She listens, openmouthed, and then sips from his glass. “You not so tough,” she says. “I hear plenty worse than that.”
The Corporal says, “I was just getting started.”
His third woman passes her hand over the sharp creases of his khaki pants and shirt, catches her image in his polished black shoes, peeks through his expensive camera, and photographs him crossing his eyes, twisting up his lips, putting on the red coat. He shows her his back and for a moment she is speechless.
“You know what it says?”
“Sure,” she says. “I read English good.”
“Okay. What's it say?”
She pauses. “Say you want me to stay with you tonight.”
All that day she tells him exaggerated stories of an American giant who kills great cats with his teeth and cooks weeping men on a spit.
“Hasn't met me yet,” the Corporal says.
She speaks of voodoo, curses, magic things. She moves over him, works on him, looks between her thighs. “You sick?”
The Corporal is ashamed.
“No worry,” she says. “I get you someone. You be cured plenty quick.”
A hot whisper of an afternoon breeze pushes at the drapes. He is openmouthed, open-eyed, seeing only his important red coat.
The Corporal winces at the stink but allows her to pull him around a corner. She drops his right hand as she ducks into a shop. He stoops at a window and looks in at her short legs and the high slit of her purple dress. Above him are rows of plucked birds strung by the neck, spinning slowly in the wind, and skinned, pop-eyed rabbits hung in a sprint; nearby are iron tanks of green eels, tripe, water snakes, gutted fish. There is an aquarium where squid throw out their bundle of arms and glide down to a darker corner. Here the men dress in baggy shorts, squat openly in the streets, scurry as though they have boys on their backs. Gray smoke twists up from pot stoves placed outside the doorways.
The prostitute comes out, showing her gapped teeth as she smiles, a wet, paper-wrapped package in her hands. “You cure,” she says.
The Corporal expects her to give him the package, but instead the prostitute hands it to a heap of rags that is abruptly next to him, rocking from foot to foot. Her hair is like wax, her upper lip is darkly mustached, her long nails corkscrew from her fingers.
“Witch,” the prostitute says.
The witch rips off the papers, chews into a squirming carp, finds the pulsing heart with her fingers, pops it in her mouth. Her fingers mull around in the entrails. She wipes her bumped face with the juice, and then raises up an eye patch to peer at the Corporal with a gray pupil. She seems surprised. “You the island man.”
The Corporal turns for an explanation, but the prostitute has disappeared. When he turns back to the witch, only the carp is there, lying on paper on the street, its eye staring up with loathing.
The Corporal runs down the hotel corridor and hits his door hard. The door swings inward, banging the wall. His gold watch, his camera, his important red coat are gone.
***
Then the Corporal sees the American giant she'd been talking about. It is a bright Sunday morning, his last day of rest and relaxation. As he packs, he looks down to the street and sees the prostitute strolling with a sun-pinked man who is probably six feet eight inches tall. He is wearing a Panama hat and a yellow suit; he jauntily leans on a cane. The prostitute speaks and the American smiles, raising overjoyed eyes to the window. The American yells, “You!” and the Corporal steps away from the open window.
The Corporal jerks and jounces and pushes into the snapping canvas on highway curves. Across from him are two other replacements, a private and a helicopter pilot. The private is named Skeeter; the pilot Kenya. Skeeter operates a radio and appears to want to go deaf—he takes a toothpick out of his pocket and begins jabbing it into his ear.
The pilot will not speak. He merely stares with rowdy eyes when the Corporal talks to him. The big truck guns up a hill, changes gears, squeals as it stops. Road dust rolls in through the open back, and Kenya gets up, brushing his pants. He says, “You in a crazy company, boy. Your captain's the boogeyman.”
Him. He is standing there with his pink head shaved, his great mustache waxed. Yes: six feet eight, maybe two hundred eighty pounds, and the boy's gold watch on his wrist. He peers at a clipboard and looks up after he reads their names. He recognizes the Corporal with a “Har!” He opens his powerful arms to the troops and smiles with deep pleasure at what he is preparing to say: “I'm Captain Saint Jones!”
Kenya whispers, “The boogeyman.”
Captain St. Jones inspects the replacements and approves of all but the Corporal. “Look at you,” he says, and touches the Corporal's name patch. It is hanging by only a stitch. And his pants come uncreased at the Captain's notice, his polished boots look sandpapered, his zipper, of course, is undone.
Captain St. Jones scowls down. “You're not a soldier,” he says. “You're a ragman.”
Ragman. The Corporal feels hexed. He weakens. His underwear suddenly tatters, his collars fray, seams abruptly rip open, leaving spider legs of thread. He discovers yellow slugs in his boots, peels and rinds in his overnight pack, green mildew and sticky webs over everything. He pushes a cleaning rod down his M16 and pulls out steel that is striped with crawling ants.
And then the ragman gets an idea. At night he creeps into the Captain's tent and puts a finger on all the things in it, making them crack, cleave, spot with rust.