Magic Terror

He nodded. ‘You know what I gotta do.’

‘Yes,’ Dengler said, in a slow, quiet voice.

‘They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.’

He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. ‘What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?’ He did not wait for me to answer. ‘I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be – I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you’re out here long enough. The edges melt.’

‘Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,’ Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, and never looked as though he belonged in uniform. ‘Here’s what I mean, kind of,’ he said. ‘When we were listening to that trumpet player –’

‘Brownie, Clifford Brown,’ Spanky whispered.

‘– I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.’

‘Sweetie-pie,’ Spanky said softly. ‘You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.’

‘When we were back in that village, last week,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell me about that.’

I said that he had been there too.

‘But something happened to you. Something special.’

‘I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,’ I said.

‘Only twenty?’ Cotton asked.

‘What was in that hut?’ Dengler asked.

I shook my head.

‘All right,’ Dengler said. ‘But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.’

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Fine,’ Dengler said.

‘What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?’ Cotton said. ‘I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.’ He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. ‘What date you give Spanky?’

‘Twentieth.’

‘He last longer than that.’ Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces’ Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. ‘Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it.’

Cotton had put thirty dollars on August thirty-first, exactly the midpoint of Lieutenant Joys’s tour of duty. He had a long time to adjust to the loss of the money, because he himself stayed alive until a sniper killed him at the beginning of February. Then he became a member of the ghost platoon that followed us wherever we went. I think this ghost platoon, filled with men I had loved and detested, whose names I could or could not remember, disbanded only when I went to the Wall in Washington, DC, and by then I felt that I was a member of it myself.

2

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside and enjoying the slight coolness that followed the rain. The packet of Si Van Vo’s white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

Wilson Manly’s shack was all the way on the other side of camp. I never liked going to the enlisted men’s club, where they were rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese beer in American bottles. Certainly the bottles had often been stripped of their labels, and to a suspicious eye the caps looked dented; also, the beer there never quite tasted like the stuff Manly sold.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted men’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes’ walk from where I stood, just at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy himself, supposedly a Green Beret captain who had installed a handful of bar girls in an old French command post, had gone home long ago, but his club had endured. There were no more girls, if there ever had been, and the brand-name liquor was about as reliable as the enlisted men’s club’s beer. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. They spoke almost no English. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post, even one that had been transformed into a bordello: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. The wood was soft with rot. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. Around six-thirty the light bounced off the long foxed mirror that stood behind the row of bottles. After five minutes of blinding light, the sun disappeared beneath the pine boards, and for ten or fifteen minutes a shadowy pink glow filled the barroom. There was no electricity and no ice. Fingerprints covered the glasses. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal boot prints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a little grove of trees in the curve of the descending road, and as I walked toward it in the diffuse reddish light of the sunset, a mud-spattered jeep painted in the colors of camouflage gradually came into view to the right of the bar, emerging from invisibility like an optical illusion. The jeep seemed to have floated out of the trees behind it, to be a part of them.

I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. Tim. Okay. You come in.’ His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. ‘Far table, right side.’

‘It’s okay?’ I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t.

‘Yesss.’ He stepped back to let me in.

I smelled cordite before I saw the other men. The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.

‘Oh, hell,’ someone said from off to my left. ‘We have to put up with this?’

I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.

‘Is okay, is okay,’ said Mike. ‘Old customer. Old friend.’

‘I bet he is,’ the voice said. ‘Just don’t let any women in here.’

‘No women,’ Mike said. ‘No problem.’

I went through the tables to the farthest one on the right.

‘You want whiskey, Tim?’ Mike asked.

‘Tim?’ the man said. ‘Tim?’

‘Beer,’ I said, and sat down.

A nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnnie Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife, and had once been blond.

‘I just want to make sure about this,’ he said. ‘You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?’

‘Anything you say,’ I said.

‘No woman walks into this place.’ He put his hand on the gun. ‘No nurse. No wife. No anything.