Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  Noting with satisfaction the file entry on the cover sheet — subject disposition — — and the handwritten insert, he drops everything into the burn box, tapping an intercom button on the conference phone beside him. A light blinks below the dial and he hears the voice of the warrant officer on duty say, “Allied Chemical.”

  Chapter 25

  “Three tears in the bucket — ”

  — unfinished latrine graffiti

  Rain. It has driven everybody into their hootches, tents, and bunkers, drenching mortars, ma deuces, recoilless rifles, and red birds, turning Viet-Spam into a huge, rusty-assed pigpen of a loblolly. FB King is a sprawling mudpile of red, nasty, sucking, gumbo-gooey hilltop that is the last thing standing between apple pie and the injuns.

  I have just finished one of those fits of secondary depression that like to come and squat over me now and again, and a number of controlled substances are beginning to get me right. Someone suggests I’m high on life.

  “Hi!”

  “No, not yet. But I’m fixin’ to get thataway.”

  The hootch smells like fish that have been left out on a riverbank for three days. We lay naked, or barely clothed, trying not to breathe in more of the stinking humidity than is necessary. It is stifling, close, oppressive, a militant thing that pinches your nostrils with one hand as it stuffs a pair of socks in your mouth with the other and says, “Now try to breathe, cocksucker!”

  We lie motionless with the patience of a herd of Herefords, pasture fat, waiting, enduring, as we listen to the rain ball-peen down on the tin hootch roof like mini-rounds of incoming.

  A big salty stream of sweat drips down onto my weed as I sit up with an agonizing sigh of bored decay and fear paralysis. I flip the dead jay under Ewell’s cot, hoping it will set fire to his cot while he’s asleep, burning him to a charred crisp as I fight to save him from the flames, winning the Silver Star, the Meritorious, Glorious Dildo of Valor, the Medal of Honor, the Blue Max, the Iron Cross, and a minor singed eyebrow that gets me medevaced to Tokyo and the Xaviera Hollandaise Burn Clinic where a lovely young nurse will sit on my face.

  “Got anything that’ll get me off?” I ask D’Allesandro.

  “Hell, yes. Ever fuck a nun?”

  “I watched your mama fuck a nun once. Come on, man, I need to get all right here.”

  “Uh-huh.” He taps a cigarette out of a beat-looking pack.

  “What the fuck I want with a damn Marlboro?”

  “Trust me.” He flames his Zippo under it.

  “Holy Keee-rist!” I cough for about five minutes. “What is this shit?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I can sense impending menace trickling through the brain rot. A clot of screaming paranoia is eating its way downward through the atrophied wrinkles of gray matter, dripping down like the colors on a phrenology chart left out in the monsoon. A nagging and formless fear intrudes on my thoughts, much the same as a photographer’s negative materializes in a tray of developer, coming in from hazy nothingness to vague outlines to a darkened shape of things to come. Time is ticking away.

  I inhale deeply, holding the noxious weed in as long as I can stand it, blowing it all out in a gasp of exorcised spirits. Jesus, what is this shit? Whooooa. I have willed myself to demobilize and failed. Only one avenue remains. I must get sandblasted. And this is the ticket right here.

  “I hope you realize,” D’Allesandro says, “I don’t lay that shit on just every speeder and junkie who comes beggin’. That is some licensed-to-kill Special Recipe, mano. Treat it right and it’ll get you right.”

  “What is this shit?” I ask again, coughing.

  “Jay Dee’s Special Recipe: take a Marlboro, remove all the tobacco. Take some of this here” — he sits up and shows me a Bull Durham sack full of powdery stuff — “then mix in some of your Thai stick, then mix in a little Story of O, and then some of Mother D’Allesandro’s el primo bach bien, then stick that fucker in one of your seven bodily orifices and kick out the jams.”

  “Waaaugh,” I gag, “some righteous shit there.”

  “Anything to knock some of the smell off.”

  “Knock some of this — whew.”

  “Ummmmmmnnnnn.” He lets out poisonous Special Recipe that washes the interior of the stifling hootch in hallucinogenic fumes. The Dutchman has lumbered over. I know this shit must really stink because Dutch is right down in my face and I can’t smell anything. The Dutchman fell in a stream about twelve-and-a-half months ago, but other than that he doesn’t have what you call your scrupulous habits of personal hygiene. The fucker stinks like a goddamn dead skunk. He takes a hit.

  “Motherfucker!” he says, letting out a toke of Special Recipe, “what the fuck is this shit anyway?”

  “Um-hmm. Thas right.” He passes the evil weed to Dusty, who inhales it down to a few tiny cinders, the greedy coon dope fiend.

  “Hot damn!”

  “I can do battle behind some of that shit. Gimme another hit.”

  “Shit, Dusty done sucked the whole thing down to a cinder.”

  “Here, gimme some of that powder and some of your el primo. I’ll mix you some fuckin’ shit.” I pop a handful of uppers and downers and shit into an empty can and begin powdering them with the butt end of my K-Bar. (Headline: “bodies found in unexplained i corps mass suicide.”)

  “Hey, do these, take off the ragged highs.” Somebody drops a handful of reds in. I mash everything up. We sprinkle coke and some of the bitchin’ bach bien (heroin) in.

  “We goin’ smoke it or eat it or shoot that shit?”

  “Fuck, I dunno.”

  “Here, let’s get that shit right.” D’Allesandro drops a few tabs in.

  “Acid!” (Sub-headline: “hearts and minds missing.”)

  “Motherfucker!”

  “That shit never go’n burn.”

  “I’ve thought of that, for chrissakes, I’m a licensed pharmacist.” I make a little funnel out of a piece of cardboard and pour the mix carefully into my canteen half full of Jack Daniel’s. “Now. Let’s see how that ages. OK. Time’s up.” I take a careful sip.

  “Bbbbllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggg!” I spew a fine mist out across the sweaty faces nearby.

  “Damn.”

  “That shit gotta be smooth.” Laughter.

  “Holy . . . shit!” All it needs are a few peyote caps and some Dilaudid.

  “Needs just a little soupcon of — uh, garlic salt!” Nobody has any. I refuse Tabasco.

  “Wanna drop some o’ this in there?” Shit, why not? It all goes in.

  Just about close enough. Darvon, Demerol. Percodans. Meth. Some unknown substance. A little cough syrup with codeine, and a few shakes of sugar to take the sting off her. A last shake of dust and ersatz Spanish fly.

  “Ummmm. Be with some of this shit.”

  “Ummmnnn.” Gagging. “Whhhhheeeegggghhh . . . nice.” Fucking nice. It is rapid black-and-silver death swirling around in that canteen. Fuck it, take a big hit. (“speed freak found fanged by militant teenage dope werewolves.”)

  As I listen to the rain, getting wrecked out of my skull, it occurs to me that we have messed in our mess kit with this Toledo Blade bullshit. Dig it: when this mission started we were a fourteen-man spike team, allowing for an FO. Now — with a scout and an extra RTO — we’re still light, and that doesn’t begin to count Harold. I figure with him we were about double in combat effectiveness in the field. Early morning we boogie, with or without him. I start thinking about everything else that’s totally fucked about this op, but the Special Recipe Black Jack is taking me where I really want to go.

  “Far fuckin’ out,” I say. I am more ripped than recalcitrant, but my mind waxes eristical. I corruscate, prickle, wink out. Silently I curse the green machine, the dope oligopoly. Mom, the flag, and fuck you, Chesty, wherever you are. Sweat drips in tempo with the
rain. Time ticks, I begin to wane.

  “This is the stuff to which my bod will become accustomed, right, Dusty?”

  “There it is, soul.”

  “‘I wanted the gold, and I sought it: I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy — I fought it. I hurled my youth into a grave.’ Know who wrote those poetic words?” I challenge them.

  “General Harkins?”

  “Rap Brown?” Fucking wiseasses.

  “No, my twisted dope fiend colleagues, it was none other than the immortal Robert W. Service.”

  “F.T. Service far as I’m concerned, Jim. Fuck the green turd-suckin’ motherfuckerer.”

  “Fuckerer? Why, you dangerously wasted heroin addict junkie honkie dickeye handjob, we be trying to hold an intelligent constipation here and you can’t even fucking shit talk plain, you pig-fuckin’ hillbilly asshole.”

  “Somebody say somethin’ about my pig, man?” White stumbles over, half asleep.

  “Crap on your nap, dap, lap some o’ dis sap.” He tilts back the canteen and swallows a huge drink of it. Jesus, the fucker’s dead for sure. This will mean a lot of damn explaining.

  “How’s that shit, Mr. Laidlaw?”

  Laughter. Nothing.

  He licks his lips. “Yumm. Real tasty.”

  He turns and walks across the hootch, heading out the door while we look at each other in amazement. He acts like it was a swallow of water. I sniff the canteen. White makes it halfway out the door before he pukes in a stream of mustard-colored barfola that splatters out across the soaked mud.

  We fall off our cots laughing and roll around on the floor as White loses it.

  “All aboard the Vomit Comet.”

  “If you wasn’t such a fuckin’ pig.”

  “Pig. There you go talkin’ ’bout his pig again!”

  Laughter dissolves into exhaustion. We are getting fuckin’ wrecked. The humidity and the pills and the acid and the dope and the smack and the booze all blend into a deadly miasma of toxicity that leaves us little more than throbbing skin sacks of wasted protoplasm.

  “You know what this shit is?” I address my canteen.

  “This shit is.”

  “This is fuckin’ Black Water Fever!” I take a hit that really puts my lights out. I am down on the floorboards in a pile of mud and rat pills. A class act as always. Down there with the rat turds and grass seeds.

  “If I get sick and fucking die from this puke juice of yours,” we can hear White hitching from the doorway where he is slumped in a puddle, “maybe I won’t have to go to VietdamnNam.”

  “Fuckin’ lifers go around sniffin’ snuffles to see if they be smokin’ grass, and the fuckers is smokin’ heroin right in their damn faces.”

  “Shit, that’s cool. I don’t blame ’em. This el primo is got to be a bitch.”

  “This guy in Armored was wasted and lightning hit his tank while he was sittin’ astraddle the hatch, and it fuckin’ zapped both his legs and both his balls right off. He never felt shit he was so damn ripped. Som’bitch is still alive, he’s back in the world with a commendation or some shit and disability, sittin’ in some chair thinkin’ how he wishes he had his balls back.”

  “Shit, that ain’t nothin’. I wish I had my balls back and I ain’t never been in no fuckin’ tank.”

  “Said it sliced them legs and balls right off. Left the poor devil a dick to piss outta and nothin’ to go with the sucker. Ain’t that a bite.”

  “I thought you was gonna say lightning hit him in the balls so they made him a fuckin’ colonel.”

  “I fucked a colonel once.”

  Somebody has finally managed to turn one of the big PRCs on and KILL blasts out of the speaker,

  “White rock . . . Blowtorch . . . Skyhook . . . Michigan . . . Viceroy . . . Bulkhead . . .”

  “Blowjob . . . Headjob . . .” someone mimics.

  “Lancelot . . . Oklahoma . . . Tomahawk . . . Scalpel . . .”

  “Fuck that shit, get some fuckin’ music on that whore.”

  “Up, up and awavvvyeeeeeaaaaaayyyy — ”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Silver Blade . . . Wisconsin . . .”

  “Silver Blade! All-damn-right!”

  “I wanna hear some goddam music, motherfucks.”

  “Zebra . . . Escapade . . . Masher . . .”

  “ — One out to all the gungies in Bravo Two/Five! And especially to Wild Bill Bonner who — ”

  “What’s goin’ on, fer chrissakes? It stinks like burnt shit in here. You assholes been smokin’ dope?” Ewell says, raising up on one elbow.

  “No fuckin’ way. What’s to it, Gunny?”

  “Hey, what’s Laidlaw doin’ out there in the goddamn rain. Get back in here, fer chrissakes.”

  “He cain’t, Top, his balls was hit by lightnin’.”

  “Yeah. White lightning.”

  There it is, white lightning and rolling thunder. And the winner gets an all-expense-paid one-way ticket right smack into the diseased heart of never-never land with a charming crew of frightened, murderous, young, drug-muddled assassins.

  “Good-bye forever, cocksucks,” I tell them, probably for the last time, as the Black Water Fever sweeps over me, extinguishing my pilot light.

  “Checkpoint . . . Zigzag . . . Florida . . . Jack-knife . . . Rescue . . .” the code stream rolls on, crackling out of the wet, heavy Vietnamese air to uncaring ears, “Oxcart . . . Quebec . . . Abracadabra . . .” I snore on unperturbed, drugged and dreamless, blissful amid the rest of the filth and ratshit there on the floor. Black Water Fever takes no prisoners.

  Chapter 26

  “Awake, awake, utter a song!”

  — Judges 5:12

  Calming herself, forcing herself to be methodical and thorough, she packed her tapes and books and records. God! She had never imagined that she’d amassed so big a library. Macaulay and Mailer and Malraux and Marx going cheek by jowl into a carton with de Beauvoir and de Maupassant and de Sade. Weighty, incomprehensible Sartre and Kierkegaard and Rand. Had she really read all this stuff? Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Rilke, Yeats, James, Fielding, Freud, Jung, and her mind was wandering as she packed by the size of the hardcover volumes.

  “Good old Proo, Ca-mue, Croff-tay-bing,” she sang melodiously to the tune of “Reuben, Reuben” as Proust, Camus, and Krafft-Ebing plopped down into their new cardboard home. Carefully she started stacking her albums in a shipping carton: Bach, Basie, Beatles, Bartok, Brown (Cliffie), Brahms, Bird, Bernstein, her whole life was in here. Lovingly she placed Chetty Baker beside the Blue Stars. Her face registered great amusement as she realized she’d been humming “I Feel Pretty” to herself.

  She stood and looked at herself in the only full-length mirror she owned. She saw a perfectly ordinary-looking young woman standing there, quite filthy, wearing a mannish shirt with rolled-up sleeves, short cutoffs bleached white, shoeless. I stink, she thought, and unbuttoned the shirt and the cutoff jeans and dropped them in a pile which she kicked into a corner.

  It was warm in her rooms, even with the air conditioning, and a long, luxurious bath would feel wonderful. She examined herself in the mirror. The scars and pockmarks that covered her face might as well have been invisible. She had always seen herself that way, so there was no sense of shock or even mild irritation. Since she looked beyond the ravages, there was no particular perception of ugliness. She saw countenance, the inward degree of control, mood, physiognomy; all manner of expressions and reflections, everything but what others saw.

  Only her friend had understood about the scars. And one other acquaintance of hers who had undergone skin grafts for severe facial burns as a child, only these two had been able to grasp the way she saw herself. She wore her scars as a badge. She would no more think of having cosmetic surgery than she would have breast implants. Take her or leave her.


  She was well built. Small, high breasts with prominent nipples, and a really terrific-looking ass and long, shapely legs. She went to the greatest lengths to cover up these attributes, saving her knockout Halstons for her private life, and preferring for the working hours more mannish clothing and ao dais which were tailored to show as little of her shape as possible.

  She considered her mode of dress a kind of disguise. Camouflage. It was another way of protecting herself, another barrier between whatever was out there in the cruel world, and Priscilla Ho.

  Right now she just wanted to make love to her very favorite person, and she could do that quite easily in the bathtub. Escape was a hell of a turn-on, she thought.

  Chapter 27

  25 April, 1964

  Dear Mr.

  I have been advised that, because of your talents and unique skills in communications, you might be interested in pursuing this type position with a component of the U.S. Government.

  Other than to inform you that the employment would make maximum use of your background in broadcasting, and would necessitate travel overseas, I cannot give you at this time any detailed information because of the sensitive nature of the government projects involved.

  If you are interested in applying for a position of this type, which will give you the opportunity to contribute to the effectiveness of the national security effort, please advise us as soon as possible and we will furnish you with the necessary application materials.

  Very Truly Yours,

  My eyes, even behind my shades, are being poleaxed mercilessly by the unyielding rays of the early morning sun as it beats down on the pierced steel planking and sandbags and huge wooden sign that reads,

  fire support base king

  Home of the Mighty Ninety & the

  FORMULA FOR VICTORY

  READINESS

  VALOR

  = THE WINNING TEAM!

  Crap on a broom handle, friends, cut me a fuckin’ huss with this shit. Somehow, during the night, mad Aztec surgeons infiltrated our hootch and beat me to a pulp, threw me on the floor in some sort of primitive religious sacrifice, and opened my veins, giving me a complete transfusion. All of my blood has been drained and replaced by paraffin. Where once precious bodily red flowed, wax now solidifies. My mouth tastes like I spent the night licking candles. My tongue wears a wool-lined latex sleeve, a precaution against any further such unnatural acts or excesses. My hair has begun growing backward down into the root follicles, or whatever the fuck they’re called, and piercing the epidermis as each hair drives down into the skull, aiming at my brain.