The Throat (90 page)

Eventually I
picked up the telephone book and started looking for veterans'
organizations. My sixth call turned up information about a veterans'
group that met at six o'clock every night in the basement of a church
in the East Thirties—Murray Hill. They took drop-ins. Without being
what I wanted, it was what I was looking for, a long walk to an actual
destination. I left Grand Street at five-fifteen and turned up at the
low, fenced-in brick church ten minutes early. A sign with inset white
letters told me to use the vestry door.

When I came
down into the basement, two skinny guys with thinning hair and
untrimmed beards and dressed in parts of different uniforms were
arranging a dozen folding chairs in a circle. An overweight, heavily
mustached priest in a cassock striped with cigarette ash stood in front
of a battered table drinking coffee from a paper cup. All three of them
glanced at my splint. An old upright piano stood in one corner, and
Bible illustrations hung on the cinder-block walls alongside colored
maps of the Holy Land. Irregular brown stains discolored the concrete
floor. I felt as though I had walked back into the basement of Holy
Sepulchre.

The two
skinny vets nodded at me and continued setting up the chairs. The
priest came up and grabbed my hand. "Welcome. I'm Father Joe Morgan,
but everybody usually calls me Father Joe. It's your first time here,
isn't it? Your name is?"

I told him my
name.

"And you were
in Nam, of course, like Fred and Harry over there—like me, too. Before
I went to the seminary, that was. Ran a riverboat in the Delta." I
agreed that I had been in Nam, and he poured me a coffee from the metal
urn. "That's how we started out, of course, guys like us getting
together to see if we could help each other out. These days, you never
know who could turn up—we get fellows who were in Grenada, Panama, boys
from Desert Storm."

Fred or Harry
sent me a sharp, dismissive look, but it didn't refer to me.

"Anyhow, make
yourself at home. This is all about sharing, about support and
understanding, so if you feel like letting it all hang out, feel free.
No holds barred. Right, Harry?"

"Not many,"
Harry said.

By six,
another seven men had come down into the basement, three of them
wearing old uniform parts like Harry and Fred, the others in suits or
sport jackets. Most of them seemed to know each other. We all seemed to
be about the same age. As soon as we took our chairs, five or six men
lit cigarettes, including the priest.

"Tonight we
have two new faces," he said, exhaling an enormous cloud of gray smoke,
"and I'd like us to go around the circle, giving our names and units.
After that, anybody who has something to say, jump right in."

Bob, Frank,
Lester, Harry, Tim, Jack, Grover, Pee Wee, Juan, Buddy, Bo. A crazy
quilt of battalions and divisions. The jumpy little man called Buddy
said, "Well, like some of you guys know from when I was here a couple
of weeks ago, I was a truck driver in Cam Ranh Bay."

I immediately
tuned out. This was what I remembered from the veterans' meeting I'd
attended four or five years before, a description of a war I never saw,
a war that hardly sounded like war. Buddy had been fired from his
messenger job, and his girlfriend had told him that if he started
acting crazy again, she'd leave him.

"So what do
you do when you act crazy?" someone asked. "What does that mean, crazy?"

"It gets like
I can't talk. I just lay up in bed and watch TV all day long, but I
don't really see it, you know? I'm like blind and deaf. I'm like in a
hole in the ground."

"When I get
crazy, I run," said Lester. "I just take off, man, no idea what I'm
doin', I get so scared I can't stop, like there's something back there
comin' after me."

Jack, a man
in a dark blue suit, said, "When I get scared, I take my rifle and go
up on the roof. It's not loaded, but I aim it at people. I think about
what it would be like if I started shooting."

We all looked
at Jack, and he shrugged. "It helps."

Father Joe
talked to Jack for a while, and I tuned out again. I wondered how soon
I could leave. Juan told a long story about a friend who had shot
himself in the chest after coming back from a long patrol. Father Joe
talked for a long time, and Buddy started to twitch. He wanted us to
tell him what to do about his girlfriend.

"Tim, you
haven't said anything yet." I looked up to see Father Joe looking at me
with glistening eyes. Whatever he had said to Juan had moved him. "Is
there anything you'd like to share with the group?"

I was going
to shake my head and pass, but a scene rose up before me, and I said,
"When I first got to Nam, I was on this graves registration squad at
Camp White Star. One of the men I worked with was called Scoot." I
described Scoot kneeling beside Captain Havens' body bag, saying
He
nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects
, and told
them
what he had done to the body.

For a moment
no one spoke, and then Bo, one of the men in clothing assembled from
old uniforms, said, "There's this thing, this place I can't stop
thinking about. I didn't even see what the hell happened there, but it
got stuck in my head."

"Let it out,"
said the priest.

"We were in
Darlac Province, way out in the boonies, way north." Bo leaned forward
and put his elbows on his knees. "This is gonna sound a little funny."
Before Father Joe could tell him to let it out again, he tilted his
head and glanced sideways in the circle at me. "But what, Tim? what Tim
said reminded me. I mean, I never saw any American do that kind of
junk, and I hate it when people talk like that's all we ever did. You
want to make
me
crazy, all
you gotta do is tell me about so-called
atrocities we did over there, right? Because personally, I never saw
one. Not one. What I did see, what I saw plenty of times, was Americans
doing some good for the people over there. I'm talking about food and
medicine, plus helping kids."

Every man in
the circle uttered some form of assent—we had all seen that, too.

"Anyhow, this
one time, it was like we walked into this ghost town. The truth is, we
got lost, we had this lieutenant fresh out of training, and he just got
lost, plain and simple. He had us moving around in a big circle, which
he was the only one who didn't understand what we were doing. The rest
of us, we said, fuck it, he thinks he's a leader, let him lead. We get
back to base, let
him
explain. So we're out there three-four days, and
the lieutenant is just beginning to get the picture. And then we start
smelling this fire."

"Like an old
fire, you know? Not like a forest fire, like a burning building.
Whenever the wind comes in from the north, we smell ashes and dead
meat. And pretty soon, the smell is so strong we know we're almost on
top of it, whatever it is. Now the lieutenant has a mission, he can
maybe save his ass if he brings back something good—hell, it doesn't
even have to be good, it just has to be something he can bring back,
like he was looking for it all along. So we hump along through the
jungle for about another half hour, and the stench gets worse and
worse. It smells like a burned-down slaughterhouse. And besides that,
there's no noise around us, no birds, no monkeys, none of that
screeching we heard every other single day. The jungle is deserted,
man, that fucker's
empty
,
except for us."

"So in about
half an hour we come up to this place, and we all freeze—it isn't a
hamlet, it isn't a ville, it's out in the jungle, right? But it looks
like some kind of town or something, except most of it's burned down,
and the rest of it is still burning. You could tell from the charred
stakes that there used to be a big stockade fence around it—some of
it's still sticking up. But we can see this goddamn
grid
, with little
tiny lots and everything, where these people had their huts all lined
up on these narrow streets. All this was straw, I guess, and it's
gone—there's nothing left but holes in the ground, and some flooring
here and there. And the bodies."

"Lots of
bodies, lots and lots of bodies. Someone pulled a lot of them into a
big pile and tried to burn them, but all that happened was they split
open. These were all women and children, and a couple old men.
Yards—the first Yards I ever saw, and they're all dead. It looked like
that Jonestown, that Jim Jones thing, except these bodies had bullet
holes. The stink was incredible, it made your eyes water. It looked
like someone had all these people stand in a big ring and then just
blasted them to pieces. We didn't say a word. You can't talk about what
you don't understand."

"At the far
end of this place, there's part of a mud wall and a lot of blood on the
ground. I saw a busted-up M-16 lying next to a big iron cookpot hung up
over a burned-out fire. Somebody had did a job on that M-16. They
busted the stock right off, and the barrel was all bent out of true. I
looked into the cookpot and wished I hadn't even thought of it. Through
the froth on top, I could see bones floating down in this kind of
jelly, this soupy jelly. Long bones, like leg bones. And a rib cage."

"And then I
saw what I really didn't want to see. Next to the pot was a baby. Cut
in half—just sliced in half, right across the belly. There was maybe a
foot of ground between the top half and the bottom half, where his guts
were. It was a boy. Maybe a year old. And he wasn't any ordinary Yard
baby, because he had blue eyes. And his nose was different—straight,
like ours."

Bo knotted
his hands together and stared at them. "It was like we were killing our
own, you know? Like we were killing our own. I couldn't take it
anymore. I said to myself, This is too weird, all I'm doing from now on
is concentrating on getting out of this place. I said, I'm through with
seeing things. This right here is it. I said, From now on, all I'm
doing is following orders—man, I'm already done."

Father Joe
waited a second, nodding like a sage. "Do you feel better about this
incident, now that you've told the group about it?"

"I don't
know." Bo retreated into himself. "Maybe."

Jack
hesitantly raised his hand a couple of inches off his lap. "I don't
want to keep going up on my roof. Could we talk about that some more?"

"You never
heard of willpower?" Lester asked.

The meeting
broke up a little while later, and Bo disappeared almost instantly. I
helped Harry and Frank stack the chairs while Father Joe told me how
much I'd gotten out of the meeting. "These feelings are hard to let go
of. Lots of times I've seen men experience things they couldn't even
grasp until a couple of days went by." He put a hand on my shoulder.
"You might not believe this, Tim, but something happened to you while
Bo was sharing with us. He reached you. Come back soon, will you, and
let the others help you get through it?"

I said I'd
think about it.

When I opened
the door to my loft, the red light on the answering machine flashed
like a beacon in the darkness, but I ignored it and went into the
kitchen, turning on lights along the way. I couldn't even imagine
wanting
to talk to anyone. I
wondered if I would ever know the truth
about anything at all, if the actual shape of my life, of other lives
too, would ever remain constant. What had really happened in Bachelor's
encampment? What had John met there and what had he done? I made myself
a cup of herbal tea, carried it back into the main part of the loft,
and sat down in front of the paintings that had been shipped from
Millhaven. I had looked at them during the long nights of work, been
pleased and delighted by them, but until this moment I had never really
seen them—seen them together.

The Vuillard
was a much greater painting than Byron Dorian's, but by whose
standards? John Ransom's? April's? By mine, at least at this moment,
they had so much in common that they spoke in the same voice. For all
their differences, each seemed crammed with possibility, with
utterance, like Glenroy Breakstone's saxophone or like the human
throat—overflowing with expression. It occurred to me that for me, both
paintings concerned the same man. The isolated boy who stared out of
Vuillard's deceptively comfortable world would grow into the man turned
toward Byron Dorian's despairing little bar. Bill Damrosch in
childhood, Bill Damrosch near the end of his life—the painted figures
seemed to have leapt onto the wall from the pages of my manuscript, as
if where Fee Bandolier went, Damrosch trailed after. Heinz Stenmitz
meant that I was part of that procession, too.

The red light
blinked at my elbow, and I finished the tea, set down the cup, and
pushed the playback button.

"It's Tom,"
said his voice. "Are you home? Are you going to answer? Well, why
aren't you home? I wanted to talk to you about something kind of
interesting that turned up yesterday. Maybe I'm crazy. But do you
remember talking about Lenny Valentine? Turns out he's not fictional,
he's real after all. Do we care? Does it matter? Call me back. If you
don't, I'll try you again. This is a threat."

I rewound the
tape, looking across the room at the paintings, trying to remember
where I had heard or read the name Lenny Valentine—it had the oddly
unreal "period" atmosphere of an old paperback with a tawdry cover.
Then I remembered that Tom had used Lenny Valentine as one of the
possible sources for the name Elvee Holdings. How could this
hypothetical character be "real after all"? I didn't think I wanted to
know, but I picked up the receiver and dialed.

I waited
through his message, and said, "Hi, it's Tim. What are you trying to
say? There is no Lenny—"