The Touch

by F. Paul Wilson

  But Patsy wasn’t going to be greedy. He’d be fair. He wouldn’t strip the patients bare. He’d just ask for half—half of everything they owned.

  He almost laughed out loud. This was going to be so sweet! All he had to do was—

  Just ahead of him, Tram shouted something in Vietnamese. Patsy didn’t recognize the word, but he knew a curse when he heard one. Tram started running. They had broken free of the suffocating jungle atop a small sandy rise. Out ahead, the sun rippled off a calm sea. A breeze off the water brought blessed relief from the heat. Below lay a miserable ville—a jumble of huts made of odd bits of wood, sheet metal, palm fronds, and mud.

  One of the huts was burning. Frantic villagers were hurling sand and water at it.

  Patsy followed Tram’s headlong downhill run at a cautious walk. He didn’t like this. He was far from town and doubted he could find his way back; he was surrounded by gooks and something bad was going down.

  He didn’t like this at all.

  As he approached, the burning hut collapsed in a shower of sparks. To the side, a cluster of black pajama-clad women stood around a supine figure. Tram had pushed his way through to the center of the babbling group and now knelt beside the figure. Patsy followed him in.

  “Aw, shit!”

  He recognized the guy on the ground. Wasn’t easy. He’d been burned bad and somebody had busted caps all over him, but his face was fairly undamaged and the scarred eye left no doubt that it was the same old gook who’d healed him up last night. His good eye was closed and he looked dead, but his chest still moved with shallow respirations. Patsy’s stomach lurched at the sight of all the blood and charred flesh. What was keeping him alive?

  Suddenly weak and dizzy, Patsy dropped to his knees beside Tram. His millions…all those sweet dreams of millions and millions of easy dollars were fading away.

  Nothing ever goes right for me!

  “I share your grief,” Tram said, looking at him with sorrowful dark eyes.

  “Yeah. What happened?”

  Tram glanced around at the frightened, grieving villagers. “They say the Cong bring one of their sick officers here and demand that Trinh heal him. Trinh couldn’t. He try to explain that the time not right yet but they grow angry and tie him up and shoot him and set his hut on fire.”

  “Can’t he heal himself?”

  Tram shook his head slowly, sadly. “No. Dat-tay-vao does not help the one who has it. Only others.”

  Patsy wanted to cry. All his plans…it wasn’t fair!

  “Those shitbums!”

  “Worse than shitbums,” Tram said. “These Charlie say they come back soon and destroy whole village.”

  Patsy’s anger and self-pity vanished in a cold blast of fear. He peered at the trees and bushes, feeling naked with a thousand eyes watching him.

  …they come back soon…

  His knees suddenly felt stronger.

  “Let’s get back to town.” He began to rise to his feet, but Tram held him back.

  “Wait. He looking at you.”

  Sure enough, the old gook’s good eye was open and staring directly into his. Slowly, with obvious effort, he raised his charred right hand toward Patsy. His voice rasped something.

  Tram translated: “He say, ‘You the one.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Patsy didn’t have time for this dramatic bullshit. He wanted out of here. But he also wanted to stay tight with Tram because Tram was the only one who could lead him back to Quang Ngai.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he mean that you the one he fix last night.”

  Patsy was aware of Tram and the villagers watching him, as if they expected something of him. Then he realized what it was: He was supposed to be grateful, show respect to the old gook. Fine. If it was what Tram wanted him to do, he’d do it. Anything to get them on their way out of here. He took a deep breath and gripped the hand, wincing at the feel of the fire crisped skin—

  Electricity shot up his arm.

  His whole body spasmed with the searing bolt. He felt himself flopping around like a fish on a hook, and then he was falling. The air went out of him in a rush as his back slammed against the ground. It was a moment before he could open his eyes, and when he did he saw Tram and the villagers staring down at him with gaping mouths and wide, astonished eyes. He glanced at the old gook.

  “What the hell did he do to me?”

  The old gook was staring back, but it was a glassy, unfocused, sightless stare. He was dead.

  The villagers must have noticed this, too, because some of the women began to weep.

  Patsy staggered to his feet.

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t know,” Tram said with a puzzled shake of his head. “Why you fall? He not strong enough push you down.”

  Patsy opened his mouth to explain, then closed it. Nothing he could say would make sense.

  He shrugged. “Let’s go.”

  He felt like hell and just wanted to be gone. It wasn’t only the threat of Charlie returning; he was tired and discouraged and so bitterly disappointed he could have sat down on the ground right then and there and cried like a wimp.

  “Okay. But first I help bury Trinh. You help, too.”

  “What? You kidding me? Forget it!”

  Tram said nothing, but the look he gave Patsy said it all: It called him fat, lazy, and ungrateful.

  Screw you! Patsy thought.

  Who cared what Tram or anybody else in this stinking sewer of a country thought. It held nothing for him anymore. All his money was gone, and his one chance for the brass ring lay dead and fried on the ground before him.

  7

  As he helped dig a grave for Trinh, Tram glanced over at Fatman where he sat in the elephant grass staring morosely out to sea. Tram could sense that he was not grief-stricken over Trinh’s fate. He was unhappy for himself.

  So…he had been right about Fatman from the first: The American had come here with something in mind other than paying his respects to Trinh. Tram didn’t know what it was, but he was sure Fatman had not had the best interests of Trinh or the village at heart.

  He sighed. He was sick of foreigners. When would the wars end? Wars could be measured in languages here. He knew numerous Vietnamese dialects, Pidgin, French, and now English. If the North won, would he then have to learn Russian? Perhaps he would have been better off if the booby trap had taken his life instead of just his leg. Then, like Trinh, the endless wars would be over for him.

  He looked down into the empty hole where Trinh’s body soon would lie. Were they burying the Dat-tay-vao with him? Or would it rise and find its way to another? So strange and mysterious, the Dat-tay-vao…so many conflicting tales. Some said it came here with the Buddha himself, some said it had always been here. Some said it was as capricious as the wind in the choice of its instruments, while others said it followed a definite plan.

  Who was to say truly? The Dat-tay-vao was a rule unto itself, full of mysteries not meant to be plumbed.

  As he turned back to his digging, Tram’s attention was caught by a dark blot in the water’s glare. He squinted to make it out, then heard the chatter of one machine gun, then others, saw villagers begin to run and fall, felt sand kick up around him.

  A Cong gunboat!

  He ran for the tree where Fatman half sat, half crouched with a slack, terrified expression. He was almost there when something hit him in the chest and right shoulder with the force of a sledgehammer, and then he was flying through the air, spinning, screaming with pain.

  He landed with his face in the sand and rolled. He couldn’t breathe! Panic swept over him. Every time he tried to take a breath, he heard a sucking sound from the wound in his chest wall, but no air reached his lungs. His chest felt ready to explode. Black clouds encroached on his dimming vision.

  Suddenly, Fatman was leaning over him, shouting through the typhoon roaring in his ears.

  “Tram! Tram! Jesus God get up! You gotta get me outta here
! Stop bleeding f’Christsake and get me out of here!”

  Tram’s vision clouded to total darkness and the roaring grew until it drowned out the voice.

  8

  Patsy dug his fingers into his scalp.

  How was he going to get back to town? Tram was dying, turning blue right here in front of him, and he didn’t know enough Vietnamese to use with anyone else and didn’t know the way back to Quang Ngai and the whole area was lousy with Charlie.

  What am I gonna do?

  As suddenly as they started, the AKs stopped. The cries of the wounded and the terrified filled the air in their place.

  Now was the time to get out.

  Patsy looked at Tram’s mottled, dusky face. If he could stopper up that sucking chest wound, maybe Tram could hang on, and maybe tell him the way back to town. He slapped the heel of his hand over it and pressed.

  Tram’s body arched in seeming agony. Patsy felt something, too—electric ecstasy shot up his arm and spread through his body like subliminal fire. He fell back, confused, weak, dizzy.

  What the hell—?

  He heard raspy breathing and looked up. Air was gushing in and out of Tram’s wide-open mouth in hungry gasps; his eyes opened and his color began to lighten.

  Tram’s chest wasn’t sucking anymore. As Patsy leaned forward to check the wound, he felt something in his hand and looked. A bloody lead slug sat in his palm. He looked at the chest where he’d laid that hand and what he saw made the walls of his stomach ripple and compress as if looking for something to throw up.

  Tram’s wound wasn’t there anymore! Only a purplish blotch remained.

  Tram raised his head and looked down at where the bullet had torn into him.

  “The Dat-tay-vao! You have it now! Trinh passed it on to you! You have the Dat-tay-vao!”

  I do? he thought, staring at the bullet rolling in his palm. Holy shit, I do!

  He wouldn’t have to get some gook back to the States to make his mint—all he had to do was get himself home in one piece.

  Which made it all the more important to get the hell out of this village. Now.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Fatman, you can’t go. Not now. You must help. They—”

  Patsy threw himself flat as something exploded in the jungle a hundred yards behind them, hurling a brown and green geyser of dirt and underbrush high into the air.

  Mortar!

  Another explosion followed close on the heels of the first, but this one was down by the waterline south of the village.

  Tram was pointing out to sea.

  “Look! They firing from boat.” He laughed. “Can’t aim mortar from boat!”

  Patsy stayed hunkered down with his arms wrapped tight around his head, quaking with terror as the ground jittered with each of the next three explosions. Then they stopped.

  “See?” Tram said, sitting boldly in the clearing and looking out to sea. “Even they know it foolish! They leaving. They only use for terror. Cong very good at terror.”

  No argument there, Patsy thought as he climbed once more to his feet.

  “Get me out of here now, Tram. You owe me!”

  Tram’s eyes caught Patsy’s and pinned him to the spot like an insect on a board. “Look at them, Fatman.”

  Patsy tore his gaze away and looked at the ville. He saw the villagers—the maimed and bleeding ones and their friends and families—looking back at him. Waiting. They said nothing, but their eyes…

  He ripped his gaze loose. “Those Cong’ll be back!”

  “They need you, Fatman,” Tram said. “You are only one who can help them now.”

  Patsy looked again, unwillingly. Their eyes…calling him. He could almost feel their hurt, their need.

  “No way!”

  He turned and began walking toward the brush. He’d find his own way back if Tram wouldn’t lead him. Better than waiting around here to get caught and tortured by Charlie. It might take him all day, but—

  “Fatman!” Tram shouted. “For once in your life!”

  That stung. Patsy turned and looked at the villagers once more, feeling their need like a taut rope around his chest, pulling him toward them. He ground his teeth. It was idiotic to stay, but…

  One more. Just one, to see if I still have it.

  He could spare a couple of minutes for that, then be on his way. At least that way he’d be sure what had happened with Tram wasn’t some sort of crazy freak accident.

  Just one.

  As he stepped toward the villagers, he heard their voices begin to murmur excitedly. He didn’t know what they were saying but felt their grateful welcome like a warm current through the draw of their need.

  He stopped at the nearest wounded villager, a woman holding a bloody, unconscious child in her arms. His stomach lurched as he saw the wound—a slug had nearly torn the kid’s arm off at the shoulder. Blood oozed steadily between the fingers of the hand the woman kept clenched over the wound. Swallowing the revulsion that welled up in him, he slipped his hands under the mother’s to touch the wound—

  —and his knees almost buckled with the ecstasy that shot through him.

  The child whimpered and opened his eyes. The mother removed her hand from the wound.

  Make that former wound. It was gone, just like Tram’s.

  She cried out with joy and fell to her knees beside Patsy, clutching his leg as she wept.

  Patsy swayed. He had it! No doubt about it—he had the goddamn Dat-tay-vao! And it felt so good! Not just the pleasure it caused, but how that little gook kid was looking up at him now with his bottomless black eyes and flashing him a shy smile. He felt high, like he’d been smoking some of his best merchandise.

  One more. Just one more.

  He disengaged his leg from the mother and moved over to where an old woman writhed in agony on the ground, clutching her abdomen.

  Belly wound…I know the feeling, mama-san.

  He knelt and wormed his hand under hers. That burst of pleasure surged again as she stiffened and two slugs popped into his hand. Her breathing eased and she looked up at him with gratitude beaming from her eyes.

  Another!

  On it went. Patsy could have stopped at any time, but found he didn’t want to. The villagers seemed to have no doubt that he would stay and heal them all. They knew he could do it and expected him to do it. It was so new, such a unique feeling, he didn’t want it to end. Ever. He felt a sense of belonging he’d never known before. He felt protective of the villagers. But it went beyond them, beyond this little ville, seemed to take in the whole world.

  Finally, it was over.

  Patsy stood in the clearing before the huts, looking for another wounded body. He checked his watch—he’d been at it only thirty minutes and there were no more villagers left to heal. They all clustered around him at a respectful distance, watching silently. He gave himself up to the euphoria enveloping him, blending with the sound of the waves, the wind in the trees, the cries of the gulls. He hadn’t realized what a beautiful place this was. If only—

  A new sound intruded—the drone of a boat engine. Patsy looked out at the water and saw the Cong gunboat returning. Fear knifed through the pleasurable haze as the villagers scattered for the trees. Were the Cong going to land?

  No. Patsy saw a couple of the crew crouched on the deck, heard the familiar choonk! of a mortar shell shooting out of its tube. An explosion quickly followed somewhere back in the jungle. Tram had been right. No way they could get any accuracy with a mortar on the rocking deck of a gunboat. Just terror tactics.

  Damn those bastards! Why’d they have to come back and wreck his mood? Just when he’d been feeling good for the first time since leaving home. Matter of fact, he’d been feeling better than he could ever remember, home or anywhere else. For once, everything seemed right.

  For once, something was going Patsy’s way, and the Cong had to ruin it.

  Two more wild mortar shots, then he heard gunfire start from the south and saw three new gunboa
ts roaring up toward the first. But these were flying the old red, white, and blue. Patsy laughed and raised his fist.

  “Get ’em!”

  The Cong let one more shell go choonk! before pouring on the gas and slewing away.

  Safe!

  Then he heard a whine from above and the world exploded under him.

  9

  …a voice from far away…Tram’s…

  “…chopper coming, Fatman…get you away soon…hear it?…almost here…”

  Patsy opened his eyes and saw the sky, then saw Tram’s face poke into view. He looked sick.

  “Fatman! You hear me?”

  “How bad?” Patsy asked.

  “You be okay.”

  Patsy turned his head and saw a ring of weeping villagers who were looking everywhere and anywhere but at him. He realized he couldn’t feel anything below his neck. He tried to lift his head for a look at himself but didn’t have the strength.

  “I wanna see.”

  “You rest,” Tram said.

  “Get my head up, dammit!”

  With obvious reluctance, Tram gently lifted his head. As Patsy looked down at what was left of him, he heard a high, keening wail. His vision swam, mercifully blotting out sight of the bloody ruin that had once been the lower half of his body. He realized that the wail was his own voice.

  Tram lowered his head and the wail stopped.

  I shouldn’t even be alive!

  Then he knew. He was waiting for someone. Not just anyone would do. A certain someone.

  A hazy peace came. He drifted into it and stayed there until the chopping thrum of a slick brought him out; then he heard an American voice.

  “I thought you said he was alive!”

  Tram’s voice: “He is.”

  Patsy opened his eyes and saw the shocked face of an American soldier.

  “Who are you?” Patsy asked.

  “Walt Erskine. Medic. I’m gonna—”

  “You’re the one,” Patsy said. Somehow, he bent his arm at the elbow and lifted his hand. “Shake.”

  The medic looked confused. “Yeah. Okay. Sure.”