the shadows were the fallen Viet Cong. That’s why it counted. You shot them to kill them, and then you had to shoot their shadows when they rose up off the dead. So that counted, too, didn’t it?
“I know missionaries from Jesus.” The little girl grins a little then, and he sees that she is missing key teeth in front. Six, maybe seven years old. Eyes much older, though. Like all the kids in this country.
His first day on patrol—when he was a cherry like Dollar Bill—Grayson had handed out candy bars to children until he ran out, then mooched them off his buddies.
That night, Haystack had pulled an empty candy wrapper out of his pocket, remembered he’d given the contents to Gray to hand out to the hungry children and said, “You know, this country’s full of little kids like those today.”
“Yeah…I know. What’s your point?”
“You can’t love all of ’em.”
“God does.”
“And because He does, you have to.”
“No, because He does, I get to.”
Grayson looks into the dark eyes of the little girl sitting beside him in the dirt and tries to feel that same way again, longs to care. Nothing.
The sound of approaching footsteps outside and someone speaking Vietnamese stop his breathing. He sees a rifle-toting backlit shadow appear in the doorway.
Please, Lord, not a POW. Kill me now!
Then he hears a braying donkey-laugh.
“They told me you stunk like a outhouse, but seein’s believin’…no, smelling is believing,” says a voice out of the shadow in the doorway, and the donkey-laugh brays again. It is followed immediately by a string of gasping expletives. “Where you been, Padre? You reek worse than a—”
“I know what I smell like,” Gray says, breathless, relief such a warm flood over him that he fears for a moment he might wet himself. “When hiding places are in short supply, the least attractive is often the most effective.”
Haystack is reluctant to step farther into the hut than just inside the door. Gray can’t blame him.
“You wanna tell me where I am and how—?”
“You’re in the village of Yan Ling—locals call it Ling—four or five klicks from where they hit us. Gunships came right before dark, and we made a run for ’em. Bartlett, the new guy, said he’d seen you go down, said you was dead.” Haystack pauses. “He didn’t make it. Took a round in the back as he was climbing up into the chopper. After the gunships sent the gooks on the run, corpsmen went back for bodies and said you wasn’t there. That was yesterday morning.”
Haystack has unconsciously backed up from the stink until he is outside the hut, and Gray can actually make out his features. He looks awful. They all do. All those boys—farmers, mechanics and electricians. Bagpipes had been installing a television set in a motel room, turned it on to see if it worked and heard the announcement that the guard had been activated. They all looked the same now, indistinguishable in the same green/brown camo. All too thin, filthy, and like they haven’t slept well in weeks. Which they haven’t. So different from the laughing young men who’d shown up once a month at the National Guard Armory in Spindle Rock, Kentucky, to “
play soldier.”
“I’ll take you to a medic, but you might wanna—”
“Get cleaned up first? Ya think?”
“There’s a stream that way,” Haystack gestures toward the setting sun, “but if you’re planning to use it, you better get after it. They’re about to set out the Claymores and booby traps.”
“I got soap,” Nguyen says and disappears into the gloom of the hut to fetch it.
“And I’ll see if I can find you something to put on that ain’t quite so odor-iferous,” Haystack beats a hasty retreat away from the hut.
Gray makes it to his knees without the world spinning crazily around him. His head still hammers in thudding rhythm with his heart, but the pain is now localized high on his neck at the base of his skull.
“You wait. I help.” The little girl appears at Gray’s side and tugs ineffectually upward on his arm.
She is no assistance in lifting, but he uses her to steady himself and is surprised to discover that he can actually stand, swaying drunkenly, but upright.
The little girl doesn’t seem to notice the stench at all, and in truth, it no longer makes his stomach heave and roll.
Goodie. I smell like crap and I don’t care. What’s wrong with this picture?
He tentatively steps out into the late afternoon sun, quickly regaining his strength. Obviously, he has been unconscious for more than a few hours, has slept the clock around. Which means he’s surely had more rest than any of the beehive of soldiers who cut a wide path around him as he approaches.
He puts the little girl a step or two in front of him, a hand on each of her shoulders, like the handles of a mule-drawn plow. Some of the soldiers are heating their K rations on the village cooking fires, and he imagines the aroma of coffee in the air, camouflaged for the time being by the latrine stink that causes wrinkled noses at thirty paces.
“What’s your name, GI?” she asks.
“Gray,” he says.
“Grape? You name Grape? Like the pop?”
Apparently, the little girl has gotten her hands on Nehi somewhere.
“Yep, that’d be me, Grape.”
“You Mr. Grape or just Grape?”
“Just Grape’ll do. What’s your name?”
“Nguyen,” she says. Figures. Every third female in Vietnam was named Nguyen.
He is pleasantly surprised to find the stream is clear, about three feet deep with a sandy bottom. He takes off his boots and then tells the little girl, “You stand over there, Nguyen,” indicating a spot on the rise leading down to the riverbank. “And turn your back.”
“Why? You not want me see you?”
“Because I said so! Toss me that bar of soap and face the village.”
The child complies, and Grayson pulls off his shirt and drops it on the sand, pulls his T-shirt over his head and—
GA. Letters printed on the inside of his T-shirt in black Magic Marker. Piper had put the marking there, said there was no way on earth he could keep track of which T-shirt was his when everybody else had one just like it and so she was going to mark his. She’d only been babbling, saying whatever came into her head to keep from crying. She’d knelt over the neck of his T-shirt in forced concentration and traced the letters that must have looked like seaweed through the flood of unshed tears in her eyes.
He lets the T-shirt fall to the sand. His chest and belly are spotted with leeches. He has no spray with him—it is in his pack and his pack is…so he pulls them off, one by one, feels his blood squish in his hands as he does. He knows the chances of infection go way up when you pull the slimy creatures off because pieces of them remain under the skin, but he has no choice. He lets his pants drop to his feet and pulls off his socks. Then he steps onto a large rock in the stream, but the rock is slick. He loses his footing and falls backward on his butt, gasping but invigorated by the cool water.
“You okay?” Nguyen calls out without turning around.
“Fine. All I need’s a rubber duckie.”
“What a bubber duckie?”
“Never mind.”
Gray scrubs his skin with soap augmented by handfuls of sand from the stream bank until his skin is pink. Two spots of jungle rot on his left hand and a swath of it from his elbow to his wrist on his right arm bleed bright-red into the water, but he keeps at it until he feels clean.
Haystack appears beside Nguyen on the rise above the bank.
“Gathered up some spares for you to wear till yours dry,” he says and unceremoniously pitches a pile of odd, mixed uniform parts down on the sand. “Ten minutes and you got to come in. CO wants to talk to you, and Bones says you need antibiotic salve on your jungle rot, seein’ as how you soaked them sores in—”
“I got it,” Gray says, steps out of the water and picks up the “borrowed” but by no means clean fatigues Haystack scrounged for him. Has to be some dead guy’s gear. He pulls the shirt on—it is a size too small, tight in the shoulders—and glances at the nameplate.
“Campbell,” he says, his voice hollow.
“Yeah, Campbell. Why? You know him? He bought the farm two days ago when—”
Grayson bursts out laughing. It makes his head scream in agony, but he can’t help it. Campbell. He is wearing the shirt of some guy named Campbell!
“Private joke or can anybody join in?”
“It’s just”—the more he thinks about it the funnier it gets—“see, my mother was a McCullough. And for generations the McCulloughs and the Campbells…” He goes off on another laughing jag, clearly insipient hysteria, but he can’t seem to get control of it.
“You mean like the Hatfields and the McCoys, that what you’re saying?” Haystack asks.
“Hey, the Hatfields may have been from West Virginia, but the McCoys were your ancestors—they were Kentucky boys.”
The absurd humor abruptly drains out of Grayson, and he stops laughing in mid-bark, so abruptly that he feels lightheaded.
“Chop, chop, Padre,” Haystack says. “You’re burning daylight.” Then he turns and heads back over the hill.
The Campbell shirt sends Grayson’s mind over the miles to Piper. She was a Campbell.
Her face appears before him. Only it doesn’t. What forms in his mind is a blur. Dark hair, but a face that…actually there is no face at all. He can’t do it, can’t conjure up her image, and that should have scared him. But he is beyond caring about a thing like that. He’d wager that half the guys here, at least the ones who’d been here more than a couple of months—the ones who’d been on patrol, had met Charlie in the trees, had run for their lives through the tall grass with blades so sharp it was like running through razor blades—he’d bet those guys couldn’t summon the images of their sweethearts to mind either. Because when you’d been here awhile, nothing but here felt real. The rest, the world and family, snowstorms and Christmas and mist on the creek on a fall morning…none of that existed. Couldn’t. Wasn’t enough room in a man’s head for the reality of here and the reality of there. One or the other, not both. And if you clung to the reality of there, you wouldn’t last a week here.
Grayson picks up his reeking clothing, then steps back into the creek and begins to clean his pants, camo shirt and T-shirt the same way he’d cleaned his body—soap and sand. Slowly the reek of feces leaves his nostrils. He wrings his clothing out and tosses it into a pile, then he stands for a moment, looking at the red sun as it slips below the treetops. He feels reasonably good. Well, if you don’t count his cracked skull, bruised ribs, leech wounds, jungle rot…oh, and trench foot. Yep, it’d been unmistakable as soon as he removed his left sock. When did his foot go numb? Who knew? When did it start to swell? Didn’t know that either. But it is clearly swollen now, and an ugly shade of bright pink with several open sores. Have to get Bones to treat that when he got the antibiotic salve, or he could develop gangrene.
He leans over, making his head throb, and grabs his pile of wet clothes. He’ll hang them up somewhere to dry. Inexplicable as it is—absurd as it is—he is an
xious to shed the shirt of the dead soldier named Campbell.
“You dress? We need get back Ling. They come mostly setsun.”
“Sunset.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not setsun. It’s…sunset. Uh-hay, et-say.”
The quizzical look on the little girl’s face strikes Grayson as funny, charmingly, innocently funny, and he burps out a gentle, sincere laugh. “Un-hay et-say…sunset in a language called pig Latin. It’s a…special language.”
“Cong know pig Latin?”
“I’m sure they don’t.”
“Then you teach Nguyen. Okay, Grape?”
Her eyes sparkle.
A smile starts on his face but dies there, and he is suddenly acutely aware of the jungle around him. He and the little girl are outside the perimeter. Unarmed. He scans the trees. There could be a sniper…
Like the sniper in the trees who’d tagged Haystack. Even with his eyes squeezed resolutely shut, Grayson was careful to keep his head down, out of the gook’s sightline.
Not out of the sightline of the road, though. He was the only one of his squad who had an unobstructed view of it. And he knew what he would see there when he opened his eyes. Not an apparition, a ghost, a hallucination. A flesh-and-blood little girl with a smile on her face and tears on her cheeks.
All those thoughts flew through Grayson’s mind in the space between one heartbeat and the next before he slowly lifted his eyelids.
Nguyen was still there.
* * *
Charleston, West Virginia
Thursday, August 14, 1969
Carter Addington lurched into semiconsciousness in sweat-soaked sheets. Some loud noise had awakened him from the dream. The same dream, of course. His father at the pulpit, his eyes blazing. Literally. Fire shot from two empty orbs beneath his bushy black eyebrows and blazed from his tongue as he spoke, the flames licking out of a mouth with too many teeth. Jagged teeth.