Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“You’ll have one by God,” someone threatened.

“Who let him out?” asked another.

“Payne in the ass.”

“Yes,” said Wendell, “yes, yes. Could you guys over there,” he called, pointing, “try to look a little more horrified. Somebody died in here after all.”

Under Wendell’s eccentric direction the thick light flowed like a blob of mercury over the scene, coating rubble and spectators in a momentary brilliance, unable apparently to choose or find an object suitable for focusing.

Someone ran by, shouting, “They got an officer, too,” and at once the crowd moved swiftly away toward Officer’s Row.

“Wait a minute,” called Wendell. “Hey, wait a minute, I’m not finished here yet.”

“Shoot for the moon,” somebody yelled, dropping his shorts as he bounded off.

“Do you think it could be Captain Fry?” asked Simon.

They turned a corner.

“No such luck,” replied Griffin.

A jeep and a field ambulance were parked beside Captain Patch’s hootch. Half the structure had collapsed. There were pieces of wood and metal strewn up and down the dirt road from the officers club to the main gate. Griffin reached down, picked up a chunk small and heavy as a meteorite. It was still warm. Wearing only his green underwear, Captain Patch came staggering backward out the open doorway, gripping one end of a long loaded bag. At the other end came Lieutenant Hand, grunting. They worked their way carefully down the wooden steps, the crowd silently clearing an aisle to the rear of the ambulance. The bag was lifted inside, the metal doors clanged shut. Captain Patch, barefoot, still in his underwear, continued on down the road without a word or glance to anyone, down toward the darkened O club. Lieutenant Hand settled back against the hood of the jeep, pulled a green handkerchief from his back pocket, and blew his nose.

“Who was it?” Griffin asked.

He looked at Griffin for a moment, then looked away. “Lieutenant Kline,” he said, looking back at Griffin angrily, then staring off across the road. “There’s a door on the roof of the photo lab,” he said, his voice casual, even, so that at first Griffin thought he was merely remarking upon some sort of architectural oddity, rarely noticed, hardly worth the comment until Griffin himself looked and saw the door undamaged and intact lying on a slant across the tin roof where the blast had put it down.

Kline was one of the operations officers, one of Private Trips’s nominal superiors, an obsessive gin rummy player, a man with a high nervous laugh like the psycho killer in a bad movie. His men called him Peaches. He hadn’t yet begun to shave.

The engine coughed, the ambulance drove away.

Lieutenant Hand looked down into his handkerchief.

The mortars were still for the remainder of the night. Griffin lay on his bunk, fully clothed, watching the darkness until the spaces between the wall planks turned pewter, and then, even before the CQ came through shrilling the morning whistle, he went out into the cool gray dawn, a white mist lifting over the field of weeds behind the unit’s guard tower, to look at the rubble in natural light. The changes were only subtle ones. The sand appeared ashen, the shattered lengths of jutting wood metallic. The wreckage was totally anonymous. Not a boot nor a locker nor a bed frame. Griffin stood there, patiently, expectant. At first it was like inspecting a construction site. Then it was like pausing before the Sphinx and he knew that if and when this hootch was ever rebuilt there would always be a hole here—fatal rounds tearing thought like rocks through tissue paper. He felt a weakening, collapsing sensation as if all his nerves had retreated into their burrows and suddenly he was exhausted, tired enough finally to sleep. On the way back to room and bed he stopped in the latrine, watched his piss arc steaming out of him into the corroded trough. He looked at himself in the stained mirror, saw eyes looking back through eyes, and vision was just a pair of hard black dots like nothing, like targets. The feel of the sink, cold as stone beneath his hands, brought him back. He turned on the faucet. Nothing happened. There was no water, he had forgotten. He glanced again at the mirror. His face was thinning out. He was beginning to look like an Indian. When he left the latrine he remembered to exit by the other door, walk around back by the empty water bladder lying flat and black in the musty sand like a dead slug, under the guard tower with Cross leaning out calling hey, what time is it? Can I come down yet? Hey, hey, and up between the cooks and the mechanics then a right turn back to the weathered door that opened into the closet-sized space that was his room and the unmade bed he had littered with sand lying on it all night in his boots. It was the long way around but today, this morning at least, he preferred a different route home.

Wurlitzer had been thinking about it for some time now. If you extended your tour, volunteered to spend another six months in Nam, you got a thirty-day leave to any place in the Free World and the army provided or paid for the transportation—They had to!—and your thirty days didn’t even start until the moment you set foot on your destination. There was this sergeant in the 131st who pored over maps for months and finally found this little bitty island off the coast of Africa, see, and the only way to get there was into Nairobi where you had to change planes, fly to this minuscule dirt strip deep in the heart of darkness, transfer to elephant caravan across mountains and bush country until you got to this virtually uninhabited trading post that ran a leaky motorboat out to the island maybe every two weeks. Took a month and a half to get to this hole. Month and a half back. That’s three months just traveling and it’s all good time! Some guys went to Sweden for thirty days of blond pussy, some never came back. But for the truly discriminating traveler there was only one spot for relief from the miseries of global handball: the diamond clarity and saffron mystery of Katmandu.

A procession of blue-skinned monks in orange robes filed down stairs of stone, a yak’s butter lamp in each hand, the tinkle tinkle of tiny bells echoing through a vast and cold emptiness.

And there was dynamite dope virtually lying in heaps all over the place.

Daydreaming again, Wurlitzer hopped into a jeep for a quick trip to the PX to buy a bag of M&Ms. Outside the gate he felt a bump and discovered he had run over the old man. The beggar was dead on arrival at the 92nd Evac. His bowl was cracked in half.

“What can I say?” said Wurlitzer.

Accident, said the MPs. Stupid gook, sitting like that beside a major thoroughfare, don’t he got any brains at all?

Plastic

no need soil

no need water

no need light

no need air

got no roots

got no seed

got no insects

got no disease

Styrofoam earth

alcohol rain

chip my paint

staple my brain

weather don’t matter

seasons stay away

bloom forever

a perfect green day

Plastic

“Not the London Fog in the hat, the whitewall head behind him.”

“Behind what?”

“At the light now, the one beside the purple dress.”

“Gimme the binoculars.”

We were up on the roof of an apartment building, leaning across the warm tiles. I focused down the length of the block, elbows propped among the pigeon droppings.

“That’s him,” Trips whispered fiercely. “That’s The Man.”

“I can’t believe the dog.”

“Penance.”

“A Yorkie?”

“He’s got a shitload of karma to mine.”

“But this guy has a moustache.”