Stone Junction

Slowly shaking his head, the blond man stared at Daniel and his belongings. He shrugged. ‘Maybe I was having a ’palm flashback. Looked like the true item to me, though. Fuck, who cares, huh? Why sweat the little shit when Death knows your address, that’s my motto.’

‘It’s a good one,’ Daniel said.

‘So, what is it, you hitching here or what? I’m going west till dawn, then I turn around and head back.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. He picked up the attache case and bowling bag.

The blond man said, ‘What are you got up as there, anyway? You the Wandering Bowler or what?’

‘I’m a professional bowler and a religious zealot,’ Daniel explained.

‘Yeah, just about anything beats the fuck out of working.’ He opened the door for Daniel.

‘How about you?’ Daniel said, slipping inside. ‘You’re out late for a nine-to-five man.’

‘I repair slot machines at the Shamrock. Swing shift, two to ten. Gives me the hard side of midnight and early morning to ride patrol.’

‘What are you patrolling for? Or against, if that’s the case.’

‘My old employer,’ the man said. ‘Death. I used to be Death’s Chauffeur.’

‘For true?’ Daniel said. He didn’t feel like listening to bullshit.

‘Straight skinny, brother; mortal fact. Let’s get it rolling here and I’ll tell you how it is.’ He shut the door.

‘Great.’ Daniel barely said it aloud, but he couldn’t decide if he felt ironic. ‘Don’t sweat the little shit,’ he reminded himself. ‘Ride on through.’

The blond man’s name was Kenny Copper. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, a judge had presented him with a choice between two years on the county labor farm for disturbing the peace/resisting arrest/assault on a police officer – which the court saw as a cluster of offenses, not a logical progression of self-defense – and immediate enlistment in the marines. He landed in Saigon eight months later, a PFC rifleman with Baker Company. Within the week they were shipped to Khe Sanh.

He told Daniel as they rocketed northwest on 95, ‘I put my head up the Dragon’s ass, man, and I saw the World of Shit. The Cong were shelling the holy fuck out of us. We sent out a couple of recon patrols just for drill; never saw the dudes again. Anything that touched the airstrip got blown away. No Med-Evac. No replacements. They air-dropped rations and ammo, but whatever came down outside our perimeter – which was about half the shit they dropped – that was Christmastime for Charlie. We owned Hell; Charlie owned everything else. But here’s the twister, Herm, your basic cold fuck – we were just bait for the trap, dead and stinkin’ meat,’ cause they wanted the Cong to mass for a siege, get ’em all heaped up on us, and then bring down the hammer. Real neat thinking, huh? Real swift. I mean, the gooks didn’t whip our ass by being dummies, not that you needed a Ph. D. in chemistry to figure it out, right? The Cong kept the pressure tight enough to choke, but they didn’t overcommit. So we went down, not any fucking hammer.

‘It wasn’t too bad at first. I’d brought a pound of Buddha weed in on the chop – fifty Yankee dollars on any street corner in Saigon – and that cut us some slack between the shit-rain and fire-fights. Everybody on base knew our bunker was Boogie City. Black dude I booted with, name was Donnell Foxworth – Arson, we called him, ’cause he said he specialized in burning pussies to the ground – Arson had two ammo boxes full of primo sounds. Motown, Hendrix, the Doors, Dylan, Stones, you name it. Between the Buddha weed and the music, the troops stayed loose.

‘And man, we needed some serious morale boosting, because the gooks had the high ground, their mortars and light artillery locked down on us dead zero, like frogs in a tub. Whenever they took the notion, day or night, for two minutes or twenty hours, they sent down a shit-rain of fire. You never been there, man, you just can’t know what it’s like to hear incoming, incoming, incoming till that shrill death whine has your blood howling like a gut-shot dog; your whole fucking body peeled back to bare nerves; your asshole puckered so tight that when it finally relaxes you crap your chaps; Dylan turned up loud on the deck, screaming in your ear, ‘Well HOW does it FEEL! to be on YOUR OWN!’ – I tell you true, if a round didn’t blow you away, the rest of it did. I don’t give a fuck if you had all the weed in ’Nam and a sound system that’d cave in your skull – all the smack; all the pussy in the world. Just no way you could keep it from getting too real. Constant sickening fear.

‘About the third week, they really started pounding it in, and the perimeter turned into Sapper City. Try sleeping when them mortars are walking the dog all over you, when you know there’s someone outside who’d love to slit your throat. I was holding on to myself in a muddy trench, literally had my arms wrapped around me, curled against the dirt wall, down with some killer gook dysentery, gagging on the smell of my own fear, shit pants, powder, smoke, exploded earth and bodies, when we took one inside, about half a football field down from where I was hunkered. Concussion fucking near blew my brains out my ears. I pushed myself up on my knees and looked up into the rain and the night, stunned so fucking bad I was wondering if I could see way up there the actual point where the rain started to fall. I was looking hard when a white square came fluttering down beside me. The second I touched it I knew what it was. Though I would have given anything not to look, this was something I was supposed to see. A guy in our outfit, Billy Hines, young guy from Missouri, real quiet, kinda bashful, was married to some seventeen-year-old sweetheart named Ginnilee whose first letter to him in-country said she was pregnant from his last leave. She’d sent a picture her mother had taken of her standing on the front lawn, the small house in the background out of focus. Written on the back, it said, “Wife with child. Never forget I love you. Ginnilee.” And her face … oh man, so young and hopeful and brave, the sweetest little strawberry-blond with freckles, man, fucking freckles, and all you had to do was see the light around her face to know she was pregnant. Chester wore it on his helmet. One time I asked why he didn’t tuck it away where a pretty lady like that wouldn’t get so jungle-scuzzed and rained on, and he said’ – Kenny’s voice began to quaver – ‘he said, “She’s my good-luck charm. She’s gonna shine me right on through all this shit, home to her and the baby.” And man, when I picked her picture up out of the mud and saw her, man, saw her all the way to my soul, I vanished somewhere inside myself. You know what I mean, man? Left the premises. Stepped out.’

In the headlight glare of an oncoming semi, Daniel caught the wet flash of tears on Kenny’s cheeks. He wiped at his own. Nothing he could have said seemed adequate.

Kenny glanced at him, then back to the road. ‘The doctors told me I was gone about three weeks, but that don’t count the one it took before they got me out of Khe Sanh on a chop that was crazy enough to come in. “Shell shock,” some of the docs called it, or “catatonic shock.” I didn’t bother to tell ’em I’d been all right until I looked into her face. But I don’t give a fuck what the doctors want to call it, I know what it was.