Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (39 page)

The moment we saw it, a tremendous cheer went up in the shelter, and then the cheer cut off in its own echo. Our closed-circuit system was color television, and this column of oil was bright red.

“Red oil,” someone whispered.

Then it was quiet.

“When can we get out?” someone else demanded.

“Another ten minutes.”

The dust was up and away in the opposite direction, and for ten minutes we stood and watched the bright red oil bubble out of the hole, forming a great pond within the retaining walls, and filling the space with amazing rapidity and lapping over the walls, for the flow must have been a hundred thousand gallons a second or even more, and then outside of the walls and a thickness of it all across the valley floor, rising so quickly that from above, where we were, we saw that we would be cut off from the entire installation. At that point we didn't wait, but took our chances with the radiation and raced down the desert hillside toward the hole, and the mobile homes and the trucks—but not quickly enough. We came to a stop at the edge of a great lake of red oil.

“It's not red oil,” someone said.

“Goddamnit, it's not oil!”

“The hell it's not! It's oil.”

We were moving back as it spread and rose and covered the trucks and houses, and then it reached a gap in the valley and poured through and down across the desert, into the darkness of the shadows that the big rocks threw—flashing red in the sunset and later black in the darkness.

Someone touched it and put a hand to his mouth.

“It's blood.”

Max was next to me. “He's crazy,” Max said.

Someone else said that it was blood.

I put a finger into the red fluid and raised it to my nose. It was warm, almost hot, and there was no mistaking the smell of hot, fresh blood. I tasted it with the tip of my tongue.

“What is it?” Max whispered.

The others gathered around now—silent, with the red sun setting across the red lake and the red reflected on our faces, our eyes glinting with the red.

“Jesus God, what is it?” Max demanded.

“It's blood,” I replied.

“From where?”

Then we were all silent.

We spent the night on the top of the butte where the shelter had been built, and in the morning all around us, as far as we could see, there was a hot, steaming sea of red blood, the smell so thick and heavy that we were all sick from it; and all of us vomited half a dozen times before the helicopters came for us and took us away.

The day after I returned home, Martha and I were sitting in the living room, she with a book and I with the paper, where I had read about their trying to cap the thing, except that even with diving suits they could not get down to where it was; and she looked up from her book and said:

“Do you remember that thing about the mother?”

“What thing?”

“A very old thing, I think I heard once that it was half as old as time, or maybe a Greek fable or something of the sort—but anyway, the mother has one son, who is the joy of her heart and all the rest that a son could be to a mother, and then the son falls in love with or under the spell of a beautiful and wicked woman—very wicked and very beautiful. And he desires to please her, oh, he does indeed, and he says to her, ‘Whatever you desire, I will bring it to you'—”

“Which is nothing to say to any woman, but never,” I put in.

“I won't quarrel with that,” Martha said mildly, “because when he does put it to her, she replies that what she desires most on this earth is the living heart of his mother, plucked from her breast. So what does this worthless and murderous idiot male do but race home to his mother, and then out with a knife, ripping her breast to belly and tearing the living heart out of her body—”

“I don't like your story.”

“—and with the heart in his hand, he blithely dashes back toward his ladylove. But on the way through the forest he catches his toe on a root, stumbles, and falls headlong, the mother's heart knocked out of his hand. And as he pulls himself up and approaches the heart, it says to him, ‘Did you hurt yourself when you fell, my son?'”

“Lovely story. What does it prove?”

“Nothing, I suppose. Will they ever stop the bleeding? Will they close the wound?”

“I don't think so.”

“Then will your mother bleed to death?”

“My mother?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“My mother,” Martha said. “Will she bleed to death?”

“I suppose so.”

“That's all you can say—I suppose so?”

“What else?”

“Suppose you had told them not to go ahead?”

“You asked me that twenty times, Martha. I told you. They would have gotten another dowser.”

“And another? And another?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” she cried out. “For God's sake, why?”

“I don't know.”

“But you lousy men know everything else.”

“Mostly we only know how to kill it. That's not everything else. We never learned to make anything alive.”

“And now it's too late,” Martha said.

“It's too late, yes,” I agreed, and I went back to reading the paper. But Martha just sat there, the open book in her lap, looking at me; and then after a while she closed the book and went upstairs to bed.

15
The General
Zapped an Angel

W
hen news leaked out of Viet Nam that Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie had shot down an angel, every newspaper in the world dug into its morgue for the background and biography of this hardbitten old warrior.

Not that General Clayborne Mackenzie was so old. He had only just passed his fiftieth birthday, and he had plenty of piss and vinegar left in him when he went out to Viet Nam to head up the 55th Cavalry and its two hundred helicopters; and the sight of him sitting in the open door of a gunship, handling a submachine gun like the pro he was, and zapping anything that moved there below—because anything that moved was likely enough to be Charlie—had inspired many a fine color story.

Correspondents liked to stress the fact that Mackenzie was a “natural fighting man,” with, as they put it, “an instinct for the kill.” In this they were quite right, as the material from the various newspaper morgues proved. When Mackenzie was only six years old, playing in the yard of his humble North Carolina home, he managed to kill a puppy by beating it to death with a stone, an extraordinary act of courage and perseverance. After that, he was able to earn spending money by killing unwanted puppies and kittens for five cents each. He was an intensely creative child, one of the things that contributed to his subsequent leadership qualities, and not content with drowning the animals, he devised five other methods for destroying the unwanted pets. By nine he was trapping rabbits and rats and had invented a unique yet simple mole trap that caught moles alive. He enjoyed turning over live moles and mice to neighborhood cats, and often he would invite his little playmates to watch the results. At the age of twelve his father gave him his first gun—and from there on no one who knew young Clayborne Mackenzie doubted either his future career or success.

After his arrival in Viet Nam, there was no major mission of the 55th that Old Hell and Hardtack did not lead in person. The sight of him blazing away from the gunship became a symbol of the “new war,” and the troops on the ground would look for him and up at him and cheer him when he appeared. (Sometimes the cheers were earthy, but that is only to be expected in war.) There was nothing Mackenzie loved better than a village full of skulking, treacherous VC, and once he passed over such a village, little was left of it. A young newspaper correspondent compared him to an “avenging angel,” and sometimes when his helicopters were called in to help a group of hard-pressed infantry, he thought of himself in such terms. It was on just such an occasion, when the company of marines holding the outpost at Quen-to were so hard pressed, that the thing happened.

General Clayborne Mackenzie had led the attack, blazing away, and down came the angel, square into the marine encampment. It took a while for them to realize what they had, and Mackenzie had already returned to base field when the call came from Captain Joe Kelly, who was in command of the marine unit.

“General, sir,” said Captain Kelly, when Mackenzie had picked up the phone and asked what in hell they wanted, “General Mackenzie, sir, it would seem that you shot down an angel.”

“Say that again, Captain.”

“An angel, sir.”

“A what?”

“An angel, sir.”

“And just what in hell is an angel?”

“Well,” Kelly answered. “I don't quite know how to answer that, sir. An angel is an angel. One of God's angels, sir.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind, Captain?” Mackenzie roared. “Or are you sucking pot again? So help me God, I warned you potheads that if you didn't lay off the grass I would see you all in hell!”

“No, sir,” said Kelly quietly and stubbornly. “We have no pot here.”

“Well, put on Lieutenant Garcia!” Mackenzie yelled.

“Lieutenant Garcia.” The voice came meekly.

“Lieutenant, what the hell is this about an angel?”

“Yes, General.”

“Yes, what?”

“It is an angel. When you were over here zapping VC—well, sir, you just went and zapped an angel.”

“So help me God,” Mackenzie yelled, “I will break every one of you potheads for this! You got a lot of guts, buster, to put on a full general, but nobody puts me on and walks away from it. Just remember that.”

One thing about Old Hell and Hardtack, when he wanted something done, he didn't ask for volunteers. He did it himself, and now he went to his helicopter and told Captain Jerry Gates, the pilot:

“You take me out to that marine encampment at Quen-to and put me right down in the middle of it.”

“It's a risky business, General.”

“It's your goddamn business to fly this goddamn ship and not to advise me.”

Twenty minutes later the helicopter settled down into the encampment at Quen-to, and a stony-faced full general faced Captain Kelly and said:

“Now suppose you just lead me to that damn angel, and God help you if it's not.”

But it was; twenty feet long and all of it angel, head to foot. The marines had covered it over with two tarps, and it was their good luck that the VCs either had given up on Quen-to or had simply decided not to fight for a while—because there was not much fight left in the marines, and all the young men could do was to lie in their holes and try not to look at the big body under the two tarps and not to talk about it either; but in spite of how they tried, they kept sneaking glances at it and they kept on whispering about it, and the two of them who pulled off the tarps so that General Mackenzie might see began to cry a little. The general didn't like that; if there was one thing he did not like, it was soldiers who cried, and he snapped at Kelly:

“Get these two mothers the hell out of here, and when you assign a detail to me, I want men, not wet-nosed kids.” Then he surveyed the angel and even he was impressed.

“It's a big son of a bitch, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir. Head to heel, it's twenty feet. We measured it.”

“What makes you think it's an angel?”

“Well, that's the way it is,” Kelly said. “It's an angel. What else is it?”

General Mackenzie walked around the recumbent form and had to admit the logic in Captain Kelly's thinking. The thing was white, not flesh-white but snow-white, shaped like a man, naked, and sprawled on its side with two great feathered wings folded under it. Its hair was spun gold and its face was too beautiful to be human.

“So that's an angel,” Mackenzie said finally.

“Yes, sir.”

“Like hell it is!” Mackenzie snorted. “What I see is a white Caucasian male, dead of wounds suffered on the field of combat. By the way, where'd I hit him?”

“We can't find the wounds, sir.”

“Now just what the hell do you mean, you can't find the wounds? I don't miss. If I shot it, I shot it.”

“Yes, sir. But we can't find the wounds. Perhaps its skin is very tough. It might have been the concussion that knocked it down.”

Used to getting at the truth of things himself, Mackenzie walked up and down the body, going over it carefully. No wounds were visible.

“Turn the angel over,” Mackenzie said.

Kelly, who was a good Catholic, hesitated at first; but between a live general and a dead angel, the choice was specified. He called out a detail of marines, and without enthusiasm they managed to turn over the giant body. When Mackenzie complained that mud smears were impairing his inspection, they wiped the angel clean. There were no wounds on the other side either.

“That's a hell of a note,” Mackenzie muttered, and if Captain Kelly and Lieutenant Garcia had been more familiar with the moods of Old Hell and Hardtack, they would have heard a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. The truth is that Mackenzie was just a little baffled. “Anyway,” he decided, “it's dead, so wrap it up and put it in the ship.”

“Sir?”

“God damn it, Kelly, how many times do I have to give you an order? I said, wrap it up and put it in the ship!”

The marines at Quen-to were relieved as they watched Mackenzie's gunship disappear in the distance, preferring the company of live VCs to that of a dead angel, but the pilot of the helicopter flew with all the assorted worries of a southern Fundamentalist.

“Is that sure enough an angel, sir?” he had asked the general.

“You mind your eggs and fly the ship, son,” the general replied. An hour ago he would have told the pilot to keep his goddamn nose out of things that didn't concern him, but the angel had a stultifying effect on the general's language. It depressed him, and when the three-star general at headquarters said to him, “Are you trying to tell me, Mackenzie, that you shot down an angel?” Mackenzie could only nod his head miserably.