The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories (12 page)

He hunched over the body of a lone Viet
Cong, a sniper killed by a foreword unit in our column. Our platoon
commander, Lt. Terry Wucker, this scared twenty-two year old fresh
out of ROTC, squatted under a tree with the radio operator, calling
in the enemy KIA by the book. A few of the men fanned out to keep
watch on the perimeter, some whispered low, maintaining noise
discipline, but I watched The Surgeon as he sliced into the dead
flesh, removing the left eye from the body with the fluid motion of
his bowie knife.

“
What the hell is he
doing,” I whispered to Tallman, a short-timer who had humped the
boonies with The Surgeon for almost ten months. Tallman once said
that ten months was long enough to sweat in Vietnamese for the rest
of your life.

“
Cutting the fucker’s eye
out,” he said. “What the hell does it look like?” Curiosity, like
strange but powerful gravity, pulled my eyes back to the body. The
Surgeon’s hands worked quickly. His wide, flashing knife didn’t
have the precision of a scalpel, but his fingers carried a swift
and special skill.

“
Why?”

“
He collects them.” Tallman
spat on the ground and rubbed his saliva into the dirt with the toe
of his boot. “He fucking collects them,” he repeated, shaking his
head.

I watched in silence as The Surgeon pulled a
glass jam jar from his rucksack, a jar filled with clear fluid and
a few floating horrible things—other eyes with small bits of flesh
clinging to them, bobbing like bleached olives. After unscrewing
the lid, he held the new eye in his palm, rinsed it with a splash
of water from his canteen, and dropped it into the jar.

“
Rumor is, they help him
see,” Tallman said, laughing.

The Surgeon looked up and smiled at me as he
rubbed the thick blood from his knife on a tuft of elephant grass.
After he slipped the clean, glinting knife back into its scabbard
and stood, I thought the man was a giant. He looked at me, and his
mouth fell open in a wide grin.

When The Surgeon walked point, he wore the
jar on a small leather cord around his neck like a special charm,
and we never made contact with the enemy. He led us through dense
underbrush, often hacking our way through the humming thickness of
the jungle, but none of the grunts complained. He kept us safe.

One day, the lieutenant lost it. His college
education blocked common sense—wisdom that even I, a straw-headed
farm kid from Kansas—could comprehend. After stopping the column,
the thin line of green men snaking through the leaves, Lt. Wucker
steamed past me and moved forward, approaching The Surgeon as he
knelt at the front of our unit.

“
What the hell are we
doing?” he asked in a near-whisper, his voice quavering enough to
belie his frustration and insecurity.

“
Avoiding traps.” The
Surgeon didn’t speak often, but his voice was low, grinding like
slabs of concrete rubbed together. He looked forward, into the
jungle ahead, not really speaking to the lieutenant at
all.

“
Like hell. We’re heading
the wrong direction.” Lt. Wucker squirmed a bit as he spoke, an
effect of the jar of swimming eyes hanging around The Surgeon’s
neck.

“
Your mistake,” said The
Surgeon.

“
I’m in command. Decker, on
point. Karnowski, you head to the rear of the column.”

We didn’t march long before we all realized
Lt. Wucker’s error. While walking point, Nick Decker,
nineteen-year-old high school dropout from Alabama, stepped into a
small hole filled with sharpened bamboo shafts—a hole in the ground
like the maw of some awful, prehistoric shark. The point of one
stake punctured the bottom of his boot, slicing through his foot,
and punching through the leather upper. Nick released a sharp yelp
of pain and dropped to his knees. We spent an hour sorting out a
medivac.

“
Fucking Lieutenant,”
Tallman muttered as we sat on the orange earth and
smoked.

When we weren’t walking and digging holes in
the dirt, we waited in the rear. The rear—sounds like we actually
had a front line—only a newbie called it the rear for long. But
short stints at base camp brought better sleep, quick showers, and
nights of poker under a corrugated steel roof that amplified the
rainy season.

“
Linder, stop fucking
around and deal,” Tallman said after biting the tip off of his
cigar and spitting the brown plug onto the dirt floor of the
hootch. I quickly tossed five cards to each of the guys around the
table, Tallman, Dave Rowe, Mickey Hernandez, Cliff Manalo, and
myself.

“
Did you guys hear about
Decker?” Rowe, a pale kid from Minnesota, asked in his slow
northern drawl while the rest of us scrutinized and organized our
cards.

“
Lost his foot.” Tallman
flipped open his Zippo and ignited the end of his cigar.

“
No shit.” I looked past
Tallman to where The Surgeon sat on his bunk, casually flipping
through the pages of
Hot
Rod
. The dim light of the barracks cast a
pall over his face, graying his features like a silver gelatin
print of some grim-faced old salt from one of my high school
history books. The jar sat on a small shelf next to him, covered
with a green towel.

“
Fucking gangrene. Had to
amputate.” The cigar tip glowed as Tallman inhaled.

“
Fucking Lieutenant,”
Manalo said, laying his cards face down on the table. He was a
solid and square man with a dark face and smudged jaw.

“
Should have listened to
The Surgeon.” Tallman tossed five cigarettes in the center of the
table. “Ante up, boys.”

I didn’t find much sleep at night, any
night, but I spent that particular night stretched on my bunk,
staring at the dark ceiling of the bunkhouse, thinking about Nick
Decker’s missing foot and The Surgeon’s jar of eyes, eventually
dreaming about one-eyed men marching toward me, each extending one
hand. The next morning, as we saddled up for a return to the bush
and our hide-and-seek game with a phantom enemy, curiosity ate at
my stomach like I’d swallowed a fist full of nails.

“
I don’t get it,” I said,
clutching my M-16 like a lifeline.

“
What don’t you get?”
Tallman tightened the straps on his rucksack.

“
Does he always just cut
out one eye?”

“
Yeah, since I’ve known
him.”

“
I don’t get
it…”

“
What’s there to get?”
Tallman shrugged and shouldered his pack while the deafening thump
of helicopter blades devoured us.

In the field, our lives resumed the
predictable pattern of walk, dig, sleep for two, three hours, and
repeat. Lt. Wucker received word from the CO that elements of D
Company drew the job of flushing out a contingent of North
Vietnamese regulars massing north of An Khe. To us grunts, all this
meant was more walking with the chance that some violence would
break up the tedium of routine. We were bait.

I sat on my helmet, cleaning my M-16 for the
second time that morning. Around me, other members of the platoon
milled around, smoking, flashing quick glances at each other
without speaking. While reassembling my weapon, my roving eyes
caught The Surgeon, standing alone, dissecting the pile of forest
in front of him. The jar rested in the palm of his right hand, and
I thought his lips moved a little, like he was talking to someone I
couldn’t see. He turned and strolled toward the Lieutenant. I
stood, snagging my pot and dropping back on my head as I meandered
in the same direction.

“
Lieutenant,” said The
Surgeon.

Lt. Wucker looked at him, folded the map he
studied a moment before, and stuffed it inside a plastic bag before
speaking. “Yeah Karnowski?”

“
Bad vibes today.” The
Surgeon’s eyes wandered past Wucker.

“
We have orders,
Karnowski.” The Lieutenant tried to meet his gaze. “I don’t give a
shit about your goddamn vibes, understand?”

The Surgeon thrust his thumb over one
shoulder toward the thick trees behind him. “Sniper. Thought you
should know.” With this, he turned and marched away from Lt. Wucker
and over to a small group of grunts—Tallman and Manalo among them.
Wucker stood like a whitewashed statue for a moment before turning
back to the radio and digging his map out of the plastic bag.

Fifteen minutes into the thick canopy and a
VC sniper split Private First Class Matthew Tallman’s head with one
well placed shot. He walked only ten feet in front of me, and with
one quick snap, his body dropped to the ground like an abandoned
marionette. I instantly burrowed, clutching my helmet to my head,
terror slashing and burning through my prone body. I inhaled the
pungent mud and dropped my weapon. I scratched at the ground while
some members of the platoon returned fire; the popping reports of
M-16s sounded like little firecrackers lit under a Folgers can,
seeming so far away.

After a few moments of fear, I scrambled for
my gun. My eyes caught The Surgeon boring straight into me with an
infrared glare. He pointed at me and then pushed toward me with his
hand. Without thinking, I obeyed, rolling to the other side of a
jagged tree stump. A small geyser of earth erupted where I’d been.
I swallowed hard while my eyes were drawn by that small smoking
crater.

Members of our platoon sprayed the treetops
with gunfire until a slight man in black dropped like poisoned
fruit. He hung in space, tied to a rope attached to the top of the
tree, dangling in front of the tree trunk just feet off the
ground.

Lt. Wucker sent a few men on perimeter watch
while the medic attended Manalo, his right side ripped into a
jagged, crimson wound by the sniper. Hernandez and Rowe zipped PFC
Matthew Tallman’s nearly headless body into a black bag. Only then
did the chattering jungle sound return. That was the odd thing, the
quiet, listening jungle followed by the slow rise of distant
monkeys, birds, and buzzing insects.

The Surgeon stood alone next to the sniper,
rolling a toothpick in his mouth. He pulled the knife from its
hilt, sawed the rope, and dropped the body to the ground. Kneeling
then, with deftness and precision, he carved out another eye for
his jar as the heavy beating of a medivac helicopter closed around
us.

Somebody should frag that son-of-a-bitch.”
Mickey Hernandez scowled as we hunched outside our tents and smoked
the last cigarettes of the day. I looked from him to Dave Rowe, and
then The Surgeon.

“
Yeah, fuck him. He should
listen to The Surgeon.” Rowe looked at me, and my stomach
squirmed.

“
Can’t be helped,” said The
Surgeon as he tossed the smoldering butt of his cigarette into a
stand of damp grass and ducked inside his tent.

“
I still say we should frag
that son-of-a-bitch.” Mickey Hernadez puffed out his chest and
sucked in a long drag. Through the shadows just inside his tent, I
could see The Surgeon’s face, eyes open and staring beyond the
green canvas.

After a few weeks of intense search and
destroy, the company returned to the rear for a week of rest, part
of the constant cycle. During that month of combat, The Surgeon
continued to collect eyes until a full school like little fish swam
inside that small jar. After Tallman’s death he withdrew, talking
little to anyone, not even the Lieutenant. Tension in the platoon
mounted with causalities, and we would never wash the orange earth
from under our fingernails.

The Surgeon approached the officers’ hootch
the night before we were scheduled to ship out again. While sucking
on a cigarette and enjoying the night sky in relative safety, I
watched him knock on the door, say something to the man that
answered, and wait. Wucker came to the door when summoned, and The
Surgeon seemed to be explaining something to him, gesturing with
his arms more than I’d seen in the past. The Lieutenant shook his
head, returned inside, leaving The Surgeon to turn and wander away.
He walked toward the perimeter, and my legs started in that
direction without conscious thought.

“
Hey Linder.”

“
Hey,” I said, sidling next
to him, “how’d you know…”

“…
it was you? Easy.” He
held the glass jar toward me, white orbs dancing as the liquid
jostled inside. “Take it. Give it a try.”

I moved my left arm to take the jar, but
hesitated, a vice squeezing my lungs.

“
They won’t bite.” He
dropped the jar in my hand, and I felt it as a small electric
pop—like static electricity but moving through my arm and chest.
The eyes bounced and jumped. I looked at him, his rectangular face,
washed with an even pallor in the twilight, and then his face
faded, the sharp coil of concertina wire in front of us faded, even
the night faded like so much color washed down a drain.

I glimpsed snatches of jungle, trail, rice
paddy, and even here in the camp through dozens of eyes at once. I
reeled for a moment, spinning and lost with no solid substance
beneath my feet, then, looking down, realizing I had no feet. My
skull burned, but I heard his voice saying, “focus, focus” inside
my brain. The ground rushed at me, and I fell to my knees, my
perception suddenly thrust back behind my eyes as I doubled over,
retching, on the hard ground.

“
It gets easier Linder.” He
held the jar again, and offered a hand to help me stand. “Focus on
where we are right now.”

I took the jar again, cold and heavy in my
hand, and concentrated. Again, the world faded, but this time the
colors melted together again in an eerie, not quite daylight glow.
My eyes seemed to stretch their scope and vision into the jungle,
reaching out almost like fingertips. In the strange space,
people—soldiers—walked from between the trees. The whole scene
vibrated inside-out, like a shimmering photo negative.