The Throat

the first place?'

'I was out of my body.'

'Goddamn it, Underdog,' said Picklock, and grabbed the handle of the heavy bag I had nearly dropped. 'What the fuck is the matter with you?' Single-handedly, he tossed the bag into the shed behind us.

'Underdog, never drop the fucking bags,' said di Maestro, and deliberately dropped a bag onto the concrete. Whatever was inside it gurgled and splatted.

For a moment or two we continued to unload the bodies into the shed.

Then Ratman said, 'Anyhow, about a second later I found out I was still alive.'

'What makes you think you're alive?' asked Attica.

'On top of everything else, this guy shoves his face into mine, and for sure he ain't no angel. I can see the goddamn canopy above his head. The birds start screeching again. The first thing I know for sure is Bobby Swett is gone, man—I'm wearing whatever's left of him. And this guy says to me, 'Get on your feet, soldier.' I can just about make out what he's saying through the ringing in my ears, but you know this asshole is used to obedience. I let out a groan when I try to move, because, man, every square inch of me feels like hamburger.'

'Ah,' said Picklock and Attica, nearly in unison. Then Attica said, 'You're a lucky son of a bitch.'

'Bobby Swett didn't even make it into one a these bags,' said Ratman. 'That fucker turned into vapor.' He sullenly grabbed the handles of another bag, inspected it for a second, said, 'No tag,' and shoved it on top of the others in the shed.

'Oh, goody,' said Attica. Attica had a smooth brown head, and his biceps jumped in his arms when he lifted the bags. He pulled a marker from his fatigues and made a neat check on the end of the bag. As he turned back to the truck, he grinned at me, stretching his lips without opening his mouth, and I wondered what was coming.

'Finally I got up, like in a kinda daze,' Ratman said. 'I still couldn't hear hardly nothing. This guy is standing in front of me, and I see he's totally crazy, but not like we go crazy. This mother's crazy in some absolutely new kinda way. I'm still so fucked up I can't tell what's so different about him, but he's got these eyes which they are not human eyes.' He paused, remembering. 'Everybody else in my platoon is sort of standing around watching. There's the little Yard mascot in these real loose fatigues, and there's this big guy in front of me on the trail with the sun behind his head. I mean this dude is in command. He is the show. Even the lieutenant, who is a fucking ramrod, is just standing there. Well, shit, I think, he just saw this guy raise me from the dead, what else is he gonna do? The big guy is still checking me out—he's scoping me. He's got these eyes, like some animal in a pit that just killed all the animals that were down there with him.'

'He looked like Attica,' said di Maestro.

'Damn straight he did,' Attica said. 'I'm a warrior, I ain't like you losers, I'm a fucking god of war.'

'And then I see what's really funny about this guy,' said Ratman. 'He's got this open khaki shirt and tan pants and there's a little black briefcase on the ground next to him.'

'Uh oh,' said di Maestro.

'Plus which, there's scars all over his chest—punji stick scars. The bastard fell on punji sticks and he lived.'

'Him,' said di Maestro.

'Yeah, him. Bachelor.'

'This is after twenty days. Bobby Swett gets turned into— into red fog right in front of me. I get killed or something like that, and nobody's moving because of this guy with the briefcase. 'I am Captain Franklin Bachelor, and I've been hearing about you,' this guy says to me. Like I didn't know. But he's really talking to all of us, he's just checking me out to see how bad I got hurt.'

'And then I look down at my hands and I see they're this funny color—sort of purple. Even under Bobby's blood, I can see my skin is turning this purple color. And I push up my sleeve and my whole damn arm is purple. And it's swelling up, fast.'

' 'This fool's a walking bruise,' says Captain Bachelor. He gives the whole platoon a disgusted look. We're in his part of the world now, by God, and we better know it. For two weeks we been getting in his way, and he wants us out. He's asking us politely, and we're on the same side, after all, which is worth remembering, but if we don't get outa his share of the countryside, our luck might take a turn for the worse. He just kind of smiles at us, and the Montagnard girl is standing right up next to him, and she's got an M-16, and he's got some kind of fancy machine I never saw before or since but I think was some kind of Swedish piece, and I got to thinkin' about what's in the briefcase, and then I got it. All at once.'

'Got what?' I asked, and everyone in the body squad looked down, or at the stack of bodies in the shed, and then they unloaded the last two bodies. We went into the shed to begin the next part of the job. Nobody spoke until di Maestro looked at the tag taped to the bag closest to him and started checking the names.

'So you got out of there,' he said.

'The lieutenant used Bachelor's radio, and even before the argument was over, we was on our way toward the LZ. When we got back to the base, we got our showers, we got real food, we got blasted every possible way, but afterward I never felt the same. Those scars. That fuckin' briefcase, man. And the little Yard chick. You know what? He was havin' a ball. He was throwin' a party.'

'They more or less got their own war,' said Scoot. He was a short skinny man with deep-set eyes, a ponytail, and a huge knife that dangled from his waistband on a dried, crinkly leather thong that looked like a body part. He could lift twice his own weight, and like a weight lifter he existed in some densely private space of his own.

'Green Berets are cool with me,' said Attica, and then I understood part of it.

'Some of them were on my flight,' I said. 'They—'

'Can't we get some work done around here?' asked di Maestro, and for a time we checked the dog tags against our lists.

Then Pirate said, 'Ratman, what was the payoff?'

Ratman looked up from beside a body bag and said, 'Five days after we got back to camp, we heard about a couple dozen Rhade Yards took out about a thousand VC. They went through all these hamlets in the middle of the night. 'Course, the way I heard it, some a those thousand VC were little babies and such, but CIDG did itself a power of good that night.'

'CIDG?' I asked.

'I heard of fifty-sixty guys, First Air Cav, offed by friendly fire,' Scoot said. 'Shit happens.'

'Friendly fire?' I said.

'Comes in all shapes and sizes,' Scoot said, smiling in a way I did not understand until later.

Ratman uttered a sound halfway between a snarl and a laugh. 'And the rest was, I puffed up about two times my size. Felt like a goddamn football. Even my eyelids were swole up, man. They finally put me in the base hospital and packed me in ice—but not a bone broken, man. Not a bone broken.'

'Now, I wonder what shape this boy is in,' said Attica, patting the body without a tag. Nearly all the bags had been named by the time they got to us, and it was our task to ensure that all had names by the time they left. We had to unzip the bags and compare the name on the tag taped to the body bag with the name on the tag either insetted into the dead man's mouth or taped to his body. From Vietnam the bodies went back to America, where the army decanted them into wooden coffins and sent them home.

'Your turn, Underdog,' said Attica. 'Your hands ain't dirty yet, are they? You check this unit out.'

'You puke on it, I'll stomp your guts out,' said di Maestro, and surprised me by laughing. I had not heard di Maestro laugh before. It was a creaky, humorless bray that might have come from one of the bags lined up before us.

'Yeah, don't puke on the unit,' said Pirate. 'That really messes 'em up.'

Attica had intended me to open the bag and find the dead soldier's tag from the moment he had noticed that the matching tag was missing. 'You're new boy,' he said. 'This the new boy's job.'

I moved toward Attica and the bag with the check. For a moment I suspected that when I unzipped the bag, some hideous creature would jump out at me, drenched in blood like Ratman after Bobby Swett had disintegrated in front of him. Because that was why he told the story! They wanted me to scream, they wanted my hair to turn white. After I vomited, they'd take turns stomping my guts out. It was their version of friendly fire.