The Brothers K (72 page)

Pillard remained silent. But someone else said, “Wanted to kill our butts, obviously.”

There was a snicker or two, but Dudek just nodded grimly.

“Hates our fuckin’ guts!” PFC Swasey chimed in. Dudek nodded again.

“He’s like one a them Japs,” another man added. “Them kamikazes. Dudn’t care
what
the fuck happens, long as he takes out a few of us with’m.”

Dudek nodded again. He had his audience right where he wanted it. He was ready to close his remarks around them like a purse-seine round a school of tuna—

until Spec 4 Chance squinched his eyes shut, gripped his temples in his big right hand, and blurted with the confidence of some yokel who’s just seen his Lord and Savior, “I know! I really think I know why he did all this! We killed his
dad
, I bet! Or his brothers! We killed his sisters or mother! If they were dead, he’d do this! ’Cause put yourself in
his
shoes. If you were a kid and your family was dead, if you were a kid an’ we killed ’em, isn’t this just what you’d do?”

The men weren’t just stunned by this outburst: they were pole-axed. A few squirmed as if a priest, or maybe somebody’s mother, had walked into the tent. A few tried to snicker. But none of them could meet Irwin’s earnest gaze. Except Dudek. Who was furious. “What objectivity!” he cried. “What acumen! How fortunate we are to have a psychologist such as Herr Doktor Chance in our midst!”

There was a little nervous laughter, but not enough to satisfy the Captain. “Would any of the rest of you care to regale us with a theory?” he asked. “Perhaps one of our B-52s injured the prisoner’s new puppy. Or maybe one of our real trucks ran over his cute little toy one.”

Pretty good lines, both of them. But no one laughed. He’d lost them completely. Irwin had whisked them all away. “All I know,” Sergeant Pillard sighed, looking at the boy, “is they sure don’t make saboteurs like they used to.”

Almost every man in the tent followed his gaze. And almost every man nodded.

“Maybe they’ve run out of grownups,” another voice put in. “Maybe the bombings up north are finally working.”

More solemn nods.

“Which reminds me, Herr Doktor,” the Captain said to Irwin. “I’ve run out of toothpaste. So go fetch me some. Now. It’s what you call a fool’s errand. It’s also an order!”

S
o Irwin had saluted, stepped toward the door, and started off after a tube of toothpaste—but not before he heard the Captain say to those who remained behind, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, use your brains before they get blown out of your heads! Are we still at war? Are we any kind of military force at all? Are we here to fight, and to attempt to win? Or have Congress and Herr Doktor Chance decreed that we operate some kind of summer camp here, providing our big black and white bodies as targets for little VCs to practice blowing to smithereens?”

The sun hit Irwin’s back, he stopped walking, and a wave washed over him—not a memory but a conjuration:
Adventist Camp Meeting, the heat of early July
. And when he looked around, there were the rows of tents, the hot dusty sunlight, even the ripe watermelons piled in the shade of a canopied truck. An old Sabbath School song started singing itself in his head:
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …
And over it came the same drift of voices, as if from the lake or the softball field, the same soothing hum of humans and insects, and the same untiring, inescapable drawl of the man of righteousness, the man in the pulpit, this time crying out: “These
are
plastic explosives, gentlemen! The very same that killed our Bobby, after obliterating his face! And to imprison this creature we’d have to fly him out of here, risking a Huey and every man in it. And for what?”

Irwin turned and looked at the prisoner’s small, sunlit back. There. That was what. But even he could see the problem: the back was nearly too small, too slight to believe in. Dudek’s voice was far more convincing as it shook the peaceful air: “We can see that he’s young. We have eyes in our heads—unlike Bobby Calcagno. But what kind of soldiers leave one another’s deaths unavenged? What kind of soldiers allow Washington to
impose rules that leave us here to die in agony, yet forbid us the right to kill our killers? When is the last time you saw a congressman bleedin’ in this war, gentlemen? When is the last time you saw Senator Love or Senator Dove out workin’ the point on recon?”

Irwin’s head roared with the. song now:
Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine!
He looked again at the boy. The little back was motionless—as still as a gas-soaked wooden Buddha. And Irwin loved Bobby so much, Dudek’s sermon was so fine, and the sun’s heat was so strong that even he half wished they could be saved from their dilemma by the boy’s spontaneous combustion.

“If he’s taken to prison,” Elder Dudek intoned, “he may escape. And if he escapes, he
will
be back!” Then the long, polished pause, during which Irwin knew the Captain’s gaze was crossing each listener’s face, demanding and receiving full complicity. And now the sharp intake of breath, and the confident, almost glib final lines: “Next month, next year, he
will
be back. And you can bet your butts—you can bet your sweet black an’ white asses.” (and Irwin smiled, knowing without seeing that the Captain was again holding the blue boxer shorts aloft) “that next time he will make no mistake!”

Will the congregation rise?

Damn right they will. And hear them pray:
“Off the little fucker!” “He killed Bobby!” “Let’s go!” “Fuck you. Senator Dove!” “Time’s a-wastin’!” “Deal me in!”

Amen.

The music left the Captain’s voice. The song stopped in Irwin’s head. And he was only sad—not angry, not surprised—when he heard the quick, practical orders. Dudek was a good officer, conducting his war by the only set of rules that let an army be an army. It was the rules that ordered the sham release of the prisoner, the rules that handpicked the men who would escort him to the clearing with their M-16s, and the rules that added: “Remember. We never saw him, never caught him. None of this happened. This little VC just does not exist.”

R
eturning from the commissary, the Captain’s toothpaste in hand, Irwin saw a group of grunts gathered in the shade of the tree across from the jeep. They weren’t talking. They were just sitting there, most of them smoking, looking at the VC who just didn’t exist. Irwin glanced at his watch. 11:55, it said. He moved into the shade and sat down among them.

The prisoner was handcuffed to the bumper again, and flanked by
guards. Irwin had a bad memory for names but an excellent one for faces and, oddly, states. He knew one of the guards as New York, the other as Alabama. In other words, he didn’t know them at all. But he’d expected them. Expected their bodies, anyhow: both about 6′2,″ both muscular, both jet black. Dudek had the old Confederate love of ritual. In martial ceremonies—executions, for instance—he favored height and muscular builds over squat or anemic specimens; favored what he called “two salts” or “two peppers” over what he called “mix ’n’ match;” favored chivalric-sounding times such as “dawn,” “sunset” or “high noon” over whatever hundred hours. In toothpastes, he favored Gleem. The good old Captain. Thirty-one years young and still going strong. Still wily too. He’d ordered the big picturesque peppers to guard the VC, but when Irwin glanced down toward his tent he saw that it was four salts who would escort the prisoner to the “escape route.” Never know when a pepper might up and muff it.

11:56, said Irwin’s watch.

The prisoner was so short that he was able to stand straight up despite being cuffed to the bumper. For the most part he remained motionless, but every now and then he’d twist his back in a slow circle, like a dancer or on-deck hitter loosening up. He looked tired and a little ashen, but his head had been rebandaged, perhaps to lessen his suspicion, and he no longer looked queasy from the fumes.

He did seem troubled by the men in the shade, though. He’d been caught trying to kill them, after all. He kept his head lowered, like a shy kid forced to give a report to his class at school. And he kept looking, Irwin noticed, at his left wrist, so Irwin looked at it too—and was amazed to see, right there next to the handcuff, a wristwatch. An enormous one too. One of those big black jobs that nerds and scuba divers favor—fluorescent numbers; built-in compass, maybe; made in Hong Kong or Taiwan by genuine, lifelike capitalist-satellite wage slaves. Such a deal at $9.95. Then a month after you buy it you notice it’s slow, go to reset it, and as the stem snaps off in your lily-white fingers you remember:
no guarantee
.

Ha. Slave’s revenge.

But why was it there at all? How had the guards missed it? Couldn’t it contain poison or something? No. You could tell it was innocuous somehow. You could tell it was just a watch. And it was there, Irwin realized, because of an oversight stemming from a very rudimentary human characteristic: no adult, even in time of war, wants to steal a toy away from a child.

So. Back to
that
question. Was he
really
just a child? Because wasn’t it important? Wasn’t it crucial? Because if they were actually dealing with a kid, shouldn’t they be doing everything differently?

I’d
sure be doing it differently, Irwin thought. I’d shoot him, all right. I’d
Gleem
his ass with this goddamned toothpaste!
WAH-HA!
Take that, Mr. Tough
VC
War Criminal! Eat this, Mad Bomber!
(Rub it in his hair, smear both cheeks, shoot it up his nose.)
Quit blowin’ up my friends, ya brat! Don’t do it! You hear me?
(A squirt in each ear, glop in each armpit.)
BLEAH! Now look at you! Had enough? Gonna be good now? Say “Uncle Ho” then. Louder! Okay. That’s better. Now get your commie ass outta here ’fore I kick it in!

Yeah. That’d fix his little red wagon.

But nobody asked Irwin’s advice.

The heat was horrific. New York pretended to ignore the men in the shade, but his face was one big cramp of irritation. Meanwhile Alabama stared right through them, hangin’ loose, restin’ easy, lookin’ like:
We got heat in ’Bama too, white muthahfucks …

But maybe
, Irwin thought, still obsessed with his question,
he’s much older than he looks. They’re very small people. If he’d speak, we could tell. If he’d say even one word we’d hear whether his voice had changed, and we’d know …

11:58, said his watch. And now the numbers were shaking. Now Irwin was in knots. Because he felt he was forgetting something—some kind of order, not the toothpaste but something dire, some matter of life and death.
But what?

The men around him lurched and stared—and Irwin realized he’d nearly shouted his
But what?
Which didn’t embarrass him. He’d never been embarrassed by his own or anyone else’s honesty. But
he
did feel he should get away from the men in order to think. So he stood, stepped out into the sunlight—

and like dust to a vortex was sucked toward the jeep, and the little Vietcong.

The boy raised his head and looked straight at him.

Irwin stopped walking, and looked straight back.

The men in the shade watched him, watched them both, but Irwin didn’t know it: he only knew he’d made a mistake, coming this close. Because now he could see him. Could really see the rich brown of the skin; the fragile clavicle in the V of the shirt; the delta of blue veins running down the throat; the smooth backs of the hands—hands far smaller than those of his little sisters.

Then he made an even greater mistake: he looked into the boy’s eyes—right into the liquid and the shining and the life there. And he saw a spark of curiosity. At a time like this, the boy was curious about Irwin Chance! He was trying to stay poker-faced, but the brown eyes flashed as he watched the huge, bare-chested man whose face was so gentle, yet so troubled, stepping slowly toward him. He watched as though Irwin were an animal—an enormous, friendly bear, maybe—coming to help or even save him, like in a children’s story …

Realizing that he was smiling, and maybe creating false hopes, Irwin made himself stop. But then, fearing the quick change of expression would confuse the boy, he smiled again. The boy’s face showed nothing. He just watched.
We’re going to kill him
, Irwin thought as he smiled.
He wanted to kill us, prob’ly did kill Bobby, so we’re going to shoot him. With bullets! Good God! We’re really going to do it!

Then he made a final mistake: he began to recollect the life-and-death matter, the forgotten command. It started to fall together when his old nickname, “Iron Man,” flicked through his mind. After nine months of ’Nam there wasn’t much of this character left. But there were shards, a jumble of fragments, and in the heat by the jeep a few fragments congealed. How did it go?
Whosoever shall humble himself …
like? as?
Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child
something something,
whoso shall help, or maybe receive, or anyhow shall stick up for one such child in My Name, receiveths, or sticks up for, or anyhow stands by Me
.

Yeah.

Irwin knew as he conjured it that it was a terrible injunction to be recalling. It came from a lost world, a world whose rules could kill him here. But he never had been a subtle fellow. Recollecting the dead-obvious line, he promptly did the dead-obvious thing: he stepped forward. As if he’d never left the Washougal church, as if answering an Altar Call, he walked straight toward the jeep with nothing in his head but the insane Sabbath plan of throwing in his lot with the boy, of somehow “receiving” him. He was perhaps six feet away when an explosion of air stopped him. The Captain’s big peppers. They’d both snapped to. And they too had a kind of call to answer.

“Clear the fuck out!”
hissed Alabama.

“He means it, fuckface,” added New York, flashing a bland, terrifying smile.

Irwin blinked at them. Obstacles! To receiveth the boy he needed a plan, some guile, a ruse. He needed Everett, was what he needed. But no time, no time! So let’s see … Rank? Pull rank? Fake an order from the
Captain? Get the keys, free the boy, and run? No. Get the keys, free him, and go straight to Dudek. Yes! Straight to the Captain, onto your knees, and beg as you have never begged before.
Now make it work …