Light found a girl first. Jackson watched him walk off with her into the house, one arm around the girl and the other around the rifle.
Then Jackson followed him with a girl. She wore a T-shirt with the words Playboy Bunny on it. In the tiny room created by a plywood partition, open to the high ceiling at the top, she took off her clothes and lay down on a bed made of two mattress stacked on the floor.
Jackson lowered himself into her, a tiny girl with big breasts, and tried to forget about Desolation Row. Then it was over quicker than he had expected. He gave her more money and waited for himself to be ready again. She brought him a beer.
There was a couple in the next cubicle. Their mattress creaked.
“Boom, boom,” Jackson’s girl said, and laughed.
“Starlight, starlight!” a girl’s voice yelled.
“Leave that alone,” Light said.
There was a thud in the hall, and Jackson began putting on his clothes. He pushed open the door. Two men had an open coffin made of unfinished wood. In it was a dead young Vietnamese soldier dressed in tiger stripe fatigues. The smell was very bad. A women bent over the coffin and began to wail. The little girl from the beach stood beside her.
“Tom Light, Tom Light,” the child screamed. Jackson ran down the hallway and onto the rooftop. There were coffins in the hall, coffins on rooftop, and more in the street. Vendors were selling soft drinks to the crowd. American MPs and Vietnamese police in their white helmets began to appear around the edges.
“Jackson!” Light yelled.
He saw Light jump out a window onto the terrace. A moment later two men followed him carrying a coffin.
“Tom Light! Tom Light!” they shouted.
“Come on, Jackson,” Light said.
They ran across the terrace. The old man with the beard tried to pull the poncho off the rifle, but Light brushed him away. Jackson tripped over coffins. He followed Light down some stairs. At the bottom a group of women dressed in black pajamas and conical hats waited with more coffins.
“Starlight! Starlight!” the women wailed after them.
Luckily it was just beginning to turn dark. They ran up the street, easily outdistancing the men carrying the coffins and made their way back to the hotel.
“You go in. Get our shit,” Light said.
“What’s going on?” Jackson asked. “What do they want?”
“Goddamn dink at the desk recognized me,” Light said. “I know it was him.”
Somewhere off in the town they heard shouts and sirens. “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here before they find me,” Light said. “We’re going back to the fucking bush.”
“I’m not going fucking anywhere. What the fuck is going on!” Jackson said.
“Goddamn dinks. They believe the whole fucking country is full of witches and spirits. Think I can raise the fucking dead with the starlight.”
Jackson wished he was back on Desolation Row.
He took a deep breath and asked, “Can you?”
“Shit no. Are you fucking crazy? I see things in the starlight. Sometimes I know when a man’s gonna die. Think I’d be in this fucking war if I could do that kind of shit?”
Jackson went into the hotel. The same clerk was at the desk. He smiled when Jackson came in. Jackson went up to the room and got their bags.
“We’re checking out,” Jackson told the clerk.
“Did you and Mr. Hale enjoy your stay?” the clerk asked.
“Sure, it was great,” Jackson said.
He took a good look at the clerk and wondered if Light was right about him.
As soon as Jackson walked out of the hotel, he heard more shouting, much louder now. They caught a ride on a truck going to the airfield. Soon they were aboard a C-130 headed for Pleiku. Light almost immediately went to sleep in the jump seat beside Jackson, his hat pulled down over his eyes.
“Hey, man, you hear the slopes went crazy in Vung Tau?” the soldier sitting on the other side of Jackson said.
“No,” Jackson said, hoping the soldier would shut up.
“They found Tom Light at some whore house,” the soldier said. “Fucking crazy slopes. Think that starlight scope of his can raise the dead. Dragged coffins all the way from the graveyard. Just like the fucking slopes. Get everything backwards. Light wastes slopes, he don’t raise ’em.”
The soldier laughed and Jackson with him.
“Yeah, fucking crazy,” Jackson said.
Jackson looked at Light who was snoring. He had always been afraid of Light, but now the fear was different. Light had struck something deep within him, that same sort of thing that set dogs howling at the moon.
He had experienced that kind of feeling one morning when he went hunting with Uncle Frank. Jackson noticed a crowd in front of the bait shop where they always ate breakfast. Running ahead he pushed his way through the crowd, reached the last row of men, and stumbled forward, hearing the buzzing noise at the same time his face came to within a few inches of the wire cage. He saw the diamond pattern of it, the thing uncoiling faster than he could have imagined, his head ringing against the taut wire, the poison splattering in his face like a light rain. The men laughed.
Afterward Frank helped him wash off his face with a hose. He was still shaking and gasping for breath.
“Nothing to be scared about, just a snake in a cage,” Frank said. “Worry about the ones in the woods.”
Light had kept him alive. He was not a man Jackson should fear. Yet there was that crazy business at Vung Tau. And Light telling the future by looking at the pictures in the scope.
The plane began its combat descent into Pleiku, coming down at a sudden, steep angle. Jackson gasped for breath, but Light slept through it all.
CHAPTER
10
Jackson and Light hitched a ride on a chopper to Desolation Row. Light was dressed in cut-off fatigues, a sweater, and dink sandals again. Instead of landing at the pad, the chopper touched down in the scrub outside the wire. Hale was making good on his threat never to let Light inside the wire again. Jackson thought that Light might protest, but instead he laughed and jumped out of the chopper. The door gunner covered him as Light waved goodbye and walked off through the scrub.
Jackson walked in to the TOC and found Hale at work on his maps. A sergeant and two lieutenants were with him. All the way back to Desolation Row, he had been wondering if he would find Hale’s RTO alive or dead. He looked around the TOC for the man. The radio was on a cot. Maybe he had gone to the latrine.
“Sniper got him last night,” Hale said.
Jackson sat down on a cot and took deep, slow breaths.
“He was a new man, a dud. Lit a cigarette without shielding it. Got him right between the eyes.”
Hale and the officers laughed, but Jackson felt sick. Jackson was glad it was not him, but he had not wanted the man to die. Better for no one to die. But what appeared in the starlight was going to happen, no way to avoid it.
Later Hale went to sleep and Jackson took the radio and left the TOC. From a bunker near the four-deuce mortar pits, he heard music. He went into the bunker. Candles were set in empty C-rations cans. The mortar squad sat on shell boxes listening to the Rolling Stones on a battery-powered tape recorder, the bunker filled with smoke from the pipe they were passing around.
“Have a hit, man,” a soldier said. “Little opium makes this grass taste sweet.”
Jackson accepted the pipe and filled his lungs with smoke. He wanted to get high, to forget about Light.
“Ain’t you Alabama, the dude that’s friends with Light?” another soldier asked.
“I’m Hale’s RTO,” Jackson replied.