The Day Before Midnight (12 page)

“What you doin, boy?”

“I was praying,” lied Walls, a gifted liar.

“Don’t make me laugh, boy. Yer fuckin’ prayers already been answered when you got an extra six weeks solitary before the Aryans get their paws on you.”

And so they had been. An Aryan named Hard Papa Pinkham had taken an intense liking to the contours of Walls’s rear end and one night in the showers with three of his biker pals had decided to possess it. It was a short-lived triumph, however; Walls caught him in the corridor between wings with a straight razor and made certain Hard Papa would never again have his way in the showers. So much blood. Who would have thought there was so much blood in a dick?

The Aryans were not pleased and had sworn to make Walls sing an equally high falsetto.

“Some shot wants to see you, boy,” said the Pig Watson. “Now, you go and be quick or you answer to me. This way.”

And so they took Walls from his solitary cell in the B Wing and marched him through the main hall to the cells of the Aryans, the best-organized gang in the Maryland penitentiary. The Aryans had heroin and porn and barbs; they had murder and protection and laundry; they had shivs and thumpers and knuckles. They ran the place.

“Hey, mo-fo, your ass gonna be fuckin’ worms for sure,” one of them informed him.

“Nigger, you one dead piece of Spam,” another decreed.

“Jive, you on the hook,” said another.

“You a real popular little songun,” said the Pig with a gleeful laugh on his face. “You know, they got a pool going how long your ass going to last once you sprung from the tomb.”

“Be round long time,” said Walls insolently. “Longer than your fat white ass.”

The Pig thought this was hysterical.

“Dead guys with smart mouths, I love it,” he chuckled.

They checked through Processing—Walls was roughly searched, but his knife had been lodged elsewhere for safekeeping—and he was removed from the main cell block to the warden’s office, where he was ushered by the Pig Watson into a roomful of suits. And there were also two soldier boys. The warden signaled Watson out of the office and he closed the door behind him.

“And here he is,” said the warden, “our favorite parishioner, House Guest No. 45667. How are you, Nathan?”

Walls just looked at the white faces which always had for him the look of balloons, smooth and fat and full of gas.

“Specialist four Nathan Walls, goddamn,” said the soldier boy, some kind of super sergeant with all kinds of stripes running up and down his arm. “Jesus, what a crime, a guy like you ending up in a place like this. I checked the records. Man, you were a
hero.
There’s a hundred men alive today because of you, Mr. Walls.”

Walls just put his sullen face on and didn’t say anything. He made his eyes see infinity.

“This hero,” explained the warden, “was known on the streets as Dr. P. P for, excuse my French, pussy. He had nine girls working for him, all of them beauties. He also specialized in angel dust, uppers, downers, grass, Mexican mud, and just about everything chemical designed to screw up the inside of the human head. To say nothing of two or three assaults with intent, and no end of muggings, breaking and enterings, and felonious assaults various and sundry. But none of it was Nate’s fault. It was Vietnam’s fault, right, Nate?”

Walls flexed his strong hands and made his face as empty as a bucket with a hole in it. He would not let them get into his head. He was done with that.

“You were also,” said soldier boy, “the best tunnel rat 25th Infantry ever had. Let’s see, three Hearts, Silver Star,
two bronzes. Jesus, you had yourself quite a war down in those holes.”

Walls’s military exploits had very little meaning to him. He’d put all that far away in the deepest part of his head, and anyhow, a tunnel was just a street with a roof on it.

“Mr. Walls, we’re in a mess,” said the officer, some kind of stern bird colonel. “And we need a man to help us out of it. At 0700 today, some kind of military unit seized a national security installation out in western Maryland. A very crucial installation. Now, it happens that the only way into this installation may involve a long, dangerous passage in a tunnel. Very scary work. We need a man who’s fought in tunnels before to take a team through that tunnel. A tunnel rat. And we need him fast. You’re the only one we could find in our timeframe. What do you say?”

Walls didn’t even have to think about it. His laugh was rich and merry. “It don’t have nothing to do with me. I’m all done with that shit,” he said. “I just want to be left alone.”

“Oh, I see,” said the suit. “Now, Mr. Walls, may I tell you that I believe you’re not going to be left alone. In about twenty hours from now the idea of being ‘left alone’ is going to lose its meaning.”

Walls just looked at him.

“Yes, well, what you’re going to notice is the warhead of a Soviet SS-18 detonating at about four thousand feet over downtown Baltimore in a fused airburst for maximum destructive potential. That is, about four thousand feet over our heads as we speak today. We figure the throw weight of an 18 to be about fifteen megatons. Now, what you’ll sense, Mr. Walls, is one second of incredible light. In the next nanosecond, Mr. Walls, your body will be vaporized into sheer energy. As will the bodies of everybody in the first circle of destruction, which will extend in a circumference of about three miles from the point of detonation. What’s that, warden, would you say, about a million and a half people?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, and in a wider circle—say, ten miles in diameter—there will be extraordinary blast damage and your usual run-of-the-mill trauma associated with high explosive. You know,
Mr. Walls, you saw enough of it in Vietnam: third degree burns, severed limbs, blindness, deep lacerations and contusions, multiple fractures and concussions. I expect it will be worst on the kids trapped in the schools. There won’t be any parents around to do much good for them, so they’ll just have to do the best they can, and pray for an early death. Now, in a circle out to twenty miles you’ll have much less actual damage, but the deaths from radiation poisoning will begin within forty-eight hours. Horrible deaths. Deaths by vomiting, by dehydration, by nausea. Not a pretty picture. I’d say in this immediate area no less than three million dead by the end of the week. Now, Mr. Walls, you project that onto every major city in America and the Soviet Union and you’ll see that we’re talking about some severe consequences. A full nuclear exchange would involve the deaths of no less than five hundred million people. And, Mr. Walls, if we don’t get into that installation, that’s what’s going to happen.”

“If the white man blow his ass up, that’s his problem,” said Nathan Walls.

“Mr. Walls, the Soviets have some extraordinary hardware at their disposal, but not even they have been able to build a bomb that discriminates between races. Think of the bomb as the greatest equal opportunity employer in history. It will take us all, Mr. Walls, regardless of our race, creed, or political affiliation, and it will make ash or corpses of us. And if you have any illusions of the third world picking up the pieces, I’d advise you against them. A, there will be no pieces, and B, the radiation deaths will girdle the globe. The survivors will be mutant rats and your friends the cockroaches, who will outlast us all.”

This had very little impact on Nathan Walls, who had never, by inclination or opportunity, had much chance to cultivate the ability to think in abstract terms. There was, in the entire universe, only one phenomenon worthy of consideration: his ass. Yet he saw how urgent the situation was to the suits, even if he could not quite get with the doom jive offered him by the head suit. And so he decided to play a little game.

“And if I can get you into this place?”

“You’ll have the thanks of your government. And the satisfaction of knowing you changed history.”

“And I’ll throw in another six weeks in solitary,” said the warden.

This wasn’t quite enough. But Walls reasoned that in the open he might have a shot at a getaway and, failing that, if by chance he brought it off, it might jingle out to some loose change for him.

“Couldn’ get Nate Walls a shot at another joint?” he asked. “Say, Allentown, where all the white politicians go? There’s a swimming pool and pussy there, or so they tell it.”

“Mr. Walls,” said the suit, “you give us Burkittsville and we’ll give you Allentown.”

“I’ll give him
Miami,”
said one of the other suits.

Even as the leader of Rat Team Baker was being recruited in the Maryland State Penitentiary in downtown Baltimore, the leader of Rat Team Alpha was being lured out of retirement in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The key figure in the seduction was a young man from the State Department named Lathrop, who found himself nervous and alone in the front room of a small house off Lee Highway in Arlington, Virginia. It smelled of pork and odd spices and was decorated cheaply, with sparse furniture from Caldor’s. Awkwardly, as he waited, he looked out the window. There he saw a young woman wrapped warmly against the chill, playing with three children. He was struck by her beauty: She had one of those delicate, pale Oriental faces, and there was something extraordinarily graceful in her movements.

Someone called his name, and he turned to discover a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of polyester trousers.

“Mr. Nhai?” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Lathrop. What have we done wrong? Is something wrong with our papers? All our papers are in order. The church checked them out very specifically, it’s—”

“No, no, Mr. Nhai, this has nothing to do with papers. It’s something quite unusual, uh—” he paused, sensing the utter despair behind Nhai’s obsequiousness. “I have been
asked by my government to bring an unusual request to you.”

“Yes, Mr. Lathrop?”

“I can tell you only that we have an urgent security problem a hundred miles outside of Washington, and it appears that one of the solutions to this problem may involve a long and dangerous passage through a tunnel. We’ve set our computers to work to uncover former soldiers who served in a unit in Vietnam we called tunnel rats. That is, soldiers who went into tunnels, such as the ones at Cu Chi, and fought there.”

Nhai’s eyes yielded no light. They surrendered no meaning. They were dark, opaque, steady.

“It turns out these men are very difficult to find. They tended to be highly aggressive individuals, the sort who don’t join veterans’ groups. We’ve found only one.”

Mr. Nhai simply looked at him, sealed off and remote.

“But one of our researchers found out from a book a British journalist wrote that there was a single North Vietnamese who had served a decade in the tunnels who had actually immigrated to this country. A man named Tra-dang Phuong.”

The little man kept looking at Lathrop. His expression hadn’t changed.

“He’d had mental problems after the war, and his government sent him to Paris for treatment. And, by a strange turn of events, he met an American psychiatric resident there who took an interest in the case, and arranged for him to come to this country under the sponsorship of an Arlington Catholic church. We cross-checked our immigration records, and sure enough, Tra-dang Phuong is here. The man is here, in this house. He came over in ’eighty-three. Our records say he lives here.”

“I am Phuong’s uncle,” Mr. Nhai said.

“Then he’s here?”

“Phuong is here.”

“Can I see him?”

“It will do no good. Phuong spent ten years in the tunnels. The effects were grievous. Phuong believes in nothing and wants merely to be left alone. There’s little that
makes Phuong happy anymore. Dr. Mayfield felt that to get Phuong away from the country and the memories would be of great help. It turns out he was wrong. Nothing is of help to Phuong. Phuong suffers from endless melancholy and feelings of pointlessness.”

“But this Phuong, he knows tunnels?”

“No one knows tunnels like Phuong.”

“Sir, would Mr. Phuong be willing to accompany our forces on this most urgent security operation? To go back into tunnels again?”

“Well, Mr. Lathrop, I seriously doubt it.”

“Could we please ask Phuong?”

“Phuong doesn’t like to talk.”

Lathrop was desperate.

“Please,” he almost begged. “Please, could we just ask him?”

Mr. Nhai looked at the young man for quite a while, and then with great resignation went to get Phuong.

While he waited, Mr. Nhai came back with the nurse and the children that Lathrop had seen outside in the garden, scrawny, energetic kids, all tangled up in one another. They ran forward to Mr. Nhai. He nuzzled them warmly and cooed into their ears.

The nurse stood to one side, watching.

It seemed to take an awfully long time. Lathrop wondered when Phuong would show.

“Mr. Lathrop,” said Mr. Nhai, “may I introduce Tra-dang Phuong, formerly of Formation C3 of the Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of Vietnam. She is famous in the north as Phuong of Cu Chi.”

Lathrop swallowed.
A girl!
But nobody—still, they wanted a tunnel rat. And she was a tunnel rat.

The girl’s dark eyes met his. They were lovely, almond-shaped. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, or was it that he didn’t read Oriental faces well, and hadn’t seen the lines around her eyes, the fatigue pressed deep in the flesh, the immutable sadness.

Mr. Nhai told her what he wanted.

“Tunnels,” she said in halting English.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lathrop said, “a long, terrible tunnel. The worst tunnel there ever was.”

She said something in Vietnamese.

“What did she say?” he asked Mr. Nhai.

“She said she’s already died three times in a tunnel, once for her husband and once for her daughter and once for herself.”

Lathrop looked at her, and felt curiously shamed. He was thirty-one, a graduate of good schools, and his life had been laborious but pleasant. Here stood a woman—a girl!—who had literally been sunk in a universe of shit and death for a decade and had paid just about all there was to pay—and yet was now a child’s nurse, aloof in her beauty. If you saw her in the supermarket, you wouldn’t get beyond the beauty of her alienness: she’d be part of another world.