The Throat (3 page)

"Every sense you got is
out
there, man, you hear a mouse move—"

"Hear rats move," di Maestro said, slapping the side of the truck as
if to wake up the bodies in the green bags.

"—hear the dew jumpin' out of the leaves, hear the insects moving in
the bark. Hear your own fingernails grow. Hear that thing in the
ground, man."

"Thing in the ground?" Pirate asked.

"Shit," said Ratman. "You don't know? You know how when you lie down
on the trail you hear all kinds of shit, all them damn bugs and
monkeys, the birds, the people moving way up ahead of you—"

"Better be sure they're not coming your direction," di Maestro said
from the front of the truck. "You takin' notes, Underdog?"

"—
all
kinds of shit, right?
But then you hear the rest. You hear like a humming noise underneath
all them other noises. Like some big generator's running way far away
underneath
you."

"Oh, that thing in the ground," Pirate said.

"It
is
the ground," said
Ratman. He stepped back from the truck and gave Pirate a fierce,
wild-eyed glare. "Fuckin' ground makes the fuckin' noise by
itself
. You hear me? An' that
engine's always on. It never sleeps."

"Okay, let's move," di Maestro said. He climbed up behind the wheel.
Hollyday, Scoot, and Attica crowded into the seat beside him. Ratman
scrambled up behind the cab, and Picklock and Pirate and I followed
him. The truck jolted down the field toward the main body of the camp,
and the helicopter pilot and some of the ground crew turned to watch us
go. We were like garbagemen, I thought. It was like working on a
garbage truck.

"On top of which," Ratman said, "people are seriously trying to
interfere with your existence."

Picklock laughed, but instantly composed himself again. So far,
neither he nor Pirate had actually looked at me.

"Which can fuck you up all by itself, at least until you get used to
it," Ratman said. "Twenty-day mission. I been on longer, but I never
went on any worse. The lieutenant went down. The radio man, he went
down. My best friends at that time, they went down."

"Where is this?" Pirate asked.

"This is Darlac Province," said Ratman. "Not too damn far away."

"Right next door," said Pirate.

"Twentieth day," said Pirate. "We're out there. We're after some
damn cadre. Hardly any food left, and our pickup is in forty-eight
hours. This target keeps
moving
,
they go from ville to ville, they're
your basic Robin Hood-type cadre." Ratman shook his head. The truck hit
a low point in the road on the outskirts of the base, and one of the
bags slithered down the pile and landed softly at Ratman's feet. He
kicked it almost gently.

"This guy, this friend of mine, name of Bobby Swett, he was right
ahead of me, five feet ahead of me. We hear some kind of crazy whoop,
and then this big red-and-yellow bird flashes past us, big as a turkey,
man, wings like fuckin'
propellers
,
man, and I'm thinkin', okay, what
woke this mother
up
! And
Bobby Swett turns around to look at me, and
he's grinnin'. His grin is the last thing I see for about ten minutes.
When I come to I remember seeing Bobby Swett come apart all at once,
like something inside him exploded, but—you get it?—I'm remembering
something I didn't really see. I think I'm dead. I fucking know I'm
dead. I'm covered in blood and this brownskin little girl is bending
over me. Black hair and black eyes. So now I know. There are angels,
and angels got black hair and black eyes, hot shit."

A brown wooden fence hid the long low shed we called the morgue, and
when we had passed the stenciled graves registration sign, Ratman
vaulted off the back of the truck and opened the storage bay. We had
four hours turnaround time, and today there were a lot of bodies.

Di Maestro backed the truck up into the bay, and we started hauling
the long bags into the interior of the shed.

"Long nose?" asked Pirate.

"Long nose, shit yes."

"A Yard."

"Sure, but what did I know? She was a Rhade—most of the Yards in
Darlac Province, of which they got about two thousand, are Rhade. 'I
died,' I say to this girl, still figuring she's a angel, and she coos
something back at me. It seems to me that I can remember this big flash
of light—I mean, that was something I actually
saw.
"

"Good ol' Bobby Swett tripped a mine," said Pirate.

I was getting to like Pirate. Pirate knew I was the real subject of
this story, and he was selfless enough to keep things rolling with
little interjections and explanations. Pirate was slightly less
contemptuous of me than the rest of the body squad. I also liked the
way he looked, raffish without being as
ratlike
as Ratman. Like me,
Pirate tended toward the hulking. He seldom wore a shirt in the
daytime, and always had a bandanna tied around his head or his neck.
When I had been out in the field for a time, I found myself imitating
these mannerisms, except for when the mosquitos got bad.

"You think I don't know that? What I'm saying is"—Rat-man shoved
another dead soldier in a zippered bag into the darkness of the
shed—"what I'm
sayin
is, I
was dead too. For a minute, maybe longer."

"Of what?"

"Shock," Ratman said simply. "That's the reason I never saw Bobby
Swett get blown apart. Didn't you ever hear about this? I heard about
it. Lotsa guys I met, it happened to them or someone they knew. You
die, you come back."

"Is that true?" I asked.

For a second, Ratman looked wrathful. I had challenged his system of
belief, and I was a person who knew nothing.

Pirate came to my rescue. "How come you could remember seeing this
guy get wasted, if you didn't see it in the first place?"

"I was out of my body."

"Goddamn it, Underdog," said Picklock, and grabbed the handle of the
heavy bag I had nearly dropped. "What the fuck is the matter with you?"
Single-handedly, he tossed the bag into the shed behind us.

"Underdog, never drop the fucking bags," said di Maestro, and
deliberately dropped a bag onto the concrete. Whatever was inside it
gurgled and splatted.

For a moment or two we continued to unload the bodies into the shed.

Then Ratman said, "Anyhow, about a second later I found out I was
still alive."

"What makes you think you're alive?" asked Attica.

"On top of everything else, this guy shoves his face into mine, and
for sure he ain't no angel. I can see the goddamn canopy above his
head. The birds start screeching again. The first thing I know for sure
is Bobby Swett is gone, man—I'm
wearing
whatever's left of him. And this guy says to me, 'Get on your feet,
soldier.' I can just about make out what he's saying through the
ringing in my ears, but you know this asshole is used to obedience. I
let out a groan when I try to move, because, man, every square inch of
me feels like hamburger."

"Ah," said Picklock and Attica, nearly in unison. Then Attica said,
"You're a lucky son of a bitch."

"Bobby Swett didn't even make it into one a these bags," said
Ratman. "That fucker turned into
vapor
."
He sullenly grabbed the handles of another bag, inspected it for a
second, said, "No tag," and shoved it on top of the others in the shed.

"Oh, goody," said Attica. Attica had a smooth brown head, and his
biceps jumped in his arms when he lifted the bags. He pulled a marker
from his fatigues and made a neat check on the end of the bag. As he
turned back to the truck, he grinned at me, stretching his lips without
opening his mouth, and I wondered what was coming.

"Finally I got up, like in a kinda daze," Ratman said. "I still
couldn't hear hardly nothing. This guy is standing in front of me, and
I see he's totally crazy, but not like
we
go crazy. This mother's crazy
in some absolutely new kinda way. I'm still so fucked up I can't tell
what's so different about him, but he's got these eyes which they are
not human eyes." He paused, remembering. "Everybody else in my platoon
is sort of standing around watching. There's the little Yard mascot in
these real loose fatigues, and there's this big guy in front of me on
the trail with the sun behind his head. I mean this dude is in command.
He
is
the show. Even the
lieutenant, who is a fucking ramrod, is just
standing there. Well, shit, I think, he just saw this guy raise me from
the dead, what else is he gonna do? The big guy is still checking me
out—he's scoping me. He's got these eyes, like some animal in a pit
that just killed all the animals that were down there with him."

"He looked like Attica," said di Maestro.

"Damn straight he did," Attica said. "I'm a warrior, I ain't like
you losers, I'm a fucking god of war."

"And then I see what's really funny about this guy," said Ratman.
"He's got this open khaki shirt and tan pants and there's a little
black briefcase on the ground next to him."

"Uh oh," said di Maestro.

"Plus which, there's scars all over his chest—punji stick scars. The
bastard fell on punji sticks and he lived."

"Him," said di Maestro.

"Yeah, him. Bachelor."

"This is after
twenty days
.
Bobby Swett gets turned into— into
red
fog
right in front of me. I get killed or
something
like that,
and nobody's moving because of this guy with the briefcase. 'I am
Captain Franklin Bachelor, and I've been hearing about you,' this guy
says to me. Like I didn't know. But he's really talking to all of us,
he's just checking me out to see how bad I got hurt."

"And then I look down at my hands and I see they're this funny
color—sort of purple. Even under Bobby's blood, I can see my skin is
turning this purple color. And I push up my sleeve and my whole damn
arm
is purple. And it's swelling
up, fast."

" 'This fool's a walking bruise,' says Captain Bachelor. He gives
the whole platoon a disgusted look. We're in his part of the world now,
by God, and we better know it. For two weeks we been getting in his
way, and he wants us out. He's asking us politely, and we're on the
same side, after all, which is worth remembering, but if we don't get
outa his share of the countryside, our luck might take a turn for the
worse. He just kind of smiles at us, and the Montagnard girl is
standing right up next to him, and she's got an M-16, and he's got some
kind of fancy machine I never saw before or since but I think was some
kind of
Swedish
piece, and I
got to thinkin' about what's in the
briefcase, and then I got it. All at once."

"Got what?" I asked, and everyone in the body squad looked down, or
at the stack of bodies in the shed, and then they unloaded the last two
bodies. We went into the shed to begin the next part of the job. Nobody
spoke until di Maestro looked at the tag taped to the bag closest to
him and started checking the names.

"So you got out of there," he said.

"The lieutenant used Bachelor's radio, and even before the argument
was over, we was on our way toward the LZ. When we got back to the
base, we got our showers, we got real food, we got blasted every
possible way, but afterward I never felt the same. Those scars. That
fuckin' briefcase, man. And the little Yard chick. You know what? He
was havin' a ball. He was throwin' a party."

"They more or less got their own war," said Scoot. He was a short
skinny man with deep-set eyes, a ponytail, and a huge knife that
dangled from his waistband on a dried, crinkly leather thong that
looked like a body part. He could lift twice his own weight, and like a
weight lifter he existed in some densely private space of his own.

"Green Berets are cool with me," said Attica, and then I understood
part of it.

"Some of them were on my flight," I said. "They—"

"Can't we get some work done around here?" asked di Maestro, and for
a time we checked the dog tags against our lists.

Then Pirate said, "Ratman, what was the payoff?"

Ratman looked up from beside a body bag and said, "Five days after
we got back to camp, we heard about a couple dozen Rhade Yards took out
about a
thousand
VC. They
went through all these hamlets in the middle
of the night. 'Course, the way I heard it, some a those thousand VC
were little babies and such, but CIDG did itself a power of good that
night."

"CIDG?" I asked.

"I heard of fifty-sixty guys, First Air Cav, offed by friendly
fire," Scoot said. "Shit happens."

"Friendly fire?" I said.

"Comes in all shapes and sizes," Scoot said, smiling in a way I did
not understand until later.

Ratman uttered a sound halfway between a snarl and a laugh. "And the
rest was, I puffed up about two times my size. Felt like a goddamn
football. Even my
eyelids
were swole up, man. They finally put me in the base hospital and packed
me in ice—but not a bone broken, man. Not a bone broken."

"Now, I wonder what shape this boy is in," said Attica, patting the
body without a tag. Nearly all the bags had been named by the time they
got to us, and it was our task to ensure that all had names by the time
they left. We had to unzip the bags and compare the name on the tag
taped to the body bag with the name on the tag either insetted into the
dead man's mouth or taped to his body. From Vietnam the bodies went
back to America, where the army decanted them into wooden coffins and
sent them home.

"Your turn, Underdog," said Attica. "Your hands ain't dirty yet, are
they? You check this unit out."

"You puke on it, I'll stomp your guts out," said di Maestro, and
surprised me by laughing. I had not heard di Maestro laugh before. It
was a creaky, humorless bray that might have come from one of the bags
lined up before us.