Matterhorn (33 page)

Mellas was too tired to push the platoon to dig deeper. He joined with them and the music.

“Man, I’ll never turn my nose up at a can of ham and moms again,” Mole said, his body swaying slightly to the music. Mellas
felt uncomfortable, not knowing what to say.

“Yeah,” Cortell said softly, “and sprinkle it with a dash of”—he paused for effect, bringing his shoulders up—“canned ham
and eggs. Oooh, man.”

Mellas laughed. “And a full course of Tabasco sauce to kill the taste,” he said.

There were murmers of “O-
kay
, Lieutenant” and “You got it,” soft voices overcoming misery.

“I know Jesus said man does not live by bread alone, Lieutenant,” Cortell went on, “but I never expected to have to prove
it, man.”

“Hey, how many records you got, Jackson?” Mellas asked.

“All depends on the table of organization, sir,” Jackson said. “We got Second Fire Team with Cortell carrying the hard core,
some Otis, a little James Brown.” Jackson stopped and gave a pretty good imitation of James Brown doing an “eehhh” at the
end of one of his lines.

“Whoa, bro.” Mole laughed and touched his fist to Jackson’s.

“And he got Wilson Pickett too,” Jackson continued, “with yours truly packing the Marvin Gaye. Parker and Broyer now, they
got the rest of the Motown. And Mallory, he’s packing, uh …” Jackson noticed Mellas looking at Mallory’s unattended machine
gun. “Uh, he carries the instrumentals like King Curtis and Junior Walker.”

“Memphis Soul Stew” died out, and the needle began rubbing back and forth against the paper record label, making a scratching
sound. Broyer quickly lifted the tone arm, stopping the turntable.

“How’s Mallory?” Mellas asked.

“How do you think, Lieutenant?” Jackson said. “He got his fucking mouth smashed in with a machine gun and his head hurts.”

“And he ain’t eaten for a week,” Mole put in.

“I don’t think Cassidy hit him in the face on purpose,” Mellas said.

“Sheeit,” Mole spat out.

“Well, I don’t think he did it on purpose.”

“Thing is, Lieutenant, it happened,” Jackson said.

“Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

“Trouble?” Jackson looked around him, indicating their situation by opening his hands to the jungle and clouds. “What’s trouble?
It’s just a different form of shit, Lieutenant.” Faces that had been cheerful a moment before turned sullen. Mellas knew his
presence had become inconvenient.

“I say waste the motherfucker,” Parker said. It was almost dark and he was leaning back against the dirt of a shallow hole.
China was sitting on Parker’s left, looking into the forest, chewing on a stick, trying to ease his body’s cry for carbohydrates.
A light drizzle collected on his poncho and ran off in tiny streams. Mallory was on Parker’s right, elbows on his knees, holding
his head and staring blankly at the ground.

“We ain’t wastin’ nobody, Parker,” said China.

“How you let a fucking pig like that live, huh?”

“I don’t
let
him live. I got nothin’ to do with him livin’. Or dyin’,” he added pointedly.

“Henry’d kill the mother.”

China noted the threat but said nothing. Henry might very well kill Cassidy, but that was where Henry was stupid. The knowledge
that Henry would kill somebody if he was crossed, however, was also what kept him in command. China knew that if he got a
reputation for being soft, he’d never take over when Henry rotated back home. Still, he couldn’t just kill somebody. It was
also too easy to figure out who had the motive in the company. It had to be done so it meant something. Either that or make
it look like an accident. Ultimately, though, he didn’t want to risk his weapons-smuggling operation.

“How you doing, bro?” China asked Mallory, changing the subject. He leaned over and looked across Parker’s chest.

“It fucking hurts, China. You got to help me get out of the bush.”

“We got to get
all
the brothers out the bush,” China said, his voice rising. He despised Mallory and wanted to jerk him up by the collar and
tell him to act like a man, but he also knew a good cause when he saw one. You just keep on moaning, Mallory, my man, he thought.

“You ain’t going to do nothing about Cassidy beating on Mallory?” Parker asked. He was looking at a mosquito that was sucking
blood from his arm.

“Course I’m gonna do something. But when the time be right.” China slapped at a mosquito on his face.

Parker put his thumb on the bloated mosquito on his arm and burst it, spreading blood on his skin. “Blood, China.”

“When the time be right.”

“Tonight.”

“No.”

“Come
on
, man,” Parker said angrily to Mallory. He stood up and slapped at a few more mosquitoes that were hovering around his face.
“We better get back before Bass or College Boy finds us gone.”

In the silence China could hear Jackson’s record player. Jackson. If he could team up with Jackson, letting him organize the
brothers in the bush, then he’d go back to the rear and start finding more Jacksons for the other companies. Man, an organization
like that and they’d get fucking
tanks
to the brothers back home.

When full dark ended the 100 percent alert, Jackson was working on organizing his pack. He watched China walk up to Parker
and Broyer and go through the handshake. Then he saw China coming for him.

China squatted down next to him. Jackson pulled a strap into place. “All we do, man, is pack and fuckin’ unpack,” China said.
“I do that much packin’ back home I be a
real
travelin’ man.”

Jackson smiled but didn’t say anything.

“Where is back home for you, man?”

“Cleveland.”

“O–
hi
–oh.”

“Yep. Oh–hi–oh.”

“You ever get high?”

“Once. In San Diego. This sister had marijuana.”

“That shit be bad for the black man.”

“I’m told it bad for ever’one.” Jackson sighed, looking back six months into the past, seeing nothing but the small dark apartment,
the funky red lava lamp, a black light making the fuzz picture of a girl in a paisley sari glow chartreuse—and Kyella. My
God. Sweet Kyella Weed. He came back to the war. “Kinda fun, though.”

“Yeah. That be its problem. The fucking British enslave millions of the yellow man with opium.”

“I didn’t get the shit from no Brit. I got it from a brother.”

“Yeah, yeah. But that brother ain’t doin’ us no
good
, man. He doin’ us
no
good. The Muslims, they don’t like drugs. And they right. Drugs, they enslave millions of yellow people and the red man,
too.”

“China, I don’t want be talkin’ politics. I’m tired and I gotta fight a war on a empty stomach.”

“That’s right. A war against brown people. James Rado say the draft is
white
people sending
black
people to fight
yellow
people to protect the country they stole from
red
people. No black man should be forced to fight to defend a racist government. That be Article Six of the Black Panther Ten-Point
Program.”

“What good you terrorist friends in Oakland doin’ ’cept makin’ money writin’ books?
Soul on Ice
. Sheeit. I don’t see no brave-ass Panthers over here.”

“That’s the point. They ain’t over here fightin’ the white man’s war.”

Jackson’s anger at being placed in positions he didn’t like and from which he couldn’t escape spilled out of him. “They ain’t
fightin’ the
black man’s
war. That’s what they ain’t fightin’. They just stirrin’ up trouble. Just like you. I don’t need you fuckin’ shit, China.
I don’t need it.” Jackson paused. “You know who the
real
people fightin’ the black man’s war are? I’m gonna tell you who. It that little girl go to school in Little Rock, wear a
nice dress, scared shitless. She don’t pack no heat, but that picture a her walkin’ to school between federal marshals turned
hearts
. It those college boys gettin’ murdered for registerin’ voters. Yeah, white college boys. It people like Mose Wright.” He
paused. “I bet chew don’t have a fuckin’ idea ’bout Mose Wright do you, Mr. Black History?”

China threw his hands open in disgust. “OK. You be the preacher man. You tell me. Who Mose Wright?”

“You ever hear of Emmett Till?”

“Wha’chew think?”

“Yeah. I be seven and I see that puffy face with the eye hanging out in
Ebony
magazine and I never,
never
, forget that face. But
I
don’t live in Mississippi.
You
don’t live in Mississippi. Mose Wright, he Emmett Till’s uncle, and
he live
in Mississippi where they hang you from
a tree with you nuts cut off and throw you in the river with iron fan blades wrap ’roun’ you black dead-ass neck. You speak
up against that shit in Mississippi, you as good as dead. But Mose Wright, no education, no money, no nothin’ except heart,
he goes to the trial a those motherfuckers killed Emmett Till, rigged like it was, and he says ‘D’ere!’ And he point his fingers
at the killers. Right there in that all-white courthouse. ‘D’ere!’ Right there, knowin’ they’d be after him next, all alone,
no help from the law.”

“Yeah, shit man.” China was momentarily stopped. Then he launched back. “Only those two chucks, they got off. They runnin’
’round loose today. They even make money
tellin’
’bout it. They tell some white magazine that they done the killin’ and that printed all over the country and they
still
get off.”

“Sure. But this time everone
knows
and sees through. This time the light got shined on that fucked-up county courthouse. It got shined all over the fuckin’
country. And why? Why this time? ’Cause that little black man and that pointin’ finger a his.”

“So what
chew
doing, black boy? They get off. You just gonna let shit like that go down? Do nothin’?”

“What I supposed do?”

“You can start by protestin’ the way this fuckin’ racist Marine Corps be run ’round here. We got brothers without R & R. We
got fuckin’ racist country-western crackers castratin’ our brother Parker right in front of everybody, and that same fuckin’
honky smash another our brothers in the mouth with a fuckin’ machine gun, and you,
you
be movin’ into
management
. You be part of the fuckin’ problem, man.”

“Look to me like chuck dudes humpin’ and gettin’ killed just like splib dudes,” Jackson said, struggling to stay cool. “Chucks
not gettin’ any food, just like the brothers. We be about one out of twelve just like back home.”

“How many officers in this regiment be brothers?”

“One.”

“And you don’t think it racist?” China asked.

“How the brothers gonna be officers if they don’t be squad leaders?”

“How the brothers gonna be free if they don’t stand together?”

Jackson locked eyes with China, and China stared right back.

Mellas and Hamilton were too tired to build a hooch, so they spent the night lying next to each other in a shallow hole. It
rained. They didn’t care. Gradually, the rain began to fill the shallow hole with water. Mellas dreamed he was in a bathtub
and the hot water had run out. He didn’t want to get out because it was even colder out of the tub. A long way off, he could
hear Hamilton’s frightened voice. “Goddamn it, Lieutenant, you got to get up and move. Please, sir, get up and move.”

Hamilton pulled Mellas to his feet. Mellas, in the stupor of hypothermia, slowly started to move. The world around him—the
dark forest, his rifle, the rain, Hamilton—seemed incoherent, whirling. Hamilton jumped around with him, grabbing him, turning
him, the two of them doing a macabre dance.

Mellas’s body responded. It began to produce heat. His mind started to clear. He stumbled off to check the lines, realizing
that Hamilton had probably saved his life.

Cassidy lay in the dark, listening to Lieutenant Hawke’s deep even breathing. He thought about how Lieutenant Mellas’s warning
had probably saved several kids from hypothermia. He smiled. He might have made Marine Corps history as the only company gunny
to have lost men by freezing to death in a jungle.

He looked at his watch. 0438. Back home he would have already been fixing a silent breakfast, trying not to disturb Martha
and the baby before slipping out the door. He’d start the engine and wait a moment for it to warm up, watching the darkened
house. Perhaps he’d check his crisply starched uniform, or the boots or shoes he’d shined the night before, and then he’d
take one last look at the house before pulling away. The few feelings that Cassidy did allow himself were either those he
could express openly for the Marine Corps or those that were intimate, like his feeling for his family, which arose only in
quiet moments when
he was alone, waiting for cars to warm up or waking in the dark and lying very still. Cassidy knew he was lucky to be married
to Martha because she would never ask him to choose between the family and the Marine Corps. If he were forced to choose,
he’d choose family. But he would hesitate.