1968. Part 7

Schizophrenia. An ordinary Joe who was walking down the street and saw a man eating eyeb.a.l.l.s out of his hand or heard voices telling him to jump naked from the Empire State Building would probably seek medical help. He would be diagnosed as schizophrenic.

But Spider, like most laymen at that time, would never have applied the term "schizophrenia" to those symptoms, or his. He thought it meant "split personality," but it never had. Schizophrenia was a term applied to people who exhibited some of a cl.u.s.ter of related symptoms, including visual and auditory hallucinations-and olfactory ones, like smelling pork chops when there aren't any around. Not all schizophrenics had dramatic symptoms, though; some just acted foolish or stopped acting at all; withdrew, became lumps.It was hard to get two scientists to agree on what caused schizophrenia. Some thought it was strictly biochemical. Others blamed the genes or the environment. The diet or gross brain malformation or a bad child/mother relationship. A few said that schizophrenia was not a disease or even a maladaptation, but simply a reasonable response to an insane world.

One minor school of thought related schizophrenia to body shape. They would have loved Spider, because he was a perfect asthenic: lean with long limbs, long face, narrow trunk. You did see more asthenics than roly-poly types in the schizo wards.

Spider's hallucinations of corpse sodomy and cannibalism might not have put him in that ward, though, depending on the clinician who examined him. Hallucinations can be precipitated by fatigue and emotional stress, both of which he had in abundance, even without having smoked marijuana of unknown provenance. If he kept seeing such things "back in the World," he would be in trouble.

He didn't feel he had to worry about that, though. Unwittingly agreeing with his replacement Lee, Spider was absolutely convinced that he would never leave Vietnam alive.

Wired When the patrol had worked up to the top of the hill, they found their way blocked by Slinkies from h.e.l.l.

Two strands of concertina barbed wire, like the fire base had. Concertina gave a quick way of putting up temporary barbed-wire entanglements to slow down an enemy charge. Each strand was a more or less taut spiral of metal, covered with rusty spikes, encircling the camp, a s.a.d.i.s.tic giant version of the child's toy. The two strands together made, effectively, a metal bramble bush about six feet thick.

Its springiness was its strength. A direct hit from a mortar round or grenade wouldn't break it; it would just bounce. If the enemy snuck up in the middle of the night and snipped it with wire cutters, it would embarra.s.s him with a loudsproing! You couldn't charge through it or over it-not until bodies piled up deeply enough to weigh it down and make a bridge, which was uncommon.

There was a gate of sorts around on the other side of the hill, the place where the two ends of the coils had been joined together. A man with pliers and heavy gloves opened the circle so they could come in, and closed it back up behind them.

Spider trudged back to his area. The other engineers and Freeling, the rifleman Sarge had excused, were relaxing with beer and soft drinks. Spider's fours & fives were stacked on top of the bunker. He dumped his pack and opened a beer.

"You were the lucky one," Killer said, holding up both hands wrapped in bandages. "That concertina's a b.i.t.c.h."

"Yeah; looka me." Batman held up uninjured hands. "Gloves."

"Too hot," Killer groused.

"Heard you found a couple bodies," Freeling said.

"Just one." Spider flopped down and leaned against the bunker. "Enough blood an' guts for two, but I think it was just one, got blown to pieces by artillery.""Take any pictures?" Killer said.

"Didn't think of it." Spider had an Instamatic that Beverly had sent him.

"Guess you've seen worse," Freeling said. "Guys say you come from Graves."

"I don' know." Spider sipped the beer. "Maybe this was about the worst. I guess it's easier when they bring 'em to you in bags. And it was an old guy. It got to my head."

"Your head?" Moses said.

"Hard to explain." Sure, tell them about the guys f.u.c.king and eating the corpse. "Some animals had got to him. Also I was feelin' kinda nauseous from last night, smoked some kinda s.h.i.t with the medics, that didn't help much."

"You're not used to it?" Batman said.

"Huh uh. Couple of times." Once, actually, at a party with Beverly. He hadn't liked it, which was why he hadn't smoked at Graves. Almost everyone else did. "It's not my bag. Oh." He unbuckled the shoulder harness and handed the Magnum to Killer. "Thanks."

"Sure." Killer set it carefully on top of his pack. "No new rifles came in. I was on the LZ for both of the slicks."

"Well, s.h.i.t. I wonder how long it takes."

Freeling stood up and brushed himself off, to no visible effect. "Don't hold your breath. If I was you I'd stock up on grenades." He found his weapon and helmet. "Better get back. See you guys."

"Not for long, a.s.shole," Batman said.

"Short!" Freeling squawked, high-pitched like a big bird. "Short! Short!"

"Twelve days, they ought to just send him back," Moses said. "How long does it take to outprocess?"

"I don't know," Batman said. "Tell you in eighty-nine days."

Killer lit a cigarette off his old one. "He was really blown apart?"

"Yeah, really. We don't have to talk about it, do we?"

"Musta been somethin'else," Batman said, "gross out the Spider."

"Like I say, different." Spider upended the can, drained the beer in two gulps, and then stretched out with the rucksack as a pillow, steel helmet tipped over his eyes. "Wake me up for the next truce."

Truces The next truce was going to be for the Tet holiday, three weeks away, and Spider would be awake.

The previous truce, the New Year's one a week before, hadn't been all that peaceful. The Americansrecorded eighty-two Viet Cong violations of the thirty-six-hour "stand-down," the most impressive of which was a human wave attack on a Tay Ninh camp on January 3rd, where twenty-seven Americans were killed and over two hundred wounded, in an action that began six hours before the end of the truce-or eighty minutes before the end, according to the Viet Cong. The two sides never agreed on much.

After Tet, that violation would be an obscure footnote.

Spider's s.e.x life (2) Spider was having an ugly dream. They were back in the reek of the clearing, but it was he who unb.u.t.toned his fly and picked up the rotting mutilated head, turned the cold slimy thing around so that its open mouth- "Wake up! Get up, you lucky a.s.shole!" Killer was shaking his arm. It was late afternoon; Spider had slept for a couple of hours.

He levered himself over onto one elbow, bones creaking. "So what's going on?" He had a painful erection that was wilting fast. A fragment of the dream stayed with him and he was horrified, confused.

"You guys who were on the recon get a one-day pa.s.s into Pleiku, G.o.d knows why. But you gotta be down on the pad in a couple minutes."

"Pleiku?"

"p.u.s.s.y!" He punched him hard on the shoulder. "It's one. big. wh.o.r.ehouse!"

Spider got up and brushed himself off. He could hear a helicopter in the distance, more than one. "So do I leave my s.h.i.t here?"

"s.h.i.t, no, take it all along. ThinkI'm gonna hump it if we move out while you're gettin' your rocks off?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm not thinkin' yet." He kneeled, leaned back into his rucksack straps, and hoisted the pack up onto his back, then picked up his steel pot and rifle. "Maybe trade this sucker in while I'm in there."

"Yeah, rotsa ruck." Killer extricated his wallet from three layers of dirty plastic bag. He handed Spider a ten-dollar Military Payment Certificate. "Look, if you think of it, get me a bottle of booze, some kinda whiskey."

"They take MFCs in Pleiku?"

"s.h.i.t yes, good as money." Merchants with Viet Cong sympathies especially liked MFCs. They sold them back to GIs for greenbacks at $1.25 to the dollar, and the American dollars wound up in North Vietnam, which desperately needed hard currency. The GIs got 25 percent more to spend at the PX and the ma.s.sage parlor and Ho Chi Minh got surface-to-air missiles.

Killer walked down to the LZ with Spider. "So you've been into town?"

"Mmm, yes." He closed his eyes. "Yes!""So where should I go? What's a good place?"

"Ain't n.o.bad place with p.u.s.s.y, is there?" He shrugged and resorted to the truth. "I don't know the name of the place we went to; I've only been in once. Just went with some other guys who knew where they were goin'."

"Sounds like a good idea. How much you pay?"

"Twenty bucks for boom-boom, ten for a b.l.o.w.j.o.b. Maybe you can cut a deal for both."

Both, Spider thought. How long would it take you to get it up again; what would you do with her in the meantime?

Would he even know what to do at all? His total practical s.e.x education comprised four handjobs in parked cars and one grainy black-and-white p.o.r.no movie the sergeant at Graves showed on a sheet tacked up to the billet wall. What if you got it in the wrong hole?

Well, animals did it without any instruction. The wh.o.r.e presumably would have had experience with virgins before. As the slicks came in, Spider was getting his hard-on back.

"A penny for your thoughts," Killer shouted as they crouched into the swirling storm kicked up by the blades.

Six scared-looking men in clean creased fatigues got out of the helicopter, FNGs. Spider was momentarily confused by the way they looked at him, trading places, and then realized that he looked like an old hand-cruddy and unshaven, equipment beat up and dirty. He laughed out loud as the helicopter surged up into the sky.

It took a couple of hours before all of them were choppered into Camp Enari and trucked to a transient billet. By that time it was almost dark. They wouldn't be going into town until the next morning; meanwhile, it was clean fatigues, a shower, a hot meal, and a movie, all of which were exotic novelties that would have been appreciated more under other circ.u.mstances. A gruff sergeant changed some of their money into Vietnamese piasters and read them a lecture about not hurting the local economy by using MFCs or dollars, and then gave each of them six condoms and an imaginative lecture about venereal disease. If you caught Brand X, for which there was no cure, you would spend the rest of your life quarantined on a little island in the Pacific. Use a rubber even for a b.l.o.w.j.o.b.

At least the outdoor movie was hilarious-John Wayne inThe Green Berets. People laughed and pa.s.sed joints around and threw empty beer cans at the Duke. Spider declined the marijuana and left the movie halfway through, to sit in the din of the EM Club and drink cold beer and read the Heinlein novel.

His dreams were gentler that night, s.e.xual but romantic, and after an amazing breakfast of bacon and eggs, he caught the second jeep into town. The RTO Morrison and three other guys were stuffed into the jeep; Morrison recommended Suzy Wong's Ma.s.sage Parlor for a start. The driver nodded wordlessly and drove them through the heavily guarded gate.

The half-hour ride into town was interesting, a kind of scenery Spider had never seen at ground level. A dry gra.s.sy plain surrounded by the low mountains they'd been clambering around on the day before.

Ever)' couple of miles there was a cl.u.s.ter of shacks with walls that seemed to be constructed from flattened-out soft drink cans, fronted by children in rags standing beside the road with their hands out.

Scrawny dogs, chickens, pigs. Sometimes green lawns decorated with piles of human-looking s.h.i.t.Morrison confirmed that that's what it was-all the fertilizer the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds could afford.

The town was dusty and dirty, littered with garbage. Faded signs advertised Winstons and c.o.kes in incomprehensible language. Old men and women and children stared at them with pleading or hostility.

Some of the buildings were piles of charred rubble, a lot of them pocked with bullet and shrapnel scars.

A new-looking Mercedes-Benz sat on flat tires, its doors st.i.tched by machine-gun fire, the bullet holes fresh enough to show bright metal.

The jeep stopped in front of the building with a weirdly lettered cardboard sign in the window: suzy wong's ma.s.sage parlor and bar-american food and beer. The driver, a buck sergeant who'd been silent all the way in, gave his speech. "I'll be back here at four-teen-thirty sharp. Anybody's not here has to find his own way back. Cab ride's fifty bucks and you might get rolled. Or killed. If you're not back at Enari by sundown, it's a general court-inartial and LBJ." Long Binh Jail, a place of legendary cruelty; it made Marine boot camp look like the Campfire Girls. "Don't lock and load unless you're fired upon. Don't kill any f.u.c.king women or children unless they're shooting at you. And keep your f.u.c.king ammo secure. The little gooks'll pick your pockets and take the ammo to Papasan; you'll be eatin' it up in the hills next week. Any questions?" They murmured no and started to get out of the jeep. "And use those f.u.c.king rubbers! Otherwise you'll be pickin' your p.e.c.k.e.r up off the floor."

The jeep peeled out. "f.u.c.k that s.h.i.t," Morrison said, and threw his rubbers into the gutter.

Spider was properly shocked. "You're not afraid of the clap?"

"s.h.i.t, you get the clap, you go to the hospital. You rather be in a hospital or out in the boonies?" He coughed and spit. "Besides, I got two hundred thirty-seven f'uckin' days. No way I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna leave this f'uckin' place in a body bag and so are you." One of the other guys said "d.a.m.n straight,"

and tossed his rubbers away, too.

They trooped into Suzy Wong's, but rather than a seductive temptress in a slit skirt, they ran into a hard-eyed old gent who bore a striking resemblance to Ho Chi Minh, standing in front of an empty rifle rack. "Give him your gun but keep the magazine and the bolt," Morrison said.

Spider had a hard time getting the bolt out, because his hands were shaking and slippery with sweat. His mouth was dry and he felt dizzy and he could taste bacon and eggs and bile at the back of his throat. He hadn't known exactly what it was going to be like, but he hadn't foreseen anything quite like this. The old man locked their M16s in the rack and gave Morrison a key on a loop of string. "If the s.h.i.t hits the fan,"

Morrison said, "get on down here and I'll hand out the rifles. Make sure you get your own." As if anyone else would want it.

They walked up a dusty flight of stairs; when Spider was halfway up, a tinny speaker started playing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." The room they walked into was pleasant but disorienting, too American: jukebox, red vinyl booths with Formica tables. The walls were decorated with posters from stateside-the Beatles and the Doors and a peace symbol with the slogan what if they gave a war and n.o.body came?

One corner of that one was charred. The air smelled of stale hamburger grease and oriental perfume.

Eleven small women sat in the booths, one per booth, wearing low-cut silk dresses or shorts. They smiled what looked like sincere smiles of welcome. Spider thought they all looked uniformly impossibly desirable, and just went to the closest one.

He started to slide in across from her, but she said, "No, ovah heah, GI," and giggled, patting the seat next to her. He got in, unsure of what to do or say next; she slid over so that their thighs were in contactand caressed his bicep. "Big muscle." Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s brushed his elbow and jasmine perfume made him dizzy. "What's you' name?"

"Spider." He looked down and saw an absolutely perfect pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nipples and all, no bra, nestled in rustling silk.

"Nice name, Spida'," she said, and made a spiderly walk with her sharp nails down his arm. She saw the activity in his lap and dropped her hand for a friendly squeeze, perhaps unaware of how close she had come to giving him a freebie. He made a noise between a sigh and a groan.

"My name's Li. You buy me some tea, Spida'?"

"Uh. couldn't we just. "

"Sure thing, GI. You buy me tea later." She b.u.mped his hip with hers. "Upstairs, numbah five." They got out of the booth and she led him by the hand. Some of the other guys hooted and made sarcastic comments, but Spider couldn't hear them for the blood roaring in his ears.

Number five was just a swinging door; the room was a small area set off by plywood part.i.tions, furnished with a rickety sagging bed and a screen and a stand with a water basin and a rag. She pointed to the bed.

"You get undress'. You got rubbers?"

"Uh, sure." Spider dropped a handful of condoms on the bed and started unb.u.t.toning his shirt. He didn't do too good a job because he was hypnotized: the screen was in front of a bright window; when she went behind it to undress, it was a slow seductive shadow show. He only had the shirt halfway done when she came back out.

She laughed. "You hurry, now."

Spider had never seen a naked woman before. He had felt Beverly's s.e.x, but always under layers of clothing. Li's was a plain frank slit, shaved, an indescribable miracle of flesh that she carried over to the basin and washed. Spider tried to undo one b.u.t.ton and failed.

Her back to him, Li replaced the rag and bent over in a gymnast's pose, her pretty face in syzygy with the delicate petals of her l.a.b.i.a and clenched pink a.n.u.s dot. "How much you want?" she said, upside down.

"b.l.o.w.j.o.b fifteen doll', boom-boom twenty five, 'roun' the world, fifty. Ma.s.sage free."

Spider had no idea what "around the world" might be, but he had over a hundred dollars as well as two thousand piasters. "Everything," he said.

"Okay." She glided over to him and nimbly unb.u.t.toned his shirt and slipped it off. She rubbed his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and then unfastened his belt and worked slowly down the b.u.t.tons of his fly. Fortunately, Spider wasn't enc.u.mbered by underwear. She looked at his erection and said, "Pretty,"

and touched it lightly as she reached for a condom. It was more than Spider could take. He shot a string of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e over her shoulder. With the speed of commerce she took him between her soft lips and sucked, cradling his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es with one hand, gently stroking the shaft of his p.e.n.i.s with the other, draining him as expertly and dispa.s.sionately as a milking machine. When he started to soften, she licked him down and up and then slowly took all of his average-sized d.i.c.k into her mouth and throat. There was not even a term for this practice yet in America, not for another four years, and it was not something Spider would have thought physically possible. He stood in the presence of a miracle, raunchy but transfigured.She slowly released herself from him and had him sit down while she removed his boots and socks and trousers. "You lie down now."

He started to recline on his back. "The other way. I give ma.s.sage now."

First she rubbed him all over, shoulders, back, and b.u.t.tocks, soft circular motions with fingertips and teasing nails. Then she got up on the bed with her knees on either side of him and dug into the tense ropy neck and shoulder muscles that yesterday had complained so much about the rucksack. She was surprisingly strong, strong enough to hurt, but it drew out the deeper pain. Then she rubbed his scalp vigorously and did something strange with his ears. She sat back on him to rub his ribs and lower back, making playful circular motions around his tailbone with her wet v.a.g.i.n.a; he had to raise up to make room for a fresh erection.

Then she stood up on the bed and carefully stepped onto his back, all eighty pounds of her, and walked up toward his head, her toes ma.s.saging his backbone. She turned around and walked back and stepped off, straddling him. "Okay, now you turn over."

The ma.s.sage was evidently over. She kneeled and scooted back, taking him in her mouth again while presenting a view of her private parts so close up that Spider's eyes crossed painfully, focusing, memorizing. Then he buried his face in the musky wetness-dismissing one nickering worry about venereal and other diseases-and licked and sucked with enthusiasm and curiosity. Then she slipped her finger past his mouth, slowly up into her v.a.g.i.n.a and back, and then slid it up his r.e.c.t.u.m and touched him inside and he exploded again, an almost painful and desperate kind of o.r.g.a.s.m, trying to discharge after there was nothing left. When she slid her finger out he bucked so hard he almost threw her off the bed.

She slithered around to lie with her chin on his shoulder. She was quiet, almost motionless, for more than a minute. "I wash up now," she said softly. "You buy me tea now?" She slipped off the bed and padded to the basin.

"Yeah, tea. Me, too." So that was "around the world." He wondered how long it would be before he could get another pa.s.s. "Thank you, Li. That was, it was, it was great."

She was scrubbing her finger with soap. She smiled and blushed. "You numba' one GI, Spida'." She shrugged into a kimono not quite long enough to cover her a.s.s and stepped into slippers and was gone.