Fatal Light Read online

  Linderman’s chest was a matted heap of bloody meat: shotgun blast. Close-quarters ambush outside a little buffalo ville, a standoff. Linderman killed the man who shot him.

  “Very weird,” Linderman said. He was breathless, as if he had run a long distance.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you know, sitting here talking like this waiting to die.”

  “You just might make it through this, you know.”

  Linderman grinned. “Fucking liar,” he said.

  I tried to grin back.

  “This sucker’s starting to hurt. That’s strange. It’s just starting to hurt.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Hey, fuck you,” Linderman said. And grinned again.

  I took a breath.

  “You hit anywhere?”

  “Don’t think so,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Linderman grimaced, grabbed at my shirt, opened his mouth wide: blood smeared on his teeth. He choked, gagged; I pushed his head to the side as he vomited blood. He tried to speak. When he did, a whisper. “God, man. Don’t let me go.”

  I cradled his head.

  “Strange,” Linderman whispered. “I’m young.”

  “Yeah. We all are.”

  “I wish I was just gone and didn’t have to think about nothing,” he said.

  I reached behind him, lifting his body off the ground, embracing him. He looked at me, his eyes clear and troubled, and he said, “Now I’m gonna cry. What a goddam thing.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got you. I’m with you.” A call for help from a few yards away, a call for water.

  “Hey,” Linderman said, “see what you can do over there. Get that man some water.”

  “Howard can get him,” I said.

  Linderman said, “It’s OK, man. I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Sure.”

  I lowered him to the ground; he groaned as I pulled my arms free. The man who wanted water had been hit in the legs, fragmentation spray, Howard working on him when I got there. I let the wounded man sip from my canteen. When I tried to pull away he pushed forward for more, so I left the canteen with him and moved back to Linderman.

  And Linderman was dead.

  MALARIA

  1

  An old story. A simple story. The story of a boy lost on a weekend furlough in a small town in the middle of America. I was sitting in the apartment of a woman I met in a bar, lithe woman with blond hair and tortoise-shell glasses, smoking her cigarettes and beginning to understand just what a stranger I really was. She asked questions, trying to spark conversation. Why are you doing this? I was drafted. You could have gone to Canada. You can still go to Canada. No. I cannot go to Canada. That was never an option.

  Bullshit, she said quietly. Don’t give me that.

  I’m not giving you anything. It’s not a simple situation.

  Do you believe in what you’re doing?

  Not particularly.

  Well, then?

  Well then what?

  Why don’t you just...not go back? What’re you doing out there anyway?

  Training.

  For war?

  Most definitely.

  So that’s what they’re doing out there.

  I laughed, and said, It’s no secret what they’re doing out there. They’ve been doing it out there for years.

  I guess so. It’s just that nobody talks about it. And I’ve never met anyone in the...military.

  We’re your basic silent types. We don’t mingle.

  Oh, right. A legion of Gary Coopers?

  High noon. High noon in the rice paddies.

  God.

  Listen...

  You’re different from what I would have expected. I just can’t believe it’s not driving you crazy.

  I can’t change anything. And there are...certain pressures... family, ideas I’ve been carrying around. I don’t know. It’s not simple.

  You can come and see me.

  Well. We’d better not get into that.

  Why not?

  I’ll be gone in short order. Shipped out.

  So?

  It just doesn’t seem wise. I don’t know...

  Doesn’t it...I mean the training...I mean, how do you do it?

  I just do it. I’m there, and I do it.

  Doesn’t it...get to you?

  I’m scared to death.

  Two doctors at my bedside. The light around them haloed, burned, shimmered. They wore olive-drab combat utilities under their white coats and one said, talking too loud, How’s it going, guy? My mouth moved but I had to try a second time to speak before the words came, and I asked: Malaria?

  The doctors laughed as if I said something funny. Well, said the one that talked too loud, that’s no surprise, is it?

  The other one said, We’re trying to keep that fever under control. You’ve been out of it here.

  I said, I’ve been remembering...stuff from...before. This girl I met. Strange.

  The doctors nodded knowingly at each other. The one who wanted to keep my fever under control was writing on my chart, and said, Malaria’ll do that to you. Funny how we always think of women.

  The other doctor grinned and said, Condition of war.

  The two of them stood beside the bed, faces discolored in the sear of light, hallucinated, phantasmagorical. The one with my chart clapped it closed and said, We’re coming right along here. We’ll have you back in action in no time.

  The one who talked too loud gripped my ankle through the bedsheet. You’ll be fine, he said. Just give it a few more days.

  2

  I remembered my first action, Mamasan yelling huge consumptive sobs, lieutenant holding his arm screaming, Mamasan rocking. Lieutenant shouts he’s bleeding. Still holding his pistol, waving it in the air. I begin dressing wounds. The widow’s son: certain blindness. Both eyes riddled by shrapnel spray. Lieutenant shouting to stop. You asshole he yells, you never work on them. I look into the widow’s face. She’s staring into mine. Thump of chopper blades in the long sky. Pulled aboard by the door gunner. Then the hit. Then the dead.

  3

  At my grandfather’s house my brother and I would climb into the cellar through the side trap after running hard in the alleys and train yards and along the river, creaking open the wood-slat door into a cool dark of mint and rotting apples. My brother told me a child had drowned in the river and was buried there, and I dreamed about the tiny skeleton going hard and white in packed earth in the silence under my grandfather’s house. It was playing hide-and-seek through one August dusk that my brother hid in the rafters of the cellar, burlap hood over his head. When I finally pulled the side trap open it was full nightfall, a voice wavering from nowhere, muffled, in pain, I’m buried in the ground you stand on. I wanted to cry out, looking around to catch the glimmer of my brother’s white T-shirt floating in a corner of the ceiling. The burlap hood made the T-shirt headless; the voice groaned. The ground under me leaned, my ankles oozed, cobalt sparks stung my eyes. My breath ached as sight failed and my brother was suddenly beside me, holding me up, his open farm boy voice in my ear, Easy now, come on, it was only me, his arms around my chest, and I woke in the hospital bed, soaked in the fever’s glare, the sound of rain roaring at the windows.

  4

  Hot and wet and the night alive with insects, lowland bereavements, the taste of night on the tongue like an essence, and I lay in the middle of a vast heat, adrift in a cathedral of fever. Malaria dreams: candles flickering in a vestry as the ghosts filed past, gone but not forgotten, back to claim their visions of a time gone by, back for one more taste of the promises that failed them in life. Moving among them I presume I have died and the grainy shadows are the light of death itself. The best you can see in a dark place, a ragged edge of dreaming where blazes of glory might still ream the sodden air if you don’t drown in the mud first. Or shoot yourself in the mouth out behind the latrine. Or simply go insa
ne, running straight up paradise lane into the face of that mysterious enemy that lives in the air, riding in from nowhere, churning a wake in the dark scan of gravity’s backslide, waiting for you, waiting for you.

  5

  It is that living, while it goes on, can seem like light itself, a perpetual slide of morning out of dawn’s rare edge of perfect watery blue, light that leans and spills from a space in the sky between mountains and a roof of storm cloud, light escaping a doomed past to live again above our heads in passing glory. Standing in the hootch doorway, looking out at the morning rising before it begins to steam, and the girl who came to do the laundry said, “What your name?”

  I turned, surprised to hear her speak. She was the typical Vietnamese child, looking ten years old but probably closer to fifteen. Not pretty, but a gentle face, a welcoming face, a wondrous smile coming easier than most. I told her my name. She offered her smile and said, “Captain?”

  “No captain,” I told her. “Just a soldier.”

  “My brother is soldier,” the girl said. I nodded, afraid to ask what kind of soldier, where, with what loyalties, and I turned away, ashamed to be standing in her world, one more uninvited cowboy in town to kill her brother, and his brothers, and their brothers. Cowboys yelling like a drunken Saturday night, house of cards in free fall, breaking down and turned loose. I did not know how much the girl knew about these things. I was not going to ask.

  Sleep ceased to be rest, was never an escape. Dreams careened, haunted, collided, and I was always forced to look: the double amputees, incinerated faces with lips burned off and teeth locked in satanic grins, bodies in decay and distended with gas, fingers and noses and ears rat-gnawed, the ones floating face down in paddies pulled out after days with tongues and eyeballs protruding from macerated skulls and their gunshot wounds looking so innocent, so simple. On the road out of a northern ville I saw a dog eating the body of a man. The man had been shot in the head, eviscerated, tossed aside. The dog pulled at a dirty loop of intestine, one paw braced against the opened belly. The passing scene on any ordinary day.

  6

  The medic who took care of me was talking, changing my sheets as I sat in a chair beside the bed.

  “You know,” he said, “for years they had no idea what the hell malaria was. You ever hear that story? Walter Reed in Panama, all that shit. Wasn’t that where he was? Somewhere down there. Now you, you’ve got one hell of a case. You know you had a fever up to a hundred and six? Christ, you’re lucky you didn’t have convulsions. You’ve been talking, though. God, you’ve been telling some stories, know what I mean? Well, the fever’ll do that. Swells your brain. No, really, I got a theory. It’s like LSD or something, swells your brain, you don’t know who the hell you are... . Hey, you rest easy now, docs’ll be around in a while. They been real interested in you. I think they wanna write an article on you for one of the medical journals. Something about your fever being the highest they ever saw.”

  “I killed a man in his own house.”

  “You call those things houses? Shit, those ain’t more than shacks.”

  “People live there. Spend their whole lives there. Raise their families there.”

  “That’s their problem.”

  “His head was nothing but eyeballs and brains. I did what I thought I had to do... . I couldn’t see a thing.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “He was unarmed. He could’ve just said something... thrown himself on the ground, I don’t know... .”

  “Better not to take chances. I mean, shit, we’re fighting a fucking war here.”

  7

  The fever breaking ground, scattering, losing its grip and I was up at night in the hospital corridor shuffling toward a core of blue light in my patient’s garb, standard military issue: SLIPPERS, HOSPITAL, ONE PAIR; ROBE, MAN’S TERRY CLOTH, HOSPITAL, ONE. In the heat of the disease I had seen a place where the past and the future were one, cleaved together like lovers rolling, turning, wide-eyed on a bed as flat as the sky. I didn’t know if I was falling or levitating, and I wanted an escape to the safety of the present, clear of the terror of what had happened and could never change and sat like a leering man in a chair, gazing at me with a head full of regret and cynical wonder. From the hospital window the earth was a groaning body on its side, a face as empty of feeling as the heart of time itself, and I found myself preoccupied with the smell of the ocean in distant gulfs, the light on summer mornings along coastlines. Trade winds of the nervous system, the blind chemistry of need. Out there it was the dance of angels, the sweet dance of life itself where a man who was both too old and too young could reclaim a world as far ahead as he could see. If he could live long enough to get there.

  SAIGON

  1

  Saigon, the elegant midday half-dark of the Continental Hotel’s veranda, and we ordered drink after drink, all of them American-style: Mai Tai, Margarita, Manhattan, Black Russian.

  “Have you ever seen a black Russian?” the American correspondent asked me.

  “Oh, yes,” the French journalist from L’Express answered, “there are quite a number in Moscow. I think many in Georgia.”

  “Georgia.” The American grinned. “You can bet they’re all over Georgia.”

  “I mean the province of Georgia in the Soviet Union,” the Frenchman said, not smiling.

  “I know what you mean.”

  There was a pause as the moment passed, and the Frenchman asked me how much time I had on R&R. I told him about the malaria, my reassignment to Saigon.

  “You have been already in the war?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The American began to talk about the assignment his paper had him on. He was from a large midwestern daily. “I’m down in these pits,” he said, “talking to these guys the MPs say are VC shipped in for interrogation. And I mean these guys look like shit. They’ve been blackjacked and brassknuckled from here to Saturday night. I mean it looks like the MPs had been absolutely all over these poor fuckers. So I wire my paper, tell ‘em I want a go-ahead to investigate the possible torture of American prisoners—”

  The first subterranean shock wave interrupted him and he sat straight in his chair, voice collapsing to a dry whisper as the fireball ballooned out of the building across the street. The roof burst off in pieces, an aura of heat bowed the walls and flickered transparently, the windows vomited a palpable light. There was a second grunt under the street—the boiler—and I moved inside and behind the bar and lay down flat on the gleaming parquet. The Vietnamese bartender was already there, chin to hardwood. We looked at each other and waited.

  Debris clatter on the veranda. A rising wind, or the sense of one; the sound of fire. A helicopter in the distance. The sirens started, one behind the other, unwinding the sky.

  I stood up and from behind the bar I saw most of the drinkers crowded at the French doors, watching the blaze. I moved back to my table, trying to breathe evenly, ease the adrenaline in my blood, settle my stomach. My drink had overturned and pooled over the table’s veneer.

  The American returned to the table shaking his head. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “that scared the shit straight out of me.” He picked up his drink and turned to look again at the burning building. “Must be a story behind it, though,” he said seriously, sucking his teeth. He rehearsed a byline to himself: Who’s behind Saigon’s urban terrorism?

  A dog wandered onto the veranda, a soiled waif, meandering under tables, whiffing cuffs. The bartender poured some beer into an ashtray and the dog lapped it eagerly. With its mange and bloody sores and starvation ribs the animal still seemed happy, and when I looked the dog caught my eye and walked wearily to my chair, lay down beside me sighing a vast resignation.

  2

  The call came across on a routine watch.

  I was standing duty with Perelli, nervous Italian from Philadelphia who chain-smoked and kept busy cleaning the telephones with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. He was wiping a phone when it ra
ng, startled him, rang again. He answered, listened, hung up frowning at me.

  I was reading the office copy of Playboy. I did not look up.

  “Sounds like a guy OD’d,” Perelli said. “We better go see about it.”

  I asked Perelli if we really needed two guys for that kind of job.

  “What do I know?” Perelli said. “Maybe they need fifty guys. So get off your ass.”

  I looked into the back office, told Master Sergeant Weldon we were going out on a call.

  “Don’t stay out too late, boys,” Weldon said from behind closed eyes. “I’ll worry about you.”

  Perelli edged the jeep from the garage and I got in on the passenger side. He drove out of the lot saying, “So anyway they don’t know what the fuck. They open a goddam broom closet, he’s in there lookin’ dead.”

  “That’s it?”

  Perelli said, “You want more?”

  We went in the front door of the barracks, Perelli carrying the aid bag while I pulled the stretcher. The corridor linoleum stroked back to the dim light of a rear exit, a high buffed shine. Nobody in sight. Silence.

  “Christ,” Perelli said. He shouted. No answer.

  “You sure you got the right building?” I said.

  “Of course I’m goddam sure,” Perelli said.

  He shouted again.

  “Take it easy.”

  “I am taking it easy.” Perelli said, opening the first door along the corridor. Paper towels, toilet paper, bars of soap.

  Perelli pushed at the next door. A day room, beer and soda cans spread around the floor, overflowing ashtrays, Sports Illustrated and pornography slicks on a Naugahyde sofa. A radio was on, turned low, Saigon Armed Forces programming.

  I opened the next door, not really expecting to see him folded on the floor of the closet with the brooms and mops, blue face and eyes half closed in lethal heroin nod, lower lip bloated and sagging.