The Throat (11 page)

The shack where an enterprising weasel named Wilson Manly sold
contraband beer and liquor was all the way on the other side of camp.
The enlisted men's club was rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese "33" beer
in American bottles.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted man's club
but closer than Manly's shack and somewhere between them in official
status. About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply
descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated
wooden structure called Billy's. Billy had gone home long ago, but his
club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was
open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly
empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three
times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy's was closed.
Billy's did not look anything like a French command post: it looked
like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had
once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone
else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows,
so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the
floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you
needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints
on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a grove of trees in the curve of the road, and
as I walked downhill toward it in the sunset, a muddy camouflaged jeep
gradually emerged from invisibility on the right side of the bar,
floating out of the trees like an optical illusion.

Low male voices stopped when I stepped onto the rotting porch. I
looked for insignia on the jeep, but mud caked the door panels. Some
white object gleamed dully from the backseat. When I looked more
closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a
moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached
human skull.

The door opened before I could reach the handle. A boy called Mike
stood before me in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt too large
for him. Then he saw who I was. "Oh," he said. "Yes. Tim. Okay. You can
come in." He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he
shot me an uncomfortable smile.

"It's okay?" I asked, because everything about him told me that it
wasn't.

"Yesss.
" He stepped back to
let me in.

The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the
opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating
a bright dazzle, a white fire. Pungent cordite hung in the air. I took
a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his
post.

"Oh, hell," someone said from off to my left. "We have to put up
with this?"

I turned my head and saw three men sitting against the wall at a
round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the
dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even murkier.

"Is okay, is okay," said Mike. "Old customer. Old friend."

"I bet he is," the voice said. "Just don't let any women in here."

"No women," Mike said. "No problem."

I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.

"You want whiskey, Tim?" Mike asked.

"Tim?" the man said.
"Tim?"

"Beer," I said, and sat down.

A nearly empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black, three glasses, and
about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier
with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so
that I could see the .45 next to the Johnny Walker bottle. He leaned
forward with a drunk's well-guarded coordination. The sleeves had been
ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not
bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife.

"I just want to make sure about this," he said. "You're not a woman,
right? You swear to that?"

"Anything you say," I said.

He put his hand on the gun.

"Got it," I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer. "Tim.
Funny name. Sounds like a little guy—like him." He pointed at Mike with
his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while
his right still rested on the .45. "Little fucker ought to be wearing a
dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress."

"Don't you like women?" I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my
table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club
because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and
now I was just making things worse. I looked at the two men with the
drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to
the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were
not drunk yet.

"This rear-echelon dipshit is personally interfering with my state
of mind," the drunk said to the burly man on his right. "Tell him to
get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue."

"Leave him alone," the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay
across his lean, haggard face.

The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and
speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned,
almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it
to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy
would understand him.

This is serious
, he said.
Most of the people in the world I do not
despise are already dead, or should be.

There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he
said, but it's pretty close.

Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears
sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel:
You
should remember what we have brought with us.

    It takes a long time and
a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more
difficult than most of a skeleton.

Your prisoner requires more drink,
he said, and rolled back in his
chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.

"Whiskey," said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the
bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to
knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.

For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked
familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his
eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch
hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the
bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could.
The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The
man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and
banged the glass down on the table for a refill.

The haggard soldier, who had been silent until now, said, "Something
is gonna happen here." He looked straight at me. "Pal?"

"That man is nobody's pal," the drunk said. Before anyone could stop
him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired.
There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite.
The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet
to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.

For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood
up. My head was ringing.

"Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?" said
the drunk. "Is that much understood?"

The soldier who had called me "pal" laughed, and the burly soldier
poured more whiskey into the drunk's glass. Then he stood up and
started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of
dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the
man with the gun.

The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body
between me and the other table. He gave me an impatient glance because
I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils.
"Goddamn," he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said,
"Goddamn" again, but in a different tone of voice.

I started laughing.

"Oh, this is—" He shook his head. "This is really—"

"Where have you been?" I asked him. John Ransom turned to the table.
"Hey, I know this guy. He's an old football friend of mine."

The drunken major shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His
eyelids had nearly closed. "I don't care about football," he said, but
he kept his hand off the weapon.

"Buy the sergeant a drink," said the haggard officer. John Ransom
quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused
Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his
glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.

We watched the major's head slip down by notches toward his chest.
When his chin finally reached his shirt, Ransom said, "All right, Jed,"
and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major's hand. He
pushed it beneath his belt. "The man is out," Jed told us.

Ransom turned back to me. "He was up three days straight with us,
God knows how long before that." Ransom did not have to specify who
he
was. "Jed and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on
talking." He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his
glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.

For a moment no one spoke. The line of light from the open space
across the windows had already left the mirror and was now approaching
the place on the wall that meant it was going to disappear. Mike lifted
the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.

"How come you're always fucked up when I see you?"

"You have to ask?"

He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him
preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star.
This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war
was inside him now.

"I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn't I?" I
agreed that he had.

"What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn't even a real graves
registration unit, was it?" He smiled and shook his head. "The only one
with any training was that sergeant, what's his name. Italian."

"Di Maestro."

Ransom nodded. "The whole operation was going off the rails." Mike
lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene
lamp. "I heard some things—" He slumped against the wall and swallowed
whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his
eyes.

I asked if he were still stationed in the highlands up around the
Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.

"You're not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?"

He opened his eyes. "You have a good memory. No, I'm not there
anymore." He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed
himself. "I'm kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sanh.
It'll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I
want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. I'd settle for a
dry place on level ground."

"Where did you come from now?"

"Incountry." His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect
was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was
smiling. "Way incountry. We had to get the major out."

"Looks like you had to pull him out, like a tooth."

My ignorance made him sit up straight. "You mean you never heard of
him? Franklin Bachelor?"

And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a
long time ago.

"In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people
don't even dream of—he's a legend. The Last Irregular. He fell on punji
sticks and lived—he's still got the scars."

A legend, I thought. He was one of the Green Berets Ransom had
mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.

"Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in
Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero.
That's straight."

Franklin Bachelor had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had
run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces
on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a
black-haired angel.

And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of
the jeep.

"I did hear of him," I said. "I knew someone who met him. The Rhade
woman, too."

"His
wife
" Ransom said.

I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.

"We're stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to
Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States— Langley. I thought we
might have to strap him down, but I guess we'll just keep pouring
whiskey into him."

"He's going to want his gun back."

"Maybe I'll give it to him." His glance told me what he thought
Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long
enough. "He's in for a rough time at Langley. There'll be some heat."

"Why Langley?"

"Don't ask. But don't be naive, either. Don't you think they're…" He
would not finish that sentence. "Why do you think we had to bring him
out in the first place?"

"I suppose something went wrong."

"The man stepped over some boundaries, maybe a lot of boundaries—but
tell me that you can do what we're supposed to do without stepping over
boundaries."

For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen
of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and
pinstriped suits, questioning Major Bachelor. They thought
they
were
serious men.

"It was like this place called Bong To, in a funny way." Ransom
waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, "A ghost town, I mean. I
don't suppose you've ever heard of Bong To."