Crossing Over Read online

  Ihave been walking a long time. Everything about the forest is glazed and bizarre: trees hanging upside down with dark birds floating in the stark roots like fish. When I look at my feet they are huge and foreign, shapeless black oblongs that are connected to me but I cannot feel, that do not belong to me. The walking pads on, my head drifting weightless above the feet and legs and chest like a helium balloon towed in a parade. I keep feeling a fall is inevitable, a hole or precipice, and I try to stop but there is a distorted, sleepy inertia. The walking goes simply on and the boredom and odd silence collect like heavy fluids in my throat and behind my eyes: it is the kind of dream that runs down under its own gravity and I wake up quietly, cut loose and empty.

  Feet over the edge and working my way down the bunks, four of them. My jungle boots unlaced and shuffling: I limp into the head, punch out a handful of water and rub my face. The glance in the mirror before going to a stall. I sit down and see somebody’s taped up a picture of a woman fucking herself with a shiny green plastic dildo.

  I get out before the fear works on me.

  Here are the facts of the matter.

  Miguel Maldonado is nineteen years of age, a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps, a first-generation Cuban-American from Miami, Florida. He is smart, funny, courageous. A high-school dropout who speaks with a strong Spanish accent, he is a former regional Golden Gloves finalist and holds the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and several unit commendations and battle stars. He has, on more than one occasion, saved the lives of his fellow marines and platoon commander. He gets on with everybody in his unit, no matter their backgrounds, prejudices, religion, or politics. He has a natural inclination toward excellence: a soldier’s soldier. He speaks of a career in the Marine Corps, telling everyone he has found a home at last. He is astonished to find himself successful and, despite the stress of combat, he is a happy man. It is in the last days of 1968 that Maldonado loses his right leg at mid-thigh and I use his belt as a crude tourniquet in the minutes before he is airlifted to the Naval Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay. When I see him next it is by chance, having escorted two wounded marines into the same hospital. There has been some trouble with the leg—a sloppy amputation, an infection—and Maldonado is medically addicted to opiates of one form or another. The bright energy and wide-eyed courage are gone. Maldonado knows he has entered the next stage of his life: a disabled Cuban high-school dropout drug addict, without prospects or direction. I sit with him beside his bed. When I rise to go he grips my wrist. After a moment, however, he drops his hand. I say good-bye, wish him well, but he does not answer or look at me.

  Here are the facts of the matter.

  What we see and know will live forever in this snapping light in the eyes, the mouth shaping one question after another, the voice sounding one question after another, the piracy of time saying I can go no further than this. It is unsafe to go further than this. Flowing back into the blank hard eye of a soldier’s one job, this last freedom failing into the heart, never fully knowing how far you can go if called to the task, how long the darkness is or how far above your head it extends, how long you might walk before the earth gives way in a watery lost moment, knowing the soldier’s one job is not a complicated affair: locate the enemy and, having done so, destroy that enemy by any means available before the same intention is visited from the opposite direction. It is a game of sorts, a contest, winners taking nothing in this elaborate boy’s contest taken to the limit of imagination and current possibility. Look around: the jungle sings. The insects and snakes and hardwoods breathe, and I can nearly believe they know we are here, sense our passage and find us ridiculous, transitory, at odds with existence, objects suitable only for pity. The sky reaches ground in patches, its weight giving root to the forest floor we cross, the forest a book we cannot read, legs moving against it, insect rattle, hollow monkey bone. I could conjure an entire magic out of this forest floor, braising dead leaves and mud between the palms, chanting under my breath monkey bone take me home, take me home, take me home

  McCormick’s face in the incoming’s scream-whistle-crunch, his face in mine saying More guys in there I know there’s more guys in there. We were coming into the perimeter, just outside the wire, heard the first scream and laid down flat, the world lit up and bounced. Gotta get em out McCormick says. You’re not goin anywhere Sergeant Halverson shouts from my other side. Gotta get em to the Doc here McCormick shouts back. Make sense shitbrain Halverson says. Mac stands up and moves forward. I try to stand and stop him but Halverson two-fists the seat of my pants, knocking me down. Mac rolls under the wire, runs into blue-light clearing and pulls two men, lifting them up and under his arms like dolls. Holy fuckin christ Halverson says. One of the men Mac’s carrying comes apart under his arm like rotten food and Mac keeps moving toward us. The other man is alive and gasping, groaning. OK Doc, Mac says, all yours. I stare at the gasping man, a few seconds before I know what I’m supposed to do. Mac is in from a second run with two dead men under his arms. He drops the corpses and heads back into the clearing. Come here you simple fuck Halverson shouts after him. Shit, Halverson chokes, what is this, what are we doing? Mac is hit, jerks upright, stumbles, keeps his balance and scoops up two more, both alive, his own blood seeping from somewhere above the elbow. Get your ass in here, Halverson shouts, you’re bringing in dead guys. Get in here Mac, I say, you’re hit, gotta take care of you. Mac blinks and his knees give way: he falls in a heap with the men he was carrying. Halverson and I belly crawl toward the wire to get him, barbs opening long streaks in my back as I go under and a direct hit scores the bunker just beyond, collapsing white light eaten by heat. Halverson goes to his knees for leverage and his right arm disappears, simply gone, hurricane wind. Blood’s spuming out of the hole of his shoulder and he seems more surprised than hurt looking down at his blood spattering the mud. Mortar deafening, the long scream, earthquake crunch, volcanic explosion. Halverson stands up staring at his shoulder. Another direct hit lays down, cracking the night to empty out a primal roar, gravity reversed and gushing down and away, into the earth, into the belly of the earth, and something I don’t see rushes into Halverson, folds him once, carries him oozing into mud thirty yards away.

  The age at death is not a sign of value I tell the platoon’s radioman. He nods and looks bewildered. A parrot lifts off above us. Tomorrow my life and times return to forest, in search of flames and snapshots to airmail home. I make suggestions that are nonsense: we all assume that life is short. I owe nothing to the form death takes.

  When I speak it is for vain reasons.

  II

  Ialways choose the bunks on top and against the wall. Privacy. Vantage points. Due on duty in two hours. Another masked night flying for the dead. Texas and Rock howling about the wetback bitch they banged in Corpus Christi. Squadbay deserted except for us, nine o’clock Saturday night. Staring at waterpipe ten inches from my skull. The Marvelettes on Armed Forces Radio. Danger. Heartbreak Dead Ahead. Jesus she squealed like a trapped rat when I gave it to her Texas roars. Opens another beer, yelling to me across the bunk tops You got any dope? Slide down and fish bag from my locker, walk to their table. Here, I say. Smoke your fuckin heads off.

  Weird dude Texas says.

  We stand on the runway in flight suits. Me with Rock. War makes us clairvoyant: two days before we watched Texas jog out to his chopper knowing somehow he was through, over, no more. Now we wait for the return of his remains. He was killed by a woman he tried to rape just south of Marble Mountain. Me and Rock on the runway, waiting. The pilot banks the helicopter to touch down and the engines stop, rotors slapping the air under their own power. Texas and the woman come off together. She small like you’d expect. Pretty in black. Handcuffed to Texas’ stretcher. His body blanched but for the old blood where she stabbed him. Crewmen carry the stretcher past us and we turn to follow. In receiving the MPs unhook her. She looks up at me. She spits on me.

  Helicopter approaching ground under fi
re: the earth seeming to flatten and recede, pulling back into its own daylight that we can see but not penetrate, everything in miniature, shadowed and working. Trees sway under the machine wind, distance leaving the ground fire hollow and artificial—random pops, stutters. Men run about, helmetless, gesturing and falling, comic if we did not know the situation, if we did not know what they were running from. The unit we are coming for has been caught in the open, retreating across a sunny flat toward a dike, taking casualties as we watch. There is a lurch in the air we pass and the earth roars suddenly toward us, trees and ground and running men surging into the vertical, gunfire slamming around our heads, smashing down from the placid sky we came out of. We take on men.

  I am on the ground, loading: pushing, shoving, shouting. The other corpsmen start the fluids, bag breathe the near-dead, position men on stretchers and line them on the deck. No more than twenty feet away a marine is on the ground, writhing, calling out. I motion the crew chief to help me.

  I am at the man’s feet; we lift. My grip slips on his ankles: I catch at bootlaces and feel the pantlegs sag as if they are two bags filled with mud and it is everything I can do to keep a finger-grip on his laces and run forward. The chopper powers up. We are on board, lifting away. It is the sky again, the hovering silver border of the universe and my hands are shaking with their own memory of lifting those legs that were not legs, that had become something other than legs, that were glutinous mire, that were ooze, and we are in the sky and traveling the expanse of its silence, the open road of its vacant glory.

  Field hospital at night, a quiet moment never guaranteed simply by cover of darkness and I walk, up and back, restless amidst the sleep of the wounded, this sleight-of-hand version of sleep that crowds the air and resists the obvious visions, that tells the body nothing it has learned is true. I sit beside the lamp and look at the men triaged into positions along the tent wall, realizing that it is impossible to do a good job at war and expect to stay alive. To do his job a soldier gives up everything even when he believes he has not, signs over the roots of his life to a chain of command, a mandate, an initiative. It is always too late in the game when a soldier recognizes the depth of his sacrifice, too late then for anything other than dreaming—the last hope of recovery nested in the shape of any one man’s life up to that point. Here, tonight, the tranced and half-conscious grapple with the void above their faces, crying out from time to time, a language in stunned reverse: the mirror-light of mirage. These are the stories of the names we have lost and there is a faith in dreams, a riding belief that no other instrument of regret might be so winsome, no other form of redress so sweetly hysterical. The reason is clear enough—in any random moment one’s life might become suddenly and utterly unimportant beyond the number it is assigned, a life that becomes a citation, an enumerated article, purely of documentary and statistical value in the reports and dispatches and memorandums and cables and books of order, none of which can ever say the single true thing: there are moments a man can be who he is a second time. Alive when he thought he would never be alive again.

  4 a.m. My relief comes in, dazed by the wake-up. He carries a worn deck of cards and a crushed half-pack of cigarettes. He motions his head toward the dark of the doorway. They got coffee in the mess tent, he says. If you can stand to drink it.

  Idream about two Vietnamese monks. It is a desert and one of them is lame, the other blind. They live together and take care of one another’s needs. When I encounter them I am in uniform, in jungle utilities. They take me in, feed me, but neither speaks. As time passes in their hovel I want to speak of something that troubles me. I hold their silence until the desire to speak burns in me and I yell, my voice startling the dream: Would you kill another being for food?

  Immediately but slowly and smoothly they become trees, the shapes of their bodies the shapes of trees, their feet taking root, their arms and heads branching and leafing and flowering endlessly.

  It is pleasant to imagine an old man’s death. Pleasant to imagine living that long.

  Past eighty years of age perhaps, tired, but grateful for life’s long pleasures, the love of family, the achievements of productive work. In those last days it seems likely there will be a garden. Pests will be bad. I will work hard and beat them at their own game, using sonic resonators and laser terminators—or whatever gardeners use in that future—turning the pests away from their sources of life, making their native jungle as inhospitable as I now help make these jungles I move through. I might look back on this war with equanimity—my war, our war—and even a lingering small measure of pride in the job well done and survived some sixty years earlier. When I am an old man there will be a Vietnamese-American in the United States Senate, my accountant and family doctor and neighborhood florist will all be Vietnamese-Americans. They will have been born in California. None of them will have ever been to Vietnam, or have any desire to go. They will be unclear as to the specifics of the war between my country and the country of their grandparents and great-grandparents. None of us will speak of this war, of course. I will have to get back to my garden in any event, and from there to my bed, knowing in some immutable way which year and month and day is my last, knowing that every human hopes for a world of their own making. We all imagine life will extend its favor in the natural course of events, that we will come at last to live in a place that is bright and simple and clean. This is our penitential desire. It is a reasonable desire, an admirable ambition, and not to be faulted. It is how time rides. It is the light by which we live and die.

  What’s the loneliest sound you ever heard, Corporal?

  Me?

  Yeah.

  The loneliest sound?

  Yeah. A thing you hear that makes you feel, you know, alone.

  What kind of sound do you mean?

  A train at night. The sound of a train whistle in the middle of the night, a train going by out there in the dark. I’d hear train whistles like that when I was a kid, on my grandparents’ farm.

  Yeah?

  I’d hear that whistle and I’d ask myself, where’s that train going?

  Disappearing out there, I guess.

  Like it was going right up into the sky, climbing right up into the night.

  You ever wish you were on that train?

  I wish I was on it right now. I really do.

  III

  War stories are the oldest stories. The only truth left is the oblique moment, the casually turned head, the single look that is what we mean. Life to death is too short, too fast, out of nothing to this moment that is everything: the last night in-country and I dream of horsemen in smoking hills, shadows on horseback, reed breastplates, quirts, halfbreed moon. Some other war. Some other ancient war but this same place, this same unspeakably beautiful place. Annam. Cochin China. Nam Viet, Viet Nam, and I am awake, standing among the other sleepers. The nightwatch drowses on a stool. I walk out into the dark’s soft dense heat and piss on a bush, flushing something alive. Bird, rat. Look up into a coast of stars. Halverson had been angry with me when I told him the sun was a star. You lying sack of shit, he said, the sun is the goddam sun, that’s all. Right, I told him, whatever. Looking up in the hour before dawn at the myriad suns of night in the sky over Asia, thinking that it is over. It’s over. You made it. You made it.

  Let us pray the Chaplain says over the plane’s intercom. Lord we thank you for bringing these boys back to their loved ones in safety, for guarding over them in their times of duress and anguish, and for giving them the strength to serve their country and their God with selfess valor. We thank you for loving them in their moments of doubt, and for bearing away to your own grace those who you’ve plucked from their midst. We welcome them home and know that you do as well. Amen.

  Maldonado only started praying when he knew help was coming, that we’d get out of the ditch. By then he’d lost too much blood, he was faint, listing toward shock, whispering for Jesus to help him. His lips movi
ng when we slid him up out of the mud, the crucifix in his fist. The Chaplain eases down the aisle, touching men on the shoulder, shaking hands, his face florid, alcoholic, and I turn to the window to avoid him, feeling the cloud cover hum below as he passes. Let us pray. Let us pray, yes indeed, let us bow our heads, let us raise our voices in a consummate union, let our prayers rise to the surface of this ocean we cross. Take every man, woman, and child this war has killed and bless them as our offerings to ourselves, the never-ending body we spend to engage the terror of our emptiness. Take these dead men, women, children, and bless them, remember them without names, without histories, without songs. This is our entreaty and it is offered in the spirit of Xerox, Coca-Cola, General Electric, General Motors, Weyerhauser, Allied Chemical, in the spirit of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and My Lai, in the spirit of every drowning ghost and airborne soul, amen.

  Home from the war. Turning small, tight circles in the airport’s blazing white, travelers swimming around the confused island of my body as I stare up at the clocks, at the arrival/departure boards, the back-lit man-high advertisements, past the suspended models of fighter planes from World War I and World War II and Korea and up, to the lights themselves, the lights imitating themselves, twenty-four hours a day the airport’s private and distant ecstasy: a built-in heaven.