Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-four

“All right, ladies, drop your rucks and take ten.” The sergeant eyed the squad in disgust. “Maybe we better take twenty. Don’t want any myocardial infarcts.”

“That’s sexist,” complained Eraserhead. His weak arms stretched like warm wax as he lowered his backpack onto the paddy dike. “Calling us ladies. It ain’t politically correct.”

“Out here in the bush, what I say is by definition politically correct, dung-beetle. Do I make myself clear?”

Everything was green, green to the point of being painful, from the stinking water all around them to the conical hills that poked up out of the flats at intervals, like models from an HO railroad set. Out in the monsoon-flooded paddies the farmers were at work, their conical straw hats bobbing. None turned toward the party of strangers that had stumbled into the midst of their world, any more than they heeded the aircraft swarming in the sky above Da Nang to the northeast. Such things were not novelties.

The joker called Spoiler slammed his own pack down. He was a tall kid, tough as a rawhide thong, whose nostrils were shrouded by a shelf of cartilage and bone and whose skull shelved way out in back. As always his anger made Mark wince.

“You son of a bitch!” he shrieked at the sergeant. “The days of slavery are over!”

He came forward with his skinny chest stuck out as if to overpower the sergeant that way. He wore a T-shirt with BURN NATS NOT OIL stenciled on it. Attempts to enforce uniformity of dress on the Brigade hadn’t met much success, especially since most of their uniforms were castoffs and hand-me-downs. Their headgear ran from gimme caps to floppy K-mart boonie hats. Scuttlebutt said the Republic couldn’t afford to give them helmets.

“Fucker!” Spoiler yelled at the sergeant. “Fucking nat-lover! You oughta be necklaced. We oughta see your head burn, you fuck!”

About then he got inside the sergeant’s personal space. The sergeant extended two hard brown fingers and poked them into Spoiler’s solar plexus.

The young joker doubled and sat down hard, gasping like a carp. “Get back to your ruck, seed-bag,” the sergeant said. He turned his back on Spoiler and walked away.

Mark was down with his back to the bole of a palm tree and his insides weak and wavery, from heat, fatigue, and reaction to the ugly scene. Each little wavelet out on the flooded paddy was a tiny laser beam firing white death through Mark’s eyes to the top of his skull. He had gone from chilly Takis to the high latitudes of Europe. The wet Vietnamese heat hammered him like mallets. He almost missed the monsoon rains, which had momentarily retreated.

The sergeant plopped down next to Mark. He had a snouted face with a damp nose and sad eyes that turned down at the outside corners. He shook his head.

“That was bad,” he said. “Shouldn’t have to touch a man to discipline him. That’s my fault, but shit. Kids were never like this, back in the old days. Don’t know what’s happening in the world.”

Spoiler was getting his air back. He sat up squealing. “He hit me! He hit me! I want a court-martial.”

“You not back in your white-bread nat world now, white boy,” called a joker with his Demon Prince rank tattooed on his right hand. “You got no Bill of Rights.”

“It’s not my nat world,” Spoiler snarled. But in a subdued way; he sensed the consensus going against him.

“Dink officers hit their men,” said Slick, wiping his forehead. He was one of what the young recruits called “politicals” – older jokers, mostly but not all ex-Brigaders. Like Brew and Luce and the rest of the Rick’s crowd, Slick had no prior military experience. “Do it all the time, in the artillery camp next door. Discipline.” He flicked his fingers, spattering the brown shit-scented water with droplets that flattened into disks reflecting the light in rainbow colors.

“Discipline?” Eraserhead wheezed. “What we need discipline for? We’re the good guys.”

“Nobody ever threatened noncoms, back in the old days?” Mark asked. “That’s not what I heard.”

“Threaten? Hell. We did more than that. One time there was this nat second lieutenant, fresh out of the Point, and he… No. That’s ancient history.” The sergeant hung his head between his knees and was quiet a long time. Mark offered him a drink from his canteen.

“I don’t know,” the sergeant admitted. “Maybe I’m kidding myself. But the kids these days seem sharper, harder. Meaner than we ever were.”

“It’s the routine,” Mark said. “It’s pretty tough on everybody, man. All this training.”

“Tough? Tough?” The sergeant laughed in disbelief. “This is nothing. Compared with Basic, this is a walk in the park.”

“Yeah. But at least, like, you had Basic. Some kind of training. These kids are coming in cold…”

“…Yeah, and they got a bunch of old out-of-shape farts to try to warm ’em up.” He looked at Mark. “You never even went, did you? What, were you a draft dodger or something?”

“Student deferment. Like, I would’ve gone to Canada, though. Or jail.”

The sergeant looked outraged. “That’s chicken-shit, man.”

Yeah? How many times have you died in action, bunky?

Flash wanted to know. Mark blinked at the sergeant.

“Wait a minute. Here you are over here ready to fight for the North – uh, the Vietnamese. And here you’re telling me I’m chicken-shit for not fighting against them?”

“That’s different. That was then. This is now.”

“That’s some answer,” Mark and J. J. Flash said in unison.

“Well, at least I was over here with my ass in the grass. I knew what it was like, knew what was really going on while all you protesters at home”

“Well, I’m really here now, man. And I didn’t switch sides.” The sergeant glared at him. For a moment Mark thought the guy was going to hit him. Whoa! I never used to talk like that.

The air and anger went out of the noncom in a rush. ’Maybe you got a point.”

“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean”

“No. No. You’re right. It’s a pretty fucked-up set of circumstances. I came over here in ’71 to serve my country. Country never did nothing for me up until then but say, ’Drop ’em and spread ’em for the whole nat world, joker.’ 1971. Shit, by that time we’d lost already; fucking Nixon had thrown in the towel. Nothin’’ left to do but hold a few more sessions on the shape of the table and have a whole lot more good jokers die. Yeah, and nats too.”

He had to pause, then, because a shadow flashed them and flattened them with a powerful roar. The young ex-Demon Prince with fins on his head like an old Chevy yelped and jumped into the water, to the jeers of his buddies. Mark glanced up to see a MiG-27 Flogger strike plane low, smoking south under full military throttle. He wondered where it was going, loaded down like that.

“When I heard the Colonel was coming back here,” the sergeant went on, “trying to pull the old joker Brigade back together again… I mean, Sobel, he was always different. He never treated us like we was The Dirty Dozen recruited out of old horror movies. He treated us like we were men. He made us feel clean and brave. He made us feel like – like heroes.”

He accepted another hit from Mark’s canteen. “It all started coming back to me then. What we’d done – what the war had done – to this country, these people. And what the nats had done to us, before and after. And I looked around, man, I saw this Leo Barnett smilin’ away on the tube, and I saw my man Gregg Hartmann going down in Atlanta with Dr. Fuckin’ Tachyon’s knife sticking out of his back, and then all this shit hit with the jumpers and the Rox and everything, and suddenly it looked like it was going to be open season on wild cards any old time. And then here was the Colonel, ’way down yonder in Vietnam, sayin’ come to me, I’ll let you be free. Let you feel like men again.”

He looked at Mark. “Guess even you aces started feelin’ it come down hard. You’re the first ace I ever met didn’t look at me like I was dirt. That or the freak poster-child for the Cause of the Week.”

He put his head close to Mark. “Lot of the boys been giving you some pretty hard looks because you ain’t just a nat, you’re an ace,” he said in a low voice. “Reckon that ain’t news. But you’re right, man. You’re here now, with your ass in the grass. You ain’t even a joker, but you’re layin’ it on the line right along with the rest of us. Guess that makes you okay – in my book, anyway.”

He stood with an audible creaking of joints. “Even if you wouldn’ta lasted five minutes back in the old Brigade. But then, neither would anybody else in this chicken-shit outfit, my sorry ass included. All right, everybody, naptime’s over. Time to saddle up and go.”

As Mark was struggling to raise his pack – he’d just gotten used to the lighter gravity on Takis, that was it – Spoiler sidled up next to him.

“Sucking up to the brass,” he said sotto voce. “Don’t think we don’t notice… nat.”

Mark looked after him as he joined the file tramping off along the paddy dike. It’s so nice to be appreciated, he thought.

The night’s sticky-hot embrace had healed the blisters on her feet. As she moved through her kata her limbs warmed, and the aches of the day’s trudging vanished. Deep in the core of her she could feel Mark’s guilt at taking the easy path, copping out from the pain the day’s exertions had earned.

The weariness stayed with her; her wound-healing ability couldn’t lave the fatigue poisons from her tissues any faster than normal. But she knew how to use the tiredness, softening the hard and angular tae kwon do movements until they were almost t’ai chi-like in their fluidity.

“I thought it was the rightwing types who always said, ’If you want peace, prepare for war,’ babe,” Croyd said. He was lying on the sandbags piled atop his bunker. The storm lanterns he’d set out to draw bugs flanked him, so that he looked like a guardian on a library’s steps in some town whose civic taste ran more to lizards than lions.

“You doubt these people are committed to peaceful means?” Moonchild asked. Her breathing was regular. “When we – when Mark went on patrol today, his squad did not carry weapons.”

Croyd tipped his head up and blew smoke at the low clouds. “Does that mean the New Joker Brigade stands for Peace and Love, or does that mean Sobel doesn’t trust the new boots with guns yet? Some of these boys seem a touch on the psychopathic side, to tell you the truth.”

“They have the passion of the young,” Moonchild declared.

“Yeah. So’d the Khmer Rouge. And speaking of the passionate young, babe, you’re about to acquire an audience.”

A crowd was drifting their way like sand blown across the parade ground. There was no television in Fort Venceremos, the food was fish heads and rice, and beer was strictly rationed – though Croyd always managed to have plenty in his cooler. Game Boys were outlawed, as were foreign magazines other than the Daily Worker, which Mark had never been able to read, and also of course marijuana and other illicit highs. With no Bill of Rights or even Uniform Code of Military justice to inhibit authority, plus a widespread network of informers doing business as good little kiem thao self-criticism group elves, the mini-prohibitions seemed generally successful – so far. The marked lack of downtime diversion beyond kiem thao and study resulted in a whole lot of fights, it seemed to Mark. Maybe he was just unused to military life.

Even the government radio was down, more or less. For some reason it had played nothing but off-key martial music all day. Not even Luce could muster much enthusiasm for it. The boys were attracted to activity like fat juicy bugs to Croyd’s lanterns.

“Hey! Look at that. It’s a babe!’

Catcalls and whistles followed. “Hey, guys, that’s sexist!” Eraserhead’s voice cried, followed a second later by a meaty thump and a “Hey! You hit me!”

“Yeah,” another voice said. “Now pipe down or I’ll tie you in knots, you little narc.”

“How ’bout a date?” somebody else yelled.

“She’s not for the likes of you low-lives,” Croyd said.

“Yeah? What, she goes in for big lizards?”

Moonchild ignored them. She was serene. “What’s she doing?” the joker called Ent asked in his piping voice. “Dancing?”

“Doing kata,” said Studebaker Hawk. He was the kid with fins on his head. “Karate practice.”

“It’s dancing,” scoffed Spoiler, “unless you just want to call it bullshit.”

“No, look at her, Spoiler,” the Hawk urged. “She’s real good.”

“She looks good,” Spoiler said, “but it doesn’t have anything to do with that crap. Hey, honey – I’m talkin’ to you, nat bitch.”

Moonchild ignored him. “Looks like you think you’re too good for us scummy jokers,” Spoiler said. “Maybe you oughta show us if that stuff’s for real.”

She finished her form and stopped. She smoothed back heavy black hair from a face half-obscured by her yin-yang mask. “I do not fight for sport or pleasure.”

Spoiler pulled a long face beneath his air-scoop nose and nodded. “Well, how about self-defense, then?”

The crowd parted. The young German joker the others called Rhino charged Moonchild. He was heavy, but he wasn’t slow, and he had his name for a good reason.

She danced aside, out of his path. A savage hooking blow with the foot-long horn that grew from his face grazed her hip. Instead of lumbering on into the side of Croyd’s bunker, the joker dropped his weight, turned, skidded, stopped facing Moonchild with one fist on the muddy ground, propped like a lineman on one massive arm.

Jesus! Cosmic Traveler shrilled. He’s serious!

The Krauts don’t do joker kid gangs the way we do back in New York, J. J. Flash responded: They got no Killer Geeks or Twisted Sisters. Last German joker to get any sound bite was that twisted little freak who got waxed at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta back in ’86. This boy figures he’s got to show some real fiendish class to keep up.

Moonchild was not used to the sort of kibitzing Mark increasingly had to put up with. She tried to put it from her mind and concentrate on summing up her opponent. He looked as if he massed two hundred kilograms, heavy gray folds of hide hanging on a squat frame. He clearly had meta-human strength, to move that bulk so quickly, and he had to be agile to come so close to tagging Moonchild on his charge. On the other hand, the tiny eyes glaring at her from the blunt-muzzled face seemed to be having trouble focusing on her six meters away, and the joker’s sides were heaving as if he were winded.

Yes. I can run from him, and I can hide from him. A sidestep, a sprint, and I become one with shadow. It was what her strict code called for, flight over fight if at all possible.

Even as Cosmic Traveler weighed in with enthusiastic approval, she knew she couldn’t do it. She had a responsibility to Mark and the others. The new recruits seemed to take her existence as a challenge. Unless she proved herself formidable, they’d just keep trying their luck with her – or with mark, who in his own persona had no ace powers and was far from robust, even for a nat.

I must best him without hurting him, she thought. Beat without humiliating him. No one ever said being an ace would be easy.

“Leave off,” she said. “Are we not comrades?”

The pig eyes flicked right and left, assessing the crowd. No mistake: it wanted blood. “You’re a nat,” he said. “I’m a joker. We fight.”

“Is not that the attitude we are supposed to fight against?”

This time Rhino looked square at Spoiler, who stood at the front of the crowd with his hands on his hips. Glancing that way herself, Moonchild saw that Brew and Luce had arrived as well and were hanging out at the rear. As was the badly disfigured young joker, Eric the dreamer.

“It’s come down evolution time,” Spoiler said. “Prove yourself or die, nat.”

Brew and Luce held obvious if not formalized rank; they could stop this if they chose. They made no move.

While she was looking toward them, Rhino charged. Moonchild leapt high, somersaulted over his head.

Built low to the ground, he recovered quickly, spun to face her again. With a falling-away sensation she realized she had not made much impression on the onlookers. They had all seen that move in a dozen kung fu movies. They didn’t realize that in most cases it was a special effect.

“Think you’re clever,” Rhino rumbled. He brought his blocky three-fingered fists up to either side of his lowered horn in a pose reminiscent of a muay Thai stance and began to circle her clockwise. She doubted he could manage the freewheeling kick-boxer’s shin-kicks, but if she got inside the comfort zone of his horn, he could give her a rib-crushing knee.

The onlookers began to jeer, disappointed by the lack of action, the lack of blood. Predictably Rhino was goaded into an advance, spiraling toward her in that mincing Thai step.

As he got near, he tossed his head and that wicked horn. Her guard came up. He whipped a roundhouse shin-kick up and into her ribs and sent her flying.

She tucked a shoulder, rolled, came up to one knee as he charged. She whipped her right arm up and out in a forearm block that connected with his horn with a sound like a pistol shot. As momentum sent him thundering past, she fired a punch into his side.

He staggered, stumbled, went to a knee. Then he stood up, hunched over with an elbow pressed to his side. She wondered if in her anger at being caught unawares she had failed to pull the blow enough, had really done him harm.

“We can quit now, before someone gets hurt.” Instantly she realized it was the wrong thing to say; to quit now would make him look as if he feared her. Why cannot I be better at this? Why is it so hard to talk to people?

He came at her with two quick punches. She blocked them easily, so easily that when the knee-shot they’d been intended to set up came, she hopped half a step away, out of the way of the short-ranged attack, and spun a back-kick into his broad belly.

All two hundred kilograms of Rhino sailed into the air. Spectators scattered. He landed on his butt with a mighty thud ten feet away.

The crowd made impressed noises. She had flashed her own power and speed. He had weight on her and probably strength. Speed and skill were all hers.

Rhino picked himself up, moving as if it pained him. “We’ve done enough and more,” she said. “Why should we hurt each other, to excite these others?”

He shook his heavy head as if her words were water he wished to shed. Surrender was no option to the proud joker youth. I hope this boy has the sense to take a dive, she felt J. J. Flash say in her head.

She was surprised. Her image of J. J. was all combative cockiness, not compassion. Rhino rushed her then, lashing out with a roundhouse swipe of his fist.

She ducked, wheeled, caught the horny wrist. She pulled the arm out straight, helping Rhino along the way he was going, put her palm against his suddenly-locked elbow, and levered his horned snout into the mud.

He struggled briefly, but he could not fight without dislocating his shoulder – or breaking his elbow. His nostrils dilated, a vast sigh blew furrows in the mud, and he went dormant.

“Waste him!” the crowd was yelling. “Rip his arm off!” She released him and stepped back.

“So brave, all of you!” she flared at the crowd. “He had the courage to fight. If you have the courage to do more than jeer, step forward and prove it!”

The crowd seemed to be held back by an invisible cordon. Spoiler had mysteriously vanished from the front rank. That spinning back-kick would have stove in the chest of just about any man in camp.

She reached a hand to Rhino. He took her hand, pulled himself upright. Then he stared at her.

“I could have stuck my horn right through you, just now,” he said, thick-tongued.

“I know.”

Soundlessly he began to cry. Then Brew and Luce were shoving their way through. “Hey,” Brew said, in that quiet, laidback way of his, “do all of you really have nothing better to do than hang here and gawk? And is there anything here you really need to see?”

Luce glared the jokers back. “If you don’t have anything better to do,” he snarled, “maybe we should schedule extra kiem thao for everybody, huh?”

The crowd became one with the night almost as readily as Moonchild might have. “All right, suckers,” Croyd announced in his best carny-barker voice, lighting up one of his death-wick cigars, “step right up and take your best shot at the Queen of the Night!”

Moonchild gave him a dirty look. Brew and Luce had Rhino under the arms now and were helping the sobbing youth to his feet. Moonchild fired a final contemptuous glance at the rapidly dwindling crowd.

She found her eyes locked with Eric’s. In them she read a compassion and understanding so profound, they staggered her.

She felt the end of her hour approaching and hurried into the bunker. Some moments were too private to share, even with comrades.