Time to Hunt (4 page)

“What the commander is saying,” said Ensign Weber, “is that it can all go away. In a flash. Orders can be cut. You could be back slogging the paddies in Vietnam, the shit flying all around you. It’s been known to happen. A guy so short suddenly finds himself in extremely hazardous duty. Well, you know the stories. He had a day to go and he got zapped. Letters to his mother, stories in the paper, the horror of it all. The worst luck in the world, poor guy. But sometimes, that’s the way it goes.”

More
silence
in the room.

Donny did not want to go back to Vietnam. He had done his time there, he’d gotten hit. He remembered the fear he felt, the sheer immense, lung-crushing density of it, the first time incoming began exploding the world around him. He hated the squalor, the waste, the sheer murder of it. He hated having his real life so close and then taken from him. He hated the prospect of not seeing
Julie ever, ever again. He thought of some peace nerd comforting her after he was gone, and knew how that one would play out.

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“Great,” said Bonson. “You’ve made the right decision.”

H
e stood outside, feeling idiotic. Rock music pumped out from inside. Inside it was loud, bright, crowded, festive. He felt so stupid.

He turned. There was Ensign Weber in the Ford, parked across the way on C Street. Weber nodded encouragingly, gave a little whisking motion with his head as if to say, Go on, get going, goddammit.

So now Donny stood outside the Hawk and Dove, a well-known Capitol Hill watering hole, where the young men and women who ran, opposed or chronicled the war tended to gather after six when official Washington closed down, except for the few old men in isolated offices waiting for the latest news on the air strikes or casualty figures.

It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing. Donny was dressed in cutoffs, Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like half the kids who’d entered the place since he’d been standing there, except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a little topside platter of hair. It said jarhead all the way.

But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.

Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another of the whisking motions with the head.

He turned and plunged inside.

The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield:
There’s a man with a gun over there, what it is ain’t exactly clear
—something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.

Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to
be a sense of sex in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn’t much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.

Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and remembered, “Keep all your receipts. You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard. Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch.”

“I’ve never even
tasted
Pinch,” Donny had replied. “Maybe tonight’s the night.”

“That’s a big negative,” said Weber.

Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, “You
idiot
. You unbelievable
idiot
. How could you let him?
Him!
How could you let him? You
idiot.”

The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.

The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him, Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.

Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom he was engaged. Man, he smiled, I still got the best.

It was the football hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero. Yes, she was a cheerleader. But he didn’t really like football and she didn’t really like cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced
together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County High School, found they didn’t really like each other very much, and broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date, he with Peggy Martin, Julie’s best friend, and she with Mike Willis, his best friend. And that was the night they really connected. Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but senior year was better, when he’d led the Southwest Counties League in yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast. Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She was …
good
was the only word he could think of, and it was so lame.

“Jesus Christ!”

Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear. He turned.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?”

Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very proletariat. He had—where the hell did he get that?—a camouflaged boonie cap on to disguise his hairlessness. He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They looked like three Jesuses.

“Crowe,” said Donny.

“I didn’t know this was your kind of place,” said Crowe.

“It’s a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?” Donny said.

“This is my corporal,” Crowe said to his pals. “He’s a genuine USMC hero. He’s actually killed guys. But he’s a
good guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty.”

“Crowe, if you’d learn your shit, you wouldn’t have to drop for any.”

“But then I’d be
collaborating.”

“Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the grieving mothers of America.”

“No, no, I’m only joking. But the funny thing is, I can’t tell my left from my right. I really can’t.”

“It’s port and starboard in the Marine Corps,” said Donny.

“I don’t know
them
either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell these guys about ‘Nam?”

“Oh, they don’t want to hear.”

“No, really,” one of the other kids said. “Man, it must be fucking hairy óver there.”

“He won a Bronze Star,” said Crowe with a surprising measure of pride. “He was a hero.”

“I was lucky as shit not to get wasted,” Donny said. “No, no war stories. Sorry.”

“Look, we’re going to a party. We know this guy, he’s having a big party. You want to come, Corporal?”

“Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you’re Ed.”

“Eddie and Donny!”

“That’s it.”

“Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It’s over on C, right near the Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw.”

“You should come, Donny,” said one of the boys. Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been worshiping John Wayne.

“I’m engaged,” Donny said.

“You can
look
, can’t you? She’ll let you look, won’t she?”

“I suppose,” said Donny. “But I don’t want any Ho Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He’s no hero of mine.”

“It won’t be like that,” Crowe promised.

“Trig will like him,” one of the boys said.

“Trig will turn him into a peacenik,” said the other.

“So who’s Trig?” said Donny.

I
t was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke, holding it, fighting the fire. He’d had quite the habit for a few months in ’Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.

Enough, he thought. I don’t need more of that shit.

Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees, he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in the night.

“They sacrifice virgins in there,” one of the boys said, “to the gods of war. Every night. You can hear them scream.”

Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.

“Donny,” said Crowe. “Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save it.”

Again, maybe it was the grass.

“ ‘Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,’ ” he improvised, “ ‘I have a fire mission for you, map grid four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.’ ”

“Cool,” one of the kids said. “What’s Hotel Echo?”

“High explosive,” said Donny. “As opposed to frags or white phosphorous.”

“Cool as
shit!”
the boy responded.

Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night, hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He’d heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if their tough noncoms hadn’t stayed on their asses, they’d have played it on ambush patrols.

“I wonder if Trig is here,” one of the boys said.

“You never can tell with Trig,” Crowe replied.

“Who’s Trig?” Donny asked again.

The party didn’t seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer. Milling people of all sorts. The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air. Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss, even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow the gig now. And really: it was only a flag.

The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men hanging around with that intense, long-haired look that the DC crowd so liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the draft by playing psycho at his physical.

“I’m nude,” he was saying, “except for this cowboy hat. I’m very polite and everybody’s very polite to me at first. I do everything they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won’t take off my cowboy hat. ‘Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?’ ‘I can’t,’ I explain. ‘I’ll die if I take off my cowboy hat.’ See, the key is to stay
polite
. If you act
nuts
they know you’re faking. Pretty soon they got majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my cowboy hat. I’m nude in this little room with all these guys, but I
will not
take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin’ hero I am! What a John Wayne! They’re screaming and I’m just saying, ‘If I take off my cowboy hat, I’ll die.’ ”

“So you weren’t drafted?”

“Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me into a slot in the Marines that wouldn’t rotate to the ’Nam. You know, when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will care. We’ll write the whole thing off. That’s why anybody who lets themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?”

Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who’d gotten zapped in his seven months with them. It was hard. And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny didn’t know.

But you definitely had to count the kid—what was his name?
what was his name?
—who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was the first one Donny remembered. He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood. People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren’t supposed to, and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of porky kid. Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn’t have to shave.
What was his name?

Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and
bucked and yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so unfair! Well, it
was
unfair. Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you? He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn’t talk much. Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged.
What was his name?
Donny didn’t remember.