Elroy Jantz’s ghost chased Albert home. His anxiety grew as he sped through quiet, residential streets, knuckles whitening as he clutched the steering wheel. The worms had to go — maybe back to the lot that once held Jantz’s little house or dumped by the roadside out of town — but they had to go.
He guided his car into the driveway and waited as the garage door slowly rose, allowing a growing bar of muted daylight inside the dark space. The worm box rested on the workbench, and Albert snatched it quickly and tucked it under one arm. Meghan’s voice punched at him from inside the house as Albert turned back to his car.
“Albert!” she called again, almost shouting to snap his hypnosis.
He stopped and turned. “Yes?”
“Albert, I’ve tried to call all afternoon. Your phone — ”
“I shut it off.” He backed a step toward the car. “I went to see Lonnie Bowman today.”
Meghan stepped into the garage, her face pale like fresh wax. “Oh. Albert, Owen came home sick today.” She pushed at her hair, an anxious gesture.
Albert blinked. The box felt heavy, and he dropped it on the hood of his car. “Sick?”
“He doesn’t look good. His arms…I’ve called Doc Wilson.”
The box seemed to throb. Albert pried off the lid and peered inside. He scanned the black earth, started clawing at the dirt, and only found a few, fat worms. He dropped the lid and dug a clump out with one fist, a writhing thing just visible between his fingers. “Not the boy…me…my turn…” he muttered before shoving the fistful into his mouth.
9: The Surgeon of An Khe
His name was Gerard Karnowski, and he hailed from Hoboken, New York. Legend held that some of the guys in the platoon tried to drop the nickname Carney — as in carnival sideshow freak — on him, but that happened before he was dubbed The Surgeon. Before he earned the name. I met The Surgeon during my time in-country, stationed with D Company, 1st Infantry, 22nd Regiment outside of An Khe, Republic of Vietnam. Regulars, by God.
During my first few weeks in the bush, we walked. We walked in the rain, in mud, orange creeping mud that sucked at your boots as a reminder that you walked on a foreign planet. The insects, especially the mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, swarmed and buzzed, harassing us day and night. We sometimes walked in the thick, humid night to set up an ambush, waiting for the invisible enemy. When we weren’t walking, we dug into that red-orange mud, trying to create a small pocket of security in an alien jungle. While on patrol one day, I unexpectedly stumbled on The Surgeon at work.
He hunched over the body of a lone Viet Cong, a sniper killed by a foreword unit in our column. Our platoon commander, Lt. Terry Wucker, this scared twenty-two year old fresh out of ROTC, squatted under a tree with the radio operator, calling in the enemy KIA by the book. A few of the men fanned out to keep watch on the perimeter, some whispered low, maintaining noise discipline, but I watched The Surgeon as he sliced into the dead flesh, removing the left eye from the body with the fluid motion of his bowie knife.
“What the hell is he doing,” I whispered to Tallman, a short-timer who had humped the boonies with The Surgeon for almost ten months. Tallman once said that ten months was long enough to sweat in Vietnamese for the rest of your life.
“Cutting the fucker’s eye out,” he said. “What the hell does it look like?” Curiosity, like strange but powerful gravity, pulled my eyes back to the body. The Surgeon’s hands worked quickly. His wide, flashing knife didn’t have the precision of a scalpel, but his fingers carried a swift and special skill.
“Why?”
“He collects them.” Tallman spat on the ground and rubbed his saliva into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “He fucking collects them,” he repeated, shaking his head.
I watched in silence as The Surgeon pulled a glass jam jar from his rucksack, a jar filled with clear fluid and a few floating horrible things — other eyes with small bits of flesh clinging to them, bobbing like bleached olives. After unscrewing the lid, he held the new eye in his palm, rinsed it with a splash of water from his canteen, and dropped it into the jar.
“Rumor is, they help him see,” Tallman said, laughing.
The Surgeon looked up and smiled at me as he rubbed the thick blood from his knife on a tuft of elephant grass. After he slipped the clean, glinting knife back into its scabbard and stood, I thought the man was a giant. He looked at me, and his mouth fell open in a wide grin.
When The Surgeon walked point, he wore the jar on a small leather cord around his neck like a special charm, and we never made contact with the enemy. He led us through dense underbrush, often hacking our way through the humming thickness of the jungle, but none of the grunts complained. He kept us safe.
One day, the lieutenant lost it. His college education blocked common sense — wisdom that even I, a straw-headed farm kid from Kansas — could comprehend. After stopping the column, the thin line of green men snaking through the leaves, Lt. Wucker steamed past me and moved forward, approaching The Surgeon as he knelt at the front of our unit.
“What the hell are we doing?” he asked in a near-whisper, his voice quavering enough to belie his frustration and insecurity.
“Avoiding traps.” The Surgeon didn’t speak often, but his voice was low, grinding like slabs of concrete rubbed together. He looked forward, into the jungle ahead, not really speaking to the lieutenant at all.
“Like hell. We’re heading the wrong direction.” Lt. Wucker squirmed a bit as he spoke, an effect of the jar of swimming eyes hanging around The Surgeon’s neck.
“Your mistake,” said The Surgeon.
“I’m in command. Decker, on point. Karnowski, you head to the rear of the column.”
We didn’t march long before we all realized Lt. Wucker’s error. While walking point, Nick Decker, nineteen-year-old high school dropout from Alabama, stepped into a small hole filled with sharpened bamboo shafts — a hole in the ground like the maw of some awful, prehistoric shark. The point of one stake punctured the bottom of his boot, slicing through his foot, and punching through the leather upper. Nick released a sharp yelp of pain and dropped to his knees. We spent an hour sorting out a medivac.
“Fucking Lieutenant,” Tallman muttered as we sat on the orange earth and smoked.
When we weren’t walking and digging holes in the dirt, we waited in the rear. The rear — sounds like we actually had a front line — only a newbie called it the rear for long. But short stints at base camp brought better sleep, quick showers, and nights of poker under a corrugated steel roof that amplified the rainy season.
“Linder, stop fucking around and deal,” Tallman said after biting the tip off of his cigar and spitting the brown plug onto the dirt floor of the hootch. I quickly tossed five cards to each of the guys around the table, Tallman, Dave Rowe, Mickey Hernandez, Cliff Manalo, and myself.
“Did you guys hear about Decker?” Rowe, a pale kid from Minnesota, asked in his slow northern drawl while the rest of us scrutinized and organized our cards.
“Lost his foot.” Tallman flipped open his Zippo and ignited the end of his cigar.
“No shit.” I looked past Tallman to where The Surgeon sat on his bunk, casually flipping through the pages of Hot Rod. The dim light of the barracks cast a pall over his face, graying his features like a silver gelatin print of some grim-faced old salt from one of my high school history books. The jar sat on a small shelf next to him, covered with a green towel.