BERGAMOT
He was all kind of wasted, watered, stoned, spun out, plastered, pissed, pilled and punched up on Halloween of '67. Through a doorway strung up with wooden beads, a wriggling mass of people wore rather less than usual. Between them, a bedsheet was pinned up to divide the loft in two. A projector sparkled coloured light through the dust and upon the sheet flickered two writhing orange bodies, male and female. Making merry. Cut right into them were the silhouettes of partygoers, dancing, laughing and throwing their heads back like the spines of so many Pez Dispensers. Everything flowed—hair, liquor, palazzo pants, musical time, but in particular, water from a faulty toilet across the hall. Sirius lifted one shoe in disgust from the rusty spreading waters. He was dressed as a warrior, Samoan or Maori or something, painted with blue tattoos. A guitar strap held a spear with a tinfoil blade across his back. Though Sirius's favourite bong was broken because someone had kicked it over while dancing to "Sorry 'Bout That," he was too stoned to get very upset about it. Across the twisting and tossing of the human current, he spotted a few familiar faces from the art school, and set off to meet up with them just as the song changed; four tense seconds of projector-whirring non-music before a fresh bass line laid anticipation across the lower register.
The girls were a trio of cackling witches, each crowned in a tangled nylon wig. Their low-cut black velvet gowns just barely brushed hems across their mid-thighs—four skinny, two plump. The man was very tall and very Greek, dressed as a pirate with an eyepatch across one heavy brow.
"Are you really done?" one of them was asking.
"Not going back?"
"Are you sure?"
"I'd do the same, if I didn't know my old man would cut me off in an instant."
"Not even for the studio access?"
"Well, I guess it must be nice," said one of the girls. A plastic wig hair caught in her teeth. "Having money to just bum around."
"I don't need the studio anymore," said Sirius. "I'm sick of that stuff. It's boring."
"But you're still working, aren't you?" asked the Greek. "I liked those clocks."
"They were shit and you don't have to lie." There was a bottle in his hand of unknown origin; perhaps someone had given it to him, or else it materialized out of the ether. "I'm not a sculptor."
"But you are one."
"I was one. I don't know. Sorry, I gotta go to the john." He allowed the hordes to swallow him up, and swam through their body heat to be near the turntable, where the music was loudest and could be perceived through vibrations in the floorboards. These, too, were wet and the brown had spread so far across the loft that the girls were kicking up splashes with their white vinyl heels. Nobody seemed to have noticed it but him and he was too far gone into the pleasure to care much; also, it was not his loft and not his problem. He'd had enough to drink at the pre-party, which was held not necessarily in that loft, but definitely in the same psycho-emotional locale. Thus transportation had not been a problem.
He wasn't sure about the next unit of time other than that it beat its own rugged trail through the silvery cymbal beat. Some girl had thrown her furs over the radiator and they were burning with a scent like castoreum and incense. A few guys seemed to be named Nick, and they had shared a brownie cut into quarters with Sirius, and everyone went out on the fire escape to smoke. One lost ember tracing its own lemniscate into the wind, singeing a falling leaf. Back inside, the power had shorted out and so the turntable was off, but some people were strumming acoustic guitars and Sirius sang along with the crowd while the three witches beat a rhythm against a sliding steel door. The water was now deep enough that the prissiest girls had left in disgust, concerned for the fate of their shoes. He felt very tired, and asked an old school friend for something to get him back into the groove and received it after the exchange of a few bills, and then, after a fold in the fabric of time, he was through the beads and back in the toilet across the hall, pressed up against the rotting cupboard under the sink, with a handsome stranger launching a reconnaissance expedition beneath the damp sarong. Snap went the spear's cardboard shaft, folding in half against the small of his back. The power was back on, just barely. An overhead lamp flickered with a moth stuck to the hanging chain. The guy—whose name and face Sirius did not know—had a strong neck, stubbled with fine black shadows, and he was dressed as a doctor. His stethoscope was cutting into Sirius's sternum, which didn't feel altogether bad. Then the power cut out again, possibly for good, and they were plunged into full dark. Not true dark—not jungle dark—but private dark, the dark of a black forest cake.
"So," said the doctor.
"Yeah."
"It's gonna get cold," he said. "Should we get outta here?"
"I guess," Sirius shrugged. They made out a little bit more, and then the toilet started overflowing so bad that the smell chased them out into the dilapidated stairway. The first time he touched the painted belly of a Cobra*, Sirius would remember the shark teeth spray-painted above that railing, and the signatures, illegible, between the nook of wall and ceiling. On the front stoop, the fake doctor pressed Sirius against the bricks and whispered into his neck—
"So, where we going?"
And he was so fucking stupid, so dumb, so naive, so ignorant as to the phone message his mother had passed on to Reggie who had forgotten to pass it on to Sirius on account of the stress of an upcoming accounting midterm, that he said, "I have a place on Bleecker Street."
"Yeah?"
"Sound alright?"
The not-doctor laughed. "I think you forgot your coat upstairs, man."
They looked up, through the deep, interlocking grids of the fire escapes, up to the fifth floor railing, where someone was knocking the ash off a cigarette.
"It's fine," he said. "We'll move quick." If only he had stopped to think—
They ran the distance with short breaks as indicated by traffic. The doctor was laughing his ass off at Sirius's stupidity in leaving his coat behind on a forty-five degree night. When they waited for the light to change at Prince and Sullivan, the doctor pushed Sirius up against the grille of a shuttered camera emporium and kissed him something fierce. The grid imprinted into his back like an Agnes Martin made flesh, or else the serrated steel of a construction site's walkway, and in the moment, he imagined what it might be like to make love on the cloud-misting top floor of a skyscraper under construction, like would it be cold and wet or else something fantastical as walking up a ladder of rain. The light went green, and they raced to make it down the remaining two blocks to Sirius's studio apartment like someone had set a timer, which was in a sense the truth, but not as they understood it. He couldn't remember making it up the stairwell but they must have because the light in the hallway was out and they fumbled through the dark. His fingertips knew the right door, tracing the number hand-welded from fine rods of steel. Introduction to Metal, first year, goggles rimed with silver dust. Inside, he and the doctor dispensed with the formal rites of hospitality. He and Sirius had collapsed onto the couch and discovered the broken spring when Sirius remembered to ask if the stranger if he wanted a drink or something.
His face was pink and damp. "No."
"Okay."
"Yeah," the doctor started to unwrap the sarong. "Okay."
Moving through the motions like a rock song—unravelling, gathering speed, adding percussion after the first four bars. Sirius ripped off the toy stethoscope and the doctor laughed and kissed his way down Sirius's bare chest. Abrupt and then timid and then fast again, the dense pregnant pause between a rhetorical question and a chorus kicking in to answer. It was cold in the apartment and they were grasping at each other for every flavour of heat. The doctor yanked on Sirius's shoulder-length hair, which he didn't like, and without thinking, he slapped the doctor hard in the face. The man froze just long enough for a spicy guitar lick, and then they laughed it off and went back to work. A baggy of green fuzz slipped out of the doctor's lab coat pocket as Sirius tore the coat free. The doctor pressed Sirius's shoulder into the crease behind a cushion with his whole body weight, and he was trying to remember the last song they heard as they left the party—it had a crispy-sizzling baseline like frying bacon on a manhole cover in July—the doctor smelled really good, tobacco and leaves in decay. Sirius grabbed the back of his head. He mashed the doctor's mouth against his own, not gently. There were handclaps just behind the crunchy base, he just realized—propelling the beat along, coating the partygoers in a slick of anticipation.
"D'you have a bedframe?," grunted the doctor.
"Can't we just stay here."
"Yeah." The doctor reached down low. "I guess that works."
Oh, yeah. It did work—not too bad, and not slowly either, until, all at once, it royally fucking did not—the front door slammed opened and a rush of cold from the hallway followed the scent of Piguet Fracas.
"Siriu—" a sing-song voice froze.
In his memory, the whole thing creaked forward in slow motion like a rusting water wheel—the smell of her. Bergamot and orange blossom. With her detachable fur collar bobbing on the tan coat as she sniffed at the air.
His head rose above the sofa, sweaty hair falling to his bare shoulders.
"Get—"
"Who the hell are you—"
"—the fuck out," he said calmly.
His mother looked him in the eyes, which were exactly the same evaporating-raindrop grey as her own. Her hair was sprayed and backcombed into a fortress of greater compressional strength than anything he'd ever dig in Kontum, adding at least three inches to her height and the square of that to her power.
"I said, 'get out,'" said Sirius.
He was addressing his mother, but it was the doctor who shrugged on his lab coat, hastily zipped his pants and ran like hell into the hall. When he brushed past W. Elizabeth Black, she followed him with her eyes alone, possessed of a Mona Lisa quality that children and animals found especially frightening. She waited until he disappeared to stroll over to the door, quietly close it, and swipe the chain through the slide lock.
Quiet room. Sirius covered himself up with the unravelled sarong. His mother walked to the kitchen to pick up a white envelope off the salvaged card table he had stabilized with a textbook under one leg. Illuminated Manuscripts of Britain and Ireland. The tear in the envelope was frothy with crinkled shreds.
"You were not invited," said Sirius. "I didn't call." The envelope was now in her hands. One pale pink manicured fingertip slipping beneath the fold.
"The President of the United States," she said.
"Whatever you told Reggie does not count as asking me."
"Greeting."
"Mother, please—" He hastily repinned the sarong, more like a toga now. Damn but the apartment had dropped at least ten degrees since she had entered, and the fun of underdressing on Halloween had dissipated entirely. Was he high? Had he been high at all? He felt stone cold sober. Dull and dry as a stone.
"You are hereby ordered," she read aloud.
"It doesn't matter," he said, rushing towards her. His feet against the floor felt like nothing. Was he even running or was he flying towards the light and the bare bulb bright above her, and the glowing white paper—her lipstick so stark, her Cupid's bow like a chisel. Was he even trying to grab the letter from her hands?
"For induction...blah blah...federal building...and so forth…"
"I saw Dr. Malfoy, he said—"
"On November 20th, 1967, seven o'clock AM—"
"Mother. Mother. He said it's all good, I had a complete exam—"
She turned to look at him and the light was all around and above her with stark shadows spilling across the scuffed wood floor. The light was in her eyes and her shiny nails and in the paper which now glowed supernaturally—and the envelope and glossing off the hairs of the fur collar.
The sarong slipped from its pin and he was nearly stark naked before her but for an instant reflex to cover himself.
"I saw Dr. Malfoy already," he tried again, though his voice was near an octave higher and shrill like the whistle of wind against the window panes. "I have—" he swallowed. "Splay feet."
"Is that so."
"He's written a letter."
She closed her eyes and a tiny clot of mascara fell down onto the lapel of her felt coat. Like a punctuation mark. "Do you know what I think, son?"
"It's been done already." He took a step away from her. "I have the letter. It's signed. There's no ch—"
"Do you know what I think?" she repeated.
Your heart is a landfill. Is what he did not say in reply. Your hands are claws. Your eyes are broken bottles and your fingers are claws.
"What I think," she said.
A landfill. A landfill. A graveyard, a shuttered institution. An abyss.
"I think it's something to be proud of, that you'll serve your country." She held the envelope up to the cave of her chest. "A privilege. A thing you'll look back on and be glad you did."
"Dr. Malfoy—"
"I'm so proud of you." His mother. Her gaze sliced open the costume he'd burn in a barrel the next morning. There was a tear forming in her left eye like a shiny shred of glass. "Reggie will be proud. Your father will be proud. I will hang the picture of you in uniform on the mantle."
She stood with her hands folded and the envelope searing burns into his vision such that he would dream of the rectangle becoming a doorway that opened into burning blankness, a brutal shade of bright he'd later call white phosphorus, and a mouse skittered between the two of them, back into safety.
"I'm already out," he breathed. A gambit and she knew it. "He sent the letter."
"There are letters," she said. "And there are phone calls, which can be made without delay." She dropped the envelope onto the floor. He could not retrieve it without bending immodestly in the sarong. She walked to the door, and the bergamot scent followed her like a trotting lapdog.
"Mother—"
She unlocked the door, stepped outside neatly, ducking to avoid the doorframe's interference into her hairdo. God fucking forbid. His mother nearly shut the door when Sirius yanked it back open. He had one card left in the deck and he saw, from her expression, that she knew exactly what he'd play.
"I'll tell them I'm a homosexual."
"Sirius…" she smiled softly.
"That's a discharge for sure."
"Darling."
"I will! I swear to god—"
"Dear, dear child." The tear slipped down her chin, leaving a fine thread of mascara upon her white cheek. "You might say a thing like that. But—" She shrugged, casual as a train pulling out of the station. "I don't believe you will. Happy Halloween."
He did not see the fake doctor again and did not wish to. Three weeks unrolled like a spool of ribbon across a hardwood floor. A lot of newspapers piled up. Black did not read the headlines and he stopped clipping the best cartoons. He burnt the newspapers in a freestanding iron stove and crouched before it for warmth. November-grey. He went for walks to nowhere. The billboards were screaming in silence. A beggar asked for money and Black tossed some paper at her that may or may not have been cash. He bought shiny new things and returned them with a receipt the following day, for no reason. I change my mind. Actually, I change it back. No, I change it again… Clouds misted the gingko trees with cold and from their defoliated nakedness Sirius averted his eyes in furious shame. It was three thousand weeks later and the army physician was spreading Sirius's toes out against the linoleum floor, squinting at the gaps.
"Looks fine to me," he said. He held a clipboard and a pen, and he scribed a series of increasingly ominous checkmarks until the ink gave out and only the shallow imprint of his asymmetric Vs dug tiny trenches onto the page. Landfills.
WHEN IT KNOCKS
They counted. Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours or two seasons (wet and dry) or one thousand and ninety-five meals assuming they ate three meals a day which was a real stretch in the bush, or three hundred and sixty four horrible anxious dawn skies breaking into new light over the denuded valleys, plus a wake-up*, or eight million, thirty thousand breaths, but probably less given how often you held it, or seven hundred thirty high tides or two thousand, one hundred and ninety times going piss in the tubes or the latrine or the mud or in your fatigues right when the shit got real, or five days of dead-tired rest on the searing white beaches of some tropical place that wasn't This Place, or twelve slender new moons blanketing themselves in the dark, or thirty-one and a half million seconds, or one year, or always the understanding that it could be a lot less, like maybe nothing at all if your number was up. When it knocks, you open.
DIG IN
"Alright ladies, dig in," said the cold voice through radio static. "We might be here a while. Over."
"Roger that." Moony dropped the receiver low in his lap. "A while sounds alright."
"It's gonna be two days," grumbled Black. "Two days tops."
"I'm gonna put my feet up and get a bit of shut-eye." Moony rose from the radio and got the large, unfolding D-handle* from Stubby, who had dropped it unceremoniously on the ground before he collapsed.
Potter was already digging. He had some kind of aptitude for it and began without being told. The rest of them wouldn't do pretty much anything short of saving their own skins until the last possible minute—conservation of energy and the like. But Potter was already glazed with red dust. His e-tool scattered clots of mud that fell to the ground with the rhythm of a work song.
"Are you coming?" he said.
"Yeah, yeah. I got to dig for me and the Tree together and he wants to be further in the perimeter."
"Does he ever help?"
"Sure," said Moony. "He's a good LT. I mean it."
Potter stopped digging briefly to swig from his canteen. His face was streaked with dirty sweat, catching the gilded afternoon light like something prettier.
"It's a lot easier to dig in with the D-handle."
"I know that ."
Moony shrugged. "I was meaning to offer you one."
Potter whacked his e-tool at the earth with additional force, "I'm doing just fine on my own, even though it seems like a whole lot of these guys wanna help me out on account of they think I'm a fuckin' idiot."
"AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH!" hollered Stubby, from his own unfinished hole ten metres away.
"WELCOME HOME," echoed another voice—some guy not even in Second Squad—from further back.
Moony laughed. "I don't think you're an idiot. At least, not yet. But you are a cherry and therefore—" he scratched at the pattern of bleached scars upon his right cheek—"not yet in the habit of knowing your ass from a hole in the ground."
"Well, I'm the only one has a hole in the ground as of yet."
Moony shifted his weight from one bad foot to the other also bad foot. "Good for you."
"Are you meaning to be sarcastic?"
"No. I'm being serious."
"I AIN'T EVER SEEN MOONY BE SARCASTIC IN MY GODDAMN LIFE," added Stubby, hoisting his e-tool above his head with both hands like a prize lifter. From this distance, he appeared as a toy silhouetted against the falling light. " Boy , you're a dumbass, Wisconsin."
"Fuck off," said Potter. He was digging even harder now, expending so much fucking energy Moony expected he'd collapse before sundown.
"Anyways," said Moony, wandering towards the rim of Stubby's shallow hole. "Save me a seat."
"Yeah, I'll be sure and do that." He threw a shovel's worth of muck at Moony's feet.
The grasses were high and shuffling like strangers in a crowd. They were making camp on the other side of the gorge, up high on a hill not yet numbered but likely in the three or four hundred meter range. The mud had dried up somewhat over the course of the day and was consequently harder to dig but more comfortable to sleep in, though Moony could sleep anywhere. He was famed for it. In fact a photojournalist had once sold a photograph of him doubled over in a six-by with his legs hanging off the bumper and his head resting on the radio beside him as a monsoon gushed its fury across the truck, the battered helmet and the sucking wasteland of mud; the photo was put up for a prize, though it didn't win, because there were many such photographs of other soldiers doing the same thing under similar or identical circumstances and only so much public appetite for evidence of one's tax dollars falling asleep on the job. He'd never seen the picture and didn't know about the prize either; he was just very, very tired.
Moony climbed the slope of the hill, leaving a trail of flattened grasses behind him. It seemed that the total weight of him never changed across the war, though the fraction attributable to his gear versus his body oscillated, with any increase in gear tending towards a loss in flesh and blood. He had grown so accustomed to the weight that he occasionally wondered in a panic, even while carrying his pack, radio and scrambler, where all his shit went and why his back felt so light. To compensate for his skewed center of gravity, Moony walked with a forward slump and occasionally lost his balance if he'd shed his gear. One time, Black had said, "You remind me of Atlas."
"The map?"
"No, no. Atlas . The Titan?"
"I'm sorry," Moony had said. "I don't know what that is. Is it from a movie or something?"
And it was the worst feeling to catch the flash of disappointment like a lightning bug sparking under the brim of Black's helmet. It came and went so, so quick but he caught it, he held it, he knew it was there.
"I just meant 'cause you hump so much heavy shit, that's all. It's, you know. It's a lot."
"I guess," he'd replied dully. Like the tip of a shovel struck too often. "I only take what I need."
He passed First Squad on his way up the hill. They had already dug into the hardening grass and were stretched out in their holes, boots untied, e-tools dropped wherever, with a ribbon of soul music wafting between them in the humid breeze. Carr was the squad leader of First Squad, a spec-4-cum-sergeant with a lazy smile and a rope-like burn scar across his neck. The pagan gods had granted him an easy bunch—mainly working class kids from smokestack towns or farm country, kids with military dads, kids who started working at eleven. They smoked a lot and went out on ambush uncomplaining, and most fights were resolved through peaceful violence rather than recourse to the Tree, who had confided in Moony that he'd just about had it with the schoolgirl drama of the drafted college boys and their petty bullshit, not to mention Fourth Squad's constant shit-stirring vis a vis allegations of racially discriminatory treatment at the hands of their (black) platoon leader. Carr waved to Moony on his way up, and Moony nodded at him.
"I heard we're not moving tomorrow," said Carr.
Moony shrugged. "Wait and see."
He passed through a cloud of stinking heat tab smoke and found the Tree with Doge and Zachary, the other LTs. They were lying in the grass filling out paperwork on clipboards; Doge and Zachary's radiomen were nowhere to be seen. Doge blew and popped his gum rhythmically; he wore only the trousers of his uniform, and a red ant crawled, unmolested, across the auburn fur of his chest.
"Moony," nodded the Tree.
"Shacklebolt."
Moony swung off his radio and laid it carefully on the grass; he collapsed into a pile next to it, lying on his back and staring up at the sky that snapped down over the hill like a clouded silver lid. He could nearly smell the sky's incipient rain and something chemical and bitter that made him wipe his eyes and nose.
The Tree put the clipboard back into his pack and crawled over to Moony, lying on his stomach with elbows against the grass and his chin balanced on his hands.
"Alright, shoot," said Moony.
"The kid," said Shacklebolt. "Whatcha think."
Moony flicked a dragonfly off the third button of his shirt. "He's a kid."
"Is he usable, though?"
He grinned. "What choice've we got, anyway? Anyway. He works hard, I think."
"I ask you 'cause I trust your judgement, man. Can I put this kid on ambush without getting us all wasted?"
Moony screwed up his mouth, shrugged lightly. "Can't say as I haven't seen him in that kind of situation yet."
"There's always a first time." Shacklebolt squinted at a tall blade of grass reaching up and swaying as though to the beat of a doo-wop song. "Can he do anything?"
"He's been here a day, man. I doubt he knows anything and I mean, it's your call, I'm just the RTO, but…"
"Yeah, yeah." Shacklebolt plucked the grass, not realizing how sharp it was. A bead of blood grew and fell from his index finger like an offering. "I'll be honest with you."
"I know you never lie."
"Yeah, I'll be honest," repeated the Tree. "He looks quite young to me and frankly, I'm not comfortable with these babies they're sending me, straight out to the bush, knowing fuckin' nothing, but the reality is that we are undermanned. Now, I've given Second Squad a lot of breaks because they're so few, but there are limits to these things, you get me?"
"Yeah, I get it," said Moony. Sometimes he wondered if Shacklebolt forgot that he himself was not a part of Second Squad and therefore not directly impacted by decisions regarding it; this, of course, was probably his own fault given that he spent most of his free time with Second Squad and generally failed to remember even the names of the boys in the other squads. A lot of them came and went; inevitably, within a week of arrival, they all looked dirty and hungry and indistinct under the reddish grime; and then they got injured or transferred or wasted or they rotated home.
"Some guys are starting to complain about them not necessarily pulling their weight in the platoon, and…" Shacklebolt shook his head. He was no longer looking at the grass so long as resting his unfocussed brown eyes directly before it. "I know it sounds dumb and unfair after all that shit back in June, but."
"But."
"But. Things have to feel fair on the other squads and I also got the Problem on my ass about shit none of you grunts get paid enough to care about."
Moony chuckled. "For what it's worth," he smiled, "I don't think you get paid enough either and you're humping just the same as us."
"There it is, my friend."
"There it is." Moony stretched his arms and legs. The brush of grass against infected cuts on his hands and wrists twanged with a feeling just this side of pleasurable, like the wrong-note reverbs of a guitarist tuning up. In the purple swollen pad of his left thumb a miniature operation raged on against S. pyogenes. He pressed it against his cheek just to feel the improper warmth. Doge was complaining to Zachary quietly about something he obviously didn't want Moony to hear, though he caught snatches: "Goddamn reprobate… in-country… how'm I supposed to… and then after all...Problem.." Moony's belly was empty and yet the hunger fit neatly inside his jet-roaring fatigue such that he suspected if sleep could be air-dropped in a can, he would trade all his charlies for a single dose.
"SHACKLEBOLT! What's up my brother?" Moony turned his head to see two pairs of battered boots sunk into the deep grass next to him.
"Aw, he don't respond to 'brother' no more, don't you know? Now he a gentleman."
"Eckthcuthe me , Mathter Gravedigger, I forgot to pay the man hith rethpect."
"Look at that clipboard. He makin' a list." It was Gravedigger and what's-his-name from Fourth Squad with the lisp.
Shacklebolt flicked Moony's sweaty forehead. "You might want to deedee* for now. I got shit to handle. Dig us in, okay?"
He scrambled to his feet, replacing the radio on his back. Oh, but it was even heavier once he had put it down and grown accustomed to being light again.
Gravedigger hissed. "Ooooh, he got shit to handle ."
"Get you oven mitth!" cackled the one with the lisp.
Shacklebolt said, "Gravedigger. Aarons."
"Loooootenant."
"At your thervithe."
"Have some fuckin' respect for your superior officer, ya pricks!" yelled Zachary. "Goddamn it." He had manifested a crumpled carton of Winstons out of thin air and was trying to pluck one out of the box with his teeth.
"He superior, alright," commented the Gravedigger. "Straight up closer to the lord." He pointed at the silver ceiling.
"Sit down," growled Shacklebolt. "Whatever it is, we'll handle it like adults."
Desperately unwilling to witness any further drama or catch the wrath of Fourth Squad, Moony found a decent spot and began slamming Shacklebolt's D-handled shovel into the earth, stomping on the blade to cut through the fibrous grasses. His shovel incised an arch from earth to air, repeating the simple motion long since tattooed into muscle memory. Digging was breathing, or prayer. It was a shade of sleep. He'd wondered at the total number of feet he'd dug over the past two years and he imagined each speck of displaced earth piled onto a giant mound like the Aztec pyramids or the blue mountains shading Kon Tum from its Marine-occupied neighbour to the north, Quang Nam. With each shovelful of earth he thought—where do the holes go, how do they dissipate. How long does it take for a foxhole to absorb itself flat through wind or erosion or the violence of time. In the evening, the temperature dropped like a marble but he was granted no relief by virtue of his physical exertion. The sweat rolled down Moony's neck and buried itself in his collar.
"It's gonna be dark soon."
Moony looked up. Before his incomplete hole stood Black, shirtless, with a grotty wine-coloured bandana tied around his forehead. He stood like a figure from a Depression-era farming poster, holding his e-tool across his shoulders, one knee cocked outward.
"Yeah," said Moony. "Why don't you get started on dinner?"
"I'll help you."
"Nah," Moony shrugged, though he very much wanted help digging the two-person hole. "It's alright. I'm near on finished anyhow."
"No, you're not."
Moony cracked a half-smile. "No. I'm not."
They dug into the earth and themselves for whatever remained. Black had this inefficient way of tossing the displaced earth as far as possible from his body with a dramatic gesture that reminded Moony of how an actor might mime the act of digging on stage. His back was shaded red with the dust.
"Potter asked me what's up with Fenwick," said Black.
"I'll bet," grunted Moony.
"He asks plenty of shit. Kid wants to live."
"I sure hope so." Moony coughed on the rising dust. He kicked down on the blade top of his shovel to break new grass, feeling the pressure of the earth ringing a new chord of pain through the mush of his disintegrating foot.
"It's like I'm his junior high teacher or something."
"Give 'em a break, Black," said Moony. "You were a dumb green cherry when you get here too."
"I'm not denying it." Black grinned. His teeth were blue from Kool-Aid. The colour of hills where snipers hide. In the swollen red arcade of Black's gums, Moony prophesied trench mouth and wondered if he should put another such worrisome thought in Black's head or suggest flossing. He chose otherwise.
"So what'd you say."
"What?"
"About Fenwick," explained Moony.
"Oh." Black shrugged. "Nothing that isn't true."
"Don't shake him up too bad."
"I didn't." Black lobbed a hunk of earth up out of the hole and a rock inside it clanged against a discarded ration can. "I told him Fenny's tired. He's been here too long."
"Yeah, I guess that's alright."
"He's gone. Vamoose. "
"Mm."
"Hung his rifle up, shitcanned his fatigues, flown home. Nonstop trans-Pacific. He's sleeping in a bar in Las Cruces and collecting unemployment and leaving dishes for his mom to wash. Macaroni and cheese. Broccoli."
"That's a lot of detail," said Moony. "How did you explain—"
"Ah, that's simple." Black stomped his shovel deep into the scar of a root long since orphaned by Monsanto mist. "He left his body here by mistake."
"Right."
"Yeah. Fenwick's at home, man. The semi-sentient meatsack operating at bare minimum capacity in our squad just happens to be, um, the unfortunate remains of what is in fact a very intelligent person living the remainder of his long life in the real world."
Most people could only recognize Moony's laughter by the crinkling of his eyes and shaking of his chest. His mouth barely opened, though for Black, he smiled. Yes, he did. Like a sleeper rolling over in bed; a motion of no significance but for the intimacy of allowing one person to witness it.
"I hope Fenwick's not pissed off," said Black in a tone implying he couldn't give less of a shit.
"I wouldn't worry about it." Moony surveyed the foxhole and dropped his e-tool to the dirt. "This one's about done. I just gotta eat something."
"Me too. Fuck it, I'm done for the night."
"You ain't on ambush or anything?"
"Fuck no. Not until this squad gets sorted out."
Black plopped to the ground and stretched out, resting his head against arms folded back behind it. The blue light was settling around them now, drawing in folds of sleep, loosening the contrast like a watercolour wash over the land's charred and abrupted profile. Far off, some guys in Zachary's platoon were yelling at each other but from Moony's hole, the sound only registered as animal calls or passing traffic.
"You don't mind if he eats with us," said Black.
"What? Nah." Moony retrieved a C-rat can from a sock attached to his pack. He levered his P-38 around the circumference of the can, taking thirty or so motions to slice it enough to be opened. "I don't mind."
"Alright. It's just, uh. You know he doesn't like doing shit alone yet. "
"FNG blues," Moony observed. "It's fine."
"Okay." Black got up, leaving his e-tool next to Moony, who unpacked the blackened stove can and some C4. He struck up a smoking fire under the can and placed his spaghetti ration, an orange congealed mass reminiscent of dog vomit or mandarin ambrosia salad, atop the stove. He coughed at the dense chemical smoke. The new guys always complained about the food and its blandness, its mysteriously gelatinous texture, its unidentifiable lumps—but what they didn't understand was that each meal served as a point of reference or memory cue for the actual food it represented. The relationship between a globby orange C-ration and true spaghetti as served in perhaps a Lower East Side Italian restaurant on red checkered tablecloths was akin to that of the letter B inked on a page, and a breathing, buzzing honeybee with antennae, a thorax, a honey stomach and so on. As such, eating C-rations was to be understood as a form of reading in that one understood each rank, salty mass as a means of triggering specific sense memories via commonly understood symbols and referents, and they functioned perfectly well in this capacity. And they also filled your stomach with a government-mandated nutritional balance effective at staving off death for another six hours.
He was lighting up a cigarette when Black and Potter arrived, trampling the desire line he himself had cut through the grass.
"What's for dinner?" said Black.
"Spaghetti and hot sauce."
"Aaah, my favourite."
Potter carried the cardboard box with his meal in one hand, and in the other, he snapped a yellow yoyo compulsively. Into his palm leapt the bright plastic drum, like all of gravity could be reversed on his whim. The glowing stub of a cigarette dangled lamplike from his clenched teeth. "Hey 'oo-ee'" he said.
"Hey."
"Give me some those crackers, would you," Black reached for the smaller can and opened it with such violence that the discarded lid resembled a table saw's serrated blade. "Goddamn it, they're soft."
Potter spat the cigarette into the dirt and crushed it with his boot. "It's the fucking humidity. I can't stand it."
"None of us can," said Moony through a mouthful of smoke. "But you'll get used to it."
"Nah, I won't. I really won't." He plopped down into the dust and dropped the rations, continuing to play with his yoyo. "I can't take this heat, it's killing me. I'm just a sweat stain, I swear. I can't take it."
"It's your second day, kid."
Potter shook his head, and as if to illustrate the point, a sparkle of sweat dripped off his long nose. "I cannot fucking think or function in this humidity. It's like my brain is dead."
"It's alright to be brain dead here, man. It's fucking preferable," said Black through a mouthful of crackers.
"What he said," added Moony. He spat out the dead butt of his cigarette and lost it in the dirt. "Alright, I think it's hot enough." Out of his pack, he pulled a filthy rag so he could remove the hot can from the stove.
"I'm eating mine cold. I just can't have anything hot. I'm fucking dying. I'm gonna die from this heat before any gooks even find me." Potter wiped his forehead with a grimy hand. He left a fevered red mark upon the skin.
"It cools down in the evening," said Black.
"It'll rain soon, don't worry." Moony squirted hot sauce into the spaghetti and licked the dregs from the packet. "You'll wish you had this weather back."
"We're usually drenched," said Black. "Fucking monsoon season." He found a spoon in his pack and scooted forward towards Moony so they could eat together out of the same can. Moony could smell him—the same spicy-sour body odour and Kool-Aid as everyone else, and then another unnamed scent like peeking through a keyhole and catching a glimpse of something blue. The liquified spaghetti was hardly more than thick soup and they were so hungry they swallowed every mouthful without chewing. The motion of Black's Adam's apple when he swallowed struck Moony in that hard, hot place where he placed thoughts that belonged nowhere else.
Potter rested his yoyo only long enough to tear open the ration package and remove one large, one very small, and two medium-sized cans. He opened the largest and smallest cans and scraped the gelatinous purple contents of the latter can into the former with his detached bayonet.
"Fuck, you got beans and meatballs?" exclaimed Black. "Fuuuuck. That's the one with the pound cake, right?" He slapped his thigh.
Potter checked one of the smaller cans. "Yup." The play of a smirk upon his cheeks.
"This is why they don't trust Echo Company with any real kinda operation," said Moony. "An outfit where cherries are getting pound cake and the loot's eating ham and motherfuckers his own squads turned down is clearly not, uh, what do you call it? Combat ready."
"There it is," said Black, and he stole the last spoonful of spaghetti before Moony could slap his hand away.
Potter stirred the grape jelly into his beans and meatballs, as per a recipe Stubby had recommended that morning. He placed the can onto the ground and fed himself with his left hand, continuing with his right hand to bounce the yoyo in an unbroken rhythm. The purpling sauce smeared his upper lip like the mustache he couldn't yet grow. When the can was empty, he spoke in a voice conspicuously lower.
"I heard there's something going on with Shacklebolt and Third Squad."
"Fourth squad," corrected Black.
"Look, it doesn't affect us." Moony shook his head. "I'd stay out of it."
"What's going on?"
"Just more racial shit, like always," shrugged Moony. "Look, you're here long enough, it always comes up. Don't bother with it. You ain't in charge and it's not your responsibility, you dig?"
"Racial shit?" wondered Potter. He wrapped the yoyo string around his left index finger, absentmindedly spinning the elegant pattern of a trick. "But Shacklebolt's black. Are they saying—"
Black rolled his eyes. "So's fourth squad. They're all black." He polished off the crackers; Moony had only gotten one.
"All of them?"
"Yeah, that's the problem." Black moved away from Moony, closer to Potter. He leaned forward and a strand of slick black hair rose up from his scalp and fluttered in the cooling breeze. Moony closed his eyes, savouring the wind's silken touch. "They think he's trying to be white or something. Everything he does, they say it's unfair, he's trying to favour us, trying to get in with the Problem."
Potter scrunched up his brow. "But Moony said he was a good lieutenant."
"He is a good lieutenant," said Black. "So far as they come."
"I say stay out of it," said Moony quietly. "Ain't nothing good ever comes of getting on the bad side of a weapons squad. When the time comes, you want that machine gunner close."
Potter considered it, his brow scrunching up into rings of grime. He shovelled one last spoonful of jelly-coated meatballs into his mouth and swallowed hard. His eyes wandered with lust towards the small can labelled POUND CAKE.
"Save it," said Moony.
"I'd go for it," said Black, just to be mischievous.
Potter shook his head. "Nah. I need something to look forward to overnight."
Moony tossed his and Black's shared can, now empty, to the ground. It rolled away until the gently sloping wall of the foxhole cut its movement short. "It's about dark now," he said, expecting Potter would take the hint. He kicked a few clumps of dirt over the fire and watched it spark out like a Roman candle.
"I'll skedaddle," said Potter. He gathered up his things, looking to Black with an undisguised expression of need.
"You better get down to your spots 'cause Shacklebolt checks on you guys all night," Moony added. "Especially cherries."
"Does he ever sleep?" asked Potter.
"No one's ever proved it." Black stretched to his height, and by the small sound escaping his lips, Moony could sense the pressure of the earth against his aching feet. "Man, I'm fucking glad we don't have to hump tomorrow. Watch your step, that's my gun."
"Sorry." Potter backed off into the swallowing dark. "Let's go." They scrambled up and out of the foxhole, disappearing from view two minutes before Moony could no longer smell the rank fragrance of them weighted like two chunks of ballast in the humid night.
BEING QUIET
Moony was especially good at it. It was in his nature to be silent as per his childhood of elective mutism; he had spoken only with his mother and father, and never in the presence of other people. When they plunked him down in front of a two-way mirror and the nice lady in white offered him a choice between Mr. Potato Head and a working miniature accordion, he covered his face and ran to clutch his mother's skirt instead. After several minutes of unsuccessful coaxing, she had to communicate his desire for Mr. Potato Head through her own embarrassed tears. The man behind the mirror took notes as Moony handed each individual feature—pink ears, tiny blue top hat—to his mother, indicating his desire that she pierce the potato on his behalf with a distressing closed-mouth whine.
His parents received the diagnosis in a brown paper envelope the following week and Moony, who was of course not called Moony in those days, was pulled from school and educated by his mother for the next twelve years. His mother wanted him to return to school for proper socialization and his father wanted to hold him at home until he got properly cured such was the intensity of his own fear of embarrassment. The dispute was not so much settled but perpetually postponed, until eventually Moony overcame his impediment with the help of thousands of dollars worth of specialized therapy, but it was not until he had already completed his GED at home, with his mother, at the same Mactacked kitchen table where he had once applied macaroni pieces to construction paper with a paint brush dipped in glue. He was eighteen. Moony said "You're welcome" to a customer in the grocery store and his father excused himself from the till and crouched in the stockroom, physically unable to express emotions in the presence of anyone but Moony's mother. He lit a cigarette and smoked between the dimly lit shelves until he was ready to pick up the telephone, emberlight sheening amber bracelets about the canned pineapple like so many priceless treasures.
A year and a half later, they received the letter. You are hereby ordered , stony silent nights in front of the television, arguing on the carpeted landing between the den and the basement stairs where footsteps had worn into the broadloom like theatrical spikes on which they rehearsed the familiar script, and so forth. Moony's mother started cupping the parakeet in her hands for so long that the bird grew accustomed to her warmth and refused to fall asleep anywhere else. Her hands shaped like a gesture of supplication but of course the man upstairs had nailed shut the submission box and accepted no further requests on account of the backlog. After Moony's medical exam, she said nothing but a week later he found her stirring a vat of green dye in which soft pale fish fluttered and sank with the motion of her spoon. It was the first nauseating stench he would pinch his nose against in a long line of such stenches. "Mom," he said, to no response. Afterwards, she pinned his soaking underwear to a line strung up in the basement where it dripped permanent witchy stains onto the concrete, for she was concerned about neighbours who might spot the olive drab in their backyard and put two and two together. Everyone had an opinion, a loud one, and there was no pleasing any of them once the letter came.
His mother was sweet and gentle and infinitely patient. She was also afraid for him, gripped by a pathos that bordered on revolting. At home, he accepted only fragments of her concern. No, he did not want to talk about it, no, he did not want her to help him pack. In absentia, he came to regret that, and by the time he was pushed into the nightmare from a hovering chopper, Moony's yearning to be held by her gained the infantile quality of a feeble sprout reaching towards its incomplete understanding of the light. In his mouth, the weight of one soft palindrome. So he was quiet.
Cu Chi was not a quiet place. More like a raw red hole than any kind of geographic locale. Mostly, Moony refrained from speech extraneous to his radio responsibilities, because there was nothing to say or else no words for the saying. Bravo Six, this is Bravo Three… The underwear—which his mother had washed with fabric softener redolent of fresh peonies—was dumped, unceremoniously, within his first four hours of real marching. Green upon green. When the load is too heavy, items of low survival value are the first to go. An experienced squad leader laughed and said no one wore underwear anyway. The squad leader was right. They walked on for the rest of the afternoon and they walked even further and eventually it was a year and a half later and he was walking in Kontum with another company, another phalanx of green. At night, they went silent and in the jungle they tried to walk softly, and though they always failed in some capacity and could not ambush the VC for love or money, Moony found his calling in noise discipline. Being quiet was a thing he could do.
Now, Black, on the other hand—
THE VALEDICTORIAN
Potter stayed in Black's foxhole overnight and Black said nothing nasty about it, nor did he even have the energy to do so. The kid was obviously scared, for which Black was glad because it was somewhat indicative of common sense. Sometime around two AM in the overwhelming darkness, the pair of them heard a soft shuffling approaching their hole, and Potter lunged for his resting rifle with a noise that would have gotten them instantly killed had the shuffler not been Shacklebolt, checking on his men. When the LT heard Potter clicking off the safety, he whispered, "Easy there." Black could hear Potter's heart pulsating like a maraca. He flailed in the dark to take hold of Potter's shoulder and gently ease him back against the sloped walls as Shacklebolt crawled forth.
"It's me, kid," murmured Shackebolt under his breath. "Put your gun down."
"I'm sorry, sir, I, I—"
"Shhh." The whisper of fabric against folded grass as the Tree shuffled, stomach-down, into the foxhole. "Lower your voice."
"We're fine," breathed Black.
"Just checking."
"Get any sleep?" he whispered.
Black shrugged, then remembered he was invisible in the dark. "A little."
"No," breathed Potter. "I can't. I can't sleep in here, it's so fucking buggy."
"Tell him not to scratch so loud," complained Black.
"Roll your sleeves down, Private."
"I did," he whimpered, and Black kicked at his ankle for speaking too loudly. "They're biting me fucking everywhere. My neck is all swollen, and my hands—"
"Put on more insect repellant," whispered Shacklebolt, barely concealing the annoyance in his voice. "I gotta go check on Fenwick." He hauled himself out of the hole on hands and knees, unknowingly kicking a clod into Black's open mouth. He spat the dirt out onto Potter, who flinched drastically.
"Calm the fuck down," whispered Black. "You're making it worse, I promise."
"I'm calm, I'm just itchy."
"We're all itchy," said Black in a voice like the blunt shutting lid of a piano.
Potter fell silent. He was bunched up in one tight ball while Black rested in a C-shape, wrapping himself around his things with the back of his head pressing dirt and the steel pot helmet hard against a pregnant abdomen against his chest. The dark was so moist and heavy that it forestalled any use of the poncho liner as a blanket.
Dawn. Heavy fog needled with rifles pointing into the valley. The boys down on the perimeter scanned the blue with eyes gone in the same colour in reflection. Black wet himself not for the first time on account of having been too prissy to piss in his hole and too scared to get out of it before 100-percent alert died down upon full sunrise. Potter didn't say anything. He had the yellow yoyo pressed to his mouth like a rosary.
The yolk of light spilled down through the cloud cover and that's when Black finally groaned, "Fuck meeeee."
"Huh," said Potter.
"Another day."
"How many you got left?"
"Two-hundred eighty-eight and a wake-up," said Black automatically. He struggled through his pack for the litho pencil to strike another tally mark on his helmet cover. The pencil, a spiral of dense paper wrapped about a waxy black stick of pigment, could be sharpened simply by tearing a string parallel to the pigment, which tore through the paper. Its oil base made it ideal for permanently defacing government equipment in a moist environment, or marking trees and stones, or sending Black into a recollection spiral vis à vis a sheaf of creamy limestone under the north-facing grid of windows back in the college cocoon. Every fifth day, he made a strike through the previous four talleys and it felt like standing on a mountain peak only to catch a dizzying glance of the drop.
The junior officers went to meet with Staff Sergeant Kojima and the morning kicked off as the previous one had, and the one before it, in a series of moist and chafing discomforts—digging, inspecting, patrolling, powdering, cooking, and carrying shit only a daily ration's worth lighter than before. Black's squad was initially selected to patrol the nothing-ish hilltop they were nominally defending, until Shackebolt came to his senses. Realizing how undermanned they were, one of Longbottom's squads was selected instead, and Second Squad joined First Squad in hacking out the long, leathery grasses to build a landing zone. The sun seared their exposed wrists and faces as though channeled through a magnifying glass. Black did not complain. The job was far preferable to patrolling with only a squad's strength in the jungle. They broke the hacking cadence up to eat lunch on the shredded grasses beneath them.
Potter examined the sunlight sliding across his K-bar's blade. "Do they let you keep this when you go home?" he wondered. "I'd like to hang it up or something."
"Sure," said Stubby. He lay on his back with the jungle cover pulled down over his eyes as a shield from the light. "They take the sixteens, though."
"Sixteens ain't shit anyway" muttered Fenwick. He spat a mouthful of yellow-green mush onto the ground. "Fuck this, I'm just gonna have crackers. Why the fuck they feed us this dogshit, I don't know..."
"I don't want to keep the sixteen."
"Sure, you don't," Black ribbed him.
"No, really. It would scare my mom."
Black glanced at him sideways, evaluating the soft slope of his forehead, his finely stubbled jaw. "How old are you anyway, Potter?'
"Seventeen."
"Holy shit," muttered Stubby. "Your daddy signed the papers for you?"
"Yeah, but I'm going to be eighteen before my tour's up."
"Why aren't you in school?" Black said as he screwed his P-38 across the lid of a can of John Wayne cookies. "Don't you have, I don't know, algebra to learn?"
Potter grinned, and two dimples appeared like headlights in the dark. "I skipped third grade," he explained. "My reading was really high and I was good at math. And then I did summer school, so I actually got to finish up my courses a semester early. They gave me a leave from AIT* to go to my graduation. I was the valedictorian."
"Good for you," said Fenwick drily.
"So, anyway. That's why I'm here." He dumped a sock's worth of cans onto the bleeding grasses, selecting the fruit cocktail to punch open with his P-38.
"Why don't you go to college or something?" said Black. He squinted at Potter, trying to work out if the kid was telling the truth. How could anyone with good grades, not even of age, choose to come to this shithole, of all places? "Or get a real job, at least?"
"This is a real job, and I am going to college," said Potter, suddenly defensive. "I got a place at University of Chicago and they promised they'd hold it for me. I got a guarantee. I made them put it in writing."
"Why not just go there? You can't have been drafted if you're still a kid."
"I volunteered." The can hissed open and a slick of fruity syrup sloshed down Potter's hand.
Fenwick laughed coolly. "I smell bullshit."
"It's the god's honest truth."
"No fuckin' way," he said. "Look, I don't care if you dropped out or some shit, but don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
"But—"
"No way," he repeated. With the hat over his face, he was blind to Potter's expression; naked hurt and an almost repulsively childish frown. "Why would some smartypants college kid sign up for the army, anyhow? If you were so gunjy, you'd go for the Marines."
"Well, I wanted the Marines, but my parents wouldn't sign for it. They said the Marines are too, you know, um, they get in all the worst shit." Potter shoved a heaping spoonful of fruit cocktail into his mouth and chewed it rapturously, his eyes closing at the sweetness.
"Fuck off," laughed Fenwick.
"It'll admit it doesn't ring true," said Black, somewhat cautious. "I mean… college or this place? Why the hell would you come here? You know they don't bring girls in on resupply, right?"
Stubby laughed. "Can you pass me—"
"Yeah." Black retrieved a packet of grape Kool-Aid powder, his least favourite, and threw it towards Stubby. The foil packet dazzled silvery bright in the sunlight and he thought, just for a moment, that even this place could be beau—
"Because I love my fucking country and I want to serve," said Potter, "and also because I want to run for office one day and I need a good military record."
Black and Fenwick tittered. "No way," said Black. "No. No. That's not—you don't actually mean that, do you?"
"I meant what I said." Potter wiped excessive juices off his face with the back of his green-stained hand. "I think it's only right, you know? Why should it be someone else instead of me? There's plenty of men who risked their lives for my freedom. I think it's only fair that I should do my part."
"Hoo boy," sighed Stubby. "We did get a cherry, didn't we."
"I'm taking a short nap," muttered Fenwick. "Wake me never." His arms and legs went limp and a column of ants began to crawl up the crinkle of his pants.
Black peeled open the lid to his crackers and began unsealing the loathsome cheese spread that he would, nevertheless, smear generously across his crackers in search of some additional calories for the day. And also because he just didn't want to carry that shit around anymore. He was dry-chewing the last cracker when Potter looked him in the eye and said, abruptly, "Don't you believe me?"
"What?'
"They think I'm bullshitting. But I did graduate early, and I did —"
"Alright, alright," sighed Black. "Yeah. I believe you."
"I know a lot of guys don't believe in this country anymore, but—"
"Hold up," said Black. He gestured around the camp, from the viscera of the slashed grasses, to the columns of smoke rising from cooking fires. " This country? Do you know what country you're in? What continent? Have you looked at a map?"
Potter rolled his eyes. "Well, obviously I meant the States—"
"You're not in the States," said Black, unscrewing his canteen.
"I misspoke, but the point still stands.."
Again it was rising like a puppet dragon in Black, the wavering fabric of fury he thought he'd folded. "What fucking point?" he asked, trying to keep his voice low. "What fucking point still stands?"
"Don't get him started on this, cherry," called out Stubby, a few feet away. "It ain't worth it. Eat your lunch."
Potter ignored him, somewhat unwisely. "The point is that somebody has to fight communism and I just don't see a valid reason why I should get out of it. It's not fair. Why does it have to be the blacks fighting all our wars so we don't get our hands dirty?"
Black's mouth opened mechanically, and three crumbs fell out. "Excuse me?"
"The way I see it—"
"D'you have a fucking problem with blacks in the army?" said Black, livid. He stood upright, looming over Potter.
Potter rose to meet him; he was just barely taller. "I don't mind blacks in the army but I sure think it ain't right that only blacks gotta serve when everyone else gets a fucking excuse note! Look around you—"
"You haven't even been here three days! You fucking look around!" insisted Black, even as a part of him digested what Potter had actually said. "You don't even know what this fucking place is, you're a goddamn cherry. A baby. You haven't seen shit."
"I know this place is under attack from communists," said Potter. "Alright, I haven't seen the shit you guys have, but I'm here to do the job and I know it's right. I know I did the right thing in coming."
"Really, now?"
"Yes, really. I have principles, you know." Potter crossed his arms over his chest; the soft skin of his wrists, dirty but uninfected with jungle rot, twanged a further chord of righteous indignation in Black. He would not stop; not until he said something unforgivably stupid, as was his nature.
"That's really interesting," said Black. "Tell me, exactly what principle motivated you to drop out of kindergarten and play with guns instead?"
"Firstly, I graduated ," spat Potter, "and I just said the principle. I don't fucking believe in communism and I don't want that cancer spreading."
"Do you even know what communism is ?"
Stubby tapped Black on the shoulder from behind and he practically jumped out of his skin.
"Alright, alright," he said. "That's enough now. Don't make me get Moony."
"Go get Moony," said Black, sitting back down. "I don't care."
"Suit yourself," said Stubby, somewhat amused. He ditty-bopped* down the hill in search of Moony, who was often excused from the hardest physical labour on account of his seniority and genuine usefulness in combat.
"Why's he getting Moony?" asked Potter.
"Never mind Moony, what exactly do you think communism is?"
"Are you really asking a question like that?" Potter cocked his head to the side, squinting at Block as though he couldn't tell if Black was serious or not. "Everybody knows what communism is. It's totalitarianism. It's the opposite of freedom."
Black grinned widely. "Tell me, who picks your clothes in the morning?"
Potter glanced down at his jungle utilities.
"Who chooses what you eat? Where you shit? Who decides where you go and when you come back?"
"Hey—that's not—we're in the army, that's not like civilian life," Potter held his hands before him, indicating stop .
"And who decided I should be in the army, hmm?" barked Black. "Was it me? Do you think I want to be here?'
Fenwick sighed loudly enough to cut into Black repartee. "We only got like fifteen more minutes, Pretty Boy. Don't you wanna lie down, or something."
"No, I want to finish this. And stop fucking calling me that."
Fenwick laughed, but Potter was still not amused.
"I get it, you were drafted," he huffed. He took a deep swig of Kool-Aid from his canteen and the red juices stained his chin like vampire fangs. "That doesn't mean the army is the same thing as communism. It's a false argument."
"No, in communism, you actually get to live."
"Ha!" Potter shook his head in disgust. "Do you even know what goes on in the Soviet Union?"
"Do you even know what goes on in your own country?"
"Have you heard of the Holodomor?"
"Heard of slavery ? Jim Crow? Cross burnings?" There was no bolder version of Black than the one standing in broad daylight, well inside the perimeter, with the whole company together and the Problem malarially weakened.
"Everyone knows about that, but it doesn't justify communism!"
"Whereas the Holodomor justifies me being practically kidnapped from my home and forced to go kill random rice farmers in—"
"Could you losers please just shut the fuck up," moaned Fenwick. "I'm so tired."
"You know, they slaughtered like a hundred thousand political prisoners in the early '40s and no one even heard about it," commented Potter. With that fucking smirk on his face and the dimples punctuation marking his self-satisfaction.
"Sounds like you heard about it," muttered Fenwick.
"I can't believe you never even turned on a TV and found out what goes in this place, in this army—" He stopped, feeling a light touch on his shoulder blade that nevertheless pained the chafe marks from his pack.
"Easy," said Moony, quietly. Like one might address a skittish horse.
"Our cherry over here is a great fan of this war," said Sirius.
Moony smiled that watery smile. "Okay." He crouched down to the earth and then dropped to his bottom, stretching his legs before him. The radio and scrambler knocked against a loose pebble.
"I'm not a fan of the war, that's a complete misinterpretation of what I actually said." Potter wiped a few beads of sweat from his forehead. "What I said was I hate communism and I think I have a duty to my country."
"It's alright," said Moony. "Eat something."
"I already ate. If I have anything else, I won't have enough for tonight and tomorrow." He picked the yoyo out of his open pack and began to compulsively bounce it. "There's not enough fucking food here. I'm starved all the time."
"No," agreed Moony.
Black said nothing, because he agreed but didn't want to.
"What I said was that—"
"Don't sweat it," said Moony. "It doesn't matter."
"Nobody gives a fuck about communism or any old -ism here," muttered Black, bitter.
Moony was silent, but he cracked open a small can and pulled out a dense muffin studded with nuts. He tore it in two and offered Black one piece. The amber crumbles fell from his fingertips like sprinkles of freshly-turned earth and Black thought of his shovel, upturned, and the shroud of dust upon him in the hole that was also his home.
"I don't want to talk about this shit anymore," he said quietly.
"Fine, then."
"Fine."
Stubby giggled that weird, high-pitched giggle that had frightened and disturbed Black so badly when he first joined Second Squad back in May. The first time he heard it, Stubby, Fenwick and old Doc Dearborn were passing a sewing needle through the heads of four decapitated rats, rigging up a "garland" with which to prank Nelson, who was shipping home in two days time. Black had caught them inside a tent, laughing their drunken guts out, and Stubby had pierced the seeping white eyeball of his rat without even looking down, and Fenwick shouted, "Bullseye, pardner!" and then Stubby giggled and Black stumbled down the hill of matted mud and vomited grape jelly onto his boots. Ten weeks later, he heard the giggle and thought, "It's fine, girls, it's all copacetic," which was what Doc Dearborn used to say.
A crackle of fuzz came through Stubby's squad radio, almost unintelligible.
"That's the Tree," he groaned. "He says we gotta get back to work."
Fenwick clapped his hands down over the jungle cover on his face.
Potter tossed his empty fruit cocktail can aside. "I'd rather finish earlier anyway."
"You would, wouldn't you."
"Yeah, maybe I fucking would."
Moony smiled languidly. He had a different smile for every occasion, usually used in place of words. This smile was more like spreading apart objects on a cluttered desk than any expression of affect.
"Can you help me find my knife?" he asked Black.
"Just look in your pack."
"Help me look," he said quietly. Black rolled his eyes, but he still knelt down next to Moony's filth-encrusted pack, delicately inserting a hand into the dark so as not to accidentally impale himself on a K-Bar.
"Why're you doing this dumb shit?" murmured Moony calmly, just loud enough for Black to hear. The afternoon sun spread upon their shoulders like a spill of coffee.
"You should've heard that idiot go off," scoffed Black.
"Alright. But why're you doing this dumb shit?"
"What shit?"
Moony stopped Black's searching arm with a gentle touch. "Forget about the knife," he said. "Why are you starting an argument in the middle of the day with a cherry teenager?"
Black shrugged. "Maybe I felt like it."
"You sure?"
"What the fuck do you mean, am I sure ?" Black shook his head dramatically. It still disappointed him every time he expected his long, silky black locks to fall in his eyes, only to remember his involuntary shearing in Basic.
"I mean," said Moony quietly, "are you sure you feel like starting a fight with a kid who probably feels a lot more enthusiastic about potentially using his weapon than you, plus he's a lot less burnt out than either of us."
Black choked out a cold laugh. "He's all talk, Moony. Trust me. He was shitting his pants last night, Potter. I doubt he's ever taken a punch in his life."
"Things go different out here, sometimes."
"Just trust me on this," said Black.
"Alright." Moony unzipped a side pocket of the pack to reveal the K-Bar that had never been misplaced. "Oh look, I found it. My knife."
"I really mean it," added Black. "I mean…he's not going to do anything."
"Okay."
"Right?"
"Yeah," conceded Moony. "Okay."
So Black kind of won the point, but he walked away on tired feet, kicking Potter's discarded can in frustration. Moony always let others win arguments, from gigantic to miniscule, but never in a way that felt satisfying to the winner, and Black—who had a real hard time ever letting anyone else get the last word—held the sneaking suspicion that Moony's technique was in fact a means of covertly winning with far more consistency than Black ever managed. But whatever he felt about it, he expressed only to the elephant grasses by means of his dulling K-Bar, whipping through the strands. He smelt cigarette smoke and whipped around, ready to lecture Potter on smoking in a shoulder-stand of dry grasses, only to find Potter kneeling on the dirt to saw away at the grasses by their roots. He was not smoking, nor was Stubby or Fenwick.
Black shrugged off his un-surprise. A scent could seed itself on the soil of anything out here. Smoke or gasoline or sawdust—they manifested at will. Just another round of ghost residue, night fright leaking through the screen of day. He worked harder, stamping down the grasses and sawing them with violence so as to finish the job before the sun slipped low. Hard day. Long, long night to come. He would sleep in boots for the seventy-seventh time.
GLOSSARY
AIT: Advanced Infantry Training (attended after 8 weeks of basic training is completed, AIT is completed only by those soldiers who are assigned the military occupational specialty of infantry)
Cobra: An attack helicopter with a chin-mounted gun and stub wings to hold weapons
D-handle: A non-folding shovel, larger than e-tool and therefore, less easily portable
Ditty-bop: To walk at a non-hurried, leisurely pace
Wake-up: The day of departure from Vietnam, when you wake up in Vietnam and go to sleep in the United States. It was counted separately from all the other days spent in country.