I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.
Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in.” His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Far table, right side.”
“It’s okay?” I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t. “Yesss.” He stepped back to let me in.
I smelled cordite before I saw the other men. The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.
“Oh, hell,” someone said from off to my left. “We have to put up with this?”
I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.
“Is okay, is okay,” said Mike. “Old customer. Old friend.”
“I bet he is,” the voice said. “Just don’t let any women in here.”
“No women,” Mike said. “No problem.”
I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.
“You want whiskey, Tim?” Mike asked.
“Tim?” the man said. “Tim?”
“Beer,” I said, and sat down.
A nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnnie Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife, and had once been blond.
“I just want to make sure about this,” he said. “You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?”
“Anything you say,” I said.
“No woman walks into this place.” He put his hand on the gun. “No nurse. No wife. No anything. You got that?”
“Got it,” I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer.
“Tim. Funny name. Tom, now—that’s a name. Tim sounds like a little guy— like him. He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. “Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.”
Don t you like women?” I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse.
I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.
That is a complicated question,” the drunk said. “There are questions of responsibility. You can be responsible for yourself. You can be responsible for your children and your tribe. You are responsible for anyone you want to protect. But can you be responsible for women? If so, how responsible?”
Mike quietly moved behind the bar and sat on a stool with his arms out of sight. I knew he had a shotgun under there.
“You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you, Tim, you rear-echelon dipshit?”
“You’re afraid you’ll shoot any women who come in here, so you told the bartender to keep them out.”
“This wise-ass sergeant is personally interfering with my state of mind,” the drunk said to the burly man on his right. “Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue. ”
“Leave him alone,” the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.
The drunken officer Beret startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.
This is serious, he said, and I am serious. If you wish to see how serious, just sit in your chair and do nothing. Do you not know of what I am capable by now? Have you learned nothing? You know what I know. I know what you know. A great heaviness is between us. Of all the people in the world at this moment, the only ones I do not despise are already dead, or should be. At this moment, murder is weightless.
There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it’s pretty close. He may have said that murder was empty.
Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian noveclass="underline" Recall what is in our vehicle (carriage) ; you should remember what we have brought with us, because I shall never forget it. Is it so easy for you to forget?
It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.
Your leader requires more of this nectar, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.
“Whiskey,” said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.
For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.
The haggard soldier who had been silent until now said, “Something is gonna happen here.” He looked straight at me. “Pal?”
“That man is nobody’s pal,” the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.
For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.
“Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?” said the drunk. “Is that much understood?”
The soldier who had called me pal laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk’s glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.