Under the Beetle's Cellar (36 page)

Jake sat quietly, watching her cry. Every so often she took a sip of beer. When she finished it, he got her another, and one for himself.

Two beers later he told her about it.

“Geronimo Joe Barbour and me—I never knew why they kept us rather than killing us the way they did the others they ambushed at the river. Three days in a bamboo cage so small I couldn’t sit up. Bowl of water, a little rice. Hot, hot sun. People walking by laughing, poking at us with sticks, like we were zoo animals.” He spoke with no emotion, as if he were talking about a day at the office.

“One thing got me through—a book, a paperback I’d had in my pocket. For some reason they let me keep it. An old girlfriend from Milwaukee had sent it to me. The whole time, for three days, I read and reread that book. Sometimes to myself, sometimes out loud to Joe.”

“What was it?”

In reply, he wheeled to the shelves that lined the end wall of the trailer and went right to the place on the shelf. He pulled a book out and handed it to Molly—an ancient paperback, faded and torn, crinkled as though it had gone through the washing machine.
The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut.

She opened it carefully, afraid it would crumble under her fingers. “I’ve never read this.”

Jake took a sip of his beer. “There was this one sentence I memorized and kept saying over and over. It got to be like a prayer, or a mantra. Joe started saying it, too. He was in screaming pain from the gangrene in his foot, and when things got unbearable, we just kept repeating this silly sentence.”

“What was it?”

“Page 265,” he said. His eyes closed, he recited, “ ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ Another one I liked is on the same page: ‘There are three seas on Titan, each the size of Earthling Lake Michigan. The waters of all three are fresh and emerald clear.’ I liked that because I grew up on Lake Michigan, but Joe was a redneck who didn’t even know where the Great Lakes were, and he was a chow hound, so the bakery worked better for him. You’d be amazed how well it works. I got so I could say it twice and I would be transported to that bakery door, Heinemann’s bakery in Milwaukee, on an early spring day just after the snow has melted, and I could smell the kuchen just out of the oven. With Joe, it was cherry pie at a bakery in Memphis, where he grew up.”

He took a long swig of beer. “That’s where he was when he died, I think. At the end of the second day. Geronimo Joe Barbour, the most gung-ho GI you ever saw. And dumb as a rock—ten months in ’Nam and
he still believed we were saving the world for Democracy, winning the hearts and minds of the people. They just left his body in the cage. Didn’t notice he was dead, I guess. The flies sure noticed—two hundred fifty pounds of dead Joe kept them busy.

“I knew our platoon would come. Trang Loi was in our orders. I just didn’t know when, or if I’d still be alive. My goal was to live long enough to see every person in that fuckin’ village die.” He crushed his empty beer can with one hand. “And I did.”

“On September 1, 1968. At dawn. Our guys swept in so fast and in such force—that’s the only thing that saved me. The village was overrun before the VC knew what hit them. It was Walter who found me and opened the cage. For a while we just watched the killing swirl around us, but then Walter found me an AK-47 under one of the hootches so I could join in. I could barely walk, but I could kill.

“The orders were to wipe the village off the map, and by God, that’s what we did. According to the intelligence, there were no civilians in Trang Loi. And really that was right. They were all trying to kill us, even the kids. We just killed them first. Although even that’s complicated, who killed who first.

“See, in the six days before I was captured, we had nineteen dead and twenty-eight wounded. They mutilated our dead. They set booby traps for us everywhere. They sent small children along the trails with grenades. And their center of operations and supply was Trang Loi.

“So when we got a chance, we did unto them as they had done unto us, but we did it to them more, worse, longer, harder. There was nothing they had done we didn’t do back that morning. Our blood was boiling.”

He wheeled to the refrigerator and got himself another beer. “You ever seen those paintings by Heironymus Bosch? Trang Loi when we got finished makes those look like a church picnic. Heaps of bodies rotting in the sun, flies everywhere—more flies than you thought were in the whole world. At the end of the morning, we were too tired to talk. The only sound was that buzz, the flies. We pushed the bodies into a ditch and left them for the flies. That night three old men came out of the tunnels, waving a white flag. We took them to the ditch and shot them.

“The next morning we set fire to the hootches and their food stores, and we exploded all the weapons that we couldn’t carry with us.

“It was then she came out. We were putting C-4, this plastic explosive, into the holes to close off the tunnels. So she had to come up. All alone. In this immaculate white ao dai, like a small ghost. She was tiny, not more than seventy, eighty pounds, wrinkled like a prune, teeth brown with betel nut, bowing and praying. ‘GI, you no shoot Granny Duc. No VC, no VC.’ Stanley Jones, Geronimo Joe’s best buddy, the one who had
taken Joe out of the cage, aimed his rifle at her, but Walter stopped him. He said we’d done enough and that we had to stop somewhere.

“But I recognized her. She was old, but a powerhouse. I’d seen her working with the men, ordering everyone around, distributing grenades and AK-47s as the units came to pick them up. I said to Walter, wait, maybe we should kill her. She is VC. She worked on weapons supply. I saw her. I recognize her. And our orders were to wipe the village out.”

Jake shifted around in his chair, as if he couldn’t find a comfortable position. He rearranged his pant legs, folding some of the extra material and tucking it under his stumps. “But Walter did some dope in those days, just pot mostly, and he was feeling mellow. He said to let her go. She was an old woman, and we had to stop somewhere. If we killed her, we’d have to kill the whole damn country. And he was right, of course. That’s really how it was. If we were going to win, we’d have to kill them all, every fucking one of them, and the babies, too.

“Everyone else wanted to waste her. We all stood around arguing about it, while she stood there bowing and whining, ‘You no shoot Granny Duc. No VC.’ It was actually kind of humorous. But Walter’s real persuasive and we’d all done so much killing that the lust had passed.”

Jake had been looking at Molly as he talked, but his eyes shifted away now. He seemed to be looking into space. “Anyway, Walter carried the day and we ended up not shooting her, even though there seemed to be something messy about leaving her, a nagging loose end.

“We moved out that afternoon. She was sitting alone on the ashes where her hooch had been, next to a stack of Lurps, this dried food we’d left her. That old lady looked like a lost child. Walter and me were the last ones to leave. I went back for something that I’d forgotten. It was stupid, but I did. Then I was jogging to catch up with the unit.” He paused to take some deep breaths as if he had been jogging. “Granny Duc ran up behind me and tossed something at me.”

Jake took a long drink from his can. “Who would have thought that old mama-san would have perfect aim? A throwing arm like Nolan Ryan. The grenade exploded right at my feet. Talk about the world ending. That’s what I thought had happened. It felt like the earth exploded and threw me into outer space.

“Granny Duc was running for the trees. She almost made it, but Walter ran her down, screaming all the way. He tackled her. He got an arm around her neck and he just pulled back and she snapped. She just … snapped. Then he lay there on top of her crying. I saw all that happen. And then I was gone, blessedly out of the world for days.”

“What did you go back to get?” Molly asked softly.

He nodded toward the book in her lap. “That.”

Molly ran her fingers over the stained and wrinkled cover. “So what did you and Lattimore decide the Granny Duc message meant?” she asked.

“Like we first thought—that he’s underground and he’s going to hunker down and wait till it’s safe to come up. But I think there’s another message there: He’ll kill if he has to.”

Molly must have looked stricken.

“Here,” Jake said, “you look like a woman in need of a mantra. Try this with me: ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ ”

Molly said it along with him a few times and by the end she was laughing.

“What’s your bakery?” Jake asked.

She used her sleeve to wipe her wet face. “The Upper Crust, on Burnet Road. Cinnamon rolls.”

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

“We shake our heads in amazement over people falling prey to communal cults like the Hearth Jezreelites. They walk away from their families and their middle-class lives, sign over their worldly goods to the cult, and submit themselves to the harsh authority of a despot who dictates every detail of their existence. Why, we wonder, would anyone subject himself to that abuse? Cult experts say that those of us who express the strongest aversion are ripest for the picking.”

M
OLLY
C
ATES
, “T
EXAS
C
ULT
C
ULTURE
,”
L
ONE
S
TAR
M
ONTHLY
, D
ECEMBER
1993

After she had settled Officer Valdez in front of the house, Molly took a very hot bath and washed her hair. It was painful because the slightest pull on her hair made the cut at her temple sting. Getting out of the tub, she noticed a purple bruise on her hip. It must have happened when she’d been knocked down on the garage floor. As soon as she saw it, it started to hurt.

She wrapped a towel around her wet hair and went downstairs in her terry-cloth robe. She didn’t open the mail. She didn’t survey the contents of the refrigerator. She didn’t look at the newspapers. She didn’t check her fax. She didn’t even listen to the messages on her phone machine.

Instead she did something she’d been thinking about all day. She rummaged through the stacks on the kitchen counter and found the book Theodora Shea had given her to pass on to Walter Demming—
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Ever since Theodora had read that poem over the phone yesterday, it had been calling out to her.

She found it—poem 949—and read it through several times, first silently, then aloud.

It could have been written for her.

It spoke directly to her lifelong preoccupation with the dead. As a child, she’d had recurring nightmares about people she loved being buried in the black, cold earth. It seemed like the ultimate banishment, exile to a dark realm, under the light, under the grass, under the dirt.
‘Under the beetle’s cellar’
—that’s just the way she had always seen it—a frightening,
lonely, primitive place, cold and distant, at the bottom of the food chain. To consign the bodies of people you loved to the beetle’s cellar was hideous.

Her mother, who had died when Molly was nine, was buried under brown dirt in a small family cemetery east of Lubbock, and her father, who had been murdered when Molly was sixteen, was buried under the rich black earth near Lake Travis. After each of them was buried, Molly felt they were impossibly far away, beyond conjecture, beyond light. So far that the longest arm in the world couldn’t reach out to them, so far sunlight could never warm them.

But it was the last two lines of the poem that had really caught her interest:

Oh for a Disc to the Distance

Between Ourselves and the Dead!

She had no idea what Emily Dickinson meant by a Disc to the Distance, but what she pictured was a flat Earth with the dead at the dark, far side, in the shadow of the Moon. If Molly could just turn it, or tip it, or if she could change her position slightly, she could bring them closer into view. That was what her vigils were about, she thought now—trying to find a disc to the distance between herself and her dead.

Each time she stared into the dark window, she was trying to bring the dead into focus, rotate them closer, communicate with them. There was something about this Apocalypse business that seemed to accelerate the process. It was useful to have a constant reminder that one tilt of the disc we live on will send us flying into eternity.

Tonight there was a growing crowd to commune with. She wanted to tell Annette Grimes how valiant she’d been in risking her life for the hostage children. She wanted to commend Gerald Asquith for his premonition about being blown toward God. She wanted to ask Geronimo Joe Barbour if he really had died outside the bakery door in Memphis with the scent of cherry pie in his nostrils. She wanted to tell Granny Duc that she understood how obsession and the desire for revenge could make you do horrible things. She wanted to sing a lullaby to young Josh Benderson, and tell him about places where the air was so sweet and easy you could take it in through your pores. And she wanted to tell Vernon Cates that he was present still, every time she used his old Webster’s dictionary, every time she started up her Chevy truck.

She turned off all the lights. Vigils came easier in the dark. She settled into the wing chair and stared at the huge black picture window. Slowly she began to sink into the darkness beyond the glass.

She was called back up by the sound of nails clicking against the wood floor. The faint jingle of dog tags and the swish of a tail announced Copper’s presence. He stood in front of her, a dark shape with two glowing eyes—a wild beast who’d wandered in toward the campfire. Molly recalled the snarling demon he’d become that morning in the garage. If he got it into his demented head to attack, she was lost.