Turn of the cards

Chapter Thirty-two

“The Man says burn the village,” Sarge said, “we burn the village.” It was a sort of post facto mantra for him; behind them the bamboo hootches were already ablaze, sending clouds of dense smoke to join the overhang of gray.

Sarge’s German shepherd face was grim. Behind him the squad was chatting excitedly, elevated by what had happened.

“Did you see the looks on their dumb nat faces when we torched their shacks?” Haskell asked. His mouth tendrils waved like cheerleader arms.

“Yeah,” the Spoiler said, marching along turning his rifle around in his hands, pointing it this way and that. His eyes shone in his backswept skull. “We really dissed ’em, man. We laid some hurt on them. Too bad we couldn’t burn some of them.”

“Payback for the Rox begins now!” Studebaker Hawk cried, pumping his fist in the air.

“The Rox lives!” the squad shouted. Sergeant Hamilton frowned.

Beside the trail the elephant grass stirred, and Croyd emerged next to Sarge, popping up on his hind legs. He was the only one who could move easily through the taller-than-head-high, razor-edged grass. Sarge whipped his M-203 up to cover him, then lowered it again.

“Whaddaya say, guy?” Croyd asked. His golden eyes were wet, gleaming bulbs in the heavy, humid air. “Just like the old days, huh?”

“Shut the fuck up and get back in line,” the sergeant growled. Croyd giggled and vanished back into the tall grass.

They had found deserters in the Highland village, a pair of them, teenagers with buzz cuts and skinny limbs. One of them glared angrily at the foreigners and tried to shake their hands off whenever they touched him. The other soiled himself as he was being dragged out of a hootch and curled into a fetal ball as soon as he was thrown on the ground by a pair of boys from Slumprock’s squad. He had to be prodded to his feet with the muzzle brake of an M-16 when the search was done and First Squad was ready to march them to the trucks that would carry them back to the Old Church base camp.

Hamilton’s squad was to continue the patrol. But there was something they had to accomplish first.

“The order has come down,” Lucius Gilbert announced, strutting around in his baseball cap. “We need to start teaching these traitors to socialism some lessons.”

Given the daily rains, Mark was surprised how readily the hootches burned. A few white-phosphorus grenades did the trick. They burned with a prodigious quantity of smoke, while the occupants stood by watching with faces so blank that not only all emotion but all thought might have been erased from them.

Mark marched along, bowed by the weight of his PAVN-issue ruck on its American frame and a rifle he had no intention of using. They were nothing compared to the weight on his soul.

I’m turning into one of the people I protested against, he thought. What’s happening to me?

If he ever hoped to recapture the golden Radical of that famed confrontation in People’s Park, he feared those hopes were dead now. His hands were blackened. His soul stained.

But all I’m trying to do is what’s right!

“Not always too damned easy to figure what’s right,” said Croyd, popping out of the grass at his side. He jumped, as much because he realized he was thinking aloud again as from being startled.

“Especially when politics come into it.” Croyd had recently developed the habit of talking very rapidly. It was no surprise to Mark, who had seen it before. “People always think politics are about right and wrong. That’s crap. Politics are about power.”

“But we’re trying to reform the world, make it a better place, man,” Mark protested. “That isn’t about power.”

Croyd patted the receiver of his M-16. “What is it that comes out of the barrel of this baby, huh? Hey, how are you going to make the world a better place without you have power?”

“There’s, like, good power and bad power, man.”

Croyd laughed and slapped him on the arm. “Hey, hey, Mark my man. You’re coming right along. Pretty soon you’ll be saying there’s good murder and bad murder, huh?”

Mark licked sweat off his upper lip and blinked very rapidly. His eyes filled with tears at the injustice of Croyd’s words. Gotta make allowances, he told himself The war between fatigue poisons and amphetamines for possession of Croyd’s metabolism was escalating.

By the time he thought of a comeback, Croyd had slipped off in the weeds again.

It rained for an hour and stopped, leaving everything dripping and steaming. Their patrol route took them down into jungled ridges, not canopy rain forest – you could find that, too, in the Giai Truong Son – but tall trees spaced far enough apart to let the sunlight in to produce thick, foot-tangling undergrowth, green and wet and just swollen with the scents of decay. There were as many nuances to the smell of decay in the jungle as there were shades of green. There was the lush, sweet, overbearing stink of rotting grass and leaves, fermentation, full and round and fruity, the sinus-invading cat-in-the-crawlspace staleness of animal death – just a hint, but even a hint was noticeable, impossible to ignore, like even the most discreet of tigers at the bal masque.

Eye Ball had point this afternoon. They had reached a level spot, where the trail widened in a little clearing. The squad began to look at Sarge, who was marching more quietly than usual, hoping he’d allow them to fall out and take five.

They had mostly filed into the clearing when Eye Ball stopped dead on its far side, near the great trunk of a tree that had fallen at an angle, creating a lean-to of roots and limbs and draped lianas. He seemed to be listening, which meant he was watching with especial intentness, the eyes of his head stirring, rolling.

Suddenly he turned and ran back across the clearing as fast as he could, clutching his rifle with one hand and signing frantically with the other.

Sarge didn’t have to wait for Mark or Mario to translate. “Ambush!” he screamed, as flashbulb-flares began to flicker from the tented debris beneath the fallen tree.

“Get down!” the sergeant screamed. Instead the patrol broke like a dropped plate, shattering away from the muzzle flashes into the brush on the near side of the clearing.

Mark heard the thunk of Sarge’s grenade launcher, slung beneath the barrel of his M-16, and the crash of the 40mm round exploding off in the woods. His long nose had plowed up a little mound of black mulch just this side of a fallen moss-grown log of much more modest dimensions than the one that blocked their path through the clearing. He had no idea how he’d gotten there.

“Man! Look at these bugs.”

Mark’s gut spasmed. He half-rolled onto his side, bringing his rifle up awkwardly. Croyd Crenson had dropped down beside him on his belly and was staring raptly at the assortment of insect life just pullulating in the rotted wood a few inches from their noses.

The ambushers’ guns were rattling in crowded staccato bursts, like giant woodpeckers on speed. “Christ!” Mark exclaimed. “What are you doing here? You’ll draw their fire!”

“What? Cap’n Trips actually showing a sign of self-interest?” Incredibly, Croyd produced a stogie and lit it with a lighter from his camo fanny-pack.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mark hissed. “They’ll smell your smoke!”

“Naw. They won’t smell anything but gunsmoke and their own sweat – and shit, probably.” The adrenal fear-rush of deadly danger seemed to be having a calming effect on the amphetamine-soaked Croyd. Mark was not in a mood to appreciate the biochemical subtleties of the fact. “They’re just as scared as we are.”

“What are you talking about?” He started to push the slim, vented snout of his M-16 over the low log. A burst of gunfire chewed up the log, spraying his face with friable punky wood and writhing white grubs.

“They haven’t hit anybody. Or haven’t you noticed?”

As if taking a cue, Sarge called, “Anybody hit? Sound off.” The squad members called out negative replies.

“Eye Ball’s okay, too, Sarge,” Mario yelled from somewhere behind and to the left of Mark.

“Hey!” Mark said. “They stopped shooting!” He started to peek over the log.

Croyd grabbed him by the arm. His grip was clammy and not strong, but emphatic just the same. “Hold on to your horses, boy.”

“Open fire!” Sarge yelled. “Start busting caps! Right now!”

Mark glanced at Croyd, then held his M-16 up over the top of the log and fired off the whole magazine in a shuddering spasm.

Croyd nodded. “Flashback time again. That’s just the way they used to do it, in Nam Round One.”

Return fire was cracking past overhead, more desultory than before. “Why’d they stop shooting?” Mark asked, dropping his spent magazine and trying to cram in another. He dropped the fresh mag three times.

“Same reason you did. They all went dry at once. Sarge Hamilton ordered everybody to shoot so we’d grab fire superiority.” Croyd took a hit from his cigar. “Basically that means making them keep their heads down.”

Mark’s fingers were scrabbling in the dark soil for the fallen magazine like the legs of some giant jungle insect. Suddenly he stopped, took a deep breath. Then he carefully picked up the full magazine and pushed it into the well with a click.

“How come you know all this stuff?” he asked Croyd.

Croyd popped a huge pale beetle into his mouth with his tongue and rolled over onto his back, as if bullets weren’t passing with miniature sonic booms inches above his nose. “I read books. I never did finish my education, but I can read.” He looked at Mark. “All the fear went out of you just then, didn’t it? What happened?”

Mark stared at him. He had studied the workings of the mind enough to have no sentimental notions about the insights of the crazy. Crazy people thought crazy things. But amphetamine intoxication or no, Croyd was being very perceptive, out here on death’s green edge.

“Yeah. I let go my fear. Now I feel calm.”

Croyd eyed him with glittering gold interest. “How’d you accomplish that?”

“I died. On Takis – off Takis, I mean. In orbit. I – part of me died. I died.”

“No white light?”

“No. Just dead.”

“So what happened just now?”

Mark shrugged. “I panicked when Eye Ball came running back and those people opened up. But talking with you, I suddenly thought, ‘What the heck? What’s it matter?’ They can’t do anything to me that hasn’t been done before.”

The attempt to make the enemy keep his head down had failed, unless they were hip to that blind-firing trick too; a brisk little firefight was in progress. To Mark it all seemed to be happening to someone else, far, far away. As if he were watching it all on TV in his parents’ den in smug southern California safety.

Croyd was studying him with speed-freak intensity. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“Why ‘uh-oh’?”

“Holy shit!” It was the normally calm Slick, his voice sliding on a glass sheet of panic. “Sarge, they’re getting around behind us!”

“Excuse me, man,” Mark said, unbuttoning a pocket of his camouflaged blouse. “I’m gonna roll behind this bush…

“Hey, it’s cool. I’ve seen you change before.”

Mark stared. Only K.C. Strange and Tachyon had actually seen him turn into one of his “friends.” Well, yes, about half of New York had seen it on the evening news, at that apartment fire the last night with Sprout and Kimberly Anne, but that was an accident. The only reason the jumper girl – Blaise’s main squeeze of that moment – who had befriended him on the Rox had gotten to witness the change was that Mark was half-convinced it wouldn’t work.

“Remember that night we both did up some windowpane? You tried this new batch of powder you’d been working on and turned into this giant raccoon. I thought I’d flipped out totally.” Mark stared at him. A friend he didn’t even know about? He shook his head. No, he was tripping…

Fresh gunfire from the left – the heavy, slow clatter of an AK. Mark slammed the contents of the tiny vial in his vest.

Croyd yelped and rolled away from the flames that enveloped Mark. “Jesus! What’s in that stuff?”

“Me,” said Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, flexing his fingers. Orange flames capered from tip to tip.

He looked at Croyd, who was flat on his belly several meters away. “So what was that ‘uh-oh,’ anyway?”

“You ever read Joseph Campbell? Hero with a Thousand Faces?”

“Yeah. I thought it was pretentious jive.”

He swooped up ten feet in the air and hovered, arms akimbo. “All right, you jerks, you haven’t hit anything yet. Try your luck with me.”

For a moment all was silence except for the dripping of rain from a billion leaves. Then gunfire reached for him from behind the huge fallen tree.

“Your aim still sucks,” he said. He rolled his left palm open. A line of fire stabbed into the heart of the great trunk.

The tree exploded as the water trapped in it flashed into steam.

J. J. Flash laughed as half a dozen black-pajama-clad ambushers went rolling backward from the blast. They picked themselves up and ran off into the bush, elbows pumping.

Shots from the left. J. J. felt the shock waves of their passing slap his face. He pivoted, jetted flame from his palm. Another tree, this one standing, blew up, fragments black against an expanding ball of plasma. As the top half of the tree crashed down, another set of ambushers fled.

Laughing, Jumpin’ Jack Flash cast his fire-lances far and wide. Miniature suns flared. Trees fell. Ambushers ran for their lives.

Then all was still. A few birds began tentatively to sing.

Wreathed in smoke, J. J. Flash looked down on his fellow squad-mates. They stared up at him, faces blank.

He conjured a guitar, a Fender o’ Flame, alive in his hands. He struck a chord, reverberating off through the jungle. The smoke whipped away. He floated against a low, cement-colored sky.

“It’s a gas-gas-gas,” he said.

A raindrop struck his shoulder. He yelped in sudden pain. “This is what I get for being overconfident,” he said, and darted for the cover of an intact stand of trees.

When the squad, still pale and unsteady on its feet – whether from the ambush or J. J. ’s demonstration – reached the point where Flash had vanished, they found Mark sitting in the rain, humming “Give Peace a Chance.”