THE NEXT THING Taylor would remember would be being in this little dugout cave overlooking the village, then searching through the area where they blew up his buddies, then being back in the cave again. It was all mixed up for days, or maybe years. Goddamn, it could’ve been years.
Funny how you felt different when Americans were killed. It just didn’t seem natural when Americans were killed.
The rest of the squad was dead. Or so he thought. Two or three bodies were still missing but he had to figure they were hid in the jungle somewhere. They’d been separated. Taylor wasn’t sure how he’d survived. A couple of bloody face and scalp wounds, but they healed okay. He could feel the puffy scars. The squad had some heavy fire power with them—several pounds of C4 plastique, M 60 machine gun, and an M 79 grenade launcher. He made several trips to get all that up to the little cave he’d dug out of a thickly overgrown hill. And he had all the guys’ packs, M 16s and K bars. He should have pulled back once the squad was wiped out. But he hadn’t. He was going to take on the mission by himself, maybe even sit out the rest of the war watching that one sleepy little ville.
He watched that village for a very long time. He watched it through the night, when every shadow was a body. He watched it when the sun was overhead and the top of that hill must have been over a hundred degrees. He thought he had killed one, maybe a couple of gooks when they got too close, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t see any bodies. Maybe I ate them, he thought, and giggled to himself. He vaguely remembered someone shouting Chu Hoi! I surrender, but he mighthave been dreaming. He wasn’t sure if he dreamed at all. Roaches ran amok under his skin. Roach bristles pushed out through his skin, seeking air.
There was a young woman in the village, a beautiful woman with long black hair, almond yellow skin. Eyes seemed a little too red. Dark dress a little too oily. But beautiful. When she walked it was like rustling leaves, vermin crawling under old wallpaper. For a few hours every afternoon she went to a small garden patch at the side of the village, in full view of Taylor, as if she knew he was there. Sometimes a boy came with her. Black, shiny hair. Too-bright eyes. Too-brilliant teeth. Taylor wondered if she had told the boy where he was hiding. The thought scared him. If the boy came too close Taylor was going to have to slit his throat with one of the K bars. See if that wiped the smile away. He wouldn’t want to do it, but it would be self-defense.
If he slept, Taylor dreamed of beehive rounds coming in, blowing human bodies to pieces. It made the officers happy, though; it was an old joke that you could get more grunts into one of those trucks if they had all been taken apart first.
But Taylor didn’t think he had slept, so maybe it wasn’t a dream.
SOME OF THE children hid at the bottom of the ditch beneath the bodies of their parents.
EACH DAY TAYLOR saw fewer villagers around. It worried him. Maybe they had tunneled out, or maybe they were off on a secret mission or something. If something awful happened because of them he’d be blamed for it. He hated them. They were the ones who brought all this dying; they were the ones who’d birthed all those corpses lying out there, fertilizing the jungle. He tasted blood on his teeth. But the woman and her son were still there. They came back to the garden at the village’s edge each day.
Some days it got so hot he started scratching at his skin. It seemed every inch of skin had begun to itch, leaving shallow, bloody furrows up his sides and chest. He dug body hair out, roots and all. But there was always more hair. Under the dirt and grime, there was hair even under his skin.
At night his nerves tingled. His nerves rang like hundreds of tiny screeching bells. Roaches crawled inside those bells and kept them ringing. He still didn’t think he slept, and the dreams that were not dreams rolled drunkenly through his head.
He thought he must be pretty sick. There were no more villagers, except the dark woman and her evil, grinning son. He’d watched them for days. He tasted blood. He was always rubbing away at his nose because of the awful smell. He burned in every organ in his body. His hair sang.
He had been eating one of the last cans of beans and motherfuckers. His head had drooped, as he would remember it later. Something else drooped, something around his neck, and brushed his raw, burning chest. He looked down.
It was a necklace made of nylon string. Strung along the entire length of the necklace—maybe two dozen or more—were these black, shriveled things. Like dates. They were ears. Some of them were new—the blood was still drying on them—and some of them old. They were usually only good for about four days; after that they started turning sour on you, and then the flies showed up. Eventually they’d just drop off the string.
Sergeant Taylor dreamed he was running, but he never slept, so how could he dream? He was screaming when he entered the village, his nerves exploding from his body, making a copper-colored mane that ran like wildfire over his bare skin, eating its way through muscle and bone. The dark lady and her son stood up from the small garden, their faces dusty in the light falling through the trees. They grinned like old friends. Welcome home… He heard a dog bark. The boy was running toward him, wanting to leap into his daddy’s arms.
But Taylor was ready. He had the grenades hanging on his arms like a morning’s catch from the old catfish pond. He was throwing his arms forward, ready to swim for safety, his daddy excited and crying from the boat. He didn’t want to die, but the dark blue water had such a strong grip, the lady just might have him this particular day. Hard insect wings raked the back of his skull and he looked at the boy again. He remembered something; he was remembering. He remembered going through this a thousand times before. The boy’s dying face all too familiar. It stopped him, made him wonder. The boy was running toward him, wanting to leap into his daddy’s arms. That stopped him. He looked again. His daddy’s arms. And so Sergeant Taylor dived into the ground, the grenades dropping, breaking open like eggs around him, before the boy could reach him.
Black billows of smoke with vague blue highlights. An awful smell of phosphorous in his nose. And Taylor continued to dream, without light or movement, but it wasn’t like a dream. Whoever was in the room with him—dark insect faces, hard wings and legs scraping at his brain—would not let him sleep. Taylor didn’t think he ever slept, and he knew that those who took care of him weren’t able to tell.
He knew the teeth he had grown in the dark never slept. It wasn’t like a dream. It was like being alive but still going to Hell. All around him he could hear the other men in the ward moaning in their sleep. They were all still in the jungle, and it was night, and Sergeant Taylor with his brand new teeth was crawling toward them in the dark.
DANIEL STOOD INSIDE the body of the soldier whose name he did not know at the edge of the irrigation ditch—shocked and numb with despair. He wasn’t seeing it right. The ditch was full of bodies, and drifts of blood like scarlet oil slicks, and yet he could not quite believe it was real. They had faked it somehow. The special effects in this… memory, were remarkable.
He watched as a lone soldier climbed down inside the lip of the ditch, lowered one arm into the tangle of bloody limbs, and pulled out a small child who had been hiding beneath the bodies of his parents. He gathered the boy into his arms and carried him off to the waiting helicopter.
7
DANIEL FLOATED UP through a rising tide of heat, his face flushed, his eyes burning. He didn’t want to open his eyes, imagining the jungle on fire, acres burning beneath sprays of napalm, or maybe the helicopter had exploded, vaporizing everyone inside. None of this was true as long as he kept his eyes closed. Then it could be dream or hallucination, nothing he’d be compelled to feel anythingabout.