The right side for a change.
Marge tried to make it like walking into the ocean, picturing herself a swimmer on a beach stepping into the tide. The image of ocean kept her almost calm; she clung to it.
All it could do, she assured herself was kill — there would be no need to talk to it. At intervals she shifted the package from arm to arm.
Where the grade of the trail eased, she switched off her light. The sky was moonlit but the moon itself invisible, sealed off by close hills. There was light enough for her to make out tree shapes and rocks along the trail. She heard singing but she had forgotten whether the voices were real or imaginary.
A sound in the woods on her right caused her to stop; the sound was like a shod footstep on metal with the creak of a steel hinge. She could smell gasoline. Turning round slowly, she saw against the dark trees the figure of a man in a broad-brimmed hat above on the trail. Oceanic comforts shattered; her body ached with fear.
A little farther on, she was certain that she had passed a second man who was standing just beside the trail. The man followed her, moving through the brush, level with her descent.
“Stop,” a voice whispered. She stopped.
“I have it,” she said softly.
“Shut up,” the voice whispered back. A whisper of authority, clearly enunciated.
The three of them stood in the darkness; for what seemed several full minutes neither of the men moved or spoke.
Hands took the package from her.
“Where is he?” she asked.
The figures before her swayed as the package passed between them.
“Right over there,” a man said.
“Where?”
“Just right down there,” the man’s voice told her. “Just ahead. Turn your light on.” She moved away from them and switched on the flash light; its beam probed among rocks and ferns. There was no one.
One of the men who had intercepted her stepped off the trail and a few moments later headlights flashed out of the darkness into which he had gone. He had set the package on the fender grid of a truck and was unwrapping the tape that bound it. The man in the Stetson was coming behind her, about ten paces back.
Ahead on the trail, in a clearing where it intersected the dirt road on which the truck was parked, she saw someone move out of the shadows. She hurried toward them.
“John?” she called.
In spongy darkness among ferns, they watched her light.
“It could turn out O.K.,” Smitty told Converse. His arm was thrown loosely, in a comradely fashion, around Con verse’s neck; in his other hand he held a large square pistol. He had passed the rifle to Danskin who was waiting in the brush behind them.
“I hope so,” Converse said. The fear of death had come back for him with darkness, a mindless craving for light. Danskin moved down with them, crouching on one knee.
“Here she comes. They got it.”
He stood up and went quickly across the trail.
“She brought it,” Converse said. “Don’t hurt her.”
“No, no,” Smitty told him earnestly. “No need, man.”
Marge’s light grew larger; he could see her bare legs and recognize the Ensenada sandals she wore. Smitty rose slowly, his hand resting on Converse’s shoulder. He had released the safety on his pistol and was leveling the weapon in Marge’s direction.
Converse heard her call to him..
He leaned back on his heels and prepared to jump. There was no force to uncoil, he would have to go on nerves, as always.
Antheil called up from the truck.
“Whoa now, folks! Just a minute here!”
Smitty paused in what Converse realized was the act of taking aim. Converse dived for where the gun might be seized and the hand that held it.
“Go, Marge,” he shouted.
“Go, Marge,” a laughing voice called. It was Danskin across the road. There was a rifle shot close by.
Smitty’s arm was like iron; he could not bend it. He looped his leg between Smitty’s legs, bent his knees, and hung on. The pistol went off twice as he turned his face from Smitty’s left-hand blows. As they wrestled, Converse heard to his astonishment a sound which he was certain might be heard in Vietnam and nowhere else — a pwock, like a steel cork popping from an empty metal drum, the sound of an M-70 grenade launcher firing its cartridge. In a moment a monstrous ball of fire swelled up under the trees down the hill from them.
He had been used to thinking of Smitty as a weak link and the man’s strength surprised him. His own was ground down — Smitty’s hand was shortly free. He turned to stare over his shoulder at the fire and then adjusted his grip on the gun while Converse, turtled on the ground, scurried backward in a panicking flail of arms and legs. Clawing at pine needles, trembling in every muscle, he covered up awaiting the shell — when the forest around them burst into pure white light, then darkened and glowed white again. Smitty froze, his eyes wild. Converse turned over, landed a kick below his knee, and lunged for the gun a second time. Desperately, they searched out each other’s hands — there was only skin.
They rolled on the floor of the flashing forest and around them erupted what sounded like an artillery barrage. Smitty was struggling for freedom now; Converse clung to him afraid to let go. Marge and her light had disappeared.
Smitty and Converse together rolled down a bank and landed on the packed earth of the trail. The din of battle swelled over them — bazookas, mortars, rockets, tank guns — it was Dienbienphu, Stalingrad. They scrambled to opposite sides of the trail, Converse moving on his elbows toward cover and low ground. As he crawled into the brush it occurred to him that there was something wrong with the artillery noises. Breath. Spit. There were loud speakers in the trees. It was someone doing it, someone playing games with a microphone.
But the column of white flame down the hill rose higher; at its core was the dark outline of a truck. Danskin stood in the firelight without his rifle, he was searching for something inside his jacket. A few feet from him a burning Stet son hat marked the trail.
The roar of mock battle coming from the trees subsided into drunken laughter — but there was a machine gun firing now, a real one and close by. Converse struggled farther from the trail — shells pounded into the earth around him, peppered the trees, chewing up leaf and branch. He shoved himself farther along, trying to put at least a tree trunk between himself and the automatic fire. The flashing lights blinded him and oppressed his brain.
As he huddled against the roots of a great oak tree, from the dazzle of lights above his head there sounded a great voice, louder than the weaponry. “Form is Not Different From Nothingness,” the voice declared.
Converse shut his eyes and cringed.
“Nothingness Is Not Different From Form.”
“They Are the Same.”
Converse was compelled to wonder if nothingness and form were not, in fact, the same. He kept his head down.
When the voice came again, it rose above rifle fire up the trail that was answered by another burst from the machine gun. Converse became aware that the flashing lights above him were revealing his position. As he prepared to crawl again, he saw Smitty run past him along the trail, in the direction of the village. Twenty feet on, Smitty stopped suddenly, sliding on his heels, turned round as though he had forgotten something of importance and charged headlong into a stand of pine saplings; his feet left the ground as though he intended to jump over them.
A network of violet lights flashed from the face of a sheer rock higher up the hill and Converse saw Angel and Antheil crouching back to back at its base. They had hunting rifles like Danskin’s. A pistol went off somewhere near the burning truck sounding thin and tinny after the heavier weapons; they turned toward the sound and Bred together, composed against their illuminated rock like figures in a sculptured frieze commemorating their own valor. Angel fired and loaded with a speed that baffled vision.