‘I don’t give a shit ’bout you’re sorry,’ said Baylor, rubbing his mouth. ‘Don’t give a shit ’bout nothin’ ’cept gettin’ the hell outta here.’
‘Leave it alone, all right?’
But Baylor wouldn’t leave it alone. He continued to argue, adopting the long-suffering tone of someone carrying on bravely in the face of great injustice. Mingolla tried to ignore him by studying the label on his beer bottle: a red and black graphic portraying a Guatemalan soldier, his rifle upheld in victory. It was an attractive design, putting him in mind of the poster work he had done before being drafted; but considering the unreliability of Guatemalan troops, he perceived the heroic pose as a bad joke. Mingolla gouged a trench through the center of the label with his thumbnail.
At last Baylor gave it up and sat staring down at the warped veneer of the counter. Mingolla let him sit a minute; then, without shifting his gaze from the bottle, he said, ‘Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?’
Baylor tucked his chin onto his chest, maintaining a stubborn silence.
‘It’s your only option, man,’ Mingolla went on. ‘What else you gonna do?’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Baylor; he flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and hissed it like a curse. ‘Crazy!’
‘You gonna take off for Panama by yourself? Un-unh. You know the three of us got something going. We come this far together, and if you just hang tough, we’ll go home together.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Baylor. ‘I don’t know anymore.’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Mingolla. ‘Maybe we’re all three of us right. Maybe Panama is the answer, but the time just isn’t ripe. If that’s true, me and Gilbey will see it sooner or later.’
With a heavy sigh, Baylor got to his feet. ‘You ain’t never gonna see it, man,’ he said dejectedly.
Mingolla had a swallow of beer. ‘Check if they got any Prowler on the box. I could relate to some Prowler.’
Baylor stood for a moment, indecisive. He started for the jukebox, then veered toward the door. Mingolla tensed, preparing to run after him. But Baylor stopped and walked back over to the bar. Lines of strain were etched deep in his forehead. ‘Okay,’ he said, a catch in his voice. ‘Okay. What time tomorrow? Nine o’clock?’
‘Right,’ said Mingolla, turning away: ‘The PX.’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Baylor cross the room and bend over the jukebox to inspect the selections. He felt relieved. This was the way all their R and Rs had begun, with Gilbey chasing a whore and Baylor feeding the jukebox while he wrote a letter home. On their first R and R he had written his parents about the war and its bizarre forms of attrition; then, realizing that the letter would alarm his mother, he had torn it up and written another, saying merely that he was fine. He would tear this letter up as well, but he wondered how his father would react if he were to read it. Most likely with anger. His father was a firm believer in God and country, and though Mingolla understood the futility of adhering to any moral code in light of the insanity around him, he had found that something of his father’s tenets had been ingrained in him: he would never be able to desert as Baylor kept insisting. He knew it wasn’t that simple, that other factors, too, were responsible for his devotion to duty; but since his father would have been happy to accept the responsibility, Mingolla tended to blame it on him. He tried to picture what his parents were doing at that moment—father watching the Mets on TV, mother puttering in the garden—and then, holding those images in mind, he began to write.
Dear Mom and Dad,
In your last letter you asked if I thought we were winning the war. Down here you’d get a lot of blank stares in response to that question, because most people have a perspective on the war to which the overall result isn’t relevant. Like there’s a guy I know who has this rap about how the war is a magical operation of immense proportions, how the movements of the planes and troops are inscribing a mystical sign on the surface of reality, and to survive you have to figure out your location within the design and move accordingly. I’m sure that sounds crazy, but down here everybody’s crazy the same way (some shrink’s actually done a study on the incidence of superstition among the occupation forces). They’re all looking for a magic that will ensure their survival. You may find it hard to believe that I subscribe to this sort of thing, but I do. I carve my initials on the shell casings, wear parrot feathers inside my helmet… and a lot more.
To get back to your question, I’ll try to do better than a blank stare, but I can’t give you a simple yes or no. The matter can’t be summed up that neatly. But I can illustrate the situation by telling you a story and let you draw your own conclusions. There are hundreds of stories that would do, but the one that comes to mind now concerns the Lost Patrol…
A Prowler tune blasted from the jukebox, and Mingolla broke off writing to listen: it was a furious, jittery music, fueled—it seemed—by the same aggressive paranoia that had generated the war. People shoved back chairs, overturned tables, and began dancing in the vacated spaces; they were crammed together, able to do no more than shuffle in rhythm, but their tread set the light bulbs jiggling at the ends of their cords, the purple glare slopping over the walls. A slim, acne-scarred whore came to dance in front of Mingolla, shaking her breasts, holding out her arms to him. Her face was corpse-pale in the unsteady light, her smile a dead leer. Trickling from one eye, like some exquisite secretion of death, was a black tear of sweat and mascara. Mingolla couldn’t be sure he was seeing her right. His left hand started trembling, and for a couple of seconds the entire scene lost its cohesiveness. Everything looked scattered, unrecognizable, embedded in a separate context from everything else: a welter of meaningless objects bobbing up and down on a tide of deranged music. Then somebody opened the door, admitting a wedge of sunlight, and the room settled back to normal. Scowling, the whore danced away. Mingolla breathed easier. The tremors in his hand subsided. He spotted Baylor near the door talking to a scruffy Guatemalan guy… probably a coke connection. Coke was Baylor’s panacea, his remedy for fear and desperation. He always returned from R and R bleary-eyed and prone to nosebleeds, boasting about the great dope he’d scored. Pleased that he was following routine, Mingolla went back to his letter.
Remember me telling you that the Green Berets took drugs to make them better fighters? Most everyone calls the drugs ‘Sammy,’ which is short for ‘samurai.’ They come in ampule form, and when you pop them under your nose for the next thirty minutes or so you feel like a cross between a Medal of Honor winner and Superman. The trouble is that a lot of Berets overdo them and flip out. They sell them on the black market, too, and some guys use them for sport. They take the ampules and fight each other in pits… like human cockfights.
Anyway, about two years ago a patrol of Berets went on patrol up in Fire Zone Emerald, not far from my base, and they didn’t come back. They were listed MIA. A month or so after they’d disappeared, somebody started ripping off ampules from various dispensaries. At first the crimes were chalked up to guerrillas, but then a doctor caught sight of the robbers and said they were Americans. They were wearing rotted fatigues, acting nuts. An artist did a sketch of their leader according to the doctor’s description, and it turned out to be a dead ringer for the sergeant of that missing patrol. After that they were sighted all over the place. Some of the sightings were obviously false, but others sounded like the real thing. They were said to have shot down a couple of our choppers and to have knocked over a supply column near Zacapa.