Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Turn that damn thing off!”

“‘Up lad: sunlit pallets never thrive.’”

“Wonderful.”

“‘Clay lies still but blood’s a rover.’”

“What is that, goddamn Kipling? Goddamn Housman?”

“‘Breath’s a ware that will not keep.’”

“Goddamn Mother Goose.”

On a shelf behind Griffin’s head between a pile of unread science fiction paperbacks and a stack of tape cassettes stood an open bag of rolled joints. The radio played on, a chart-busting love song about dunes, moons, and orgasms. Seated in the center of his bunk, Griffin set about doing some serious smoking. Trips never slept. He napped; up all night on dope and verbal inspiration, he spent much of his duty day sprawled across a desk in Flight Operations where Sergeant Perkle had given up badgering him about production. Sergeants still bothered Griffin, he was expected to rest, he was expected to work, in the proper sequences, at the proper times. “Isn’t there someone who’d appreciate hearing from you today?” asked the radio. “Take a moment and write that letter home.” A pleasant confusion settled over him and his head became music and light, music and sleep.

When Griffin awoke, hours later, the rain had stopped, the air smelled of lunch, the radio was silent. Outside he could hear Vegetable talking to Thai. “You’re a good ole puss, ain’t ya, hon, give Daddy a kiss, c’mon puss dog, please c’mere.” Between the wooden slats of his wall the visible sky resembled the color of cement. A sandbag atop Trips’s hootch had burst open overnight, spilling its contents like wet brown flour across the corrugated tin. No leaves yet on the TV antennas. For reasons unknown every roof had one even though there wasn’t a single set in the entire compound and the nearest broadcasting station was out of reach in Da Nang. Griffin liked to suppose the army, in a typically misguided outburst of lunatic generosity, had erected them as props, morale aids. Hamburgers, incoming, and TV. All the comforts of home.

Griffin got out of bed and still in his green underwear staggered down the short corridor to the back porch where he slumped into a sagging deck chair. He rubbed his eyes, pulling the skin of his cheeks downward so the bottom lids turned out, red and pulpy as a movie monster’s. There wasn’t anyone around to frighten. The hootches stared back with the shabby dispossessed look of a Depression-era Hooverville. Griffin stuck his hand inside his shorts, jiggled his balls like a pair of dice. Already there was something wrong. The roundness of the day had an imperfection, a bruise. It wasn’t the dream, that now familiar uneasiness, this was something new. Then he remembered. Today was the start of his botany lessons. He wished he could stay home, have his mother write a note.

The door at the other end of the hootch creaked open.

“I’m back here,” Griffin called.

Someone came down the corridor. It was Simon.

“What’s for lunch?” Griffin asked.

“Baked canteen covers, sautéed malaria pills, and that disgusting chocolate cake you like with the purple frosting.”

“Yum, yum.”

“Look at me,” said Simon, spreading his arms dramatically.

“I’m looking.”

“The paint, damnit. I’ve got fucking paint all over my fatigues.”

“And now you can’t go to the prom.”

“Jesus, you people who work nights. I’m there every day right in the middle of it.”

“Sounds like the action’s getting a bit heavy at the front.”

“Now he doesn’t want to see any spots on our fatigues. That was the word he used, spots. So the other day Hagen comes in from the motor pool with grease stains on his back pocket and the CO goes crazy and rips the whole damn thing off. So today he says he wants the whole orderly room painted.”

“I thought Uncle Sam did that a couple months ago.”

“He did, but the CO doesn’t like the color and he says there’s a hole in his wall he wants covered. Says it stares at him.”

“He’s seeing that stuff already?”

“And we’ve got to do it ourselves because Uncle Sam’s still out there working on the stage for Bob Hope.”

“I hope all those singers and dancers have insurance.”

“So we’re supposed to paint whenever we get a chance, in between typing out memos on haircuts and shoeshines and rinsing out the coffee urn.”

“Intense cross fire.”

“The Board’s got to come down, too.”

“No.”

“Anarchistic ornament. Top made a notation on his clipboard.”

“When was this?”

“Who knows. You were probably asleep. He and Top toured the hootches together. He came through here like Queen Victoria visiting a leper colony.”

“But The Big Board’s a work of folk art.”

“Subversive junk.”

“So the colonel said. The late colonel.”

“Hey…” Simon leaned backward into the corridor, checked both entrances. “Don’t even joke.”

“Well, I’m pissed. Think of all the man-hours spent leafing through newspapers and magazines, the calluses on my scissors hand. Look at the one I found yesterday, up there near the top.”

Simon stepped back to see.

The back wall of the hootch, protected by the screened porch, was covered with a monstrous collage of news clippings, paperback book covers, army manual pages, C-ration boxes, record albums, letters, photographs, and food labels from cans and boxes sent from home. There was no one in charge of The Board, no one to arbitrate questions of form, harmony, and taste. Any member of the 1069th with an item he considered suitable was free to paste it up himself using the jar of glue that could usually be found kicking about the porch floor. The cutting and pasting had been in progress for years now and though rain and humidity had managed to bleach out most of the earlier contributions or caused them to peel off limp and faded as dead skin, fresh clippings went up often enough so that the board continued to renew itself like some exotic snake. Griffin had proposed that when the war ended The Board be preserved under a coat of liquid plastic and left to the patient scrutiny of the North Vietnamese. What would they make of these inscrutable Occidentals? There would be much to ponder: presidents and penises, officers and orifices, history as an illustrated stroke book, from the ancient mamasan in conical hat and black latex to last year’s Playmate of the Year from whose glossy pink ass a stick of five-hundred-pound bombs dropped onto a football field mined with pizzas where one team marked AFL rushed another team marked NLF for possession of the oversized head of Mickey Mouse decapitated by the blades of a Cobra helicopter streaming rockets into the U.S. Capitol dome that was a beanie on the head of Ho Chi Minh. In the upper right where pigs grazed on the White House lawn under a rain of pubic bushes cut into the shape of hydrogen bombs and Jesus with golden halo and folded hands lay on his side in a pile of charred Asian dead from which rose the Statue of Liberty who was taking it stoically in the rear from Pham Van Dong’s dong, Griffin had pasted his latest addition atop the handle of freedom’s torch. The photograph, clipped from the front page of Captain Patch’s Chicago Tribune, showed the President shaking hands with a Marine corporal about whose neck he had just placed the Congressional Medal of Honor. The President was smiling. The boyish corporal was smiling. The parents were smiling. The mother clutched a handkerchief. But the senator who represented the soldier’s home state had been caught by the camera in mid-yawn or mid-laugh with eyes rolled comically upward and mouth stopped in a huge black O.

Simon laughed. “It looks like the Vice President just stuck a thumb up his ass.”

“We need a picture of the CO, stick his head in here somewhere. That’s probably why he got so upset, he couldn’t find himself with the rest of the gang.”