Lucky Bastard (19 page)

“Whatever you say.”

Lisp notwithstanding, Motley was enormous, black, and angry. He said, “Glad you agree. Now get your sorry pink ass back up to the ward and carry out your legal orders, or I will personally take you into the latrine and beat that selfsame sorry pink ass into dog meat.
Do you understand?
”

Jack nodded.

“Good,” said Motley. “Now get of my sight, dogshit. If you had the balls to look those men in the eye, you wouldn't have to look at their stumps and burns and shot-off faces.
Do you understand?
”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Don't call me Sergeant. I am not a sergeant. And don't even talk to me no more. Move it!”

Jack went back to the ward and began to draw blood, moving from bed to bed. The first man was unconscious, bleeding through the bandages that covered his face. The next, who had lost both legs, watched with disinterest as Jack stuck the needle into his arm and filled the several vials that were required by the lab.

He said, “You new around here?”

Jack said, “Sort of.”

“When you came in the first time, you looked like a queer in the girls' locker room, man. Left in a hurry.”

No one laughed. The soldier said, “Where was you headed?”

Jack scratched his head, looked straight into the soldier's eyes, and said, “To buy some rubbers.”

It was a feeble joke, but the legless soldier laughed, one bark. To the man in the next bed he said, “You hear what the man said, Harper?”

Harper nodded; he was watching television.

The first soldier said, “You ever see anybody get shot, man?”

The death of Greta flashed in Jack's mind, a gory nickelodeon. “No, I haven't,” he lied.

“Don't sweat it, man,” the soldier said. “Ain't fuck-all to it. Hello, bang, you're dead, who gives a shit.”

That described it, all right. Jack realized that this man, who would be better off dead and knew it, was being kind to him. He said, “I can't believe that, but thanks.”

After that, it wasn't so bad. If Jack could talk, he was all right. He had the touch. He asked questions, he made jokes, he charmed and entertained and talked about sports. Soon guys in the next bed were listening in, telling him he was full of shit if he thought Carlton Fisk was in the same class as Johnny Bench, that gook pussy
squeaked
, man. Jack began to enjoy himself. He stopped seeing the horror. Ignoring the wounds, pretending he and the wounded had something in common, was just another form of white lie. He was good at both the things he was doing—drawing blood and blowing smoke. He was, in a strange way, happy.

Jack worked his way down one side of the ward and was about halfway back on the other side when he came to a bed in which a soldier lay rigid and unmoving, face covered by the sheet. Was he dead? Jack started to back away. Then the man spoke from beneath the sheet.

“Other side of the bed,” he said.

He stuck his left arm out. Jack thought he understood: There was no right arm. He went around the bed, swabbed the soldier's arm, applied the rubber band, found the vein, inserted the needle.

In a falsetto, the man said, “Ooh! That hurt.”

Jack said, “Sorry.”

“Sorry doesn't help. You're supposed to be an angel of mercy, motherfucker.”

The voice was black. The arm was white. Jack said nothing.

Face still covered, the soldier fluted, “You always were a clumsy lout.”

This time Jack recognized the voice and looked up, startled. The man in the bed uncovered his face. It was Danny.

2
On night patrol inside Cambodia, Danny's squad had been advancing along a jungle trail in pitch darkness, each man tethered to the man ahead of him by two bootlaces tied end to end and fastened to their belt loops by a quick-release slipknot.

Danny was walking point, several meters ahead of the other men. It was so dark that he sometimes had to fall on his hands and knees to locate the path by sense of touch. The talcumlike red dirt of the trail had been pounded into chalk by the feet of the enemy. He was worried about mines. The thought of stepping on a mine in the dark was a particularly horrible one to Danny; the idea of losing his legs, of dying in the dark, of bleeding to death while not being able to see a thing, made him shudder.

Right now he had a feeling that he was almost on top of a mine, that the next step he took would detonate it. He drew his bayonet and slid its point gently into the dirt, probing for metal. He thought he heard a click, but it came from somewhere down the trail. He paused, crouched in the darkness, and listened hard. He immediately heard the unmistakable
spoing
of the spring-steel safety lever flying off a captured American hand grenade. Four seconds later a phosphorus grenade exploded behind him. It went off at the feet of the first man in the file, almost certainly because he had stumbled over a trip wire that detonated the device. This meant that enemy soldiers lying in ambush beside the trail had let Danny go by, and had then tightened the wire across the path so that the first man behind him would trigger the booby trap.

“Shit!” Danny cried, spinning around.

He saw the explosion as a blinding blue-white fountain of burning phosphorus that threw off droplets of burning liquid in all directions, just as a real fountain releases a mist of water.

Danny was out of range, but the squad leader and the man behind him were burned alive when the phosphorus set their clothes and then their flesh on fire. A third man was burned, too, when two or three globs of liquid fire landed on his shirt. He ran down the trail toward Danny, screaming and shedding equipment. The wind created by his movement fanned the flames, and in a matter of seconds he was on fire, too. Danny dropped his rifle and tackled the man. He then attempted to put out the flames by rolling him in the dirt. It was too late for this, so Danny attempted to smother the flames with his own body. His own fatigues caught fire, enveloping the entire right side of his body from ankle to shoulder. As he rolled on the ground trying to put out the flames that were igniting his own body fat, the dead man's ammunition started to go off. Danny threw off the bandolier he was carrying and pressed the burning half of his body into the ground. The flames died—but not before they had consumed most of the skin and about 20 percent of the muscle of his right arm and leg.

Down the trail, Vietnamese soldiers were firing assault rifles and a machine gun at the surviving members of the squad, who had deployed into the trees on the opposite side of the trail and were returning fire. Danny was in shock, so he felt very little pain. He had lost his rifle, and when he found it again by sense of touch and tried to lift it to his right shoulder, he discovered that his right hand and arm no longer functioned. He found his discarded bandolier and grenades and crawled in among the trees, intending to attack the enemy from the flank, but he lost consciousness before he could reach them.

When he woke, the sun had risen. He made his way back to the trail. Three charred corpses lay on the path. He found blood and scattered brass among the trees on both sides of the trail, but no other bodies or equipment, either American or Vietnamese. By now he was out of shock and in agonizing pain. He lost consciousness again. An hour or two later another American patrol found him lying in the path and carried him out to a landing zone. None of the missing members of his squad were ever heard from again.

Jack said, “You tackled a guy who was on fire?”

“Saved my life,” Danny replied.

He was right, of course. With the sheet pulled up to his chin, Danny looked the same: thick blue-black hair, dancing blue eyes watching for an opening, twisted grin. The eternal optimist.

Jack said, “What about Cindy?”

“I haven't exactly been communicating with Cindy.”

Jack said, “Not communicating with Cindy? Since when?”

Danny's face lost all expression. “Since when do you think, Jack?”

An electric shock ran through Jack's body. He was a stranger to guilt, but dread was his constant companion. Getting caught is the liar's greatest fear, and like all liars Jack lived with it every day. Danny was staring into his eyes. Did he
know?

He said, “What are you saying to me, Danny?”

“You figure it out,” Danny replied.

Good God, he
did
know. Jack hadn't thought about his hour with Cindy since it happened. But suppose she had told Danny? He could hear her sweet, flat, Ohio voice saying,
I wish it hadn't happened, honey, but it did. With your best friend.
For a long moment Danny stared brightly at Jack. Then tears filled his eyes. He closed his lids. The tears squeezed out between them like a child's tears, great beads of water appearing one by one and then bursting.

“Shit,” Danny said, his eyes still closed. He wiped his eyes with the sheet. Jack handed him a box of tissues, and—touched to the heart, Cindy forgotten—he reached under the sheet and took his friend's good hand. Danny returned the pressure.

Jack said, “Danny, I don't know what to say. Things happen—”

Danny grinned again, painfully. “That's what I mean,” he said. “She must be pretty horny by now. The minute I tell her, she'll be down here with the wedding rings and a bouquet. I'd never get rid of her.”

Relief flooded through Jack's whole being. Danny didn't know what had happened between him and Cindy. He had no suspicion, no idea. And now how could Cindy ever confess? She couldn't, not ever, not to this victim of fate. Jack was safe.

Jack said, “So she comes down in a wedding dress. Would that be so bad?”

“Being married to Florence Nightingale for the rest of my life? It would be terrific.”

“How long have you been back?”

“A month.”

Jack said, “And she doesn't know you're here? Danny, let's go. There's a phone in the hall.”

“I can't.”

“Like hell you can't.”

Danny tightened his grip, but Jack wrenched his hand free and ran out into the hall and grabbed a wheelchair. When he returned with it, Danny waved him away.

Jack said, “Danny, get in the fucking chair.”

The men in the other beds, those who were conscious, were watching and listening. Who were these guys?

Danny said, “No fucking way. Get your ass out of here, Jack.”

“Get in the chair or I'll call her myself.”

Danny was angry now—a good sign, in Jack's experience of him. When he got mad on the gridiron or the diamond, he usually did something amazing.

“
You
'll call her?” Danny said. “She'd hang up.”

“Not before I told her what's going on.”

“You'd do that to me?”

Jack said, “You have no fucking idea. Believe me.” Then, softly: “Come on, Dan. Pick up the phone. Please.”

Danny closed his eyes. Then he said, “I haven't got the balls.”

“Yes, you have. And that's the whole point. Come on, Dan. Get in the chair.”

Danny thought hard, eyes vacant, remembering his life: a landscape with three figures: Jack, Cindy, Danny.

He said, “I'll need a hand.”

Jack thought he meant that he wanted him to break the news, prepare Cindy before Danny came on the line. But then Danny threw back the sheet and Jack saw what had happened to him, and he understood what kind of help Danny really needed. Half of his body—the body that had been such a wonder, such a gift—was frozen, scarred, numb to commands from Danny's brain.

Jack helped Danny into the chair and wheeled him out to the pay phone by the elevators. Jack placed a collect call and handed the phone to Danny.

Jack heard Cindy's voice shrieking, “Yes! I accept!” And then shouting, “Danny! Danny!”

Danny held the mouthpiece against his chest. His eyes were fixed on the pay-phone box. Jack knew that he wanted to hang up, but he was too far below the phone to be able to reach the hook, and he could not get up on his own.

He said, “Jack, help me out.”

Jack shook his head, then locked the wheels on Danny's chair and walked away, out of earshot.

Danny said, “End of the fucking world.” Then he put the phone to his ear and said, “Hi. It's me.”

He talked to Cindy for more than an hour, weeping most of the time. At the end of it, he waved the phone at Jack, asking for help. Jack walked over and hung up the phone.

Danny said, “Thanks a lot, buddy. You just dropped me on the flypaper. She's coming tomorrow.”

Jack wheeled Danny back to his bed and helped him in. He covered him up. He said, “I'll be back.”

“When?”

“Soon. Maybe not tomorrow, though.”

“Good thinking.”

“You mean she didn't send me her love?”

“I told her you got here first,” Danny said. “The rest was silence.”

“Does this mean I don't get to be best man?”

“Don't ask,” Danny said. “At least the two of you were right about the one thing you ever agreed on. I never should have gone to ‘Nam. Wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He grinned. “Lost at least ninety miles off my fastball.”

Jack's eyes filled with tears. He said, “Danny, I'm so sorry.”

“Why?” Danny said. “You weren't there.”

3
One Thursday evening, Jack, finishing a long Jesus joke, failed to notice that the floor of the ward had just been mopped. Syringe in hand, he slipped, fell down, and impaled his hand on the needle.

Sitting on the floor, staring at the blood on his palm, he said, “That's what I get for trying to walk on water.”

After that the men called him Jesus.

When they caught their first glimpse of Cindy, they were stunned by her beauty and her love for Danny. After she left, the loud soldier on the other side of the ward said, “Hey, Miller, is that the chick Jesus forced you to call up on the telephone?”