The dreams in black and white went back to an Asian country where, out there in the sweltering dark, beyond the concertina wire and the claymores and the flicker of an offshore battery, Bedcheck Charlie launched grenades randomly with a captured blooker, blowing mud, foliage, and even a sit-down shitter into the air, the detritus raining down on Clete’s poncho and steel pot. Occasionally, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky, and after the explosion, a grunt down the line would scream words at the stars that Clete did not want to attach to an image.
Sleep came to Clete only by way of surrender to a fantasy. Before he went overseas, he saw a black-and-white news film in an art theater in San Fran that showed Vietminh sappers crawling through barbed wire strung by French Legionnaires. The Vietminh wore sandals cut out of rubber tires and sweat-soaked black pajamas that looked like black oil on their skeletal frames. Their only possessions and weapons were a rice ball, a piece of fish tied in a sling on their waist, and a bamboo cylinder packed with explosives tied on their back. Without flinching, they crawled across anti-personnel mines that blew them into dog food; yet they kept coming, undaunted. Clete wondered how desperate a person would have to be in order to become so brave.
At about 0400, he would surrender to his fatigue, the eggs of a malarial mosquito humming in his blood, the sour stench of his body, the jungle ulcers on his skin, the squishiness of trench foot inside his boots, the insects that got into his socks and up his legs, the cut on his nose where his steel pot had scissored down on his face. In surrendering, he put the faces of the sappers on Bedcheck Charlie and, for a brief time, did not think of him as an enemy. Clete gave himself over to a mental opiate, and Bedcheck disappeared into a box.
Clete never spoke to others of the private universe in which he lived; nor did he share his belief that the world was mad, that most politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.
Sunrise brought heat and humidity that felt like fire ants crawling inside his utilities. The dawn also meant rice paddies filled with human feces and trails with poisonous snakes looped around tree branches and booby-trapped 105 duds and Vietnamese knockoffs of our M14 mines and Bouncing Betties that would steal your limbs and eyes or simply take you off at the waist and leave half of you to whisper your last words. In his dreams he saw all of this in black and white, never in color, and he believed the phenomenon had something to do with the distinction between good and evil. The irony was that he had never learned where the difference lay.
He woke with a start at 3:06 A.M., unsure where he was. He saw lightning outside and the silvery-green slashing of an oak limb across the window. But it was not the storm that woke him. Just before waking, he had seen an image in his mind, an incandescent wormlike creature whose heat was so bright and intense that it evaporated the rain and the darkness surrounding it.
He took his snub-nose from under his pillow and put on his slippers and unbolted and unchained the door and stepped out on the stoop in his pajamas, ignoring the rain. “Who’s out there?”
An electric light burned in a boathouse across the bayou. His Caddy was parked in the cul-de-sac, the hood and cloth top sprinkled with leaves and pine needles, the hand-waxed paint job beaded with water. In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a figure moving through the trees, away from the motor court. Clete walked out on the gravel, rain running into his face, his pajamas sticking to his skin, the snub-nose hanging from his hand. “I saw you, pal. Come out or you might catch one in the brisket.”
No response.
“Hey, shit for brains, I know who you are,” he said.
No answer or any movement in the trees.
“You’re the guy they call Smiley,” he said. “My daughter is Gretchen Horowitz. A fuck like you is lucky to do hundred-dollar hits in Little Havana.”
None of it worked, and Clete felt foolish talking to the rain. He walked through the trees to the water’s edge, his slippers sinking in the loam. The bayou was the color of café au lait, wrinkling in the wind like shriveled skin. His hand was squeezed tight on the grips of the .38. Maybe he had imagined it all. There was no wormlike creature anywhere except in his mind, which for years had been a repository of weed and alcohol.
He walked back to the cul-de-sac and his Caddy, then saw the slim-jim stuck solidly and abandoned between the driver’s window and the door. Clete reached under the back fender and removed the magnetized metal box that held his spare key, and unlocked the passenger door and removed a small flashlight from the glove box. He went to the driver’s side and shined the light on a few footprints that seemed inconsequential, then opened the car door with the key and searched the floor.
Nothing.
He pulled the slim-jim from the window and began searching the ground. Again nothing. Or almost nothing. Just as he clicked off the light, he saw a glimmer in the grass. He clicked the light on again and stooped down and touched a small glass tube with the flashlight’s case. It was a mercury tilt switch, probably homemade.
He went back into the cottage and pulled off his pajamas and dried off with a towel and put on clean clothes and wrote a note for Homer. Then he tore up the note and sat in a stuffed chair and stared out the window until daylight, when the rain thinned into rings on the bayou and fog bumping in thick clouds amid the tree trunks. When he thought of the glass tube’s implications, his shingles flared like a nest of heated wires between his shoulder blades, and the remnants of his undigested supper spilled into his mouth.
Chapter 34
He pulled in to my driveway at seven A.M., when I was feeding Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon on top of Tripod’s hutch. I fixed a pot of coffee and took it and two tin cups out to the redwood table in the backyard and filled our cups, waiting for him to explain why he had come to my door.
Clete’s face was a complex study, particularly during times of crisis or decision. The more intense the emotion, the more silent and withdrawn he became. The pattern never changed. He breathed evenly through his nose, his green eyes fixed on a hologram no one else saw. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes flattened and turned the color of papier-mâché, his forehead turning as cool as marble, the blood settling in his cheeks because it had nowhere else to go.
“Had an early visitor this morning,” he said. “In the middle of the storm.” He hooked a finger through the handle on the cup. The coffee was black and scalding hot, a wisp rising from it like a trail of cigarette smoke. He drank from the cup a sip at a time, then swilled half of it, swallowing with no discomfort.
“What happened?” I said.
“Somebody tried to put a bomb in my car.”
“You saw somebody around your car with a bomb?”
“I went outside before he could finish jimmying the window. He ran off.”
“How do you know he had a bomb?”
“I found a tilt switch in the grass next to the driver’s door.” He saw the confusion in my face. “It’s a glass tube that’s got mercury in it. It’s attached to the brake pedal or the accelerator. When the driver presses down on the pedal, the tube tilts and creates the electrical connection that detonates the charge.”
“You saw the guy?”
“He took off. If I hadn’t woken up, he probably would have killed me and Homer. We go down to McDonald’s in the morning for biscuits and eggs.”
“Do you have the tube?”
He nodded. “I think it’s this guy Smiley. I told him that.”