Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“The CO had six days left, can you believe that? Six days. His bags were already packed.”

“So what do the folks down at Graves Registration always say? If you can’t wrap it, bag it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they discovered he was just plain drunk. He usually started with a couple beers at lunch and by six-thirty he’s down to his underwear and singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’”

“Has anyone mentioned ailerons?” asked Trips. “Tricky parts, break down real easy like iffen they don’t get proper maintenance, if you know what I mean.”

“Quit it,” said Griffin.

“Paranoid humor,” said Simon.

“I feel funny.” Claypool appeared groggy, his bleared eyes veered unsteadily from side to side.

“More medicine,” Trips declared, handing him a joint. “If you don’t smoke this instantly to your knuckles and then pop the roach into your mouth you will lose all sensation below your waist for the rest of your life.”

There was a pause and the pause grew, lengthened into a space. The room went falling forever through endless voids.

Silence and laughter. Spontaneous giggles.

Stretches of time. Deserts. Hissing sand.

Griffin pointed solemnly to the floor. “Has anyone ever noticed that that knothole there looks exactly like a profile of Richard Nixon?”

Simon bent over to inspect. “My God, he’s right. Check the planks, men. Maybe there’s one in all the wood.”

A shell sailed sedately overhead; and Vegetable, apparently regarding its shrill whistle as his cue, began to recite in a newscaster’s drone: “Sergeant Jimmie Parker (above, center), a communications specialist with the 101st Airborne Division, happily counts a portion of the ten thousand dollars in cash he has just received from Reenlistment NCO Staff Sergeant Charles B. Norton (second from left) as a bonus after signing up for an additional six-year hitch. Sergeant Parker plans to buy a new car when he completes his present Vietnam tour.”

“Wind him up and hear him speak,” said Trips.

The door at the other end of the hootch opened, banged shut. Tense glances were exchanged. Grass and tobacco smoke rose tall-stalked from unmoving hands, a garden of streaming light. Footsteps, heavy and slow. An inner door opened and closed. A light came on. A radio. More steps, shuffling. Bedsprings. Sound of one boot dropping to floor. “The blue bus is calling us,” sang the radio, “the blue bus is calling us.”

“Alexander,” said Griffin. “He had guard duty.”

“We’re pretty edgy tonight,” commented Trips.

“Word is Sergeant Anstin’s out on a headhunt.”

“Well, fuck him with a hot mortar tube.”

“The U.S. Command announced today the loss of three more jets in the latest bombing raids over North Vietnam. This brings the figure of downed aircraft to seventeen for the week. Dead total two hundred seventy-eight Americans, three hundred forty-six Vietnamese, and four thousand five hundred eighty-two NVA and Viet Cong.”

“Has anyone ever bothered adding up those numbers,” said Simon. “We must have wiped out the entire population of North Vietnam at least twice over by now.”

“You can’t be too careful,” commented Griffin.

“I heard there’s a bald E-6 somewhere in an air-conditioned closet deep in MACV with a slide rule and a collection of dried hen bones who turns that stuff out every week.”

“My lips are numb.”

“It’s all a grotesque hoax,” declared Trips, “concocted for economic purposes. There is no war, there is no Vietnam. We’re sitting inside a secret sound stage somewhere in southern Arizona.”

“Yeah,” said Simon, “right next to the studio where they faked the moon landing.”

Buds of perspiration had blossomed on Claypool’s forehead. His left leg bounced up and down nervously on the ball of his foot.

“Members of a Twenty-fifth Division recon unit were surprised yesterday on patrol when they encountered a full-grown tiger less than twenty yards from their bivouac site. PFC Henry Butwinski who first heard the animal’s growl and then shot the four-hundred-pound cat says the skin will make a fine rug for the division’s orderly room.”

“A tiger?”

“Remember when they bombed the elephants in the valley and Wurlitzer flew over later taking pictures and crying all over his viewfinder.”

“Not people, elephants.”

“People and elephants.”

“I think I’m going to have to leave.”

“Wonder if anyone ever picked up the ivory.”

“Vietnamese ones aren’t the kind with ivory.”

“All elephants have ivory.”

“Well, you can be sure that if there was any ivory someone got it.”

“Maybe there were guns inside.”

“Guns?”

“Sure, the dinks could have hollowed out the tusks, fit machine guns inside.”

“Tear gas canisters in their trunks.”

“Those Indian rajahs used to paste jewels on them. To bully the lower castes.”

“That’s what I’d like to know, where are the jewels. The jewels and the women. What do you think I came over here for? What good is a war without pillage and plunder? Where’s our share? The only women around here are these smelly dog-faced hootch maids and they sure as shit don’t wear any jewels. Where the fuck are my jewels?”

“Look in your pants.”

“There was that elephant in the movies, what’s his name, who knew how to fly.”

“Dumbo.”

“He had to hold a magical cap in his trunk to get off the ground.”

“No, no, it was a feather. His friend, the mouse, sat in the cap on his head and whispered instructions in his ear.”

“Wow, what if they got a gook mouse to fly an elephant around and snap recon pictures of us.”

“They could train hundreds of gook mice to pilot them in, bomb the compound with pachyderm pies. Dusty gray squadrons spread out in V-formation.”

“Ears flapping like giant bat wings.”

“Evil baby eyes inflamed.”

“Trunks thrashing.”

“Triangular mouths spilling drool.”

“Then they all swoop in at once like this mammoth wrinkled hand pressing down and down, closer and closer. The intimacy is frightening. Dirty yellow toenails. Wispy belly hairs infested with black ticks.”

“Dung-clotted tails.”

“Hot peanut breath.”

“The shock of the weight, the consciousness of collapse, the infinite agony of an unendurable mass.”

“Weather for today: continued clear and sunny. Highs in the mid to upper nineties.”

The Kid leaped from his seat, knocking over the water can, and darted to the door. “Let me out of here, please,” he said. His fingers scrabbled ineffectually at the lock, twitching like galvanized worms. The bolt was already retracted. “How do you.” Simon stood and pulled the door open and The Kid tore down the corridor, crashed through the hootch door and out into the rain and the night.

“Bye,” called Trips.

“Oh boy,” said Simon, reaching out for the wall, “have you people got a surprise when you stand up.”

Trips tossed a lighted match through the open doorway, watched its yellow ribbony afterimage hang for an instant in the air. “I wouldn’t want to be in junior’s path the next time the sirens go off. But he’ll be back tomorrow night begging for more. That boy’s a head if I ever saw one.”

“I’ve got to go to bed,” said Simon, “if I can find my bed, if I can go. Goodnight, gentlemen. See you on campus.”

Simon was gone.

“I thought they’d never leave,” said Trips. He unbuttoned his left shirt pocket and produced a metallic film canister. “Home brew,” he explained, pouring some into a rolling paper. “I’m gonna fix you a nightcap you won’t forget.”

“I’m getting better and better at forgetting,” warned Griffin.