In Pharaoh's Army (17 page)

I put the package on the floor and pressed at it with
my stockinged foot, for better control and so as not to leave any bootprints. It was tougher than I’d expected, but then of course it was tough. How else could it have lasted all those years? I gave it more and more of my weight until I was almost standing on it. Though I didn’t hear the break, I felt it travel up my leg—a sudden, sad release. I picked up the package and checked to make sure I hadn’t broken just the wooden base. It was the bowl. It had cracked into several pieces. I wrapped the package in some bunched sheets of
Stars and Stripes
and covered those with a layer of parcel paper. Then I took it to the airstrip. I followed Pete’s orders to the letter, and I did not delay.

R
EALLY
, now. Is the part about the bowl true? Did I do that?

No. Never. I would never deliberately take something precious from a man—the pride of his collection, say, or his own pride—and put it under my foot like that, and twist my foot on it, and break it.

No. Not even for his own good.

S
ERGEANT BENET’S TOUR
ended a month before mine. They kept promising me a replacement but none came, because units up north had greater need. The day before his departure I was told I’d have to wait at least another week, which news I did not take well.

Sergeant Benet didn’t want to go by helicopter to Saigon, he wanted to go by road. The road was worse, actuarially. His odds were better in the air, but of course he knew that as well as I did. This was just a feeling he had. We attached ourselves to an American convoy from Dong Tam and made the city late afternoon the day before Sergeant Benet’s flight home. We were running behind time, but before dropping him off at out-processing I convinced him to stop on Tu Do Street for one last beer. I had some idea that we might have a personal talk. Instead we watched a Vietnamese girl in a white cowboy hat sing like Patsy Cline. The troops in the bar were actually listening to her. They were all white.

This was a cracker joint. I took some time figuring
that out, being white myself, and by then we were attracting unfriendly attention. Nobody said anything, but they looked us over. I wouldn’t have made much of it except for the way it affected Sergeant Benet. He sat low in his chair and drew into himself in a way that reduced his presence, offering self-diminishment as a peace bond. There was something timeworn and entirely dignified in his attitude, but I felt like a fool, and I wanted to say so. What I said was, “I hope you know how much you’re going to miss me.”

“Yes sir, I believe I will.”

“I was joking.”

“I know.”

The girl was singing “Crazy.” We went back to watching her.

For eleven months we had lived together. Each of those mornings Sergeant Benet had appeared in fresh fatigues, with our day already mapped out. He called me sir. He found work for us to do when there didn’t seem to be any and somehow let me know what orders I should give him to preserve the fiction of my authority. I knew that he was my superior in every way that mattered, but he didn’t allow me to acknowledge this and gave no sign of suspecting it himself. If he had, our barely sufficient imitation of purposeful existence would have collapsed. I understood all that. But I’d hoped to say some word of truth to him here at the end, to show some recognition of the facts. I didn’t intend to flatter him, or even thank him. I just wanted him to know I wasn’t stupid. And to accomplish this I had brought him to a redneck gutbucket.

Sergeant Benet finished his beer. “Time we hatted up,” he said.

We drove the rest of the way in silence, according to our custom. When we reached out-processing Sergeant Benet let me carry his duffel bag inside the gate.

I set it down among some others. “I don’t see how I can stay there alone,” I said.

“You’ll do just fine, sir.”

“Forget I said that.”

“They’ll send somebody else down, for sure. You got, what, twenty-eight days?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty days. One at a time, sir, like the man says.”

A second lieutenant came over and snapped his fingers for Sergeant Benet’s orders. He began to read through them, and without looking up he said, “You’re late.”

I had rank on him. I could have locked his heels and smoked him good, but I kept quiet. Whatever I said now, Sergeant Benet would pay for later. He wasn’t mine anymore.

I
T WAS
too late to head back to My Tho, so I booked into a hotel near Cholon. There was a bar on the roof and a small malarial-looking pool and a bandstand where a knock-kneed girl in go-go boots was dancing to scratchy records and talking to the men watching her. From where I sat I looked across at a line of buildings ruined by the fighting at Tet, collapsed walls exposing furnished rooms like stage sets.

I drank brandy through what was left of the afternoon. This was not my habit. I began to feel lucid and strong. I thought of things I could have said and done to
the men in the bar who had made Sergeant Benet agree to seem smaller than he was. At sunset I went to the railing and puked. I stood there as night came on, watching flares go up across the river. I could see tracers streaking back and forth near a distant bridge but the sound was lost in the clamor of the streets below. It seemed to me I made an interesting figure, staring out into the darkness with my pipe in my mouth. It was a Kaywoodie I’d bought at the PX to help me ease off cigarettes. The pipe, the idea of myself smoking a pipe, alone at the railing, gave me a gallant and philosophical picture of myself. I smoked my pipe and gazed over the city, over the people below, to whom I felt superior because I was feeling deep and dark things of which they were ignorant. This was when the idea came to me to go back to that cracker establishment. The thought of the place produced a sense of obligation, as if it was my duty to return and introduce these backward folk to the notion of consequence.

I didn’t get there anytime soon. There were other venues in between. I turned up on another hotel rooftop, the Rex, arguing almost to the point of blows with a helicopter pilot about
Bonnie and Clyde
. He thought the violence was gratuitous. Then I was in a dive on a side street somewhere. Then another dive. Then the cracker joint. At a certain moment I became brightly conscious that I was there, though I had no memory of getting there from the last place I’d been. The night was without transitions.

An American was up on the stage, singing and pounding an acoustic guitar whose fancy inlays glittered in the lights. He had long stringy hair and a
stringy, truly pathetic beard. All the crackers joined in when he got to the last line: “I’ll never get out of this world alive!” They were actually stomping and slapping their knees.

“Why, you stupid cracker,” I said to the fellow next to me at the bar. He had a long white face and thick glasses in owlish black frames. He cupped a hand at his ear and leaned over. “Beg pardon?”

“Stupid cracker!”

“Dusty!” He pointed at the singer and shook his head as if to say, Is this guy great or what?

I checked up and down the bar to see if anyone was looking at me so I could say, What the
fuck
are you looking at? Then I lit my pipe and leaned back and almost fell off my stool. My neighbor caught me by the arm. “Whoa,” he said. “You don’t look too hot there, fella.”

“Can’t breathe.”

“What?”

“Can’t breathe.”

“You okay?”

I shook off his hand and made my way outside. I was in the alley out back, leaning against the wall, when fate sent me some customers. They came out of the bar and looked around and started to bicker. There was a tall guy with his arm in a cast up to his elbow, and two buckaroos wearing identical yellow shirts, with yokes and pearl buttons. Except for the shirts they didn’t look anything alike. One had a big plume of red hair and simian arms that poked way out of his sleeves. The other was a trim fellow, small head, very neat-looking, neat in his movements, very pleased
to have himself in such good order. He had a toothpick in his mouth. It bothered me that they would dress this way without being twins.

“Okay, we’re here,” the redheaded buckaroo said, “so where the hell is Henry?”

“He’s coming,” said the guy in the cast.

“He’s supposed to be here. That was the deal.”

“He’ll be here. Just hold your horses.”

I started singing “We Shall Overcome.”

The two buckaroos talked about Henry, whether they should wait for him or not.

I sang louder. “We’ll walk hand in ha-and, We’ll walk hand in ha-and …”

They looked at me. The one in the cast said, “You got a problem?”

“I’m a Negro,” I said.

The trim buckaroo took out his toothpick as if he meant to say something, then put it back in his mouth.

The guy in the cast said, “I guess you do have a problem at that.”

“I ain’t got all night,” the redhead said.

“Me neither,” the trim one said. “If Henry thinks he’s got some kind of monopoly around here, he is sadly mistaken.”

“That’s it,” the redhead said. “That is the whole truth.”

“I’m a Negro,” I said. “What’re you stupid rednecks going to do about that?”

“I could kick your ass,” the guy in the cast said. “Would that satisfy you?” He was sweating profusely. His shiny black shirt was streaked white with salt stains and his eyes bulged like a horse’s.

The trim fellow turned to me and took out his toothpick. “Sleep it off, buddy,” he said. “You’re kind of getting in the way.”

“I was here first,” I said. “You’re the one who’s in the way, asshole.”

I didn’t see him swing. He came out of nowhere and nailed me right in the face. I felt something crack inside my mouth. I have to say it discouraged me. The tall guy stepped up and swung his cast like a bat. When I ducked under it the redhead grabbed my arm and yanked it behind my back. He slipped a headlock on me and tightened it up to where I couldn’t move without breaking my own neck. Those chimpanzee arms of his were like cables. Then the trim buckaroo hit me in the mouth again, and on the ear, and over my eye. He stood there bopping my head while his pal held me tight. He didn’t have much power in those neat little hands, but they were hard as nuts and he kept them coming. I could hear the guy in the cast laughing wildly. After a time the redhead asked me if I’d had enough. I nodded. He let go and I bent over, hands on my knees, trying to fill my lungs. When I straightened up they were watching me. The guy in the cast was still laughing. The other two were alert. I turned and walked up the alley toward the street.

Even before I touched my head I felt the bumps coming out. I turned the corner and stopped and checked myself over. There were bumps on my forehead and on top of my skull, under my hair. But it was my teeth that had me worried. Something had broken in there and was floating around my mouth. I spat it into my hand, a jagged black thing. I studied it
for a while. It was a chunk of the mouthpiece of my Kaywoodie. Here was a lesson, some profit for my pains. This was the last time I’d start a fight with a pipe in my mouth.

Still, I hated to lose that pipe.

I turned and went back up the alley. When they saw me coming they faced me and waited. “You want some more?” the redhead asked.

I told him I was looking for my pipe.

They watched as I searched for it, patrolling the ground in a crouch, then on my hands and knees. And then they joined me, even the one in the cast. We were all on our hands and knees, feeling our way in the shadows, patting the damp stones. None of us spoke. After a while the redhead hollered, “Got it!” We gathered around him where he knelt. He turned the pipe over in his hand. “It’s broke,” he said sadly.

“Mouthpiece is broken,” I said.

He handed me the pipe. “Still nice and shiny. Maybe they can fix it.”

“It’s got a guarantee,” I said.

“Sure, just send it in,” the trim one said.

The one in the cast said “Ha!” He said it with such bitterness that we all looked at him. “You’ll never see the fucker again,” he said. “They’ll say the guarantee don’t apply because you didn’t do this or you didn’t do that. Some technicality. Lying bastards!”

The redhead stood and brushed his hands. “So, I suppose you know all about it.”

“I know. Believe me, I fucking know.” He looked from one to the other of us. He was ready to go the distance on this.

“I don’t believe Henry’s coming at all,” said the trim fellow.

Through the open door we could hear Dusty singing “El Paso.” We fell silent and listened to him, right to the very end. One little kiss, and Felina, good-bye.

O
UR GUNS WERE
deployed on the edge of a refugee camp. Some evidence remained of the old village the camp had swallowed—a big, breezy, tile-roofed house that used to belong to the local mandarin, and a few hooches of sturdy construction. The new quarters had been knocked together out of scrap lumber, flattened cans, cardboard, old tarps and ponchos. Open ditches carried sewage to the canal where the women did their laundry and their fishing. There were few men, and they were shy of being seen. These were people who had lost their homes during Tet.

The battalion had set up headquarters in the mandarin’s house. I was sprawled on the steps, shirt off, baking in the sun. A yellow cat ran past, chased by a pack of kids. A spotter plane circled slowly in the distance.

Captain Kale clomped down the steps. Captain Kale was a newly arrived infantry officer waiting assignment to another battalion. They’d sent him over to assume my so-called responsibilities until an artillery officer
could be found to replace me, which might take a while. Sergeant Benet’s replacement, now off on a supply mission, had come in almost two weeks late.

Captain Kale was disappointed by this assignment. We had just a few more days until I left, but there were times when I wondered if we’d make it. He was strongly of the opinion that I had failed in my duty. I’d babied the Vietnamese, he thought, instead of raising them to American standards of aggression. They lacked the killer spirit, and Captain Kale was bullish on the killer spirit.