1968 Page 11

She gave him a look. “You know we no take pee. Fifty-five dolla’ MPC, same-same fifty dolla’ American.”

  Spider counted out sixty-five in MPCs and left them on the bed. He lit up a cigarette. “Thanks, Li. You’re really nice.” He knew he had been dismissed but couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Here.” She smiled and took the cigarette from him. She stuck it into her vagina and half squatted, tensing, then removed it and produced an impressive stream of smoke. She handed the cigarette back. “Bet no round-eye girl do that.” She pushed him out through the swinging door.

  He looked at the cigarette and put its wetness to his lips. Then he stubbed it out and carefully put the butt in his shirt pocket. Back at the base, he would find a plastic bag. For three weeks he would take it out now and then and kiss it, a charm against her countrymen. After that he would need luck of a different kind.

  Spider retrieved his M16 and left Suzy Wong’s. He drifted up and down the main drag, half asleep in the warm afterglow but not worried about pickpockets, since he’d managed to find a belt and so kept his wallet cinched up tight against his abdomen. It would be awhile before he realized that children, presumably, had stolen two magazines of ammunition from his pockets while he ambled from window to window.

  They were everywhere, from little knee-high tykes to wary, serious boys around ten or eleven. Some of them offered to sell drugs or Numbah One boom-boom; one even offered the sexual services of his grandfather, whom he claimed had no teeth.

  Spider amiably refused all of the offers. He wasn’t surprised that there were so many children. If the average Vietnamese woman was a tenth as sexy as Li, she’d be pregnant all the time.

  He came to an alley and his reverie was suddenly broken. In the corner of his eye he saw a VC in black pajamas raise an AK-47. He hit the dirt—children scattering like panicked chickens—cocked his ineffective weapon and brought it up to aim, but just before he could yank the trigger his target grinned and disappeared. Its lipless smile was from the face of the decapitated corpse.

  Spider stood up slowly, brushed himself off, and ostentatiously cleared the round from the chamber. It was in there at the expected angle, harmless to any VC, real or imaginary.

  An Army MP came running up, brandishing his .45. Spider waved him off. “Nothin’. Just a ghost.”

  The MP peered down the dark alley. “You guys and your fuckin’ ghosts. Just leave ’em back in the fuckin’ boonies, okay?” He replaced the pistol in its holster with a loud snap and strode away, erect.

  Spider studied the shadowy passage. Random garbage, nothing that bore the remotest resemblance to a man in black pajamas. Nothing big enough to hide behind. “I’m crackin’ up,” he whispered to himself. “I am losing … my fucking … mind.” He leaned against the dusty stucco and tried to force a laugh.

  Showdown

  Beverly did not especially like her twice monthly Thursday night trips home for dinner. This one was especially tense. She knew her parents knew something, and had discussed it, and were waiting for the proper time to dump it on her.

  “Did you catch the moon lander on TV?” she asked, making conversation. “The Surveyor?”

  Her mother reached for seconds of spaghetti. “Your John would have liked that.”

  “Spider? Oh, yeah, I’m going to write him about it.”

  “That’s nice. He’s such a nice boy.”

  Actually, Mom, he’s a helpless pawn in a cynical … oh, well. She didn’t know what to say, so she tossed the salad in front of her and served herself some lettuce.

  “Beverly,” her father said with a tone of finality, and patted his mouth with a napkin. She looked at him.

  “Dolores Hopkins says she saw you down in the Negro part of town Saturday.”

  “That’s right.” Her insides were fluttering but she knew she had to be firm now. “I told you I was doing volunteer work weekends.”

  “You said it was the Red Cross,” her mother said plaintively.

  “No, I didn’t say what it was. I said I was still doing volunteer work, and you assumed that since it was the Red Cross last summer, it’s still—”

  “Don’t get smart with your mother, young lady.”

  “I’m working for Martin Luther King—”

  “Oh, God!” her father said.

  “—and he doesn’t have any offices out in the suburbs. Don’t you believe in Negro equality?”

  “Of course we do, dear, but—”

  “He’s just a god-damned rabble-rouser! Those people are too impatient already, and he’s firin’ ’em up to march on Washington.”

  “Someone has to get Johnson’s attention.”

  “Those niggers are gonna get more attention than they want.”

  “Murray, don’t—”

  “Negroes, then. Nee-groes. It’s like nobody remembers the veterans’ march. Those guys were real heroes, with real grievances, and they got nothin’ but lumps.”

  “You don’t think the Negroes have real grievances?”

  “Don’t you twist my words around, young lady. She saw you with a boy.”

  “What?”

  “Dolores Hopkins,” her mother translated. “When she saw you, you were with a boy.”

  “Well? Was he a Negro?”

  “No, thank God. But he was a hippy; hair as long as a girl’s. Is he who you’re shackin’ up with?”

  “Murray!”

  “Well, I call a spade a spade.”

  “Or a nigger!” Beverly said.

  There was a heavy, crawling silence. “You are living with him,” her father said. “Or with somebody.”

  “I went by your dorm three times last week,” her mother said, “and you weren’t there. Finally I asked one of the girls, and she said you’re living out in Chillum with this, this, man with the long hair.”

  “Chillum Heights,” Beverly said. “It’s not Chillum.”

  Her mother started crying. “And you feel good about this?” her father said. She just looked at him, nostrils flaring.

  “Do you … love him?”

  “Maybe I do, Mother, I—”

  “Maybe?”

  “Murray! Let her talk!” The novelty of her mother raising her voice stunned her father into silence.

  “Mother, I’m not sure of anything. He’s a good man; he’s very kind and gentle, and when I’m around him I just feel like, I feel like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Maybe it’s love.”

  “Maybe,” her father said.

  Her mother dabbed at her eyes. “Have you told John?”

  “No. I feel bad about him. I didn’t—”

  “You should feel bad, God damn it. He’s man enough to serve his country—”

  “He was drafted!” Beverly threw down her napkin and spoke right into her father’s face, almost shouting. “He didn’t want to go! When they wouldn’t take him for the Peace Corps he talked about shooting his toe off so they’d turn him down! Did you know that?”

  “Don’t give me any of your—”

  “I won’t give you anything. And you don’t give me anything either.” She turned and ran out of the dining room, knocking her chair over in the process. While she was gathering her clothes and books, her father ranted about Don’t set foot inside this house until you’re ready to straighten up, and her mother was saying We have to talk, we have to talk, and even as she slammed the door behind her she realized she had left behind her only hat and gloves. She slid into the frigid car and ground the engine into life, shouted Fuck! six times and popped the clutch, laying ten feet of rubber in front of her parents’ house, pointing toward Chillum Heights, where Negroes lived.

  Love letter

  January 11th

  Dear Spider,

  I just had a real knock-down drag-out fight with Dad. He found out that I’m doing volunteer work for Martin Luther King—the Poor People’s March I told you about—and boy did he blow his stack! His little girl working in the same room as NIGGERS! I couldn’t reason with him, I just walked out.
<
br />   You remember Sherry Radnor, who was my roommate first semester last year? She’s preggers! She doesn’t want to say who the guy is. (I bet she doesn’t know. Let’s see, was it the football team or the soccer team or the Glee Club?)

  Bobby Kennedy says he’s not going to run this time. I’m disappointed, but I guess it’s a smart move. No matter what any candidate says about the war, whichever side he’s on, there’s a million people waiting to jump down his throat.

  Well, no. I guess I’d be happier if he went ahead and put his money where his mouth is. God, I sound like my Father!

  I watched the Surveyor 10 land on the moon, which was exciting. It landed near Tycho—when they showed a picture of it from space, I remembered it from looking through your telescope. They call it tee-ko, though, not tie-ko like we did. It sure looks weird from ground level. I’ll find the picture that was in the paper yesterday.

  Bottom of the page and I better study for Botany. But I’m still so pissed off at Dad I don’t know if I can think straight.

  Love,

  Beverly

  The army and the whores

  If Spider had come to Vietnam a year or so earlier, he wouldn’t have had to go all the way into Pleiku for sex. At that time there was a village, or at least a ramshackle assemblage of huts, on the other side of the barbed wire from Camp Enari, called Sin City. It was mostly whorehouses and bars, with a couple of souvenir shops thrown in just in case the soldiers had some money left over.

  It was a dump, inarguable, but it was also a safe place for the boys to get laid, on two counts.

  One was venereal disease: the girls were regularly inspected and certified by army doctors. Of course if the fellow who came before you, so to speak, had clap or gleets, you were liable to come down with a dose, but it was safer than the city.

  Likewise with murder. There certainly were Viet Cong sympathizers in Sin City—they probably outnumbered the ones who approved of the American “presence”—but at least they weren’t heavily armed.

  Sin City got bulldozed to the ground, so the story goes, because of mothers. The upper-case Army loves mothers, the flag, and apple pie, but the lower-case army thinks that mothers are a hindrance. In the case of Sin City, somebody wrote his mother about the goings-on there, and she wrote angry letters to a bunch of politicians, who leaned on the generals, who leaned on the colonels, who leaned on the majors, who ordered the sergeants major to have their boys fire up the bulldozers. So the women and girls who worked Sin City moved back into town, where they didn’t have to put up with the doctors’ probings. They had fewer customers, but charged more.

  Toward the end of January, Spider would develop syphilis chancres on his lips and anus, both of them courtesy of the Treponema pallidum that thrived in Li’s vaginal mucosa. They would be the least of his worries.

  Different kinds of craziness

  Spider had no luck with the supply sergeant back at Camp Enari. Standing in front of a full rack of presumably functional M16s, he told Spider that he couldn’t spare one. Spider’s request for a new weapon was “in the hopper,” and when a new weapon came in from Cam Ranh Bay, he would send it out to the field with the proper paperwork. When Spider asked whether he could just loan him one that worked, he patiently, sarcastically, explained how supply channels worked.

  Translated, the message was that Spider had made extra work for the sergeant, and Spider would get no favors. Meanwhile, since he was back early from his pass, he automatically went on the duty roster. So for the next two hours he shoveled gravel out of a wheelbarrow onto walkways defined by staked one-by-fours. That tore open his old blisters and made him some new ones.

  At six, they knocked off for chow, a stew made of beef or water buffalo—one never knew—ladled over lumpy mashed potatoes. It was ambrosia, compared to C rations, but Spider had difficulty getting it to his mouth, his hand splayed like a claw, the spoon’s handle awkwardly inserted between his first and second fingers. The claw fit more naturally around a can of cold beer, he found, so he sat in the EM Club for about twelve of them, feeding quarter slugs to the jukebox, playing Beatles tunes. He wound up drinking with Morrison, who had been smart enough to stay downtown and take a cab back, getting in too late to go on duty.

  It’s a good thing they were together, because it was unlikely that either one of them could have found his way back to the strange billet alone. A combination of remembered landmarks and dumb luck got them back to their hard bunks, where they crashed so solidly they slept through a general alarm and some light incoming, two rockets and ten mortars; hardly enough to stop dreaming for.

  The next morning, Spider followed Morrison’s lead and feigned indifference about the attack, but privately vowed that he would never drink that much again, even in the supposed safety of base camp. It’s like they said. There were no front lines in this war. Charlie was everywhere.

  They walked to the helipad pretty well loaded down, each of them with two chain saws and a can of gasoline as well as their normal load and stuff from Pleiku. The powers that be had decided that the army needed a fire base on the hill they had left a couple of days before. Morrison said it was stupid; they obviously had all the area covered anyhow. There was probably an extra artillery unit embarrassing everybody by standing around with no work to do.

  The next week was uneventful except for hard labor, which was a pleasant alternative to walking around the jungle being a target. The engineers dug a semi-permanent bunker, deep enough to stand up in, the top insulated with eight layers of sandbags. They dug shelves in the underground walls, long enough for their air mattresses. Most people preferred to sleep out in the open, near the entrance to the bunker, but when the monsoon season started it would rain day and night for weeks on end, and their roof would be a coveted luxury.

  Spider found that he enjoyed lumberjacking. He learned how to predict where a tree wanted to fall by the distribution of mass in its limbs, and how to aim it by proper placement on the initial cut. They used explosives to bring down the largest trees, several at a time, which was good clean destructive fun.

  Charlie pretty much left them alone, though they assumed they were being watched all the time. One night a sniper fired a dozen blind rounds at them. It was over in less than a minute; no one could tell where the sniper had been or where the bullets had hit. The engineers were drafted into a “sweep” the next morning, along with a rifle platoon, searching the ground outside the perimeter for brass. They didn’t find any, which was a relief. Nobody knew what they’d be ordered to do if they had found the guy’s position, but it probably wouldn’t have been a matter of “Okay, come on back.”

  Spider got mail from home and had time to write long letters to Beverly and his parents. It felt strange not to be able to write about the thing uppermost in his mind. He thought about Li day and night; on the edge of sleep she would come and clasp him with her legs or mouth. She stalked his dreams and even appeared sometimes during the day, a more pleasant apparition than the other one, who also made regular appearances.

  He wondered whether to tell a doctor about the hallucinations, which often seemed as real as the people and things around him. They would probably accuse him of shamming and put him on a lurp team. That was LRRP, for Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol, people who went out in groups of four and five, looking for trouble and usually finding it. In some divisions these were all-volunteer, made up of gung-ho types who loved action. In Spider’s, being assigned to a LRRP team was punishment, sometimes capital, for cowardice, insubordination, or laziness.

  Spider decided he could live with the hallucinations for the time being. The one of Li was pleasant, and the others were just startling, now. He’d always had an overactive imagination, according to his parents, and he reasoned that this was just his brain’s way of dealing with a difficult situation. There were probably lots of guys with the same problem, who didn’t want to say anything about it because they didn’t want people to think they were crazy.

  But what if they
, and he, actually were?

  Spider suspected that wondering whether you were crazy was a pretty good indicator that you weren’t. He hadn’t read much about psychology, which he now regretted, but he was pretty sure that crazy people thought they were sane.

  FOURTH WEEK

  Chat

  January 21st

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  Well, I never thought I’d be glad to be out in the field rather than in base camp. But nothing’s been happening out here at all, and the base camps are getting kicked. Pleiku was hit last night, the airfield and the hospital. We could barely see the light, over the horizon from the hill here. Lotsa fireworks. Too far away to hear anything.

  I think maybe the last letter you got from me was when I was in Pleiku. Camp Enari, which is where the hospital is that got hit. Don’t worry, in case you read about this attack in the papers. I’m not there anymore. But I guess you’ll read about it before you get this letter, duh.

  I finished the Heinlein book you sent. It was really fine. Any other Heinlein would be appreciated, even if I’ve read it before. I traded it for a Philip K. Dick book, which is also science fiction but pretty weird.

  Also, could you try to find a paperback introduction to psychology? Think I’ll take a few courses in it when I go back to school.

  Lumberjacking is the first thing I’ve learned in the army that’s actually kind of fun. These rubber trees, you really have to work on them. Even with a chain saw it can take an hour to drop one. It’s a real feeling of power. But I don’t think it’s something I would want to go into, peacetime. They say the pay’s pretty high, but chain saws aren’t the safest things to work with. And I almost got hit by a tree yesterday. Moses was working uphill from me, he yelled TIMBER! but I couldn’t hear him because I had a chain saw roaring in front of me, natch. So this big rubber tree comes crashing down about ten feet away, scared the be-Jesus out of me!

  So maybe I should look for a line of work where you use a pencil instead of a chain saw.