When the silent jets streaked over the valley, they turned sweat-streaked faces toward the unbearable sky. They were surprised — but not alarmed. The aircraft were friendly. There was nothing else for them to be.
At the same moment in which they heard the engine roar the things began going off. MACV called them Selective Ordnance; it made them sound like assorted salad or Selected Shorts. They were Elephant Feet, the most dreaded, the most awful things in the world.
The Cambodians were still gawking skyward when bits of steel began to cut them up. Converse saw the wire-service man dive for the grass and did the same.
After the first detonations there was the sparest moment of silent astonishment. The screams were ground down by the second strike. Men rolled in the road calling on Buddha or wandered about weeping, holding themselves together as though embarrassed at their own destructibility — until the things or the concussions knocked them down.
A man was nailed Christlike to a tree beside the road, a shrine.
Converse lay clinging to earth and life, his mouth full of sweet grass. Around him the screams, the bombs, the whistling splinters swelled their sickening volume until they blot ted out sanity and light. It was then that he cried, although he had not realized it at the time.
In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.
One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.
Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.
He had lain there — a funny little fucker — a little stingless quiver on the earth. That was all there was of him, all there ever had been.
He walked from the Red Field into the lobby and there was no place to sit. People passed him and he avoided their eyes. His desire to live was unendurable. It was impossible, not to be borne. He was the celebrated living dog, preferred over dead lions.
Around him was the moronic lobby and outside the box-sided street where people hunted each other. Take it or leave it.
I’ll take it, he thought. To take it was to begin again from nowhere, the funny little fucker would have to soldier on.
Living dogs lived. It was all they knew.
_
SHE WOKE TO MOONLIGHT, PHOSPHORESCENCE BEHIND HER EYES dimming to sparkles. There was the slamming of a car door. At first she could make no sense of the place.
Hicks was asleep in a chair, his feet up on the writing desk. Moonlight lit half his face.
Standing, her knees trembled, a strange liquescence rippled under her skin. There was a tart chemical taste in her mouth. But it was not sickness, not unpleasant.
Another door slammed, footsteps sounded on the cement patio. She moved the hanging blind and saw Eddie Peace with a red bandana at his throat. It seemed to her that figures moved behind him — but she stepped back when his eyes swept the window where she stood.
Hicks was awake, rubbing his stiff legs.
“It’s them,” she said. “It’s Eddie.”
He went past her in shadow to crouch at the blind.
There was a knock at the door. Over Hicks’ shoulder she saw Eddie Peace before the bungalow door; a blond couple stood behind him. The couple looked very much alike and they were both a head taller than Eddie Peace. They did not, in the odd seconds before Hicks let the blind fall, appear to be the sort of people who knew everyone’s weakness.
“Hello,” Eddie Peace said.
Hicks sped across the room toward the moonlit picture window. “Tell them wait.”
“Just a minute,” Marge called. He peered into the moonlight, pressing his face against the glass.
“Can’t see shit that way.”
“Hey,” Eddie Peace said.
“Don’t let them in yet.”
“Coming,” Marge said.
He seized the backpack from beside the bed, shook it, and disappeared into the bathroom.
“O.K.,” she heard him say through the bathroom door.
She opened to Eddie Peace’s thick-lipped smile.
“Hello ‘dere.”
Eddie led his friends inside. The blonds nodded soberly as they passed.
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie said, “could we have some light?”
When she turned the lights on, Eddie looked around the room.
“So where is he?”
Marge had no answer. The blond couple watched Eddie Peace.
“What’d he do? Take off on you?”
When Hicks came out of the bathroom he held a pistol in either hand; he bore the weapons before his shoulders with the barrels raised like a movie-poster cowboy.
Eddie drew himself and displayed empty hands.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Eddie said. “Look at this!”
The woman looked at Hicks with a sensitive frown. Her companion moved in front of her.
“Buffalo Bill,” Eddie said.
Hicks stared at him and glanced about the room. He was looking for a place to put the pistols down.
“You asshole,” Eddie said. “If I was the narks your ass would be dead.”
“So would yours,” Hicks said. Marge went into the bathroom and brought the backpack out. Hicks put the pistols inside it and slung it around his shoulder by one strap. Then he went to the door and looked outside.
“Don’t you love the guy?” Eddie asked his friends.
The man nodded sadly as though Hicks represented a mode of behavior with which he was wearily familiar. He was a big soft man. He had steel-rimmed spectacles and dim blue priestly eyes. The woman was very like him, as bland to look at but perhaps a shade meaner. They were both wearing light-colored leather jackets and bell-bottom pants. The clothes appeared brand new.
Hicks came back from the door and sat on the bed beside Marge. He set the backpack between them.
“If these people are buying weight,” he told her softly, “things are really getting fucked up.”
Eddie Peace had linked arms with the couple; he hauled them before Hicks’ blank stare.
“These folks, Raymond, are the nicest folks you could ever want to meet. Gerald and Jody — this is Raymond.”
Jody stooped to shake Hicks’, hand as though he were an Indian or a lettuce picker. Gerald saluted briskly.
“Sit,” Hicks said.
Jody spread herself cross-legged on the carpet. Gerald and Eddie Peace took the only chairs.
“Gerry is a writer,” Eddie Peace explained, “and he’s one hell of a writer too. He wants to see the scene.”
“What scene?”
“Oh man, like the old Malibu scene. You know.”
“Man,” Hicks said, “I don’t have a notion.”
“He wants to look at some scag,” Eddie said. “For atmosphere.” He turned toward Gerry in coy apology. “I’m sorry, Gerry — I’m just teasing you. Why don’t you explain yourself to the man.”
“That may not be easy,” Gerald said modestly. He did not like to be called Gerry. Everyone watched him.