"Indiana" and "Donna Lee"—or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words—"I Thought About You" (Art Tatum), "You and the Night and the Music" (Sonny Rollins), "I Love You" (Bill Evans), "If I Could Be with You" (Ike Quebec), "You Leave Me Breathless" (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, "Thou Swell," by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.
On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.
After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, "Enough." The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.
"I'm gonna have a smoke and a drink," Cotton announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly's shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.
Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.
Dengler looked at me and smiled. "What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it'll just go on like this day after day, or do you think it's going to get stranger and stranger?" He did not wait for me to answer. "I think it'll always sort of look the same, but it won't be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that's what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt."
"Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler," Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.
Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, he never looked as though he belonged in uniform. "Here's what I mean, kind of," he said. "When we were listening to that trumpet player—"
"Brownie, Clifford Brown," Spanky whispered.
"—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time."
"Sweetie-pie," Spanky said softly. "You pretty hip, for a little ofay square."
"When we were back in that village," Dengler said. "Tell me about that."
I said that he had been there too.
"But something happened to you. Something special."
I shook my head.
"All right," Dengler said. "But it's happening, isn't it? Things are changing."
I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this, and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to write.
2
I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside into the slight coolness that followed the rain. The sun, visible again, was a deep orange ball far to the west. A packet of white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.
The shack where an enterprising weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor was all the way on the other side of camp. The enlisted men's club was rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese "33" beer in American bottles.
One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted man's club but closer than Manly's shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy's. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy's was closed. Billy's did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.
A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor.
The building stood in a grove of trees in the curve of the road, and as I walked downhill toward it in the sunset, a muddy camouflaged jeep gradually emerged from invisibility on the right side of the bar, floating out of the trees like an optical illusion.
Low male voices stopped when I stepped onto the rotting porch. I looked for insignia on the jeep, but mud caked the door panels. Some white object gleamed dully from the backseat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.
The door opened before I could reach the handle. A boy called Mike stood before me in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt too large for him. Then he saw who I was. "Oh," he said. "Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in." He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me an uncomfortable smile.
"It's okay?" I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn't.
"Yesss." He stepped back to let me in.
The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. Pungent cordite hung in the air. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.
"Oh, hell," someone said from off to my left. "We have to put up with this?"
I turned my head and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even murkier.
"Is okay, is okay," said Mike. "Old customer. Old friend."
"I bet he is," the voice said. "Just don't let any women in here."
"No women," Mike said. "No problem."