Stone Junction

‘I repair slot machines at the Shamrock. Swing shift, two to ten. Gives me the hard side of midnight and early morning to ride patrol.’

  ‘What are you patrolling for? Or against, if that’s the case.’

  ‘My old employer,’ the man said. ‘Death. I used to be Death’s Chauffeur.’

  ‘For true?’ Daniel said. He didn’t feel like listening to bullshit.

  ‘Straight skinny, brother; mortal fact. Let’s get it rolling here and I’ll tell you how it is.’ He shut the door.

  ‘Great.’ Daniel barely said it aloud, but he couldn’t decide if he felt ironic. ‘Don’t sweat the little shit,’ he reminded himself. ‘Ride on through.’

  The blond man’s name was Kenny Copper. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, a judge had presented him with a choice between two years on the county labor farm for disturbing the peace/resisting arrest/assault on a police officer – which the court saw as a cluster of offenses, not a logical progression of self-defense – and immediate enlistment in the marines. He landed in Saigon eight months later, a PFC rifleman with Baker Company. Within the week they were shipped to Khe Sanh.

  He told Daniel as they rocketed northwest on 95, ‘I put my head up the Dragon’s ass, man, and I saw the World of Shit. The Cong were shelling the holy fuck out of us. We sent out a couple of recon patrols just for drill; never saw the dudes again. Anything that touched the airstrip got blown away. No Med-Evac. No replacements. They air-dropped rations and ammo, but whatever came down outside our perimeter – which was about half the shit they dropped – that was Christmastime for Charlie. We owned Hell; Charlie owned everything else. But here’s the twister, Herm, your basic cold fuck – we were just bait for the trap, dead and stinkin’ meat,’ cause they wanted the Cong to mass for a siege, get ’em all heaped up on us, and then bring down the hammer. Real neat thinking, huh? Real swift. I mean, the gooks didn’t whip our ass by being dummies, not that you needed a Ph. D. in chemistry to figure it out, right? The Cong kept the pressure tight enough to choke, but they didn’t overcommit. So we went down, not any fucking hammer.

  ‘It wasn’t too bad at first. I’d brought a pound of Buddha weed in on the chop – fifty Yankee dollars on any street corner in Saigon – and that cut us some slack between the shit-rain and fire-fights. Everybody on base knew our bunker was Boogie City. Black dude I booted with, name was Donnell Foxworth – Arson, we called him, ’cause he said he specialized in burning pussies to the ground – Arson had two ammo boxes full of primo sounds. Motown, Hendrix, the Doors, Dylan, Stones, you name it. Between the Buddha weed and the music, the troops stayed loose.

  ‘And man, we needed some serious morale boosting, because the gooks had the high ground, their mortars and light artillery locked down on us dead zero, like frogs in a tub. Whenever they took the notion, day or night, for two minutes or twenty hours, they sent down a shit-rain of fire. You never been there, man, you just can’t know what it’s like to hear incoming, incoming, incoming till that shrill death whine has your blood howling like a gut-shot dog; your whole fucking body peeled back to bare nerves; your asshole puckered so tight that when it finally relaxes you crap your chaps; Dylan turned up loud on the deck, screaming in your ear, ‘Well HOW does it FEEL! to be on YOUR OWN!’ – I tell you true, if a round didn’t blow you away, the rest of it did. I don’t give a fuck if you had all the weed in ’Nam and a sound system that’d cave in your skull – all the smack; all the pussy in the world. Just no way you could keep it from getting too real. Constant sickening fear.

  ‘About the third week, they really started pounding it in, and the perimeter turned into Sapper City. Try sleeping when them mortars are walking the dog all over you, when you know there’s someone outside who’d love to slit your throat. I was holding on to myself in a muddy trench, literally had my arms wrapped around me, curled against the dirt wall, down with some killer gook dysentery, gagging on the smell of my own fear, shit pants, powder, smoke, exploded earth and bodies, when we took one inside, about half a football field down from where I was hunkered. Concussion fucking near blew my brains out my ears. I pushed myself up on my knees and looked up into the rain and the night, stunned so fucking bad I was wondering if I could see way up there the actual point where the rain started to fall. I was looking hard when a white square came fluttering down beside me. The second I touched it I knew what it was. Though I would have given anything not to look, this was something I was supposed to see. A guy in our outfit, Billy Hines, young guy from Missouri, real quiet, kinda bashful, was married to some seventeen-year-old sweetheart named Ginnilee whose first letter to him in-country said she was pregnant from his last leave. She’d sent a picture her mother had taken of her standing on the front lawn, the small house in the background out of focus. Written on the back, it said, “Wife with child. Never forget I love you. Ginnilee.” And her face … oh man, so young and hopeful and brave, the sweetest little strawberry-blond with freckles, man, fucking freckles, and all you had to do was see the light around her face to know she was pregnant. Chester wore it on his helmet. One time I asked why he didn’t tuck it away where a pretty lady like that wouldn’t get so jungle-scuzzed and rained on, and he said’ – Kenny’s voice began to quaver – ‘he said, “She’s my good-luck charm. She’s gonna shine me right on through all this shit, home to her and the baby.” And man, when I picked her picture up out of the mud and saw her, man, saw her all the way to my soul, I vanished somewhere inside myself. You know what I mean, man? Left the premises. Stepped out.’

  In the headlight glare of an oncoming semi, Daniel caught the wet flash of tears on Kenny’s cheeks. He wiped at his own. Nothing he could have said seemed adequate.

  Kenny glanced at him, then back to the road. ‘The doctors told me I was gone about three weeks, but that don’t count the one it took before they got me out of Khe Sanh on a chop that was crazy enough to come in. “Shell shock,” some of the docs called it, or “catatonic shock.” I didn’t bother to tell ’em I’d been all right until I looked into her face. But I don’t give a fuck what the doctors want to call it, I know what it was. It was a limbo trance. Until my spirit could get itself together again, heal itself, the rest of me was not real, and my ass was up for grabs.

  ‘And that’s when Death snagged me for his personal chauffeur, dressed me in a white satin suit and put me behind the wheel of his black, ultra-swank seventy Caddy limo.’ Kenny paused and glanced at Daniel again. ‘You following this shit?’

  ‘So far,’ Daniel said.

  ‘I don’t see Death, right? He always rides in the back, behind a smoked-glass partition with this tiny little slot just over my right shoulder. He’d get in, I’d start the limo, he’d slip a stiff white card through the slot with a name on it – no address, just the name – and I’d go find the person. Don’t ask me how ’cause I have no fucking idea. Just knew. I’d find the person, park, Death would get out and be gone a minute, then he’d get back in and slip another name through the slot. No food, water, sleep, piss, shit – one name after another.

  ‘At first, when I was still on the fire base, I knew some of the names, guys in my outfit. And there were some Vietnamese names, too. After a while I didn’t know any of the names. But I fucking always knew where to find them.

  ‘Then one night driving along there’s a huge flash of light behind us, like an ammo dump getting off, and when I glance back the light’s just right somehow so I can see through the partition into the backseat, see Death. He’s a skeleton all right, man, with this mad, hungry, lonely grin, but forget the Grim Reaper shit,’ cause he’s wearing a business suit, one of them sharp, pinstriped jobs, and his finger bones, every one of them, is crusted with diamond rings.

  ‘The next card comes through the slot, I don’t even have to look to know my name’s on it. When you see Death, Death looks back, and there’s millions of fucked-up people to chauffeur him around.

  ‘I didn’t think twice – if I was going down, I was gonna take that motherfucker with me. So I stood o
n the gas until we were howling through the dark and then I jerked the wheel hard right and hit the door rolling.

  ‘But I didn’t get him. He’s got some kind of dual controls in the backseat there, and I hear the brakes lock before I clear the car. Now feature this, man: I don’t hit the road, the bushes, nothing – I’m just falling through space. All I can concentrate on is the image of Ginnilee’s face. I look into it, into her eyes and her smile and her dreams and the life inside her, and I don’t know whether I’m imagining, remembering, or actually seeing her, because when I stop falling and open my eyes, I’m looking at this ugly old nurse who growls, “About time, soldier. There’s a war on.” But they sent me home to the VA.

  ‘Not many know what Death looks like, what kind of wheels he has. Those that do have a responsibility to ride patrol and waste the motherfucker on sight. No questions. No answers. I got my piece from ’Nam under the seat. When I see him, I’m gonna blast them diamonds off his fingers, blow him down to dust.’

  Daniel said, ‘You think you can kill Death?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I sure as fuck can try.’

  ‘Almost have to,’ Daniel said softly. He leaned back in the seat and shut his eyes. He tried to imagine Ginnilee’s face but he was too weary. He opened his eyes only to be blinded by the high beams of an oncoming car. As it passed, Daniel, struggling to refocus, thought he caught a glimpse of a black limo. He wheeled to look out the rear window, telling Kenny, ‘I got an eyeful of headlight, but I think that might have been it, the black limousine.’

  ‘Fuck, man, are you on drugs? That was a red seventy-seven Toyota.’

  Daniel watched the taillights move closer together as they faded in the distance. From what he’d seen, the car was long, low-slung, black. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Relax, man,’ Kenny reassured him. ‘It’s a crazy story to get behind, I know. Hard news. Cut the spook loose in ya is all. Remember, I drove the fuckin’ limo; I’d know it blind. That was a red seventy-seven Toyota – bank it.’

  Daniel turned back around on the seat. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s your call, your patrol – only trying to help out.’

  ‘I roger that, bro’, and much obliged. Fuck, man, you were crying with me there during the war stories – think I don’t know you’re on my frequency? I pick up every hitchhiker I see on patrol, and I tell ’em all about Ginnilee’s face and that gone month driving Death around. Some of them say nothing, some tell me I’m full of shit, some humor me like I’m some sort of war-psychomoron, and almost all of them decide that they’d rather stand on the empty desert highway than ride another mile with me. Maybe one out of a hundred has even a little fucking tiny tear to shed, has the heart to cry because it hurts. And you’re one of them, man. You ever seen Death?’

  The question, sudden and oblique, caught Daniel off balance. ‘What makes you ask that?’

  Kenny shrugged. ‘A hunch. A feeling. I wasn’t meaning to get in your shit about it. You don’t have to tell me diddly.’

  ‘I almost died once,’ Daniel said. ‘From a bomb explosion. My heart stopped when they were loading me in the ambulance; they had to shock it to get it started. That’s what the doctor told me, anyway – I don’t remember. I was falling, that’s the last thing I remember, falling till it seemed I’d fall forever, then right in front of me, out of nowhere, was a mirror, and I remember lifting my hands to protect my face but I don’t know if I fell through it or it shattered or what. I guess the closest I’ve ever come to seeing Death was in that mirror, but I don’t remember what I saw there, if I saw anything at all.’

  ‘That’s Death, all right. He loves to fuck around with mirrors, mirrors and windows – two of his favorite toys.’

  ‘If you don’t mind a personal question, something you said has got me curious.’

  Kenny glanced over at him. ‘Do it, man. Shoot.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure how to put it,’ Daniel replied. ‘You said when you looked at Ginnilee’s picture, you vanished inside yourself. Do you mean your body actually disappeared, turned into air?’

  ‘Negative. Just the fucking opposite. My body stayed and my mind vanished. You had the right track, though; just the wrong train.’

  Daniel thought about this. It actually seemed to make better sense than the way he was going about it. He tried to imagine his mind vanished, smiling when he realized he’d gotten ahead of himself, that first he’d have to imagine his mind. The thought cracked him up.

  Kenny eyed him nervously. ‘What got you off, man?’

  ‘I was trying to imagine my mind.’

  ‘Yeah, I know – it’s weird, huh? Like a TV watching itself, or a slot machine playing itself, shit like that.’

  ‘Shit like that,’ Daniel repeated, still chuckling.

  Kenny, eyes back on the road, seemed almost solemn. He nodded his head once, as if confirming a decision, and turned to Daniel. ‘I got a deal for you, Herman, a stone guarantee. Why don’t you hook up with me for awhile, ride some patrol. I can get you decent work in the casino if you want some play money, but if you’d rather kick back I’ve got an extra bunk and lots of rations. I’m no fucking Julie Child, but I cook good enough I don’t use nothing from cans.’

  Sobered by the offer, Daniel said, ‘I’m honored, but I have a mission of my own. Maybe when it’s over, I’ll take you up on it.’

  ‘What’s your mission, man. This some of that “religious zeal” stuff?’

  ‘Some, I guess. You see, I found the Grail––’

  ‘Say what?’ Kenny cocked his ear. ‘The Grail?’

  ‘Like the Holy Grail,’ Daniel said.

  ‘You mean like in the Knights of the fucking Round Table? Some kind of trophy cup from God or something like that? I always dug those knights thundering off to lance some flipped-out dragon. Foxworth used to laugh at me about it. Said, “Fuck dem knights and da round table. Thas a lot of hard riding fo’ not much pussy.” I told him pussy wasn’t the point. The point was the quest, fighting your way through. He said, “Thas cool wi’ me, Kenny. You quest it, I’ll fuck it.” That was Foxworth, man, pussy and music. Fucking Foxworth. Ate a Claymore at Song Be. Heard about it from a guy in the VA, bed next to––’ Kenny stopped, lifting his hands from the wheel in a helpless shrug. ‘Sorry, man,’ he apologized. ‘I shit all over your riff. I get spaced here at night. Get the diarrhea jaws.’

  Daniel said, ‘I understand. No problem.’

  ‘So anyway, before I went drifty, you were saying you’re after this Grail, right?’

  ‘Not exactly. I found the Grail – not the Holy Grail, but one like it. My mission is to figure out what to do with it.’

  ‘Fuck, man! Hang on to it.’

  ‘I thought of that first, too,’ Daniel said, ‘but now I’m convinced hanging on to it is the one thing I can’t do.’

  ‘I know some people in Vegas who could move it for thirty percent, if what you mean is too hot to hang on to. Free introduction, just to help a brother get clear.’

  ‘Not necessary. It can’t be sold or bought or stolen or kept. But maybe it can be opened.’

  ‘Got a torch in the shop,’ Kenny offered.

  ‘No, wouldn’t do it, but thanks for the thought. I’ll find a way, I’m sure.’

  ‘Right on, brother. One way or another, blow the walls down. Soul belongs to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Corps. Any way I can help you, call the Shamrock and let me know. I’ll ride in like the fucking cavalry, my iron flipped to rock’n’roll. Me and fucking Foxworth, man, we had this secret army, all the drug-suckers and wailing fools, the loonies and the lonely and the desperately fucked up, a secret army of us called The Brotherhood of the Hideous Truth. Foxworth was the supreme commander, and I was his field general, General Chaos he called me. Only had one rule for meetings. They couldn’t begin until everyone was too stoned to stand up and salute the flag. Fucking Foxworth, man …’

  Daniel listened till he could almost imagine Foxworth sitting between them, drinking Bacardi with b
eer chasers, grinning at his certain knowledge that of the five billion adult human beings on the planet, over half had pussies – and even if that wasn’t the ultimate point, it surely offered reason to live.

  At Daniel’s insistence, Kenny let him off near dawn in the middle of nowhere, just road and sagebrush as far as you could see.

  ‘Look me up any time, man; I’ll be there,’ Kenny reminded him as Daniel got out.

  ‘Shoot straight,’ Daniel said.

  Kenny raised a clenched fist. ‘Now you got the spirit. Semper fi, bro’.’ Daniel smiled and started to close the door. ‘Whoa, mofo! You forgot your bowling ball. Get your shit squared away, son. There’s a war on.’ He handed the bag out to Daniel with a wink. ‘How can you bowl ’em over without a fucking ball? That’d be like going questing without a lance.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Daniel said as he took the Diamond back. ‘Thanks again.’

  Kenny swung the Trans-Am across the center divider and headed back to Las Vegas. The loss of Daniel’s company depressed him. In that vanished month as Death’s Chauffeur, Kenny had developed an acute sensitivity to the thin musky odor released in the breath of those who would die soon. Kenny shook his head dolefully. ‘You stupid jaw-jacking shithead, he was the best bait you’ve had in fifteen years and you fucked it up just like you’ve fucked up everything. Get your shit squared away, boy; there’s a war going down.’ He remembered saying the same thing to Daniel. When he thought about it, he realized those were the last words Foxworth had ever said to him. Fucking Foxworth. He started crying again.

  Gurry Debritto smiled as he finished decoding the transmission. He put the message with the others his West Coast listeners had picked up. If the locations were accurate – his subcontractors were the best in the world – the Diamond had been flown to Seattle, driven by van to Coos Bay, Oregon, and was now on an unnamed ship seventy miles due west of the mouth of the Smith River, headed down the coast. He reread the last transmission:

  SAIL AWAY. PROBLEMA. FIRST NEST FOULED. BACKUP SHAKY. SAME BAY AND DAY BUT SHIFT STORAGE OKIE TURF 107772400. SHINE ON HARVEST MOON. BLT T GO.