poke and pull,back, poke and pull back, like that . . . and they had this thing they’d do . . . ‘
Sully licked his lips, aware that his mouth had gone dry. Now he wished he hadn’t gone to Pags’s funeral. Pags had been a good guy, but not good enough to justify the return of such memories.
‘They’d set up four or five mortars in the bush … on one of our flanks, you know . . . and beside each mortar they’d line up eight or nine guys, each one with a shell. The little men in the black pajamas, all lined up like kids at the drinking fountain back in grammar school. And when the order came, each guy would drop his shell into the mortar-tube and then run forward just as fast as he could. Running that way, they’d engage the enemy — us — at about the same time their shells came down. It always made me think of something the guy who lived upstairs from Bobby Garfield told us once when we were playing pass on Bobby’s front lawn. It was about some baseball player the Dodgers used to have. Ted said this guy was so fuckin fast he could hit a fungo pop fly at home plate, then run out to shortstop and catch it himself. It was . . . sort of unnerving.’
Yes. The way he was sort of unnerved right now, sort of freaked out, like a kid who makes the mistake of telling himself ghost stories in the dark.
‘The fire they poured into that clearing where the choppers went down was only more of the same, believe you me.’ Except that wasn’t exactly true. The Cong had let it all hang out that morning; turned the volume up to eleven and then pulled the knobs off, as Mims liked to say. The shooting from the bush around the burning choppers had been like a steady downpour instead of a shower.
There were cigarettes in the Caprice’s glove compartment, an old pack of Winstons Sully kept for emergencies, transferring from one car to the next whenever he switched rides. That one cigarette he’d bummed from Dieffenbaker had awakened the tiger and now he reached past old mamasan, opened the glove-box, pawed past all the paperwork, and found the pack.
The cigarette would taste stale and hot in his throat, but that was okay. That was what sort of what he wanted.
‘Two weeks of shooting and squeezing,’ he told her, pushing in the lighter. ‘Shake and bake and don’t look for the fuckin ARVN, baby, because they always seemed to have better things to do. Bitches, barbecues, and bowling tournaments, Malenfant used to say. We kept taking casualties, the air cover was never there when it was supposed to be, no one was getting any
sleep, and it seemed like the more other guys from the A Shau linked up with us the worse it got. I remember one of Willie’s guys — Havers or Haber, something like that — got it right in the head. Got it in the fuckin head and then just lay there on the path with his eyes open, trying to talk. Blood pouring out of this hole right here . . . ‘ Sully tapped a finger against his skull just over his ear. ‘ . . . and we couldn’t believe he was still alive, let alone trying to talk. Then the thing with the choppers . . . that was like something out of a movie, all the smoke and shooting, bup-bup-bup-bup. That was the lead-in for us — you know, into your Ville. We came up on it and boy . . . there was this one chair in the street, like a kitchen chair with a red seat and steel legs pointing up at the sky. It just looked crapass, I’m sorry but it did, not worth living in, let alone dying for. Your guys, the ARVN, they didn’t want to die for places like that, why would we? The place stank, it smelled like shit, but they all did.
That’s how it seemed. I didn’t care so much about the smell, anyway. Mostly I think it was the chair that got to me. That one chair said it all.’