Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Then Claypool was standing with the rest of the company in a ruined corn field surrounded by dead stalks. His eyes were blinking. The sunlight was dazzling. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Johnson was drinking from his canteen when his face froze, his mouth opened, and blood came pouring down his chin, soaking into his shirt. He laughed at Claypool. “Kool-Aid,” he said and took another swallow. Claypool couldn’t stop blinking. Then, instead of precipitation, the sky brought helicopters and after everyone’s jaws and backs and legs had been loaded on, Lieutenant Davis helped Claypool aboard saying, “Guess we really didn’t need you after all,” as the helicopter sprang upward from the revolving ground piled high with green mountains Claypool stared at for some time before realizing that the snow on their peaks was only clouds. Then the door gunner leaned over and, shouting above the engine noise, offered Claypool a hundred bucks for the camera around his neck. His girl had been begging him for months, she wanted to see some photographs of what it was really like.

In any other war Wendell Payne would have been instantly recognizable as the goldbrick with the thick money belt (easy loans to close friends at special interest), the one with the cap on backward catcher-style and the pile of chips and bills spreading beneath the hand holding the flush and the suspiciously uncanny luck. In this war he was making a movie.

“Okay, listen up!” Wendell shouted through a battery-powered loudspeaker. “I want all the Americans over here on this side of the bunker,” pointing the broken half of a meter stick he handled like a riding crop, “and all you VC out there in the field.”

He cracked the stick against the rim of the loudspeaker.

“VCs, be generous with the camouflage paint. I don’t want to see any white skin.”

He slapped the stick against his thigh.

“Are we ready? Hell for leather now. I want controlled insane hysteria.”

Crack.

“Go ahead, people, laugh your heads off, you want to laugh, I’ll shoot laughing, if all you want to give me today is a field of laughing painted people I’ll take that, I’ll use it, must be something I can do with it.”

Slap.

“Let’s go, let’s go, another hour and all the good light is gone.”

Crack.

Today Wendell was staging a minor ground attack upon the unit compound. Lying on his stomach on the floor of the guard tower, his assistant Vegetable holding his legs, he wanted to shoot from directly overhead as his VC stormed the bunker below. He envisioned the clash of bodies as a ripple, a repulse, a sweep, and a release, a collision of line, a resolution of tension. He wanted grace and beauty of movement, he wanted to see a spring flower open and quietly close. He wanted choreography, a dance of death.

“Action!” he screamed, hanging out into space over his viewfinder.

Motion and light poured through the lens, the black chamber, the speeding film, and stopped against the backs of his eyes. “Chinese fire drill,” he muttered, already mentally editing today’s incoherency into harmonious design. He’d probably be up all night.

This movie was the latest and certainly most obsessive in a series of projects that had, to the displeasure of several superiors, diverted Payne’s energies so thoroughly he could rarely be found on the set of the real war. In fact, the war and Wendell’s duties pertaining to it seemed to be at best props, at worst temporary hindrances to his continuous unfolding delight in the toylike mechanisms of his own mind. Wendell often gave the impression of having wandered onto the wrong bus somewhere, and, finding himself uniformed in Southeast Asia, had hardly paused to express annoyance before carrying on with his life much as he would have in another time, another place. To Captain DeLong, his section chief, Wendell was just one of the loose wheels occasionally thrown off by the Green Machine as it lumbered through the soggy unmapped waste of this unfortunate war.

His first project, begun only days after his arrival, had been the creation of the famous all-star rodent circus, a warren of cages constructed from pilfered wire and ammunition crates and stocked with dozens of unsavory-looking black rats he trained to fight for sport and gambling or to run through mazes equipped with no-no panels of flattened C-ration cans connected to jeep batteries. The show was forced to strike its tent one night when a starlite scope in the perimeter tower detected movement in the wire and bunkers were alerted, machine guns manned. The flares sputtering overhead turned the VC shadow into a frozen Wendell, crouched in surprise, a trap in each hand. On the wall of his room now hung a black-bordered photograph of him emptying a sack of poisoned little bodies into a Dempsey Dumpster.

His second project was made possible by “borrowing” electronic parts from the signal shop where he ostensibly worked. Cages, rat ring, and maze were soon replaced by colored wire, tubes, transistors, circuit boards, instrument panels all soldered together until the crammed room resembled a cockpit to the moon. At night people gathered on the floor while Wendell plugged in some plugs, switched on some switches, and tubes glowed, lights blinked, as a series of unearthly sounds escaped from huge stereo speakers placed at intervals about the walls—mercury dripping from a faucet, galactic winds, ball bearings rolling across the floor of a vacuum—a sort of sonic doodling. Fans were entranced for hours, Wendell’s Thing, they called it. This was also the period when Wendell himself began to be known everywhere as weird.

Then he got his camera, lost interest in his Thing, and suddenly wherever Colonel Dauer went there was Wendell hunched behind a lens. The War In Vietnam, he called it, Leadership In Action. How he had managed to convince the CO, a notably saturnine man, of the pleasures of cinéma vérité was a mystery no one understood. There had always been rumors of a book, a little black book in which were recorded certain violations flagrant and minor of military regs concerning blackmarket activity, illegal equipment use, doctored files, et cetera, et cetera, complete with dates, times, names of witnesses, but there was an apocryphal black book in every unit and as far as anyone could determine only one genuine Wendell in all MACV. When questioned about his Svengali-like power over immediate superiors, Wendell’s reply was, “I took a lot of crystal in LA back in ’sixty-seven.” No one knew what that meant. The unit’s response to these Delphic utterances, to Wendell himself, was a curious confusion of wonder and discomfort similar to the emotion once inspired by the village idiot. Kraft believed he was a genius. “He’s not a serious person,” said Simon. The problem was that Wendell’s edges remained perpetually, maddeningly out of focus: brilliant or dull? sincere or deluded? talent or fraud? Another edge: as a sound engineer prior to his induction Wendell Payne had helped mix the Are You Experienced? album, an achievement regarded by most of the enlisted men as being equal to successfully managing a presidential campaign. He certainly seemed to possess the electronics knowledge and he had amazing tales of Hendrix, lost, rapt, fingers dancing on wires into paradise—but who could know, who could be sure?

Meanwhile, Wendell was having an exhilarating time. As the colonel’s official photographer he occupied a cozy position warmed by the artificial light of bureaucratic power. Temporarily freed from the tedium of routine duty he lived like the colonel himself, traveling about I Corps in guarded comfort, dining in country-club splendor, making influential friends among the field grades, a heady style spiced by that journalistic sense of being on the inside, in the know, privy to information mortals didn’t have, and then too, to have all this high life strangely negated by the very act, filming, which had given access to it, so that at the same moment Wendell was luxuriating in his luck he could also take delight in the fact that he was and always would be a hopeless outsider.