by Peter Straub
Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tim. Okay. You come in.” His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Far table, right side.”
“It’s okay?” I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t.
“Yesss.” He stepped back to let me in.
I smelled cordite before I saw the other men. The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.
“Oh, hell,” someone said from off to my left. “We have to put up with this?”
I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.
“Is okay, is okay,” said Mike. “Old customer. Old friend.”
“I bet he is,” the voice said. “Just don’t let any women in here.”
“No women,” Mike said. “No problem.”
I went through the tables to the farthest one on the right.
“You want whiskey, Tim?” Mike asked.
“Tim?” the man said. “Tim?”
“Beer,” I said, and sat down.
A nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnnie Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife, and had once been blond.
“I just want to make sure about this,” he said. “You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?”
“Anything you say,” I said.
“No woman walks into this place.” He put his hand on the gun. “No nurse. No wife. No anything. You got that?”
“Got it,” I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer.
“Tim. Funny name. Tom, now—that’s a name. Tim sounds like a little guy—like him.” He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. “Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.”
“Don’t you like women?” I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse.
I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.
“That is a complicated question,” the drunk said. “There are questions of responsibility. You can be responsible for yourself. You can be responsible for your children and your tribe. You are responsible for anyone you want to protect. But can you be responsible for women? If so, how responsible?”
Mike quietly moved behind the bar and sat on a stool with his hands out of sight. I knew he had a shotgun under there.
“You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you, Tim, you rear-echelon dipshit?”
“You’re afraid you’ll shoot any women who come in here, so you told the bartender to keep them out.”
“This wise-ass sergeant is personally interfering with my state of mind,” the drunk said to the burly man on his right. “Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue.”
“Leave him alone,” the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.
The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.
This is serious, he said, and I am serious. If you wish to see how serious, just sit in your chair and do nothing. Do you not know of what I am capable by now? Have you learned nothing? You know what I know. I know what you know. A great heaviness is between us. Of all the people in the world at this moment, the only ones I do not despise are already dead, or should be. At this moment, murder is weightless.
There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it’s pretty close. He may have said that murder was empty.
Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: Recall what is in our vehicle [carriage]; you should remember what we have brought with us, because I shall never forget it. Is it so easy for you to forget?
It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.
Your leader requires more of this nectar, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.
“Whiskey,” said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.
For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.
The haggard soldier who had been silent until now said, “Something is gonna happen here.” He looked straight at me. “Pal?”
“That man is nobody’s pal,” the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.
For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.
“Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?” said the drunk. “Is that much understood?”
The soldier who had called me pal laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk’s glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.
“I am not a rear-echelon dipshit,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble, but people like him do not own this war.”
“Will you maybe let me save your ass, Sergeant?” he whispered. “Major Bachelor hasn’t been anywhere near white men in three years, and he’s having a little trouble readjusting. Compared to him, we’re all rear-echelon dipshits.”
I looked at his tattered shirt. “Are you his baby-sitter, Captain?”
He gave me an exasperated look and glanced over his shoulder at the major. “Major, put down your damn weapon. The sergeant is a combat soldier. He is on his way back to camp.”
I don’t care what he is, the major said in Vietnamese.
The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. I motioned for Mike to come out with me.
“Don’t worry, the major won’t shoot him. Major Bachelor loves the Yards,” the captain said. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to
move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. “God damn,” he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said “God damn” again, but in a different tone of voice.
I started laughing.
“Oh, this is—” He shook his head. “This is really—”
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
John Ransom turned to the table. “Hey, I know this guy. He’s an old football friend of mine.”
Major Bachelor shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. “I don’t care about football,” he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.
“Buy the sergeant a drink,” said the haggard officer.
“Buy the fucking sergeant a drink,” the major chimed in.
John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.
We watched the major’s head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached the unbuttoned top of his ruined shirt, Ransom said, “All right, Bob,” and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major’s hand. He pushed it beneath his belt.
“The man is out,” Bob said.
Ransom turned back to me. “He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.” Ransom did not have to specify who he was. “Bob and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.” He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.
For a moment no one in the bar spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror, and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it would soon disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.
“How come you’re always fucked up when I see you?”
“You have to ask?”
He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. His body had thickened and hardened, and his eyes had retreated far back into his head. He seemed to me to have moved a long step nearer the goal I had always seen in him than when he had given me the zealot’s word about stopping the spread of communism. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.
“I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn’t I?”
I agreed that he had.
“What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn’t even a real graves registration unit, was it?” He smiled and shook his head. “I took care of your Captain McCue, too—he was using it as a kind of dumping ground. I don’t know how he got away with it as long as he did. The only one with any training was that sergeant, what’s-his-name. Italian.”
“DiMaestro.”
Ransom nodded. “The whole operation was going off the rails.” Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. “I heard some things—” He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. He closed his eyes. “Some crazy stuff went on back there.”
I asked if he was still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.
“You’re not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?”
He opened his eyes. “You have a good memory. No, I’m not there anymore.” He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. “I’m kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sahn. It’ll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. Actually, I’d settle for a dry level place on the ground.”
“Where did you come from now?”
“In-country.” His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. “Way in-country. We had to get the major out.”
“Looks more like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.”
My ignorance made him sit up straight. “You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?”
And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.
“In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don’t even dream of—he’s a legend.”
A legend, I thought. Like the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.
“Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That’s straight. Bachelor got to places we couldn’t even get close to—he got inside an NVA encampment, you hear me, inside the encampment and silently killed about an entire division.”
Of all the people in the world at this minute, I remembered, the only ones he did not detest were already dead. I thought I must have heard it wrong.
“He was absorbed right into Rhade life,” Ransom said. I could hear the awe in his voice. “The man even got married. Rhade ceremony. His wife went with him on missions. I hear she was beautiful.”
Then I knew where I had heard of Franklin Bachelor before. He had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.
And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the backseat of the jeep.
“I did hear of him,” I said. “I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too.”
“His wife,” Ransom said.
I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.
“We’re stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States—Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we’ll just keep pouring whiskey into him.”
“He’s going to want his gun back.”
“Maybe I’ll give it to him.” His look told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. “He’s in for a rough time at Langley. There’ll be some heat.”
“Why Langley?”
“Don’t ask. But don’t be naive, either. Don’t you think they’re . . .” He would not finish that sentence. “Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?”
“Because something went wrong.”
“Oh, everything went wrong. Bachelor went totally out of control. He had his own war. Ran a lot of sidelines, some of which were supposed to be under, shall we say, tighter controls?”
He had lost me.
“Ventures into Laos. Business trips to Cambodia. Sometimes he wound up in control of airfields Air America was using, and that meant he was in control of the cargo.”
When I shook my head, he said, “Don’t you have a little something in your pocket? A little package?”
A secret world—inside this world, another, secret world.
“You understand, I don’t care what he did any more than I care about what you do. I think Langley can go fuck itself. Bachelor wrote the book. In spite of his sidelines. In spite of whatever trouble he got into. The man was effective. He stepped over a boundary, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we’re supposed to do without stepping over boundaries.”
I wondered why he seemed to be defending himself, and asked if he would have to testify at Langley.
“It’s not a trial.”
“A debriefing.”
“Sure, a debriefing. They can ask me anything they want. All I can tell them is what I saw. That’s my evidence, right? What I saw? They don’t have any evidence, except maybe this, uh, these human remains the major insisted on bringing out.”
For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pin-striped suits, question Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.
“It was like Bong To, in a funny way.” Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, “A ghost tow
n, I mean. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Bong To.”
“My unit was just there.” His head jerked up. “A mortar round scared us into the village.”
“You saw the place?”
I nodded.
“Funny story.” Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it. “Well, think about Bachelor, now. I think he must have been in Cambodia or someplace, doing what he does, when his village was overrun. He comes back and finds everybody dead, his wife included. I mean, I don’t think Bachelor killed those people—they weren’t just dead, they’d been made to beg for it. So Bachelor wasn’t there, and his assistant, a Captain Bennington, must have just run off—we never did find him. Officially, Bennington’s MIA. It’s simple. You can’t find the main guy, so you make sure he can see how mad you are when he gets back. You do a little grievous bodily harm on his people. They were not nice to his wife, Tim, to her they were especially not nice. What does he do? He buries all the bodies in the village graveyard, because that’s a sacred responsibility. Don’t ask me what else he does, because you don’t have to know this, okay? But the bodies are buried. Generally speaking. Captain Bennington never does show up. We arrive and take Bachelor away. But sooner or later, some of the people who escaped are going to come back to that village. They’re going to go on living there. The worst thing in the world happened to them in that place, but they won’t leave. Eventually, other people in their family will join them, if they’re still alive, and the terrible thing will be a part of their lives. Because it is not thinkable to leave your dead.”
“But they did in Bong To,” I said.
“In Bong To, they did.”
I saw the look of regret on his face again, and said that I wasn’t asking him to tell me any secrets.
“It’s not a secret. It’s not even military.”