Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

The sound of impacting rounds moved gradually away. The giant stomped off toward the runway. Griffin waited a moment, then crawled out from under the bench. Framed in the chapel doorway down a dark corridor of sand between the hootches the hangar was in flames and miniature black figures scurried back and forth in front of the light. Shouts and screams were muffled, sounds from beneath a heavy blanket. Incredible corollas of orange and white bloomed at random across his eyes. Then the sirens changed pitch and rhythm, began making noises Griffin had never heard before. The signal for ground attack? He stood transfixed in the doorway. Every sudden explosion of sound and color ignited a dazzling rush through his body. His insides sparkled. The air burned, the floor vibrated. He felt close to orgasm. Something flew out of the sky, thumped against the chapel wall. He bent down and saw a combat boot that had miraculously landed upright. He peeked inside. It still contained a foot. The top of the stump bubbled and heaved like a volcano about to erupt. So. He supposed he would need a weapon. Fear was in him somewhere but dimly heard, a screaming voice trapped behind double panes of glass. He waited for a lull in the downpour, then lowered his head and sprinted out umbrellaless into the storm. Behind him in the abandoned chapel a voice patiently explained, “Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul.”

Captain Fry’s replacement, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant from Honolulu, raced to the revetments, buckled himself in, and was taxiing down the flight ramp when a mortar round fell into his right wing. The cockpit exploded and melted around him. In an amazing display of accuracy the mortars leapfrogged down the flight line, leaving behind in each sandbag and steel revetment a crackling pyre of aeronautical rubbish.

Wendell stood in the tunnel outside the command bunker, beating on the door with his fist. No one was answering. This infuriating plank of reinforced wood was barring him from the dramatic climax to a great motion picture. The missing footage, the bunker documentation. Tense counsels, questioning eyes, bare bulbs burning above huddled heads, dust shaking down onto the map tables, the chirr of field phones, the cackle of the radio, furrowed faces watered with sweat, assessments, decisions, arguments, the tracing of stress patterns, the deterioration of poses, panic, delirium, death. He was missing it all! Furious, he began kicking at the door with a booted foot. “Hey!” he shouted, “c’mon, open up, I know you’re in there.” But no one answered. No one seemed to be at home.

The sand was blue, the hootches were huge and black as boulders. Griffin slipped and staggered on. His sunglasses fell off. The plummeting shriek of a whistle made him pause and look up. The darkness opened on a blast of light that tossed him against a wall. He lay on the ground, arms crossed over his head, chuckling quietly as hot metal clattered down onto nearby rooftops. He patted his body. The shoulder was sore but he had sprung no leaks. Of course, he had on his magic field jacket. Tonight nothing could harm him. A small dark shape crept out from beneath the nearest hootch. It was a dog, one of several unnamed mongrels who had appeared in the compound since the famous “canine incident.” The animal crawled slowly toward him, whimpering softly. Its skinny body trembled under Griffin’s hand. “Hey,” he whispered, stroking the bony chest, “it’s okay.” From a radio left on in someone’s room a female country singer was whining nasally about bourbon, Bob, and bouncing beds. Another whistle forced him to cover his head. Lightning cracked behind his eyes. He heard someone screaming in a nearby bunker. The dog looked at him. He scratched its neck. He tried to hug the animal closer to him and muttered in disgust. The dog had peed on him. He felt around the animal’s flank. Without warning his fingers slid through fur and skin, were plunged knuckle-deep into wet warm darkness. No wonder the dog had seemed to calm under his comforting. Globs of sticky jellylike things squeezed forward, surrounding his hand. He lifted the gilded hand into the light, then wiped his fingers across both his cheeks. The dog looked at him. Good-bye dog, he said silently. He got up and stumbled across the road. An officer’s hootch had received a direct hit. There were splintered chunks of wood and twisted roof tin scattered about a smoking crater. It was like an explosion in a barbecue. Portions of the product were everywhere. He almost stepped on a pale unattached hand. He saw a hairless blackened head lying on the ground like an abandoned bowling ball. He didn’t want to examine too closely, he was afraid he might recognize the owner. Up on the hill a crowd had gathered around the window of the arms room. “Number!” demanded the squeaky voice of Potter, the clerk, “No number, no weapon.” “I’ll show you a number,” yelled someone and the cluster of men surged forward to mangled cries and the sound of objects hitting wood. Rifles and loaded magazines began flying out the window. The crowd toppled to the ground, fighting for weapons. “Goddamn that Holly, goddamn him!” Griffin waited until the tangle of limbs and barrels had unknotted. He found an M-16 in the weeds. Flares were popping now in the black sky over the perimeter where ground fire could be heard like gravel rattling down a chute. Was everyone deploying his weapons in the proper sequence? He clutched the rifle in his hands and looked about in bewilderment. He was supposed to have been assigned a defensive position in the event of a night like this but Sergeant Sherbert, his group leader, never showed up for their only drill months ago. Griffin stood there watching the shadows start to come alive.

Trips had broken into Wendell’s room easily enough by knocking the door off its hinges and once inside had opened the footlocker with a firm precise blow from his entrenching tool, but he couldn’t get into the metal clothes locker, the hasp was too strong, the bolts too tight, proof that this was where Wendell kept his jewels, the gems he had been bringing in from Thailand to finance his first civilian picture. He pushed the locker onto its side and began jumping up and down on it. The door started to bulge. All he needed was a space big enough for his arm.

Lieutenant Tremble ushered his terrified band of Remington rangers out to the cover of a guard bunker on the road between the orderly room and the motor pool. Of course, the bunker was abandoned. “The coward who deserted this post,” vowed Lieutenant Tremble, “will find himself tomorrow in a world of hurt.” An overloaded jeep ground up the hill from the burning garage, seats piled high with silent, bareheaded soldiers, several men flung spreadeagled across the hood, and sideswiped the bunker and gunned away, its lights off, its horn stuck in a relentless howl of inanimate pain. Some live rounds banged into the metal roof above Lieutenant Tremble’s head. He checked his pulse. His own men were huddled there shoulder to shoulder behind an untrustworthy wall of moldering sandbags, their rifles clattering awkwardly together, “watch where you’re pointing, shithead,” helmets either too big or too small, clips jammed in backward, their round eyes peering out at the pluming flames and an impossibly hostile confusion and Lieutenant Tremble had a vision: if the commies ever do hit the beaches of California, here is a preview of what to expect—clumsy panic in a defensive position around the parking lot of fast-food Burgerama. “Hey,” whispered Sergeant Maloney, touching his sleeve. Apelike shapes were slinking down the dark road. Then, for one amazing moment, there were no thoughts, there were no fears. Lieutenant Tremble simply propped a rifle against his cheek, aimed, and fired. The nearest shape slumped to earth like a puppet with severed strings. He aimed, he fired again. Score two. My God, he was good at this. He was really good.