Fatal Light (13 page)

Once upon a time I had been in love with Mary Meade. Loving her was one of the things that kept me alive in a place where staying alive was hard to do, loving her resonant image, the effigy of our touch. The truth that we were had its own home in some better time, a music played so often it could always be pulled back into hearing, but for the most part wandered all the back roads of need and desire. I wanted to tell Mary about things I had seen: the family living in a thrown-out refrigerator carton in the shadow of Chase Manhattan's Saigon branch, smudge-pot cooking fire, all of them crouching in front of the box as I passed, Mamasan, Papasan, five handsome children. And in the Caribbean, before I had ever seen Vietnam—iridescent hotels rising in background shimmer—a man, woman, and two children living in the gutted body of a lime-green Chevrolet Nova, damp diaper hung to dry over the steering wheel and the younger child, a girl, bathing her naked hairless doll in a roadside ditch. I wanted to talk about the roads cleared for the impoverished and the helpless and the dead, roads used for no other purpose, bone dancers turning in a white sun. I wanted to tell Mary everything I knew. That rain could keep us clean. That
night was an asylum. That time was a lie, that the sky was on fire and in ruins, a long heat pouring over the edge of the world for miles.

When I first arrived in Vietnam I was assigned a holding barracks, waiting for my unit to move. I dreamed of Mary at the top of a stairway, looking down at me. I climbed the stairs, trying to reach her. I kept climbing and she was never closer and she looked sad, as if she pitied me. The more I climbed the more desperate I felt.

In those days before I left for the bush I sat up through the nights, avoiding my dreams, squatting in torpid heat outside the barracks door, smoking cigarettes and hissing smoke through my teeth, looking off across an endless airstrip waiting for the onslaught of in-country, ancient rage and the jungle's fatal light. I sat and waited, and the nights and the jungle were ghosts that would not speak as the past escaped like steam. When I looked out across that airstrip in predawn darkness, I saw nothing.

Waiting for sleep the last night in my grandfather's house I lay in the bed I slept in as a child, remembering the voluptuous spread of summer darkness as my brother and sisters and I ran into dusk, the flare of our cries running with the blink of fireflies, careen and cascade of breath, and the bright gasp of lightning behind clouds before thunder began in the distance of the sky and opened into us, a moving wave until the sound was alive inside the world, possessing it. Later, from our beds, we heard the rain begin and grow and rush over the countryside, an intense whisper, and the smell of water and wet earth was everywhere like a destiny, steaming in the moon's white voice.

Close heat and crush of jungle, walking through the cathedral light, one of a group of walking men in Bonetown, graveyard shift and random drift of memory and we are nine men. See us walking, and walking. See us from above, the shift of our bodies, boots alternating just ahead of our helmets, seen from above. We walk as if walking is the job itself, as if walking is all we are here for, walking with care, with respect for the possibility in the next moment.

On the seventh of June at two o'clock in the afternoon the point—first walker in this group of solemn walkers—is killed by an activated Claymore device. The second walker receives a fragment of the same device into the midsection, which enters via his intestine and exits across his spine, and now his walking days are over.

The rest of us continue to walk, although we have become confused about why, or where it is we must go, or do when we arrive, and we fear our destination more than any beast we might imagine, and it is the eighth of June, and the ninth, and the tenth, and we are walking, afraid to continue and afraid to stop.

Fatal Light,
a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, received the Special Citation of the Hemingway Foundation, the Vietnam Veterans of America's Excellence in the Arts Award, the Pratt Library of Baltimore's “Face to Face” Book Award, and went on to appear in over 20 editions in 11 languages. Richard Currey is also the author of two story collections and the novel
Lost Highway.
His work has been accorded numerous honors, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, in both fiction and poetry, a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, and the Daugherty Award in the Humanities from the State of West Virginia. Currey served as a member of the writers panel for Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a national initiative fostering the writing of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan that led to both a critically acclaimed anthology and Oscar-nominated film. A Navy veteran who was a Marine Corps combat medic in the late 1960s, Currey now lives in Washington, D.C.

 

www.richardcurrey.com