Untitled 2
Theodore found his brother in the mess. He loaded up a tray of green beans and S-O-S and sat down across from him.
“Say, what gives with Lumpy?” he asked.
Wally probed his brother with squinted eyes. His nostrils flared..
“What do you mean ‘what gives’?” he said.
Theodore told his brother about his exchange with Lumpy, and Wally rubbed his face with his palm.
“We all do what we have to,” he said.
“But – gee, I don’t know – that seems wrong,” Theodore said.
“Well what do you know? Eat your toast, then. See if I care.”
Indignant, Theodore got up to leave, but a boney hand on his shoulder kept him down. He heard a familiar cackle come from behind. He hadn’t heard it in four years, and it still made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“The thing about Lumpy,” Eddie said, “is that he’s a goddamned 4-F.”
Wally dropped his eyes and shoveled in a mouthful of gravy and bread.
“We’re all friends here – we can talk about it, right? Like old friends?” Eddie said, and he sat down next to Theodore, very close, his arm wrapped around Theodores shoulder and his mouth almost at his ear.
“When the shit hits, see, Lumpy just ghosts right out. He falls on the ground and throws a banana upwind, then he curls up and sucks his thumb, ain’t that right, Wally?”
Wally stared down at the table. His fork and knife lay across the top corners of his tray.
“But that’s…why don’t they pull him out?” Theodore asked.
“Because we’re all that son of a bitch has got – isn’t that sweet? We’re all he’s got, and we’re all you’ve got, and that means Lumpy too. We’re all you’ve got in the big scary north, scrip. We’re all you’ve got.”
Eddie got up. Wally picked up his tray and followed, leaving his brother alone in the mess.
***
Wally had caught it.
It played out just like they said it would, that they’d be out for a walk and then right in the middle of a ballgame. First there was a loud rattle that slowed to a dull clap – AK-47 fire from outside their clearing. A dumb setup, the dinks didn’t wait for them to pass, but tried to take them head-on. Number ten.
But they’d caught Wally dead front and center, right in the chest, and Theodore held him across his knees.
Right through the heart. Instant peanut.
Paddy water soaked up into Theodores drawers. Lumpy lay next to him, just as they’d said. The scarecrow huddled deep into himself, his smoking M-16 laying in the mud at arm’s length.
Then there was Eddy. Tow headed, dragon-eyed and cruel. Untouchable, glowing with hot rage, pulling fuel from the horrid mud under his feet – Antaeus with an M-16. Eddie roared, and the jungle shook – his voice like a chasm opening in the earth, like artillery shells, black fury.
But he was alone, and Theodore could see it, and he knew that Eddie Haskell was all that was keeping him alive. His brother was dead, Lumpy lay cowering in the filth.
Theodore let his brother slide off his lap, limp and heavy. He slumped into the mud the way a cinder block hits the ground – dull and heavy. Theodore un-slung his rifle and took a knee.
The rifle felt good to him, something firm and dangerous. The butt gave him little love taps on his shoulder, just an old friend play-punching after a tough home game at Mayfield high. He saw nothing but the tall grass, and the thick bamboo twenty yards away, little incandescent flashes from the end of his barrel, and the slow fade-out of blue-white gun smoke filling in the void.
How was Eddie still standing? He was a giant, a titan – larger than life, impossible to miss, but he was untouchable in the way that only a god can be. His gun spat fire, his mouth cackled hate.
Not a god, but the devil, Theodore thought, and he’s my master now. He’s what I’ve got – I had my brother, but he’s gone, and Lumpy was never here. In hell, only the devil has safe passage. Better to follow in the devil’s wake than to be washed aside and dashed on the rocks of the damned.
In an instant the tree line unfolded, the bamboo bent inwards, outwards, to and fro, coming undone and flipping upside down. Riding the crest of the sonic boom of the mortar fire came the screams of the incinerated VC.
Theodore didn’t know who called in the strike – he hadn’t, he knew it for damn sure. He had clenched his teeth so hard that he’d bitten through the inside of his cheeks and only now in the calm after the storm, in the deadly quiet after the jungle had come undone could he relax his throat and free his tongue.
Not Lumpy, who still sobbed and heaved in the grime.
And not Wally.
It must have been Eddie Haskel. Boonie number one, the blonde devil, death on two legs.
All that hate – where did it come from? Where did it go? It came from the air, the dirt, the water, the stinking filth of the deep bush, the people, their alien language, their wholesale death - and it came out through his gun, spilled out of his mouth, leapt through the air in a hideous summons calling down napalm, mortars, and mini-gun bursts that mowed down slow, the brave, the cowardly, and the cruel alike.
This was America. This was what bought the dream of Mayfield – Detroit steel sharpened into a killing edge, ten thousand swords for every ploughshare. There had been so much death, and there would be so much more.
Theodore looked down at his brothers blue eyes staring up wild and unseeing into the sun. He was one of many. Theodore did not cry – what was one more body on this pyre? Who was this man at his feet? He had known him in another life, but out here in the bush, he was just a gaunt face and a name: Cleaver, W., the man who wore his brother's face.
He heard the jolly greens coming in. Eddie helped Lumpy to his feet and Theodore bent over his brother’s body. Wally had two dog dags - Theodore took one and put it on his own chain.
Mom will want it, he thought.
The Jungle, it killed. It was brutal and dark, unthinking, an animal. It had been hard on Wally, and Eddie, and Lumpy. It would be hard on him too.
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