The other seven members of the body squad were serving out their remaining time in Vietnam. All of them had once been in regular units, and most of them had re-upped so that they could spend another year in the field. They were not ordinary people— the regiment had slam-dunked them into the body squad to get them out of their units.
Their names were Scoot, Hollyday, di Maestro, Picklock, Ratman, Attica, and Pirate. They had a generic likeness, being unshaven, hairy—even Ratman, who was prematurely bald, was hairy—unclean, missing a crucial tooth or two. Scoot, Pirate, and di Maestro wore tattoos (BORN TO DIE, DEALERS IN DEATH, and a death's head suspended over an umber pyramid, respectively). None of them ever wore an entire uniform. For the whole of my first day, they did not speak to me, and went about the business of carrying the heavy body bags from the helicopter to the truck and from the truck to the "morgue" in a frosty, insulted silence.
The next day, after Captain McCue told me that my orders still had not come through and that I should return to the body squad, he asked me how I was getting on with my fellow workers. That was what he called them, my "fellow workers."
"They're full of stories," I said.
"That's not all they're full of, the way I hear it," he said, showing two rows of square brown teeth that made his big cheeks look as if his character were being eroded from within. He must have seen that I had just decided I preferred the company of Ratman, Attica, and the rest to his own, because he told me that I would be working with the body squad until my orders came through.
On the second day, the intensity of my new comrades' disdain had relaxed, and they resumed the unfinishable dialogue I had interrupted.
Their stories were always about death.
"We're pounding the boonies," Ratman said, shoving another wrapped corpse into the back of our truck. "Twenty days. You listening, Underdog?"
I had a new name.
"Twenty days. You know what that's like out there, Underdog?"
Pirate spat a thick yellow curd onto the ground.
"Like forty days in hell. In hell you're already dead, but out in the boonies everybody's trying to kill you. Means you never sleep right. Means you see things."
Pirate snorted and tossed another body onto the truck. "Fuckin' right."
"You see your old girlfriend fuckin' some numbnuts fuck, you see your fuckin' friends get killed, you see the fuckin' trees move, you see stuff that never happened and never will, man."
" 'Cept here," Pirate said.
"Twenty days," Ratman said. The back of the truck was now filled with bodies in bags, and Ratman swung up and locked the rear panel. He leaned against it on stiff arms, shaking his drooping head. His fingertips were bulbous, the size of golf balls, and each came to a pointed tip at the spot where his fingerprints would have been centered. I found out later that he had earned his name by eating two live rats in a tunnel where his platoon had found a thousand kilos of rice. "Too fat for speed," he was supposed to have said.
"Every sense you got is out there, man, you hear a mouse move—"
"Hear rats move," di Maestro said, slapping the side of the truck as if to wake up the bodies in the green bags.
"—hear the dew jumpin' out of the leaves, hear the insects moving in the bark. Hear your own fingernails grow. Hear that thing in the ground, man."
"Thing in the ground?" Pirate asked.
"Shit," said Ratman. "You don't know? You know how when you lie down on the trail you hear all kinds of shit, all them damn bugs and monkeys, the birds, the people moving way up ahead of you—"
"Better be sure they're not coming your direction," di Maestro said from the front of the truck. "You takin' notes, Underdog?"
"—all kinds of shit, right? But then you hear the rest. You hear like a humming noise underneath all them other noises. Like some big generator's running way far away underneath you."
"Oh, that thing in the ground," Pirate said.
"It is the ground," said Ratman. He stepped back from the truck and gave Pirate a fierce, wild-eyed glare. "Fuckin' ground makes the fuckin' noise by itself. You hear me? An' that engine's always on. It never sleeps."
"Okay, let's move," di Maestro said. He climbed up behind the wheel. Hollyday, Scoot, and Attica crowded into the seat beside him. Ratman scrambled up behind the cab, and Picklock and Pirate and I followed him. The truck jolted down the field toward the main body of the camp, and the helicopter pilot and some of the ground crew turned to watch us go. We were like garbagemen, I thought. It was like working on a garbage truck.
"On top of which," Ratman said, "people are seriously trying to interfere with your existence."
Picklock laughed, but instantly composed himself again. So far, neither he nor Pirate had actually looked at me.
"Which can fuck you up all by itself, at least until you get used to it," Ratman said. "Twenty-day mission. I been on longer, but I never went on any worse. The lieutenant went down. The radio man, he went down. My best friends at that time, they went down."
"Where is this?" Pirate asked.
"This is Darlac Province," said Ratman. "Not too damn far away."
"Right next door," said Pirate.
"Twentieth day," said Pirate. "We're out there. We're after some damn cadre. Hardly any food left, and our pickup is in forty-eight hours. This target keeps moving, they go from ville to ville, they're your basic Robin Hood-type cadre." Ratman shook his head. The truck hit a low point in the road on the outskirts of the base, and one of the bags slithered down the pile and landed softly at Ratman's feet. He kicked it almost gently.
"This guy, this friend of mine, name of Bobby Swett, he was right ahead of me, five feet ahead of me. We hear some kind of crazy whoop, and then this big red-and-yellow bird flashes past us, big as a turkey, man, wings like fuckin' propellers, man, and I'm thinkin', okay, what woke this mother up! And Bobby Swett turns around to look at me, and he's grinnin'. His grin is the last thing I see for about ten minutes. When I come to I remember seeing Bobby Swett come apart all at once, like something inside him exploded, but—you get it?—I'm remembering something I didn't really see. I think I'm dead. I fucking know I'm dead. I'm covered in blood and this brownskin little girl is bending over me. Black hair and black eyes. So now I know. There are angels, and angels got black hair and black eyes, hot shit."
A brown wooden fence hid the long low shed we called the morgue, and when we had passed the stenciled graves registration sign, Ratman vaulted off the back of the truck and opened the storage bay. We had four hours turnaround time, and today there were a lot of bodies.
Di Maestro backed the truck up into the bay, and we started hauling the long bags into the interior of the shed.
"Long nose?" asked Pirate.
"Long nose, shit yes."
"A Yard."
"Sure, but what did I know? She was a Rhade—most of the Yards in Darlac Province, of which they got about two thousand, are Rhade. 'I died,' I say to this girl, still figuring she's a angel, and she coos something back at me. It seems to me that I can remember this big flash of light—I mean, that was something I actually saw."
"Good ol' Bobby Swett tripped a mine," said Pirate.
I was getting to like Pirate. Pirate knew I was the real subject of this story, and he was selfless enough to keep things rolling with little interjections and explanations. Pirate was slightly less contemptuous of me than the rest of the body squad. I also liked the way he looked, raffish without being as ratlike as Ratman. Like me, Pirate tended toward the hulking. He seldom wore a shirt in the daytime, and always had a bandanna tied around his head or his neck. When I had been out in the field for a time, I found myself imitating these mannerisms, except for when the mosquitos got bad.