Fatal Light Read online

  It was raining harder, stinging my cheeks, a rich muddy smell. I was drifting in and out of pain, dreaming, somehow in another time, and it seemed easy to think of the smell of water in other places, the beach at night with an unexpected rain spattering a driftwood fire, Mary’s body lit and shadowed, or the way summer rains blew and gushed over the river behind my grandfather’s house, veil of haze and chill pushing a wall of August heat across the water’s face, and I looked up at the heavy Asian sky knowing how simple it would be to let go, to turn my breath loose, and the world gaped, roared, turned on its side, spinal warp opening vistas into my body, down into my body that was big as the earth. No job for the fainthearted, the colonel had said. Right. But he had never told us how to die. Nobody, I realized, had ever told me how to die. Somewhere, nearer than before, an explosion, a short tight burst. A grenade, and I tried to move my leg. Nothing. I fell back, wet slap on mud, the man next to me belly up in downpour, still alive but probably dying and mumbling in a high-pitched voice, calling to people I did not see. Sure, baby, I’ll tell her, he was saying, you can rely on me. Right away, baby. No problem. He began to sing, a lullaby. Another grenade burst and I tried to move, rolled to crawl and the motion brought an elastic pain that covered me, shut out the sky, took my breath. The rain thundered, mist in the air like mirage shimmer and inside the gush of rainfall I heard the bleat of helicopters. Pain labored the length of my leg, a generous pain, and I wanted to shout at the helicopters, I wanted to stand up and wave my arms and I was cheek-down in mud, falling, a stone through darkness at the limits of the known world falling along the ridges of the last visible horizon, arms pushing against the air rushing into my face, alone in that darkness and falling.

  3

  Supine on a filthy canvas stretcher I remembered horror movies at the small theater next to the department store in my grandfather’s hometown, my terror of a bloody hand reaching for me in the upstairs dark, a blanched and eyeless face suddenly in a third-story window. I remembered the light in 1955, beside the river with autumn rising. An industrial city bone-tired and alone the way depression and war left such places, islands out in America, train town, city of retired conductors and brakemen, farmers whose country died, the displaced middle-aged cranking up textile and chemical plants along the river, bored pawnbrokers, damp housewives in sack dresses desperate over stoves, managers of five-and-dimes. A small item appeared in the local obituaries: James Dean was dead behind his steering wheel.

  I touched my bandage, wet, the palm print where I was seized when the heat came down. I had dreamed of violence, of injury. And there were other dreams: days of snow. Miles and seasons from where I was and warm inside me. A room in a huge old house like a painting, winter walking away from the windows. There was music, an embodiment. I woke up when the pleasure began to hurt in my chest.

  And there were dreams of flying.

  4

  I was ascendant.

  With the sense of levitation the pain was subdued, quieter. And when someone screamed or a helicopter landed the pain rose to fill me deadfall to gasping contact, diffusing to own my legs.

  Mary in her mother’s pink convertible at the curb and my father smiling easily in the cavalier sophistication that leaned on the mantel Errol Flynn style, saying Sure, have a good time for me. So we drove and drove, gentle into the sundown wind past the high school and stadium and the outdoor markets to the highway where Mary opened the night, her hair standing straight behind her, not another car in sight. She took me to a golf course with mist collecting over the water traps: we walked out of sight of the car and sat down at the top of a long fairway.

  We kissed with a determination, a natural ache, and Mary pulled away, looking at me evenly, drawing down the straps of her summer dress.

  Driving home I watched the sky slide over, purple air and the memory of her breasts stippled from night cold, the kind of private event that might save me, a thing I could own free and clear.

  My stomach began to undulate, to fold in its glove of muscle when the pain used up my legs. I tried to call out.

  5

  My father was still awake in his tartan bathrobe. Watching the eleven o’clock news. He asked if Mary and I had a nice drive. When the news signed off he heaved up from the olive-green recliner, pulling his robe tighter. I remembered the spray of Mary’s headlights over a country road as if I were no longer in the car, as if I had been a boy standing alone on the side of the night, watching the points of light approach, flash, slowly flow back into the darkness inside my head.

  My father stood for a few minutes waiting to see what the late show would be: Flying Leathernecks; Thirty Seconds over Tokyo; Back to Bataan; Run Silent, Run Deep. Hell of a time, my father said, we had with the Japs. They just about did us in.

  I wanted to remember but the details swam: I watched the headlights approach, circles of intense light out of a black distance, converging, roaring, blinding sheen, and I know what I heard, capsized insight, the day I was leaving my mother crying and my father shaking my hand, saying All of us have a duty that’s more important than ourselves.

  6

  Through-and-through shrapnel wounds with fractured bone. I was airlifted to a staging hospital, underwent surgery, debridement, sewing, plastering. Not too bad—my surgeon nodded from the end of the bed—all things considered. Coulda been a lot worse.

  One afternoon in the hospital we heard an announcement. Bob Hope was touring in-country, entertaining the troops. The announcement came just after a general stopped in to award a Silver Star. I was asked to sit at the soldier’s bedside in a wheelchair, an audience, the witness. The soldier’s head was a white swath stained yellow and green at the temples, eyes staring flat as stones from a window in the tapes. I had overheard one of the surgeons on rounds, looking down at the bandages.

  Brain’s gone, he said. All we can do is wait him out.

  The general’s aide read the citation about meritorious action in the face of a hostile enemy. Citations always told the story in one hundred words or less, small translations of how lives ended on bleached afternoons along riverbanks or inside the nights, suffocating in rain. The soldier with the bandaged head had escaped a mortared bunker but returned to reclaim a burning corporal, killing four or five of the enemy with knife and side arm on the way back in. He sustained his wounds on the crawl out, taking shrapnel in the head and shoulders but moving on with the burning man on his back.

  The man he rescued, I was told by those who were there, was dead by the time they gained cover. They were both in flames.

  The medal rested in a case lined with scarlet velvet, was opened in front of the soldier’s eye window, and he stared through the box lid, into the bed across the aisle, into the next world. I wheeled slowly back to my cot. As the entourage moved out, the general’s aide stepped to one side in the doorway and announced that Bob Hope and company would be at the hospital in the coming week. Mr. Hope was coming to cheer us up, he said. The aide read prepared copy typed onto an index card. We would all be expected to attend the performance. He read on about classic humor, beautiful girls, and a special musical guest. Then he turned and was gone.

  All of us, all of us who could, watched the doorway in a lengthening silence; all of us, bandaged, minus limbs, minus eyes, in traction, in body casts, in wheelchairs, on crutches, we watched the vacant doorway. The soldier with the Silver Star continued to stare into the same square of empty space. His medal glinted in its case, with a copy of the citation on the bedside table.

  I heaved up to my cot and lay down and looked at the water-stained ceiling, listening to helicopters coming and going, smelling the mud and sweat. My mind seemed useless to me, an old engine riding into a backwash, lost in the world I had called home. I sat on the side of the bed to reach for some stale C-ration chocolate I had saved, and I was unable to cry, or speak, or move.

  7

  A chaplain made rounds while I was on convalescent status. Usually he only nodded; now he was pulling a foldin
g chair to my bedside, pointing to the book I was reading. A paperback mystery from the hospital library. A black stamp defaced the worn cover: DONATED BY AMERICAN RED CROSS.

  “Good book?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “All about murder and deception.”

  “I see,” the chaplain said, sitting down.

  There was uneasy silence between us. I put the book aside. “Something I can do for you, Father?”

  The chaplain pursed his lips before he spoke. “Your doctor mentioned you might be in the market for somebody to talk to. He thinks your recovery’s been a lonely one.”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “A veritable party.”

  The chaplain crossed his legs, patted one hand on his knee three times, looked away.

  I said, “I’m not really in the market for much of anything just now, Father. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  I nodded.

  “They have you doped up?”

  I smiled, closed my eyes. “Haven’t had a thing today,” I said.

  The chaplain told me he imagined it was hard for a man to say what was on his mind, things being what they were. He was as crisp as his uniform, thin black hair falling away from a receding hairline.

  I opened my eyes. “Things being what they are,” I said.

  “That tremor,” the chaplain said. “Your doctor mentioned that. What’s that about?”

  I reached a pack of cigarettes from under my pillow, offered one to the chaplain.

  He declined. “It’s no smoking in here,” he said.

  I swung my casted leg over the bedside, sat up, lit the cigarette.

  “So what about that tremor,” the chaplain said.

  “Anger,” I said.

  “Anger?”

  “Pure and simple.”

  The chaplain looked confused.

  “Terrible anger,” I said quietly. “Rage.”

  “Don’t you mean fear? I mean, why should you be angry?”

  I stared at him.

  “Really,” he went on. “Your platoon commander tells me you’re a remarkable young man. Courageous. Intelligent. Tough. Your platoon looks up to you. He said they all consider you a good-luck charm.”

  “Soldiers are superstitious,” I said.

  “In fact,” the chaplain said, “and maybe I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you’re being recommended for a very high decoration. For how you handled that situation out near Cu Chi.”

  I blew smoke, extinguishing the cigarette on the inner wall of a Styrofoam cup. “Father,” I said, “I didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t even know who I was shooting at.”

  The chaplain uncrossed his legs. His shoulder insignia sparkled under the fluorescent bulbs.

  “I didn’t even see the face of the man I killed,” I said. “I was just a terrified guy with a gun.”

  The chaplain looked at me, and I knew he would not pretend to understand. I had read most of the mysteries in the hospital library and the tremors were subsiding and the cast was due to be removed the next day. I would be pronounced healthy, recovered, able-bodied, fit for duty. I would be returned to my unit. They would be in the bush, I had been told, out on a a search-and-destroy. I could fly out to join them on the supply chopper. Everyone would be happy to see me.

  8

  Tropical rain, the rain that begins suddenly in downpour, drilled across the face of palm fronds and gushed out of trees, vibrated across my helmet. The firefight ended as suddenly as the rain began and I had given the man I was with two Syrettes of morphine, one in each arm, and laced two battle dressings over his thigh wound, one on top of the other. The blood was still soaking through.

  He motioned me closer and I took my helmet off so I could hear him. The rain slowed to a whisper and ran out of my hair and he spoke into my ear: That’s bone blood down there.

  I turned my head to look at him. “You mean did you get hit in the bone?”

  “I mean that’s marrow blood running out of me now,” he said. “You get that kind of bleeding you done for.”

  “You’re going straight out of here,” I said. “We’re going straight out of here together.”

  “We may get out of here,” he said, “but a man draws bone blood he be bleeding forever.” He looked at me, lips drawn tight over his teeth, and said, “He be bleeding forever, you hear me?”

  The rain stopped and the forest clicked as water fell into groundcover and we stared at each other, his eyes flickering in disappearing light. Mist filtered, smoke and constant drip. In the distance, the hoarse choke of approaching helicopters.

  “Choppers coming,” I said. “We’re on the way.”

  “Gonna bleed the rest of my life,” he hissed. “Gonna be coming right out of my bones all the rest of my life. You hear what I’m saying?”

  I looked at him and the sound of the helicopters grew closer. “I hear what you’re saying,” I whispered.

  9

  Waiting for sun. Rain coming. The top sergeant who lost six toes to frostbite and three fingers to a grenade at Cochin Reservoir in Korea said, “Go on out there, fellas, make sure there’s none of our guys left out there.”

  Linderman and I looked out at the hillside from the bunker porthole.

  Top said, “We ain’t leaving none of our guys out there.”

  Linderman glanced at me and said, “Yeah, what if we go out there and end up like some of those dudes laying on the ground? You thought of that, Top? I ain’t going out there for no goddam stroll.”

  The Top sat down on a sandbag, sighed, said, “That’s what’s wrong these days. No goddam cooperation. Trying to run a war with assholes like you. I must really be too old for this shit. Times’ve changed too much on me.”

  “Christ,” Linderman said, “here we go.”

  “When I joined the army things were different,” the Top said. “Yes sir.”

  “Top,” Linderman said. “You’re breaking my heart. You know that?”

  The Top reflected. “Probably all you guys on dope,” he said. “Can’t run a war on dope.”

  “Shit,” Linderman said, “give me a break.”

  “So we just gonna leave our boys out there? That coulda been you out there, Linderman. Tomorrow it probably will be. So I can just write to your mother, Hey, no sweat, your boy don’t care if his body turns to shit out there in no-man’s-land.”

  Linderman moved to the porthole, not responding, looking at the corpses on the hillside.

  “We can just let the rats chew on your worthless bones,” the Top said, standing up. “So give me a fucking break, Linderman. I’ll go out there myself. I’ll be damned if I’ll leave even one of our guys to rot in that slime.” Top turned to me. “Does Linderman give a shit? I ask you.”

  Linderman was still studying the hillside and spoke without turning around, speaking gently. “Hey, Top, I guess I see how you feel. We’ll get ‘em. We’ll get the job done. Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.”

  The old sergeant squinted into the dense air. “Really,” Linderman said. “Don’t worry about it. Sit back down. We’ll bring ‘em home. Every one of ‘em.”

  10

  Moonless night on a hill. Faces visible in deep shadow, dreamlight. Night sounds: isolated monkey scream in jungle distance, giant cricket, dragonfly whir.

  “Jesus.” Queen sighed softly. “I’d love a cigarette.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  We sat, silent. After a few minutes Queen whispered, “How the hell long we been up here anyway?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Who cares?”

  “Who cares?” Queen laughed under his breath, said, “My momma cares, dude. Don’t you know that?”

  Our intelligence had reported North Vietnamese army activity in the area, moving in our direction. We were dug in, deep cover, waiting. Riflemen stationed prone on the escarpment lip, 360-degree outposting.

  “Christ,” Queen said, “I don’t know if I gotta shit or puke.”

  “Maybe both,” I said.


  “Both what?”

  “Shit and puke.”

  A low throaty whistle. The signal. One of the sentries had spotted something, heard something. Something moving. I laid my cheek to the earth, smelling rank wet odor of jungle, each breath roaring, burning in my nose. NVA, I thought. With a rocket launcher they can simply blow us out of our bed. So it occurred to me.

  Then I thought: Maybe not NVA. Maybe an animal. Or a lookout so nervous he imagined something. My ear to the earth and a pain in my chest spreading against the moist ground. We lay, and lay, and after a time another whistle like the first. All clear. It was past, whatever it was. Or was not. Or only a wild-eyed point man, another American teenager in the grip of a bad midnight on a hill in a jungle country.

  “It’s OK man,” Queen was whispering to me. I felt his hand on my arm and I kept my ear pressed to the ground, listening to the sound night makes moving inside the earth, on a low hill, in a jungle country.

  11

  Linderman said, “This is all she wrote I guess.”

  “Come on.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Linderman said. “Not now. We’ve come too far together for you to bullshit me now.”

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “I’m dead and I know it. Only a goddam matter of time.”