“Like I said,” McNulty added, not offering anything more.
“Oh come on, man,” Render said, his voice raising. “I mean, come the fuck on. It’s different for you chucks. Everything is, no matter where you go, getting that prince treatment, so don’t start speaking like you know how it for us, for me and Crayfish.”
“Here we go again,” McNulty said, rolling his eyes.
“I’m telling you because you need to know. Broussard know. Shit, even Medrano know.”
“Yep, I know,” Medrano said, combing his hair, blotches of iodine making a stained patchwork on his skin.
“It’s different for us,” Render said, deflating, sitting on the ground. “It’ll always be different. No matter where we are.” He roughly wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.
McNulty shook his head and ducked into his hooch. “It’s pointless talking to you about anything.”
Broussard looked at Darby, who was oddly quiet, sitting cross-legged and rubbing a thin, almost invisible layer of mud over every inch of exposed skin, staring out into the total blackness of the jungle around them. “What about you, Darby?”
“What about what?”
“I don’t know,” Broussard said, wishing he had a fire of his own, like Chapel did before he doused it without sharing. “About any of it.”
“I love it out here,” Darby said.
Render sniffed. “What?”
“I love it.”
“Love it?” McNulty said from inside his hooch. “Man, you fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, that’s some jive-ass bullshit right there.” Render laughed. “Ain’t nobody who’s been here loves it out here.”
“No, I mean it. I really do love it.” Darby’s voice sounded dreamy, almost childlike as he rubbed his hands over his skin, covering his cheap tattoos and scars with the reddish brown mud that created a protective layer against every biting thing in the wilderness that surrounded them.
Render gritted his teeth, a “pssshhh” escaping between them and waved him away.
“What do you love about it?” Broussard asked. He was genuinely curious.
Darby held up his arms, stretching them wide. “The freedom, man. The goddamn freedom of it all. Can’t you feel it?”
“That’s some pie-in-the-sky bullshit. No one’s free out here, motherfucker,” Render said, standing up and getting heated. What right did some down-south white boy have to talk about freedom? Freedom for who? “No one,” Render said. “On either side. Any side.”
“No, but we are,” Darby said. “All of us are, you just don’t realize it. Don’t remember it.”
“The fuck?” Render was beyond incredulous. “Hey Cray, you hearin’ this?”
“Out here,” Darby continued, “We’re human beings as we was supposed to be. Wanderin’ the land, fightin’, fuckin’, killin’ each other to survive. That’s freedom, brother. That’s the freedom of the cave that we left behind and been tryin’ to find ever since.”
“I ain’t your brother, chuck,” Render said.
“Yes, you is. We all brothers. We don’t remember that neither.”
Render said nothing, sitting down hard on the ground and staring into the dim lantern that provided the only light in the clearing, tears once again rimming his eyes. Broussard watched Render, worried about him, as Darby continued.
“This is my third tour,” he said, completely covered in mud now. “I finished my first, and after I got back home, I signed up again. Second time, they sent me home, callin’ me ‘emotionally unfit’ or some such college-boy garbage. Tried to enlist after that, and got rejected. So I took my cousin’s ID—he looks a lot like me, you know—and signed up as him, just before he got drafted anyway. Did both of us a favor. Heck, I should be lance corporal, not a private. But I don’t care none. I’m just a soldier.”
“What’s your cousin’s name?” McNulty asked, his head sticking out of his hooch now.
“Tom Darby.”
“So, Tim and Tom Darby?” Render said. “And y’all look like twins?”
“Dang close.”
Render nudged Broussard’s leg. “Ay, I ain’t gonna say nothin’ about keepin’ it in the family, okay?”
Darby just shrugged, the mud starting to dry and lighten, cracking when he moved. “They wouldn’t allow me to be here, them powers that be, but I had to come back. I need it. I need to be here. I get real restless when I ain’t.”
“Pendejo!”
Everyone looked at Medrano, who dumped his coffee onto the ground. “I could be home with my family, with my wife, my kids, my mom and dad, and they send me back here every time. And you, they don’t even want you, and you cheat to get sent back over here?”
“Don’t be sore, Jorge,” Darby said. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.”
“That’s some fucking güero bullshit, man.” Medrano stalked off away from the clearing. “Bullshit!”
“He’s gonna get into them leeches out there,” McNulty said.
“Didn’t mean to make him sore,” Darby said, watching Medrano go. “Got nothin’ to do with him.”
“He’ll be all right,” Broussard said. “Just misses home.”
“I get that, I guess,” Darby said. “I try to, anyway. But I don’t miss home. Nothin’ there for me to miss. Job in the textile mill, I guess. Maybe do some farm work, scoop horseshit or some such. But when I got home, the last time, hell every time, I looked around, and the buildings and stores and the people and even the trees—everything looked faded out. Drained of color like an old shirt that been washed too many times. Trees even. Ain’t that somethin’? The trees back home didn’t look green no more. They looked gray. Everything looked gray.” Darby looked out into the night, sending his mind back home, to the trees of his youth, trying to conjure them up lush and emerald out of the gray. A pair of bloodshot white eyeballs looking out through a layer of dried mud. “Everything’s green here.”
Leaves whispered at the edge of the jungle. Quick feet disturbed the underbrush. The men scrambled for their rifles.
“It’s me,” Morganfield whispered, walking briskly into the clearing. “Let’s move.”
“Where’re we going?” Broussard said.
“Top of the ridgeline,” Morganfield said, checking his sidearm.
“Why?” McNulty said, standing outside of his hooch.
“Chapel’s there,” Morganfield said. “He’s seen it.”
“Seen what? Gookers?”
He was gone, back into the jungle. The men looked at each other, then hopped to their feet, grabbing their rifles, ammo, and gear, pulling on helmets and boonie hats and leaving their packs behind. McNulty was shaking, muttering a prayer under his breath. Darby laughed as he got up, pulling on his fatigues over the dirt covering his skin.
25. Burn Then the River Down
The men clambered through the undergrowth after Morganfield, breathing hard and sweating under their hastily assembled gear, following his disappearing trail through the jungle, the ground rising in a sharp incline.
The thick crush of vegetation broke and the men found themselves on a wide grassy rim that sloped down into a gentle open valley, lit blue-bright by a full moon. Away from the jungle, heading up into the mountains, massive blocks of granite were stacked and clustered like the ruins of a toy castle, foam bricks scattered by a brat god in a fit of rage or boredom.
On the far side of the valley were two nearly identical mountain peaks that might have been a singular edifice at some point in some forgotten epoch, before the patient wear of water cut a V between them, cleaving one giant child of the earth into begrudging twins. What remained of this tributary was a gentle river that now flowed between them, creating the valley and moving on to the south of the country without a single memory of what it had done in times long past.