Slice

STOBAUGH

Daniel had a trot line in back of the Darnell's Field, and adjacent to a place known locally as Gum, which led to the New Cairo Ditch. But he'd never walked that far, nor had he ever wanted to go through all the tall weeds, swamp, quickmud, poison ivy, and thickly overgrown areas between Michael Hora's ground and the New Cairo. There was also a shallow ditch that ran down through Gum parallel to the Sandy Road, running past Darnell's, Hora's, Thurman's, and the Lingo Field to the extreme eastern edge of the land on this side of the river, the point of the fishhook. The top left of the hook as one saw it on a map would be the New Cairo, a deep and swift-moving ditch that curved back around the farmland feeding into the river. There was good fishing in the New Cairo, and Daniel had driven all the way to Texas Corners and put a line in there, which he ran when he thought about it.

He had decided he was going to try to walk the whole distance, a long, boring, tough, solitary march to wear himself down. Just one more variation on his daily theme—to tire himself to the point where he could ignore his hungry, screaming belly, which was shrinking just as his companion's seemed to grow more prominent by the day.

So it was a new experience as he cut down through the swampy Dutch Barrow, plowing through the high, wet grass, moving up a little weed-covered hill full of cottonwoods and willows, down over the ditch bank, and in that eyeball click he was back in Vietnam.

The McDermotts had 160 acres of rice and this is what he saw as he came through the overgrown ditch bank foliage, stepping out into a rice field that lay across his field of vision all the way to the far tree line. Chaingang had gone over the bank and between a pair of cottonwoods and a willow and some horseweed, but he came out in high elephant grass between two palms in the Rung Sat Special Zone, in another time, another lifetime.

To the mind of this insane killer and precognitive genius and childlike retard and atavistic two-legged mastodon—a strong emotion or a quick psychic jolt will not be the same as it will be for you or me. This bestial man draws on a lifetime of cruelties; tortures and deprivations beyond the line of normal human tolerance.

To us a surprise or shock or consternation will register in a different way. We forget our coffee, which has been sitting there for a quarter-hour and we lift the cup to our lips, preoccupied, busy with something else, and the unexpected coldness is a minor, unpleasant moment. Nothing more. An insignificant annoyance. But to this man, a sound—the metal-cleated footfalls on certain surfaces—or the smell—a feces-clogged tenement toilet—or the sight—a tattooed arm reaching out in a certain way: these are the nuances that can trigger fast, steel-muscled, relentless, deadly responses that strike out to silence the nearest human heartbeat.

And Daniel Bunkowski steps between the rustling cottonwoods and the high weeds and Chaingang emerges into the heat and fearsome dangers of the Rung Sat, and it is the 1960s and the big man is there for only one reason—to KILL—and it is open season on humanity. And he sees no one but he SENSES ... SMELLS THEM ... the little people, and he moves cautiously, moving backward, stepping exactly where he has just stepped before, moving back between the palms disappearing back into the high elephant grass and saw grass, into the myriad, mysterious, many shades of Vietnam green and melting back into the shadows to wait and plan his ambush.

This is Charlie's. Everything is his. Jungle. Delta. Mountain range of straw-carpeted, deep caves. Tiny spider holes that dot the land like cancer. Massive, intricate tunnel complexes. And a mined, bobby-trapped, pungi-sticked paddy running between here and the blue feature. And Chaingang lies chilly in the tan grass. Frozen. Waiting for the cover of night when he will be ready to run the game back on Victor Charles. When he will take it to him.

The Stobaugh County Army Corps of Engineers had just run a piece in the Hubbard City paper about the paddy situation, but Chaingang didn't read the paper. He didn't know he was looking at a rice field that would soon have its dikes leveled so they could simply let the levee water in and help the farmers who had until now been forced to implement the costlier and more time-consuming methods of irrigation. He looked out and saw only the paddies and dikes of the Rung Sat Special Zone. He waits, frozen, hiding in the wet shadows of the Dutch Barrow Pit, but in his mind he is at 331/STAR RACER, at the edge of an area of marshes on the Long Tau River, and he is surrounded by Charlie.

To visualize the area, picture the exaggerated hourglass of a woman's figure. Facing her, the large left breast is the Long Tau, curving around marshland, curving back into the woman's waist, the tree line of palms and cottonwoods, the exaggerated woman's hip curving back out around the field of flooded paddies and an overgrown path leading to the blue feature.

The huge man is not in his geographic location but is, instead, somewhere south of the pagoda woods, to the east of the woman's right breast, north of the rice fields, and west of the comic's edge, like the early stories of Christopher Columbus, who would surely fall off the edge of the world. He is out of body, back in time, transported back to the hot, stinking hell of the RSSZ, Republic of South Vietnam. It is monsoon season, and he is caught in a tidal stench, alone, surrounded by things that could hurt him to death, not the least of which was a company of Ho's fiercest who were using the woods for a base camp and reppo depot.

He preps for the night ambush, sitting there in the scorching down-state sun, in the Vietnamese blast furnace of the foul-smelling Rung Sat, and he begins methodically taping every loose piece of gear, every clanking metallic thing that moved, taping with his precious black friction tape, or slick black electrical tape, pulling out the huge tractor chain and painstakingly taping each individual link so that nothing clicked, snikked, ticked, rattled, clattered, bang, shook, chinged, pinged, or thumped a unnatural noise of warning in the night. No shiny metal will take the reflected jungle moonbeam and light up his night in sudden and fiery pain.

And the shiniest metal imaginable, a slashing, razor-sharp bowie that weighs as much as a small sword, a flashing silver blade that could sever a one-inch manila hemp line the way you could shave a hair from your arm, a monstrous killer knife is drawn from its oiled sheath and he begins running the blade back and forth across a spittle-wet, oiled whetstone. Ffffsssssssss. Fffffffffssssssssssssssssss. Long, measured strokes with the blade carefully angled to produce maximum results without feathering the razor edge. Long, patient, unhurried sharpening pulls across the rough stone. Ffffffffsssssssss. In tempo with his heartbeat. Then, when he is satisfied with the keenness of the cutting edge, he slices into his wiping cloth and wipes off the filth, laying a light, almost invisible coat of oil on the bright, perfectly hardened and tempered steel that had killed so many times.

He smelled them. They would be coming as the tide moved back in. When the rains came and the monsoon torrents swelled the river over the banks and the rice fields became awash and the whole of the RSSZ became one putrid, dangerous swamp, he would have to find the high ground, and they would be there, a company of the enemy's toughest elite, waiting to kill him.

But they would not kill him. He had heard of the rewards offered among their little soldiers and the ones in the villages who were their spies. They would give much to have the huge man alive. To take him and make his dying a slow and precisely choreographed pain play, a tapestry of agony. They'd enslave him first as they liked to do—keeping him in a hell they would devise to match his worst fears, prolonging his suffering as few races could do better than the hard-hearted North Vietnamese.

He wondered how it would come. His presentience would warn him if capture were inevitable. He would kill many, many of them. But when the M-60 was out of ammunition, the claymores gone, the frags expended, the pistol clips empty, the belts shot up, the explosive used, the chain lost—he would kill as many as he could with the bowie and then turn it on himself. He knew he could summon the resolve to stab himself in the heart and stop his own life force. Or he could save a grenade for the last. Or save one bullet. One special round tucked away for the end.

He absentmindedly finds himself with the oiled bowie in hand, holding it in a death grip, and without thinking, for no reason other than emphasis, makes a deep, quick downward slash over his strong heart.

It is funny. He smiles widely at the sudden bloodstream. It is a deeper cut than he meant to make but of less than no significance. A prank. Nothing more than a jailhouse tattoo, a heart stabbed into the arm from boredom, filled with a poison of inks to darken and dye the skin. LOVE and HATE inscribed upon the knuckles. A pachuco cruciform at the webbing of the thumb. A slash over the heart for luck.

He is hunkered down beside his huge rucksack in a small woods at the edge of an area of marshes on the Long Tau, where the spike team was to effect an ambush of Viet Cong guerrillas who had terrorized a small, nearby hamlet, torturing and brutally killing a province chief and his family. Intelligence believed that the VC were using the ruins of a pagoda in the woods in back of him for a supply cache near the hamlet, but Chaingang knew it was a setup and he had gone on a different course, alone, waiting and watching. The team had been wiped out by mortars and sniper fire. Set up by hoi chanh dinks who had been double agents or quadruple agents or ... who knows? And the boat was gone. There was no radio. And Chaingang was alone.

He knows he will wait until dark and then make his way to the New Cairo Ditch, which is the Long Tau River in the IV Corps Tactical Zone, 331/STAR RACER, Spike Team M-1350, Republic of South Vietnam.