The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown’s music sounded regal and unearthly. Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. We were out of the war. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

  After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, “Enough.” The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

  “I’m gonna have a smoke and a drink,” Cotton announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly’s shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

  Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces Radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

  “Leonard,” I said, and he swung his big buffalo’s head toward me. “You still putting in for compassionate leave?”

  He nodded. “You know what I gotta do.”

  “Yes,” Dengler said, in a slow quiet voice.

  “They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.”

  He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

  Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. “What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?” He did not wait for me to answer. “I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.”

  “Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,” Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

  Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, and never looked as though he belonged in uniform. “Here’s what I mean, kind of,” he said. “When we were listening to that trumpet player – ”

  “Brownie, Clifford Brown,” Spanky whispered.

  “– I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.”

  “Sweetie-pie,” Spanky said softly. “You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.”

  “When we were back in that village, last week,” Dengler said. “Tell me about that.”

  I said that he had been there too.

  “But something happened to you. Something special.”

  “I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,” I said.

  “Only twenty?” Cotton asked.

  “What was in that hut?” Dengler asked.

  I shook my head.

  “All right,” Dengler said. “But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.”

  I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

  “Fine,” Dengler said.

  “What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?” Cotton said. “I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.” He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. “What date you give Spanky?”

  “Fifteenth.”

  “He last longer than that.” Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. “Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it.”

  Cotton had put thirty dollars on August thirty-first, exactly the midpoint of Lieutenant Joys’ tour of duty. He had a long time to adjust to the loss of the money, because he himself stayed alive until a sniper killed him at the beginning of February. Then he became a member of the ghost platoon that followed us wherever we went. I think this ghost platoon, filled with men I had loved and detested, whose names I could or could not remember, disbanded only when I went to the Wall in Washington, D.C., and by then I felt that I was a member of it myself.

  II

  I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside and enjoying the slight coolness that followed the rain. The packet of Si Van Vo’s white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

  Wilson Manly’s shack was all the way on the other side of camp. I never liked going to the enlisted men’s club, where they were rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese beer in American bottles. Certainly the bottles had often been stripped of their labels, and to a suspicious eye the caps looked dented; also, the beer there never quite tasted like the stuff Manly sold.

  One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted men’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes’ walk from where I stood, just at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy himself, supposedly a Green Beret Captain who had installed a handful of bar girls in an old French command post, had gone home long ago, but his club had endured. There were no more girls, if there ever had been, and the brand-name liquor was about as reliable as the enlisted men’s club’s beer. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. They spoke almost no English. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post, even one that had been transformed into a bordello: it looked like a roadhouse.

  A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. The wood was soft with rot. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. Around six thirty the light bounced off the long foxed mirror that stood behind the row of bottles. After five minutes of blinding light, the sun disappeared beneath the pine boards, and for ten or fifteen minutes a shadowy pink glow filled the barroom. There was no electricity and no ice. Fingerprints covered the glasses. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal boot-prints on either side of a hole in the floor.

  The building stood in a little grove of trees in the curve of the descending road, and as I walked toward it in the diffuse reddish light of the sunset, a mud-spattered jeep painted in the colors of camouflage gradually came into view to the right of the bar, emerging from invisibility like an optical illusion. The jeep seemed to have floated out of the trees behind it, to be a part of them.

  I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

>   Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in.” His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Far table, right side.”

  “It’s okay?” I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t.

  “Yesss.” He stepped back to let me in.

  I smelled cordite before I saw the other men. The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.

  “Oh, hell,” someone said from off to my left. “We have to put up with this?”

  I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.

  “Is okay, is okay,” said Mike. “Old customer. Old friend.”

  “I bet he is,” the voice said. “Just don’t let any women in here.”

  “No women,” Mike said. “No problem.”

  I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.

  “You want whiskey, Tim?” Mike asked.

  “Tim?” the man said. “Tim?”

  “Beer,” I said, and sat down.

  A nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnnie Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife, and had once been blond.

  “I just want to make sure about this,” he said. “You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?”

  “Anything you say,” I said.

  “No woman walks into this place.” He put his hand on the gun. “No nurse. No wife. No anything. You got that?”

  “Got it,” I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer.

  “Tim. Funny name. Tom, now—that’s a name. Tim sounds like a little guy—like him.” He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. “Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.”

  “Don’t you like women?” I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse.

  I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.

  “That is a complicated question,” the drunk said. “There are questions of responsibility. You can be responsible for yourself. You can be responsible for your children and your tribe. You are responsible for anyone you want to protect. But can you be responsible for women? If so, how responsible?”

  Mike quietly moved behind the bar and sat on a stool with his arms out of sight. I knew he had a shotgun under there.

  “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you, Tim, you rear-echelon dipshit?”

  “You’re afraid you’ll shoot any women who come in here, so you told the bartender to keep them out.”

  “This wise-ass sergeant is personally interfering with my state of mind,” the drunk said to the burly man on his right. “Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue.”

  “Leave him alone,” the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.

  The drunken officer Beret startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.

  This is serious, he said, and I am serious. If you wish to see how serious, just sit in your chair and do nothing. Do you know of what I am capable by now? Have you learned nothing? You know what I know. I know what you know. A great heaviness is between us. Of all the people in the world at this moment, the only ones I do not despise are already dead, or should be. At this moment, murder is weightless.

  There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it’s pretty close. He may have said that murder was empty.

  Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: Recall what is in our vehicle (carriage); you should remember what we have brought with us, because I shall never forget it. Is it so easy for you to forget?

  It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.

  Your leader requires more of this nectar, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.

  “Whiskey,” said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.

  For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.

  The haggard soldier who had been silent until now said, “Something is gonna happen here.” He looked straight at me. “Pal?”

  “That man is nobody’s pal,” the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.

  For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.

  “Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?” said the drunk. “Is that much understood?”

  The soldier who had called me pal laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk’s glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.

  “I am not a rear-echelon dipshit,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble, but people like him do not own this war.”

  “Will you maybe let me save your ass, Sergeant?” he whispered. “Major Bachelor hasn’t been anywhere near white men in three years, and he’s having a little trouble readjusting. Compared to him, we’re all rear-echelon dipshits.”

  I looked at his tattered shirt. “Are you his babysitter, Captain?”

  He gave me an exasperated look, and glanced over his shoulder at the Major. “Major, put down your damn weapon. The sergeant is a combat soldier. He is on his way back to camp.”

  I don’t care what he is, the Major said in Vietnamese.

  The Captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. I motioned for Mike to come out with me.

  “Don’t worry, the Major won’t shoot him, Major Bachelor loves the Yards,” the Captain said. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move
at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. “God damn,” he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said “God damn” again, but in a different tone of voice.

  I started laughing.

  “Oh, this is –” He shook his head. “This is really – ”

  “Where have you been?” I asked him.

  John Ransom turned to the table. “Hey, I know this guy. He’s an old football friend of mine.”

  Major Bachelor shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. “I don’t care about football,” he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.

  “Buy the sergeant a drink,” said the haggard officer.

  “Buy the fucking sergeant a drink,” the Major chimed in.

  John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.

  We watched the Major’s head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached the unbuttoned top of his ruined shirt, Ransom said, “All right, Bob,” and the other man slid the .45 out from under the Major’s hand. He pushed it beneath his belt.

  “The man is out,” Bob said.

  Ransom turned back to me. “He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.” Ransom did not have to specify who he was. “Bob and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.” He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.