Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“There’s talk the colonel’s accident was not as it seems.”

“No shit.”

“Really, there’s rumors of a full-scale investigation. Imported CID, fingerprint experts, trained dogs, the works. We’re all suspects.”

“Check it out. So are they.”

“Watch close, motherfuck.” The knife catapulted from Bennie Franklin’s fist, went spinning down the narrow corridor and buried itself Plunk! in the door at the far end of the hootch. The blade was still quivering when Franklin yanked it from the wood. “Now, tell me, don’t that give a man supreme confidence?”

“Right,” said Marvin. “Long as he’s standing directly behind you.” He shook his head gravely, regretfully. “No, Bennie, I ain’t gonna do it.”

“Hooooooeeeeee,” crooned Franklin, raspy as a witch. He danced around Marvin flashing the knife like a psychotic surgeon. “Looky here at Mister Uppity, he afraid of taking a scratch, don’t want his chrome dented, huh? He don’t put a cigarette in his mouth and stand sideways like the good doctor say, this stiletto gonna slip and let the air outta his tire so fast his mama hear him squeal. Now go on before I get extra nasty.”

“Get that steel out of my face,” said Marvin quietly.

“Maybe I oughta disconnect your hose.”

“Try it.”

Their eyes locked for an instant. Someone blinked. Franklin backed off. With careful exaggeration he peered over first one shoulder, then the other, and leaned forward to whisper, “You a smart nigger, Marvin.” He slid the pad of his thumb along the shiny blade edge, then held it up, displayed the deep horizontal stroke, the blood draining into his palm.

As soon as Lieutenant Tremble took a seat among his men he noticed the crude verse scratched into the table top:

The men looked at each other and shrugged. Yes, everyone was well aware of the punishment for defacing government property, everyone certainly wished the unknown offender could be captured and brought to justice, everyone was quite sorry. Specialist Alexander volunteered to sand and repaint the table. Draw your tiles, lieutenant.

Even though Tremble detested playing Scrabble (he always lost) almost as much as he disliked his men (they weren’t serious ) he occasionally allowed himself to be coaxed into a game as a demonstration of plebeian charm, of manly camaraderie, hands across the steely waters of rank. It wasn’t always easy. The weight of the entire Research and Analysis Section bore constantly down upon his own prematurely balding head. The nominal chief of the section, Captain T. Hewitt, was no longer competent, having stared long into the crystal ball on his desk—an unfortunate joke, the gift of his predecessor—and seen all responsibilities transformed into distant objects of bathos. He had lost interest in any feats of clairvoyance beyond the summoning of spirits into a shot glass and sardonic predictions about how long the latest ice shipment would last. He was cheerfully spending the remainder of his war in the officers club with Major Brand, the executive officer, the two of them engaged in a joint assault upon the bourbon supply and the weaving of a new age philosophy of life based on the pleasures of college football and imported cars. Papers requiring Captain Hewitt’s signature were delivered to a back table in the corner in the dark. Hewitt had not been seen in natural light for months. Like Major Brand he planned on retiring at the end of this tour. He was tired of being a gypsy.

So that left Tremble, a shake and bake looey fresh out of Ohio State ROTC, and already holding down a captain’s slot, the makings of a professional career unexpectedly dumped in his lap, and him trying as well as he could not to fumble the pieces. This act had been complicated in recent weeks by The General tossing another ball into the air. The 5th NVA regiment. Where from? Where to? How big? How good? Find it! It was the mission of Research and Analysis to outline shapes, to color in detail. In the back room, protected by steel doors and air conditioning, were banks of vigilant computers, their insomnia tended in shifts around the clock by the men of R&A, working like medieval scribes to copy field reports onto programming sheets, which were punched on keyboards, cut and shuffled by circuits, then retyped with automatic precision on perforated printouts rolling endlessly into cardboard boxes on the floor beneath each machine. Shelves along all four walls were stacked with boxes, dates scrawled in black across the cardboard. Somewhere in those boxes was the enemy. And sooner or later, despite the obstacles thrown around him, Tremble would find it and when he did The General would not forget.

“S,” he said, carefully placing a tile on the board, “W, I, Z, Z, L, E.” Tiles were arranged in a vertical column. “Double word, triple letter, what’s that—twenty-one, twenty-two?”

Overhead hung framed portraits of the leaders of the National Liberation Front, executives of the Communist Party of the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and generals of the People’s Army. Hollow-cheeked men staring resolutely into a Scrabble-less future.

The First Sergeant, sipping coffee behind the morning copy of Stars and Stripes acknowledged with a low grunt the madness of the world. Terrorism, et cetera, murder, et cetera, rioting, et cetera, all the usual redundancies. Amateur hysteria. He was glad to be in the company of professionals. There was safety in specialization. Around him his clerks hunched over their machines. The typewriters clattered and rang. Rosters, directives, memoranda, orders. Names and numbers, rat-a-tat-tat.

Trips struck the match with a cavalier flourish and attempted for the second time to start his first pipe of the day. Lungs wheezing like a pair of mildewed bellows, he sucked furiously on the black stem of his seasoned briar. A wisp of pungent smoke came and went. “Well, bite my butt,” he mumbled, scowling into the dead bowl. “This goddamn weather.” He tamped the springy contents down with a P-38 can opener, which shared the chain around his neck with a metallic swastika and a gold-plated scarab beetle. (His dog tags he had ceremoniously deposited one moonless night inside a Buddhist tomb, one of many overgrown and sand-swept mounds heaped in apparently random fashion back of the perimeter like a distribution of shell craters seen in reverse stereoscopic lenses.) “The rain makes the grass damp and hard to light.”

Squatting in a corner, Vegetable dangled a broken watch in front of Thai’s snout, trying to hypnotize the indifferent animal. “Sure,” he agreed, “and it gives the water buffaloes headaches.”

Trips looked at Vegetable. Vegetable looked at Trips. “You simple little shit,” said Trips. He took off his cap and began beating Vegetable on the head and shoulders. “Just what are we going to do with you, huh? you simple little stupid stoned shit.” They rolled on the floor in convulsive laughter.

At the airfield’s passenger terminal the few men waiting for flights out were too tired to do more than smoke cigarettes, exchange stale jokes. No one wanted any conversation. Their restless eyes shifted from the dark surface of the runway to the cloudy sky and back again. No one looked at the pyramid of long narrow boxes also awaiting a ride, the fork lift, and the windowless transport home.

The door was locked, the shutters closed. A small reading lamp projected a cone of light across the desktop mess: a heavy-duty government typewriter; a pile of papers, files, manuals; a pair of bare feet, crossed. Brown smoke drifted through the diagonal light, turning languidly. Slouched in an aluminum lawn chair was the room’s occupant, First Lieutenant Zachary Mueller, a corncob pipe stuck between his teeth. The walls were an unmilitary burnt orange. He was dressed in a blue bathrobe. He was writing the unit history.