Nebraska (9 page)

Mickey and the kid named Bob stepped over a yard hedge and Mickey was hanging his coat on a clothesline pole. Walter was on the sidewalk, stamping snow off his wing tips, apparently hoping he couldn't be seen.

Rick sought a pacifying conversational gambit. “How about this weather?” Rick asked the kid. “My nose is like an ice cube.”

The kid smiled. “Colder than a witch's tit, ain't it?”

The kid was in Rick's pocket. Rick still had the goods, all right; spells he hadn't tapped yet.

Mickey and the boy named Bob were closing together in the night-blue snow, like boxers about to touch gloves, when Mickey swung his right fist into the kid's stomach and the kid collapsed like a folding chair. “Ow!
Ow!
” he yelled. “Oh, man, where'd you hit me? Jeez, that hurts!”

A light went on in an upstairs bedroom.

The passenger got out of the souped-up car, still holding his stocking cap, and the kid next to Rick tripped through deep snow to help Bob limp back to the Ford. “Get me to a hospital quick!”

One of them said, “Oh, you're okay, Bob.”

“You don't know, man! I think the dude might've burst my appendix or something! I think he was wearing a ring!”

Mickey carefully put on his coat and sucked the knuckles
of his right hand when he sat down inside the Oldsmobile. As Rick drove to Mickey's condominium, Mickey pressed a bump on his forehead and put on his gloves again.

“What made you want to do that, Mick?”

Mickey was red-eyed. “Are you going to let some punk call you a son of a bitch?”

Rick slapped the steering wheel. “Of course! I do it all the
time!
Is that supposed to destroy you or something?”

Mickey just looked at the floor mats or out the window. He jumped out when Rick parked in front of his place, the sack of cold pizza clamped under his arm. He didn't say good-bye.

Walter Herdzina moved up to the front seat and brought the seat belt over to its catch. “Whew! What an evening, huh?”

“I feel like I've run twenty miles.”

Walter crossed his legs and jiggled his shoe until Rick drove onto Walter's driveway, where he shook Rick's hand and suggested they do this again sometime, and also wished him good luck in getting his business out of the starting gate.

The light was on in the upstairs bedroom of the Bozacks’ blue Colonial home. Jane had switched the lights off downstairs. Rick let himself in with the milk-box key and hung up his coat. He opened the refrigerator door and peered in for a long time, and then Rick found himself patting his pockets for cigarettes. He went to the dining-room breakfront and found an old carton of Salems next to the Halloween cocktail napkins.

He got a yellow ruled tablet and a pen from the desk and sat down in the living room with a lit cigarette. He printed
VENTURE
at the top. He drew a line down the center of the paper and numbered the right-hand side from one to twelve. After a few minutes there, Jane came down the stairs in her robe.

“Rick?”

“What?”

“I wanted to know if it was you.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Why don't you come up? I'm only reading magazines.”

“I think I'd like to just sit here for a while.”

“In the
dark
?”

He didn't speak.

“Are you smoking?”

“Yep. I was feeling especially naughty.”

She was silent. She stood with both feet on the same step. “You're being awfully mysterious.”

“I just want to sit here for a while. Can I do that? Can I just sit here for a while?”

Jane climbed back up the stairs to their bedroom.

Rick stared at the numbered page. Why quit the team? Why risk the stress? Why give up all those Cookies?

If pressed against the wall, he'd say, “I just don't feel like it now.”

The Boogeyman

T
he Corporal pushes aside the green case of machetes and six crates of assorted shoes and moves to the lightless rear of the pawnshop. Ancient muskets and spotted brown swords are hanging from the ceiling. The Corporal peers at one coat for a long time and then points to it. The pawnshop owner looks up and nods. He says in his own language that the coat is not only a bargain but exactly what a good soldier needs.

“How much is it?”

The man creeps through the junk underfoot and removes the red coat from its hanger. It appears to be only a helicopter pilot's jacket made of resplendent red silk, but the man says, “Yes, plenty important coat.” The pawnshop owner flips the coat over. Embroidered across the top is the phrase “Live Free or Die,” and below that is a green dragon with wings sewn in rainbow colors. Curling out of its mouth are yellow flames.

“Yeah,” the Corporal says. “That's what I want. How much is it?”

The little man squints his eyes at the Corporal. “I
give
it to you, soldier.”

The Corporal drinks a green beer and swivels on a high bar stool to tell a girl in net stockings stories about how he split a private's lip clean past his nose with only one punch, how he rolled grenades into a sergeant's tent, how he shot a machine gun overhead and then walked inside the anarchy of slugs pelting down like rain.

She listens, openmouthed, and then sips from his glass. “You not so tough,” she says. “I hear plenty worse than that.”

The Corporal says, “I was just getting started.”

His third woman passes her hand over the sharp creases of his khaki pants and shirt, catches her image in his polished black shoes, peeks through his expensive camera, and photographs him crossing his eyes, twisting up his lips, putting on the red coat. He shows her his back and for a moment she is speechless.

“You know what it says?”

“Sure,” she says. “I read English good.”

“Okay. What's it say?”

She pauses. “Say you want me to stay with you tonight.”

All that day she tells him exaggerated stories of an American giant who kills great cats with his teeth and cooks weeping men on a spit.

“Hasn't met me yet,” the Corporal says.

She speaks of voodoo, curses, magic things. She moves over him, works on him, looks between her thighs. “You sick?”

The Corporal is ashamed.

“No worry,” she says. “I get you someone. You be cured plenty quick.”

A hot whisper of an afternoon breeze pushes at the drapes. He is openmouthed, open-eyed, seeing only his important red coat.

The Corporal winces at the stink but allows her to pull him around a corner. She drops his right hand as she ducks into a shop. He stoops at a window and looks in at her short legs and
the high slit of her purple dress. Above him are rows of plucked birds strung by the neck, spinning slowly in the wind, and skinned, pop-eyed rabbits hung in a sprint; nearby are iron tanks of green eels, tripe, water snakes, gutted fish. There is an aquarium where squid throw out their bundle of arms and glide down to a darker corner. Here the men dress in baggy shorts, squat openly in the streets, scurry as though they have boys on their backs. Gray smoke twists up from pot stoves placed outside the doorways.

The prostitute comes out, showing her gapped teeth as she smiles, a wet, paper-wrapped package in her hands. “You cure,” she says.

The Corporal expects her to give him the package, but instead the prostitute hands it to a heap of rags that is abruptly next to him, rocking from foot to foot. Her hair is like wax, her upper lip is darkly mustached, her long nails corkscrew from her fingers.

“Witch,” the prostitute says.

The witch rips off the papers, chews into a squirming carp, finds the pulsing heart with her fingers, pops it in her mouth. Her fingers mull around in the entrails. She wipes her bumped face with the juice, and then raises up an eye patch to peer at the Corporal with a gray pupil. She seems surprised. “You the island man.”

The Corporal turns for an explanation, but the prostitute has disappeared. When he turns back to the witch, only the carp is there, lying on paper on the street, its eye staring up with loathing.

The Corporal runs down the hotel corridor and hits his door hard. The door swings inward, banging the wall. His gold watch, his camera, his important red coat are gone.

*
*
*

Then the Corporal sees the American giant she'd been talking about. It is a bright Sunday morning, his last day of rest and relaxation. As he packs, he looks down to the street and sees the prostitute strolling with a sun-pinked man who is probably six feet eight inches tall. He is wearing a Panama hat and a yellow suit; he jauntily leans on a cane. The prostitute speaks and the American smiles, raising overjoyed eyes to the window. The American yells, “You!” and the Corporal steps away from the open window.

The Corporal jerks and jounces and pushes into the snapping canvas on highway curves. Across from him are two other replacements, a private and a helicopter pilot. The private is named Skeeter; the pilot Kenya. Skeeter operates a radio and appears to want to go deaf—he takes a toothpick out of his pocket and begins jabbing it into his ear.

The pilot will not speak. He merely stares with rowdy eyes when the Corporal talks to him. The big truck guns up a hill, changes gears, squeals as it stops. Road dust rolls in through the open back, and Kenya gets up, brushing his pants. He says, “You in a crazy company, boy. Your captain's the boogeyman.”

Him. He is standing there with his pink head shaved, his great mustache waxed. Yes: six feet eight, maybe two hundred eighty pounds, and the boy's gold watch on his wrist. He peers at a clipboard and looks up after he reads their names. He recognizes the Corporal with a “Har!” He opens his powerful arms to the troops and smiles with deep pleasure at what he is preparing to say: “I'm Captain Saint Jones!”

Kenya whispers, “The boogeyman.”

Captain St. Jones inspects the replacements and approves of all but the Corporal. “Look at you,” he says, and touches the
Corporal's name patch. It is hanging by only a stitch. And his pants come uncreased at the Captain's notice, his polished boots look sandpapered, his zipper, of course, is undone.

Captain St. Jones scowls down. “You're not a soldier,” he says. “You're a ragman.”

Ragman. The Corporal feels hexed. He weakens. His underwear suddenly tatters, his collars fray, seams abruptly rip open, leaving spider legs of thread. He discovers yellow slugs in his boots, peels and rinds in his overnight pack, green mildew and sticky webs over everything. He pushes a cleaning rod down his M16 and pulls out steel that is striped with crawling ants.

And then the ragman gets an idea. At night he creeps into the Captain's tent and puts a finger on all the things in it, making them crack, cleave, spot with rust.

St. Jones throws up the flap of his tent in fury and peers at his company. The rising sun is big behind Captain St. Jones, and his men grow hunched at the sight of him. He wears a musketeer's plumed hat, high black boots are pulled up to his thighs, a great sword hangs at his side, and his spurs ring when he moves. “Okay, men. Have it your way.” He dips his fingers in a jar and twists wax into his mustache. And then he grins. “Patrol!”

The Corporal is ordered to pack for the Captain. The rips in his blankets have been neatly patched, pants seams sewn, cracks in plastic cemented together, spots of rust polished out. When the tent is down, the great cot folded, the air mattress stamped flat, the Corporal discovers an old wooden trunk in the jungle close by. He wrenches open the catch and heaves up the lid. Inside are his expensive camera, his impor-
tant red coat, the carp the witch had chewed open. The Corporal presses the coat to his cheek and passes his fingers lovingly over the green dragon.

The Corporal sits in the helicopter, his legs swinging in the wind, watching high grass spray away as they wobblingly lift off. Jungles sway under them, green and yellow birds dart and soar away. The open fields are gold and steamy and roll in the air blasts like cooking broth. They aren't gone twenty minutes before Kenya dips the helicopter to the right so St. Jones can point to weeds parting for stooped runners. He yells words that the Corporal cannot hear and then hangs by one arm from a strut, clenching his silver sword in his teeth. He jumps down and sprints into the jungle. High palms swoop away from him, great trees shake. The chopper cuts and sways and hammers the air over little people who are cowering helplessly in the weeds. One of them stands and picks his weapon up, but words are apparently spoken, for he stops and cocks his head to the left and is pulled down into the grass. Another stands and runs to the jungle, then is tripped and swallowed up. A painted man appears in a rain cape of weeds and angles a bazooka up at the chopper's guns when he is surprised by a big hand on his rope belt and disappears. Again and again it happens like that, and then Captain St. Jones gets up, waving his big arms overhead, wincing at the chopper's wake as it lowers to him. He jumps up into the helicopter and wipes the sword with his palm. He is panting a little but happy. The Captain grins at Kenya and Skeeter and the Corporal. “Here is greatness,” says Captain St. Jones.

A journalist in green fatigues patrols with the company for a day, bellying through the yellow savannah, whispering into a
tape recorder, snapping pictures of the geography, the plunder, the piled-up bodies. He takes a group portrait with Captain St. Jones eating grapes in a hammock, his patrol sitting cross-legged below him. And there will be a dark photograph, too, of a villager hung by his ankles from a high tree as Skeeter interrogates him.

“Getting anything from him?” the journalist asks.

“Nope,” Skeeter says.

The Captain appears in his high boots and plumed hat and tells Skeeter to step aside. Gripping the sword with both hands, the Captain swipes it upward through the man's body. The skin bursts open with an explosion of green bats and straw. His blowing hair is grass. The journalist attempts a picture but the iris on his camera won't open. Skeeter looks sheepish. The Captain pats him on the cheek and says, “You were asking the wrong questions.”

The Corporal spies a black shape in the woods.

On patrol, a soldier drops to his knees and slumps over. There are no apparent wounds in him, but his eyes roll up with death when he is lifted. Another soldier on patrol leaps into swamp water, pitching onto his sides and back as he slaps at the phantom fire that is creeping up to his ears. A private keeps on sleeping as his squad makes preparations. A buddy walks over to wake him up and finds a screwdriver hole in the private's throat. Green leeches suck all the blood from an overweight sergeant in one night. A private drowns on his canteen water even as he's drinking it. Cigarette packs are poisoned.

And they walk into a village of grass huts. A cooking fire of gray embers is in the center, with young boys around it, playing a game with their fingers. A pretty girl is stripped and appraised. Mothers are lined up with babies at their hips.
Skeeter interrogates them in their language and they give him poor inventions. Away in a steamy clearing, an old woman is singing in high pitch, “
Yo ti ya yam i no bi tamba co o no.
” As she approaches, the villagers get down on elbows and knees, praying, pitching away their coins, slapping themselves with open palms.

The Corporal is pulled to her. He can't explain it. And then he sees that she is rocking from foot to foot in gunnysacks and signaling that he ought to come nearer. Her hair is like wax, her upper lip darkly mustached. Only the eye patch is missing. She leers at the Corporal and her teeth are gray pebbles. She inchingly raises up her skirt.

The Corporal wakes up in moonlight with her body cold beneath him. He can't recall all that happened. One of his eyes has been poked out and the pain is enormous. He pushes himself up from the witch but somehow she holds him even in sleep. And then a smile comes to her lips and she simpers at the Corporal. “You mine now,” she whispers and permits his escape from her. The Corporal is naked in a green swamp and his Army company has disappeared. His skin is painted with blood. He looks down to the witch in puzzlement and she opens a path to the west.

And now
he
is the boogeyman. The Corporal follows his company at a great distance. He can hear cassette players, helicopters, warning shots that rap the trees and provoke the monkeys into wild jabber. And he can pause and hear slippered footsteps behind him or pick out the stink of skunks killed on a highway, of forty fish belly-up in a pond. Spiders are in the grass she walks, a gray sickness powders the leaves, yellow slugs grow huge as legs and are overslow in eating the dogs they catch.

*
*
*

Horrible things happen to the Army company as they sleep. A man can wake up cloaked in white moths or with a mitten of red ants on his right hand. A pool they sip from on one night can become, by dawn, a dry cup in the earth heaped with poisonous frogs. Young men die of their nightmares or sleep-walk into the jungle. Skeeter, for example, is missing. And the moon is always green.

Even Captain St. Jones is ill with high fevers, headaches, muscle cramps that purple his legs. His ankles swell until his bootlaces pop, and stomach pains make him walk in a stoop. At last he sicks up a pale, gutted fish, its green gills pulsing, its eyes plucked out.

Her work.

The pygmies are in a circle, eating raw meat and rice from wooden bowls. Crossbows lie at their feet. They speak poetry in whispers, oil themselves, pat their skin with leaves. One of them presses another's wrist and points.

The Corporal stands in steep rock shadow, as still as he can.

The pygmies get to their feet, pick up their bows, and slowly creep back into the jungle. The Corporal sits in their places, collecting their body heat, their spoken words, their unspoken memories. Skeeter's bones are in a pit on gray coals. The Corporal strips off pieces of Skeeter's meat and eats them as the pygmies sing their word for
boogeyman.

A deer yanks a leaf from a limb and swings her head to the south, staring into the jungle as she chews. Her ears perk up and she leaps away, but Captain St. Jones intercepts the doe on the path, wrapping his great arms around her neck and riding her down into a sprawl. The doe chops at the peat with her hooves and nearly wrenches away, but the Captain rips his bayonet up
through the hide and pulls out the deer's insides. High up in the cavity, he pushes the Corporal's watch, his camera, and especially his important red coat.