Going After Cacciato (33 page)

“Evil?” Oscar tapped Doc’s shoulder. “You ever see evil in Nam?”

“What’s evil?” Doc said.

The girl smiled indulgently. They were passing through a small moated village full of spires and steeples. The van shimmied on the brick streets. When they were back in the forest, Oscar removed Cacciato’s rifle from its wrapping and began cleaning it.

“So all I’m saying,” the girl continued, “is I’m behind you dudes all the way. You’ve got friends. All over the world, everywhere, there are people who’ll be there to help. Sympathetic friends.”

“No kidding?”

“Sure. These people can plug you into anything you need. Money, jobs, housing. Tickets to Sweden. Contacts. I mean, it’s a whole underground network set up for guys like you. Resisters, deserters. Guys with the guts to say no.”

Oscar let the rifle bolt fall.

“Stop,” he said.

“And isn’t that what friends are for? To help out when—”

Pausing, the girl glanced into the mirror. Oscar had the rifle against her ear. She pulled off onto the shoulder, stopped the van, and sat still while Oscar moved to the front seat.

She smiled at him. “Look, rape isn’t necessary. I mean, hey, I really dig sex. Really. We can rig up a curtain or something.”

“Out,” Oscar said.

The girl kept smiling. She wore blue jeans and a sweater and a khaki jacket. “Outside?” she said.

“You got it.”

“It’d be a lot more comfortable in back.”

“Out.”

Shrugging, glancing again into the mirror, the girl opened the door and stepped out. She watched while Oscar dumped out her suitcase and sleeping bag. She never stopped smiling.

Eddie drove, Oscar rode shotgun.

“You know,” Doc said wistfully, “sometimes I do feel a little guilt.”

   It was springtime. The forests were wet. They saw lilacs and budding trees, melting snow high on the mountains, scrubbed villages, wide-open skies.

Through Graz and Linz, then northwest toward Passau, the Danube, through the dark, through Regensburg and midnight Nürnberg. It was easy.

In Fulda the van broke down. They left it behind, marched two miles to the railroad depot and boarded the next train west.

There was acceleration now. The nightlong rumbling of the train, crowded cars, the wind behind them.

Fast through the German heartland—Giessen, Herborn, Limburg—and at each stop Paul Berlin dashed for a window to watch as the conductor waved his lantern. There were streetlights in the towns and steeples over the churches and neon-lighted ads for Coke and Bromo-Seltzer. The end was coming. He could feel it. Already he anticipated the textures of things familiar: decency, cleanliness, high literacy and low mortality, the pursuit of learning in heated schools, science, art, industry bearing fruit through smokestacks. Wasn’t this the purpose? The goal? Some vision of virtue? Weren’t these the valued things? Wasn’t freedom worth pursuing? If civilization had meaning, weren’t these the reasons? Hadn’t wars been fought for these very promises? Even in Vietnam—wasn’t the intent to restrain forces of incivility? The
intent
. Wasn’t it to impede tyranny, aggression, repression? To promote some vision of goodness? Oh, something had gone terribly wrong. But the aims, the purposes, the ends—weren’t these fully virtuous and proper? Wasn’t self-determination a proper aim of civilized man? Wasn’t political freedom a part of justice? Wasn’t military aggression, unrestrained, a threat to civilization and order? Oh, yes—something
had gone wrong. Facts, circumstances, understanding. But had the error been wrong intention, wrong purpose?

Now, rushing through the German dark, Paul Berlin felt full of this same desire for order and harmony and justice and quiet. A craving. Good intention made good by good deeds. Civility on street corners and courtesy at the borders between nations. He could feel it coming.

At dawn the train crossed the Rhine.

There was a twenty-minute wait in Bonn—he considered getting off but decided against it—then they were moving again through the hilly country that rolled south toward Luxembourg. Things were familiar. Lightheaded and eager, he couldn’t get over how easy it was. He felt he was riding on ice.

T
he battle flowed down the ditch. It turned into the village, through the eastern paddies, then north into the next village. It was a running battle. Gunfire came in bursts separated by long hollows of silence. There was no enemy. There were flashes, shreds of foliage, a bright glare. Heavy machine-gun fire rattled behind the hedges along the ditch, then later from a grove beyond the second village. Then it ended. It ended like the end of rain. There were dripping sounds succeeded by an immense silence.

Afterward, Paul Berlin and Cacciato and Eddie Lazzutti patrolled the ditch, slowly retracing the course of the battle. They moved carefully. It was a wide, shallow-cut ditch that during the rainy season overflowed to feed the paddies on either side. Now it was dry. Its bed was cracked with fissures deep enough to put a hand into, and along the banks elephant grass grew in crisp powdered tangles. Cacciato found Buff.

They dragged him from the ditch and laid him in the grass and
covered him with a poncho, then Eddie used the radio to call in a dustoff.

Later Doc Peret came by.

“It’s Buff,” Eddie said.

He pulled back the poncho and Doc bent down to examine the body.

“We found him like that,” Eddie said. “Unpretty.”

Doc took the grenades and ammo off the body. Then he went through the pockets. He removed a pack of Luckies and a wallet and chewing gum and a penknife and the dog tags. He dropped everything into a plastic sack, clipped the sack shut, and tied it to Buff’s wrist.

“You forgot something,” Eddie said.

“Cover him up.”

“Sure, but don’t you want what’s in his helmet?”

“Just cover him up,” Doc said.

Behind them, Paul Berlin’s eyes were closed. He sat with Cacciato at the lip of the ditch. Cacciato was opening a can of peaches. The peach smell was sweet. Eyes closed, Paul Berlin pretended he was at the bottom of a chlorinated pool. Pressing silence on his ears, breathing through a snorkel, fuzzy green images swimming in his head. He tried not to think. He concentrated on the silence, but then he was thinking. Buff’s shirts—the way they stuck to his shoulders in the heat. Or when he wasn’t wearing a shirt, the way his belly hung over his belt, jiggling as he walked. A big guy, Buff was. All that blood and flesh and fat. On hot days he would sweat and stink. They called him Buff, which was short for Buffalo, which was short for Water Buffalo. Paul Berlin tried not to think about it. When they died, they died. He pretended he was deep in a green pool in summertime.

“On his knees,” Eddie was saying. “Cacciato found him like that, all hunched up on his knees, ass stickin’ up in the air, and his face … you had to see it. Hunched up like the way Arabs pray, all tight, facedown in his fuckin helmet. You had to see it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did. Just like a prayin’ Arab.”

“Arabs don’t pray that way,” Doc said.

“Hell, they don’t. I seen it on TV, man. Asses in the air, all hunched up like that.”

“Okay.”

“I seen it.”

“I said
okay.
”

There was a muffled explosion, a slight shaking of the earth. Two more explosions followed. In the village beyond the ditch the First and Second Platoons were blowing bunkers. Paul Berlin kept his eyes closed. What could you do? It wasn’t really sadness. Or only partly sadness. Embarrassment, that was a big part of it. Noise and confusion, and then silence. You peek up. You feel the embarrassment.

He listened to Eddie and Doc talking softly behind him. Cacciato was still eating his peaches, and the smell mixed with the smells of the burning village.

He tried to concentrate on better things. His father raking leaves—red-gold piles to be jumped into, then taken to the incinerator behind the house, the smoke and bonfire smells, acorns popping. That was the smell. Bonfires and burning villages and dried crackling grass. It wasn’t really sadness.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey, Oscar.”

Oscar Johnson dropped his pack. There was the sound of a canteen being opened, then quiet, then a rustling.

“Who is it?”

“Big Buff,” Eddie said. “Who else?”

“Buff.”

“There it is. You want to look?”

“No,” Oscar said.

They were quiet for a time.

“Shot,” Eddie said. “You had to see it. Found him down there in the ditch. Hunched up like a praying Arab in Mecca.”

“Eddie’s our Arab expert,” Doc said. “And I wish to hell he’d shut up.”

“I never said I was no expert.”

“Then—”

“But I seen how Arabs pray, just like that. Like in
Lawrence of Arabia.
”

“Yeah.”

“A billion fuckin Arabs blowin’ up trains.”

“Buff. You wouldn’t think it.”

Paul Berlin listened with his eyes closed. Life after death, he thought. And what could you do? Beside him, Cacciato was opening a can of boned chicken. Brine smells, the click of the P-38, salt and fat. Cacciato, he’d eat anything. Ham and eggs from a can, tropical chocolate bars, anything. He’d eat it. Dumb, all right. Just dumb. You couldn’t fake sadness. It had to be there. If it wasn’t there you couldn’t fake it. You were glad it wasn’t you. There was relief—it was Buff and not you. You couldn’t pretend away the relief. The salty smell of the chicken made him dizzy and he turned away.

The earth was shaking again. Two hundred meters up the ditch, the others were still blowing bunkers. The explosions came in groups of three. It was Stink’s steady hand: tight, neat charges that left no stains against the sky. There was smoke, but the smoke came from the burning huts. Paul Berlin let himself slide to the bottom of his warm deep pool.

“Any kills?” Eddie asked.

There was silence. Paul Berlin could picture Oscar shaking his head.

“One-zip, huh? The gooks shut us out, one-zip.”

“That’s enough, man.”

“I’m just—”

“Have some respect and shut the fuck up.”

“What can you do? You can’t—”

“You can have respect.”

They were smoking now. Paul Berlin smelled it. He paid attention to the ritual. Quiet, then voices.

“He was okay.”

“Sure, he was. I wish the hell they’d hurry.”

“What time you got?”

“Noon,” Doc said. “Almost noon. I wish they’d hurry.”

“Buff don’t care. He was pretty slow anyhow. Jesus, that time in the mountains. Remember that?”

“What?”

“In the
mountains.
”

“Oh, yeah.”

“He was okay, though. He was—you know—he was okay.”

“Pass the smoke, man.”

“And, shoot, he was good with the gun, I’ll say that. He knew that big gun.”

“
Pass
it”

“He knew that M-60 like … like, he really knew it. Take it apart in twenty seconds, remember that? Twenty fuckin seconds.”

“Sure.”

“Zip, pow. Just like that. Take it apart so fast you’d shit. I mean, he really knew that gun.”

“I guess Murphy gets it now.”

“I guess so,” Eddie said.

“Unless Paul Berlin wants it.” There was a pause. It was Oscar. “Hey, Berlin. You want the big gun now? You want it, it’s yours.”

Paul Berlin, whose eyes were closed, shook his head.

“He don’ want it.”

“I guess not.”

“Maybe Cacciato wants it.”

“No, Cacciato don’t want it neither. Harold Murphy’s elected.”

“Thank God for democracy,” said Doc Peret.

“Amen.”

Oscar sighed. “Buff,” he said. “No lie, the dude
was
good with that gun.”

“Tell it.”

“He was okay.”

They waited another fifteen minutes.

When he heard the dustoff coming, Paul Berlin opened his eyes. The day was bright without clouds. A single willow tree shaded part of the ditch. This surprised him. He hadn’t noticed the tree before; in all these months, it was the first willow he’d seen. A fine white powder covered the tree and the grass beneath it. Maybe it was the powder that gave the air the smell of sulfur. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, but it was pleasant to smell it. It was pleasant to see the bright light, and the tree, and the long shallow ditch.

No, he couldn’t pretend to be sad.

He sat up and looked for the chopper. Eddie was on the radio now, talking to the pilot, and Doc and Oscar sat smoking beneath the willow.

“Yellow,” Eddie said.

Doc threw out yellow smoke.

They didn’t see the chopper until it was right on them, settling down in the brown grass beside the ditch, then there was a long blind struggle to get Buff aboard. The plastic sack fell off the wrist, and Doc swore and quickly tied it back on, and the noise was fierce, and white powder filled the air, and then it was done. The pilot held up two fingers; the chopper rose, dipped, and took Buff away.

“So,” Doc said.

They smoked again, a serious and quiet smoke, then they stood up and put on their packs and pulled the straps tight. Cacciato was finishing a chocolate bar.

“So,” Doc said. He tried to smile. “What about the helmet?”

It lay at the bottom of the ditch. They looked down on it, then looked away.

“We can’t like—you know—just le
ave
it there,” Doc said. “It’s not decent.”

“True,” Oscar said, but he did not move.

“Not decent.”

“True enough.”

Eddie knelt down, pretending to have trouble with his radio.

“And, look, the big gun’s down there, too. We can’t—”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody’s got to,” Doc said softly. “It’s not respectful to let it stay. Somebody’s got to do it.”

Cacciato did it.

He shrugged and smiled at Paul Berlin. There was chocolate all over his face. He dropped his pack and weapon, slid down the bank to the bed of the ditch, picked up the machine gun, and carried it up to Oscar.

Then, again, he slid down into the ditch.

Very carefully, keeping it steady and close to his stomach, Cacciato picked up the helmet and carried it down the ditch to a patch of high grass.

Life after death, Paul Berlin thought. It was a stupid thought. How could it be? Eyes and nose, an expression of dumb surprise—how could this promise anything? He wanted to feel grief, or at least pity, but all he could feel was curiosity.