“I don’t know the answer,” I said.
“An even more sacred obligation, created by a really spectacular sense of shame. When a crime is too great to live with, the memory of it becomes sacred. Becomes the crime itself—”
I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut’s basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.
“Here we have this village and its chief. The village knows but does not know what the chief has been doing. They are used to consulting and obeying him. Then—one day, a little boy disappears.”
My heart gave a thud.
“A little boy. Say: three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He’s just gone
—poof.
Well, this is Vietnam, right? You turn your back, your kid wanders away, some animal gets him. He could get lost in the jungle and wander into a claymore. Someone like you might even shoot him. He could fall into a booby trap and never be seen again. It could happen.
“A couple of months later, it happens again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they really look, not just Mom and Grandma, all their friends. They scour the village. The
villagers
scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.
“And guess what happens next. This is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees a ghost. This old lady is part of the extended family of the first lost kid, but the ghost she sees isn’t the kid’s—it’s the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a drunkard, in fact. A local no-good, in fact. He’s just standing near the well with his hands together, he’s hungry—that’s what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants
more.
He wants to be
fed.
The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.
“Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Evil forces have been set loose. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she’s about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. She used to be a friendly old lady, but she doesn’t look too friendly now. She’s hungry, too, like all ghosts. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl’s face, and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.
“The next night, another little boy disappears. Two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chief’s hut. Among them are a sister who died during the war with the French and a twenty-year-old first wife who died of dengue fever. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, who looks something like what we could call a vampire, he saw her pass into the chief’s hut without the benefit of the door.
“These people believe in ghosts, Underhill, they know ghosts exist, but it is extremely rare for them to see these ghosts. And these people are like psychoanalysts, because they do not believe in accidents. Every event contains meaning.
“The dead twenty-year-old wife comes back out through the wall of the chief’s hut. Her hands are empty but dripping with red, and she is licking them like a starving cat.
“The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. They are as afraid of what they’re thinking as they are of all the ghosts moving around them. The ghosts are part of what they know they know, even though most of them have never seen one until now. What is going through their minds is something new: new because it was hidden.
“The mothers and grandmothers go to the chief’s door and begin howling like dogs. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find. They find the end of Bong To.”
Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.
“But what
happened
?” I asked. “How did you hear about it?”
He shrugged. “We learned all this in interrogation. When the women found the underground room, they knew the chief had forced the boys into sex, and then killed them. They didn’t know what he had done with the bodies, but they knew he had killed the boys. The next time the V.C. paid one of their courtesy calls, they told the cadre leader what they knew. The V.C. did the rest. They were disgusted—Trang had betrayed
them
, too—betrayed everything he was supposed to represent. One of the V.C. we captured took the chief downstairs into his underground room and chained the man to the posts, wrote the names of the dead boys and Trang’s daughters on the padding that covered the walls, and then . . . then they did what they did to him. They probably carried out the pieces and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, not all at once but slowly, everybody in the village moved out. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border.”
“Do you think they really saw ghosts?” I asked him. “I mean, do you think they were real ghosts?”
“If you want an expert opinion, you’d have to ask Major Bachelor. He has a lot to say about ghosts.” He hesitated for a moment, and then leaned over to open my door. “But if you ask me, sure they did.”
I got out of the jeep and closed the door.
Ransom peered at me. “Take better care of yourself.”
“Good luck with your Bru.”
“The Bru are fantastic.” He slammed the jeep into gear and shot away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.
Two weeks later Leonard Hamnet managed to get the Lutheran chaplain at Crandall to write a letter to the Tin Man for him, and two days after that he was in a clean uniform, packing up his kit for an overnight flight to an air force base in California. From there he was connecting to a Memphis flight, and from there the army had booked him onto a six-passenger puddle jumper to Lookout Mountain.
When I came into Hamnet’s tent he was zipping his bag shut in a zone of quiet afforded him by the other men. He did not want to talk about where he was going or the reason he was going there, and instead of answering my questions about his flights, he unzipped a pocket on the side of his bag and handed me a thick folder of airline tickets.
I looked through them and gave them back. “Hard travel,” I said.
“From now on, everything is easy,” Hamnet said. He seemed rigid and constrained as he zipped the precious tickets back into the bag. By this time his wife’s letter was a rag held together with Scotch tape. I could picture him reading and rereading it, for the thousandth or two thousandth time, on the long flight over the Pacific.
“They need your help,” I said. “I’m glad they’re going to get it.”
“That’s right.” Hamnet waited for me to leave him alone.
Because his bag seemed heavy, I asked about the length of his leave. He wanted to get the tickets back out of the bag rather than answer me directly, but he forced himself to speak. “They gave me seven days. Plus travel time.”
“Good,” I said, meaninglessly, and then there was nothing left to say, and we both knew it. Hamnet hoisted his bag off his bunk and turned to the door without any of the usual farewells and embraces. Some of the other men called to him, but he seemed to hear nothing but his own thoughts. I followed him outside and stood beside him in the heat. Hamnet was wearing a tie and his boots had a high polish. He was already sweating through his stiff khaki shirt. He would not meet my eyes. In a minute a jeep pulled up before us. The Lutheran chaplain had surpassed himself.
“Good-bye, Leonard,” I said, and Hamnet tossed his bag in back and got into the jeep. He sat up straight as a statue. The private driving the jeep said something to him as they drove off, but Hamnet did not reply. I bet he did not say a word to the stewardesses, either, or to the cabdrivers or baggage handlers or anyone else who witnessed his long journey home.
3
On the day after Leonard Hamnet was scheduled to return, Lieutenant Joys called Michael Poole and myself into his quarters to tell us what had happened back in Tennessee. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand, and he seemed both angry and embarrassed. Hamnet would not be returning to the platoon. It was a little funny. Well, of course it wasn’t funny at all. The whole thing was terrible—that was what it was. Someone was to blame, too. Irresponsible decisions had been made, and we’d all be lucky if there wasn’t an investigation. We were closest to the man, hadn’t we seen what was likely to happen? If not, what the hell was our excuse?
Didn’t we have any inkling of what the man was planning to do?
Well, yes, at the beginning, Poole and I said. But he seemed to have adjusted.
We have stupidity and incompetence all the way down the line here, said Lieutenant Elijah Joys. Here is a man who manages to carry a semiautomatic weapon through security at three different airports, bring it into a courthouse, and carry out threats he made months before, without anybody stopping him.
I remembered the bag Hamnet had tossed into the back of the jeep; I remembered the reluctance with which he had zipped it open to show me his tickets. Hamnet had not carried his weapon through airport security. He had just shipped it home in his bag and walked straight through customs in his clean uniform and shiny boots.
As soon as the foreman had announced the guilty verdict, Leonard Hamnet had gotten to his feet, pulled the semiautomatic pistol from inside his jacket, and executed Mr. Brewster where he was sitting at the defense table. While people shouted and screamed and dove for cover, while the courthouse officer tried to unsnap his gun, Hamnet killed his wife and his son. By the time he raised the pistol to his own head, the security officer had shot him twice in the chest. He died on the operating table at Lookout Mountain Lutheran Hospital, and his mother had requested that his remains receive burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
His mother. Arlington. I ask you.
That was what the Lieutenant said.
His mother. Arlington. I ask you.
A private from Indianapolis named E. W. Burroughs won the six hundred and twenty dollars in the Elijah fund when Lieutenant Joys was killed by a fragmentation bomb thirty-two days before the end of his tour. After that we were delivered unsuspecting into the hands of Harry Beevers, the Lost Boss, the worst lieutenant in the world. Private Burroughs died a week later, down in Dragon Valley along with Tiano and Calvin Hill and lots of others, when Lieutenant Beevers walked us into a mined field, where we spent forty-eight hours under fire between two companies of NVA. I suppose Burroughs’s mother back in Indianapolis got the six hundred and twenty dollars.
BUNNY IS
GOOD BREAD
for Stephen King
PART ONE
1
Fee’s first memory was of a vision of fire, not an actual fire but an imagined fire leaping upward at an enormous grate upon which lay a naked man. Attached to this image was the accompanying memory of his father gripping the telephone. For a moment his father, Bob Bandolier, the one and only king of this realm, seemed rubbery, almost boneless with shock. He repeated the word, and a second time five-year-old Fielding Bandolier, little blond Fee, saw the flames jumping at the blackening figure on the grate. “I’m fired? This has got to be a joke.”
The flames engulfed the tiny man on the slanting grate. The man opened his mouth to screech. This was hell, it was interesting. Fee was scorched, too, by those flames. His father saw the child looking up at him, and the child saw his father take in his presence. A fire of pain and anger flashed out of his father’s face, and Fee’s insides froze. His father waved him away with a back-paddling gesture of his left hand. In the murk of their apartment, Bob Bandolier’s crisp white shirt gleamed like an apparition. The creases from the laundry jutted up from the shirt’s starched surface.
“You
know
why I haven’t been coming in,” he said. “This is not a matter where I have a choice. You will never, ever find a man who is as devoted—”
He listened, bowing over as if crushing down a spring in his chest. Fee crept backward across the room, hoping to make no noise at all. When he backed into the chaise against the far wall, he instinctively dropped to his knees and crawled beneath it, still looking at the way his father was bending over the telephone. Fee bumped into a dark furry lump, Jude the cat, and clamped it to his chest until it stopped struggling.
“No, sir,” his father said. “If you think about the way I work, you will have to—”
He blew air out of his mouth, still pushing down that coiled spring in his chest. Fee knew that his father hated to be interrupted.
“I see that, sir, but a person on my salary can’t hire a nurse or a housekeeper, and—”
Another loud exhalation.
“Do I have to tell you what goes on in hospitals? The infections, the sheer sloppiness, the . . . I have to keep her at home. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, sir, but there have been very few nights when I have not been able to spend most of my time at the hotel.”
Slowly, as if he had become aware of the oddness of his posture, Fee’s father began straightening up. He pressed his hand into the small of his back. “Sometimes we pray.”
Fee saw the air around his father darken and fill with little white sparkling swirling things that winked and dazzled before they disappeared. Jude saw them, too, and moved deeper beneath the chaise.
“Well, I suppose you are entitled to your own opinion about that,” said his father, “but you are very much mistaken if you feel that my religious beliefs did in any way—
“I dispute that absolutely,” his father said.
“I have already explained that,” his father said. “Almost every night since my wife fell ill, I managed to get to the hotel. I bring an attitude to work with me, sir, of absolute dedication—
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” his father said, “but you are making a very great mistake.
“I mean, you are making a
mistake
,” his father said. The little white dancing lines spun and winked out in the air like fireworks.
Both Fee and Jude stared raptly from beneath the chaise.
His father gently replaced the receiver, and then set the telephone down on the table. His face was set in the cement of prayer.
Fee looked at the black telephone on its little table between the big chair and the streaky window: the headset like a pair of droopy ears, the round dial. On the matching table, a porcelain fawn nuzzled a porcelain doe.
Heavy footsteps strode toward him. Jude searched warmth against his side. His father came striding in his gleaming shirt with the boxy lines from the dry cleaner’s, his dark trousers, his tacked-down necktie, his shiny shoes. His mustache, two fat commas, seemed like another detachable ornament.
Bob Bandolier bent down, settled his thick white hands beneath Fee’s arms, and pulled him up like a toy. He set him on his feet and frowned down at the child.
Then his father slapped his face and sent him backward against the chaise. Fee was too stunned to cry. When his father struck the other side of his face, his knees went away and he began to slip toward the rug. His cheeks burned. Bob Bandolier leaned down again. Silver light from the window painted a glowing white line on his dark hair. Fee’s breath burned its way past the hot ball in his throat, and he closed his eyes and wailed.
“Do you know why I did that?”
His father’s voice was still as low and reasonable as it had been when he was on the telephone.
Fee shook his head.
“Two reasons. Listen to me, son. Reason number one.” He raised his index finger. “You disobeyed me, and I will always punish disobedience.”
“No,” Fee said.
“I sent you from the room, didn’t I? Did you go out?”
Fee shook his head again, and his father gripped him tightly between his two hands and waited for him to stop sobbing. “I will not be contradicted, is that clear?”
Fee nodded miserably. His father gave a cool kiss to his burning cheek.
“I said there were two reasons, remember?”
Fee nodded.
“Sin is the second reason.” Bob Bandolier’s face moved hugely through the space between them, and his eyes, deep brown with luminous eggshell whites, searched Fee and found his crime. Fee began to cry again. His father held him upright. “The Lord Jesus is very, very angry today, Fielding. He will demand payment, and we must pay.”
When his father talked like this, Fee saw a page from
Life
magazine, a torn battlefield covered with shell craters, trees burned to charred stumps, and huddled corpses.
“We will pray together,” his father said, and hitched up the legs of his trousers and went down on his knees. “Then we will go in to see your mother.” His father touched one of his shoulders with an index finger and pressed down, trying to push Fee all the way through the floor to the regions of eternal flame. Fee finally realized that his father was telling him to kneel, and he, too, went to his knees.
His father had closed his eyes, and his forehead was full of vertical lines. “Are you going to talk?” Fee said.
“Pray
silently
, Fee—say the words to yourself.”
He put his hands together before his face and began moving his lips. Fee closed his own eyes and heard Jude dragging her tongue over and over the same spot of fur.
His father said, “Let’s get in there. She’s our job, you know.”
Inside the bedroom, he opened the clothing press and took his suit jacket from a hanger, replaced the hanger, and closed the door of the press. He shoved his arms into the jacket’s sleeves and transformed himself into the more formal and forbidding man Fee knew best. He dipped his knees in front of the bedroom mirror to check the knot in his tie. He swept his hands over the smooth hair at the sides of his head. His eyes in the mirror found Fee’s. “Go to your mother, Fee.”
Until two weeks ago, the double bed had stood on the far end of the rag rug, his mother’s perfume and lotion bottles had stood on the left side of what she called her “vanity table,” her blond wooden chair in front of it. His father now stood there, watching him in the mirror. Up until two weeks ago, the curtains had been open all day, and the bedroom had always seemed full of a warm magic. Fat black Jude spent all day lying in the pool of sunlight that collected in the middle of the rug. Now the curtains stayed shut, and the room smelled of sickness—it reminded Fee of the time his father had brought him to work with him and, giddy with moral outrage, thrust him into a ruined, stinking room.
You want to see what people are really like?
Slivers of broken glass had covered the floor, and the stuffing foamed out of the slashed sofa, but the worst part had been the smell of the lumps and puddles on the floor. The walls had been streaked with brown.
This is their idea of fun,
his father had said.
Of a good time.
Now the rag rug was covered by the old mattress his father had placed on the floor beside the bed. The blond chair in front of the vanity had disappeared, as had the row of little bottles his mother had cherished. Two weeks ago, when everything had changed, Fee had heard his father smashing these bottles, roaring, smashing the chair against the wall. It was as if a monster had burst from his father’s skin to rage back and forth in the bedroom. The next morning, his father said that Mom was sick. Pieces of the chair lay all over the room, and the walls were covered with explosions. The whole room smelled overpoweringly sweet, like heaven with its flowers.
Your mother needs to rest. She needs to get better.
Fee had dared one glance at her tumbled hair and open mouth. A tiny curl of blood crept from her nose.
She’s sick, but we’ll take care of her.
She had not gotten any better. As the perfume explosions had dried on the wall, his father’s shirts and socks and underwear had gradually covered the floor between the old mattress and the bare vanity table, and Fee now walked over the litter of clothing to step on the mattress and approach the bed. The sickroom smell intensified as he came closer to his mother. He was not sure that he could look at his mother’s face—the bruised, puffy mask he had seen the last time his father had let him into the bedroom. He stood on the thin mattress beside the bed, looking at the wisps of brown hair that hung down over the side of the bed. They reached all the way to the black letters stamped on the sheet that read
St. Alwyn Hotel.
Maybe her hair was still growing. Maybe she was waiting for him to look at her. Maybe she was better—the way she used to be. Fee touched the letters, and let his fingers drift upward so that his mother’s hair brushed his hand. He could hear breath moving almost soundlessly in his mother’s throat.
“See how good she looks now? She’s looking real good, aren’t you, honey?”
Fee moved his eyes upward. It felt as though his chest and his stomach, everything inside him, swung out of his body and swayed in the air a moment before coming back inside him. Except for a fading yellow bruise that extended from her eye to her hairline, she looked like his mother again. Flecks of dried oatmeal clung to her chin and the sides of her mouth. The fine lines in her cheeks looked like pencil marks. Her mouth hung a little bit open, as if to sip the air, or to beg for more oatmeal.
Fee is five, and he is looking at his mother for the first time since he saw her covered with bruises. His conscious life—the extraordinary life of Fee’s consciousness—has just begun.
He thought for a second that his mother was going to answer. Then he realized that his father had spoken to her as he would speak to Jude, or to a dog in the street. He let his fingertips touch her skin. Unlike her face, his mother’s hands were rough, with enlarged knuckles like knots and callused fingertips that widened out at their ends. The skin on the back of her hand felt cool and peculiarly coarse.
“Sure you are, honey,” said his father behind him. “You’re looking better every day.”
Fee clutched her hand and tried to squeeze some of his own life into her. His mother lay on her bed like a princess frozen by a curse in a fairy tale. A blue vein pulsed in her eyelid. All she could see was black night.
For a second Fee saw night, too, a deep swooning blackness that called to him.
Yes,
he thought.
Okay. That’s okay.
“We’re here, honey,” his father said.
Fee wondered if he had ever before heard his father call his mother
honey.
“That’s your little Fee holding your hand, honey, can’t you feel his love?”
A startling sense of negation—of revulsion—caused Fee to pull back his hands. If his father saw, he did not mind, for he said nothing. Fee saw his mother floating away into the immense sea of blackness inside her.
For a second he forgot to breathe through his mouth, and the stench that rose from the bed assaulted him.
“Didn’t have time to clean her up yet today. I’ll get to it before long—but you know, she could be lying on a bed of silk, it’d be all the same to her.”
Fee wanted to lean forward and put his arms around his mother, but he stepped back.
“We’re none of us doctors and nurses here, Fee.”
For a moment Fee thought there must be more people in the room. Then he realized that his father meant the two of them, and that put into his head an idea of great simplicity and truth.
“Mommy ought to have a doctor,” he said, and risked looking up at his father.
His father leaned over and pulled him by the shoulders, making him move awkwardly backward over the mattress on the floor. Fee braced himself to be struck again, but his father turned him around and faced him with neither the deepening of feeling nor the sparkling of violence that usually preceded a blow.
“If I was three nurses instead of just one man, I could give her a change of sheets twice a day—hell, I could probably wash her hair and brush her teeth for her. But, Fee—” His father’s grip tightened, and the wedges of his fingers drove into Fee’s skin. “Do you think your mother would be happy, away from us?”
The person lying on the bed no longer had anything to do with happiness and unhappiness.
“She could only be happy being here with us, that’s right, Fee, you’re
right.
She knew you were holding her hand—that’s why she’s going to get better.” He looked up. “Pretty soon, you’re going to be sitting up and sassing back, isn’t that right?”
He wouldn’t allow anybody to sass him back, not ever.
“Let’s pray for her now.”
His father pushed him down to his knees again, then joined him on the blanket. “Our Father who art in heaven,” he said. “Your servant, Anna Bandolier, my wife and this boy’s mother, needs Your help. And so do we. Help us to care for her in her weakness, and we ask You to help her to overcome this weakness. Not a single person on earth is perfect, this poor sick woman included, and maybe we all have strayed in thought and deed from Your ways. Mercy is the best we can hope for, and we sinners know we do not deserve it, amen.”