Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-six

“Village is deserted, Sarge,” Mario called back from the point, leading the squad out of the rice fields. He was a slight, intense kid with a Rambo rag tied around his temples. His skin was covered with pebble-like protrusions, which gave rise to the name Mark had briefly known him by back on the Rox, Rocky.

The sergeant stopped. Still strung out single file after coming off a paddy dike, the squad did an inchworm thing behind him.

“Is it, now?” Mario was shifty and smart and had seen some combat during the nightmare siege of Bloat’s stronghold. The sergeant thought he had potential to be a good troop, which was why he’d put him in the crucial – and, in an actual wartime situation, highly dangerous – point position.

The sergeant pointed at a pen where a heavy-horned water buffalo with a calf nuzzling her side eyed them with deep suspicion. “Think they’d leave their animals behind?”

He started walking again. Mario stood there slumped, with the consciousness of having fucked up just beating off him like heat off sun-warmed blacktop.

“Mario, my man. Walk with me.” The sergeant put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and urged him along into the village. He didn’t go by “Rocky” anymore; he had fallen under the influence of Lucius Gilbert, otherwise known as Luce, who held that joker names were bogus-slave names.

Moving with egg-walking care, Mark followed along with the others. Mark felt dumb; he’d thought the village was deserted too. He hadn’t noticed anything but these funky bamboo hootches, like he’d grown up seeing on the six o’clock news. They gave him a sense of dйjа vu.

“Maybe they’re off working the paddies,” suggested Slick.

“With a big old pot of rice bubbling on the fire out front of one of their hootches like that?” the sergeant asked, pointing again.

The hair started to rise on the back of Mark’s neck. Where are they? Are they watching us? He felt like a trespasser.

“There!” Eraserhead screamed, so shrilly it made everybody jump. He flung out a hand to point, so fast his arm stretched to half again its normal length. “I saw somebody there in that hut!”

Mark snapped his head back and forth as if watching a tennis match on speed – him or the players, it didn’t make much difference. Yes, he saw them. Faces in the shadows. Some sullen, some openly hostile. Most of them wore a blank resignation he imagined a rape victim got when she knew she couldn’t fight back.

“Why are they doing this?” Spoiler demanded in a high-pitched voice. “Why the hick are they hiding from us?”

“They’re afraid of us,” the sergeant said. “They think we’re monsters – even Meadows, who looks about two feet taller’n any human they ever seen before. Also, we got these.”

He slapped the receiver of the M-16 he, like the rest of them, had been issued that morning. They were the reason Mark was being so hypercautious. He was afraid the thing would go off by itself.

The sergeant chuckled. “Got no way of knowing we got no bullets.”

“But we’re here to help them!” Mario said.

The sergeant gave him a look. “They heard that one before, son.”

Croyd tipped back his bottle of Giai Phong. He and mark, whose squad had been stood down after coming in a little after noon, sat on lawn chairs in front of their bunker. The afternoon sun lit up bubbles the color of Croyd’s eyes.

“As far as I know,” he said regretfully, “I got no ace powers this time around.” He gave a half-lidded glare to a bunch of jokers drifting their way in evident hope of cadging beer. “Not that I’ve been in any hurry to let these shrabs know that.”

“You really dig life as a gecko, man?” asked Mark. He wore a T-shirt tied turban-fashion around his head and nothing on his chest. He wasn’t worried about ultraviolet radiation at the moment. He was worried about hot.

“Skink, dammit. I’m a skink.”

“I thought skinks were skinny, squinty lizards with heads smaller than their necks.”

Croyd drew himself up in his chair. At Mark’s suggestion he had discovered that he could sit in a lawn chair if he fed his tail through the back.

“See the words you’re using?” he asked. “Skinny. Squinty. ‘Sk’ words. They sound like ‘skink.’ That’s why you associate them with skinks.”

Mark looked mulish. “I don’t know, man.”

“Look, who’s the authority here? You – all right, you’re a biochemist. But I – I’m a skink. So there.”

He had an audience for his outburst. “Naw,” said one of the old breed, a three-eyed joker Brigade vet everybody called Tabasco. “You’re a fuck-you lizard.”

“Okay,” Croyd said. “Fuck you.” He lunged at the joker, opening his mouth wide. It was shocking red inside and armed with alarming teeth. Tabasco squawked and ran, pelted by the jeers of his buddies.

“You fools wouldn’t know a skink if it bit you on the ass,” Croyd grumbled. He settled back and resumed his beer.

“Uh-oh,” he said at once. “Now what?”

For the last ten or fifteen minutes there had been a lot of activity around the wooden headquarters buildings in the center of camp. Now the tall figure of Evan Brewer – Brew – was striding across the parade ground toward Croyd’s bunker.

Tabasco was standing on the far side of the group of idlers from Croyd, batting at his buddies’ hands as they poked at him. His hand hit something hard and spiky. He stopped and turned to see Brew with the end of his lobster-claw resting on his shoulder.

“You. Down to the quartermaster. Do it now. And you, and you.” He was picking out men from the original Brigade.

He stopped in front of Mark, reached out his claw to touch Mark on the sternum. The spiny tip was strangely cool as it pricked Mark’s bare skin.

“You too,” Brew said. “The Colonel wants an ace along. Though I don’t exactly know how your friends will find you to help you if something comes down.”

Even a half day on patrol had left Mark drained. But he struggled to make himself rise. “What’s happening, man?” he asked.

Brew’s handsome face clouded. “Somebody just took a couple of shots at one of our training patrols.”

“The bastards! The nat fuckin’ sons of bitches!”

The sun had vanished into a cloud tsunami rolling in across the South China Sea. Rays of pale light fanned out from the place where it had vanished like the fingers of a cosmic hand. Ambling back from the mess hall – he went along to chow to be comradely and also because there were sometimes big snaggletooth bamboo rats to be found – Croyd gestured toward the rec hall with his cigar.

“Spoiler’s in good voice tonight.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. The parade-ground mud sucked at his feet, trying to pull his boots off. He could barely muster the strength to lift them. An hour of flying cover for a rescue mission as J. J. Flash left him feeling completely blasted. They hadn’t found any enemies, and no one had been hurt, but the tension had wrung more out of him than even J. J.’s overamped metabolism.

Spoiler tore off his Brooklyn Dodgers hat and threw it down. Then he tore off his T-shirt and threw that too. “It was those Vietnamese Army assholes, you know it was! They think all us jokers are dog-shit, do you hear me? Dog shit. We ought to go down to that camp and just mop the place with the cocksuckers!”

Croyd stopped to watch. “Oh, yeah,” he said, though Spoiler was out of earshot even if he could hear anything over his tantrum. “You don’t even know how to fire your M-16s yet. The People’s Army has machine guns. This should be interesting.”

Mark noticed a deputation marching across from the headquarters buildings. Brew and Luce and a couple of their cronies he recognized from Rick’s, Osprey and Purple and his squad-mate Slick.

Spoiler was still rampaging around offering to personally kick the ass of the entire People’s Army of Vietnam, collectively or one at a time, when Brewer called out, “Hey, why burn up all this energy? Is this display really accomplishing anything?”

Spoiler stopped in the process of trying to fight his way through a knot of his pals to get inside the rec hall, presumably to bust up the pool table, which was way the hell off true anyway. He turned to face the older jokers, skinny chest working like a donkey engine.

“It’s those fucking nat bastards,” he panted. “They were the ones who bushwhacked our boys today”

Luce’s cheeks puffed out. “Is that the Vietnamese Army you’re talking about?” he demanded. “Is that our comrades-in-arms…” Brew put a calming hand on his friend’s upper biceps. “What happened today was an accident. Things happen. Life’s like that.”

“Bull-fucking-shit it was an accident. Your butthole buddies from down the road were out to bag them some joker meat. What the fuck are we doing here? I thought we were supposed to be training to defend the right of jokers everywhere. How the fuck can we do that if we can’t even defend ourselves?”

Luce was starting to turn colors and ball all his hands into fists. “If the attack today was deliberate,” Brew said smoothly, interposing himself a little more firmly, “bourgeois elements had to be responsible. The reactionaries have been kicking over the traces all over the South the last couple of days. And if that’s the case

He shrugged. “Then you may get a chance to fight for joker rights a lot sooner than you think. And for our hosts.”

“Why should we fight for them, man?” another young joker asked. “They hate us.”

“Well, so what? How important is it for you to have the nats love you? It isn’t going to happen.

“The Vietnamese are giving us a shot at being the nucleation point for a whole new phase of joker activism. But more than that, they’re giving us a chance to atone for the sins of America. This is Vietnam, man. It’s crucial, absolutely crucial. What went down here is the focal point of our national consciousness.”

The joker boy looked at him blankly. “Why? Did something happen here?”

Croyd tugged on Mark’s olive-drab sleeve. “We better draw a curtain discreetly over this scene. Spoiler’s lost his head of steam, and the only thing liable to happen here now is our friend Brewer having apoplexy. Or don’t people have apoplexy anymore?”

“They call it having a stroke, now, man.”

“Is that so? Damn. It’s hard to keep up with slang when you spend two thirds of your life asleep. Of course, I guess you normal people spend a third of your lives asleep, but it’s not, like, all at once, if you know what I mean.”

Mark looked at him with bleary intensity. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right, man? You’re starting to sound like you need sleep worse than I do.”

“Bite your tongue. I never felt better in my life. In my whole damned life. Besides, I told you: lizards don’t sleep.”

“Huh,” Mark said, and allowed himself to be led off to the bunker.