The Med (45 page)

“Don't get uptight about it. I just wondered.”

“Well, wonder to yourself, Oreo.”

His fingers tightened on the frets. He sat up on one elbow, staring up at the close cotton striping, the dingy yellow fabric of Liebo's fartsack.

“What did you call me, man?” he said to the mattress.

Silence, and then he heard: “Sorry, Will. I'm kind of on edge, I guess. I didn't mean to call you that.”

He waited, considered, and then lowered himself back into the embrace of his bunk, still feeling the pulse-hammer of arousal, but relieved that he didn't have to face the private down. But there was disappointment, too. He wanted to say something angry, strike out, hurt someone. Yeah, on edge.
We're all on edge,
he thought. That was why there was no sound in the compartment except the whine of the blowers, the distant throb of engines running at full speed, the omnipresent creak as the bunk frames warped under the weight of bodies and the steady batter of the storm. No mutter and sudden laughter of bull sessions, joking, cassette players, no grab-assing, none of the continual ritual murmur of card games.

He glanced down at the table, below where he lay. The cards were out, but no one was playing. Harner was sitting with his boots planted square on the deck, head down, whittling slowly with his Ka-bar on a swab handle. Wash-man had his feet up on the bottom bunk, staring blankly at a full-page crotch shot in an Italian girlie magazine. He watched them for several minutes. Harner whittled on. Washman stared at the same page. Not even his eyes moved; only his thin chest, ratitic and sharp-edged beneath the thin cotton of his skivvy shirt, rose and fell, rose and fell.

He tried another chord, but it seemed too loud. Liebo shifted nervously above him. He laid the guitar aside and pulled out the book, tried to read a page. The equations made no sense. They described somewhere else, some perfect universe of concepts and logic that had never existed, and never would. He laid it aside too after a few minutes and stared at the underside of the bunk frame for a while. At last he climbed down, taking the guitar with him. Harner and Washman looked up, jerked from their reveries by the scrape of his chair.

“Good magazine?” he asked Washout.

“Uh, yeah.” The private closed it, looking guilty.

“Get that in Palermo?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated, then held it out. “Want to check it out?”

He didn't. He had resolved not to look at such things again. He had prayed over what he had done, prayed over it and been, he felt, forgiven. He was clean now. But the glossy flash of white thigh as the page turned, a curve of brown into pink, had made the water start in his mouth.

There is none righteous, no, not one …

He took it, and flipped the stained pages. It was in Italian, but the pictures were self-explanatory.

“Oreo,” said a familiar voice behind him, “what are you doing with that trash?”

“Just looking at it, I—”

Cutford's arm came over his shoulder, so close he could smell him, and seized the magazine. He snatched for it, but he was too late, and the corporal too fast. Bits of paper fluttered down over his head. Washman started up, his eyes wide. “Hey! That's my magazine, asshole! What the fuck's wrong with you?”

“Why you pushing it on this brother, then? He don't want no cheap white cunt, nor no pictures of any, either.” The tearing came faster, and Washman flinched back as a wad of pages flew at his face.

“Come off it, Cutford—”

“Shut up.” The corporal finished his shredding and tossed the naked spine to the deck. He swung on Givens, his eyes whited. “Why you poison your mind with this toubab shit? It's a trap for the true man, nigger. Don't you know that?”

Harner, silent, scooted his chair back. He put the chewed broomhandle behind him, holding the knife in his lap.

“Goddamn it—” began Washman, getting up. His face had gone pale, the blotches standing out in red relief.

“I'll pay you for it, Washout,” said Givens, standing up, too. “Never mind.”

“Fuck you will,” said Cutford, swaying dangerously ponderous as the ship heaved to a heavy sea. Under the thin dark fabric his chest bulged as he lifted his fists. “He give it to you. I tore it up. Anyone want to settle anything, he settle it with me.”

Givens sighed. The corporal was hungry for a fight. There was no way around it. All he could do was show Washout and the others that he was on their side, not Cutford's. The anger he had lit with Liebo, and then tamped down, licked up again. Anger was sin, but there was righteous anger, too. The long-built rage of being black yet not accepted as black, the truthlessness of stereotypes and the way men of hate like Cutford forced you into them despite yourself. And suddenly he was eager for it, too. Rage sang through his veins, tightened his calves and the long muscles of his arms. The weak points: groin, eyes, throat. The voice of the instructor at boot camp. “Like they say, troopers, you can build muscle, but not over eyes or knees.” But Cutford had been through boot camp, too. And a lot more. He stepped forward warily, knowing that his enemy was both bigger and more vicious. David had won in the Book, but only with the help of the Lord.

The Lord seemed far away from Troop Berthing tonight.

“You crazy—” he was beginning, when a cry from the next bay of bunks pivoted them all around. It was Hernandez, his voice high with surprise and insult.

“What you doing in my locker, jerkoff?”

“You owe me ten bucks, man. I'm takin' it out in trade.”

“Like shit you are, you goddamn thief.”

“Fight! Fight!”

Givens stumbled forward, catching an edge of the table. The guitar jangled a discord on the steel deck, but he didn't stop. He rounded the bunks in time to bounce a red-haired man, one of the riflemen, head-on. There were four of them, all from the same squad. Hernandez, his back to his locker, was wrestling with the biggest. There was time only to see that before the redhead stiff-armed his head against the bunk frame. A dazzling pain shot forward between his eyes. All through the compartment, men leaped down from their racks, taking sides with instantaneous readiness. Unfortunately, that meant the mortar-men were outnumbered four to one.

The white dazzle cleared, and he came away from the frame fighting mad. He grabbed the redhead in a half-nelson, tripped him down in the same motion, and made for Hernandez. Two riflemen took him halfway, hammering him to the deck with punches in the ribs and back. They rolled in a melee around the feet of the bunk frames, he punching out at whomever he could reach, as above him the original fight dissolved in a free-for-all. Hernandez stubbornly defended his locker; Harner had his long arms around a lance corporal from the second platoon; Washout screamed shrilly as a black grunt twisted his wrist behind his back. Liebo was still going round atop that first biggest rifleman.

Then he saw Cutford. The big corporal battered his way through three men in as many seconds, snarling, leaving them sitting on the deck holding bloody faces and moaning. His assault left the mortar team in possession of the narrow space for a minute or two, then the grunts got smart and scrambled across through the racks between them. Surrounded, the squad went down under a mass of shouting men. There were too many of them, and as if realizing it, the riflemen began to fight among themselves, without pretext, and the atmosphere suddenly changed with that, as if they all realized simultaneously that it was over. The skirmish eased off into slaps and pushes. Givens found himself in a corner with Hernandez. “What the fuck, hombre!” the little man said, grinning, a trickle of blood coming from his nose.

“Too many of them, man.”

“Ah, they want to fight, we fight, right?”

“They think they can push mortarmen around, they going to end up with their asses in a sling,” panted Liebo.

“The brass!” somebody shouted from the far end of the compartment. There was no officer, or else he wisely decided not to come in, but they broke apart. The riflemen drifted back toward their racks, leaving behind threats and lifted fingers. The mortarmen jeered after them, but not too loudly. Givens reached up to feel the back of his head. It hurt, but he didn't seem to be bleeding. Probably leave me with a lump, he thought. It hurt when he breathed, too. Some bastards always had to go for the kidneys. But still he found himself grinning, the adrenaline happiness of a fight welling up, and he bent to help Hernandez pick up the clothes the riflemen had knocked from his locker.

Back at the card table they scraped chairs together. There were not enough and Washman and Hernandez sat side by side on the lower bunk. Liebo displayed a torn shirt sleeve, Harner grinned slowly around a bruised lip, and Givens rubbed the back of his head with a shade more wince than it really called for. They panted together for a minute or two, and then Cutford rubbed abruptly at his skinned knuckles. “I'd 've liked to take out a couple more of the fuckahs,” he whispered. “Young bastards. None of them old enough to show hair yet.”

The others looked up, uncertain as to whom he meant. Them? There was something strange in the way the older man sat, chafing his palms as if for warmth. Givens saw that he was bleeding, the drops thick and black as road tar against his skin.

“How old are you, Cutford?” he said softly.

“Old enough I shouldn't be wastin' my time in shitpot little troop-compartment scuffles,” said the corporal sharply, yet still without looking at any of them.

“Uh … you fought real good,” said Washout.

Cutford looked at him then, close, and his broad flat nose widened. He gathered his feet beneath him as if to get up, and a jangling musical sound came from under the chair.

“My guitar,” said Givens, remembering suddenly. “Gimme it.”

“Get it yourself, Oreo. Crawl under there and fetch.”

Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought hopelessly, groping under the table, among the butts and scrap paper. What is it with this dude? Is there no way to pacify this anger, this apartness? Looking up at Cutford's heavy legs, the tops of the athletic socks he always wore showing above the scuffed black of boots, he felt a sudden need to answer what the corporal was continually asking of him, of all of them.

Only what was the question?

When he came up with the guitar, leaning it carefully against the smudged bulkhead where the mortar tube had leaned every morning since the far beginning of the float, Cutford was talking about Vietnam. He never had before.

“Shitpot little scuffles like this … we done this all before, in d'Nam,” he was saying, not remotely, but to Hernandez, who was nodding, eyes intent. “Scuffle around, fart around, grab-ass in the bunkers … it was the heat. It got to you real quick, when you come in country. Heat, man, Alabama was nothin' to it.”

Givens eased himself back into Washman's bunk, away from the level of the corporal's eyes. The other men grew silent too, waiting with him for whatever Cutford had to say.

“Heat,” prompted Hernandez. “Yeah, like in the Delta, hah?”

Cutford looked to him, almost gratefully. He sighed. “Yeah. Hot like that.”

“Where were you?” whispered Hernandez. “In the jungle? The swamp? The mountains?”

“Shit, the bush, man, the bush. It was jungle, man. Fucken scorpions all over, find them in the Claymore pouches, you could feel them crawling on you at night, on ambush, couldn't move…”

They hung breathless and alone with him, hunters at a campfire, young warriors by the bard; silent in the once-again silent compartment filled with expectant men. The ship banged and creaked. Cutford rubbed his hands.

“How long was you there, man?”

“Two tours, man.”

“
Two,
Cutford? How come you went around again?”

The corporal hesitated, just for a moment, looking round at them; then reached into his back pocket.

The picture was ironed from years in the wallet, an old Polaroid, the green of jungle yellow, faces yellow, sky yellow. Over his shoulder Givens' eyes found the eyes of other marines. Hand-twisted cigarettes dangled from smiling mouths. One of them was a short man, thin, something gold gleaming yellow against his dark throat. Next to him, his arm over his shoulders, stood a gangly, grinning, friendly-looking boy Will recognized with a shock as Cutford.

“They needed me,” said Cutford. “Them simple bastards I was with. Off the streets of Watts and Durham and Selma. They needed my black ass. They was going down like … like … we was going down bad. It was sixty-nine, man. They was no more grunts to come. I was a rifleman then. We just went patrol; they just kept sending you patrol, you know, no slack, no break, maybe a day back at battalion if you took heavies, but then, man, right back in the bush. After Tet the Man was scared. He knew what was coming down. It was use the grunt or lose him, and they used us, man. Used us up. I tried to learn them, them simple bastards…”

“The squad?” said Hernandez.

“The whole fucken squad,” said Cutford, leaning forward. The little golden charm, twisting on its chain, swung out from his chest and dangled gleaming in the stark fluorescence from the overhead. “The whole fucken squad one night. Overrun by a batt of en-vee regulars. Just me. They only left me.

“That's how it was, fuckheads. The Man sends you out there, the ghost officers. They fuck up, the Man don't pay. We pay, baby, you pay, dickheads like you. I stuck the rest of that tour, and they wanted me to be a warrant. I said, no, fuck you, I'm gettin' out. And I did.”

“You got out?” said Liebo, gentle-like.

“Two years.”

“Why'd you come back?”

Cutford looked at him long and hard, then seemed to see the rest of them. His face changed, and he shook his head angrily. He was starting to get up when the 1MC came on. The silence in the compartment went suddenly, electrically a dozen times more silent, the men looking naked-eyed up at where the gray speakers sat screwed to the bulkheads. The boatswain's pipe shrilled, cutting through the whoosh of ventilators, and someone cleared his throat.