“How?”
“Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue.”
She held her eyes on mine, her mouth parting silently. I wanted to take out my vocal cords.
Chapter Six
THE HELICOPTER, A vintage Huey that had no external armament—what we called a “slick” in Vietnam—came in low over the water, yawing, smoke twisting from the airframe, the Plexiglas pocked from automatic-weapons fire, a bloody bandage taped over one eye of the kid on the joystick.
An actor dressed like a third-world peasant clung to one of the skids. The helicopter roared over our heads, flattening the sawgrass around the levee where we stood. The moment sent me back to the sights and sounds and collective madness of an Eden-like Asian country gone wrong, a place I had consigned to my dreams and hoped I’d never see again.
In the dreams I heard the metallic klatch on the night trail but not the explosion. Instead I was painted with light, my body auraed with cascading leaves and air vines and dirt that had a fecund odor, like that of a freshly dug grave. I watched my steel pot roll silently down the trail. To no avail, I opened and closed my mouth to force the deafness out of my ears. Inside the great green darkness of the trail, I could see the silhouettes of my patrol against the muzzle flashes of their weapons and also the weapons of the tiny men in pajamas who lived on one rice ball a day and wore sandals made from rubber tires and drank mosquito-infested water hand-cupped from a stream. The flashes resembled electricity leaping inside a cloud of dust and smoke that blotted out the stars.
A black medic from Jersey City, whom we called Spaceman because he was the bravest kid in the unit and also a Section Eight in the making, was suddenly sitting on top of me, pasting a cellophane cigarette wrapper over the hole in my chest, thumping my chest with his fist. There was a rush of air into my lungs, and my hearing came back, and I heard him say, “Breathe, Loot. Chuck got to breathe. One, two. One, two. My main man goin’ back alive in ’65. Motherfucker got it made.”
My patrol rigged a stretcher with web gear and carried me all night while shells from an offshore battery arced overhead and exploded with a whump in the jungle. At first light we could see the LZ in the distance, flames climbing inside the elephant grass on the hillside, men in black picking over the dead. I heard someone say “We’re fucked.”
Then the slick came out of a molten sun, already loaded with wounded grunts, a Vietnamese civilian dangling from one of the skids. He let go and fell sixty feet into the jungle, grinding his legs like a man on a bicycle. The pilot was a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston. A compress was tied on one side of his face, his cheek streaked with blood. When he landed, I saw a decal of a death’s head on his helmet. Under the image were the words “I am the giver of death.”
I became one of many on the floor of the slick. The others had an M for morphine painted on their foreheads. I never had a chance to thank the pilot. I heard later that he did not survive the war.
I was not fond of talking about the war or even remembering it. And grand as the intention might be, I hated ceremonies that took me back to it. I had laid down my sword and shield a long time ago, down by the riverside, and did not want to pick them up again.
“You okay?” I heard Bailey say.
“Sure,” I said.
We had just arrived and hadn’t spoken to anyone on the set. The helicopter landed on the levee, descending slowly enough to let the stuntman drop safely to the ground. He limped away, holding his back.
“Good job, but we got to shoot it again,” Desmond said. “A cloud went across the sun. We need the silhouette of the impaled man against a red sun.”
“I’m done, Des,” the stuntman said. “I think I tore my sciatica.”
“Give me your clothes.”
“Here?”
“Where else?” Desmond said.
The stuntman went behind the helicopter to undress. Desmond wasn’t so shy. He worked off his golf shirt, stuffed it into a pants pocket, and stripped down to his jockstrap, balancing on one foot.
“You want a codpiece, Des?” someone called out.
“I left it in your mother’s bedroom,” he replied.
He dressed in the clothes of the peasant and turned around. He had not seen us arrive. His face was bright red, and not from sunburn. “Don’t tell me you just watched this.”
I shrugged. Bailey’s gaze wandered over the set. Desmond closed and opened his eyes like a man who had stepped into an elevator shaft. “I’ve got to reshoot this scene, then I’m at your disposal.”
“Go right ahead,” Bailey said. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Dave?”
“Sure,” I said. “I should have called.”
Desmond pulled on a pair of leather gloves and stood under the helicopter blades as they began rotating. When the helicopter lifted, he sat on a skid as casually as someone taking a funicular ride. A safety belt was attached to one of the stanchions, but he didn’t use it. The helicopter rose higher, then tilted away over the water while Desmond sat with one hand on the skid and the other on the stanchion. After the pilot made his turn and headed back in, Desmond swung under the skid. His body looked twisted and tortured, his legs silhouetted against the sun, kicking as though somehow Desmond had stolen from my dreams and re-created the desperate man I had seen fall into the jungle decades ago.
The helicopter descended far enough for him to drop to the ground. He stooped under the blades and walked toward us smiling while everyone on the set applauded.
“We have champagne and soft drinks and cold cuts and potato salad over on the table,” he said. “Let’s put something in the tank, shall we?”