Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

But there wasn’t any cocaine in Asia. Was there? Didn’t those trees grow in Colombia?

“Buck a vial. How many you want?”

“I don’t think so,” said Griffin, still staring, still wondering. “Looks a little too potent for me.”

“Hey, your choice.” The PFC bowed. “No sweat.” He held up the first two fingers of his right hand in a V. “Here, a complimentary sample.” He offered the vial.

“No, really,” said Griffin.

“Hey, I understand.” He crossed his fingers, kissed them, crossed his chest. “Don’t worry, don’t worry ’bout nothing.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Catch you later, huh?” His high unsettling laughter followed Griffin down the hill and onto the road. When Griffin turned around to look, the PFC, all teeth and hair now, flashed him another V sign.

A jeep pulled up beside Griffin.

“Need a lift, soldier?”

It was Ellis, the CO’s driver. Griffin climbed in.

“Who’s your friend?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he is.”

“Hundred and first?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t go near any of them. They’re all demented.”

“No worse than the rest of us. So what are you doing over here anyway, hiding out?”

“Oh, I just dropped Hollyhock off at the terminal. The General’s holding another one of his seances in Da Nang. Figured I’d take the opportunity to get some air. Driving this character around is like sitting in a john with your mother. Told me on the way over I should rent out the insides of my ears for truck gardens.”

“Witty fellow, isn’t he?”

“Look, I gotta get out of here. I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. I haven’t been feeling well either. I think I’ve got scurvy or beriberi, some kind of tropical disease. Gonna see the doc this afternoon, beg for a confinement to quarters, anything for a rest, or I’m going out of here wrapped in wet sheets.”

The jeep slid down the mushy road, past the motionless old man, through the gate, under the eye of a tracking camera, the orderly room, 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT, the barber shop, the basketball court, around the mess hall, the smoldering gray dunes of the dump, wisps of smoke rising like torn tissue paper from the decay where an old man stooped over a stick poked impatiently at the garbage, and down into the motor pool.

“Was that Wendell on the roof of the photo lab?” Ellis asked.

“I didn’t see a thing. Let me out here.”

Griffin climbed the hill behind the chapel and peeked around the corner. In a moment Wendell would probably be running down into the motor pool with a bottle of dye wanting to pose him as a corpse under the wheels of a deuce and a half. He sneaked around the officers mess where he could hear someone favorably comparing combat casualties to traffic accident victims. Joe the barber stood there, his ear to the wall. When he saw Griffin he grinned, bobbed his head up and down like a mechanical toy. Vegetable was stomping through the puddles on the basketball court, showering Thai and himself with water. Short Time Suzi sat on the steps of Trips’s hootch, polishing boots, her bag of pharmaceutical wares between her knobby feet. Sergeant Mars, a towel around his waist, stepped to his door and spat into the sand. Someone was singing off-key “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town.” A Mohawk roared in overhead, buzzing the compound. Franklin’s knife went thud into a wall. Outside the Spook House Conrad lifted his Gustav, pretended to spray a laughing trio of Green Berets. Sergeant Anstin put his hand on Griffin’s shoulder. “You don’t mess with that dope, do you, son?” His eyes were turquoise marbles, splintered glass that had been hit with a hammer hard enough to crack but not destroy. “No, Sarge, of course I don’t.” “That’s right, I know, I know you’re one of the good boys.” Lieutenant Phan rushed out of the interrogation section, looked at the backs of his hands, rushed back in. In the latrine the toilets were overflowing again and “George,” the Vietnamese attendant, was hosing down the floor. A used rubber lay in the bottom of the urinal like a dead fish. Along Officers Row there wasn’t a sound. The doors and windows were all tightly closed. Sagebrush ghost town. Griffin climbed creaking steps, cautiously pushed open the door to Mueller’s room. The lieutenant, stripped to his shorts, was stretched out on the white sheets of his bunk leisurely absorbing ultraviolet rays from the sunlamp nailed to the wall above him. One eye squinted open.

“Don’t explain,” said Griffin. “You heard me coming and knew I needed a good laugh.”

Mueller sat up, flicked off the lamp. “No way I can go home without a tan. I’d be laughed off the beach.”

“At least that lamp keeps your room dry. I feel like I’ve been sleeping in a mushroom cellar.”

“I always suspected you had a secret stash. Those astonished eyes. The surgeon’s studied composure.”

“I had one of those snow dreams again.”

“Don’t worry about it. You get to escape for a few hours. Exotic adventures, novel climes. What are you complaining about? I lie down and see SAM missiles and the ground rushing at me like a big lime pie. Awake I suffer from daymares. Now where the hell is it?” His arm rooted around under the bed, came up with a book he waggled in Griffin’s face. “You ever read this?”

Griffin shook his head.

“Curl your hair. Listen, fact: January nineteen nineteen, Paris, Nguyen Ai Quoc, a twenty-nine-year-old ex-mess boy, former pastry cook for Escoffier, and Parisian photo retoucher, believing that Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not in fact a practical joke on a naïve world, attempts to see the great man with a list of eight points for his own small country. Naturally he is shown instead to the door. Who was that man?”

“The Lone Ranger?” guessed Griffin.

“Ho Chi Minh, yes, wandering the corridors of Versailles in a bowler hat and a rented tux, for God’s sake. Between all those mirrors. An infinity of yellow interlopers. Did you know that, you with your rich American education for God’s sake?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Or in nineteen forty-three and four his guerrilla operations for the OSS?”

“No.”

“Or in forty-six offering Ben-Gurion Hanoi as the site of an Israeli government-in-exile?”

“No.”

“Or his final petition to the government of Washington and Jefferson for help against European tyranny?”

“No, but look, what does it…”

“Or the A-bomb business, Dulles offering the French the use of a couple nukes, just the tiny ones you understand, enough fireworks to frighten the Viet Minh to the peace table, having noted, of course, a couple years earlier, the encouraging effect these weapons have on the little colored people of the world, did you know about that, does anybody know about that?”

“No.”

“I’m still tracking this line down, just sent another list of books to my mother yesterday, thank God she lives in Berkeley.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? You sound like a whiny freshman. So we can know what’s going on why. So we’re not political zombies why. So we can begin seizing the controls why. You seen my latest addendum to the unit history? Here, have a copy.”

“But why torture yourself? I mean, we’re already here. Ferreting out obscure facts ain’t gonna help us now because this whole grand pageant of idiocy simply condenses down to you and me trying to make it through another day. You’ve got to be the only fool on this entire damn peninsula who beats himself over the head with these political horror stories. Me, I can barely get through a comic book.”

“Well, I have a separate speech on that topic, ‘Apathy or Paranoia: How to Know the Difference,’ but I just remembered I’m not even supposed to be talking to you, I’m supposed to be informing you that if you have any questions or problems regarding the military and your role in it you may visit me in my office during posted duty hours or arrange for an appointment.”