Across the Spectrum (34 page)

But now Etta’s second marriage had gone sour. DeWitt was
engaged to Wanda and had a steady job. “He needs a father right now,” Etta had
said—her idea, of all things. And though the boy might be hardly more than a
stranger, DeWitt had instantly agreed to take him.

“Better get a ten-pounder,” DeWitt told Wanda, with a
twinkle in his eye. “My family knows how to eat.”

They discussed more details of Rudy’s welcome-home party.
Only six days to go—DeWitt could hardly believe it. They talked until it was
time for church.

At the services, it seemed every pew held another friend.
Never had the Virgin in the stained glass window smiled down more kindly. Yet
DeWitt was restless sitting on the polished wood. He kept turning to the wrong
pages in the hymnal.

A trace of purplish fog slid by the window. DeWitt would see
it out of the corner of his eye. When he’d turn, the view would be clear, but
he knew what he’d seen. His breathing deepened, and his palms itched, like a
hunter who has a four-point buck in his sights, but hasn’t yet pulled the
trigger.

Fourteen years he’d lived with that adrenaline kiss. When
he’d been too poor to buy food, the Purple Haze had fed him. When he didn’t
have four walls to call his own, he’d always had a place to go. Even the
morphine he’d taken for his shrapnel wounds hadn’t possessed such a siren call.

He didn’t know why the haze was appearing so frequently.
Usually many days passed, sometimes weeks or even a month. But lately it had
been hiding in the background almost everywhere he went, and right now his gut
told him that before the day was over, he’d cross the threshold again.

When it came, he was ready.

∞

The Purple Haze always led DeWitt to the same spot. When
the mists cleared, he was standing on a dirt road on the outskirts of a rice
paddy. The noon sun hammered on his helmet, turned his gun barrel to a branding
iron and his collar to a washrag. Directly in front of him was jungle. Here,
ages ago, the original patrol had set out. Here is where the replays had to
start. It was one of the rules.

He blended into the elephant grass. Five steps in, a frog
croaked, right on cue. Ten more steps, and he reached the edge of a punji pit,
which he avoided. Another twenty meters and the canopy closed overhead. In the
shade of a massive teak, he found his buddies.

Grease-painted faces beamed at him. Helmets tilted in
salute. And Johnnie, as always, stepped forward, wrapped his thumb around
DeWitt’s, and said, “Good to see you, brother.”

The other bloods had always liked him, but now even the
white guys—even Boone—looked up to him. Without DeWitt, none of them would be
there, healthy and whole, their clips full of fresh ammunition, the enemy
nowhere in sight or hearing.

The first hour was always the most special. It was their
gift from the Purple Haze. The rules didn’t require them to head out. They
could take a nap, converse, think. The choice was theirs.

Zuniga wrote his usual notes to his family. Smith and Brodie
obsessively tried to armor-pad the places where they’d taken wounds on earlier
replays. But most, at some point, sat and listened while DeWitt described the
changes out in the world where time did not hold still.

“Home video,” Johnnie said, sighing wistfully. “I’d never
miss another Phillies game.”

“Pussy hair in
Playboy
,” added Morgan.

“The Rolling Stones still makin’ records? Damn.”

They asked him of things DeWitt had told them many times.
Like the parent of small children, he patiently repeated item, fact, and
anecdote. They clutched at the information, drawing it to their hearts, trying
to make it stick. It did so haphazardly, giving them, at best, a fragmentary
glimpse of a future that had skipped them by.

DeWitt wanted to think that their inability to remember was
merely because they had not directly experienced the events and changes, but he
didn’t put much faith in the theory. It was the haze toying with them, with
him. The haze made the rules. He could bend them about as well as he could
throw a hand grenade with his ear.

All too soon, they rose to their feet. The smiles evolved
into nervous twitches and stiffly held spines. The men all wanted to stay right
where they were.

The Purple Haze wouldn’t allow that, either. They had to go
forward, toward the
LZ.
They had to pass through the ville. They had to reach the fire zone before
nightfall. And they had to make contact with the enemy. Other details might
take a million different tangents, but those basics were set. If DeWitt or any
of the squad ignored them, the Purple Haze would come early, pulling DeWitt out
and sending the other men back to limbo.

DeWitt sent Morgan forward to serve as point man. The rest
assumed patrol formation, lifted their heavy packs to their shoulders, and
began the hump to the ville.

The jungle smelled of rot and laterite clay. The humidity
drew fluid from the pores of every man in the squad. As they walked, the eyes
of DeWitt’s buddies lost the knowing depth. He sighed, sad and happy for them
at the same time. Soon recall would not be an issue. They were returning to the
selves who had originally set out on patrol, back in 1969. They wouldn’t
remember the replays until the beginning of the next one, though for the rest
of the day, they would follow his suggestions with an obedience far more
profound than when he had been their plain old squad leader.

If only he could command that sort of obedience at night,
when the bullets, mortar rounds, and grenades started to fly.

The route took them across a narrow sliver of jungle and
back into cultivated land. Breaking through a bamboo thicket, DeWitt spotted
the familiar rows of pepper and rice, with the ville on the far side.

The squad approached the area carefully but openly—this was
theoretically Friendly country. The residents put away their farm implements
and gathered between their hootches in plain sight—women, children, and old
men. The headman, hat in hands, bowed and came forward, swallowing visibly at
the sight of automatic weapons pointed at his chest. DeWitt gazed at him as one
would look at a longtime acquaintance, and uttered several well-rehearsed lines
of Vietnamese, a language he’d not known during his original tour.

The headman’s eyebrows rose, but without comment, he waved forward
a middle-aged woman. She bowed to DeWitt. He explained again what was needed.

The mama-san gave a nod. Her lips drew back, revealing teeth
made dark from long years of chewing betel nut. The expression could not have
been called a smile, but it denoted consent, however grudging. Business was
business. She called out in a raucous voice. A young woman came forward and
bowed. The latter was small, her breasts mere bumps beneath the fabric of her
pajamalike garments, but her eyes betrayed her worldliness.

DeWitt nodded his approval. At the mama-san’s burst of
orders, the young woman disappeared into a hootch.

“Reggs.” DeWitt waved one of his men forward. “Got a job for
you.”

Reggs had barely arrived In Country. His nostrils twitched
nervously as he strode up, obviously concerned that his sergeant had singled
him out.

DeWitt whispered in his ear.

“You want me to do
what?
” Reggs’s eyes went wide.

DeWitt took Reggs’s weapon, and tilted his helmet toward the
drape over the doorway. “You got fifteen minutes. You think you can figure out
the details?”

Reggs gaped like a fish. DeWitt waited calmly. The older man
already knew the outcome. No doubt on the original patrol, Reggs would have
been too much of a Fucking New Guy to realize the stakes. But it was early in
the replay. Some part of the greenhorn private knew what he was being offered.
This was not an opportunity to waste.

“The girl will help you out,” DeWitt said. “Go do America
proud, boy.”

The squad spread throughout the ville, glances roving
swiftly from here to there, fingers inside trigger guards, safeties off. If any
of them found the circumstances odd, they didn’t reveal their doubts. DeWitt
gave the mama-san the money and leaned back against a stack of woven baskets,
just outside the hootch containing Reggs and the whore.

The villagers dispersed, pretending to return to their
tasks. DeWitt kept his glance down, preferring not to think of what these
conservative rural folk must think of the intrusion on their morality. It was
one thing to look the other way when the mama-san took a selected few of the
village’s young women to work the shantytown near the military base. It was a
different thing entirely to have a transaction occur in their midst, at
gunpoint. Though they didn’t show it, he knew an anger was burning behind their
placid eyes, fuel for the Viet Cong cause. Had this been the original patrol,
DeWitt would never have provoked them so.

But no shots would be fired inside the community. The
villagers might all be VC. Snipers might have every last grunt in the
crosshairs of their scopes right now. But both sides would save the bullets.
Later, out Beyond in the jungle, after night extinguished the sun, there would
be plenty of time for gunpowder, for lead, for principles.

Sounds leaked through the thatch of the hootch—little sighs
of feigned female pleasure, amazed grunts from Reggs, and slapping, wet echoes
of flesh meeting flesh at a frantic pace. Slowly, the tense lines in DeWitt’s
forehead faded to smoothness.

The noises were a balm. For five years, through countless
replays, DeWitt had seen Reggs die too young. Finally, DeWitt had realized what
kind of bargains could be made with mama-san. Though he had yet to learn how to
save Reggs completely, at least now when the mortars or the grenades or the punji
pits took him out, the rifleman died a man.

“Hey,
GI,
”
said the mama-san, startling DeWitt. “Numbah one girl you? Ownnee two dollah.”

She gestured at another of her charges. The woman was a
nut-brown beauty, slightly older than the nymph currently seeing to Reggs’s
needs, with hips wide enough to handle a big man like DeWitt. She shyly turned
away when she realized he was watching her—a cultivated but effective
bashfulness.

DeWitt frowned. What was happening here? He’d never been
offered a girl of his own before. That hadn’t occurred in 1969, and it was not
something he’d tried to make happen on any replay. If he had, he would have
staged it differently—the offer would not have been made in unrefined, pidgin
English, for one thing.

“No,” he told the mama-san. He willed the goodtime girl to
vanish. But she remained, rich with the aroma of female sweat and betel-nut on
the breath. He could hear her murmuring to the mama-san, and though his command
of Vietnamese was inexact, he could have sworn they were discussing ways to
make him linger.

Reggs’s voice rose in a huff-puff-ahhh and trailed away.
DeWitt tapped his foot on the hard-packed clay until the beaming young man
lifted the drape and stepped outside. “Move out!” DeWitt announced instantly.

The jungle waited, as threatening as ever. That hadn’t
changed.

∞

Night came, and so did the
NVA.
The trees were suddenly full of them—just like
the first time. The skinny devils had bunkers dug and claymores wired, they had
mortars set up, catwalks strung in the upper canopy. They were
ready
,
and no squad of American grunts, no matter how well led, stood much chance
against them.

DeWitt chose the strategy that had worked the best in the
recent past. He divided the squad into three groups, and sent the other two
into areas he knew would draw the worst fire. With four men, he traced a long,
circuitous route toward the
LZ.
He gave them one absolute rule—don’t shoot, no matter what. Gunfire always drew
the wrong kind of attention. By silent running, they could avoid contact for
many klicks. One of these times, they’d make it far enough.

Sometimes the men resisted. Sometimes DeWitt had to wait
until the shit started coming in from all sides before he could gain their
cooperation, and by then it was too late. Little of what he ordered them to do
followed regulations. He had learned the words to convince them only through
long, bitter trial and error. Once night fell, they remembered nothing at all
of the other replays.

This time, it worked. He, Johnnie, Zuniga, Boone, and Smith
glided through the bush, packs left far behind, listening to the firefights
where their buddies had become pinned down. The only time they entered battle
themselves was when DeWitt took out a sentry with his bayonet.

He had never chosen this exact combination of companions. He
always kept Johnnie with him if he could, but seldom brought Boone—only the
memory of the last replay prompted him to do it now. Most of all, he regretted
the absence of Welles. He hated being without an
RTO.
But more than once, the
noise of the radio had betrayed the plan, and humping the equipment slowed the
entire group down.

He realized his mistake when the rumble of aircraft began to
shake the trees. Someone had called for air support.

“Down!” DeWitt shouted.

The rumble became a roar. Abruptly, branches evaporated off
the trees behind them. Soil fountained. Hot lead cut a track through the jungle
and right through the small knot of soldiers, like a giant’s scythe, come to
harvest. Puff the Magic Dragon breathed.

The ringing in DeWitt’s ears drowned all other sound.
Spitting grit, he lifted his head from the mulch.

The top half of Johnnie’s body lay near him. Near the gory
remnant lay Boone’s head and possibly one of his arms. DeWitt choked and rolled
to his feet, turning away. He staggered to the other two bodies. They were more
intact, but just as dead.

His face contorted into a painful rictus, but he didn’t cry.
After all these years, he had no tears left. The channels in his heart that
carried his frustration, his anger and sense of loss, were so deep now that the
emotions poured like a flashflood through him. He shook his fist at the sky,
kicked the ground, and it was done. The familiar stench of despair rose up in a
viscous mass, entered him, and dissolved all real feeling.