“You don’t lead men from behind,” he said. “I’ll be Number One.”
The answer did not surprise Puller, which was why he asked it.
“I want you to reconsider, Frank,” he said. “A commander risks his operation if he exposes himself pointlessly and gets fataled in the early going.”
“I’d never ask a man to do what I couldn’t,” said Skazy, meaning it and believing it.
“Frank,” said Puller, “look, I’m not going to tell you how to run your assault. But don’t go down that rope first out of some idiotic notion of showing me up. I know you’re pissed at me because of Iran. I know you think I fucked your career. For what it’s worth, I talked to Bruce Palmer and tried to get you your eagle. I told him what happened at Desert One was my fault. It wasn’t yours. Okay?”
Skazy didn’t look at him.
“I’m just trying to do the mission, Colonel. That’s all. I just want the chance. The chance I didn’t get in Iran.”
Puller, who never explained anything, felt the temptation to this time. We couldn’t go with five choppers out of specific mandate by the Joint Chiefs, who overcontrolled the mission beyond belief. I had no choice. I’m an army officer, I get paid to follow orders, and I get paid to take the heat afterward, when they all walk away because of their careers. I could have made a stink, but I didn’t. Which is my way.
But he didn’t say anything.
“Well, Frank, good luck to you, then. It’s Delta’s baby now.”
“Just let us go, this time, Dick. Whatever you do, let us go.”
So many turns and twists and dark ladders now, Walls felt as though he were in somebody’s intestines, following the little trace of light upward. Sometimes this meant almost straight up, as if he were crawling up a chimney, supporting himself on the tension between his knees and his hunched, pressing shoulders, all of it made more difficult by the heavy weight of the remaining shotgun shells in his bellows pockets and the gun itself, wrapped awkwardly about his arm.
Dump the sucker, he thought.
But he could not. He loved the piece. It had never let him down.
And sometimes it meant almost walking rather than climbing, where the floor went to a slant, then switched back, but always, always, it went upward. So upward he fought in the darkness, seeing before him only the little bounce of illumination from the mazelike warren of tunnels. He knew only that there was this hint of light and that there was air in the tunnel, more now, cool and clean, whispering in from somewhere.
Maybe you dead, and this is hell, boy, he thought. Maybe this is forever, crawling through these damned holes, the tunnel rat’s final fate: tunnels to other tunnels. Walls saw it before him: tunnels to heaven, tunnels into space, tunnels forever.
He paused. Sweat was in his eyes. Beginning to craze out a little. There, boy, he told himself. He breathed, realized how hungry he was. He’d kill for a piece of chicken about now: he focused on it for a second, thinking about the crisp outer crust and how he used to rip through it with his teeth, feeling it crunch beneath them, then get at the tender white meat inside that would fall off the bone into your hand, sweet in its own sweet grease. He smiled: his brother James was across from him. They used to joke — when white people died they came back as chickens so black people could eat them and finally do black people some good.
He laughed to himself. Hadn’t thought about that shit in years. Hey man, be nice, get out of this jam, get out of this hole, go back and see James, have some of Mama’s chicken.
Mama was a big Baptist woman. She worked for many years at some Jewish people’s in Pikesville and they treat her good. But nobody else treat her good, not Tyrone, her husband, who disappeared, and Willis, who moved in and used to beat her. His mother was a large, sorrowful praying woman who worked very hard every day in her life and died when her eldest boy, Nathan, was in tunnels in Vietnam and only heard about it from his brother James. Then James got killed. Another boy at a basketball game had a gun, said James called him something bad, shot him.
So Nathan came home to no Mama and no brother James, and all the men he’d fought with in the tunnels were dead too. Death was everywhere, like the rats that prowled the hot alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, in B-more, Maryland, and he could get no job or when he got a job and his head would ache because of the time he was blown up and buried in the tunnel and couldn’t work, he got fired.
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, the sign had said in the DEROS station on the way back from ’Nam, but it was another white lie: today was the first day of no part of your life.
The sign should have said what another sign did say: FUCK NIGGERS.
Walls shook his head. He was gripping the shotgun hard enough to break it; no one understood how full of rage Pennsylvania Avenue could turn a man. Man do anything to get off of Pennsylvania Avenue, and bury his mama and his brother in a nice place in the country. He missed his mama, he missed his brother. He never got off of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he became the dude of Pennsylvania there for a while, boy, the Dr. P of Pennsylvania, he could do anything for you, foxy pussy, some magic pills make you feel good, a piece to make you a man. He was the sultan of Pennsylvania Avenue until—
Walls came out of his reverie when a drop of water hit him in the cheek. Was only this motherfucking tunnel, no lie, Jack, that seemed to go on forever and ever and—
And then he saw it.
Well, a long way to climb to see this shit, but this was it all right, this was what he’d come for.
It was a metal pipe, corrugated, cutting through the tunnel up ahead. But goddamn, it was rusted, and it was from the hole in it that the light originated.
Walls scrambled ahead, not straight up exactly, but on an angle toward that pipe. Was this where white shit came out of the fort in the mountain? But no, didn’t smell like no shit. He got up to it and crouched. Yes, the water came through here and had eaten the flues into the mountain from this spot. This was the main mother of all the tunnels he’d come through, this itty-bitty little thing. He reached up, touched the hole. Yes, by God, man could get through. Walls pulled himself into it. It was like being unborn: it was like crawling back into a pussy. His body had to work in an odd way to get into the rotted pipe, bending here, twisting there, wiggling his skinny hips this-way-that-way and — dammit, fucking gun caught! uh, c’mon, goddammit, uh — yes, yes, yes, again yes.
He was in the sucker.
Okay, motherfucker, where you go? He began to slither forward. His shoulders could barely move. The roof of the pipe was an inch above his nose. He wiggled ahead. He couldn’t turn to see. He could smell the metal. The gun was under him, it hurt — goddamn, it hurt — but he was so trapped he could move forward only by inches. Panic hit him again. Oh, shit, to die like this in some pipe like a turd in the sewer. He screamed, his scream coming back in his face off the metal above him. This was the worst. There was almost no room for movement at all in here; he just had to keep pushing himself forward inch by inch. A man could die in here, stuck and starved to death and the little rats would come and eat the skin and muscles off his bone.
Walls tried not to think of the rats, and thank Cod there weren’t any for him: only the pipe, above him, all around him, and the vague sense of light ahead and the rush now of absolute cool, dry air, and a vague hum. He squirmed on, and the seconds seemed to expand into hours. He felt like he’d been down here forever. He felt like this was his life. He couldn’t remember a goddamned thing, except that this morning he’d been worried about the Aryans whacking his ass in the shower as they’d sworn to do. He figured he ought to pray, but now he was out of gods. He could think of no gods to pray to. The Baptist God of Mama was no good down here. Besides, lots of guys believed in a Baptist God and they got wasted easy, the most recent of them being poor Witherspoon some hours back in the tunnel. But this guy Allah was no treat either, and the guys that ate up his action died just like the Baptists. Larry X, head Fruit of Islam in the pen, he got his throat splayed open as a fish mouth by an Aryan, Allah did his ass no good at all. So Walls could think of no one to pray to, and he just sang a verse of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” thinking, those dudes the closest thing to God I ever heard of, and squirmed ahead, and came, centuries later and awash in his own stench and sweat and terror, to the end of the tunnel.