Slice (22 page)

“That's okay. But you know, before, we've always talked about it if something is bothering one of us."

“I know."

“I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing something wrong."

“Hey. Don't be silly."

“I don't think it's being silly. Obviously something is out of kilter all of a sudden,” she said.

“Nothing about us. I just have a lot on my mind."

“It hasn't been a problem before.” (Let UP for crissakes—what is
your
problem?)

“I love ya a lot, you know that.” He touched her lightly on the tip of her nose. “I'm just having an off week."

“Okay.” She smiled. “If you feel like talking about it...” Jeez, kid, she thought to herself, why can't you shut your trap? But she couldn't. It was too important not to let anything ever wedge itself between them. “You know I'm here to listen. Whatever it is."

“Some things are just better left unsaid.” He sat up against the headboard. “If you really want to hear about it I don't mind telling you about it. It's no mysterious thing. You really want me to tell you the details?” He could no more stop himself now than she could.

“It might make YOU, you know"—long pause—"feel better to have, uh, to be able to talk about it. I don't mind.” Her voice very quiet.

“A multiple homicide and robbery in a Chicago butcher shop. It was something got called to my attention. Just one of those awful killings where the sickness of the perpetrators keeps screaming at you. So we make bad jokes. We do this and that. Usually we can let it all drop at the front door. This one's just been harder to shake. Somebody butchered the butchers, you might say. Cut their throats in a very cold-blooded way the same way you might slaughter something for food.” She seemed to shrivel as he told her about it. And the more Donna recoiled from it, the more it irritated him that she'd goaded him into telling her about it. And the more he told her of the gory details, the more he felt like he did when he was trying to gross out some woman reporter in the squad room, or some TV schmuck at a crime scene. And when he'd finished she was still irritated, and he was irritated, and nobody was feeling very loved, and something awful and sick and horrible had inserted itself into the intimacy of their warm marriage bed.

“It has NOTHING to do with us,” he said, knowing even then that what he'd just said couldn't be further from the truth.

D
aniel had a trot line in back of the Darnell's Field, and adjacent to a place known locally as Gum, which led to the New Cairo Ditch. But he'd never walked that far, nor had he ever wanted to go through all the tall weeds, swamp, quickmud, poison ivy, and thickly overgrown areas between Michael Hora's ground and the New Cairo. There was also a shallow ditch that ran down through Gum parallel to the Sandy Road, running past Darnell's, Hora's, Thurman's, and the Lingo Field to the extreme eastern edge of the land on this side of the river, the point of the fishhook. The top left of the hook as one saw it on a map would be the New Cairo, a deep and swift-moving ditch that curved back around the farmland feeding into the river. There was good fishing in the New Cairo, and Daniel had driven all the way to Texas Corners and put a line in there, which he ran when he thought about it.

He had decided he was going to try to walk the whole distance, a long, boring, tough, solitary march to wear himself down. Just one more variation on his daily theme—to tire himself to the point where he could ignore his hungry, screaming belly, which was shrinking just as his companion's seemed to grow more prominent by the day.

So it was a new experience as he cut down through the swampy Dutch Barrow, plowing through the high, wet grass, moving up a little weed-covered hill full of cottonwoods and willows, down over the ditch bank, and in that eyeball click he was back in Vietnam.

The McDermotts had 160 acres of rice and this is what he saw as he came through the overgrown ditch bank foliage, stepping out into a rice field that lay across his field of vision all the way to the far tree line. Chaingang had gone over the bank and between a pair of cottonwoods and a willow and some horseweed, but he came out in high elephant grass between two palms in the Rung Sat Special Zone, in another time, another lifetime.

To the mind of this insane killer and precognitive genius and childlike retard and atavistic two-legged mastodon—a strong emotion or a quick psychic jolt will not be the same as it will be for you or me. This bestial man draws on a lifetime of cruelties; tortures and deprivations beyond the line of normal human tolerance.

To us a surprise or shock or consternation will register in a different way. We forget our coffee, which has been sitting there for a quarter-hour and we lift the cup to our lips, preoccupied, busy with something else, and the unexpected coldness is a minor, unpleasant moment. Nothing more. An insignificant annoyance. But to this man, a sound—the metal-cleated footfalls on certain surfaces—or the smell—a feces-clogged tenement toilet—or the sight—a tattooed arm reaching out in a certain way: these are the nuances that can trigger fast, steel-muscled, relentless, deadly responses that strike out to silence the nearest human heartbeat.

And Daniel Bunkowski steps between the rustling cottonwoods and the high weeds and Chaingang emerges into the heat and fearsome dangers of the Rung Sat, and it is the 1960s and the big man is there for only one reason—to KILL—and it is open season on humanity. And he sees no one but he SENSES ... SMELLS THEM ... the little people, and he moves cautiously, moving backward, stepping exactly where he has just stepped before, moving back between the palms disappearing back into the high elephant grass and saw grass, into the myriad, mysterious, many shades of Vietnam green and melting back into the shadows to wait and plan his ambush.

This is Charlie's. Everything is his. Jungle. Delta. Mountain range of straw-carpeted, deep caves. Tiny spider holes that dot the land like cancer. Massive, intricate tunnel complexes. And a mined, bobby-trapped, pungi-sticked paddy running between here and the blue feature. And Chaingang lies chilly in the tan grass. Frozen. Waiting for the cover of night when he will be ready to run the game back on Victor Charles. When he will take it to him.

The Stobaugh County Army Corps of Engineers had just run a piece in the Hubbard City paper about the paddy situation, but Chaingang didn't read the paper. He didn't know he was looking at a rice field that would soon have its dikes leveled so they could simply let the levee water in and help the farmers who had until now been forced to implement the costlier and more time-consuming methods of irrigation. He looked out and saw only the paddies and dikes of the Rung Sat Special Zone. He waits, frozen, hiding in the wet shadows of the Dutch Barrow Pit, but in his mind he is at 331/STAR RACER, at the edge of an area of marshes on the Long Tau River, and he is surrounded by Charlie.

To visualize the area, picture the exaggerated hourglass of a woman's figure. Facing her, the large left breast is the Long Tau, curving around marshland, curving back into the woman's waist, the tree line of palms and cottonwoods, the exaggerated woman's hip curving back out around the field of flooded paddies and an overgrown path leading to the blue feature.

The huge man is not in his geographic location but is, instead, somewhere south of the pagoda woods, to the east of the woman's right breast, north of the rice fields, and west of the comic's edge, like the early stories of Christopher Columbus, who would surely fall off the edge of the world. He is out of body, back in time, transported back to the hot, stinking hell of the RSSZ, Republic of South Vietnam. It is monsoon season, and he is caught in a tidal stench, alone, surrounded by things that could hurt him to death, not the least of which was a company of Ho's fiercest who were using the woods for a base camp and reppo depot.

He preps for the night ambush, sitting there in the scorching down-state sun, in the Vietnamese blast furnace of the foul-smelling Rung Sat, and he begins methodically taping every loose piece of gear, every clanking metallic thing that moved, taping with his precious black friction tape, or slick black electrical tape, pulling out the huge tractor chain and painstakingly taping each individual link so that nothing clicked, snikked, ticked, rattled, clattered, bang, shook, chinged, pinged, or thumped a unnatural noise of warning in the night. No shiny metal will take the reflected jungle moonbeam and light up his night in sudden and fiery pain.

And the shiniest metal imaginable, a slashing, razor-sharp bowie that weighs as much as a small sword, a flashing silver blade that could sever a one-inch manila hemp line the way you could shave a hair from your arm, a monstrous killer knife is drawn from its oiled sheath and he begins running the blade back and forth across a spittle-wet, oiled whetstone. Ffffsssssssss. Fffffffffssssssssssssssssss. Long, measured strokes with the blade carefully angled to produce maximum results without feathering the razor edge. Long, patient, unhurried sharpening pulls across the rough stone. Ffffffffsssssssss. In tempo with his heartbeat. Then, when he is satisfied with the keenness of the cutting edge, he slices into his wiping cloth and wipes off the filth, laying a light, almost invisible coat of oil on the bright, perfectly hardened and tempered steel that had killed so many times.

He smelled them. They would be coming as the tide moved back in. When the rains came and the monsoon torrents swelled the river over the banks and the rice fields became awash and the whole of the RSSZ became one putrid, dangerous swamp, he would have to find the high ground, and they would be there, a company of the enemy's toughest elite, waiting to kill him.

But they would not kill him. He had heard of the rewards offered among their little soldiers and the ones in the villages who were their spies. They would give much to have the huge man alive. To take him and make his dying a slow and precisely choreographed pain play, a tapestry of agony. They'd enslave him first as they liked to do—keeping him in a hell they would devise to match his worst fears, prolonging his suffering as few races could do better than the hard-hearted North Vietnamese.

He wondered how it would come. His presentience would warn him if capture were inevitable. He would kill many, many of them. But when the M-60 was out of ammunition, the claymores gone, the frags expended, the pistol clips empty, the belts shot up, the explosive used, the chain lost—he would kill as many as he could with the bowie and then turn it on himself. He knew he could summon the resolve to stab himself in the heart and stop his own life force. Or he could save a grenade for the last. Or save one bullet. One special round tucked away for the end.

He absentmindedly finds himself with the oiled bowie in hand, holding it in a death grip, and without thinking, for no reason other than emphasis, makes a deep, quick downward slash over his strong heart.

It is funny. He smiles widely at the sudden bloodstream. It is a deeper cut than he meant to make but of less than no significance. A prank. Nothing more than a jailhouse tattoo, a heart stabbed into the arm from boredom, filled with a poison of inks to darken and dye the skin. LOVE and HATE inscribed upon the knuckles. A pachuco cruciform at the webbing of the thumb. A slash over the heart for luck.

He is hunkered down beside his huge rucksack in a small woods at the edge of an area of marshes on the Long Tau, where the spike team was to effect an ambush of Viet Cong guerrillas who had terrorized a small, nearby hamlet, torturing and brutally killing a province chief and his family. Intelligence believed that the VC were using the ruins of a pagoda in the woods in back of him for a supply cache near the hamlet, but Chaingang knew it was a setup and he had gone on a different course, alone, waiting and watching. The team had been wiped out by mortars and sniper fire. Set up by hoi chanh dinks who had been double agents or quadruple agents or ... who knows? And the boat was gone. There was no radio. And Chaingang was alone.

He knows he will wait until dark and then make his way to the New Cairo Ditch, which is the Long Tau River in the IV Corps Tactical Zone, 331/STAR RACER, Spike Team M-1350, Republic of South Vietnam.

T
he LZ, which is named with some ridiculous woman's name, is perhaps fifteen clicks out and the birds change pitch and it signals his on-line terminal that this is the time he hates about to materialize and manifest itself in the sudden drop to the decks, and suddenly your lunch is in your throat and before you can drop your socks and grab your rocks the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) has set them down through the small opening in the green, and a commo “adviser,” a marine sergeant, is yelling at them to double-time it to the blue feature.

They are soon jammed onto a PACV from some riverine unit and roaring up the snaky waterway into the Long Tao's ranged mouth. The Hovercraft is called a patrol air-cushion vehicle and Chaingang thinks of the blue feature as a water snake, winding the way a serpent will, flowing and twisting into the Rung Sat.

These are spooky Charlie-held streams that weave a web of blue and brown lines through the jungle delta and sprawling Vietnamese marshlands. There will be no medevac back in here. No arty. Nor resupply. This is a lonely game to be played by the chosen few. What did they say on the commercials? The few—the proud. If you get your ass kicked back in here you are permanently fucked up.

Chaingang sees the tributaries as a thousand water snakes, their names sounding like notes played on a busted musical instrument by a deaf man without hands, music that reverberates and twangs and echoes shrilly with Asian monkey vibes of bad luck and slow death and omens of evil.

Water snakes feeding into the arms of Satan. Warping the drug-ripped minds of these children. Injecting them with massive shots of instant paranoia and fear tremors that rumble deep in the gut like the New Madrid Fault Line, and the boys hope they can get their fatigues off before the fear erupts, because as everyone knows Ho Chi Minh's revenge takes no prisoners.

The PACV comes coasting into the Long Tao at dusk in a ratfuck of off-loading mania and hand signals and everyone sweating bullets, wishing they were aboard her when the chief petty officer makes her a memory. And the team is moving out to dig in the night positions before the blackness of Victor Charlie country comes to blind and befuddle.