Spitalny shot a blast of flame into a ditch and burst out laughing when the ditch began to shriek.
Beevers yelled something and ran over to see what was in the ditch. All around Poole men were running between the hootches, setting them on fire. It was hell now, Poole thought. Beevers was reaching down into the ditch. He pulled out a naked pink girl. They hid the children, Poole thought, that’s why it was so quiet, they heard us coming and sent the children into hiding. All around Poole, rising up like the screeches and yells of protest from the old people, were the fireplace smells of burning wood and the choking smells of burning grass and the flat dead odor of burned earth. Poole could hear fire snapping at the dry hootches. Beevers held up the pink squirming girl like a fisherman holding up a particularly good catch. He was screaming something, but Poole could not hear the words. Beevers began to move toward the village, now holding the girl out in front of him with both hands. Her skin was beginning to shrivel. When Beevers came to a tree with a vast fleshy head and a winding mazy trunk made of many trunks combined, he swung the girl by her heels and struck her head against the tree.
“This is it!” he screamed. “This is it, okay?”
Spitalny fired a flamethrower blast into a pen and incinerated two hens and a rooster.
Beevers swung the little girl around once more and this time split open her head against the mazy tree. He threw down her body and came raging toward the center of the village. “Now ask these people about Elvis,” he yelled. “Let’s get the truth out of these motherfuckers for once.”
Underhill spoke to the old man, who was now trembling with mingled terror and rage, and got back a rapid tirade that made him shake his head.
“You want to see how to do this? Watch.” Beevers stormed into the circle of cowering Vietnamese and pulled to his feet the little boy Pumo had taken from a hootch. The little boy was too frightened to speak, but the old woman who had been clutching him began to wail. Beevers clipped her in the forehead with the butt of his .45, and she toppled. Beevers clutched the child’s throat, pointed the .45 at his head, and said, “Elvis? Elvis?”
The little boy gargled something.
“You know him. Where is he?”
Layers and curls of smoke drifted around them, carrying odors of burning straw and singed meat. Spitalny was training his flamethrower on whatever was left in the ditch. The hootches crackled around the lieutenant, the little boy, and the old people. Underhill knelt beside the child and spoke to him in soft Vietnamese. The child did not look as though he understood anything Underhill was saying. Poole saw Trotman approach the hootch where he had killed the VC, and waved him off. Trotman went on to the next hootch in the circle. A second later yellow flame grew along the roofline.
“I want his head!” Beevers yelled.
Poole began to trudge through the smoke toward the hootch where he had killed the VC. He wanted to drag him outside before the hootch was fired. Everything was all fucked up anyway. None of the hootches had been properly searched—Beevers had gone crazy when he had been fired on. Where was that list, anyhow? Poole thought that after the hootches burned down, they could still check beneath them for secret compartments—maybe it would not be a total loss. He saw Dengler, dazed and covered in dust, walking back toward the ditch to see what Spitalny was doing.
The problem was going to be to keep Beevers from killing all the old people. If he found Elvis back in that hootch, which Michael had begun to think might be very likely, Beevers would want to execute the whole village as VC. Then they’d double or triple the body count, and the Tin Man would be another little step along the way to his brigade.
For the first and only time in his military career, Michael Poole asked himself what it was that the army wanted him to do—what America wanted him to do. His radio popped and sizzled, and he ignored it. He stepped over Rowley’s body and went into the hootch.
The hootch was full of smoke and the smell of gunpowder.
Poole took another step through the smoke and saw the body kneeling before the far wall of the hootch. A small black head, a brown shirt now wet with blood. The body seemed to be all trunk—“main housing unit,” Beevers would have said. Poole saw no grenade. Then he finally took in the size of the body curled up before the wall and knew that he had not killed Elvis—he had killed a dwarf. He took another look around for the dud grenade, breathing hard now without knowing why. He looked at the dwarf’s hands, which were small and dirty. They were not a dwarf’s hands: they were not any adult’s hands, being very delicate as well as crusted with dirt. Poole shook his head, sweating, and lifted the shoulder of the VC’s body to get a look at his face.
The shoulder gave him almost no resistance at all, and the small body rolled over to expose the face of a small boy of nine or ten. Poole allowed the boy’s body to relax back down onto the floor. “Where’s that grenade?” he asked himself in a voice that sounded normal. He kicked over a little table, scattering pins and combs and a pair of round sunglasses. He tossed everything that was in the hootch upside-down—the pallets, the tin cups, straw baskets, a few old photographs. He realized that he was doing this to keep himself from fully understanding what he had done. There was no grenade. He stood very still for a moment. The radio sizzled again, and Beevers yelled his name.
Poole bent down and picked up the child’s corpse. It was about as heavy as the body of a dog. He turned around and walked through the smoke to the hootch’s entrance. The shrieking went up a notch when he came out.
Underhill blinked when Poole came toward him carrying the dead child, but said nothing. A woman jumped up with her arms outstretched and her face broken into craziness by grief. Poole moved up to her and gave her the dead child. She sank down into the circle of old people, crooning to the child.
Then at last the Phantom jets came wailing in over the village, their noise drowning out the sounds of fire and human voices. The old people huddled close to the earth, and the big jets screamed over the village and turned in the air. Off to the left the forest around the cave became a single huge fireball. The forest made a noise like a thousand wind machines all going at once.
In the next instant he realized that absolutely nothing was going to happen to him because of what he had done. Lieutenant Beevers had smashed a girl’s head against a tree. Spitalny had burned children to death in a ditch. Unless the entire platoon was court-martialed nothing was going to happen. This too was terrible. There were no consequences. Actions that took place in a void were eternal actions, and that was terrible. Everything that surrounded Poole, the burning hootches, the curling smoke, the earth beneath his boots, and the huddled old men and women, for a moment seemed utterly unreal. He felt as if he could float up off the ground, if he wanted to.
He decided not to float up off the ground. That was some serious shit. If you did something like that, you’d be like Elvis, you couldn’t be sure you could ever get back down.
He looked to his left and was surprised to see most of the men in the platoon standing at the fringe of the village, watching the incineration of the forest. When had they left the hootches? It seemed to him that there had been a break in time, an irrational space, an area of blockage in which everything had changed positions without his knowing or seeing it. The unreality of everything around him was much clearer now—the burning forest was a kind of movie on a screen, and the burning hootches were places where people lived in a story. It was an ugly story, and if you told it backwards by burning down the little houses it would disappear. Totally. It would never have been. Things were much better that way—the way in which the story got pulled backwards out of the world through its own asshole and disappeared. He should have levitated while he had the chance, because it no longer made any difference if he got back to earth or not. Because it was not the real earth anymore, it was a movie. What they were watching now was the unhappening of the story.
The whole village was going to unhappen.
Poole could see the ugly purple hill very clearly now. At the base of the hill, like a fold in the rock, lay the entrance to a cave.
“That’s where everything is,” he heard Lieutenant Beevers say.
3
Poole almost called out when M.O. Dengler began to run toward the cave after the lieutenant. Lieutenant Beevers was a human unhappening—nobody should follow him into a cave, but especially not M.O. Dengler.
Poole wanted to yell, to keep Dengler from going into that place as Harry Beevers’ shield. Then he noticed Victor Spitalny sprinting after M.O. Dengler and Lieutenant Beevers. Spitalny wanted to go in there with them. Spitalny was a soldier today, Spitalny was red hot.
