The Best of Lucius Shepard (44 page)

the wire at
the base of the hill. I was part of the MP contingent, and I guess I was the
closest thing Randall had to a friend. We weren’t really tight, but being from
a small Southern town myself, the son of gentry, I was familiar with his
type—fey, quiet farmboys whose vulnerabilities run deep—and I felt both sympathy
and responsibility for him. My sympathy wasn’t misplaced: nobody could have had
a worse job, especially when you took into account the fact that his top
sergeant, a beady-eyed, brush-cut, tackle-sized Army lifer named Andrew Moon,
had chosen him for his whipping boy. Every morning I’d pass the tin-roofed shed
where the corpses were off-loaded (it, too, was just inside the wire, but on
the opposite side of the hill from the PX), and there Randall would be,
laboring among body bags that were piled around like huge black fruit, with
Moon hovering in the background and scowling. I always made it a point to stop
and talk to Randall in order to give him a break from Moon’s tyranny, and
though he never expressed his gratitude or said very much about anything, soon
he begn to call me by my Christian name, Curt, instead of by my rank. Each time
I made to leave, I would see the strain come back into his face, and before I
had gone beyond earshot, I would hear Moon reviling him. I believe it was those
days of staring into stomach cavities, into charred hearts and brains and Moon
all the while screaming at him . . . I believe that was what had squeezed the
poetry out of Randall and birthed his radio soul.

I tried to
get Moon to lighten up. One afternoon I bearded him in his tent and asked why
he was mistreating Randall. Of course I knew the answer. Men like Moon, men who
have secured a little power and grown bloated from its use, they don’t need an
excuse for brutality; there’s so much meanness inside them, it’s bound to slop
over onto somebody. But—thinking I could handle him better than Randall—I
planned to divert his meanness, set myself up as his target, and this seemed a
good way to open.

He didn’t
bite, however; he just lay on his cot, squinting up at me and nodding sagely,
as if he saw through my charade. His jowls were speckled with a few days’
growth of stubble, hairs sparse and black as pig bristles. “Y’know,” he said,
“I couldn’t figure why you were buddyin’ up to that fool, so I had a look at
your records.” He grunted laughter. “Now I got it.”“

“Oh?” I
said, maintaining my cool.

“You got
quite a heritage, son! All that noble Southern blood, all them dead generals
and senators. When I seen that, I said to myself, ‘Don’t get on this boy’s case
too heavy, Andy. He’s just tryin’ to be like his greatgrandaddy, doin’ a
kindness now and then for the darkies and the poor white trash.’ Ain’t that
right?”

I couldn’t
deny that a shadow of the truth attached to what he had said, but I refused to
let him rankle me. “My motives aren’t in question here,” told him.

“Well,
neither are mine . . . ‘least not by anyone who counts.” He swung his legs off
the cot and sat up, glowering at me. “You got some nice duty here, son. But you
go fuckin’ with me, I’ll have your ass walkin’ point in Quanh Tri ‘fore you can
blink. Understand?”

I felt as if
I had been dipped in ice water. I knew he could do as he threatened—any man
who’s made top sergeant has also made some powerful friends—and I wanted no
part of Quanh Tri.

He saw my
fear and laughed. “Go on, get out!” he said, and as I stepped through the door,
he added, “Come round the shed anytime, son. I ain’t got nothin’ against
noblesse oblige. Fact is, I love to watch.”

And I walked
away, knowing that Randall was lost.

In
retrospect, it’s clear that Randall had broken under Moon’s whip early on, that
his drifty radio spiels were symptomatic of his dissolution. another time and
place, someone might have noticed his condition; but in - Vietnam everything he
did seemed a normal reaction to the craziness of war, perhaps even a bit more
restrained than normal, and we would have thought him really nuts if he hadn’t
acted weird. As it was, we considered him a flake, but not wrapped so tight
that you couldn’t poke fun at him, and I believe it was this misconception that
brought matters to a head.

Yet I’m not
absolutely certain of that.

Several
nights after my talk with Moon, I was on duty in the operation bunker when
Randall did his broadcast. He always signed off in the same distinctive
distinctive fashion, trying to contact the patrols of ghosts he claimed were
haunting the free-fire zones. Instead of using ordinary call signs like Charlie
Baker Able, he would invent others that suited the country lyricism of his
style, names such as Lobo Angel Silver and Prairie Dawn Omega.

“Delta Sly
Honey,” he said that night. “Do you read? Over.”

He sat a
moment, listening to static filling in from nowhere.

“I know
you’re out there, Delta Sly Honey,” he went on. “I can see you clear, walkin’
the high country near Black Virgin Mountain, movin’ through twists of fog like
battle smoke and feelin’ a little afraid, ‘cause though you gone from the
world, there’s a world of fear ‘tween here and the hereafter.

Come back at
me, Delta Sly Honey, and tell me how it’s goin’.” He stopped sending for a bit,
and when he received no reply, he spoke again.     “Maybe
you don’t think I’d understand your troubles, brothers. But I truly do. I know
your hopes and fears, and how the spell of too much poison and fire and flyin’
steel warped the chemistry of fate and made you wander off into the wars of the
spirit ‘stead of findin’ rest beyond the grave. My soul’s trackin’ you as you
move higher and higher toward the peace at the end of everything, passin’
through mortar bursts throwin’ up thick gouts of silence, with angels like
tracers leadin’ you on, listenin’ to the cold white song of incoming stars. . .
. Come on back at me, Delta Sly Honey. This here’s your good buddy Randall J.,
earthbound at Noc Linh. Do you read?”

There was a
wild burst of static, and then a voice answered, saying, Randall J., Randall
J.! This is Delta Sly Honey. Readin’ you loud and clear.”

I let out a
laugh, and the officers sitting at the far end of the bunker turned their
heads, grinning. But Randall stared in horror at the radio, as if it were
leaking blood, not static. He thumbed the switch and said shakily, “What’s your
position, Delta Sly Honey? I repeat. What’s your position?”

“Guess you
might say our position’s kinda relative,” came the reply. But far as you
concerned, man, we just down the road. There’s a place for you with us, Randall
J. We waitin’ for you.”

Randall’s
Adam’s apple worked, and he wet his lips. Under the hot bunker lights, his
freckles stood out sharply.

“Y’know how
it is when you’re pinned down by fire?” the voice continued. “Lyin’ flat with
the flow of bullets passin’ inches over your head? And you start thinkin’ how
easy it’d be just to raise up and get it over with. . . You ever feel like
that, Randall J.? Most times you keep flat, ‘cause things ain’t bad enough to
make you go that route. But the way things been goin’ for you, man, what with
stickin’ your hands into dead meat night and day--”“

“Shut up,”
said Randall, his voice tight and small.

“—and that
asshole Moon fuckin’ with your mind, maybe it’s time to consider your options.”

“Shut up!”
Randall screamed it, and I grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Take it
easy,” I told him. “It’s just some jerk-off puttin’ you on.” He shook me off;
the vein in his temple was throbbing.

“I ain’t
tryin’ to mess with you, man,” said the voice. “I’m just layin’ out, showin’
you there ain’t no real options here. I know all them crazy thoughts that been
flappin’ round in your head, and I know how hard you been tryin’ to control
‘em. Ain’t no point in controllin’ ‘em anymore, Randall J. You belong to us now.
All you gotta do is to take a little walk down the road, and we be waitin’. We
got some serious humpin’ ahead of us, man. Out past the Napalm Coast, up beyond
the high country . . .” Randall bolted for the door, but I caught him and spun
him around. He was breathing rapidly through his mouth, and his eyes seemed to
be shining too brightly—like the way an old light bulb will flare up right
before goes dark for good. “Lemme go!” he said. “I gotta find ‘em! I gotta tell
‘em it ain’t my time!”

“It’s just
someone playin’ a goddamn joke,” I said, and then it dawned on me. “It’s Moon,
Randall! You know it’s him puttin’ somebody up to this.”

“I gotta
find ‘em!” he repeated, and with more strength than I would have given him
credit for, he pushed me away and ran off into the dark.

He didn’t
return, not that night, not the next morning, and we reported him AWOL. We
searched the base and the nearby villes to no avail, and since the countryside
was rife with NLF patrols and VC, it was logical to assume he had been killed
or captured. Over the next couple of days, Moon made frequent public denials of
his complicity in the joke, but no-one bought it. He took to walking around
with his holster unlatched, a wary expression on his face. Though Randall
hadn’t had any real friends, many of us had been devoted to his broadcasts, and
among those devotees were a number of men who . . . well, a civilian
psychiatrist might have called them unstable, but in truth they were men who
had chosen to exalt instability, to ritualize insanity as a means of
maintaining their equilibrium in an unstable medium: it was likely some of them
would attempt reprisals. Moon’s best hope was that something would divert their
attention, three days after Randall’s disappearance, a peculiar transmission
came into operations; like all Randall’s broadcasts, it was piped over the PA,
and Moon’s fate was sealed.

“Howdy, Noc
Linh,” said Randall or someone who sounded identical to him. “This here’s
Randall J. Willingham on patrol with Delta Sly Honey speakin’ to you from
beyond the Napalm Coast. We been humpin’ though rain and fog most of the day,
with no sign of the enemy, just a few demons twistin’ up from the gray and
fadin’ when we come near, and now we all hunkered down by the radio, restin’
for tomorrow. Y’know, brothers, I used to be scared shitless of wakin’ up here
in the big nothin’, but now it’s gone and happened, I’m findin’ it ain’t so
bad. ‘Least I got the feelin’ I’m ‘someplace, whereas back at Noc Linh I was
just spinnin’ round and and close to losin’ my mind. I hated ol’ Sergeant Moon,
and I hated him worse after he put someone up to hasslin’ me on the radio. But
now, though, I reckon he’s still pretty hateful, I can see he was actin’ under
the influence of a higher agency, one who was tryin’ to help me get clear of
Noc Linh. . . which was somethin’ that had to be, no matter if I had to die to
do it. Seems to me that’s the nature of war, that all the violence has the
effect of lettin’ a little magic seep into the world by way of compensation. To
most of us, this broadcast signaled that Randall was alive, but also knew what
it portended for Moon. And therefore I wasn’t terribly suprised when he
summoned me to his tent the next morning. At first he to play sergeant,
ordering me to ally myself with him; but seeing that this didn’t work, he
begged for my help. He was a mess: red-eyed, unshaven, an eyelid twitching.

“I can’t do
a thing,” I told him.

“You’re his
friend!” he said. “If you tell ‘em I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, they’ll
believe you.”

“The hell
they will! They’ll think I helped you.” I studied him a second, enjoying his
anxiety. “Who did help you?”

“I didn’t do
it, goddammit!” His voice had risen to a shout, and he had to struggle to keep
calm. “I swear! It wasn’t me!”

It was
strange, my mental set at that moment. I found I believed him—I didn’t think
him capable of manufacturing sincerity—and yet I suddenly believed everything:
that Randall was somehow both dead and alive, that Delta Sly Honey both did and
did not exist, that whatever was happening was an event in which all
possibility was manifest, in which truth and falsity had the same valence, in
which the real and the illusory were undifferentiated. And at the center of
this complex circumstance—a bulky, sweating monster—stood Moon. Innocent,
perhaps. But guilty of a seminal crime.

“I can make
it good for you,” he said. “Hawaii . . . you want duty in Hawaii, I can arrange
it. Hell, I can get you shipped Stateside.”

He struck me
then as a hideous genie offering three wishes, and the fact that he had the
power to make his offer infuriated me. “If you can do all that,” I said, “you
ain’t got a worry in the world.” And I strode off, feeling righteous in my judgment.