Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

I borrowed Arden’s car, an emerald Datsun with a comfortable defeated look despite the painted chrysanthemums growing out of the chrome strips on its doors. I never went out before dusk. The day couldn’t really begin until the light had died and all the edges were gone. Then the city became a terrarium. Electrical life scurried out into the open, the exotics of artificial illumination. I cruised around for a couple hours admiring the flora, then drifted up a ramp and out onto the petrified coils of the interstates. Destination was unimportant. What mattered was rapid movement between points, traversing vast distances, intersecting possibilities. Here the only distractions were the road, the night, the wind, and those large luminous green mileage and exit signs that come up into the headlamps as if lifted by the night’s pit crews.

The right foot presses into the accelerator.

The radio, glowing like a plastic saint on the dashboard, pumps out the beat and chatter of urban monsters gliding along out there beyond the highway. I hear the voices, the names, the sweet regret as one radio station fades into a penumbra of static from which another inevitably emerges. The night country howls past, the cities race across the windscreen like planets. Even the cells seem to understand they are engaged in extraordinary movement. Here is a chance to rhyme, to equal at last the incredible speed of things.

The foot rides the accelerator down to the floor.

The tires, working the road outside, pick up a rhythm from the radio, drum a rhythm onto the pavement, roll a rhythm through the body, lock a rhythm into the wheels of the head, and bam! blood explodes in the piston chambers, axles rotate along the spine, gears mesh, transmission achieved. Interstate consciousness. I could drive like this forever, swift and loose, senses drowned in a shriek, headlights boring holes in the void, because somewhere out here there must be a way home.

The minute the phone rang Major Holly knew who it was. The General had taken to calling every Tuesday morning at 1000. Today he wanted to harass him about Hamlet Evaluation figures.

“There’s no consistency here, Marty, we need some g. d. consistency.”

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t see it that way, sir.”

“Didn’t think you would. What about that Fifth NVA? Any new leads?”

“The most recent is a D reliability interview with a dispossessed grandfather. I believe I sent you a copy.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that. Well keep it cooking, Marty. The cost-benefit equation on this operation is already shot to shit.”

At lunch Major Holly was informed by the mail officer that Private Franklin had received two crates of revolutionary literature from Oakland, California. Home of the Black Panthers.

In the afternoon Captain Fry demanded that one of the crew chiefs be reduced a grade for giving him the finger as he taxied out on a highly important mission.

Major Quimby sent over a message saying he couldn’t possibly spare any of his men for unit guard duty, washing trucks, or any other quote yardwork unquote.

The First Sergeant reported that two of the cooks seemed to have gone AWOL.

The General called again.

The swivel on Holly’s chair broke.

“This place looks worse than a ghetto,” the CO informed the First Sergeant. “How’s that painting coming along?”

“About half. We’re waiting on another shipment of white.”

“Let’s get the torn sandbags on all the bunkers replaced. Look like hell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And First Sergeant.”

“Sir?”

“That sign out front. Didn’t I tell you to get it fixed?”

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

“Well, have it taken care of. 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT. Must be in the double or triple digits since what?—the colonel’s crash.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, count it up and get an accurate number up there. And change it daily! Let’s get some pride in this outfit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s go for the record, First Sergeant, let’s kick ass in the accident department.”

“Yes, sir.”

One night, returning from a latrine so filthy from use and lack of water—stools stuffed to the rims with wadded paper, globs of crap—he had had to breathe through his mouth, Griffin saw them in silhouette against the dark sky perched like monkeys along the peak of the roof, three men, their backs to him.

“See no evil, huh?”

One of them turned, looking down. “Come on up,” Trips invited.

Beside each hootch was a “bunker”—a section of corrugated sewer pipe buried in sandbags, the top reinforced with a piece of portable steel plating, the open ends protected by sandbag walls. Under the weight of his boots the weathered bags tore, crumbled apart. Sand slid hissing in the dark. From the top of the bunker Griffin stepped easily across onto the slanting tin roof, clambered up to the peak, and found himself a seat on one of the sodden bags that helped hold the roof on in tropical storms.

Off in the distance beyond the clustered lights of the base the smooth rock surface of night was split by—he paused to count—five magnesium flares, hung like lamps at various altitudes, each dangling on a parachute between a twisting coil of gray smoke and a cascade of sparks, artificial suns drifting down into extinction, their replacements bursting brightly into illumination further above, the whole show like a student’s model of genesis and apocalypse, planets spawning and dying in unbroken succession, a parody of eternity. From below a long red line of tracer fire arced back and forth like a sluggish windshield wiper. A second red line appeared, the two swung slowly toward each other, intersected with no perceptible effect, swung slowly away.

“Wire probe?” asked Griffin.

Trips shook his head. “Too far out. Looks like Deadman’s Curve again.”

“Yeah,” said Griffin. He knew about Deadman’s Curve. The unit had lost one jeep, a deuce and a half loaded with Mohawk parts and two drivers on that blind secluded section on the road to Da Nang. That was where he had seen the three bodies flung like highway litter into the concertina-choked ditch. VC, explained Sergeant Sherbert, ambushed in their ambush. Griffin ambushed by the spectacle of his first dead. And tomorrow looked like there’d be more trash in the ditches out there where three or four red lines joined occasionally now by spurts of green weaved about like colored hoses. Two flares burst simultaneously at similar heights, moved through the smoky sky like a great pair of dragon’s eyes. From where they sat the four on the roof could hear no sound except the low lawnmowerlike growl of the generators powering the installation through the night. The distant fire fight proceeded in eerie silence. It was like watching the electronic display of a fancy pinball machine on which all the bells and buzzers had been disconnected.

“God,” Griffin exclaimed, “it’s beautiful.”

Noll turned to look him full in the face, his features breaking languidly apart into a facsimile of a grin. Griffin could see the silver flare light reflected in his shiny eyes and teeth.

“Regular Fourth of July,” mumbled Trips, smoke streaming from his nostrils. He passed the weed along the roof top.

“Who’s the third who sits beside you?” Griffin asked.

“Who the hell does it look like?”

“Claypool?” said Griffin, leaning forward. “Is that you?”

There was no response. The figure sat motionless as a gargoyle, his knees drawn up under his chin.

“Why doesn’t he answer?”

“I’m not his goddamn mother.”

There were bursts of white in series along the ground, bright rapid explosions like a string of bulbs popping one after the other.