The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘To show us how the semiautomatic on the M-16 worked, this guy blew the head off an alley cat in a garbage can. And one afternoon he invited me to his quarters and showed me the skull of a Vietcong, which he’d scooped out and dried like a Halloween pumpkin. Then he hauled out this album of photos of mutilated bodies. I said, “Hey man, I don’t wanna look at these. This little hobby of yours is weird.” And he said, “Well, son, you’d better get used to lookin’ at them, ‘cause where you’re goin’ you’re gonna see plenty.”’

  Hawk went to Vietnam in the grip of the basic male thing: Here was this rite that would either make a man of you or destroy you. If you returned alive, you’d somehow conquered Death. Naturally he assumed that he would be one of those to return — loaded down with medals just like his father. But once there, his only concerns became enduring the incredible boredom and staying alive and getting home, which required doing as he was told. Out on a patrol he and four others abducted a Vietnamese girl from a field near a village. Hawk protested faintly and was told to shut up. He speculated on pulling a John Wayne and rescuing her. Then he pictured himself in a jungle grave with a bullet through his head. Or returned to Atlanta in a body bag — a war hero. It was one of those jarring moments when a person realizes that he’s stepped out of the familiar everyday world into a realm of primal lawlessness in which anything goes. The girl panicked and started kicking and scratching. The others slapped her around. Finally Hawk joined them in raping her.

  I looked at him with alarm: I was alone and defenseless with a rapist. What should I do?

  ‘You have to understand that I was almost a virgin,’ Hawk explained grimly, as I stared at him with horror. ‘I’d done the usual back-seat grapplings when I was at military school. At Tech I went once to a black whore — and came all over her before we were even undressed. Once I wrangled a date with a townie who’d reportedly “do it for anyone.” I got her drunk so that she wouldn’t notice my ineptitude, and she passed out. So I screwed her anyway, and then cleaned her up. She never knew. Junior year I fell hopelessly in love. But my girl’s education was very important to her, and we didn’t want to risk wrecking it by getting her pregnant. So we had this beautiful chaste relationship for over a year. I went off to war knowing that she’d be through school when I got back and all would be well. I’d have saved myself for her, and she for me, and we could spend the rest of our lives making up for lost time.

  ‘While I was raping the girl, I looked down at her face. She was staring at the sky with resigned hatred. One eye was swollen shut, and she’d bit through her lower lip. I lost my erection. I pretended to come. One of the guys dragged her to her feet. She spat in his face. He started shouting things about “gooks and yellow cunts and slant-eyed sluts,” and then threw her down and shoved a grenade up her. We heaved what was left of her body off a cliff.’ He was talking mechanically, gazing off into space. ‘I had thought I was hero material. That day I learned I wasn’t.’

  Wendy toddled over and squatted down and tried to fondle his penis. He pushed her away gently. I continued to stare at him, alarm and disgust vying with compassion.

  What he mostly felt, he said, was relief. Poof! She was blown away, and he didn’t have to think about her anymore. After all, if it hadn’t been for all those scrawny pathetic gooks who couldn’t take care of themselves, he wouldn’t have had to be stranded in some God-forsaken rain forest in the first place.

  By the time they got back to camp, the relief had worn off. He expected a bolt of lightning with their names engraved on it to arrive from Uncle Sam. But nothing happened. To his dismay. He expected to be punished, he wanted to be punished — to be dismembered with the assembled troops looking on and jeering. But no punishment arrived.

  So he punished himself. He stopped eating and sleeping. He lay in his tent crying and reviewing obsessively the various points at which he could have taken a stand and saved the girl. When he did sleep, he dreamed that his cock was being chopped off in wafer-thin slices. He fought with his friends. In the field it was all he could do not to turn his rifle on himself. The post psychiatrist gave him some pills and suggested that he relax. The chaplain recommended that he sit in the chapel and lay his sorrows on Jesus. His lieutenant said, ‘This is war, soldier, not a Sunday picnic.’ When Hawk wept all over him, he got upset and counseled him to fake a physical ailment.

  Hawk was past faking anything, so he reenlisted to get leave. He went to Atlanta and told his family he was deserting, that the beaches of Los Angeles weren’t in immediate danger but that his mortal soul was. His father nearly had a coronary. He went to his girl’s college and asked her to come with him. She said she never wanted to see him again if he was such a coward.

  ‘I drove due north. Went through Hullsport in fact. Went through Washington and drove slowly round and round those convoluted clover leafs near the Pentagon staring at the place. I reflected on how my life was turning out so different from the mold it had been cast in. And for a little while, my crime assumed a place in a meaningful pattern, as though its function had been to jar me irretrievably out of that mold.

  ‘I drove up through Vermont. It was autumn, and the trees were dazzling. I crossed the border at Highgate Springs. The border guard asked me my name and place of birth. “Your reason for visiting Canada?” “Pleasure,” I said with my first grin in months, and I drove away — free! It was as though this great weight had been lifted off my shoulders: I didn’t have to do what anyone said, I had only myself to account to. The sun was shining, and the sky was that brilliant Kodachrome blue you get on a crisp fall day up here. I laughed out loud. I was on a real high, burning pure adrenaline. And when I came down, I crashed but good. Anyhow, Ginny, that’s my fugitive story.’

  I stared at him. I had recovered from my alarm. I was now trying to digest the fact that here was a whole range of experience I’d had no contact with. The Vietnam war had been a symbol to me for years, an abstraction signifying various things. I’d never known anyone who’d been in it, much less anyone who’d left it. It occurred to me that deciding what to do about it constituted the real rite of passage for the males of my generation. How they conducted themselves would determine the course of their futures. And like the puberty rites of a primitive tribe, only the males were privy to the secret joys and terrors of the ordeal. A woman could only watch with awe from the sidelines at the grim and terrible struggle. Just as males couldn’t really participate in a woman’s equivalent ordeal of what to do about an unwanted pregnancy. The issues of life vs. death, an individual’s duties vs. his rights, seemed to get grappled with quite early by a great many people.

  ‘So why in the world have you come back? What happens if you’re caught?’

  ‘Five years in prison getting fucked up the ass. But to explain why I’m back, I’d have to continue my saga.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Well, I applied for landed immigrant status and got it. I rented a room in a decaying townhouse on a dingy side street in the French section of Montreal. And I took a job cleaning up the operating rooms at the hospital next door.

  ‘Then the Montreal winter set in. Day after day with no sun. Snow piling up and turning to gray mush. Wind blasting down the streets. I was afraid to make friends because then I’d have to own up to being a deserter. I was in continuous fear of being tracked down and shanghaied back to the States. I would freeze at footsteps behind me; I’d shrink up against buildings to let people pass. Every time my landlady knocked at my door I’d panic.

  ‘Plus the double culture shock. I was out of the military. After fourteen months of knowing exactly what to wear, and having my meals set before me, being told when to get up and how to spend my entire day, my every movement was suddenly no longer planned for me. I was in a daze for weeks — getting to work late, forgetting to eat, ending up with all my clothes dirty at once.

  ‘And then the culture shock from no longer being in America. I hadn’t thought much about this in advance. I knew Canadians spoke
English. Why, Canada was like the fifty-first state, I thought. Well, that attitude was exactly the problem. I felt Canada’s resentment of America very strongly. And here I was in the French section with storekeepers glaring at me when they had to switch to English. Or at least I felt they were glaring, from the depths of my paranoia. I felt hated on every hand — by Canadians for being American, by the French for being English, and by the whole world for being a deserter.

  ‘And at work I was mopping up the operating rooms and carting out stained linens and collecting soiled instruments. Blood and pain and unhappiness all around me. I might just as well have stayed in Vietnam.

  ‘I had written my family and my girl begging for their understanding and had gotten no reply. I was cut off from my old life, but I hadn’t been able to set up a new one. I read one morning in the paper about a deserter’s crossing the border into the States; he’d been caught, had panicked and pulled a gun, and was shot to death by the guards. The reality of my situation was getting home to me. I began not sleeping and having gory nightmares. It was all I could do to drag through the dreary days.

  ‘One day as I was leaving a bookstore, the clerk said in an American accent, “Hey man, you a deserter?” My paranoia from all those weeks alone and terrified just swept over me. I crouched and started backing toward the door. “Hey man,” he said, “stay cool. I’m a deserter, too.” Later I asked him how he could tell and he laughed. I was apparently as identifiable as a Girl Scout in full regalia, with my short hair and green canvas jungle boots and army-issue field jacket.

  ‘Well, the next thing I knew, my life was like a college reunion. This guy was taking me to all these meetings of deserters and draft dodgers. Every night was like a party. I would tell all about all the hideous things I’d seen and done, and they’d tell me all the hideous things they’d seen and done. And, like, I wasn’t alone with my crime anymore. It was such an incredible relief. I went around the operating rooms smiling all day. These new friends dispersed a lot of my paranoia by telling me that the FBI wasn’t allowed into Canada. In short, I was safe.

  ‘Spring had arrived. The trees in the parks were leafing out. The snow and ice had melted and washed out to the St Lawrence. I got very involved in resister politics, went to meetings, discussed policy decisions, organized demonstrations, printed pamphlets, arranged housing. I worked like a fiend for six months, every spare moment devoted to war resistance. What had seemed an isolated leap, undertaken in desperation, had been taken by thousands of other men at the same time! It was a heady discovery.

  ‘But over the months, I discovered that this moral force that I had thought was united behind the great and glorious cause of war resistance was in fact fragmented into dozens of small interest groups that regarded each other with contempt. The resistance was a Tower of Babel. The dodgers were condemning the deserters for having gone into the army in the first place. The resisters still in the service were condemning the deserters for not having stuck it out to subvert from within. For that matter, the resisters in the service were criticizing us all for requiring men less educated and less monied to be killed in our places. Resisters in America — those in jail and in the service and underground — were criticizing us exiles, saying we’d done just what the American government wanted us to do by leaving. Joan Baez did a concert and ended it by reprimanding us for not being back home in jail with her David. The exiled draft dodgers were criticizing the jailed dodgers for being on a martyr trip. The deserters were accusing the dodgers of head tripping, of not really knowing what they were talking about. And of course, everyone was down on the CO’s. Almost everyone I knew up there had applied for CO status at one time or another and had been turned down. They used CO applications as a stalling device, but they never actually performed alternate service, because that was still cooperating with the war machine.

  ‘In Canada it was the American exile types versus the Canadian immigrant types: The exile set wanted to use Canada as a base for a United States government in exile; whereas the immigrant types wanted to go native, become citizens, take Canadian wives, and raise lots of little Canadians. The exiles charged that the immigrants just wanted to vanish into the Canadian middle class without having made any impact on the American government; and the immigrants accused the exiles of using Canada in as politically predatory a fashion as the American corporations were using her economically. Even the immigrant group was fractionated into those who really did want just to blend into Canadian life, those who wanted to organize against American colonialism, and those who wanted to organize the French against the English. And the exiles were fragmented into those who were just against the Vietnamese war, and those who were opposed to capitalism in any of its manifestations. Then there were the earth trippers, who insisted that we forget about America and Canada and the French and the English and move to the countryside and dig in for the Apocalypse.

  ‘Well, it was just exhausting really. I had been so happy that day in the bookstore when I’d found another deserter. And now I was miserable.

  ‘I began staying in my room all the time. I’d never done drugs before, even in Nam with them all around — just some beer, and grass a few times. But I really went at it now. Soon I had eaten or injected or smoked or sniffed everything I could get my hands on — psilocybin and peyote and LSD and hash and cocaine, aspirin, glue, nitrous oxide, permoline, yohimbine, ritalin, reserpine, chlorpromazine, codeine, atropine, kava-kava. I had a deserter friend who was as disillusioned as I. He’d come over and we’d drop a tab of acid; and when we got tired of tripping, we’d take some thorazine to bring us down. And when we were so far down that we felt like shit, we’d take some dexedrine to level us off. And then we’d start in on something else. Or we’d get out our speed collections and trade pills like two little kids swapping marbles: “I’ll give you six greenies and twelve black beauties, for eight purple hearts and eight dexies.” After one of those weekends, a junky could have lived off our vomit for weeks.’

  ‘What was it like, all that stuff?’ I asked, as fascinated as a child at a candy counter.

  He looked up at me, surprised. ‘Didn’t you play around with this garbage when you were out on the farm?’

  “No, I never got into it. Some grass, half a peyote button. Frankly, I was scared.’

  ‘You were right to be. I was crazy then. The fact that I survived more or less intact is a tribute to the indestructibility of the human body. Artificial interference with states of consciousness is a mistake.’

  ‘Yes, but what was it like?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said yawning, ‘the usual. I ascended into heaven and met God, who put His hand on my shoulder and called me “son.” He conveyed me to the abode of Infinite Truth, where my sharpened powers of perception commanded instant insight into the nature of pure existence.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Not really. The whole thing was a ghastly mistake. I thought I’d throw down a few pills and — zap! — instant answers. I ended up this phase of my journey to your back yard yearning to kill myself, but in a frenzy of terror that if I did, I’d go straight to hell for my hideous crimes. It was awful. I’d sit there for hours in my room with a razor blade poised over my wrist, trembling with fear as I imagined what the afterlife had in store for me — too many southern revivals in my boyhood. I could feel my flesh roasting on those spits, man! God bless the Southern Baptists! They’re the only reason I’m still alive today. If that’s a boon.’

  ‘To me it is,’ I told him, gazing with admiration. I’d never known a war hero before. I knew I’d never have had the gumption to do as he’d done. I was dazzled. ‘Would you like to sleep with me tonight?’

  He said with wounded dignity, ‘No, thank you.’

  I did a double take. Was it possible that he had refused me? After all, various people had been vying for a decade for the privilege I’d extended to him as a reward for his bravery. And he had turned me down?

  ‘I don’t “sleep around,” or whatever that phrase
is,’ he explained. ‘I haven’t really been able to stomach the idea of sex since — my war crime.’

  I looked at him, my eyes gleaming — a mission! I could restore him to sexual health, thereby contributing to the war effort, without leaving my back yard — and perhaps I could relieve my unutterable boredom at the same time! I conveniently put out of my mind the fact that my tutoring anyone in lovemaking would be like Helen Keller’s conducting bird watches. I also put out of my mind the fact that I had a functioning husband whose moral stomach would find adultery indigestible.

  ‘I’m not interested in casual sex,’ he continued. ‘I’m interested in deadly serious sex. I’m interested in using disgusting animal lust in controlled doses, like a poison administered for therapeutic purposes, to get beyond sex and out of my wretched body. Kularnava Tantra says, “As one falls on the ground, one must lift oneself by aid of the ground.” Are you interested?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m interested or not. I don’t know what you’re asking.’ The earth was quaking. This discussion felt momentous.

  ‘Ginny, I’ve been looking for you for months. I thought I’d have to go south to find a woman tuned to my frequency, but here you are. Will you be my shakti?’

  ‘Pardon me?’ I was immensely flattered that he thought we were ‘tuned to the same frequency.’

  ‘Are you interested in uniting with me in the holy sacrament of Maithuna?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Maithuna. Ritual coition.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to sleep with me?’

  ‘I don’t want to “sleep with you,” — he said with distaste. His switch had clearly been flipped, just as Miss Head’s switch was flipped by questions about Descartes, or Eddie’s by remarks about the ruling class. I had arrived with Hawk at that jarring moment when you finally discover after hours, days, years of talking, what obsession it is that gets a person through the night. ‘I want us to use carnal desire, Ginny, as a vehicle for achieving spiritual illumination, as a means of effecting reintegration of our opposing polarities. The generative forces that fetter our souls to samsara can instead be used to fuel our escape into the ineffable bliss of divine union.’