I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.
"You want whiskey, Tim?" Mike asked.
"Tim?" the man said. "Tim?"
"Beer," I said, and sat down.
A nearly empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnny Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk's well-guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife.
"I just want to make sure about this," he said. "You're not a woman, right? You swear to that?"
"Anything you say," I said.
He put his hand on the gun.
"Got it," I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer. "Tim. Funny name. Sounds like a little guy—like him." He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. "Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress."
"Don't you like women?" I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse. I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.
"This rear-echelon dipshit is personally interfering with my state of mind," the drunk said to the burly man on his right. "Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue."
"Leave him alone," the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.
The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.
This is serious, he said. Most of the people in the world I do not despise are already dead, or should be.
There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it's pretty close.
Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian noveclass="underline" You should remember what we have brought with us.
It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.
Your prisoner requires more drink, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.
"Whiskey," said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.
For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.
The haggard soldier, who had been silent until now, said, "Something is gonna happen here." He looked straight at me. "Pal?"
"That man is nobody's pal," the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.
For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.
"Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?" said the drunk. "Is that much understood?"
The soldier who had called me "pal" laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk's glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.
The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. "Goddamn," he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said, "Goddamn" again, but in a different tone of voice.
I started laughing.
"Oh, this is—" He shook his head. "This is really—"
"Where have you been?" I asked him. John Ransom turned to the table. "Hey, I know this guy. He's an old football friend of mine."
The drunken major shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. "I don't care about football," he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.
"Buy the sergeant a drink," said the haggard officer. John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.
We watched the major's head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached his shirt, Ransom said, "All right, Jed," and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major's hand. He pushed it beneath his belt. "The man is out," Jed told us.
Ransom turned back to me. "He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that." Ransom did not have to specify who he was. "Jed and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking." He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.
For a moment no one spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it was going to disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.
"How come you're always fucked up when I see you?"
"You have to ask?"
He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.
"I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn't I?" I agreed that he had.
"What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn't even a real graves registration unit, was it?" He smiled and shook his head. "The only one with any training was that sergeant, what's his name. Italian."
"Di Maestro."
Ransom nodded. "The whole operation was going off the rails." Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. "I heard some things—" He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes.
I asked if he were still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.
"You're not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?"
He opened his eyes. "You have a good memory. No, I'm not there anymore." He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. "I'm kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sanh. It'll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. I'd settle for a dry place on level ground."