I Am the River Page 12

  “Some, I guess. Depends.”

  Chapel smiled, looked off into the complete black of night, and blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Then he recited:

  “We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,

  We build the house where we may rest,

  And then, at moments, suddenly,

  We look up to the great wide sky,

  Inquiring wherefore we were born…

  For earnest or for jest?”

  Chapel returned his gaze to the fire.

  “I think I know that one,” Broussard said.

  “Do you, now?” Chapel said.

  Broussard reached back into his memory to freshman-year English, all that poetry that none of the other boys liked, but he secretly did. Some of it, anyway. He had to read in front of the class, in that northern school, and kids snickered at his accent. He only heard his own voice passing across his ears, not the words moving through his brain, but some of it lingered long enough to be folded up and stored away. He never spoke the same way again after that first day. No Yankee was going to hold anything over him. They were all the same anyway.

  “Yeah,” Broussard said. “Barrett Browning, right? Elizabeth. That ‘sow the glebe’ thing stuck with me. Had kind of a ‘Jabberwocky’ feel.”

  “Do you remember the ending?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Shame. It’s the best part,” Chapel said.

  Broussard waited for him to continue, possibly recite the ending of the poem, or give him something to tell the other men, but Chapel offered nothing more, staring into the wizard’s fire and digging into the coals with that glowing tip of iron as the roots gathered up closer around him.

  Broussard walked back to his hooch while the rest of the men finished their chow, buried their trash, and prepped for sleep. He tumbled the verses over in his mind, but forget the words each time he did. He didn’t tell the others that he’d tried to talk to Chapel, and had gotten nowhere. That would add to the discontent, and they were all too far out into the wilderness to start whispering—or shouting—about mutiny. Scared minds need a scapegoat, and if the men decided to hang the hooves on Chapel, with only Morganfield in his corner, things could go south in a hurry, for all of them.

  In the camp clearing, carved out from the grass and tangle of soaked plants, Darby was lying on his back in the mud, looking up into the patch of darkened sky through a break in the forest canopy. “I think I’m just going to sleep outside tonight,” he said.

  “You’ll wake up bones when them ants get to you,” Render said, pounding in a stake for his hooch with the back of his Ka-Bar.

  “Bugs don’t like me,” Darby said. “I’m too mean.”

  “Shit,” Render said with a chuckle. “You sweet as canned milk, white boy.”

  McNulty squatted in his stained skivvies, a mirror in his hand, examining his pudgy body and peeling off leeches with the blade of his knife, then burning them with his Zippo. “I got leeches in places I didn’t even know I had skin.”

  “Better watch out that they don’t crawl up inside your peckerwood, peckerwood,” Render said.

  McNulty paled. “They can do that?”

  “Don’t worry, Chicago,” Darby said, his eyes closed, “They don’t grow leeches that small.”

  The other men laughed. McNulty threw a charred leech at Darby.

  Medrano was scratching his skin maniacally, leaving red, irritated patches. “Something’s been biting me all day. Bunch of things. Driving me crazy.”

  “Everything bites out here,” Render said.

  “Different country, same jungle,” Broussard said.

  “Same war, too,” Render said.

  “I don’t even know what war we’re fighting now,” McNulty said with a grimace as he pulled off an exceptionally long leech. “They didn’t tell us any of this shit in boot camp.”

  “They don’t tell boots shit,” Render said, “just what they need to know to kill, kill, kill, right? Ooh-rah and all the good Marine bullshit? Nah, man… Nah. They want to keep us dumb, dying young and full of cum with stars in our eyes, you dig? We fighting the war the big bosses tell us to fight. That Chapel’s just another one of them big bosses. Star Spangled Banner playing a bugle out his ass.”

  “He ain’t like that,” Broussard said.

  Render shot him a look. “Man, how do you know?”

  Broussard pressed the toe of his boot into the mud, making repeated geometric shapes. “I just do.”

  “Fuck them big bosses, okay?” Darby said, catching a shooting star arcing across the sky. “I’m fightin’ for y’all.”

  “You just fightin’ to fight, with your crazy ass,” Render said. “My daddy always told me that white folk can’t get enough of war. Can’t get enough. Genocide, homicide, land grabbin’…”

  “I am who I am,” Darby said, scratching at a rash under his armpit. “A monkey with a club.”

  Medrano chuckled. “Albino monkey.”

  “We can’t all be born perfectly brown, amigo,” Darby said. “Like a roasted turkey.”

  “Our big boss might not know what war we’re fighting, either,” Render said, glancing over to Chapel’s fig tree and the tent now set up where he sat over his fire. No light glowed from inside, like on most nights. He was either asleep, listening in the dark, or gone.

  Broussard looked at Render, noticing the nervous way his fingers were pinching and fidgeting.

  “We gon fight until we told not to fight no more, and we get sent stateside, either sittin’ in a chair or lyin’ in a box,” Darby said.

  “You need to stop saying shit like that,” McNulty said.

  “I’m just pontificatin’ the truth, my Union brother,” Darby said. “Believe it or not. The world gon keep spinnin’ either way.”

  McNulty angrily pulled up his pants and threw on his shirt. “That negative shit ain’t good for nothin’.”

  The men sat in uneasy quiet. The air was hot and damp, the jungle oppressively silent, seeming to crowd in close around the camp. Like those roots around Chapel. Tricks and ruses.

  “You think we make it out of here?” Medrano said.

  “Shiiit,” Render said, laughing.

  “Why wouldn’t we?” Broussard said. The other men looked at him, including Darby, who was sitting up, the entire back part of his body covered in mud. “I don’t think we’re here to fight,” he continued, “Humping these boxes in a small group, traipsin’ around God knows where. Did you see what was in those choppers? What kind of fighting are we doing with cable and boxes? Without artillery or air support? Chapel got something else in mind.”

  “Yeah, but what?” Medrano said.

  Broussard shrugged.

  “Maybe we bait,” Render said.

  “Why would we go to so much trouble to be bait in a whole different country?” Broussard said. “Vietnam’s full of it. The whole south.”

  “Maybe we’re a sacrifice,” McNulty said quietly.

  “Now there’s a dark thought.” Darby smiled. “Didn’t think you had it in you, Chicago.”

  “Maybe the moon smashes into the earth tomorrow,” Broussard said. “We keep our heads up, do shit right, and we get out of here. All of us. Doesn’t matter what the mission is. We ain’t here to give orders. We here to take them, and then get the hell out of this place.”

  “Look who’s the good soldier now,” Render said, disgust twisting his face. Broussard ignored him.

  “But what are we supposed to do?” Medrano said. “No one’s telling us shit, and there’s no one to ask out here. Feels like a fucking setup.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Render said. “Something don’t feel right.” He stood and paced, his hands working faster, twitching and gesturing unconsciously. “Man, I hate this shit. All of it. Don’t none of us belong out here, all by ourselves, without supporting fire, resupply, chain of command. None of us need to be out here.”

  “Chapel does,” Broussard said, looking over at the man’s hooch buried
within the roots of the tree.

  “He don’t neither,” Render said. “He don’t belong, you dig? Ain’t none of us belong here. We outsiders. We in their back yard, like a bunch of stray dogs, and they’re getting the shotgun after us.”

  “Everyone hates it, man,” McNulty said. “Not knowing shit. You’re not the only one, so stop acting like you always are.”

  “Hate it?” Render said. “This ain’t some inconvenience, white boy. This out here is just life for us. Being told what to do without a reason why. Treated like we not important or worthy of any fucking explanation for nothing’. Hating got nothing to do with it.”

  “Like I said,” McNulty added, not offering anything more.

  “Oh come on, man,” Render said, his voice raising. “I mean, come the fuck on. It’s different for you chucks. Everything is, no matter where you go, getting that prince treatment, so don’t start speaking like you know how it for us, for me and Crayfish.”

  “Here we go again,” McNulty said, rolling his eyes.

  “I’m telling you because you need to know. Broussard know. Shit, even Medrano know.”

  “Yep, I know,” Medrano said, combing his hair, blotches of iodine making a stained patchwork on his skin.

  “It’s different for us,” Render said, deflating, sitting on the ground. “It’ll always be different. No matter where we are.” He roughly wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

  McNulty shook his head and ducked into his hooch. “It’s pointless talking to you about anything.”

  Broussard looked at Darby, who was oddly quiet, sitting cross-legged and rubbing a thin, almost invisible layer of mud over every inch of exposed skin, staring out into the total blackness of the jungle around them. “What about you, Darby?”

  “What about what?”

  “I don’t know,” Broussard said, wishing he had a fire of his own, like Chapel did before he doused it without sharing. “About any of it.”

  “I love it out here,” Darby said.

  Render sniffed. “What?”

  “I love it.”

  “Love it?” McNulty said from inside his hooch. “Man, you fucking crazy.”

  “Yeah, that’s some jive-ass bullshit right there.” Render laughed. “Ain’t nobody who’s been here loves it out here.”

  “No, I mean it. I really do love it.” Darby’s voice sounded dreamy, almost childlike as he rubbed his hands over his skin, covering his cheap tattoos and scars with the reddish brown mud that created a protective layer against every biting thing in the wilderness that surrounded them.

  Render gritted his teeth, a “pssshhh” escaping between them and waved him away.

  “What do you love about it?” Broussard asked. He was genuinely curious.

  Darby held up his arms, stretching them wide. “The freedom, man. The goddamn freedom of it all. Can’t you feel it?”

  “That’s some pie-in-the-sky bullshit. No one’s free out here, motherfucker,” Render said, standing up and getting heated. What right did some down-south white boy have to talk about freedom? Freedom for who? “No one,” Render said. “On either side. Any side.”

  “No, but we are,” Darby said. “All of us are, you just don’t realize it. Don’t remember it.”

  “The fuck?” Render was beyond incredulous. “Hey Cray, you hearin’ this?”

  “Out here,” Darby continued, “We’re human beings as we was supposed to be. Wanderin’ the land, fightin’, fuckin’, killin’ each other to survive. That’s freedom, brother. That’s the freedom of the cave that we left behind and been tryin’ to find ever since.”

  “I ain’t your brother, chuck,” Render said.

  “Yes, you is. We all brothers. We don’t remember that neither.”

  Render said nothing, sitting down hard on the ground and staring into the dim lantern that provided the only light in the clearing, tears once again rimming his eyes. Broussard watched Render, worried about him, as Darby continued.

  “This is my third tour,” he said, completely covered in mud now. “I finished my first, and after I got back home, I signed up again. Second time, they sent me home, callin’ me ‘emotionally unfit’ or some such college-boy garbage. Tried to enlist after that, and got rejected. So I took my cousin’s ID—he looks a lot like me, you know—and signed up as him, just before he got drafted anyway. Did both of us a favor. Heck, I should be lance corporal, not a private. But I don’t care none. I’m just a soldier.”

  “What’s your cousin’s name?” McNulty asked, his head sticking out of his hooch now.

  “Tom Darby.”

  “So, Tim and Tom Darby?” Render said. “And y’all look like twins?”

  “Dang close.”

  Render nudged Broussard’s leg. “Ay, I ain’t gonna say nothin’ about keepin’ it in the family, okay?”

  Darby just shrugged, the mud starting to dry and lighten, cracking when he moved. “They wouldn’t allow me to be here, them powers that be, but I had to come back. I need it. I need to be here. I get real restless when I ain’t.”

  “Pendejo!”

  Everyone looked at Medrano, who dumped his coffee onto the ground. “I could be home with my family, with my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, and they send me back here every time. And you, they don’t even want you, and you cheat to get sent back over here?”

  “Don’t be sore, Jorge,” Darby said. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.”

  “That’s some fucking güero bullshit, man.” Medrano stalked off away from the clearing. “Bullshit!”

  “He’s gonna get into them leeches out there,” McNulty said.

  “Didn’t mean to make him sore,” Darby said, watching Medrano go. “Got nothin’ to do with him.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Broussard said. “Just misses home.”

  “I get that, I guess,” Darby said. “I try to, anyway. But I don’t miss home. Nothin’ there for me to miss. Job in the textile mill, I guess. Maybe do some farm work, scoop horseshit or some such. But when I got home, the last time, hell every time, I looked around, and the buildings and stores and the people and even the trees—everything looked faded out. Drained of color like an old shirt that been washed too many times. Trees even. Ain’t that somethin’? The trees back home didn’t look green no more. They looked gray. Everything looked gray.” Darby looked out into the night, sending his mind back home, to the trees of his youth, trying to conjure them up lush and emerald out of the gray. A pair of bloodshot white eyeballs looking out through a layer of dried mud. “Everything’s green here.”

  Leaves whispered at the edge of the jungle. Quick feet disturbed the underbrush. The men scrambled for their rifles.

  “It’s me,” Morganfield whispered, walking briskly into the clearing. “Let’s move.”

  “Where’re we going?” Broussard said.

  “Top of the ridgeline,” Morganfield said, checking his sidearm.

  “Why?” McNulty said, standing outside of his hooch.

  “Chapel’s there,” Morganfield said. “He’s seen it.”

  “Seen what? Gookers?”

  He was gone, back into the jungle. The men looked at each other, then hopped to their feet, grabbing their rifles, ammo, and gear, pulling on helmets and boonie hats and leaving their packs behind. McNulty was shaking, muttering a prayer under his breath. Darby laughed as he got up, pulling on his fatigues over the dirt covering his skin.

  25. Burn Then the River Down

  The men clambered through the undergrowth after Morganfield, breathing hard and sweating under their hastily assembled gear, following his disappearing trail through the jungle, the ground rising in a sharp incline.

  The thick crush of vegetation broke and the men found themselves on a wide grassy rim that sloped down into a gentle open valley, lit blue-bright by a full moon. Away from the jungle, heading up into the mountains, massive blocks of granite were stacked and clustered like the ruins of a toy castle, foam bricks scattered by a brat god in a fit o
f rage or boredom.

  On the far side of the valley were two nearly identical mountain peaks that might have been a singular edifice at some point in some forgotten epoch, before the patient wear of water cut a V between them, cleaving one giant child of the earth into begrudging twins. What remained of this tributary was a gentle river that now flowed between them, creating the valley and moving on to the south of the country without a single memory of what it had done in times long past.

  The men stared down at this basin, a pastoral scene too perfect to not be suspect, and gripped their rifles tight, waiting for a sign of the enemy. Broussard was excited and terrified, not necessarily about fighting, but what he would do when it was time to fight. That old fear, whispering to him from the playground and the street corner, the barroom and the battlefield. Inflict pain or take it. Both equally horrifying to him. Embarrassing in the action and the reaction. He felt like he knew what he’d do this time, but there were no guarantees when war cries filled the air, the steel flashed, and gunpowder started to burn.

  “I don’t see noth—”

  Morganfield grabbed McNulty by the back of his shirt and yanked him to the ground, his helmet falling off his head.

  “Keep your heads down, goddamn it,” Chapel whispered, now among them again. No one heard him approach. “There’s eyes everywhere.”

  “Whose eyes?” McNulty mashed his helmet back on and wiped mud from his face, shooting Morganfield a hateful glare.

  Chapel didn’t answer, peering intently out into the darkness of the valley below. The gray of his eyes sparked blue, catching the moonlight that somehow added color to them when it leeched it away from everything else.

  “What is it, sir?” McNulty said, moving his head back and forth, trying to see what wasn’t seeable. Not with his eyes.

  “There,” he said, pointing between the peaks. “It’s going to come from there. Where the twins meet.”

  “What is?” Broussard couldn’t stand the anticipation, suddenly irritated with Chapel’s cryptic way of expressing himself when direct facts were desperately needed.