“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean”
“No. No. You’re right. It’s a pretty fucked-up set of circumstances. I came over here in ’71 to serve my country. Country never did nothing for me up until then but say, ’Drop ’em and spread ’em for the whole nat world, joker.’ 1971. Shit, by that time we’d lost already; fucking Nixon had thrown in the towel. Nothin’’ left to do but hold a few more sessions on the shape of the table and have a whole lot more good jokers die. Yeah, and nats too.”
He had to pause, then, because a shadow flashed them and flattened them with a powerful roar. The young ex-Demon Prince with fins on his head like an old Chevy yelped and jumped into the water, to the jeers of his buddies. Mark glanced up to see a MiG-27 Flogger strike plane low, smoking south under full military throttle. He wondered where it was going, loaded down like that.
“When I heard the Colonel was coming back here,” the sergeant went on, “trying to pull the old joker Brigade back together again … I mean, Sobel, he was always different. He never treated us like we was The Dirty Dozen recruited out of old horror movies. He treated us like we were men. He made us feel clean and brave. He made us feel like — like heroes.”
He accepted another hit from Mark’s canteen. “It all started coming back to me then. What we’d done — what the war had done — to this country, these people. And what the nats had done to us, before and after. And I looked around, man, I saw this Leo Barnett smilin’ away on the tube, and I saw my man Gregg Hartmann going down in Atlanta with Dr. Fuckin’ Tachyon’s knife sticking out of his back, and then all this shit hit with the jumpers and the Rox and everything, and suddenly it looked like it was going to be open season on wild cards any old time. And then here was the Colonel, ’way down yonder in Vietnam, sayin’ come to me, I’ll let you be free. Let you feel like men again.”
He looked at Mark. “Guess even you aces started feelin’ it come down hard. You’re the first ace I ever met didn’t look at me like I was dirt. That or the freak poster-child for the Cause of the Week.”
He put his head close to Mark. “Lot of the boys been giving you some pretty hard looks because you ain’t just a nat, you’re an ace,” he said in a low voice. “Reckon that ain’t news. But you’re right, man. You’re here now, with your ass in the grass. You ain’t even a joker, but you’re layin’ it on the line right along with the rest of us. Guess that makes you okay — in my book, anyway.”
He stood with an audible creaking of joints. “Even if you wouldn’ta lasted five minutes back in the old Brigade. But then, neither would anybody else in this chicken-shit outfit, my sorry ass included. All right, everybody, naptime’s over. Time to saddle up and go.”
As Mark was struggling to raise his pack — he’d just gotten used to the lighter gravity on Takis, that was it — Spoiler sidled up next to him.
“Sucking up to the brass,” he said sotto voce. “Don’t think we don’t notice … nat.”
Mark looked after him as he joined the file tramping off along the paddy dike. It’s so nice to be appreciated, he thought.
The night’s sticky-hot embrace had healed the blisters on her feet. As she moved through her kata her limbs warmed, and the aches of the day’s trudging vanished. Deep in the core of her she could feel Mark’s guilt at taking the easy path, copping out from the pain the day’s exertions had earned.
The weariness stayed with her; her wound-healing ability couldn’t lave the fatigue poisons from her tissues any faster than normal. But she knew how to use the tiredness, softening the hard and angular tae kwon do movements until they were almost t’ai chi—like in their fluidity.
“I thought it was the rightwing types who always said, ’If you want peace, prepare for war,’ babe,” Croyd said. He was lying on the sandbags piled atop his bunker. The storm lanterns he’d set out to draw bugs flanked him, so that he looked like a guardian on a library’s steps in some town whose civic taste ran more to lizards than lions.
“You doubt these people are committed to peaceful means?” Moonchild asked. Her breathing was regular. “When we — when Mark went on patrol today, his squad did not carry weapons.”
Croyd tipped his head up and blew smoke at the low clouds. “Does that mean the New Joker Brigade stands for Peace and Love, or does that mean Sobel doesn’t trust the new boots with guns yet? Some of these boys seem a touch on the psychopathic side, to tell you the truth.”
“They have the passion of the young,” Moonchild declared.
“Yeah. So’d the Khmer Rouge. And speaking of the passionate young, babe, you’re about to acquire an audience.”
A crowd was drifting their way like sand blown across the parade ground. There was no television in Fort Venceremos, the food was fish heads and rice, and beer was strictly rationed — though Croyd always managed to have plenty in his cooler. Game Boys were outlawed, as were foreign magazines other than the Daily Worker, which Mark had never been able to read, and also of course marijuana and other illicit highs. With no Bill of Rights or even Uniform Code of Military justice to inhibit authority, plus a widespread network of informers doing business as good little kiem thao self-criticism group elves, the mini-prohibitions seemed generally successful — so far. The marked lack of downtime diversion beyond kiem thao and study resulted in a whole lot of fights, it seemed to Mark. Maybe he was just unused to military life.
Even the government radio was down, more or less. For some reason it had played nothing but off-key martial music all day. Not even Luce could muster much enthusiasm for it. The boys were attracted to activity like fat juicy bugs to Croyd’s lanterns.
“Hey! Look at that. It’s a babe!’
Catcalls and whistles followed. “Hey, guys, that’s sexist!” Eraserhead’s voice cried, followed a second later by a meaty thump and a “Hey! You hit me!”
“Yeah,” another voice said. “Now pipe down or I’ll tie you in knots, you little narc.”
“How ’bout a date?” somebody else yelled.
“She’s not for the likes of you low-lives,” Croyd said.
“Yeah? What, she goes in for big lizards?”
Moonchild ignored them. She was serene. “What’s she doing?” the joker called Ent asked in his piping voice. “Dancing?”
“Doing kata,” said Studebaker Hawk. He was the kid with fins on his head. “Karate practice.”
“It’s dancing,” scoffed Spoiler, “unless you just want to call it bullshit.”
“No, look at her, Spoiler,” the Hawk urged. “She’s real good.”
“She looks good,” Spoiler said, “but it doesn’t have anything to do with that crap. Hey, honey — I’m talkin’ to you, nat bitch.”
Moonchild ignored him. “Looks like you think you’re too good for us scummy jokers,” Spoiler said. “Maybe you oughta show us if that stuff’s for real.”
She finished her form and stopped. She smoothed back heavy black hair from a face half-obscured by her yin-yang mask. “I do not fight for sport or pleasure.”
Spoiler pulled a long face beneath his air-scoop nose and nodded. “Well, how about self-defense, then?”
The crowd parted. The young German joker the others called Rhino charged Moonchild. He was heavy, but he wasn’t slow, and he had his name for a good reason.
She danced aside, out of his path. A savage hooking blow with the foot-long horn that grew from his face grazed her hip. Instead of lumbering on into the side of Croyd’s bunker, the joker dropped his weight, turned, skidded, stopped facing Moonchild with one fist on the muddy ground, propped like a lineman on one massive arm.