Next morning brings a hasty meeting. The warden and superintendent are summoned by the higher powers. Some big-brained scientist in a position of authority at last wakes up and realizes people can’t do this. The whole experiment is fucking criminal. All the prisoners are to go free, pardoned early, sprung from a nightmare that has lasted only six days. Six days. It doesn’t seem possible. Five seventy-one barely remembers what he was, a week ago.
The experimenters debrief everyone before turning them out into the world. But the victims are way too keyed up for reflection. The guards defend themselves while the prisoners go apeshit with anger. Douggie, too—Douglas Pavlicek—jabs his finger in the air. “The people who ran this—the so-called psychologists—should all be locked up for ethics violations.” But he didn’t give up his blanket. He will now, forever, be the guy who wouldn’t take sides and didn’t surrender his blanket, even in a tame little two-week playact experiment.
He comes up out of the dungeon into the brilliant, beautiful Central Peninsula air. A sweet little breeze smelling of jasmine and Italian stone pine goes down his shirt and ruffles his hair. He knows where he is now: the Psych Building, on the robber baron’s campus. Stanford. Land of knowledge, cash, and power, with its endless tunnel of palms and the intimidating stone arcades. That fat-cat monastery where he has always been afraid to walk, or even run an errand, for fear that somebody will arrest him as an imposter.
They give him his check for ninety bucks and drive him back to his efficiency in East Palo Alto. He holes up in his private bunker, eating Fritos stewed in Pabst and watching television on a tiny black-and-white with crumpled tinfoil horns for antennae. It’s there, three weeks later, that he sees a broadcast about the hundred-some U.S. helicopters lost in a bungled operation in Laos. He didn’t even know the U.S. was in Laos. He sets his can of beer on the spool table and has the distinct impression that he’s leaving a water-ring stain on someone’s pine coffin.
He stands up light-headed, feeling like he did the night 416 spent in the hole. He runs his fingers through the lush curls that will decamp from his skull early and en masse. Something is distinctly fucked up in the status quo, and that includes him. He doesn’t want to live in a world where some twenty-year-olds die so that other twenty-year-olds can study psychology and write about fucked-up experiments. He’s perfectly aware that the war is lost. But that changes nothing. The next morning, he’s out in front of the recruiting center on Broadway when they open. Steady work, and honest at last.
TECHNICAL SERGEANT DOUGLAS PAVLICEK flies two hundred–plus trash hauler missions in the years following his enlistment. Loadmaster on a C-130, he balances up planes with tons of barrier material and Class A explosives. He puts ordnance on the turf under mortar fire so thick it froths the air. He fills outbound flights with deuce-and-a-half trucks, APCs, and pallets full of C-rations, loading up return flights with body bags. Anyone paying attention knows that the cause tanked long ago. But in Douglas Pavlicek’s psychic economy, paying attention is nowhere near as important as staying busy. As long as he has work to fill his hours and his crewmates keep the radio on R&B, he doesn’t care how late or soon they lose this pointless war.
His habit of blacking out from dehydration earns him the nickname Faint. He often forgets to drink—in the daytime, anyway. After sundown, in quadruped crawls down Jomsurang Road in Khorat or the sex mazes of Patpong and Petchburi in Bangkok, City of Angels, the rivers of Mekhong and vats full of Singha flow freely enough. The hooch makes him funnier, more honest, less of an asshole, more capable of holding expansive philosophical conversations with samlor drivers about the destiny of life.
“You go home now?”
“Not yet, my man. War’s not over!”
“War over.”
“Not for me it isn’t. Last guy out still has to turn off the lights.”
“Everyone say war over. Nixon. Kissinger.”
“Fuckin’ Kissinger, man. Peace Prize, my flaming ass!”
“Yes. Fuck Le Duc Tho. Everyone go home now.”
Douggie no longer quite knows where that might be.
When not working, he gets high on Thai stick and sits for hours playing bass riffs along with Rare Earth and Three Dog Night. Or he’ll prowl around the ruined temples—Ayutthaya, Phimai. There’s something about the blasted chedis that reassures him. The toppled towers swallowed up by teak and ruined galleries left to crumble into scree. Jungle will get Bangkok, before too long. L.A., one day. And it’s okay. Not his fault. Simple history.
The monster bases with their fleets of carpet bombers are closing down, and the thousand piggyback cottage industries of an addicted economy turn violent. All Thailand knows what’s coming. They’ve been forced into this pact with the White Devil, and now it seems they’ve backed the wrong side. Yet the Thais Douglas meets show nothing but kindness to their destroyer. He’s thinking of staying on when his tour and the endless war are over. He’s been here for the good times, he should stick around and pay back, in the coming bad. He already knows a hundred words of Thai. Dâai. Nít nói. Dee mâak! For now, though, he’s the shortest of short-timers, crewing the most reliable transport ever built. It’s job security, for a few more months, anyway.
He and his crewmates prep the Herky Bird for yet another daily commute to Cambodia. They’ve been running resupply into Pochentong for weeks. Now resupply is turning into evacuation. Another month, maybe two—surely no longer. Cong are overrunning everything, like the summer rains.
He buckles himself into the jump seat and they’re up, routine, above the still lush and verdant world, the patchwork rice terraces and encircling jungle. Four years ago, the route was still green all the way across the rivers to the South China Sea. Then came the shitstorms of rainbow herbicides, the twelve million gallons of that modified plant hormone, Agent Orange.
A few minutes into Rouge Land they’re hit. Impossible; all their instruments had them clear the whole way into Phnom Penh. Flak rips into the cabin and cargo compartment. Forman, the flight engineer, catches shrapnel in the eye. A shell fragment slashes open the flank of the navigator, Neilson, and something warm, moist, and wrong comes spilling out of him.
The whole crew stays eerie-calm. They’ve queued up this particular horror one-reeler in their dreams for a long time, and here it is at last. Disbelief keeps them efficient. They fall in, attending to the wounded and inspecting the damage. Thin twin greasy black smoke trickles out of two engines, both starboard, which isn’t good. In a minute, the trickles thicken into plumes. Straub swings the plane into a wicked bank, back toward Thailand and salvation. It’s only a couple hundred clicks. A Hercules can fly on a single engine.
Then they start to drop, like a duck homing in on a lake. Smoke licks out from the back of the cargo bay. The word evacuates Pavlicek’s mouth before he knows what it means: Fire! On a plane packed to the hull with fuel and ordnance. He fights his way back toward the spreading flames. He must get the pallets out of the bay before they ignite. He, Levine, and Bragg struggle with the tie-downs and the releases. A bleeding air duct, ruptured in the blast, pisses molten steam on him. The heat scalds the left side of his face. He doesn’t even feel it. Yet.
They manage to jettison all the cargo. One of the pallets explodes on the way out of the plane. Shit detonates as it falls through the air. Then Pavlicek, too, is floating down to earth like a winged seed.
MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.
Hatched, the parasite larvae fed on the insides of this inflorescence. But they stopped short of laying waste to the thing that fed them. The males mated with their sisters, then died inside their plus
h fruit prison. The females emerged from the fig and flew off, coated in pollen, to take the endless game elsewhere. The fig they left behind produced a red bean smaller than the freckle on the tip of Douglas Pavlicek’s nose. That fig was eaten by a bulbul. The bean passed through the bird’s gut and dropped from the sky in a dollop of rich shit that landed in the crook of another tree, where sun and rain nursed the resulting seedling past the million ways of death. It grew; its roots slipped down and encased its host. Decades passed. Centuries. War on the backs of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs.
The bole of the fig put forth branches, and branches built their drip-tipped leaves. Elbows bent from the larger limbs, which lowered themselves to earth and thickened into new trunks. In time, the single central stem became a stand. The fig spread outward into an oval grove of three hundred main trunks and two thousand minor ones. And yet it was all still a single fig. One banyan.
. . .
LOADMASTER PAVLICEK belly-flops through the blue, faultless air. The whoosh perplexes him. Disaster floats high above him in the cloud, no longer needing to be solved. He wants only to forgive the world, forget, and fall. The wind takes him where it will, halfway across Nakhon Ratchasima Province. As the earth rushes up to meet Douglas, he revives. He tries to steer the chute toward a rice terrace, topped with water and stippled in green bundles. But the toggles tangle, he overshoots, and in the mad collapse of the last hundred feet a sidearm strapped to his thigh discharges. The bullet enters below his kneecap, shatters his tibia, and tears out through the heel of his Leather Personnel Carriers. His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.
Branches slash through his flight suit. His silks tangle him in a shroud. Between lacerations and burns, the gunshot wound and his pulverized leg, the airman passes out. He hangs twenty feet above the Earth in friendly territory, facedown and spread-eagled in the arms of a sacred tree bigger than some villages.
A baht bus full of pilgrims comes to pay devotion to the divine tree. They walk through the colonnade of aerial prop roots toward the central trunk, the trunk that crept down around a foster parent it choked to death ages ago. Set into that meandering bole is a shrine covered in flowers, beads, bells, prayer-covered papers, root-cracked statues, and sacred threads. The visitors parade toward the altar through the mazy pergola of spreading limbs, chanting in Pali. Their arms are full of joss sticks, stackable lunch tins filled with gang gai, and garlands of lotus blossom and jasmine. Three little children run ahead, singing a lûk thûng song as fast as their lips can move.
They draw near the shrine. They add their garlands to the rainbow of offerings already spidering across the branches. Then the sky falls and a missile crashes into the foliage above. Joss sticks, garlands, and lunch tins scatter at the impact. The shock knocks two pilgrims to the ground.
Chaos clears. The pilgrims look up. A giant farang hangs above their head, threatening to crash through the branches and fall the last short stretch to the ground. They call up to the foreigner. He doesn’t respond. A debate begins on how to reach the man and cut him loose from the stranglehold of fig and parachute. Technical Sergeant Pavlicek wakes to several Thais standing on benches and prodding him. He thinks he’s lying on his back, bobbing in a pool of atmosphere, while inverted people lean down and snatch at him from under the mirror surface. The pain from his leg and face crushes him. He coughs up a trickle of red spittle. He thinks: I’m dead.
No, a voice near his face corrects. Tree saved your life.
The three most useful syllables from his four years in Thailand bubble out of Douggie’s mouth. “Mâi kâo chai.” I don’t understand. With that, he blacks out again and resumes the long, cyclic task of falling. This time, he keeps on tumbling as the Earth beneath him opens wide and takes him in. He falls deep underground, a long, luxurious drop into the kingdom of roots. He plunges beneath the water table, downward toward the beginning of time, into the lair of a fantastic creature whose existence he never imagined.
THE LOCAL CLINIC won’t touch the leg of an American soldier. A staffer drives him to Khorat in a coral-colored Mazda with a Buddhist Wheel flag flying from its antenna. The car sounds like a choking khlong boat and trails a similar cloud of oily fumes in its wake. Pavlicek, drugged to the gills in the back seat, watches the green kilometers slide past. The low, lush landscape, the rolling hills. In the waters there are fish; in the fields, there is rice. The entire region will sink like a banana-leaf boat in a typhoon. Charlie will be sunning himself at the Siam Intercontinental, this time next year. A tree saved his life. It makes no sense.
When the injection from the clinic begins to wear off, Pavlicek begs the driver to kill him. The driver waves fingers around his mouth. “No Angrit.”
Douglas’s shinbone is cored. A doctor at the base in Khorat patches him up and ships him to Fifth Field, Bangkok. All his crewmates have survived—thanks in large part, the after-battle report says, to him. And he—he owes his own life to a tree.
. . .
THE AIR FORCE has no use for gimps. They give him crutches, an Air Force Cross—second highest medal for valor they hand out—and a free ticket back to SFO. He gets thirty-five bucks for the medal at Friendly’s Pawn on Mission. He’s not sure whether Friendly is helping a wounded vet or ripping him off blind. Nor does he much need to know. So ends loadmaster Douglas Pavlicek’s efforts to help preserve the free world.
The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below. Now and then words come trickling up the trunk for Douglas, like he’s still hanging upside down in the air: Tree saved your life. They neglect to tell him why.
LIFE COUNTS DOWN. Nine years, six jobs, two aborted love affairs, three state license plates, two and a half tons of adequate beer, and one recurring nightmare. With another fall ending and winter coming on, Douglas Pavlicek fetches the ball-peen hammer and smashes a row of potholes into the somewhat surfaced road that runs past the horse ranch and down toward Blackfoot. The goal is to slow people down so he can stand by the fence and see their faces a little. Come November, it may be some time before he’ll have that pleasure again.
Douglas makes a Saturday of it, after the horses have been fed and read to. The scheme works. If the car slows down enough, he and the dog jog alongside until the driver either opens the window to say hello or pulls a gun. Couple of nice conversations that way, real give-and-take. One guy even stops for a minute. Douggie is aware that the behavior could appear somewhat eccentric, from the outside. But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.
In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.
He has tried this idea out on others, without much success. But a bit of steel floating near his L4 vertebra, a small war chest of kiss-off pension, an Air Force Cross (pawned), a belated Purple Heart the back of which reminds him of a toilet seat, and the ability to make things with his hands all entitle him to strong opinions.
He still limps a bit, as he swings the hammer. His face has grown long and horsey, in unconscious imitation of the animals he tends. He lives by himself for seven months out of the year while the ranch’s elderly owners make the circuit of their other hobbies and houses. Mountains hem him in on three sides. The only TV reception he can get is the ant races. And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sicknes
s the entire race will die of. And still he spends the second Saturday of October working the road in front of the house, hoping a good-sized pothole will slow folks down.
He’s about to bag the checkpoint for the day and head back to the barn to talk Nietzsche with Chief Plenty Coups, the Belgian draft horse, when a red Dodge Dart crests the rise at somewhere near the speed of sound. Seeing the stretch of craters, the car slams into an admirably controlled skid. Douggie and the dog start their lope. The window is down by the time they come up alongside. A substantially redheaded woman leans out. They have much to talk about, Douglas sees. Destined to become friends. “Why is the road so messed up, just here?”
“Insurgents,” Douglas explains.
She rolls up her window and speeds off, axles be damned. Not even a look. Game over. It takes something out of Douglas. Yet another last straw. Not even enough élan vital left over to read the next bit of Zarathustra to the horse.
That night the temperature drops into the teens, with sandpapery snowflakes scouring his face like the whole great outdoors has turned into a California exfoliation parlor. He heads to Blackfoot, where he lays in a month’s worth of fruit cocktail, in case the drifts come early. He ends up at the billiards bar, dispensing silver dollars like they’re aluminum extrusion slugs.
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame,” he tells a fair chunk of the clientele. Thus speaks former prisoner 571, who will forever have to say that he didn’t give his blanket to a fellow inmate when he should have. He comes home after eighteen rounds of eight ball with more money than he left with. Buries the cash in the north pasture, alongside the rest of the nest egg, before the ground gets too cold to dig.
Winter here is longer than civilization’s running tab. He whittles. He builds things out of his pile of antlers: a lamp, a coat rack, a chair. He thinks about the redhead and her glorious, unattainable kind. He listens to the animals doing calisthenics in the attic. He makes it through The Portable Nietzsche and continues with The Complete Nostradamus, burning it page by page in the woodstove as he finishes each one. He grooms the hell out of the horses, rides them daily by rotation in the indoor ring, and reads them Paradise Lost, since Nostradamus is too upsetting.
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