Everyone who saw action knows. He went over to join the other side, the Cong, the winning fucking side, the side that’s looking back into history, to the ancestors, man, to the worship of those who came before you.
So you’re saying you saw him? Hank looked away over the yard. Rake had Meg tied up in a chair and was sitting across from her talking, smoking a cigarette, sipping a beer. The wind was high and the sound of waves came through the trees.
I’m saying I was him, Haze said, and he bent forward slightly with his chin up as if to offer his face to a fist, his eyes wide open, a dapple of sweat on his brow. It was a face waiting to be struck. It was a testing position — his arms dropped to his side, his tiny hands open, not clenched. High winds were coming in from the west and the sound of the surf came and went, came and went, milky white against his eardrums. You must not fight, Hank told himself. His internal voice was sullen and sad-sounding, coming through the continual buzz of his own treatment. What had just happened with Haze was a skirting around the issue at hand, the sense that if he had been asked the question about where he fought he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Had Haze sensed this? All the cocky, bullshit wordplay, the twisting around of his questions.
* * *
MomMom began throwing visionary fits with wholehearted vigor. One afternoon, she went to the yard, tossed herself into the weeds, convulsed, and spoke in tongues. Go do something, Rake said. Stop your old lady, man. I’m having a bad enough trip without having to watch her freak out and talk God this and God that. I’ll do what I can, Hank said. He went and said, Mom, Mom, MomMom, you’ve got to stop. He listened and located a vague syntax in her nonsense phrases, a logic in the way she went on about the torment of vanquished peoples, a fiery end, as she heaved her calico chest into the air. Eventually, he dragged her deep into the brush near the barn where the sound would be buffered by the rotting wood structure.
How’d you get her to stop, Rake said. He was at the kitchen table cutting up some product, chopping with quick, efficient strokes.
I talked to her in her own tongue as much as I could, Hank said. I just said back to her what she was saying to me and that calmed her down.
Rake prepared his product like a prep cook, moving from task to task.
I hope you don’t do that with me? He looked up with glazed eyes. In his right hand, shaking slightly, he held a box cutter.
Do what? Hank said.
Say back to me what I’m saying to you to calm me down.
THE BLUE PILLS
In the last few days of June they had started to arrive, more and more of them, coming down from the U.P. and up from the south, attracted by a rumor that was passing from vet to vet, from the VFW Hall in Hell, Michigan, to the streets of Detroit — a rumor that the original treatment had been twisted into something better than an acid trip, and that it included not only free grub and a place to hang out but also a chance to pay back command, to frag the guy who messed up your life forever. In a meeting, Singleton was briefed that the rumor’s originator was a man named Stan Newhope, who suffered from acute delusions and shell shock in addition to a run-of-the-mill schizophrenia that gave him visions of lumbering ships in the sky — not aircraft, but pirate ships. Newhope was throwing out a good rap, blowing it way out of proportion, saying: “Man, what I hear is they give you AK-47s, not some shitcan M16, but a Ruskie weapon that actually works, and you’re free to kill the officers who screwed you in the first place.” The weird specificity of the AK-47—the agent giving the brief had explained — was the vital element that had fueled the rumor. The key concept of the rumor was that you could do anything you wanted so long as you came out of a reenactment firefight a winner, on top, alive. By the time the rumor reached the hills of Kentucky, the briefer said, it had been put to music and was being sung like a ballad from the porches of backwoods shacks; by the time it got to Virginia, where only a few vets lived, after the great migration north, it had solidified into what seemed to be a solid slice of the truth. Now, thanks to the rumor, Flint had become a beacon of hope for those who hadn’t already come north, luring in the non-enfolded (the briefer said). Most didn’t qualify for the program. Some were too old, like Korean War vets, or too physically damaged. The Tripizoid simply wouldn’t work on subjects too far — in years, or in memory — away from the actual combat trauma. They were, as some of the vets liked to put it, those who had been back home so long they would never get home.
* * *
Singleton held the plastic baggie of bright blue pills and thought about the stunning sensations they might induce when ingested; no holding back, a bright sense of portent had led them to the window where they stood watching the ash heaps smoldering with a new intensity. A sliver of moon hung far out in the haze. The pills had come to Singleton via an intricate series of events — at least it seemed that way, passed from palm to palm secretly through old connections he hadn’t known existed, ending with the man who had approached him on the street with big, Howdy Doody ears, produced a snappy salute, and said, “Hey, Captain Singleton? Fucking A. That you? I’d know you anywhere. It’s me, man. It’s me, remember? Used to call me Chaplain because, well, basically I was the chaplain and all that. I had a feeling I’d bump into you soon.”
The stranger was dressed in full regalia, old army-issue jacket, helmet liner with ballpointed peace symbols. Vets lurked around. “I’m over here to get into the program, sir,” the man on the street said to Singleton. “I’m gonna go sign up for the treatment and kill me some of those fresh-faced West Point fucks. Not men like you, sir. You didn’t act like a ring wearer. No West Point bullshit from you. It’s Wilson I want to kill for making us walk the middle of the roads when we told him we’d be sitting ducks. How are you doing, Sing?”
“OK,” Singleton said.
“Man, Captain Sing, I’ve been wondering what happened to you. I had a feeling if I bumped into you anywhere it would be here, man, because I’ve seen half the men in these streets.”
Singleton took a step back and put his arm out as if to say, “Here I am.” “What do you do now?” he said.
“I’m not doing God’s work, if that’s what you’re thinking. Left that behind me, too. Got all that preaching out of my system in Hue. But I didn’t forget, sir. I didn’t forget the promise I made. I promised to get you some good shit when we got home, and I got it for you.”
* * *
“Then the guy took this from his pocket and went through the motions, bowing and presenting, one survivor to another,” Singleton said at the window. “The magic shit I told you I could score, he said to me. I told you I’d get it for you, I promised, and I’m good on my word, he said. Then he gave it to me and before I could thank him he walked away.”
Singleton handed her the bag and watched her hold it, fingering the pills. She took one out and sniffed it and dropped it back into the bag and then handed it gently back to him and shook her head.
“I don’t think I’m describing him correctly. He had this helmet liner on, and a flack jacket, and his eyes were spooky but also made up a little bit, with eyeliner or glitter or something.”
“So if this guy’s for real you might’ve been an officer, a West Pointer,” she said, pulling him away from the window. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
“If I was an officer, I was laid-back about it, or maybe it was a nickname. It might make sense that he was a chaplain and might’ve called everybody Captain, because that’s what we did. We took a big word and made it small, got control of it, maybe messing with the real captain by calling everybody the same.”