by Jauss, David
That’s what he’d said after Freeze had stepped on the mine. He’d come up to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Hey man, you okay?” Over and over, “You okay?” When Freeze had finally been able to answer, he told Jackson to fuck off, he was all right, leave him alone. But Jackson didn’t back off. None of them did. For the rest of the patrol, they all stayed close to him, thinking they were safe if they were around him. He had the magic, they said, the luck. He wasn’t going to get greased. The mine had proved that. So they stuck close to Freeze until finally he turned his M-16 on them and said he’d shoot the next mother who came near.
Now Freeze looked at Jackson, then at the others. Once he had been closer to these guys than to anybody in his whole life. But ever since he’d stepped on the mine they had seemed like strangers. He felt like he’d walked into someone else’s barracks, someone else’s life.
“Yeah,” he said to Jackson. “I’m okay.” Then he crossed over to his rack and pulled off his drenched shirt. Kneeling down, he started to dig through his bamboo footlocker.
“I hear you and Konieczny are going to a party,” Clean Machine said, then laughed. “Some people have all the luck.”
Freeze looked at him, but he didn’t say anything.
Duckwalk sat down on Freeze’s rack. “I hope you’re doing all right,” he said. “We been worried about you, bro.”
Freeze didn’t answer. He was trying to remember what he was looking for in his footlocker. Then it came to him: cotton. He found some in the neck of an aspirin bottle and tore off two chunks. Then he stood and turned to Konieczny, who was waiting in front of his rack, smiling uneasily. “What’re you laughing at, twink?” he said. Konieczny just stood there, looking confused.
“Ain’t nobody laughing,” Boswell said, and pushed his Stetson back on his head. “Ain’t nothing funny here.” Then he looked at Jackson. “You want to finish this hand, pardner? ‘Cause if you don’t I’ll be plenty happy to pick up that pot.”
Jackson looked at Freeze, his forehead creased. “You still with us?” he asked.
“What’s it to you?” Freeze said.
Jackson looked down and shook his head, then he picked up his cards and turned back to the game.
Freeze went outside then and stood in the heat, his head pounding. He wanted to go back to sleep. Maybe when he woke up he would be Mick again, not Freeze, and the mine would be just a bad dream.
In a moment, Konieczny joined him and they marched in silence up the hill to the latrine, each of them humping a can of diesel fuel. When they got there, Freeze stuffed the cotton up his nostrils, glaring at Konieczny all the while. Then they lifted the shelter off its blocks, exposing the fifty-five gallon drums cut in half, and started to soak the shit with fuel.
“Jesus,” Konieczny said. “This is number ten.”
Freeze didn’t say anything; he was thinking how much he hated Reynolds for making him do this. If the son of a bitch was here right now, he’d throw him into the shit barbecue. Lieutenant Crispy Critter. He smiled as he poured the fuel into the latrine.
“Make that ten thousand,” Konieczny said, his hand over his nose and mouth.
Though it was still early, the day was so hot and humid that the air seemed too thick to breathe. Freeze was breathing through his open mouth because of the cotton in his nose, and it felt like he was suffocating. His head throbbed and his stomach felt queasy. Then the smell of the diesel fumes and the shit suddenly penetrated the cotton and made him drop to his knees. With a noise like a bark, he vomited onto the red dirt between his trembling palms.
“You all right?” Konieczny asked, leaning over him.
Freeze wiped his mouth and looked up at Konieczny’s face, its freckles and peachfuzz and acne. The twink would be lucky if he lasted a week in the bush. Freeze could see him tripping a mine and blowing into the air, his body cut in half. He remembered how Perkins had looked after he triggered a Bouncing Betty. He’d had his wet intestines in his hands, and he was trying to put them back in. Or had Freeze just dreamed that?
He looked away, squinting in the sun. “Fuck you,” he answered.
“Just trying to help,” the kid said. He shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the work.
Freeze stood, his legs quivering. He thought about saying he was sorry, but then he’d have to explain and he didn’t know how to explain or even what to explain. So they finished soaking the shit without talking, then dropped matches on it. Black smoke curdled out of the pit, and the stench made them gag. Standing there beside the blaze, his eyes burning, head swimming, Freeze almost threw up again. And later, back in the hootch, he lay on his rack, the stink of the burning shit still thick in his nostrils, and heaved his guts into a C-rats can. His heart was beating fast, like it did when they were in a fire fight. What had happened? He’d been a strack soldier for ten months, an assistant squad leader—leader of the first fire team—for the past four, ever since C.B. got zapped. And now he was a shit-burner. God, how he hated that frigging brown-bar.
Hating the lieutenant made him feel better than he had since he’d stepped on the mine; it made things seem more real, more logical. So he stoked his hate, made it grow. Everything was Reynolds’ fault. Reynolds was the evil heart of it all. If it wasn’t for him, he’d be happy now, he’d be one of the guys again, nothing would have changed. The bastard was worse than Charlie.
Lying there on his canvas cot, Freeze imagined Reynolds walking point through knee-high brush. Then he saw him stop dead. He’d felt something under his boot. For a second, stupidly, Reynolds thought it was a scorpion, or a rock, but then he felt the pin sink and he knew it was the metal prong of a Bouncing Betty. Before he could move, or even think, the mine flew up out of the ground with a pop. Reynolds closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands, and for a moment, a moment that stretched out until it was outside of time, he waited for the explosion of light, the thundering roar, the hail of shrapnel. Then the moment ended and the Bouncing Betty fell back at his feet, dead. The main charge hadn’t gone off. Reynolds opened his eyes and stood there for several minutes, panting hard, the sweat rolling off his face and dripping onto the mine, his eyes staring into ozone. Hey, his men would say later, you should have seen the brown-bar freeze.
Freeze planned his revenge all afternoon. Then, an hour or so before dusk, he saw Reynolds go into the officers’ club. After waiting a few minutes to be sure he wasn’t coming back out, he snuck into Reynolds’ quarters. He had planned to fire a single pistol shot into his pillow and leave, but once he was there, that plan seemed too dangerous, even crazy. He had to do something, though, so he stole the two officer-grade steaks Reynolds had in his refrigerator. He stuffed them inside his shirt and left, almost giddy. He could just see the look on Reynolds’ face when he saw the steaks were missing.
Back in the hootch, Freeze put the smaller steak up for auction. He stood on his footlocker and dangled the slab in front of his squad. “What am I bid for this hunk of heaven?” he said.
Duckwalk was sitting on his rack, cleaning an AK-47 he’d souvenired from an NVA. He shook his head. “The LT’s gonna fuck you, Freeze,” he said.
“You’ll have his steaks for supper, but he’ll have your ass for breakfast,” Jackson agreed. “He’s gonna know you swiped his meat.” He took another drag on his joint and went back to playing solitaire on his footlocker.
Everybody was trying to act uninterested, but Freeze knew better. He knew how long it had been since anybody’d had a steak. To them, even the warm Cokes they got every stand-down were bennies.
“Let’s start the bidding at a bag of el primo no-stem, no-seed, shall we?” he said and grinned. He was having fun. He had crossed over the edge of hatred and now he was having fun. He could barely keep from laughing.
“Are you nuts?” said McKeown. “We buy that hot cow and we’re in as much trouble as you.”
“Smoke my pole,” Boswell said.
“Shit,” Clean Machine said. “I wouldn’t give on
e joint for your sister and your mother both.”
But before long, McKeown offered a pack of Park Lanes and soon they were all bidding. When it was over, Clean had shelled out four packs of Park Lanes and a handful of military payment certificates for the steak. Freeze stashed his loot under the floorboard beneath his rack, then ditty-bopped out to the perimeter where nobody could see him and hunkered down in some brush to broil his steak. He lit a tin of Sterno and set it over a little stove he’d made by puncturing an empty C-rats can. Then he started to broil the steak on a steel plate he’d ripped off the back of a Claymore mine.
Smelling the steak browning on the plate, he forgot the stench of the burning shit for the first time that day. He leaned back on one elbow, lit a Park Lane, and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs. As he smoked, he looked out over the brush at the lead-colored sky and tried to daydream about going back to the world. He imagined he was back in Little Rock, lying on a lounge chair beside his apartment pool, catching some rays and checking out the talent. But the daydream began to unravel as soon as it started. First he couldn’t remember what his pool had looked like. Then he wasn’t even sure whether he’d had a pool at Cromwell Court or if that was earlier, at the Cantrell Apartments. And the girls that strolled by in their bikinis were faceless, vague. He tried to remember Mary Ellen, the girl he’d dated the fall before he enlisted, but nothing would come to him. He wasn’t sure of the color of her eyes or hair, the sound of her voice. He laughed. Then he listened to himself laugh. It was such a strange sound. He wondered why he’d never noticed how strange it was. He tried to remember Mary Ellen’s laugh, but it was no use. Ever since he’d come to Nam he’d been forgetting things, and now almost everything was gone. And what he did remember seemed more like something he’d overheard in a bar, some dim, muffled conversation. He couldn’t have seen Perkins holding his plastic yellow guts, or C.B.’s brains in his mouth, the top of his skull turned to pulp. He couldn’t have seen these things. It was impossible. Wasn’t Perkins transferred to another company? Hadn’t C.B. gone back to the world?
By the time Freeze finally remembered to turn over the steak, it had burned black.
After lights out, a heavy monsoon rain began to beat against the ponchos nailed on the outside of the hootch. The wind whipped the water against the green plastic, battering the hootch like incoming.
Then it was incoming. Duckwalk sat up in the rack next to Freeze’s. “You hear that?” he asked.
Freeze sat up, his poncho liner wrapped around him.
“Not tonight, Charlie,” Jackson moaned, “I’m having me a wet dream.”
They listened as the mortars walked in closer and closer. At first there was only a distant pop, then a closer thud. Then they heard the whistling of a round and the roar of an explosion.
“Shit,” Freeze said. And he and the rest of the men scrambled out of their racks, grabbing their M-16s, and double-timed in their skivvies out into the cold pounding rain. Through the rain’s thick odor of rot, they could smell the sharp scents of gunpowder and cordite. On the perimeter of the camp, M-79 grenade launchers and mortars were thumping into a sky green with star flares, punctuating the nonstop sentence of an M-16 on rock-’n’-roll.
In the platoon bunker, they huddled behind the wet sandbags, shivering, staring out at the dark. Konieczny was next to Freeze. “Are they gonna come through the wire?” he asked. When a star flare burst, his face turned green, a Martian’s, and Freeze felt the urge to laugh. Then he heard the whistle of an incoming round. He ducked and waited for the burst. It seemed to take forever. Looking around, he saw that everyone was still, as if they’d been frozen. He remembered the game he’d played as a kid back in Arkansas. Statues. It was like they were playing Statues.
Then the shell exploded nearby, raining shrapnel into the bunker, and everybody came alive again. Somebody started screaming.
Reynolds stood up at his end of the bunker. “Who’s down?”
Everybody looked around. But no one was hurt. Then the screaming started again. It was coming from outside the bunker.
“I’m dying!” the man yelled. “Help me!”
Before anyone could say anything, Reynolds had crawled out of the bunker and started to run in a crouch toward a man lying in the mud halfway between the second platoon hootch and bunker. Under the light of the star flares, Freeze watched the brown-bar drag the man toward their bunker. For a second he admired Reynolds for rescuing the soldier when he could have ordered someone else to do it, but then he felt the comforting return of hate. The hotdog, he thought. He’s bucking for goddamn Eagle Scout.
The moment Reynolds made it back, they heard the whistle of another mortar and ducked, holding their breaths until it exploded. Then they looked up.
Someone shined his flashlight on the man. “Jesus H. Christ,” Reynolds said then, and turned away, disgusted. The man was all right. He hadn’t been hit at all. Still, he was moaning as if he were dying.
“Save me,” the soldier pleaded. “Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking to anybody there. He was staring up at the sky, his eyes blank as milk glass, and whimpering. And he wasn’t even a twink. He’d been in the bush long enough to get a bad case of jungle rot. It had invaded his face, and though he’d tried to hide it by growing a scruffy beard, it made his skin look raw.
They told him he was okay, but he kept on moaning and crying. Even after the mortars stopped falling and the machine guns faded to random bursts, he would not stop.
The rest of the men looked away, embarrassed, but Freeze couldn’t take his eyes off him.
The next morning, the other soldiers were laughing about the man who thought he was wounded, calling him a snuffy, a wuss, and praising Reynolds for risking his butt to save him. They even had a nickname for Reynolds now. “Man, did you see the look he gave that pogue?” Jackson had said. “It was righteous rabid.” And it stuck. All the while they prepared for inspection, the men talked about Righteous Rabid and The Wuss. A week before, Freeze would have joined in. But he wasn’t one of them anymore.
At inspection, Reynolds stopped in front of Freeze and poked him in the gut with his finger. “Private Harris,” he said, “you look like you’ve put on a couple of pounds since yesterday.” He looked Freeze in the eye. “Maybe you had an extra helping of ham and mothers? Or maybe the entire platoon gave you their cookies?”
Freeze stood there a moment. For some reason he was suddenly sleepy. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep right there on the floor of the hootch.
“I’m talking to you, Private,” Reynolds said.
Freeze just stood there. He was so tired he didn’t even have the energy to lie.
“So you did do it,” Reynolds said. Then he put his face in Freeze’s. “I’m going to report this little incident to Captain Arnold, and I’m going to recommend that you receive an Article 15. If I have my way, he’ll bust your ass to E-1.” Reynolds sneered. “But until then you can party. How does filling sandbags sound for starters?”
A mortar shell had blasted through the first layer of sandbags during the attack and ripped into the second layer, spilling sand like guts. It would take hours to fill enough sandbags to repair the bunker, and it was going to be another hundred and ten degree day. Already the sun was burning off the puddles left by the rain.
Freeze stared at the blue vein that popped out on Reynolds’ forehead, between his eyes, a perfect target. “It sounds like shit,” he heard someone say. It was a second before he realized he was the one who said it.
Reynolds stiffened.
“What did you say, pogue?”
Freeze said, “Cut me some slack.”
Reynolds’ eyes narrowed. “Maybe one Article 15 isn’t enough for you, Harris. Maybe you’d like another.”
Freeze stared at him. He was trying to hate him, trying to recapture the way he’d felt when he stole the steaks, but he couldn’t get it back. He wanted it back desperately, but it wouldn’t come. Af
ter a moment he looked down.
“No, I didn’t think you’d want any more,” Reynolds said then, stepping back and smiling. “I figured you’d had enough.”
The rest of that morning, Freeze filled sandbags in the dizzying heat, his back and shoulders aching, while a fat-ass MP named Hulsey stood by the bunker, throwing his walnut baton into the air and catching it. He was trying to see how many times he could spin the baton and still catch it. So far his record was six revolutions. Whenever he dropped the baton, he’d say “Uncle fucking Ho” and spit. Freeze stood, stretching his stiff back, and watched the MP fling the baton. He shook his head. He’d come halfway around the world to watch a man toss a baton into the air and try to catch it. And the MP had made the same trip to watch a man shovel sand. Freeze wanted to tell him how crazy it was, maybe suggest they go get a beer, but the MP caught the baton and said, “Seven. A new record! Let’s hear it for the boy from Brooklyn.” Freeze turned back to his work.
He finished repairing the bunker just before noon. He thought the brown-bar was done with him then, but after lunch, Reynolds gave him more scutwork to do. He mopped the barracks, unloaded ammo crates from a deuce-and-a-half truck, and then helped carry the wounded from medevac helicopters, humping stretchers down the metal ramp to the deck, where medics sorted the living from the dead. He was so exhausted from working in the heat that he could barely stand in the prop wash of the helicopters. He staggered in the hot wind, gravel swarming around him, stinging like hornets, and felt his hatred for Reynolds rise almost to madness. He knew Reynolds was just making an example of him, using him to prove to the others that he was in charge and wouldn’t take any shit, and he knew he’d back off as soon as he felt he’d made his point. But Freeze didn’t care. He still hated him. The bastard had treated him like a dead man’s turd ever since he came. He’d embarrassed him in front of his best friends, he’d turned them against him. He could hear the men now, talking and laughing about Righteous Rabid and Freeze. Well, he’d give them something to talk about. When they got out in the bush, he’d frag the son of a bitch. This decision made him feel suddenly calm, even happy, but then he saw Reynolds lying dead on the jungle floor, his eyes open to nothing, his face mottled with shadows cast by the sunlight flickering through the trees, and everything was as confused as a dream again because Reynolds was wearing Freeze’s fatigues and he was smiling. Grinning. Almost laughing. Freeze stood there in the prop wash until his partner yelled from the chopper’s cargo bay for him to hurry up and give him a hand.