The Phantom Blooper (23 page)

The frogs crank up their volume another notch. A dog runs along the riverbank, barking at the movement of the river. The dog is black and white, half ghost, half shadow.

I think about my father, always working, always making a crop, but never making a dollar ahead of next month's feed bill, happy just to be alive and healthy and with honest work to do.

I think about my mother. Whenever I think of my mother she's always wearing one of those flour-sack dresses she wore when I was a boy, and she's always cooking supper or putting up preserves.

I think about how much I miss my baby sister, Stringbean, whose idea of joy in life is to put salted peanuts into her RC Cola and watch it fizz.

I think about Old Ma, my grandmother, who is always full of energy and good humor. Right now she's probably out fishing in the Black Warrior River, her faded khaki trousers rolled up over her bony brown knees, wading back and forth with a bamboo fishing pole, red worms wiggling in her shirt pockets. I can see her hooking a yellow catfish, fighting it, then pulling it from the water. I can see the fat catfish flopping on the end of her line, white-bellied, glistening wet in the sun.

Small-arms fire crackles, far away, and is answered by thumping shells and slow-motion blips of neon. Enemy artillery is going in. Metal projectiles tear open the sky and collide with the stars and bounce off the moon. A hundred-pound artillery shell floats and sighs and slams into some rocky ridge where dumb grunts hunker down, cold and wet, in some grubby little bunker in some unimportant sector of some half-forgotten firebase.

The grunts eat cold C's with bandaged hands while humming rock-and-roll songs. To the artillery shells exploding all around them, they say, "Shot at and missed, shit on and hit." And when Puff the Magic Dragon comes, bringing forty thousand rounds of happiness, and rains red death onto their enemies, the grunts nod to one another knowingly, satisfied, and they say, "Spooky understands."

Sometimes I have nightmares. I see Daddy D.A. and Thunder and Donlon and Animal Mother, and all of the others, all of the strong young faces. I see all of my friends, dead, lying facedown in the mud on some dismal LZ.

Red bullets dance on the horizon, and I can hear the dark music of violent death, all beat, no rhythm.

I strain my mind until my head hurts. I try to catalog the objects in my room in Alabama. I try to recite the titles and authors of all of my books.

Walking in the Alabama in my mind, I see forests and streams. I see freshly plowed cotton fields full of Yankee cannonballs and Cherokee bones, and I think about every arrowhead I ever found, the shape, the color, and what the day was like when I found it.

I remember hunting arrowheads in our neigbbor's freshly plowed cornfield after a rain. I found a perfect Indian arrowhead of blue flint lying inches away from a Confederate musket ball.

On our own farm I found only enemy bullets. We plowed up so much Federal ordnance in our fields that Old Ma used Yankee Minie balls for sinkers when she went fishing for catfish.

I sit, staring out over the black water of the river and as I listen to the flowing of the water the night goes on and on without end and I think about catfish and about how catfish have whiskers and look like Fu Manchu.

Noon at the
Luu Dan
factory. After a sleepless night on the riverbank I still feel stiff, I've got a cough, and my nose is running.

The day is quiet and peaceful. The air is clean and the sun is a gold coin. I smell a fire and rice cooking. I can hear children playing nearby, running in a ragged troop along the paddy dike, laughing, flying a long blue kite shaped like a dragon.

Battle Mouth is playing with the village children. For months after the victorious battle at the Nung combat fortress Battle Mouth was a catatonic zombie. When he finally did snap out of it, his personality had improved and he was no longer an asshole. He no longer wants to slaughter the jackals of imperialism for the glory of socialism. All he wants to do now is be a little kid again. And the little kids of Hoa Binh don't mind. The kids love Battle Mouth because he likes to laugh and have fun and is big enough to give them piggyback rides.

Most of the villagers are out working in the paddies. The harvest is almost over.

Under an open-air canopy of glossy green palm fronds and bamboo poles we sit, cross-legged on reed mats, our faces tiger-striped by wedges of sunlight. We sing as we work, constructing military equipment out of American trash, making
Luu Dan
weapons for the People's Army.

We sit in a row. In front of each worker is a pile of components. As each
Luu Dan
is passed from hand to hand along the human assembly line each person attaches a component from his pile.

The boy to my right has a harelip and likes to smile. He has the same cheerful, spaced-out expression on his face all the time, every day, like he's either retarded or eats opium with a spoon. In front of the boy is a pile of red metal Coca-Cola cans gathered from American trash dumps by the children of the village.

With a cold chisel the boy rakes a can from the pile. He flips the can upright with the chisel, an impressive trick. He presses the chisel hard onto the center of the bottom of the can and gives the chisel a precise tap with a square-headed hammer, punching a hole into the can. Using the cold chisel like a big finger, he flips the punctured Coke can into my pile, claws another can from his pile, upends it with a practice motion, and his hammer falls again.

The rhythm of the work is steady. As we work we sing:

On we go to liberate the South

Smash the jails, sweep out the aggressors

For independence and freedom

Taking back our food and shelter

Taking back the glory of spring. . . .

I pick up a punctured Coke can. I insert a bamboo handle that is about four inches long into the hole in the bottom of the can. I toss the can to an impatient Johnny Be Cool, who is always one beat ahead of me in the rhythm of the production line.

Johnny Be Cool's nimble fingers insert a coiled string into the hollow bamboo handle. The string is attached to a pull ring of braided comm wire. Before he hands the
Luu Dan
to the Broom-Maker, Johnny Be Cool slips a cap of hammered tin over the bottom of the bamboo handle.

The Broom-Maker inserts a pair of wire cutters into the small drinking hole on the top of the can and cuts across the top, folding back two flaps of thin metal.

Song takes the can from the Broom-Maker and inserts a short metal cylinder hacksawed from a length of plumbing pipe. Inside the short piece of pipe is a simple spark-producing friction firing mechanism. Song carefully ties the end of the string inside the bamboo handle to the firing mechanism.

Behind Song is a scrawnv little old man with no teeth. He is sitting on a defused American howitzer shell with a hacksaw in his hand. He holds on to the shell with his legs while he hacksaws through it like a metal log. After a minute or so he stops sawing and pours water from a plastic Pepsi bottle onto the shell. When he starts sawing avain the wet shell slips free and the little old man grunts, wrestling with the shell until he loses his grip and falls to the ground like a rodeo rider.

The assembly line laughs.

Song says, "The bomb is alive!" and everybody laughs again.

The bony little shell rider stalks his prey. He hops back into the saddle. In the high-pitched rasp and grind of his hacksaw metal dust flies. The tip of the shell falls off and the old man has laid a big copper-jacketed egg. Only the egg has hatched and there are no bronze baby birds inside. Instead, the shell is full of old cheese, light tan on the outside, off-white on the inside. The old man with no teeth quickly plunders the inside of the shell, digging out the TNT with a fish knife.

Song cautiously stuffs the piece of plumbing pipe with the white waxy scrapings, then passes the can to a chubby twelve-year-old girl in a red T-shirt. From a mound of materials scrounged by the smaller children of the village, the girl fills the Coke can with bits of glass, nails, scrap metal, truck engine parts, rusty shrapnel, paperclips, thumbtacks, and other sharp and deadly things.

At the end of the assembly line a black cast-iron cooking pot full of hot pitch boils over a wood fire. It smells like a hot road. Bubbles pop on the surface as it is stirred. With a gourd dipper full of hot pitch, an old woman in a patched UCLA Bruins sweatshirt seals the top of the Coke can, then holds the can upside down and seals any open spaces in the hole around the bamboo handle. She looks like a chamber of commerce volunteer dipping candy apples at the country fair. She lays the finished homemade hand grenade on its side to cool.

Just before lunch the hand grenades are picked up by children who carry them in small rattan baskets on a bed of straw, like Easter eggs. The children hurry to distribute the
Luu Dan
weapons to
Chien Si
fighters in camouflaged defensive positions around the village.

At noon, when the sun is without mercy, our lunch arrives on the back of a snorting black water buffalo led by an eight-year-old girl. The girl guides the bulky monster, tugs him along, her fingers hooked over the heavy brass ring in the water bo's nose. When the water bo hesitates or deviates, the midget buffalo handler gives the animal a sharp slap across the nose with the palm of her hand.

As we distribute lunch bundles from two giant earthenware jugs slung on either side of the water buffalo, Battle Mouth comes up and greets me and smiles at me. He likes me now, maybe because I'm the only other adult in the village who has time to play games with him and the kids.

We pass out small wooden bowls and wait our turns as hot rice is ladled out with a tin cup.

A shell hits the deck a mile from the village. We ignore it. Just another short round. Just some gungy cannon cockers playing that silly game they play.

Dark gray puffs of smoke appear in a treeline two hundred yards to the east, followed by muffled explosions. H&I fire--harassment and interdiction. The Americans and their puppet armymen shoot shells at random into areas where troop movements have been reported by recon. Another Long Nose crazy thing, of no consequence to anyone except as a source of dud shells with which to construct
Luu Dan
weapons and as an annoyance for Comrade Lizard.

Shells fall. Then more shells.

The Woodcutter appears in a nearby vegetable field. He squints, shields his eyes from the sun with a callused hand. He gives an order and immediately the men and women in the field drop their farm implements and lift bundles of black plastic sheeting from beneath the paddy water. Inside the bundles of black plastic sheeting are weapons.

In the village, somebody is banging a shell casing with a bayonet.

At the grenade factory the women collect our uneaten bowls of rice and dump the rice back into the earthenware jugs.

Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si
dee-dee
down the paddy dike. The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan have a muted but animated conference that, this time, does not end in an angry confrontation.

As we watch the gray puffs of smoke
whump-crumping
into the treeline we think about how sometimes the Arvin puppet soldiers like to crank off a few rounds of artillery for no particular reason except that they get nervous and the noise boosts their morale.

But these shells are obviously not intended to hit anything, not even ghost battalions of Viet Cong, and are not marking rounds. All of the shells are striking the same spot, in a tight group, not in a pattern. A pattern kills, a tight group minimizes the danger of hitting innocent bystanders.

General Fang Cat may be a corrupt public official, but he is an honest businessman. General Fang Cat is firing his rusty old guns to fulfill his contract with the Woodcutter. The incoming shells are a warning.

Commander Be Dan, the Woodcutter, and Bo Doi Bac Si are all running down paddy dikes in different directions, and Song has disappeared.

"
Truc Thang!
" yells the old man without teeth who hacksaws artillery shells. "
Truc Thang! Truc Thang!
"

And he's right. The sky is full of helicopters. The killer locusts are coming, armed to the teeth, gunships and troop carriers, buzzing high in the sky, holding off, waiting for the artillery barrage to lift. No doubt company commanders are screaming obscenities into radio handsets, asking what stupid son of a bitch opened fire ten minutes early and what stupid son of a bitch is continuing to fire ten minutes late.

Everyone is running somewhere. The village gong bongs with heavy resonance, announcing the attack.

I don't move. Johnny Be Cool waves goodbye, then charges off to take care of his water buffalo. My leg is still stiff from the wound I got on the combat mission. I can hump, but I'm awkward, slow, and clumsy when I run. There's no cover crossing the paddies. I don't want to be caught out in the open by the gunships.

When General Fang Cat has decided that he has jumped the gun on his orders as much as he can safely explain away as merely the fortunes of war, the artillery lifts, and the sky is open for the gunships.

Under the canopy of the
Luu Dan
factory I watch as American airplanes fill the sky. There is the knifing of green wings and four Phantom fighter-bombers roll in for a bomb run across the village.

Five-hundred-pound bombs drift down at an angle, black blobs with
X
s on top. Energy bells blossom and hang in the air for an instant, faintly visible, like heat coming up off a hot road. Hooches, trees, and disassembled people float up into the sky. Then, as though unrelated, a muffled thud, followed closely by a tremor in the ground.

I pull up a reed sleeping mat in one corner of the
Luu Dan
factory and lift the trapdoor of a tunnel. I climb down into the tunnel and the trapdoor drops back into place.

I learned the locations of every tunnel in the village by playing an educational game with Johnny Be Cool, Battle Mouth, and the kids. We walk through the village and I say "
Boom
" and the last kid into a tunnel loses the game.