Sin City (66 page)

I didn't bring a coat, so I'll have to borrow his; find it in the wardrobe, stand a moment, motionless, holding just one sleeve. I'm remembering when we bought those two cream trench coats, how we strutted in the mirror, tried on silly hats as well; what fun he was, how generous. He asked me where my coat was when we were driving here last night, and I had to lie again. It wasn't easy. You don't lose coats at craps, yet how could I explain that it was shut up at the Gold Rush, or perhaps in the hands of the police? He didn't probe, or nag about my carelessness, just promised me another one. And when I mumbled something about expense, he said his own coat was mate to mine and hated being parted from it, so it was an act of simple mercy to replace it, not extravagance at all.

I smile, sling his lonely coat across my shoulders. I'll find this guy if I have to search the whole damn desert for him. I race back to my room to get my shoes, stifle a cry as I stop dead at the door. He's in there, sitting on my bed, fully dressed except for rings and socks. He hasn't seen me. He's staring at the floor, head down, shoulders sagging; seems somehow much more vulnerable bare-fingered and barefoot. I feel suddenly confused. Did I dream the scars? The skin that's showing looks so smooth and normal, can it really be so monstrous lower down? He's holding my blue dress, has it twisted through his fingers, lying on his lap. I clear my throat, see him start. I imagine he'll leap up, maybe dart away. He doesn't; simply shifts position on the bed. “Sit down,” is all he says.

I can't bring myself to join him on the bed, so I squat down on the floor, his coat still round my shoulders. It's gloomy in the room, the curtains drawn tight shut, that gloating sun blocked out.

“Remember last night you told me when your birthday was?”

What's he on about? My birthday's five whole months away. Is he just trying to pretend everything's all right, that the last hour hasn't happened, blank it out in small talk? That's fine by me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I'll be nineteen on 19th June. Nineteen must be lucky.”

He shakes his head. “No way. Though it's quite incredible – same date, same year. When I heard that, Carole, I felt real churned up inside. It seemed kind of … meant – you being born on the day that …” He breaks off, bites his lip.

“What d'you mean? Which day?”

He doesn't answer. The bedroom door is open and I can hear a sudden judder from the ancient fridge, filling in his silence. I lick my finger, try to clean my oozy knee through my ripped pyjama leg. My blue dress has slithered off his lap, fallen to the floor. I don't think he's even noticed.

At last he looks across at me. “Let's go back a bit, okay? October '67.”

Pre-history. I wasn't even born then. I can feel the years slowly creaking back. My parents got married that year – two scared people in stiff clothes, yellowing on our front-room mantelpiece. Victor's picking at a nail, seems more remote from me than he's ever been before, as if he's moved into a past that can't include me. “That's the date I joined Battery C in Bardstown.”

“Joined what?”

“The National Guard. It's a civilian reserve force, something like your Territorial Army. To be honest with you, Carole, I only joined in the hope of dodging the draft. I was twenty-two and a real live wire.” Suddenly he laughs. I jump. The sound is totally unexpected when he's been looking so anguished and intense. “I wish you'd known me then.” He runs his hand though his thinning greying hair. “I had a thick brown beard and hair to match and I was so lean and keen and hot to trot, I was like a jumping bean. I was determined to get ahead – and also save the world as well, just in my spare time. My Dad was a pretty humble guy, and Christ! was I going to make him proud of me. I'd already worked my way through college and landed on my feet as a site engineer in a small construction firm with big ideas. The last thing I wanted was to louse up my career, lose two years of my life to the regular army, which didn't really figure in my high ideals. But Battery C was like the perfect compromise – just six months training, and only weekend duties, and there was no way we could be drafted, or so we thought. Then in May '68 – May 13th, actually – my father said he'd heard something on the radio about Nixon activating a whole bunch of Guards units for front-line duty in Vietnam.”

“Vietnam? You mean you …”

“Hang on a second, Carole, let me finish. I told my Dad he must have got it wrong. ‘No way, Pop,' I said. ‘If they send us anywhere, it'll be to Cincinnati, to help put down the race riots.' Three months later, I was stepping off a military plane in Saigon.”

Saigon. I stare at him. I've heard so much about that war, seen films – pro the war, anti the war, revenge for the war, remorse for the war. Yet it always seemed remote. I'd never met anyone who's actually set foot there, not in Saigon.

“We were posted to Tomahawk Hill – that's near Phu Bai, the northern part of South Vietnam. We had to take another plane to Danang, then we drove our guns to Phu Bai, and from there we were choppered into Tomahawk. It was a helluva trip for someone whose foreign travels had been restricted to Miami and LA!” He allows himself a grin. “There were worse postings, far worse. We had hot meals and dry beds, even ice-machines and electric cooling fans, donated by the loyal folks back home. It was a spooky kind of place, though, completely bare, not a tree or blade of grass in sight, just old abandoned cemeteries.”

He shivers as if he can see the place again, rubs his eyes, perhaps to blot it out. “Our year was almost up. It hadn't been too bad. We'd had a real good community feeling, almost like a family. We were all local boys who'd grown up together, trained together, and mostly damn good gunners …”

“You were a
gunner
, Victor?” I simply can't imagine it, can't imagine him a soldier at all, not Victor.

“Yeah. I was lucky. We gunners had it easy. It was the grunts who did the dirty work, out in the paddies and the jungle. They slept in all sorts of shit – if they slept at all – while we reclined on bunk beds in the dry. And like all good artillerymen I could sleep though our own gunfire. So when I woke in the early hours of June 19th, 1969 …”

“That's when I was born,” I interrupt. “The early hours. About two o'clock I think it was. My Ma was most indignant. She's always liked to sleep late.”

He doesn't laugh, just gets up from the bed and comes and squats in front of me, takes my hands in his. “You were born at two o' clock, Carole?”

I nod. His expression is so strange, so fierce, I feel quite scared. Another nervous rumble from the fridge, then silence closes over it again.

“What's the matter, Victor?”

“Nothing. It just seems so …” He leaves the sentence hanging, then gets up slowly, moves towards the door, seems to be almost talking to himself.

“It's still so clear, that night. I can remember every little goddamn detail, like I'm living it again. We'd seen a movie –
Bonnie and Clyde
it was – and a barbeque was planned. Oh yeah, they tried to keep us happy, give us lots of goodies, but it started pouring down with rain, the kind of icy sheeting rain you only get out there, so we all drifted off to our bunkers instead of broiling steaks and chicken. I went to sleep with the noise of the rain drumming down like crazy. I woke up to another noise – enemy guns.”

He pauses for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is different – strained and tight. “Fourteen of our men were killed, five of them from Battery C, all good buddies of mine. One guy – we'd been real close, Carole, grown up together, more or less, been to the same school, same church – he was burned so bad, his back just came away when I put my arm around him.”

Victor slumps down on the bed again, shuts his eyes. “We … We were duty crew in the gun when it got hit. My buddy got the worst of it. He was still alive – just; wanted me to stay with him until …” He makes a gesture, a horizontal slicing of the hand. I can't speak myself, feel too upset, too sick. Some tactless bird is squawking through the silence, singing about light and food and morning when Victor's friend is dying in the dark. I get up for a cigarette, try to keep my movements small and quiet. It feels wrong to move, disturb this solemn moment with matches which won't strike. The third one does, takes me by surprise. I jump with the flame, almost burn my fingers holding it too long. Victor's still sitting there in silence, mops his face with a corner of the sheet. It's quite chilly in the bedroom with the curtains closed, but I can see the sweat glistening on his forehead.

At last, he speaks again. His voice is flat, matter-of-fact. “Then more gooks poured in, wearing just these jockstraps, with their naked bodies greased so they could slip through the barbed wire. They were firing grenades, spraying the place with machine-guns, shooting anything that moved. It was pandemonium.”

“You mean you stayed there, Victor, with all that going on?”

He shrugs. “It wasn't long before I
could
n't move. Some of our ammo starting blowing up. We had these phosphorous shells piled nearby and I got caught by one of those. White phosphorous burns even worse than napalm, Carole. It kind of clings and then eats slowly through layers and layers of skin. And it's no good dousing it with water. It just ignites again, so the more water you pour on, the worse it burns.”

I clutch my stomach. Now I understand. Those are burn scars, skin-graft scars. I should have known. Jan's got this friend who used to come to supper, a trainee nurse, working on a Burns Unit. I couldn't bear to even hear her talk about it, and her text-books – God! the pictures. She told us she had nightmares the first few weeks she worked there, woke up screaming, sweating. Yet Victor seems so calm, is speaking quite impassively, still fiddling with the corner of the sheet.

“It's kind of odd. Up to then, I remember everything, and in real strong Technicolor, but after that it all goes blank and black. Next thing I knew I was waking up in base hospital in Danang – or half of me waking up. I guess God has a sense of the ridiculous – hit a guy where it'll really louse him up. It's okay, Carole, everything's still there, in working order.” He gives a forced and bitter laugh. “But as you've seen, it doesn't look too hot. I understand how you felt just now. It was years before I could look at my own body without wanting to throw up, even after twenty separate skin-grafts.”

“Twenty?”

“Yeah. Once I was out of danger, they flew me back Stateside, then on to Louisville. I was lucky. I had one of the best plastic surgeons in the country, but it was a real slow business waiting for the scars to heal before they'd risk a new graft. And I kept getting infections, so it was like one step forward, two steps back. You're helpless as a baby in that state. My weight went down by nearly thirty pounds, and I had so many tubes and drips and wires, I felt like a sick computer.”

He grins. I'm still feeling sick and shocked, still remembering what Jan's nurse friend said. Some of her patients lay for months and months with their faces missing or half their bodies gone. And it wasn't just the physical pain, but the shock of being permanently deformed and having to live with it. They were sometimes quite alone. Their relatives couldn't face them, couldn't cope; made more fuss than the patients did, or simply stayed away.
I'
d have been like that, rushing off, more sorry for myself than the poor wretch in the bed. I take a deep drag of my cigarette, inhale the smoke right into my lungs. Even now, I haven't managed a simple word of sympathy, am more concerned with my stupid heaving stomach than with Victor lying maimed in hospital.

Did people rally round, or was he left to sweat alone? He's an only child – I know that – and his parents are both dead now, had him late in life.

“Were your parents still alive then, Victor? I mean, did they help and visit you and … ?”

“Oh, yeah, they were great, Mom especially. It was harder for my Dad. He was so upset and not in such great shape himself.”

“So why did you leave Bardstown, when that was your home town with all your friends and family and everything?”

He pauses a moment, tugs at the sheet as if he'd like to rip it end to end. “I … er … couldn't stand living round the corner from my girlfriend – not after she married someone else.”

“You mean you were engaged?”

“Yeah, even bought the ring. It was a pretty ring – sapphires and diamonds.”

I'm suddenly furious and jealous, hate the girl, loathe her rotten ring. “And she threw you over?”

“I don't blame her, Carole. She was loyal at first, waited a whole year, in fact. The trouble was, I guess I didn't seem much better at the end of it than I did at the beginning. They had to use the good skin on my thighs for grafting, so they were scarred as well. And I had these ugly rashes on my hands and feet and arms, which didn't seem to heal. The grunts called it jungle-rot, and I soon discovered why, once I'd joined them on a few patrols. I wasn't used to walking trails, and my soft and pampered gunner's feet began to fall to pieces, ended up corpse-white and kind of dead. It's a fungus thing which eats away the skin, makes it ooze and crack. It can go on for years. I was luckier than most, though. Mine was nothing compared with what I'd seen. All the same …” He shrugs. “I guess I didn't look exactly the romantic bridegroom.”

“But you were a … hero, Victor, a war hero.”

“No way. I didn't even want to fight, went out there protesting.”

“That doesn't matter. You still went, and you stayed by your friend when you could have run for cover and …”

“I'd have been hit most likely, whatever I'd have done. It was chaos, total chaos. The whole war was like that. You can't use words like ‘hero' for a war which fucked up three whole decades. We're still fighting it in one way, fighting its results. There was so much bitterness, it was like it poisoned the whole country. We
were
heroes when we first returned, at least in Bardstown where our folks did everything they could to honour us and mourn the boys who didn't make it back. But a couple of years later, the media fucked us over, called us all drug-crazed dangerous psychopaths who might explode at any moment and couldn't be trusted with a job or … I know that from my own case. Well, I guess I was crazy for a while, not on drugs, but real mixed up and …” He stops, as if remembering, makes a gesture of contempt.