The Throat

made.

For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.

'Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?' said the drunk. 'Is that much understood?'

The soldier who had called me 'pal' laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk's glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.

The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. 'Goddamn,' he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said, 'Goddamn' again, but in a different tone of voice.

I started laughing.

'Oh, this is—' He shook his head. 'This is really—'

'Where have you been?' I asked him. John Ransom turned to the table. 'Hey, I know this guy. He's an old football friend of mine.'

The drunken major shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. 'I don't care about football,' he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.

'Buy the sergeant a drink,' said the haggard officer. John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.

We watched the major's head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached his shirt, Ransom said, 'All right, Jed,' and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major's hand. He pushed it beneath his belt. 'The man is out,' Jed told us.

Ransom turned back to me. 'He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.' Ransom did not have to specify who he was. 'Jed and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.' He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.

For a moment no one spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it was going to disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.

'How come you're always fucked up when I see you?'

'You have to ask?'

He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.

'I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn't I?' I agreed that he had.

'What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn't even a real graves registration unit, was it?' He smiled and shook his head. 'The only one with any training was that sergeant, what's his name. Italian.'

'Di Maestro.'

Ransom nodded. 'The whole operation was going off the rails.' Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. 'I heard some things—' He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes.

I asked if he were still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.

'You're not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?'

He opened his eyes. 'You have a good memory. No, I'm not there anymore.' He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. 'I'm kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sanh. It'll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. I'd settle for a dry place on level ground.'

'Where did you come from now?'

'Incountry.' His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. 'Way incountry. We had to get the major out.'

'Looks like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.'

My ignorance made him sit up straight. 'You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?'

And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.

'In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don't even dream of—he's a legend. The Last Irregular. He fell on punji sticks and lived—he's still got the scars.'

A legend, I thought. He was one of the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.

'Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That's straight.'

Franklin Bachelor had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black- haired angel.

And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.

'I did hear of him,' I said. 'I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too.'

'His wife' Ransom said.

I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.

'We're stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States— Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we'll just keep pouring whiskey into him.'

'He's going to want his gun back.'

'Maybe I'll give it to him.' His glance told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. 'He's in for a rough time at Langley. There'll be some heat.'

'Why Langley?'

'Don't ask. But don't be naive, either. Don't you think they're…' He would not finish that sentence. 'Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?'

'I suppose something went wrong.'

'The man stepped over some boundaries, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we're supposed to do without stepping over boundaries.'

For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, questioning Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.

'It was like this place called Bong To, in a funny way.' Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, 'A ghost town, I mean. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Bong To.'

'My unit was just there.' His head jerked up. 'A mortar round scared us into the village.'

'You saw the place?'

I nodded.

'Funny story.' Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it.

I said that I wasn't asking him to tell me any secrets.

'It's not a secret. It's not even military.'

'It's just a ghost town.'

Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank.

'Complete with ghosts.'

'I honestly wouldn't be surprised.' He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. 'Let's take care of Major Bachelor, Jed,' he said.

'Right.'