Profane Men (15 page)

Your body is on the island under lock and key until you eventually buy the farm. If this is some leper-colony bullshit story, it sure is a widespread one. Almost every military unit has heard first-generation rumors about somebody with a really “numbah ten thousand” case of VD that just upped and disappeared one day. Nobody ever heard from any of those cats again. Guess they all went to that big clinic in the sky.

Another one of the ball-busters is about the Americans fighting for the Cong. That is no lie, GI. Me, D'Allesandro, and Dutchman, all know a dude went over. White motherfucker too. He just boogied out one time on a patrol. So far as we know, he's still working for the other side right now. Probably married Jane Fonda or some shit. Sharp mother too, just went batshit.

He's carried on the books KIA, but we all know better. That cocksuck is alive and goddamn VC. Up here in Eye-Corps somewhere probably, lighting up Marines and shit, I wouldn't be surprised. Crazy asshole.

It wouldn't be hard to go over. There's all kinds of routes. In Saigon we know a place where you can go and drink with VC on R&R, and that's no shit. Place is fucking notorious. Some of them hate their officers just like we do. Some are hard-core lifer types. All kinds of VC. But the thing is, almost every one of them is real strongly motivated. To them this sonofabitch is a holy war. And the few I've talked to, I can promise you those slopes never doubt they're gonna kick our asses out. I'll say one thing for 'em, they've got balls to the walls.

Right next door to where the hard-cores go is this sales outlet for special weapons. If you know somebody, you can go get a rifled Zippo, a cigarette lighter that literally
will
light you up, a pen gun that fires a .22 round, all kinds of neat shit like that — and it's run by the VC. Everybody in-country knows about it. The question I always wonder is, how do they stay open? I don't like to think about the answer to that one.

Dig it. We are cacked out in some weeds, trying to figure a way to dump some batteries and ammo. Nobody has seen our drag man for two days and somebody says, look — and over across the field there's old HOG, real as death and four times as ugly, waiting for us on the other side of the field. Got that look on his face like he just got done choking his chicken. Go figger it.

I'm running scraps of cloth patch through Sweet Alice's mouth, ramrodding out little shitclogs of oily black residue. Scratching bites, swigging from canteens, popping bennies and Dexis, checking out a boil on the back of one of my ankles, fascinating shit like that. I'm also higher than eagle kaka.

I am doing lots more speed than I used to, so it's lucky that I don't give a clustered rat fuck. I can take a hit off my canteen and I'm higher than a bat right from the git-go. Then, pretty soon, I have to do some more or I get jumpy and tired. Speed picks my raggedy ass right up, man. I'm sorry, but there it is. It sits on my chest a little, sure, but I can handle that. I'm flying right now. How do you think I get through this ass-kicking green motherfucker — prayer?

“I keep wishing I were somewhere else . . . walking down a brand-new street — ”

“Awwwriight, let's go, goddammit, girls! Saddle up!”

“Mmmmmnnnn.” Who died and made
his
ass king?

Diddybopping through some snaky weeds and on the edge of another desolate ghost town of blown hootches. We stop while El Tee looks at his maps, trying to figure out where the hell we are. He's talking to somebody on his radio. Corns is talking on his radio. I wonder if they could be talking to each other. I fucking couldn't care less who they're talking to as long as we can get this daisy chain over with.

Into this wiped-out ghost town. I mean, the sensors are really out. This fucker is one big fighting hole. It is completely trenched. There is a spider hole or an overgrown bunker or a trench running every place you look.

Hold it. White has got his booby-trap sign going. He's grabbing ass and pounding tit. Booby traps.

We lay chilly. White is duck-walking back toward us and he whispers to El Tee, “Move on back a few meters — move on back. Traps.”

El Tee signals us to move it back five to ten meters. White goes back up and pokes around. He is moving very carefully, alert to traps, snipers, and Charlie in his hidey hole somewhere watching. He eases back to our position in a couple of minutes.

“I make out at least a dozen trenches and shit just from here. I see hidey holes everywhere. I just took out a couple of traps and marked them right there,” he motions, “and there's gotta be lots more.”

Half a day later we're still down on our hands and knees with K-Bars working on it. Here's what we find in Ghost City: in three hours we've uncovered eighteen hidey holes, twenty-five trenches, four grenade traps (two of which won't blow), a very nasty trio of “whips” (bamboo devices), fourteen punji-stick pits, two claymores, and a small tunnel with what I hoped was going to be the front door of KILL, but what turned out to be a sack of grenades and some documents, which Tex says are some worthless, obsolete order of battle bullshit. All of this shit is overgrown and takes forever to clear.

“Fire in the hole.”

Crrrrooooomp! Crompppp! Crrrrrooooooommmmmpp!

“Shit sakes!” screams Ewell, “whyncha throw a fuckin' few more frags in there! Waste a few more grenades, fer chrissakes. Jesus! Ya girls threw enough frags in there to kill a fuckin' platoon, goddammit! That's enough already, shit!”

“Hey, Top,” D'Allesandro asks innocently, “should we throw some more grenades in there, do you think?”

“Wiseass motherfucker. Come on, let's get it done!”

Laughter. As we are all relaxing for a second, having a few grins with the ole Sarge, there's a humongous explosion at the other end of the ghost town.

Steel flying through the air in this big, exploding wave of shrapnel, red dust, and stinging rock, cutting, smashing, blinding, bigass deafening noise out of nowhere and a horrible yell.

“Aaaaahhhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Everybody's going nuts trying to find out what hit the fan. Who's hurt.

El Tee is hollering, “Doc! Up from! Get a gun up on that knoll! Somebody get a fire team over there.” He's hollering, we're running around grabbing ass, running through the weeds.

“Aaaaaaaaaaa.”
That awful moaning yell again.

El Tee screams, “Where the fuck is doc? Doc!”

It is Doc McAllen. He's sitting in a really large puddle of blood and Jeezus H. Christ he is a fucking goner. Half of him's blown away. I drop down and grab all kinds of bandages and battle dressings out of his bag, and me and Dutchman try to tie some of him off. Man, it is just hopeless.

Blood is everywhere, soaking the ground. He even has blood all over his glasses, and he is sitting sort of on what is left of his torso holding himself up with his hands, I guess, and moaning in a kind of long, tortured yell.

He pitches over backward in the blood and bones and stuff. Dutchman and I can't do anything. Blood has poured out of him like a faucet. There is nothing to tie into, just slippery, blood-soaked, torn, meaty shreds. McAllen isn't moving.

We're a mess. Our hands look like the stockyards at noon Friday. We've got blood expander, battle dressings, bandages, all kinds of crap around. We've hit him with morphine. Shit, he is gonski. Doc is
all
fucked up.

I never could understand how he stayed conscious so long. Everything below the groin is gone; balls, dick, pelvis bones, thighs, knees, calves, ankle bones connected to de foot bone, dem bones dem bones dem dry bones, I am just on the borderline of losing it.

One of his boots is lying off to the side of the weeds, and the FO picks it up absentmindedly and sees one of Doc McAllen's feet still in it, sheared off at the top of the boot like it was cut by a single guillotine slice. He tries to yell, but before he can he pukes all over himself. It just rushes up through him with a will of its own and he goes to barf city. People are crying, puking, holy shit, what a mess. I have never seen so much blood loss from anyone who was still alive. It looks like somebody took a couple of bathtubs full of bright red paint and dumped them on the ground. Dutchman and I are covered with all kinds of filth and blood.

Doc must have stepped on a bouncing Betty mine. What a way to buy it. I thought I'd seen some bad shit, but this is really something I could have done without. McAllen was a stand-up dude too. Fucking Vietnam.

We should all have a choice as to how and when we die. I want to go on the eve of my hundred-and-fifteenth birthday by being fucked to death in the arms of twin Polynesian hooker sisters who own a liquor store. And then I plan to go kicking, screaming, pleading, and whining.

Here are some of the 482 ways I do not — repeat, not — want to bite it:

138. Squashed by a fifty-foot python

139. Falling off the Empire State Building

140. Exsanguination by clinical vampires

141. Immolation at the hands of irate Buddhists

142. Disintegrating from interior rot

143. Drowning in a septic tank

144. Mutilation from berserk appliances

145. Being bored to death by politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.

146. Internal combustion

147. Crushed by a falling Chinook

148. Suffocating in a woman wrestler's armpit

149. Being flare-fucked in any orifice: some dudes down in the Delta had this sixteen-year-old prisoner; four of them give her some nummah one boom boom, then ram a pop flare up her and blow her up like a rotten sandbag

150. Having my pancreas removed through my nose

151. Stabbed in the eyes by marlin spikes

152. OD'ing on diuretics

153. Slicing in a premature autopsy

154. Decapitation by rotor blades (I saw a dude go that way!)

155. Being infuriated to death by officious morons

156. Swallowing Cokes with ground glass in them

157. Digesting a CIA “pep” (pulmonary embolism pill)

158. Sliding down a banister with razor blades in it

159. Stepping on a bouncing Betty mine and hearing a little noise when the detonator blows and knowing that before I can move one meter a 60-mm Viet Cong mortar round with a fast fuse is going to go off in the air about waist-high, turning everything south of my belt buckle into bright and slippery-red Hamburger Helper

El Tee is on the horn, trying to shout up an emergency medevac. Fucker's yelling like a champ at some other lifer asshole down the line. Hate to tell ya, Loot, but no way, Jose. Doc is chewed.

Dutchman and I are trying to wipe all the blood and sticky stuff off our hands and arms. It'll be a while before Doc McAllen's death sinks in. For some reason I flash on the stew as I'm getting off the plane at Tan Son Nhut, bitch smiles one of those plastic grimaces and says, “Ve'll see you again in a year. Meanwhile, haffa nice var!”

Bitch had more hair on her legs than I do. Haff a nice var. Outstanding. Goddamn krauts.

“Marvel not at this:
for the hour is coming in which
all that are in the graves shall
hear his voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good,
unto the resurrection of life and they that
have done evil, unto the resurrection of
damnation.”

— John 5:28-29

“Jesus,” he half screams, wrenching himself awake.

“Oh, shit. Thank God,” he sighs, remembering the fragment of the dream, waking up drenched in sweat, really soaked and with a case of bad D.T.'s. He inhales all the oxygen he can suck into his aching lungs. He thinks, “Thank God for not letting me dream about him again” as he tries to shake the cobwebs loose.

It was only another of the snake dreams. He has snake dreams, too. Are they common in Nam? Has there been a snake dream survey? Does a desk jockey somewhere have the data? He has the snake dream often. It ain't shit. But sometimes he flashes on in when he's awake and that's weird. Like the other day when he didn't really see the snake, but he saw the S where it was slithering through the grass. Looked to be a real big mother. Some of the snakes over here can really book. Big Merle isn't scared of snakes. It's just that he remembers the one snake dream a lot.

He and his father used to go out in the fields snake hunting. There was a place where people tossed their junk, and the snakes liked to coil up under the stuff and keep cool on hot summer days. They could flip things over and take the snakes off with their clubs before the snakes could do shit. He liked going out with his dad on the snake hunts. Sometimes if it was a king or black or hog nose or chicken snake, he would take it and put it in his dad's snake sack and they'd take it back to the house and turn it loose to catch field mice and rats. Snakes were OK.

First time his dad made him pick one up he was just a little kid, so he was a trifle scared of it, and he wasn't going to do it, but his pop says no, son, it won't hurt you. Now you go ahead and pick up that snake just like I showed you. And he picked it up and was real surprised. It wasn't slimy or anything like he thought it would be. After that his pop had him handle snakes a lot, and it wasn't long before he wasn't scared of them at all.

Oh, that one time he'd started to kill that big copperhead that was curled up in the back of that old car and he'd been a little slow and it had come after him, he'd been scared then, but that was different.

The snake dream really wasn't anything to speak of. One time when they were down in the woods where the backwater was, a pair of big old water mocs had come slithering across their path and his pop had sliced that big mama snake right in two with the double-bitted ax he was carrying, and a sac of little worm-size water moccasins came whishing out of that mama's sliced-open belly, all writhing around in the stream of blood and pus, and that was what he saw when he had the snake dream, all those bloody little worms that would remind him of the boy.

As long as he didn't have to visualize the little boy in his mind, that was OK then. The snake dream wasn't puppy shit. He tries to stretch out his arm and shoulder where he has slept all scrunched up. He can't let himself think about the boy again. He knows the dream can turn him right around. He rubs his arm and wipes the dream sweat off his face as he watches two colored men jive-ass back and forth, wiping the sleep from his eyes as he watches the two men saying hello in their endlessly complex handshake, known by its acronym DAP — Dignity for Afro Peoples.

“Nuttin' to it!”

“Jes' do it!” An endless dap, over three minutes of fingers, hands, forearms, back fists, slaps, high and low fives, slap-dapping and chanting.

Damn jail sure has a lot of colored and Mexes in it, Big Merle thinks. Just about as many beaners as there are spades. He thinks how he got in here in the first place, which is just exactly what he does not want to be thinking about.

Just for a second before he can jerk his mind out of gear and put her into neutral, ChristohJesusoh nooooooo, he sees the boy again just for a second and feels the pain of it and sorrow and terror just as if it was yesterday before he can stop himself. Think about something, dammit! He tries to conjure up a thought about something else awful, some other thought that is strong and evil and bad enough he can get his teeth into the fucker and wrench his mind off the boy.

Think about that insane, no-good sonofabitch broke the little puppy's paws just because it wouldn't obey him, think about the bag lady he watched drown in her own vomit that time, think about the night they peeled that spic down in Oklahoma City, anything. Think about the dirt bike accidents, the time he rolled that stolen car, the circus geek lived down by the water works, time he fucked that sissy, think about anything.

There's nothing to do about it now. God took the boy. Big Merle thinks about the one colored jailed with him. Old Tom used to say, “Country safe, motherfucker,” when he'd pass ya in the slams, and one time he said, “Tom, how come you always sayin' country safe?” Just to have something to rap about.

“Are the white folks still in power?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

“Well, then the country's safe, motherfucker!” And he laughed like a hyena.

In a second of clarity he feels the blood rush to his face. Awww, fuck me, he thinks, with some embarrassment. I'm not in jail anymore. I'm in fucking Veet'nam. Shit!

He remembers the snake in the grass, the one he didn't really see, the one slithering an S through the tall weeds, that was a Vietnamese snake. The bloods are United States Marine Corps splibs named Vernon Brown, a radio telephone op from Memphis, and LeRoi Washington, a weapons-and-demo brother from the Windy, and he is far away from the Cook County Jail and crime and slime and dope without hope.

He hasn't dealt any bad crank in a long time. Hasn't slung a mama over his sissy bars or worn his colors in a damn coon's age. He hasn't even thought about the little boy in a long time.

Motherfucker! he thinks, why can't I pull myself off it, for God's sake. It is driving me batshit. It ain't nothin' now, anyway. He wipes his face with the back of his hand and looks at the sunburned arm and the hairy, thick-fingered hand with its swollen knuckles. Fuck it. He lets himself think about the little boy again. Poor little son of a bitch. Oh, God, he thinks, why would you let something like this happen?

God moves in mysterious ways, somebody once told him when he was a kid. God's ways are not for man to understand. Oh, yes, that is right as rain, Big Merlin thinks. He never could understand any of it. Not for a fucking second.

Why is it whenever he thinks about the little yellow pus-sack of baby snakes spilling out of that big water moc, he automatically triggers a flash on the boy there in the dark place down under the Doc's place? OhJesusohGod no. Ohnoohno. Please don'tpleasedon'tletme . . .

He remembers as he always does, in a gushing flood of soul-tearing insight and memory and pain. He can see it as vividly as if he had painted a big color picture of it on the inside of his eyelids. He carries the picture with him everywhere, like some men carry a picture of their girl or their family. He carries this.

First, as he goes through the wall, he sees the big room with the two snot vampires and the little girl they are working on. He can see it with crystal clarity, the corrugated tin, the rusty nails bleeding brown stains down the metal, the Skelly Oil and Coca-Cola signs and crap nailed to rotting timbers and planks, the pictures thumbtacked all around, the little girl all dirty and screaming as he takes off the snot vampires, hoping to only hurt them so that he can go back and take his time with them and show them some payback, but he loses control and just totally fucks them over right then and there.

He saved the little girls, all three of them, the one they had in the wig and the two back in the other part, but not the boy. He didn't even find the boy at first, and part of the shock was when he did find him. He didn't even know what he had found at first.

He stops thinking about it for a moment and forces himself to take big, deep breaths. Sometimes it gets so bad he can't breathe and he makes himself calm down and then in spite of himself it slides back in there and he lets it take him down.

It was in the last of the tin-partitioned areas where he found him. He was huddled in a ball on a bloodstained, filthy mattress, and the boy was not chained as the little girls were. Big Merlin was so scared and sick at first he thought he was going to just pass out or die right then and there. He backed off from the boy, and went back in and looked around in the first room for a while, and when he allowed his mind to finally grasp what the man and woman had been using the little child for, he went back and took his knife to their bodies, he just went nuts and cut them in a damn bloodbath and he shouldn't have because the little girl was screaming and it finally got through to him and he stopped. Shit, they were dead anyway.

For a time after that, he stood around in the room, just trying to figure out what he should do next. Nothing in his experience, sordid as it was, had begun to prepare him for this. He just stood there. His mind wouldn't touch it. He just couldn't deal with it. He didn't know whether to shit or go blind. He was still there when the ambulances and the taw finally showed.

Claudia and the Doctor, as they were called to their faces on the street, lived most of the time in a secret sub-basement of a long-deserted sharecropper shack out on the edge of an overgrown field about an hour's drive north of O'Hare's flight path. The Doc had found the basement out nosing around and spent the best part of a year constructing the rooms from a cache of old metal signs and billboards and pieces of roofing he'd been squirreling away.

They also maintained a straight residence in a nearby, rundown suburb, but except for one or two occasions they'd been staying down in the secret place here this past year. Ever since they'd had the three girls and the little thing, which is what they called the boy, they had used the house only for infrequent shows and the odd kitchen convenience, preferring the dank sub-cellar of their “school.”

Claudia was Myrtle Pratt, fifty-six, and the Doctor was Joseph Forbis Ely, fifty-one. They were the twisted proprietors of the School for the Blind Ten-Year-Olds, as they called it, a quartet of tin-walled cubicles, three of which contained a stained mattress and slop can and a manacled, sightless, captive child cowering in darkness and abject terror. The main area where Claudia and the Doctor ate and slept and watched soaps and sit-coms on their battery-powered TV also held a blinded child, whomever might be the luckless focus of their current energies.

They liked the secret place now because they could make all the noise they wanted to, and sometimes their students would scream like little wounded animals during their instruction. It was better there near their charges.

They had found and kidnapped three of the kids themselves, Ely then blinding each child in the makeshift operating room of their home, in a surgical procedure he had paid five hundred dollars and a Yuban jar full of dope to learn. Because both Myrtle and Joseph were grotesquely ugly, their mangled egos required that their victims be very young, beautiful children who could not see.

It was not enough of a turn on, unfortunately, to just blindfold the children. And the Doctor was more than willing to see that each of his charges was immediately forced to suffer.

Considering the degradation of the ordeal each victim would undergo, this may have been a dark blessing of sorts. The Doctor had performed the operation unsuccessfully only three times. The four others, one of whom he'd traded a CB and a trunkload of stolen audio cassettes for, had lived to provide their nucleus.

Myrtle hated her name and had seized on Claudia while enthralled in the plastic plot of some long-forgotten soap opera. She was simply a very ugly, lonely, sad, embittered, lazy, violent-tempered, amoral, insensitive old slut with a scarred sex drive and a wide mean streak. Left to her own devices she would have probably fogged her brain and body chemistry into a junkie stupor and remained fairly harmless.

But the combination of the Doctor and Claudia produced a synergy that was something else again. His vile appetites and dark, evil nature evoked a viciousness and twisted mindset so perverse it sometimes shocked even Claudia.

Joseph Ely was what is called in the jargon of the street gang a “doc,” meaning that he is an expert in the applications of brutal team sex. In the confines of an all-male environment, he'd be the one to find out the greatest area of vulnerability of the new fish. If Tommy was nauseated and repelled by the touch or sight of feces, the Doc would carefully investigate. In that sense he was a collector. He collected information, technique, concepts.

He'd learn somehow that when Tommy was a little kid he had tried to clean himself and had plunged his fingers through the thin toilet tissue and into an anus covered in filth, and gone screaming in to his mother, who had forced him to wipe himself as he cried, gagging in disgust. What was a distasteful, intimate anecdote to be forgotten as soon as possible would be pure gold to a doc. It would be trivia to be filed away and mined later. Later when he can operate on Tommy with five or six of his cronies for backup, the Doc will bring Phyllis, the black faggot, to pay a call on Tommy.

They will begin by forcing the new fish to eat the peanuts out of Phyllis's freshly shat bowel movement, and on and on through a series of perversions too disgusting to catalog until Tommy is left a quivering, limp sack of flesh-covered organs and bones, covered in filth of every description, every orifice raped and bleeding, and terrorized to the brink of sanity's sawtoothed edge.

That, in the sick substrata of the counterculture's underworld, is the function of a doc in gang sex: to so destroy and humiliate and injure the victim that as the gang gets off, a bit of the victim dies. It is a form of group sex crime that transcends the physiological and for which no penalty can begin to compensate. A doc who is allowed to continue will only sink lower into the abyss of depravity, becoming more jaded, requiring greater challenges, filthier gross-outs, a higher terror threshold, a deeper and more relentless violence.