The Vietnam Reader (77 page)

“I’ll help you,” he said.

“I don’t need any help.”

He put his hands in his lap. He wanted cigarettes now, badly, but he didn’t want to go back and look for them in the dark where the bed was.

“Would you get me my smokes? I’m drunk.”

His voice caught in his throat. She did not answer or look at him but went out of the room.

I shouldn’t stay here,
she thought.
But all my things are here. He was talking to himself.

While she was gone he noticed that his face, hands, chest were cold with sweat. His hands trembled when he lighted the Marlboro.

Weak, he thought, holding the smoke in his lungs. But now he was used to the shaking, this kind of shaking, which meant that the tightness was lowering, lowering him. He lit one cigarette from another and dropped the ends in the bowl beneath his hip. As he watched her, his breathing gradually calmed. The blackness edging his vision dropped away. The movements of her hands were humble and certain. She had a long curved back and those jutting shoulder blades, like wings of horn.

How long can I sit here and let him watch me like this?
She felt like she was still riding on the bus. Her blood rocked.

“Please,” he said finally, when she had put everything in order several times, “can we go to bed? I won’t touch you. Too drunk anyhow.”

“All right.”

He took her hand and led her from the bathroom, half shutting the door.

“I’m going to leave the light on if that’s okay with you.” She nodded silently.

She took her jeans, boots, socks off, then slid into bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and underwear. Once beside him, although she had been half asleep as she folded her clothes, she became completely alert, conscious of his lightest movement.

Good night. I’
m going to shut my eyes and pretend to sleep.

But the pretense just increased her sensitivity to his breathing, to the way the sheets scratched against his body.

The
CREDIT
sign across the street ticked on by slow stages until the letters completed, flared three times in silence. She turned to him. She propped herself on her elbow and unbuttoned her shirt. He took her hand away and worked the cloth off her shoulders. She wore a thick cotton brassiere. He put both arms around her and undid the hook. Once she was naked beneath him, he could hold off no longer. In panic, he tried to surge inside of her.

Her fear excited him so much, though, that he came helplessly, pressed against her, before he was even hard. She was quiet, waiting for him to say something. She touched his face, but he did not speak, so she rolled away from him.

Henry was not drunk anymore, not in the least. He knew that in a moment he would want her again, the right way, and in this expectation he listened as she pretended to sleep. Her back curved, a warm slope. The length and breadth of her seemed edgeless. He felt wonder and moved closer. She tensed. Her breathing changed.

She gave off a fetid traveler’s warmth, cigarette smoke, bus-seat smell, a winy undertone from what they’d drunk, the crackery smell of snow melted into unwashed hair, a flowery heat from her armpits.

He thought of diving off a riverbank, a bridge.

He closed his eyes and saw the water, the whirling patterns, below. He pushed her over, face down, and pinned her from behind. He spread her legs with his knees and pulled her toward him.

Muffled, slogged in pillows, she gripped the head bars. He pushed into her. She made a harsh sound. Her back was board hard, resistant. Then she gave with a cry. He touched her with the cushioned part of his fingers until she softened to him. She opened. The bones of her pelvis creaked wide, like the petals of a wooden flower, and he thought she came. Then he did, too. Wobbling then surging smoothly forward, he came whispering that he loved her.

Afterward, he let her go, put his face in dark hair behind her ear, and was about to whisper love talk, but she rolled out from under his chest.

She got as far away from him as possible. It was, to Henry, as if she had crossed a deep river and disappeared. He lay next to her, divided from her, just outside and with no way to follow.

At last she slept. Her even breath was a desolate comfort. He wound his hand in a long hank of her hair and, eventually, slept, too.

Near dawn Albertine could not remember where she was. She could not remember about the dull ache between her legs. She turned to the man and made the mistake of touching him in his sleep. His name came back to her. She was about to say his name. He shrieked. Exploded.

She was stunned on the floor, gasping for breath against the wall before the syllables of his name escaped. Outside their room a door opened and shut. Somewhere in the room she heard his breath, a slow animal wheeze that froze her to the wall. He moved. The scent of his harsh fear hit her first as he came toward her.

In reflex, she crossed her arms before her face. A dark numbing terror had stopped her mind completely. But when he touched her he was weeping.

From
Carrying the Darkness
W. D. E
HRHART
, E
DITOR
1985

After Our War
J
OHN
B
ALABAN

After our war, the dismembered bits
—all those pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters,
gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes—
came squinting, wobbling, jabbering back.
The genitals, of course, were the most bizarre,
inching along roads like glowworms and slugs.
The living wanted them back, but good as new.
The dead, of course, had no use for them.
And the ghosts, the tens of thousands of abandoned souls
who had appeared like swamp fog in the city streets,
on the evening altars, and on doorsills of cratered homes,
also had no use for the scraps and bits
because, in their opinion, they looked good without them.
Since all things naturally return to their source,
these snags and tatters arrived, with immigrant uncertainty,
in the United States. It was almost home.
So, now, one can sometimes see a friend or a famous man talking
with an extra pair of lips glued and yammering on his cheek,
and this is why handshakes are often unpleasant,
why it is better, sometimes, not to look another in the eye,
why, at your daughter’s breast thickens a hard keloidal scar.
After the war, with such Cheshire cats grinning in our trees,
will the ancient tales still tell us new truths?
Will the myriad world surrender new metaphor?
After our war, how will love speak?

D. C. B
ERRY

The sun goes
   down     
a different way when
             you
are lungshot in a rice
paddy and you
are taking a drink of
your own unhomeostatic
globules each
Time
you swallow a pail
of air     pumping like you
were
bailing out the whole
world throw
   ing it in your leak
   ing collapsible lung
that won’t hold even
a good     quart and on
top of that     the sun
goes down
     Banging
the lung completely
flat.

Christmas
S
TEVE
H
ASSETT

The Hessian in his last letter home
said in part

“they are all rebels here
who will not stand to fight
but each time fade before us
as water into sand …

the children beg in their rude hamlets
the women stare with hate
the men flee into the barrens at our approach
to lay in ambush

some talk of desertion …
were it not for the hatred
they bear us, more would do so

There is no glory here.
Tell Hals he must evade the Prince’s levy
through exile or deformity

Winter is hard upon us. On the morrow we enter
Trenton. There we rest till the New Year.…

Patriot’s Day
S
TEVE
H
ASSETT

When the young girls rolled into one
and she without a face became
death’s ikon,
   ,and to the silence of our fathers
seemed to offer as redemption Vietnam,
we went.

Now we bring our dead to supper.

All our women are warriors
and the men burn slowly inward.

S
TEVE
H
ASSETT

And what would you do, ma,
if eight of your sons step
out of the TV and begin
killing chickens and burning
hooches in the living room,
stepping on booby traps
and dying in the kitchen,
beating your husband and
taking him and shooting
skag and forgetting in
the bathroom?

would you lock up your daughter?
would you stash the apple pie?
would you change channels?

A Romance
1979
The Monkey Wars
1985
What Saves Us
1992
B
RUCE
W
EIGL

Sailing to Bien Hoa

In my dream of the hydroplane
I’m sailing to Bien Hoa
the shrapnel in my thighs
like tiny glaciers.
I remember a flower,
a kite, a mannikin playing the guitar,
a yellow fish eating a bird, a truck
floating in urine, a rat carrying a banjo,
a fool counting the cards, a monkey praying,
a procession of whales, and far off
two children eating rice,
speaking French—
I’m sure of the children,
their damp flutes,
the long line of their vowels.

Surrounding Blues on the Way Down

I was barely in country. December, hot,
We slipped under rain black clouds
Opening around us like orchids.
He’d come to take me into the jungle
So I felt the loneliness
Though I did not yet hate the beautiful war.
Eighteen years old and a man
Was telling me how to stay alive
In the tropics he said would rot me—

Brothers of the heart he said and smiled
Until we came upon a mama san
Bent over from her stuffed sack of flowers.
We flew past her
But he hit the brakes hard,
He spun the tires backwards in the mud.
He did not hate the war either
But other reasons made him cry out to her
So she stopped,
She smiled her beetle black teeth at us,
She raised her arms in the air.

I have no excuse for myself,
I sat in that man’s jeep in the rain
And watched him slam her to her knees,
The plastic butt of his M-16
Crashing down on her.
I was barely in country, the clouds
Hung like huge flowers, black
Like her teeth.

Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry

All this time I had forgotten.
My miserable platoon was moving out
One day in the war and I had my clothes in the laundry.
I ran the two dirt miles.
Convoy already forming behind me. I hit
The block of small hooches and saw her
Twist out the black rope of her hair in the sun.
She did not look up at me,
Not even when I called to her for my clothes.