The Best of Lucius Shepard (41 page)

“Why?”
he asked.

“I
go to the Memorial, man,” I said, standing up from the table where we had all
been sitting. “And I cry. You can’t help but cryin’, ‘cause that”—I hunted for
an appropriate image—”that black dividin’ line between nowheres, that says it
just right ‘bout the war. It feels good to cry, to go public with grief and
take your place with all the vets of the truly outstandin’ wars.” I swayed,
righted myself. “But the Memorial, the Unknown, the parades...basically they’re
bullshit.” I started to wander around the room, realized that I had forgotten
why I had stood and leaned against the wall.

“How
you mean?” asked Witcover, who was nearly as drunk as I was.

“Man,”
I said, “it’s a shuck! I mean ten goddamn years go by, and alla sudden there’s
this blast of media warmth and government-sponsored emotion. ‘Welcome home,
guys,’ ever’body’s sayin’. ‘We’re sorry we treated you so bad. Next time it’s
gonna be different. You wait and see.’” I went back to the table and braced
myself on it with both hands, staring blearily at Witcover: his tan looked
blotchy. “Hear that, man? ‘Next time.’ That’s all it is. Nobody really gives a
shit ‘bout the vets. They’re just pavin’ the way for the next time.”

“I
don’t know,” said Witcover. “Seems to—”

“Right!”
I spanked the table with the flat of my hand. “You don’t know. You don’t know
shit ‘bout it, so shut the fuck up!”

“Be
cool,” advised Fierman. “Man’s entitled to his ‘pinion.”

I
looked at him, saw a flushed, fat face with bloodshot eyes and a stupid
reproving frown. “Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck his ‘pinion.” I turned back to
Witcover. “Whaddya think, man? That there’s this genuine breath of conscience
sweepin’ the land? Open your goddamn eyes! You been to the movies lately? Jesus
Christ! Courageous grunts strikin’ fear into the heart of the Red Menace!
Miraculous one-man missions to save our honor. Huh! Honor!” I took a long pull
from the bottle. “Those movies, they make war seem like a mystical opportunity.
Well, man, when I was here it wasn’t quite that way, y’know. It was leeches,
fungus, the shits. It was searchin’ in the weeds for your buddy’s arm. It was
lookin’ into the snaky eyes of some whore you were bangin’ and feelin’ weird
shit crawl along your spine and expectin’ her head to do a Linda Blair
three-sixty spin.” I slumped into a chair and leaned close to Witcover. “It was
Mordor, man. Stephen King-land. Horror. And now, now I look around at all these
movies and monuments and crap, and it makes me wanna fuckin’ puke to see what a
noble hell it’s turnin’ out to be!”

I
felt pleased with myself, having said this, and I leaned back, basking in a
righteous glow. But Witcover was unimpressed. His face cinched into a scowl,
and he said in a tight voice, “You’re startin’ to really piss me off, y’know.”

“Yeah?”
I said, and grinned. “How ‘bout that?”

“Yeah,
all you war-torn creeps, you think you got papers sayin’ you can make an ass
outta yourself and everybody else gotta say, ‘Oh, you poor fucker! Give us more
of your tortured wisdom!’”

Fierman
muffled a laugh, and—rankled—I said, “That so?”

Witcover
hunched his shoulders as if preparing for an off-tackle plunge. “I been
listenin’ to you guys for years, and you’re alla goddamn same. You think you’re
owed something ‘cause you got ground around in the political mill. Shit! I been
in Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. Compared to those people, you didn’t go
through diddley. But you use what happened as an excuse for fuckin’ up your
lives...or for being assholes. Like you, man.” He affected a macho-sounding
bass voice. “ ‘I been in a war. I am an expert on reality.’ You don’t know how
ridiculous you are.”

“Am
I?” I was shaking again, but with adrenaline not fear, and I knew I was going
to hit Witcover. He didn’t know it—he was smirking, his eyes flicking toward
Fierman, seeking approval—and that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit
him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of
drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to
be moral imperatives. But the real reason, the one that had begun to rumble
inside me, was Stoner. All my fear, all my reactions thus far, had merely been
tremors signaling an imminent explosion, and now, thinking about him nearby,
old horrors were stirred up, and I saw myself walking in a napalmed ville rife
with dead VC, crispy critters, and beside me this weird little guy named
Fellowes who claimed he could read the future from their scorched remains and
would point at a hexagramlike structure of charred bone and gristle and say,
“That there means a bad moon on Wednesday,” and claimed, too, that he could
read the past from the blood of head wounds, and then I was leaning over this
Canadian nurse, beautiful blonde girl, disemboweled by a mine and somehow still
alive, her organs dark and wet and pulsing, and somebody giggling, whispering
about what he’d like to do, and then another scene that was whirled away so
quickly, I could only make out the color of blood, and Witcover said something
else, and a dead man was stretching out his hand to me and....

I
nailed Witcover, and he flew sideways off the chair and rolled on the floor. I
got to my feet, and Fierman grabbed me, trying to wrestle me away; but that was
unnecessary, because all my craziness had been dissipated. “I’m okay now,” I
said, slurring the words, pushing him aside. He threw a looping punch that
glanced off my neck, not even staggering me. Then Witcover yelled. He had
pulled himself erect and was weaving toward me; an egg-shaped lump was swelling
on his cheekbone. I laughed—he looked so puffed up with rage—and started for
the door. As I went through it, he hit me on the back of the head. The blow
stunned me a bit, but I was more amused than hurt; his fist had made a funny
bonk sound on my skull, and that set me to laughing harder.

I
stumbled between the houses, bouncing off walls, reeling out of control, and
heard shouts...Vietnamese shouts. By the time I had regained my balance, I had
reached the center of the village. The moon was almost full, pale yellow, its
craters showing: a pitted eye in the black air. It kept shrinking and
expanding, and—as it seemed to lurch farther off—I realized I had fallen and
was lying flat on my back. More shouts. They sounded distant, a world away, and
the moon had begun to spiral, to dwindle, like water being sucked down a drain.
Jesus, I remember thinking just before I passed out, Jesus, how’d I get so
drunk?

*
* * *

I’d forgotten Stoner’s promise
to tell me about the Land of Shades, but apparently he had not, for that night
I had a dream in which I was Stoner. It was not that I thought I was him: I was
him, prone to all his twitches, all his moods. I was walking in a pitch-dark
void, possessed by a great hunger. Once this hunger might have been
characterized as a yearning for the life I had lost, but it had been
transformed into a lust for the life I might someday attain if I proved equal
to the tests with which I was presented. That was all I knew of the land of
Shades—that it was a testing ground, less a place than a sequence of events. It
was up to me to gain strength from the tests, to ease my hunger as best I
could. I was ruled by this hunger, and it was my only wish to ease it.

Soon
I spotted an island of brightness floating in the dark, and as I drew near, the
brightness resolved into an old French plantation house fronted by tamarinds
and rubber trees; sections of white stucco wall and a verandah and a red tile
roof were visible between the trunks. Patterns of soft radiance overlaid the
grounds, yet there were neither stars nor moon nor any source of light I could
discern. I was not alarmed by this—such discrepancies were typical of the Land
of Shades.

When
I reached the trees I paused, steeling myself for whatever lay ahead. Breezes
sprang up to stir the leaves, and a sizzling chorus of crickets faded in from
nowhere as if a recording of sensory detail had been switched on. Alert to
every shift of shadow, I moved cautiously through the trees and up the verandah
steps. Broken roof tiles crunched beneath my feet. Beside the door stood a bottomed-out
cane chair; the rooms, however, were devoid of furnishings, the floors dusty,
the whitewash flaking from the walls. The house appeared to be deserted, but I
knew I was not alone. There was a hush in the air, the sort that arises from a
secretive presence. Even had I failed to notice this, I could scarcely have
missed the scent of perfume. I had never tested against a woman before, and,
excited by the prospect, I was tempted to run through the house and ferret her
out. But this would have been foolhardy, and I continued at a measured pace.

At
the center of the house lay a courtyard, a rectangular space choked with
waist-high growths of jungle plants, dominated by a stone fountain in the shape
of a stylized orchid. The woman was leaning against the fountain, and despite
the grayish-green half-light—a light that seemed to arise from the plants—I
could see she was beautiful. Slim and honey-colored, with falls of black hair
spilling over the shoulders of her
ao dai.
She did not move or speak,
but the casualness of her pose was an invitation. I felt drawn to her, and as I
pushed through the foliage, the fleshy leaves clung to my thighs and groin,
touches that seemed designed to provoke arousal. I stopped an arm’s length away
and studied her. Her features were of a feline delicacy, and in the fullness of
her lower lip, the petulant set of her mouth, I detected a trace of French
breeding. She stared at me with palpable sexual interest. It had not occurred
to me that the confrontation might take place on a sexual level, yet now I was
certain this would be the case. I had to restrain myself from initiating the
contact: there are rigorous formalities that must be observed prior to each
test. And besides, I wanted to savor the experience.

“I
am Tuyet,” she said in a voice that seemed to combine the qualities of smoke
and music.

“Stoner,”
I said.

The
names hung in the air like the echoes of two gongs.

She
lifted her hand as if to touch me, but lowered it: she, too, was practicing
restraint. “I was a prostitute,” she said. “My home was Lai Khe, but I was an
outcast. I worked the water points along Highway Thirteen.”

It
was conceivable, I thought, that I may have known her. While I had been laid up
in An Loc, I’d frequented those water points: bomb craters that had been turned
into miniature lakes by the rains and served as filling stations for the water
trucks attached to the First Infantry. Every morning the whores and their mama
sans would drive out to the water points in three-wheeled motorcycle trucks;
with them would be vendors selling combs and pushbutton knives and rubbers that
came wrapped in gold foil, making them look like those disks of chocolate you
can buy in the States. Most of these girls were more friendly than the city
girls, and knowing that Tuyet had been one of them caused me to feel an
affinity with her.

She
went on to tell me that she had gone into the jungle with an American soldier
and had been killed by a sniper. I told her my story in brief and then asked
what she had learned of the Land of Shades. This is the most rigorous
formality: I had never met anyone with whom I had failed to exchange
information.

“Once,”
Tuyet said, “I met an old man, a Cao Dai medium from Black Virgin Mountain, who
told me he had been to a place where a pillar of whirling light and dust joined
earth to sky. Voices spoke from the pillar, sometimes many at once, and from
them he understood that all wars are merely reflections of a deeper struggle,
of a demon breaking free. The demon freed by our war, he said, was very strong,
very dangerous. We the dead had been recruited to wage war against him.”

I
had been told a similar story by an NLF captain, and once, while crawling
through a tunnel system, I myself had heard voices speaking from a skull half
buried in the earth. But I had been too frightened to stay and listen. I
related all this to Tuyet, and her response was to trail her fingers across my
arm. My restraint, too, had frayed. I dragged her down into the thick foliage. It
was as if we had been submerged in a sea of green light and fleshy stalks, as
if the plantation house had vanished and we were adrift in an infinite
vegetable depth where gravity had been replaced by some buoyant principle. I
tore at her clothes, she at mine. Her
ao dai
shredded like crepe, and my
fatigues came away in ribbons that dangled from her hooked fingers. Greedy for
her, I pressed my mouth to her breasts. Her nipples looked black in contrast to
her skin, and it seemed I could taste their blackness, tart and sour. Our
breathing was hoarse, urgent, and the only other sound was the soft mulching of
the leaves. With surprising strength, she pushed me onto my back and straddled
my hips, guiding me inside her, sinking down until her buttocks were grinding
against my thighs.