Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

His companion snorted.

The smiler kept smiling. It was an extraordinary smile, sharp-toothed and wolfish. He prowled back and forth, gracefully, stopping once to wipe sweat from Ollie’s forehead, once to inspect the fat at Tina’s stomach.

“These campers,” he said gently, “are in sore need of outdoor recreation.”

“Bullshit,” said the second man.

The first man chuckled.

“Pitiful, I concur.” He smiled and make a tsking noise. Stooping, he ran his hand along the surface of Tina’s stomach. Then suddenly he stopped smiling.

“My name,” he said, “is Ebenezer Keezer. This here gentleman is Nethro.” He paused to let these facts take shape. “So let’s everybody get acquainted. Real loud an’ happy. Say hi to my pal Nethro.”

“Hi,” we said.

“Loud, children.”

“Hi!” we shouted.

“Bullshit,” said Nethro. “Can’t hear nothin’.”

“Volume, people. Blow it out. On three—ready?”

On three we yelled, “Hi!”

Nethro shook his head. He was a large, unhappy man. “Fuckers forgot my name. They s’posed to say, Hi, there, Nethro.”

“Legitimate truth,” Ebenezer said. “Repeat them your name.”

“My name,” said Nethro, “is fuckin’ Nethro.”

“Again,” said Ebenezer.

He counted to three, and on three we shouted, “Hi, there, Nethro!”

Nethro seemed unimpressed.

“Nobody waved.”

“Beg your pardon?” said Ebenezer.

“Didn’t wave ,” Nethro said. “Not one wave in the whole bullshit crowd. My ego’s hurt.”

Ebenezer Keezer sighed. Carefully, he took off his beret, inspected it for dust, put it on again, then stepped up to Ned Rafferty and stared at him with an expression of solemn perplexity. His nose was a half inch from Rafferty’s forehead.

“A level answer,” he said softly. “You forget to wave?”

“I guess.”

“Oh, you guess,” Ebenezer purred, smiling again. “First day at camp an’ you don’ display no fundamental politeness. Where’s your salutations, shithead?”

“Sorry,” Rafferty said, and grinned.

“Oooo! Man’s sorry, Nethro.”

“I overheard.”

“Man claims sorryhood.”

Nethro shrugged and scuffed the toe of his boot against the courtyard tiles. He seemed genuinely aggrieved.

“Sorry don’ do it,” he said. “Don’ help the hurt none.”

“Shitheads,” said Ebenezer Keezer. “What they require, I submit, is politeness practice.”

“Let’s practice ’em,” said Nethro.

There was distress in the courtyard. Reality, I surmised, was passé. Here was a new dimension. Over the morning hours we engaged in supervised waving practice. “Hi, there!” we yelled, and we waved with both hands, vigorously. The courtesy was painful. I could feel it in my throat and shoulders. Nethro counted cadence, Ebenezer Keezer smiled and offered instruction in matters of form and posture, schooling us in the complexities of camp etiquette. It was a kind of basic training, clearly, but with numerous innovations. Standing there, waving, I recognized the diverse and intricate plenitude of a world on tilt.

At noon Ebenezer Keezer clapped his hands and said, “Recreation time, people. Fun an’ games.”

Single file, we marched through the courtyard and down a long grassy slope to the tennis courts. There were no rackets or balls. The game was called Fictitious Tennis, and the rules, I thought, were capricious. “Advantage, Shithead!” Ebenezer cried—“Quiet, please!”—and then we pantomimed the mechanics of serve and volley, rushing the net, backpedaling in pursuit of high phantom lobs. “Out!” Nethro would yell. Or he’d yell, “Let! Two serves!” There were no disputed calls. For me, at least, it was hard to maintain a keen competitive edge.

The match went five sets. An awards ceremony, a quick lunch, then we convened on the volleyball court.

“No net,” said Ebenezer.

“No problem,” said Nethro.

In the late afternoon they led us on a nature hike. The pace was brisk, mostly running, and by dusk, when we trooped into the villa’s courtyard, things had approached the point of shutdown.

We ate supper standing up.

Afterward we were escorted into a small lecture hall. The room was bare except for a podium and five metal chairs.

Ebenezer Keezer smiled at us.

“This concludes,” he said, “our first day at camp. I trust we’re all relaxed.”

His beret was gone. He wore a dark blue suit, a blue tie, a crisply starched white shirt with gold cuff links. His voice, too, had changed. There were no dropped consonants, no ghetto slurrings; it was the precise, polished voice of a corporate executive. Smoothly, referring now and then to notes, he outlined the program that lay ahead. He stressed its rigors. The idea, he said, was to stop a war, which would require certain skills, and certain qualities of a physical nature, among them stamina and strength and the capacity to resist hardship. “Resistance,” he declared, “entails resistance.” Then he discussed the particulars of Vietnam. It was a firsthand account, largely anecdotal. He talked about the effects of white phosphorus on human flesh. He talked about anatomy. He described the consequences of a foot coming into contact with the firing mechanism of a Bouncing Betty, the reds and whites, the greenish-gray color of a man’s testicles in bright sunlight. He smiled at this, and winked. He leaned forward against the podium, adjusting his tie, and spoke quietly about a morning in 1966 when his platoon of marines had gone on a buffalo hunt in Quang Ngai province, how they’d entered the village at dawn, and burned it, and how, afterward, with the village burning, they had moved out into a broad paddy where the buffalo were—big slow water buffalo, he said, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty—and how the platoon had lined up in a single rank, as if on a firing range, and how without hunger or provocation the platoon had gone buffalo hunting—like the Wild West, he said, like Buffalo fucking Bill—how they put their weapons on automatic, M-6os and M-16s, how it was slaughter without aim, just firing to fire, pistols, too, and M-79s, and grenades, and how those slow stupid water buffalo stood there and took it broadside, didn’t run, didn’t panic, just took it, how chunks of fat and meat seemed to explode off their hides—how the horns exploded, and the tails and heads—but those ignorant damned buffalo, he said, they took it, they didn’t make sound, and how there was the smell of a burning village and munitions and those buffalo that wouldn’t run or die, just took it. Ebenezer paused and shuffled his papers. “That’s the Nam,” he said softly, “and it’s unbecoming. I’ve seen my share of buffalo. And you folks—you nice folks have not seen shit. Understand me? You have not seen shit.” There was conviction in the room. There was also, I thought, anger. Ebenezer Keezer folded his hands and smiled and went on to discuss evil. He was specific about atrocity and saturation bombing. The war, he told us, was a buffalo hunt, and we would be wise to disabuse ourselves of romantic notions regarding the propriety of peaceful protest and petitions of grievance. We were soldiers, he said. Volunteers one and all. It was an army. “Like in wartime,” he said, and his smile was cool and pleasant. “When there’s evil, you learn to absorb it. You build up your resistance. This here’s buffalo country.”

He studied his notes, then nodded at Tina.

“Young lady,” he said, “front and center.”

Tina moved to the podium.

Deftly, with the tip of his thumb, Ebenezer lifted her yellow T-shirt. “Yummy,” he whispered. Tina’s stomach was conspicuous under the white fluorescent lighting. Fish-colored, it seemed, bloated and pale and slightly bluish. She wore a white bra. Her breasts, too, were large, but Ebenezer ignored them.