The lieutenant had shouted after him, —You know what. You’re right. I’m gonna leave this bastard’s nose right where it is.
Kip did not reply, and it possibly cost the captive his manhood because no sooner had he turned his back on the lieutenant than the marine started sawing away at the poor fellow whose agonized cries about his penis Kip understood from his knowledge of Vietnamese slang. Hideous screaming followed him for days after that, screaming and the stench of fear. Soft on slopes. He thought if he could have one thing now, it might be the tongue out of that lieutenant’s foul mouth. But that was elsewhere, another time. This was now. He tried to get his mind straight, hold his bearings from veering off further. He listened, he pulled himself with considerable ardor into time present.
Laughter. What he heard was laughter. Dry, emphatic laughter. It irritated him to hear it, and if he was imagining he heard it, he was irritated, superbly and profoundly irritated anyway. Pathet Lao and some Vietnamese troops, the NVA, who were no more supposed to be operating inside Laos than we were. A taunting, chill laughter toward which he was meant to react with hostility. Grace notes, kind of giggles, or sniggers. Sneers, deliberate and calculated to provoke a response that would betray his position. He was up and running, bent over so as not to be seen or shot, and Kha Yang seemed to be running with him. Then they stopped at the far edge of this same field and Kip went down to his knees, keeled onto his side and curled into the fetal position, which he knew not only gave comfort in the maternal grasses but was the posture that least taxed his drumming heart. He clutched his gun, dear teddy bear, to his breast.
He woke up, having slept.
The laughter may have ceased, replaced by a silence intended to inspire dread. Or it may not have ceased, but rather not have been heard by Kip who had bundled his consciousness into a protective coil that mirrored his jackknifed legs, rounded back, head cradled in his own bent arms. His palms locked him in from the jeering world.
Was this perspective enough, Tan Kip, as his Hmong associates—the backseaters who flew missions with him every day, sometimes as many as four between sunrise and dusk—addressed him, perspective enough, Mr. Kip? And though the only perspective these Hmong were concerned with had to do with distances between their spotter plane and enemy movement below, Kip might allow himself to wonder how much farther from the Hill he might have to travel before he could see himself as he had in the ocotillo-framed mirror in his parents’ den. He might, on bad days, indulge himself in reveries—some unkind, some kind—about me and Jessica. But such daydreams were reserved for bad days, and bad days were days that saw no action, and the need to assure himself of ceaseless turmoil, a clutter of missions so perpetual that waking nightmares would crowd daydreams right off the mental stage, was satisfied by volunteering for covert duty here. The option was to figure out how to join the grunts up on the incursion points, some of whom had gone berserk, homicidal, who trashed their memories, their futures, any interest in survival, whose sole purpose was to take out as many gooks as they could on their fast descent to hell. For all their madness they had a purpose and a commitment. But gruntdom was not, for whatever reason, an option. Kip was a runner, not a suicide. And so this program in Laos, about which he had kept hearing rumors, suited him.
Prey to memory, he didn’t want to be. Not now, not here. “No memories no regrets.” He had chalked those words in yellow on a bomb casing before an operation near the tricorner, an early run up the Trail when he was still over in Vietnam, growing bored and anxious. Message in a bottle, again. A form of farewell for his victims, but also a philosophy for himself, one that he knew he could never embrace given the persistence of his memory.
What was he trying to justify? And where was his companion, who went down with him just now, into a sprawl of vegetation?
He should have been back from his patrol by now. But no, hadn’t they just been running again? Yes, after the laughter, or?—well, maybe not. It was hard to say. Kip’s sense of time was all skewed. Kip should never have let Kha Yang leave in the first place. Mistakes were compounding. It was not good.
Tigers, he remembered. They had smartassed about it back in the capital of Vientiane. There were many tigers out here in the mountains. It was a joke among the pilots, what more brutal irony than to survive a crash and escape capture, only to be eaten by a tiger out in the jungle. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, he thought. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire?
The grass had sharp edges. Either that or his skin had thinned during these last hours.
Predawn was quieter than ever. He licked his finger, which was wet. He couldn’t taste whether it was dew or blood. It didn’t matter. He held the finger aloft to check the direction of the wind. The eastern sky was just beginning to brighten, however dully, and the stars had begun to fade under a thickening cover of clouds. It threatened rain, he could smell the moisture. The breeze freshened. His finger tingled most when its damp flesh was pointed south. Wind from the south always boded evil in the old romance novels. Soon enough it began to sprinkle. Weather would keep the rescue choppers grounded, that is, if there were any rescue choppers. It was time to get moving. He didn’t move. The clouds continued to lighten. Someone quite nearby coughed. Kip’s stomach began to grind. He didn’t breathe. A caterpillar of some sort climbed with mechanical vitality over a spear of crushed grass several inches from his eye. His finger tightened on the trigger.
He waited. Nothing happened. Had the cough come from his own mouth? Perhaps he had drifted off to sleep yet again, despite his efforts, and despite his unwonted anguish—anguish more than fear or dread, almost a form of sorrow or a kind of regret, regret because in his progressive delirium he had come upon the hard fact that he was here because he had put himself here. —What the fuck, he said. The ant was there again and seemed to hear him. It wiggled its antennae, like a rigid semaphorist. —Tell it to me straight, Kip beckoned. The ant did not reply. He was mildly surprised it seemed not to have the power of speech. Blake had written about a fly—“For I dance and drink and sing till some blind hand shall brush my wing.” Had he ever written about an ant?
Kip, stop flowing, man, he thought. Keeping his mind steadied was like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall.
Then it happened. The hand on his shoulder was real, very real, and grasping him. It was strong.
The cough and the hand came in lightning succession despite the intervention of observations and ideas. The moment felt excessive. It was as if the amount of time that passed between the cough, then the occurrence of the hand touching his shoulder, and his response to the hand on the shoulder was not enough to accommodate the emotions and thoughts coursing through his imagination. The time should have been doubled or trebled to hold all that occurred within its temporal borders. Regret didn’t feel right. No, regret wasn’t enough. It was more like revulsion. Arrogance had brought him to this. He was so angry with himself. His skill, his training, his native intuition should have precluded this ever coming to pass.
As the fingers tightened he resigned himself to the worst. He knew what would be in the man’s other hand. And in his own he held nothing with which to protect himself but a gun whose two spare clips wouldn’t give him even two dozen rounds. —The last bullet’s for yourself, the pilots always joked. Shoot, get it on, get it over with.
Then it was all movement. He twisted around toward the one who had him in his grasp, and let out a guttural, weird howl. Ire, terror, frenzy, an elaborate weave, no language, just noise, or this cluster of such unlikely noises, bound into a single cry, and though it was not loud (terror imprisoned much of the air in his lungs), it was compelling because so peculiar.
Neng Kha Yang locked his hand over Kip’s mouth, and whispered, —You no shout, no shout.
—What the fucking, goddamn it, Kha Yang.
—Quiet, you be quiet, Tan Kip.
Kip’s finger eased forward off the trigger. His barrel was at Kha Yang’s temple.
He stared with wild eyes at Kha, and said, —Where the hell you been?
Kha Yang’s English was a little better than that of many backseaters but he still communicated with gestures and the few dozen words necessary to his job. —Here, he said.
—It’s almost morning, argued Kip.
The Hmong hesitated.
Kip pointed to his watch, then to the brightening sky.
—Where you been all night? All night you’ve not been here.
Kha Yang shook his head and frowned. —I here, night. You here, sleep.
—Where are we? he asked.
—We here. They know.
—Who knows? Bad guy knows?
—No, they know.
—Our people know.
—Yes, our people.
The downdraft began to buffet through the grasses and a gust now and again carried with it a light spray of rain. Our people might know they were here but so did the enemy. He was out there, the enemy was, and Kip had learned to think of them as him, as not the bad guys, which was what everyone called them —not Viet Cong, not VC or Charlie as over in Vietnam—but the enemy, one body made up of thousands of youthful enemies, boys and men and women and girls, and to Kip melded as if into a single organism, regenerative and apparently ineradicable. Having grown up where there were no mangrove channels or tidal pools, Kip had only read about the sea star and how if it lost one of its rays, it simply generated another. He was like that, the enemy. And he was out there now.
The first time Kip had seen him dead up close, his youth and beauty were arresting. He turned the frail body over not with the tip of his boot but with his hands, less an act of reverence, more curiosity satisfied, because yes he wanted to touch the thing. It was featherlight, this corpse, and upon its visage, astonishing tranquility. Genderless, the delicate neck, his eyes moist and contoured like a sunflower seed, the cheeks pronounced and lips apart, the look on his face of modest, languid surprise. As if to be no longer alive was unexpected.
That was not quite a year ago, and Kip had seen so many of the boy’s comrades since then that their beauty and adolescence he had come to take for granted.
And, yes, he was out there now. Kha Yang, whom he watched in a very loosely focused sort of way, betrayed no nervousness about their vulnerable situation. He was armed but must have known as well as Kip that if the enemy wanted to take them, Kha Yang could not prevent it.
—Why don’t they move? Kha Yang’s comrade asked.
Kha Yang looked into the south skies and listened for friendly air. The sun was coming up, or had already come up, and the heavy mists wore a pearlescent glow. The earth was fragrant, smelled of sweet feces and of jism, fecund as the scent of intercourse. The grass rattled and sang, but it was just dumb grass now. Where was everybody? What was going on here?
—Why don’t they move? he echoed himself.
—You are hurt? his companion asked.
Kip couldn’t tell. He must have been, mustn’t he, but it was beyond knowing.
They hunkered down, silent, and waited. No sooner had it begun than the rain seemed to end. Kip may have dozed again, he could not tell wakefulness from dream, and didn’t care to distinguish them. No point to it at that moment. He knew that should the need arise for him to burst into consciousness, he would.
Kha Yang clicked his tongue then. Kip admired his adjunct for these tics. Kha Yang was simple, in his way, readable. Kip listened, too, for that’s what the clicking tongue was meant to communicate.
Air was off to the south, very low. And he heard now, from another direction, up above the cloud cover, a T-28. No, not one but two of them. In the southern air was what sounded like a Jolly Green Giant. It was about to happen, it was going to happen, Kip thought.
Popping at every periphery. Resistance from the ground had begun. Tracers lit up the fog like a false dawn. Flak fire from the gunners’ nests on the near hills. Blasts, and snapping from a gatling gun festooned the soft wind. The enemy had not bothered with Kip and Neng Kha Yang because the enemy wanted more from the situation, wanted to take out a chopper if one arrived to evacuate pilot and his spotter from where they were pinned down. This tactic was nothing new over in Vietnam but the enemy here was often too disorganized and dispersed to employ sophisticated strategy. But here it was, going on. The T-28s were pounding positions just north and east now, plummeting forth from the cloud base to rain fire not a quarter kilometer away. Kip and his backseater hugged the earth as their own position was strafed. High and wide the barrage poured in so that it appeared they would be cut off from the rescue chopper, but then there was a break in the action. The lead T-28 had swung around to unload the balance of its ordnance, and after a series of profound explosions, punctuated by secondary blasts which indicated to Kip that an unfriendly position had been hit, there was first a riveting flash of silence, then the conspicuous, horrid sound of engine trouble. Kip took the chance of divulging his location to some sniper who might just be waiting for him to make a mistake by raising his head to see the plane forfeiting altitude, veering in a lazy course out away from the heavy forest toward this open pitched field, and before long a parachute burst into view. Most of these T-28s flown by the Hmong were antiquated and had no ejection system, so it was a promising sign that the pilot had managed to pry his canopy open and scramble out. At least he wasn’t dead yet, though floating under his idle chute, he would be easy prey in the gunsight of anyone who wanted to pick him off. The second T-28 dove through on a final strafing run, and hell broke loose again from a more distant enemy perch. The parachute disappeared over a rise downfield.
Time fractured. The grass was flattened by the density of the downthrust wind off the chopper blades. There was shouting, and he was lifted by several arms, carried to the platform, and no sooner were they aboard than the chopper dipped, then banked hard, rolling him over on his back. A medic was asking him what was wrong. He shouted over the din, —Forget it, I’m fine. Kha Yang sat on heels next to him studying the quick landscape that tumbled behind, and knew better than to contradict Mr. Kip. He understood, too, why Kip had warded off medical attention. Having worked so hard to get detailed up in Long Tieng, he didn’t want to risk being medevaced down to Udorn or worse yet, out to the Philippines. The breed of soldier who sought out an injury by which to rotate home was not one who ended up in Laos, and certainly not as a member of the Raven outfit. Just the opposite. These came to work. Kha Yang knew that if they got out of their present situation within the week, Kip would be back in the air, back on mission.
The fire was more sporadic now. The chopper dropped, hovered. The door gun was rattling away all the while the Hmong pilot from the other plane was hauled in, unceremoniously, by the collar of his flight jacket. He was breathing, but his leg was a mess, must have been hit on the drift down. Kip and the man—both on the metal floor of the chopper, a chaos of vibration, its floor violent, which now was taking on velocity—locked eyes, and seeing the other give him a thumbs-up just before he passed out, Kip managed, —I owe you, then himself closed his eyes to retreat back into his head.
Sometime before they reached Long Tieng it came to him. That line. Came to him in the midst of a litany of promises he was making to himself that he would never be downed again, and that if he did, he wouldn’t call in help but get himself out of the jam on his own. What came to him was he remembered that the contemplation of Incapacity and Prudence was one of Blake’s proverbs. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. A proverb in fact from hell.
His eyes opened and he saw his finger caked with blood. He should have known it wasn’t dew he’d tasted back there lying on the grass. A broad smile broke across his face, and he thought, Proverb from hell, wasn’t that just too perfect for words.
Kha Yang looked at his partner and shook his head. —Tan Kip, he said. —What so funny you laugh?
Kip closed his eyes and said, —You are funny, Kha Yang. You are making me laugh.
—Tan Kip, Kha Yang mused. —Tan Kip, he crazy sometimes.
Their engagement might have been made more formal, might have been expressed with more resolve, she thought. They might as well have gone ahead and married, if they were as much in love as they told one another they were. Even before her pregnancy was confirmed she found herself regretful at not having been more direct with Kip about her dread of his leaving her with this promise, his proposal, and nothing more. Or, if not more direct, more sure herself of what she wanted to do, because wasn’t it true that she had resisted the idea of making an “institutional commitment” as much as he? Wasn’t it true that even now, as she thought about it, she couldn’t with confidence remember whose somewhat cynical definition of marriage those words had been?—“institutional commitment,” like being committed to an asylum for the romantically insane? And which of them had proclaimed, with all the studied naivete of a lyricist writing a mushy Broadway musical, though perhaps without the lyricist’s understanding that most musicals are by definition cheap fantasies expensively staged, that they “needn’t a piece of paper to keep their love together”? Another question for them: why bother with these ridiculous French terms—fiancé, fiancée, past participles of fiancer, to vow, promise, trust—and all the wicked weight of history and tradition they conjure, if neither she nor Kip had the mettle to carry that weight to its proper end? He had come back from New Mexico after the death of his parents and proposed to her, had he not? And she had accepted. There was the valid excuse to delay the marriage because air force regulations stipulated only unmarried men may enter pilot training school. Training stretched over months into two years or so. But things drifted after flight school, Kip left for his tour of duty, and now, here she was, into her second trimester, this fiancé of hers on the other side of the world. Jessica could with the authority of experience shake her head at the thin innocence she and Kip had shown regarding all this. But couldn’t she at the same time be grateful, if that is the word for it, that the piece of paper did not exist, given how things seemed to be evolving?
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