Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Don’t look at me!” shouted Sergeant Mars. “Fucking gook was looking at me.”

“Oh yes, sergeant, happy to cut off your head, number one trophy for mamasan.”

Sergeant Mars raised a threatening fist and Lieutenant Phan, in a mockery of fright, backed away into the corner, stumbled on a neglected bone, and fell on his butt. Even Claypool smiled. The session seemed to be nearing its end.

“All right, gentlemen,” announced Captain Raleigh. “I’m afraid we’ve got a bad connection here. Time for a conference call.”

Winking at Claypool, Lieutenant Phan spoke rapidly to his men. One of the policemen stood up and pulled a sheet of muddy canvas off a second field phone, which had been hidden behind a pair of upright fifty-gallon drums. Claypool couldn’t imagine what the drums were used for. The phone unit was dragged to the table and the Vietnamese policeman took his place at the crank. The second set of electrodes was attached to the prisoner’s lips by Captain Raleigh. “Okay,” he said, “on my command—four, three, two, one, now!”

There was the noise of several pencils being sharpened simultaneously. The prisoner’s body tightened against the straps. Claypool couldn’t watch. His own bones were being ground into points. He thought he had seen a thin wisp of blue smoke rising from the prisoner’s groin. The policeman cranked away as if anxious to drop a couple pounds by day’s end. A hundred miles later he stopped. The silence afterward reminded Claypool of those uneasy moments following a test of civil defense sirens. The prisoner’s screams must have been shattering. In the air there was a curious odor of spoiled cottage cheese.

Captain Raleigh seized handfuls of the prisoner’s wet hair, lifted the head off the table. “VC?” he shouted. “VC? VC? VC?” Spittle sprayed the prisoner’s pale face. For a moment the prisoner studied him, as if pausing to compose the proper reply, then the dull black eyes rolled back into the head and the body went limp.

“Is he dead?” asked Sergeant Mars.

Captain Raleigh felt for a pulse. “Hell no,” he answered. “These gooks are made of bamboo.”

“He must be NVA,” said Sergeant Mars, “or he would have confessed by now.”

“Well,” Captain Raleigh said, “let’s let the fucker dream about what’s gonna happen when he wakes up. You know what a good rest can do for a man.”

“Maybe the demons will fly out his ears,” said Lieutenant Phan.

Captain Raleigh turned to Claypool. “Learn anything, specialist?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He learned not to mess with Ma Bell,” commented Sergeant Mars.

“I think Charlie freak him out,” said Lieutenant Phan.

Claypool was relieved he hadn’t been expected to translate the prisoner’s responses. He hadn’t even understood those simple phrases. His ignorance frightened him. If you couldn’t translate they handed you a gun and pointed to the bush. Try interrogating a little return fire.

“Let’s break for chow,” said Captain Raleigh. “Lieutenant Phan and his thugs can have a go at the other one after lunch.”

“Very good,” said Lieutenant Phan, rubbing his hands together. “You Americans number ten in art of persuasion. Always so impatient.”

“Like it or leave it, Phan.”

“I think I wait and see.”

The mess hall was a haven of activity and light. Human bodies, human noises. Claypool could hear the clean sound of the surf in that company of voices. Standing in line he watched with affection as Sergeant Ramirez insulted his cooks. A week earlier, sweat stinging his eyes, Claypool had stood before a back sink arms plunged to ruddy elbows in a pool of pans and greasy water. That seemed like a holiday now. His stint as kitchen spy had been largely undistinguished, yielding only two items of hard intelligence on the Vietnamese help: 1) female nationals enjoyed joking about the size of PFC Noll’s nose; 2) neither sex would touch American hot dogs believing them actually to be boiled dog penises. Claypool carried his loaded tray to an empty table. There was no one in the room he knew. He sat down and examined his lunch: instant potatoes, creamed chicken, watery Jell-O, khaki-colored beans that appeared to have been carved from a bar of soap, and a square of chocolate cake coated with green frosting. The old gag: Why do you think they call it mess? The food resembled an unfinished painting, an action abstract in which the oils had not yet set; even as he watched shapes and colors began to change character, to flow, to blend. Chunks of chicken dissolved in the too yellow gravy sliding globules of fat down a mound of collapsing potato into the red Jell-O sea floating a flotilla of soggy beans. Everything moved toward the stability of mush. Claypool tried his fork. The food dripped between the tines. Everything was moving and then so was his stomach and he too up and out the door moving toward the latrine. This was going to be unpleasant. He hadn’t eaten all day. Dry heaves could really hurt.

an apple

a pomegranate

a squirting cucumber

a gypsy’s wolfbane

a pickled cactus under a pregnant moon

the trimmed hedge of a diabolical maze

the fungus in the basement

the rose between Groucho Marx’s teeth

the money tree in the backyard

a sprig of mint in the senator’s drink

a weary sunflower

a merry maypole

the carved pineapples on a fourposter bed

the dandelion on teacher’s desk

the orchid on a corporate breast in an air-conditioned box high above the Super Bowl

a morning glory on Bikini Island

the cherry tree George Washington chopped down

the cork in the bottle

the olive branch in a taloned claw

the mushroom Alice ate

the ivy spelling obscenities upon institution walls

the moss between the cracks

the yeast in the body politic

the wreath on a tomb

a pod from outer space

a hyacinth

a forget-me-not

an evergreen

In the cafeteria we were required to occupy the table nearest the door, standard operating procedure when dining out with Everett Triplett. The exit had to be close and unobstructed in case of an emergency. Trips had always been a sensitive. Atmospheric fluctuations most people chose to ignore could send him bolting for the street. And any room whose proportion of packed bodies per square foot approached that of a stockyard he simply refused to enter. He had a great fear of animal madness.

“You still owe me for the door,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“Hunting Nazis.”

His eyes were so bright all you could see in them were reflections.

“Yeah? How many did you find?”

“You’d be surprised.”

He unscrewed the cap from a saltshaker and dumped the contents onto the table. Wetting his finger, he pressed it into the salt, then with elaborate deliberation licked it neatly clean.

“That’s bad for the blood pressure,” I said.

“Maybe it’ll kill me, huh?”

It was lunch hour. The place was full of open mouths, talking, chewing. The room breathed an aroma the color of the walls, weak gravy brown, a fragrance that seemed to accompany every meal through all changes in menu. Cafeteria spoor. Salisbury steak monster. At the adjoining table a middle-aged couple (floral print dress, tan leisure suit) were pretending they did not see the unpleasantness they saw, a difficult pose requiring intense whispers, a furtive eyeball dance, distant looks of concentrated abstraction. Trips had not cut his hair since his discharge. It hung unsanitarily to his waist. He looked like a mobile willow.

“If that toothless fart peeks over here once more,” Trips declared in a loud voice, “I’ll tie his glasses in a pretzel he can eat.”