The Phantom Blooper (29 page)

Donlon reaches over and takes my arm and pulls me to the microphone. "This is Joker, a brother, just back from the Nam. Come on, Joker, say something funny."

I look at the audience and I think about what I should say to men who have gathered together to fight against their own war. When the silence starts to make me feel self-conscious, I say, "You can't fight bayonets with songs."

Someone says angrily, "What does
that
mean?"

"Yeah," says the audience.

I say, "I mean that you people are warm-hearted, you're good people, but you are kidding yourselves if you think that slogans printed on gumballs are going to stop the Viet Nam war.

The audience grumbles, jeers, moves closer to the podium.

The King jumps forward and says, "He's right! Pick up the gun! Pick up the gun!" His face is wild. "Off the pigs!"

Donlon pushes the King back, says to me and to the crowd, "Joker, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War observes a strict policy of nonviolence. We're not going to fight anybody. Not even against Nixon, the skull-king of San Clemente." He taps his armband. "I'm a peace marshal. That means that it's my job to prevent any of our people from resisting arrest by any means except passive resistance."

I say to Donlon and to the crowd, "I wish you luck."

Before anyone can say anything there is a sudden flurry to port. We all look over there and we see a long double line of the biggest policemen in the world advancing, faces hidden behind tinted Plexiglas helmet shields. The policemen are carrying long walnut nightsticks. Their uniforms are so blue that they look black. They attack, silver badges flashing in the sun like shards of burning metal.

The black lines merge and whack at the edge of the crowd with nightsticks, attacking without warning and without mercy. Before we can react, chaos breaks out as tear gas canisters are lobbed in from starboard, followed by a second double line of cops, a blocking force.

People run around in circles, trying to escape, choking on the tear gas.

I see Murphy frantically distributing damp dishrags to be used as primitive gas masks.

A ragged verse of the song "We Are Not Afraid" ripples through the demonstrators while white-helmeted tactical squads in blue flak jackets elbow their way through the trapped demonstrators, clubbing everybody. Some of the veterans lose their tempers and take swings at the cops with their fists while peace marshals try to restrain them.

The King picks up one of the slim gray tear gas canisters and throws it back at the police. The smoking canister hits a cop in the kneecap and brings him down. This enrages the police even more.

I see Donlon and some of the other peace marshals begging the police to have mercy. The police ignore the peace marshals and hit them with their nightsticks.

I move toward Donlon and I hear a police Sergeant give the order: "Pound the shit out of everything hairy that moves."

The cops converge on a fifteen-year-old girl. The girl is wearing a boy's sweater. The sweater is gold-colored and has a black high-school varsity letter on it. One cop gets behind the girl and latches a bar arm control on her throat with his nightstick, chokes her with his nightstick across her throat. Her tongue comes out. She's suffocating.

The middle-aged housewife with the MY SON DIED FOR NIXON'S PRIDE sign moves clumsily, pulls at the cop's arm, but he shrugs her off. The cop says, "Get away from me, bitch. You're next."

The housewife hits the cop with her cardboard sign. The cop releases the girl in the varsity sweater and allows her to collapse unconscious to the ground. Then he turns and hits the housewife in the face with his nightstick.

The cops reach the microphone, where twenty disabled Viet Nam veterans in wheelchairs are jammed together. The cops dump the crippled and legless veterans out of their wheel-chairs onto the ground and beat them with nightsticks as they try to crawl away.

I see Donlon trying to protect the wheelies and I'm right behind him, ready to kill. Donlon tries to talk to the cops, tries to reason with them, tries to calm them. But the cops are as reasonable as Brownshirts in Nazi Germany. When Donlon tells the cops that the crippled men are wounded veterans, the cops get even madder.

One cop turns and hits Donlon in the face with his nightstick. Donlon falls.

The cop who hit Donlon turns away and returns to beating the wheelies. The wheelies who have arms hold up their arms to block the blows.

As I move toward Donlon some cop involved in a violent struggle drops his helmet. I pick up the helmet, which looks like headgear for a Martian gladiator.

I charge the cop who hit Donlon. By the time he looks at me I'm already swinging the helmet and the helmet hits the cop's Plexiglas face shield and the face shield shatters and the cop's nose breaks and blood splatters the inside of the Plexiglas so that he can't see. While the cop takes off his helmet I get an armlock on his throat and I put my knee into the small of his back.

I say, "Drop the nightstick or I will break your spine.

Somebody lays a nightstick hard across one of my kidneys and it hurts and I fall down.

When the police handcuff me I'm spread-eagled on the deck. Donlon is lying next to me, unconscious.

A cop steps up to Donlon, says, "We're Viet Nam veterans too, asshole." The cop spits in Donlon's face.

Another cop says, "That boy is going to lose that eye."

The spitting cop says, "Yeah. Life is hard, then you die." And they both laugh.

I'm herded together with a hundred other prisoners of war. The pigs don't see us as people anymore. We are no longer American citizens. We're the Viet Cong. We're the enemy. We are dupes of Moscow. We are round-eyed gooks and we have no I.D.

Except for the guy they call the King. The King flashes FBI credentials at the cops and they let him go.

A blond cop comes up to me, looks me over. He is a snarling, sneering little shit. "Look. Just lookie lookie," he says, and two more cops come over to check me out. Blondie taps my chest with his nightstick. "Look at this rack of fruit salad. He's got three Purple Hearts. But no stripes."

Blondie gets up in my face and says, "You make me ashamed to be a Viet Nam veteran."

I say, "You make me ashamed to be a human being."

The blond cop slaps his nightstick into his gloved hand. "Yes, this is starting to look like another case of resisting arrest.

Suddenly a cop, still wearing his helmet and with his face shield down, shoves his way past the three cops and says, "This one is
mine
."

The helmeted cop drags me away and throws me roughly into the back seat of a black and white prowl car with a rack of blinking blue bubble-gum machines on top. Inside, the car smells of vomit, whiskey, and cheap perfume.

As the prowl car pulls away, the blond cop and his pals wave goodbye to me and laugh knowingly. I feel like a Viet Cong Suspect who has just been invited along for a friendly little chopper ride.

I watch through the metal screen as the cop takes off his helmet and looks back at me, grinning.

Thunder laughs. "Joker, you piece of shit. Where the fuck did you come from? We thought the Phantom Blooper wasted your ass at Khe Sanh, the day before we pulled out. You're a real ball of tricks, man. You're a fucking magician."

Jerking myself clumsily up into a sitting position, I say, "Thunder, you fucking pogue lifer. What the hell are you doing being a cop? It's good to see you, man."

Thunder shrugs. "Hey, man, maybe half of the guys in the department are Viet Nam veterans. What can I say? It's a good job. Good pay. Twenty years to a pension. I ain't no Einstein. They got me with the snipers. Only now I don't waste gook officers. I waste dirt-bags, junkies, and pimps."

I say, "Yeah, sure, and dangerous criminals like those people back there."

"Listen," says Thunder, looking back over his shoulder as he drives, "I hate that bullshit. I really do. Hey, Donlon is a friend of mine. I was looking for him when I found you. Somebody told me he was hurt. I'm in the VVAW too, Joker, only don't tell them that downtown. Orders is orders."

I say, "How bad is Donlon hurt?"

Thunder says, "Listen, we'll go to this place I know. I'll get you out of those cuffs and we'll have a couple of beers. Give the fucking pogue liters downtown time to book the demonstrators. I'll call the station and find out where they took Donlon. I didn't see Murphy. She must have got away."

"That's solid, man. Thanks. And thanks for the huss."

Thunder says, "Don't thank me, bro. We're family."

I don't trust myself to make a reply.

VVAW lawyers have Donlon out on bail in a couple of hours and Thunder drives me to the hospital in Santa Monica where they've taken him.

Thunder stays in the car. "I can't be seen talking to Donlon," he says. "I'll wait for you. I'll drive you to the airport."

I go in alone. Murphy is in the waiting area. Some other wives of vets are with her.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

Murphy says, "Yes, thank you, Joker. I'm glad you're here."

I say, "Is he sleeping?"

"Yes." Murphy looks up at me, holding her feelings in. "He's lost his eye."

I don't say anything. Then: "I've got to go, Murphy. My family is waiting for me. They haven't seen me for three years."

Murphy stands up, hugs me. "I understand. It's okay. There's really nothing more you can do here. You'll keep in touch?"

I say, "Of course. Will you be okay? Is there anything you need? I've got some money with me, back pay."

Murphy says, "Thank you for the offer, but we'll be okay."

A nurse comes out of Donlon's room. The nurse is a sexy candy-striper with long blond surfer-girl hair and big blue eyes.

I say, "Could I just look in on him for a second?"

The candy-striper starts to say no, but Murphy touches her arm and the candy-striper says, "Okay. But just for a second. Okay?"

I go into Donlon's room. He's drugged to the gills. One whole side of his head is bandaged. His head is in a harness so that he can't move. His eye is covered with a Styrofoam eye-cup.

I stand by the bed. I feel like I'm back in the recovery ward in Japan.

Donlon opens his good eye and sees me. He's too weak to say anything.

I lift his hand off the bed and I hold his hand in a grunt handshake.

I say, "I wish you a lifetime of cold L-Zs."

The day after the peace rally in Los Angeles I'm standing in a dirt road in front of Cowboy's home in Kansas. It's twilight and I'm thinking about how Kansas is nearer to Oz and the Emerald City than it is to the village of Hoa Binh, Viet Nam.

Here in this vast ocean of swaying wheat, gold below and blue sky above, the air is clean and the silence is broken only by the flutter and warble of flights of sparrows. For a moment the war seems like a black metal fantasy, nothing more than a particularly noisy nightmare.

But even here in Kansas with my feet firmly set on American soil I can see Cowboy's face the moment before I fired a bullet through his head. He gave me the Lusthog squad, and when I took the squad from him he trusted me to protect the life of every Marine in the squad, even if I had to get wasted to do it, even if I had to waste another Marine to do it. I just wish it hadn't been him. I liked him. He was my best friend.

In my nightmares I see it over and over, but it's always the same. Cowboy is down, shot through both legs, his balls shot off, an ear off, a bullet through his cheeks has torn out his gums. Cowboy is being shot to pieces by a sniper in the jungle. The sniper has already mutilated Doc J.-for-joint, Alice, and Parker, the New Guy. Cowboy has shot them all in the head with his pistol and tries to shoot himself, but the sniper shoots him through the hand. Then the sniper is shooting Cowboy to pieces so that the rest of the squad, led by Animal Mother, will try to save him and then the sniper can kill the whole squad, and Cowboy too.

One time each night Cowboy stares at me with eyes paralyzed with fear, and his hands open to me like language and I fire a short burst from my grease gun and one round goes into Cowboy's left eye and rips out through the back of his head, knocking out brain-wet clods of hairy meat. . . .

When you kill someone you own them forever. When your friends die, they own you. I am a haunted house; men live in me. Every time I dream about Cowboy the nightmare ends in a fearful splattering of blood and I wake up in a cold sweat, wanting to scream, but afraid to give away my position.

Now I'm on the other side of the planet, in a place where violent death is not the daily concern. This is Kansas farmland, where weather is God and the ripening wheat is life itself.

According to a rusty mailbox, Cowboy's parents live in an old Winnebago motorhome. The motorhome is roughly the shape of and has been painted to look like a sliced loaf of bread.

Off to starboard there's a small barn and a corral. In the corral is a beautiful white horse.

I step up onto the broken cinderblock that serves as a front step. As I knock on the aluminum door, Cowboy's horse watches me from the corral and snorts.

A woman comes to the door and invites me in.

Cowboy's parents are dirt farmers. Farm people feel that they are obligated to invite visitors to stay for supper, because it's only good manners. And it would be bad manners not to accept.

Because I am Cowboy's friend his mother cooks up a batch of Cowboy's favorite food: chili with Gordon Fowler's original Texas-style chili seasoning. The chili has a lot of spicy Mexican things in it.

Nobody says anything when Cowboy's mother sets a place for him at the dinner table.

Mrs. Rucker says, "He always had his nose in some book about Texas. I guess Johnny always wanted to be from Texas. I don't know why." Stirring the chili slowly, she says, "He was a good boy."

When we sit down at the table Mr. Rucker invites me to say grace.

I lower my head and say, "We thank You, heavenly Father, for the blessing of this food. We ask You to bless our body strength in your glory. Amen."

The Ruckers say, "Amen.

We eat. I pull Cowboy's Stetson from my AWOL bag. "Here," I say, "I think you should have this."