by Tim O'Brien
It was a relief when John finally started growing. By eighth grade he'd gone tall and slender, almost skinny, which looked good in the mirrors.
"Javelin John," his father said, chuckling a little, slapping him on the back.
The mirrors helped him get by. They were like a glass box in his head, a place to hide, and all through junior high, whenever things got bad, John would slip into the box of mirrors and disappear there. He was a daydreamer. He had few friends, none close. After school, and on most weekends, he spent his free time down in the basement, all alone, no teasing or distractions, just perfecting his magic. There was something peaceful about it, something firm and orderly; it gave him some small authority over his own life. Now and then he'd put on fifteen-minute magic shows at school assemblies, or at birthday parties, and it was a surprise to find that the applause seemed to fill up the empty spaces inside him. People looked at him in new ways. It wasn't affection, not quite, but it was the next closest thing. He liked being up on stage. All those eyes on him, everybody paying close attention. Down inside, of course, he was still a loner, still empty, but at least the magic made it a respectable sort of emptiness.
By eighth grade John had come to realize that secrecy carried its own special entitlements. Which was how the spying started. Another survival trick. At home, just for practice, he'd sometimes tail his father out to the garage and stand listening by the door. Later, when the coast was clear, he'd slip inside and dig around until he found the bottles. Sometimes he'd just stand looking at them. Other times he'd perform another little trick: carry the bottles outside, turn on a spigot, transform the vodka into cold water.
Later, in the house, it was hard not to laugh. He'd sit grinning at the TV set.
Sometimes his father would glance up.
"What's wrong with you?" he'd say, but John would shrug and say, "Nothing."
"Well, cut it out. You look ridiculous."
Everybody had secrets, obviously, including his father, and for John Wade the spying was like an elaborate detective game, a way of crawling into his father's mind and spending some time there. He'd inspect the scenery, poke around for clues. Where did the anger come from? What was it exactly? And why didn't anything ever please him, or make him smile, or stop the drinking? Nothing ever got solved—no answers at all—but still the spying made things better. It brought him close to his father. It was a bond. It was something they shared, something intimate and loving.
In the late morning of March 17, 1968, after Meadlo was taken away, the platoon received orders to head back to the village of Thuan Yen. It was an easy twenty-minute march. They crossed two broad paddies and followed their noses through the morning heat. After ten minutes they began to tie towels and T-shirts around their faces.
They entered the village's northern outskirts just before noon. The place was dead—a loud, living deadness. Along the main east-west trail they found a few fresh graves, a few white marking stones, but most of the bodies still lay in the sunlight, badly bloated, their clothing stretched tight like rubber skins. The wounds bubbled with flies. There were horseflies and blackflies and small iridescent blue flies, millions of them, and the corpses seemed to wiggle under the bright tropical sunlight. An illusion, Sorcerer knew.
Deeper into the village, just off the trail, they came across a young female with both breasts gone. Someone had carved a C in her stomach.
Boyce and Maples went off to be sick. Sorcerer took refuge behind the mirrors. He watched Rusty Calley stroll over to the body and stoop down, hands on his knees, examining things with an eye for detail. The man seemed genuinely curious. "Messy, messy," he said.
He scooped up a handful of flies and held them to his ear. After a second he smiled.
"You hear this? Fuckin' flies, they're claiming something criminal happened here. Big noisy rumor. Anybody else hear it?"
No one spoke. Some of them looked at their boots, others at the woman's body.
Calley walked over to Thinbill. "You hear that rumor, man?"
"I don't know, sir."
"You don't know."
"No, sir."
"Well, gosh." Calley grinned and pressed the flies up against Thinbill's ear. "That better?"
"I guess so."
"You hear any murder talk?"
Thinbill took a step backward. He was taller than Calley, and stronger, but he was young.
"No, sir," he said.
"Listen close."
"I don't hear it, sir. Nothing."
"Positive?"
"Yes, sir."
Calley's lips tightened. He turned to Sorcerer and lifted up the fistful of flies. "What about you, Magic Maker? How's the hearing?"
"Not so good," said Sorcerer.
"Take your time."
"Deaf, sir."
"Deaf?"
"It's a trick."
Somebody laughed. Boyce and Maples were back now, wiping their mouths. Mitchell stood gazing wistfully at the dead woman's carved-up chest.
"Well, good," Calley said softly. "What about the eyesight?"
"Sir?"
"The eyes. Notice any atrocities lately?"
"Not a thing, sir. Blind too."
The little lieutenant pushed up on his toes, arranging his shoulders in an authentic command posture. He looked briskly from man to man. "Here's the program. No more flappin' lips. Higher-higher's already got a big old cactus up its ass, people blabbing about a bunch of dead civilians. Personally, I don't understand it." He smiled at Sorcerer. "These folks here, they look like civilians?"
"No, sir."
"Course not." Calley crushed the flies in his fist, put the hand to his nose and sniffed it. "Tear this place apart. See if we can find us some VC weapons."
They broke up into two-man teams. There was nothing to find, they all knew that, but the search went on all afternoon. At dusk they established a perimeter along the irrigation ditch just outside Thuan Yen. The stench was deeper now. It was something physical, an oily substance that coated their lungs and skin. A steady buzzing sound came from the ditch to their front. There were fireflies and dragonflies and huge blackflies with electric wings. The ditch seemed to glow in the dark.
"Trip," someone whispered.
After an hour the same voice said, "Turn it off."
Restless and wide awake, Sorcerer did mind-cleansing tricks. He thought about Kathy, her curly hair and green eyes, the way she smiled, the good life they would someday have together. He thought about the difference between murder and war. Obvious, he decided. He was a decent person. No bad intentions. Yes, and what had happened here was not the product of his own heart. He hadn't wanted any of it, and he hated it, and he wished it would all go away.
He closed his eyes. He leaned back and punched an erase button at the center of his thoughts.
And then late in the night Thinbill came to sit at Sorcerer's foxhole. Together, they watched the flies.
At one point Thinbill seemed to be asleep.
Later he said, "Don't you think we should ... We should do something."
"Do what?"
"You know. Tell somebody. Talk."
"And then?"
Thinbill made a vague motion with his shoulders. His face was slick with moisture. "You and me, we could report it and ... Wouldn't be so bad, would it? Do it like a team."
"What about Calley?"
"Little turd."
"And the others?"
"I didn't sign up for the Mafia. Wasn't any code of silence."
Sorcerer looked out at the night. Everything moved. Directly in front of him, thick swarms of flies swirled just over the lip of the ditch, a wild neon fury in the dark. The buzz made it hard to think straight. There was his future to take into account, all the dreams for himself; there was the problem of an old man with a hoe. And PFC Weatherby. He didn't blame himself—reflex, nothing else—but still the notion of confession felt odd. No trapdoors, no secret wires.
Thinbill nudged his arm. "No other way," he said. "At least we'll s
leep at night."
"I don't know."
"We have to."
Sorcerer nodded. An important moment had arrived and he could feel the inconvenient squeeze of moral choice. It made him giggle.
"Hey, come on," Thinbill whispered, "you can't—"
Sorcerer couldn't help it. He covered his face and lay back and let the giggles take him. He was shaking. In the dark someone hissed at him to shut up, but he couldn't quit, he couldn't catch his breath, he couldn't make the nighttime buzz go away. The horror was in his head. He remembered how he'd turned and squealed and shot down an old man with a hoe—automatic, no thinking—and how afterward he'd crawled through a hedgerow and out into a wide, dry paddy full of sunlight and colored smoke. He remembered the sunlight. He remembered a long, bleached-out emptiness, and how later he'd found himself standing at the lip of an irrigation ditch packed tight with women and kids and old men.
The pictures turned him upside down.
"Man, you all right?" Thinbill said, but Sorcerer wasn't Sorcerer anymore, he was just a helpless kid who couldn't shut down the giggles.
He rolled sideways and pressed his nose into the grass. But even then it wouldn't go away. He saw mothers huddled over their children, all the frazzled brown faces. Rusty Calley was firing from the shoulder. Meadlo was firing from the hip. Impossible, Sorcerer told himself, but the colors were very bright and real. Mitchell was doing trick shots over his shoulder. PFC Weatherby rattled off twenty rounds and wiped his rifle and reloaded and leaned over the ditch and shook his head and stood straight and kept firing. It went on and on. Sorcerer watched a red tracer round burn through a child's butt. He watched a woman's head open up. He watched a little boy climb out of the ditch and start to run, and he watched Calley grab the kid and give him a good talking to and then toss him back and draw down and shoot the kid dead. The bodies did twitching things. There were gases. There were splatterings and bits of bone. Overhead, the pastel sunlight pressed down bright and warm, hardly a cloud, and for a long time people died in piles and layers. Ammunition was a problem. Weatherby's weapon kept jamming. He flung the rifle away and borrowed somebody else's and wiped the barrel and thumped in a fresh magazine and knelt down and shot necks and stomachs. Kids were bawling. There were shit smells. Something moist and yellow dangled from Calley's forehead, but Calley didn't seem to mind, he wiped it off and kept firing. The bodies were all one body. They were mush. "You ask me," Calley said, "these personnel got definite health problems," and Weatherby said, "Roger that," and then they both reloaded and fired into the mush. Paul Meadlo was crying. He sobbed and shot at the ditch with his eyes closed. Mitchell had gone off to take a pee. Again some elastic time went by, sunlight and screams, then later Sorcerer felt something slip inside him, a falling sensation, and after a moment he found himself at the bottom of the irrigation ditch. He was in the slime. He couldn't move, he couldn't get traction.
The giggles seemed to lift him up.
"Easy, easy," Thinbill was saying, "take it slow."
Sorcerer bit down on his hand. He hugged himself and listened to the night. A half moon was up now, pale and cool, and the flies made an electric blue glow over the ditch to his front.
Thinbill clucked his tongue. "Deep breaths," he said. "Drink the wind, man, suck it in."
"I'm all right."
"Sure you are. A-okay."
Sorcerer composed himself.
The giggles were mostly gone. He folded his arms tight and swayed in the dark and tried not to remember the things he was remembering. He tried not to remember the ditch, how slippery it was, and how, much later, PFC Weatherby had found him there. "Hey, Sorcerer," Weatherby said. He started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him.
"That's the ticket," Thinbill said. "Looking good. Whole lot better."
"I'm fine."
"Absolutely."
They stared out at the ditch. Nearby, someone was weeping. There were other sounds, too. A canteen, a rifle bolt.
"You okay now?"
"Sure. Perfect."
Thinbill sighed. "I guess that's the right attitude. Laugh it off. Fuck the spirit world."
22. Hypothesis
Maybe this.
Maybe in the bleak light of dawn Kathy arranged a pile of twigs on the beach. A shrewd, resourceful woman. She would've pried off the Evinrude's steel hood. She would've held a wad of Kleenex over the spark plugs, yanked on the starter cord, whispered prayers until the tissues flared up.
"Genius," she would've said. And maybe then she smiled to herself. Maybe she pictured the proud face of her Girl Scout leader.
Carefully then, guarding against the breeze, she would've transferred the burning tissues to her pile of twigs and watched the wood smolder and rise up into a compact fire. She would've dropped on a few more twigs, then the thicker stuff, and when the fire was solid she would've pulled off her sweater and shirt, draping them over a couple of rocks to take the heat.
Breakfast was a Life Saver.
The hunger, she decided, wasn't all that bad yet. Certainly nothing painful. Right now the only requirement was warmth. Squatting down, she opened her arms to the fire, bent forward, and drew in the heat through her nose and mouth. A dismal night, now a dismal morning. Sheets of fog still hovered over the lake, wet and durable. The cold air seemed to punch tiny holes in her skin.
She placed another thick branch on the fire and tried to conceive a sensible agenda for the day.
Dry clothing, that was first. Then fill up the gas tank. Then point the boat south and keep going until she struck the Minnesota mainland. Just go. No matter what. Later in the morning, if the hunger got worse, she could try her hand at some fishing, but for now the imperative was to lay a mental ruler across the wilderness and follow it home. Straight south and nothing else.
She pressed her lips together. It was decided. There was no reason to think about it any longer.
When her clothes were dry, she got dressed and replaced the Evinrude's hood and poured the last of her gasoline into the tank. The morning had turned even colder. Like winter almost, except for the heavy fog. The wilderness seemed to bend low under its own weight, and the day was soggy and oppressive, and for an instant she felt her resolve vanish altogether. Impossible, she thought. Completely lost, that was the fact, and it was silly to pretend otherwise. Her ignorance of the natural world was vast. North, south, it was all the same, and either someone found her or she was dead.
Still, there was also the need to move. She could at least choose the circumstances.
"So stop diddling," she told herself. "Up the lazy river."
Quickly, before she could undo the decision, Kathy stowed her tackle box and oilcloth. She pushed the boat out into the shallows and got in, slipped on her life vest, started up the Evinrude, and turned out into the empty lake. When she looked back, the fire was a soft discoloration in the fog; a minute later it was gone entirely. She tucked one arm inside the life vest, steering with the other. Already a murderous chill was in her bones. The sun was somewhere behind the clouds off to her left, which had to be east, and in her head she conjured up an imaginary map and a steel ruler to put herself on course. The map was large and blank. She penciled in North at the top and then lay the ruler down and pictured the boat moving along its edge from top to bottom.
The exercise gave her encouragement. Simple, really. Follow the geometry.
Slowly, over the next hour, the fog thinned out into smudgy patches. The sky remained overcast, but at least she could make out the somber forests ahead. Everywhere, the wilderness seemed desolate beyond reason. All the color had been washed out of things, pale grays blending into deep iron grays; there was the feel of rain without rain, everything wet, everything sad and dreary and obscure. Even the birds looked grim—a few geese, a few lonely loons. The country had a dense, voluptuous sameness that made her wish for a billboard or a skyscraper or a giant glass hotel, anything glitzy and man-made.
The thought carried a certain comfort.
Maybe someday she'd build a casino up here. Blackjack under a plastic dome. Lots of neon. Outdoor escalators. She recalled a trip to Las Vegas several years ago. One of those do-nothing political conferences—the party was paying—and John and Tony had talked her into tagging along. Ridiculous, she'd thought, but after the first two hours she'd been hooked hard. She loved the flash. She loved the sound of dice and slot machines, the clatter of mathematics. It wasn't the money that had kept her up all night; rather, in ways she didn't care to fathom, it had to do with the possibility of a prodigious jackpot just out of reach. Possibility itself. The golden future. Everything was next—the next roll, the next card, the next hour, the next lucky table. Gaudy and artificial, cheap in the most fundamental sense, the place represented everything she found disgusting in the world, but still she couldn't deny the thrill of a black ace descending like a spaceship on a smiling red queen. It did not matter that her wager was only five dollars. What mattered was the rush in her veins. The pursuit of miracles, the rapture of happy endings.
Kathy smiled out at the thick morning.
"Go ahead," she said. "Hit me."
After ten minutes a low wooded island materialized directly ahead. Ideal for a casino. Something sleek and glittery. Designed in the shape of a spaceship or maybe a fine young penis.
She passed along the island's eastern shore, adjusted the ruler in her head.
And then later, when the lake opened up again, she let herself slide back to that last extraordinary night in Vegas. A sizzling hot blackjack table, she and Tony camped out there, all the pretty chips piled up in front of them, lots of greens and blacks. She remembered a giddiness blowing through her. All evening the table had been under a cone of supple white light—hot light—a soft shimmering incandescent glow. Anything was possible. Luxury and bliss. Neither of them had budged in well over two hours.
Around midnight John had come up behind her. He'd rested his hands on her shoulders and stood quietly for a while. His grip seemed stiff.