The Throat (2 page)

There must have been some envy in my irritation. John Ransom was a
fairly good-looking boy, as good looks were defined in the days when
John Wayne was considered handsome, and he wore expensive clothes with
unselfconscious ease. One look at John Ransom told me that he owned
closets full of good jackets and expensive suits, that his drawers were
stuffed with oxford-cloth shirts, that he owned his own
tie rack.

Mr. Schoonhaven sat down, the parish priest stood to give a prayer,
and the dinner was over. All the football and baseball players from St.
Ignatius and Holy Sepulchre began to move toward the steps up to the
nave.

John Ransom asked me if we were supposed to take our plates into the
kitchen.

"No, they'll do it." I nodded toward the weary-looking women, church
volunteers, who were now standing in front of the serving tables. They
had cooked for us, and most of them had brought beans and macaroni in
covered dishes from their own kitchens. "How did you hear about this,
anyhow?"

"I saw an announcement on our notice board."

"This can't be much like Brooks-Lowood," I said.

He smiled. "It was okay. I liked it. I liked it fine."

We started moving toward the stairs behind the other boys, some of
whom were looking suspiciously at him over their shoulders.

"You know, Tim, I enjoyed playing against you," John Ransom said. He
was smiling at me and holding out his hand.

I stared stupidly at his hand for a couple of beats before I took
it. At Holy Sepulchre boys never shook hands. Nobody I knew shook hands
in this way, socially, unless they were closing a deal on a used car.

"Don't you love being a lineman?" he asked.

I laughed and looked up from the spectacle of our joined hands to
observe the expressions on the faces of Father Vitale and a few of the
women volunteers. It took me a moment to figure out this expression.
They were looking at me with interest and respect, a combination so
unusual in my experience as to be rare. I understood that neither
Father Vitale nor the volunteers had ever had much contact with someone
like John Ransom; to them it looked as if he had come all the way from
the east side just to shake my hand.

No,
I wanted to protest,
it's not me
. Because I finally
understood:
every year, Holy Sepulchre sent out flyers about the Christian
Athletes' Fellowship Dinner to every high school in the city, and not
only was John Ransom the first Brooks-Lowood student who had ever come,
he was the only student from the entire east side who had ever been
interested enough to attend the football supper. That was the point: he
was interested.

The other boys were already up in the church vestibule by the time
John Ransom and I reached the bottom of the stairs. I could hear them
laughing about Mr. Schoonhaven. Then I heard the voice of Bill Byrne,
who weighed nearly three hundred pounds and was the Bluebirds' center,
saying something about a "dork tourist," and then, even more horribly,
"some east side fag who showed up to suck Underhill's dick." There was
a burst of dirty laughter. It was just aimless, all-purpose hostility,
but I almost literally prayed that John Ransom had not heard it. I
didn't think a well-dressed hand-shaking boy like John Ransom would
enjoy being called a pervert—a fairy, a queer, a
cocksucker!

But because I had heard it, he had too, and from the hiss of indrawn
breath behind me, so had Father Vitale. John Ransom surprised me by
laughing out loud.

"Byrne!" shouted Father Vitale. "You, Byrne!" He put one hand on my
right shoulder and the other on John Ransom's left and shoved us apart
so that he could push between us. My classmates opened the creaking
side door onto Vestry Street as Father Vitale squeezed into the space
between John Ransom and myself. He had forgotten we were there, I
think, and his big swarthy face moved past mine without a glance. I
could see enormous black open pores on his nose, as if even his skin
was breathing hard, stoking in air like a furnace. He was panting by
the time he got to the top of the stairs. The stench of cigarettes
followed him like a wake.

"That priest smokes too much," John Ransom said.

We reached the top of the steps just as the door slammed shut again,
and we walked through the vestibule, hearing running footsteps on
Vestry Street and the priest's yells of
Boys! Boys!

"Maybe we should give him a minute," John Ransom said. He put his
hands in his pockets and ambled off toward the arched entrance to the
interior of the church.

"Give him a minute?" I asked.

"Let him catch his breath. He certainly isn't going to catch
them
." John Ransom was gazing
appreciatively into the long, dim length of Holy Sepulchre. He might
have been in a museum. I saw him take in the font of holy water and the
ranks of flickering, intermittent candles, some new, some guttering
nubs. Ransom looked into the depths of our church as if he were
memorizing it: he wasn't smiling anymore, but his evident pleasure was
not in any way diminished by the reappearance of Father Vitale, who
came back in through the Vestry Street door and huffed and puffed like
a tugboat through the gray air. He did not speak to either of us. As he
moved down the aisle, Father Vitale almost instantly lost his
individuality and became a scenic element of the church itself, like a
castle on a German cliff or a donkey on a dusty Italian road. I was
seeing Father Vitale as John Ransom saw him.

He turned around and inspected the vestibule in the same way, as if
seeing it was
understanding
it.
He was not the supercilious tourist for
whom I had mistaken him. He wanted to
take
it in
, to experience it in a
way that would probably not have occurred to any other Brooks-Lowood
boy. I thought that John Ransom would have taken that same attitude to
the bottom of the world.

Later, John Ransom and I both went to the bottom of the world.

When I was seven years old, my sister April was killed— murdered.
She was nine. I saw it happen. I thought I saw
something
happen. I
tried to help her. I tried to stop whatever it was from happening, and
then I was killed too, but not as permanently as April.

I guess I think the bottom of the world is the
center
of the world;
and that sooner or later we all see it, all of us, according to our
capacities.

The next time I saw John Ransom was in Vietnam.

Ten months after I graduated from Berkeley, I was drafted—I let it
happen to me, not out of any sense that I owed my country a year of
military service. Since graduating I had been working in a bookstore on
Telegraph Avenue and writing short stories at night. These invariably
came back in the stamped, self-addressed manila envelopes I had folded
inside my own envelopes to the
New
Yorker
and
Atlantic
Monthly
and
Harpers
—not to mention
Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review,
Antaeus,
The Massachusetts Review,
and
Ploughshares
.
At least I think it was
Ploughshares.
I knew that I
did not want to teach, and I had no faith
that teaching deferments would hold (they didn't). The more that my
stillborn stories came back to me, the more discouraging it became to
spend forty hours a week surrounded by other people's books. When my
2-S classification was adjusted to 1-A, I felt that I might have been
given a way out of my impasse.

I flew to Vietnam on a commercial airline. About three-fourths of
the passengers in tourist class were greenhorns like me, and the
stewardesses had trouble looking at us directly. The only really
relaxed passengers in our section of the plane were the weatherbeaten
lifers at the back of the cabin, noncoms, who were as loose and clubby
as golfers on a weekend flight to Myrtle Beach.

In the first-class cabin at the front of the plane sat men in dark
suits, State Department functionaries and businessmen making a good
thing for as long as they could out of cement or building supplies in
Vietnam. When they looked at us, they smiled—we were their soldiers,
after all, protecting their ideals and their money.

But between the patriots at the front and the relaxed, disillusioned
lifers at the rear, in two rows just aft of first class, was another
group I could not figure out at all. As a group, they were lean,
muscular, short-haired, like soldiers, but they wore Hawaiian shirts
and khaki pants, or blue button-down shirts with crisp blue jeans. They
looked like a college football team at a tenth-year reunion. These men
took no notice of us at all. What language I overheard was bright,
hard-edged military jargon.

When one of the lifers walked past my seat, stretching his legs
before going to sleep, I touched his wrist and asked him about the men
at the front of the cabin.

He bent low and squeezed out a single word.

Greenies?

We landed at Tan Son Nhut in sunlight that seemed almost visibly
dense.
When the stewardess
swung open the jet's door and the
astonishing heat rolled in, I felt that my old life had gone forever. I
thought I could smell the polish melting off my buttons. In that moment
I decided not to be afraid of anything until I really had to be—I felt
that it was possible to step away from my childhood. This was the first
of the queer exaltations—the sudden sense of a new freedom—that
sometimes visited me in Vietnam, and which I have never felt elsewhere.

My orders sent me to Camp White Star, a base in II Corps located
outside of Nha Trang. There I was supposed to join other new members of
my regiment for transport north to Camp Crandall in I Corps. One of the
unexplained glitches not unusual in army life occurred, and the men I
was supposed to join had been sent on ahead of me. I was left awaiting
orders for eight days.

Every day I reported to a cynical captain named McCue, Hamilton
McCue, who rubbed his square fingers over his babyish pink cheeks and
assigned me to whatever task took his momentary fancy. I moved barrels
from beneath the latrine and poured kerosene into them so old
Vietnamese women could incinerate our shit; I cannibalized broken-down
jeeps for distributor caps, alternators, and working fuel pumps; I
raked stones out of the fifteen square yards of dust in front of the
officers' club. Eventually McCue decided that I was having an unseemly
amount of fun and assigned me to the body squad. The body squad
unloaded corpses from the incoming helicopters, transferred them to the
"morgue" while the paperwork was done, and then loaded them into the
holds of planes going to Tan Son Nhut, where they were flown back to
the States.

The other seven members of the body squad were serving out their
remaining time in Vietnam. All of them had once been in regular units,
and most of them had re-upped so that they could spend another year in
the field. They were not ordinary people— the regiment had slam-dunked
them into the body squad to get them out of their units.

Their names were Scoot, Hollyday, di Maestro, Picklock, Ratman,
Attica, and Pirate. They had a generic likeness, being unshaven,
hairy—even Ratman, who was prematurely bald, was hairy—unclean, missing
a crucial tooth or two. Scoot, Pirate, and di Maestro wore tattoos
(
BORN TO DIE, DEALERS IN DEATH
, and a death's head
suspended over an
umber pyramid, respectively). None of them ever wore an entire uniform.
For the whole of my first day, they did not speak to me, and went about
the business of carrying the heavy body bags from the helicopter to the
truck and from the truck to the "morgue" in a frosty, insulted silence.

The next day, after Captain McCue told me that my orders still had
not come through and that I should return to the body squad, he asked
me how I was getting on with my fellow workers. That was what he called
them, my "fellow workers."

"They're full of stories," I said.

"That's not all they're full of, the way I hear it," he said,
showing two rows of square brown teeth that made his big cheeks look as
if his character were being eroded from within. He must have seen that
I had just decided I preferred the company of Ratman, Attica, and the
rest to his own, because he told me that I would be working with the
body squad until my orders came through.

On the second day, the intensity of my new comrades' disdain had
relaxed, and they resumed the unfinishable dialogue I had interrupted.

Their stories were always about death.

"We're pounding the boonies," Ratman said, shoving another wrapped
corpse into the back of our truck. "Twenty days. You listening,
Underdog?"

I had a new name.

"Twenty days. You know what that's like out there, Underdog?"

Pirate spat a thick yellow curd onto the ground.

"Like forty days in hell. In hell you're already dead, but out in
the boonies everybody's trying to kill you. Means you never sleep
right. Means you see things."

Pirate snorted and tossed another body onto the truck. "Fuckin'
right."

"You see your old girlfriend fuckin' some numbnuts fuck, you see
your fuckin' friends get killed, you see the fuckin' trees move, you
see stuff that never happened and never will, man."

" 'Cept here," Pirate said.

"Twenty days," Ratman said. The back of the truck was now filled
with bodies in bags, and Ratman swung up and locked the rear panel. He
leaned against it on stiff arms, shaking his drooping head. His
fingertips were bulbous, the size of golf balls, and each came to a
pointed tip at the spot where his fingerprints would have been
centered. I found out later that he had earned his name by eating two
live rats in a tunnel where his platoon had found a thousand kilos of
rice. "Too fat for speed," he was supposed to have said.