There was an instant in which I could almost see the impact, the caving in of all that made this poor bastard who he was, whoever he was. And then he dropped, not backwards or forwards but straight down onto the black dirt of the jungle floor, a lumbering sack of weight, as final as that.
The guys spread out to cover the flanks, their eyes, still bleary from dreaming about home or about here, searching the striped darkness of the jungle walls. Soon though, it became apparent that the enemy had only numbered one, that I had scored myself a stray, and they approached the body.
I stayed back, glad now of my poncho’s protective embrace. My hands, alive with a trembling beneath my skin, still gripped the rifle. I remembered such a feeling from my baseball days, and from hunting, the cold aftermath of an adrenaline prematurely spent, but those innocent things seemed a hundred years more than the months ago that they had really been. I forced myself to breathe, and tasted the jungle heat.
One by one the men approached until they had formed a small open-ended circle around the dead Viet Cong. Everyone needed to see. Some just glanced and moved away. Others lingered as if in wait for something more to happen, trying to get the full measure of exactly how much they could endure. And some trembled with an adrenaline of their own, the fervour that had so savagely ruptured their sleep and now had nowhere to go.
‘He ain’t pretty no more,’ Cooper mumbled to himself and cast a glance in my direction before walking away, his eyes tight on his black hands. Cooper, who would last only a fleeting fortnight more himself.
‘Effin’ car crash, man,’ Kelly roared, and spat out a peel of laughter that sounded maniacal in the quietness of the hour.
But most said nothing. They recognised that death was near, and they respected that. A long trail lay ahead, this day and the next. Weeks and months more of trails just like this one. And this could be any of them, they knew. So they looked for a while, and then they moved off to eat some breakfast and to get ready for the trail again.
‘You okay?’
I raised my head; it was the upward swim from the bottom of a dream. And Crow was standing there above me, his hulking frame bringing shadow even in this place of scant light. He was a shade of brown that was almost white but still wasn’t, and in my mind I can see even now the man’s big bare muscular arm with the fresh band-aid fixed to the swell of his shoulder. His Purple Heart wound, he liked to boast, smiling whenever anyone teased him about it, about the nick he had taken from an enemy bullet and then cultivated in all the months after, claiming that knowing how close he had come helped to keep him sharp. Maybe it was even true.
There was nothing to do but to shrug to his question and nod.
His big hands worked at a joint, needing no guidance, knowing the way. He raised his work to his mouth and licked the paper’s edge, then let his fingers finish the job.
‘You sure?’
I cleared my throat and tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure I am.’ It didn’t really work but it was the best I had, and I think he knew it.
Our stares fell away, to settle on something distant. He stood there for a minute or more, Crow, called that I think so that no one would forget his colour, even when it wasn’t always that obvious, and then he fixed the joint in the clenched corner of his mouth and snapped open a zippo. His tour was almost over; he had been In Country a long time and was waiting now for a rear echelon posting. I watched the leaf of flame lick at the paper’s end and smoulder red. The guy drew deeply, held his breath and let it seep free in a series of stuttering hitches. White ropes of smoke crept from his flared nostrils and were lost in the gloom. He nodded to himself at last.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Take it easy, kid.’
‘Yeah,’ I muttered, partly in reply, partly in thanks, but Crow had already turned and walked off, intent on other business.
The dead boy gazed up at the slash marks of sky through the branches of touching trees. Someone had turned him over, probably with the toe of their boot. They wouldn’t know why they did it except that some part of them needed to quench the terrible curiosity.
Kelly’s words sounded off with such clarity that I almost shot a glance around to see where he was standing. It was in my head, but that didn’t make it any less real.
‘Effin’ car crash, man.’
And he was right; there was some of that same need. It was a bad thing to see: a wreck on the highway or a boy without a face stretched out on a black jungle trail. A haunting thing, aching with the promise of nightmares, but it was a thing that had to be seen. You could look and then look away, but you had to look.
The bullet had opened up his face. His eyes were wide and held captive the final fatal glimpse of horror and pain. The white of the left eye had flushed a shade of red that was slowly darkening to black.
I did that, I told myself.
The fringe still lay matted to that pale forehead but, leaning in to look close, I could now see tiny parallel worry creases, three of them, fine but emphasised by dirt. The close look was a punishment, and I felt like I was looking for some lesson, as if this should be too much of a thing to forget. The dead boy’s face yawned in a soundless black pit, his nose and mouth reduced to just white shards of bone amongst the grey and yellow pulp of brain tissue and congealing blood. His lower lip was gone, and the exposed row of perfect teeth offered up to me the worst half of a terrible grin.
‘All right, fellas,’ the lieutenant, Rollins, barked at last. ‘Get your shit together and let’s move out.’ So we did. We fell into formation and took the trail east, following coordinates that meant little to anyone and nothing at all to me. But we had to go somewhere, and every direction held its own box of magic tricks, its own particular brand of poison, so really, it didn’t matter very much. East was just as good as west.
Everyone glanced at the kill as they passed, and I did too.
It was him or me, I told myself, or some voice did. He’d have done the same given half a chance. But there was something in the tone that didn’t quite ring true. I had no grudge against this boy. I didn’t want to be here killing men and children on the simple premise that they would do the same to me should the opportunity present itself. I’d learn in the months to come that they would, that they’d lie in ambush and give me and my comrades no chance at all. They had hatred in their hearts for Americans and to survive I knew that it was necessary for us to hate them back. And some did; the survivors, mostly.
I didn’t hate them, even after I had seen enough atrocities by their hand to hate everything and everyone, and to never know a proper night’s sleep again. I didn’t hate them but I killed them. And the first was this Viet Cong kid on some damn jungle trail whose name I’d never remember and probably never even knew.
‘You sure smoked that mother, Scruggs,’ someone up ahead said, loud enough for me to hear, and someone else laughed at that. It was a joke, got so that it had to be, if we were going to keep any kind of hold on our sanity.
But I made no reply. I was thinking about ghosts, and how I had just sent another ghost to walk in this cursed jungle for all the time to come.
In Exile
Even on the mornings when the details prove elusive, I know when I have been dreaming of home. The first time I open my mouth to speak, I know. The words feel awkward and ill-fitting to my tongue, and it is clear to me that I have been dreaming again in Irish.
‘Good morning, love,’ I say, when Jenny, my wife, emerges from the bathroom all scrubbed and perfect and ready to face the day, and I have to stifle a gasp at the words. After such nights and dreams, this simple greeting always feels awkward and untrue, and the old words tumble towards the surface instead, the rugged dialect of the island which bears little or no resemblance at all to the bookish Irish that they teach the children in schools nowadays.
Nobody speaks Irish here in Dublin, it is a language as foreign as Swahili and as dead as Latin. But back on Cape Clear it was all we spoke. We had some English for dealing with the
mainland, but it was broken and barely functional, like so many of our things, and it never felt quite right to us. I learned how to read and write and speak English in school, the first generation of my family to do so, the first to really be exposed to any kind of schooling at all, and at home I would do my homework aloud by the light of a kerosene lantern or else spread out on a piece of old rug before the fire. My sisters would watch me, fascinated, as they darned socks and mended the seats and knees of our trousers, understanding some of what I said but not all, and for their benefit I used the tone of casting spells when I read aloud, having quickly come to know the power of the words. It was a party trick though, and finally I’d grow tired of teasing them and we’d all sit around the fire and wait for Pádraig, my brother, to return from his day at sea.
What’s past is past. I have some family there on Cape Clear still, but those obligations are easily met with a letter two or three times a year and a couple of hundred euros in a card at Christmas time. The island has closed its heart to me, and yet, despite the comforts of my life now, it can still feel very close. The bare stone walls of our cottage seem at times only a breath away, or the big window coated with the salt and grit of the sea wind and whistling drafts where the sealing putty has dried and turned to dust. I can feel the heavy wool of an old sweater, a thing belonging to my brother or my father, the thick shape of it sagging around me, and it fills my mouth with sweetness, that itchy taste so familiar. And when a storm is blowing and the wind catches the eaves just right it can almost pass for the high keening of one of my sisters singing something ancient as she busies herself with the chore of collecting breakfast eggs from the small coop or struggles with a slopping pail of water from the communal pump at the bottom of the hill.
We eat muesli now. Eggs are high in cholesterol, and muesli is good for the heart. Bacon is like a swear word, and I have almost stopped using it. Jenny wants me to switch to one of those pro-biotic spreads and I suppose that I’ll give in, but not yet. Healthy diets are all the rage, but I am still holding out on some of the little details.
Jenny knows that I am prone to vagueness, and when my attention slips she understands that is where I have gone. Home. She doesn’t have the same depth of feeling about her own home, Galway, but I think that is because any city, however quaint it may be, is just a degree of Dublin, or London, or probably even New York. She misses her family, but she speaks to her mother once or twice a week by telephone, her sister too. Her brother lives in Manchester, but even he is less isolated from her than my own people are from me.
Coming to terms with the pace of the city is not easy, but who ever said it would be? I’m just an old dog, I suppose, but I’m trying. Dún Laoghaire acts as my half-way house, my watered-down version of the reality; devoid of greenery, yes, but away from the worst of the bustle too, and I need it that way. Even after eight years, I can’t help but feel surprised at the pace of this world. Torrents of people, the seething hum of engine noise, the chorus of horns blazing as a car dares to cut lanes; it is all so relentless. Taking my place amid all of this, I feel the way all refugees must feel, wandering along in a strange place, even those of us who choose our exile.
I saw him on a Saturday in February, on a bench in the Phoenix Park, hunched down into a thin Mackintosh coat that looked wet through. A mist was falling, a grey veil that brought frowns to many faces but didn’t bother me at all. It gave the city a certain mystique, and its drabness reminded me of other misty days that I had known beside the sea. I was upon him before I realised, but he didn’t see me and so I hurried by.
Later, I was content to stand waiting with our son while Lucy took the few minutes that she needed to browse for Country music in Virgin Megastore. Luke looked too big to be in the light canvas stroller, and the way he slept with his head lolling to one side made him seem far removed from his childhood. I had seen old men sleep in just that same way, with their mouths slightly open and their hair mussed from the day. His eyelids fluttered softly beneath the drone of mindless speaker music, and his red lashes darkened from being pressed together. I told myself that it couldn’t have been Pádraig on the park bench. He was back on the island, just as always, working the sea by day and then at night rattling around in the old place, the last of us inside those walls now. Wild and gullible, wrong for the confines and fancies of Dublin.
But it was him, I knew. My only brother, the man who had raised me as a son.
The following morning I went back to find him. A sleepless night was persuasive. The chances of him being there, I told myself, were slim, but he was in the same place. Waiting. Hunched there as before, that thin Macintosh coat still looking soaked, his hands thrust so deeply into its pockets that he might never have moved at all. It hurt to know that he’d been sitting here all night, destitute, afraid of every sound, afraid to fall asleep. He was strong and able to fight, but in terms of the city he was as naive as a child and bad things lurk in lonely places once darkness falls.
A wine bottle lay empty beside him, side down and steadied from rolling by the slats of the bench.
‘Pádraig,’ I said, and he looked up slowly, waking from his thoughts. My voice had the tight air of long ago, back when I had waited shyly at the top of the road for him to return from work. I’d stand there for hours sometimes, throwing stones from the road’s verge into the fields, and when finally I’d see him approach I’d run to him and take his hand. But it would make me shy, as if the distance that really stood between us, a distance of fifteen years, was just too great, and I’d say his name, Pádraig, in that same tight, airy way as now.
The mist had lasted through the night but then had dried up with the dawn, and now the sky was overcast but holding. A bleak light made the world ache with shadows. He squeezed one eye closed against the glare, and I stood waiting for recognition to dawn.
He cleared his throat before he spoke, and that also stirred some things in me from the old days, long put-aside feelings of familiarity and pity. He had always done that, I remembered, ever since I was a child. It was a habit of island men, having spend so much of their lives in a boat, breathing the corrosive air.
‘Who’s that? Is it Peadar?’
‘It is,’ I said, though nobody has called me that in years. Dublin has made me a Peter.
He smelled of damp, and wine, and his cheek was cut, the blood dried to a crust, but his frame was hard beneath the layers of clothes and the clothes weren’t ragged, just well worn. I wondered about the cut, whether it was due to a fight or a fall. Both seemed possible, and equally likely.
In the car, he dipped in and out of sleep. When he dozed he looked just like Luke, with his head lolled that same way to one side. He was red-haired too; our gene pool is strong, I suppose. I drove out to Dún Laoghaire wondering if there was a lesson here, if I was somehow being afforded a glimpse of the future. Luke was only four, and born into a different world, but time goes by so fast, and things can change. Different things call to different people.
The radio brought him back; Traditional Hour, the moan and thud of fiddles and bodhran seeping through the car. He sat up straight, his eyes set on the road ahead, one hand patting absent time against his knee. Rows of houses passed us by, each one an exorbitant but necessary debt, the price of a metropolitan lifestyle. Such ideas would be incomprehensible to Pádraig, I knew, as indeed they would have been to me, once upon a time. We drifted along, huddled together beneath unfolding reels and polkas, and I made what must have seemed like random turns left and right, past layer upon layer of apparently identical estates, until finally I found our road.
‘Grand place,’ he said, clearing his throat. I paused with my key in the front door, looked back and nodded, then, embarrassed, looked away again.
‘Peter?’ Jenny called out from the kitchen. ‘Is that you?’
I ushered Pádraig in and closed the door behind him.
‘Where did you go?’ she said, and then she appeared in the hallway, caught sight of the down-and-out stranger bes
ide me, and stepped back, startled and confused. I wanted to say something, but there didn’t seem room somehow.
‘If you like, I’ll only stay a minute,’ Pádraig said, lowly, to me. ‘I can easily catch a bus back.’
‘Jenny,’ I said, trying not to make it too formal, ‘this is my brother, Pádraig. Pádraig, my wife, Jenny.’
He cleared his throat again and muttered a greeting. It hardly seemed like words at all, and I knew it to be Irish, our old slang usage, all the vowels guttural, all the consonants soft as water.
I stood between them, feeling the brunt of all the discomfort. Then finally, Jenny smiled, straightened her dress around her hips, and said, ‘Welcome, Pádraig. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ This wasn’t exactly true; at best she’d heard mention of him, more his name than the actual details of his character, but I was grateful that she said it, and I think Pádraig was too.
For an hour or so we sat in the living-room and watched as he drank mug after mug of hot sweet tea and ate bacon, eggs and sausages. He ate slowly, clearly not used to it, and he didn’t come close to finishing.
It was difficult to talk. Jenny tried to help by pushing back the heavy silence, and I let her take charge. She was a buffer, I realised, and we needed her between us. Piece by piece, she gleaned the facts of my brother’s recent life, and it was like extracting little nubs of glass from a dirty wound. The fish were gone, he said, but what he meant was that he could no longer harvest them. He’d had to sell the boat. I nodded, understanding, and let him think that we believed it was because times were hard and not that we guessed the truth, which was that drink had taken it, and every other small thing of worth in his life. ‘The trawlers have taken over the ocean. There’s no room for the small boat any more.’ Over the past eighteen months he had grabbed short-term work on other fishing boats, or digging the roads as part of a contract crew around the west of Ireland, or toiling in the engine room of an oil tanker. ‘I’m going back on that,’ he assured us. ‘In a week or so, I’m lined up to go to Argentina. Last year it was a Nova Scotia run. We do six months on, six months off. It pays good, enough to keep me floating anyway.’
In Exile Page 5