Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Yeah?” replied a sulky voice.

“Yaaay-uh? Get your ass in here when I’m speaking at you!”

“Yes, Sarge.” A lanky PFC ambled into the office.

“You spit on that grill one more time, maybe I shove your cheeks down in the bacon and fry ’em for the troops, huh?”

“Aw, Sarge.”

“Didn’t I tell you to mop up that grease under the corner oven?”

“Yeah, and I told…”

“I don’t care who the fuck you told—do it!”

Ramirez gasped like a lanced animal, hunching at the waist, clutching his midsection. He grabbed one of the Gelusil tabs he had left sitting out, swallowed it, then laid the side of his head flat against the desk.

“Sarge, are you okay?”

He was dimly aware of the clatter of men eating in the next room and the taste bud-erecting aroma of percolating coffee. “Oh, my aching gut,” he groaned to whoever would listen.

Between haircuts Joe, the Vietnamese barber, paced. He paced from his shop beside the mail room to the mess hall, from the mess hall to his shop, from his shop to the orderly room, from the orderly room to his shop, from his shop to the main gate, from the main gate to his shop. He paced and paced. He couldn’t seem to stay still.

Damn, muttered Wendell, trying to hold his hands steady. In the viewfinder the plane wiggled, shrank into a speck, and disappeared. He lowered the Beaulieu movie camera from his eye. “You got anything else to Da Nang in the next hour?” he asked the young Air Force sergeant with the clipboard and the astonished stare.

“Nothing I know about. Of course, there’s a lot of stuff goes in and out of here I know nothing about. You might try asking around the 101st helicopter pad.”

“Aw shit, I’d probably be too late anyway.”

They were standing on the loading ramp in front of the air terminal.

“Was he a friend of yours?” asked the sergeant.

“Hell, no.”

The sergeant scratched his chin with the edge of the clipboard. “Well, listen, you want pictures of stiffs I can…”

“I needed that one,” cried Wendell, pointing up at the empty sky.

For Wendell this had not been one of the war’s better days. Sergeant Anstin had forbidden him to leave the signal shop all morning and to make sure his orders were carried out had deliberately sat on a counter doing his paperwork in the same room with him as Wendell sorted colored wires with his hands and various tools of assassination with his mind. He had missed the crash itself, the camera had jammed, so he had been forced to stand there like an idiot with a dead lens while the Old Man took the plunge. Now he had missed the corpse, too.

“Do me a favor,” Wendell said to the sergeant. “Hold your clipboard like you’re shading your eyes and look up at the sky, and I’ll make you into a movie.”

The sergeant turned toward the sky and then looked back at Wendell. “What do I shade my eyes for? The sun ain’t even out.”

Wendell frowned. “You want to be in pictures or you want to be an Air Force chump all your life?”

The sergeant raised his clipboard.

“Hey,” he said, crinkling his face at an imaginary sun, “am I gonna be in color?”

Griffin had been drifting peacefully above the same frame of film for more than twenty minutes when a voice from out of the air spoke abruptly into his ear: “Leaf abscission.”

“Huh?”

It was Captain Patch, chief of the Imagery Interpretation Section. “Define the terminology.”

Whatever “leaf abscission” was, Griffin certainly didn’t want to know about it. Abscissa. Coordinates. Mathematical lines.

“Tree geometry, sir?” He couldn’t stop staring at Patch’s head, he seemed to be seeing it for the first time, seeing into it—a vast geodesic dome constructed out of a complex network of brass tubing through which moved streams of dense blue smoke, swift, silent, sure.

“Thought you’d been to college, Griffin. From the Latin meaning to cut, to strip, to denude. Shredded palm, if you know what I mean. Winehaven’s scheduled to rotate home in sixty days. I want you to start training to take over his herbicide studies.”

“What about my bomb damage assessments?” Small puffs of smoke were coming out the captain’s ears.

“We’ll pass those on to Specialist Cross.” Patch’s voice sank into oily confidential. “You know you’re the only one I can trust to do this job properly. These studies are top priority. The General has expressed a personal interest. I need someone I can depend on, someone who appreciates the situation.” He straightened up. “This duty shouldn’t be any problem, you’re the brightest boy in the class.”

“Yes, sir.” Patch had also designated PFC McFarland “the brightest boy” when he appointed him in charge of office supplies.

“This’ll look damn fine on your record.” He placed a hand on Griffin’s shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do about some in-country R&R. Have you seen Saigon yet? There’s a good chance I can get you there next month. Chief Winkly needs someone to go with, you know how he is about traveling alone. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine then, real fine.”

“Wonderful,” mumbled Griffin, leaning out again over the light. He had always been interested in plants. The craters shone up at him like watery eyes.

From its position of honor above the bar the painted head of the screaming woman stared into a fog of tobacco smoke, alcohol fumes, and body odor that comprised the constant atmosphere of the 1069th officers’ club. The large yellow eyes focused in horror upon an invisible point high above the commissioned heads. Here she was known as Minnie, Sweetheart of the Crafty Eye.

A glass of amber liquid was held dramatically aloft.

“Here’s to the colonel, a soldier, a gentleman, maybe not the best pilot in the world, but certainly one ace of a drinker.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Watch it, Osgood.”

“Oh, shut up, Ed, we all know what a flaming asshole he really was.”

The stereo twanged out a raucous version of “Ring of Fire.” On the corner of the bar stood a table lamp cast in the shape of an Hawaiian hula dancer. A red light bulb stuck in a socket on top of her head lit up a shade depicting a dozen imaginative sexual positions. Slowly the pink plaster hips swiveled from side to side in mechanical voluptuousness.

Even at this hour the club was already more than half full.

“How about a couple more drinks over here. C’mon, Lee, you old lecher, I’ll be running on empty in about half a second.”

The Vietnamese bartender produced an automatic smile. “No more ice,” he said. “Machine broke.”

“Whaddya mean there’s no more ice? There better be, pardner.”

“He said the machine was broken.”

“Well get a man in here to fix it, an ice mechanic.”

“The beer had best be cold or somebody tells me why.”

“Why is the army like a copulating sow?”

“It’s a question of technique, Harv, there are those of us who take the time to learn and there are those who, well…”

“So I said to the general, ‘No, sir, I’m afraid I am unfamiliar with that particular section of FM 380-5’ and that’s why I’m here now with you guys in this paradise.”

“That moron, that bastard, that scumbag.”

“I know damned well somebody did it.”

“The Twenty-fifth uncovered a big rice cache in the Ashau today. A lotta zip bellies gonna be rumbling out there in the woods.”

“Yes, it’s my boy’s birthday tomorrow.”

“Has someone been watering the Scotch or did my tongue die?”

“As far as I can tell, the only way we’re ever going to get a leg up on this war is to give every damn gook his own two-bedroom ranch complete with nice shrubbery, a lawn, and a white picket fence.”