The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “Basketball then,” said the failing voice. Wakefield came from Arkansas. He had three brothers and five sisters. He had not once in his life slept in a room alone.

  “The Comets.”

  “Tell about a Comets game. Beginning to end, how it all went down. I’m trying to do like you told me and not think about my throat, sir.”

  “You aren’t dying yet, Wakefield. You’ll be all right.”

  “My throat’s tighter than a widow’s twat, sir.”

  In addition to a broken leg and collarbone, Wakefield had been running a fever from which he got not even the relief of sweating, he was so dehydrated. They both were.

  Vollie did diamond push-ups until the wound in his back stung too badly to continue. Wakefield, who hardly stirred anymore except to squeeze a little piss in a hole they had dug, counted for him. “Now tell about a game, sir, please. I know you don’t like to talk about yourself.”

  Vollie sat up in the dirt, panting, his head and shoulders against the dirt wall, his back arched, air to the wound, grasping at memories that quickly escaped him. He couldn’t remember a single game in which he’d played. He told instead of one he had watched—must have watched, though he could not recall the stands or bench where he would have sat, what he had eaten or drunk while watching. An away game at Maquoketa in which the Comets had won in the final seconds. He remembered watching, not playing. However, it was a fact that he had played guard in every minute of every Comets game of that season. These competing realities he could not square.

  * * *

  • • •

  “DO YOU HEAR HIM?” Wakefield asked.

  The lieutenant was praying again in a vestibule farther down the tunnel. Vollie heard but said he didn’t.

  “Yes, you do,” Wakefield said.

  “His prayers are his business.”

  “Why is he praying out loud if he doesn’t want us to hear?”

  “To hear himself.”

  “How many sisters and brothers do you have?”

  “I told you,” Vollie said.

  “Not any? Did they die?” The voice of a sick child, trusting. “I got eight.” Pride smoothed the croak in his throat.

  “You told me. I won’t forget.”

  “I guess that’s a lot. I mean that’s enough. Mom will manage.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  The lieutenant’s low emphatic murmured prayers continued like weather.

  “Staff Sergeant Frade?”

  “What is it, Wakefield?”

  “I want to live, sir.”

  “Attaboy.”

  * * *

  • • •

  TIME.

  Space.

  He lay unmoving on the tunnel floor, inwardly at work. He was remembering the life he had led while unremembering his own place in it. Life continued here in the dark, ungoverned by the normal sequences, the diurnal patterns, the tidal routines of body and consciousness. The girl brought water in an aluminum bowl, or she didn’t. He pissed and shat, or he didn’t. The thing he had formerly understood as himself was only a cluster of phenomena, predictable and repeated. In their absence, this illusory entity, his self, was withering away like a weed under a tarp.

  The lack of patterns. The three captive men were kept in separate vestibules, or the two enlisted men were kept together and the lieutenant sequestered, or all three were confined in one space. Chains or lengths of manila rope bound them to the artillery carriage. Teenage boys came behind carbide lamps dragging equipment through the tunnel and moved the captive men to out-of-the-way vestibules where they were kept separately for unknowable durations, possibly endless durations, so that they each separately might be occupying their timeless separate graves. Cold rice came in folded newspaper bundles, or it didn’t. Leafy broth in a cup. Wakefield stank of rot, humming Christmas carols. They dragged him away on his blanket, making room for a crate to pass. They dragged him back.

  They confined Vollie in a larger vestibule, lighted. A kind of workshop where children and grandmothers in pajamas filled empty tomato-juice cans with explosive and road gravel, and enveloped them, with great solicitude, in empty cans of beer: grenades homemade like dumplings.

  Wakefield, unable to stand or crawl, was dragged away and dragged back.

  Their captors bore their own convoys on foot underground, shadowed crates on creaking wagons, and they dragged Wakefield back into the vestibule with Vollie, or they didn’t. The lieutenant through an air shaft apologized to space, the dirt. Vollie did not listen to the private words of dark confession.

  His bones and blood, his fingers—all his parts participated in hunger. If rice came, he devoured every grain before he had a moment to taste it. Then he woke Wakefield and fed him his equal portion, reminding the boy to chew.

  It was difficult work, the reconfiguration of world in absence of self, and he approached it with commitment. The rerecording of innumerable bike trips down Route 61, Clinton County, the waterhemp being weeded—all of it having happened now without him. All qualities refined out of being. All attachment. Needful, invisible work, like the distillation, within the lungs, of oxygen from crude air. What was left: a being, alive.

  The lieutenant and Wakefield were dying, he could smell them dying. But he was not.

  * * *

  • • •

  “STAFF SERGEANT FRADE,” Wakefield said. “They know we’re down here, don’t they?”

  Vollie twisted his back, stretching the cramped and spasming lumbar muscles until they emitted a new hurt, and keeping the hurt there in the muscle, dwelling in the hurt. “Probably,” he said.

  “But I’m afraid if it’s them spooks who got us into this, then nobody else knows.”

  “It’s all right if nobody knows.”

  They rarely saw or heard their captors, who came and checked the ropes or chains and brought water, or didn’t. No efforts were made to extract names or serial numbers from them, which Wakefield took to mean they were not being held as prisoners of war but as chits to trade. “If the mission was classified, then us disappearing is classified. And we’ll just be MIA forever. But why are they keeping us alive unless they think the spooks will pay something for us? What do you think we’re worth?”

  Vollie didn’t answer, and Wakefield said, “I feel really awful today.”

  “Your throat’s better.”

  “That’s right. Thank you for reminding me, sir.”

  “You’ll make it, Wakefield.”

  “Okay, thank you, sir.”

  But Vollie feared for the boy that his throat had opened only because the body was giving up.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BODY WAS GIVING UP. The thin rank body that often fell asleep even as it ate, while Vollie hungered, feeding it. The body surrendering to its wounds as Vollie’s own body did not. The body preparing to die that could not have hungered the way his own body did. The boy’s body that did not deserve to eat because it refused to struggle.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE LIEUTENANT COULD BE HEARD from afar through a communication tunnel talking a blue streak. A three- or four-person confab in which he played all the voices. Later, when he was tied up with Vollie and Wakefield, he mostly shivered unspeaking. His shivers rustled the pebbles under him. Wakefield asked how many brothers and sisters he had.

  Once, the girl put fish or some other sweet-smelling mash atop the rice, and Wakefield, rousing a little, wanted them all three to say grace. The lieutenant by then spoke only when alone, and Wakefield gave thanks to God for his loving-kindness and their good fortune and said amen. Vollie listened for the prayer to end and did not partake of it. Then he ate.

  He put the mash in Wakefield’s mouth and Wakefield chewed. He fell asleep while he was chewing, and Vollie woke him up and told him to swallow.


  The lieutenant was taken away.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BODY THAT REFUSED to struggle still could eat. Wakefield’s body. It breathed and stirred.

  After perhaps two days without food, a Vietnamese boy behind a lamp came with rice, two packages wet and cold in paper, one for Vollie, one for Wakefield. The boy went away. Vollie unwrapped the first bundle and ate, licking the paper afterward, listening to his companion breathe. His hand then grabbed the second bundle—not his own hand, but the hand of the no one he was becoming—and unwrapped it and brought the rice to this no one’s mouth, and the mouth ate again.

  The next time food came, he again took what was his from what was theirs and ate it, and took the rest and ate it too, while the other body slept.

  * * *

  • • •

  STRANGE WORK, only possible in the absence of time. The arrangement of impressions in memory came loose and came together again without him. Twilight slogging through the muddy pasture. Music and spring rain. The people he had known and loved. All of it falling away from him in the dark.

  The other body began to die more quickly now.

  Vollie was cold, or he wasn’t. He lusted for more rice, or he had descended beneath any want. No time governed the intake or outflow of this breath. Whether his feet remained his feet, he could neither confirm nor deny. The hair on his body was mostly dirt.

  Maximum possible forgetting.

  The wound in his back had closed on itself.

  * * *

  • • •

  KNOW THE MEASURE, know the times, study that. When you are left alone, pray. But he was never really alone until the lieutenant and Wakefield died at last. That happened four months after they were taken into the tunnel. It could have been half or twice as many months. There had been less to eat, then almost nothing. Wakefield died. Then the lieutenant died real fast, and Vollie was alone. He never figured out what the lieutenant was sick with, a new illness he got at the end. He coughed a lot, but Vollie didn’t catch it. By and by, their bodies were taken away. He was led elsewhere within the tunnel into another equipment cavern, where most of the time his hands and feet were tied to the wheel of a buffalo cart so that he sat or curled himself on the rubble floor but could not lie flat or stand. Lucky he had Heflin’s letter to read and sometimes a kid would come by with a lamp. Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. He memorized the letter. Love all men, love everything.

  It was now in the nowhere no-time realm of tunnel dark—after the bodies of the lieutenant and Wakefield had been taken away, after his bones had seemed to bend to fit the shape in which they were constrained, after time had lost its nature as a duration leaving only its nature as a medium in which the things endured that had never come into being and could never pass out of it—that his vision came back to him:

  The farm. Moon on the orchard. Night frost in the high grass that cracked underfoot. The cry of a hog. Thirst. He approached the creek in the meadow. No one else about. His head burning. The warped reflection in the creek of the anguished face he knew to be his own. The fear of the water’s cold. The recognition that he had come from this water and must go back into it now.

  When his eyes penetrated the water, the face disappeared as though it had never been. The person lost his nature as mind, a venue of conflict, as bearer of a name, leaving only the nature of a body swimming in the body’s medium of water. Vision time merged with tunnel time. He had fallen once before from the vision into the frigid bath, his mother holding his feet, his father dumping snow in the water from a pail. He understood that night in the bath to be only one of many births he had known. And all the births had already taken place. Each was the repetition of a previous birth. None had happened first. His soul lived only temporarily inside the medium of time and subject to duration. It endured otherwise, nameless and faceless, outside of time in peace.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEN A GIRL CAME.

  Weeks or years had passed.

  She put a coarsely woven bag over his head. There were men’s voices.

  The ropes at his feet were untied. He was prodded in his back to stand. The back did not straighten for several minutes; the bullet was still lodged in it from the long-past day the camp had been overrun. By and by he was prodded to walk. He counted his steps and figured they walked about five miles always in the dark and he always crouching and continually hitting his head on the dirt or rock tunnel walls made for smaller people.

  They stopped in the tunnel and pulled the bag up a little and tied it over his eyes and gave him a cup of rice to eat. They pulled the bag back down and tied it and they kept going. He figured about three more miles. Slowly, gradually more slowly, as his strength was giving out. Then an unmistakable sewage smell, and he was walking on a harder surface through cold stagnant water to his ankles. Then there was a ladder. His hands were placed on the rung of a ladder. He heard curt commands, and there was a jab to the legs, and he climbed. After the ladder they walked perhaps another fifty yards, he always crouching.

  Then he smelled leaves. Then through the bag light seeped. Green, yellow, and orange light stabbing his eyes. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. He rode in a vehicle. He was given water to drink under the bag, then they retied the bag snugly under his jaw. When the vehicle stopped he was prodded to step out of it. With slaps to his shoulders he was prodded to kneel on the ground. They retied his hands behind his back. With slaps to his head, he was prodded to lower it, which exposed the back of his neck, and the warmth of the sun penetrated the skin at the exposed juncture of head and body, and seemed to warm even his bones. His eyes constricted as if he were about to cry—to cry out his shame that the others had had to die in the dark but he was going to get to die now with the light of the sun on his neck, shame that the sun at the hour of his death had blessed him and not the others, or shame at the food he had taken—yet the no one he had become could feel no shame: he wanted only, devoutly, impossibly to go on living.

  He heard city sounds. Engines and distant tangled voices. He was not prodded and so did not move. Then he heard men speaking in low-toned American English.

  A sudden shuffling of feet. A smell of Brut aftershave. Hands that gripped his scrawny arms by the elbows and shoulders, and urged him to stand up.

  A fumbling of fingers at his Adam’s apple where the bag was tied. The bag coming off his head. A burst like an Arc Light too near to be survived. Don’t be ashamed of that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God and a great one; it is not given to many but only to the elect.

  Then he was taken to the hospital in Saigon.

  4

  It was there, in the hospital mess, that the civilian first approached him. The natty dresser, the last to have arrived at the Bien Hoa barbecue and the first to have left. His name was Lorch. Vollie was to learn it only there in the hospital. He really did import cleaning supplies to the Republic of Vietnam, although he could disclose to Staff Sergeant Frade that the import enterprise did not represent the totality of his dealings there. He also ran what he called a “shop” that developed intelligence products—both raw and finished products—as well as engaging, here and there, in the more modern intelligence function of covert operations. At length, he would make Vollie a proposition. It would sound at first as if the man wanted to shove him into another tunnel. With time, however, Vollie would recognize the proposition as the tracer wish that you send out of yourself red and burning when you’re too young to know what you’re wishing for, and that sometimes hits something hard in the dark, a rock out there, and ricochets, and starts a chain of consequences you could not have foreseen, though you willed it.

  The MPs who discovered him, tied up and kneeling on the sidewalk outside a field office of the Military Assistance Command, set him on a bench in the hospital emergency room. They conferred in whispers with t
he intake orderly. One of them gave him a candy bar, but the strange person he had become was numb to hunger, and he didn’t eat it. Nobody else was waiting there to be treated. Perhaps the war had been won in his absence. The MPs shook his hand uncertainly and went away. A nurse led him toward the showers. She gave him a bottle of Coke as they walked through the hallway afire with fluorescent light, but he didn’t drink it. She gave him a towel. He stripped and washed. When he got out, she was waiting and gave him pressed fatigues, new socks, underwear, shoes. She seemed the last woman on earth. She took him to a barber elsewhere on the quiet base. While the barber cut his hair, the nurse read a magazine, standing in a corner. She led him across the hospital complex to a ward, mostly empty of patients.

  Was the war over? he asked.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  She signed some documents on a clipboard and gave him the documents to hold and told him to take a seat in the hall there and to give the documents to the orderly who would show him his bed. She asked if he would be all right waiting there by himself. He thought a moment and said yes and watched her go out the door, her legs and feet, her upward-swooping hair. The door swung closed behind her, and he never saw her again.

  They gave him a private room. At night he left the room and walked the dark ward, thin as a rod beneath his clothes, barefoot, feeling the cold slick tiles.

  People tried to talk to him, army intelligence, sociable marines who’d heard scuttlebutt about him. He didn’t say much. He spent his exercise hours apart from the other patients, pacing the Saigon junk bazaars that teemed with people, sunlight on nameless faces. In the bazaars, unlike the hospital, no one claimed to recognize him from a previous tour or asked him whether his appetite was improving, whom they should wire with the news he’d been found, how had he kept his fingernails pared with nothing sharp to cut them—just teeming nameless human faces young and old jostling him softly like another fish in the school, crowded under the canopies of the markets in exactly the parts of town he did not have leave to visit.