Magic Terror

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‘Come down here, Tim,’ Poole called up.

I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.

Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was almost sickeningly strong.

‘What do you see?’ the Lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.

‘Hot,’ Poole said, and closed the lighter.

‘Come on, damn it,’ came the Lieutenant’s voice. ‘Get out of there.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room, and the topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like poetry, like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

‘Well, well,’ Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

‘I want you guys out of there, and I mean now,’ whined the Lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut.

‘I just changed my mind,’ I said softly. ‘I’m putting twenty bucks into the Elijah fund. For two weeks from today. That’s what, June twentieth?’

‘Tell it to Spanky,’ he said. Spanky Burrage had invented the pool we called the Elijah fund, and he held the money. Michael had not put any money into the pool. He thought that a new lieutenant might be even worse than the one we had. Of course he was right. Harry Beevers was our next lieutenant. Elijah Joys, Lieutenant Elijah Joys of New Utrecht, Idaho, a graduate of the University of Idaho and basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was an inept, weak lieutenant, not a disastrous one. If Spanky could have seen what was coming, he would have given back the money and prayed for the safety of Lieutenant Joys.

Poole and I moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The Lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand – uselessly, because he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We levered ourselves up out of the hole stiff-armed, as if we were leaving a swimming pool. The Lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and thick, fleshy nose, and his Adam’s apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. He might not have been Harry Beevers, but he was no prize. ‘Well, how many?’

‘How many what?’ I asked.

‘How many are there?’ He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.

‘There weren’t exactly any bodies. Lieutenant,’ said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

‘Well, what’s that good for?’ He meant, How is that going to help me?

‘Interrogations, probably,’ Poole said. ‘If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods.’

Lieutenant Joys nodded. ‘Field Interrogation Post,’ he said, trying out the phrase. ‘Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated.’ He nodded again. ‘Right?’

‘Highly,’ Poole said.

‘Shows you what kind of enemy we’re dealing with in this conflict.’

I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with Elijah Joys, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry – I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.

For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’, from A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of times.

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I froze. A ragged Vietnamese boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there – I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that’s what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ was about two children who were about to die, and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. He was beautiful, beautiful in the ordinary way, as Vietnamese children nearly always seemed beautiful to me. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud. That child had been murdered in the hut: he had not just died, he had been murdered.

I said something to the other two men and went through the door into the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the Lieutenant asking Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain. Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill’s cigarette, and Tina Pumo exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me with an absolute conviction that this was the Paradise Garden. The men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green background of the paddy.

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware that there was something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. Every member of a combat unit makes unconscious adjustments as members of the unit go down in the field; survival sometimes depends on the number of people you know are with you, and you keep count without being quite aware of doing it. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light. Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

‘Let’s saddle up,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘We aren’t doing any good around here.’

‘Tim?’ Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.

‘Well, what was it?’ asked Tina Pumo. ‘Was it juicy?’

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

‘Aren’t we gonna torch this place?’ asked Spitalny.

The Lieutenant ignored him. ‘Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post.’

‘No shit,’ said Pumo.

‘These people are into torture, Pumo. It’s just another indication.’

‘Gotcha.’ Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.

‘I was just remembering something,’ I said. ‘Something from the world.’

‘You better forget about the world while you’re over here, Underhill,’ the Lieutenant told me. ‘I’m trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn’t noticed, but you have to cooperate with me.’ His Adam’s apple jumped like a begging puppy.

As soon as he went ahead to lead us out of the village, I gave twenty dollars to Spanky and said, ‘Two weeks from today.’

‘My man,’ Spanky said.

The rest of the patrol was uneventful.

The next night we had showers, real food, alcohol, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut. I wanted the oblivion that came in powdered form.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers’ tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisal: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and that he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names – ‘Cherokee’ and ‘KoKo’, ‘Indiana’ and ‘Donna Lee’ – or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words – ‘I Thought About You’ (Art Tatum), ‘You and the Night and the Music’ (Sonny Rollins), ‘I Love You’ (Bill Evans), ‘If I Could Be with You’ (Ike Quebec), ‘You Leave Me Breathless’ (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, ‘Thou Swell’, by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown’s music sounded regal and unearthly. Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Garden. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. We were out of the war. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, ‘Enough.’ The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

‘I’m gonna have a smoke and a drink,’ Hill announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Hill sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly’s shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces’ Radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

‘Leonard,’ I said, and he swung his big buffalo’s head toward me. ‘You still putting in for compassionate leave?’

He nodded. ‘You know what I gotta do.’

‘Yes,’ Dengler said, in a slow, quiet voice.

‘They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.’

He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. ‘What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?’ He did not wait for me to answer. ‘I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be – I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.’

‘Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,’ Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, and never looked as though he belonged in uniform. ‘Here’s what I mean, kind of,’ he said. ‘When we were listening to that trumpet player –’

‘Brownie, Clifford Brown,’ Spanky whispered.

‘– I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.’

‘Sweetie-pie,’ Spanky said softly. ‘You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.’

‘When we were back in that village, last week,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell me about that.’

I said that he had been there too.

‘But something happened to you. Something special.’

‘I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,’ I said.

‘Only twenty?’ Cotton asked.

‘What was in that hut?’ Dengler asked.

I shook my head.

‘All right,’ Dengler said. ‘But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.’

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Fine,’ Dengler said.

‘What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?’ Cotton said. ‘I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.’ He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. ‘What date you give Spanky?’

‘Twentieth.’

‘He last longer than that.’ Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces’ Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. ‘Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it.’

Cotton had put thirty dollars on August thirty-first, exactly the midpoint of Lieutenant Joys’s tour of duty. He had a long time to adjust to the loss of the money, because he himself stayed alive until a sniper killed him at the beginning of February. Then he became a member of the ghost platoon that followed us wherever we went. I think this ghost platoon, filled with men I had loved and detested, whose names I could or could not remember, disbanded only when I went to the Wall in Washington, DC, and by then I felt that I was a member of it myself.

2

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside and enjoying the slight coolness that followed the rain. The packet of Si Van Vo’s white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

Wilson Manly’s shack was all the way on the other side of camp. I never liked going to the enlisted men’s club, where they were rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese beer in American bottles. Certainly the bottles had often been stripped of their labels, and to a suspicious eye the caps looked dented; also, the beer there never quite tasted like the stuff Manly sold.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted men’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes’ walk from where I stood, just at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy himself, supposedly a Green Beret captain who had installed a handful of bar girls in an old French command post, had gone home long ago, but his club had endured. There were no more girls, if there ever had been, and the brand-name liquor was about as reliable as the enlisted men’s club’s beer. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. They spoke almost no English. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post, even one that had been transformed into a bordello: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. The wood was soft with rot. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. Around six-thirty the light bounced off the long foxed mirror that stood behind the row of bottles. After five minutes of blinding light, the sun disappeared beneath the pine boards, and for ten or fifteen minutes a shadowy pink glow filled the barroom. There was no electricity and no ice. Fingerprints covered the glasses. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal boot prints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a little grove of trees in the curve of the descending road, and as I walked toward it in the diffuse reddish light of the sunset, a mud-spattered jeep painted in the colors of camouflage gradually came into view to the right of the bar, emerging from invisibility like an optical illusion. The jeep seemed to have floated out of the trees behind it, to be a part of them.

I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

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.