The Best of Lucius Shepard (21 page)

“Nine
o’clock,” said Mingolla. “The PX. Okay?”

Gilbey said,
“Yeah,” and moved off. Baylor took over his stool and leaned close to Mingolla.
“You know I’m right,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They almost got us this
time.”

“Air Cav’ll
handle ‘em,” said Mingolla, affecting nonchalance. He opened the box of
stationery and undipped a pen from his shirt pocket.

“You
know
I’m right,” Baylor repeated.

Mingolla
tapped the pen against his lips, pretending to be distracted.

“Air Cav!”
said Baylor with a despairing laugh. “Air Cav ain’t gonna do squat!”

“Why don’t
you put on some decent tunes?” Mingolla suggested. “See if they got any Prowler
on the box.”

“Dammit!”
Baylor grabbed his wrist. “Don’t you understand, man? This shit ain’t workin’
no more!”

Mingolla
shook him off. “Maybe you need some change,” he said coldly; he dug out a
handful of coins and tossed them on the counter. “There! There’s some change.”

“I’m telling
you ... “

“I don’t
wanna hear it!” snapped Mingolla.

“You don’t
wanna hear it?” said Baylor, incredulous. He was on the verge of losing
control. His dark face slick with sweat, one eyelid fluttering. He pounded the
countertop for emphasis. “Man, you better hear it! ‘Cause we don’t pull
somethin’ together soon,
real
soon, we’re gonna die! You hear that,
don’tcha?”

Mingolla
caught him by the shirtfront. “Shut up!”

“I ain’t
shuttin’ up!” Baylor shrilled. “You and Gilbey, man, you think you can save
your ass by stickin’ your head in the sand. But I’m gonna make you listen.” He
threw back his head, his voice rose to a shout. “We’re gonna die!”

The way he
shouted it—almost gleefully, like a kid yelling a dirty word to spite his
parents—pissed Mingolla off. He was sick of Baylor’s scenes. Without planning
it, he punched him, pulling the punch at the last instant. Kept a hold of his
shirt and clipped him on the jaw, just enough to rock back his head. Baylor
blinked at him, stunned, his mouth open. Blood seeped from his gums. At the
opposite end of the counter, the bartender was leaning beside a choirlike
arrangement of liquor bottles, watching Mingolla and Baylor, and some of the
soldiers were watching, too: they looked pleased, as if they had been hoping
for a spot of violence to liven things up. Mingolla felt debased by their
attentiveness, ashamed of his bullying. “Hey, I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I ...
“

“I don’t
give a shit ‘bout you’re sorry,” said Baylor, rubbing his mouth. “Don’t give a
shit ‘bout nothin’ ‘cept gettin’ the hell outta here.”

“Leave it
alone, all right?”

But Baylor
wouldn’t leave it alone. He continued to argue, adopting the long-suffering
tone of someone carrying on bravely in the face of great injustice. Mingolla
tried to ignore him by studying the label on his beer bottle: a red and black
graphic portraying a Guatemalan soldier, his rifle upheld in victory. It was an
attractive design, putting him in mind of the poster work he had done before
being drafted; but considering the unreliability of Guatemalan troops, the
heroic pose was a joke. He gouged a trench through the center of the label with
his thumbnail.

At last
Baylor gave it up and sat staring down at the warped veneer of the counter.
Mingolla let him sit a minute; then, without shifting his gaze from the bottle,
he said, “Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?”

Baylor
tucked his chin onto his chest, maintaining a stubborn silence.

“It’s your
only option, man,” Mingolla went on. “What else you gonna do?”

“You’re
crazy,” said Baylor; he flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and hissed it like a
curse. “Crazy!”

“You gonna
take off for Panama by yourself? Uh-unh. You know the three of us got something
going. We come this far together, and if you just hang tough, we’ll go home
together.”

“I don’t
know,” said Baylor. “I don’t know anymore.”

“Look at it
this way,” said Mingolla. “Maybe we’re all three of us right. Maybe Panama
is
the answer, but the time just isn’t ripe. If that’s true, me and Gilbey
will see it sooner or later.”

With a heavy
sigh, Baylor got to his feet. “You ain’t never gonna see it, man,” he said
dejectedly.

Mingolla had
a swallow of beer. “Check if they got any Prowler on the box. I could relate to
some Prowler.”

Baylor stood
for a moment, indecisive. He started for the jukebox, then veered toward the
door. Mingolla tensed, preparing to run after him. But Baylor stopped and
walked back over to the bar. Lines of strain were etched deep in his forehead.
“Okay,” he said, a catch in his voice. “Okay. What time tomorrow? Nine
o’clock?”

“Right,”
said Mingolla, turning away. “The PX.”

Out of the
corner of his eye he saw Baylor cross the room and bend over the jukebox to
inspect the selections. He felt relieved. This was the way all their r&r
had begun, with Gilbey chasing a whore and Baylor feeding the jukebox, while he
wrote a letter home. On their first r&r he had written his parents about
the war and its bizarre forms of attrition; then, realizing that the letter
would alarm his mother, he had torn it up and written another, saying merely
that he was fine. He would tear this letter up as well, but he wondered how his
father would react if he were to read it. Most likely with anger. His father
was a firm believer in God and country, and though Mingolla understood the
futility of adhering to any moral code in light of the insanity around him, he
had found that something of his father’s tenets had been ingrained in him: he
would never be able to desert as Baylor kept insisting. He knew it wasn’t that
simple, that other factors, too, were responsible for his devotion to duty; but
since his father would have been happy to accept the responsibility, Mingolla
tended to blame it on him. He tried to picture what his parents were doing at
that moment—father watching the Mets on TV, mother puttering in the garden—and
then, holding those images in mind, he began to write.

“Dear
Mom and Dad,

In
your last letter you asked if I thought we were winning the war. Down here
you’d get a lot of blank stares in response to that question, because most
people have a perspective on the war to which the overall result isn’t
relevant. Like there’s a guy I know who has this rap about how the war is a
magical operation of immense proportions, how the movements of the planes and
troops are inscribing a mystical sign on the surface of reality, and to survive
you have to figure out your location within the design and move accordingly. I’m
sure that sounds crazy to you, but down here everyone’s crazy the same way
(some shrink’s actually done a study on the incidence of superstition among the
occupation forces). They’re looking for a magic that will ensure their
survival. You may find it hard to believe that I subscribe to this sort of
thing, but I do. I carve my initials on the shell casings, wear parrot feathers
inside my helmet ... and a lot more.

“To
get back to your question, I’ll try to do better than a blank stare, but I
can’t give you a simple Yes or No. The matter can’t be summed up that neatly.
But I can illustrate the situation by telling you a story and let you draw your
own conclusions. There are hundreds of stories that would do, but the one that
comes to mind now concerns the Lost Patrol ... “

A Prowler
tune blasted from the jukebox, and Mingolla broke off writing to listen: it was
a furious, jittery music, fueled—it seemed—by the same aggressive paranoia that
had generated the war. People shoved back chairs, overturned tables and began
dancing in the vacated spaces; they were crammed together, able to do no more
than shuffle in rhythm, but their tread set the light bulbs jiggling at the end
of their cords, the purple glare slopping over the walls. A slim acne-scarred
whore came to dance in front of Mingolla, shaking her breasts, holding out her
arms to him. Her face was corpse-pale in the unsteady light, her smile a dead
leer. Trickling from one eye, like some exquisite secretion of death, was a
black tear of sweat and mascara. Mingolla couldn’t be sure he was seeing her
right. His left hand started trembling, and for a couple of seconds the entire
scene lost its cohesiveness. Everything looked scattered, unrecognizable,
embedded in a separate context from everything else: a welter of meaningless
objects bobbing up and down on a tide of deranged music. Then somebody opened
the door, admitting a wedge of sunlight, and the room settled back to normal.
Scowling, the whore danced away. Mingolla breathed easier. The tremors in his hand
subsided. He spotted Baylor near the door talking to a scruffy Guatemalan guy
... probably a coke connection. Coke was Baylor’s panacea, his remedy for fear
and desperation. He always returned from r&r bleary-eyed and prone to
nosebleeds, boasting about the great dope he’d scored. Pleased that he was
following routine, Mingolla went back to his letter.

“
... Remember me telling you that the Green Berets took drugs to make them
better fighters? Most everyone calls the drugs ‘Sammy,’ which is short for
‘samurai.’ They come in ampule form, and when you pop them under your nose, for
the next thirty minutes or so you feel like a cross between a Medal-of-Honor
winner and superman. The trouble is that a lot of Berets overdo them and flip
out. They sell them on the black market, too, and some guys use them for sport.
They take the ampules and fight each other in pits ... like human cockfights.

“Anyway,
about two years ago a patrol of Berets went on patrol up in Fire Zone Emerald,
not far from my base, and they didn’t come back. They were listed MIA. A month
or so after they’d disappeared, somebody started ripping off ampules from
various dispensaries. At first the crimes were chalked up to guerrillas, but
then a doctor caught sight of the robbers and said they were Americans. They
were wearing rotted fatigues, acting nuts. An artist did a sketch of their
leader according to the doctor’s description, and it turned out to be a dead
ringer for the sergeant of that missing patrol. After that they were sighted all
over the place. Some of the sightings were obviously false, but others sounded
like the real thing. They were said to have shot down a couple of our choppers
and to have knocked over a supply column near Zacapas.

“I’d
never put much stock in the story, to tell you the truth, but about four months
ago this infantryman came walking out of the jungle and reported to the
firebase. He claimed he’d been captured by the Lost Patrol, and when I heard
his story, I believed him. He said they had told him that they weren’t
Americans anymore but citizens of the jungle. They lived like animals, sleeping
under palm fronds, popping the ampules night and day. They were crazy, but
they’d become geniuses at survival. They knew everything about the jungle. When
the weather was going to change, what animals were near. And they had this
weird religion based on the beams of light that would shine down through the
canopy. They’d sit under those beams, like saints being blessed by God, and
rave about the purity of the light, the joys of killing, and the new world they
were going to build.

“So
that’s what occurs to me when you ask your questions, mom and dad. The Lost
Patrol. I’m not attempting to be circumspect in order to make a point about the
horrors of war. Not at all. When I think about the Lost Patrol I’m not thinking
about how sad and crazy they are. I’m wondering what it is they see in that
light, wondering if it might be of help to me. And maybe therein lies your
answer ... “

It was
coming on sunset by the time Mingolla left the bar to begin the second part of
his ritual, to wander innocent as a tourist through the native quarter,
partaking of whatever fell to hand, maybe having dinner with a Guatemalan
family, or buddying up with a soldier from another outfit and going to church,
or hanging out with some young guys who’d ask him about America. He had done
each of these things on previous r&rs, and his pretense of innocence always
amused him. If he were to follow his inner directives, he would burn out the
horrors of the firebase with whores and drugs; but on that first
r&r—stunned by the experience of combat and needing solitude—a protracted
walk had been his course of action, and he was committed not only to repeating
it but also to recapturing his dazed mental set: it would not do to half-ass
the ritual. In this instance, given recent events at the Ant Farm, he did not
have to work very hard to achieve confusion.