That was the point of becoming a Green Beret. He could take anything. But each day in the jungle camp he grew weaker, and at last he was afraid that his body could not keep on. More work, more heavy work, less food, less sleep. What he saw went gray and blurred; he stumbled, moaning, talking to himself. After three days without food, they tossed a snake flopping into his hole to squirm in the dirt, and they watched as he twisted off its head and ate the body raw. He only managed to keep a little of it down. Not until later — a few minutes, a few days, the time was all the same — did he wonder if the snake was poisonous or not. That and the bugs he found in his hole and the chunks of garbage they occasionally threw down at him, that was all that gave him life the next few days — or weeks, he could not tell. Hauling a dead tree through the jungle back to camp, he was permitted to pick fruit and eat it, and by nightfall he had dysentery. He lay in a stupor in his hole, mired in his excrement, hearing them talk about his foolishness.
But he had not been foolish. In his delirium his mind seemed better than it had been since capture, and the dysentery was intentional. He had eaten just enough to catch it mildly so the next day when they hauled him up be could pretend his cramps were more severe than they were actually, so he could collapse while dragging the dead trees back to camp. Maybe they would not make him work for a while then. Maybe his guard would leave him in the jungle and go for help to carry him to camp, and by the time the guard returned, he would have been able to escape.
But then he realized that his mind was not better at all. He had eaten too much fruit, and the cramps were worse than he expected, and once he could no longer work, the guard would likely shoot him, and even if he did escape, how long could he last, how far could he get, starved and half-dead and diarrheic? He could not remember if he realized all this before or after. Everything became confused, and suddenly he was on his own, crashing through the jungle, collapsing into a stream. The next thing he knew, he was crawling through ferns up a slope, standing at the top, falling onto level grass, standing again and straining to get across the level, then crawling up another slope, at the top no longer able to stand, only to crawl. The mountain tribes, he was thinking. Get to a tribe, was all he could think.
Somebody was making him drink. The soldiers had caught him he was sure, and he fought to break away, but somebody was holding him down and making him swallow. It wasn't soldiers, it couldn't be: they let him break away, stumbling through the jungle. Sometimes he thought he was back in his hole, only dreaming he was loose. Other times he thought he was still dropping from the plane with the rest of his team, his chute not opening.
In two weeks the rain started, coming down forever. Mud. Wood rot. Showers streaming down so thick that he could hardly breathe. He kept on, dazed by the pelt of the rain, infuriated by the suck of the mud, by the wet bushes clinging to him. He could not tell which way was south anymore — the night clouds would break and he would take a bearing from a star, but then the clouds would close up and he'd have to travel blind, and when the clouds once more opened, he'd discover he had lost direction. One morning he found he had wandered in a circle, and after that he travelled only in the day. He had to go slower, more carefully, to keep from being spotted. When clouds obscured the sun, he aimed toward far-off landmarks, a mountain peak or a towering tree. And each day, every day, the rains came.
He fell out of the forest staggering across a field, and somebody shot at him. He stumbled to the ground, crawling back to the trees. Another shot. People running through the grass. 'I told you to identify yourself,' a man was saying. 'If it weren't I saw you didn't have a weapon, I'd have killed you. Stand the hell up and identify yourself.'
Americans. He started laughing. He could not stop laughing. They held him in the hospital for a month before his hysteria left him. His drop into the north had been at the start of December, and it was now the start of May they told him. How long he had been a prisoner he didn't know. How long he had been on the run he didn't know. But between then and now he had covered the distance between his drop area and this American base in the south, three hundred and ninety miles. And what had started him laughing was that he must have been in American territory for days, some of the soldiers he had heard in the night and hid from must have been Americans.
11
He put off going back out there as long as he could. He knew he would not be able to stand it when Teasle came touching the scissors to his head and cutting. The spray of water on him, he glanced out the shower, and Galt was suddenly at the bottom of the stairs, holding the scissors and a can of shaving cream and a straight razor. His stomach tightened. He watched frantically as Teasle pointed at a desk and chair by the bottom of the stairs, saying something to Galt that came muffled through the noise of the spray. Galt brought the chair around in front of the desk, took some newspapers from inside the desk and spread them under the chair. He was not long doing it at all. Directly Teasle came toward him in the stall, close enough for him to hear.
'Turn off the water,' Teasle said.
Rambo pretended not to hear.
Teasle came farther down. 'Turn off the water,' he repeated.
Rambo went on washing his arms and chest. The soap was a big yellow cake that smelled strongly of disinfectant. He switched to soaping his legs. It was the third time he had soaped them. Teasle nodded and walked out of sight to the left of the stall where there must have been a shut-off valve because in a second the water quit spraying. Rambo's legs and shoulders tightened, water dripping from him onto the hollow metal bottom of the stall, and then Teasle was in sight again, holding a towel.
'There's no sense in putting this off,' Teasle said. 'You'll just catch cold.'
Rambo had no choice. He stepped out slowly. He knew that if he didn't Teasle would reach in for him, and he didn't want Teasle touching him. He dried himself repeatedly with the towel. In the cold the towel made prickle marks on his arms. His testicles felt exposed.
'Dry yourself anymore and you'll wear out the towel,' Teasle said.
He went on drying himself. Teasle reached to guide him toward the chair, and Rambo side-stepped, keeping Teasle and Galt in front of him as he backed over to the chair. Without a pause everything built up in quick sequence.
First Teasle touched the scissors to the side of his head, snipping, and Rambo tried, but could not stop himself from flinching.
'Hold still,' Teasle said. 'You'll jerk against the scissors and maybe hurt yourself.'