Sorcerer wrote back that evening: "What do you get when you breed VC with rats?"
He smiled to himself and jotted down the answer on a separate slip of paper.
"Midget rats," he wrote.
At 7:22 on the morning of March 16, 1968, the lead elements of Charlie Company boarded a flight of helicopters that climbed into the thin, rosy sunlight, gathered into assault formation, then banked south and skimmed low and fast over scarred, mangled, bombed-out countryside toward a landing zone just west of Pinkville.
Something was wrong.
Maybe it was the sunlight.
Sorcerer felt dazed and half asleep, still dreaming wild dawn dreams. All night he'd been caught up in pink rivers and pink paddies; even now, squatting at the rear of the chopper, he couldn't flush away the pink. All that color—it was wrong. The air was wrong. The smells were wrong, and the thin rosy sunlight, and how the men seemed wrapped inside themselves. Meadlo and Mitchell and Thinbill sat with their eyes closed. Sledge fiddled with his radio. Conti was off in some mental whorehouse. PFC Weatherby kept wiping his M-16 with a towel first the barrel and then his face and then the barrel again. Boyce and Maples and Lieutenant Calley sat side by side in the chopper's open doorway, sharing a cigarette, quietly peering down at the cratered fields and paddies.
Pure wrongness, Sorcerer knew.
He could taste the sunlight. It had a rusty, metallic flavor, like nails on his tongue.
For a few seconds Sorcerer shut his eyes and retreated behind the mirrors in his head, pretending to be elsewhere, but even then the landscapes kept coming at him fast and lurid.
At 7:30 the choppers banked in a long arc and approached the hamlet of Thuan Yen from the southwest. Below, almost straight ahead, white puffs of smoke opened up in the paddies just outside the village. The artillery barrage swept across the fields and into the western fringes of Thuan Yen, cutting through underbrush and bamboo and banana trees, setting fires here and there, shifting northward as the helicopters skimmed in low over the drop zone. The door gunners were now laying down a steady suppressing fire. They leaned into their big guns, shoulders twitching. The noise made Sorcerer's eyelids go haywire.
"Down and dirty!" someone yelled, and the chopper settled into a wide dry paddy.
Mitchell was first off. Then Boyce and Conti and Meadlo, then Maples, then Sledge, then Thinbill and the stubby lieutenant.
Sorcerer went last.
He jumped into the sunlight, fell flat, found himself alone in the paddy. The others had vanished. There was gunfire all around, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He couldn't get his legs beneath him. For a time he lay pinned down by things unnatural, the wind and heat, the wicked sunlight. He would not remember pushing to his feet. Directly ahead, a pair of stately old coconut trees burst into flame.
Just inside the village, Sorcerer found a pile of dead goats.
He found a pretty girl with her pants down. She was dead too. She looked at him cross-eyed. Her hair was gone.
He found dead dogs, dead chickens.
Farther along, he encountered someone's forehead. He found three dead water buffalo. He found a dead monkey. He found ducks pecking at a dead toddler. Events had been channeling this way for a long while, months of terror, months of slaughter, and now in the pale morning sunlight a kind of meltdown was in progress.
Pigs were squealing.
The morning air was flaming up toward purple.
He watched a young man hobbling up a trail, one foot torn away at the ankle. He watched Weatherby shoot two little girls in the face. Deeper into the village, in front of a small L-shaped hootch, he came across a GI with a woman's black ponytail flowing from his helmet. The man wiped a hand across his crotch. He gave a little flip to the ponytail and smiled at Sorcerer and blooped an M-79 round into the L-shaped hootch. "Blammo," the man said. He shook his head as if embarrassed. "Yeah, well," he said, then shrugged and fired off another round and said, "Boom." At his feet was a wailing infant. A middle-aged woman lay nearby. She was draped across a bundle of straw, not quite dead, shot in the legs and stomach. The woman gazed at the world with indifference. At one point she made an obscure motion with her head, a kind of bow, inexact, after which she rocked herself away.
There were dead waterfowl and dead house pets. People were dying loudly inside the L-shaped hootch.
Sorcerer uttered meaningless sounds—"No," he said, then after a second he said, "Please!"—and then the sunlight sucked him down a trail toward the center of the village, where he found burning hootches and brightly mobile figures engaged in murder. Simpson was killing children. PFC Weatherby was killing whatever he could kill. A row of corpses lay in the pink-to-purple sunshine along the trail—teenagers and old women and two babies and a young boy. Most were dead, some were almost dead. The dead lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead. The noise was fierce. No one was dying quietly. There were squeakings and chickenhouse sounds.
"Please," Sorcerer said again. He felt very stupid. Thirty meters up the trail he came across Conti and Meadlo and Rusty Calley. Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying. Conti was watching. The lieutenant shouted something and shot down a dozen women and kids and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded again. The air was hot and wet. "Jeez, come on," the lieutenant said, "get with it—move—light up these fuckers," but Sorcerer was already sprinting away. He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled in the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet. He found someone stabbing people with a big silver knife. Hutto was shooting corpses. T'Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.
Stop, he thought. But it wouldn't stop. Someone shot an old farmer and lifted him up and dumped him in a well and tossed in a grenade.
Roschevitz shot people in the head.
Hutson and Wright took turns on a machine gun.
The killing was steady and inclusive. The men took frequent smoke breaks; they ate candy bars and exchanged stories.
A period of dark time went by, maybe an hour, maybe more, then Sorcerer found himself on his hands and knees behind a bamboo fence. A few meters away, in the vicinity of a large wooden turret, fifteen or twenty villagers squatted in the morning sunlight. They were chattering among themselves, their faces tight, and then somebody strolled up and made a waving motion and shot them dead.
There were flies now—a low droning buzz that swelled up from somewhere deep inside the village.
And then for a while Sorcerer let himself glide away. All he could do was close his eyes and kneel there and wait for whatever was wrong with the world to right itself. At one point it occurred to him that the weight of this day would ultimately prove too much, that sooner or later he would have to lighten the load.
He looked at the sky.
Later he nodded.
And then later still, snagged in the sunlight, he gave himself over to forgetfulness. "Go away," he murmured. He waited a moment, then said it again, firmly, much louder, and the little village began to vanish inside its own rosy glow. Here, he reasoned, was the most majestic trick of all. In the months and years ahead, John Wade would remember Thuan Yen the way chemical nightmares are remembered, impossible combinations, impossible events, and over time the impossibility itself would become the richest and deepest and most profound memory.
This could not have happened. Therefore it did not.
Already he felt better.
Tracer rounds corkscrewed through the glare, and people we
re dying in long neat rows. The sunlight was in his blood.
He would both remember and not remember a fleet human movement off to his left.
He would not remember squealing.
He would not remember raising his weapon, nor rolling away from the bamboo fence, but he would remember forever how he turned and shot down an old man with a wispy beard and wire glasses and what looked to be a rifle. It was not a rifle. It was a small wooden hoe. The hoe he would always remember. In the ordinary hours after the war, at the breakfast table or in the babble of some dreary statehouse hearing, John Wade would sometimes look up to see the wooden hoe spinning like a baton in the morning sunlight. He would see the old man shuffling past the bamboo fence, the skinny legs, the erect posture and the wire glasses, the hoe suddenly sailing up high and doing its quick twinkling spin and coming down uncaught. He would feel only the faintest sense of culpability. The forgetting trick mostly worked. On certain late-night occasions, however, John Wade would remember covering his head and screaming and crawling through a hedgerow and out into a wide paddy where helicopters were ferrying in supplies. The paddy was full of colored smoke, lavenders and yellows. There were loud voices, and many explosions, but he couldn't seem to locate anyone. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. All around him there were flies and burning trees and burning hootches.
Later, he found himself at the bottom of an irrigation ditch. There were many bodies present, maybe a hundred. He was caught up in the slime.
PFC Weatherby found him there.
"Hey, Sorcerer," Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him anyway.
14. Hypothesis
What happened, maybe, was that Kathy drowned. Something freakish: a boating accident. Maybe a sandbar. Maybe she was skimming along, moving fast, feeling the cold spray and wind and sunlight, and then came a cracking sound, a quick jolt, and she felt herself being picked up and carried—a moment of incredible lightness, an unburdening, a soaring sensation—and then the lake was all around her, and soon inside her, and maybe in that way Kathy was drowned and gone.
The purest speculation, just one possibility out of many, but Kathy might've awakened early that morning.
Maybe for a few moments she watched him sleep. It had been a bad night, like so many other nights, and the sockets of John's eyes looked dark and old. At times she barely recognized him. All that rage. Like an infection, it seemed. Some terrible virus that kept multiplying inside him. She wished there was a cure she could offer, or words she could say, but of course there was nothing.
Maybe she leaned over and kissed him. Maybe she whispered something.
It was still dark, almost certainly, when she slipped out of bed. She showered, dried her hair, checked her eyes for new wrinkles, returned to the bedroom, and put on a pair of faded blue jeans and a white cotton sweater. She was careful not to wake him. She hung her bathrobe on its hook near the door, aligned her slippers at the foot of the bed. In her stocking feet, trying for silence, she moved out to the kitchen and went about her morning routine. Orange juice and vitamins. Strong black coffee. A bowl of Wheaties, no sugar. She ate slowly, content to be alone, enjoying the stillness all around her. This was her favorite part of the day: the unfolding light, the fragile gleamings and stirrings. After breakfast she brushed her teeth, vigorously, rinsing the brush and leaving it bristles-up in the old jelly jar on the bathroom sink. She washed her dishes, wiped the counter. All these were rituals, fixed and solid.
And then for fifteen minutes, over a second cup of coffee, she sat at the kitchen table with her book of crossword puzzles. This, too, was a ritual. She liked to start each day with a sense of accomplishment, solving what could be solved.
Outside, the first smoky light had spilled out over the lake, and for a few seconds Kathy gazed without focus out the kitchen window, maybe daydreaming, maybe hoping that today things might finally turn good again. Pack a picnic lunch. Go for a swim and lie in the sun and talk about their lives. Which was one of the problems—they never talked anymore. They never communicated, they never made love. They'd tried once, on their second night, but it had been an embarrassment for both of them, and now it seemed they were always guarding their bodies, always careful, touching only for comfort and closeness. What they needed, she thought, was to be honest. Talk about everything they'd never talked about—trust and love and hurt, their truest feelings. Get him to open up. And then if things went well, if she could find the nerve, maybe then she'd confide her own big secret, just blurt it out. Tell him she was glad it was over. A relief, she'd say. No more elections. All that was finished and now she could confess to how much she'd always hated it. The polls and cameras and crowds. Real hate, she'd say. She hated the speeches and petty conspiracies and fake smiles and greedy old pols with their Velcro votes and greasy hands. She hated the stink of cigarettes and betrayal. There were times, she'd tell him, when the hating made her stomach hurt; it was like a rock inside her, a huge heavy rock, and she'd tell him that. Maybe she'd break down. Maybe she'd cry. Probably not. For sure, though, she would be clear about how much she hated tying her self-esteem to the whims of idiots. And the public eye. How it made her feel exposed and naked. How she couldn't tolerate another convention hall or another baked bean dinner or another soggy paper plate. Hate, she'd say. Deep, thick, honest hate. She would present a long, detailed list of the things she hated, and at the end she'd tell him that what she despised more than anything was what politics had done to their lives, how it had taken away everything she most wanted. Ordinary peace. A decent house, a baby to love. To say these things might be difficult—it had to be—but she wouldn't hold back. She'd tell him how the landslide made her happy inside. How it came as a soft warm rush, a release, like carrying around an enormous weight for years and years and then suddenly putting it down and feeling an incredible new lightness flow into her chest and stomach.
Glad, she'd say. She couldn't help it. It was all over and she was glad.
Kathy closed her eyes.
Don't cry, she thought. Then she said it aloud: "You jerk, just don't."
She sighed and went to the stove, refilled her coffee cup, stood motionless for a time before returning to the crossword puzzle. It was just after six o'clock. Flakes of speckled light filled the kitchen. "Well, that's better," she said, and then for five or ten minutes she sat filling in the grid of squares, effortlessly, almost without thought, as if the puzzle were solving itself.
She felt calm and alert. A locking sensation, things in balance.
And so maybe then, gradually at first, Kathy became attuned to a curious new odor in the air. A foul tartness, like spoiled fruit. The smell had been there all along, in her coffee and orange juice, but now it seemed to condense into something solid.
Maybe at first she ignored it. Maybe she frowned and went back to the puzzle.
Or maybe, instead, she put down her pencil and got up to check the refrigerator and garbage pail. She would've tested the air again, maybe squinting, maybe not, then quietly followed her nose out to the living room. At that point things would've accelerated. She would've said something—a question probably—then reached out to touch one of the scalded plants. She would've remembered the teakettle wailing in the night, and John's voice. After a second a kind of understanding would've become manifest.
Something must have stirred inside her.
Not panic. Just the need to breathe. Speed seemed essential—move and keep moving.
She left her book of crossword puzzles folded open on the kitchen counter. She did not pause for a jacket, or to leave a note.
She was outside before telling herself to go.
Half trotting, not thinking at all, she hurried down the slope to the boathouse. It was all impulse. She opened up the double doors and dragged the little aluminum boat out into shallow water, letting it fishtail there while she went back for the engine. The old Evinrude was heavy but she managed to lock it in. She loaded the oars
and gas can and life vest, then turned to close the boathouse doors. The right panel hung loose at its upper hinge, partly jammed. Kathy muscled it with a shoulder, leaning in hard, but the panel was stuck solid. She shook her head and waded out to the boat and hopped in. Maybe then, just for an instant, she gave an irritated glance back at the jammed door. Maybe she forgot to put on the life vest.
A chain of events was established. All the rest had to follow.
She used the oars to pull out into the deep water beyond the dock. Pausing there, she worked the choke and yanked hard on the starter cord, and when the engine caught, she gave the throttle a quarter turn and swung the boat north toward Angle Inlet. A hundred yards out she gave it more power. Fleetingly, perhaps, Kathy noticed the life vest under the front seat, but she did not stop to put it on. Her mind was elsewhere.
Just go, she thought. She leaned forward and concentrated on speed.
And so what must've happened was that Kathy took the boat along the curving shoreline, past the Birchwood resort and Brush Island. She was at full throttle. The little boat seemed to pick itself up at the bow, the breeze stiffening to a wind, and for ten or fifteen minutes Kathy watched the great pine forests sweep by in liquid greens and yellows. The speed felt good to her. The wind and the sunlight, the cold spray against her skin. Maybe she was daydreaming. Maybe she shut her eyes for a moment and tried to tell herself that things might still end happily. Even now it was possible. Thirty-eight years old, which wasn't so bad, and with luck she could still have the child she wanted, and a house, and a big garden out back with lilacs and a white birdbath. All they needed was to be open with each other. Tell the truth. Later, she thought, she'd make herself do it. No evasions—tell him straight out about Harmon. And then recite a list of all the things she resented. Politics, for sure. But also the manipulation and secrecy and self-pity and paranoia. Tell him it had to end. Tell him she knew about the spying—years ago, she'd known—and she simply couldn't bear it any longer. She'd be blunt with him. Not accusing, just telling. All those years, she'd say, like a disease, but now everything was different. They were free. They could start over and do things right and make their marriage fresh and good.