The Throat

'All right,' Dengler said. 'But it's happening, isn't it? Things are changing.'

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this, and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to write.

2

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside into the slight coolness that followed the rain. The sun, visible again, was a deep orange ball far to the west. A packet of white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

The shack where an enterprising weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor was all the way on the other side of camp. The enlisted men's club was rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese '33' beer in American bottles.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted man's club but closer than Manly's shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy's. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy's was closed. Billy's did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a grove of trees in the curve of the road, and as I walked downhill toward it in the sunset, a muddy camouflaged jeep gradually emerged from invisibility on the right side of the bar, floating out of the trees like an optical illusion.

Low male voices stopped when I stepped onto the rotting porch. I looked for insignia on the jeep, but mud caked the door panels. Some white object gleamed dully from the backseat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

The door opened before I could reach the handle. A boy called Mike stood before me in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt too large for him. Then he saw who I was. 'Oh,' he said. 'Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in.' He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me an uncomfortable smile.

'It's okay?' I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn't.

'Yesss.' He stepped back to let me in.

The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. Pungent cordite hung in the air. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.

'Oh, hell,' someone said from off to my left. 'We have to put up with this?'

I turned my head and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even murkier.

'Is okay, is okay,' said Mike. 'Old customer. Old friend.'

'I bet he is,' the voice said. 'Just don't let any women in here.'

'No women,' Mike said. 'No problem.'

I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.

'You want whiskey, Tim?' Mike asked.

'Tim?' the man said. 'Tim?'

'Beer,' I said, and sat down.

A nearly empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnny Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk's well-guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife.

'I just want to make sure about this,' he said. 'You're not a woman, right? You swear to that?'

'Anything you say,' I said.

He put his hand on the gun.

'Got it,' I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer. 'Tim. Funny name. Sounds like a little guy—like him.' He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. 'Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.'

'Don't you like women?' I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse. I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted— whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.

'This rear-echelon dipshit is personally interfering with my state of mind,' the drunk said to the burly man on his right. 'Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue.'

'Leave him alone,' the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.

The drunken officer startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.

This is serious, he said. Most of the people in the world I do not despise are already dead, or should be.

There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it's pretty close.

Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: You should remember what we have brought with us.

    It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.

Your prisoner requires more drink, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.

'Whiskey,' said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.

For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.

The haggard soldier, who had been silent until now, said, 'Something is gonna happen here.' He looked straight at me. 'Pal?'

'That man is nobody's pal,' the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it