Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“What’s that?” asked Perkle.

“He’s laughing, shiteating gook is laughing at us. Now I know it’s that gook fairy. Gimme the fucking rifle.”

Anstin positioned his feet firmly, then suddenly stood erect, the M-16 swiveling from his hip in a wide cutting arc, rounds singing into the darkness, tapdancing on the dunes. When the magazine was emptied, he dropped to the ground. There was no return fire.

“What happened?”

“Think I got him.”

“Fancy shooting, Millard.”

Anstin peered out from his cover. “Yep,” he declared, “believe I got me one dandy kill.”

After exposing himself several more times with no response, Sergeant Anstin crawled out to the gook’s position. There was no body, no blood. Feeling around in the sand with his fingers, he found some expended cartridges, a couple empty magazines, and fragments of what appeared to be a dog tag chain and one article of jewelry, a gold beetle.

The sky was filled with moving helicopters. A banana-shaped Chinook hovered in place above the runway, its miniguns spewing metallic fire. A defensive line composed of 101st Airborne troops and a company of Green Berets had been set in place perpendicular to the air terminal. The Opponent would proceed no further. So The General had informed by phone the base commander.

This is my third Purple Heart, thought Chief Winkly, the blood still dribbling down the back of his throat. Lying there in the dark he couldn’t see how much he had lost, but the handful of towel pressed to the nostrils of what was certainly a broken nose seemed disturbingly damp. A natural healer he had seen on television once claimed that relaxation promoted the clotting process. Think about women. A crew of naked women with lighted hats and picks and shovels crawled through a grimy mine shaft, prying chunks of coal from the dank walls. Their sleek muscular bodies gleamed with sweat and black dust. The air rumbled. “What was that?” asked one of the officers. “Awful close,” answered another. Teams of naked women in helmets and shoulder pads hustled out onto the Astroturf. The ball was snapped. Jiggle, jiggle, bounce, bounce. Then somebody tossed a long bomb into the bunker and a giant hairy clam closed its lips over Winkly’s head and the chief was gone.

Wendell couldn’t believe his luck: Captain Raleigh and a genuine VC in black shorts locked in a lover’s clench on the gravel outside the O club and stabbing one another at intervals with long knives. Wendell circled them carefully, tracking the angry movement of arms and blades. He squatted in the shadows, attempting to backlight his protagonists against the bonfire consuming Chief Winkly’s hootch. Beautiful. Through the viewfinder Cain and Abel grappled in some bizarre biblical epic. The next instant Wendell was slammed to the ground, nose and mouth stuffed with grit. He tried to get up again but the only part of his body he could move was his left hand.

“Where’s my camera?” he screamed, spitting out dirt. “Where’s my damn camera?”

He didn’t know what had happened to him or to his actors.

“Help! Someone help me find my camera!”

It was Griffin exploring the landscape of this foreign planet who heard his cries.

“Who’s that?”

“Where’s my camera?”

“Oh Wendell.”

“Don’t touch me!”

“You need a tourniquet on these.”

“I need my camera. Over there somewhere.”

“I can’t see anything in this. Who are those two?”

“Extras. Please God, don’t let it be broken.”

“Something tore hell out of here, the ground’s still warm.”

“Need to be dragged, Grif… drag me into the light, please.”

“I found it.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, here I’m putting the camera into your hands, okay, got it? Okay, hold on, and I’ll get some help.”

“No! Too late… here, you’ve got to do it for me.”

“Do what?”

“Shoot, you mangy cocksucker, shoot me, shoot them, shoot the whole fucking compound. The War In Vietnam: The Final Hours, huh?”

“Wendell, you need help.”

“Yeah, finish the picture. I know you don’t like it, Grif, but here’s your chance. There’s no time for anything else, anyway. Here, socko ending.”

“Oh Wendell, I don’t know… I’m… I don’t know… I’m so fucked up.”

“Let’s not argue anymore.”

“Like this? Is this the trigger here? I look through this?”

“Honorary cinematographer.”

“Now what?”

“Focus on my head and begin, slow pan down my body, slow as you can go without shaking the lens, good, now move off the boots onto the road, down the road, let the rise of the ground lift the camera level, good, ease up onto the orderly room, now pan, pan, 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT, get it all now, the big flames, the busting wood, the jeep, get the overturned jeep, keep it coming now nice and easy, Winkly’s barbecue, okay, the flattened latrine, real good, the untouched O club and now back onto me, my head and out. Great. Welcome to the union. You just completed an astonishing 360 that will have ’em moaning in their seats. Okay, give me the camera. Now you can go for help.”

“Hold on, Wendell, I’ll be back in a second.”

“I’m never going to know how it comes out.”

“How what?”

Wendell’s hand was pawing at the side pocket of his fatigue pants. “My book.”

Griffin reached over and pulled out the dog-eared paper brick of Atlas Shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said. “Money saves the world.”

“Grif.”

“Yes, Wendell.”

“Thanks.”

Griffin put his hand into Wendell’s remaining good one and squeezed and got a squeeze in return. He was trying hard to manage the first emotion he’d felt in months when he realized he didn’t have to. He didn’t have to go for help either. Wendell’s hand still curled about his own, he stretched out beside him and looked into those huge open eyes, eyes now blank and motionless as camera lenses. The irises, he noticed, were green. Why had he never seen that before? Now he wanted to miss nothing. He leaned in closer. Yes, those were still Wendell’s eyes, that was Wendell’s face, but Wendell was gone. Something else occupied his spacesuit. In the cold surface of his eyes, flat and hard as those of a fish, all he could see were the frantic lights and shapes of the mad world around him and the dim reflection of himself peering into what he would be when he and this whole screaming planet had been sucked down into the bottomless pupils of those eyes and turned into stone forever. What had Wendell seen at that instant? What was he seeing now?

Shortly after the ground attack sirens had begun, Simon left his bunker and crawled into the cramped space under his hootch, a move that had saved his life. Now, huddled in the dark sand, he felt something against his leg, something alive, something sliding up his body. He didn’t even have to look or feel with his hand. Sergeant Mars’s interrogation aids had broken out of their cages. The pythons were loose in the compound.

The First Sergeant was having a lively night. Game plans, conference calls, brain storms, fire fights. Utilizing the major’s ridiculous tunnels, he shuttled between his office and the command bunker, rallying, mobilizing, dispatching, with the formalized nonchalance of a traffic cop at the apocalypse. Reports were good. The enemy was taking a beating on this one. After hand-holding sessions with the officers he went outside and renewed his combat infantryman’s badge. Aided by the CQ and five good men, he had managed to keep the orderly room from harm. No goddamn gook was going to ransack his files, squat on his desk, rifle his drawers. A rocket dropped in, killing instantly the man beside him and seriously wounding two others. He shook his head. He brushed the debris off his shoulders. First sergeants never die.