Carter Clay (11 page)

Long before, and up to the day of the accident on Post Road, Katherine Milhause had wondered how she—with her lucky life, knock on wood—would respond to misfortune. Say she lost
her
hands? Would she be brave? Suppose something terrible happened to Jersey or to Joe, or she herself were ravaged by disease, or thrown into a concentration camp? Would she be able to remain sane and helpful to others if she were tortured?

Brain damage, however, was never on Katherine's disaster list, which suggests that she intuitively understood that a person could hardly hope to adhere to—or even recall—a course of action or a philosophy selected by a differently composed mind.

Jersey, of course, does recall the mind of the mother of the past. Jersey remembers lying with her mother in the sweet dark of her Seca bedroom; her mother telling a little Zen story that she said she sometimes used to calm her own fears:

“Today is the day of a man's execution. One thing you should know about this man: he has trained himself to pay attention to each moment. Though he knows he will soon be hanged, he watches the dawn with great interest. He watches the sun light up the bricks of his cell. He sees that even though the bricks are a brownish red, when the sun shines on them quite brightly, they change colors, some even become white. The man feels the cool morning air, and he notices that, hm, it feels a little different on his scalp than it does on the back of his neck and his hands. The man smells rain in the air. A good, clean smell, and he can take it right inside himself when he breathes. In the air, he can smell the leaves and the dirt of the region. He hears a set of keys jingling. The door to his cell opens. It is the people who have come to take him to his execution. Still, he stays in each moment. As he walks outside, he observes the way his feet move, and how it feels to put down the heel, and then the ball of his foot, and then his toes. He notices that his knees feel wobbly with fear of his execution. A breeze moves across his scalp, and the sky is a bowl of pale turquoise in a golden frame.

“He passes a woman who presses one of her feet forward. Tan dust coats a smear of dried mud on her shoe. Ocher mud. His heel goes down and then the ball of his foot and then his toes. Heel, ball, toes. He pays attention to the moment, and it's not so bad, going to be hanged, when he is in each moment.”

Her mother sounded calm, contented, when she finished telling her story of staying in the now, but Jersey does not forget that there were also times when her mother stood in the middle of the kitchen and clutched her head and said to Jersey's father,
“How about giving me a lobotomy? Just for the evening? A temporary frontal lobotomy?” Usually, she laughed after she said this; usually, Jersey's father frowned.

He also frowned the night he walked by Jersey's darkened bedroom and heard Katherine telling Jersey the execution story.

“I don't know what you see in that story, Katherine,” he said from the doorway. “Somebody can make up a story like that—it may comfort you now to think a story like that would help you out if you were about to be hanged, but that doesn't mean it helps you know how to live.”

Katherine did not look Joe's way but stared up at Jersey's ceiling, which was covered with the dabs of glow-in-the dark paint that she and Jersey had put there: stars of the Northern Hemisphere in the summer sky. “It does help me, though, Joe,” Katherine said.

“But that's not the way
you
live. Living like that—it would be like living on tepid broth.”

Jersey kept quiet while her parents talked back in forth, but she agreed with her father. The execution story struck her as depressing. Still, in the hospital, and for a long time after, it is the execution story, and the execution story alone, that proves the bedtime story that helps her to sleep.

Prior to 1968, the year he entered the Marines, Finis Pruitt did not realize that, in their attempt to give biblical names to all eleven of their children, his parents had mistaken the last five letters of their home's only book for something akin to Elam, Mordecai, and Naomi, the names of children eight, nine, and ten.

Finis.

Pronounced
fine-us
in that backwater New Mexico town.

A bookish, if not religious, sergeant major first brought the senior Pruitts' error to Finis's attention. That was on Finis's first day in boot camp. The following evening, the sergeant major took pains to explain the joke to the entire mess hall. As several men in the mess line had already dubbed Finis “Mule,” owing to the size and shape of his ears, he proceeded to spend almost a week as Fine Ass—until the group rejected that moniker as too complimentary, and he became simply Rear End.

Certain draftees might have found this hard to bear, but eighteen-year-old Finis Pruitt knew that though he was a poor boy from an absurd family in a dinky town just then in the process of being devoured by an open-pit copper mine, he was also a good deal smarter than most of the people he met. In addition, Finis Pruitt had discovered, long before boot camp, that there were definite benefits to viewing life as a series of private jokes. He awarded himself a point his third morning in camp when he got
out of his bunk and said, without evoking any response at all from the dull fellow dressing by his side, “This is the day that the hoard hath made, let us read Joyce and be cads in it.”

Ten points when he sneaked a puppy corpse out of the garbage bin of a local pet shop and installed it in the locker of the literary sergeant major.

Rear End's career as a Marine ended before he ever left the United States (the upshot of several issues, including his implication in the suicide of a fellow recruit). He was not sorry. He was eighteen. He imagined himself eventually emerging in some amalgam of London, New York, and Paris as a darker, more elegant sort of Kerouac (dark suits, dark ties, playwright as opposed to novelist).

In the eighteen years following his discharge, however, whenever he looked about, Finis found himself in one university town or another, taking classes, selling stereo speakers. Now and then, he would establish himself in a college coffee shop or bar as an eccentric young professor of drama. He managed to stage the occasional play with the help of enthusiastic students; but though there was some pleasure in acting the temperamental director, he never felt he had found his true role until one fine Sunday afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska. Early autumn, 1987.

NAM JAM IV!
FREE MUSIC ALL DAY!
ROSENBLATT STADIUM!

So read the neon orange posters that veterans' groups and their families and friends had tacked up on telephone poles and buildings all around that lovely green town. Finis calculated that where there was free music, there would also be girls, and he was just then abandoning a period of thought that included celibacy as one of its tenets. (Why not, given that sex was so hard to come by and usually made him want to screech?)

The day of Nam Jam IV, he managed to arrive at the baseball stadium early enough to stake out a spot behind the first base dugout. The day was mild, the grass was green. As a private joke,
under his jacket he wore a T-shirt upon which a long-lashed, pink-bowed Persian lay preening above Valentine-red lettering that read
A LITTLE PUSSY NEVER HURT ANYONE
. Local bands replaced one another hourly on the black-curtained, black-aproned stage erected behind second base. During the changing of the bands, veterans and local dignitaries made announcements, gave testimonials, read speeches. The emcee—a tall, shirtless, sunglassed vet—crowed, “Man, we got a crowd here of upwards of three thousand!” An exaggeration, but the crowd roared with delight.

It was the crowd that interested Finis, not the bands on the stage or the hypothetical female he had meant to seduce beneath the bleachers. That crowd—its ebb and flow of the pathetic (or debased) and the heroic—that crowd revived and inspired him. Vets. Neo-hippie children of vets. Cattle-fed moms and dads. Wives and girlfriends. Brothers and sisters. Everybody's brother and sister, father and son, grandma and gramps. It was a family reunion, a neighborhood block party, a carnival, Homecoming and the Fourth of July, all done up with primitive pageantry. This was no costumed Renaissance Fair. People ate their crappy food and drank and danced and puked it up and engaged in the occasional brawl. Aging vets handed out brochures and flyers, sold flags and bandannas, T-shirts, pins and patches and bumper stickers—both for and against the long-gone war. A guy hawked homemade cassettes of songs by Hendrix and the Doors and the Airplane.
The War Years:
so the man had titled his cassettes, which rattled around in a splintered plywood box that dangled from his neck by a piece of twine. Five dollars a cassette. Volume One. Volume Two. Songs every oldies station played all day long, yet the cassettes sold like hotcakes.

In the evening, Finis worked his way around the cars and campers and pickups holding tailgate picnics in the parking lot. Most people had set up barbecues—Smokey Joes, hibachis—but a few free spirits had gone right ahead and built fires on the asphalt. Lawn chairs and folding tables. Tappers and open coolers. Finis fell in with one group, then another. He listened to war stories. The bad fight. The good fight. The death of the buddy. The Dear John. Some of the vets had repeated a story so many on
times that it had worn flat, become the spare change in the vet's pocket that would not buy him a thing worth having; others, however, jumped and spun while they told their tales. They drew the eyes and ears of their listeners, and on the edge of one such group, during a lull, Finis turned to a vet at his side and tried out a story he had heard back in Lincoln:

“I didn't give a rat's ass he was my c.o.! I told him I'd shoot him! You don't drag a good soldier around like a piece of lumber just 'cause he got his fucking head blown off!”

The man nodded appreciatively.
“Fucking right!”
he said, and Finis felt so alive in the man's eyes that he had to take himself away from the group. His knees trembled. His stomach felt warm as a bowl of pudding. From a bank of grass at the edge of the parking lot, he stared at the spectacle in front of him. The white-blue overhead lights of the parking lot turned the revelers to cold steel, while the fires cast up something molten, hot. The vets were variously humble and self-righteous; drunk and sober; glamorous in old fatigue jackets, grotesque in their mutilations. Some were sacred and some profane, and their very variety made Finis laugh with delight.

Cackle
was the word he liked.
Cackle
had a properly diabolical ring.

A nearby pocket of vets began to shout out a drill song (“I'm going to go to Vietnam / Kill myself a yellow bird!”) and Finis understood that the dark Kerouacian fantasy of his twenties had grown out of the deeper, more elemental shit of yearning to be Vic Morrow on
Combat
, and wouldn't a classic role for the late 1980s be the two combined in the Hero Scorned? Vietnam vet Private Rear End?

He moved to Texas. There, the big fatigue jacket worn by so many veterans proved useful not only for sleeping outdoors but as an instant costume. He learned how to take advantage of all opportunities to display a “rage” that would have left a genuine veteran depleted, but that invigorated and amused Rear End. The brotherhood of one vet for another—what fun to simulate
such cornball feelings! What fulfillment in pretending to be an enraged drunk suffering from, say, the effects of Agent Orange, or PTSD.

While he panhandled around Austin, he reread Nietzsche, and Artaud, to whom he had once been exposed in a university class called Theater of Communion. He came to think of himself as the pinnacle of a street actor, a mummer observing perfect dedication to his craft. But there was more: in the role of R.E., Finis Pruitt was released from the burdens of life. He renounced the self and its natural instincts; he did not need to be—serve—Finis Pruitt any longer.

For the last five years, then, Finis Pruitt had introduced himself to new acquaintances as Private Rear End, lighting the insult so brightly that it seemed an incognito; and, indeed, many people believed they glimpsed the outlines of a hero through that incognito's glare.

You had to be careful, of course. Once, Finis allowed himself to get drunk in front of Clay, which was unwise but, fortunately, had only amusing repercussions. (
Why
, Clay asked the next day,
had R.E. kept saying that the motto of Superman was “No compassion for anyone?”
)

Generally, however, Finis stayed sober, and sensitive to his audience. The bio of Private Rear End was outfitted with pockets and zippers that could be opened and closed according to who was listening: zip, and here was an ember-lit scene of nighttime street-fighting in Saigon; or zip, good guy Rear End digs a well in a remote village that, zip, appears in another story, for another kind of audience, as the setting for a rare barbecue of gook babies who, Rear End was only too happy to report, tasted “just like rattlesnake.”

Remember the footage of the bombing of the U.S. embassy shown on television during the Tet offensive? Remember the guy who managed to toss a lifesaving pistol to Colonel George Jacobson as one of the commandos sneaked up the stairs? None other than the intrepid hero Rear End.

Really, Finis Pruitt's descriptions of his fictitious stint in Vietnam—a compilation drawn from literature and film and the lives of other men—were much more coherent and vivid than Carter Clay's accounts of actual time spent in the place. Clever Finis could offer up place names, geographical features, dates, and savvy—if somewhat over-the-top—political comment. Yes, he had been intimate with a Confucian whore who helped him understand the mind-set of the Vietnamese people. He could make you see how, when it hit, napalm splashed along on the ground like a wave on a beach. He could tell you, with a wry smile, that he'd nominated the
thorn
for national flower of Vietnam, and that the best way to remove the plentiful leeches of the Trung Bo was to burn them off with a cigarette. If you had come into Vietnam at the busy air terminal at Tan Son Nhut, Rear End had arrived on the beach at Da Nang or at Cam Ranh Bay. You were Infantry? He was Navy. Marine? Air Force. If you were there in ‘68, he was part of Operation Linebacker, mining Haiphong Harbor in ‘72, or an early carpet-bomber in Operation Rolling Thunder.

Yes, Finis had presented Clay with the soldier who both fought at Hue and was one of Colonel David Lownd's 26th Marines at Khe Sahn. His special value to the colonel had been his rare ability to spot a subtle disruption in foliage or rock patterns that might indicate the camouflage of an enemy installation.

“Shit, man,”
Rear End said, his grin signaling an acceptable mix of pleasure and self-depreciation,
“the VC considered me so much trouble, they put a price on my head!”

Rear End knew payloads. That a good C ration heater could be fashioned from a tin of peanut butter and insect repellant, and that if you were fool enough to leave a shell behind, Victor Charles would be happy to fill it with gunpowder and bits of metal, seal it up, and place it in a bamboo tube with a nail ready to detonate it from below. The converted shell was a
dap loi
, and Rear End could tell you exactly how Charlie buried it in the ground, and how, if you were unlucky enough to step on the mother, you were damned lucky if it blew off only your foot.

Carter Clay still shivers over his own, genuine memories. Landscapes scorched black and white as a photographer's negative. Pools of blood left behind after the VC dragged their dead from the shell-pocked mud. The sewage-stink of triple-canopy jungle. Sleeping in water with his face covered by his tarp so a rat wouldn't take a bite out of his cheek. He had seen that—a rat taking a bite out of another soldier's face. He knew cowardice—his own and others'. He had smelled the smoke of burning villages that were home to kids and women and old people who maybe were or were not the ones who planted the booby traps in the sand—booby traps everywhere, so just walking made you crazy with fear that you might end up like that package of screams you'd seen rise on the trail ahead of you, no arms, no legs, no dick. But there had been real bravery, too, men risking their lives to save other men—and the kids and women and old people who maybe were or were not the ones who planted the booby traps in the sand—