tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
And Farrell’s voice, too, dissolved into the air.
‘Come on. Wen, let’s get our asses out of here. They’retearing us to pieces.’
tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
‘No, not that way. There’s no cover.’
‘Holy shit, they’re everywhere.’
He opened his eyes again and let the things around him return. The closet, the chair, the table, the bed, the windows with the unusually clean panes. And here, too, a smell of rust and disinfectant. This room had been his one landmark for months, after all the time spent in a ward, with doctors and nurses bustling around him trying to alleviate the pain of his burns. It was there that he had let his mind, almost intact, back into his ravaged body, and had made himself a promise.
The woodpecker conceded a truce to the tree it had been torturing. It seemed like a good omen, the end of hostilities, a part of the past that he could somehow leave behind him.
That he had to leave behind him.
The next day he would be leaving.
He didn’t know what kind of world he would find beyond the walls of the hospital, nor did he know how that world would greet him. In fact, neither of those two things mattered. All that mattered was the long journey he had ahead of him, because at the end of that journey an encounter with two men awaited him. They would look at him with eyes full of fear and astonishment. Then he would talk, to that fear and that astonishment.
And finally he would kill them.
A smile, again devoid of pain. Without realizing it, he drifted into sleep. That night, he slept without hearing voices, and for the first time didn’t dream about rubber trees.
CHAPTER 2
What surprised him during the journey was the corn.
As he rode north, getting closer and closer to home, stretches of it started to appear at the sides of the road, meek in the shadow of the Greyhound bus. The ripples of the wind and the shadows of the clouds made it come alive. He remembered how resistant it felt when you ran your hand through it. An unexpected travelling companion, the colour of cold beer, the warm shelter of the hayloft.
He knew that sensation.
And he remembered how, with other hands, he had run his fingers through Karen’s hair and breathed in her scent, which smelled like nothing else in the world. He had felt it like a painful spasm when he had left after being at home on leave for a month, a fleeting illusion of invulnerability the army granted everyone before they shipped out. They had been offered thirty days of paradise and possible dreams, before the Army Terminal at Oakland became Hawaii and finally turned into Bien-Hoa, the troop selection centre twenty miles from Saigon.
And then Xuan-Loc, the place where everything had started, where he had found his own small plot of hell.
He took his eyes away from the road and lowered the peak of his baseball cap. He wore sunglasses held on with an elastic band because he had practically no ears left to rest the arms of the glasses on. He closed his eyes and hid himself in that tenuous semi-darkness. All he got in return were more images.
There was no corn in Vietnam.
There were no blondes. Just a few nurses at the hospital, but by then he had almost no feeling left in his fingers or any desire to touch their hair. Above all, he was sure no woman would ever again want to be touched by him.
Ever again.
A long-haired young man in a flowered shirt, who had been sleeping across the aisle from him, to his right, woke up. He rubbed his eyes and allowed himself a yawn that smelled of sweat and sleep and pot. He turned and started to look in a canvas bag he had placed on the free seat beside him. He took out a portable radio and switched it on. After some searching he found a station, and the strains of The Iron Maiden by Barclay James Harvest joined the noise of the wheels.
Instinctively, the corporal turned to look at him. When the young man, who must have been about his own age, noticed him and saw his face, the reaction was the usual one: the one he saw every time on other people’s faces. The young man dived back into his bag, pretending to look for something. Then he turned to sit with his back to him, listening to the music and looking out the window on his side.
The corporal put his head against the window pane.
They passed billboards, some of them advertising products he didn’t know. Speeding cars overtook the bus, and some were models he’d never seen. A 66 Ford Fairlane convertible coming in the opposite direction was the one image that was at all familiar. Time, short as it had been, had moved on. And so had life.
Two years had passed. The blinking of an eye, an indecipherable tick on the stopwatch of eternity. And yet they had sufficed to wipe out everything. Now, if he looked ahead of him, all he saw was a smooth wall, and only resentment was urging him to climb it. In all those months he had cultivated that resentment, fed it, let it grow until it was pure hate.
And now he was going home.
There would be no open arms, no speeches or fanfares, no hero’s welcome. Nobody would ever call him a hero, and anyway everyone thought the hero was dead.
He had left from Louisiana, where an army vehicle had dropped him off unceremoniously outside the bus station. He had found himself alone. Around him he no longer had the anonymous but reassuring walls of the hospital. As he waited in line to get his ticket, he had felt as if this was a casting call for the Tod Browning movie Freaks. This thought had made him smile, the only choice he had if he didn’t want to do what he had done for nights on end, and what he had sworn never to do again: cry.
Good luck, Wendell…
‘Sixteen dollars.’
Suddenly Colonel Lensky’s words of farewell had become the voice of a clerk putting down the ticket for the first stretch of the journey. Hidden behind his window, the man had not looked at that part of his face that the corporal granted to the world, but instead had showed him the indifference due to any anonymous passenger – which was just what he wanted.
But when he had pushed the banknotes across the counter with a hand covered in a light cotton glove, the clerk, a slight man with not much hair and thin lips and lightless eyes, had looked up. He had lingered for a moment on his face and then lowered his head again.