But let me reiterate. The dead can’t speak.
All this before the end. All this with the rot in my crotch. The imaginings that come with fear. The step-by-step movement through the jungle. What else could we do to fill the time? But the thing is, and here I might digress a little bit, we really didn’t dream when we were out there; one didn’t dream on point. Too much to look for. You were charged up, fired into an acute and exhaustive attentiveness to the things around you, ears perked up, eyes as wide as you could get them, just looking for a hint, a sign, a glint of flash in the treetops, a trip wire at the feet. You began to find a way intuitively; you trusted the sense that you had of seeing what was before you, which was why, when we were ordered to go down the road by the new guy, the one who came in on his West Point high horse, Singleton said no fucking way. We’re not going to obey that order, send us home, lock us up, whatever you want, man, but we’re not going down the road.
That’s how we found ourselves in the place I met my death.
All this is a cop-out. What I mean is I can’t speak from this vantage, not honestly, and not without sifting it all through the retrospection of someone who is, or might be, as I said, gone. That terminal point came and went. That’s what death is. You’re taken away and a point is made — a pinpoint of antimatter, if there is such a thing — until people forget you (I mean really forget) and your life as it was dissipates and evaporates, and then it becomes more of a fuzzy remnant of that terminal moment, and then eventually it’s gone, a mossy tombstone, if you’re lucky, that someone clears the weeds away to read the words of it, and then later not even that; just an overgrown field outside of Benton Harbor, Michigan, in my case — and then, of course, nothing. Yet theoretically that terminal point is still there. Anyway, the cop-out is that I bring myself up in the first place. After all, I’m gone. Trapped in that moment. That’s how I imagine it — not on point, or even in the middle — the safe spot; the safest spot on recon, in the middle where you’re not at the end or at the beginning but hunched down in a hole calling in coordinates for an air strike — I’ll be this terminal memory for a while, as hard and cold as anything in your mind, and then it’ll get subsumed by the rest of your life until it’s smeared out and bloblike, if even that, and then it’ll be nothing much to you, a sliver of pain you carried through your life from one place to the other. All I could do — weary, humping my weight in shit on my shoulders, my feet caved in, the itch of jungle beyond annoying — was imagine that point, make it up, and see what might transpire as I tried to imagine it. We paused and stopped to catch our breath in the middle of the jungle. How many clicks outside Hue? I couldn’t tell you. That battle was just a memory of streets. A real vintage Second World War street fight; we’d created what we could in the way of language around it, taking sips from the end of a rifle, good long hits of the best dope we could fine, passing the peace pipe, until it was nothing but a tangle: Frank praying over the bodies until his hips were tired from genuflecting; he’d lean over and say his prayer and then come up hollow-eyed and spiritless and say, Fuck God, fuck him into the ground. I’d like to see him come down and kiss my ass, I would. Where’s Jesus when you need him? he’d say. I’d take his cloak or shawl and yank it and say, Save us, and he’d give me his shit and I’d say, Don’t fuck with me, man, just save me, and he’d say, Do you believe, and I’d say, No, man, and he’d say, How much don’t you believe, and I’d say, Not at all, not much at all, not even much, not even at all, and he’d smite me with his jagged bolt of energy, man, and the fucker would fry us all with that bolt of energy he would shoot out, and then Frank would lean over and spew vomit and cry with shame and collect himself, going into the hermitage of his tent or foxhole tarp, and then he’d come out cleaned up, refreshed, ready to disbelieve again, because he was circular that way, and he’d start the routine over again and did so until that day when Deek Johanson got zipped — he was fresh meat, most certainly, but not that fresh, a month in, and he and Frank were buddies, and when he got to Deek he gave it all he got, did his cross and prayed, and then came up with his gun firing into the woods, drawing more fire, that fucker, until we were pinned down for a night because of his faith — before that we’d been slithery and quiet until Deek took a phantom shot, out of the blue, just some gook popping them randomly to keep us awake; took it by sheer chance in the head, a skull opened like a hardboiled egg in a cup (not the first one, I might add), so that what Frank was praying to was a skull spilling the cauliflower brain matter in the moonlight; did I mention it was moonlit that night, all glorious bright, so that movements could be easily detected? Everything in that hallowed colorless light, visible in texture and quality but not with colors; senseless in a way but completely sensible. The fire that Frank drew lasted for what seemed like an hour and sent us scrambling to reposition. Phantom gooks who could pass through trees. Amid all of it Frank crab-walked and then did a belly crawl back to us and, while we yelled at him to get fucking moving, he curled up, still in the fire zone, and buried his hands in his face and did that snort-gag-cry — the one a guy does when his buddy is killed, the one I’d do in the morning, at dawn light, when I lost Kingston, my buddy; the one they’d do for me — I could only imagine — when, in Hue, I was offed in the big fire bloom of misplaced napalm. (Don’t get me wrong; not that I could foresee that exactly. I’ll leave the foreseeing to Eugene Allen. I’ll let him conjure my life.) The napalm rounds came in halfheartedly, adrift on indeterminate axes, tumbling to the earth without the precision of a finned bomb; no careful target at hand; they just fell down from the sky tossed like coins, one after another, to spill fire into rectangular zones of death and destruction and so on. There was an arrangement to the fire they produced, but it came only after the fire raged, one bomb into another, to form a mass that could and would be driven into form by the wind, if there was some wind, Vietnam wind.
What else could you do in a firefight but imagine the possibilities at hand, just ahead?
Did I imagine my fate was just ahead of me? You bet I did. Did I stand there at dawn, a Nam dawn creeping across our weary faces and fleshing out the colors in the jungle, and imagine my death? You bet. Because what else could we do between firefights but try to foresee the possibilities at hand, all of them, including our own deaths? What else could we do? Along with imagining what it would be like to take you, Meg, into my arms and to nuzzle up against your warm sweet neck, to take your earlobe in my mouth.
* * *
Hank led her to the shore and went and got a towel from his ruck and dried her. Then he held her from behind as she leaned back into his arms. Then told her to rest and went for cigarettes. The beach seemed emptier than before, beneath the smoky white sky. It was a late spring, early summer beach with dark stones and black sand before a vast body of water, with a lone young woman hunching in a towel. Hank wanted to lift her out of her solitude, but he knew that he couldn’t. His duty was to continue to protect her from Rake. It was that simple. He lifted his head, blew out smoke, and sniffed the air. The wind was coming down from the Canadian Shield and he could catch the scent of the boreal forest, the long, lonely, isolated strands of untouched forest, the last remaining purity. He had things he wanted to say, things that might make her feel better. He’d tell her that she reminded him of a balsam willow. It wouldn’t mean much to her, but it would mean something to him. He felt limited in his ability to make metaphors beyond trees. He’d say a balsam willow. They make good smoke, they have uses if you know what they are. He’d tell her that maybe she was like a sandbar willow, because they were slightly forsaken, no board feet in the species, but they had good uses, made sweet smoke, great charcoal from the bark. Or maybe he’d go with the crack willow, because it was for baskets, for weaving, and even, if you worked the fibers the right way, pounded them down, for blankets.