Trinity Fields (30 page)

He slept, and then he woke.

The ant had brought him water and as he drank the ant spoke of Urizen and Lucifer. I never would have thought you'd know so much about such things, Kip marveled. The ant demurred. When Kip thanked him for the water, the grass laughed a little, and the ant began to laugh along with it. You're drinking air, fool, the grass said, finally. When Kip reached out to crush the ant, it was gone, of course. And when he looked at the blades of grass he saw that they were only blades of grass.

Impudence and imprudence landed you in this mess, motherfucker, he scolded himself. But what passion was there in a life lived with prudence? It was Blake who wrote that only Incapacity would fall in love with Prudence. The line, could he remember it?
Prudence was rich
, it began. No, it went
Prudence was a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity
. Yes, he could draw it up from memory—his tenacious, slipshod memory—and this meant that the accident hadn't robbed him of that part of his mind, but what book was it from? In a moment the answer to his question would come. All he had to do was wait and it would rise to the surface like a message in a bottle carried by obedient waves to his tempested beach. He wondered how could he remember such eccentric fragments? Surely, he reasoned, this was the first time in history that someone lay wounded just here, in this particular wild field of hissing grass, hissing like surf over sand, who conjured a line from the English poet William Blake to anesthetize an evil night. His incapacitation promised to be temporary only, and given he had tried never to court prudence he wondered whether the time to begin was now. An old maid, perhaps, but what had Prudence accomplished to get rich? Pondering this would occupy a quarter of an hour, if not more. Keep out the bad thoughts for fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes was eternity. He closed his eyes, having realized that he'd forgotten which star was the last one he counted.

They had assured him he would never make it through the night up here if he were downed. In most ways it was worse to be shot down over Laos than North Vietnam. There you became a prisoner of war and were reduced by interrogation, torture, humiliation, the gradual destruction of your ego and your will. Here, when you went in you could cry “Mayday Mayday” over the radio for as long as you liked but chances were you were on your own. They might well hear your cries, but often there was nothing they could do. He could still see the long face of the man who, with a rheumy wink, told him that, back in Vientiane. He'd said it without inflection, —Not even a posthumous medal for those back home since officially you're no longer a member of the service. . . . No, I tell you sir, the best advice I got for you is don't get hit.

Where was the grass? He rolled on to his side again. Here I am. Good, the grass was again articulate. Where was the ant?

Fifteen minutes, Kip. One–one thousand, two–one thousand, so the seconds crept just as they had when we used to play hide-and-seek down in the summer canyons. Say, how did Prudence come by her fortune? Hard to guess, quite a question. Three–one thousand. He thought about it not because he cared to know the answer—he decided there was none, Willy Blake had erred—but because given all the reasons there were to abandon hope, you still hoped, and you didn't want to hope, and so you blocked out hope by answering impossible questions. But hope seeped through and stained you anyway. You still pressed your defiant ear hard to the sky to hear the signs of your salvation.

So what happened here?

Before the catastrophe he had stretched forward in the cockpit to landmark his position, note the coordinates on the inside of the windshield with his grease pencil in case the crash would knock him witless. If he could still read and if his UHF survival radio—the field radio that was his “hope chest” (he liked naming these things)—were functional, he could call in his latitude and longitude and try to summon a rescue chopper. The impact had mangled the plane but not caused a fire. They'd already made their run and were on their way back, so fortunately the fuel was low when they took the hosing. He knew where he was. Lima Site 21, Sam Thong, he could make it on foot, if he were lucky enough not to be seen and taken, in two days, three at the outside. Dear Prudence would dictate staying put and waiting for air to come and retrieve him. He would make the decision to move but didn't. He resolved to wait, not be cavalier, and the line from Blake began to persecute him again.

Kip had never been shot down before. His aircraft was, he estimated, half a kilometer north of where he lay. He couldn't remember exactly how he got from the jungle to this field, the adrenaline must have powered his legs. Neng Kha Yang, his Hmong backseater, was conscious on impact, more than conscious, had helped him out of the fragile, broken Bird Dog. They had sprinted together through the thicket until they reached a flatland. Neng Kha Yang had gone out to patrol the area, not to secure it but get a better sense of the immediate topography, while Kip lay in this shallow cover, awaiting morning, not daring to sleep but also oddly doubtful whether he even was conscious. He wondered what was next. Would a Spooky gunship appear in predawn before the enemy found him? the enemy who he heard now and again, as close as a few hundred yards away, having fanned out from the downed aircraft in search of its crew? Would our people bring in one of those Psyops soundships to hover, and broadcast at full volume to point of distortion the music of breaking glass, or women weeping, or bagpipes wheezing, or babies screaming? We did that to torment the enemy in Vietnam, in the theater east of here. Psychological combat. Nobody knew whether or not it worked but we derived a certain pleasure from the savagery of the gambit.

No, there was no such backup in Laos. A bat drove peeping through the dark. Bats here, he thought. Was that acrid stink cordite, or just the stink of fear pouring off him? Or was it napalm. No, that could not be right. No nape here. It was terror and nothing more he smelled.

He could remember a first lieutenant, thin peaked fellow with dilated pupils, who once threatened to cut off a prisoner's nose back near Can Thó. The boy had sneezed in the lieutenant's face during an interrogation. Prisoner stank of terror. Smelled like this present stink.

—Leave him alone, Kip said.

—Fuck off, the lieutenant said.

—He's sick, look at him.

—He's about to get a whole lot sicker.

Kip had learned to turn away from situations like this. They never had happy endings. The kid's fate was sealed and Kip knew that arguing with the lieutenant was a waste of time at best, and at worst could turn into something ugly between himself and the marine.

—You soft on slopes? the lieutenant pushed.

Kip said nothing.

—I tell you what. You like his nose so much, I'm gonna make you a little present.

The prisoner, understanding nothing, sat with his mouth open. His eyes darted back and forth between Kip and the lieutenant.

—You're cracked, man, and with that Kip backed away toward the door of the hootch.

The lieutenant had shouted after him, —You know what. You're right. I'm gonna leave this bastard's nose right where it is.

Kip did not reply, and it possibly cost the captive his manhood because no sooner had he turned his back on the lieutenant than the marine started sawing away at the poor fellow whose agonized cries about his penis Kip understood from his knowledge of Vietnamese slang. Hideous screaming followed him for days after that, screaming and the stench of fear. Soft on slopes. He thought if he could have one thing now, it might be the tongue out of that lieutenant's foul mouth. But that was elsewhere, another time. This was now. He tried to get his mind straight, hold his bearings from veering off further. He listened, he pulled himself with considerable ardor into time present.

Laughter. What he heard was laughter. Dry, emphatic laughter. It irritated him to hear it, and if he was imagining he heard it, he was irritated, superbly and profoundly irritated anyway. Pathet Lao and some Vietnamese troops, the NVA, who were no more supposed to be operating inside Laos than we were. A taunting, chill laughter toward which he was meant to react with hostility. Grace notes, kind of giggles, or sniggers. Sneers, deliberate and calculated to provoke a response that would betray his position. He was up and running, bent over so as not to be seen or shot, and Kha Yang seemed to be running with him. Then they stopped at the far edge of this same field and Kip went down to his knees, keeled onto his side and curled into the fetal position, which he knew not only gave comfort in the maternal grasses but was the posture that least taxed his drumming heart. He clutched his gun, dear teddy bear, to his breast.

He woke up, having slept.

The laughter may have ceased, replaced by a silence intended to inspire dread. Or it may not have ceased, but rather not have been heard by Kip who had bundled his consciousness into a protective coil that mirrored his jackknifed legs, rounded back, head cradled in his own bent arms. His palms locked him in from the jeering world.

Was this perspective enough,
Tan Kip
, as his Hmong associates—the backseaters who flew missions with him every day, sometimes as many as four between sunrise and dusk—addressed him, perspective enough, Mr. Kip? And though the only perspective these Hmong were concerned with had to do with distances between their spotter plane and enemy movement below, Kip might allow himself to wonder how much farther from the Hill he might have to travel before he could see himself as he had in the ocotillo-framed mirror in his parents' den. He might, on bad days, indulge himself in reveries—some unkind, some kind—about me and Jessica. But such daydreams were reserved for bad days, and bad days were days that saw no action, and the need to assure himself of ceaseless turmoil, a clutter of missions so perpetual that waking nightmares would crowd daydreams right off the mental stage, was satisfied by volunteering for covert duty here. The option was to figure out how to join the grunts up on the incursion points, some of whom had gone berserk, homicidal, who trashed their memories, their futures, any interest in survival, whose sole purpose was to take out as many gooks as they could on their fast descent to hell. For all their madness they had a purpose and a commitment. But gruntdom was not, for whatever reason, an option. Kip was a runner, not a suicide. And so this program in Laos, about which he had kept hearing rumors, suited him.

Prey to memory, he didn't want to be. Not now, not here. “No memories no regrets.” He had chalked those words in yellow on a bomb casing before an operation near the tricorner, an early run up the Trail when he was still over in Vietnam, growing bored and anxious. Message in a bottle, again. A form of farewell for his victims, but also a philosophy for himself, one that he knew he could never embrace given the persistence of his memory.

What was he trying to justify? And where was his companion, who went down with him just now, into a sprawl of vegetation?

He should have been back from his patrol by now. But no, hadn't they just been running again? Yes, after the laughter, or?—well, maybe not. It was hard to say. Kip's sense of time was all skewed. Kip should never have let Kha Yang leave in the first place. Mistakes were compounding. It was not good.

Tigers, he remembered. They had smartassed about it back in the capital of Vientiane. There were many tigers out here in the mountains. It was a joke among the pilots, what more brutal irony than to survive a crash and escape capture, only to be eaten by a tiger out in the jungle. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, he thought. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire?

The grass had sharp edges. Either that or his skin had thinned during these last hours.

Predawn was quieter than ever. He licked his finger, which was wet. He couldn't taste whether it was dew or blood. It didn't matter. He held the finger aloft to check the direction of the wind. The eastern sky was just beginning to brighten, however dully, and the stars had begun to fade under a thickening cover of clouds. It threatened rain, he could smell the moisture. The breeze freshened. His finger tingled most when its damp flesh was pointed south. Wind from the south always boded evil in the old romance novels. Soon enough it began to sprinkle. Weather would keep the rescue choppers grounded, that is, if there were any rescue choppers. It was time to get moving. He didn't move. The clouds continued to lighten. Someone quite nearby coughed. Kip's stomach began to grind. He didn't breathe. A caterpillar of some sort climbed with mechanical vitality over a spear of crushed grass several inches from his eye. His finger tightened on the trigger.

He waited. Nothing happened. Had the cough come from his own mouth? Perhaps he had drifted off to sleep yet again, despite his efforts, and despite his unwonted anguish—anguish more than fear or dread, almost a form of sorrow or a kind of regret, regret because in his progressive delirium he had come upon the hard fact that he was here because he had put himself here. —What the fuck, he said. The ant was there again and seemed to hear him. It wiggled its antennae, like a rigid semaphorist. —Tell it to me straight, Kip beckoned. The ant did not reply. He was mildly surprised it seemed not to have the power of speech. Blake had written about a fly—“For I dance and drink and sing till some blind hand shall brush my wing.” Had he ever written about an ant?

Kip, stop flowing, man, he thought. Keeping his mind steadied was like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall.

Then it happened. The hand on his shoulder was real, very real, and grasping him. It was strong.

The cough and the hand came in lightning succession despite the intervention of observations and ideas. The moment felt excessive. It was as if the amount of time that passed between the cough, then the occurrence of the hand touching his shoulder, and his response to the hand on the shoulder was not enough to accommodate the emotions and thoughts coursing through his imagination. The time should have been doubled or trebled to hold all that occurred within its temporal borders. Regret didn't feel right. No, regret wasn't enough. It was more like revulsion. Arrogance had brought him to this. He was so angry with himself. His skill, his training, his native intuition should have precluded this ever coming to pass.