Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Ho ho, the seven of clubs. Griffin!”

In the back room Griffin’s petitioning eyes rolled ceilingward. “Yes, chief.” He was alone in his counting house, counting defunct nipa palm, acre after blighted acre of leafless trunks like dandelion stems gone yellow to white and dispersed by the wind. Except that these breezes sowed no seeds.

“Get in here! You ever see what a pig’s dick looks like?”

“No, chief.”

“About time you did. Get in here.”

The card, erect in a stubby fist, greeted Griffin rounding the corner to Winkly’s loud, “You see that?” pointing a dirty fingernail. “It curls up into a corkscrew like the tail.”

“How do you know it isn’t?”

“Isn’t what? Curled?”

“Isn’t the tail. It looks like a real pig’s tail to me.”

“So tell me the last time you saw a pig’s tail.”

“Her face is green.”

“Of course it’s green. What color do you think your face would be sucking on a pig’s dick?”

“I like the eight of hearts. The snake must have been drugged.”

Winkly shuffled rapidly, raised a second card in smirking anticipation.

“Good God,” Griffin exclaimed. “Don’t tell me that turns you on.”

“Griffin, my boy, I don’t have a choice. If you could pull back the top of my head and peep inside all you’d see would be little pussies.”

“With that crowd up there how can you possibly concentrate on your game?”

“I can’t, that’s why I want to talk to you. There’s been a change in mission plans.”

“Again?”

“Now hold on before you get your balls in an uproar. This guy with the Americal called who he and I go back a long way, Dix in ’fifty-nine, and he’s gonna be in Saigon then, too, so I’m flying down on the twenty-third before he flies back to the field and you fly down and meet me on the twenty-sixth only two days later than we planned. Not disappointed are you?”

“Of course not.”

“I figured your pecker would keep and all the girls’ll still be there, walking stiff-legged with cock burn maybe, but still there. Got your bag packed yet?”

Griffin cupped a hand over his groin. “Roger, it’s packed.”

“That’s affirm,” whooped Winkly, slapping Griffin on the butt. “We’re gonna have a great time, you and I, a real grunt time.” His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “You’re not gonna bring any of that stuff you people smoke, are you? I’d hate to see what the captain would do to the both of us if you got caught.”

“What stuff is that, chief?”

“Roger,” Winkly replied, “over and out.”

Griffin returned to his palms, temples throbbing like the sides of a bell.

For the next sixteen days Griffin was unable to pass Winkly’s desk without undergoing similar interrogations that left him feeling like an erotic immigrant. He began to arrive late for work, hoping the chief was already gone. Instead, he’d be greeted by “Hey stud, watcha doing, getting in some practice sessions before the trip?” Drawn through time his carefully composed smile turned brittle, had begun to crack when Winkly, sunglassed and cologned, departed at last for the open legs of Saigon. Griffin went limp with relief. He seemed to have just been expelled from the musty interior of a dirty joke that had no punch line. For two days even the office was not unpleasant. He toyed with phoning the chief, sorry, sudden onset, bones ache, skin burns, asshole leaks, maintenance required, can’t be helped, things happen, another time, huh? But seven days without Winkly were also seven days with bleeding trees, sore eyes, stiff muscles, the dead stink of warm film, the same faces, the same complaints, the same ugly hootches, the same stand, the same sky, the same sameness. The entire area occupied by the 1069th Military Intelligence Unit was no larger than one fair-sized city block. Griffin hadn’t set foot outside this area except to visit the PX, a dull warehouse well within the protective confines of the base, and to accompany Sergeant Sherbert on that disturbing jeep trip to Da Nang, the memory already clouded with a sort of perverse cheer which said, now I have seen that, now I can put that behind me. He needed to get out again. The signs were everywhere. He had started to enjoy abusive arguments, he couldn’t sufficiently concentrate to read a comic book, he yawned a lot. Childhood claustrophobia had returned. When he slept, the walls moved so after he got up everything was smaller. This must be what a convict feels, he imagined, with his cell, his daily work space, the shuffle to chow and back again, the slow turns around a sandy yard, and outside, beyond the wire and guard towers, the hostile population that kept you locked in. Saigon would be a temporary parole, in the custody of a difficult probation officer to be sure, but at least an outing, a change, a chance to breathe. Trips’s favorite joke wasn’t so funny anymore. Sensory evidence provided no clues to contradict his theory that they had not in fact left the United States at all but were simply prisoners in a bizarre behavioral study somewhere in Utah. Except for a few KPs, a couple latrine attendants, and a handful of maids, everyone around was quite American, speaking American, eating American, driving American, reading American, rocking American, the sky itself crisscrossed dense as grandma’s knitting with American aircraft and American telephone poles and American wire. The difference of Saigon might allow him to believe he had been somewhere.

“You’ll be sorry,” Trips warned.

“The chief said he’d loan me one of his rubbers,” replied Griffin.

So on the scheduled day Major Holly’s driver, Ellis, drove Griffin to the air terminal. He was fizzing with news.

“The CO’s sending me home,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Seems like I’ve got this here weird skin disease now, they don’t know what it is, see.” He lifted his hands into the air. The jeep veered toward the ditch. “I’ve got to wear these here gloves. The steering wheel hurts my fingers.”

“Yeah, is this contagious?”

“They don’t know that either, but I’m sure hoping. Don’t see why it shouldn’t be, and let me tell you, if it is you’ll have to pay to touch me. I think I can make enough to buy a new car when I get home.”

“Well, good luck, Ellis.”

“Thanks, I scratch it every chance I get.”

Inside the terminal, a huge metal shed stuck next to a runway of portable steel plating, Griffin was informed he had been bumped by a lieutenant colonel on emergency leave. “I don’t know,” said the Air Force sergeant behind the counter. “I think one of his warehouses in New Jersey just burned down. Afraid there’s nothing till six tomorrow morning.”

“Fine,” said Griffin. “Wake me.”

He spent the night curled up on the concrete floor, his AWOL bag for a pillow, dreaming of his mother washing windows, a stone mansion of a hundred windows, gray and brown streaks across the glass, the water in the bucket turning ink black and even when all the windows had been washed no one could see in or out.

At five-thirty the Air Force sergeant tapped him on the top of the head. “Our turbo prop service to Da Nang is now loading at gate three.”

On the plane Griffin was the only passenger below the rank of E-7. He knew he was out of place, he should have been on the ground, slogging with his peers through the grass and the mud. He sat beside a pale grim major in dress uniform whose briefcase looked inappropriate without being handcuffed to his wrist. There were a pair of captains who resembled twins, a lieutenant wearing love beads, and various other bars and stripes he barely glanced at. No one spoke to anyone else. Two minutes after take-off Griffin was sound asleep again.