The Throat

was just aimless, all-purpose hostility, but I almost literally prayed that John Ransom had not heard it. I didn't think a well-dressed hand-shaking boy like John Ransom would enjoy being called a pervert—a fairy, a queer, a cocksucker!

But because I had heard it, he had too, and from the hiss of indrawn breath behind me, so had Father Vitale. John Ransom surprised me by laughing out loud.

'Byrne!' shouted Father Vitale. 'You, Byrne!' He put one hand on my right shoulder and the other on John Ransom's left and shoved us apart so that he could push between us. My classmates opened the creaking side door onto Vestry Street as Father Vitale squeezed into the space between John Ransom and myself. He had forgotten we were there, I think, and his big swarthy face moved past mine without a glance. I could see enormous black open pores on his nose, as if even his skin was breathing hard, stoking in air like a furnace. He was panting by the time he got to the top of the stairs. The stench of cigarettes followed him like a wake.

'That priest smokes too much,' John Ransom said.

We reached the top of the steps just as the door slammed shut again, and we walked through the vestibule, hearing running footsteps on Vestry Street and the priest's yells of Boys! Boys!

'Maybe we should give him a minute,' John Ransom said. He put his hands in his pockets and ambled off toward the arched entrance to the interior of the church.

'Give him a minute?' I asked.

'Let him catch his breath. He certainly isn't going to catch them.' John Ransom was gazing appreciatively into the long, dim length of Holy Sepulchre. He might have been in a museum. I saw him take in the font of holy water and the ranks of flickering, intermittent candles, some new, some guttering nubs. Ransom looked into the depths of our church as if he were memorizing it: he wasn't smiling anymore, but his evident pleasure was not in any way diminished by the reappearance of Father Vitale, who came back in through the Vestry Street door and huffed and puffed like a tugboat through the gray air. He did not speak to either of us. As he moved down the aisle, Father Vitale almost instantly lost his individuality and became a scenic element of the church itself, like a castle on a German cliff or a donkey on a dusty Italian road. I was seeing Father Vitale as John Ransom saw him.

He turned around and inspected the vestibule in the same way, as if seeing it was understanding it. He was not the supercilious tourist for whom I had mistaken him. He wanted to take it in, to experience it in a way that would probably not have occurred to any other Brooks-Lowood boy. I thought that John Ransom would have taken that same attitude to the bottom of the world.

Later, John Ransom and I both went to the bottom of the world.

When I was seven years old, my sister April was killed— murdered. She was nine. I saw it happen. I thought I saw something happen. I tried to help her. I tried to stop whatever it was from happening, and then I was killed too, but not as permanently as April.

I guess I think the bottom of the world is the center of the world; and that sooner or later we all see it, all of us, according to our capacities.

The next time I saw John Ransom was in Vietnam.

3

Ten months after I graduated from Berkeley, I was drafted—I let it happen to me, not out of any sense that I owed my country a year of military service. Since graduating I had been working in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue and writing short stories at night. These invariably came back in the stamped, self-addressed manila envelopes I had folded inside my own envelopes to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and Harpers—not to mention Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Antaeus, The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares. At least I think it was Ploughshares. I knew that I did not want to teach, and I had no faith that teaching deferments would hold (they didn't). The more that my stillborn stories came back to me, the more discouraging it became to spend forty hours a week surrounded by other people's books. When my 2-S classification was adjusted to 1-A, I felt that I might have been given a way out of my impasse.

I flew to Vietnam on a commercial airline. About three-fourths of the passengers in tourist class were greenhorns like me, and the stewardesses had trouble looking at us directly. The only really relaxed passengers in our section of the plane were the weatherbeaten lifers at the back of the cabin, noncoms, who were as loose and clubby as golfers on a weekend flight to Myrtle Beach.

In the first-class cabin at the front of the plane sat men in dark suits, State Department functionaries and businessmen making a good thing for as long as they could out of cement or building supplies in Vietnam. When they looked at us, they smiled—we were their soldiers, after all, protecting their ideals and their money.

But between the patriots at the front and the relaxed, disillusioned lifers at the rear, in two rows just aft of first class, was another group I could not figure out at all. As a group, they were lean, muscular, short-haired, like soldiers, but they wore Hawaiian shirts and khaki pants, or blue button-down shirts with crisp blue jeans. They looked like a college football team at a tenth-year reunion. These men took no notice of us at all. What language I overheard was bright, hard-edged military jargon.

When one of the lifers walked past my seat, stretching his legs before going to sleep, I touched his wrist and asked him about the men at the front of the cabin.

He bent low and squeezed out a single word.

Greenies?

We landed at Tan Son Nhut in sunlight that seemed almost visibly dense. When the stewardess swung open the jet's door and the astonishing heat rolled in, I felt that my old life had gone forever. I thought I could smell the polish melting off my buttons. In that moment I decided not to be afraid of anything until I really had to be—I felt that it was possible to step away from my childhood. This was the first of the queer exaltations—the sudden sense of a new freedom—that sometimes visited me in Vietnam, and which I have never felt elsewhere.

My orders sent me to Camp White Star, a base in II Corps located outside of Nha Trang. There I was supposed to join other new members of my regiment for transport north to Camp Crandall in I Corps. One of the unexplained glitches not unusual in army life occurred, and the men I was supposed to join had been sent on ahead of me. I was left awaiting orders for eight days.

Every day I reported to a cynical captain named McCue, Hamilton McCue, who rubbed his square fingers over his babyish pink cheeks and assigned me to whatever task took his momentary fancy. I moved barrels from beneath the latrine and poured kerosene into them so old Vietnamese women could incinerate our shit; I cannibalized broken-down jeeps for distributor caps, alternators, and working fuel pumps; I raked stones out of the fifteen square yards of dust in front of the officers' club. Eventually McCue decided that I was having an unseemly amount of fun and assigned me to the body squad. The body squad unloaded corpses from the incoming helicopters, transferred them to the 'morgue' while the paperwork was done, and then loaded them into the holds of planes going to Tan Son Nhut, where they were flown back to the States.

The other seven members of the body squad were serving out their remaining time in Vietnam. All of them had once been in regular units, and most of them had re-upped so that they could spend another year in the field. They were not ordinary people— the regiment had slam-dunked them into the body squad to get them out of their units.

Their names were Scoot, Hollyday, di Maestro, Picklock, Ratman, Attica, and Pirate. They had a generic likeness, being unshaven, hairy—even Ratman, who was prematurely bald, was hairy—unclean, missing a crucial tooth or two. Scoot, Pirate, and di Maestro wore tattoos (BORN TO DIE, DEALERS IN DEATH, and a death's head suspended over an umber pyramid, respectively). None of them ever wore an entire uniform. For the whole of my first day, they did not speak to me, and went about the business of carrying the heavy body bags from the helicopter to the truck and from the truck to the 'morgue' in a frosty, insulted silence.

The next day, after Captain McCue told me that my orders still had not come through and that I should return to the body squad, he asked me how I was getting on with my fellow workers. That was what he called them, my 'fellow workers.'