by Steve Vernon
I looked ahead and saw a North Korean soldier walking towards me, with one of those blunt ugly burp guns slung at the ready. I lay there in the dirt, not more than fifteen feet away from him, doing my level best to think moss thoughts and smell like Korea.
He kept walking towards me. My platoon was hunkered down on higher ground, belly down behind the corduroy of a ridge, damn near invisible from a distance, but if he took it into his mind to walk this way much further he’d be stepping right onto us faster than you could holler cow patty.
Trumble had his BAR out and ready. He glanced a questioning look in my direction. His message was pretty damn clear. Did I want him to grease the little fellow, or did I want to take a chance that the North Korean might walk right on by us?
That thought had entered my thinking too. It wouldn’t have been that hard of a kill, but the fact of the matter rested squarely upon the general nature of the infantryman. White or yellow, a lone infantryman most closely resembled your common household cockroach. The fact was they usually travelled in packs. If you saw one infantryman, odds were there were ten more within bullet-spitting distance.
The last thing I wanted was to squeeze off a shot and bring down a whole cockroach herd of North Korean infantrymen on our poor sorry unreinforced Marine asses. Not that I was afraid, you understand, but right now I didn’t need to buy any more trouble. He might have been walking point for a patrol, or he might be the lead man for a goddamn division and I just didn’t know.
I hesitated over that doubt just long enough for the moment to slide from time enough into too damn late, and then that North Korean infantryman started walking straight towards us and the shit hit the propeller, real hard and real fast.
*
There is a trick to hooking a trout.
You have to wait until you feel a nibble and then you’ve got to flip it with your wrist just hard enough to set the hook or the fish will slip clean away. It’s a cocking motion, like a gun, or a thought. It has to be done just right at just the right moment in time.
I had learned that trick the hard way, standing on the bank of this very stream watching my Grandpa Jake hook in trout after trout while I just kept on losing my bait, bringing in nothing but a splash of stream water.
A trick like that is something that you learn the hard way or not at all. You pick it up or you don’t. You feast or go fishless. It’s a little like show and tell, only the other way around. You know how it is way back in kindergarten, when you bring something into school and you stand up there in front of the class with that something held high and proud in your sweaty prepubescent grip, and you say something like “This is my ant farm.” or “This is my brother’s severed arm.” Only with Grandpa Jake it was more like a game of show, without any of the tell. Grandpa Jake did everything the way things were supposed to be done in this world, and he figured that if I knew what was best for me I’d keep a sharp eye peeled and learn by observation.
So that’s just what I tried to do with Billy, only a little softer. I explained things to him, now and then. A fellow has to bend the trail he’s following just a little to suit his gait and habit, or he’ll never get too far in this old world.
But some things come back around no matter how hard you try to walk away from them. Some trails you follow, and some will follow you.
*
There is a sound that you hear, right before a gunfight kicks off.
There is a sound and a smell and a feeling, like the dice-cup shake of a timber rattler’s tail. There’s a taste of knife edge and the cold copper penny swallow of dry fear, choked down hard. There is a smell of bones and blood and rot crumbling away.
The North Korean was walking towards us.
I watched the North Korean’s boots lifting themselves, one over the other, floating that little rat bastard closer to our position. This is what an ant feels like, right before the boot comes down.
I felt the eyes of my platoon waiting for a word or a signal or some kind of heavenly sign from me. I felt the eyes of the gods of war and death and decay, just wondering to themselves if I really knew just what the hell I was doing out here today.
I let go of my M3, and I slid my Kabar knife out of its sheath. The Kabar knife was basically a Bowie Knife with a few pretensions of civilization, a highly refined killing machine, useful in all matters of blood-letting, sacrifice, and home-grown murder.
I was careful to keep the blade of the Kabar knife buried in the dirt, for fear of catching the sun’s gleam and glinting out a tattletale warning. I figured I could bring the knife up fast enough to open his blood pipe. The only noise that he would make would be the spatter-spray of his red salt water blood spilling down onto the thirsty forest floor.
I could see Trumble right behind me with his BAR out and ready. The Browning Automatic Rifle was a hell of a lot louder than my Kabar knife, and would make its own kind of red mist. I passed a prayer up to the lord of bullets and stupid redneck chances that Trumble wouldn’t have to use his thunder maker this one particular time.
Then the North Korean stopped, just about three feet away from me. He must have been stone blind, or dead tired, or maybe he just didn’t give a damn. He lit a cigarette with a Zippo that he’d probably taken from a dead marine. I figured that as a good sign. If he thought we were close he wouldn’t have risked the scent of burning tobacco.
He parked the cigarette in his lips. The smoke haloed out around his skull like a dirty yellow wreath. One step closer, I thought, and I’d give him a for-real halo to wear. It’d be easy at this distance. Only he didn’t step closer. He just stood there and unzipped his fly and he pointed his pecker straight at us, ready to make a little more dirty yellow.
Oh hell.
I should have closed my eyes just as tightly as I dared, praying he didn’t get any on me, but I didn’t want to take the chance of him getting the drop on us first, so I watched every last drop coming down. It wasn’t much as peckers went, although I was certain it kept his Korean girlfriend happy as a hot buttered clam. It kind of looked silly, poked out there from his pants like a dirty yellow worm but I expected that I looked just as foolish standing in my own stretch of woods making my own personal rainbow trickle arc of warm lemonade.
It was kind of funny how once you get our pants off and our baby making mechanisms hanging out in the breeze, we all look pretty goddamn ridiculous, leaning back and thanking the Lord as we drained the tank one more time. Yes sir, God give a pretty hard tug on the giggle rope when he slung our fixings together, I reckon.
Everything hung still and quiet in one of those goddamn-fuck-me moments. None of us moved or breathed as we hugged our own shadows groundward, wishing for foxholes and maybe a piss-proof umbrella. The North Korean leaned backwards and closed his eyes, lost in mid-piss bliss, the fine yellow arc making a foul smelling rainbow outwards and the tobacco smoke yellowed upwards and everything echoed back on itself and then all at once the sound of the Korean piss falling on my leatherneck leather boots was all that was needed to start this dance rolling.
*
There is something fine about casting a fishing line out across open water. Feeling that circuit close from your feet up your legs through your hips, back and arm, into the hand closed around the rod grip, bringing that rod out into a sabre swing at eternity, the line snaking out hard and fast and lofty, making that long hissing whiz bang out across the waiting water.
Whizzzzzzzzzzz.
It isn’t always about catching fish, you know. If you’re careful, you can catch gods this way. You can catch a feeling and you can catch a cold or you can catch a moment in time and hook it hard and hold it just long enough to count before it slipped away into the stream again.
It was a strange thought, but that’s how fishing works sometimes. All of those thoughts that have been mired down in the muck below come dredging up from the bottom of your think hole. Other times it’s different. Other times you lose yourself in that quiet hum of doing things, not thinking about anything b
ut the feel of the sun and the shade and the wind in the trees and the beads of sweat crawling from under your fishing cap, and the singing of that high fine line.
Whizzzzzzzzzzz.
I heard a trout jumping, and I looked, and that’s right about when the boy fell in. He’d been reaching for a turtle, maybe thinking about soup, or just having himself a peek at what lay underneath that gnarly old mudbox’s back shell, when he leaned over too far over that slow running stream and slid in and found out how fast that current really ran.
Oh hell Billy, I thought, let’s see how well you can swim. I wasn’t worried, you see, because I knew that as fast as that current ran I could catch it easily. This’d just be a lesson for him, something to stick and grow with. Yes sir, this’d be just another memory to hang onto.
Only then the water started running to red, and I knew something had just gone a whole lot of ways towards way too wrong.
*
I jacked another clip of ammo into the M3 and squeezed a few pissed-off pissed-on blasts over my shoulder, on account of my platoon was moving in full retreat and I was doing my best to follow. I guess I was where I was supposed to be, following them. I emptied the clip and kept on running. I could hear somebody praying really loudly to my left as if God had been born deaf and foreign at the same damn time.
“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus Christ.”
That loud-mouthed choir boy sure sounded American to me, but I didn’t have time to look. I fumbled in my tunic for another clip. I was certain there was one in there, but the damn thing kept playing hide and seek with my fingertips.
The whole fouled up catastrophe was a solid state shit sandwich for sure, delivered shitty side up. That no-good boot-pissing North Korean son of a bitch was walking point for about half of the entire North Korean army, as far as I could tell. The jungle just exploded with gunfire, mortars, and North Korean stick grenades.
“My legs,” someone shouted to my right. “The cocksuckers have shot off both of my legs!”
I didn’t know a lot of these men, even though I’d served with them. I’d given up memorizing other names not long after my sixteenth casualty report, a half a hundred reinforcings ago. That was about the time when I learned the lie of death. For years the movies and television and phrases such as “passed away” and “expired” had lead me to believe that death was an easy parting, a long leisurely cast of the line out over Lethe, when in fact death was a little rougher than that. Here on the battlefield death was an uncaring drunken bastard in combat boots, stomping blindly across a playroom full of toy soldiers and pop bottle glass.
The soldier screaming about his legs sounded like another American. I don’t imagine the word cocksucker translates quite so cleanly in North Korean. Still, it didn’t sound like there was much I could do for him, except maybe offer to bury his legs in a narrow deep grave now that he was done using them. I didn’t even have time for that. The entire goddamn North Korean army was hot on my ass and I couldn’t fart for shit.
Of course maybe there were only six of the North Korean bastards, but they were six pretty good shots as far as I could tell. It was impossible to calculate what we were up against in the midst of all of this indiscriminate gunplay. The fog of war had moved on in, and here we were without even so much as a fog-eating cow to clear our way.
“Help me, damn it, help me.”
I kept running.
Everybody was running.
I swear I saw Jesse Owens and a jet plane and that grand old horse Seabiscuit hot-footing it past me in an avalanche of khaki-clad panic. The North Koreans were after us, and a machine gun nest opened up to the left of us, and I think a couple of snipers were leaning down and taking potshots at us from somewhere up past the glintering north-end ass of the Big Dipper constellation.
This is where battles usually wind up. A whole lot of sorry assholes who used to tend bar, catch dogs, sweep streets, jerk sodas and wait on tables; running and screaming and shooting through the woods, usually in the middle of a starless pitch night, not having a hope in fuck at knowing just where the hell they were really at.
Forget about Errol Flynn and John Wayne and remembering the Alamo. That sort of happy crap only happened up on the movie screen, and it was worth about as much as a handful of stale popped popcorn swept up three days later.
There is no room for heroes in this country called War. There is no one out here but soldiers and sorry assholes and most of the time it is damned hard to tell the difference between the two of them. Yes sir, the gods of war are a pack of random bastards, as indiscriminate as hand grenades and hailstones.
Then somebody hit my right thigh with a red hot ball peen hammer and my inner leg spat tomato soup onto my combat pants, and my knees ran to water and the ground came up real fast and something else socked through me into the belly meat and I felt a long snake running out of me even faster and the dirt hit hard and the darkness rolled on over me like a slow growing wave.
*
Damn it.
I tried to hang onto Billy, all slippery from the stream and the blood but he kept getting away from me. I grabbed him harder, trying to catch at the wound that he was bleeding from. I could see what the problem was. That goddamn Kabar knife, he’d gone and tucked it into his belt without a sheath and when he fell it slid up and twisted and caught him in the soft of his belly.
I tried to hang onto him, tried to hold the wound closed, but it was worse than trying to drown water. I felt my fingers slip and poke into the wound, moving around inside my grandson, touching him where I shouldn’t ought to be. I felt shame and I felt failure and I felt things running away. He screamed and I was drowning in the sound of my panic and his and the water splashed and swallowed around us and that wound thirsty and open and spilling out.
I heard a mosquito buzz about me, drawn to the scent of the blood I guess. I don’t know just how I heard it over Billy’s screaming, but it was loud and persistent and a part of me wanted to let the boy go for just a moment while I swatted the bejesus little blood-sucking bugger, but I held on hard.
The blood pooled out around us and I saw a trout jump and another part of me wondered what kind of bait human blood would make. The wound kept pumping and the maggots and bacon spilled from our pockets and the trout kept jumping around and I didn’t know what the hell to do and then all at once I did.
*
I awoke and the whole world was dark and reeked of Korean dirt.
Shit, I thought. I’ve been buried. They thought I was dead and buried me down in the dirt too soon.
Opening my eyes improved the situation just a little.
I remember waking up years before that in a strange hotel in Los Angeles, right before they shipped me off to Korea. I was wearing nothing but a torn pair of boxer shorts and wondering just where in the hell my shirt, pants and wallet had got to. There was something growing on my baby-making stick that it took three long weeks of penicillin and cursing at to clear up and I wasn’t sure where that had happened either.
Only this was way worse. I tried to roll over carefully, but my knees and arms had forgotten how to work. The world was spinning just slowly enough for me to feel it. I kept thinking gentle thoughts, slow and careful. If I moved too fast I was afraid that I’d spill off into the space between the stars and forever, which was okay, because I didn’t think I could move at all.
I leaned back and looked up into the night sky, wondering just how I had managed to turn the world around like this. I saw a perfect crescent moon, hanging there in the heart of the sky like a perfect silver fish hook. My grandpa Jake, who always claimed he was one-quarter Ojibway, one-third Russian, one-sixteenth black bear, and one-half American, you do the math, used to tell me a story about the sun and the moon and the night. He used to tell me how the day married the sky and got bitch assed jealous over where that old sky kept getting off to in the night time, so Lady Day stabbed the Mother Night with a perfect crescent cut and then shot her all up full of star holes.
; Yes sir, Grandpa Jake could sure as shooting give bullshit lessons to Sergeant Akerly Trumble, every known politician in history, and a half a thousand travelling snake oil and shoe polish salesmen to boot.
“That moon-cut never did heal,” Grandpa Jake used to tell me. “It swoles up and then puckers closed, the infection eating it in and out, the damn thing’ll keep opening and closing and pussing down night dew, until the sky is called on account of rain.”
I never did quite understand what all Grandpa Jake was telling me in that little moral tale. I didn’t understand a lot of what my Grandpa Jake told me, but you know I learned a lot from the old man all the same. Some of it stuck and some of it didn’t and some of it grew into what became me.
Right about now what was me was in a shitload of trouble. I forced myself to lay still, because that was the easiest thing to do. I figured out how to open up and close my right hand fist and I spider-worked my hand up along the side of my rib cage until I felt something wet.
This reminded me of the witch game Grandpa Jake used to play with me and my buddies every Halloween. I remember how a bunch of us would get together in the dark and my Granpa Jake would guide our hands.
“This is the witch’s eyeball,” Uncle Jake would say, holding my hand to a peeled wet grape. “And this is the witch’s guts.”
A bowl of cold spaghetti and scrambled eggs for the brains, and when he snapped on the light to show us what the trick was a part of me always wondered if maybe he hadn’t been tricking us twice, and pulling out those grapes and eggs and spaghetti at the last minute and hiding what we’d really been feeling.
Here in Korea my gut pipe was leaning out of me like a dead snake, my intestines, what my old Grandpa Jake would have sliced up and fried for chittlings, they were leaning out of me and wandering off into the darkness of whatever I couldn’t see, like a slow moving runaway train. When I touched it, the soggy personal tissue slithered a little further, like a chain dangled too far over the edge of a boat. Momentum took over and my insides slowly ran out.