The Throat (10 page)

"It's where they hide the kids when people like us show up," I said.
"Did you take a look?"

I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not.
He wasn't about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while
his platoon stood around outside.

"Taking a look is your job, Underhill," he said.

For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches
lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.

"Give me the lighter," Poole said, and grabbed it away from the
lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing
the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he
saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off
the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I
looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.

The lighter flared again. I could see Poole's extended arm, the
jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed
room was less than an inch above the top of Poole's head. He moved away
from the opening.

"What is it? Are there any"—the lieutenant's voice made a creaky
sound—"any bodies?"

"Come down here, Tim," Poole called up.

I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped
down.

Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was sickeningly strong.

"What do you see?" the lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound
like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were
covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk
into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed
old bloodstains.

"Hot," Poole said, and closed the lighter.

"Come
on,
damn it," came
the lieutenant's voice. "Get out of there."

"Yes, sir," Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers
of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room.
The topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of
Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like the left-hand pages of
Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

"Well, well," Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what
first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the
bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave
jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains
had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths
of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between
the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains,
and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

"I want you guys out of there, and I mean
now
," whined the
lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut, and we moved back toward the
opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The
lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand, but of course he did not
bend down far enough for us to reach him. We stiff-armed ourselves up
out of the hole. The lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and a
thick, fleshy nose, and his adam's apple danced around in his neck like
a jumping bean. "Well, how many?"

"How many what?" I asked.

"How many are there?" He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a
good body count.

"There weren't exactly any bodies, Lieutenant," said Poole, trying
to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

"Well, what's that good for?" He meant,
How is that going to help me?

"Interrogations, probably," Poole said. "If you questioned someone
down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you
could just drag the body into the woods."

"Field Interrogation Post," said the lieutenant, trying out the
phrase. "Torture, Use Of, highly indicated." He nodded again. "Right?"

"Highly," Poole said.

"Shows you what kind of enemy we're dealing with in this conflict."

I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space
with the lieutenant, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I
did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field
Interrogation Post, Torture, Use Of, highly indicated, unless the
Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the
writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry—I thought
that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the
war, a Vietnamese mystery.

For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be
endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: "The
Walk to the Paradise Gardens," from
A
Village Romeo and Juliet
by
Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of
times.

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the
whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the
door of the hut. Then I stopped moving. A boy of seven or eight was
regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I
knew he was not there—I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in
spirits, but that's what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a
crime reporter reminded me that "The Walk to the Paradise Gardens" was
about two children who were about to die and that in a sense the music
was
their death. I wiped my
eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my
arm, the boy was still there. I took in his fair hair and round dark
eyes, the worn plaid shirt and dungarees that made him look like
someone I might have known in my childhood in Pigtown. Then he vanished
all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned
aloud.

I said something to the other two men and went through the door into
the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the lieutenant asking
Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain.
Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning
against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy
shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill's cigarette, and Tina Pumo
exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me
with absolute conviction that
this
was the Paradise Gardens. The men
lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the
patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as
physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green
background of the paddy.

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware of something wrong about the men arranged before
me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my
intuition. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me.
Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the
nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. A wonderful soldier
named M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I
thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through
me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far
right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise
different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking
directly at me.

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light, Poole and
Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted
his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his mysterious letter.
I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

"Let's saddle up," the lieutenant said. "We aren't doing jack shit
around here."

"Tim?" Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had
come out of the hut. I shook my head.

"Well, what was it?" asked Tina Pumo. "Was it juicy?"

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

"Aren't we gonna torch this place?" asked Spitalny.

The lieutenant ignored him. "Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post.
Field Interrogation Post."

"No shit," said Pumo.

"These people are into torture, Pumo. It's just another indication."

"Gotcha." Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler
moved closer.

"I was just remembering something," I said. "Something from the
world."

"You better forget about the world while you're over here,
Underhill," the lieutenant told me. "I'm trying to keep you alive, in
case you hadn't noticed, but you have to cooperate with me." His adam's
apple jumped like a begging puppy.

The next night we had showers, real food, cots to sleep in. Sheets
and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins,
whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long
after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them
up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I
wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced
inside the hut.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the
ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the
tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the
brothers' tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big
reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky
Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisical: great
jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his
friends back in Little Rock and which he knew so well he could find
individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the
counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions,
changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the
same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under
different names—"Cherokee" and "KoKo,"

"Indiana" and "Donna Lee"—or long series of songs connected by
titles that used the same words—"I Thought About You" (Art Tatum), "You
and the Night and the Music" (Sonny Rollins), "I Love You" (Bill
Evans), "If I Could Be with You" (Ike Quebec), "You Leave Me
Breathless" (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, "Thou
Swell," by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day,
Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named
Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown was walking to the
Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man
shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of
light. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination
had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James
Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky
followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky
rewound the long tape and said, "Enough." The end of the tape slapped
against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if
awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all
around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

"I'm gonna have a smoke
and
a drink," Cotton announced, and pushed
himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled
the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light,
the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a
wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff
flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to
Wilson Manly's shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long
journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its
cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces
radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter
out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. "What do you think is going to
happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it'll just go on like this day
after day, or do you think it's going to get stranger and stranger?" He
did not wait for me to answer. "I think it'll always sort of look the
same, but it won't be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think
that's what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt."

"Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler," Spanky said, and
applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious,
dark-haired child, he never looked as though he belonged in uniform.
"Here's what I mean, kind of," he said. "When we were listening to that
trumpet player—"

"
Brownie
, Clifford
Brown
," Spanky whispered.

"—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a
long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a
long time."

"Sweetie-
pie,
" Spanky said
softly. "You pretty hip, for a little
ofay square."

"When we were back in that village," Dengler said. "Tell me about
that."

I said that he had been there too.

"But something happened to you. Something special."

I shook my head.

"All right," Dengler said. "But it's happening, isn't it? Things are
changing."

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky
Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an
American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great
and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this,
and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to
write.

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside into the
slight coolness that followed the rain. The sun, visible again, was a
deep orange ball far to the west. A packet of white powder rested at
the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers
just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.