Death Chants (8 page)

"How could you have
heard what the chopper pilot said to me over the whine of the rotors? And how did you know I
didn't understand what he meant?"

"Welcome to
Vietnam. It ain't what people say that you got to hear, it's what they don't say that counts,"
said the pilot, giving me a double thumbs up and a wink.

I spotted the
chopper that was to take me to Bien Hoa.

I turned to say
thanks for the advice, lame as it was, to the pilot in the Super Sabre, but the plane was gone.
Where it had stood was a burned hulk of a jet in a mortar crater. The wreckage was at least six
months old.

In spirit quests,
by the Sacred Lake of my people, after long fasts and much suffering, I have seen animal spirits
that were not there, and sometimes the dead spoke to me. But never in the real world have the
dead spoken to me.

I looked all around
me then and I saw that I was in a place that was unlike itself. I looked in the old ways of my
people, where a tree stood I saw not the tree but its shadow. This was a shadow world, half robed
in the strange clothes of the dead, and alive only with things of another world.

I approached the
chopper I had been ordered to report to, staggering under the weight of cage and eagle. A line of
bullet holes ran across the middle of the craft. Somebody had stuck plastic roses in the
holes.

I knew the pilot,
by name at least.

I saluted
stiffly.

Lieutenant Colonel
J. N. Howton regarded me with a strange look on his face. "Can the salute, pinhead! You must be
Lieuten­ant Lookseeker. What the hell is it you do, boy? The brass said you were a very hush-hush
secret weapon."

"I'm sorry. I have
been instructed to say that the information you have requested is classified."

Howton jumped out
of his craft, circling it. "OK, high-hat me, I don't give a shit. Just get your classified ass in
the chopper. I'm preflighting it. It won't take long—just a few extra minutes of insurance. You a
weapons specialist?"

"I have been
instructed to say ..." I began.

"Aw, shut the hell
up with that crap, will ya," he growled. "Stow your equipment on board. If you don't know much
about choppers, climb topside with me and I'll fill you in. Also, you can count the bullet holes
on your side. If we come up with the magic number, we win a magic elephant, personally
autographed by General Westmoreland himself."

I stowed the cage
in the back and then I climbed up after him. He pointed out the rotor head, and then indicated a
large retain­ing nut which holds the rotors to the mast.

"Just thought I'd
tell you, this dingus keeps it flying. If this whatsis comes off, we lose the blades and we take
on the aerody­namic capabilities of a pregnant rock. We call the dingus the Jesus
nut."

"It won't come
off," I said. "A Russian surface-to-air missile will down this chopper and fuse it in
place."

"What did you say?"
Howton had a strange look on his face.

I turned away. I
had spoken before I thought. So often with me, I say things that I wish I could keep inside. But
as these things so easily spring to my mind, also so easily do they spring to my lips.

"You're a strange
one, Lookseeker," said Howton. "How many bullet holes on your side?"

"I count ten,
eleven, uh, fourteen," I said.

"Damn, there's only
twenty-two on my side. Never going to break no damn records this way," said Howton with a
good-natured curse.

We climbed down and
entered into the chopper.

I was already
wearing a flak vest, but once inside the chopper, Howton insisted that I put on a fifteen-pound
chest protector of laminated steel and plastic.

"Bet you never
thought you'd ever be wearing an iron bras­siere," said Howton as he buckled himself in at the
controls. The crew chief and door gunner fitted ammo belts into their M-60 machine guns. I was
given a flight helmet and settled it on my head. I adjusted my headset so I could hear the radio
transmis­sion between our craft and Saigon ground control.

"Helicopter Nine
Nine Four. Departure from Hotel Three. East departure mid-field crossing." That was what Howton
said into the radio. What I heard was Howton's life twisting in the dark like a lost white bird.
I heard his heart stop in the crash that was yet to be and almost cried out because though
Howton's heart died with no pain, it caused a hole between the two worlds of home and here, and
the hole let the dark wind in.

All my life, I have
feared the dark winds.

In a strongly
Vietnamese-accented voice, Saigon control re­plied, "Roger, Nine Nine Four. Takeoff approved. We
have you lor a cross at five hundred feet."

We lifted with a
thump, hovered over the adjoining runway,
our nose tilted down, and then there was a larger thump as we went through transitional
lift and soared up and away.

"Your first eyeball
of the terrain?" asked Howton over the roar of the blades. "Or did you scope it on the flight
in?"

I looked down at
the land which I knew I would leave my bones in. I did not see what Howton saw. I saw the flat
tabletop lands of my people, the great stone mesas, the pueblos gleaming in the shimmering
heat.

I didn't speak.
Howton dropped the chopper until we were flying just above the treetops. "Why are we flying so
low?"

"Heavy VC batteries
in this section. I'm not cleared for the upper lane, so if I can't go high, I go as low as I can
get it. Harder to hit us. Our exposure time is shorter this way."

The UH-1D chopper
vibrated a lot as we skirted the treetops. Two gunships joined up with us, taking up position on
each side of us.

The radio crackled,
giving off
 a brief series of
orders in code which I did not recognize. It was half in code, half in slang.

Howton spoke into
his headset. "This is Hownow Howton. Nine Nine Four. I'd like permission to divert to extradite
ARVNs at Phu Loi."

"Negative. Continue
with mission," was the immediate reply.

Howton regarded me
sourly. He glanced upward—the sky was filling with jets, F-lOOs.

He began a rapid
upward climb.

"Your nursemaids
are here. Time to take the high road."

"Wish I knew what
the hell it is you do," said Howton. "You're becoming an itch I can't scratch."

We gained a fairly
high altitude, paced by the gunships on each side and the ever-present jets.

"You're a
short-timer," I said to Howton. "Your wife, Annie, loves you very much."

"Don't recall
mentioning her name, Chief. Somebody brief you on me or what? Maybe you're one of those psychic
types?" Howton regarded me with cynical distrust.

"I just know
things," I said.

"Not in this case,
partner," said Howton, hunched over the controls. "I've got a big four hundred and thirty-eight
days to
go. A long hard winter and a
long hard summer and another goddamn winter to boot. Sort of like a two-for-one sale."

At times like this,
when I know too much, I find myself grow­ing quiet and cold and remote from life. Remote and cold
be­cause there is nothing I can do for those around me. Knowledge of what is yet to be is not
always a way to change what is about to become.

I knew in less than
ten days Lieutenant Colonel J. N. Howton would die in a fiery helicopter crash. I knew his wife,
Annie, who hated war, would slowly drink herself to death and would know no other men in her
life. And so, two lives would burn in the crash of a helicopter in this place of
shadows.

Howton spoke into
his headset, talking to the bay-door gun­ner. "What's the good word from the back of the
bus?"

"This is Doctor
Death, in basic black, here, talking the stuff at you, big pilot. I got zero unfriendlies. I got
Rattlers on my sleeves and we is A-fine and Butt Ugly." Doctor Death was a huge black with gold
teeth. Huge muscles threatened to burst the shoulders out of his olive-drab T-shirt. He wore a
baseball cap decorated with chicken feathers and a huge button that said,
I LIKE IKE. HE'S DEAD.

"That's the meanest
son of a bitch who ever squatted over a quad 7.62 machine gun. They tell me he shot his mother.
Claimed she was a VC infiltrator."

"He'll survive the
war but not the heroin," I said and then wished I hadn't said it. I hadn't meant to.

Howton shook his
head. "You are a little too weird to live, if you ask me, Big Chief. How about you do me and mine
a favor and lay off the heavy gloom and doom."

"Sure." I grinned
at him. "Maybe it's just Indians are natu­rally pessimistic. Probably has something to do with
losing a whole continent."

"Hey! How come I
gots to ride shotgun on this here wild-ass chicken? The damn thing just bit the hell out of me!"
said Doctor Death.

"That's an eagle,
numb butt! It's on the cargo manifest and it's classified top secret, so keep your paws off it!
It's worth more than you are on this mission," snapped Howton.

I could tell Howton
wanted to ask me about the eagle but perhaps he knew I couldn't tell him anything.

"Listen, since I am
going to be the last to know, maybe you can tell me what kind of traffic we're heading for?"
asked How-ton.

"I know even less
than you do. All I know is, I'm to join up with a unit called the 145th, at a place called Phu
Loi."

"You ain't been out
to fight no war yet, Big Chief. You smell green to me. So where do they get off calling you a
secret weapon? You some kind of superskunk? Is that it, Big Chief— you lift your legs and squirt
smell juice on old Uncle Ho Chi Minh?"

"I've donated blood
on a battlefield on another world," I said, but I knew it was not something I could
explain.

"Yeah, well you're
a freaking Martian and I'm Doctor Death's toothless old mother," said Howton, scanning the
horizon. "This is it. Our landing zone."

"Where are we
exactly?"

"As the cootie
flies, we're northwest of Saigon, near the Michelin Rubber Plantation, if that tells you
anything."

We landed on the
helipad. Howton turned in his seat, looked at me expectantly. "Now what?"

The radio kicked
in. "Nine Nine Four. This is Gunship Tiger Fifty Seven Seven. Stand by for new
orders."

"Ask and you shall
receive," said Howton. "Got your ass covered back there, Doctor Death?"

"Wrapped in a pimp
Cadillac, you limp-ass white boy. What's the poop?" sang out Doctor Death.

"No poop. We hang
on to our Mystery Guest and wait for the sun to shine."

"I'm getting
restless back here, boss. I ain't killed nothing all goddamn morning and I am getting a
considerable mad on."

"How is the war
going? Are we winning?" I asked Howton, although that was what I myself was here to find out and
I knew Howton had no answers.

"War can't take you
no place but cold and old. You ask me how the war's going, I'll tell you I miss the hell out of
my wife and I don't think I'm ever going to be young again. You ought to be asking Doctor Death,"
suggested Howton. "If he don't exactly
know the answer, he's sure-ass good at making up one that sounds good."

"Doctor
Death?"

"Who that yammering
in my ear?" said the big black with a wide grin splitting his face. "Is that the baby we want to
throw out with the bathwater?"

"Affirmative."

"Welcome aboard,
Chief. You out here trying to do to Viet­nam what your folks done did to Custer?"

"Something like
that," I said. "How do you think the war is going?"

"Just like a
waitress with her legs crossed and her arms folded. The frigging service here is
terrible."

Howton smiled and
jerked his thumb back at Doctor Death. "His name is actually Jackson Jackson, but Doctor Death
suits him better. Unwise to try to unconnect him with his own label. Ain't saying he's mean, but
his pockets are full of teeth donated by second place in arguments with him."

"Sounds mean," I
said. I spoke into the headset. "Once a tribesman, Elk Shoulder, fought many enemies
single-handed, as many as the bar could hold, I guess. He said he didn't like the damn white man
music on the jukebox. Survived the fight with­out a scratch. He grabbed some guy's head, tore the
legs off a bar stool, and beat on his head right along with the music, singing he don't know
exactly what because he don't speak any English, but no matter 'cause he's got the rhythm down,
that's for sure. And he walked off, where somebody else would have died. If you get the rhythm,
it is said you can walk off. When you talk, I hear the same rhythm."

"That's me to a T.
I am the King of Walking It Off," said Doctor Death. "I am so goddamn mean I am going to survive
Vietnam. Man, you can't get no meaner than that."

Another chopper, a
gunship, joined us on the helipad.

It discharged
several men, two guns at ready, obviously guards, with a prisoner between them, and a man walking
like an architect's idea of what a human would walk like if he were a high-rise.