Fields of Fire (34 page)

“Cabron! Hijo de la chingada! Dig!”

Papasan bled slowly at the edge of the welt the rifle butt had made on his head. He eyed Cat Man fearfully, fetched the shovel, and began to dig in the wrong place. Cat Man exploded again, rushing the man, striking him again in the head with his rifle.

“You motherfucker! Here! Do you think we are blind?”

Papasan comprehended. He bled doubly from his head, slow rolls of red that oozed down his neck and disappeared along the ridges of his back muscles. He walked to the first low place in the dirt, eyed Cat Man one final, petrified time, and lifted out spadefuls of earth.

The others also comprehended, and were silent.

Scoop by scoop the earth revealed a long prone form, lying facedown underneath a row of plants, stretched comfortably as if at rest. He still wore his flak jacket. The helmet was gone, as were his pack and weapon and all ammunition. The waves of blond hair were matted and black in the back of the head, and strangely flat.

Bagger leaned down and began to turn the body over, then recoiled at its rigidity. Finally he took a shoulder, and Cannonball the boots, and they lifted Baby Cakes out of the ground as if he were a board. They rolled him onto his back, and Bagger gagged. Baby Cakes’ skin was tawny, as if burnt in a frying pan. His eyes were gone. Squarely in the middle of his forehead was a bullet hole. The matted black behind his head was where the bullet had blown the back of his head away.

Papasan was digging out the other body, now anxious to appear cooperative. In a few minutes Ogre lay comfortably inside his own shallow grave. Goodrich and Cat Man rolled him out. He also had been shot in the forehead. His handmade peace symbol still hung on his dog-tag chain. Ogre grinned an eyeless, ironic grin.

Snake stood with Dan and the mamasan, waiting. Mamasan appeared absorbed in papasan's effort. She did not look at the bodies. Snake glared at papasan, who now stood alone with his shovel. He spoke calmly, his face seething with murderous rage. “You motherfucker. You piece of shit.”

Papasan raised his hands in another futile gesture, babbling to Snake. He finished, looking expectantly to Dan. Dan spoke disgustedly, his breast heaving with emotion. “He say, not my fault. He say VC bac-bac Ogre, Baby Cake, make him bury. He say, no VC. He say, mebbe mamasan VC.”

“So he says it wasn't him, huh? So it was his buddies. Oh, I'll bet he really laughed his ass off to see two Marines get shot between the eyes. I'll bet he really got his rocks off. Well. We're gonna send your buddies a little message.”

Goodrich looked up, nauseated from staring at the decaying forms that once were Baby Cakes and Ogre, and comprehended what Snake's “message” would be. He started, standing quickly, his eyes going round. “Ohhh, no. Let's get out of here. We found 'em. Let's get back.”

“We'll be leaving in a minute, Senator.”

“I came out here to find Baby Cakes, not to kill civilians. No.”

Bagger erupted. “I said all along that motherfucker was a gook. He just looks like a gook.” He walked up to the man. “Yeah. Well, we ain't letting you get away with this, sweetheart.” He grabbed papasan by the neck and bent him down over Ogre's body. Papasan resisted, but Bagger possessed massive strength. He bent papasan nearer and nearer, until the man's bleeding face was only inches above Ogre's corpse. “Yeah. Take a good look, gook. You think we should let you go after that?”

Goodrich took off his helmet and rubbed his fleshy face with one hand. “No! Don't do it, man.”

“You don't care, do you Senator?” It was Cat Man, still so angry he was flushed, trembling. “It don't bother you that they done that to 'em.”

Guilt. Goodrich admitted inwardly that his greatest emotion at seeing the bodies was repulsion, a wish to be done with them, to get back to the perimeter and be away from them. And irritation that carrying them back would increase the chance of ambush.

“It does bother me. Just not enough to kill civilians.”

“They ain't civilians, fucker!” Bagger.

“You didn't even like Baby Cakes. You couldn't wait to get out of his team. You thought Ogre was an ass. I seen you, Senator.” Snake glared through him with razor eyes.

Goodrich felt himself backing away. They had all turned on him. “That wouldn't matter. I mean, it's not true, but it wouldn't matter, even if it was.”

“We been baby-sitting you too long!” Snake grew fierce.

Cannonball smiled curiously. “You doan’ like to kill, Senator? Ol’ Senator, so goo-o-ood an’ smar-r-rt. He doan’ like to kill. You killed Burgie, Senator. You sat on yo’ fat ass two feet away from the man an’ let him die. I seen it.” Cannonball lost his smile. “Mebbe you only like to kill Marines. These gooks friends o’ yours, Senator? You like what they did.”

Help me, Senator. “Oh, for Christ sake! Leave me alone! Just leave me alone.”

“Cannonball.” Snake called them off. “Well, Senator. We're gonna do what we think we have to. You do what you think you have to. If you don't like this, leave.”

Leave. Killer weeds. A mile. “You know I can't.”

“Then go up by that hootch.” Snake ignored him now. He instructed Dan and Bagger. “Put 'em in the same graves they put Ogre and Cakes. Make 'em lay down.”

Goodrich walked quickly away. He heard Snake count behind him.

“One.”

He went under the thatch porch and sat, looking out at the fields of sawgrass.

“Two!”

I'm in hell. I'm being punished. How did this ever happen to me?

The mamasan yelled something. Dan yelled back. Shots cut through the heavy air. A lot of shots. Goodrich held his head. He felt wronged, humiliated. He had told them not to and they had not listened.

Goodrich did not return to the grave sites. He waited for them in the hootch. They worked in the field for a few minutes. He could hear them conversing. He heard the spade pitch dirt. Then they returned to the porch. They were somber, spent, like after making love. Dan smiled faintly.

Only Snake spoke to Goodrich. “You keep your mouth shut, Senator. Know what I mean?”

THEY tore sections off of the thatch porch and made two sledlike stretchers. Baby Cakes was loaded onto one of them, Ogre onto the other. Then they wound slowly back through sawgrass fields, two men pulling each stretcher like somber pallbearers, a gut-wrenched funeral procession that had avenged the murders of its kin.

And, when they returned, the Spot Report to regiment read: 2 VC KIA.

28
CAMP HANSEN, OKINAWA

Hodges stood at the base of the low, flat hill and felt a dry, insistent wind confront him as he stared up at the Officers’ Club. He stood uneasily in the raw wind, no longer used to the elements after a month of Japanese hospital beds and wards, and questioned reality again.

Am I really on my way back to Vietnam?

It was a difficult truth to accept, after all the days of shots and probing rods and gouging scalpels, all the doctors peering over him as if he were a specimen on a book page or pickled in formaldehyde, all the pain. He thought of the days of warm floating and then falling into valleys of excruciating pain. Days when warm and pain were the total conscious focus, his mind nothing but an image on the ceiling, and thought could not be considered. Only little blurbs flashing through, like a slide show on the ceiling. Booby trap. Rabbit over him, dripping sweat into his face. Blood gushing from his arms and through his trousers. Picture faded. Booby trap. Grandma's lips are set, her eyes in tears. We all so proud of you. Picture faded. Booby trap. Picture of father, cap at a cocky angle, footlocker behind it. I'm not afraid.

Then pain would chase the slide show off the ceiling, leaving only red throbs that flashed from behind his eyebrows. Warm and pain and uninvited slide shows. It was terrible and he felt he could not go through it again.

But dreading it was not that easy. He had developed a numbing ambivalence that prevented him from feeling any real bitterness about being sent back. He enjoyed his status as a wounded infantryman. He missed the people in the bush, more than he had ever missed any group of people in his life. There was a purity in those relationships that could not be matched anywhere else. A person's past was irrelevant, unless it affected his performance. A person's future was without exception bright: the Great Reward for doing battle awaited all of them in the World. There was a common goal, and a mutual enemy. And the stakes were high enough to make each minor victory sweet, each loss a cause for grief.

Hodges scratched his head, climbing the hill. I hate it. It's terrible. It's destructive. Nobody gives a rat's ass whether any of us live or die. They've sold us out back in the World. It makes me cry every time somebody gets screwed up. The damn civilians are all VC. It's so stupid any more I can't believe it.

But damn it, I can't wait to show Snake my scars.

Nothing in the Club had changed and that alone reminded him of how different he had become. He entered through the game-room doors and watched anxious young Lieutenants drink and play pool and shuffleboard. The electric tension of the uninitiated dominated all their motions.

Not young, he thought. They were his age. Merely different. Green. The thin green line, he mused, allowing himself a small grin. He had met several of them, had even allowed himself a war story or two, but he did not yet enjoy exploiting their greenness. He would fly back to Da Nang with them. The bush was still too real, too much a killer to be laughed at. He liked the honored place his scars and experience accorded him, but most of all he found them naive and boring.

He walked through the dining area, heading for the bar. He quickly scanned the tables, searching for her, but it was mid-afternoon and the dining area was empty. He moved into the bar area, nodding to the scattered groups of men at the tables, and sat alone at the bar.

He bought a bourbon-and-water and tipped it straight up, draining it quickly. He bought another and sipped it slowly, waiting for the buzz to hit him. It was his greatest solace. His tongue and lips went numb, then his face. He bought another drink. He was watching himself in the mirror, but he was seeing Vietnam. He felt vaguely like a wounded cock being re-razored and tossed back into the dust arena. His only option was to win another fight, for the glory of the owner, or to die.

And yet… And yet. Once the cock gets the taste of it, mused Hodges, you may as well throw him back into the arena. He isn't good for anything else because the fight is in his blood.

And he missed them. He missed the abrasive, deeply dedicated companionship of Snake. He wondered about the misguided antics of Wild Man and Waterbull, and whether anyone had heard from Phony. He even missed the complaints of Bagger, and the morose lamentations of Goodrich. It was all a part of it, he reasoned, drawing on his fourth bourbon-and-water. It all made the whole thing.

He addressed his drunken image in the mirror. The image stared searchingly back at him as he spoke. “I hate it. Goddamn it, I hate it. But I miss it.”

He could see the dining area through the mirror, and presently he noticed the waitresses begin to prepare tables for dinner. Their way of walking was no longer entrancing to him. Rather, it appeared timid, restrained. He was used to Oriental women after a month in Japan. During his last ten days in the hospital he had been an ambulatory patient, and had emptied his anxieties into a half-dozen Japanese whores.

But he had thought of her continually since his mede-vac to Japan, knowing he would transit through Okinawa on his way back to Vietnam. He remembered her freshness, her hesitating innocence. Her earlier reluctance was its own attraction. She was young, fresh, untainted by the spoilings of the others.

Finally she crossed the mirror, her deceptively curved body hidden by the waitress uniform, her face a study of emotional control. Her presence was a hand that lifted him from his chair and pushed him into the dining area, seeking her. He was alone and confused and she was almost an anchor, a part of his pre-horrific past. Walking toward her, he could not help but marvel at his own earlier conquest. My God, she's dynamite, he thought.

She was preparing a table in the far corner of the room. She saw him coming and half-smiled, as if embarrassed, then looked around herself to ensure that the other waitresses were out of earshot. Her doe eyes watched him impishly as he approached and he felt light, buoyant, a part of something clean and electric that had shot between them.

No time for formalities. Vietnam in three days. He started to take her arm and her eyes grew large and she backed away, looking around the room. “No-o-o! You crazy?”

He remembered. Resist. Pressure for equal time from officer observers. Image of purity. He backed away, not wanting her to feel cornered or embarrassed. “Please see me tonight.”

“No can do! I got Okinawa boyfriend now.” She became the slightest bit coy, straightening already straight silverware. “You say four months, you come on R & R.”

To him it was an admission. “I couldn't. I was hit.”

She stared curiously at him. “What is ‘hit’?”

He rolled down his collar, unveiling ropelike welts of scars along his neck and lower head. He secretly reveled in her expression as she squinched her face, on the verge of nausea. Along his back was an ineradicable message that he had endured and conquered an unsharable hell. The ultimate message, mused Hodges drunkenly, that transcends all language barriers. One scar is worth a thousand wasted words.

“I'm on my way back.”

“Vietnam?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged helplessly, his voice a whisper. “I'm scared.”

She softened, staring into gray eyes that had shone at her in the dark room months before, while he filled her insides for the first time with the stuff of love. Vietnam. Again.

“Please. Tonight.”

She shook her head, upset. “No can do.” He still stood nakedly before her. “Mebbe tomorrow?”

Tomorrow. No time. Tomorrow could be next year or never. The way flights into Vietnam were handled, tomorrow could be Da Nang. “No tomorrow.” Hodges walked away from her, back to the bar. Got to think about it, figure it out. He felt the stares follow him, from other waitresses and officers at the bar. Screw them. All of 'em. What the hell do they know.

He sat in her area at dinner. He said almost nothing, looking dumbly at her with an empty face. Tomorrow. Bullshit. As he rose to leave he touched her arm and stopped her in one of her journeys to another table.

“I'll wait for you outside tonight.” She said no again and walked away.

HE sat in the dark on the fence railing, whipped by the dry, insistent breeze, thinking of the other times he had waited for her, and of the intervening months. He no longer understood himself completely and the very fence on which he sat was where he had begun to lose his comprehension.

As he dragged on his tenth cigarette she became a gliding shadow in the dark. He hopped down from the railing and stood in front of her. “Mitsuko.”

She stopped abruptly, staring into him. He was unable to tell whether she was angry or merely upset. He stepped toward her and she lowered her head. “No-o-o! Boyfriend come now. Pick me up in front. You go!”

Tomorrow. No time. “Tell him to go.” He sensed the wrong in his demand as soon as he issued it. It asked too much in the name of uncertain memories.

Remarkably, she compromised. “Come my house later. Ten-thirty. O.K.?”

He took her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. She kissed him back, charging him, then walked quickly away. He returned to the bar and had another bourbon and then swore it off for the night, feeling he had abandoned his only friend for her. After that he took a long, sobering walk through the camp and into the village. It was dangerous to walk alone. The camp and Kin village had spawned their own myriad of battlegrounds, shadows and bushes where violent men would gut you for the dollars in your wallet. Americans behind the gutting knives. But still he walked, quickly, impervious.

IT was time. He bounded down the lighted street to her apartment, knowing the way by heart, retracing less-burdened footsteps of his former self. He knocked quietly on the door and she answered it, filling the door with a fresh innocent radiance. He stepped inside and closed the door and she looked achingly at him and asked him what he wanted but she knew what he wanted because she craved it, too. He crushed her to him and felt her breathe more quickly and then there was no need to crush her because she was holding him so tightly that he could feel her urgent pressing from knee to shoulders.

The futon was unfolded but it was too far away, a whole room away, and he had no time to walk it. No time. He pulled her to the kitchen floor and somehow her happy-coat was gone and he reveled in the silky tightness of her skin again, having dreamed of it so many thousand times that he had to remind himself that this was real. She talked to him in low moans and he said his only Japanese words over and over, Ichi Ban, Ichi Ban, and he was inside her, she was hot mercury for him. He grasped for every part of her, wanting to absorb it all, and then exploded, sobbing from spent emotion.

And then was still. They held each other tightly on the kitchen floor, the light still on, the wonderful misery of memory now a melancholy joy of rediscovery. But Hodges was already thinking of when he would leave her again, and he embraced her more tightly, a murmur deep inside him saying that he would not lose her if he somehow held her close enough.

She smiled shyly and left him for a moment and when she returned he grabbed her and wrestled her to the futon. They laughed, still wrestling, then abruptly she held him very tight, her face into his chest. Billows of raven hair were a blanket on his middle parts.

Then they began talking, using gestures and half-words to convey experiences and thoughts. He watched her give so much of herself merely to be understood, and was overcome by the innocent beauty of her effort. She talked to him with small words, and with her hands, and with her eyes, telling him how much she had missed him, her voice almost in awe that he was now in front of her. He grabbed her to him, grinning. Words, he decided, are so empty. This is what you call communication.

He tried to tell her about Vietnam. She was too used to Marines to fully appreciate it. She saw the combat-innocent going in, and the survivors going out. She thought it was terrible that he had been hurt, and stroked his ropelike knots of scars as he spoke, gently massaging each one, trying to rub the hurt away. But she could not appreciate all of it. He stopped talking about it. There was no way she would ever even comprehend.

She mentioned something about her Okinawan boyfriend that he did not understand, and he waved her off. “Hey. Forget the man, Mitsuko.”

She laughed. “O.K.”

“No, I mean really. You wanna get married? All right. Marry me.”

She started to laugh and then stopped, trying to read his face. Finally she pursed her lips, her eyebrows furled, and scolded him.

“You crazy. American, Okinawan get in trouble all the time. I know. Forget it.”

He lay back on the futon, his hands behind his head, smiling comfortably. He felt better than he had since—well, since the last time he had been with her. “Everything I've ever asked you to do, you've said no first. Then you've always done it. Do you realize that? Well, I'm gonna marry you. I just made up my mind. And I'm not gonna let a little thing like you not wanting to get in my way!”

She studied him back. She had not understood everything he said, but she comprehended that he was serious about it. Or at least believed he was. She spoke with absolute finality. “No. Can. Do. No way. You no got family tomb.”

He grinned quizzically. “What the hell has a family tomb got to do with you and me?”

Slowly she explained. The family tomb was the center of worship. When one dies he is remembered at the tomb. To marry a person who had no family tomb would be to condemn yourself to an afterlife of loneliness, without memory. Parents would never allow it. And her parents’ blessing was important.

She shrugged with finality, eyeing him hopefully. “Understand?”

He nodded, then lay still, pondering her explanation, trying to figure out a way around it. There's got to be a way. Finally he hit it. He remembered all the Sundays talked away with Grandma, learning of the ghosts, the trials and the sacrifices of the ones Grandma simply called “us.” Right here on Okinawa, he thought. Pick a war memorial.

“Hey.” He caressed a silky arm. “Tell 'em I have a family tomb. Tell 'em Camp Hansen is my family tomb. It's the biggest one on the whole damn island!” She laughed, low and velvety, thinking he was teasing her. Then he attempted to explain it. The way he was brought up. Bullets in the creek beds. Daddy in the back shed. She mulled it for a few moments, not really understanding, running her fingers gently over his recent wounds, and pulled him to her. Neither mentioned it again.