Why Are We in Vietnam?

  That was when the grizz came.

  Around a turn in the trail, by the side of a ledge, he’d been waiting, listening to the tick snap and twig crack of their boots, and he came at them from thirty yards away with the roar of nothing D.J. ever heard, like a foghorn fire siren about to burst, cause some congested hell in a whirlwind has come thundering with rocks down a hill out of its foghorn throat and D.J. heard the crazy wild ass moan of every animal they’d gunned down and the tear and blast of all flesh from all fat exploding knockout Magnums, what a cry came out of that shit ass beast, and frozen like prisoners in the searchlight, hypnotized half up to sky, and the air shivered as if a .105 howitzer just gone off, the grizzer came at them on the heuuuuuu of the cry, two red coal little eyes of fire, wall of fur coming fast as a locomotive barreling on that trail, and D.J. in some sweet cool of rest below all panic and paralysis dropped to one knee, threw up Remington, had a sail of light at the top of his head of far-gone tree and sky, and pulled off the trigger to smash a shot into that wall of fur, almost leisurely, like shot-putting a rock into a barrel, his eye not even to the scope, you could not miss if your arm had the strength to get the gun up. And Rusty fired from behind and that animal didn’t stop, it kept coming on down like a twelve-foot surf of comber bamming right for your head, and D.J.’s heart and his soul sweet angel bird went up the elevator of his body and all balls but flew out before he slammed bolt and fired again at grizzer not ten yards away flame of the muzzle meeting flame from grizzer’s red flame ass red mouth, grizzer kerwhonked half in air from the blast, took leap, hop, howl, one mad bound off trail, leaving a wake of hot caves, gamy earth, fur went by so near, yeah, one flash of blood on his honey hide, and then he went booming down the mean crazy slope of the ledge, twisting D.J.’s neck, so fast was the move. Then grizzer was gone.

  Well, now they had a pretty, didn’t they? How sweet seemed Big Luke’s precaution stay in open with the bear. Now they had to climb down that fucking ledge and somewhere down, down there in all that thicket and brush and owl shit slunk and precipitous slope was Mr. D., the Red Ball Express, half-dead or not nearly dead at all, awful bad. They are doing their best not to chatter, cackle, or carry on like birdwomen now. “Never heard of a grizzer charging like that,” said Rusty’s voice, weak as piss over pebbles.

  “They gone ape shit just as Big Luke say.” Hoarse adolescent big phlegm voice.

  “Yeah.” Humps.

  “Yeah.” Humps. Echo in the silences.

  “I wish I had my Ruger right now,” said Rusty, big-ass State Trooper style. “A rifle’s too slow for tight-ass quarters.”

  “Was you going to bring it?”

  “I almost took it up from Ding Bat today.”

  The Ruger 44 Magnum is Rusty’s twelve-inch barrel pistol, detachable stock, comes highly recommended for bear in the brush. “That fucking Luke,” says Rusty, “sticking us around the chimney—who’s to know we’d end up here?”

  They are waiting for the other to be first to say, “Let us go back to camp and come out tomorrow with the Ruger and the mob.” But they can’t, and the moment they are silent, echo of the event opens silence after silence—they are close to puking they are so scared. D.J. feels shit yellow between his toes, his bowels slosh internal bilge, every bit of hard shit in him has broken down to squirts like spit and dishwater rumblings. A pall is on the woods. He can smell nothing but randy ammonia in his armpits. Yeah. And like lightning which cut across the sleeper’s bed so close that sleeper was turned and flung to the floor, so the memory of Mr. D. (D for Death) Grizzer’s mad-ball charge is like a stroke across the strings of nerve in his life—say, it will come back and back again.

  Yeah, recollected in memory, it comes back to D.J. eating in the Dallas ass manse, and he shivers—no man cell in him can now forget that if the center of things is insane, it is insane with force, heuuuuuu goes the bellow of the grizzer in the salt on his meat and sorrow. But bearable. Cause they went down for the grizzer after all—here is how—58% of D.J. wanted nothing but to leave Mr. Wounded Grizzer and get the fuck out, in fact that 58% was pulling on his liver and gut. But D.J. is a head man. Which is not to say he gives head, but is ruled by his head. A creature of will. That will now says to sixteen-year-old flesh, “Go back without looking for this griz and Tex will ride your ass to shit.”

  That’s it. D.J. face the anger of God before he look into the contempt and contumely of that State of Texas personified by Gottfried Tex Hyde Jr. Whooee.

  “Well, dad, let’s start down after the animal.”

  “Right, son,” and Rusty smiles with lips like two wet soda crackers flapping at each other.

  And the grizz is there. Forty shit-eating minutes later, their backs wet, legs trembling like horse just run the mile and a quarter, their hands slippery with coward oil (clam juice and sweat, you bird watcher), faces scratched like two bitches been working them over with long nails, lad, rifle stocks scratched, their knees, thighs, ribs and butts a congregate of bruises (which congregate is the established plural for bruises, look it up, turd pedant) their lungs fired from fear, funk, exhaustion and the anticipation that each step could back them into a wound-ass grizzer, they worked their collective father and son ass down the steep slope below the edge, farting through catbrier brush, dwarf alder brush, blueberry cranberry brush, rocks, slick-ass rocks, sharp-ass rocks to cut their hands, ghost trees with roots half-exposed on the near precipices of the slope, trees taking on witches’ arms for shapes, limbs beseeching the North—O, power above the Circle, incantations and greetings from this witches’ tree.

  Well, they went down one at a time following a trail of blood as thick and clean as Sherwin-Williams Red. D.J. would go first and Randy would cover him—combat men flushing out a sniper. Then Randy would make his trip and pass D.J., D.J. meanwhile scanning about him in a 360 degree circle which meant thirty feet of visibility here, one hundred there, and wonder. Cause the blood led down and down, as if Mr. D., his insides a rocket of exploded works, was plunging like a cannonball to the bottom of something, and yet. All grizzers crazy. What if Mr. D. went down and then circled up to take them from behind? So D.J. scanned three hundred and sixty degrees about, waited till Rusty beckoned from below and then started his scratch-ass descent on the trail of the griz, passing Rusty with the high hard sobs of lungs working too hard, and Rusty sobbing back. What a fucking dual coward-ass twin sweat and sob that was. Wham! That Texas will carries Texas cowards to places they never dreamed of being. Vava, va va voom!

  After forty minutes they made rendezvous. The griz was lying in a beat-down circle of brush which he must have tromped out forty or fifty times while going through one of the bends of his wounds, and he had set down like a tabby cat on its stomach, forelegs tucked under him, peaceful, looking to be stuffed bear served on a red plate ten feet in diameter, for that blood beneath was monumental in its pool. They came on him from a hundred feet above, and Rusty was for pouring in some lead just to make shit-and-sure, but peace was coming off that bear—it was like the moment a gull sets on water—and so Rusty contented himself—being a camera-conscious flash-bulb poking American—to heist a little stone and bap that bear on the hide. Old Griz raised its head a little. Not dead yet. And its mouth looked to laugh as if between the millstones of two huge pains (or was it three huge gears from three huge wounds?) something very funny has occurred, as if he was saying, “You put your palm sweat on that stone, mother-fucker, and I’m taking your sweat with me.”

  Rusty raised his gun, but D.J. touched the rifle slightly with a little salute, and started walking down toward the bear.

  “Come back,” Rusty whispered, “you’re out of your fucking head,” for D.J. was holding his rifle in one hand swinging down around his thigh. “You cover me, daddy,” said D.J. to avoid a fishwife family gone-for-gooney while that poor huge beast was going. D.J. just had to see him up close.

  At twenty feet away, D.J.’s little cool began to evaporate. Yeah, that beast was huge and then
huge again, and he was still alive—his eyes looked right at D.J.’s like wise old gorilla eyes, and then they turned gold brown and red like the sky seen through a ruby crystal ball, eyes were transparent, and D.J. looked in from his twenty feet away and took a step and took another step and another step and something in that grizzer’s eyes locked into his, a message, fellow, an intelligence of something very fine and very far away, just about as intelligent and wicked and merry as any sharp light D.J. had ever seen in any Texan’s eyes any time (or overseas around the world) those eyes were telling him something, singeing him, branding some part of D.J.’s future, and then the reflection of a shattering message from the shattered internal organs of that bear came twisting through his eyes in a gale of pain, and the head went up, and the bear now too weak to stand up, the jaws worked the pain.

  Then the gale subsided. The peace came back to the eye, pain fading like the echo of the last good note, and that wild wicked little look of intelligence in the eye, saying something like, “Baby, you haven’t begun,” and when D.J. smiled, the eyes reacted, they shifted, they looked like they were about to slide off the last face of this presence, they looked to be drawing in the peace of the forest preserved for all animals as they die, the unspoken cool on tap in the veins of every tree, yes, griz was drawing in some music of the unheard burial march, and Rusty—wetting his pants, doubtless, from the excessive tension—chose that moment to shoot, and griz went up to death in one last paroxysm, legs thrashing, brain exploding from new galvanizings and overloadings of massive damage report, and one last final heuuuuuu, all forgiveness gone. And coughed blood out of his throat as he died.

  D.J. didn’t speak to Rusty on the way back. And when they hit camp at dark, Big Luke so relieved he couldn’t even read various prescribed riot acts, they asked at last who had got the bear, and D.J., in the silence which followed, said, “Well, we both sent shots home, but I reckon Rusty got it,” and Rusty didn’t contradict him—one more long silence—and Rusty said, “Yeah, I guess it’s mine, but one of its sweet legs belongs to D.J.” Whew. Final end of love of one son for one father.

  Next morning, crack ass of dawn, Rusty was overseeing the transfer of that dead and now dressed grizzer from his dried blood patch up the winch to the helicopter. And they figured the bear in his natural state had stood nine hundred pounds and more counting the claws.

  Intro Beep 9

  The hunting over? This fine narrative of native Texas pluck and grits now to be laid back into its rifle case while D.J.’s mind opens up another box of strict inside goodies? Screw. The climax within Alaska is yet to come—you will get rocks off you thought were buried forever. But rest for an inst. Return to civ, which is to say syphilization and fuck James Joyce—now enter D.J.’s genius head working its ventral hatch and vale, which is to say his mouth, turd nugget! at the dinner cited before in the Dallas ass manse, D.J. eighteen, two years later, composing in his head (while smiling at Texas tooth and cunt hostess types to right and left of him)—reach for your brains, Mr. Intellectual Testicles—let us snap down deep into D.J.’s mind patterns, and see if we pick up a universal mandolin or two, spelled mandala, dear Major Galliana, frostbite and fuck hairs, there is no logic to projects but incest, family bugger—you want to see D.J. the brain? he is working out the secret inner logic of piss. Now D.J. is a shit-oriented late adolescent, he is marooned, in case you have not noticed, on that balmy tropical isle pronounced Selador, spelled cellardoor—asshole—do you know a committee of Language Hump-type professors put out a committee finding back in 1936—most beautiful word in the English language is cellardoor. Think of that. The Isle of Selador—think of that. The Isle of Selador—otherwise known as cellardoor, the entrance to your asshole. Where we began was with fact one—D.J. is marooned on the balmy tropical isle of Anal Referent Metaphor. Now that’s a moniker, man. You can see the fellow stand up and walk around, Anal Referent Metaphor! He’s confidential secretary to America’s #1 financial wizard Mr. Isower Anal Compulsive. You can write a fucking play suitable for staged readings about the confidential dialogue between the two. As viz:

  Isower Anal Compulsive—How was your movement, today, Referent Metaphor?

  Anal Referent Metaphor—Loose and slicky ass, Isower. How was yours?

  I.A.C.—Bonded. We got to move some capital down the list.

  A.R.M.—Set up a technical slide?

  I.A.C.—For shit-and-sure, Señor Manure.

  That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss.

  What can D.J. have to say about piss which is new? Whoo whoo. Piss, pious pretender, is a nerve of the wind when it’s drilled from a peter. Rushings of the air, balms of the limbs (which is what air is, sexy). Piss, fascinated auditor of D.J.’s intellectual shuttlings and switchings, is a lullaby of the waters when it poozles from a sweet damp pussy. So get your turns recorded. Problem of piss broken down into two. Peter piss and cunt piss. Phallic urine, Vaginal urine. You’re dealing with different details, Delilah, P.U. and V.U.

  Well, this is deep stuff. Excrement is defeat. Liquid excrement otherwise known as You’re-In Spa-ce-man is the defeat which comes from stand-up ventures where you had to wait. Someone talking, and you want to interrupt but you hold your tongue—that makes for piss. Gather near, D.J. tell you why. An impulse once it is frustrated crystallizes the chemicals which had been interacting in order to fuel the move. Why? Say, son, take something on faith. D.J. genius philosopher and commo engineer (that’s communications, not Come-you-nism, Senator, although it’s a mistake any intelligent Southerner might make) D.J., Grand Synthesizer of the Modern Void, suggests that the intellectual equipment to comprehend why frustration makes crystals of impulse when they are in the mode of liquid chemical matter is not yet yours. Study basic electricity, basic electronics. Come back. D.J. will stick an electrode up your ass. Now consider, take it on faith: a crystal is a receiving apparatus to draw in messages, because it’s a form, man, a crystal is the most acute kind of form and forms are receptors of that which is less formed because that which is less formed looks to define itself by getting fucked by a form. You hip? That’s why beauty stands still and lets a piece of ass come to it. Cause beauty is a high form. It is a crystal. It is the frustrated impulse of a general desire to improve the creation. So it fixed, man. How else comprehend the flowers? They get all the messages. Ever heard of a flower coming to you? Only its scent. But avoid complexities and reversals of direction at this stage—do not try to solve positive and negative electricity, rather gather on D.J.’s observed fact: frustration makes you telepathic, cause the cat’s whisker (which is the frustrated nerve still dangling from the residue of the frustration) tickles that new-formed crystal of the impulse till the electronic message comes in. Frustration makes you more telepathic because it makes you more electric. Up to a point, Poindexter, after that, dielectric, apathetic, insulated, you ass. Cause to be telepathic while frustrated is to be burned on charged wire. After the bomb comes apathy. So call for the flushing waters. Your body, D.J. would inform you, sends out a call to all cell waters: gather here, kiss this crystal, dissolve its form. Unloose my stasis. Crystal washes down to glub, glub, glub. Urine is a pipe running the dissolution of all unheard messages. That’s why people piss like horses at good parties and bad—they are getting uncouth oceanic messages from all over the room: come here, I want to fuck you; go there, I want to kill you. Whoo-ee! That bladder gets full of piss. Therefore, D.J. seeks to avoid all frustration of impulse in order to test his hypothesis. For figure thee, Henry, if D.J. makes it through a day without a single impulse held back, he should not need to piss a drop. That’s science, dear clients.

  Chap Nine

  At the party in Dallas ass manse, D.J. and Tex
have each lined up the possible tooth and cunt hostesses they can fuck. That is simple. Some tooth and cunt hostesses are closet fucks. Walk in on them in an unlocked bathroom and you can have a two minute red-hot steaming ass blubber wet slap-dizzy oceanic cunt fuck. Need never fuck them again, understood, or don’t fuck them again for six months. You just taking two minutes out of the tissue of responsible executive country club station wagon et cetera shit et cetera shit life. Key to it all, cause not all do, is don’t make a mistake, adolescents! with the wrong kind of tooth and cunt responsible hostess type or she’ll kick your nuts in: you got to pick the one with the right schizophrenia, that beam in the eye, that gleam of the mind which says I keep a closet for occasions, meet you on the moon for a sixty-second suck. Well, when fucking these mad insane ones, D.J. here to advise, get in fast, get out fast, cause they greedy fiends. This ain’t young cunt from which you cop the goods—this is used cunt, burnt meat, cliff-hanging menopause types which can’t get rid of the poisons by any hole but the pussy hole. They greedy fucking fiends. You accept their invitation on leaving the bathroom to make it with them in a motel and they get more out of you in three hours than a new chick emanating happy fucks would elicit in a day and a night. And the tooth and cunters are converting their schizophrenia into cancer juice for you. This too deep and disagreeable? Listen, loves, we getting back to Alaska soon, but Tex and D.J. for present period in their eighteen- and nineteen-year-old life are super-hot business cause they got illicits going, nobody like Tex and D.J., wait’ll you hear.