Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Inside, three men sat quietly beneath an ultraviolet hum. No one spoke. The skin on their hands and faces seemed rich and dark, deeply textured, the exotic tan of an alien star. The walls, sealed in sheets of plastic against the gray damp months of tropical storm, were glowing like the inside of a picture tube. It was a small room not much larger than a prison cell. There were no chairs. An upended ammunition crate served as a table. Out of the top of an empty Coke can leaned four sticks of smoldering incense, the frail strands of perfumed smoke winding slowly upward among rafters of decayed wood where the rats sometimes crawled and the black light buzzed tonelessly on. The rain banged against the corrugated tin roof like lead pellets.

Crouched on the edge of his bed, Griffin gazed intensely into the pure steady eye of a candle planted in its own tallow at his feet. Beads of hot wax slipped silently to the floor, hardened into tight red clots. He was admiring the cool beauty which rested along the blue-edged curve of its flame. He saw himself, hammer and piton, scaling the slopes of that fire toward the orange air of its wispy peak. He was the hero of heady expeditions bound for the secret temples of ice, the subterranean courts of vanished gods. Pinned flat against a glacial wall by the whip of searing mists, he watched helplessly as his best guide tumbled screaming into icy chasm, arms flailing, body twisting and rolling, the insignificant speck of his white face dying out like a spark. The ropes dangled down empty into darkness. And, leaning curiously creviceward, Griffin’s mind detached itself from whatever it is minds cling to and also dropped, a happy plummet, to crash in an explosion of warm color that tickled the groin and lit up the brain.

“What are you looking so goofy for?” asked Simon. “This stuff ain’t that good.”

“I’m standing on my head,” replied Griffin. “I’m turning somersaults.”

“Yeah? My head hurts.” Impatiently, he shifted his weight on the footlocker where he sat. “My pants are wet.”

“I’m bouncing against the ceiling. You look like a tiny person.”

Simon began tapping his foot on the floor. He held a hand out in front of his eyes, studied the palm for a long moment, then turned it over and examined the back.

A voice, sharp and clear, whispered his name in Griffin’s ear. He turned. There was no one there and he had to laugh. The dog, Thai, a crossbreed of MP German shepherd and Asian mongrel, looked up at him from under the bed through shiny black olive eyes. The dog yawned.

“What time is it?” asked Simon.

Griffin pulled up his sleeve to display a bare wrist. “I don’t know. I think someone stole my watch.”

“Oh God,” said Simon wearily.

The wind rattled the plastic, the rain ran in quick streams off the roof, splashed noisily onto the sand outside. Simon stretched out his arms, let them fall heavily against his thighs. He sighed. He studied his hand again. “Lieutenant Kline put in for a transfer to the infantry,” he said.

“Wonderful.”

“Says he’s bored, says he’d rather run around the woods ducking gook bullets than sit on his hemorrhoids reading Batman comic books.”

“Kline is not well.”

“Major Brand laughed in his face, said the unit was under strength and every swinging dick was needed just in case quote the balloon should go up unquote. So Kline stands there wheezing, says, ‘Well sir, then with your permission I guess I’ll just go back to my room and jack off.’”

“Funny little Kline.”

“I don’t know. He wants to play soldier, they should let him. What should we care? We got lieutenants falling out our crack.”

The room trembled as an artillery round screeched directly above them to detonate harmlessly in an uninhabited patch of foliage miles away.

“Damn it,” Simon muttered. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

Griffin nodded.

“Seven months and I still jump like that. Jesus Christ, it’s either the goddamn shells or the sirens or the prisoners screaming. I don’t think I’ve gotten used to anything. I mean even dogs start salivating after two or three bells, right? Seven months and it’s like I just stepped off the goddamn plane.”

“Cringing is healthy,” declared Griffin, turning away at last from the world of the flame. “I want to be a champion cringer.”

“Some night I know, one of those short rounds is gonna drop right in here on top of us, right down our fucking skulls. We’ll just be sitting here laughing and blowing weed and zap! A bad fuse, bad casing, I bet there’s a hundred things could go wrong. Manufacturer’s error. What do these companies care? Government contracts. You could paint string yellow and sell it to the army for gold chain.”

“Alex told me a buddy of his in Basic had his sixteen explode on the range. Tore a ugly hole through his cheek.”

“You know how it is. They got these gigantic factories with rows and rows of little old ladies in brown sweaters and bifocals screwing rifles together. Cataracts. Arthritis. They spill cookie crumbs inside.”

“The unspoken scandal of American industry.”

“You know the Lockheed guy was up here tonight examining the wreckage and he comes back and says the plane is a flying death trap and you couldn’t pay him to climb into one. The fucking Lockheed guy.”

“I guess the trick must be to keep clear of moving parts.”

“There it is.”

Griffin had personally witnessed the crash, a spectacular failure of moving parts. He had seen them after dinner, just before sunset, strolling casually onto the flight ramp in that characteristic chimpanzee like slouch of pilots cinched into ejection harnesses, helmets in hand, seat buckles slapping against their thighs, pistols jiggling on their hips, the CO confident, expansive, detailing the company’s operations to the other man’s attentive ear. Strapped into the cockpit, the bulbous window hatches fastened, propellers fanning up a misty wind, they trundled across the slick black runway, rooster tails of blown water spraying from the wheels. Quickly the plane gathered speed, lifted ponderously as a loaded transport before dropping back, almost unwillingly, landing gear squealing, then lifted again like a flat pebble skipping off a lake as the low rhythmic thrum of the engines drastically changed pitch, unreeling into a frantic shriek of steel under torque and still battling to sustain each desperate inch of altitude banked on a long aching arc down into a foul marsh not five hundred feet off the end of the asphalt and exited behind a mushrooming ball of ignited fuel as Griffin, under a rubber poncho, stood nonchalantly urinating against a revetment wall in the rain.

“I certainly hope the next CO knows how to speak English,” said Simon. “The colonel jabbered like an immigrant. I was lucky to catch every other sentence.”

“I think all our officers should speak in vague semiintelligible East European accents,” replied Griffin.

“We’d probably end up invading Poland.”

“Ah, but gently. The good guy’s blitzkrieg. Silencers on our rifles, rubber tips on the bayonets, mufflers on the bombs, contraceptives taped to all our dicks. Nice. Calder could decorate the tanks.”

“In my last letter home I wrote my mother that if one had to go to a war you were the ideal person to go to a war with. You have an agreeable peasant’s sense of the dumb incongruity in things.”

“What does that mean?”

“Who knows? My mother liked it. She believes that if you surround yourself with good company you’re sure to be protected from harm.”

“Isn’t there already a deterrent against that: the laser-guided good company cluster bomb unit?”

“I’ll tell her in my next letter. I enjoy taking Mom up, dropping her down. She doesn’t know anything. She thought Vietnam was an island someplace off the coast of India. She won’t look at a newspaper.”