Going After Cacciato (7 page)

   They were often organized around Standard Operating Procedures. The SOPs were of two sorts, formal and informal.

Formally, it was SOP to search tunnels before blowing them.
Informally, it was SOP to blow the tunnels and move on, without a search, without risking life. Lieutenant Sidney Martin, who was trained at the Point, violated the informal SOPs, and the men hated him.

The routinization of the war, which helped make it tolerable, included even trivial things—what to talk about and when, the times to rest and the times to march and the times to keep the guard, when to tell jokes and when not to, the order of the march, when to send out ambushes and when to fake them. These issues were not debatable. They were governed by the informal SOPs, and these SOPs were more important than the Code of Conduct.

   “How many days you been at the war?” asked Alpha’s mail clerk, and Paul Berlin answered that he’d been at the war seven days now.

The clerk laughed. “Wrong,” he said. “Tomorrow, man, that’s your first day at the war.”

And in the morning PFC Paul Berlin boarded a resupply chopper that took him fast over charred pocked mangled country, hopeless country, green skies and speed and tangled grasslands and paddies and places he might die, a million possibilities. He couldn’t watch. He watched his hands. He made fists of them, opening and closing the fists. His hands, he thought, not quite believing. His hands.

Very quickly, the helicopter banked and turned and went down.

“How long you been at the war?” asked the first man he saw, a wiry soldier with ringworm in his hair.

PFC Paul Berlin smiled. “This is it,” he said. “My first day.”

S
pec Four Paul Berlin tilted his wristwatch to catch moonlight. Twelve-twenty now—the incredible slowness with which time passed. Incredible, too, the tricks his fear did with time.

He wound the watch as tight as it would go. Facing east, out to sea, he counted to sixty very slowly, breathing with each count, and when he was done he looked at the watch again. Still twelve-twenty. He held it to his ear. The ticking was loud, brittle-sounding. The second hand made its infinite sweep.

Maybe it was the time of night that created the distortions. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time. First-hour guard was better; the safest time, and surest, and once it ended you could sleep the night through. Or last-hour guard. Last guard was all right, too, because there was the expectation of dawn coming upon the sea, and you could watch the water turn to color as if paint had been poured into it at the horizon, and the pretty colors helped sustain pretty thoughts.

Sure, it was the hour. Things shimmered silver in the moonlight, the sea and the coils of wire below the tower, the sand winding along the beach. The night was moving now. He tried not to look at it, but it was true—the night moved in waves, fluttering. The grasses inland moved, and the far trees. Middle-hour guard, it was a bad time for keeping watch.

Kneeling, he lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hand to hide the glow, then he stood and leaned against the sandbagged wall and looked down on the sea. The sea helped. It protected the back and gave a sense of distance from the war, a warm washing feeling, and a feeling of connection to distant lands. His mind worked that way. Sometimes, during the hot afternoons beneath the tower, he would look out to sea and imagine using it as a means of escape—stocking Oscar’s raft with plenty of rations and foul-weather gear and drinking water, then shoving out through the first heavy breakers, then hoisting up a poncho as a sail, then lying back and letting the winds and currents carry him away—to Samoa, maybe, or to some hidden isle in the South Pacific, or to Hawaii, or maybe all the way home. Pretending. It wasn’t dreaming, it wasn’t craziness. Just a way of passing time, which seemed never to pass.

He could make out the dim outline of Oscar’s raft bobbing at anchor in the moonlight. They used it mostly for swimming. Sometimes, when boredom got the best of them, they would take it out to deeper water and fish off it, spend the whole day out there, separating themselves from the daily routine.

He watched the sea and the bobbing raft for a long time. Then he checked the watch again. Twelve-twenty-two.

He tried to remember tricks for making time move.

Counting, that was one trick. Count the remaining days. Break the days into hours, and count the hours, then break the hours into minutes and count them one by one, and the minutes into seconds.

He began to figure it. Arrived June 3. And now it was … What was it? November 20, or 25. Somewhere in there. It was hard to fix exactly. But it was November, he was sure of that. Late November. Not like the old-time Novembers along the Des Moines River, no
lingering foliage. No sense of change or transition. Here there was no autumn. No leaves to turn with the turning of seasons, no seasons, no crispness in the air, no Thanksgiving and no football, nothing to gauge passage by. Inland, in the dark beyond the beach, there were a few scrawny trees, but these were mostly pines, and the pines did not change whatever the season.

November-the-what?

Oscar’s birthday had been in July. In August, Billy Boy Watkins had died of fright—no, June. That was in June. June, the first day at the war. Then, in July, they’d celebrated Oscar’s birthday with plenty of gunfire and flares, and they’d marched through the sullen villages along the Song Tra Bong, the awful quiet everywhere, and then, in August, Rudy Chassler had finally broken the quiet. That had been August. Then—then September. Keeping track wasn’t easy. The order of things—chronologies—that was the hard part. Long stretches of silence, dullness, long nights and endless days on the march, and sometimes the truly bad times: Pederson, Buff, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn. But what was the order? How did the pieces fit, and into which months? And what was it now—November-the-what?

He extinguished the cigarette against his thumbnail and flipped it down to the beach.

Stepping over the sleeping men, he moved to the tower’s west wall and faced inland.

He tried to concentrate on the future. What to do when the war was over. That was one happy thought. Yes—when the war ended he would … he would go home to Fort Dodge. He would. He would go home on a train, slowly, looking out at the country as it passed, recognizing things, seeing how the country flattened and turned to corn, the silos painted white, and he would pay attention to the details. At the depot, when the train stopped, he would brush off his uniform and be certain all the medals were in place, and he would step off boldly, boldly, and he would shake his father’s hand and look him in the eye. “I did okay,” he would say. “I won some medals.” And his father would nod. And later, the next
day perhaps, they would go out to where his father was building houses in the development west of town, and they’d walk through the unfinished rooms and his father would explain what would be where, how the wiring was arranged, the difficulties with subcontractors and plumbers, but how the houses would be strong and lasting, how it took good materials and good craftsmanship and care to build houses that would be strong and lasting.

The night was moving. He concentrated hard, squinting, trying to stop the fluttering …

He would go to Europe. That’s what he would do. Spend some time in Fort Dodge then take off for a tour of Europe. He would learn French. Learn French, then take off for Paris, and when he got there he would drink red wine in Cacciato’s honor. Visit all the museums and monuments, learn the history, sit in the cafés along the river and smile at the pretty girls. Take a flat in Montmartre. Rise early and walk to the open market for breakfast. He would eat very slowly, crossing his legs and maybe reading a paper, letting things pass by, then maybe he’d walk about the city and learn the names of places, not as a tourist but as a man who comes to learn and understand. He would study details. He would look for the things Cacciato would have looked for. It could be done. That was the crazy thing about it—for all the difficulties, for all the hard times and stupidity and errors, for all that, it could truly be done.

S
o without Harold Murphy and his big gun they continued along the trail west, twice finding the ash of Cacciato’s breakfast fires, once a neat pile of discarded ammunition. They found a broken penknife and tripflares and grenades, but they did not find Cacciato.

“War’s over,” Doc Peret took to chanting. “Peace and domestic tranquillity, a humble line from Marsilius. Translated it means this: Back on the block.”

The jungle ended.

Descending, flattening as it dropped, the land opened to expose patches of sky. The rain forest turned scraggly. There were antelopes and deer. The trees thinned out to make meadows, and the meadows grew wider and fuller, and soon the meadows became open plains. At the crest of a small hill they stopped to look down on savanna that stretched to the horizon. They were quiet. Taking turns, they used the lieutenant’s binoculars.

“Peace,” Doc murmured. “World unto end, amen.”

It was graceful, expansive country. To the north, barely visible even with the field glasses, a river ran down from the hills and wound off into a flat meadow filled with wild flowers. There were gazelles in the meadow. The sky was full of birds.

They marched easily now. The trail widened, turning north toward the river, and soon it became a real road. At noon Oscar found an empty Black Jack wrapper. Ten minutes later Eddie spotted a swirl of smoke just beyond the next line of hills.

“It’s him,” Stink said. His teeth rapped together.

Unslinging his weapon, Stink tapped the magazine to be sure it was engaged. He waved impatiently for the others to follow.

The road kept widening. For a time it ran parallel to the river, then it swung off sharply to the west, weaving through a stand of hunched banyan trees. The smell of smoke was strong now. Up ahead there was a strange new sound, a low groaning, something stamping. Stink dropped his pack and broke into an awkward half-trot, cradling his rifle.

The road made a final violent twist through the trees and emerged into a bright clearing.

It happened instantly.

There was a short, high squeal, then a shout. Stink fired. He dropped to one knee and kept firing. Paul Berlin stumbled, threw himself forward and rolled. Insane, he thought. A pair of old water buffalo stood at the center of the clearing, both yoked up to a large slat-cart.

Stink fired without aiming. It was automatic. It was Quick Kill. Point-blank, rifle jerking. The first shots struck the closest animal in the belly. There was a pause. The next burst caught the buffalo in the head, and it dropped.

That fast. Every time, that fast.

Someone was screaming for a cease-fire but Stink was on full automatic. He was smiling. Gobs of flesh jumped off the beast’s flanks.

Paul Berlin, sprawled now in the center of the road, had the rare courage to peek.

Mad, he kept thinking. Gone to the zoo. No reason, no warning. He heard someone bawling—a woman’s bawling. The clearing shimmied in a hazy white swirl. Chunks of meat and hide kept splattering off the shot-dead water buffalo. It wouldn’t end. Behind him, in the weeds, the lieutenant screamed for a cease-fire, pawing at the sky from flat on his back.

It ended. There was quiet, then a clicking noise as Stink rammed in a second magazine.

The fierce bawling continued. Doc and Eddie were picking themselves up. Oscar was gone.

Grinning, Stink Harris posed on one knee.

   “Lash LaRue,” Stink kept chirping. “Lash L. LaRue.”

Whoever was bawling was still bawling. It was like a baby’s wail, high and angry.

“Lash L. LaRue. You see them reactions? You
see?
”

The clearing gleamed. The dead buffalo was bleeding. The living buffalo kept trying to run. It would get to its feet, stumble, struggle for a moment, and then fall.

“Like lightning, man! Zip, zap!”

It was a woman’s bawling. It came from somewhere near the cart. The cart was splashed with blood.

Stink licked his lips and grinned.

“Stupid,” Doc said. He was shaking his head. “Stupid, stupid.”

The cart was piled high with lamps and rugs and furniture. Three women sat there. The two old women were bawling. The other was a girl. A girl, not a woman: maybe twelve, maybe twenty-one. Her hair and eyes were black. She wore an
ao dai
and sandals and gold hoops through her ears. Hanging from a chain about her neck was a chrome cross.

“Greased lightning,” Stink said. “Hands like bullwhips.”

“Stupid.”

“Zingo, bingo, bang!”

“Criminal stupid.”

All three women were bawling now. Madhouse sounds. The bawling flickered in and out, sometimes very high, other times seeming to tremble and fade. The dead buffalo kept bleeding.

“Fastest hands in the West,” Stink tittered. He looked at Paul Berlin and flicked his eyebrows. “Zip, splash, totaled!”

   They spent the night in the clearing.

Unbuckling the harness, Eddie and Doc dragged the dead buffalo off the road and covered it with branches. Oscar managed to quiet the other animal. Patting its nose, clucking, he led it to a tree and tethered it and brought it water. Stink built a campfire. Afterward, as dark came, the lieutenant began the interrogation.

“Refugees,” said the young woman, the girl. She glanced nervously at Stink Harris. “You know refugees? My aunts, they take me away. But the war chases us.”

As if on signal, the two old women began howling, their noses at the moon. The lieutenant waited. He rubbed his eyes.

“Look,” he said softly, “I’m sorry about this. War’s a lousy thing.”

“And now poor Nguyen.”

“Who?”

Sadly, moving only her head, the girl gestured in the direction of the dead water buffalo. “My aunts raised him from a tiny baby. Their own breasts. And now poor Nguyen—”

“Stupid,” Doc Peret said.

Stink looked up. He shrugged, picked up his weapon and began cleaning it.

They were silent. Leaning back against his rucksack, the lieutenant stared for a time into the fire. Then he blinked and looked at the girl.