Gods Go Begging (18 page)

Jesse pointed toward the PRC-25 at his feet, a radio the size of a large rucksack that had a very conspicuous antenna. The first radiotelephone operator was lying in one of the body bags at the top of the hill.

“I speak
pocho
Spanish because I’m Chicano, and passable French because I once had a girlfriend from Quebec. She was one sweet thing. I haven’t had much opportunity to speak French until I came to the Nam. A lot of the older folks here still
parlent Français;
some of the Montagnards, some of the bar girls, and all of the Catholic nuns do. Sometimes the Sarge and I practice our French on each other. It comes in handy over here.”

As he spoke, the image of Hong Trac’s cold body lying by a roadside back in Da Nang pushed its way back into his mind’s eye. He could hear the sharp clicking of the photographer’s camera. The blond hair of the French woman was the last image to fade from his mind.

“But that’s all I’m going to say about my past. It’s really not very interesting. Right now all I want is to be any place on earth but here, but I’ll settle for a Thai stick, a bath, and two weeks in Singapore. This boonie shit ain’t for my ass. I can’t believe I volunteered for this.” He held his hands out as he spoke. They were still shaking violently. They had been shaking for hours.

“Hit on this,” said a voice behind the glowing ash of a joint that had been extended to Jesse. It was Jim-Earl, the Shoshone from the Wind River Reservation. Almost every Indian that had enlisted or who had been drafted by the army had been put directly into the infantry.

Jesse took the cigarette, inhaled deeply, then held his breath for a few seconds before speaking. “Now you guys have to answer a question for me. What was your asshole pucker factor last night? I need some sort of gauge for future reference—just in case there is a future.”

“Mine was a definite ten.” Cornelius laughed and reached around with his right hand and rubbed his ass. It had leaked. “Good thing this here underwear is green.” He reached around and checked the front of his pants, too. “Seems I done leaked from every damn hole. I’ll tell you, the army sure has been good for my sex life. Every time I turn around, I’m gettin’ fucked.”

“It was a definite eleven,” said another voice. “Fuck, it still is,” added the voice. There was a look of distance and horror in the speaker’s eyes. He was a new grunt, a boy from Nevada who had a pronounced overbite and one slow eye.

“That’s good to hear. I feel better now.”Jesse sighed. “But I really don’t think my asshole will ever open again. The damn thing is sealed shut. I didn’t know there was that much fear anywhere in the universe. It’s been hours and I’m still shaking from it. My heart won’t slow down and I’m so numb I can’t feel my fingers and my feet. I have deep cuts everywhere and I don’t know how or when I got them.”

He exhaled deeply as he probed a dozen new lacerations and abrasions. Now he started to feel the pain. Jesse couldn’t know it as he spoke, but his voice was no longer the same. Around each forced word that left his lips was a deathly host of sullen harmonics, echoes of savagery, second- and third-order resonances of screams and sighs, sights of explicit mortality and images of incredible courage that had settled in to infect and to bless each day for the rest of his life.

“Join the club,” said a Midwestern voice. “I went my whole first tour of duty without ever getting this close to Charlie. I can’t believe it, last night the fuckin’ dinks was running right between our bunkers. I could hear ‘em talking. I could see their faces. Jesus, I thought I was dead.”

“I felt like there were lead weights all over me,” continued Jesse, who somehow felt compelled to keep talking, “like I was moving in Jell-O. At first I was too afraid to pull the trigger, then I was too scared to stop. If there had been a Southern Baptist church choir in front of me, I would have shot it to pieces.” He turned to gaze at the body bags lined up at the crest of the hill.

“Human life is only worth what we agree it’s worth. There’s no intrinsic value.”Jesse’s voice almost broke as he spoke. He had dared to say the ancient secret out loud.

“I don’t know what you just said, but you’re one of us now, man,” said Cornelius. “You sho nuff rneat just like us,” he smiled, using his best Alabama-East Oakland drawl.

Jim-Earl grunted his laconic agreement. The other Indians said nothing. They were huddled together, lighting up still another gigantic joint. The Midwestern voice was silent. After a few minutes, the voice from Iowa said, “I thought I joined up to be a soldier. Hell, I ain’t nothing but a chauffeur for this here rifle. How come they don’t use robots for this here job?”

“Because there have to be casualties.” It was the padre, who had seemingly appeared from nowhere. “You can’t keep score without casualties.”

“Charlie ain’t keepin’ score,” said Cornelius softly. “We’re runnin‘it up on him and he keeps on comin’.”

“Orale,
” said a Mexican voice. “Let these
Norteños
and the
Sureños
kill each other off. I don’t give a shit about either side.”

Just then the breeze shifted, bringing with it the hot air that had been languishing above the row of body bags. Some troops bent over with dry heaves, some held their breath and closed their eyes until the stench passed. It was the smell of meat. The rancid meat of friends. The graying meat of a second lieutenant who had lost his face. The meat of a Russian boy who went berserk just before the mortar round hit him. It was the scent of the secret. After holding his breath for half a minute, Jesse was the first to test the air. He inhaled the lingering remnants of tragedy.

“Last night, when the zips started using RPGs on us, I heard someone yell out, ‘Hide in your asshole!’ ”

“The troopers’ anthem!” shouted the Midwestern voice.

“How is it that you guys say to hide in your assholes when they’ve been squeezed shut by a maximum pucker factor?”

“Holy shit, I never thought of that one,” said Cornelius. “Is we gone and mixed our muthafuckin’ metaphors?” he asked in a terribly rendered British accent.

“Grunts’ homilies are certainly anomalies,” mused Jesse.

“Jesus-Santo,”
said the same Mexican voice. It was Tiburcio Mendez, an enlistee from Tijuana who joined the U.S. Army to get his American citizenship. Enlistment was a way of getting across the Rio Grande that the Border Patrol didn’t seem to care about. No idiot gringos were crying out for a greater INS presence at the recruitment centers.

“Don’t worry, Mendez,” said Cornelius, “I didn’t understand it either. In fact, I’m not even sure it was English. Tell me, Jesse, will I be able to talk like that after two semesters?”

Cornelius‘a voice always had a calming effect on his buddies. It was a lovely tenor voice that had been polished and tuned in a tiny Baptist church choir in East Oakland. It was Cornelius who sang “Asleep in the Arms of the Lord,” the little-known lyrics to “Taps” whenever there was a stand-down for fallen comrades. His clear, pure voice would rise above the benediction like a wish rising from an orphan.

As the sun set, Mendez’s brown eyes had been glued to the darkening horizon. It was not the same expanse of sky he had always seen down in Mexico. As he compulsively rubbed a large silver crucifix that hung from his neck, his eyes spotted an object moving in the sky. Beneath his thumb the body of Christ had eventually gone from white metal to a dull gray. One arm of the cross had been completely eroded away. The wound to His side was no more.

“Is that one of those …
como
se
dice…satélite
…
uno de los esputniks?
”

Some necks craned upward to look. A few tired eyes pulled away from the dull green light of starlight scopes and lifted to the heavens. Few of them would ever notice that the constellations were different in this sky, that the distant stars were impossibly bright against the black felt of an unpolluted atmosphere. But they all saw what Tiburcio Mendez had seen: it was a bright ball that moved unswervingly across night sky.

“It’s a spy plane,” said a voice in the darkness.

“No spy plane goes that fast,” said the Shoshone voice. “Besides, what spy plane is gonna advertise itself like that?”

There was a strange desperation in the two voices in the dark, a desperation generated by the impending disappearance of the flying object. When it dove into the horizon, this human pause, this moment of normalcy would go with it. Their eyes would have to return to the specter of North Vietnamese troops moving out there in the blackness.

“B-52’s don’t fly alone,” said another voice, “maybe it is a satellite. It don’t have to be Sputnik; it could be one of ours. For a time back there, those Russians were sure kickin’ our asses up there in space. Is Jesse still here? Ask him what he thinks.”

“Yeah,” said another voice filled with friendly derision, “let’s ask the college-boy radio whiz.”

Other voices laughed nervously in the dark, then waited for an answer from Jesse. Someone’s eye went back to his scope for a second or two to verify that nothing in the darkness had changed. They were still out there, digging spider holes, dragging their killed and wounded into the forest. They were busy diagramming the new claymore placements on the hill and calculating the fields of fire that had thinned out since their last assault. They were out there, totally aware of the fact that wounded and dead Americans and Mon tagnards had been airlifted away but no replacements had arrived.

“I think Mendez is right,” said a voice that was a distance away from the others yet clearly audible. It was Jesse’s voice. He had moved away from the group, suddenly groggy from the marijuana “It’s too high and too fast for any airplane.”

“Shit, Mendez,” said a Midwestern voice. “you finally got some thing right.”

There was silence from Mendez.

“Hey, chatterbox, you got nothing to say?”

Mendez was silent, ruminating over a question he had always wanted to ask someone but had never gotten up the courage for.

“What keeps that thing up there?” asked the Midwestern voice. happy to talk about anything but the small, surrounded hill that at once exposed him and protected him.

“It’s not high enough to be truly beyond earth’s gravity,” said Jesse’s distant voice, “but it has enough lateral velocity so that it keeps missing the earth as it falls. Essentially, it keeps falling toward something that it will never hit.”

“Sounds just like my life,” said another, much more disturbed voice. It was the chaplain. There were still remnants of tenor in his voice box. His body and soul were still buzzing with horror. It had taken hours for his battered heart to return to a rate that was only twice normal. He couldn’t know it but every capillary in his eyes had burst; even in the relative calm of evening, his eyes and ears were bleeding. “Sounds like my life,” he repeated.

“Todavía està loco, elpadre?”
whispered another, even more distant voice. It was Lopez, using Spanish to compound the courtesy of a lowered voice. People from his village would never dishonor a priest. Julio Lopez shivered as he spoke into the dark. Below his face, his fingers were moving like fleshy machines. Even in pitch blackness he could clean his rifle again and again, then load and reload each magazine. Each round was drawn across his forehead to lubricate it before it was placed into a magazine. Julio Lopez’s rifle was never going to jam.

Sometime during the night a cold chill, as sharp as a knife, had suddenly penetrated his flak jacket and shoved its honed and frigid fingers down his perpetually sweating back. In a moment of both insight and panic, Lopez understood that he had to speak to the padre, whether he was insane or not. There wasn’t much time left. There were sins to confess.
“Está fuera de sussesos
? he asked.

“Shit, he’s in his right mind,” said a Southern black voice that was breaking silence. It had the nasal, snarling vowels of the Mississippi Delta. It was a voice that slid effortlessly up and down in pitch, like a polished bottleneck on wooden frets. “It’s this shit that’s crazy. It’s the Nam that’s crazy.”

He had been scanning the horizon with his scope. Suddenly his eye settled on a single target.

“Shit, do you know what them zips are doing? I can see ‘em up there in the trees cutting down them poor fuckers that got blown up into the canopy. I sure do love them gunships. J can see two of them out there eating something. It looks like they’re eating rocks! What the hell could it be?”

The voice of a Montagnard soldier rang out. He had heard the question and was answering it with his beautiful, incomprehensible dialect. No one but his own countrymen would ever understand his words. The importance of his statement would be lost forever: “They are eating green rocks. Can’t you fools see? They are swallowing green rocks. They seek out the power in jade.”

“Jesse, amigo.
”It was Mendez, finally breaking his own pouting silence.
“Pienses que algún día habrán Mexicanos en espacio? Mexicanos en lasgalaxias?”
A long, silent interval passed before he had the courage to translate the passage. “Do you suppose that there will ever be Mexicanos in space?”

There was laughter everywhere. Grunts who had been on the brink of despondency or fatigued beyond description began to chuckle at the absurdity of the question and the insane images it had created in their minds. A hundred yards away North Vietnamese regulars lifted their heads when the laughter reached them. The glow from their horridly bitter Chinese cigarettes was visible at a hundred meters. Some even laughed mockingly, while others wondered why the GIs weren’t more afraid.

“Pancho Villa on Venus.” Cornelius giggled. His was a tentative, restrained form of laughter. He had heard the North Vietnamese. They sounded cocky. “The Frito Bandito versus Emperor Ming on Jupiter.”

“Mi vida loca
on Mercury,” said Lopez.

“How the hell do you jump-start a rocket ship?” asked the voice from the Mississippi Delta.

Within the perimeter, only the Montagnards failed to laugh. They were busy cleaning their antique rifles while speaking their strange language, drinking bark tea, and taking bites out of dried balls of rice that contained slices of roasted monkey meat and a few morsels of vegetable.