Starlight

by Scott Ely

  Then Jackson rose to the surface and again looked at the ships. The ships seemed only a few hundred yards away, but he knew they were several miles out. A Vietnamese fishing boat had moved in and dropped its nets just outside a bar. Small baitfish began to jump, pursued by a school of porpoise.

  I could get them to take me out to a ship, Jackson thought.

  Jackson floated on his back, letting the tide carry him. The beach looked very far away, the sound of the music from the band growing faint. Then he saw a figure on the beach waving its arms.

  Light. Wants me to come in, Jackson thought.

  He turned from the open sea and swam back towards the beach.

  They left the beach and took a bus into town. It was like walking through K-Mart, Jackson thought. Everywhere vendors had black-market American goods for sale: boxes of soap, shaving cream, soft drinks, beer, stereos, tape decks, and watches. The buildings were single, some double story with red tile roofs and white walls and others made out of cinder block with tin roofs. Rows of eucalyptus trees and a few palms grew along the street.

  “Hey, GI, you want boom boom?” a boy no more than ten or twelve said to Light, “Numba one.”

  Light gave the boy money and they followed him down a side street.

  The boy stopped at a two-story house. They went in through a passageway and then up on the roof of the first story. Girls and soldiers were there. A group of soldiers who all wore thirty-eights in shoulder holsters were sitting around in bathrobes. Music came from speakers set on the rail of the terrace.

  Light found a girl first. Jackson watched him walk off with her into the house, one arm around the girl and the other around the rifle.

  Then Jackson followed him with a girl. She wore a T-shirt with the words Playboy Bunny on it. In the tiny room created by a plywood partition, open to the high ceiling at the top, she took off her clothes and lay down on a bed made of two mattress stacked on the floor.

  Jackson lowered himself into her, a tiny girl with big breasts, and tried to forget about Desolation Row. Then it was over quicker than he had expected. He gave her more money and waited for himself to be ready again. She brought him a beer.

  There was a couple in the next cubicle. Their mattress creaked.

  “Boom, boom,” Jackson’s girl said, and laughed.

  “Starlight, starlight!” a girl’s voice yelled.

  “Leave that alone,” Light said.

  There was a thud in the hall, and Jackson began putting on his clothes. He pushed open the door. Two men had an open coffin made of unfinished wood. In it was a dead young Vietnamese soldier dressed in tiger stripe fatigues. The smell was very bad. A women bent over the coffin and began to wail. The little girl from the beach stood beside her.

  “Tom Light, Tom Light,” the child screamed. Jackson ran down the hallway and onto the rooftop. There were coffins in the hall, coffins on rooftop, and more in the street. Vendors were selling soft drinks to the crowd. American MPs and Vietnamese police in their white helmets began to appear around the edges.

  “Jackson!” Light yelled.

  He saw Light jump out a window onto the terrace. A moment later two men followed him carrying a coffin.

  “Tom Light! Tom Light!” they shouted.

  “Come on, Jackson,” Light said.

  They ran across the terrace. The old man with the beard tried to pull the poncho off the rifle, but Light brushed him away. Jackson tripped over coffins. He followed Light down some stairs. At the bottom a group of women dressed in black pajamas and conical hats waited with more coffins.

  “Starlight! Starlight!” the women wailed after them.

  Luckily it was just beginning to turn dark. They ran up the street, easily outdistancing the men carrying the coffins and made their way back to the hotel.

  “You go in. Get our shit,” Light said.

  “What’s going on?” Jackson asked. “What do they want?”

  “Goddamn dink at the desk recognized me,” Light said. “I know it was him.”

  Somewhere off in the town they heard shouts and sirens. “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here before they find me,” Light said. “We’re going back to the fucking bush.”

  “I’m not going fucking anywhere. What the fuck is going on!” Jackson said.

  “Goddamn dinks. They believe the whole fucking country is full of witches and spirits. Think I can raise the fucking dead with the starlight.”

  Jackson wished he was back on Desolation Row.

  He took a deep breath and asked, “Can you?”

  “Shit no. Are you fucking crazy? I see things in the starlight. Sometimes I know when a man’s gonna die. Think I’d be in this fucking war if I could do that kind of shit?”

  Jackson went into the hotel. The same clerk was at the desk. He smiled when Jackson came in. Jackson went up to the room and got their bags.

  “We’re checking out,” Jackson told the clerk.

  “Did you and Mr. Hale enjoy your stay?” the clerk asked.

  “Sure, it was great,” Jackson said.

  He took a good look at the clerk and wondered if Light was right about him.

  As soon as Jackson walked out of the hotel, he heard more shouting, much louder now. They caught a ride on a truck going to the airfield. Soon they were aboard a C-130 headed for Pleiku. Light almost immediately went to sleep in the jump seat beside Jackson, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

  “Hey, man, you hear the slopes went crazy in Vung Tau?” the soldier sitting on the other side of Jackson said.

  “No,” Jackson said, hoping the soldier would shut up.

  “They found Tom Light at some whore house,” the soldier said. “Fucking crazy slopes. Think that starlight scope of his can raise the dead. Dragged coffins all the way from the graveyard. Just like the fucking slopes. Get everything backwards. Light wastes slopes, he don’t raise ’em.”

  The soldier laughed and Jackson with him.

  “Yeah, fucking crazy,” Jackson said.

  Jackson looked at Light who was snoring. He had always been afraid of Light, but now the fear was different. Light had struck something deep within him, that same sort of thing that set dogs howling at the moon.

  He had experienced that kind of feeling one morning when he went hunting with Uncle Frank. Jackson noticed a crowd in front of the bait shop where they always ate breakfast. Running ahead he pushed his way through the crowd, reached the last row of men, and stumbled forward, hearing the buzzing noise at the same time his face came to within a few inches of the wire cage. He saw the diamond pattern of it, the thing uncoiling faster than he could have imagined, his head ringing against the taut wire, the poison splattering in his face like a light rain. The men laughed.

  Afterward Frank helped him wash off his face with a hose. He was still shaking and gasping for breath.

  “Nothing to be scared about, just a snake in a cage,” Frank said. “Worry about the ones in the woods.”

  Light had kept him alive. He was not a man Jackson should fear. Yet there was that crazy business at Vung Tau. And Light telling the future by looking at the pictures in the scope.

  The plane began its combat descent into Pleiku, coming down at a sudden, steep angle. Jackson gasped for breath, but Light slept through it all.

  CHAPTER

  10

  JACKSON AND LIGHT HITCHED a ride on a chopper to Desolation Row. Light was dressed in cut-off fatigues, a sweater, and dink sandals again. Instead of landing at the pad, the chopper touched down in the scrub outside the wire. Hale was making good on his threat never to let Light inside the wire again. Jackson thought that Light might protest, but instead he laughed and jumped out of the chopper. The door gunner covered him as Light waved goodbye and walked off through the scrub.

  Jackson walked in to the TOC and found Hale at work on his maps. A sergeant and two lieutenants were with him. All the way back to Desolation Row, he had been wondering if he would find Hale’s RTO alive or dead. He looked around the TOC for the
man. The radio was on a cot. Maybe he had gone to the latrine.

  “Sniper got him last night,” Hale said.

  Jackson sat down on a cot and took deep, slow breaths.

  “He was a new man, a dud. Lit a cigarette without shielding it. Got him right between the eyes.”

  Hale and the officers laughed, but Jackson felt sick. Jackson was glad it was not him, but he had not wanted the man to die. Better for no one to die. But what appeared in the starlight was going to happen, no way to avoid it.

  Later Hale went to sleep and Jackson took the radio and left the TOC. From a bunker near the four-deuce mortar pits, he heard music. He went into the bunker. Candles were set in empty C-rations cans. The mortar squad sat on shell boxes listening to the Rolling Stones on a battery-powered tape recorder, the bunker filled with smoke from the pipe they were passing around.

  “Have a hit, man,” a soldier said. “Little opium makes this grass taste sweet.”

  Jackson accepted the pipe and filled his lungs with smoke. He wanted to get high, to forget about Light.

  “Ain’t you Alabama, the dude that’s friends with Light?” another soldier asked.

  “I’m Hale’s RTO,” Jackson replied.

  “But the major don’t need no radio man,” the same soldier said. “He don’t go outside the wire.”

  All the men laughed.

  Leander was there, still wearing his pith helmet.

  “Hey, Leander, you think Alabama draws fire like Light?” a soldier said.

  “Looks like he’d draw fire,” Leander said.

  Someone turned down the music.

  Jackson decided to say nothing, wishing he had not smoked. Instead of feeling good, watching the colors and listening to the music slow down, the guitar runs almost frozen in time, he was beginning to feel uneasy. His chest grew tight, and he took a deep breath to try to relax.

  Another soldier said in a slow, thick voice, “I bet this mo’fucker draws fire, just like Tom Light.”

  “That LRRP team in the Ia Drang Valley got themselves fucked because of him,” the soldier who had offered him the hit said.

  “Yeah, that’s so,” Leander said. “Ain’t you Light’s bro? Went on R&R with him. You go out to the graveyard with him and dig up dead dinks?”

  Jackson said nothing. That was the same rumor he had heard in Pleiku at the airbase.

  “We thought Dak To was the bad shit,” another soldier said. “Nothing worse than this crazy ass place. I get an R&R out of here, I’m not coming back. I’ll volunteer for an LRRP team. Anything’s better’n this.”

  “Fucker, don’t you come messing around this bunker no more,” Jackson heard Leander say to him, the man’s voice pot cool, soft and calm. “Nothing personal. Don’t want to go home in no sloppy rubber bag because of you.”

  No one took up his defense, and Jackson left the bunker, hearing the men laughing behind him.

  Tom Light’s got my ass covered, Jackson thought.

  Jackson laughed softly to himself as he thought of what they might have done if they had known about Light’s prediction. That might have been enough to set off the mutiny Hale worried about.

  Now he was stoned and wished he could have stayed with the mortar squad and listened to music. He went to the TOC and climbed up the sandbags. The sandbags had recently been painted with tar to keep water out of the bunker, and the tar, still soft from the heat of the day, stuck to his hands and the seat of his fatigues. On the perimeter someone on a heavy machine gun began firing out into the bush. He listened to the slow chug of the gun and watched the red tracers, fascinated by the way they glowed. Like fireworks, he thought, the machine gun a giant Roman candle. The gun stopped, the gunners popped a flare.

  And Jackson, stoned beyond fear, lay back on the sandbags and watched the magnesium flare crackle and sparkle, showers of white sparks dropping off as its parachute carried it over the wire.

  Jackson turned on the radio.

  “Tom Light, Tom Light,” he spoke into the handset, as he had night after night after night, receiving no reply.

  He began to wonder if he would ever see Light again. It was easy for him to imagine Light wandering off through the jungle, walking the ridges of the Long Mountains toward China.

  No reply, only the white noise from the handset. Another flare went up on the perimeter and a gunner fired a long burst on an M-60 machine gun. He’s going to burn up the barrel, Jackson thought. Perhaps there were sappers in the wire, but the response was not frantic enough for that. The firing stopped and more flares went up. He lay on his back, watching them sparkle.

  Jackson picked up the handset again.

  “Loretta, Loretta, Loretta,” he said, releasing the handset’s transmission bar.

  And although he did not hear his girl’s voice come out of the handset, and did not want to hear it because that would mean he was as crazy as Light, he imagined what she would say.

  “Jackson, I’m waiting for you,” her soft voice spoke within his head.

  He tried to figure out whether it would be day or night back in the world. If it was day she would be at her typewriter in the lawyer’s office in Birmingham, and if it was night she would be at her apartment which she shared with another girl.

  “I’ll meet you in Hawaii for R&R,” Jackson said into the handset.

  Static hissed from the handset. Jackson, even though stoned, knew he was imagining the whole conversation, but he had heard her voice. A little breeze came up, and he shivered. He buttoned the top button of his fatigue jacket.

  “We’ll stay in a hotel right on the beach,” he said.

  “All day in bed with you,” she said.

  A soldier walked past the TOC. Jackson wondered if the man had overheard him. Then Jackson imagined he was undressing her, feeling her warm, smooth skin against his fingers, fumbling with hooks and buttons. He worried about getting the tar on her which had stuck to his hands. Now he was hard, his dick tight against his fatigues. She was unbuttoning his fly.

  “I’ll send you money for a ticket,” he said.

  “I’m waiting for you,” she said.

  Jackson could see her clearly—breasts, legs, the dark patch of hair. He ran his hands over her body, explored with his fingertips between her thighs.

  “I’m coming home,” he said. “Nothing will stop me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Now her voice was clearly coming out of the handset, not out of his mind. Jackson sat shivering in the breeze, cold except for the hot place between his legs.

  “Just for me, Loretta,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  And Jackson thought that it was not real because she was agreeing to everything. He wondered if she agreed with whatever the men in Birmingham suggested to her. There appeared a picture in his mind of her bent over one of them in bed, her mouth over his dick, just as large and erect as Jackson’s was now. She could do as she liked, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop her. She could suck and fuck every man in Birmingham, dance in one of the topless bars, walk the streets, and there was nothing, nothing he could do.

  “Loretta, you wouldn’t—” he began.

  “No, just for you,” she whispered. “Just for you.”

  And the imaginary voice broke across the static and filled his ears coming out of the night, out of nothingness. Jackson looked up at the star-filled but still moonless sky and wished he could hide her away from all the Jodys in that blackness.

  “Loretta, you promised me,” he said.

  “Tom Light, Tom Light!” a shrill dink voice came out of the handset.

  Jackson lost his hard-on in an instant, lying atop the bunker breathing heavily as if he had just spent himself in the girl.

  “Tom Light, you motherfucker!” the high-pitched dink voice said again. “We kill you!”

  Laughter from the handset.

  “Light’ll waste your dink ass!” Jackson said into the handset between gasps.

  “Someone fucking you girlfriend
right now,” the dink voice said. “All at Desolation Row die. No one have a nice day.”

  Jackson wanted to switch the radio off but could not. He wondered if Light was listening, wished Light would come on the frequency and tell the slope his ass was as good as greased.

  “Tom Light, Tom Light,” Jackson said.

  “The jungle is our friend,” the dink voice said again. “The jungle has killed Tom Light.”

  “He’s out there,” Jackson said. “He’ll blow you away.”

  More laughter. To stop it Jackson pressed down on the transmission bar and shouted, “Tom Light! Tom Light!”

  But still there was nothing, only the hiss of static. Jackson switched the radio off and felt like crying. He wanted to smell the jungle smell of Tom Light, but instead there was the sharp, sour stink of a piss tube in the air.

  The mortars began firing, and Jackson stood up to watch the impacts. When the rounds hit up on the ridge, a series of flashes, it was with the soft whump of willie peter instead of the sharp crack of high explosive. He lay back on the sandbags and imagined that white phosphorous cloud of fire dropping down on the dink he had just talked to on the radio. Now the night was quiet.

  Jackson stretched out on the sandbags and tried to push the war out of his mind by concentrating on the beautiful vision of colors he had begun to see, hoping they would twist and flow into the shape of Loretta.

  Suddenly without warning the fear took hold of him, sucking the air out of his lungs. He saw Tom Light walking through the jungle and a squad of NVA crouched in ambush on both sides of a trail preparing to catch Light in a crossfire from which there was no possibility of escape. Then the dinks sprang the ambush.

  “Run! Run!” he screamed, and he was in the forest too, running toward the sound of the firing, his feet becoming tangled in vines, running and falling, running and falling.

  He reached the ambush, but there was no more firing. Tom Light stood on the trail with a smile on his face, the rifle with the starlight scope in his hands.

  “You ain’t never gonna be short,” Light said.