The Throat

He spelled it. 'Li Ly. Say you want six one hundreds. It'll be about thirty bucks. You get 'em in a plastic bag, which you put into your shirt and forget you have. You don't want to look too fuckin' sneaky coming back through.'

'Some Jack,' Scoot said.

'Why not? Across from bubble, go into this little shack, pick up two fifths, Jack Daniels. Shouldn't cost more than ten bucks.'

'New guy buys a round,' said Attica.

Without confessing that I had no idea what one hundreds were, I nodded and stood up.

'Lock and load,' said Scoot.

I walked out of the shed into the amazing noontime heat. When I went around the fence that isolated us, I saw soldiers lining up at the distant mess hall, the dusty walkways and the rows of wooden buildings, the two ballroom-sized tents, the flags. A jeep was rolling toward the gate.

By the time I reached the gate, I was sweating hard. There was no guardhouse or checkpoint, only a lone soldier beside the dirt road.

The road out of the main part of the camp extended straight through a warren of ramshackle buildings and zigzag streets— the military road was the only straight thing in sight. Two hundred yards away, in harsh brilliant light, I saw a real checkpoint with a flag and a guardhouse and a striped metal gate. The jeep was just beginning to approach the checkpoint, and a guard stood in front of the gate to meet it. I was aware of being watched as soon as I passed through the gate—it was like stepping out of the elevator into a men's suit department.

Beside a hand-painted sign reading HEINECKEN COLD BEER ROCK a Vietnamese boy in a white shirt lounged in a narrow doorway. An old woman carried a full basket of laundry down a steep flight of stairs. Vietnamese voices floated down from upper rooms. Two nearly naked children, one of them different from the other in a way I did not take the time to figure out, appeared at my legs and began whining for dollah, dollah.

By the time I reached the BUBBLE sign, five or six children had attached themselves to me, some of them still begging for dollah, others drilling questions at me in an incomprehensible mixture of English and Vietnamese. Two girls leaned out the windows of bubble and watched me pass beneath the sign.

I turned right and heard the girls taunting me. Now I could smell wood smoke and hot oil. The shock of this unexpected world so close to the camp, and an equal, matching shock of pleasure almost made me forget that I had a purpose.

But I remembered the green door, and saw the name Ly picked out in sharp businesslike black letters above the knocker. The children keened and tugged at my clothes. I knocked softly at the door. The children became frantic. I dug in my pockets and threw a handful of coins into the street. The children rushed away and began fighting for the coins. My entire body was drenched in sweat.

The door cracked open, and a white-haired old woman with a plump, unsmiling face frowned out at me. Certain information was communicated instantly and wordlessly: I was too early. Customers kept her up half the night. She was doing me a favor by opening the door at all. She looked hard at my face, then looked me up and down. I pulled the bills from my pocket, and she quickly opened the door and motioned me inside, protecting me from the children, who had seen the bills and were running toward me, squeaking like bats. She slammed the door behind me. The children did not thump into the door, as I expected, but seemed to evaporate.

The old woman took a step away from me and wrinkled her nose in distaste, as if I were a skunk. 'Name.'

'Underhill.'

'Nevah heah. You go way.'

She was still sniffing and frowning, as if to place me by odor.

'I'm supposed to buy something.'

'Nevah heah. Go way.' Li Ly snapped her fingers at the door, as if to open it by magic. She was still inspecting me, frowning, as if her memory had failed her. Then she found what she had been looking for. 'Dimstro,' she said, and almost smiled.

'Di Maestro.'

'Da dett man.'

The dead man? The death man?

She lowered her arm and gestured me toward a camp table and a wooden chair with a rush seat. 'What you want?'

I told her.

'Sis?' Again the narrow half-smile. Six was more than di Maestro's usual order: she knew I was being diddled.

She padded into a back room and opened and closed a series of drawers. In the enclosed front room, I began to smell myself. Da dett man, that was me too.

Li Ly came out of the back room carrying a rolled cellophane parcel of handmade cigarettes. Ah, I thought, pot. We were back to the recreations of Berkeley. I gave Li Ly twenty-five dollars. She shook her head. I gave her another dollar. She shook her head again. I gave her another two dollars, and she nodded. She tugged at the front of her loose garment, telling me what to do with the parcel, and watched me place the wrapped cigarettes inside my shirt. Then she opened the door to the sun and the smells and the heat.

The children materialized around me again. I looked again at the smallest, the filthy child of two I had noticed earlier. His eyes were round, and his skin was a smooth shade darker than the dusty gold of the others. His hair was screwed up into tight rabbinical curls. Whenever the other children bothered to notice him, they gave him a blow. I sprinted across the street to another open-fronted shop and bought Jack Daniels from a bowing skeleton. The children followed me almost to the gate, where the soldier on duty scattered them with a wave of his M- 16.

In the shed di Maestro unrolled the cellophane package and inspected each tight white tube. 'Ly Li loves your little educated ass,' he said.

Scoot had produced a bag of ice cubes from the enlisted man's club and dropped some of them into plastic glasses. Then he cracked open the first bottle and poured for himself. 'Life on the front,' he said. He drank the entire contents of his glass in one swallow. 'Outstanding.' He poured himself another glass.

'Take this slow,' di Maestro said to me. 'You won't be used to this stuff. In fact, you might wanna sit down.'

'What do you think we did at Berkeley?' I said, and several of my colleagues called me a sorry-ass shit.

'This is a little different,' di Maestro said. 'It ain't just grass.'

'Give him some and shut him the fuck up,' said Attica.

'What is it?' I asked.

'You'll like it,' di Maestro said. He placed a cigarette in my mouth and lit it with his Zippo.

I drew in a mouthful of harsh, perfumed smoke, and Scoot sang, 'Hoo-ray and hallelujah, you had it comin' to ya, Goody for her, goody goody for me, I hope you 're satisfied, you rascal you.'

Holding the smoke as di Maestro inhaled and passed the long cigarette to Ratman, I scooped ice cubes into a plastic glass. Di Maestro winked at me, and Ratman took two deep drags before passing the cigarette to Scoot. I poured whiskey over the ice and walked away from the table.

'Hoo-ray and hallelujah,' Scoot rasped, holding the smoke in his lungs.

My knees felt oddly numb, almost rubbery. Something in the center of my body felt warm, probably the Jack Daniels. Picklock lit up the second cigarette, and it came around to me by the time I had taken a couple of sips of my drink.

I sat down with my back against the wall.

'Goody goody for it, goody goody for shit, goody goody for war, goody goody for whores…'

'We oughta have music,' Ratman said.

'We have Scoot,' said di Maestro.