Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (13 page)

“Colonel Kane, it’s almost light,” whispered the sergeant at the rendezvous; then noticed the blood streaking the greasepaint on Kane’s face and hands; followed his stare to the jungle floor, and saw the bleeding, headless body. Vietcong. Very young. Perhaps no more than fifteen.

“He spoke to me,” Kane said dully.

The sergeant looked around for the head. Then gasped with horror as he saw it rolling down an incline from the tree trunk, overcoming the pressure of weeds. It thudded gently against Kane’s foot.

“He spoke to me,” Kane repeated. Then he lifted his eyes to the sergeant’s. “After I killed him,” he said.

The sergeant looked suddenly alarmed. “Jesus, Colonel, let’s get back!”

“He said I loved him,” Kane said softly.

“Christ,
forget
about it, Colonel!” The sergeant took him by the arm, squeezing deep with steely fingers. Then he rasped, “Colonel,
forget
it!” and savagely kicked away the head, fighting an instant impulse to vomit. Suddenly Kane ripped free from his grip. His eyes seemed to clear.

“Come on, let’s go,” he ordered the sergeant in a tone that was brisk and commanding. The sergeant returned with him to base. Said nothing. And pondered.

In days to come Kane was to wonder why the sergeant, whenever he saw him, would eye him oddly, almost in puzzlement: the look of a man who has asked a question, then suddenly hoped he would get no answer. Kane had completely forgotten the incident. But something within him had remembered. He made sure that the sergeant never again accompanied him on patrol. He could think of no special reason, except that it somehow seemed more efficient. Beneath this glaze of motivation, he was careful never to probe.

Some two weeks after the incident Kane was standing by a window of his adjutant’s sandbagged shack, staring out at torrential rains that had not ceased for the last four days. The adjutant, Lieutenant Bidwill, was hunched over a TWX machine that noisily spewed out messages a chattering eighth of an inch per thrust. It mingled in ominous syncopation with the pounding of the rain. Kane suddenly started; then relaxed. He’d heard a voice, he thought, from the jungle: a single cry that sounded like “Kane!” Then he’d seen the bird taking off from the treetops and he remembered the screech of its species.

An orderly, carrying food on a tray, came in through the open door. “Ready for lunch now, Colonel Kane?”

Kane had heard the orderly’s footsteps, but continued to stare out the window. He remembered steaming mugs of cocoa frosty mornings, yes, and evenings, at the orphanage long ago. He could never get enough of it. There’d been a brother—Brother Charles—who would tousle his hair and call him “Cocoa-top.” “You’re turning to chocolate,” he’d say; then sometimes look sad and walk away. There was no cocoa now in the rations. “Never enter this office,” Kane said edgily, “without knocking, Private Miller. Try it again; this time with knuckles.”

“Yes,
sir!
”

Kane heard the orderly retreating; felt an unaccountable trembling in his fingers; a twitching in his bones. These were his constant companions ever since coming to Vietnam. Nor could he sleep; at best, an hour or two each night; and the strings of sleep were plucked by dreams, chilling nightmares always forgotten. He tried to remember them but couldn’t. There were times when he was dreaming when he would tell himself in the dream that surely this time he would remember. He never did. Not once. The morning’s only legacy was sweat and the buzz of mosquitoes. Only that. No more. Yet the dreams, he knew, never left him; still ran darkly through his subconscious like an underground channel for sewage; eyes of rats, sleek and slimy, gleaming bright, gleaming assurance, fixed on some easy prey within him. Behind him he sensed vague tracks; was nagged by a prescience of imminent disaster.

“‘If it were done when it were done,’” murmured Kane.

“Sir?” queried Bidwill.

“Macbeth,” said Kane. “You should read more, Lieutenant; makes the jungle almost bearable.”

Kane heard the orderly’s knock. Then footsteps halting beside him. “Ready for lunch now, Colonel?”

The sentence was never completed. Kane chopped out irritably with his hand, sending the tray and all of its contents shattering noisily to the floor. “Get that fungus out of my sight!” he rasped, never turning his gaze from the window.

Private Miller raced out of the room. Lieutenant Bidwill looked up at Kane. His face was a mask without expression, and yet in his eyes there flickered a sadness, a questioning wonder flecked with fear. Then once more he looked to the TWX machine as it clicked its teeth without pause.

“Can’t you turn that damn thing off!” snapped Kane.

“Special orders coming in, sir.” Abruptly the machine fell silent. Bidwill grunted; then he snorted; then he ripped away the message. When he looked up, the Colonel was gone; rain splattered in through an open door. He raced to the doorway, saw the Colonel walking slowly toward the jungle; coatless, hatless, instantly drenched in the violent downpour. The Lieutenant shook his head. Again there was sadness in his eyes. And gentle concern in his summoning voice: “Colonel? Colonel Kane, sir!”

Kane stopped dead, turned and faced him, eyes on his hands that were cupped before him, like a child catching the rain.

The Lieutenant flourished the TWX. “Colonel Kane! Please come in, sir!”

Kane walked slowly back to the shack, stood silently staring at Bidwill as trickles of water plopped down from the cuffs of his trousers and sleeves, puddling the floor.

Bidwill held out the TWX. “Sir, I thought this might give you a laugh.”

“What is it?”

“Orders reassigning you to Los Angeles, California.”

Kane stared numbly at the Lieutenant. “Where?”

“Stateside, sir! Los Angeles! But it’s an obvious mistake.”

Kane took the TWX and started to read it as the Lieutenant rattled on, straining for lightness in his voice. “Puts you in charge of some kind of asylum. Man, what a rock!” He fingered a place on the message. “Got you confused with someone else. See? Calls you a psychologist. Also wrong middle initial.”

The Lieutenant moved to a desk, picked up a pipe and began to fill it. “Sir, I only hope the Russians are as fouled up as we are. If computers cut their assignments, then I’m damned sure that they are.” He briefly laughed through his nose. “I know some clerks as dumb as computers, but they don’t cost millions of dollars and some are a hell of a lot more charming. Take that typist in—”

He turned and Kane was gone. He was walking in the rain. On the floor was the crumpled TWX. Bidwill soberly walked to the door, grimaced as raindrops splattered his face. The orderly, back to clean up, walked up beside him, stared out at Kane. “What is it with him?” he asked the Lieutenant.

“I just told him a funny joke.”

*   *   *

Night fell suddenly. The Lieutenant paced in his quarters, chain-smoking nervously. Kane had been gone for hours. What should he do? Send out a patrol? He would like to avoid it if he could; avoid the necessity of explaining that “Colonel Kane took a walk in the rain without a hat, without a coat, but I thought it in keeping with his recent behavior, which has generally seemed unglued.” He was protective about the Colonel. Everyone else regarded Kane with a mixture of awe, dislike and fear, but for Bidwill he’d lowered the veil: treated him gently; sometimes with fondness; allowed him to glimpse, from time to time, a sensitive boy who was hopelessly trapped inside a massive suit of armor. Bidwill responded with stubborn loyalty. This, in turn, had prompted compassion when Kane’s behavior turned erratic. The Lieutenant suspected what was happening. Yet he feared to give it a name.

Bidwill crushed out a cigarette, picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem. Then he saw Kane in the open doorway. Drenched, sopping wet, he was faintly smiling at his adjutant. “Lieutenant,” he said, “Lieutenant—if we could scrub away the blood, do you think we could find where we’ve hidden our souls?” Before the Lieutenant could answer, he’d walked away and down the hall. Bidwill heard, with great relief, the muted closing of his door.

*   *   *

The following morning Kane told Bidwill that he was leaving, complying with orders. The Lieutenant said nothing about the “mistake.” But when he gave the TWX to mimeo for the cutting of ample copies, he made two slight and deft alterations. Instead of “Hudson L. Kane,” it now read “Hudson
O.
Kane”; and it no longer specified “psychologist.” Kane never mentioned whether or not he had noticed it. But just before boarding the Air Force helicopter that was to take him to the capital, he stared at Bidwill intently, shook his hand and said simply, “Thank you.”

The Lieutenant wished him good luck.

The Cure

Chapter 10

When the message arrived from Lastrade, General Syntax was answering questions on a television program called “Meet the L. A. Press.” Ordinarily “live,” this particular session was being taped because the General had insisted that “in the interest of national security, certain editing might be needed.” Studio heads had grumbled, but after the first fifteen minutes of taping, both the producer and the director breathed a prayer of silent thanksgiving for the General’s demand, for by then it was clear to both of them that editing
would
be required to achieve the basic, minimal requisite of simple declarative sentences in any of the General’s answers. Out of ninety minutes of tape, roughly sixty minutes of “uhs,” “wells,” and both the definite and indefinite articles wound up in a wire basket on the cutting-room floor, where that evening a startled scrub-woman swore that when she looked at it, she’d heard “someone clearing his throat at the bottom of the basket.” No one dared to say she’d imagined it.

*   *   *

When Syntax reached his office, General Lastrade was awaiting him, impatiently hurling darts at a wall map of the world. “About time,” gruffed Lastrade, his cigar twitching impatiently at the corner of his mouth. “What did you say,” he asked, “on that show?”

Syntax said, “Nothing!”, and looked proud.

“Good! Good!” throated Lastrade, winging a dart into Trucial Oman and hoping that Syntax was telling the truth. He remembered how once, on a network radio show, Syntax referred to De Gaulle as a “frog.” Like a peacful old dog asleep in the sun, Syntax was likely, at any moment, to suddenly waken and bite someone’s leg.

“Senator Hesburgh’s in Los Angeles on vacation,” Lastrade explained. “Now what about Cutshaw? How’s he coming? What about all those other creeps? What do you hear from the ‘Little Flower’?”

“I said nothing,” Syntax said dully. He was still thinking about the panel show. So far as he could remember, he had answered most of the questions in the words of Sir Roger de Coverley: “There’s much to be said on both sides.” But then, anything was possible, he thought, in a rapid and heated exchange. He awoke to find General Lastrade gently pricking his ear with the point of a dart, snarling, “
Back,
Sheba,
back!
”

Lastrade went through it again, concluding, “The senator might get cozy, sneak an inspection out at the farm. I promised to take him there myself, but then that filibustering bastard’s likely to wing out on his own. I’ve got a tail on him, just in case; couple of boys from OSI. Now what’s the score? Any progress? When’s the last time you were there?”

“Uh—when I dropped off Colonel Kane.”

“When you dropped off Colonel Kane.”

“Yes.”

Lastrade, in a sermon of fire, then instructed General Syntax on the prudence and practical merit of hieing his person out to the mansion. “Or would you rather,” bawled Lastrade, “that I order an air strike on your billet!” Syntax saw no point in the latter.

*   *   *

Why did I do it? wondered Kane.

He sat at his desk, his head in his hands. The mansion was quiet. Nothing stirred. The silence was heavy, thick, like waiting, ever since Kane, the night before, had fled from the dorm and from Captain Alterman; from his startled recognition based on a course in survival tactics taken from Kane years ago in Korea. He’d run to his room and locked the door. But no one approached him, no one had knocked. Same thing this morning. No one. Nothing.

“Why did I do it?” Kane murmured aloud. What did I mean that night in the rain? What did I mean when I said that to Bidwill—scrubbing the blood? finding our souls? At the time, he remembered, he’d known; had felt a wave of exhilaration. And yet now it was like his dreams: he was awake and could not remember. Something. What? Defiance? Partly. Yes, partly; partly that. And something to do with killing. Blood. No more killing. And yet more, much more. Probing tentacles of memory dipped frantically into the wood, into that rainy jungle night when he’d heard that urgent inner voice, irresistible in its command, insist he accept the mistaken assignment. What had it said? What was its warning? Yes!
Warning!
he realized abruptly. The voice gave a warning! What was the warning? Kane groped for the words, then gave up the search, fell back into brooding, hopeless lethargy. Impersonating a psychologist. It seemed now the impetuous act of a madman. He’d known all along they would find him out; that sooner or later the tape would unsnarl. Meantime, what was it he’d hoped to accomplish?

Kane rested his head on top of the desk, straining to remember; and slept for ten minutes; deeply; heavily. Kane dreamed. It was disjointed, wildly jumbled. And in places, contradictory. First, he was in Korea, someplace far beyond the Parallel, kneeling over a body, a dripping wire still in his hand. The enemy (enemy?) was in the habit of a Franciscan. He turned the body over. And recognized the face. It was kindly Brother Charles. Sweet Brother Charles. And at the very same time it was Cutshaw. He was dead but still alive. And in Kane’s mind he was also Father Zossima in
The Brothers Karamazov.
“Hell,” said Zossima-Cutshaw-Charles, “is the inability to love.” Kane plucked out a knife and stabbed at the heart, and said, “I’m sorry, I have to do it.” Then he kissed his victim’s cheek and said, “I’m crazy! Yes, I’m crazy! I’m St. Caribou of the Cross!” Then Kane was walking in the jungle, stolidly walking in the rain. A giant white mouse stepped out in front of him; out from behind the trunk of a tree. “You’re out of your mind,” it said. “Vivisect me!” And abruptly the wood became Molokai, and Colonel Kane was Father Damien who had come to cure the lepers. No—come to cure
himself.
Was he a leper? Something like that. Suddenly Cutshaw appeared before him, but the astronaut’s face was blank and eroded. “I know who you are,” he said with cunning. And abruptly became a foot. Then Kane was sitting in a straw-thatched hut on Molokai, but he was also at the orphange and Brother Charles was lecturing, standing at a blackboard, saying: “Don’t drop bombs, you bastards!” Then Brother Charles began to bleed—from the palms—from the feet. Out of his side there sprouted a lily. Kane jumped up by his desk and shouted, “Brother, you said to respect authority!” And then the roof fell in upon them as bombs struck Molokai. “Get out of here!” gasped the Franciscans. “Get out of here! Get out! There’s still time! Get the hell out!” “I’m staying with
you!
” cried Kane in the dream. The Franciscan’s head came loose from his body and Kane picked it up and fervently kissed it. “Staying with you! Staying with you!” Then he hurled it away in revulsion. The head said, “Feed my sheep.”