When the hospital people reiterated how far he was allowed to go from the base, he listened, elbows on knees, smoking, quiet. Then he went where he wanted. To the bazaars—or to a record store where he listened on headphones to the Beach Boys or to Schumann, to the coded language of numbers in motion in which a spirit had been trying since he was a small child to communicate some urgent news, some extremely important instruction that after almost twenty years he still failed to comprehend. Neck bent with the headphones on in the record store, listening, white as newsprint from the months underground.
During his third week at the hospital, while he was forcing himself to eat a bacon sandwich in an isolated corner of the mess, the civilian made his approach. Vollie recognized him at once from his strawlike hair but neither looked at the man directly nor otherwise acknowledged any compromise of his solitude. The civilian took the seat opposite him, arranging before himself a plate of baby corn cobs, another piled with brisket, and a steaming bowl of apple fritters. “I note you like to perambulate and see the town,” the civilian said.
Vollie didn’t respond. He was watching a Vietnamese girl in an ao dai bright as waxed fruit polish the big veranda windows. Two things he could watch forever—fire and other people working. Midday city light behind her. Gleaming smog.
“Ain’t it the smell mostly,” the civilian was asking, “that says, ‘Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore’?”
“I’ve never been to Kansas.”
“I mean the smell more than all these identical people under their identical hats, don’t you think?”
The civilian sported loafers and shiny cuff buttons, a slim yellow tie; like an executive just off the links with that accent peculiar to the southern rich, that corporate hillbilly inflection none of them could shake even to tell a joke about Yankee talk. “What do you see when you walk?” he asked. “Khe Sanh? Calamus? Kalamazoo?”
“I’ve never been to Kalamazoo.” Pause. “What do you know about Calamus?”
A town of four hundred people, but the civilian knew a lot, it turned out. Right down to most Union Army volunteers, on a per capita basis, of any town in the state of Iowa. Vollie himself hadn’t known that, though he was descended from more than one of them.
The civilian knew a lot about a lot of things. When Vollie let slip about the 16-inch shells from the New Jersey that had lit up the perimeter that morning at Khe Sanh during his first tour, the civilian listened with smiling relish but then explained why it couldn’t be true. The battleship had indeed been en route to the South China Sea, but by the time of Khe Sanh it had yet to cross the Pacific. The shells he’d seen had most likely come from the 175-millimeter army guns at Camp Carroll. “Anyway, the sixteen inch can’t quite reach Khe Sanh, less they could’ve sailed the ship fifteen miles up on land.” The civilian had done enough of his homework, or somebody had done it for him, that Vollie didn’t see the point in trying to hide his private business. There was no knowing the limit of what this man already knew.
It was the civilian who informed him that of the men those spooks had led away from the dump the morning they were overrun, not one had made it back to base. All were presumed dead.
The civilian knew all about the tunnel, knew where some of the tunnel entrances were, knew the exact number of days Vollie had been in it. He spoke obliquely of the inside of the tunnel itself, as though he had seen and heard what Vollie alone had seen and heard. A promise seemed sewn in these allusions. That he might speak more explicitly but chose not to.
He apologized on behalf of their government—not to say he was employed in government; he did all his business on a contract basis—for how long it had taken to get Vollie out of the tunnel and for the unfortunate exigency that Vollie was never going to be allowed to tell anybody where he had been for 412 days. “Actually, you don’t yourself have clearance to know where you were.”
“I was in Cambodia,” Vollie said.
“That ain’t possible,” the civilian said shortly. “Congress in its wisdom prohibited you from setting foot in Cambodia.”
“Sir, I don’t know exactly where that last part of the tunnel was. It only took a half day’s walking before we got to the sewer under Saigon and they let me go. But when they hit us, we were in Cambodia. And they weren’t guerrillas wandering around. They were NVA. They had new K-50Ms and AK-47s. Their uniforms were clean. And there were four of them for every one of us. Some hidden camp. Those NVA knew our location real good.”
“I hear you, Staff Sergeant, but after the secret bombings and the incursion Congress passed a law. The law said you could not be in Cambodia. Ergo you were not. The enemy is allowed to shoot at you from behind an international boundary, but you ain’t allowed anymore to walk over there and ask him to knock it off. You’d have to be real smart to understand whatever sense that makes. I ain’t smart myself, so I don’t get it. Neither do some of the poor folks at the Defense Department who have actual responsibility for soldiers and marines deployed in combat zones. But in other quarters of government people are more sophisticated. These people are so sophisticated they think we can save men by losing them. They can make a complex argument for why our success here is impossible. This argument is so beautiful to them that they would rather see us all fail and prove them right than see us all win and prove them wrong.”
Interesting as all this was, Vollie had no intention of buying whatever the civilian was here to sell him, likely a promotion wrapped in some other secret he’d have to keep as long as he lived. Sun drenched the veranda. He wanted to go out there and take a nap. “Don’t worry, sir,” Vollie said. “I have no one to tell where I was.”
The civilian wagged his head, bit a fritter, chewed. “Actually, you were not only not in Cambodia. Actually—and I’m sorry to tell you this—you deserted.”
A laugh almost escaped him before the implications of what the civilian was saying pierced his brain. “The hell I did.”
“I’m sorry, but on paper you did. And nobody looking at your files will have clearance to find out about any operations we might or might not have been conducting. I’m sorry. You ain’t got a witness. There’s a gap now. A gap going to get filled with desertion. Some nosey parker in the hospital already asked to refer your case to the Judge Advocate Division. Marine went off the reservation and got hungry, then he come back—that’s what they think they see.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
His name was Lorch. He gave it frankly. He had assumed Vollie knew it by now from scuttlebutt. “I feel we owe you a debt,” he said. “I think we need to figure out how to make this go away for you. But if military justice gets interested, we can’t just tell them to mind their own business. And we could hardly exculpate you by explaining you were in a place where Congress made it illegal for you to be. So we have to think creatively. I’ve been fixing to introduce myself so we could talk about a proposition that might tidy you up.”
The lights went out. The lights were always going out. Then they came back on.
He was rotating out of country, Lorch was. His operations were winding down, sadly, along with the war. He’d had a lot of fun here, the men in the shop he’d assembled made good product, but more than that they were good friends. It would have been a terrible waste to let the bonds of trust they’d built wither away only because there was no war to fight. Once you made a bond, you ought to keep it. So they were retooling the shop in the hope their existing customers might throw them enough domestic work to stay in business. “There’s always going to be a demand for intelligence, even stateside,” he said. “Now. You’ll be looking for a position soon, Staff Sergeant.”
“I didn’t know I was leaving the service.”
“Unfortunately you are. You haven’t been listening. You’ll get to go to Kansas. To the prison at Fort Leavenworth, understand? Or you’ll let me help you. They won’t stick you with a month in the brig. This ain’t a weekend’s AWOL. Thi
s’ll be desertion in wartime. You’ll be locked up till about 1985.”
Vollie’s toes contracted within his shoes, as if he was about to jump across the table, grab the man’s fork, and stab it in his devil tongue.
“I wager a position that could give you an end run around that might appeal. You don’t want to hear about it?”
He believed not a word Lorch had said. Yet so much of it was plainly true that he could not even trust his unbelief, and chose to listen for some new reality he might extract that might point him where to go; because he had wanted nothing in the tunnel but to leave himself behind and feel the sun on his head, and now he stood naked at the end of a road with the sun all over his head and the rest of him, but he had nowhere to go, home least of all—it was no home of his anymore—and no one else with him.
Lorch knew how many cavities Vollie had, what were his political affiliations (none), what were his family connections in the active-duty officer corps of the four service branches (none), what were his bank holdings (nothing), how many people stateside had bothered to pester Washington as to the whereabouts of Staff Sergeant Frade while he was underground (one letter, on behalf of his mother, from a preacher who was told Vollie was temporarily stationed out of postal range), and even if he didn’t get Leavenworth what did he think his employment prospects were with a dishonorable discharge? Anyway, he hadn’t heard what the position was yet. It wasn’t hard duty. If he had eyes and could live someplace, he could do it.
“You would embed in a stateside locality of interest and report to us what you see,” Lorch said.
Having been tied up so long, he now remembered how it felt to be a threat—the rush, the appetite to cause pain, also the recognition imperfectly hidden in an adversary’s eyes of what you might do and the lengths he would go to evade you. Whatever this position might entail, Vollie could see no reason Lorch should offer it to him: he could only be trying to keep a potential enemy close. Vollie said, “None of this solves the problem you say I have.”
“I’m getting to that. It’s standard protocol when setting up an asset like this to sheep-dip him. You ever dip a sheep? I bet you have. You dip him in pesticide, fungicide. Nothing living sticks to his fleece. That is, we strip him, temporarily, of whatever’s in his files; the name, the family relations, the personnel records fall away from him for a while. This lets him move unencumbered in his new environment.” At the same time, Lorch said, a rudimentary second person was created. None of this required ingenuity. A war had been waged in Laos by thousands of operatives processed in about the same way. Documents establishing the second person were inserted in files at various levels of government from which identification papers could then be obtained for the asset’s use while he engaged his assignment.
Typically, nothing needed to be done with the original person’s legal existence, into which the asset reintegrated at the end of his assignment. But in Vollie’s case, the protocol could be exploited to scour his record. While his whereabouts remained unknown, nobody would pursue any investigation, and affiliates in the Defense Department would have time to establish a paper trail that could refute any later speculations against him. Whenever he completed his work with Lorch’s shop, he would reintegrate into his old life with his good name beyond reproach, fully eligible for all the benefits of a returning veteran.
Most of the mayo-soaked bread of the sandwich remained on Vollie’s plate. At least he had managed to eat the bacon and the lettuce. “Not interested,” he said.
As to money, Lorch continued. The shop was not a corporation of owners and employees. It was a family, each member with his role, usually operating at significant distances from one another but all sharing in the family’s fortunes. Servicemen in military units that sometimes cooperated with the shop weren’t knowing participants in its operations and didn’t share its revenue, but now he would be within the fold. No one involved, not even Lorch, drew a salary. Members were compensated, each according to his share, when the team as a whole made good on a contract and the customer paid the fee. “In other words, we work independently for a common reward. We take from the shared pot only what belongs to us,” Lorch said, with the merest hint of further insinuation. “You of all people would understand that.”
The food in Vollie’s gullet rose to his throat. He nearly gagged. Before he knew it, he had stood to leave—
But he had stood too quickly. The blood went right out of his head.
“I respect what you’ve come through, Staff Sergeant. All the little decisions I’m sure you had to make. And I feel we owe you, morally if not contractually, for the way our—for the way your operation went off its rails. I don’t like to owe. Why don’t you set down awhile? You don’t look half right.”
Vollie held the back of a chair, tottering. His brain was a water balloon: as if from a distance, he watched it pop. The pressure that gave it its shape dispersed. If only someone else could share his bewilderment, his dizziness, at this moment—but of course he was alone in such experiences. And right then he understood that the person he had been before the tunnel had fooled himself to believe he knew how it had sounded within his father’s silver head when the old man’s artery had burst: that his father like the rest of us was alone within the cavern of his skull when he died as at every moment he had lived.
The mess was empty. “Go lie down,” Lorch said with concern. “I’m sorry, I talked off your ear. Why don’t you get some sleep and consider? I wouldn’t take too long though, if I was you.”
Vollie lay the rest of the afternoon in the unaccustomed sheets of his bunk but did not sleep. At nightfall he walked off base to the record store and stood with head bent, listening to the numbers in motion, the music scribbled in vinyl and shipped here from the other side of the world. He wore the headphones. He needed to listen close. There was something cruel about the headphones, that he should be condemned to listen to the piece called “Of Foreign Lands and People” with others present, but that they should not share it. He looked up at the Vietnamese in fine white shirts flitting their fingers through the albums in this place to which the war had brought some merchant prosperity, the elegant Vietnamese wearing headphones too but listening to other music from other times right there next to him, within the distant globes of their own brains.
The power went out. Amid near-perfect obscurity, everybody looked up. The turntables slowly losing momentum but the sound utterly snuffed as though killed. Everybody looking up. Strangers, animal in their startling, human in their namelessness. For a second, he was in the tunnel again and saw the girl putting the bag back on his head. He even felt the weave of the bag against his face. It filled him not with dread but peace. A person unseen, unknown, even unremembered—if he hoped for anything, he hoped to stay this way.
The lights flickered on in the store, and it came to him what he would do.
* * *
• • •
HE FOUND LORCH the next day, in the mess, staring with avid eyes through the cough guard at a steam tray of chicken casserole.
The two of them sat down at a table overlooking a highway choked with cars, men and women carrying grocery bags, picking their way through the traffic. “How long can you make me go away?” Vollie asked.
Lorch, not understanding the question or ignoring it, wanted first to discuss how much Vollie could expect to earn. “The exact figure depends on the size of the gross contract and your percentage of shares in it,” Lorch said. “We anticipate the typical range per operation for you will be between eight and ten thousand dollars, payable as you see fit either before or after you reintegrate.”
“That’s what I want to ask. The reintegration. Is it voluntary?”
Lorch’s tongue discovered something disagreeable amid the casserole in his mouth, and he spat it in a paper napkin. “Either there’s a pebble in here or a piece of bone,” he said to the wad in his palm. “Are you listening? That was serious money I
just quoted you. What do you mean, voluntary? You misunderstand.”
“Nossir, I don’t. It’s not my behind you’re covering, it’s yours. I’m a mistake you made. You want me out of the way until I can’t cause you any trouble. I want me out of the way too.”
“You misunderstand completely. We paid a lot to get you out of where you were. We’re proud of you, I mean it. We don’t want you to go out. We want you to come in.”
“Nossir, you want me to disappear. So do I.” The roots of his hair prickled. His skin seemed an insufficient container for the pressure of the hope he could feel. His vision came back to him unbidden: the fever vision of childhood. The creek in the meadow. The twisted face and its anguish vanishing the moment he pushed the face through the surface of the water. The cold shock when he dove in fully. The body at one with all that surrounded it. The naked body swimming along the rocky creek bed. The body turning within the water to face the gleaming moon. However, in this vision it was not the moon overhead but the sun. Light all over him. And he gave himself over to crazy hope. “I’ll do what you want,” he said. “But only if I can go away for good.”
“You’re not talking about a scouring, you’re talking about a hard clearing,” Lorch said. “As a matter of fact, there’s a protocol, but it’s for people in bigger trouble than you.”
“I thought I was going to Leavenworth.”
“There’s bigger trouble in the world than Leavenworth. There’s bigger people than you. And a hard clearing takes forever. We can’t do it in house. Half a dozen staff assistants to the deputy resource manager of bureaucratic horse shit would get to withhold approval. The transfer protocol for financial assets and liabilities alone is a nightmare. They wouldn’t let you use this to run away from creditors, if that’s what you’re thinking. They would also set up a chain of accounts to filter any kind of trust funds, pensions, legacies that may become payable to the old entity after he’s wiped out.”
The Volunteer Page 10