Turn of the Cards

  Mark stood by Croyd with his M-16 held so muzzle-low, the flash suppressor was practically in the mud. Like those of the rest of the platoon, his hands and face streamed blood from dozens of tiny cuts. They had humped half a klick through elephant grass for their surprise visit to the suspect village. The stuff was higher than Mark’s head and edged like razors.

  Lucius Gilbert stood with top two pairs of arms akimbo and a steady stream of rain sluicing off the bill of his cammo baseball cap, staring from the Vietnamese interpreter to the young Montagnard to the old Montagnard with a face like a relief map of the Chaîne Annamitique. “When I talk to you, why do you have to talk to him, and then he talks to the old guy?” Luce demanded. “Won’t the old fuck deign to talk to us directly?”

  “He no can,” Pham said haughtily. “He no speak Vietnamese. Him moi.”

  “That means ‘savage,’” Croyd said brightly. He was propped on his tail with his rifle cradled in his arms. He claimed it was uncomfortable to hold in a ready-to-fire position. “The Viets don’t think the ’Yards are human. Of course, the ’Yards return the favor.”

  To Mark the twenty or so villagers, squatting in the rain in ponchos made from what would probably be colorful blankets if there were enough light to bring out colors, looked more like Andean Indians without derbies than Southeast Asian hill tribes-folk. Then again he wasn’t really sure what he thought they would look like. Mostly they looked pathetic.

  Mark glanced at Sarge, standing beside a hootch with his M203 held ready. The brown canine eyes would not meet Mark’s.

  I’m trembling, Mark realized.

  “Tell them,” Luce said to Pham, “that we have a good tip that they’re harboring deserters. Mention to them that that’s a pretty serious offense.”

  Pham spoke rapidly to the younger, who spoke to the elder, who grunted. The grunt came back down the chain.

  “Him say no deserter here.” From the way Pham was glaring at the elder, Mark suspected he had said more than that.

  Suddenly Luce’s upper right hand lashed out, seized the old man by the wrist, and dragged his hand out from under the blanket. “Just like I thought,” Luce crowed, holding the captive arm up for display while the old man glared holes in his face. “A Timex watch. Takes a licking, keeps on ticking. Some tribal people.”

  He let go the old man’s arm. “Have it your way, you soul-bought old puke. All right, everybody, search the village. Really shake it down.”

  “I don’t like this,” Mark muttered to Croyd from the corner of his mouth.

  “Just remember, you volunteered.”

  “There!” Gilbert’s strident yell cut across the white-noise rain. “That man! What’s your problem, soldier? Why aren’t you following orders?”

  It was Eraserhead, the squad fuckup, still standing there in the middle of the village with the little toy Cub Scout-size pack that was all he could carry pulling his shoulders back like modeling clay and the butt of his M-16 planted in the mud.

  “I ain’t going,” he said.

  “What the fuck did you say?”

  Eraserhead raised his round little chin. Water beaded on his rubbery dark skin. “I ain’t going in no huts! I saw Platoon and Apocalypse Now. They probably got all these crossbows and punji sticks and booby traps and shit just waiting.”

  In three strides Luce was beside him, grabbing him by the biceps. He pointed. “Get your ass in that hootch. Right fucking now.”

  Eraserhead pulled away from him. Luce held on. Eraserhead squealed in pain as his upper arm stretched.

  “Lemme go! I won’t do it!”

  “You bogus little fuck!” Luce went wild, pummeling the boy with four fists in a frothing fury. Eraserhead’s malleable flesh dented and flowed beneath the storm of blows. Sergeant Hamilton was between them, thrusting Luce back with a strong left arm. Luce staggered, almost went on his ass in the mud, caught his balance. Eraserhead sat down in a puddle and began to cry.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Luce yelled.

  “You got no call to go beating on my men, sir,” Sarge said in a low voice.

  “That man disobeyed a direct order.”

  “Then there’s disciplinary procedures to follow. You can’t lay hands on him.”

  “Look, just spare me the petit-bourgeois horseshit, will you?” Gilbert started forward as if looking to try the sergeant on for size.

  Then he stopped. He had belatedly realized that both barrels of Hamilton’s weapon were trained on the center of his little hill of belly.

  “You’re going on report for this, Hamilton!” Luce shrieked, screwing his face up so tight it almost pushed his Lennon glasses off his nose. “You’ll bake in the Box for fucking weeks!”

  “That’s fine, sir. Charge me if you want. But remember this: lay hands on one of my men again, I’ll kill you.”

  He turned away, put a gentle arm around Eraserhead’s shoulder and helped him up. “You okay, son? Nothing permanent out of place? Good. Why don’t you come along, cover me while I search that old hootch there?”

  They were out of the jungle but not out of the rain. The hills their patrol route ran up and down were steep-sided hogs-backs, lightly forested. It probably would have been very pleasant, if Mark didn’t have a heavy rucksack on his back, infected leech bites on his right hip, and a rifle in his hands that felt frilly as alien as any Kondikki artifact. And if he wasn’t expected to tote it all up and down slopes that ran with slick-mud water like a polluted water slide.

  He had just helped Studebaker Hawk down a meter-high drop-off when both feet squirted out from under him. He sat down hard. He began to slide. He shot past the Hawk, who was so startled that he lost his balance, too, and fell sideways. Fortunately there was a bush he could grab and prevent himself and the radio from following Mark. In his own personal rivulet, bouncing over moguls, flailing his long arms and legs and going, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” as if that would do any good, Mark shot clear to the bottom of the hill. He landed in a narrow hollow between hills, sitting in the midst of what at the moment was a full-blown stream. Fortunately this had some rocks in it to stabilize the slippery mud, otherwise he might not have stopped till he hit the South China Sea.

  Croyd came slithering down next to him. “You’re such a showoff, Meadows. Can’t you just walk downhill like everybody else?”

  Not trusting himself to reply, Mark let Croyd help him to his feet and out of the torrent. Croyd’s skin felt clammy, and for all Croyd’s banter he seemed sluggish and strange.

  “You doing okay, man?” Mark was taking inventory and finding to his amazement that he hadn’t lost anything: hat, nick, rifle, wits.

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  The rest of the squad reached the bottom of the hill. They were on their own today. For some reason Luce had stuck close to First Squad since the village raid, and sent the two squads out separately.

  Sarge had memorized their route so that he wouldn’t have to take his map out of its sealed pouch and have it melt in the rain. He sent Mario, today’s point, down the hollow along a trail following the temporary stream. The rest of the squad trudged after.

  “You don’t sound fine, man.”

  Croyd half shrugged and half shivered. “I don’t think I’m entirely warm-blooded. I react to changes in temperature a lot more severely than I usually do. It’s all a matter of heat economy, I guess. I don’t really know what that means, but I read about it somewhere, and it seems to me it applies.”

  He looked at Mark. His gold eyes lacked their customary shine. “You know all this stuff, you’re a scientist. I wish I’d gone to college. Hell, I wish I’d finished high school. I’m always making these plans to continue my education, but I never follow through.” He shook his head. “I guess it’s tough to go to school when you sleep for months at a time.”

  “Have you ever thought about video courses, man? I mean, you can, like, order VCR cassettes, watch ’em whenever and then take the tests when you’re ready.”

&nbs
p; “Say, that’s a really good idea. Didn’t think of that one. That’s another trouble with this stop-and-go lifestyle, you tend to lose the ramifications of all this new technology.”

  Mark was about to remind him that VCR technology was not exactly new when someone behind them began to scream.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The latter half of the squad was clumped on the trail like a gall on a tree-limb. On the ground in their midst someone was flopping like a fish and screaming as if he didn’t ever have to breathe. Mark shed his ruck and went racing toward them. Sarge arrived the same instant, ordering the squaddies to stand back and let him through.

  Eraserhead writhed in the mud. His right leg bent like a bow — not a bad sign in itself; though his body and limbs would bend and stretch, they wouldn’t break. But the leg disappeared into a hole in the mud beside the trail.

  Haskell and the Hawk had him by the shoulders. They pulled on him. His right leg stretched until his bloused pant leg pulled out of his boot and his leg, thinned like a rubber band under tension, was bared. His lips skinned back from his teeth and his head thrashed from side to side. Only the whites of his eyes showed.

  “Lay off that!” Sarge barked. “You’re doing more harm than good. Dig him out, dammit!”

  “With what?” Only Mark and Croyd still had their entrenching tools. The others had covertly thrown theirs away.

  “Meadows, Croyd, use your E-tools. The rest of you, use your belt knives or use your bare hands. Just get him out.”

  They attacked the sodden earth. Eraserhead began to thump in a circle around his trapped foot, shrieking hysterically. Haskell and Mario had to pin his shoulders.

  “A pot,” gasped the Hawk, clawing up mud though his hands bled from nicks by shovels and knives. “He’s got his foot in a fucking pot.”

  “Careful, careful,” Sarge urged. “Get it out of there slow. Somebody — no, fuck it. Spoiler, gimme your Ka-bar.”

  As pale as the rest of them, Spoiler handed over his heavy knife without argument. “Sheath too.” The former gang member unfastened his sheath from his harness and gave it to him.

  The sergeant sheathed the knife, reversed it to grip it by the sheath. “Hold that sucker steady,” he murmured. Mark and Eye Ball reached in to hold the pot firm. Sarge rapped it carefully with the knife pommel. Eraserhead screamed.

  On the third hit the crude pot cracked. Sarge tapped it a few more times to extend the crack. Blood spilled out. The fired clay was thick, and bore the marks of the fingers that had shaped it.

  They opened the pot. It was a vicious kind of egg. The inside of the shell was lined with sharp bamboo splinters, smeared with chocolate-brown shit.

  They had to hump Eraserhead back to the old church on a stretcher fashioned out of rain-slicks and long black M-16s. It took seven hours. Eraserhead sobbed the whole time, though Spoiler raved and threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up. Mark thought he was crying more from fear and a certain outrage than pain, but by the time they got him to their base camp, his foot had swollen to twice its normal size, and streamed clear serum from a score of red-rimmed holes.

  The rain broke not long after they arrived. Just before sunset a polliwog-shaped Mi-8 Hip utility chopper motored in from Da Nang. It touched down beside the church, and a crew of khaki-clad medics bundled the now-quiescent Eraserhead aboard. They seemed to be trying to hold the stretcher at arm’s length, to avoid all contact with the patient. Most dinks — uh, Vietnamese — don’t think black people are human, any more than they think jokers are, Sarge had told him once. Eraserhead was both.

  Mark had wanted to ask Sergeant Hamilton why, if the Vietnamese were so prejudiced against jokers and blacks — and Sarge was both those things too — he had volunteered to come back and fight for them. He hadn’t had the nerve.

  “Stay hard, man,” Mario called after Eraserhead. “The Rox lives!” Some of the old-timers sneered, but none said anything.

  As the Hip lifted off, Croyd came out of the apparent trance he’d been in since they finally stumbled back up the hill. He rose from the base of the church’s pocked wall and wandered over to stand next to Mark.

  “All right, everybody,” Sarge told the quiet crowd after the chopper’s rotor thunder had dwindled enough to permit speech. “We all got better things to do than stand around with our mouths open collecting flies. Or if not, I can sure as hell think of a few.”

  “But, Sarge,” Slick said, “that thing the kid’s foot got stuck in”

  “Punji trap. Old piece of shit, left over from the last war. Like that old crashed Huey we found, remember? It don’t mean nothin’.”

  He walked off. The crowd began to break up. Mark watched with single-minded intensity as the helicopter lost itself against a distant slab of slate-colored cloud that seemed to be balancing just above the horizon with the half-set sun for a blinding fulcrum. He felt a sense of isolation and dread. There were monsters thronged around them, in all that evening green. One of their youngest and most vulnerable was being taken away into the land of monsters, and there was nobody to look after him.

  A star came out, visible just above the band of cloud. Mark shivered.

  Croyd yawned, stretched, and took a cigar from the camo fanny-pack he wore in front of his smooth-scaled belly. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  Mark shuddered. “I wonder what’ll happen to him.”

  Croyd scratched a match alight on his pectoral scales and fired up his smoke. “If we’re lucky,” he said between puffs, “we’ll never find out.”

  He whipped the match out and dropped it into the red clay at their feet. Glaring at him with ecological fervor, Mark bent over to pick it up.

  “What’s your sweat, man?” Croyd asked. “It’s organic.

  It’s just wood. Soldier termites think it’s a tasty hors d’oeuvre. Something exotic, a break from the same-old same-old.”

  “Oh.” Mark straightened, feeling sheepish. He also felt surprise. He thought the trendy activist side of him had died with Starshine, in orbit around a far, cold world.

  Croyd yawned again. “Uh, y’know, man,” he said, looking down at his splayed skink feet, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor when we get back to Venceremos tomorrow.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Well, you’re the Brigade pharmacist now and all. I was wondering if you could maybe slip me a little something to help keep me, y’know, sharp.”

  Mark looked at him and sighed. Maybe nothing did change.

  “I guess,” he said in a carefully neutral tone.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong, guy. I just need to keep my” — yawn — “my edge, if you know what I mean. Lizards don’t sleep.”

  “Of course not,” Mark said.

  “What does it mean,” she asked, accepting a tin plate of steaming rice and vegetables, “when the jokers say, ‘The Rox lives’?”

  “It means they come from a TV generation that never learned to tell the difference between reality and spun-sugar Steven Spielberg Technicolor bullshit,” said Eric the Dreamer. To the light of his bunker’s single lantern his eyes showed the depth and shimmer of the layered glazes of a seventeenth-century Japanese cup. It was hard to say what color they were — harder, perhaps, to say which they weren’t. From somewhere in the depths of her, Moonchild summoned the knowledge that such varicolored eyes were called “hazel.”

  He nodded his heavy jut-encrusted head at the plate, which his guest had yet to touch. “There’s no meat in there, if that’s bothering you,” he said. “I don’t eat it myself.”

  “Koreans are not necessarily vegetarians,” she said.

  We are a harsh people in some ways, I suppose.” She dropped her eyes. Her black yin-yang half mask and a heavy fall of black hair hid most of her face in shadow. “But I eat no meat either. It is against my … my principles to take life.”

  He took a bite, chewed slowly, watching her the while. She found she couldn’t look at him for any length of time without her cheeks g
rowing uncomfortably warm.

  “Strange to find you in the camp of Mars, then,” he said. “We are an army, Ms. Moonchild.”

  “Isis,” she said quickly. “Isis Moon. ‘Moonchild’ is an ace name. I don’t know where I got it, to be honest. There are so many things I don’t know … To use an ace name seems so ego-bound, yet that’s how Mark and his other friends refer to me.”

  “Isis, then. If I may.”

  “Oh, yes — Eric.”

  “So why are you here? This seems like a funny place to find a pacifist.”

  “Perhaps pacifist is not the right word to use — oh. Forgive me if I seem to contradict you.”

  He shook his head, mouth full.

  “This food is excellent. The vegetables are crisp and flavorful.”

  “Thank you. The Sterno-can cooking method adapts well to stir-frying. Sorry I’m not able to offer you kimchi.

  “This probably tastes a little on the anemic side to you.”

  “Oh, no, not at all. It’s wonderful.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  She lowered her eyes again. “I lack the skill with words that I have with my body. I have no gift of verbal evasion.”

  She took a few bites in silence. He let her. He watched her closely.

  “I do not forswear — is this the word? I have not renounced the use of force. There are times when it is necessary to defend the weak or needy, or to defend oneself. But I do renounce the doing of harm. Therefore I use force to subdue an attacker without hurting him, so that I can leave his presence. And so, with luck, he can cool down, let go his anger and perhaps through meditation realize that there is no need for violence.”

  “But there is need for violence sometimes. However gently applied, the means you use to subdue your attacker still are violence.”

  She sighed. “As I say, I have no skill for debate. The violence — I use is restrained, defensive. None suffer it who do not intend harm, and even they suffer as little as possible.”

  He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s a sweet sentiment. I really applaud you for it, Ms. Moon — Isis. But what happens when your attacker isn’t just coming after you in the heat of passion? What happens when he really comes to kill you, and he won’t cool down? When he keeps picking himself up and dusting himself off and coming after you?”