Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  And the big black shadow suddenly materialized from far below me, rushing up with its jaws open taking in lake water, drum, lily pads, broken glass, Keds, weeds, cattails, frogs, turtles, catfish, and one-man Japanese submarines. Crunch. Gulp. And I was gone inside the black monster as big as a nine-mile lake.

  The next morning I stumbled out the front door of a strange Holiday Inn on the outskirts of big, dirty D.C., shaking from the sense of loss as much as from the booze I’d taken in the night before, stumbling out blindly into the bright sunshine to see if it was a dream. Awakened by the most pleasant sound in the world, a combination of ringing telephones, vehicle horns, and maids screaming at each other from half a city block away, Minnie Pearl–style, I jerked to life hearing, “Hhhhhhhoooooooooooo­wwwwwwwwwwwwwww­dddddddd­eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  Is there any landscape, extraterrestrial or otherwise, as barren of any aesthetics as the Great American Mercantile Vista? You can wake up with a savage hangover, foggy-brained, pummeled by a cacophony of lunatic maids and flushing toilets and slamming doors and screamed greetings, and the one comfort is that wherever you are, it will look exactly the same. The Great American Mercantile Vista has become one vast horizon of Fried Chicken buckets and golden Big Mac archways. Assuring you that if you fall asleep tonight, drunk as a lord in Schenectady, and you are kidnapped in the night by a gang of Arizona outlaw bikers, when you escape the next afternoon, trembling in Scottsdale, it will look exactly the same. Kulture — so $ucce$$ful, Kommershul, plastic, fast-n-EZ, and regimented as to be staggeringly harsh — assaults the senses.

  Of course, this is news to no one. But if you are suddenly thrown out of work, divorced, lose a loved one, or otherwise see your life flipped upside down by the fates and powers that be, this environment takes on a wholly new ugliness. Excluding perhaps the Gulag Archipelago, the poisonous rings of one or two distant planets, and certain parts of Cincinnati, no vista is so crushing in its irritating uniformity.

  Nobody ever said it was going to be a walk in the park, you tell yourself, and if you have a lick of sense you then go out and find a pretty girl and take a walk in the park. For weeks I did nothing but just that, walking in parks and assorted grassy places, humping the endless reaches of the boundless Smithsonian, seeing every show in town, rubbernecking at every famous monument, the great institutions of government, doing D.C.

  I was dating a fabulous-looking semi-android who worked as a part-time receptionist for a big record company, and I took her everywhere from the great art museums to the awe-inspiring, gilt-encrusted cathedrals of the nation’s capital. We walked for miles and miles. Each of us with the other out of habit more than desire. Both of us were in love with other people, she with a married steamfitter, and me with all trim. Not the perfect couple.

  When her company began to wear and my budget started giving glimpses of its underwear, I tired of the expensive French eateries and the aimlessness of my life. There were about six or eight weeks in a rooming house. I remember this time only vaguely, as if it was seen through gauze, a time of great lassitudes, of long, aching boredom spent watching the tube and reading and picking my dry cleaning up; small drudgeries performed somnambulistically. I was alone by then, my friend having found a lively surrogate for her steamfitter.

  The last few days before they made contact were very strange, melancholy mornings of rememberings. Mostly the mistakes and the incongruities and the disappointments and the endless humiliations of “the farm,” which was not a farm at all but a concentration camp for junior drones and good little Nazis willing to do anything in the name of “chust followink orderz.” The specialties of the house were subversion in ninety-seven flavors, and a particularly vicious Masters in Blackmail Administration. Cryptonym: “ISOLATION.” Right.

  Afternoons found me wandering around out at the airport, one of the world’s busiest confluences of the international air travel streams, pretending I was going somewhere (I was, it turned out) as I watched the passengers embark for Addis Ababa, Athens, or Atlanta, with a wretchedly purposeful demeanor as I sat or stood, slouched with lethargic indecision. I had arrived at a point where I was insanely contemplating squandering my last dollars on a one-way flight to — where? I could catch the red-eye to Baltimore and spend the rest of my savings in a week of decadence on “the block,” shacked with a pneumatic hooker go-go girl named Lynn. Then what?

  One memory is retained from those last days. I saw the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life there in the D.C. airport. And I’ve seen the young Liz Taylor running across a beach. But this woman was just heart-attack, full-mill beautiful. Men were dropping their luggage, women were running into things, it was that sort of a beauty. She had on a liberal coating of makeup, just this side of theatricality, and I ran up to her with the fatuous line, “On your way back to Vegas?” I gambled, smiling for all I was worth, which was about $238 and change.

  “L.A.,” she sneered breathily, with the same bored tone she always used on the six hundred guys a day who hit on her with dopey lines. On your way back to Vegas? Pitiful. On your way to the shit drawer, chump, and don’t come to play in the majors when you ain’t even got a bat. She was so beautiful that even as she turned around to ignore the semihuman vermin that had accosted her, bathing the airport in musk, and standing there on legs that seemed to go all the way up to her neck, I kept waiting for more, all blown out of my shoes, panting, looking at her gorgeous back. That’s how far down the well I’d fallen. Beggars can’t be choosers, isn’t that the line?

  Finally I just dove down into it. Down into the blackness, down in the murky depths below the lily pads, in the cool, muddy slime where time has no meaning, down below the bluegill and the perch, and I came to rest there on the bottom, in the Land of the Lost, amid the Campbell’s cans rusting away with the broken Griesedieck bottles. I was lying there on the bottom, waiting for the monster as big as a nine-mile lake to come and get me, when they made their approach.

  “Code name Rescue” blasting out of a PRC snaps me back to reality. I am a few thousand mites from Langley and McLean, deep in the green, green grass of USMACV, far from the madding crowds of Camp Peary and Quarters Eye and Foggy Bottom, and farther still from home.

  “ — is a three-man team offering short-term services worldwide to travel barriers and no taboos. We are a can-do unit, with complete flexibility and deep background in sea-air-land penetrations, removals, and other services. Reasonable fees and absolutely ironclad discretion is assured. Protect yourself when inquiring and keep a nice clean paper trail. We do the same. Rescue. Box 1001H, Agana, Guam 96909. And this is KILL Outlaw Radio on the air!

  “Want privacy assured for your special announcement on KILL or elsewhere? Send twenty dollars U.S. funds for one month’s forwarding to Seeker 2, Center Street 10, Auckland, New Zealand. Complete privacy, no questions asked, cash or money orders only please. And KILL has a new number following this brief message.”

  I lay there thinking about Chi. Wondering who and what. Thinking those thoughts you told me not to think, Rona, as I lay there on the muddy bottom of the lake there in the land of the lost souls. I felt the ground shudder in a great, heaving, sphincter-shrinking earth tremor, and in that split second of wondering whether it was an arc light or the thing as big as a nine-mile lake coming up from the core to swallow us, I saw something fine and white and irreplaceable disengage itself from me and leave.

  Wisdom: never swim alone in the Land of the Lost.

  Chapter 22

  “Protect yourself at all times.”

  — tagline routinely used in covert-type classifieds

  We are sweeping toward the far edge of a field bordered by thick hedgerows along the base of a hillside, moving toward the Z, in the deep, bad bush. This is the farthest north any of us have been.

  The closest thing to home from here is Firebase King, which is our northernmost base camp this side of the Z. King is a typical hilltop-supp
ort firebase. After that, it’s all injun country. We have taken the occasional sniper round this morning. A couple of AK-47s making their distinctive pops don’t come too close, but Charlie knows we’re here.

  As we reach the hedgerow, we hear a noise. From the distance it sounds like a wounded animal, then a baby crying. Everybody’s uptight at the sound.

  “Wwaaaaaahhhh!” The screaming is much louder. Big Merlin plunges into the hedgerow. It is a little kid lying in there, crying up a storm.

  “Hey! C’mere, there’s a little boy in here!” Merle walks toward the Vietnamese, who can’t be over eight or nine, on his back there in the hedgerow screaming and crying in pain, and just as he leans over to see what’s wrong with the little boy, something happens nobody can believe. I see it on my eyeball’s slo-mo instant replay again and again. This little tot pulls his hand out from under his leg and he has a fucking gun and pulls the trigger.

  Again, it is something that you just stand and watch for a heartbeat because nothing has ever prepared you for it. A little baby with a gun is a contradiction your mind isn’t going to deal with. Then one of us hollers as the gun goes off:

  “Lookout!”

  The gun is the loudest fucking .22 you’ve ever heard, and it jumps from his tiny hand as it fires. On reflex, Merlin blows the little boy away, just cuts the poor little bugger in two with a close burst, and then he drops his piece and he just stands there with the .22 in him. He’s not believing it, either.

  “Awww, hey, goddammit to hell! I’m shot!” he yells.

  “Eighty-ninth Med, Toledo Blade Six, over!”

  Cccrrrrrrrawwww.

  Crack! Crakaka-crack! AK-47 opens up on us. Sniper.

  “Wait one! Goddamit, gimme that fucker.”

  “Hold that dressing there.”

  “Eighty-ninth Medevac! Blade Six, do you read me over?”

  Ccccrrr “— vac, over.”

  “Wait one, med. Can anybody see him . . .? Fall back about five.”

  “See anybody?”

  “I think it’s more’n one.”

  “Eighty-ninth Med — we — uh, this is Blade Six Actual, emergency, we need an emergency medevac at these grid coor — ”

  “Hold it, wait one!”

  “Copy that request. Blade Six, say grid coordinates, over.”

  Finally El Tee gets him squared away.

  “Echo Tango Alpha ten minutes over?”

  “Rog that, thank you, eight-niner, Blade Six Actual out.”

  “I still don’t see ’em.”

  “Anybody got ’em?”

  “I got one made,” Shooter says. He has done about a pound of toot. He pops a pair of North Sonic Us into his ears and squints into his scope, laying the cross hairs on his target area.

  “Somebody draw his fire and I’ll pencil the fucker right now.”

  “Whatdya have in mind, Shooter, ya want me to have Washington stand up?”

  “Have yo’ mama stand up, Chuck.”

  “Stand on this.” Ci-rrakkk.

  We hear a long scream.

  “Shit! All fuckin’ right!”

  “Get some!”

  “Way to reach out and touch someone, my man!”

  Sarge has got Big Merle resting, but he looks like he’s going to go into shock any minute. He’s probably about as ripped from wasting the kid as he is from the wound.

  “Million-dollar wound, Big Merle.”

  “Yeah,” he mutters, “fuck it.”

  “There it is.”

  Merle looks like he’s about to go over the high side. He’s just about to redline. Come on, dust-off!

  We examine the gun. It is an American-made .22 derringer manufactured by the same folks who make the CIA silencer hit kits. Who the hell ever heard of anybody ever getting shot with a derringer? Wisdom: I’d rather be missed by a .44 Magnum than hit by a .22.

  Another first. Man, when they start putting eight- and nine-year-old assassins in the game, you can fuckin’ believe those dinks are out to eat your lunch. There is just no way Americans can grasp the concept of little kids sent out to war by their own families. It’s just too Martian to handle. All of us know somebody who was taken off by a little flower girl with a chi corn, but seeing something like this is pretty staggering.

  The other sniper, if there is one, has either booked or he’s waiting to pot us when the dust-off chopper comes in. We leave Harold with his M-60 and make a perimeter for bird security, splitting into two-man teams. The field is about one hundred meters in back of us, and it’s a natural LZ, as long as we don’t have that other AK-47 on our case. We gotta get Big Merlin out.

  We bring in the medevac bird OK, and Merlin is out in a shitstorm of flying rocks and crap, heading for a heart and an early DEROS. Lucky motha. You never can find a nine-year-old with a derringer when you need one.

  We find Shooter’s sniper. Local-forces type who looks like he might go all of sixty pounds soaking wet. Make that fifty-nine pounds, he’s about a quart low on gray matter, which has oozed out of a big hole in the back of his head in a funky, leaking mess of brains, skull, and spongy stuff.

  “Nailed him right between the horns there, Ace.”

  “Way to get some!”

  Hot as hell’s nuts out here. Stifling, breezeless, suffocatingly close from the humidity, rotting vegetation, stinking slime, and the everpresent smell of danger and death. Moving. White Laidlaw at the point. Rodriguez behind him on the radio counting down like some zombie astronaut:

  “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . How do you read, over?”

  “Forces Radio, with transmitters in — ” Slowly I turn.

  South of the Z, heading through The Badlands toward Firebase King and the big green hurt locker out beyond. Waiting to drop into the quicklime and hunting KILL, which is shaping up to be a cesspool full of bad t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

  Corns, our new FO if he lives long enough, plunges off a muddy strip of embankment as we cross a rice field, and is standing there in knee-deep slime and stinking paddy water, hollering:

  “Ooooohhh. Goddamn, it hurts! Oooohhh, shit!”

  “Atsa way to go there, Corns,” the Dutchman says. “Whatja do, break ya’ ankle?”

  “Shit! I’m hurt!” We stop. We assume he’d twisted an ankle or whatever.

  “What’d you do — sprain your ankle?” asks El Tee.

  “Uuuunnnnnnnnn, oh! Get it out! Back of my leg!”

  Ewell checks him. There is a thin, needle-sharp piece of bamboo stuck through his left calf where he slid down off the paddy dike into the water and muck. Ewell and I get him out of the slime and he gets his pants off, slitting the one pantleg off with his blade. It isn’t the usual punji stick; there are a row of little bamboo needles implanted in the side of the embankment. Paddy seems to be full of them. They are very small, but long enough to do the damage, and he has broken this one off in his leg.

  “Watcha think, Roy?” Dutchman asks the El Tee.

  “Well. Looks like we gotta cut her out.”

  “There it is.”

  “Well, girls, let’s get it done.” We try to lift Corns as gently as possible and half carry him over to the tree line. It seems like it takes fucking forever.

  “Lucky the dinks didn’t use bigger bamboo on that fucker.”

  “Lucky your grandma didn’t have wheels, she’d been a trolley car.”

  “Lucky your mama didn’t have kids or they’d been pussies.”

  “Fuck your mama, cuntlips.” This shit ain’t getting nobody nowhere.

  “Let’s go — lift him there.”

  “Nnnnnnmmm mmmmmm.”

  “Here, get a hold like this here.”

  “Ahhhhummmm.”

  “Be careful there, goddammit!”

  We get Corns under a tree and try to start a fire. Even though it is
hot as a bitch, stuff is still too soggy, so we flame up some C-4 and El Tee and Sarge hold him while we gather around to watch the big operation.

  “Anybody got a small pocketknife?” El Tee asks innocently, as a five-inch “007,” a Remington bullet, and a Super-auto “straight-ahead” all flick open in his face. Laughter.

  “Very fuckin’ funny. Ya mind gettin’ that shit outta my face.”

  We get Corns back to his feet and he tries to walk, but he is in lots of pain. El Tee tries to get another bird in to cut us a huss, but no way. No more dust-offs. We sit around sandbagging while El Tee screams at some other lifer, but he can’t get it done this time. No birds available until tomorrow. No way we’re staying out here tonight.

  “Ed, you’re going to have to walk on that leg.”

  “I’ll try.” We’ve hit him with some good dope.

  We get him back to his feet again, and we take turns helping him as we drive on. We are carrying eight frags apiece, couple claymores each, a ton of ammo and water, the batteries, now we all got some of Corns’s shit too. What a foot-dragging, bamboo ball-buster of a hump this is turning out to be.

  “Goddammit, no-good rank ass cockshit fucked-up mothergrabbing remf pussydick faggot ballsucker-poguebait . . .” El Tee has gone a little nuts for a second and he just runs out of steam. Fucker hates it when he can’t get a dust-off, or a ride or whatever.

  “Gimme that goddamn sonofabitch again.”

  “Blade Six Actual. King Six over?”

  “Wait one.”

  Sizzle.

  “Yo. Six, King Six?”

  “We’re about a half a klick from Romeo Niner Sierra — ” and he gives grids of a main road that leads into King’s AO. “If we’d deploy to that position, what would be the chances of getting a lift on any wheels moving inbound, over?”

  Slim and none, I think and Slim left town.