The Night In Question (3 page)

This proved hard going. He owned no patience or humor, no ease of command. He was short and balding; when he got worked up his face turned red and his voice broke into falsetto. Therefore the men called him Fudd. Ryan mimicked him relentlessly and with terrible precision. That Lieutenant Dixon should overhear him was inevitable, and it finally happened while Ryan and B.D. and some new guys were sandbagging the interior walls of a bunker. Ryan was holding forth in Lieutenant Dixon’s voice when Lieutenant Dixon’s head appeared in the doorway. Everyone saw him. But instead of shutting up, Ryan carried on as if he weren’t there. B.D. kept his head down and his hands busy. At no time was he tempted to laugh.

“Ryan,” lieutenant Dixon said, “just what do you think you’re doing?”

Still in the lieutenant’s voice, Ryan said, “Packing sandbags, sir.”

Lieutenant Dixon watched him. He said, “Ryan, is this your idea of a j-joke?”

“No, sir. My idea of a j-joke is a four-inch dick on a two-inch lieutenant.”

B.D. closed his eyes, and when he opened them Lieutenant Dixon was gone. He straightened up. “Suave,” he said to Ryan.

Ryan pushed his shovel into the dirt and leaned against it. He untied the bandana from his forehead and wiped the sweat from his face, from his thin shoulders and chest. His ribs showed. His skin was dead white, all but his hands and neck and face, which were densely freckled, almost black in the dimness of the bunker. “I just can’t help it,” he said.

Three nights later Lieutenant Dixon sent Ryan out on ambush with a bunch of new guys. This was strictly contrary to the arrangement observed by Lieutenant Puchinsky, whereby the shorter you got the less you had to do. You weren’t supposed to get stuck with this kind of duty when you had less than two months to go. Lieutenant Dixon did not exactly order Ryan out. What he did instead was turn to him during the noon formation and ask if he’d like to volunteer. Ryan said that he would
love
to volunteer, that he’d been just
dying
to be asked. Lieutenant Dixon put his name down.

B.D. watched the detail go out that night. With blackened faces they moved silently through the perimeter, weaving a loopy path between mines and trip-flares, and crossed the desolate ground beyond the wire into the darkness of the trees. The sky was a lilac haze.

B.D. went back to his bunk and sat there with his hands on his knees, staring at the mess on Ryan’s bunk: shaving gear, cigarettes, dirty clothes, sandals, a high-school yearbook that Ryan liked to browse in. B.D. lifted the mosquito
netting and picked up the yearbook.
The Aloysian
, it was called. There was a formal portrait of Ryan in the senior class gallery. He looked solemn, almost mournful. His hair was long. The photographer had airbrushed the freckles out and used backlights to brighten the outline of his head and shoulders. B.D. wouldn’t have known him without the name. Below Ryan’s picture was the line “O for a beakerful of the warm South!”

Now what the hell was that supposed to mean?

He found Ryan in a few group pictures. In one, taken in metal shop, Ryan was standing with some other boys behind the teacher, holding a tangle of antlerish rods above the teacher’s head.

B.D. studied the picture. He was familiar with this expression, the plausible blandness worn like a mask over cunning and mockery. It made B.D. want to catch Ryan’s eye and let him know that he saw what was going on. He put the book back on Ryan’s bed.

His stomach hurt. It was a new pain, not sharp but steady, and so diffuse that B.D. had to probe with his fingers to find its source. When he bent over the pain got worse, then eased up when he stood and walked back and forth in front of his bunk. One of the new guys, a big Hawaiian, said, “Hey, Biddy, you okay?” B.D. stopped pacing. He had forgotten there was anyone else in the room. This Hawaiian and a guy with a green eyeshade and a bunch of others were playing cards. They were all watching him.

B.D. said, “Haven’t you read the surgeon-general’s warning?”

The Hawaiian looked down at his cigarette.

“Fuckin’ Biddy,” said the man with the eyeshade, as if B.D. wasn’t there. “Eight months I’ve been in this shithole and he’s still calling me
new guy
.”

“Ryan calls me Tonto,” the Hawaiian said. “Do I look
like an Indian? Seriously, man, do I look like an Indian?”

“You don’t exactly look like a white man.”

“Yeah? Well I don’t
even
look like an Indian, okay?”

“Call him Kemo Sabe. See how he likes that.”

“Ryan? He’d love it.”

B.D. walked toward Sergeant Holmes’s hooch. The sky was low and heavy. They’d had hamburgers that night for dinner, “ratburgers,” Ryan called them
(Hey, Cookie, how about tucking in the tail on this one?)
, and the air still smelled of grease. B.D. felt a sudden coldness on his back and dropped to a crouch, waiting for something; he didn’t know what. He heard the chugging of generators, crumple and thud of distant artillery, the uproarious din of insects. B.D. huddled there. Then he stood and looked around and went on his way.

Sergeant Holmes was stretched out on his bunk, listening to a big reel-to-reel through a set of earphones that covered his head like a helmet. He had on red Bermuda shorts. His eyes were closed, his long spidery fingers waving languorously over his sunken belly. He had the blackest skin B.D. had ever seen on anyone. B.D. sat down beside him and shook his foot. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Russ.”

Sergeant Holmes opened his eyes, then slowly pulled the earphones off.

“Dixon has no business sending Ryan out on ambush.”

Sergeant Holmes sat up and put the earphones on the floor. “You wrong about that. That’s what the man’s business is, is sending people out.”

“Ryan’s been out. Plenty. He’s under two months now.”

“Same-same you, right?”

B.D. nodded.

“I see why you worried.”

“Fuck you,” B.D. said.

Sergeant Holmes grinned. It was an event in that black face.

“This goes against the deal, Russ.”

“Deal? What’s this deal shit? You got something on paper?”

“It was understood.”

“Eltee Pinch gone, Biddy. Eltee Dixon head rat-catcher now, and he got his own different philosophy.”

“Philosophy,” B.D. said.

“That’s how it is,” Sergeant Holmes said.

B.D. sat there, looking at the floor, rubbing his knuckles. “What do you think?”

“I think Lieutenant Dixon in charge now.”

“The new guys can take care of themselves.
We
did.”

“You did shit, Biddy. You been duckin’ ever since you got here, you and Ryan both.”

“We took our chances.”

“Hey, that’s how it is, Biddy. You don’t like it, talk to the Eltee.” He pulled his earphones on, lay back on the bunk and closed his eyes. His fingers waved in the air like seaweed.

A few days later Lieutenant Dixon put together another ambush patrol. Before reading off the names he asked if one of the short-timers would like to volunteer. Nobody answered. Everyone was quiet, waiting. Lieutenant Dixon studied his clipboard, wrote something, and looked up. “Right. So who’s going?” When no one spoke he said, “Come on, it isn’t all that bad. Is it, Ryan?”

B.D. was standing next to him. “Don’t answer,” he whispered.

“It’s just great!” Ryan said. “Nothing like it, sir. You’ve got your stars twinkling up there in God’s heaven—”

“Thanks,” Lieutenant Dixon said.

“The trees for company—”

“Shut up,” B.D. said.

But Ryan kept at it until Lieutenant Dixon got impatient and cut him off. “That’s fine,” he said, then added, “I’m glad to hear you like it so much.”

“Can’t get enough of it, sir.”

Lieutenant Dixon slapped the clipboard against his leg. He did it again. “So I guess you wouldn’t mind having another crack at it.”

“Really, sir? Can I?”

“I think it can be arranged.”

B.D. followed Ryan to their quarters after lunch. Ryan was laying out his gear. “I know, I know,” he said. “I just can’t help it.”

“You can keep your mouth shut. You can stop hard-assing the little fuck.”

“The thing is, I can’t. I try to but I can’t.”

“Bullshit,” B.D. said, but he saw that Ryan meant it, and the knowledge made him tired. He lowered himself onto his bunk and lay back and stared up at the canvas roof. Sunlight spangled in a thousand little holes.

“He’s such an asshole,” Ryan said. “Somebody’s got to brief him on that, because he just doesn’t get the picture. He doesn’t have
any
hard intelligence on what an asshole he is. Somebody around here’s got to take responsibility.”

“Nobody assigned you,” B.D. said.

“Individual initiative,” Ryan said. He sat down on his footlocker and began tinkering with the straps of his helmet.

B.D. closed his eyes. The air was hot and pressing and smelled of the canvas overhead, a smell that reminded him of summer camp.

“But that’s not really it,” Ryan said. “I’d just as soon let it drop. I think I’ve made my point.”

“Affirmative. Rest assured.”

“It’s like I’m allergic—you know, like some people are with cats? I get near him and boom! my heart starts pumping like crazy and all this stuff starts coming out. I’m just standing there, watching it happen. Strange, huh? Strange but true.”

“All you have to do,” B.D. said hopelessly, “is keep quiet.”

The power of an M-26 fragmentation grenade, sufficient by itself to lift the roof off a small house, could be “exponentially enhanced,” according to a leaflet issued by the base commander, “by detonating it in the context of volatile substances.” This absurdly overwritten leaflet, intended as a warning against the enemy practice of slipping delay-rigged grenades into the gas tanks of unattended jeeps and trucks, was incomprehensible to half the men in the division. But B.D. had understood it, and he’d kept it in mind.

His idea was to pick up a five-gallon can of gasoline from one of the generators and leave it beside the tent where Lieutenant Dixon did his paperwork at night. He would tape down the handle of a grenade, pull the pin, and drop the grenade in the can. By the time the gas ate through the tape he’d be in his bunk.

B.D. didn’t think he had killed anyone yet. His company had been ambushed three times and B.D. had fired back with everyone else, but always hysterically and in a kind of fog. Something happened to his vision; it turned yellow and blurry and he saw everything in a series of stuttering frames that he could never afterward remember clearly. He couldn’t be sure what had happened. But he thought he’d know if he had killed somebody, even if it was in darkness or behind cover where he couldn’t see the man go down. He was sure that he would know.

Only once did he remember having someone actually in
his sights. This was during a sweep through an area that had been cleared of its population and declared a free-fire zone. Nobody was supposed to be there. All morning they worked their way upriver, searching empty hamlets along the bank. Nothing. Negative booby traps, negative snipers, negative mines. Zilch. But then, while they were eating lunch, B.D. saw something. He was on guard in the rear of the company when a man came out of the trees into an expanse of overgrown paddies. The man had a stick that he swung in front of him as he made his way with slow, halting steps toward the opposite tree line. B.D. kept still and watched him. The sun was warm on his back. The breeze blew across the paddies, bending the grass, rippling the water. Finally he raised his rifle and drew a bead on the man. He held him in his sights. He could have dropped him, easy as pie, but he decided that the man was blind. He let him go and said nothing about it. But later he wondered: What if he wasn’t blind? What if he was just a guy with a stick, taking his time? Either way, he had no business being there. B.D. felt funny about the whole thing. What if he was actually VC, what if he killed a bunch of Americans afterward? He could be VC even if he
was
blind; he could be cadre, infrastructure, some high official …

Blind people could do all kinds of things.

Once it got dark B.D. walked across the compound to one of the guard bunkers and palmed a grenade from an open crate while pretending to look for a man named Walcott.

He was about to leave when pumpkin-headed Captain Kroll appeared wheezing in the doorway. He had a normal enough body, maybe a little plump but nothing freakish, and then this incredible head. His head was so big that everyone in camp knew who he was and generally treated him with a tolerance he might not have enjoyed if his head
had been a little smaller. “Captain Head,” they called him, or just “The Head.” He worked in battalion intelligence, which was good for a few laughs, and didn’t seem to realize just how big his head really was.

Captain Kroll crouched on the floor and had everyone bunch up around him; it was like a football huddle. B.D. saw no choice but to join in. Captain Kroll looked into each of their faces, and in a hushed voice he said that their reconnaissance patrols were reporting
beaucoup
troop movements all through the valley. They should maintain an extreme degree of alertness, he said. Mister Charles needed some scalps to show off in Paris. Mister Charles was looking for a party.

“Rock and roll!” said the guy behind B.D.

It was a dumbfuck thing to say. Nobody else said a word.

“Any questions?”

No questions.

Captain Kroll rolled his big head from side to side. “Get some,” he said.

Everyone broke out laughing.

Captain Kroll rocked back as if he’d been slapped, then stood and left the bunker. B.D. followed him outside and struck off in the opposite direction. The grenade knocked against his hip as he wandered, dull and thoughtless, across the compound. He didn’t know where he was going until he got there.

Lieutenant Puchinsky was drinking beer with a couple of other officers. B.D. stood in the doorway of the hooch. “Sir, it’s Biddy,” he said. “Biddy Sears.”

“Biddy?” Lieutenant Puchinsky leaned forward and squinted at him. “Christ. Biddy.” He put his can down.

They walked a little ways. Lieutenant Puchinsky gave off a certain ripeness, distinct but not rank, that B.D. had forgotten and now remembered and breathed in, taking
comfort from it as he took comfort from the man’s bulk, the great looming mass of him.