Time to Hunt (16 page)

This is nothing, he told himself. Think of football. Think of two-a-days in August. No, no, think of games. Think of … Think of … Think of making the catch against Gilman High; think of third and twelve, we’ve never beaten them, but for some odd reason late in this game we’re close but now we’ve stalled. Think of setting up at tight end instead of running back because you have the best hands on the team. Think of Julie, a cheerleader in those days, the concern on her face.

Think of the silliness of it all! It all seemed so important! Beating Gilman! Why was that so important? It was so silly! Then Donny remembered why it was important. Because it was so silly. It meant so little that it meant so much.

Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around, his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the ball in the air. Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much, the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you went airborne.

That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head took over your body and off you went.

He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop out, he had caught it for a first down,
and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient enemy for the first time in living memory.

Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.

The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of energy. Maybe he would make it.

But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog. It was Swagger, of course.

“Come on,” Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain. “We’re almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of hills, a river and a goddamn mountain. Damn, ain’t this fun?”

W
ater. According to the map, the river was called Ia Trang. It bore no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen brown and wide, overspilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine gun fire.

“Guess what?” said Swagger. “You just got a new job.”

“Huh?”

“You just got a new job. You’re now the lifeguard.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I cain’t swim a lick,” he said, with a broad smile.

“Great,” said Donny. “I can’t either.”

“Oh, this one’s going to be a pisser. Damn, why’d you insist on this trip?”

“I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important.”

“That kind of thinkin’ll git you killed every damn time. Now, let’s see if we can find some wood or something.”

They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in
time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had worked it over pretty well; nothing could have survived the hell of that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain. There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.

“I hope they were bad guys,” said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.

“If we run this fucking war right,” Swagger said, “we’d have
known
they was bad, because we’d have people on the ground, up close. Not this shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should have to die because he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and some squid pilot’s got some ordnance left and don’t want to land on no carrier with it.”

Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who it killed, why it happened. His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.

“Well, nobody’ll ever know, that’s for goddamn sure,” said Bob. “Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell ’em. You got that, Pork? That’s your new MOS: witness. You got that?”

Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different instrument?

“I’ll tell ‘em.”

“ ’Cause I’m too dumb to tell ’em. They’ll never listen to a hillbilly like me. They’ll listen to you, boy, ’cause you looked the goddamn elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now let’s scare up some wood and build us Noah’s ark.”

They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny’s rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the pistols to it.

“Okay, you really can’t swim?”

“I can sort of.”

“Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and you kick hard. I’ll be on the other side. Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what. And don’t let go. The current’ll take you and you’ll be one dead puppy dog and nobody’ll remember your name till they inscribe it on some monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain’t that a pretty thought?”

“Very pretty.”

“So let’s do it, Pork. You just became a submariner.”

The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus. In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the rickety raft over and only Bob’s strength on the other side kept them afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.

It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the
stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as it fell from the gray sky at a brutal velocity.

“Kick, goddammit!” he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a kind of strangely rhythmic breast-stroke. The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.

But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn’t imagine its ending. The water lured him downward to its black numbness; he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit, peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead kids in ditches, flaming villes, friendly-fire casualties, the whole fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history itself.

“Fight it, goddammit,” came Swagger’s call from the other side, and then he knew who Bob was.

Bob was Trig’s brother.

Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow. Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn’t, to be heroes in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special, they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force. The war would kill them. That’s why
both
had commanded him to be the witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in the war.

Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be working late that night. They found Trig’s body, smashed and ruptured by the explosive.

It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines:
HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST; CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS SELF IN BOMB BLAST; TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE
.

It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That’s what Trig was telling him that last night; now he understood. He
had
to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?

Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with exhaustion.

“Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit,” said Bob.

F
rom the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the mountain. It wasn’t a great mountain. Donny had seen greater mountains in his time in the desert; he’d even climbed some. Swagger said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious backwoods the sniper hailed from.

The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to observation from hundreds of meters out. Pick your poison.

“Oh, Christ,” said Donny, looking at the steep slope. Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.

“I want to get halfway up in the next two hours,” Bob said.

“I don’t think I can,” gulped Donny.

“I don’t think I can either,” said Bob. “And, what’s worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area heading on that base camp, they’re sure to have security out, just the thing to keep boys like us out of their hair.”

“I can’t do it,” Donny said.

“I cain’t do it neither,” said Swagger. “But it’s gotta be
done and I don’t see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two others, believe me, I’d send them, yessirree.”

“Oh, shit,” Donny said.

“Well, look at it this way. We only got where we got ’cause we came through full monsoon. We go back, when the rains dry up Victor C. gonna come out. He’s gonna find us. He’s gonna kill us. We weren’t invited into his goddamn yard, and he’s gonna be plenty pissed. So we gotta make that Special Forces base camp or we are going to die out here for sure. That’s just about the size of that piece of shit and that’s all there is to it!”

He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too exhausted to do anything else.

“Wish I had a Dexedrine,” he said. “But I don’t believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn’t much fun at all.”

The man wasn’t
in
Vietnam; in some sense he
was
Vietnam. He’d done it all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to generals. He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This was entirely new, but unsurprising: he’d been a speed freak. Maybe he’d done heroin, maybe he’d caught the clap, maybe he’d been tattooed, maybe he’d murdered prisoners. He
was
Trig, at least in the way that he’d done everything to win the war that Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a difference.

“You remind me of a guy,” Donny said.

“Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner? They come from my hometown.”

“No, believe it or not, a peacenik.”

“Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like
Jesus. His shit didn’t stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork.”

“No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He was a legend.”

“To be a legend, don’t you have to be dead? Ain’t that part of the job description?”

“He is dead.”

“He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now, that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you of him? Son, you must have the fever bad.”

“He just wouldn’t quit. There wasn’t any quit in him.”

“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I am going to quit for the rest of my life. Now, let’s just git a move on.”

“Which way?”

“We go up the switchbacks, they’ll bounce us. Only one way. Straight up.”

“Christ.”

“We’ll eat. Picnic time. It’ll be the last meal you git till this is over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got that?”

“I don’t—”

“Sure you do. Watch me.”

Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he gobbled quickly.