Blood Memory

“Here we go,” Henry says, turning right onto a narrow gravel road through the trees.

“What’s Jesse like?” I ask.

“You don’t know him?”

“No.”

“Jesse’s a mystery. He used to be the most laid-back cat on this island. Loved to smoke and talk. But now he’s a hard-ass. I don’t know why, exactly. But he is.”

“Was it the war?”

Henry shrugs his big shoulders. “Who knows? Jesse don’t talk too much. He mostly work, or watch other people work.”

A minute passes in silence. The cabins of the hunting camp appear ahead. Unlike the shacks of the workers, many of which are made of tar paper or clapboard on brick stilts, the cabins are built of sturdy cypress, weathered gray and hard as steel. The roofs are corrugated tin that’s rusted to dark orange.

“There Jesse,” says Henry.

I don’t see a man, but I do see a brown horse tied to the porch rail of one of the cabins. Henry pulls up in front of the cabin and honks his horn three times.

Nothing happens.

“He’ll be here,” Henry says.

Sure enough, a wiry black man wearing no shirt crawls from beneath the cabin, stands, and brushes himself off. At first he looks like a hundred other black workmen I’ve seen. Then he turns, and I see the right side of his face. Blotches of bright pink skin stand out like splatters of paint from his right shoulder to his right temple, and his cheek is a mound of deformed scar tissue.

“He got burned over in Vietnam,” Henry says. “It looks bad, but we used to it now.”

Henry leans out his window and shouts, “Yo, Jesse! Got a lady in here wants to talk to you!”

Jesse walks over to the truck-my side, not Henry’s-and looks me in the eye. Henry uses his switch to roll down my window, which leaves only six inches of space between my face and Jesse Billups’s scars.

“What you want with me?” he says in an insolent voice.

“I want to talk to you about my father.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Luke Ferry.”

Jesse’s eyes widen, and then he snorts like a horse. “Goddamn. All this time, and now you come back? I met you when you was a little girl. I knew your mama pretty well. How’d you get down here?”

Henry says, “Her car’s parked on the other side of the bridge. I told her you’d take her back to it when she’s ready. You got her okay?”

Jesse studies me for a bit. “Yeah, I’ll take her back.”

He opens my door and helps me down from the high cab. Jesse must have a half inch of calluses on his hand. As Henry drives away with a blast of his horn, Jesse leads me to the next cabin down from the one where his horse is tied.

“Hardass don’t like strangers,” he explains.

“You named your horse Hardass?”

“People call me hard-ass all the time behind my back, so I figured I’d let ’em know I know it.”

He climbs onto the porch and sits against the wall of the cabin. I sit on the top step and brace my back against the rail. There’s no doubt that Jesse Billups works hard for a living. He has to be fifty to have served in Vietnam, but his stomach is still as tight as a teenager’s. His arms don’t bulge, but the long muscles in them ripple with every movement. His face is another matter. It’s hard to get an impression of his looks; I can’t really see past the scars yet.

“Diesel fuel,” he says in a ragged voice.

“What?”

“This face I got. I was cleaning toilets at a firebase when Mr. Charlie dropped a few mortar rounds on us for Christmas. We used to burn our shit with diesel fuel. I was standing next to five burning drums when the round went off. Covered me with shit and burning diesel. Would have been funny except for the infection I got from it.”

“I’m sorry.”

He gives me a cynical wink, then takes a pack of Kool menthols from his back pocket. Lighting one with a silver lighter, he inhales deeply, then blows blue smoke away from the porch. He seems to be settling in for a long talk. After another deep drag on his cigarette, he turns his dark eyes on me.

“You here to ask about your daddy?”

“I heard you knew him pretty well.”

This seems to amuse Jesse. “I don’t know about all that. But me and Lukie hung together some, yeah. A long time ago.”

“I was hoping you could tell something about what happened to him in the war.”

“You know anything already?”

“Somebody told me he was a sniper. I didn’t know that. They also said he was part of a unit that was accused of war crimes. Do you know anything about that?”

Jesse snorts in derision. “War crimes? Shit. That the craziest expression I ever heard. War is a motherfucking crime, start to finish. It’s only people who don’t know that be talkin’ ’bout shit like war crimes.”

I’m not sure how to continue. “Well, there must have been some unusual events, at least, for the army to talk about prosecuting his unit.”

“Unusual?” Jesse barks a humorless laugh. “Yeah. That’s a good word.”

“Can you tell me anything?”

“Luke told me a little about that. He was a country boy, see? That’s what got him in trouble. He knew how to shoot. I’m a good shot, but that boy was something with a rifle. Like he was born holding one. Wouldn’t kill nothing after the war, though, not even deer for food. Anyway, the army made him a sniper. And he did that job for a couple months. Then they took him into this special unit called the White Tigers. Supposed to be a all-volunteer thing, but I think the CO pretty much volunteered anybody he wanted into it. That’s how old Lukie got stuck.”

“The White Tigers? What was the purpose of the unit?”

“They was put together for one reason. What they call incursion into enemy territory. Only this incursion wasn’t exactly legal. The Tigers went into Cambodia to try to hit the Cong where they hid from our bombers.”

“Do you know what happened there?”

“Same shit that happened a lot of other places, only worse. The Tigers went from village to village looking for weapons, VC, or VC sympathizers. Thing was, they didn’t operate like we did over in I Corps. In Cambodia, they didn’t wait around to get shot at. They went in there to scare the shit out the people, keep ’em from helping Mr. Charlie. To deny the enemy sanctuary and interdict lines of supply, MACV would have said. Double-talking motherfuckers. Anyway, they had some bad boys in this Tiger outfit. Hard cases from other platoons. So naturally, they did some bad shit.”

“What exactly falls into that category?”

Jesse stubs out his cigarette and immediately lights another. “Assassinated tribal chiefs and VC paymasters. Punished anybody known or suspected of helping the VC or the Khmer Rouge. Questioned people vigorously.” He laughs bitterly. “That means torture.”

“My father did some of this?”

He nods deliberately. “That was the job, you know? That shit happened down where I was, too. Especially shooting prisoners so you wouldn’t have to drag them around with you. But if the wrong officer saw you, you could get in bad trouble. Luke’s outfit was different. In the Tigers, it was the officers instigating the shit. Cutting off heads and leaving them on sticks to scare the Khmer Rouge. Taking girls from the villages and using them for recreation. Getting-”

“Wait a second,” I cut in. “You mean they kidnapped girls and raped them?”

Jesse nods like it’s no big deal. “Sure. That’s how the CO rewarded his men. When his boys did good, they could pick a girl from a village and keep her for a couple days.”