The Grand Tour (25 page)

I wiped my face, clearing away the image of the smoldering village. “Do you really want to go to prison over this?”

He crouched and leaned in toward me. Our faces were close as he talked quietly. “No, I don't. I want to provide honest testimony before a judge and God. I want Endicott to go to prison. Endicott, fucking Westmoreland. Lyndon Baines Cocksucking Johnson.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Gee, thanks.” He backed off a little.

I said, “Look, I don't know, maybe you're right. Maybe it was fucked up, maybe it was a bad call. But orders are orders, all the way down. Take a Section Eight, you'll be back in Kansas in a week. Endicott's trying to help you here—he doesn't want to see you court-martialed.”

“Is that what he said? You know why Endicott wants to Section Eight me? He doesn't want me testifying at a trial. Not that the army will do anything, but he doesn't want my testimony on record. The word ‘massacre' might jump out at some bored correspondent reading a transcript.”

“It wasn't a massacre,” I said. For a few moments we looked at each other in silence. My mind felt like a car with its back tires caught in the mud. “And what about Carbone?”

“What about him?”

“You forget his leg? One of those VC might've planted that mine.”

Berlinger laughed again, right in my face, and I felt myself turn red with the knowledge of how far I was reaching. He said, “One might have. All of them didn't. The village didn't. And who gives a fuck, anyway? Did you give a fuck about Carbone? I didn't.”

Outside the window, some jungle bird cycled through an endless three-note song. “Okay, fine. I tried. So what's your defense gonna be at the court-martial then?”

He picked up the wooden figurine by the tips of its feet and head, and spun it around and around in his huge hands. “Lazar, I ever tell you about my father?”

“No.”

“He was a real piece of work. Got fired from every job he ever had, drank all the time, had an affair with just about every woman in Manhattan. He made my mother miserable, and he was a shitty father to me and my sister. He didn't hit us or anything, just wasn't ever there and could have given a shit, you know? I fucking hated him.”

“Yeah, I have a father, too.”

“Listen, so one night after dinner, I must have been around fifteen, I waited up for him to come home from wherever he was. Around midnight, he came in drunk as usual, and I let him have it. Told him what I thought of him. You know, ‘You've never been there for us,' and blah blah. I said he'd never given me a single piece of fatherly advice I could use. He laughed and said, ‘That's the best advice I could ever have given you, Mitch. Figure things out for yourself, and don't listen to what anybody tells you. Nobody knows a goddamned thing, at least I don't walk around pretending I do.' Berlinger moved to the window and set the figurine down on the sill and for a moment they both looked outside, at the beach and sea in what he must have realized was an absurdly dramatic pose, because he quickly shook his head and returned to the middle of the room, sitting again on the bucket of bean crud. “And he was right, you know? Rip those stripes off Endicott's sleeve, he doesn't know a goddamned thing. Nobody knows a thing all the way up the line, bunch of dipshits and yes-men and cowards and hacks, all the way to whoever at command sent down that fucking kill order. And I'll be goddamned if anyone is going to tell me to take part in a massacre. You wanted to know what my defense is going to be, there it is.”

The next day, Berlinger was led out by the MPs. He nodded back at me and was gone. I noticed that wooden soldier was still where he'd left it, standing on the windowsill, looking out. I had the strange sense, that whole day, that he'd left it as a sort of totem, a miniature version of himself standing guard—although whether over me, or the outside world, I couldn't tell.

Two days after that—two days of the most intense boredom and dread I've felt in my life, short of waiting to see the Eagles on the Hell Freezes Over tour—the Vietnamese MP waved me out. Davis Martin was there, said Hawkins was conscious and wanted to talk. If I was smart, he said, with a look suggesting he thought I probably wasn't, I would apologize, grovel if need be. I went over to sick bay, a cinder-block cube on the edge of base, and found Hawkins on a metal bed in the corner. He really did look like a raccoon.

“Lazar,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you I'm not pushing for a court-martial.”

“Thanks.”

“Why'd you hit me?”

“It was the hat, I think.”

He seemed to consider this, then said, “Here's the thing. The doctor said it looks like when I fell, this little itty piece of my skull chipped off inside. Says it's fine, no big deal, 'cept I can't be out in combat, that a mortar concussion or something like that could cause it to kill me. They're sending me home in a week, you believe that?”

“No.”

“So I called you in here to say thanks. I've had these nightmares ever since I've been in-country, slept like an hour every night for three months. Thought about shooting off my own toe, turns out all I had to do was wear that gook's lid, and your dumb fucking ass took care of the rest.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

He said, “I bet you are. Hey, one more thing. You hear about your buddy Berlinger?” I guess the blank stare on my face informed him I hadn't. “He got zapped on the way down to MACV for his tribunal. Tough shit, huh? No good deed, huh?”

“You're lying.”

“Unh-uh.” He rearranged himself on his bed with a look of satisfaction, like a man who'd just eaten a little more than he should have. “Ask around. He got ambushed on that same convoy line we rode in on when we first got here.”

His big rubbery lips were assembling themselves into the formation of a smile as I retreated from the room. “Poor old Berlinger. I guess maybe it don't matter much how smart you are.” He turned, grinning horribly now. “Hey, Lazar. I hope you get shot just like your buddy.” I couldn't get out before hearing him say, “I hope some gook sniper draws a bead on your fat head. Brains for monkey dinner. You hear me? I hope you get cut wide open, you fucking son of a bitch.”

Davis Martin confirmed the rumor at an impromptu meeting in the mess hall during lunch and told us, matter of fact, that Berlinger had been killed in transport to army headquarters in Saigon. An insurgent mortar attack, the wreckage discovered by the supply truck fifteen minutes behind it. Endicott had gone to Saigon, too, to testify at the trial, but he'd been choppered in. Martin told everyone to shut up and observe a moment of silence, bowed his fireplug head, then left the room to its questions, its inane chatter, its guilty feelings of relief that it hadn't been them, its turkey potpies. No one seemed that bothered, and it occurred to me that most of the guys considered him a traitor.

I walked outside. It was a gorgeous clear day. I went back to the barracks, polished off the warm dregs of a bottle of brandy, and vomited. I sat there for a very long time, sweating, watching the river of faces on the wall, watching Berlinger surface and resurface, live and drown, over and over again. I watched as the other guys came in chattering, laughing, lying down, snoring. I watched in the dark. I didn't get up in the morning, and I didn't get up when someone was in the door talking, surrounded by a rectangle of harsh, white light. I didn't say anything and they went away, and then I was alone again, with the same thoughts circling in my head: It had been a massacre, Endicott had given the order, I had followed it, Berlinger hadn't, he'd been right, and he'd died for it.

That evening, I approached Martin in the canteen. A ceiling fan overhead seemed to beat in slow motion, and I could see the helicopter touching down, Endicott crouching under the spinning blades, getting the news from some crew-cut hack. I could see his long face, touched with sadness, and with relief at being spared the trial. Martin was drinking a beer and thumbing through a
Whole Earth Catalog
someone stateside must have sent him.

“Look who it is.” He didn't look up, kept thumbing through the pages.

“Sir, can I ask you a question?”

“You already did. Just ask.”

“I was wondering if there was any more news about Berlinger.”

“What other news could there be?”

“I mean, is there any word about what happened?”

“Just that the truck got hit.”

“Did they recover the bodies?”

He put down the catalog and gave me a look, his eyebrows screwed up. “How the fuck would I know, Lazar? And why does it matter? Either the mortar got them, or Charlie got them after. What happened to their bodies I don't know, and I don't want to know.”

“Is Endicott still in Saigon?”

“Lieutenant will be back next week. Until then, I'm your CO.” He went back to the catalog. “And I don't give a fuck what kind of miserable state you're in, Jack, you better be up and on duty tomorrow. Ten-hut.”

Ten-hut. Back at barracks, I loaded my field pack with clothes, water, provisions, sidearm, and a grenade; I ate an MRE and brushed my teeth; I lay in bed and pretended to sleep, and later I walked off base.

Deserting was surprisingly easy. I waited until the barracks were filled with the rattle and hiss of several dozen sleeping men, opened the door, and walked out. The beach side of the base was dark—no one was worried about a surprise attack by the famous NVA Navy—but the moon and the photoluminescence of the water provided enough light to see. I scurried around the edge of the base, almost to the eastern gate and its guard post, and I waited. There wasn't really much to it—when guard shift changed over, there was usually a little lag as the guy on duty grabbed his sleeping replacement. It wasn't how things were supposed to work, but not much here worked how it was supposed to. I waited until the guard walked over to the barracks, then ducked through the gate and into the shadows by the perimeter wall. The spotlight swept the road in front of the base, and when it passed, I ran. In what seemed like only a few seconds, I'd dashed across the road, through the open, weedy strip that buffered base from village, past the village itself—a sprawling, chaotic Tinkertown of concrete structures, colonial houses, thatched huts, and lean-tos; everyone, even a mottled terrier sleeping near a crumbling stone wall, dead asleep at three in the morning—and up a steep and sparsely wooded hummock. In a small clearing, I caught my breath and took a last look toward the sea. Spotlights on each side of the base scanned the road and moved up into the middle dark; the airstrip and distant conning tower were lit yellow and orange and red, and the whole thing glowed glamorously in the night like a movie marquee. As I climbed farther, it was the last of this light that led me to the distant, indistinct scar curving through waist-high elephant grass, up the hill, and into the jungle. It was the dirt road we'd walked in on, that Berlinger had been killed on—the road to Saigon.

O
utside the small, oblong airplane window, the midwestern landscape unspooled in agreeable uniformity, a drab flatness in perfect concert with his mental state, as though the entire world below was one endless five-mile loop. The only sign of real movement was the occasional clouds that sailed past and underneath the plane, a regatta of schooners and clippers and yachts and little sailboats bound for nowhere in particular. In the distance, another airplane shouldered bravely through the blue waves of the midwestern sky. The sky was the real God, but I should have been a sailor.

He pressed the call button on his seat again. The man next to him read
Business Weekly
or
Weekly Business
or some other deadening money rag with ads every other page for gold investment and studiously avoided acknowledging Richard's sodden presence. This was a task, as he was nearly as large as Richard, and it was all they could do not to merge amoebically together over the armrest.

While he waited for the flight attendant to come out of hiding, he attempted to piece together the events of the previous twenty-four hours. This was also a task: his consciousness during this time was like a drowning man, briefly coming up for air and catching a momentary, frozen glimpse of the world—the surrounding ocean and a snatch of blue sky, perhaps dotted with a lone gull—before going under again. It didn't help that he was still incredibly drunk, although less drunk than he had been, a fact manifest in his serial memory of getting on the airplane, falling into his seatmate, and annoying the stewardess. Somewhere in there, he'd vomited into a vintage barf bag with jet-set typography, which had, in turn, instantly voided its contents onto his lap. Earlier events, however, floated on their own, suspended in amber, and he closed his eyes with the effort of ordering them, at the same time wondering what difference it made. None, was probably the answer, he knew, but when you give up on making sense of anything, you've given up on life—he was close, but not quite there yet. So:

Lying beneath a giant hamburger. No, before that.

Someone opening the door, bathing the room in fluorescent light. He stood there, a dark figure in the threshold. Other men lay in the room, snoring, moaning, talking to themselves, palsied hands waving through air humid with urine.

“Get up,” the person said. It was Vance.

“Where am I,” Richard croaked.

“Jail. The drunk tank. I was out looking for you all night.”

“Where's Cindy?”

“She's gone, don't you remember?”

Out of a lifetime spent waking up in strange places and not knowing where he was, this was the most disoriented he had ever been. The light in the room refracted crazily off fragments of his own story. He couldn't shake the notion that the kid that stood before the bed was in the army. Home from. When Johnny comes. Tie a yellow.

“I'm done with this,” the soldier said.

“Negatory to that,” he mumbled. “AWOL will land you five years. Do your duty, son. One more tour.”

The kid came over and helped him upright. “There's no more tour, it's over.”

“I'll run it up the CoC tomorrow. We can still make New York.”

The kid sighed. “Come on.”

“Copy that,” said Richard, and together they moved toward the shining door.

Before that. Driving through Kansas, the remorseless prairie scrub whipping past. Drinking from a half-empty bottle, which he'd hidden in his bag under a pile of unfresh T-shirts and socks and boxers. Stowed away, for emergencies. Well, if this wasn't an emergency, he'd thought, unscrewing the top and bringing the bottle to his lips, he didn't know what was. Life was an emergency.

Vance looking over at him. “I thought you weren't drinking anymore.”

“I wasn't. Now I am.”

“Why don't you wait until after the reading?”

“Because I want it now. Because I want. Because, because, because, because, because.” Singing off-key with the Kansas grassland dancing in all directions. When they stopped for gas, he climbed into the backseat and positioned himself where the kid couldn't watch him, and he sat for the remainder of the drive with the whiskey sloshing against his lips. Give baby his bottle! There was something gratifying, freeing, about completely giving up any pretense of control—really, he should have done it years before.

Standing in front of a university, an imposing gothic building that resembled an enormous sea monster bearing down, maw agape, on the unsuspecting green quad. Shaking hands with people, and these people leading him into an elevator and up to a room where he shook other people's hands. Sitting for a while in a burgundy leather chair, the impressive kind embroidered with iron nails, and they—whoever they were—diligently approached him, with an air of mild, gracious irony, like savvy villagers paying respect to a cut-rate viceroy. Despite Vance's vigilant chaperoning, he managed to get one young girl to sneak him a glass of wine. Then they were in some sort of backstage area, which he was able to deduce from the red velvet trembling in front of him.

The kid was holding his arm. “Let's go. I'll tell them you weren't feeling well.”

“I feel fine.”

“You're not fine.”

The audience applauded on the other side of the curtain. He wrested away from Vance and attempted to push through it, but became caught in its voluminous folds. He felt a hand on his arm again, but again he twisted free. For a moment his person was fully contained inside the heavy, red sway. Why was the entire world against him? Finally, he'd picked up the curtain's weighted bottom edge and pulled it over himself, or himself under, to a room full of laughter.
You like me, you really like me.

Staring out at the audience staring back at him with a massed expression of amused dismay. Vance looked on grimly from the side of the stage, arms hanging limp at his sides. The auditorium's silence was broken by a cough, which brought him back to the task at hand. He looked down at the book and tried to figure out where he'd left off. What the hell was he reading? It seemed like nonsense to him—unfollowable, hieroglyphic.

“Sorry,” he said, uselessly flipping the pages. The problem was the lights. They were instruments of torture, designed to confuse and blind him. He needed water, craved it as he never had. His tongue was a fat snake stuck in the dirt hole of his mouth. He picked the book up and held it about four inches from his squinting eyes. His face was a crumpled wad of paper. Finding a paragraph that looked familiar, he resumed reading, though it was more like running some kind of horrible obstacle course in which every word, every syllable, was a barrier to be surmounted, defeated, climbed over. In the middle of the thing, he kept forgetting who the characters were or what they were talking about. It was not an unfamiliar sensation or mode of reading, although typically it happened right before he went to sleep, and not in front of an audience of three hundred people.

Somehow he got to the end of the chapter. He turned the page, just to make sure, and discovered that it went on! Ah, wretched life! Ferdinand Magellan himself could not have been more anguished to see the limitless Pacific stretch out before him after navigating the straits that—like Richard's book—cruelly bore his own name. He continued for a moment, but finally stopped again in the middle of a sentence and peered out into the audience. Some blonde woman whom he momentarily thought was his daughter pushed out of the room and loudly slammed the door behind her. But Cindy was gone, he remembered. Vance swayed on the side of the stage. The whole room swayed in unison, underwater plants doing a gentle, sinister hula.

“I'm sorry,” he said again, shutting the book. “My daughter hates me.”

An endless series of hallways, lost in the guts of the beast. Emerging into an expansive atrium, its walls bedecked with portraits of similar-looking old white men. He got lost trying to leave, twice entering the same lecture hall, the second time to sarcastic applause, before finally pushing outside into the dim, merciful chill. As he lurched directionlessly down a brick-lined path, the men in the paintings seemed to stare at him from the ether of the early purple dusk. They were rich men, obviously, viciously sober and responsible men; men who had dedicated their long lives to making money and building things; things that bore their names in etched stone; stone that exemplified their belief in themselves and God, in life's inherent value and design and purpose. If they could see him, what would he look like to men like that? Nothing, of course. Just a ridge of shit, a russet smudge under the waterline of a dirty toilet.

He shuddered across the campus in a kind of time lapse: a building would appear in the distance, and then he would be careening past it; a remote cluster of girls chatting among themselves seemed to teleport to his right flank, where they pointed and whispered. He hadn't expected, or meant, to get quite this drunk. The problem, of course, was that he hadn't been drinking—he wouldn't make that mistake again. Once more feeling the intense need to escape—from the campus, from public view and comment, and, ideally, though impossibly, from himself—he aimed toward a distant wall of trees.

Scurrying through the woods. To his right, red and blue lights flashed horribly. What had he done? All he wanted to do was get away. But you couldn't do it—you couldn't get away, you just couldn't. He tripped over a rotting tree stump, got up, tripped again, felt something in his ankle buckle. It hurt, everything hurt. Ten ten ten. He paused, panting next to a large tree. A used condom hung off one of its lower branches, like an offering to the gods. He pressed on, past strange shapes hanging in the trees, nightmare fruit, people watching him, faces looking down: leering strangers, the judge at his DUI trial, old lovers turned to crones, his daughter's, his own. Why couldn't he get away?

Without warning the woods opened up. He was thrashing through grabby underbrush, stumbling up the grass strip beside someone's house. Through the blurred rheum of his own twinned vision and thick patio glass, a large TV glowed blue and cast in shadow the two people on the couch in front of it. A wall of books, a table and chairs, gas grill on the patio. It looked simple, perfect. Why do other people's lives always look so much more appealing than our own? Eileen had told him once that his problem wasn't that he didn't count his blessings; he just also counted everyone else's. Standing before a window, a child sleeping, a little boy with a brown swirl of hair and delicate half-moon eyelids lit by the dull-orange glow of a night-light. A look of uncorruptible peace that suggested an absolute faith in his security, in the adults in the other room. Had Cindy ever looked like that? Then the child's eyes were open, locked through the window on Richard's, and the look was gone, replaced by the opposite. The mouth in a black O, screaming at the monster from the deep, the murdering ogre in the night.

Lost again, sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac, watching the squaddie pull in. Its squawking siren and flashing lights—his unwitting accomplice in the ruination of childish sleep. Another car pulled in behind, prettily bathing the dark lawns in red and blue. A cop got out, mumbled something into his staticky shoulder, graciously opened the rear door of the car, and Richard obligingly tumbled in.

Riding in the cool dark, lying down on that cool seat, oh never never never let it end.

He'd fully regained his senses—an unfortunate development—in the back of another car: Vance's. Outside a place that served hamburgers, apparently, judging from the giant plastic patty melt on its mammoth concrete plinth. It hovered upside down in Richard's vision like an invading UFO. The spray-painted green of iceberg lettuce and the floppy red edge of a beefsteak tomato floated merrily overhead. Vance returned with a grease-stained bag from which he pulled a small bouquet of wilted french fries.

“Where are we going?” said Richard.

“The airport.”

“Why?”

“So you can fly back home.”

“The tour's not over.”

Vance started the car. “The tour's definitely over.”

They arrived at the airport.
KANSAS CITY
, the sign said.
DEPARTURES
, the sign said. Large midwestern people pulled large midwestern bags from large midwestern SUVs. The kid set his battered Samsonite on the sidewalk and waited for him to clamber out. Richard steadied himself on the suitcase handle, and for a moment they stood there looking at each other. Vance offered a solemn hand, as he had when they first met—but how different he seemed now.

Richard said, “I'm still going to do the New York stop. Come on. It'll be fun.”

“You think this has been fun?”

“Yeah, some of it.”

“I thought you were dead last night.”

“I thought I was, too. Look, I'm sorry, okay? Come on. Don't you want to find out how this all winds up?”

“What?”

“This trip. Remember how you said my story was a cop-out? How I needed to figure out the ending?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you head west on that interstate, you're copping out. It's not a real ending.”

“And you think there will be a real one in New York?”

“Yeah, I do,” Richard said. “Come on.”

An airport police car approached and honked three times. The cop motioned out the window for them to wrap it up. “Sorry,” Vance said. “Good luck.”

He bought an exorbitantly expensive same-day ticket to New York, then, after somehow making it through security, bought an exorbitantly expensive Bloody Mary at a place called Tiki's Jungle Lounge. He sat in a dark corner table under a mounted, hopefully fake, tiger's head, its mouth open in what was probably meant to be a snarl but seemed closer to a grimace, the default expression of everyone in the establishment. Plastic palm fronds scraped his arm as he drank and quietly retched away the three hours before boarding. An unpleasant and debasing phone call to Dana, marked with many apologies and as many false promises, reestablished the New York stop. But it wasn't really that hard of a sell in the end—after all, she wanted him to make the appearance. It wasn't ever that hard to convince people of something they already wanted to believe.