The Throat (4 page)

"Yeah, don't puke on the unit," said Pirate. "That really messes 'em
up."

Attica had intended me to open the bag and find the dead soldier's
tag from the moment he had noticed that the matching tag was missing.
"You're new boy," he said. "This the new boy's job."

I moved toward Attica and the bag with the check. For a moment I
suspected that when I unzipped the bag, some hideous creature would
jump out at me, drenched in blood like Ratman after Bobby Swett had
disintegrated in front of him.
Because
that was why he told the story!
They wanted me to scream, they
wanted my hair to turn white. After I vomited, they'd take turns
stomping my guts out. It was their version of friendly fire.

I had not entirely left my old self behind on the tarmac at Tan Son
Nhut, after all.

Scoot was regarding me with real curiosity. "It's the new boy's
job
," Attica repeated, and I
guessed that although the term was ridiculous when applied to him, he
had been the new boy before me.

I bent over the long black bag. There were fabric handles on each
end, and the zipper ran from one to the other.

I grasped the zipper and promised myself that I would not close my
eyes. Behind me, the men took a collective breath. I pulled the zipper
across the bag.

And I almost did vomit, not because of what I saw but because of the
dead boy's stench, which moved like a huge black dog out of the opening
in the bag. For a second I did have to close my eyes. A greasy web had
fastened itself over my face. The gray ruined face inside the bag
stared upward with open eyes. My stomach lurched. This was what they
had been waiting for, I knew, and I held my breath and yanked the
zipper another twelve inches down the bag.

The dead boy's mud-colored face was shot away from his left cheek
down. His upper teeth closed on nothing. A few loose teeth had lodged
in the back of his neck. The other tag was not in the cavity. The
uniform shirt was stiff and black with blood, and the blast that had
taken away the boy's lower jaw had also removed his throat. The small,
delicate bones of the top vertebrae were fouled with blood.

"There's no tag on this guy," I said, though what I wanted to do was
scream.

Di Maestro said, "You ain't finished yet."

I looked up at him. A big fuzzy belly drooped over his pants, and
four or five days' growth of beard began just under his rapacious eyes.
He looked like a fat goat.

"Who cleans these people up?" I asked before I realized that the
answer might be that the new guy does.

"They make 'em presentable at the other end." Di Maestro grinned and
crossed his arms over his chest. The tattoo of a grinning skull floated
over a brown pyramid on his right forearm. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was
now present all about me, the frame houses with peeling brickface
crowded together, the vacant lots and the St. Alwyn Hotel. I saw my
sister's face.

"If you can't find the tag inside the shirt, sometimes they put 'em
in the pockets or the boots." Di Maestro turned away. The others had
already lost interest.

I struggled with the top button of the stiffened shirt, trying not
to touch the ragged edges of flesh around the collar. The odor poured
up at me. My eyes misted.

The button finally squeezed through the hole, but the collar refused
to separate. I pulled it open. Dried blood crackled like breakfast
cereal. His throat had been opened like a surgical diagram. A few more
teeth were embedded in the softening flesh. I knew that what I was
seeing I would see for the rest of my life —the ropes of flesh, the
open cavity that should have been filled with speech. Lost teeth.

The tag was nowhere inside his neck.

I unbuttoned the next two buttons and found only a pale bloodied
chest.

Then I had to turn away to breathe and saw the rest of the body
squad going efficiently down the rows of bodies, dipping into the
unzippered bags, making sure the names matched. I turned back to my
anonymous corpse and began fighting with a shirt pocket.

The button finally passed through the buttonhole, and I pushed my
fingers into me opening, cracking it open like the pocket of a stiffly
starched shirt. A thin hard edge of metal caught beneath my fingernail.
The tag came away from the cloth with a series of dry little pops.
"Okay," I said.

Di Maestro said, "Attica used to shake down these units in five
seconds flat."

"Two seconds," Attica said, not bothering to look up.

I got away from the gaping body in the bag and held out the
unreadable tag.

"Underdog's a pearl diver," di Maestro announced. "Now wash it off."

The stained, crusty sink stood beside a spattered toilet. I held the
tag beneath a trickle of hot water. The stench of the body still clung
to me, as gummy on my hands and face as the film of fat from ham hocks.
Flakes of blood fell off the tag and dissolved to red in the water. I
dropped the tag and scrubbed my hands and face with PhisoHex until the
greasy feeling was gone. The body squad was cracking up behind me. I
rubbed my face with the limp musty rag that hung between the sink and
the toilet.

"Looking forward to the field?" Ratman asked.

"The unit's name," I said, picking the tag out of the pink water at
the bottom of the sink, "is Andrew T. Majors."

"That's right," said di Maestro. "Now tape it to the bag and help us
with the rest of them."

"You knew his name?" I was too startled to be angry. Then I
remembered that he had the field officer's list, and Andrew T. Majors
was the only name on it not also found on a tag. "You'll get used to
it," di Maestro said, not unkindly.

I had not even understood what the rest of the body squad had seen
at once, that Bobby Swett had been killed by an American explosive; and
that Captain Franklin Bachelor, the Green Beret with the briefcase and
the Rhade mistress, had scared Ratman's lieutenant right back to camp
because he was leading the "cadre" the lieutenant had spent two weeks
chasing.

When I turned up at the shed the next day, Attica actually greeted
me. I jolted along in the back of the truck with Attica and Pirate and
felt a naive pride in myself and what I was doing.

Five units tagged with the right names waited on the tarmac. All
five had died of concussion in a field. (Walking across anything that
resembles a field still makes me nervous.) Apart from killing them, the
shell did no damage at all. Three of them were eighteen-year-olds who
looked like wax dummies, one was a heavyset baby-faced lieutenant, and
the fifth man was a captain in his mid-thirties. It was all over in
about five minutes.

"Shall we pop over to the country club, play a round a golf?" Attica
asked in a surprisingly passable British accent.

"I fancy a fucking tea dance," Scoot said. His slow-moving drawl
made the sentence sound so odd that no one laughed.

"Well, there is one thing we could do," said Pirate.

Again I felt a comprehensive understanding from which I was excluded.

"I guess there is," said di Maestro. He stood up. "How much money
you got on you, Underdog?"

I was tempted to lie, but I took what I had out of my pocket and
showed it to him.

"That'll do," he said. "You ever been in the village?" When I looked
blank he said, "Outside the gate. The other part of the camp."

I shook my head. When I got to White Star, I had been still so
turned around that I had noticed only a transition from an Asian
turmoil to the more orderly disorder of an army base. I had the vague
impression of having gone through a small town.

"Never?" He had trouble believing it. "Well, it's about time you got
wet."

"Get wet time," Pirate said.

"You walk through the gate. As long as you're on foot, they don't
bullshit you. They're supposed to keep the gooks out, not keep us in.
They know where you're going. You turn into the first lane and keep
going until the second turn—"

"By the bubble," Attica said.

"You see a sign says
BUBBLE
in big letters. Turn
right there and go
under the sign. Go six doors down. Knock on the green door that says
LY
."

"Lee?"

He spelled it. "Li Ly. Say you want six one hundreds. It'll be about
thirty bucks. You get 'em in a plastic bag, which you put into your
shirt and forget you have. You don't want to look too fuckin' sneaky
coming back through."

"Some Jack," Scoot said.

"Why not? Across from bubble, go into this little shack, pick up two
fifths, Jack Daniels. Shouldn't cost more than ten bucks."

"New guy buys a round," said Attica.

Without confessing that I had no idea what one hundreds were, I
nodded and stood up.

"Lock and load," said Scoot.

I walked out of the shed into the amazing noontime heat. When I went
around the fence that isolated us, I saw soldiers lining up at the
distant mess hall, the dusty walkways and the rows of wooden buildings,
the two ballroom-sized tents, the flags. A jeep was rolling toward the
gate.

By the time I reached the gate, I was sweating hard. There was no
guardhouse or checkpoint, only a lone soldier beside the dirt road.

The road out of the main part of the camp extended straight through
a warren of ramshackle buildings and zigzag streets— the military road
was the only straight thing in sight. Two hundred yards away, in harsh
brilliant light, I saw a real checkpoint with a flag and a guardhouse
and a striped metal gate. The jeep was just beginning to approach the
checkpoint, and a guard stood in front of the gate to meet it. I was
aware of being watched as soon as I passed through the gate—it was like
stepping out of the elevator into a men's suit department.

Beside a hand-painted sign reading
HEINECKEN COLD BEER ROCK
a
Vietnamese boy in a white shirt lounged in a narrow doorway. An old
woman carried a full basket of laundry down a steep flight of stairs.
Vietnamese voices floated down from upper rooms. Two nearly naked
children, one of them different from the other in a way I did not take
the time to figure out, appeared at my legs and began whining for
dollah, dollah.

By the time I reached the
BUBBLE
sign, five or six
children had
attached themselves to me, some of them still begging for
dollah
,
others drilling questions at me in an incomprehensible mixture of
English and Vietnamese. Two girls leaned out the windows of bubble and
watched me pass beneath the sign.

I turned right and heard the girls taunting me. Now I could smell
wood smoke and hot oil. The shock of this unexpected world so close to
the camp, and an equal, matching shock of pleasure almost made me
forget that I had a purpose.

But I remembered the green door, and saw the name Ly picked out in
sharp businesslike black letters above the knocker. The children keened
and tugged at my clothes. I knocked softly at the door. The children
became frantic. I dug in my pockets and threw a handful of coins into
the street. The children rushed away and began fighting for the coins.
My entire body was drenched in sweat.

The door cracked open, and a white-haired old woman with a plump,
unsmiling face frowned out at me. Certain information was communicated
instantly and wordlessly: I was too early. Customers kept her up half
the night. She was doing me a favor by opening the door at all. She
looked hard at my face, then looked me up and down. I pulled the bills
from my pocket, and she quickly opened the door and motioned me inside,
protecting me from the children, who had seen the bills and were
running toward me, squeaking like bats. She slammed the door behind me.
The children did not thump into the door, as I expected, but seemed to
evaporate.

The old woman took a step away from me and wrinkled her nose in
distaste, as if I were a skunk. "Name."

"Underhill."

"Nevah heah. You go way."

She was still sniffing and frowning, as if to place me by odor.

"I'm supposed to buy something."

"Nevah heah. Go way." Li Ly snapped her fingers at the door, as if
to open it by magic. She was still inspecting me, frowning, as if her
memory had failed her. Then she found what she had been looking for.
"Dimstro," she said, and almost smiled.

"Di Maestro."

"Da dett man."

The dead man? The death man?

She lowered her arm and gestured me toward a camp table and a wooden
chair with a rush seat. "What you want?"

I told her.

"Sis?" Again the narrow half-smile. Six was more than di Maestro's
usual order: she knew I was being diddled.

She padded into a back room and opened and closed a series of
drawers. In the enclosed front room, I began to smell myself. Da dett
man, that was me too.

Li Ly came out of the back room carrying a rolled cellophane parcel
of handmade cigarettes.
Ah
, I
thought,
pot.
We were back to
the recreations of Berkeley. I gave Li Ly twenty-five dollars. She
shook her head. I gave her another dollar. She shook her head again. I
gave her another two dollars, and she nodded. She tugged at the front
of her loose garment, telling me what to do with the parcel, and
watched me place the wrapped cigarettes inside my shirt. Then she
opened the door to the sun and the smells and the heat.

The children materialized around me again. I looked again at the
smallest, the filthy child of two I had noticed earlier. His eyes were
round, and his skin was a smooth shade darker than the dusty gold of
the others. His hair was screwed up into tight rabbinical curls.
Whenever the other children bothered to notice him, they gave him a
blow. I sprinted across the street to another open-fronted shop and
bought Jack Daniels from a bowing skeleton. The children followed me
almost to the gate, where the soldier on duty scattered them with a
wave of his M-16.