‘Hey, Wen.’
He turned and saw him, the silhouette of a man and a machine against the sunset.
‘Get laid for me,’ Jeff said, making an unambiguous gesture with his hand.
Wendell smiled in reply. ‘OK. When I do, it’ll be in your name.’
Corporal Wendell Johnson walked away, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his walk still, in spite of himself, a soldier’s walk. He reached the accommodation block without greeting or talking to anyone else. He entered his quarters. The bathroom door was closed. He always kept it closed, because the mirror faced the main door and he preferred to avoid his face being the first image to greet him.
He forced himself to remember that from the next day onwards he would have to get used to it. There were no charitable mirrors, only surfaces that reflected exactly what they saw. Without pity, and with the involuntary cruelty of indifference.
He took off his shirt and threw it on a chair, away from the masochistic spell of the other mirror, the one inside the wall closet. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head, rough skin against rough skin, a sensation he was used to.
Through the half-open windows, like an emanation of the darkening sky, came the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker hidden somewhere in the trees.
tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
Memory turned in its vicious circle, and the sound became the muted splutter of an AK-47 and then a tangle of voices and images.
‘Matt, where the fuck are those bastards? Where are they firing from?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t see a thing.’
‘Hey, you with the M-79, throw a grenade into those bushes on the right.’
‘What happened to Corsini?’
Farrell’s voice, stained with earth and fear, came from some point on their right. ‘Corsini’s gone. Mac, too
tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
And Farrell’s voice, too, dissolved into the air.
‘Come on. Wen, let’s get our asses out of here. They’re tearing us to pieces.’
tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
‘No, not that way. There’s no cover.’
‘Holy shit, they’re everywhere.’
* * *
He opened his eyes again and let the things around him return. The closet, the chair, the table, the bed, the windows with the unusually clean panes. And here, too, a smell of rust and disinfectant. This room had been his one landmark for months, after all the time spent in a ward, with doctors and nurses bustling around him trying to alleviate the pain of his burns. It was there that he had let his mind, almost intact, back into his ravaged body, and had made himself a promise.
The woodpecker conceded a truce to the tree it had been torturing. It seemed like a good omen, the end of hostilities, a part of the past that he could somehow leave behind him.
That he had to leave behind him.
The next day he would be leaving.
He didn’t know what kind of world he would find beyond the walls of the hospital, nor did he know how that world would greet him. In fact, neither of those two things mattered. All that mattered was the long journey he had ahead of him, because at the end of that journey an encounter with two men awaited him. They would look at him with eyes full of fear and astonishment. Then he would talk, to that fear and that astonishment.
And finally he would kill them.
A smile, again devoid of pain. Without realizing it, he drifted into sleep. That night, he slept without hearing voices, and for the first time didn’t dream about rubber trees.
CHAPTER 2
What surprised him during the journey was the corn.
As he rode north, getting closer and closer to home, stretches of it started to appear at the sides of the road, meek in the shadow of the Greyhound bus. The ripples of the wind and the shadows of the clouds made it come alive. He remembered how resistant it felt when you ran your hand through it. An unexpected travelling companion, the colour of cold beer, the warm shelter of the hayloft.
He knew that sensation.
And he remembered how, with other hands, he had run his fingers through Karen’s hair and breathed in her scent, which smelled like nothing else in the world. He had felt it like a painful spasm when he had left after being at home on leave for a month, a fleeting illusion of invulnerability the army granted everyone before they shipped out. They had been offered thirty days of paradise and possible dreams, before the Army Terminal at Oakland became Hawaii and finally turned into Bien-Hoa, the troop selection centre twenty miles from Saigon.
And then Xuan-Loc, the place where everything had started, where he had found his own small plot of hell.
He took his eyes away from the road and lowered the peak of his baseball cap. He wore sunglasses held on with an elastic band because he had practically no ears left to rest the arms of the glasses on. He closed his eyes and hid himself in that tenuous semi-darkness. All he got in return were more images.
There was no corn in Vietnam.
There were no blondes. Just a few nurses at the hospital, but by then he had almost no feeling left in his fingers or any desire to touch their hair. Above all, he was sure no woman would ever again want to be touched by him.
Ever again.
A long-haired young man in a flowered shirt, who had been sleeping across the aisle from him, to his right, woke up. He rubbed his eyes and allowed himself a yawn that smelled of sweat and sleep and pot. He turned and started to look in a canvas bag he had placed on the free seat beside him. He took out a portable radio and switched it on. After some searching he found a station, and the strains of The Iron Maiden by Barclay James Harvest joined the noise of the wheels.
Instinctively, the corporal turned to look at him. When the young man, who must have been about his own age, noticed him and saw his face, the reaction was the usual one: the one he saw every time on other people’s faces. The young man dived back into his bag, pretending to look for something. Then he turned to sit with his back to him, listening to the music and looking out the window on his side.
The corporal put his head against the window pane.
They passed billboards, some of them advertising products he didn’t know. Speeding cars overtook the bus, and some were models he’d never seen. A 66 Ford Fairlane convertible coming in the opposite direction was the one image that was at all familiar. Time, short as it had been, had moved on. And so had life.
Two years had passed. The blinking of an eye, an indecipherable tick on the stopwatch of eternity. And yet they had sufficed to wipe out everything. Now, if he looked ahead of him, all he saw was a smooth wall, and only resentment was urging him to climb it. In all those months he had cultivated that resentment, fed it, let it grow until it was pure hate.
And now he was going home.
There would be no open arms, no speeches or fanfares, no hero’s welcome. Nobody would ever call him a hero, and anyway everyone thought the hero was dead.
He had left from Louisiana, where an army vehicle had dropped him off unceremoniously outside the bus station. He had found himself alone. Around him he no longer had the anonymous but reassuring walls of the hospital. As he waited in line to get his ticket, he had felt as if this was a casting call for the Tod Browning movie Freaks. This thought had made him smile, the only choice he had if he didn’t want to do what he had done for nights on end, and what he had sworn never to do again: cry.
Good luck, Wendell …
‘Sixteen dollars.’
Suddenly Colonel Lensky’s words of farewell had become the voice of a clerk putting down the ticket for the first stretch of the journey. Hidden behind his window, the man had not looked at that part of his face that the corporal granted to the world, but instead had showed him the indifference due to any anonymous passenger – which was just what he wanted.
But when he had pushed the banknotes across the counter with a hand covered in a light cotton glove, the clerk, a slight man wi
th not much hair and thin lips and lightless eyes, had looked up. He had lingered for a moment on his face and then lowered his head again.
‘Vietnam?’
The corporal had waited a moment before replying. ‘Yes.’
The ticket clerk had given him back his money.
He had ignored Wendell’s surprise. Maybe he had taken it for granted. He had simply said a few words to smooth things over. Words that, for both of them, said everything there was to say.
‘I lost my son there, two years ago tomorrow. You keep that. I think you need it more than the company.’
The corporal had walked away, feeling the same thing he’d felt when he’d turned his back on Jeff Anderson. Two men alone for ever, one in his wheelchair and the other in his ticket office, in a twilight that seemed destined to become endless.
He had stopped in third-class motels, sleeping little and badly, with his teeth clenched and his jaws tensed, dreaming recurring dreams. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, someone had called it. Science always found a way to turn the destruction of a flesh-and-blood person into a statistic. But the corporal had learned the hard way that the body never completely gets used to pain. Only the mind sometimes manages to accustom itself to horror. And soon there would be a way to show certain people exactly what he himself had been through.
Mile after mile, Mississippi had become Tennessee, which had then turned into Kentucky. Soon, he was promised the familiar landscape of Ohio. Around him, and in his mind, the different panoramas fell into place, a succession of strange locations, a line traced by a coloured pencil across the map of an unknown territory. Beside the road ran electricity and telephone wires, carrying energy and words above his head. There were houses and people, and the people were like puppets in a toy theatre, and the wires helped them to move, gave them the illusion of being alive.
From time to time, he had asked himself what energy and what words he needed right now. Maybe, while he was lying on Colonel Lensky’s couch, all the words had been said and all the forces evoked and invoked. It had been a surgical liturgy, which his reason had rejected the way a believer rejects a pagan practice. The doctor had celebrated that liturgy in vain, while he, the corporal, had hidden what little faith he had, his faith in nothingness, in a safe place in his mind, a place where nothing could hurt him or destroy him.
What had been couldn’t be changed or forgotten.
Only repaid.
The slight lurch forward of the bus as it slowed down brought him back to where he was. The time was now, and there was no escaping it. The place, according to a sign, was called Florence. Judging by the outskirts, the town was like a lot of others, and laid no claim to being anything like its Italian namesake. One night, lying with Karen on the bed in his room, he had looked at a travel brochure.
France, Spain, Italy …
And it had been Florence, the one in Italy, that had most drawn their attention. Karen had told him things he didn’t know about the place and made him dream things he had never imagined he could dream. That was a time when he still believed that hope cost nothing, before he’d learned that it could cost a lot.
It could even cost you your life.
By the inexhaustible irony of existence, he had finally come to a place called Florence. But nothing was the way it should have been. He remembered words he’d heard spoken by Ben, the man who had been closest to a father figure for him.
Time is like a shipwreck and only what really matters stays afloat …
His own time had turned out to be a question of clinging to a raft, trying to find a desperate foothold in reality after being cast out of his own private utopia.
The driver drove obediently to the bus station. The bus jolted to a halt next to a rust-eaten shelter covered in faded signs.
He stayed in his seat, waiting for all the other passengers to get off first. Nobody moved to help a Mexican woman who was struggling with a sleeping little girl in her arms and a suitcase in her free hand. The young man across the aisle from the corporal couldn’t resist throwing him a last glance as he picked up his bag.
The corporal had decided he wanted to reach Chillicothe around sundown, so it was best to stop here before crossing the state line. Florence was a place like any other, which made it the right place. Any place was the right place, right now. From here, he would try to hitch-hike the rest of the way to his destination, in spite of the complications that choice was likely to involve. He didn’t think it was going to be easy to get a ride.
People usually thought physical disfigurement meant a nasty character. It never seemed to occur to them that evil, in order to flourish, had to be seductive. It had to attract the world with a winning smile and the promise of beauty. Whereas he felt like the last sticker needed to complete an album of monsters.
The driver glanced in the mirror to check the inside of the bus. Immediately, he turned his head. The corporal didn’t bother to ask himself if the man was urging him to get off or looking to see if the image in the mirror corresponded to the truth. Either way, he had to take the initiative. He stood up and took his bag down from the rack. He loaded it on his shoulder, taking care to hold the canvas strap with his gloved hand in order to avoid abrasions.
As he walked down the aisle, the driver, who bore a curious resemblance to Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers pitcher, seemed all of a sudden to be strangely fascinated by the dashboard.
The corporal descended those few interminable steps and found himself again alone in a small square.
He took a look around.
On the other side of the square, divided in two by the road, was a Gulf service station and a diner with a parking lot that it shared with the Open Inn, a shabby-looking motel promising vacant rooms and golden dreams.
He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and headed in that direction, prepared to buy himself a little hospitality without arguing about the price.
As long as it lasted, he would be a citizen of Florence, Kentucky.
CHAPTER 3
The motel didn’t live up to the promise of its sign. It was just the usual cheap and nasty kind of place, where everything was strictly utilitarian and lacking in taste. The receptionist, a short, plump, prematurely bald man who made up for the little hair he had left with a big moustache and long sideburns, hadn’t had any visible reaction when asked for a room. Except that he wouldn’t hand over the key until the corporal had put the money down on the desk. He wasn’t sure if this was normal practice or treatment reserved exclusively for him. He didn’t care much, either way.
The room smelled damp, the furniture was nothing special, and the shoddy carpet was stained in several places. The shower he took, hidden from prying eyes behind a plastic curtain, alternated hot and cold unpredictably. The TV set worked intermittently, and he had finally decided to leave it tuned to the local channel, where the images and sound were clearer. They were showing an old episode of The Green Hornet.
Now he was lying naked on the bed with his eyes closed. The words of the two masked heroes, fighting crime with their clothes always immaculate, were a distant hum. He had removed the bedspread and put the sheet over him, so he wouldn’t have to endure the sight of his own body when he opened his eyes again.
He was always tempted to pull the sheet up all the way over his head, like they did with corpses. He had seen so many corpses lying on the ground like that, with bloodstained sheets thrown over them not out of pity, but to spare the survivors a clear vision of what could happen to any of them at any moment. He had seen so many dead people, and now he was one himself even though he was still alive. The war had taught him to kill, had given him permission to kill, and because he wore a uniform he knew nobody would blame him and he didn’t have to feel any guilt. Now all that remained of that uniform was a green cotton jacket at the bottom of a bag.
Without realizing it, the men who had sent him to face the war and its tribal rituals had given him something he’d previously only had the illusion of possessing: freedom.
&nb
sp; Including the freedom to kill again.
He smiled at the idea, and lay there for a long time in that bed that had unceremoniously welcomed dozens of bodies. In those sleepless hours he went back in time to when, also at night …
… he had been sleeping soundly, as only young men do after a day’s work. A muffled noise had woken him suddenly, and immediately afterwards the door of the room had burst wide open, and he had felt a draught on his face and seen a light shining straight at him and, through the light, the burnished threat of a gun barrel hovering a few inches from his face. There were shadows behind that light.
One of the shadows had become a voice, harsh and clear.
‘Don’t move, punk, or it’ll be the last thing you do.’
Rough hands had turned him face down on the bed. His arms had been pulled unceremoniously behind his back, and he had heard the metallic click of the handcuffs. From that moment on, his movements and his life had stopped belonging to him.
‘You’ve been in reformatory. You know all that shit about your rights?’
‘Yes.’
He had breathed that monosyllable with difficulty, his mouth still furry.
‘Then just imagine we read them to you.’
The voice then addressed the other shadow in the room in a commanding tone. ‘Take a look around, Will.’
With his face still pressed to the pillow, he heard the sounds of a search. Drawers being opened and closed, objects falling, the rustle of clothes. The few things he had were being handled expertly, but far from gently.
Finally another voice, with a hint of excitement in it. ‘Well, well, chief, what do we have here?’
He heard footsteps approaching and the pressure on his back lessened. Then four rough hands pulled him up until he was in a sitting position on the bed. In front of his eyes, the light played over a transparent plastic bag full of grass.
‘So, we roll ourselves a little joint from time to time, huh? And maybe we sell this shit, too. Seems to me you’re in big trouble, boy.’